TUTORIAL: how to work in costume

I may have mentioned before, but my main way of earning money at the moment is by working in costume as a ghost tour guide. I dress like someone from the 18th century (minus the stays/ corset, because those are expensive and I don't want that in my life), so I figured I'd show you how to dress like a woman from the time period.

step one: find a bathroom and use it.

because apparently women didn't pee in the 18th century.

step two: get your 21st century clothes off

apparently women couldn't wear pants in the 18th century, either..

step three: actually get your costume on.

chemise, then pockets, then petticoat, then pin the jacket, then apron, then bonnet, then modesty piece if you have it, then cloak if you need it, then shoes.

Does Jane Eyre deserve the romantic hype?

I know I should have done this post a few weeks ago, when I was actually reading the novel. Also, Valentine's Day was last month, so I probably could have capitalized on that. Instead, it's Saint Patrick's Day, and I'm writing about romance novels. You read the title. We're talking about Jane Eyre. If you don't want spoilers then you should stop reading. If you don't mind getting spoiled about a novel that came out 170 years ago, keep going.

I read Jane Eyre as part of a Gothic Literature course. The basic plot summary is that Jane Eyre survives an abusive home and a terrible school (though it gets better) and becomes a teacher at said school, once she's done with her education. At 18, she puts an ad out for a change in position, and gets a response from someone at Thornfield Hall. She becomes the governess for a girl named Adele, who's the ward of a mysterious man named Edward Rochester. Rochester (and his literary cousin Heathcliff) basically invented the trope of the romantic lead being "tall, dark, mysterious, and handsome." Despite being 20 years older than Jane, the two form a vaguely romantic relationship. Blah, blah, romantic conflict, blah, blah, turns out the strange noises that Jane has been hearing in the attic are NOT a servant - the strange noises are ACTUALLY ROCHESTER'S FIRST WIFE!!! *CUE DRAMATIC MUSIC* Jane finds this out on HER WEDDING DAY TO MR. ROCHESTER!!!! *CUE MORE DRAMATIC, SOAP-OPERA MUSIC*
Turns out Bertha (the crazy first wife in the attic) has been crazy since the honeymoon, and there was absolutely positively no way for Rochester to get out of the marriage he was conscripted into. So he kept her up in his attic, instead of trying to relate to her as a human being who might just have some issues with communicating her anger. Jane freaks out, and wants to leave instead of being Rochester's mistress. She cites power iniquity, miscommunication, personal finance, and the existence of a crazy wife in the attic as her main reasons for wanting to leave. She takes off in the middle of the night.
Jane gets taken in by St. John Rivers (pronounced sin-jin) and his sisters Diana and Mary. A year later, they find out that Jane is their cousin, and their mutually estranged uncle had left Jane 20,000 pounds. She wants to split it evenly and, even with having 5,000 to her name, is quite well-off. Jane insists she doesn't want to marry St. John and leaves to go find Rochester again.
Turns out Rochester's house has been burned down by Bertha. Bertha died. Rochester lost his left hand; one eye had come out entirely and the other had extremely reduced vision. Within ten days of Jane's return, they get married for realsies.

So, is this romantic?

Well.

Five Reasons Why Jane Eyre is Definitely Romantic

1. Romantic tension out the wazoo. First Rochester could be getting engaged to Blanche Ingram! Jane could be getting engaged to St. John! There's imagery reflective of Beauty and the Beast in Act 1, where Belle/ Jane has to go home for something (in this case, because her abusive aunt is dying and specifically asked to see her), then Beast/ Rochester asks her to only stay out a week, but she winds up staying out longer. All the fairy tale imagery here (and there's a metric sh**ton) means FAIRY TALE ROMANCE???!!
2. Rochester can only feel his true and best self while with Jane! Jane cares about Rochester despite his flaws! #RelationshipGoals
3. They deliberately choose each other, despite class differences, age differences, power differences, and LITERALLY ANY KIND OF DIFFERENCE (except racial/ regional) that you can think of.
4. About halfway through the novel, Jane saves Rochester's life. That's definitely romance novel material, right?
5. At the end, Jane and Rochester work together for their relationship. She helps him get places, and helps out in pretty much every sense. Rochester wants to do more to provide for her, but the most he can do is own a house and have a really good bank account, which is all Jane needs at that point. They really do seem to care for each other, despite the variety of power and age dynamics in their relationship.

Five Reasons Why Jane Eyre is Definitely NOT Romantic

1. Can you say, "ROCHESTER IS TWICE JANE'S AGE?" Rochester is 20 years older than Jane, who is 20 years old when they get married for real at the end of the novel. He is literally a generation older than her, which can result in all sorts of weirdness.
2. Speaking of power dynamics, that's basically what this relationship is based on. Rochester has literally every power over Jane for most of the year Jane spends as Adele's governess - he's her employer, he has money, he has social standing, he's male, he's physically bigger and stronger than Jane is. Only when he loses most of these and Jane gains some money do they seem like they're on any kind of equal footing. Jane also never actually calls him by his first name, even at the end of the novel. She always addresses him as "sir" or "Mr. Rochester," even though they're married and have a kid together. He's never Edward to her; that's less a thing of the times than it is a possible indicator of power iniquity.
3. Rochester has his secrets and has problematic timing when he reveals them. He wasn't planning on telling Jane about Bertha until they had been married a year. He only told Jane about other relationships he had after Bertha and before Jane to prove the point that he wanted to get away from Bertha. Also, HE KEPT HIS INSANE WIFE IN HIS ATTIC.
4. Say it again for the people in the back: ROCHESTER. KEPT. HIS. CRAZY. WIFE. IN. THE. ATTIC. If Jane had started to irritate him, what would he have done to her?
5. Also, he sometimes flirted with other people to see if he could make Jane jealous. He also dresses up as a gypsy at one point and tries to "read fortunes" with the real intent of "reading Jane's emotions to see if she actually likes him." That can be read two ways: romantic conflict because of the repressed emotion, or "Rochester is a grown man and needs to learn to express his feelings to women instead of dressing up in ridiculous costumes and asking stupid questions."

CONCLUSION: IS IT ROMANTIC?

you decide. Tell me in the comments. Or don't.

A new semester!

Well, here I am, a week and a half into the new semester, and it's time for a Real and Proper Update on classes and life in my last semester of college.

First, I'm taking my second required senior capstone. The course is called The Gothic Tradition, which is far more up my alley than I thought it would be. Usually I can't stand horror and paranormal things (says the person who tells ghost stories professionally), but this is neither of those things. Well, it is a little. At this point, though, the style often feels reminiscent of 18th-century Scooby-Doo, but that's the time frame and establishment of the genre that allowed Scooby-Doo to happen.

I'm also taking Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, which makes up entirely for not taking Greek this semester. Since Middle English is closer to Modern English than Ancient Greek is, studying Chaucer is a bit easier than studying Homer, or Plato, or Xenophon. It still takes patience, though. Things would have been pronounced differently than we might think of them today, though. At the time Chaucer was writing, you didn't waste time writing unnecessary letters, so words like "knight" would have actually been pronounced with a "k" and "gh" sound.

I'm taking Creative Writing too, which I'm only about half-enthused about. We're doing poetry right now. I can't stand poetry. I need the expansive detail that prose allows. GAAAHHHH! Well, college is supposed to be a learning experience, right?

Finally, I'm taking Ancient Sexualities. We've only spent time discussing sexualities and the discourse surrounding it, mostly through reading Michel Focault. I don't like Focault. He writes too much and says too little. (Apparently that's a French thing.) It would be more interesting if he were more direct, but I've still learned things: For example, we can't say that Achilles and Patroclus from the Iliad are hella gay (even though it's easy to read them that way). "Hella gay" wasn't a thing in 900 BCE Greece. They didn't have the same concept of relationships and sexuality as we do now.


That's what I'm taking, and hopefully it'll be an interesting semester!

Favorite Things from January

Because I'm a blogger and I'm only posting three times a month now, I feel like it's best to update you on a few things I like. Let's get into it!

yarn things

firstly, I recently bought myself a YARN SWIFT for maybe $30 on Etsy. It's simple enough; you use it to wind large skeins of yarn into balls without the skein getting really messed up. I got a lot of yarn for Christmas and it was super helpful to have the yarn swift. I was able to start winding yarn from Christmas last year that I didn't get to because I didn't want the headache of trying to wind all of it and getting it all snagged on the back of a chair or something. but now I have this, and it's great!

I also really liked going through my old yarn; this month, I've realized that I have way too much yarn that's not going to go into any project. So I decided I'm going to make a blanket (or five) for someone who needs it more than I need that yarn. I know it would probably be better to give really nice blankets out of really nice yarn, but acrylic blankets are better than no blankets at all.

book things

I started (but did not finish) two books this month. The first is Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, which a friend of mine gave me for Christmas last year. It was the perfect size to carry on the Metro for the first few weeks of my internship. I wish I had thought to bring it for the second half, because having such a small book would have been helpful in a crowded Metro train. The book is a nonfiction one about the development of the English language, which is actually more interesting than you might think. Linguistically, English is a hella weird language, and there are several reasons for that. Check it out if you're curious!

The main reason I didn't get more into it was because a good friend of mine (TheReviewingFangirl over at BooksMoviesandMore.Net) mentioned the series Outlander. When I was fangirling over All Souls last summer, she was fangirling over Outlander. Around Fall Break, we swapped. I know, I'm awful, because it took me until Jterm to get to reading it, but I like it so far. Now that I've actually got time to read for more than 20 minutes during Jterm break, I'm eager to get more into it.

writing things

I haven't well kept my "editing novels" new years resolution. HOWEVER, that's partially because I've been writing and editing a tour for a tavern during my internship. That was pretty cool. The main takeaway I got from that writing experience was more of an academic writing hack: to write out everything in an outline (or print it, or whatever), and then cut up all the sections and lay them out on the floor. It's easier to visualize everything if you can see it laid out like that.

In other writing news, I have kept up with the resolution of "writing a journal every day." I bought this journal from a Papyrus store last summer, and I finally started writing it more. It's really small, which is really handy. If I didn't have five other journals waiting to be written in, I would probably buy it again.

makeup things

I wore makeup a lot to work this month. It wasn't super fancy, mostly eyeliner and sometimes eyeshadow or mascara. I got two new eyeshadows in December that I wore a lot.

One was called Indian Summer from Maybelline. It's two-toned and very muted; one color is for the main part of the eyelid and one is for contour. In this case, the main color was slightly lighter than my eyelid and the contour was quite a bit darker. That made it ideal for everyday things.

The nicer one is also from Maybelline - it's 30D (Golden Star); it's a gold color with a dark blue contour color. I've got 0% credibility for mixing colors from huge eyeshadow selections, so I really like how both of these were just straightforward: FIRST THIS. THEN THIS. NOW LEAVE. Since Golden Star was more shimmery, I didn't use it quite as often as Indian Summer, but check them out wherever you get Maybelline things.

I also bought a bunch of eyeliner a million years ago from the drugstore - just a few pencil shades from Wet and Wild that are $1. I typically use either the dark brown shade, Pretty in Mink, or the dark blue shade, Deep Ocean. (Apparently, Deep Ocean's foothold into the Blue $1 Eyeliner World has been replaced by "Like, Comment, and Share," which is a terrible tie-in to the social-media-blue color of the pencil. I haven't used the lighter blue shade yet, but my dark blue eyeliner is nearly out and it makes me sad.)

SO HERE ARE MY OPINIONS! I wasn't sponsored by any of these. I hope you liked it.

See you next month!

What Am I Doing in Jterm?

So this January term, I didn't move back into my dorm. Instead, I stayed home, boarded the Metro on Monday morning, the 4th, and went to an INTERNSHIP! I'm working at a museum and it's been very interesting thus far. Like, genuinely interesting.
It's also been giving me research frustration, because there are only so many ways you can put your search terms into JSTOR before you start seeing the same things that you KNOW aren't what you're looking for. But that's what in-house libraries are for, right?
It's been an interesting month, for sure. I've learned a LOT of history things (I expected that, but still). The most frustrating thing so far is the number of snow days that have made me work from home. The city owns the museum, so we have to do what the city does. Since the city has been closed today and was closed on Friday, we've been closed too. I'm running out of things to do that are work-related. It's frustrating.
I'm hoping that the city is open tomorrow, just so I can actually DO something. My bus isn't running tomorrow, but the Metro is. I'm just hoping I have somewhere to go. It's irritating to have too many days off.
It's been a really cool month for sure, though. :)

What Posting Schedule Can You Anticipate This Year?

Well, it's a new year, which means it's a new time to figure out what I'm doing with the year ahead. This includes what I'm going to do with blogging.
To be honest, I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this URL once May is over and I graduate. It's been a fantastic four years (both blogging and not), and I've kind of dated this time frame by saying it's for my college years. So there's that.
I don't know if I'm going to keep this blog going or make a new URL for something that's more relevant to my life as a whole, in the future, or if I'm going to keep this blog, change the URL, and... then what? I don't know.
Until the end of the semester, at least, I'll try and post at least three times a month. That seems to be manageable at this point. That's all you can reasonably expect from me, I think, but I may try and post more often than that. But senior year and all means I'm going to be finishing up graduation things, so three times a month is the best I can assure you for the next few months.
It's really real, though, the fact that I'm about to graduate. I haven't really internalized it yet. But here we are.

New Years' Resolutions

Well, 2016 is here, which means I'm going to have a lot of things I want to do. Here are a few of them.

1. Write or edit one of my novels at least three hours a week.
2. journal every day (and possibly read spiritual things too)
3. read at least one new book a month that's not for class
4. exercise effectively and eat well
5. Get a job.
6. built my savings account to where I can actually live on my own.
7. finish a large, long-term knitting project.
8. Don't buy new things (i.e. makeup, notebooks, pens, yarn) without using up the old ones first.
9. Try and move out by the end of 2016. I don't have any housing lined up for the future aside from living with my parents (nor do I really have the bank account for it just yet), so I need to work on that.

the glory of arm knitting

I recently discovered arm knitting. What this means is that, instead of using knitting needles as anchors for the stitches, one uses arms for the anchors. It creates large stitches and requires very thick yarn (or 3-5 strands of thinner yarn). The result is a lot of quickly knit but very warm garments (especially scarves. Arm-knit scarves are easy). TRY IT!

Yea or Nay: "Friends"

So I am rapidly coming to the end of the final season of the TV show FRIENDS. For reference, I was born within the twelve months preceding the release of the first episode, and so I was in fourth grade when the final episode aired. I have vague recollections of the show before middle and high school; in high school, one night of the choir tour my hotel roommates and I watched a few episodes of the show one night, because it was on before we went to bed. That and maybe a few passing references were the only real interactions I had with the show until Spring Break 2015. I signed up for a free month of Netflix and started watching. I recall rambling to a friend about how excited I was about Ross and Rachel in the first season.
The rest of the semester went by without much in the way of watching it, and then I signed up for Actual Paying Netflix and watched a lot of the episodes as I worked on knitting projects.
I now feel a little dumb for rambling about Ross and Rachel in March - at the beginning, they're so awkward about the relationship, but then WE WERE ON A BREAK happened. And then Ross started getting really annoying.
It's hard to quantify the time frame of everything in the show when watching 10 years worth of material in 10 months. There are a few hints in the show that serve as reminders to the time frame. One time Ross says that he and Rachel haven't dated for six years - my first thought was "no, you haven't dated since July... oh wait..."
So, do I like it? Yes. HOW YOU DOIN'? COULD I BE ANY MORE JOEY? (sorry...)
Is it totally a product of its time? Yes. The way the show handled the gender identity of Chandler's father would definitely be problematic today if the relevant episodes had been aired more recently. It also goes to show how much society has changed around the concept of gender identity and expression - I'm sure that, for the time, the presentation wasn't problematic at all.
In all, though, FRIENDS are.... friends. And I appreciate that.

Gifts for English Majors

In continuing with yesterday's theme, here are some gifts that I might recommend for an English Major. These are things I, as an English major (and a person with opinions), would totally appreciate, but keep in mind that these are only my opinion. Every English major is different.

First off, gift-giving hints:

1. There are a lot of lists on the Internet about "THINGS ENGLISH MAJORS WILL APPRECIATE." I will be completely honest with you: unless the English Major is interested in the cross-sections of Poe, Shakespeare, Austen, and loves the books they were assigned in high school, be wary of randomly selecting from these lists (including mine). I've met several English majors who can't stand Shakespeare. (I am not one of those people - I can't stand Samuel Beckett, and I say that after I wrote a capstone paper on him).
2. That being said, learn what sort of thing the English Major DOES and DOES NOT like. (This is a general gift-giving guideline, to be honest). See above about how some English Majors can't stand Shakespeare. If they're interested in Shakespeare, then you have a LOT of fun options. If they're not interested in William Shakespeare, James Joyce, Jane Austen, or Edgar Allen Poe, you still have options, but do ask because that means you'll have to do some more exploring.
3. Not all English majors want to be writers. (I do, but that's beside the point.) Not all English majors want to be editors. Not all English majors want to be journalists. Some English majors want to be teachers; others are going to grad school for something completely different. Many lists will include variations on the first three, but you may need to do more exploring.

Gifts for the Writer English Major

Definition: the Writer English Major wants to write fiction/ poetry/ etc. May have strong opinions on the Classic Works of Fiction.

1. This GO AWAY I'M WRITING bag. Ships from UK. 
2. Or any of these journals. Various prices. Ships from UK. 
3. This pin from Etsy on the attachment to fictional characters.
4. Or this "i write" one, also from Etsy.
5. Or quite possibly my favorite quote about writing, on a pin from Etsy.
6. This basic summation of writer's block.

Gifts for the Gothic Fan

Definition: Gothic works are basically dark horror and romance. There are different sub-genres (Southern Gothic, Romantic-Era Gothic, Victorian Gothic, etc) and I'm not very familiar with the differences among them. Edgar Allen Poe was a Victorian Gothic writer; Dracula, Wuthering Heights, and Jane Eyre are all classic Gothic novels. Search Wikipedia and Google for more information.

1. This bracelet, with a quote from Dracula. $40, Etsy (note that the shopkeeper says she won't be shipping until January 4).
2. Seriously, just google Edgar Allen Poe quotes and find something.
3. Or Jane Eyre. If you get anything related to a "Madwoman in the attic" then you're on the right track. Wuthering Heights is my least favorite book so I'm not going to say you should go search for it. I cannot willingly inflict that book onto anyone.
4. Jane Austen isn't Gothic. Unless you're reading Northanger Abbey, apparently.

Gifts for the Jane Austen fan

Definition: Someone who likes Jane Austen.

1. There are so many Jane Austen things. Google "Jane Austen quote jewelry."
2. CafePress is also good for this.
3. And Etsy.

Gifts for the Shakespeare fan

about as ubiquitous as the Jane Austen merchandise, you'll be able to find a loooooooooooooot of things online (especially Etsy). Be warned, though: if they have a strong opinion against A Midsummer Night's Dream, avoid things that say "though she is but little, she is fierce."