basic deliciousness

I had a whole "Things I'm reading that I like" post planned because I have a hard time adjusting to the fact that Delicious is no more and fics I normally would have bookmarked are just sitting in open tabs BUT. BUT BUT BUT. There is a vid.

Club Can't Handle Kaner, by way2busymom




If you like sports, bros, faily humans, or joy, you will love this vid.


ETA: thanks to go_gentle for the source!

When the 19 Years Later title card appeared onscreen, most of the people in my theater cheered.

FOR THE EPILOGUE.

So is the hatred of said Epilogue fandom-related? Because I could have sworn people didn't like it.

I have had "Post to LJ" on my to-do list for like two weeks, so...here is a super brief greatest hits list of all the posts I should have been making during that time.

THING THE FIRST: I went to Boston to watch the USMNT vs Spain on June 4th! Except that I flew out on the 2nd with my friend and we trundled our little wheelie suitcases around Boston for like three hours in the most aggressive display of tourism I've ever participated in. We saw Historically Significant Sites and ate gelato and browsed at a second-hand bookshop (where I managed to find the one soccer-related book in the store in less than five minutes) and generally had a delightful time. Then we went to my cousin's house and proceeded to laze around for a few days until it was time for the game.

The game itself: I simply have too many feelings to write about this adequately. idek where to start. The fact that we got there two hours early and just wandered around in the midst of all the soccer fans tailgaiting at the Patriot's stadium? How my friend and I hung over the side of the railing with a Hispanic family from Rhode Island trying to catch a glimpse of players in the tunnel? The way I actually calculated the velocity with which I would strike the ground to see if it would break my legs if I were to hop the railings and fangirl Fernando Hierro? That was the point, btw, that I decided it would be best for me to back away and head to my TWELFTH ROW SEAT, FUCK YEAH.

The game itself...all the interested parties will have seen it already, so I'll stick to shallow things. David Silva is astonishingly short; Pepe Reina's shiny bald pate was about 100 yards away from me for 50 minutes and every single one of them was magical to me; and we were right in front of Torres' goal, so I was able to watch it happen and I'm still not over that blonde bitch. His goal did bring a moment of utter hilarity, though. A guy in the row behind us had been heckling Torres/Chelsea for most of the second half, when he was subbed in. As soon as Torres scored, two men in their 50s/60s a few rows ahead of us stood up, turned around, chanted "CHELSEA CHELSEA" at the heckler in unison and then turned around as though nothing had happened. Soccer rivalries: American style. HAHA THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE BRIEF.

THING THE SECOND: I'm still hunting for internships and have encountered my old nemesis: cover letters. Why oh why do internships need cover letters? I'm basically volunteering out of desperation to be everyone's bitch, not to fulfill my hopes and dreams.

THING THE THIRD: I'm devouring Parks and Recreation as fast as my family will allow me to disappear into Netflix Instant and ignore them for hours at a time. So like, three episodes a day? Whatever, the point is that I love it. As one friend described it "I like everyone on that show. That NEVER happens."

THING THE FOURTH: you should download this song by a band called Seryn who played SXSW and likes harmonies. It's free!

THAT REMINDS ME OF THING THE FIFTH AND FINAL: I saw fun. and Panic! At The Disco last week, which was delightful. It was also the hottest I have ever been in my entire life in the venue, and that was after _hmmm and I decided to get iced tea and sit in the balcony rather than fight our way into the pit. Semi-adulthood rocks, yo.

LIES HERE IS THING SIX THE LAST ONE FOR REALS THIS TIME: I bought these beautiful shoes basically because dorkorific told people to, which bodes well for her burgeoning career as a personal shopper/life guru but less well for me and my pocketbook. At least I will be impeccably shod while waiting in line at the soup kitchen.

...that make each other more delicious.

The Festival of Swag currently going on at ontd_football and

YOU'RE WELCOME

ETA: The fic where Zlatan is Orpheus, and Alessandro Nesta is Eurydice. Zlatan in the Underworld by meretricula Cracked out, perfect cameos, and really good timing.

NOW YOU ARE EVEN MORE WELCOME.

That quote is actually something my blaugrana friend got asked during the madness that was 4CLASICOS by a friend who was trying to understand our bitter rivalry. At first I resisted, but then I actually looked at pictures of Esteban Granero and Guti and realized I didn't have much room to protest. My friend and I managed to make it through all four games with our football friendship intact, which is more than we expected at the beginning. It helps that we're three states apart and communicate mostly via facebook and text message.

I know I owe feedback and recs for gazillions of fics, not the least being dorkorific's latest cracked out soccer fusion which shouldn't work and yet somehow does (Star Trek in Minus the Shooting). The reason I'm behind is that I've started preliminary work on my Senior Honors Research project, which is not required but instead designed for students to utilize independent work to demonstrate how they've absorbed the superlative research methodology of their particular discipline. So naturally I'm writing it about soccer.

This has been incredible in a lot of ways (dudettes, there are a LOT of articles about soccer/football/futbol and globalization and nationalism), so rather than treat this as the pinnacle of my academic career, I treat it like a party. For nerds. Aside from such brilliant article titles as 'It All Ended in an Unsporting Way': Serbian Football and the Disintegration of Yugoslavia, 1989-2006 and Football Fandom and Post-National Identity in the New Europe.* I get to visit Kickette and pretend it's valuable intelligence-gathering rather than my devotion to the Thursday Thigh-Off. Perhaps the greatest part is that because I'm only a sophomore, I have two years to work on this project/trick someone into letting me travel Spain and England as "research".

BEST PROJECT EVER Y/N?



*Seriously I have so many articles you guys. Ask me about the Jose Mourinho case study.


ETA: The blaugrana friend I mentioned in the first paragraph are flying out to Boston in like-two weeks to see the Spanish National Team vs. the US - WILL ANYONE ELSE BE THERE?

For some reason, I'm remembering to update facebook every day with poetry, but not lj. And they certainly don't deserve any more poetry than you do. So without further ado:

Emily Dickinson and Elvis Presley in Heaven

They call each other 'E.' Elvis picks
wildflowers near the river and brings
them to Emily. She explains half-rhymes to him.

In heaven Emily wears her hair long, sports
Levis and western blouses with rhinestones.
Elvis is lean again, wears baggy trousers

and T-shirts, a letterman's jacket from Tupelo High.
They take long walks and often hold hands.
She prefers they remain just friends. Forever.

Emily's poems now contain naugahyde, Cadillacs,
Electricity, jets, TV, Little Richard and Richard
Nixon. The rock-a-billy rhythm makes her smile.

Elvis likes himself with style. This afternoon
he will play guitar and sing 'I Taste A Liquor
Never Brewed' to the tune of 'Love Me Tender.'

Emily will clap and harmonize. Alone
in their cabins later, they'll listen to the river
and nap. They will not think of Amherst

or Las Vegas. They know why God made them
roommates. It's because America
was their hometown. It's because

God is a thing without
feathers. It's because
God wears blue suede shoes.

~Hans Ostrom

I technically skipped a day already. Whatever, better late than not at all.

Nostalgia

Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called "Find the Cow."
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.

Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent, a badly broken code.

The 1790s will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.

I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.

Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.

As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.

Billy Collins

So yeah, it's April! I always think that I'm going to be able to post a poem every day, and this is always an utter lie. So this year I'm deciding to overcompensate by posting like mad every time I do remember, and then hoping that carries over for the days when I forget.

First up is Def Jam poet and inspiration Shihan. I was insanely lucky and got to hear him speak when my school's Black Student Union brought him in this past February, and I've exercised a lot of self restraint here by only showing three of his poems.

1. Drum



how much better would this poem be if I got mad right now
and how much more will this poem affect you if I got sad right now
and started to cry or better yet
would you still cry if I borrowed your eyes
or would you still dream if no one inspired you?

2. Sick and Tired



I want to drop kick minorities who vote Republican

Biting and wonderful, and then the last one, which is just plain wonderful.

3. This Type Love




And check this, I want to place those little post-it notes
all around the house so she never forgets how much I love
her type love then not have enough ink in my pen to write
all there is to love about her type love.
Hope that I make her feel as good as she makes me feel,
and I want to deal with my friends making fun of me the
way I made fun of them when they went through the same kind of love type love.

I don't care if you don't know who he is (though I have been clearly falling down on the job if you don't), everyone head over to the

Richard Siken Fic Fest


because how does this:

Hello darling, sorry about that.
Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we
lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell
and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud

not make you want to write all the fic in the world?

I feel like GAY PIRATES are relevant to the interests of everyone on my flist. Like, why the hell would we all be here if not for gay pirates of some sort or another?



You're welcome.