Satisfying Day

Law and Order, Law and Order, Law and Order, Mimesis as Make-Believe, Law and Order, Epsilons, Haagen Daaz, spiked hot chocolate. This is the life.

Oh and by Law and Order, I wasn't talking about my left fist and right fist, respectively (hee hee!), I was talking about Special Victims Unit, of course.

I forgot to mention that I heard another band I liked, confirming once again that my tastes seem to be regional. This time it's the Smut Peddlers from Redondo Beach. They had a song featured in Jackass called If You're Gonna Be Dumb You Gotta Be Tough - nuff said - and I was wondering and wondering where I had heard of the Smut Peddlers before. Then I realized that I had heard of them, though I hadn't heard their songs, because they play around the neighborhood. It's true that SoCal punk all sounds the same after a while, but for now I haven't had enough. For now I'm thinking no one else does it as well as the people of my soil.

OMG! It Finally Happened

I can't watch music videos anymore. I'm sick of them all: the endless assault of bikinis in the hip hop videos, the post-grunge whiny fashion show of the "rock" videos, Mariah Carey trying to convince us that her balloon-like limbs are something we'd want to see, ass-clowns trying to convince us that a little wiggle counts as "dancing," ugly people using some creative lighting to act like they're all better than us. Nothing is authentic, and for some reason even the kitsch has lost it's charm for me. I blame the videos themselves: I know this is a familiar tune, but I honestly think they're not as good as they used to be. How else could I get sick of them, when I haven't seen any MTV for over a month? Surely surfeit is not my problem. It's an actual problem with the quality.

Rashomon is Obsessed with Me

There was a time a few years ago when Thomas Mann was obsessed with me, because everywhere I went it seemed that people would tell me about him. I don't have the foggiest recollection of who Thomas Mann is; I'm only able to produce the name because the haunting effect impressed me so much at the time that I incorporated it into a short story.

Anyways, now the same thing is happening with this Japanese movie called Rashomon. I guess every now and then the universe decides that there's something you have to do (even though I don't have the best track record of following through). Last night I was looking at my TV's programming guide, and I saw that Rashomon was playing at midnight or so, after Wild Strawberries. My brother made some comment about how it looked interesting, and I made a note to myself that I might check it out if I were to stay on the couch that long (I didn't). Later that night I was reading in bed, an academic book called Mimesis as Make-Believe, and the author used Rashomon as an example to illustrate some point about imagined propositions. I almost jumped up right then, and I would have rushed over to the TV to turn on Rashomon (it was about 12:30 then), but it was too cold outside my bed and I was so content reading...

It was probably a wasted opportunity. In any case I think it's a funny coincidence how obsession goes both ways: you can be obsessed with works of art you love, and the works of art can be equally obsessed with being loved by you.

Jackass Number Two

is the best thing since sliced bread! I'm totally in awe of how good it was. A league and a half beyond anything I've seen before from the Jackass franchise - which puts it 300 leagues beyond everything else - and way, way more unwatchable. The one weakness is that they didn't really get 100% of the mileage they could have out of Steve-O. My favorite stunt was probably the puppet show.

Willy Wihly

is a young Englishman, middle-class, mild-mannered and earnest, held down by his termagent wife. On his quest for a better life he meets other men eerily like himself, and together their stories explore the bounds between truth, fiction, and lying.

This is a book I had dreamed up last night, though in my dream I had attributed it to someone else (one of my professors). There were a lot of twists and turns that really did make you think about the philosophical status of truth as you read about these four young men - but now I forgot what they were. Without them, all that's left is a bland Charles Dicken novel, so that's why I didn't think I was compromising my intellectual property to post the synopsis of my story on this blog.

I just thought it was funny how in a complete, perverse absence of external mental stimulation, the brain resorts to challenging itself.

Pirates 2: Dead Man's Chest

Against all probability, I really enjoyed this movie. I heard people complain that there were too many plot twists, even more than the first; but in my opinion the flaw is not so much that as it being completely impossible to figure out what the plot is in the first place. I gotta say I spent about 90% of the movie scratching my head and wondering, WTF? Plus, every conversation that seemed like it would have been clarifying was delivered by a mumbling actor. Luckily I had a narrator there to explain things to me, because if I had been on my own all the motivations of the movie would have made no sense to me whatsoever.

But once I knew what was going on, I thought it was a pretty cool concept. Norrington: didn't see that one coming.

When I won't hang because "I'm tired"

I'm probably lying. Empirical evidence has shown that tiredness doesn't do much to stop me from going out, except maybe those times when I haven't slept fro 24+ hours. But even then, it's a toss up; the time I went to see Old School followed on the heels of 36 hours of wakefulness. And it was worth it.

Twice this week I've blown off friends - friends I like seeing, and friends I don't see very often. So why did I blow them off? Four words:

Buffy. The. Vampire. Slayer.

Of course I said I couldn't go out because I was tired. What I really meant was, I'm too tired to PREFER going out to curling up in a blanket by the roaring fire watching Buffy nonstop and commercial-free until my head hurt. So it's partially true that I was tired. The effort appears overwhelming when you think of getting dressed and driving and socializing and being engaging and amusing when all you want to do is sit on your ass in your sweats with the one you love (Spike, in this case). But my dedication paid off: I've finished off season 6 last night.

Proof positive of nerddom.

Done and Done

I finished grading exams, which was the last thing I had to do. Now I'm free to watch Buffy DVDs until my eyes fall out. My friend Boom Boom is the best friend ever: I got him a $5 gag gift for Christmas, he got me season 6 of Buffy, to save me from myself in my cable-less state.

I'm Such an Asshole

I always say my students kinda suck, and there was one in particular who wrote very incoherent, disorganized papers - even though he tried really hard - and I used to wonder aloud if he was semi-retarded. And by "wonder aloud" I actually mean "laugh at cruelly." Well, guess who feels totally abashed now...

Dear Rex,

I just wanted to thank you for leading the discussion for Greek Civ this semester and learned much about Greek civilization that went past the common perception that Greece was simply the foundation of the democracy that we embrace today. I remember the first day of class when professor asked us what was Greece, and the only thing that really came to mind for me was democracy and Plato's ideal society contrived through the cross-examination of the Republic. So thanks again for everything...sorry I seemed a little out of it after the exam but had my calculus exam right before the Greek one so was literally out of it after finishing the Greek exam (otherwise I would have thanked you right after turning in my exam for everything). I also want to wish you the best of luck in your life and for you to never lose your sense of humor...that is what made this class so fun for me this semester. I am positive the comments that you wrote on my essays will benefit me in classes to come and hopefully I did make some progress during the semester with my writing ability.

Best of wishes,

The Guy Who Proved Beyond a Doubt That Rex Is Going to Hell

* * *

PS, congratulations to HDG, who's putting my evil plan into effect.

Close One

It looks like my computer suddenly got over whatever existential crisis it was having. Perhaps it's because it realized it wasn't funny anymore once I was about to fork over $39.95 for Apple Care. Perhaps it's because I was cleaning the crumbs off my motherboard while the phone with customer support, since I had to open it up in order to read him the serial number. In any case, my computer's timing sure didn't suck.

Freaking Out!

My computer is dying on me!! I'm having a fucking heart attack. Sometimes it won't even restart, and at other times it freezes when I start up Eudora. I blame my student, who must have sent me a virus, because this disaster happened while I was replying to his email. This means that I'm going to have to write my last paper on public computers.

Costco

To all the three of my fans who have been waiting with baited breath for a new post, I apologize for my delinquency. I've been playing hostess this weekend and it would have been rude for me to take time away to do meaningless stuff - much as I'm doing now. Anyways, the most exciting thing to report is that we made a Costco run today, with access my houseguest's membership, and I bought some lovely wine glasses. And we had some delicious frozen custard.

Kids These Days, with Their Shoes and Their Pants and Their Rock and Roll Music

Somehow the theme of last night's dinner party. My colleague said she was once on a dig with a guy who used to say it all the time. Apparently he sincerely was hostile about the shoes, because Gary S(?) was so cheap that he wore shoes with holes in them and didn't want to replace them. Then one day the group took a trip to Naxos, a volcanic island whose crater still emits a lot of hot sulfuric gas. The ground was hot enough that day to weld the rubber around the holes in Gary's shoes and I guess from that day forward he didn't have to be so bitter about kids today.

There was something else about last night's dinner party that I thought I should write about - no doubt because I was annoyed - but now I can't remember what it was. I just know there is a nerd I can't stand who was present.

I just remembered what it was. It actually wasn't a story about me being annoyed, it was a stupid old joke that I was thrilled to have a chance to tell.

"I'll be cooking the main dish. Did you all decide among yourselves what you're bringing?"
Nods.
"I'll also have about a liter and a half of wine."
"That's nice, but what will the rest of you all be drinking?"

Hee hee!

Why I Have to Watch TV Like It's My Job

How misguided I was to think I could live without TV! I see now the error of my ways. I need TV/MTV to stay young and hip - the ace up my sleeve for burrowing a scholarly niche - as it became painfully obvious to me while I was reading Sommerstein's translation of Aristophanes' Acharnians last night.

Sommerstein isn't a bad translator of Aristophanes, mostly because he isn't afraid to use the F-word. But he suffers the affliction that afflicts most academics, that of being too naturally nerdy to comment adequately on how most of the population would react to popular literature. There's a scene in the Archarnians where a Megarian (=poor) tries to sell off his daughters disguised as pigs. The joke here is that the Greek word for piglet, choilos, is also the slag for vagina. The play's hero, bartering with the Megarian, comments that the little girls may be choilos now, but they will be kusthos (grown-up vagina) later. Sommerstein renders this well: "They're piglets now, but they'll be beavers later."

Here's where Sommerstein goes wrong: after this translation he appends an elaborate endnote in which he explains that he borrows this translation of "beaver" from Kesey's One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, where this term is used multiple times.

...Totally unnecessary! Beaver is just beaver.

In conclusion, I must do everything I can to keep from being foiled by my own nerdiness. And I must counteract those damn Englishmen, who keep translating dick/cock/shlong/johnson as the rather colorless "prick."

I Don't Get It

I thought I just switched to blogger in beta. I hate technology.

Phaedo

I finished reading Plato's dialogue on the death of Socrates, for the first time - as opposed to doing something that's actually important and urgent. It's been a while since I've read a dialogue I haven't read before, and it's been even longer since I've thought critically about Platonism and how it would measure up in relation to my own beliefs. Is it a convincing argument that the soul is immortal? There's a lot at stake in that question, much more than say, what is the nature of love (Symposium), or what is the difference between truth and belief (Gorgias)? Especially since Socrates gave this speech on his deathbed, it make you wonder if he really believed his own argument (or if this was just another of those proverbial rivers in Egypt).

One thing that became crystal clear for me is how much more doubtful and insecure I've become since I first tangoed with Plato - I must have been 16 or 17 then. In those days I was enarmored by Socrates because he was so uncompromising and everything he said made sense to me. I found myself much more skeptical today, because I thought it would be a beautiful thing to have that kind of conviction; but isn't it hopelessly, foolishly idealistic? Can you really rid yourself of your baser desires (food, drink, sex, love, honor, duty to home and city) just by telling yourself that they come a far second to the care of the soul? Or to put it in more concrete terms: could I really be satisfied with my studies and self-improvement if they didn't come with some promise of a job, and eventually, a well-respected tenured professorship (material sustenance and honor, respectively)?

Everyone knows that idealism is for the young, but I must have always hoped, somewhere in the back of my mind, that character would grow with age. Now I'm suspecting that nothing grows stronger, in the Socratic sense. Conviction is a luxury for the strong and young and beautiful. For the rest of us, terror obliterates character. Each day the probability that I'll really die a spinster librarian looms more and more likely that I find myself wondering if it's worth it, or if I should just jump ship from my feminist idealism in order to recoup the "baser" pleasures of having people to take care of me in my lunatic old age.

But then I read about the courage of Socrates and remind myself, Fuck that noise. Better to die with honor. Victory or death.

Borat and Other Divertidos

I'm thinking that maybe when January comes, I might reinstall my Comcast, as much as I hate those rotten mfs. Not having internet at home is creating quite the backlog with the blog.

Borat was about as good as I expected it to be before I got into the Ali G show, and my expectations went up. It was totally weird how they tried to make it reality show, but with a plot. You can only pick one or the other if you want it to make sense. If I thought about it more, I'm sure I could come up with a complex theoretical explanation for the status of truth and fictionality in this movie, but I honestly don't think the weirdness was a result of their trying to push any envelop. I think there were just too many different perspectives on how to make this movie, and the failure for any one strong vision to take over made everything discombobulated and a bit nonsensical. And it really didn't do justice to the kind of humor that is Cohen's forte.

Yesterday Que-ni had a great karaoke party. I think it was Electric Eye that tore my voice up, trying to hit those falsettos.

Today I had a ballet class in which the teacher made me spit out my gum. Unfortunately the trash can was overflowing with booger tissues from all the sick little kids throughout the week, and I couldn't avoid touching it, and now I'm afraid I've contracted some germs. I'm going to be positively irate if I fall sick from this.

On a happier note, the gnomes have returned my sunglasses that have been missing for a week.

Dietesios

"And we have provided the means for much rest from toils to our souls, having the custom of games and year-long festivals..."
"Wait now. That sounds like the Athenians have as many holidays as the French. Let's translate it as "festivals throughout the year."

HAHA!! So nice to hear a French joke from someone other than myself.

Neville Chamberlain

I accidentally talked some trash about the British, unaware that I was in the presence of one, this weekend.

"I expect about a 70% participation rate from my friends."
"You're a stern mistress."
"Well...a 70 is a C, and that's average."
"Not in England. In England 70 is a really high mark."
"Yeah, and that's why we had to bail them out of WWII, isn't it?"

I stand by my claim. How can they deny mediocrity? Chamberlain! Appeasement! Admittedly it's better than the French's capitulation, but nevertheless...

Honors Students

As I was grading papers, I started to get this weird sense that all my non-honors students were doing better than my honors students. At first I thought it must be my bias, ie I must be grading the former more easily because I'm expecting less of them, but then I remembered that their midterm scores went through the roof: the lowest score was 88, and most of the class was at 95+.

I guess it makes sense at an instituion with selective admissions. Non-honors here doesn't mean remedial like it used to in grade school, it just means that they aren't quite as type-A. And in order for a non-type-A student to be performing at the same caliber as the type-A student, she or he must be inherently brighter, right? My experience with the papers seems to confirm as much. I often feel when I'm grading some of these honors papers that I'm giving too much credit to their regurgitative mediocrity because I know that their grades mean a lot to them and they try really hard and I feel bad for them. Like if it's basically grammatical and they participate a lot, I'll give them a frickin B+. Sigh. It's true that there are some real lemons in the non-honors batch (as there are in the honors batch), but on the whole I seem to discern a marked difference in the quality of their ideas.

Suddenly I feel this hostility toward those type-A kids. Are they really going to coast through life by hyperventiliating all the time and eliciting the grader's sympathy? That doesn't seem fair.

Weekend

I have no balls. I'm so desirous of avoiding confrontation that I'm willing to start a false rumor about having a secret affair, which is ridiculous if you think about it. Twice last week I got very, very close to being caught for having traded in the douchebag who made me buy his beers to pay for the Latin we didn't read, for a Latin tutor who is not so douchey. After the first close shave I said to Not-Douche that if anyone asks why we're getting together on Friday afternoon, he should say we're secretly dating. Not-Douche is a bit of a man-whore, so I'm sure one more such rumor won't hurt him too much. Luckily we haven't had to use that allegation yet, since I narrowly avoided confrontation on Friday, the second close shave. The downside of it is that we didn't get to read any Latin; when I walked into our rendevous place on Friday afternoon, I saw Douche already ensconced there, and it was all I could do to call Not-Douche frantically and secretly in order to tell him, "abort, abort!!"

Why am I tiptoeing around this one jackass who so clearly needs to be told off by someone?

Anyways, that was Friday. On Saturday I went to a birthday dinner, then I tried to go to a party, but it looked from the outside that no one was at this party, so we tiptoed around the house and decided that if we went inside and the party sucked, it wouldn't be easy to tear ourselves away. So we went to a bar instead, which had live jazz music, and we congratulated ourselves on coming to a new place, and we wondered why we always go back to our same old Regular joint. Then this new bar closed at midnight, and we realized why we always end up at the Regular joint, as we headed back there again. At the Regular joint, we ran into one of the jazz musicians from the other place. He was a 70s leisure suit-wearing wankster, who made some comments that would have irritated me if I were, say, an Asian female. Then we went back to the party where we tried to start the night. Fashionably, fashionable late. The good thing about being so fashionable is that it's excusable to leave early.

Zit

I have a zit on my face so impressive it looks like I'm growing a Siamese twin.

Out ta Get Me

This SOB is out to make my life difficult, for no apparent reason. I'd like to say more about it, except it could harm my professional career.