Snape essay

This is a fantastic essay about Snape
http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/#static:bookseven/snape that is as good a starting point as any for my own personal "Why Snape" tirade, although I don't think I'll be writing such a thing tonight. It also manages to speek to the idea of what Slytherin loyalty is and how the notion is, in fact, supported by the books and not just the fandom.

Also, without saying it, it raises a very likely possibility
( yes, I'm actually protecting someone on my friends list from spoilers )

Marie Antoinette

So I've been watching more Marie Antoinette on the portable DVD player while lounging about in bed. I don't think I've ever had the sense of so visual a film being better on the small screen, but it is, at least, on a small screen you hold in your hand -- it's like a smuggled diary. I get, this time, from watching it, such a sense of terror from the film, this sense that to be good at bieng a woman means you can't really be good at anything else. The film is, of course, of a time and place and our world is one of freedom blah blah blah, but man, it freaks me out.

I think this is one of those films that is going to age very well, despite the critical and popular reception when it was released. Of course, I also have a thing for movies that are broken -- see: AI.

As an aside, Mi-Del Gluten-free mint sandwhich cookies are the most disgusting things I've ever eaten and not in a good way.

Union Square pillow fight

Union Square looked like the site of the war in heaven today! I thought angels had exploded.

DZ and AOB

I was in a sorority in college, Alpha Theta Beta, a regional founded at Hofstra. We were small and by most expectations of such things, strange -- I was one of several openly queer women, many members were non-white (the president one year was a Saudi national, the president another, was Hawaiian), one girl was in a wheelchair (she'd bend down and rip off the footrest and brandish at guys who were rude at frat parties). And while other houses talked shit about us, and we may have cared, changing or hiding what we were was never in the game plan of our reaction to it.

I can't say I learnt much from sorority life. It's not where I found friends for life or developed leadership skills. I did not learn to be pretty or popular, nor did I network for a future career. What I did learn was that tradition and ritual matter if you choose for it to and that there were, in fact, practical applications to the odd sorts of self-discipline I harboured. Ultimately, it made me feel powerful because I was never cowed, not by exercises designed to make pledges uneasy and not by my school's Greek system that had no respect for us. I remember a girl named Soo Bang, who didn't get a bid from any other house, several of which later admitted in earshot of me, that it was because of her name.

And so, the following utterly enrages me, not just because it's wrong, but because I swam upstream in the Greek system, as did AOB, and while it didn't change my life, you can't say I got less out of it for all that.

Worried that a negative stereotype of the sorority was contributing to a decline in membership that had left its Greek-columned house here half empty, Delta Zeta’s national officers interviewed 35 DePauw members in November, quizzing them about their dedication to recruitment. They judged 23 of the women insufficiently committed and later told them to vacate the sorority house.

The 23 members included every woman who was overweight. They also included the only black, Korean and Vietnamese members. The dozen students allowed to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men — conventionally pretty women the sorority hoped could attract new recruits. Six of the 12 were so infuriated they quit.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/25/education/25sorority.html