Reading on a... Wednesday?
Dec. 22nd, 2021 06:25 pmI had to double-check the day of the week today. What is time.
I was feeling a little under the weather from the booster, but it's better now after the ibuprofen kicked in and I had some tea. Poor Z did not react as badly as he did to the shots but still worse than me :(
Man, I am glad I don't care that much about most of the Russian skaters RN or else the weekend's schedule would be chaos. Mostly I am crossing my fingers for Misha and... I guess Zhenya Semenenko? The men have been all over the place this season. Instead, I am trying to find what VPN people are using to get Fuji On-Demand to watch Japanese nats, because they have wisened up to mine >[
I am sorry to hear Rika isn't making the Olympics - she's never been my favorite and I don't like many of her programs, but she's enormously talented. Though despite the fans wailing about howZhenya stupid JSF standards have kept her from going.... if her ankle is that badly damaged now and clearly has been for a while, I wonder if she is even going to be able to compete in just over a month. I know four years is a long time to wait for another chance that may or may not come, but the fact that she did withdraw given the stakes feels like not good news.
Anyway, I'm hoping for Satton to rotate those jumps and get PCS that are even in the same stratosphere as her performance, and for Yuzu to not hurt his ankle again. I'm curious if he is actually going to go for the 4A this time, because it's getting a little tiring to hear about how he's going to try it over and over again and it to not appear. Loved his SP last year, so I was a little sad to hear he was getting a new one, but his new music is a great choice, too. Hoping Kazuki repeats his Rostelecom performance, too, and for KanaDai to shine!
(Also, Eteri needs to be Elsa and let fucking Polina S. and Yulia goooo, let alone her new BS about Zhenya. Shut the fuck up and go away with the rest of your team.)
Read: Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh - holy crap, the chapter about her medical problems and sister hit hard. The material felt a little thinner for this one, but I still laughed at several of the more lighthearted stories. I kind of wavered about what rating to give this on GR, because on the one hand I read it straight through other than the one break, but the organization was a little off, and I think a couple of the stories could have used a bit more editing to make them more story and less book report. Still recommended if you are okay with the gut-punch in the middle.
Also Taking Flight by Michaela DePrince, which I randomly found at the library - I watched First Position years ago, and her story definitely stuck with me the most, both because of the tension over her injury and her frank discussions of racism in the ballet world. I can still remember her mom talking about having to sharpie her costumes to match her skin tone, and in the book she talks about how she sought in vain any professional women in dance with skin as dark as hers.
This is a YA-level read despite some harrowing parts, though I didn't mind. The most vivid parts are definitely those describing her childhood in Sierra Leone and her life at the orphanage after her parents are murdered, as well as when she and her new sister first moved to America. In the back half, it became a bit more list-y, as though they either couldn't figure out how to make her life sound interesting or they tried to stick to a certain page limit and compressed the later ballet parts to let her adoption story have more room.
I enjoyed reading her childish delight - and cultural adjustments - to her newfound life in the US after she was adopted. But to me the most interesting part was probably a small bit at the end where she talks about how after First Position came out, a lot of anti-international adoption advocates borrowed her story to criticize her parents and her adoption as human trafficking, and someone even posed as her deceased mother to claim she wasn't an orphan. Obviously adoption (and international adoption in particular) are complicated subjects, but I can understand her being unhappy that her story was co-opted to make a point she disagrees with: as she says, she and her sister would have died very soon if they hadn't been brought to a country where they could get medical treatment, she writes of being afraid to return to her home country, there is no way she could have pursued becoming a professional dancer in Sierra Leone, and... she dearly loves her family. That comes off in ever page.
Reading: Maybe-Tomorrow, which is Not Good and which I am reading mostly for the historical interest (it's a novel about a gay high schooler in Texas written in the 50s).
To Read: Picked up Queen of the Damned at the library... I think I've heard it's the last 'good' Anne Rice vampire book? Guess I'll find out.
I was feeling a little under the weather from the booster, but it's better now after the ibuprofen kicked in and I had some tea. Poor Z did not react as badly as he did to the shots but still worse than me :(
Man, I am glad I don't care that much about most of the Russian skaters RN or else the weekend's schedule would be chaos. Mostly I am crossing my fingers for Misha and... I guess Zhenya Semenenko? The men have been all over the place this season. Instead, I am trying to find what VPN people are using to get Fuji On-Demand to watch Japanese nats, because they have wisened up to mine >[
I am sorry to hear Rika isn't making the Olympics - she's never been my favorite and I don't like many of her programs, but she's enormously talented. Though despite the fans wailing about how
Anyway, I'm hoping for Satton to rotate those jumps and get PCS that are even in the same stratosphere as her performance, and for Yuzu to not hurt his ankle again. I'm curious if he is actually going to go for the 4A this time, because it's getting a little tiring to hear about how he's going to try it over and over again and it to not appear. Loved his SP last year, so I was a little sad to hear he was getting a new one, but his new music is a great choice, too. Hoping Kazuki repeats his Rostelecom performance, too, and for KanaDai to shine!
(Also, Eteri needs to be Elsa and let fucking Polina S. and Yulia goooo, let alone her new BS about Zhenya. Shut the fuck up and go away with the rest of your team.)
Read: Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh - holy crap, the chapter about her medical problems and sister hit hard. The material felt a little thinner for this one, but I still laughed at several of the more lighthearted stories. I kind of wavered about what rating to give this on GR, because on the one hand I read it straight through other than the one break, but the organization was a little off, and I think a couple of the stories could have used a bit more editing to make them more story and less book report. Still recommended if you are okay with the gut-punch in the middle.
Also Taking Flight by Michaela DePrince, which I randomly found at the library - I watched First Position years ago, and her story definitely stuck with me the most, both because of the tension over her injury and her frank discussions of racism in the ballet world. I can still remember her mom talking about having to sharpie her costumes to match her skin tone, and in the book she talks about how she sought in vain any professional women in dance with skin as dark as hers.
This is a YA-level read despite some harrowing parts, though I didn't mind. The most vivid parts are definitely those describing her childhood in Sierra Leone and her life at the orphanage after her parents are murdered, as well as when she and her new sister first moved to America. In the back half, it became a bit more list-y, as though they either couldn't figure out how to make her life sound interesting or they tried to stick to a certain page limit and compressed the later ballet parts to let her adoption story have more room.
I enjoyed reading her childish delight - and cultural adjustments - to her newfound life in the US after she was adopted. But to me the most interesting part was probably a small bit at the end where she talks about how after First Position came out, a lot of anti-international adoption advocates borrowed her story to criticize her parents and her adoption as human trafficking, and someone even posed as her deceased mother to claim she wasn't an orphan. Obviously adoption (and international adoption in particular) are complicated subjects, but I can understand her being unhappy that her story was co-opted to make a point she disagrees with: as she says, she and her sister would have died very soon if they hadn't been brought to a country where they could get medical treatment, she writes of being afraid to return to her home country, there is no way she could have pursued becoming a professional dancer in Sierra Leone, and... she dearly loves her family. That comes off in ever page.
Reading: Maybe-Tomorrow, which is Not Good and which I am reading mostly for the historical interest (it's a novel about a gay high schooler in Texas written in the 50s).
To Read: Picked up Queen of the Damned at the library... I think I've heard it's the last 'good' Anne Rice vampire book? Guess I'll find out.