Stargate Atlantis: new episode tonight

So...uh...it's very odd to have my ship end and be reintroduced...simultaneously. ( spoilers for tonight's ep )

It kinda sucks to do shipping for a Stargate series. With most shows, you can hope for two people to get together or break up or whatever, but you know that at least SOMEONE is going to get together with SOMEONE. In SG1 and SGA, no body really hooks up, not for real. It's depressing. They're all such professionals when it comes to workplace relationships, which is patently ridiculous considering how most of the characters are very unprofessional in every other aspect of their jobs, taking unbelievable risks, blowing off authority, and generally doing things that would have them kicked out of a real military from day 2. So they can break all the rules they want and be forgiven if the day ends well... but they can't sleep with each other. It's kind of painful to watch, honestly.

3rd poem: The Morning After Sleeplessness

I've decide to do a series of poem posts, alternating between my own poems and poems I love by famous writers.

The poem below was one I wrote March of last year for a lit poetry class in my senior year. I didn't get a very good mark for it, which I understand because I didn't put a lot of work into it-- I think I actually wrote it the morning before class.  Anyway, even if its not that great a poem, it is an honest look into my psyche and my strange personal habits in university life. The scene described below happened a lot during finals weeks.

"The Morning After Sleeplessness"

Sometimes I don't sleep at night
just to be stubborn. I can control time
and time, day, doesn't really begin again
unless you've rested some point in between.
Although it never quite works like that:
I've created hours from nothingness
but I still feel like I've lost time somewhere,
and I just have to wait for it to catch up.

Objects and feelings aren't unreal they're much too real.
I shiver every time the air changes and think
What time is it now? Is it 8 o'clock yet,
the hour when my roommates wake up and catch me?
Can I fake it-- do I want to fake it?
Yes, I've been sleeping, not reading, not watching tv,
not fucking up my body cycles.
A raised eyebrow is my reward-- I am not
entirely certain I'd buy it either.

Ninth hour hits and morning rituals are due. Most important
is the shower, the cave that wakes me up
but only after making me feel drunk.
I palm the tile wall as if I'd taken six shots
of something and hold myself
steady, straight, and stable,
because a cracked head is kind of scary
when you wrap your head around it.

Stepping out of the shower I'm awake, brighter and higher
than I've been in weeks. Still kind of drunk
from fatigue but not to worry,
the real fatigue won't hit me till early afternoon.
Right now I've got four or five hours
of total sensation to play with.

linguistic complaint: Abracadabra vs. Avada Kedavra

One of the things that always annoyed me about JKR's use of spell-words in Harry Potter books, in fact the only thing of this nature that really did annoy me about her spell naming, was designating the phrase "Avada Kedavra" as a death curse, and basically the worst curse that could be uttered in the entire series.

Then she went on to sell billions of books and influence children's vocabularly for an entire young generation. The problem? She basically ruined the phrase "Abracadabra". Every 10 year old who read HP is going to forever associate the two, which puts unfair negative connotation on a phrase that has survived for hundreds of years with a relatively neutral meaning. It could be used to do good things, bad things, or things classified as neither moral nor immoral (like turning a flower pot into a clock.)

Here's a perfectly well-known word that's seeped in literary tradition, used by flowery princes and evil sorcerers alike, a phrase the Tooth Fairy might use to sneak some money under a child's pillow, and now through some questionable phonetics JKR has villified it. Ruins a good word.


If you're curious about the origins of the phrase abracadabra, Wikipedia has an entry on it, though no promises to accuracy or validity with that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abra_Kadabra#History