ignorance toboggans

Buffalo

2010-01-13T19:17:00.000-08:00

As I was driving across the country last week, I spent a little time (admittedly not much) composing in my head a short list of the things that I would miss about living in Buffalo, the seven years I spent there. It's a work in progress and not presented in any kind of order--emphatic or otherwise:

1. My friends. I've lived in a fair number of places, more than most of the people I know, though far fewer than some. In Ohio and Virginia, and a few others, I never really met the kind of people that I really felt represented my ~kind~ of people, for lack of a better way of putting it. Though I made one very dear friend in Ohio--who has since almost entirely vanished into marriage and miscellaneous adult life--most of the time I spent there proved very lucrative for a particular video store. The culture was really all about hanging on porches, playing poker, and drinking beer. Also dogs. I liked the people in the department, and in many many many ways, the academic culture there kicked the ass of the Buffalo academic culture. But I never really made connections in the way that an introvert like myself finds satisfying and meaningful. In Buffalo, I did. I made a few really good friends. Hopefully, lifetime friends.

2. The city. Being from Montana, I never have really lost my sense of wonder at living in places other than Montana. Buffalo was truly excellent for that. It had a distinctly northeastern cultural difference from my birthplace, and the cityscape always made me feel like I had really come a long way, if that makes sense. The downtown felt very distinctly ~urban~ even if most of the storefronts were empty. The city missed it's moment, essentially. It sprung up, had it's hayday, overextended, and then was over. Over. People in Buffalo liked to joke that they didn't really feel the recession because the city had already been in one for decades. Of course, this wasn't exactly true. Though this was certainly the case for the housing market, as it turns out, the same was not as true for employment and cost of living. Renting prices were going steadily up, as was food. Though I begin to linger on the bad stuff, I still always loved downtown Buffalo. I loved its kind of post-apocalyptic feel. It's as close as I ever want to be to living in a real eastern city. All the grit and towering skyline, none of the claustrophobia, expense, and shitty parking. I love it. It's the urban version of a Willa Cather novel, whose descriptions of space and sky make me want to climb into a warm tub and touch myself.

3. The coop. It seems stupid to miss one's old job like I do, but I really had a sense of community there. As banal as that sounds. I learned so much while I was working there. I changed so much. My life changed so much. Primarily, I never thought of myself as a person invested in food and food politics to the extent that I now am. With all its ups and downs, my time spent working at the coop went a long way toward instilling that in me.

4. The summers. Not only are they particularly beautiful in Buffalo, but this beauty is intensified tremendously by their contrast to the long, grey, persistent winters. I will never forget my first early Spring in Buffalo (which is almost the same as the summer). I had spent months in my tiny one bedroom, which had a great location but sucked in terms of space. I vowed afterward to always try to have a separate space for eating and living, though this is no longer the case! Also, we almost never used the dining room when we had one. I went out one afternoon to walk to the health food store on the corner for a cookie. Walking back, the sun came out for what felt like the first time in an eternity. It felt so good to be in it's light that I walked around sort of dazed for a while, like a mole, blinking at the sun. The intense pleasure of that epiphany of sunlight, though, can't be overestimated.

The List

2009-12-31T06:39:00.000-08:00

Of resolutions, of course.

Be kinder--to myself. This encompasses so much. I had a very caring and insightful teacher in high school try to obliquely caution me about the tendency toward perfectionism she apparently noticed in my budding younger self. At the time, I didn't really get it. I thought she was merely passing along information, and, at the time, I didn't get that information is never innocent. I was also a Joyce enthusiast. Go figure. Only with time have I slowly begun to realize what it means to have these leanings, which in many ways are extremely compatible with the whole grad school enterprise. Grad students--and perhaps everyone in academia--are encouraged to be in a constant state of tension. This is also called staying current. The need to show oneself to be of superior intelligence and capacity, even in the very small pond of the department. I also think that perfectionism has a kind of positive connotation. It sounds like a solid, American value at some level. Why wouldn't you strive to be the best? All good things come from something like that, right? Financial success? Personal contentment?

The other side of that, though, is that perfectionism is extremely negative and destructive. It highlights and emphasizes the inevitable deficiencies of all of our lives. And it turns all of that negative energy inward. This is why one of my primary resolutions will be to try to pare back my own tendencies in this direction. Doing so, hopefully, will let me work on forgiving myself for the many many moments in my life when I've fallen so short of the mark. So very short. Apart from apologizing where I'm able, this is the best and most effective strategy--I hope.

Contemplating Resolutions

2009-12-30T05:55:00.000-08:00

The very idea of them, really. This is the time of year when all the blogs I read and at least some of the people I know start generating these lists of promises they make both to themselves and their loved ones (but mostly just to themselves) for things they will do, behaviors they will modify, changes they will seek in the coming year. Will 2010 be a better year? Was 2009 a triumph or a disappointment? And so on. Though it's doubtless very soulless of me, my own celebration/resolution bit is always sort of stymied by how artificial it all seems. Why count our lives by years and not some other measure? Of course, this is likely just a bluff. I'm terrified at the necessity of having to measure my life by an kind of standard. Being in school for almost my entire life has to be somewhat to blame for this. The academic calendar is tightly tethered to the concept of measuring time and clicking off years. I guess what's happened is that I've run out of years to account for in this way. Even more, when I stop measuring my life by numbers and schedules, the future yawns out in front of me. As I think I've said before, in my good moments, this lack of structure looks like possibility and I get little thrills of excitement thinking about all the other directions my life might take. In my bad moments, I feel lost.

It reminds me a little, actually, of teaching Stephen Crane's "An Open Boat" in my comp classes a year or so ago. Or is it "The Open Boat"? It doesn't really matter right now. Anyway, this story is all about these 4 (4?) men who survive a shipwreck and end up tossing about in the waves. They can get close enough to the shore to see people on it, but they can't get to land without swamping their rickety little vessel. Most of the story takes place with them drifting in the sea, paddling up and down the coast, and ignoring the sharks. The journalist figure is the Crane stand-in and through this experience he ponders the futility of human striving in a godless universe. Gotta love the naturalists. I do. He repeats the phrase "If I am to die," over and over, and appeals to some sort of archaic sea gods. One of my students actually thought this meant that he was a devotee of Poseidon (what an excellent sense of history, right?).

I'm not sure why I'm rambling on about that here, except I kind of feel like I was on my own petty ship. And it wrecked. The metaphor works, I think, well enough that I needn't expand on it.

Solipsist, I

2009-12-25T15:42:00.000-08:00

More self-focused ramblings today, I suppose. Because it's Friday. And it's Christmas. And I've been drinking scotch and watching movies all day. And something about the holidays brings out my (not so hidden) inner pontificator. And what better place to pontificate than a readerless blog?

Today I feel precariously balanced, as I have been for some time, between multiple distractions and the abyss of my future. Please note, I do not mean to reference the abyss here in any kind of self-pitying way. I do not intend it to resonate with the apocalyptic or to conjure up notions of a futureless future, whatever that might mean. Instead, I mean that for the first time in my brief thirty-something years, I don't know what the future holds. How cliche when I put it that way. Having always been working toward some goal or another, I now find myself goal-less, and I question whether my desire to patch together some kind of idealism is an effective survival strategy, a useful way of imaging the world to myself, or itself a kind of fatalism.

The last day at my job is coming up soon, and that feels very tactile, like a finite amount of something slipping through my fingers. I feel the sudden need to get organized. Like a kind of gasping desperation. What will I do? I need to make lists! And so I do. And for a time, as contrary to intuition as it might be, this quells the storm. My body relaxes ever so slightly once I have a good list. But the best thing of all about lists is how utterly replaceable and tenuous they are. I love that. My need to be organized is at some fundamental level tethered to the need for a replaceable present. Re-listing, throwing out, and listing yet again, offers the opportunity to re-affirm, re-organize, re-vision the future. I find this incredibly liberating.

When I was young and less troubled by nuance, I knew that the future was a function of a person's ability to prioritize--to some extent, anyway (I wasn't a sociopath). Yet I felt surrounded by people who refused this ability. Refused responsibility, in a way. As an adult, I reject this even while I recognize what generates it. In preparing for this new, unpredictable future, I make lists, I get organized, and I try to focus on the potential. Instead of on the waste. The lost years. The mistakes.

Recommitment Fail

2009-12-24T05:56:00.000-08:00

So it officially happened. I was sucked down into the facebook K-hole, but it hasn't been all that bad. Status updates, like the ubiquitous tweets, are like blogging in soundbites. Little flash-captures of thoughts. I like them. I like keeping in touch with people I knew so long ago in some of my other lives. For example, I now regularly hear from the woman who befriended me when I worked at the electronics superstore in Billings. We used to go dancing at clubs together, eat at Dennys (!). Her little daughter loved me, and the feeling was mutual. She taught me how to take care of my eyebrows, though I don't always do so as well as I could. I'm also in touch with a guy who I knew really peripherally as an older man who dated a girl who was friends with my friends. He's now very vocally political and leans toward raw foodism. The less satisfying facebook friendships are actually those that were a bit closer to me than the above. My first and third loves, for example. Frustrating relationships that were inevitably disappointing and unrequited, in one way or another.

Basically, as much of a curmudgeon as I've become in my early-middle age, facebook offers the veneer of contact. It is an immediate avenue for contacting people who otherwise slip into the void of personal history. I almost wish that absolutely everyone was on facebook. One could friend them or not, but at least they would be there. For this reason, I have a handful of names that I periodically search for, just to see if perhaps they've popped up. No luck so far. Some people just resist social networking, and that for reasons familiar to all of us.

I've recently started to miss my blog more acutely, however. I'm in danger of confusing it for a journal in which I might write more or less completely uncensored. This is the peril of having no audience. I'm hoping to pick it back up. We'll see if I can do better this time around.

Finally

2009-03-17T16:16:00.000-07:00

I'm giddy today. Positively giddy. After three pretty good classes, as such things go, I submitted the last three hard copy drafts of my entire dissertation. Now I have only to wait a little less than a month for the defense date that will, I once thought, put the perfect seal on my terminal degree. From what I can gather from talking to my director, the defense should be really pro forma, not anything to worry about or prepare for. In spite of this, I'm sure to torture myself for weeks in advance, reading over the copy obsessively and imagining endless questions that they might ask that I wouldn't be able to answer. This is my particular form of self-flagellation. Not that it works out very well for me. Indeed, you'd think in my early adulthood I would move on to other forms of masochistic torture, but this has proved a long-lasting and painful habit. I can fondly remember being an undergrad, and even at the beginning of my grad career, fantasizing excitedly about being asked questions that I would be able to answer and that would showcase my "considerable" knowledge to best possible effect. What does it say about my life now that my fantasies are rather a darker version of this?

Grieving

2009-03-06T14:08:00.000-08:00

One of my students passed away this week. It's been a few days now, and I guess I'm still processing. This is the first time this has happened, really, and it's the strange little details that are the most disturbing. I was sitting in my office holding conferences all damn day yesterday after receiving an email from campus judiciaries. All day long I was looking at his name on the sign-up sheet and wondering what would happen at 2:00 when he wasn't going to be there. Every time I flipped through the stack of graded papers I was returning to people in these conferences, I would see his paper. I suppose the obvious thing would have been to remove it from the stack, but I just couldn't find my way to doing that. It's the weirdest thing. We weren't friends, of course, by any stretch. By his own admission, he didn't like me. (As a matter of principle, due to childhood trauma, he didn't like any English teachers.) In class he was erratic and off-beat, unpredictable and slightly disruptive. He was quite bright but not extremely motivated. He wanted to major in philosophy and admired H.P. Lovecraft. Other than those tidbits and a partially completed paper on which he'd received a C-, I don't have anything else. All my comments on his work went something like this: "Jack (not his real name), This is a very engaging and promising discussion of these texts. I'd really like to see where you would go with this if you expand it to fulfill the page requirement for this paper. [and so on]." It's refreshing, really, because most of the papers I get are so deeply uninspired and banal. This not because the students themselves are either of these things but because they're not sinking much of themselves into their 4-6 page paper for composition. In short, he was the kind of student you noticed.

I've been thinking that if there's a memorial service I'll attend. As far as talking about this with my class? I don't know. I need to, of course. While I work really hard on a rather jovial and cool rapport with my students, I wouldn't describe it as in any sense touchy-feely. A lot of the advice I've gotten from people is targeted at a different kind of teacher, I think. A collage? A collaborative epitaph? A heartfelt outpouring? I'm not sure yet what I'll be able to manage. The one thing I know for sure is that I can't say nothing. You know? I might send an email this weekend just to make sure every one knows. Then, when I bring it up in class on Tuesday, perhaps it will be less...surprising? Abrasive? Otherwise unexpected? Truly, I'm at a loss and very much grateful for the intervening week that will let me gather my thoughts. David, I think, was right on when he said to me earlier that there really is no right thing.

Facebook Usurper

2009-02-21T06:09:00.000-08:00

The blogs are kind of bumming me out recently. Q accurately diagnosed the problem last night when she quipped, in a shockingly (to me) casual way about something to the effect of how the blogs are done, having been replaced by facebook. And, indeed, why bother blogging about anything if you can just obsessively comment and read status updates on facebook? I would submit, though, that these two things simply don't serve the same function. Perhaps if we were all more open and confessional about leaving Notes on our profiles, this would be the case. As it is, pretty much the only stuff you're supposed to write in such notes are interesting and compelling bits and lists of favorites. It's the myspace survey all over again. While this has it's place, admittedly, and I like facebook way more than I ever liked myspace (the latter is quite simply too damned fussy), it doesn't rival the blogs. I've gotta say, though they've fallen off in recent months--first GeoffreyCrayon, then B--I still like them. I still like having one. This is really the only time I do this kind of writing, and while I'm not particularly good at it, I do enjoy it. A lovely difference from my bloody dissertation. Bloody in more than one sense.

So I, for one, am clearly guilty of not blogging. I think this is partially the time of year. I have more momentum in the late spring and fall, or maybe I'm just making that up. Really what it is is I've been waiting until I felt like I could write about something other than how devastated I feel after experiencing my worst case scenario on the job market this year. I always knew it would be bad, people start warning you about that when you're an undergrad with grad school ambitions, but I didn't think it would be as bad as it was. Where this leads me from here is into a shame spiral, k-hole, whatever you want to call it, where I obsessively recount my failures and wail mournfully about my future prospects. I've done that enough, so I'm not going to do it here. I'm trying really hard to pull myself out of that and reclaim my sense of forward motion. So I'm focusing on finishing. And putting off, for now, the job hunt. I'm telling myself that next year, when my dissertation is off my lap, I'll be able to focus on a number of different possibilities. To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, a job announcement I saw recently for a book manager at Amazon gave me a great deal of pause. Anyway, suffice it to say: badness.

Moving on, I really want something else to talk about. And this seems silly because I have so much else going on. I have dissertation drama, teaching drama, money drama, family drama. But for the last couple of months, all I've been able to do is scream about the job market. Ridiculous, right? I'm recommitting to my blog. Perhaps it can keep me from being such a whiny bitch.

Just in case you were wondering

2009-01-22T16:22:00.000-08:00

or idling conjecturing...or pondering...or smugly musing...

Bret Michaels admitted on the third episode of Rock of Love Bus that he, indeed, has the finest hair extensions Europe can provide. Imagine all those flaxen-locked Swedish ladies swooning under his masterfully tied bandanna.

*sigh* A perfect ending to an otherwise mediocre day. Also, dig the pout.

Savage Love Fest

2009-01-19T14:33:00.000-08:00

I just saw this on the Slog. I loved it too much to keep it to myself, even though I think BEM reads the bloody thing as much as I do. Anyway, if you can get past the weirdness of the letter, all the "imaginings" and "believings," which Dan is graceful enough not to mention, the whole thing is beautiful. Just the kind of pick-me-up we all need on the eve of the inauguration and Bush's last night in office. Enjoy.

Savage Love Letter of the Day

Posted by Dan Savage on Mon, Jan 19 at 2:06 PM

In your response to "Faithful Obama Girl" you refer to Rick Warren as a "gay-hatin', right-wing Christian bigot." I found this confusing. I can understand that he represents a political/social faction which has an agenda opposed to your own. I can also imagine that I can not even begin to imagine how any criticism of a gay lifestyle takes a sinister aura when it has a religious basis. However, is it accurate to describe Warren this way? Certainly, he does speak against the gay lifestyle, but would you say that anyone who does this is a hateful bigot? Is there a difference between the beliefs of Rick Warren and those of Fred Phelps?
I could understand if you described Warren (or myself) as a dangerously deluded Christian fanatic because you believe that our beliefs naturally lead towards the hateful bigotry of Phelps. I would disagree but differentiate between that description and the one you gave.

A Biblical Christian

Rick warren is Fred Phelps plus 100 pounds and a smile.

You can speak against the gay lifestyle without being bigoted. There are certainly aspects of "the gay lifestyle" that trouble me, and I'm as gay guys get. You'll certainly find examples of me taking gay men to task if you read through the "Savage Love" archives. But a person can't insist that people shouldn't be gay, or that gay people shouldn't have relationships, or that gay people shouldn't be parents or adopt, or that being gay is a sinful choice, without being considered a bigot.

Imagine if I told you that I only hated "the Christian lifestyle," and not, you know, actual Christians. Hey, nothing personal! I know and like tons of individual Christians, and I've broken bread with Christians, and I've had Christians over to my house. But I nevertheless think that Christianity—just the practice, not the people—is immoral and that no one needs to be Christian—it's a lifestyle choice, and Christians can change! Indeed, I was a Christian once. And while I have great affection for Christians I also believe that no one who is Christian is fit to parent, that Christians should not be allowed to marry or adopt, and that Christians aren't going to heaven because my God condemns their immoral lifestyle.

Oh, and I also believe that Christians being allowed to marry infringes upon my right to, um, live in a world where Christians do not enjoy that right.

Would you consider me an anti-Christian bigot then? I expect you would, ABC, and you'd be right.

I don't even care

2009-01-14T14:09:00.000-08:00

that none of you care. I'm posting the vegan's 100 list that's been making the rounds on the foodie blogs for the last several months. I've been holding off, resisting, if you will. Today, though, in the midst of the shit storm, I don't even care.

"Your mission, should you choose to accept it:

1) Copy this list into your own blog, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Post a comment here once you’ve finished and link your post back to this one.
5) Pass it on!"

1. Natto
2. Green Smoothie
3. Tofu Scramble
4. Haggis
5. Mangosteen
6. Creme brulee
7. Fondue
8. Marmite/Vegemite
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Nachos
12. Authentic soba noodles
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Taco from a street cart
16. Boba Tea
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Gyoza
20. Vanilla ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Ceviche
24. Rice and beans
25. Knish
26. Raw scotch bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Caviar
29. Baklava
30. Pate
31. Wasabi peas
32. Chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Mango lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Mulled cider
37. Scones with buttery spread and jam
38. Vodka jelly
39. Gumbo
40. Fast food french fries
41. Raw Brownies
42. Fresh Garbanzo Beans
43. Dahl
44. Homemade Soymilk
45. Wine from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Stroopwafle
47. Samosas
48. Vegetable Sushi
49. Glazed doughnut
50. Seaweed
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Tofurkey
54. Sheese
55. Cotton candy
56. Gnocchi
57. Piña colada
58. Birch beer
59. Scrapple
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Soy curls
63. Chickpea cutlets
64. Curry
65. Durian
66. Homemade Sausages
67. Churros, elephant ears, or funnel cake
68. Smoked tofu
69.Fried plantain
70. Mochi
71. Gazpacho
72. Warm chocolate chip cookies
73. Absinthe
74. Corn on the cob
75. Whipped cream, straight from the can
76. Pomegranate
77. Fauxstess Cupcake
78. Mashed potatoes with gravy
79.Jerky
80. Croissants
81. French onion soup
82. Savory crepes
83. Tings
84. A meal at Candle 79
85. Moussaka
86. Sprouted grains or seeds
87. Macaroni and “cheese”
88. Flowers
89. Matzoh ball soup
90. White chocolate
91. Seitan
92. Kimchi
93. Butterscotch chips
94. Yellow watermelon
95. Chili with chocolate
96. Bagel and Tofutti
97. Potato milk
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Raw cookie dough

from Bittersweet. I kick so much ass I can barely stand it. Either that, or I really do eat my way through every place I visit. And I'm a huge fatty.

My God. I Love a Reunion Special.

2009-01-07T12:35:00.001-08:00

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It Fills the Void

2008-11-29T14:27:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-25T15:43:00.001-08:00

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

2008-11-08T06:26:00.000-08:00

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

2008-11-07T07:57:00.000-08:00

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

2008-10-21T06:55:00.000-07:00

...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

2008-10-11T10:45:00.000-07:00

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

Hilarious

2008-09-29T16:49:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-09-20T15:29:00.000-07:00

Things That Make Me Want to Die

2008-09-20T09:44:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-09T09:19:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-05T06:18:00.000-07:00

Via Slog, of course.

A Little Whining, A Lot of Procrastination

2008-09-01T07:40:00.001-07:00

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

2008-08-30T12:40:00.001-07:00

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

2008-08-15T11:47:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-01T17:04:00.000-07:00

Via Slog, what else?

More New Favorite Things

2008-07-29T07:06:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-19T06:54:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-15T08:03:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-08T12:01:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-28T16:27:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-13T05:34:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-29T11:04:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-28T11:43:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-12T16:04:00.001-07:00

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

Chapter What-ish

2008-05-02T16:23:00.000-07:00

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,

2008-04-26T15:18:00.000-07:00

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 Cupc akes.
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

2008-04-23T15:05:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-04-21T15:02:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-11T16:31:00.000-07:00

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

Insect Reflection

2008-04-09T14:15:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-03-29T08:08:00.001-07:00

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

2008-03-22T06:22:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-19T15:16:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-04T16:14:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-25T05:23:00.000-08:00

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?

2008-02-16T15:46:00.000-08:00

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

2008-02-06T10:07:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-30T05:50:00.000-08:00

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

2008-01-28T13:26:00.000-08:00

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.

Applications, Classes, Pilates

2008-01-16T12:28:00.000-08:00

Things aren't so bad. I've been working on the couch for several hours now. Mina is curled up sleeping by my side but apparently happy to wake up now and then when I give her some love. I've been trying to compose my five page dissertation summary for the dreaded CAS fellowship application. I wasn't quite prepared for how difficult it is to do so in five pages for readers who are unfamiliar with your discipline but whom you presumably must impress with the significance of your project. Q, please don't panic, you know I draft long and interminably. It isn't done and won't be. For a long time. So hard. That, coupled with the beginning of the new semester this week, is the less fun part of the week. I've only seen my students once, and it's much too early to get anything like a sense of how things will shake out. They're not yet really laughing at my jokes, but this is to be expected. I'm keeping my fingers crossed. That said, having two of my best students from my last comp class in this one is making me more hopeful than I would otherwise have a right to be at this early date.

My only other news--and brace yourself for how exciting this is--is that I went to my first pilates class last night and totally loved it. Some things were really hard and others were really easy and I could seriously do without the wall of mirrors and the weird sense that the whole thing is so gendered. You have to imagine me and a bunch of tall, thin girls, rolling around on mats and practicing our "pilates 'v'". I'm not even going to tell you all what that is because it's more fun that way. Sounds nasty, doesn't it? Really, though, it's totally hard on your core, which is exactly what I need. I hate working my abs, so this is excellent and included in my gym membership. If I can get my shit together enough tomorrow, I'm going to go to the yoga class. This will surely be me with another bunch of tall, thin girls, rolling around on the floor and stretching or something.

Wow. I really had nothing to say. To distract you from that annoyance, have some baby red pandas, Q's favorite. Almost as adorable as Mina, I'd have to say.
Almost.

Crazy and Obsessed

2008-01-07T13:26:00.000-08:00

That's me today. Or, maybe even more accurately, crazy-sick-obsessed. Or some permutation thereof. The sick part is the easiest to explain. I haven't had so much as a mild cold for some freakish number of months now. I was long overdue, but I seem to making up for lost time. Either Q gave it to me or I picked it up at the coop and gave it to her (though the latter seems less likely since she manifested the snifflies a full day before I did). Not that it matters in any case. If you're going to kiss someone on a regular basis you simply can't worry a lot about incubation times and illness probabilities. Or at least I can't worry about that.

The crazy obsessed part is a little more involved. One part is working on the diss, which actually made me into a raving lunatic for the first part of today. Q was, as they say, grace under fire as I shrieked at her about radically unrelated minutiae that, because of my unstable emotional/intellectual state, had become quite blown out of proportion. Then she comforted me and all was well for a short time. This scenario repeated a bit later on a slightly different topic, but I think, for the day, I've finally got it managed. Significantly helpful in this capacity are the three jam thumbprints I brought home from the coop. Never underestimate the power of a jam-filled cookie to soothe emotional sores. (Though in hindsight I don't think the words "jam" and "sores" should ever appear in such close proximity.)

So imagine me, crazy and raving and sniffling, dragging my ass to the gym at exactly eleven o'clock today. I couldn't run because of that sick thing where you pant for breath after even minimal effort. All of this because I simply had to see the I Love New York 2 reunion show. What do you think? Is this a new low? I actually wanted it to end after an hour, but it ended up being a ninety minute show. I walked the whole ninety minutes. It totally sucked.

So that's the saga of crazy-sick-obsessed, though you may choose to apply those labels willy-nilly. Now things have indeed calmed down a bit. I know I promised stories from the holidays in Montana, so here are some brief highlights:

My uncle and his girlfriend are, indeed, getting married this summer. Also another one or two of my cousins. Speaking with my mom about it, she excitedly began listing the very few young people in my very large family who are of age and could potentially get hitched in the near future. The conversation went like this:

Mom: Wow, who's left? There's your cousin so-and-so, and so-and-so, and that's about it!
Me: Well, there's ME.
Mom: Well, we just don't know what's going to happen with that.

I ~mostly~ succeeded in not getting into any arguments with my uncle (a different one) who used to a a lawyer and is notoriously belligerent. I have this horrid memory of having him cross-examine me at great length when I was fifteen and just exploring atheism for the first time. Truly painful. He's fond of saying thing like: "Women only have half a soul until they've had children. They will always regret not having them if they don't." The lovely thing was watching my mom tear into him about it, and we even collaborated to antagonize him by blandly generalizing about how "men are." That was fun. Okay, and maybe a little childish. My mom and stepfather also awesomely hopped to my defense when he began a line of rhetorical questioning by asking me why I think milk is poisonous for babies and not just neutral like all other food. Yes, you read correctly, this man used to be a lawyer.
I managed not to be mean at all to my stepbrother's 14 year old son, who has been praised and loved and fought over as the long-sought male heir over two older daughters. I'd like to think that his life will get harder. I just wish I could be sure. And to be fair, it may be that what I can only describe as his "fuckishness" as in "what a fuck!" is due primarily to his age and station in life and is not innately part of his personality.
I had a great time seeing a few old friends and generally hanging with my mom. Perhaps best of all, I didn't fight with anyone or cry at all the whole time I was home. A real triumph.

The Shee-ee-eee-eeple

2008-01-05T06:00:00.001-08:00

I'll post again soon with holiday recaps and joyful thoughts on the new year...or something. Until then, for your consideration, I give you Lacy Lamb and her story. Enjoy.

The Sheep-Child

Farm boys wild to couple
With anything         with soft-wooded trees
With mounds of earth         mounds
Of pine straw         will keep themselves off
Animals by legends of their own:
In the hay-tunnel dark
And dung of barns, they will
Say         I have heard tell

That in a museum in Atlanta
Way back in a corner somewhere
There's this thing that's only half
Sheep         like a woolly baby
Pickled in alcohol         because
Those things can't live         his eyes
Are open         but you can't stand to look
I heard from somebody who ...

But this is now almost all
Gone. The boys have taken
Their own true wives in the city,
The sheep are safe in the west hill
Pasture         but we who were born there
Still are not sure. Are we,
Because we remember, remembered
In the terrible dust of museums?
Merely with his eyes, the sheep-child may
Be saying         saying

    I am here, in my father's house.
    I who am half of your world, came deeply
    To my mother in the long grass
    Of the west pasture, where she stood like moonlight
    Listening for foxes. It was something like love
    From another world that seized her
    From behind, and she gave, not Iifting her head
    Out of dew, without ever looking, her best
    Self to that great need. Turned loose, she dipped her face
    Farther into the chill of the earth, and in a sound
    Of sobbing         of something stumbling
    Away, began, as she must do,
    To carry me. I woke, dying,

    In the summer sun of the hillside, with my eyes
    Far more than human. I saw for a blazing moment
    The great grassy world from both sides,
    Man and beast in the round of their need,
    And the hill wind stirred in my wool,
    My hoof and my hand clasped each other,
    I ate my one meal
    Of milk, and died
    Staring. From dark grass I came straight

    To my father's house, whose dust
    Whirls up in the halls for no reason
    When no one comes         piling deep in a hellish mild corner,
    And, through my immortal waters,
    I meet the sun's grains eye
    To eye, and they fail at my closet of glass.
    Dead, I am most surely living
    In the minds of farm boys: I am he who drives
    Them like wolves from the hound bitch and calf
    And from the chaste ewe in the wind.
    They go into woods         into bean fields         they go
    Deep into their known right hands. Dreaming of me,
    They groan         they wait         they suffer
    Themselves, they marry, they raise their kind.

 -- James Dickey

Head in a Vise 2

2007-12-14T17:07:00.000-08:00

Does anyone even remember part 1? I do, of course, because it was my head in the vise. Another busy semester has ended, and after cramming in more work than I really thought was humanly possible into the last week and a half, I'm theoretically poised to spend a little quality time fucking off...to full effect, as Snoop says (the latter is a reference to the fourth season of the Wire, doubtless not lost on BEM and others). Something about the taste of leisure, though, feels more like alienation, or something. I'm having a hard time believing that I really don't need to be poking at my latest chapter or something. Of course, that will happen, but it needs to be not the ONLY thing I'm doing. On the agenda for the remaining days before I ship off to do my time in MT are things like Christmas shopping for the small selection of relatives I actually buy for--ah, the pleasures of having large, disconnected families--swapping library materials (the only time I hope to be driving to UB for the duration of the break), making these pumpkins cinnamon rolls that have been giving me wet dreams ever since I saw them on Isa's blog, and indulging in some kind of birthday festivities with my beloved Q. You only turn 32 once! Also in there are some tentative plans, like watching the most recent Pirates of the Caribbean, managing my gym time in such a way that I actually get to see the finale of I Love New York 2. Fuck you, that matters to me. Although, pretty much, I'll be shocked if Buddha doesn't win. Don't judge me, dick. As Gina says.

Not too much else, really. I'm surprised to find myself looking forward to the easy prep accompanying the research writing course I'm teaching in the spring, my anticipation of which is heightened by the fact that I have one of my best 101 students enrolled in it. Awesome! I always feel like a little bit less of a terrible teacher when I have a repeat student, though some niggling, naysaying part of my brain never fails to chime in with "the devil you know..."

As a parting gift, in so far as the conclusion of a blog is parting, I give you, by way of what I imagine is an introduction, the teacup pig. If these pictures don't make you want to curl up into a ball and die of cute poisoning, I don't think I want to know you anymore.

And...scene.

If I HAD money,

2007-12-07T05:01:00.000-08:00

I would spend it HERE. Now you can start guessing which prize I covet the most. After all, the holidays are just around the corner....

Do YOU Have Love?

2007-11-29T10:12:00.000-08:00

Things have slowed down a little, which is a good thing and a bad thing. I need to be gearing up to get some work done over the break, and I have my students' final papers staring me down from the end of next week. That grading promises to be boatloads of fun. I just hope to god that they haven't all again chosen to argue the same thing about the same small selection of pieces. Whaddayathink? Yeah. I'm screwed. Ah well, at least I made it through the semester, mostly intact. I'm bizarrely looking forward to the comparatively easy work of teaching research writing in the Spring! More grading, more repetitiveness, WAY less prep. The nightmares should start right around the first week of January. Bring 'em on.

I guess my perception that things have slowed a bit is primarily due to some denial I've been cultivating. Does that denial have a face, you ask? Why, yes. Yes, it does. I've been unabashedly scouring youtube for the parceled up back episodes of A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila. I still have a wretched time getting her name right. For some stupid reason, my tongue doesn't want to say the 'l', so I'm always saying "Tia," even in the heat of an intensely nerdy discussion with q about the representation of bi-ness on the show. But, truly, the show has found a place in my not-as-guilty-as-you-might-imagine pleasures. I was trying to explain to Q last night what I find so captivating about it. I haven't quite articulated it to myself yet, but in a way I find it more compelling than other such reality shows. This is actually saying something as I've developed something of a penchant for the genre over the last couple of years. Blame it on my devotion to the treadmill. That's how it all began. As a sidenote, I actually had to plead the poor gym attendant today not to change the channel from vh-1 just as I Love New York 2 was coming on. I had, indeed, planned my trip to coincide with the new episode. Things look rocky in the house, by the way.

But the thing with A Shot at Love is complicated. The show is framed in such a way that, at the beginning, Tila was talking about trying to decide if she wants to be with a man or a woman. Now, closer to the end, she's getting a bit more ambivalent about this, talking instead about focusing on the person rather than the gender--a pretty standard bi line that drives non-bisexuals batso. Or, rather, it isn't that one discourse has replaced the other, but they are now woven together in the show. Depending on who she's talking to--the white, wealthy, suburban grotesques who exclaim that they never thought their son would bring "someTHING" like "that" home--or the suspiciously loving and non-prude extended family of our favorite "futch" (you guessed it, femme/butch)--she switches back and forth. I want to say that it radically doesn't matter who she ends up with, but... I'm always pulling for someone on these shows, but it seems less charged whether New York ends up with Buddha or Punk this time around (although, mark my words, it WILL be one of the two) than whether Tila chooses Dani or Bobby. This is all intimately bound up with the show's surreal subjunctivity, posing "straight" men against "lesbians" as though all's fair in love and war. The guys are so hysterical about affirming their heterosexuality that they are and have been way more violent than on any other comparable shows I've watched. The girls are constantly accused, by the guys and each other, of being indecisive, not knowing which (male or female) they want. One girl was kicked off really early in the show for messing around with a boy who is one of the final three. Not to be trusted.

All in all, the language of indecisiveness--always an important part of the drama in this genre-- is intensified as something intrinsic to bisexuality. At the end of the day, as Lorna likes to say, she's most likely to pick Bobby, thus proving once and for all that bisexuality doesn't exist. She likes the "softness" and "understanding" of a woman, but she gets really excited for the men, whose rough faces and strong hands she dwells on in every episode. Tila will go where the sex is, mark my words. Still, though, indulging in the fantasy of equality, which the show exploits with as much panache as is imaginable, I would love to see Dani win. Or lose and move to Buffalo. One of the two.

Mortiri Te Salutuum

2007-11-12T12:13:00.000-08:00

That's one of the few phrases that actually stuck after two years of high school Latin. Perhaps further indicative of, as I've insisted to my sister on more than one occasion, high school is not nearly as much about education as it is, ultimately, survival. Anyway, we've just returned from our fabulous weekend in Ithaca. We splurged on a gay-owned b&b, where the owner, equal parts angel and sadist, stuffed us to the gills with three course breakfasts. Bless him, he veganized some of his usual suspects and conspiratorially commented that the other guests didn't need to know. So much delicious fatness. Above and beyond, though, was the amazing aromatherapy, surround-sound, five-headed steam shower. Holy fuck. Follow that up with the softest, fluffiest, robe and slipper combo you can imagine and settle in to watch Tila Tequila for a few hours and I'm completely in heaven. I'll save most of the reviewing for Q, perhaps, but suffice it say, we had a lovely time. Cornell brought out my good old undergrad resentment about the total college experience and that breezy, New England sense of entitlement. I'll refrain from elaborating and keep my self-righteous bile to myself. At least for now.

I close with a redirect, for those of you who feel meanly of yourself for not having taken the GRE, or who are, perhaps, mildly nostalgic about the verbal section. You also get to feel sort of smug for sticking it to the corporate world in that really vague, indirect way that websites with lots of ads offer. Also, it's bizarrely addictive. Check it out here, if you dare.

It Is Broughten!

2007-11-03T15:06:00.001-07:00

Halloween Food and Scary Movie Festival tonight at 28. I made the imperious, rather assholey move of deciding who would bring what and further demanded that all food be Halloween themed. Time will only tell what others have come up with, but here's what Q and I are taking.

First, bean dip. Tasty, spicy, creamy. Not particularly good for us. Decorated with tofutti-licious sour cream web and spiders I whittled out of olives. The spots of red on the particularly scary looking ones are sri racha. I went that way instead of Franks for the creepy and bloodlike vermillion hue. I think I get extra points since the olives were not pitted and thus extra tricky. Whatever.

We're also bringing dessert. I volunteered us for this honor because VCTotW has been burning a hole in my kitchen counter for weeks now. Well, maybe the metaphor doesn't work here, but you know what I mean. These are the red velvet cupcakes with buttercream frosting. I got the wrong kind of food coloring, so they came out more brownish-maroon than red. I had been looking forward to a scarlet-gore sort of effect. In any case, I hope they look like brains, but it took a couple tries to get the technique quite right. As with all such things, I know what I would do differently next time. Right now I'm just hoping they're tasty and nobody confuses the decoration for piles of sloppy intestines. What do you think?

Also, first ever food porn on Ignorance Toboggans!

Wish Fulfillment

2007-10-25T05:00:00.000-07:00

SNL Awesomeness, via SLOG.

Nausea, and some good stuff, too

2007-10-23T13:41:00.000-07:00

Ugh. Does it make me a bad person that I was filled with loathing last night when my mother told me an "exciting" piece of family news? My mom uncharacteristically warned me that this is all very much, for the time being, on the down low (which apparently means I can't tell my sister, since she's the only member of my family whose knowledge of the secret might be of some consequence through me both in that I am actually in contact with her and she might actually give a damn). So here, the big secret: my uncle (aged...I don't know...but he's gotta be at least in his late forties as my mom's baby brother) has decided to propose marriage to his lovely girlfriend. Or ex-girlfriend. I'm not sure what she qualifies as and my mom was clearly irritated at my raising such a frivolous question when faced with exciting and happy news and refused to answer my request for clarity. The would-be fiance is in her early 20s and recent left her home state, where she and my uncle dated for a couple of years, to attend grad school on the other side of the country. She's a splendid girl. Cute, very smart, slightly sassy. On my last trip home, I stumbled on a copy of Gender Trouble and presented it with her as a pre-grad school gift. She studies German history with an emphasis in Women's Studies or something of this variety. She's now been away from home for two years, I think, and she and my uncle have more or less kept up a long-term relationship. I say "more or less" because my uncle has always been...monogamy challenged? She always said if she ever found out about another woman it would be over between them. Things apparently changed this summer when she let my uncle know that she had met someone else, and since she's a self-proclaimed monogamist, my sense, and my mom's sense, was that things were over between them. My uncle was appropriately plied with drinks and good humor, I assume, and all was as it should be (I thought). Because, seriously, OF COURSE she would find someone else. Then, apparently, he's had the epiphany that if moving to where she lives is what is required to win her back, then goddamn it he's going to marry her and move. He's purchased the ring, and all that, and is apparently planning to pop the question on Christmas at midnight, where she will be staying at her parent's house (which is, by the way, in a really really rural part of the state). He's under a strict directive to inform my mother the next morning of how things turned out, so I'll be among the first to know, as I'll be home for the holidays this year. Seriously, if she says yes, it will make me so sad on more than one account. Then, again, if she says no, that will suck for different reasons. Thus the nausea. On the one hand, I'll have to participate in the celebration when a dirge seems more appropriate. On the other, just having to watch the vicissitudes of emotion on my mother's face betray her own emotional investment in this couple sounds excruciating. If I can manage to be drunk for that phone call (What do you think? Can I pull off a bender on Christmas morning?) it would be better for everyone, and if all else fails, it will be excellent practice in keeping my trap shut. Families are so good for such exercises in self-improvement.

The good stuff? I recently made the zombie finger cookies from Lindy Loo's fabulous blog, and they were fabulous. Most of them are hurtling through space for my stepfather's Halloween/Birthday party, but they were generally adored by all. STILL want to make some cupcakes, but I've not yet plucked up the checkbook to go purchase the pastry bag and all that. Reading Michelle Cliff and really liking her, so that's fun. However, I loved this comic from Married to the Sea. I hope you enjoy it as well.

Holy Crap

2007-10-18T12:44:00.001-07:00

Seriously. What a week this was. It all started off with receiving midterm essays from my students on Monday. Sixteen or so hours later, I had them all graded and commented on. And I was braindead. Poor Q, having to listen to me rant about how predictable and boring such papers can be. To give you all a hint of this mundanity, we've been through two thirds of a rather hefty anthology, read tons of stuff, and yet most of my students wrote on some combination of the same four stories. Seriously, what's up with that? I guess this phenomenon is just the literature class version of the "big game" essay in composition. I could go the rest of my life without ever reading another one of those things. It is, however, compelling evidence against the snowflake theory. I'd love it if there was a way to make students aware of this without crushing their mindgrapes completely. You know, they need a little juice just to get through the day.

What else? Work work work. It occurred to me that I needed to make a couple changes in my first chapter. Again. Then sitting down to do so proved to be this incredibly painful experience. I've looked at this freaking thing so much that out of sheer exhaustion I ready to just let it be what it is, come what may. I finally, after more hours than it really should have taken, managed to hammer something out. Hopefully when I go back to look at it on Saturday, I'll experience much less loathing. This is fascinating stuff, right?

Mina went to the vet today for her "senior visit." In cat years, she's 65, which seems so weird to me. I still call her "baby." Should I switch at some point to "grandma"? Two hundred and fifty dollars later, we walked out with the promise of a phone call in the morning to let me know how her blood screening worked out. I've got my fingers crossed really tightly that they don't turn up something awful. The whole experience prompted me to look at the pet insurance company websites, but ultimately decide against trying to pursue that option. For most of the plans, she's too old, and most don't cover pre-existing conditions, which I assume would her kidney problems and the teeth that the vet wants to extracted. Can you say suckage? Poor kitty.

Enough with the whining already! Q and I have lovely plans to get some delicious Chinese food tomorrow night and then go see Patricia Williams talk. I've offered my students an extra credit incentive to attend and write a response, and it will be interesting to see how many take me up on it. I'm thinking not many are planning on it, but perhaps that will change when I give them back their papers tomorrow?

In My Shoes

2007-10-08T14:28:00.000-07:00

Recovering from another marathon Monday--seven hours on North Campus, and slowly letting a touch of bourbon ease the vise-like tension on my brain. The sea of my students' faces was particularly inscrutable today as they demonstrated their manifest lack of enthusiasm for Richard Wright and Nella Larsen. So, as in other days when class doesn't go as brilliantly and smoothly as I'd like, I'm feeling sort of slumped. Mostly, I hope to Yog-soggoth that yesterday doesn't prove any sort of indication of the way the rest of the week is likely to go. You know how people joke about doing ridiculous things, like putting on an article inside out or accidentally wearing different socks (though some of us [me] worry about this particular incident considerably less than others [queercat], occasionally even doing so on purpose when a pair of appealing and matching socks simply doesn't present itself)? Well, yesterday I got up at 6:15, walked the half mile to work, and went about my day for a solid hour before I realized that, yes, I was wearing two different shoes. Yes. Yes, I did. Luckily, they were sufficiently similar in color and material that nobody else noticed without having it pointed out. When Q showed up several hours later, my samaritan with a matching shoe discretely wrapped in a canvas shopping bag, this was the subject of general mirth (for my co-workers) and pinkness (for my gingery self). Ah well. Does this mean a need a day off?
Fucking wah, right?

My good news is that I was granted permission by our neighbors, the lucky owners of a monstrous squash plant that has taken over their front yard, to harvest the squash blossoms than have been growing in more or less abundance. Just to piss you all off, here's what we're having for dinner tonight: our beloved and ubiquitous kale, barbecued seitan ribs, herbed cream cheese stuffed squash blossoms, and baked sweet potatoes with cardamom butter. Suck it.

Parents Gone Wild!

2007-10-06T05:02:00.000-07:00

What a week that was. Extra hours at the co-op, loads of evaluations for the search committee, the usual labor of teaching, doing final revisions AGAIN on my first chapter to resubmit it to my committee. I don't know, maybe it wasn't all that much extra work. For the last couple months, though, I've been setting my alarm to get up at about seven in the morning to squeeze the maximum number of productive hours out of the day. Truly, most mornings, I wake up perfectly alert and ready to start the day. My own personal neurosis is that if I don't get up right away, the slowly seeping anxiety will begin to overtake me and completely ruin any semblance of rest above and beyond my standard eight hours. On Friday, though, I actually woke up and thought *ugh, again?*. (Note, for the full effect, you should hear this in the whiniest voice you've ever heard me use.) One class and one search committee meeting later, I was finally able to read some comic books and my assigned reading for Monday. It was kind of relaxing and lovely. Now I'm staring down the barrel of a day completely free for whatever research seems to me appropriate, relevant, and interesting. It's still disorienting to be able to read whatever I want to in the name of research. I suppose it's still akin to the giddiness of radical freedom when I remember being a kid and how badly I wanted to be able to go where I wanted, do what I wanted, etc. Is anybody else still thrilled that they've grown up and escaped their parents?

Also, the pumpkin pie brownies were pretty good. I made them in a 9X9 pan, and if I were to make them again, I'd make them in a round pan of some sort. It figures that I'm not enthusiastic since I'm not crazy about pumpkin in general. Q loves them, though, so mission accomplished.

Lastly, another one for you silly non-sloggers, particularly b. Dan Savage said he would file this one under "every child needs a mommy and a daddy," but I think something more like simply "American family values" would be appropriate. Be prepared to feel very self-righteous. http://www.parentsbehavingbadly.com/

Discuss.

Totally Fake

2007-10-01T15:10:00.000-07:00

Why, totally fake? Because (and I know I'm unlikely to garner much sympathy from you lot) I've been busy, yet plagued by guilt for neglecting my blog so grievously. Teaching a survey class, as it turns out, is a fuck of a lot of work. I've almost got comp down to an art form requiring practically no prep, but to do this class right I've had to bone up on a lot of history and related stuff. My class seems largely benign (as in, NOT hostile, thank you god) but mostly very quiet. If they're not moved by the reading, I suffer. Today, I suffered. Last week, not so much. I actually composed a really frustrated blog entry a few weeks ago after trying to teach some Native American accounts of Wounded Knee. Or, really I should say after failing to do so. Then things looked up a bit. I'm managing my crazy stress better now. I'm no longer over-preparing quite so heinously as I once was. Also, seeing my office mates buried in comp essays makes me feel a minor twinge of relief. At least I don't have to talk about thesis statements, even if all my students are likely to write their Midterm essays on the "Yellow Wall-Paper." What can you do?

So, here comes the fakeness. Since I have nothing new to say, only teaching, dissertating, working, running when I can, have the following little shreds of candy. I don't know whether or not I'm the only SLOG fanatic, but on the off-chance I am...In response to extreme protests about the San Francisco Folsom Street Fair posters, which featured a playful rendering of the Last Supper complete with leather daddies and dildoes, Savage has compiled this great collection of other Last Suppers that apparently failed to garner so much outrage. For some reason, I find this endlessly entertaining. Lastly, I just got the famous vegan cupcake book, but lacking a pastry bag and some nice tips (I hope to acquire some soon so I can torture you all with cupcake porn), I'll be making these. We're going to be so deliciously fat.

Updates, New Classes, Hot Freaking Weather

2007-09-06T11:58:00.000-07:00

Blech. Ninety degrees today? You wouldn't think this is September, or maybe I'm remembering incorrectly the way this late summer thing goes down every year. That's funny because Q and I end up arguing every year about when it is precisely that real winter hits here in the frozen northeast. She generally takes the position that Fall sucks here, compared to the sylvan paradise where she roamed as a whimsical little nugget of a queercat, and that it's all over by some time in October. I'm sure she'll correct me if I'm wrong. I, however, being from a less wooded and more...arid and frozen place, find the falls here to be long and idyllic and lovely. Winter, proper, for most of the five years I've been here, doesn't really get going until the beginning of January. Let the weather polling commence, if you have it in you and feel so inclined.

In other news, I finally got the more or less full story about my sister's dogs if you'll be so kind as to remember my fairly recent post on the matter. As it turns out, my mom didn't have the full scoop because she was so relieved when my sister admitted that they were gone that my sister no longer wanted to talk about it. I can get that. My mom has a very utilitarian perspective on animals. Anyway, apparently what had developed over the last few years is that the dogs had been tearing to pieces any other animal they could get their paws on: birds, rabbits, raccoons, the pet hamster, etc. The behavior started very young and apparently just got worse. My sister said that the sheriff had been to their house once, and the health department more than that. The final straw came when they dogs ripped apart a raccoon on their neighbor's lawn. gshhh. The story from this point is that she got in touch with their vet, the Newfoundland rescue people, and so on, and the experts concurred that the behavior had been rewarded and distinctly not corrected for so long that there was no hope for the dogs. She claims she was roundly counseled to put them down before they decided to go after even worse prey--small children? Pet dogs? Basically, it's still their fault. However, I feel bad for her for having to make that decision. It's the kind of thing that I don't think you ever get out from under. If that makes sense. Again, ugh.

Not to close on that note, the new class seems to be going fairly well. I think my students are warming up a bit, and I'm figuring out how to aim my jokes so that they get them. I made a DOMA quip last week that I thought was clever but which fell so flat that the room instantly got quiet. I hate it when that happens. Other news? I'm fighting my sense of overwhelming dread about revising my third chapter. I drafted the bloody thing in July and then let it fester on my computer for over a month. Mostly I don't think it sucks too bad, but, as with everything else, there's still so much to do. No more whining about that for now. You're welcome.

Consolation Prize

2007-09-01T18:02:00.000-07:00

With Q off at her brother's ersatz wedding party-celebration thingy, I'm at home moping and trying to make the best possible use of my quasi-single time. Naturally, I'm drinking gin and watching movies that my lovely partner would never ever be interested in watching. The first movie I picked I actually discovered on a recent trip to Hollywood to get The Host for movie night. I picked up the case because of the picture. You should know, I'm a sucker for cover art. Knowing this about myself, though, means that I increasingly second guess myself when trying to pick out largely unknown horror flicks. Things in the industry seem to have changed over the last year five years or so. Used to be, you could tell the low budget, super bad movies simply by the title and the cover art. Thanks to increasingly good graphics, this is no longer the case. Good movies are more and more indistinguishable from bad movies. More to the point, though, is the way in which this ups the ante for the would-be horror connoisseur. It gives me genuine pleasure to know about sort of kick ass out of the way horror films. To get there, though, you have to be willing to slog through a lot of simply bad movies. This, I always contend to Q, is what separates the true horror fan from...everyone else. True horror fans are willing to take risks. Willing to sit through over half an hour of bad bad bad story and effects for just a few interesting and unconventional plot twists.

Speaking of, I rented this: The Thirst. Says Netflix "Clean and sober for the first time in years, Lisa (Clare Kra mer) and Maxx (Matt Keeslar) are just beginning to get their lives together when they fall under the spell of the seductive Darius (Jeremy Sisto), the leader of a local vampire clan. Lured into his world, the couple soon finds a new addiction -- blood -- in this darkly humorous gore fest co-starring Adam Baldwin and featuring the music of Rasputina, Jack the Mad and more."

Of BtVS fame, Glory joins a band of vampires led by the fucked up brother, Billy, from Six Feet Under. Jayne of Serenity is also a member of this band, though cunningly here named Laine. In a small role is Andrew from BtVS as a petite dominant-in-training. He gets some of the best lines in the film. In my personal favorite, he informs the straightlaced and annoying protagonist that he has to be led through the s&m club on a leash and give him (Andrew) a blow job. All of this plus Rasputina led me to hope for a lot. I'm sorry to add, not so much in the delivery. It's rather shallow. Very derivative. The best and most flattering analogy I can give it is Modern Vampires meets splatter. I had never noticed how much Clare Kramer looks like Mena Suvari until I saw her without those curly golden locks. Trust me, this is the case. Whatever. Attic Expeditions was better.

Next up? Anatomy 2 .

Give me that good good Franka Potente lovin'. Uh huh.

Finally out on DVD!

2007-08-25T06:58:00.000-07:00

This: Aspiring stand-up comic Marty Malt (Judd Nelson) can get a laugh only out of his fellow trash man Gus (Bill Paxton), who accompanies Marty's deadly routines on the accordion. But things change for the duo when Marty suddenly grows a third arm out of the center of his back. They soon get an agent (Las Vegas royalty Wayne Newton), who books the act for a Hollywood TV appearance. Director Adam Rifkin wrote the warped cult comedy when he was just 19.

Netflix here has left off the brilliant trashiness of Lara Flynn Boyle in the role of Marty's sometime love interest. Picture a set flooded with trash, filth, and shadows--ala Naked Lunch.

Now if only I could get some dvd lovin of this persuasion:

Mmmmm. Helen Slater.

No No No No Drama

2007-08-21T15:46:00.000-07:00

August. What a strange month this has been. A week of cabinning. One significant addition to our small community (Once again, congrats to GC and the lovely T). School starts in less than a week but I seem to finally have managed a headspace where I'm blissfully in denial about it. After returning from Allegany, I had a couple days of blinding panic, threaded with existential despair. That mood has finally dissipated a bit and I'm now hoping that I've experienced the bulk of my craziness and stress well in advance of the main event. Penultimacy. Of course, a week into the semester, the weirdness will already have begun to wear off. Normalcy will be settling in like a warm blanket, and I can once again turn to the fresh terrors of dissertationism.

Much as I enjoy my time at my other job, the end of the summer inevitably finds me ready to vacate the retail space for most of the week. One day turns out to be the perfect amount of time to spend on a sales floor, being nice to irritable shoppers, and teaching my coworkers words like "vestibulary," "innocuous," and "superfluous". The bureaucracy bums me out. The capitalism bums me out. The bums bum me out. I'm also, increasingly, made to feel very old. I had the horrifying experience of discovering this week that many of my co-workers have never heard of Tori Amos. And the ones that have, don't know who Christian Slater is. Horror. When the hell did this happen?

I find myself groping for common ground. Validation. An anchoring sense that the people in my small community share in some critical ways an orienting grasp on reality. For example, the conviction that Tori Amos, whether or not you like her, is important. A worse example, and you may want to brace yourself for this one, follows.

Approximately five years ago, when I was doing my year in the Shen'do Valley with my sister and her family, she decided to buy my nieces puppies for Christmas. She did some research, and finally decided to buy, at considerable expense (think in the thousands), two Newfoundland female puppies. She did the whole thing, signed papers and agreements, flew them in from wherever it is their breeder lives, bought those hideous cages for them, etc. I must admit to not liking them from the start. They're reputedly very gentle and good with other pets, but one of the first things they did when they got big enough was tear apart the ducks that lived around the pond that was on the property. Also, they're water dogs, which means they have thick oily coats that smell like hell. They slobber. They roll in the mud and then lean on you. Eventually they got freaking huge, as they do. They're incredibly stupid. Untrainable, even. None of this is their fault. Our obsession with purity creates such critters. So, yes, I never liked them. I like small, clean, tidy dogs. Newfoundlands are the antithesis of this. I even have a story I liked to tell about how these dogs would lap tons of filthy water off the sidewalk and then come inside and throw it all up. All of this is not the point, though. The girls dug them. All was well.

Several years pass. The last time I visited, the family had more or less relinquished the downstairs of their sizable farmhouse to the dogs. They slept there on the destroyed armchairs all night. The kids took care of them, but I never saw them walked or really played with. Here's where the story takes a sinister turn. I was on the phone with my mom yesterday, and she was filling me in on all the changes that my sister has made to her house recently. My sister does this kind of thing often, completely changing up her living space in almost unthinkable ways. My mom is going there for a week to watch the kids so the parents can take a romantic vacation in the Bahamas. Then my mom says, "Oh, yeah, well since they got rid of the dogs--" I said, "What do you mean, 'got rid of them'?" And she said, "Yeah, they weren't staying on the property anymore, so they put them down." (here's the dramatic pause in our conversation where I grasp for the edges of reality) She eventually hedged a bit, saying that she wasn't sure what had happened, but it sounded a lot more like...simply hedging. I asked her, seriously, whether she didn't think there was something weird/awful/crazy about this, and she responded in a sort of shocked way. She had no idea there was anything to be upset about. It simply hadn't occurred to her.

So, yeah, the rest of the conversation was...stilted. I was so shocked I wasn't sure what to say. I'm now desperately hoping that there is more to the story. That my sister actually gave them away. Or if she didn't, that they were... I don't know...sick or something. I had to tell Q and a few other people before I was able to reestablish my ethical mooring. I had to ask, like I asked my mom, "Isn't that messed up? Aren't you seriously disturbed by this?" I mean, you wouldn't think one would need validation. Nothing so alienating as family.

Matoes!

2007-08-02T14:39:00.000-07:00

Yes, its true. I've actually grown something. The tomato is my first homegrown ever. I'm so proud.

Channeling Lorna

2007-08-02T12:57:00.000-07:00

Why? Because for the first time ever, q and I have retreated from the blazing heat and sweltering stuffiness of the Livingston into the air conditioned refuge of Cafe 59. Q is plugging away on her second chapter, and I'm endlessly poking the chapter I'm now referring to, with a hearty chortle, my charticle! How delightful, yes? I wish I could take credit, but it was the neologism of my better half. Why "charticle"? Because it is a chapter that I'm trying, and perhaps failing, to convert into an article. Surely, you might think, it wouldn't be that much work. After all, the chapter was fairly well received and all that. I'd already done some revisions, and so on. Of course, what you would be forgetting is that for some of us (not all *coughqueercat*) the chapter must be fed into the proverbial grinder and what comes out may only bear a slight resemblance to the previous thing. In that spirit, I started out with a 50-odd page document. I've since cut approximately 20 pages and rewritten whole passages including the entire introduction.
And other stuff of course...transitions...blah blah. I realized all of a sudden that "barbaristic" isn't a word, though I had used it as one on my first page. Who would have thought? Not that I'm against coining words because clearly I'm all about it. And I would argue that academic writing is uniquely suited to the coining of neologisms. There are so many words that really should be words as well as so many that are words that nonetheless nobody knows. I was mildly shocked when I described something to a co-worker recently as gelatinous and she responded with a "huh?" "Viscous," I explained. "Huh?" she said. Not that such things really matter. They merely flag my particular brand of mudgeon. Which, indeed, has enjoyed free rein of late as my disdain for the "Can you double it? I'm walking" crowd intensifies. It all makes me think that the end of the summer heralds my return to the entirely different set of anxieties and difficulties that is teaching. Things to look forward to.

Moment of Zen

2007-07-25T15:37:00.000-07:00

Or, okay, not zen, but something else entirely. Folks, today I decided to take the whole day off from any kind of responsible labor. I went to the gym, did an energizing seven miles, and devoted the rest of my afternoon to reading Almanac of the Dead and going to see the new Harry Potter film. I'm not sure whether or not this latter should qualify as a guilty pleasure, but I don't feel particularly guilty about it. Q and I have thoroughly discussed, and I think I'm pretty much on top of, the many problems with the Potter and the many more reasons why the phenom is simply annoying. Nonetheless, it's a pretty good story and I like keeping up with such things when possible. If I was a Potter nerd to the caliber of, say, BEM, I would have no doubt seen the film opening night. As it was, I waited until I had an afternoon of naughtiness away from my place of wage labor. I hoped the 3:50 showing wouldn't be TOO packed with bored adolescents whiling away a summer afternoon in the old, dark movie theater downtown. Here's the moment of zenishness: The theater was dead. I asked, anxiously, at the counter whether there was indeed a 3:50 Harry Potter and was assured that there was. I had not plugged two dollars into the parking meter for nothing, and I had been duped by those pesky parentheticals before. B and Q will no doubt recall the unfortunate Grindhouse event of the Spring of 07. Anyway, I bought my ticket, and the ticketseller promptly got on her walkie-talkie to announce that there was "one for Harry Potter," adding as an aside that I would be the only one in there. I think, though I'm not at all sure, that I stopped short of clapping my hands at this unexpected and very welcome news. I went into the theater, which was delightfully silent, and took my time selecting the perfect seat, dead center and I bit toward the front. I'm serious. It was something like pure, unadulterated joy. I was as tickled as a kid at a surprise birthday party. Right after I sat down, they started the movie. Then, after about five minutes, two women came in and sat in the back of the theater. They proceeded to do the commenting-on-everything-obvious thing that people like to do in theaters. "Yes," you want to say, "she really really is a bitch." "Oh my, I suppose that is the character's shoe left tellingly behind the bed." Whatever, it wasn't too bad, really. It was a little bit like having my lollipop stolen and was completely what I deserved.

Senseless Distractions from Blogging

2007-07-17T14:53:00.000-07:00

Well, not senseless, really. It's just that there have been a lot of things standing in the way between me and this silly thing lately. Okay, all summer. Not that I'm the worst of the lot. A certain g. crayon is, I believe, still outstripping me in this capacity. What can possibly be so important that I haven't found the time/capacity/incentive to update? Well, wage labor, for one. I sometimes think I'm the only person in my situation--the whole, fifth year PhD bit, to be working a non-academic job not only during the summer but over the entire year. My loved ones will chime in here and remind me of the possibility of taking the summer off if only I'd be willing to make one small concession and sign on the dotted line. And I might, some day. Maybe next year, but we'll see. It will probably all depend on a number of factors, but the primary struggle is between my frugal-to-the-point-of-being OCDness and my desire for free time. Also, the older I get and the more advanced in this here game we all know and love, the more I think that in the final analysis, (or, at the end of the day, as Lorna might say) the joke is going to be, finally, on me.

So, yeah, but what else? I could write about our broken front window, my ever-larger but still not red tomatoes, my frustration with my pepper plants for apparently not caring for my style of plant-lovin', my dissertation blues, but who wants to hear about it? I'd like to think I'm not so deluded. Yet.

Then again, I was mystified for a long time about the whole blogging phenomenon in general. I always thought, how bizarre that people would make their journals public. You know, as if anybody would care to read the kind of drivel that I, when I was better about writing every day in my own journal, would pour onto the pages. Then I started reading peoples' blogs, checking out cyber-high school (aka myspace), etc. The result was that I gained a deep appreciation for the pleasures of online voyeurism. What fun. This has led, of course, to the place where I can write a completely uninteresting blog entry and am complete unfazed by its lack of humor or other interest. This does not mean, however, that I will not obsessively check back for comments. Next!

Another Version of the Story

2007-06-14T05:58:00.000-07:00

I found the following version of the now infamous events at the California University where Mel was called upon to defend the representations of Mayan culture in Apocalypto:

Northbridge, CA (O! Online) - Students and faculty at Cal State University at Northbridge were shocked earlier this week as an enraged Mel Gibson used a knife to rip out the still beating heart of a faculty member, and Mayan cultural expert, who had sought to criticize his most recent film "Apocalypto" for unfairly stereotyping ancient Mayans. The Professor, Alicia Estrada, asked Gibson if he had actually read about Mayan culture before shooting his film. Gibson then produced a knife from the small of his back and shouted, "Lady, f**k Off! You want f**king cultural sensitivity? I'll show you f**king cultural sensitivity! Make a f**king movie out of this!"

According to stunned onlookers, Gibson then pounced on Estrada and within seconds of a few deft strokes of his knife, produced her still beating heart as she collapsed before the crowd. Other Mayan experts in the audience stated that it was obvious that Gibson had indeed done his homework, at least on Mayan ritual sacrifice.

Estrada and her heart were subsequently rushed to a nearby trauma center where she underwent an emergency re-implantation procedure. University and hospital officials have stated that Estrada is currently in serious, but stable condition, and expected to make a complete recovery.

No charges have been filed in the incident as yet. California State police authorities are said to be investigating, but Cal State University campus police are currently declining to press charges. A spokesperson for the campus police stated that the incident pales in comparison to other incidents in the past that have arisen during everyday academic discourse and debate between faculty members.

Mel Gibson's publicist, Alan Nierob refused to apologize for Gibson's behavior, and denied that the movie "Apocalypto" was racist in any way. "I can understand the frustration from the Mayan hecklers who were present, but they represent a conquered people. To the victor goes the spoils of history."

Yes, p and b were kind enough to rescue me from the sickliness of watching this film by myself. For two hours and twenty minutes we were entranced by the flying heads, still-beating hearts, a head wound that was miraculously like a fountain, and a trench filled with corpses that looked remarkably similar to the creatures filthy lab of creation in Jeepers Creepers. I hope everyone could follow me on that last one. Basically, Mel gave us the slasher part of the slasher film within an irresponsible work of historical (or maybe, historically inspired?) fiction. I expected this and it's what I was hoping for from the film, largely. What I only came to realize in my mild incredulity after the film was over was that I had actually, against all logic and reason, expected a bit more nuance from the creator of the JCM (that's Jesus Chainsaw Massacre--thanks Faust--for you uninitiated). Ah well. At least now we know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, why it is that Mel Gibson thinks that the Spaniards were so able to conquer Mexico--the Aztecs were soaked in unrepentant sin. Cortez and his band--themselves far from exempt from the indelible stain of the Black Legend--really made the world safe for Christians and other decent folk who will not (presumably) start slashing up captured foreigners with obsidian knives. Right. Don't you feel better now?

On a side note, I once again lost altogether my ability to *stop talking*. This happens whenever b and I get into academic debates, particularly involving the genre in which we are both so deeply invested. Even the well-timed and articulate p couldn't stop the deluge. Our party was broken up suddenly by q, who had very sweetly permitted us to keep her up a couple of hours past her accustomed bedtime. Her appeal for rest prompted me to kick out our still debating friends, to continue that conversation at some later date...perhaps. I slunk off to bed some time later, feeling sort of guilty and dirty anyway. Ah well.

If You Don't Have Anything Nice to Say...

2007-06-09T14:46:00.000-07:00

let Melville say it for you:

The Maldive Shark

About the shark, phlegmatical one,
Pale sot of the Maldive sea,
The sleek little pilot-fish, azure and slim,
How alert in attendance be.
From his saw-pit of mouth, from his charnel of maw
They have nothing to harm to dread,
But liquidly glide on his ghastly flank
Or before in Gorgonian head;
Or lurk in the port of serrated teeth
In white triple tiers of glittering gates,
And there find a haven when peril's abroad,
An asylum in jaws of the Fates!
They are friends; and friendly they guide him to prey,
Yet never partake of the treat--
Eyes and brains to the dotard lethargic and dull,
pale ravener of horrible meat.

And, incidentally, I really don't have anything nice to say. This poem is so much better and more interesting than any of the negative bullshit I might otherwise spew on your well-intentioned and unassuming readerly brains. Discuss.

And Today's Headline Is...

2007-05-23T14:58:00.001-07:00

HETEROSEXUAL, CHRISTIAN, OMNIVOROUS PARENTS PUT BABY IN MICROWAVE--NATION DIVIDED: CAN WE TRUST OMNIVORES TO CARE FOR CHILDREN? SHOULD STRAIGHT CHRISTIANS BE ALLOWED TO MARRY?

GALVESTON, Texas (AP) -- A woman blames the devil, and not her husband, for severely burning their infant daughter in a microwave, a Texas television station reported.

Eva Marie Mauldin said Satan compelled her 19-year-old husband, Joshua Royce Mauldin, to microwave their daughter May 10 because the devil disapproved of Joshua's efforts to become a preacher.

"Satan saw my husband as a threat," Eva Mauldin told Houston television station KHOU-TV.

A grand jury indicted Joshua Mauldin last week on child injury charges after hearing evidence that he placed the two-month-old in a motel microwave for 10 to 20 seconds. (Watch cops react to burned baby )

The infant, Ana Marie, remains hospitalized. She suffered burns on the left side of her face and to her left hand, police said.

Police said Joshua Mauldin told them he put Ana Marie in the microwave because he was under stress. Eva Maudlin denied it.

"He would never do anything to hurt her. He loves her," she said.

She is hoping to be reunited with her daughter, but Child Protective Services is working to have the parental rights severed.

Pronounced "Ah'-Sha"

2007-05-21T15:01:00.000-07:00

I'm reminded more than once lately of one of Nietzsche's more catchy aphorisms. "It takes more courage to make an end than a beginning. All poets know that." I'm probably quoting him badly since the last time I read Zarathustra was when I was 18 and that's, well, many years ago now. Anyway, I've been, indeed, in the wells and caverns of the revisionist blues. Granted, I've been pretty lucky so far. I can only hope that my next four (gasp) chapters go over so well. I'm currently in the process of finishing up revisions of my second chapter. The first is already heavily revised and currently circulating with my committee. The quote above is applicable because I'm discovering that writing conclusions to chapters is a bigger bitch than I ever realized. I think I'm really bad at conclusions to begin with, and usually I end up doing some sort of verbal equivalent of the spastic jumps that really annoying man-child does on MAD TV. I hope to christ one of you gets that reference. ("Look what I can do!") I'm currently trying to tack on an at best subjunctive and at worst half-assed conclusion that gestures toward the argument I'll make in the next chapter, which I haven't written yet. I had a feeling that you all would be really riveted by this account of my revision process, but it's mah blog, so whatevah.

When I'm not slogging through my own prose, the summer is lovely. I've been getting work done, spending 30-40 hours a week smiling at strangers at my other job, working out at the gym (13 miles today! AND it felt great), and watching Dark Angel. There is still much work to be done, as there always is, but I always appreciate the winning combination of warm weather and no teaching! I'm also, perhaps as a way of distracting myself from the more difficult library books patiently awaiting my attention and which are much more pertinent to my next chapter, reading a bit more into the oeuvre of the deeply problematic and endlessly fascinating H. Rider Haggard. My dearest niece doesn't know if yet, but she's definitely getting She and Ayesha: The Return of She for her birthday this year. What a fun writer he is! I'm currently reading Allan Quartermain and it's cracking me up. Haggard is deeply obsessed with imaginatively penetrating (pun intended) the wilds of various non-European spaces. He's mostly into Africa, though the second She book mostly takes place in Central Asia. His rugged, manly, great white hunter protagonists go on the most brutal, exhausting, and excruciating quests before discovering--as they must--white people lording power over non-white people and white women threatening to destroy civilization as we know it. Herein are contained the great remaining mysteries of the world. Like I said, he's a great story-teller, and he completely cracks me up.

As a reward for bearing with this perhaps tedious exposition, here's some artist's rendering of the endlessly fascinating Ayesha.

Here, I'm pretty sure she's bathing in the eternal flame that gives her her immortal youth, beauty, and mysterious ability to rule superstitious minds (read natives) through terror. Make no mistake about it, her love kills mere mortals. In the world of Haggard, many mountains contain such a flame. The novels are finally unclear, though, about whether Ayesha power comes from Isis, to whom she was a priestess in her regular lifetime, or Set--the Egyptian version of the Devil.

Oh, Manichean Delirium! Angel? or Angelheart?

One of the Many Signs of the Apocalypse

2007-05-07T16:36:00.001-07:00

Or at least this should be. I felt sort of, vaguely, validated when I saw this site for the first time. Validated not so much in the general sense as in my feeling of horror when Red Lobster aired a commercial featuring a tracking shot of lobsters scampering rapidly across the ocean floor to the soundtrack "Nowhere to run to, baby....nowhere to hide." This from a former seafood lover. Anyway, for your perusal and comment, my friends, I offer this. If you dare.

Who's the biggest loser?

2007-05-01T08:18:00.001-07:00

I am, of course. And not in that lame, reality tv way.

I attempted the Master Cleanse this week. Ten days of syrup, lemon juice, and cayenne, supplemented by a quart of salt water first thing in the morning and some wonderful, cramp-inducing laxative tea. I tried and failed. To my credit, my generous friends B and Q assure me, I made it almost two days on the "lemonade." I like to think of myself as a ~fairly~ hardcore person in that I rarely do things half-assed, so I'm still feeling pretty lame for not being able to make it even two complete days on this cleanse. Some people do it for 40+ days. After something like 43 hours, though, I got absolution from the two people closest to the process, and dove into a rice cake. Exquisite. Then B made delicious tacos with brown rice, beans, red peppers, and his famous guac. I feel human today for the first time in two days. Most, but not all, of the online info I got about it exclaimed about how much energy the cleansers had. How light and clean they felt, how acute their thinking was, and so on and so forth. I felt like my calves were full of concrete, and I had almost no energy. My head felt like it was stuffed with hot, wet, cotton balls. Fully seed-of-doubted, I decided yesterday afternoon that I was going to the gym. After all, the master cleanse is supposed to be enhanced by exercise. You're supposed to exercise while doing it, though that sounds counter-intuitive. Anyway, I really really value my time on the treadmill. Saturday I ran fourteen miles and lifted weights. Add a hot shower, some soft clothes, and a good meal to that and I call it heaven. Yesterday, I went to the gym, hopped on the treadmill, and started to walk. I thought I'd be able to do at least a slow three miles, maybe at 5 (I usually run at about 6.5). I couldn't even run for a minute. I was immediately fatigued and felt like I was going to fall over. Then I tried to lift weights with approximately the same result. All I really wanted to do was stare into space somewhere warm. A bit teary-eyed, I fled the scene of my humiliation. That's when the absolution and rice cake episode began.

Thus endeth the fast. I completely suck. I AM the biggest loser. But I can think clearly again, and I think this might be a ten mile day.

Oh Bleeding Nun, Bleeding Nun, Wherefore Art Thou, Bleeding Nun?

2007-04-28T09:01:00.000-07:00

The latest stop in my sort of chaotic, researchy wanderings has included some plays by that most eminent of the Sturm und Drang persuasion, Friedrich von Schiller. The focus of my inquiry has been thwarted, though. I read, or thought I read somewhere, that the famous Bleeding Nun episode from Lewis's The Monk was borrowed from The Robbers. After reading all of the plays in the collected volume I picked up from the library, though, I'm disappointed in this regard. Not a single bleeding nun to be found amid the thwarted, young heroic barons and mistakenly murdered and wrongly imputed maidens. Not one. However, I've discovered something that Schiller does do remarkably well. Have this for a sample:

"I have been told that the great never know what misery is; that they fly from the knowledge of it. But I will teach the duke what misery is; I will paint to him, in all the writhing agonies of death, what misery is; I will cry aloud, in wailings that shall creep through the very marrow of his bones, what misery is; and, while at my picture his hairs shall stand on end like quills upon the porcupine, will I shriek into his affrighted ear, that in the hour of death the sinews of these mighty gods of earth shall shrivel and shrink, and that at the day of judgment beggars and kings shall be weighed together in the same balance."

And this from sweet Louisa, daughter of the town fiddler and prized primarily--as is typical of the logic of this kind of romance--for her artlessness and innocence. I still want my bleeding nun, but I see what the big deal is.

Ah, Spring!

2007-04-17T15:08:00.000-07:00

Annoys me. Or, rather, it predisposes me to annoyance. I friend of mine from some years ago recently blogged about how Spring makes her feel...lascivious isn't quite the right word...randy might be. You know,

"The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
- Those dying generations - at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies."

(NB: no dolphins splashing in the above, queercat)

For as long as I can remember, though, I do get the characteristic Spring Fever, accompanied by itchy palms and feet, the irrepressible desire to open windows and just BE in outside spaces, the longing to flee. What accompanies it, though, is not the desire to spawn with strangers, but a sudden and deep distaste for the flesh explosion that particularly comes along with warming weather in previous cold climes. Everyone who teaches can identify, I'd imagine. You suddenly come face-to-ass with all that flesh-ness previously hidden under $90 sweat pants and Ugg boots. And, it really isn't just that. Winter brain fog melts into Spring anxiety. At the moment, for example, I'm incredibly annoyed that, while I recalled all three volumes of Edward Long's 1868 History of Jamaica, the library only held Volume 2 for me. I, of course, checked it out and went merrily home, believing that the three had been surely collected in the one quite imposing tome I had received. As it turns out, this isn't the case. Really, though, this is my fault, and this is the place at which curmudgeons--whether Spring feverish or not--go bad. Had I been paying attention, I would no doubt have stumbled home weighed down with all 2000 odd pages of the thing. Instead, I sit here grumpily writing about undergraduate skin folds and the idiocies of library search and hold functions. Clearly, I need a life.

Still, I remember being a freshman (since none of you knew me then, let me paint this picture for you: extremely doughy, long and crazy red hair, facial piercings, chain-smoking, with that mushroomy look one gets from spending virtually all of one's time in a tiny dormroom slogging through the Bible and really anything else that made me feel a little bit less like I was wasting my life) and hating all the healthy hippies with their frizbee and their dogs, making happy homes on the campus quad at the first hint of Spring. Maybe my annoyance is vestigial, but I don't suppose it really matters.

The Horror...The Horror

2007-04-07T08:06:00.000-07:00

I realize that this post should really be entitled, Domestic Antics, part 2, but that didn't really work out so well. The complete lack of privacy during that little trip, complicated and improved by my beloved nephews who have no sense of personal space or time (bless them) rendered further blogging while in the thick of things impractical if not impossible. This means I'll leave you with the image of me stretched out on makeshift bed amid a tumble of laundry in the middle of the night, starving, and doing my best to ignore the inevitable squeaking of the poor hamster's wheel. I, Abject. Suffice it to say, it was lovely to be there and lovely to come home. The intervening eight and a half hour drive through a snow storm that stretched from Virginia to New York was not lovely. When I finally got here, the entire front of my car was covered with a thick crust of ice. It took a whole day of sitting in the sun and my strenuous efforts with an ice scraper to get it off. My ocd was tweaked with satisfaction, though, at the sight. billy, perhaps, can sympathize.

Since then things have been non-stop. My students are alternately adorable and terrifying. The weather is, by turns, lovely and crappy. People seem to be in the collective state of denial generally brought on by winter's death rattle. B, of course, in particular. Two weeks. Christ. Who ever heard of two full weeks of vacation in the middle of the semester? I'm telling you, Buffalonians are soft. In Montana, they never cancelled school no matter how bad the weather was, we only got one week off during Spring semester, and almost nobody went to college or left the state. So there.

I'm sort of on tenterhooks--not that I know what these are--this week. I'm getting ready to hand two very rough chapters in for comments, so I'm officially in self-flagellation mode. Writer's remorse, maybe? Brief periods of placid self-assurance are continuously swept away by a moment of horror in which I think suddenly of the worst thing that could be said to me about my project so far. With an effort, I quell the panic, and sink once again into comfortable denial. Okay, fellow writers, this would be a good moment for you to come clean about your own writerly loathing and, maybe, self-destructive behaviors. Surely, I'm not the only one, right? Ummm. Right? The above picture of one of my favorite horror villains is intended to give you the appropriate, visceral, organ-cringing sensation just in case you don't sympathize.

Domestic Antics, part 1

2007-03-14T13:23:00.000-07:00

I name this part one because it seems that the following days must, inevitably, bring a part two. This because I'm spending part of this week visiting my sister and her family in VA. Things have always been a bit nuts here, particularly since their once smallish family has swelled to six (four kids, two parents--though the non-involvement of the father almost merits calling it five and a half). Furthermore, trip to VA always occasion a bit of nostalgia as I recall the little more than a year I once spent living here. It's a long story and one I won't repeat here, particularly since most of you undoubtedly know it. If you don't, you're not missing much. The point, here, is that there is always an element of the uncanny. Usually, it's fairly mild and I experience of few moments in which I sigh for the family experiences (as cool and loving aunt--not, repeat NOT, as mommy [or daddy for that matter]) that I'm missing living so far away and committing the unforgivable sin of having a life of my own so radically different from the one they live here in the Valley (pronounced Shen'n-doh). I've not been here, though, for about a year and a half, and things HAVE changed. My sister opened a small clothing shop downtown where she sells (you guessed it) clothing that she has not always made so much as embellished in her particular way. More time for this and away from the house has been really good for her and she loves her work. All good so far. That bad part is that the domestic chaos that used to greet me when I came for a visit has intensified ten-fold. I'll go into specifics a bit later, but the problem of it strikes me as quite troubling. I've before encountered these scenarios in which a married couple with subordinate whole areas of their home--if not their entire home--to the particular habits and tastes of children. You end up with big, empty spaces with some beaten up furniture lining the walls and toys scattered around the bare, hard floor--carpets no longer being realistic or desirable as things don't roll across them as satisfactorily and they're so much harder to clean. Plus, of course, rug burn. This is largely the case coupled with huge piles of laundry on the floor everywhere, mountains of plastic toys in the bathrooms, and no furniture capable of seating more than one adult at a time. What especially tweaks my 'mudgeon is that they've apparently abandoned (in despair no doubt) the whole project of washing glasses. Now an entire shelf in one cabinet in the kitchen is devoted to plastic cups. Single use brilliance. They use them once and throw them away. Routinely.
So anyway, I got into town yesterday evening, famished and ready to be done driving for a while. I met my sister at her shop because she had suggested we go out for a celebratory welcome drink at the Irish bar across the street. We ended up waiting for some of her friends who do some sort of zany birthday club thing. They were celebrating one of the lady's birthday by staging an episode of "What Not To Wear." You can imagine, perhaps, what happened earlier, but the evening culminated in them converging on my sister's shop where the birthday girl got to design a shirt that my sister will now make for her to her specifications. Unfortunately, they didn't show up for an hour and a half, by which time it was too late to do anything else. We went back to the house and I was told that I should prepare to bunk up with my youngest niece (13, a lovely girl) and my oldest nephew (5, very cute, and a total hellion). This in a tiny bedroom crammed with two twin beds and not even any room for my stuff. Instead, I recruited my nieces to help me set up a bed in an adjoining room containing only some piles of clothes and two chairs. The truly bizarre thing about this is that my sister was truly, deeply shocked (you should have seen the baffled look I got) when I said I didn't want to share the room with the kids. Am I fucking crazy or something? So I made my bed...sort of...and finally settled down to try to sleep when the kids' hamster got to work. Screeak Screeak Screeak Screeak Screeak. I tried to muffle the sound of his late-night aerobics with pillows, hoodies, concentration, exhaustion, and so forth. Finally, after about two hours, I got up and used some fishing line to tie the wheel in such a way that it wouldn't roll under his weight. Then I kept myself up for at least another hour worrying that the frustration might drive him to some desperate measures. I pictured my teary-eyed niece asking me why I drove her hamster crazy after he spent the night dive-bombing off the top of the wheel trying vainly to move it. What would a hamster do when pushed to the limits? I'm going to hell for sure.

Hoo-Haw Monologue

2007-03-09T11:03:00.000-08:00

So maybe I know what you're thinking...long time, no blogging? Indeed. I've been trying to spare you all from my utter lack of inspiration that otherwise might drive me to blog about really annoying, petty quirkiness. Today, though, after unwisely and sort of accidentally drinking too much whiskey last night and keeping my poor sick girlfriend up longer than necessary by yammering at her about something or another, I'm feeling properly inspired.

It was conference week with my students. I decided, in direct contradiction to my usual way of handling graded papers (I throw them at my students while they're filing out the door) to give them back during the conference itself. This provided my students with the opportunity to emote and directly vent any grievances immediately and to my face. I was a bit worried about how this might go, having once (and ONLY once) given a papers back at the beginning of class and had to face an hour's worth of stony silence--an experience I will never repeat. Lesson learned. I'm happy to say that it went quite well, with the exception of one student who laughed at his A, claiming that he wrote the essay right before class, and who complained that we only read essays about racism--patently untrue, by the way. The rest of my students were remarkably positive and it ended up being a good experience. I think I'll repeat it in the future, unless I have a recurrence of the horror comp class. If you know me well, you know what I'm referring to here.

In other news, I saw a segment on the Today show about some students who were facing suspension at their high school for saying the word "vagina" at a school sponsored public event. Apparently, the three girls were doing some sort of performance that involved reading a passage from, you guessed it, the Vagina Monologues. They were directly told that they must either not perform or expunge the stanza from Ensler's book containing the offensive word. Of course, they did it anyway. The Today show hosted the three girls, the school's superintendent, and Eve Ensler to talk--quite briefly--about what happened. They claimed that an other performance had included the word "fuck" and had received no such prohibition of punishment (they are facing a one day suspension for "insubordination"). The reason for objecting to the word, which Katie Couric kindly reminded Ensler that some people do indeed find objectionable, was that there would be families and children present. SAVE the Child-wen! Protect innocence! This is almost as good as the theater that put on a performance of the Vagina Monologues, but who opted to advertise them, rather, as the "Hoo-Haw Monologues." For reals.

BOO!

2007-03-05T14:41:00.000-08:00

Seriously, I'll write something of my own soon. This was just a bit too much to pass up.

Snowflakes, Snowflakes, Read All About Them!

2007-02-27T09:11:00.000-08:00

This just in...

By DAVID CRARY, AP National WriterTue Feb 27, 12:32 AM ET

Today's college students are more narcissistic and self-centered than their predecessors, according to a comprehensive new study by five psychologists who worry that the trend could be harmful to personal relationships and American society.

"We need to stop endlessly repeating 'You're special' and having children repeat that back," said the study's lead author, Professor Jean Twenge of San Diego State University. "Kids are self-centered enough already."

Twenge and her colleagues, in findings to be presented at a workshop Tuesday in San Diego on the generation gap, examined the responses of 16,475 college students nationwide who completed an evaluation called the Narcissistic Personality Inventory between 1982 and 2006.

The standardized inventory, known as the NPI, asks for responses to such statements as "If I ruled the world, it would be a better place," "I think I am a special person" and "I can live my life any way I want to."

The researchers describe their study as the largest ever of its type and say students' NPI scores have risen steadily since the current test was introduced in 1982. By 2006, they said, two-thirds of the students had above-average scores, 30 percent more than in 1982.

Narcissism can have benefits, said study co-author W. Keith Campbell of the University of Georgia, suggesting it could be useful in meeting new people "or auditioning on 'American Idol.'"

"Unfortunately, narcissism can also have very negative consequences for society, including the breakdown of close relationships with others," he said.

The study asserts that narcissists "are more likely to have romantic relationships that are short-lived, at risk for infidelity, lack emotional warmth, and to exhibit game-playing, dishonesty, and over-controlling and violent behaviors."

Twenge, the author of "Generation Me: Why Today's Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before," said narcissists tend to lack empathy, react aggressively to criticism and favor self-promotion over helping others.

The researchers traced the phenomenon back to what they called the "self-esteem movement" that emerged in the 1980s, asserting that the effort to build self-confidence had gone too far.

As an example, Twenge cited a song commonly sung to the tune of "Frere Jacques" in preschool: "I am special, I am special. Look at me."

"Current technology fuels the increase in narcissism," Twenge said. "By its very name, MySpace encourages attention-seeking, as does YouTube."

Some analysts have commended today's young people for increased commitment to volunteer work. But Twenge viewed even this phenomenon skeptically, noting that many high schools require community service and many youths feel pressure to list such endeavors on college applications.

Campbell said the narcissism upsurge seemed so pronounced that he was unsure if there were obvious remedies.

"Permissiveness seems to be a component," he said. "A potential antidote would be more authoritative parenting. Less indulgence might be called for."

The new report follows a study released by UCLA last month which found that nearly three-quarters of the freshmen it surveyed thought it was important to be "very well-off financially." That compared with 62.5 percent who said the same in 1980 and 42 percent in 1966.

Yet students, while acknowledging some legitimacy to such findings, don't necessarily accept negative generalizations about their generation.

Hanady Kader, a University of Washington senior, said she worked unpaid last summer helping resettle refugees and considers many of her peers to be civic-minded. But she is dismayed by the competitiveness of some students who seem prematurely focused on career status.

"We're encouraged a lot to be individuals and go out there and do what you want, and nobody should stand in your way," Kader said. "I can see goals and ambitions getting in the way of other things like relationships."

Kari Dalane, a University of Vermont sophomore, says most of her contemporaries are politically active and not overly self-centered.

"People are worried about themselves — but in the sense of where are they're going to find a place in the world," she said. "People want to look their best, have a good time, but it doesn't mean they're not concerned about the rest of the world."

Besides, some of the responses on the narcissism test might not be worrisome, Dalane said. "It would be more depressing if people answered, 'No, I'm not special.'"

I, Mudgeon

2007-02-24T15:48:00.000-08:00

So, yeah. It was a day of fighting off my own inner 'mudgeon. She's a bit singular, as the 'mudgeons tend to be, considered narrowly. Considered broadly, it is her imagination of her singularity that constitutes the very soul of the 'mudgeonliness. Permit me sloppily to quote one of my favorite wide-mouthed vixens: "Every schmo as the fantasy that the world revolves around the them. It rains. A car crash stops traffic. You say 'How could this happen to me.'" How indeed. C and I were just talking about these candid interviews that various shows (remember Street Smarts anyone? . . . um... anyone?) air where a camera crew asks seemingly common sense questions to people on the street, and we all get to chuckle at how shockingly ill-informed the American public is. It's a fun game, and helps cultivate a bit of the 'mudge in even your average, similarly shockingly-informed TV audience.

Anyway. Yes. A day for battling my 'mudge. Made all the more difficult by challenging myself to read the majority of Said's Culture and Imperialism. (On a mostly unrelated side note, for some reason I find this incredibly difficult to say. The syllables want to glide together in my mouth, inevitably coming out something like "cultulal imperialism") I almost made it, too. I let my self stop a few minutes ago to make dinner, rationalizing my slacking by owning silently up the fact that after 200+ pages, nothing the honorable Said wrote was any longer penetrating my rock hard 'mudgeonly cranium. The last forty pages will have to wait until another day.

What else? I have no idea, except that the bandying about of this film keep bringing to mind another film with a structurally similar title. If you haven't seen it, you might want to.

Chapter 2ish

2007-02-20T09:47:00.000-08:00

Clearly, rock isn't dead. And for that matter, neither is punk, metal, industrial, gothic, etc. Those of you who would make such a proclamation must do so repeatedly and quietly, lest the rising hysteria of your assertions attract too much of the wrong kind of attention and throw suspicion on your project. I feel your fear. It's much too quiet out there in the world of adulthood. We miss the louder, more raucous days of our youths with all the eyeliner and the fuck-the-system sentiment. I know, I miss it too. Where the hell do all these 18 year olds get off talking about punk anyway? Since when is Hot Topic an authentic subcultural shopping mecca? This is a frightening world, my friends. These are frightening times. But I digress. . . What I mean to say is, rock is alive and well. For evidence of this fact, I need only urge you to navigate to the following URL. You will at once be overcome and astounded, and, I hope, in time, filled with hope: http://www.metalmontana.com/index.php . Let this put an end, once and for all, to the epitaphs for real music. Now I must go make cookies. Respectfully submitted, asenath.

You're On...Bio-techs.

2007-02-17T12:44:00.000-08:00

Apocalyptic Ape-Men?

2007-02-15T16:27:00.000-08:00

Incidentally, if I've subjected you to this dream-like, meandering description of a film I vaguely remember seeing thanks to my father's (thankfully) questionable judgment as to what constitutes appropriate viewing for children (A & T, take note), you might want to check this out: http://monsterhunter.coldfusionvideo.com/2019.html. I do not make this shit up. Now look into Mina's eyes.... deeper....deeper....

Fe-Mina Simone, AKA...

2007-02-15T13:27:00.000-08:00

She looks sweet, doesn't she? C and I this morning were calling her hell-beast because she apparently took a disinclination to letting us sleep. She tried to bite my earlets out of my ears, puked on the kitchen floor, and harassed C out of bed rather earlier than she was hoping. This in addition to here usual game of plant-eating and trying in vain to open the closet door. I can't blame her for trying, I suppose, since it is the place in the whole apartment where she is most likely to want to be: dark, quiet, out of the way, vaguely musty, lots of shoes and clothes for her to cover with a stubborn coat of white fluff. In one of my old dwellings, she would crawl inside the furnace, which was bizarrely mounted on the wall. It was very disconcerting to me, but there wasn't much I could do about it.

See the look of insane determination? It's all in the eyes, see. Stare too long, and you, too, will be doing her bidding.

Two Nightmares about Teaching

2007-02-13T06:14:00.000-08:00

1. The night before last: I was hanging out at a lunch table outside at some university campus. You know how geography smears into a weird bricolage of impressions of various places? So, yeah, I think it was a mixture of UB and UM, not that this is SO very important. Anyway, I'm at this table, probably doing research (because, what the hell else would I be doing?) and I suddenly have to leave right away. There's a younger guy sitting at the table as well, but I barely look at him. Anyway, I get up, gather my books, and leave right away. THEN I realize that, shit, I'm not wearing my glasses and I definitely had them at the table. I go back there, only to find a new group of students at the table. I ask them if they've seen my glasses, and they produce a pair that they found sitting on the table after the guy who was sharing it with me left. A light dawns and I suddenly know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this guy schemed in order to switch my glasses with his, which aren't even close to my prescription. I'm enraged, fuming, really, as angry as I can ever remember having been in my life. I know that new glasses right now (since I already used up my once a year free lenses and reduced fee schedule for frames) would cost me at least $300. I can't even think too clearly about that, though, because I'm so angry. Then, miraculously, campus police show up because they've apprehended the guilty party who is, indeed, wearing my comparatively quite stylish glasses. I'm so filled with rage that I start slapping him across the face repeatedly, calling him every bad thing I can think of, and it isn't doing anything to quell my anger. He just stares at me with this slight smile, totally unbothered. He's one of my students this semester.

2. Another miscellaneous college setting that, for some reason, I think is Illinois. I've never been there and perhaps that's why this dream is set there. It's a weird time. The sitting is being bombed by some enemy forces of some sort, and people keep assuring me that when they call in the leafblowers it will all be okay. A huge plane kind of collapses into the ground, killing everyone aboard, which was supposed to include me. But I'm teaching in this private high school, with the same students I have now. I'm trying to lecture about something, and one of my students keeps talking. I ask him once to stop, nicely, and then I slam my fist into the desk and tell him he needs to shut up while I'm talking. Everyone is completely horrified, the class ends, and the next teacher comes in. The offended student walks up to her, because she is my superior, and tells her (she's really one of C's past professors in AMS) that I struck him. The next thing I know, the school is considering firing me for hitting and student and I know that I'll never get another job if this happens. Meanwhile, people outside the university are freaking out about getting enough food, and these weird little gadgets that make polluted water drinkable. The funny thing is that I don't think I've ever even heard this particular student speak.

Everyone bored now?

A Viscous Cycle

2007-02-08T10:21:00.000-08:00

I'll soon be done grading (read commenting extensively) on my first batch of papers from my new class. They are, predictably, mostly horrific and occasionally encouraging. Watch out, though, everyone, next Wednesday, a whole flock of snowflakes will fall from the sky, laden down with my critical penmarks pointing out that either a) they have no argument, b) they don't understand their own argument, or c) they may not be able to read. It will be a sad, sad day. Freshmen are bits of stardust, blown from the hand of god. *sigh*

Aside from the the horrors inevitably attending this kind of grading, I've had a pretty productive week. I managed to draft a chapter, which you should not understand to mean that I've finished a chapter. What I've actually accomplished is to spew about 40 pages of absolute drek, which I will now sit on for about a month while I work on another chapter. At the end of this time, I'll haul its mutilated but still semi-living carcass (in the loosest sense possible, you semantic nazis) up onto my table and begin the vivisection. Think of me as Dr. Moreau. It's the pain, you see, the pain makes my creatures...docile. They know that I am the giver of pain, and if they don't obey me, I'll do some of that flying chain shit from Hellraiser. I hope I'm not mixing my genres too much for you people. This is a fairly accurate description of my writing process, though. Unlike some people (ahem, C and B), who looove their MA theses, I rather tend to look at mine as a pile of my guts that I was somehow able to remove from my body and survive. I bled my ass all over the fucking project. Say what you will, 110 pages in two weeks is no fucking joke. I still have twinges of pain when I think about it, but my pain-go-bye-bye juice keeps the thesis weasels away.

I suppose you can chalk this up to the aforementioned paper grading. One particular gem reads something like this (because I want you all to share my pain): "This may sound racist, but I feel like black people are always acting in really exaggerated ways to call attention to themselves. They do this so that when someone reacts to them, they can accuse that person of being racist! I feel like they are the ones who are racist." All together: grrooooaannnnn.

Intervention?

2007-02-01T08:59:00.000-08:00

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Seriously, I might need one. The terrors of writing are sending me fleeing as fast as my fingers can take me to the internet, and I've been dwelling a bit too obsessively on the message boards at vegweb. This is bad. A couple of nights ago, I was so worked up about the stupid shit some people said that I couldn't sleep for endlessly formulating the most appropriate and productive response. Of course, it is more than likely that my anxiety about the vegweb boards is really just spillover from my comp class where people say and write the most offensive shit imaginable, but I have pretty strict limits on to the extent to which I can call them out on it. Not that there aren't bright moments of glee. One of my better students described something in our reading as a "viscous circle." I think I'll be adding that one to my arsenal of "putting people up on peddle stools," and "lowering their self of steam," though it still doesn't touch my all time favorite about men being "escape goats." ahhhh... the joys of higher education. Where would we be without it, seriously? I'm pretty sure I'd be slinging candles and wicker at my own Pier One store, maybe in Washington or Colorado, and drinking myself into oblivion every night. Oh wait, ahem. (just kidding!)

Afterall, it really is SO much easier to rail on the vegwebbers than it is to figure out what the hell Bhabha is talking about and what it might have to do with the Gothic.

Nevermind the Weasels.

2007-01-25T14:35:00.000-08:00

So, I'm really not going to write a sad, frustrated, mopey blog. Really, I'm not. The latter part of January actually feels bizarrely hopeful to me. I'm languishing in subjunctivity, but this feels like it has a distinct shelflife. My writerly juices are percolating. I think I can sense them even in my dreams, which have been uncommonly bizarre recently. In one, I was about to go down on Tina from the L-Word when I thought better of it. She'd recently hooked up with this guy who SEEMED really nice, but whom I felt certain the later episodes would prove a total sleazebag. Then, last night, a whole portion of the world was suddenly shrunk down into dusty, miniscule proportions and I was forced to sift through little draws of dust to try to find my books (which were about the size of unpopped corn kernels) and laptop. Sadly, or perhaps ominously, I never did find my damned computer. The whole affair was apparently orchestrated and the villains, with whom I was strangely and suddenly in league, had a special microscope sort of thing that you could put the shrunken objects under to restore them to the regular size. The point in all of this being that an active dream life just must be a good sign, right? Usually in my dreams, I'm swimming with gargantuan sealife--sharks, whales, crocodiles, dinosaurs, that kind of thing--or fishing mermaids out of huge vats of jelly. It's all very chthonic, really. You'd think C would be suspicious of all the womb imagery. We're never having kids. Really, we're not. Unless it ACCIDENTALLY happens. But then the rest of the world is totally fucked, anyway, and we're taking over.

Did someone put my head in a vise?

2007-01-17T11:33:00.000-08:00

Stop it, seriously. Something about being at UB makes my front lobe feel like it's being squeeezed ever so gently. Then, eventually, as I meditate on my two possible remedies, it settles into a nausea inducing headache. C calls this the UB migraine. It might have something to do with the flourescent lights in Clemens. It might be the ambiguously unseeing visages of inscrutable fifth year seniors, taking freshman comp for the first time. It might be the silence, which hums just an octave below regular silence, that fills the room right after I make a lame, English-teacher joke. (Q. What do you call Santa's little helpers? A. Subordinate clauses.) But, seriously, what's a well-intentioned TA to do? Crying's always good. Running is better. Where's the pain-go-bye-bye juice in this whole situation? Maybe some light meditation and stretching?

Of course, this is really just first day jitters. You'd think, wouldn't you, that after....what?...eight some years of teaching writing the initial shock of immersion would be somewhat lessened. I've yet to do the thing where you picture them all naked, but I don't think this would do much for my nausea problem. Sometimes I'd kill for a little fuzzy, blurry-eyed, comp rhet action. Maybe I could convince myself that I'm not drumming thesis statements into unwilling craniums, dulled by too much online poker and reality tv, but liberating my students into their own, individual, snowflake-ness. If only I could get my hands on some of those mini-pizzas that the oh-so-creepy John Ritter makes in the Buffy-verse, we could all just chill out about rhetorical styles and introductory paragraphs, pronoun-antecedent agreement and topic sentences. Somewhere, in the dark, little trolls are cranking the big wheels that make this shithouse run! At least some of us know what's really important, right B?

American Apparel, Pending Crisis, Aphasia

2007-01-09T11:57:00.000-08:00

A week past the full-blown holiday insanity and everything is settling back into normality, minus the normal part. While not so much in celebration mode about our vacation from school extending even into the first part of next week, C and I are slipping through liminal states. I've been resisting the urge to indulge in utter hibernation, sleeping ten or eleven hours a night, by forcing myself to set the alarm even when I don't really have to get up.

Somehow, regardless, I am getting a fair amount of reading done. Some of this is new stuff, mostly disappointing (luckily), and everything else I've already read and am going over briefly once more to take some more focused notes. Of course, I still have a list of books I want to read that is at least ten titles long... and this before I'm likely to let myself start writing. Really. I say luckily, above, because if everything I read was freaking amazing I might feel like I had nothing to add. So goes the life of an academic. Perpetually disastisfied BOTH with my own work and that of others. I met a psychiatrist when I lived in the Valley (pronounced Shen-n-doh-uh--the trick is to make the second syllable as slight as you possibly can...as though it were the ghost of a syllable) who liked to tell me a story about when he was in med school. Apparently, all the psychiatric med students had a joke about how thankful they were for English majors, apparently because, being the sullen, introspective lot that we are, we tend to bread and butter the pocket books of the profession. Yay us!

Much as I love American Apparel, I've just gone through a month and a half long process of trying to get an order corrected. I won't bore you all with the details, but suffice it to say that the affair has hopefully just ended with a mildy hysterical email to the customer service representative apparently assigned to deal with me. He ended up confusing my replacement shipment with the original, months were flipped around, time collapsed on itself, and I sent a strongly worded message in which I even went so far as to include a not so ambiguously encoded indicator of my dismay and frustration: "(!)" Ah, the power of prose.

Why aphasia? Because it is...

Holiday Glam

2006-12-25T12:38:00.000-08:00

The holidays feel...remarkably un-holiday-ish this year. This is my first year of being officially on Christmas strike, and it's really pretty anti-climactic. For some reason, Thanksgiving, a holiday to which I've historically granted very little interest, was much harder than this diva of holidays, Christmas. I got up at 9, went to the gym, did my usual 7 mile run, went home, had some grapefruit and leftover yam biscuits, talked on the phone (to my mother--twice), watched a Sandra Bernhard special that I'd rented, blah blah blah. The eeriest thing about this is that it feels, in most respects, like a normal day. The primary thing separating it from MOST of the days in the year is, together with the absence of my loved one, the fact that I'm still not really working very hard. Luckily, that neurosis is haunting my peripheral vision and little bit more each day. Soon, it's likely to manifest in some kind of all-consuming despair and sense of worthlessness for my apparent inability to get anything at all accomplished.

ABD: Freedom Is Real. Of course, it is real in that sense in which we are all free to languish in that hazy middle ground of the subjunctive. I can think of at least a few people in my acquaintance who have made cozy little nests for themselves in this ABD land, happily or unhappily (usually, depending whether or not they've had kids and that sort of thing) adjuncting at whatever college or university is closest at hand. Hell, four sections of composition a semester (and that fat, sweet 20 grand I could make a year doing it) sounds like bloody paradise. Emphasis on the bloody, of course.

What else--besides the ubiquitous work drama, which does, of course, pursue me through most of my waking hours, especially when I sit down to write something about my immediate life and experiences--could I possibly have to blog about? Really, anything else I'll write will simply smack of complaining, and the most non-productive variety of that. Check, please.

Blah-dom

2006-12-15T11:52:00.000-08:00

December is running by more quickly than I really want to intellectually deal with. It's been and continues to be one of the most relaxing and one of the most stressful months I think I've had in recent memory. The major project is slipping by the wayside, an indulgence I'm justifying by telling myself all kinds of cozy, laziness-justifying things like these: 1) Clearly, my brain needs a break. I need to listen to my brain. This is the "work out lie." While true to a certain extent, my vacation has far exceeded my real need for it. Now I'm just taking pleasure in curling up on the slightly furry fabric of my undersized couch, reading a novel through the body buzzing post-exercise and breakfast haze when I really should be reading, say, Imagined Communities. 2) A more logistical excuse. I can't start working because I don't have the books that I need. Again, this is seductive because partially correct. I ordered the last novel that I think I really, desperately, need to read before starting my chapter on the 18th century, and they're taking a very very long time to arrive. Silent scream. This is not, of course, to say that I couldn't be doing other, also quite relevant reading, which I currently have in my possession. 3) The paralysis of the overwhelmed. Do I start, as I said I would, on the introductory chapter? This sounds fun. I could hone my genre and theory chops, flesh out other ideas, make promises that I may find I can never fulfill. Or do I launch into the 18th century? There's something very seductive about starting to do secondary research. Reading about what people have said about specific novels and finding them all laughably inadequate to the task I've undertaken. This kind of research has the advantage of filling one with a sense of the exigency of her work, while also hazarding certain feelings of hopelessness.

I'm setting goals now. Truly. Monday I'll go to the library and try, as they say, to light a fire of some sort under my ass. It would be deeply lovely to have some sense of purpose and accomplishment ensuing from the pending holidays which are promising to be solo drunken revels, perhaps accompanied by insipid popular movies that C has the good taste not to watch.

Ultimate

2006-12-01T14:53:00.000-08:00

Like so man things, the ultimate was, finally, not so ultimate after all. This is always the way, though I don't seem to be able to keep myself from getting worked into a self-hating, ego-annihilating frenzy all the same. C points out, and I well know, that this is in some way strategy. I go through all the worst case scenario emotional junk well before any of it even *might* happen. In this way, it freaks me out considerably less when things happen like this:

Well, I think we should start off with M encapsulating her project for us, in just a few minutes, before we start discussing the 27 page document that accompanies it.

Normally, this would tailspin me, but because I've already in my head imagined and dealt with all the really horrible things that could be said, I muddle through. Nobody seems to have caught on just yet that I'm a terrible fraud. With any luck, they never will... So, yeah, (spitting sound) that's over. Now I can actually start writing. How sick is it that I'm actually looking forward to it?

In other news...what? I'm making cakes, and very much agonizing over it. C thinks I'm dwelling too much, and she is undoubtedly right. Right in that truly damning way. A while ago I was swamped with this sudden sense of self-loathing, so intense that I could barely speak. I feel like the protagonist from Nausea, sitting in the park watching the world dissolve around him. Not that I should be writing about vertigo right now.