#Club lecture

[frenchlitclub]

Vote for our June book now on the server!

[biggest-gaudiest-patronuses]

historical drama/sitcom where two gay best friends (woman and man) get lavender married--and proceed to spend the Fancy European Honeymoon their parents paid for acting as each other's wingman

[communistkenobi]

i love when academics are like fuck this one method in particular, which is uniquely stupid and awful and all of its proponents are charlatans

[ryllen]

jade who got heartstruck by someone who listens, and trey who generally takes interest on really listening to what people have to say, about things he doesn't know yet

[phantomfoxart]

Fem!Modern! Wei Ying and WangXian are real TO ME. And that's all that matters. ❤️

Rambles in the tags~

[khaire-traveler]

No one is entitled to know about your personal life, events, or similar. No one is entitled to you.

[lilislegacy]

me after attending one lecture and answering 20 tumblr asks: wow im exhausted

[jefaiscequejepeux]

[parasitoidism]

Nothing ever changes in scrap world

[horatio-fig]

I will never shut up about Thrawn and Eli being college roommates.

[frenchlitclub]

Voici nos livres du mois d'octobre pour les deux groupes:

Groupe 1, lecteurs avancés:

Le Monstre, de Camille Bodin -

Résumé du livre:

"Albert aime Marie depuis l’enfance, mais tandis que son père l’a envoyé en ville faire des études, sa promise épouse un autre homme, le comte de Nulsen. Avant qu’Albert n’ait pu intervenir, les jeunes mariés partent pour la Sicile.

Sans nouvelles depuis des semaines, Albert décide de partir à la recherche de Marie. Alors qu’il passe la nuit dans un hôtel, Albert est réveillé par d'horribles cris. Le lendemain, la police lui apprend qu’on a tenté d’assassiner une femme dans son hôtel. Un temps soupçonné, Albert est innocenté par la victime qui a reconnu son agresseur : le comte de Nulsen. La jeune femme raconte son histoire à Albert et lui apprend que le comte est un monstre adepte du marquis de Sade, qu'il torture Marie et la retient prisonnière dans son château."

~~~~~~~~~

Groupe 2, lecteurs débutants:

Le Fantôme de l'Opéra, de Gaston Leroux -

Résumé du livre :

"L’Opéra est hanté. On ne peut pas expliquer autrement les événements étranges qui s’y produisent : la chute d’un lustre, le personnage au visage inhumain que des machinistes ont aperçu dans les coulisses, la voix que la jeune chanteuse Christine Daaé entend dans sa loge. D’ailleurs, un billet signé « Le Fantôme de l’Opéra » a exigé du directeur la réservation permanente d’une loge, et une pension mensuelle. Cette présence mystérieuse terrorise tout le personnel. Un jour Christine Daaé disparaît des coulisses. Son amoureux, Raoul de Chagny, devra échapper à bien des pièges terrifiants pour la tirer des griffes du «Fantôme»."

[quill-of-thoth]

Can't walk much so have a story: how I fell down a mountain and got my 'rescuers' stranded

(It's temporary) (The not walking and the stranding) Backstory: I periodically can't walk because my feet are, to use a technical term, flat ass bitches. I discovered this near the end of my second semester of college by getting a raging case of tendonitis that felt like someone was trying to drill a hole in my foot. Instead of taking another ice pack from the campus nurse, I promptly got a pair of too tall crutches and swung my way to finals with a 104 degree fever, scaring my philosophy professor badly enough that he threw out my final and just wrote in an A. Which is lucky, because. I sat down to analyze The Odyssey and woke up writing about The Tempest.

A doctor, physical therapy, a pair of custom insoles and three months later, I went back to college. With some amount of optimism because hey, I was 19. 19 year olds make full recoveries. Also the reason why I was a failure at gym and my feet hurt a lot had been figured out so I was probably going to get BETTER at, you know, being fully vertical for extended periods of time. Once I worked up to it.

And then for reasons known only to 19 year old me, a person who took a Spanish minor largely because I felt I should use 16 free credits somehow, I signed up for a month long trip to Guatemala during winter break.

Which is how I got to the mountain, but not how I fell down it.

The class was technically an econ course, but Profe. Ed was a closet anticapitalist and every year he dragged about 20 young people to Guatemala to

1) make business majors less insufferable by giving them a "cool" way to pad out econ credits while making them meet the realities of the world and how capitalism doesn't, you know, feed people well, 2) Distribute some American cash directly to the locals, via the purchasing power of said hungry young people who were willing to pay the equivalent of the price of a nice dinner for a single frozen chocolate banana because to us it was like 50 cents

and

3) let his advanced Spanish students do immersion by the sink or swim method. I was a member of group number three. I was in charge of speaking Spanish to guide my group of 4 around. I was also on uh. An amount of painkillers. Enough that it was not recommended that I do any drinking. Nobody warned me about doing any walking up a mountain though because they figured I was smart enough to know that already. Anyway we made it to the first stop and my group was charged with finding the new location of the weavers' collective, with whom our college's chapter of Amnesty International intended to deposit over a thousand quetzales. (So... maybe a hundred USD?) We did not find them on the first day. We were at over 5 thousand feet (and as midwesterners we were used to an elevation whose distance from sea level is a rounding error), we were jet lagged, we were working in a second language, and we didn't know how to find anything without, you know, an address. Also, we thought the directions we did get were to somewhere on the other side of town and my limp had become the fifth member of our party. We pulled out our instructions sheet, hopped back on the Lancha (a boat serving as a bus), took some dramamine because everyone working public transit in Guatemala drives like they're in mario cart, and I told the driver that we were returning via Las Lomas at Tzununa. I felt like I had gotten a second wind.

I remember being a little lightheaded but I thought it was heat exhaustion. Or possibly the moment of second language fluency that feels like either enlightenment or a stroke.

Anyway we were dropped off at Tzununa and pointed up. We walked. Increasingly slowly as I discovered that sometimes instead of being in increasing pain your nerves do an end run around your consciousness to make you EXTREMELY spacey. We saw a parking lot that said "Las Lomas" and went. Past it. Slowly. Until we found a cow and decided we should probably locate a human to ask for directions. At which point we were directed three or four miles up the private driveway we had skipped because we'd been told to follow the calle, a word I only knew as 'road'. The thing is that despite feeling like I was legitimately going to fall apart, and also barf, and probably also faint, I had to keep it together because I was the primary Spanish speaker, damn it. The token guy in our group for machismo safety was like, two classes behind me on a Spanish minor. Also if I didn't have something to do I was gonna hurl. So I cracked a lot of jokes that landed very poorly due to me looking kinda half dead and kept going until we finally reached Las Lomas, the place we were supposed to be over an hour ago. They told us, and I quote, "follow the path through the maize over the ridge and you'll come down right at the edge of town." Which was on our agenda. They also told us "you should be able to make it before dark" which was optimistic even if our group hadn't included me, current winner of the global misery award. They did not tell us that they had their own private dock with ten million stairs. Which was where we were supposed to dock.

I would not have been able to climb them. I was barely able to descend them. But. If we had known they existed we would have known three things: 1) We were now about two hours and five miles late for our original itinerary.

2) The alleged two mile mountain hike across the ridge had not yet begun

3) We could get back on the fucking Lancha from here. So when the hike turned out to be on an 8 inch wide dirt scuff through a field of maize that looked ALL the way down into the extremely sharp and rocky beach we might have thought of getting back on the boat instead of towing my - now violently shivering - top-heavy carcass in a conga line of suffering across the mountain. Hand in incompetent hand we crept like a concussed centipede around the point of the mountain only to see yet another ridge with a huge rock slide crossing the path between us and it. We tried to cross the gravely bit. I promptly slid fifteen feet, ripped the entire butt off my shorts, and kinda passed out for a second. At which point we decided to call Profe. Ed.

This was before international cell phone plans, or even good sim cards, or possibly the existence of cell service anywhere in Lago Atitlan that wasn't populated by American and European expatriates. "Profe Ed we're lost, the trail is washed out, Quill has like broken her ankle or something-"

"Tendonitis! It's actually not the bone -"

"-And the sun is going down and it's like. A million miles back to the lancha. Are there any wild jaguars around here? I hope there aren't jaguars."

"Pretty sure we need to worry more about freezing to death." (When in peril I become a font of extreme helpfulness.)

"GET BACK TO LAS LOMAS YOU HAVE 45 MINUTES TO CATCH THE LAST LANCHA AT 6 PM." The concussed centipede returned the maybe half a mile back up the mountain, at top dragging speed, with one fourth of its underwear on display. I only nearly fell twice. The time was 5:30.

It was decided that two of the team, Token Guy who spoke a bit of Spanish, and French club girl, who were cross country runners, would run and try and delay the lancha while Amnesty International treasurer girl would be my human crutch and keep me from going into shock or something with a water bottle and a bag of chips. The last I saw was of Token Guy literally jumping over a wheelbarrow as they sprinted... down the four mile driveway... to the town of Tzununa.

Whose last lancha was, unbeknownst to us, at 5:45 pm. Because we didn't know about the secret, private dock. And because not a single one of us could estimate distance well enough to realize that we had started by getting off at the wrong stop.

Someone at Las Lomas saw that I was an American in distress and offered their phone. And an English speaking front desk worker because my Spanish had been reduced to me duele las pies, which is less than grammatical, and my English had gotten kinda thin.

All I really remember is the phrase "we have a dock and you can flag the lancha from there" and then. Hundreds of millions of stairs. Uneven. winding. with handlebars added haphazardly to prevent me from just pitching off into the water. You can slide down a handrail on your armpits if you have to but not if it's broken up by a thousand turns. And then we were on the boat and Amnesty went up and down looking for Token Guy and French Club before realizing: they were not on board. We had the cell phone. The time was 6:15 pm and nothing we said could induce the lancha driver to turn around, though he did offer that we could get off in the middle of the lake if we wanted.

We crawled into our hotel at 7 and a new chunk of Profe. Ed's hair spontaneously went white while we tried to explain, in tears, what had happened. At least there (probably) weren't jaguars on the driveway from hell. "I'm going to make some calls" he said, in a voice that was reserved for crises, not the aftermath of dumbassery, and Amnesty dragged me, by way of a bottle of naproxen, to dinner where we sat in silent, guilty, treacherous misery, poking at the fish and wondering exactly how much shit we had just stranded our friends in. Everyone else, who had gotten in hours ago, was talking about the shaman, who was going to come and give us a lecture about how the world was not going to end this year.

No, it was just Amnesty and I who were going to end this year, because if the tendonitis didn't get me, leaving Token Guy and French Club on the side of a foreign mountain was going to do me and Amnesty in. Profe Ed was going to send us back to America, because we were dirty rotten traitors who split the party.

Meanwhile everybody sat playing with the candles until it was very dark. Amnesty and I had procured a blanket and sat under it like two hermit crabs trying to hide in the same guilty shell. Profe. Ed's dinner was attracting mosquitoes.

Until finally in a blaze of flashlights, the Shaman appeared, with French Club and Token Guy carrying like seven bags of his stuff between them.

[supernutcollectionuniverse]

Perhaps the Beatles made some good music

[eternelle-chenille]

[lobie-the-cartoonist]

i need an expert opinion

would jet pack guy listen to dad rock?