It Fills the Void

I feel like the blog-o-sphere has gotten quieter, recently. Perhaps we're just looking at the late fall, holiday ennui that strikes all of us and saps of our desire to emote, at least in such a bizarrely public format. Well, you know. Public in the sense that people could inadvertently read it. Private in the sense that most likely nobody will! And I'm comfortable with that. There's a certain amount of pleasure in even the slight promise of anonymity, such as it is. Anyway, I hope someone was as tickled by the objectivist personals as I was. I will strive to keep you updated on the absurdities of Ayn Randism, particularly as the global crisis launches it into even unprecedented levels of hilarity. Ah, to be fifteen again and mulling over the crisis of my own gigantic ego.

What else? Happily keeping a handle on what remains of my self-esteem (or self of steam, as my students would have it) while rejection emails trickle in. A few here, a few there. It's all good. U of Colorado, though, hit a certain level of suckiness by sending out a perfectly nice rejection letter (So sorry, we got a billion applications, appreciate the effort, so on and so forth) on Thanksgiving day. Who does that? Maybe people in Boulder are simply more enlightened, and it wasn't a big deal to take a moment off from dwelling on the atrocities of colonialism to tap out a mass email to the hundreds of people who are no longer in the running for the position in Ethnic Literature? Thanks! I will admit, though, that they darken my day for a moment each time I get them. Here's to hoping that I don't receive thirty in a single afternoon! Maybe some kind school will send me a batch of cookies as a consolation prize? Poor B got the brunt of my frustration yesterday when he asked QC and I how many interviews we had lined up. I think I'm just getting to the point where when anyone asks me that I'll start screaming like the cast used to on Peewee's Playhouse whenever anyone said the word of the day!

Long Time, No Bloggy

And there won't be any today. Instead, I bring you news from that other, parallel universe occupied by Ayn Rand fanatics. What could be better, more gut-ticklingly funny, even at a time of extreme uncertainty, financial collapse, and soaring unemployment, than Objectivist Personals! I reproduce below for your pleasure. You're welcome.

Via Slog, for you non-sloggers.

In the Free Market for Love

Posted by Erica C. Barnett on Tue, Nov 25 at 2:17 PM

Three attractive Objectivists at The Objectivist Center's 2006 Summer Seminar

From the listings on the Atlasphere, a dating and networking site for Objectivists (via New York Magazine):

waitingfordagny, Chicago, Illinois
I want to meet a serious woman who both challenges me intellectually and inspires me to noble things by her beauty.

mxjohnxm, Greenville, South Carolina
“One can’t love man without hating most of the creatures who pretend to bear his name.”

thustotyrants, Selden, New York
[I am] short, stark, and mansome.

You should contact me if you are a skinny woman. If your words are a meaningful progression of concepts rather than a series of vocalizations induced by your spinal cord for the purpose of complementing my tone of voice. If you’ve seen the meatbot, the walking automaton, the pod-people, the dense, glazy-eyed substrate through which living organisms such as myself must escape to reach air and sunlight. If you’ve realized that if speech is to be regarded as a cognitive function, technically they aren’t speaking, and you don’t have to listen.

Zak, Long Island, New York
I am rational, integrated, and efficacious. So far, I’ve never met a person who lives up to the standard I hold for myself (except online).

I take my relationships seriously. I am simply not attracted to many of the women in this world. I do not “hook-up” with girls. I only kiss those who deserve, and so far I have only encountered one who did. I would love to find someone I can learn something from; someone who challenges me to think; someone I can feel like I’ve won, rather than lowered myself to.

lostpainting, Hagerstown, Maryland
Please note: If you’re overweight, I won’t date you. If you believe in God, I won’t date you. If you vote for Democrats, I won’t date you.

Lewis, London, U.K.
I love intelligent, sassy girls, particularly those working in consulting or investment banking (but other fields are great too). Really, nothing is hotter than an accomplished girl in a suit, as long as she is willing to settle down and have my children. I want a girl who will support my ambitions against the naysayers in society.

Rob, Stanford, California
Ayn Rand ignited the fire within me that was searching for the right spark. My every action is guided according to my philosophy, and my philosophy is the philosophy of Ayn Rand.

I am interested in meeting someone that truly embodies the values and virtues of Objectivism. I have found very few women that have not already been beaten down to a flimsy, irrational, empty pulp. I have changed many girls’ lives, but no one has blown me away yet.

I never “hook-up” randomly, I never kiss a girl that doesn’t deserve mine. I have yet to find a girl deserving of my falling in love with her. But “other people” are secondary values no matter what, so finding someone is not a priority for me.

Illuminations

A slogger posted a link to the Mormon Stock Index. I knew they had their fingers in a lot of pies, but I didn't realize the diversity and ubiquity of those pies. This is good information, though, if we'd rather not help them fund future Prop 8 debacles. Dell? American Express? Marriott? Well, okay, I knew the hotels were Hellmouths. But Black & Decker? Ugh.

Struggling with Dismay

I write this as I'm preparing to go teach the second part of the fourth episode of Black.White. I've always thought of the show as not particularly progressive or interesting, just another one of these narratives about how much skin color contributes to and in part determines the way that the world interacts with us. Every decade or so cranks out at least one because we remain, in some fundamental way, unable to see things from perspectives other than our own. I was really surprised, in perhaps an incredibly naive way, by how hostile and defensive a few of my students were to a scene in which the black father on the show talks to his son about why he shouldn't be okay with the n-word. Immediately after, my confronto student, who I've written about before, started bellowing about how the father was standing in the way of racial progress. He started throwing the word around and talking about how ridiculous it was. Apparently, we should all use racial slurs freely as a way of taking their power away from them. Is this the post-racial world I keep hearing about? My second class, of course, was completely different. We managed to have a calm conversation about the show and how it engages with ideas about race in the U.S. today. We were able to talk about how the show frames the issues and what it's doing rhetorically. In my first class, I ended up asking my confrontos to not be so defensive. Now I don't know what will happen today. I've long said that I'll settle for anything short of overt hostility. Is it wrong that I'm relieved this is our last discussion-oriented day? I just hope I can make it semi-productive for the other students. Wish me luck.

Basically, I guess it's been a rough week. The Tuesday night high followed by a steadily increasing sense of dismay. At prop 8 and the other anti-gay rights legislation. At my co-worker who was furious that a non-citizen was elected to the presidency. At the security guard who blandly affirmed that he doesn't care about the 800,000 people who have lost their jobs this year and just generally doesn't feel much compassion for others. His only regret is that there isn't another Bush to put in office for another 8 years. That's how happy he is with the way things are. This from an ex-marine who probably doesn't make much more than 20,000 a year running necking teenaged couples out of mall parking lots after hours. I'll have something nice to say next time, I'm sure of it.

Sturm und Drang

...which, incidentally, as I've just discovered, is the name of a Finnish metal band. B, you must have known this already. It also expresses, quite adequately, the general tenor of this semester. Hence the lack of blogging. Q and I are taking turns talking each other down off the ledge, though lately, to be fair, she's been doing most of the talking and I've been doing most of the near-leaping. But here we are. Mostly, I'm maintaining of balance of dread and excitement. Running helps. Food helps. Kitties help.

First, the job market: Wow. I've already received one rejection, and one university lost their funding for the position I applied for. Today, though, I'm mailing five more applications to bring me back up to a total of 50. I really can't decide how I feel about this. My understanding is that you're supposed to keep looking at ads as they keep trickling out year round. I had to force myself to do this yesterday and only barely suppressed feelings of nausea while clicking through the pages. But then I think that the job for me might be the one I don't apply for! You can imagine. So, this is exciting in a way. It's the culmination of so very many years and so very much work. Not to mention the sacrifice of full adulthood in exchange for a grotesque, protracted adolescence (of which I am reminded every time I speak with my family). I'm excited at the prospect of starting over somewhere. Of having a real job. Of . . . beginning, really. Again. What balances and occasionally overwhelms all that sunshine is the prospect of getting fifty more rejections. Slough of despond? Here I come.

Teaching: I can't complain, really. I did get that one gem about Victorians that pretty much redeems a lot of other things. I still have the angry confronto, but he seems to have diverted his ire away from me directly and more toward the major injustice facing white men in America today (the only "legally oppressed group," in his words): affirmative action. Other than that, he's mostly fine, and even my white power kid doesn't seem overly upset by having to read bell hooks. Or maybe he's just punching walls every time he leaves my class? Tough to say. As I like to say, I'm happy with just about anything short of overt hostility. I said this to a man who teaches in the African-American studies department recently, and it cracked him up. The exciting news is that I think I might get to teach a one-credit seminar in the Spring on a topic of my choice. I proposed a course via the website for this special program, and it looks like I'm being approved! Though, as I confided to my office mate yesterday, I feel like kind of a fraud because the website specifies "distinguished faculty" as the people who teach this class. My sense is that they probably have a hard time getting "distinguished" faculty members to propose the courses because they don't pay much at all. In fact, one faculty member told me he'd never done it because it isn't enough money. And, indeed. But this isn't why I want to do it. If I get the class, I'll no doubt write more about it. I just can't help but be cautious until I see my course listed on their seminar offerings page. And then people have to sign up for it. Keep your fingers and toes crossed!

By the way, has anyone had the opportunity to see any of the new Charm School: Rock of Love Girls? Fucking fantastic. In fact, I'm miffed that it isn't on today, so I can watch it during my run. Real Chance of Love looks like the worst, lamest spin-off evah. And this coming from me.

For Queercat

The hilarious, existential angst of Jon Arbuckle, Garfield Minus Garfield. Ummm. Feeling a little interpellated right now. Resisting.

Hilarious

It's probably just my slowly setting in paper-grading hysteria, but this is my favorite quote extracted from an evening of freshman writing:

"The troops on the battlefield also want to walk away as Victorians."

It has a quiet sublimity to it, no? A close second would be a description of Rambo, refusing to settle down, "budding heads" with the authorities.

Ahhhhhhhh.

Heirlooms!

Things That Make Me Want to Die

In no particular order:

1) Going on the job market, but not having finished any applications, and with no end in sight.

2) The idea of not going on the job market.

3) Sarah Palin

Teaching Antics, 2.0

It's been many years since I've taught two classes simultaneously. It seems ridiculous to complain about the work, as actual professors, particularly in the early stages of their careers, have MUCH heavier teaching load. So I'm not going to complain. No promises for how I'll feel after grading my first batch of 48 papers, though. But, really, the whole experience is throwing me for a bit of a loop. I'm trying to get my head around how weird it feels some days. In previous years, whenever I had a bad classroom experience, I alternated between feeling like it was just me sucking and suspecting that actually the students played a large hand as well. While I remain completely aware of my own tendencies toward suck-titude, I'm now laying much more responsibility at the door of simple classroom chemistry. I can now go from my first class--where one of my students is likely to yell at me, one is going to perform his abject dissaffected ennui, and one, I've recently realized, is a white power kid--to my shy but engaged and respectful second class--where even the dude leaning his head against the far corner of the room is nice and speaks in discussions. Oddly, the white power kid is perfectly fine in class, while the disaffected kid made a point of coming up to me after class yesterday and saying: "Yeah, your comments were really vague, and generic, and totally unhelpful." Blech. I'm resisting the urge to generate a taxonomy to explain the different types.

Bottom line, I kind of like it and hate it at the same time.

No Comment

Via Slog, of course.

A Little Whining, A Lot of Procrastination

One week into school and already everything is in full swing. I, of course, am still struggling to get my head around it. This is my first day off in seven days between teaching the things blowing up at the coop. I know everyone can relate to the overworking so I won't over-whine.

I should be revising my fourth chapter, but I really just want to take this day--JUST this day--to read, go on a bike ride (see how naughty? I'm not even planning to go to the gym! This could change, though, if I get caught in an unexpected but overwhelming wave of self-hating nausea. Wish me luck), cook, watch tv on the internets. We still have a bunch of beets from Mama and Papa BEM's incredibly generous bounty. Even after Q and I ate about a gallon of Gazborscht (don't ask. It's an Isa thing). Now I really want to make this beet and fennel salad. The coop used to make on that I adored and would eat until I thought I was going to die. The latter mostly because beets are so perniciously red that they retain the vibrant scarlet hue all the way through the intestines. I'm thinking about this recipe. Looks good, right? We also have a bag of pears and apples that Q's friend dropped off, and no bloody room in our refrigerator (because of before mentioned bounty), so a crisp seems in order. I made a peach crisp earlier in the summer only to be forced to recognize that I don't dig so much on soft fruit crisps. Give me an apple or a pear, any day.

What else? I have to meet with a student on Wednesday to ask him to control his emotional performance. He was extremely hostile (to the point of almost berating me in class for having him read this essay) to the suggestion that perhaps Batman/Joker dynamic has homophobic undertones. I think, really, that there could be any homoeroticism in this narrative was so offensive to him that he almost couldn't speak rationally at all. So, I, paragon of impartiality and objectivity, am going to sit down with him and make some things very clear. I hope it goes well. Wish me luck, again. I was kind of panicking about this on Saturday, having flashbacks to that most horrible of classes, dreading a repeat experience. Thus the early meeting. I'm hoping to nip this in the bud before it ruins the class.

Am I the Only One

Who finds this photo deeply disturbing? I don't know what tips it beyond the boundaries of sanity: the motorcycle/just-fucked hair, the highly unlikely and very photoshopped waist (but, you know, it's vogue, so what can you expect?), or the wonky eyed stare that wants science teachers to talk about god. Seriously, "Supermodel Tour de Force"? What the hell does that mean?

Treadmill Confessional

I forgot to bring my headphones to the gym today. This may sound like a minor thing, but it has, in the past, sent me into minor fits of nerd rage. Do me a favor and don't ask QC about it. I'll deny anything she says. So, anyway, while I was doing my seven miles on the treadmill, in silence, I had time to do some thinking. (I should note that had there been anything on that I really wanted to see, I would have been irrationally fuming for much of this time.) For the most part, my thoughts revolved around two things:

First, my mental state. Or, at least, I tried to stay focused here. My attention kept slipping to number two in spite of all my best efforts, but in a little over an hour, I had more than enough concentration for both of them. I was speaking to a woman I know by loose association via the co-op and school. She just finished her MFA, for which I duly congratulated her, and I was attempting to commiserate with her about the job materials. Not the job prospects--since the idea of what happens after one sends out the applications seems entirely smoke and mirrors at this point--just the materials. She couldn't really join me because she landed a sweet gig teaching in the department from which she just graduated. Suffice it to say, she's going to be making just a titch more than the lucrative adjunct salary (2300/class). I was sort of moaning to her about it in the way that I do, aiming my comments at some chimeric combination of gallows humor and mild self-deprecation. With a perfectly cheerful face she responded that she was sure it would go well, especially since I had such a good attitude. She didn't sound sarcastic, but I can't fathom how she wasn't. She had to be, right? I was bitching and moaning, albeit humorously *i hope*. Remembering it, though, I still feel like an ass. Like without meaning to, I let myself become one of those black holes who spews stomach acid at anyone stupid enough to come too close. Something like the tiny jew who routinely digs her boney knees and chin into QC's psyche. And then I think, maybe she just didn't appreciate my humor? But, no, I was just repulsively negative.

So, post-realization. What now? This is where I admire the philosophy my Buddhist friends have embraced. While I still don't seem myself going down that path, for reasons I won't detail here, the Buddhist ideas of value and compassion are unsettlingly appropriate. Basically, my coping mechanism (aforementioned gallows humor/self-deprecation) isn't helping. What remains is for me to tread that delicate, treacherous tightrope that negotiates the hairline fracture separating outright panic from exhilaration, terror from excitement. Because, really, I should be excited about this next step. Excited to be finished with this stage of my life and moving on to whatever comes next. Thrilled that the coming years will take a shape that I can't foresee right now. The only thing I'm certain of is that something is going to change. In some important sense, it follows that I can choose this latter path rather than the former. I'm working on it. Fucking hard.

Second, the end of Breaking Dawn, the fourth book of the Twilight series by Mormon vampire writer Stephenie Meyer. These books have made quite a splash, as you probably all know. I was introduced by a girl I work with who claims to have read all of them many times (with the exception of BD, doubtless, because it just came out). I read on the SLOG, *sigh, how I love thee* that a huge portion of the fanbase is pissed as hell about this last book. Even the girl I work with told me she found the ending to be weird and abrupt. There's a petition online with hundreds of signatures damning the book. Check it out. I'm not sure why people are so surprised by this book. It seems, in many ways, where the "saga" was headed all along. I also think that many of the weirdnesses and the abruptness of the ending is traceable to the author's disinclination (or lack of a hand?) for writing action sequences. She practically avoids them at all costs, and it makes for some odd narrative turns. She spends a loooong time setting up the conflict and ten pages resolving it. Happy happy, the end. So? And, really, people upset with the conservatism of the text? At least BD had sex (nothing pre-marital, mind you), pain, and one of the goriest baby deliveries evah. (think broken bones and fountains of blood) My point? All the books are conservative, largely; she quotes Orson Scott Card for fuck's sake. Still, it was lovely reading. Like high fructose corn syrup for my brain, with the ensuing nasty sugar smell and lethargy.

I Had to Share

Via Slog, what else?

More New Favorite Things

These are the side benefits of spending long hours staring at my own writing while outside the sun is shining, birds chirping, and so forth. I assuage my desire to tear my hair out in bloody handfuls by surfing the internet. It's a measured reward. Whenever I get past five pages, I get to spend a few minutes clicking and browsing. Finding new and interesting webpages is like heaven after staring for ten minutes at a paragraph that simply isn't doing what it needs to do. Or agonizing over whether or not an additional source, which one of my committee members tells me I need to deal with, has to be integrated *somehow* into the body of the text or whether I can tuck it away into a tidy footnote. God, I love footnotes. Never thought I'd say that.

No other news, really. As per usual, just my whineyness, checking in now and again. I am mildly excited about making cupcakes for a co-workers upcoming birthday. I'm mulling it over a bit, since this is finally an opportunity to make something other than the Mexican Hot Chocolate. I'm thinking seriously about Bittersweet's Root Beer Float cupcakes. I considered the chocolate stout cupcakes, but I must own up to a slight prejudice against the whole crumb topping thing. I really feel, in some control freaky place in my head, that cupcakes should be covered in mounds of creamy lusciousness. I can't help it. I feel that way. If I can't find any of this ridiculous substance called root beer extract, though, I'm shit out of luck. I'll have to regroup.

Before I get too out of control, I give you the following awesomenesses.

The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotations.

Just what it sounds like. "Quotations": They're not for "emphasis."

Contrariwise: A blog devoted to literary tattoos!






Lovely and, oddly, inspiring. I've been thinking about something like this for myself. Not the same poem, of course. And not on my back. I am surprised, though, at how many of these tattoos are the same. Lots of Plath (I am I am I am), Vonnegut (everything was beautiful and nothing hurt), and Cummings. Who knew?

I have to fess, though, I found this via Slog, like everything else. The slogger, I don't remember who it was, was particularly fond of this one:

Now, if you need me, I'll be over here feeling sorry for myself.

Oh My Gawd

Rock of Love 3. Yes, they did.

How will Bret find a woman to ‘rock his world’ when his world is always moving? VH1 is loading up a tour bus filled with beautiful babes and taking them on tour across the country. Rock of Love Bus with Bret Michaels takes contestants out of the mansion and on the road in true rock star style. This season will feature all-new ladies vying for Bret’s affection while traveling across America following Bret on a month-long tour. The contestants will face new challenges to see if they can handle the rock star life on the road.

This time as the bus pulls into each new city, the girls will engage in challenges specifically revolving around Bret’s life on the road. Whether it’s greeting aggressive groupies with a smile, enduring grueling schedules, dodging the advances of the warm-up band or even stepping in last-minute to fill in for delinquent roadies – these girls will be put to the test. This season, as the Rock of Love Bus heads into America’s heartland, the show will be taking the viewer to a whole new level with crazy, fun, over-the-top challenges- imagine Truck Stop Olympics or a dance contest on top of the St. Louis Arch or even a BBQ cook-off beneath the World’s Largest Thermometer. And also, back by popular demand…Mud Bowl 3. Americana at it’s finest!

So things didn't work out with Ambre. Nobody's really surprised. I think I even heard that New York and Tailor Made broke up, of all the absurdities. But seriously, season 3 promises all the glorious, trashy insanity of the first two seasons plus that key ingredient that will make it all fresh and new and so so much worse: claustrophobia! I can't wait. When the hell is Tila's third season going to be announced?

Three seasons has to be the death knell. Flavor Flav has pioneered all this nonsense, and I doubt anyone will be giving that poor bastard a fourth season. Right? I'm not sure what logic this is, but there does seem to be one.

In other news, I'm currently immersed in different levels of revisions on my third, fourth, and fifth chapters. I haven't yet summoned the nerve to look at my conclusion. It's amazing to be at this stage, though, and I'm even feeling waves of something I can only describe as elation. Even if I don't get a job this year, at least I'll be done. With this project. (Cue the hysterical laughter.)

New Favorite Thing

Deliciously wicked photos by Joshua Hoffine. Check out his website for many many more. Click the first image to enter, obviously. Via Michael Strangeways.

Birthing Pains

Ugh. I've had the worst writing week trying to crank out my conclusion. Who knew this bloody thing would be so fucking difficult to write? I spent two or three days hammering away at it very slowly (and between shifts), and I only managed to produce about eleven pages that I was pretty sure I wouldn't be able to use. I went to work very much on edge yesterday, and vented (with much restraint) my frustrations to one of my co-workers. Poor guy. He responded initially by saying, "Oh, yeah, that's like, the most important part of your dissertation, right?" When I was like "Ahhhhhhh!" he changed tactics and said, "Oh, yeah, nobody will read it anyway." "Ahhhhhhh!" Like I said, poor guy. Seriously, though, I hope neither of those things is true. At least I need to believe that right now.

Anyway, so today I screwed myself up to try again. I sat down and started writing the thing from the beginning. Between 9 and 3 (with a break in there to take C to the mechanics and eat lunch with her) I wrote sixteen pages. Now I'm as done as I can be for the time and very much desirous of a reward of some sort. So far, I've decided to skip pilates, since I'm not feeling it today and ran eight miles yesterday. (On a side note, I didn't really intend to. It just so happened that the jerks at vh1 decided to get the maximum mileage out of the first episode of the new reality tv show, "I Love Money" and stretch the bloody thing out to 1 1/2 hours with loads upon loads of commercial breaks. So, of course, I ran the whole time. And, yeah, today, I'm not feeling it. If it doesn't make me too sweaty, I might flounder around on the living room floor for a while doing some of the moves that like best/find the most difficult. C is suffering through sad tv movies, so whatever I do, I can't be very disruptive.

Other things I'm considering: 1) Driving to Weggies for some more of the Purely Decadent Coconut Ice Cream. This time I'd get the cookie dough flavor, because I'm fat like that. Last time I got the Mint Chocolate Chip, because C's fat like that. 2) Hunting for a pastry blender. I dearly want one and have vowed not to make any more recipes which involve cutting fat into flour until I have an adequate one in my possession. So far, I've only really looked at Target, and the ones there looked very chintzy indeed. I want one that can really cut the cold cold vegan margarine (not room temperature, because, as we all know, pastry is all about coldness. We do all know that, right?) into flour. I feel like getting a substandard one would be like buying it just to throw it away. In the interest of full disclosure, I should add that I have some serious cherry pie on the brain. I made a pie a week or so ago that was quite good, but not perfect. And now I have the need to try again using the sour cherries that are newly in season. Farmer's Market. Saturday. Here I come. The pie crust, incidentally, and not that anyone cares, is the kind made with vodka and ice water. The idea here, which I would have appreciated more fully if I hadn't kind of fucked it up by preparing the fruit too early, is that the vodka evaporates during cooking eliminating forever the problem of the gummy pie crust. Exciting right? 3) Cleaning the fridge. The only good thing about this is that I don't have to drive to do it, and it fills up some of the time between now and when I can have a glass of tequila without feeling...strange. 4) Calling my mom. I'm going to do this for sure, and it has the advantage of fulfilling part of the requirements of number 3. While I decide, check out this pie via www.thenibble.com.

My First Survey

Whatever, don't say you weren't warned. Plus, there's something about these things that tweaks my voyeuristic ocd. Via the ever lovely Lindy Loo at Yeah That Vegan Shit. If you haven't checked it out yet, what the hell is wrong with you? Get thee to Lindy's blog! Or to a nunnery! Or ...something.


What are five things on your to-do list for today?
I'm cheating. This is my to-do list for Monday. Tomorrow is simply a wash. Already.

1) Finish revising my fourth chapter.
2) Email my fifth chapter to my director.
3) Prepare to write my conclusion (which means, in part, finishing Serenity).
4) Run seven to ten miles.
5) Eat leftover Strawberry-Rhubarb-Peach pie with almond, whole wheat crust.

What are five snacks you enjoy?

1) Salt and pepper pretzels with nut butter
2) Multi-grain toast with earth balance, salt, and LOTS of tomato
3) Bananas with salt and nut butter
4) Tortilla chips with garlic hummus
5) Popcorn with Red Hot and Nootch

What are five things you would do if you were a billionaire?

1) Help my loved ones with their debt
2) Move to Bellingham, WA and buy a comfortable, smallish home with a view of the San Juan Islands and never leave. Ever.
3) Become a pilates instructor. Just for fun.
4) Begin my world travels by visiting the following places: the Caribbean (I write enough about it. I oughta go there.), Eastern Europe, and Russia. I hear the Trans-Siberian Railroad is lovely this time of year. Also, I'd love to drive to Alaska from Maine.
5) Make certain my mom could travel anywhere she wants, as long as she wants, as long as she lives, and go with her.

What are five of your bad habits?

1) Fixating on food.
2) Fixating on exercise.
3) Fixating on reality tv.
4) Are you seeing a pattern?
5) Being inappropriate.

What are five places where you have lived?

1) Billings, MT
2) Seattle, WA
3) Athens, OH
4) Woodstock, VA
5) Buffalo, NY

What are five jobs you’ve had?

1) Alfalfa sprout engineer
2) Barista
3) Ass. Accountant (yes, it should be "Asst.", but so what? I like ass.)
4) Coop cashy
5) English T.A./Adjunct Instructor

Tag! You're it if you ...

1) Have a right boob that's bigger than your left.
2) Like to dance the robot.
3) Find a good shit more satisfying than sex.
4) Are vegan.
5) Your mom.

I Hated It

Rambo 4, that is. Just, ugh. The reviews I've read since seeing it--I never read reviews in advance, for other reasons--fault its absence of plot, and its...shall we say...over reliance on gore to carry scene after scene. One reviewer said there weren't enough shots of John Rambo running through the woods and engaging in cleverer-than-thou guerrilla-style war tactics. In other words, not enough straight up bad-ass Rambo action. Being the Mudgeon I so avowedly am, I couldn't disagree more. Well, that might be somewhat of an overstatement. The plot was definitely weakish and it was extremely gory. The latter is really all I had heard about the film before seeing it. As a fan of the earlier three films, though, and a sort of connoisseur of gore, I didn't let these warnings bother me. What nobody told me was how deeply regressive the film was.

Let me clarify. In the first three films, John Rambo is a Vietnam vet struggling to find a place in a world from which he feels radically alienated. The source of this alienation is the violence, betrayal, and treachery that he has personally and vicariously experienced at the hands of the U.S. government. He has seen the horrors of a politically misguided war, and has been transformed by them. He's sort of the Gothic product of an American war machine, the self-stated ethos of which is to make the world a better, safe, and more prosperous place. He creeps out from the shadow of whatever national mission statement and articulates (well, grunt-screams) a very different story. He knows, for example, that violence and war, in some sense, serve only themselves. That father-figures--in the form of commanders, generals, what have you--espouse benevolence and care, but are just as likely to leave you in the very maw of danger and certain death as to kill you themselves. He knows that for all the government praises the importance and honor in service, soldiers are ultimately expendable, but during and after they are "used."

The first film engages the trauma of the Vietnam veteran in a kind of national allegory, perhaps, of a nation very much divided, inwardly torn. The second and third films feature Rambo fighting--extremely reluctantly--once again on the behalf of the U.S. in the service of a third party. In the second film he rescues P.O.W.s left behind in Vietnam, no thanks to the military. In the third, he helps aid Afghan freedom fighters in their struggle with the Soviets. That film is dedicated to the "gallant people of Afghanistan." Trautman, Rambo's primary contact and former commanding officer, explicitly likens the misguided efforts of Russians in Afghanistan to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam Conflict. In both the second and third films, Rambo works as an independent operative, serving a higher calling (truth, freedom, justice) through the expedient means of the U.S. military operations. The sense in both is that he is hugely bigger than the latter and could probably settle things by himself. There is some vestigial soldier logic here, of course. No matter what way you slice it, Rambo is always saving white Americans from Others of various derivations. While he always has these rescue missions as his surface motivation, the deeper logic of the films is much more complicated and gets very much to the core of a problematized humanist military ethics. In other words, while performing fairly cohesive missions, there's always this sense that Rambo is really fighting for the greater good in spite of the nation he ambiguously serves.

If I haven't already bored you, I'll now tell you what is wrong with Rambo 4. He's living in Thailand (where he is at the beginning of both the second and third films, incidentally), doing an excellently surly ex-pat thing when he's sucked into saving some Christian missionaries who are captured bringing aid to the Burmese people. His pessimism is acute, and there's a sense that he wouldn't have bothered with the rescue mission at all if it hadn't been for the naive, pollyanna appeals of an angelically white Julie Benz (watch out, Rambo! she's a vampire!). She actually gives him a small cross--the only payment he'll accept for his services--and he wears it wrapped around his wrist during the remainder of the film. She asks him some apparently soul-searching question about why he never went home. Rambo says his father's alive in Arizona, he thinks, but he doesn't really know. He gives her his typically stoney-faced response and doesn't reply. Clearly, though, we're supposed to know that this has been a life-altering moment. Apparently he doesn't have a good reason for not going home, and this question never occurred to him. Why not just go home? (Forget the first film all together, apparently.) After he discovers they've--or, really, SHE's--been captured, there's a horrible scene with him making a machete (which he never uses, preferring instead the bow and arrow and the gatling gun). Picture a blacksmith forge. Lots of steam and red hot metal. Super sweaty, roid-tastic, Stallone, banging away at said mysterious weapon. Cue the voiceover about how he knows deep down he's built for war. He's good at it. He likes it. Don't fight it.

Then the violence and exploding heads. Throats ripped out. Evisceration. Babies on bayonets. Hey, that has a nice ring to it! Limbs torn off. What have you. The villains (Burmese army) are (almost) completely irredeemable, aside from a bit of information about how they are recruited. The leader is the worst of all of course. A sadist and pedophile who makes games out of killing civilians. They keep people in cages, put heads on stakes, the whole nine. And these soldiers die horrible deaths. About half the missionaries, plus Julie Benz, make it out alive. If Rambo weren't quite so monstrous, it seems, Julie would have been the romantic interest. But as it stands...not so much. In the final scenes, he's walking down a road in a pastoral American setting. Blue jeans, army duffel bag, just like in the opening of the first movie. Except here, instead of picking fights with asshole town sheriffs, he's going home. He turns down a small dirt road leading to a prosperous-looking ranch behind an appropriately dilapidated mailbox labeled "Rambo." The end.

No vision. No politics. No engagement with the other films beyond a nod to Rambo's experience with torture. The U.S. government is conspicuously absent and the sense here is that, unlike these stupid missionaries who are barely able to escape with their lives, daddy (the U.S.) is smart enough to stay away. The world is a very very very dark and scary place. The best thing, by far, for Americans--both those as lily-white and sweet as Julie Benz and those as rugged and laconic as Rambo--is to go home and stay home. Home is safe and good and pure. Finally, Rambo finds peace in the rural hills of Arizona. With his real, not his surrogate, father. Or maybe these are still the same thing. In that case, the bad father from the first three films has become a benevolent, stay-at-home dad.

Lunk Alarm! part 2

This from the NYT today. I've highlighted particularly relevant passages for your reading convenience and pleasure.

Grunting in East Side Gym Class Leads to Hospital, and to Court

By JOHN ELIGON

Published: May 29, 2008

Stuart Sugarman was exercising the way he had hundreds of times before.

He arrived at the Equinox gym on the Upper East Side 30 minutes before the start of spin class and signed up for the stationary bike on the left side of the room. He adjusted the bike for his hefty frame and clicked his specialty cycling shoes into the pedals.

And as the class got going, Mr. Sugarman, a senior partner at an investment firm, began the most conspicuous part of his ritual: his loud noises.

“You go, girl!” “Good burn!” “This is great!” Those are all phrases, Mr. Sugarman said on Wednesday, that he might well have screamed. When you’re getting pumped up, he said, “it’s all very normal responses.”

But on Aug. 15, 2007, Christopher Carter, a Manhattan stockbroker two bikes down, could not take another of Mr. Sugarman’s groans. After words were exchanged, Mr. Carter hopped off his bike and charged toward Mr. Sugarman “like a football player,” Mr. Sugarman said.

Mr. Carter grabbed the bike by the handlebars, raised the front end off the ground, driving the rear of the bike into a wall, and then let the bike go, Mr. Sugarman said. The impact of the drop, Mr. Sugarman said, has caused chronic neck and back pain.

Now, Mr. Carter, 45, is on trial in Manhattan Criminal Court, charged with assault. He faces up to a year in prison if convicted on the misdemeanor charge.

On Wednesday, the second day of the trial, the two men were face to face for the first time since the incident.

The case could be seen as a cautionary tale for New Yorkers with outsized personal habits — or bystanders who are easily irritated.

Mr. Sugarman, 49, sees himself as the victim of an unreasonable man having a bad day. Hospitalized for two weeks after the incident, with part of the time in intensive care, he contended that his actions during spin class were in line with what athletes do.

“Like any sporting pursuit,” he said, “you get pumped up.”

Because of his injuries, Mr. Sugarman said, he is no longer able to golf, hike, cycle or participate in other sports as he had done five or six days a week.

To the defense, Mr. Sugarman was as much the aggressor as Mr. Carter. He is exaggerating his injuries and Mr. Carter’s actions, the defense has argued.

“The complaining witness is not to be believed,” said Michael Farkas, the lawyer for Mr. Carter. “This is all an attempt to manipulate the criminal justice system to his own ends.”

Mr. Sugarman, who sometimes goes by the nickname Shug, testified that he had not filed a civil lawsuit. But he has retained Samuel L. Davis, a personal-injury lawyer from Teaneck, N.J. Mr. Davis declined to comment on whether his client would sue.

Mr. Sugarman, who is about 5 feet 11 and said he weighed 204 pounds, limped into the courtroom Wednesday morning. His neck appeared stiff.

He spoke softly before a jury of six. Some of his testimony was inconsistent with accounts given by two other witnesses who testified on Wednesday. He was often combative with Mr. Farkas on cross-examination, twisting his red face, sighing and offering up pointed rejoinders.

The judge admonished both Mr. Farkas, for comments he made between questions, and Mr. Sugarman, for not answering questions.

Mr. Sugarman described his grunts as “expelling air” and said that others in class sometimes appreciate the noises he makes because it motivates them.

From the start of the class, Mr. Sugarman testified, Mr. Carter was scowling. It became clear, Mr. Sugarman said, that Mr. Carter was agitated with him when he went over to one of the two spin instructors and said something. The instructor simply shrugged, Mr. Sugarman said.

Mr. Carter returned to his bike and, using an obscenity, yelled for him to shut up, Mr. Sugarman said. He said his initial reaction was a shrug.

But after Mr. Carter continued to swear at him, Mr. Sugarman said, he responded: “You don’t have to be such a baby. If you don’t like the class, there’s the door to the right; just leave.”

That was when Mr. Carter charged him, Mr. Sugarman testified. As Mr. Carter held up the bike, he looked Mr. Sugarman in the eyes and swore at him, Mr. Sugarman said.

After the incident, Mr. Sugarman said, he stayed and pedaled slowly for the final 15 minutes of the class, despite attempts by the club manager to make him leave, because he was in searing pain and wanted to figure out what he should do. He also was embarrassed in the class of mostly women, he said.

“I wanted to be a guy,” he said. “I wanted to muscle through it.”

One of the instructors in the spin class testified that he asked Mr. Sugarman to quiet down after Mr. Carter complained and that the two began arguing as he stood between them.

Earlier Wednesday, Dr. Sherri Sandel, a physician who was in the spin class, testified that after Mr. Carter told Mr. Sugarman to shut up, Mr. Sugarman responded, “Make me.”

Oh, it is Ber-Ought-En

Things have slacked off a bit lately in our small corner of the Bloggerverse. I blame this half-ass-idaisical weather, which has been bumming me out for the greater part of a month. Well, really ever since school got out. I submitted grades and then a few days later launched straight into my traditional summer program of working thirty hours a week at my other, non-academic job, squeezing as much academic work as possible into the remaining daylight hours when I'm not punching the clock, and having as close as I can get to a relaxing summer with what remains of the time. It sounds harried and hectic, right? Do those mean the same thing? But, it's really not so bad. Truth be told, yours truly gets more than a little weird when I have too much time on my hands. I still amuse (mostly myself) with my story about what happened the last time I was a little too idle. Bear with me.

I was living alone in an apartment in my hometown the summer after I graduated from college. I had a job working, I think, at one of those corporate electronics retail places. Like Best Buy, but not. If memory serves, I wasn't reading anything at all, though it's difficult to imagine that now with the pace I usually maintain. Instead, I was spending forty hours a week (a fat $1100/month) selling and stocking cds. The highlight of that job, incidentally, was listening to people sing. Of course, some of the singing was bad. Think people who don't know they're looking for Chumbawumba crooning a couple bars of "Oh, Danny Boy..." Not that singing. I liked it when people would be listening to cds, and they would kind of lose their grasp on what was going on in the world around them. Rather understated people would suddenly start singing the ubiquitous Goo Goo Dolls song (everyone remember "Iris"?) or Third Eye Blind or whatever. I loved that. Sometimes, what was even better, were the people who would pick their own cd to listen to. These folks were mostly No Limit Soldiers, though I doubt very much Master P would have given them the nod. There were also your metal heads and jazz folks. Some strippers, a handful of concerned moms. The coolest of these listeners was a ten year old girl belting out "Like a Virgin" on a busy Saturday afternoon. Really, it was almost as though the presence of headphones and music took everything else out of the picture. When they could no longer hear the bustle of the retail gambit going on all around them, they simply behaved as though the souls occupying that bustle couldn't hear them either. They always reminded me of the whitetail deer, which roam around the hills where one set of my parents live. They have such bad eyesight that they think that if they hold very still, you can't see them. You know, they can't see you, you can't see them. The metaphor works, right?


Anyway, so this post-graduation summer, as I dated around aimlessly a little bit before giving up in abject frustration, I was bored. Or maybe a better way to describe it would be to say that I had gone from taking eighteen credits and working forty hours to just working forty hours. I didn't know what the fuck to do with myself. And quite honestly, I can't remember what I did do. I wasn't running or cooking at the time, both things that take up a lot of my time now when I'm not reading or writing or fretting. What I do remember is coming home one day and determining to call the phone company to shut the thing off. I had decided, rashly as it turns out, to withdraw utterly from the world. With the spare exception of the forty hours a week I spent working retail. I was pretty set on it, and I couldn't tell you why I decided against it in the long run. Maybe my better self stepped in and reminded my everyday idiot to relax a little bit. Maybe I just got distracted. Most likely, it's the latter. It was a dark hour, my friends, and a good example of what can happen if you let your world shrink to the size of your head.

I guess what I'm trying to say, in a bright hour, and to quote our brave leader, is this: Bring it on.

Moment of Zen

But I saw this on the Slog today, and I just had to share.

Chapter What-ish

I was going to title this blog entry, "Facing the Muzak," but then figured that that bit is probably more than a little played out. So here we are with "Chapter What-ish." Why? Because I, like so many people I know right now, am up to my neck in dissertation chapters, revisions, etc. The "facing the muzak" temptation comes in because I just got back from the "required" department meeting for grad students planning on going on the job market in the fall. This, of course, is terrifying for more reasons than I'd care to enumerate, but suffice it to say, I left the meeting feeling oddly...hopeful. I was prepared to be lectured and chided for my insufficient preparation, but these are, I'm increasingly realizing, my own personal bogeys. In fact, the placement officer is so remarkable. She's so fucking intelligent and articulate and goofy and human all at the same time. I emphasize the human bit because when people in the academy truly freak me out, like, at the level of Ardelia Knightley (if we all remember her?), it's because they don't seem human. That's probably not accurate. It's more like they are so invested in defending with their very last breath the illusion that they are this bizarre, epistemologically privileged composite of academic wisdom, which makes them completely, apparently, devoid of irony, facetiousness, and the capacity for self-denigration and self-abasement of any sort. Fucking weird, you know? This is a long way of saying that this woman is amazing. And *cou-hot-gh*. Ahem.


Back to my newly discovered hopefulness. I've been focusing lately, inspired, I'll admit, in some degree by QC (and mrtreetop) in their admirable pursuit for self-improvement. While I have yet to take the plunge, what with the chanting and all that (though I've promised QC to try it sometime soon, and I will) the important idea is clearly developing one's capacity for introspection, for seeing the painful truths and delusions that govern our lives, and for taking proactive measures to adjust these painful truths as necessary. To disillusion oneself, say. Or something. With that in mind, I'm trying to focus on being just a little bit less my own worst, most crippling adversary.


Sorry for the earnestness. Have a lolcat.


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Since Fundie Mormons Are a Downer, and Since BEM is a Pansy,

and I mean that in a good way. Really. I remember being really impressed as a kid that the flowers called "pansies" were demonstrably the hardiest, outlasting the earliest and coldest snow falls in the unpredictable Montana weather. But, yes, a pansy. In preparation for his immanent descent on our beloved 'burg, I sent him a number of cupcake possibilities (since I tend to promise cupcakes), with a clearly stated imperative that he must choose. Instead, BEM replied, narrowing the list of five to three, and optimistically enjoining me to choose for myself. The full text is worth quoting here. Here's what I said:

To: BEM From: Asenath Subject Line: Your options

Cupcakes:

Root beer float

S'mores

Orange Chocolate Pudding

Mexican Hot Chocolate (since Q insists)

Margarita

You must choose. No halfsies.

Here's what he said:

Man, those all sound pretty amazing.

I guess I would go with either the Mexican Hot Chocolate, Root beer float or Margarita. You make the final call.

Aweeeesome.

As though, god love him, this helps me.

While I don't want at all to give anyone the impression that I ultimately will not just decide, regardless of what anyone (though I love you all so) has to say on the matter--cause I totally will, and it will no doubt (as BEM probably suspected all along) be simply a function of my caprice and whimsy--I thought I'd stage a poll.

What should I make?

Option A: Root Beer Float Cupcakes.
These are an unknown quantity. But they were rated in the top ten of all these vegan cookbooks! Plus: awesomeness?

Option B: Mexican Hot Chocolate Cupcakes.
These are a favorite. Reliably delicious, and they make everyone crazy. I've made them twice: Once with a fluffy, chocolate mousse topping, and once with regular chocolate frosting. If I made them again, I'd do the mousse. The blog that this links to shows the cupcakes with the suggested sprinkling of powdered sugar, cocoa, and cinnamon. I really think the mousse adds a fabulously outrageous dimension, though.

Option C: Mucho Margarita Cupcakes
My (relatively) recently acquired addiction to tequila (thanks a lot, BEM, totally your fault, by the way) makes these particularly attractive. Although, I'll admit to a little trepidation in that I don't know where the fuck I'd find the special, chunky multi-colored sugar that I really really need to have these be as awesome as they should be. I'm a crazy perfectionist like that. Whatever.

Option D: Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Brownies.
For our inner and insatiable fat kid. These are a late entry, but I've only recently discovered. My desire for them is only met part of the way by my desire to not eat them all. Good angel, bad angel.

By the way, I made the VCTOTW green tea cupcakes for one of Q's meetings. They were totally awesome, and I've compelled Q to take pictures. Hopefully, I'll have one forthcoming. In the meanwhile, please take a moment and weigh in on my (delicious) quandary.

Why I Heart Dan Savage, et al

We've all heard about the FLDS scandal, yes? I've been following it with the usual interest in American spectacle and grotesquery. There's much to be said. The most recent news, as far as I'm aware, is that government and state agencies are currently trying to dis-entangle the dramatically convoluted genetic lines of this particular band of fundies. It's fucked up in more than one way and from more than one direction. On the one hand, fundamentalists...yikes. Double triple yikes. All the freaking way. Scary, scary shit. On the other, I can't get behind this hysterical desire to simply figure out which sperm went to which egg, as though if we could only discover the truth of the heterosexual nuclear family in the midst of all this unwieldy, patriarchal heterogeneity, that order would return and we could all feel better about any possible future solution. We're all about opening up the straightjacket definition of the family, right? Every child deserving a mother and a father, and this being the key to normalcy, health, and success, blah blah blah. But raffling pubescent girls off to crusty older men, and shuffling younger men off to the suburbs of Utah cities so that they won't be in competition with the aforementioned crusties for the aforementioned girls? Or, not raffling, but "joining in spiritual marriages" with said crusties and popping out as many babies as their bodies can handle.

Anyway, I've been wondering wondering wondering, where on the earth the mainstream, non-polygamous LDS folks are on all of this. Where's the public statement--disavowing, supporting, remaining neutral, WHATEVER? After all, these are the majority of the folks who will be living this one down in posterity. The FLDS, after all, will have retreated to some compound in the middle of nowhere, filled with bolts and bolts of gingham cloth and hair gel (have you seen the 'dos?), so they won't be dealing with the social backlash. Assuming there is one. And then, in the midst of all this wondering I was doing, comes Savage with this post on the Slog. If you love me, you'll read it. It's short. I promise.

OMFG! LMAO!

Sorry for the annoying header. I couldn't quite come up with something better. Also, fair warning to b: This is going to be a "my life this week" "daily log" of boring bullshit blog entry, of the variety the aforementioned notoriously disdains. Correct me if I'm wrong, b. Otherwise, you all should bear with me. Or, you know, fuck off or whatever.

My glorious subject matter? A busy week. Twisting in the wind. So much potential rejection, so little time. Something along those lines.

The short version, to spare you all the banal, paper-pushing details, is that I've applied for a bunch of stuff recently and should have a good idea soon whether or not I'll be successful in any of these. In the meantime, the experience rather intensifies the usual sensation that my diss director assures me is "the quintessential dissertation experience." In other words, my sense of acute adriftness is dramatically heightened by dwelling even more in the unknown. Don't get me wrong, I'm not confused or anything about the nature of adulthood and all the void-twisting that it naturally entails. For a salient example, see my last blog entry. This is slightly less inter-personal, though, and more...professional? Pseudo-apocalyptic? Now I'm (obviously) exaggerating, but my point remains. And this is my blog, so I can whine about whatever I want to.

The upside, and there is a substantial one, is that Spring has finally arrived in Western New York. Daffodils are pushing their insistent heads up all over the places, and all the trees are covered with tight little leaf buds. The 'llonians are going batshit crazy, of course. Somebody at my (extra) place of employment told me the other day that he'd driven by at night, and it looked like "Disneyworld had come to B-lo"! I would think he was exaggerating were it not for the ice cream spills that now fragrantly coat the sidewalk and the cigarette butts (and a bra?!) mingled amid the aforementioned daffodils on the side of the building. So, indeed, Disneyworld, or something. It is beautiful, though. Q and I have been staggering around the city, blinking at the sun like albino moles. Joyously de-winterizing the house. Q has even torn into her Spring ritual of touching up every painted surface that has somehow been marred by our cold-weather hibernation, rat-nesting kind of activities. I'm planning a garden, which I think will consist exclusively (though I've not quite decided) of kale and tomatoes. How awesome would that be? We also have plans to build a compost bin, which can apparently be done cheaply and with minimal effort with a bit of galvanized chicken wire and some stakes of some sort.


Also, I'm making green tea cupcakes for Q's meeting, and plan to steal some of them. My friend from work is having an art opening that I'm looking forward to. And it's the last week of school. Rock fucking on, right? As soon as I grade that last stack of portfolios, I'm free from teaching for the foreseeable future. Super sweet.

Funny story, the aforementioned friend with the art opening featured in a dream I had recently. It was the bizarrely good kind. He and I were for some reason being forced to participate in a gender norming test of some sort. The first test fell to me, and consisted of my demonstrating how well I could iron his pants. There was an audience and everything. The awesome part is that he and I both thought the whole thing was so ridiculous and funny, that we couldn't even participate because we were laughing so hard. Ever have a dream where you're laughing your ass off? Like full, belly laughs that come from your guts? Anyway, that was my dream.


Feel free to rate the banality.

Adulthood

Is a howling wasteland where BFFs move to Chile and totally fuck off. That is all.

Insect Reflection

I've been staying away from my blog for a while, entertaining my mom, and trying to stay out of trouble. Kind of. Seriously, my mom was just here for a week, and we had a good visit as such things go. Typically, our visits start out good, and then we go through a kind of protracted rough patch in the middle where I think we're driving each other absolutely bonkers, and then things turn a corner and the visit ends on a high note (typically lubricated with lots of liquor). I wish, sometimes, that I could verify the rough patch that I always perceive. This is always my moment of hermeneutic anxiety in which I'm wondering whether I'm being as big of an asshole as I think I am. Can it be that my skills of intonation are so superb that she just doesn't realize I'm going crazy, or is she just gracefully choosing to ignore the whole dynamic? I can never tell. Q assures me that there's something weird that happens, and some instances make me feel more confident that I'm perceiving what I am than others.

For example, we're sitting at a cafe, having breakfast, and she starts talking about politics. Actually, she begins by asking me what I think about the war, the presidential candidates, and Guantanamo Bay. The latter, she's convinced, is a huge secret and that we're not even allowed to know why we even have a military base in Cuba. When I try to answer by talking about the history of U.S. interference in elections in other nations, though, her face slams shut like a door. Somehow, I've been a jerk. Inappropriate. I'm not speaking to her question. When I stop talking, freaked out by her response, she continues where she left off with the same interrogatory tone, *as though* we're having a discussion that we absolutely can't have. I get, in some way, that this is because my mom dislikes the particular way in which we all tend to talk to one another about politics, the world, our lives, whatever. She believes, again in some way I can't quite articulate, that disagreement is fundamentally hostile and negative. I learned this lesson the hard way when I had a little too much fun debating some ridiculous point with one of my uncles. My mom was horrified at my inability to simply get along with people.

In my thirties, this tendency to simply be difficult is considerably exacerbated by being vegan. Queer-vegan-academic = the most difficult of all. In this economy, what is good is flexibility. The willingness to accommodate, to go with the flow. Nothing is political, especially not the Olympics or picking a presidential candidate based on a gut feeling. I'm ending my rant now.

Anyway, bizarrely, this experience, coming as it did on the heels of another recent house guest of ours, has led me to some further (insect) reflections. If you're reading all the blogs, you've heard something about a certain "nerd troll" who stayed with us while checking out the program. I won't belabor the incident further than to comment that she is, indeed, an example of what can happen to nerds who aren't sufficiently reigned in by...oh...social sensitivity, politics, literary history, or even just the pressures of high school. They turn into people like Dob Baly, and I think we all know who I mean. For my purposes, here, I'm going to call her Ardelia Knightley. Ardelia drove us totally crazy. When she first got here, she said she had already been up to campus because she likes to show up places when she isn't expected, "just to see what will happen." (picture a little finger curling up toward the mouth as she says this, in an oddly unselfconscious or allusive way)

All I could think to ask was, "And did anything happen?" What a bizarre take on the world and one's place in it, you know? Yeah, she drove us crazy. There was the scream, of course, but harder than that were the constant difficulties of conversing. The pathological inability to admit any gaps in knowledge. The giddy praises of a particular, archaic meter. The mainlining of tea laced with loads of sugar. The just...plain...weirdness.

My epiphany? To my family, I am Ardelia Knightley.

Lunk Alarm!

I had a number of things I was thinking about blogging. I feel like I've been remiss recently. Going to VA, being sick, assembling applications for a fellowship and two GAs, preparing for my mom's visit to NY, etc. etc. Here's what I came up with. It actually started as a Britney rant, and became a gym etiquette rant. I'll get back to the Britney at some future point since you're all no doubt titillated at the prospect. Perhaps there will also be a GA rant, a mom/visit rant, and, most shamefully of all, a That's Amore! rant. This is a spin-off of Tila's reality dating show, and, yes, I've been catching up. Another day.

I'm deadset against being one of those gym types I think of as "moaners" and "yellers." This may sound like Appalachian slang, but it isn't. Moaners and yellers are almost inevitably men. Moaning and yelling are the cardio equivalents of grunting. If you're not a gym rat, you probably don't know about the fervor people work themselves into over gym etiquette. Doing a bit of research on the grunting phenomenon, I found that some of the more inflammatory issues are the obvious ones like not wiping down sweaty equipment when it clearly needs to be squee-geed after your disgusting ass has used it and standing too close to, for example, a treadmill while waiting for the user to finish. If you remember my rage about Yacht-guy, this is probably starting to sound more than a little pathological.

Grunters, though, receive the most press. Some gyms even have posted anti-grunting policies where "lunks"--those who slam weights and make guttural sounds while lifting--are singled out and humiliated via something called a "lunk alarm." Sometimes they are even expelled and have their memberships revoked. I shit you not. Of course, lunks/grunters are upset about this as they feel their god-given right to grunt in public is being infringed upon, while health clubs claim they are trying to set a certain tone in the gym. In other words, not having dudes grunting and slamming weights around makes for a calmer and less intimidating gym experience. There's a great article from the Seattle Times about this issue here, if you're interested. The pivotal contention, apparently, is whether or not the grunting actually improves the workout, as many grunters insist. The Seattle Times writer takes the debate back to where it obviously needs to go: primates. To figure out whether or not it is "natural" for people to grunt, they examine the behavior of primates to figure out whether they grunt in moments of exertion. The comparison regrettably crumbles when the researchers are forced to conclude that unlike humans, monkeys never grunt disingenuously . Here's just a taste for those of you disinclined to follow the link:

But there are differences. Even though monkeys and apes grunt plenty, researchers believe they do it as an involuntary response to an emotion, Owren says. In short, you will never see a monkey fake a grunt.

Humans, however, have a unique ability to simulate or exaggerate this sound strictly for effect. Owren surmises that humans who produce exaggerated effort grunts do so to signal great exertion and, hence, great power.

"One can readily imagine that in a fitness and weight-lifting circumstance that it's being used as a kind of dominance signal," he said.

They really needed to consult a gruntologist (yes, the article refers coyly to the expert as such) to figure this out? Really? I could have told them this. There's a small but prominent cadre of guys who go to my gym who routinely slam weights, grunt, moan, and yell. My absolute favorites are the panting, big-bellied, sweaty older guys who try to correct my form while banging weights so loudly that the floor vibrates. One guy actually asked me why I don't slam them, since he finds it so "satisfying." I didn't tell him that I'm pretty sure if you're unable to resettle the weight without slamming it, you're lifting too much. Dominance signal? Posturing? Or, I guess the gym-slang is hot-dogging? Yeah. In my mind the guys who yell and moan incomprehensibly while running on the treadmill are in the same class as grunters. It's all about taking up space, and men are socialized to do this. Of course, this is when everyone drops in the apparently notoriously vocal Monica Seles and Maria Sharapova as proof that women do it too, but I guess I've just never had the good fortune to end up on treadmill next to one of them or any woman like them. Perhaps this would change everything for me.

The Last of It, I promise

Otherwise known as, "Why I Love the SLOG." For those of you game enough to click the link in my last post, here's the contest decision, cut and pasted for your reading convenience:

"We the judges of this contest believe Ayn Rand serves a critical purpose. She’s the ideal author for a teenager to read and be captivated by because she enshrines the primary value of teenagerdom—the idea that the self is the unquestionable center of the universe—as a kind of moral imperative. By the time you begin to outgrow that sense of self-enshrinement and recognize yourself as connected to a larger world, the stiff, fascistic humorlessness masquerading as heroism of Rand’s writing should become one of those things (maybe the first one) you realize you thought was brilliant, but only because you were young, and selfish, and WRONG. She’s a skin you shed. And essay number one is the best evidence of someone prepared to use this portrait to help future generations shed that skin. So, Bill, the portrait is hereby yours and no one else’s."

To read the winning submission and some others of note, click here.
If you can make it through the cuntberries, you're home free.

Fuck John Galt

Not for the collectivists (you know who you are): More amusement courtesy of the SLOG. Seriously, who's going to make me that t-shirt already? Whatever you do, don't skip the comments!


Keep working on your teasers. More soon.

Tales from the Short Bus

In which I regale you with tales from my pilates class. I know I'm going to read about this any day now on this blog, which I've enjoined you all to check out at your convenience. Anyway, this edition of Tales from the Short Bus, features this little maneuver demonstrated below by the much esteemed founder, Joseph Pilates. It's called the Teaser. I have no idea why.

I can't do it.

I've been taking classes for almost two months now, and practicing a couple more times a week between sessions on the treadmill and circuit training. I really like pilates. It focuses on the core, which is one thing I'm shamefully lazy about. What can I say? I find ab work b-o-r-i-n-g and bizarrely feminizing in some way. The point being that I'm in reasonably good shape.

And I can't do it.

The Teaser, that is. In addition to the frustration have having hit a brick wall like this one, it became just a little more humiliating tonight. Perhaps a little explanation? You start off on your back with your chin tucked into your chest. Your arms are straight down at your sides and hovering slightly off the ground. Your feet are pointed and lifted slightly off the ground. Then you simultaneously lift your arms and legs and come up into the position demonstrated above. Go ahead and try it. I can't fucking do it. At some point, my legs won't go up any further without bending slightly, and then once up, they kind of drag me back down, like my ass is a fulcrum. Can you picture this?

Anyway, my pilates instructor is wonderful. She's extremely cool, helpful, rigorous, kind, excellent. And tonight she gave me the ball. I should explain a bit more.

Q and I have a long-standing animosity with an older, heavy-set white man I've dubbed "yacht-guy." Yacht-guy, like most of us, has a sort of standard gym outfit. I tend to wear black pants and a black or grey shirt. Big surprise. Yacht-guy is just as predictable and never seen in anything but one of a series of different, you guessed it, Yacht Club t-shirts tucked into white sweatpants. He and one of his cronies once changed the radio while Q was lifting, and when she changed it back, yelled at her. We're not fans. These kinds of simmering social antagonisms build over time when people have to share space and equipment.

Yacht-guy takes pilates. Tonight, the instructor brought a small beach ball for him to use in performing another maneuver that I can actually do quite well. Again, I refer you to Pilates himself. I think Yacht-guy put it under his lower back to help him get up a little higher. Just when I'm feeling somewhat unjustifiably smug about my old nemesis having to use a ball, she brought it over to me.

Yes, I had to use the ball for the Teaser. She verbally pondered the conundrum. She's genuinely confused about my utter inability to lift my legs and keep them up like I should be able to--like everyone else in the class can. Am I hopelessly disproportionate? This is the possibility that keeps coming up. In other words, it may be that my legs are way too long and my torso way too short to let me get any kind of leverage. Q keeps talking about my center of gravity, but I don't know. The other possibility is that I'm just weak. Thus ends this edition of Tales from the Short Bus.

Killing Me

On the off-chance that you all don't peruse the SLOG like BEM and I do, and assuming that you have a bit of time to kill, definitely check out this blog. I keep checking back in and being tickled to the point of laughing out loud, much to Q's irritation. Particularly amusing, to my crooked sense of humor, are the following: #73 Gentrification, #64 Recycling, and the Guest Column, Top Ten Hip Hop Songs White People Love. Some of the entries are definitely funnier than others, and some ring truer than others. So, go ahead! Nominate your favorite!

What?

Taking up Q's theme of wishful mishearing, this, just now:

Me: My mom called today and want to know about making you a muffler.

Q: Your mom wants to know about navy bean knackwurst?


A muffler, for those not in the know, is simply a scarf. Someone please confirm: Q is batshit crazy. Adorably so.

Today's Headlines

Sometimes CNN just sucks. And I don't mean to lay all my angst solely on the door step of this particular channel, but it is catching the brunt of my fury today. It seems like a variety of constellation lined up just perfectly to create one of the worst multi-tasking/viewing experiences ever. Part of the problem is that vh1 is really lagging recently. They're slowing down the Rock of Love 2 episodes and slipping Flavor of Love 3 into the mix, which leaves me wondering why they couldn't both air in any given week? Perhaps so much loving would make the world explode. For at least an hour of my run today, my choices were as follows: MSNBC's redundant, circular coverage of the primaries fallout, a very sad Drew Carey as the new host of The Price Is Right, a re-run of a RoL2 episode that I've already seen 3 times, and which doesn't get better with age, and CNN, which at least offers something in the way of variety. They are notorious, of course, for only running the same three of four stories, every twenty minutes, for hours and hours and hours. It serves short attention spans very well, but not so much prolonged viewing of the kind I was doing. As I'm struggling not to focus on my growing fatique, rounding the eight mile, I wanted to scream. Sandwiched in between a story about a tornado demolishing a dormitory in Tennessee and the endless, nauseating pontificating on the cause of Heath Ledger's death (chemical overdose, surprise!) and whether or not it was suicide (we'll never know, surprise!), is some of the worse celebrity-focused primary coverage ever. You should know that they were doing a special edition of some oddly conceived super Tuesday for celebrities in which they asked people with WAY too much time on their hands to vote on pressing issues such as "Which star couple is going to last longest? and Who is more likely to stay clean, Amy Winehouse or Lindsay Lohan?" Somehow this eventually segued into a viewer poll on whether or not Oprah should have backed Clinton instead of Obama. Now my irritation was complete.

The poll, apparently, strong indicated that most of the poll-takers think Oprah did the wrong thing, here. They followed up this revelation, which for some bizarro-land reason, qualifies as news, with an emailed viewer comment. "Kathy" was upset because on her show she is very vocal about her support of women and women's issues. Kathy felt that instead of being true to her principles and supporting the obvious choice--another woman, Hillary--she "let race get in the way." Luckily, they had a vh1 commentator (wouldn't this be simply a "commenter," the distinction eludes me yet) to proclaim this statement "ignorant," which clearly it is. The CNN interviewer, whose name I don't remember right now, nervously backpedaled for a minute and changed the subject. They cut to a shot of Oprah speaking to an audience of Obama supporters and mimicking the women who have had the audacity to ask her, and here you have to imagine Oprah doing her best anal-retentive white lady, "How could you do it?" If she commented beyond the laughter and booing this got from the audience, directed at these ladies, they didn't air it.

And in breaking news, recent coroner reports show conclusively that Heath Ledger died from an overdose of six different prescription medications. Medical professionals and police are holding off from ruling it a suicide due to a lack of clues. Now let's go to some Hollywood reporters who lament the intrusiveness of the press and speculate on the emotional state of Matilda, including whether or not she'll need counseling later in life.

We're doomed.

Family Antics, part 1

Speaking with my sister a few minutes ago, I had an extremely misguided moment when, searching for a topic of conversation, I asked her if she was planning to vote in the primaries on Super Tuesday. She said no. Even more misguidedly, I asked her if she had been following the election campaigns at all, and she said she had and that if she was going to vote, it would be to elect anyone who isn't Hillary Clinton. (For a moment, I had a flashback to a similar discussion about the relative merits of John Kerry vs George Bush in which she stated flatly, and with no reference to any of the issues at all, that she thought Kerry was not a nice man. She just didn't find him likeable, and Bush, at least, is likeable.) Trying a deflect a little, I joked that anyone would be better than Bush. Then she proceeded to tell me that she thinks Hillary is horrible, mean, mud-slinging, a "super negative person," and ambitious. Additionally, it worries her that Bill has spent so much time campaigning with his wife because she [my sister] can't imagine anything worse than having Bill Clinton in the White House again.


Instead of screaming at her, I thought I'd blog instead. Enjoy.

Stalled

Not a point I would belabor, particularly since all of us are familiar with the sensation of being unmoored, as it were. Adrift. This is my feeling about the world today, though. Teaching this semester is surreal and so much less stressful than my lit class last semester that I'm alternately astounded and relieved. The chapters are coming along, with no end to revision in sight. Facing this next segment, though, I feel like I'm trying to drop anchor in a deep and swiftly flowing river, though that analogy probably doesn't make sense to anyone who understands things of the nautical persuasion. I suppose I'm plumbing the depths, if you will. Searching blindly through the tortured recesses of the mountain of research I've already done and which will undoubtedly prove practically useless for my next chapter. What I really want to write about is Serenity and Charles Brockden Brown, and I'm barely resisting the urge to write my conclusion instead of this last chapter. No, I didn't say "last chapter." You must have imagined it. I'm pretty sure I did.

The Rock of Love II is coming along nicely. There's some good drama, the usual dose of hysteria and backbiting, and some particularly good strategists among the new women. One of them actually had the foresight to feed compromising information about one of the other girls to someone else, who then went immediate to Brett with her nasty little tidbit. How it is that these girls don't know that the schemers make for excellent tv but never win the competition is beyond me. It's like they didn't watch the last season or pay any attention at all to the Flavor of Love franchise (now going into its 3rd season!). The exception, perhaps, being the ultimate (?) I Love New York, in which she chooses the most underhanded guy in the competition both, I imagine, because she wanted someone with whom she is fairly matched in terms of competitiveness and because she was really looking for a mollifying lackey--post-Tango disappointment. Right now my money is on Megan. Q's right that Peyton should win, but she won't. Anyone else ready to pick your pony?

And to BEM: Unspeakably lame that you can't get into it, dude. It's not as though I only sat through the first fifteen minutes of No Country for Old Men and proclaimed it to be not my thing. No, indeed. Give it another shot, buddy. Do it for Brett.