all sorts of things

[psocoptera]

Tithe: I don't actually *know* blackholly, but I know her enough to be reading Tithe as a book written by a person instead of a mysterious product of the spontaneous generation of library shelves. So, reading it in terms of intent, why did she do this and not that; like having the author present in the reading makes me pay more attention to the mechanics of it and not just the story, maybe? Which I find particularly interesting as I'm a scientist and not a humanities major: I don't *usually* need to ascribe creative intent to be interested in process...

But anyways, Tithe! It's good. And interesting - not the book I thought it was going to be, although I should probably write about that in a separate spoiler-cut post. But I recommend it, especially to people interested in ya fantasy and/or fairy tales - meaning kelilah, it is yours to borrow as soon as I've reread the second half.

In school news, proctored an exam this morning (whee) and am now in grip of anxiety over not-entirely-unpredictable-yet-I-somehow-hadn't-thought-of-it professorial demand that I grade one of the questions - I have two choices, unless the other TA has already picked. Needless to say for anyone remotely aware of my TA situation, I have *utterly* *no* *idea* about the answers to these questions - I'm not even sure I could correctly give a name to the topic of their subject matter. I spent pretty much all of today desperately trying to block out the realization that sometime before tomorrow night I need to educate myself thoroughy enough in one of these topics to not just be able to hack up some half-assed answer for partial credit (my usual level of scholarship) but *write an answer key and judge other people's answers*. God, I just have *no idea*, it's like those dreams where you're taking advanced conversational Mongolian, a language you have never even heard spoken before.
And I don't see much of a way out... last time we graded the prof was entirely resistant to discussing what might constitute a good answer (she eventually gave me the question out of a solutions manual to grade after I pronounced bafflement over the one she had first assigned me). And she doesn't review our grading either, so I can't hope that unfair grading due to my poor understanding of the subject will be amended by any sort of oversight. Sigh sigh sigh, I may have to resort to reading all the exams and going by the majority opinion on the subject. And being liberal with points; a little grade inflation should make everyone happy. Sigh.
And, sigh, I should probably lock that but don't want to lock the Tithe part, and can't easily cut&paste in lynx. I guess I could edit it. Or hope that my utter TA suckitude gets revealed in time to get some desperately-needed guidance grading my question, I suppose.

In the department of random griping, a line from the hysterically Newage magazine "Earth Star" (free to anyone dumb/amused enough to pick it up) asks you to consider the opinion of your "inner trio - heart, head, gut".
Inflation of the non-thinking part much? I mean, the brain is down to a mere third now, while there are two separate sources of visceral leaning? Sigh. I am all in favor of understanding that your brain does not hold everything it's doing in consciousness (duh), and that you might have different levels of awareness about conclusions it's reaching that show up as emotion or intuition or whatever, but ergh, I do not much like this way of describing them as issuing from your heart and gut. Your gut is a display peripheral, people. If it clenches, it's because it's receiving signals from your brain to do so. Or because you ate greasy uni food for lunch, but if you're thinking you should associate it with some external situation, oy! You're *thinking*!

I think there was something else, too. Hm. Fic rec, maybe. Well, another time.