Bite Me

Me and Husband celebrated one year of marriage yesterday! Albeit in separate countries. Fish and chips is a special meal for us so when we had our respective teas (dinners - I miss saying the word tea, sorry to non-Northerners there!) we had fish and chips. That was the plan. There's a British restaurant called The Rose & Crown in a mini shopping precinct on a street round the corner that I went to with Alexis and Sidonie - a really nice MFA2 Photo student from Paris. It was shut. Its shut on Mondays. Using her quick thinking Alexis called up BJs, a Chicago diner chain to find out if they served the important dish - they did - we ate it - and had a big brownie pudding thing afterwards too for good measure. It was not exactly authentic, but nice. The chips were coated in savoury seasonings and the fish batter was a bit too heavy - a bit like a pancake batter, not light and crispy enough. Husband had has fish and chips at home, and his mum made it healthy with a jacket potato. This places added importance on our first fish and chip shop take away complete with mushy peas, when I get home in 5 weeks. Funnily enough, Sidonie, the Parisian was very interested to hear about mushy peas and wants me to make some here. Can you believe that? It took me a while to get my head around that.

Other good news. I got a Calarts scholarship for next year - they are giving me $12,000 for the year. This is an unusually high figure for a grad student. So I feel very lucky. I still need to do much fund raising and need to earn a lot of money over the summer.

Today I gave a presentation in Buffy class. I worked really hard on it. My feeling is, I can unpick film, photography and television and by having something to say on them, I am admitted to higher, more learned debates (without having to do all that reading. I'm not so good at reading). So I pushed myself, I wanted to see how far I could take my ideas. My presentation was basically delivering a formal paper - just me speaking - a personal perspective on watching way too much Buffy. I entitled it 'Christianity, Rape, Heroin Addiction, Cockney Rhyming Slang, Tea and The British Class System: A Personal Decoding of Buffy'. If that really tickles your fancy, email me and I can forward you my notes. Leslie came up to me afterwards to tell me that she really enjoyed it and that she overheard many of the others in the class saying how much they enjoyed it too. She really liked what my brain did with it, she said. In particular, she liked an observation I made. I noticed in Pangs, Season 4, Episode 8, when the Initiative plants a chip in Spike’s head and he tries to bite Willow, the scene is played as a farce and Willow expresses her sadness at not being very bite worthy. Spike reassures her by saying “Don’t be ridiculous, I’d bite you in a heart beat” and “If I could, I would”. The following episode, Something Blue, Season 4, Episode 9, Spike’s inability to bite is referred to by calling him “impotent” and “flaccid”. Instead he must drink blood through a straw in mug. The mug has written on it: “Kiss the Librarian” – its as if all he can do now is kiss. And here's my big observation that Leslie liked: its as if male vampires can experience impotency in two ways. The penis is doubled in the teeth. The wet mouth that house the teeth is a symbolic doubling of the vagina. This means that a vampire’s mouth is constantly a symbol for penetrative sex! Leslie told me that in psychoanalysis we can go off and view the world symbolically, and then return to normality, but bringing back a little bit of experience. The same arc that happens each Buffy episode, we wander off into fantasy but return to our starting position by the end of the episode - a little bit wiser. As previously mentioned, I adore Leslie, so this all made me feel very pleased with myself.