Birthing Pains

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

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

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

My First Survey

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


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

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

What are five snacks you enjoy?

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

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

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

What are five of your bad habits?

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

What are five places where you have lived?

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

What are five jobs you’ve had?

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

Tag! You're it if you ...

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

I Hated It

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lunk Alarm! part 2

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

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

By JOHN ELIGON

Published: May 29, 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, it is Ber-Ought-En

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

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


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

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

Moment of Zen

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

Chapter What-ish

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


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


Sorry for the earnestness. Have a lolcat.


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