Aurora Dimitre's Books and Rambling

So, I get a kind of seasonal depression. I also live in North Dakota, so the winter actively tries to give me seasonal depression. This year wasn't as bad as last year, but it still wasn't like, stellar--one of those reasons, I think, is that I love going for walks. I just love walking. I like to listen to music, or to podcasts, and I just love wandering around in the sun.  So today it's like, fifteen degrees above zero. This is a good thing. This is a fantastic thing. This is a, I did go for a twenty minute walk after lunch thing. Keep in mind, it's fifteen degrees above zero, WITH the sun, AND ALSO only like, the wind at 16mph. So it only feels like -1, but if you get to a place that's pretty sheltered, it will actually feel like 15. And then, since you're wearing two long-sleeved shirts, a leather vest, and you leather jacket that you just kind of use as a winter coat because you're North Dakota Dumb, it's almost TOO WARM. Like, holy shit. OUTSIDE,...

So, I do hate driving in the winter, which really does suck when you live in North Dakota, as the year is 75% winter (I'm exaggerating, but I'm not exaggerating when I say 50% winter). So, while I'm in college, I don't go home all that often. But I keep this box of shit I need to take home, and the box was full, so I decided to head home last weekend. And promptly was snowed in. I missed all my classes yesterday, because I didn't get back into town until about noon. The rural school my little sister goes to/parents teach at had to cancel because a) two of the bus drivers were stuck in their yards, b) nobody could get out of one of the tiny towns the school leeches kids from, and c) my dad, the high school principal, tried to plow our road and his plow got stuck. The highways and everything were fine, it was just all those tiny gravel roads that just filled the fuck up. It's the end of February right now, so like, it's still winter, but it's at the po...

It's the end of February. Almost March. I mean, I know it's still winter, and while I was at first romanced by the temperatures in the positives (POSITIVES!! IT'S SIXTEEN DEGREES ABOVE ZERO RIGHT NOW!!), I'm looking forward at the stupid forecast and we're supposed to get negative again next week. And I gotta say, seasonal depression's a bitch, because I just feel this raw feeling of hatred and despair clawing its way around my chest. Like it's two days--next Monday and next Saturday, and the forecast could change, it already has since the last time I checked it, but March 2nd is no the time for negative fourteen degrees, I'm sorry NoDak, you bitch. We got an e-mail this morning about graduation. Graduating seniors did, I mean. I'm graduating college this year. So that's a thing. I think I'm pretty much done with college, though I've been doing weirdly good this year for not giving a shit about any of my classes (I really don't need...

(okay, so like, any language you're learning + your favorite person from that country, i'm just learning french and it was a snappy if long title) Everyone talks to themselves. Everyone does. Some people definitely talk to themselves more than others, and I know I'm one of those people, because even beyond the normal levels of talking to yourself I've also got the 'figure out plot points' talking to yourself thing going on. Also, I'm a French minor. I'm not like, super great at French. I could be worse. I could be a lot worse. But I could be better. Lately I've been real into the French Revolution, for some reason. Okay, I know the kick-off point, but I don't know why it's really got me so much right about now. Anyway, the point is, I love French revolutionary/journalist/propagandist/failed lawyer/general public nuisance Camille Desmoulins, and I have taped up (sticky tack'd up) a bunch of Camille stuff on my wall. Including a por...

les trois: my boy ulysses s grant sir 'the rime of the ancient mariner was so metal' himself, samuel taylor coleridge  camilllllllllllllllllllllllle desmoulins I'm gonna get this out of the way immediately, and it is that I'm ending up killing Ulysses, because even though I love him, his entire life was mired in tragedy and I don't want to be another one of those people around him who just died, also he was only good at drinking and being a general in the Civil War, so, good-bye, Ulysses, I'm sorry, I love you. Now it gets a little bit trickier. Let's get this straight--I have recently been swept up in my love for Camille Desmoulins. Camille is maybe the most obscure of the three I've got up here, but he was one of the major journalists/propagandists in the French Revolution. On July 12, 1989, he leaped on a table and started yelling, and lo and behold, his stutter that had made it kinda rough to make work as a lawyer disappeared, and also h...

I've talked about how I'm conflicted about Tate Langdon from the first season of American Horror Story, and I have reason to be conflicted, or rather... I don't, because he's terrible, and I should not be conflicted about falling for his bullshit each time I watch the damn season, because I know going in that he's a school shooter-rapist-father of the antiChrist?-murderer, et cetera. But like I like him anyway. On a completely different plane, though, I've been watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel recently. I'm one episode into the second season, and apart from using my eight years of French class to understand what they're saying in France when they don't put the subtitles on (which might have ruined the vingt francs/twenty-five francs joke in 2:1, might have made it better, haven't decided yet), I've been really loving the show. It was absolutely phenomenal. And apart from the fact that I just love Midge, and I love Susie, and it's a hi...

I'm taking a poetry class right now, like poetry-writing, and I am not a poet. The only time I ever write poetry is for when I take this class (it's my second time around), and like most of my general personality and feelings, most of the poetry I write is not serious. My first poem this time around was about powdered soup. Like, Lipton powdered soup. Last time I took this class, I remember writing this one poem that I thought was kind of serious but apparently was not, and so this time around for my ballad, when I did write a serious one, I was a little bit leery. Because while with that one, while I wasn't meaning it to be funny, I could take it. Like, it was supposed to be serious but if I made you laugh I made you laugh and that's pretty all right. But this one. So I was nervous. And naturally my professor had us go alphabetically, and I am cursed alphabetically, so I was first. So I read it. Ballad, six stanzas, put it down, and nobody laughed this time. So...

When I was in middle school, my best friend got a crush on this guy who liked to play Dungeons & Dragons. It always sounded vaguely cool, like there were some really funny Tumblr accounts that would post some cool text posts about D&D mishaps that were always funny (my favorite one is the story of the Hand of Mercy, in which someone tried to rip a goblin's dick off, botched their roll, and ended up giving the poor goblin a handjob). Once, when I was in high school, my family tried to start up a whole D&D thing. It didn't last very long. One of my coworkers is super into it, and her husband was willing to whet his Dungeon Master teeth on a game full of people who don't know what they're doing, so now I'm part of this. And it's pretty chill, to be honest. I am a bard, because fuck yeah. Even though half of our people were gone on Sunday, when we really started our whole campaign (be kind, I don't know all the lingo yet, so if I fuck up on it it...