My entries are set to "friends only," but I will add you as a friend if you'd like to read this blog and keep in touch with me.

One thing I really want to do is learn/read more about and become involved in transgender issues. I've come to realize, through my interactions on Twitter of all places, that my graduate and undergraduate education of women studies, feminist, and gender/sexuality issues has always blatantly and intentionally left out the voices of a whole group of people. What bothers me even more (and is shameful, really) is that I never realized this omission in my studies. It never occurred to me that the GLBT literature I have read is really mostly GL, maybe some B... but definitely not T. I didn't realize that the "gay marriage" issue completely ignored transgender people. Then, I started to think how transgender people are ignored everywhere! They are labeled, mislabeled, I even feel like a tool writing this, because of my damn ignorance. I don't know anything about a subjugated group that have a harder and more dangerous day-to-day life than I could ever imagine. This whole post reeks of my own privilege that I never realized I had.

My thesis is centered around a lot of feminist theory that I was always drawn to. For the most part, I do lean towards writers whose conceptions of gender and sexuality are not binary at all, but fluid. However, this doesn't mean they include transgender issues in their theories, because they don't. Thinking back, I'm not sure the word transgender came up in class discussion at all. But, what is even more important and less acknowledged is the fact that as a group feminists are not acting out against the violence that transgendered people deal with on a daily basis. We talk about violence towards women. That's it. We exclude transgendered people who have less rights than ourselves! That's not what being a feminist is about at all. It's not the feminist I want to categorize myself as.

I do have to continue to think closely about this in my own writing because leaving out a group, ignoring them and their voices, their existence is exactly what feminists argue happened to women. How can we, I, call myself a feminist if I do the same to another group? That's just unacceptable.

Have you read more than 6 of these books?

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Look at the list and put an 'Yes' after those you have read. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so i can see your responses!


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - Yes
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - No
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - Yes
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - Yes
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - Yes

6 The Bible - Not the whole thing, but most of it.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - No
8 1984 - George Orwell - Yes
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - No
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - No

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - Yes
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy - No
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller - No
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - Almost 90% probably. A couple of plays I haven't read...
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - Yes

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - No
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk - No
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - Yes
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - No
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot - No

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - No
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - Yes
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens - No
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - No
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - No

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh - No
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - No
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - No
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - No
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - No
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - Parts of it.
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - No
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - No.
34 Emma - Jane Austen - Yes
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen - Yes

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - Yes
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein - No
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres - No
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - No
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - Yes

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - Yes
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - Yes
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Yes
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving - No
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - No

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - No
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy - No
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood - No
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - Yes
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan - No

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel - No
52 Dune - Frank Herbert - No
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - No
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - Yes
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth - No

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon - No
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - No
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - Yes
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon - No
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - No

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - Yes
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - No, but it's an upcoming read. Can't wait!
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt - No
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold - No
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - Started it.
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac - No
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy - Yes
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding - No
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie - No
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - No

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - No
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - Yes
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - Yes
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson - No
75 Ulysses - James Joyce - No
76 The Inferno - Dante - No
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome - No
78 Germinal - Emile Zola - No
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - No
80 Possession - AS Byatt - No

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - No
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell - No
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker - No
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro - Yes
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - No

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry - No
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White - Yes
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom - No
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - No
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton - No

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - Yes
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - Yes
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks - No
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams - No
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole - No

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute - No
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - No
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - Yes
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - No
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - No

Verdict:
Yes: 28
No: 72

I wonder how many books I've read in total. I am working on cataloging my collection still and will probably get around to noting which books I've read and which books I own, but haven't read yet.

I cannot wait to get some things off my chest that have been haunting me for the past year.

One large item I cannot wait to scratch-off my to-do list is my thesis, of course. But, I've noticed a small army of little things that have been driving me insane. Things like uploading old pictures from my computer to my flickr account, or cleaning out a drawer that's full of junk. Stupid little things like that have become so irksome to me.

The list of little (and big) things to get done is so long. I don't think I'll ever get to all of them.

This makes me wonder though. Isn't there always something to do? What would it feel like if I didn't have a list (well, a metaphorical one) of things to get done and would I even want to know that feeling?

I don't think I would. I don't ever want to feel done. Unless I am dead, I guess.

That would be a problem.

But, even though I get frustrated with all the stuff I have to do... I suppose it's better than having nothing to do. Or, even worse, not being able to do anything.

Went to Panera this morning with Tony. Did a few errands. Spent about two hours on my thesis. I'm trying to finish going through some library books still. I want to get a draft of my intro to my thesis chair by next Tuesday since I have to go up to school for work. I'm still waiting for his comments about chapter 1 (or at least the part that I sent him...still needs two more sections). Ugh. Just feeling a wave of overall frustration. But...I am making progress. Slowly, I guess.

Anyways. Not much has happened today. I'm going off to boxing class in about a half-hour. Then, I'll probably finish up with these damn books tonight. We're taking a small weekend trip to Disney. Leaving this Thursday. So I've got to get a'crackin' with my writing. I'm behind my imaginary schedule. Way behind. I start teaching this month and I wanted to have my whole thesis in readable rough draft form before then. Looks like I'll have my intro and chapter 1 done. Hopefully chapter 2... but the conclusion. I have no idea about that yet. That's still simmering in the back of my mind.

I've been a little frustrated lately about my inability to focus as much as I should on finishing my thesis. Not having to work for the past couple of months has been wonderful. Being halfway through writing my thesis is wonderful. But there are those days (today being one of them) when I think of every possible thing I could be doing besides my thesis.

I have some books next to me that need to get back to the library. My only task is to skim through them and extract any possible useful quotes for my thesis and reference the work in my BibDesk file as well as Worldcat.org. That's all. It shouldn't take me more than an average of an hour or so per book. Obviously, and frustratingly, it has taken me much longer because I keep finding other things to do (entry in LJ, twitter updates, obsessively reading my RSS feeds, brainstorming blog topics I can't justify writing until I finish my thesis, thinking about designing a new web-page for myself, compulsively fantasizing about finally finishing an inventory of my books and assigning dewey decimal numbers to all of them and organizing them by subject, then by author's last name!!!).

Yes, I obviously have a bit of a problem. Avoidance.

Woke up at the ungodly hour of 7:30am on a Sunday and then Tony and I met up with Yordans and Manny for a nice bike ride all over South Beach and downtown Miami.

Here's Yordans' Facebook update (he does a great job of summarizing our journey this morning):

Yordans Mosquera: biked from South Point through SoBe, up Lincoln, through the Venetian Csway, up Biscayne & 31st, over the 112 Highway, up to Alton and down to South Point. After 2:30 hrs and 10-12 miles, I am dead. Thx Janine and Tony for coming with Manny and I.

Had a great time. Everyone else is sore but since I've been riding on my own most days, I guess I've gotten used to it.

Planning on spending the remainder of this afternoon doing some more thesis research and then I'm off to my grandma's for dinner. Bringing leftovers for Tony, who's stuck at work until 9 tonight.

The Nutrisystem diet I did last year was wonderful. It actually worked. But that's because I didn't EVER deviate from what I was supposed to eat. For three months straight I probably ate more lettuce and veggies that I have in my whole life. The meat or chicken I ate was usually less than the size of my fist and I drank nothing except water and tall skinny lattes from Starbucks.

This year, after gaining much of the weight back I've decided to get on a diet again and try to get into shape too, which I didn't really do last year. So I've been bike riding anywhere between 7 and 10+ miles maybe 3-5 times a week. This week I haven't been able to ride because it's been raining, so tomorrow morning I am whipping out the exercise DVDs and the yoga mat to workout at home instead if I can't ride.

But OH MY GOD is the food thing killing me this time. I haven't purchased Nutrisystem again because it is pretty expensive and I was thoroughly bored of the food. Instead I've tried to limit my calorie count to 1100 a day. I'm using Lose It! an app for the iPhone to keep track of what I eat. Not having the prepared meals definitely makes it that much more difficult to stick to the 1100 calorie limit. But I'm trying.

Ugh... oh well. I had to write about my frustration. I'm hungry =(

Yikes...it's been 44 weeks since I've posted anything on LJ.

It's probably been just as long since I've been productive in any sense of the word. My thesis has been on the back burner for so long (many disappointments with myself, my skills-or lack thereof-as a writer, and my committee. But mostly my unsuccessful attempts are my own fault). My job has been sucking the life out of me for the past year (just quit on Monday!). Time has simply been lacking lately and by the time I find the energy to do anything, half the day has gone by. Obviously...it's time to change that.

Even though it's the end of February it's not too late to start working on those New Years resolutions.

Here they are...and I guess I'll keep writing about my progress to keep me focused.

FINISH THESIS
**This needs no explanation; it just has to get done by THIS SUMMER.**

Find a great job
**I just want to be happy. Right now it will be difficult, but I'm not going to be scared to change my situation if it no longer works for me. I won't care about who I work for more than I care about myself any longer.**

Create
**I bought some canvases from Pearls and I started painting. I also had a print I made years ago professionally framed. I want to continue working on my art and also work on some of the fiction I've started but never finished. It's something I love to do and I will make time for it.**

Go back to school
**While this scares me to death I want to go back and do something that I avoided the first time I was in college.**

Learn another language
**Not sure which one yet, but it's between German and either Italian or French.**

Volunteer
**This is something I've only done a couple of times many years ago. It is important to contribute to the community in any way possible so I want to find a program I can get involved in a couple of days a week.**

Get finances in order
**They're not too out of whack considering everything Tony and I have purchased in the past year. Mainly, I need to make sure I cancel some credit cards I no longer use and cancel those subscriptions and memberships I can live without**

Lose weight
**Getting down to anything below 140 would be great. This also includes creating a schedule for exercising. I'm thinking about joining Curves.**

I haven't blogged about school again, because I usually only have bad things to say.

But now...at 2 something in the morning...I realize that I have something really interesting to say about some of my school work.

I'm working on my thesis and I am going through the mountain of photocopies I had never read/sorted through/filed into my binders. Well, I just noticed that many of the photocopies I have of the title pages of books are marked by someone filling in names for some of the authors whose names appear in initials. They always write in small print and almost always enclose the names in parenthesis.

I am almost 100% sure it is the same person who has done this. And I think it's interesting to see a "footprint" of someone who probably was working on a big paper or published something about Schreiner...like I am trying to do.

I love to find writing in books. Handwritten anythings are lovely. I bought an 18th-century leather-bound French herbal remedy book on e-bay years ago and spent most of my time with it trying to decipher the faded and incomprehensible handwriting in the margins and at the end of the book. I'm just weird that way.

Just thought I'd share this interesting quote...in case anyone's interested...

From Mark Twain's essay, "On the Decay of the Art of Lying"

Lying is universal--we all do it. Therefore, the wise thing is for us diligently to train ourselves to lie thoughtfully, judiciously; to lie with a good object, and not an evil one; to lie for others' advantage, and not our own; to lie healingly, charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously; to lie gracefully and graciously, not awkwardly and clumsily; to lie firmly, frankly, squarely, with head erect, not haltingly, tortuously, with pusillanimous mien, as being ashamed of our high calling. Then shall we be rid of the rank and pestilent truth that is rotting the land; then shall we be great and good and beautiful, and worthy dwellers in a world where even benign Nature habitually lies, except when she promises execrable weather.

~Canadian T-REX 3-wheel street racer comes with a bad attitude as standard.
Yes, it's a toy, but it will out-accelerate other toys worth 10 times the price... At least until the party-pooping 140mph speed limiter kicks in.~

Should I move to Canada today? or tomorrow? =) Clickety-click on link to see what I'm gonna buy myself *one day* =)

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I LOVE drivers who flash their lights so that oncoming traffic knows there is a speed trap up ahead. I was driving up to campus on the Turnpike a little while ago and a car was flashing its lights like crazy as he/she drove up and over the hill in the opposite direction from me. I was on the left going over 100 (I drive very fast) and when I saw the flashing lights I slowed down, and pulled off of the left lane. The highway patrol officer was over on the right shoulder. As you come up over the top of the small hill, you can't see him soon enough to slow down. Yey, I avoided another speeding ticket. I love it when fellow drivers look out for each other rather than just have road rage all the time =)