waiting game...

okay, so i actually have about 4 uber in-depth blogs from the past month that i've been meaning to put up and they'll come in due course... i swear!

right now, i've just been monstrously pre-occupied with my rather last-minute plans to get the hell out of dc and get into the cutthroat, yet stylistically superior hell of new york city. i've had two rounds of interviews for a job up there that i really want; it sounds like i'd have lots more responsibility and more varied day-to-day tasks than my current job. and plus, it's in new york! i went up there on tuesday and am now just waiting to hear back from them... on pins and needles! it's only been 3 days, but i know that they're trying to make their decision fairly quickly and i just want it so badly!

i've been moderately successful in passing the time by spending obscene amounts of time reading the deliciously superficial nuggets of pop culture gossip on best week ever and learning lots of things on wikipedia. my startling discovery from yesterday:

apparently it's common knowledge, but i had never heard of the supposed connection between the popular children's nursery rhyme/game ring around the rosey and the plague. according to the clever wikipedia contributors, it's been argued that the "ring around the rosey" referred to the red rash that would break out on the skin of plague victims who then placed posies (or some other pleasant smelling flora) on their person to mask the stench of rotting flesh. the "ashes" line may have been in reference to the burning of the bodies and the "we all fall down" was an existential conclusion about the inevitably of man's mortality.

upon further investigation on snopes.com, i learned that this interpretation is most likely a load of over-imaginative, english major bunk. the first written records of ring around the rosey didn't surface until its publication in kate greenaway's mother goose or the old nursery rhymes in 1881. so unless kids were stealthily playing this game on the dl for 500 years, it's unlikely that the rhyme is in reference to the plague. one argument that i read (and liked) explained how perhaps it was a reaction against the religious ban on dancing among protestants in the 19th century. sounds good to me.



last night at midnight, i finally saw brokeback mountain... i'm not sure exactly what i was expecting, but that wasn't it! i wasn't overwhelmed with emotion like i wanted to be. and i really wasn't expecting heath ledger to suddenly mount lil' jake gyllenhall while on their first sheep-herding assignment up on brokeback. i always make it a point to watch movies a few times to make sure whether i like it or not, so i'll prolly do the same for this before i send it back to netflix.


so that's what i've been doing with my downtime - overdosing on pop culture and research, and netflixing. oh and slowly becoming obsessed with carla bruni... listen to quelqu'un m'a dit and try not to get all warm and weepy.