I have never been more proud to be a Californian.

I am crying!

About a week ago, I ventured into London all by myself. I negotiated my way through several modes of public transport and to several sites of significance, which may come as a shock to those of you who have ever met my sense of direction, which is nobody, because I don't have one, or didn't until now. I was there on an assignment to visit places that are mentioned in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and then when I was done with that, I met up with Becci for the purposes of clubbin'.

( Here are some things that I saw and did! )

Now I am done writing most of my class words, and I still want to tell you about my exciting trip to London, but I can't because now I'm too overwhelmed by all the coverage our graphic novel is getting.

Once more, in a violent spasm of self-promotion, here is a link to read Shake Girl, our collaborative graphic novel about the phenomenon of acid attacks against women in Cambodia.

It is extremely surreal seeing a bunch of complete strangers commenting on something I helped create. Some of the comments have been really mean, but those mostly just came from dumb people going, "TEH COMIX R STOOPID!" I don't really care about those people's opinions. Someone had a criticism about the ending being too optimistic, but I was okay with that because I agree with that criticism (my first [very] rough draft of the script was rejected by most of the rest of the class, one of the reasons being that it was too pessimistic).

But there have been so many positive comments pouring in! It is really gratifying to have people say that the story is compelling and the art is pretty and stuff, but what's really amazing is the people who are saying that their eyes have been opened to an issue they didn't know about before. Like this person and this person. We are even on Cambodia.org (which makes me very retroactively happy that I only used my last initial and ensures that I will never travel to Cambodia for fear of detainment and life imprisonment by the top government officials indicted in our book). We're, like, making a difference in the world! That is crazy times, you guys!

There are two moment that have really stood out as my favorites, though.

The first is the comment on our BoingBoing blurb from someone who says they didn't want to read it because they were sure we'd be all racist, but then they did read it and thought we handled it very well. This was a huge concern of ours during the making of this book; we tried to talk to as many people with firsthand experience of Cambodian culture as we could, and I know that I personally spent a lot of time going over all the dialogue and editing anything that sounded the least bit pidgin-y or Orientalist. To know that we achieved that goal is immensely gratifying.

The second is finding via Google a message board where the real-life basis for one of our characters (the half-brother) is a regular poster. Someone posted a link to Shake Girl, and then our character just basically pops up and is all, "Yeah, that's me. I'm in that book." I don't think that the experience of a character from your book discussing your book is one that happens very often, and I am enjoying the hell out of it.

I want to tell you all about my exciting trip to London, but I can't right now because I need to write a bunch of words for a bunch of classes.

But I do want to share a few links with you really quickly.

Remember that graphic novel I was working on with other folks for a class? Well, it is finished, and you can read it here. We wanted to put it on the Internet in addition to our print run, because it is about Important International Issues (III) and we want to spread the word as much as possible. It also lets us set up a donate button, so folks can give money to help solve the III if they want.

It is a really exciting thing to get something published. And it is even more exciting when it gets written up in the San Francisco Chronicle and on BoingBoing. This shit's going on my resume.

Go read it! I didn't draw none of it, but I wrote some of it, and I edited all of it. When you're reading, you can just go ahead and assume that anything you like was written by me, and anything you don't like wasn't. You can give me credit for the art, too, if you want. I mean, I'm not gonna complain.

Edit: Oh dang, looks like we're on Metafilter, too. Click through to see a comment calling us "Stanford idiots"!

My tutorial went well today! The weather was the nicest, so we sat on a little bench by the Thames, and some ducks swam around and flew at each other and then one came out and smacked her bill around in a mud puddle. According to my tutor, Eliot saying that it never occurred to him that The Waste Land's Mr. Eugenides could be read as cruising for gay sex is "a typical fucking useless Eliot comment." Yessss. I am just getting over a case of the fucking black lung, and he said I had an "eighteenth-century cough." It's like he really knows me! If I lived in the eighteenth century, I would so have died of the consumption!

Afterward, I went to the bookstore and bought some books about gay people for the paper due Tuesday that I haven't started writing. One of the books tricked me. It is called Queer Theory but is mainly just racy gay smut. I am a little happy I got tricked.

And after that, I went to the American Embassy, by which I mean the place on Cornmarket Street where there is a Starbucks across the street from a McDonald's. You can stand in the middle of the road (there are no cars) and feel them stroke each other's faces with their warm rays of capitalism, and it is glorious.

I went into that Starbucks once, but it was a Mirror Dimension Starbucks. They had some normal stuff, but they also had some stuff like "iced fancies," which I could not comprehend. I am too afraid to go into the McDonald's, in case they try to pull some shit like that. The last time I went to a British McDonald's, a few years ago, they sold hot dogs. That is not really acceptable behavior from a McDonald's, so I have been wrapping up my fry-cravings and shoving them down into a little dark pit in my soul and making do with the chips at kebab vans and pubs. All I want from this life is some goddamn chemically enhanced French fries covered in salt and synthetic processed molecules of delicious. I think this is like a basic human right.

Observation: There are way more biracial couples here than in the United States. Is that because people are less racist, or because there just literally aren't enough people of color to go around?

Question: Why do the Brits call it "washing up liquid" when they could call it "dish soap"? This is a matter of efficiency as well as good taste.

New Week's Resolution: I am going to start going to bed before the sun comes up. And maybe even get up before 2 PM.

Complaint: I have to analyze one more stanza of this poem and I am so close to being done with this paper but I just don't want to do it. (Edit: Done. Boom. Eight and a half pages in two days. I am a star of rock.)

Random Factoid: I watched the movie Rock-A-Doodle in five-minute segments on YouTube yesterday/today. Yes, I remembered all the lyrics and about half the dialogue. No, it did not stand up to the test of time. Someone pointed out in the comments that Goldie looks exactly like Thumbelina and Edmond looks exactly like Fievel. It looks like Don Bluth is just as lazy a git as Walt Disney.

This Oxford tutorial requires a paper a week (which doesn't count the three papers required for the social change class; I have to write a lot of freaking papers this quarter). I haven't started my paper for this coming Wednesday. I need to, but instead I keep doing silly futile things like getting into Internet fights and going to clubs.

It is weird that I keep going to clubs. I had never gone to one before arriving in England, and now I go like twice a week. I am maybe just still the slightest bit tipsy from tonight's outing, and I want to tell everyone about this thing that I am thinking, because the alcohol has taken the place of the self-restraint molecules in my bloodstream.

T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land was the "Smells Like Teen Spirit" of 1922.

How do we feel about this? I know at least one of you cares enough about both works to evaluate that statement, even if the rest of you are goldurned philistines.

I've always considered myself to be not just a native speaker of English, but a good speaker of English, with a good command of grammar and a pretty decent vocabulary. I am majoring in English, after all. Turns out I was speaking American all this time, not English at all. Since my arrival in the UK, my vocabulary has been violently assaulted, the heads of my words sliced off and catapulted back at me, dripping gore. Here, for example, are some words from the past two or three days only that proved my grasp of my own mother tongue to be feeble and arthritic:

( Vocab lesson! )

Some more krazy komparisons between The Land of the Free and this wet rock that God forsook in the middle of the cold ocean.

( The sequel you've been breathlessly awaiting. )

Being in England is a little like being in a mirror dimension; everything is almost the same as home, but just different enough so that you can't help but notice.

They call cigarettes "fags" and cell phones "mobiles." They spell tire "tyre" and curb "kerb." They call dessert "pudding;" there is a "pudding" section on menus, and people say to one another, "Have you had pudding yet?" in the dining hall, even on the days they are not serving actual pudding, which is all the days. It's not just the streets that go the wrong way; the light switches are on when they look off and off when they look on, and half the time you turn the light on by pulling a string dangling from the ceiling. Don't even get me started on the menagerie of incomprehensible currency. I know it's fucked up that dimes are smaller than nickels, but it's even more fucked up that two-pound coins are smaller than two-penny coins.

Of course, these are pretty trivial differences. No, I do not understand why they call drunk driving by the grammatically questionable name "drink driving," or why "kebab" refers more often to gyros than to kebabs, but I could theoretically learn to accept these things in time. Already I am used to the juice that comes in boxes like cheap wine.

The important things to compare are the social, political, and economic stuffs, a couple of which I'll get around to right...now!

( Keep reading. )