Wish It Were Done

I've been working on this stupid lecture for days...and a lot of it has been really, really pointless, like looking up images on the web and photoshopping them, or flipping through the whole of the Iliad for that one quote I remember from 3 years ago, or searching everything to make sure there's not an obvious contradiction to a point I plan to make, or hunting down the source for that old story that the sculptor Phidias modeled his Zeus at Olympia on a passage in Iliad 1 (turns out to be Strabo).

The first lecture is petrifying. I wouldn't want to say something wrong! I'm afriad I'll start repeating myself, so I'm trying to write out a detailed sketch of everything I'm going to say...and so this project will never end. One day it will take me all of 30 minutes to prepare this thing, and I will laugh at myself.

I'm crawling out of my skin!

My Outta Control To-Do List

1. Write lecture
2. Write abstract
3. Write conference paper
4. Take-home midterm
5. Grade papers
6. Write exam questions (multiple choice)
7. Teaching: write study questions
8. Read Callimachus
9. Read aesthetics article

I don't think I'll get through even number 3, which are the most urgent in my mind. Unfortunately, numbers 4-9 are due earlier.

!!!

What Is Happiness?

Happiness is living with people, like your parents, who take care of your meals for you, and good meals too, like two live lobsters choked to perfection in garlic and green onion sauce; and when things like your computer break down they buy you a new one AND get the old one repaired...

...and in an ideal state of happiness you wouldn't have to do a finger's-lifting worth of work, but in the second-best case you'd be able to hook yourself up to a special machine and download all the information you have to know, so that you don't have to read a thing. God, I hate reading! I sense this more and more vividly. What sucks about reading is that you could put all this time and effort into it, but there's never any guarantee that you'll do a good job, so that at the end of a hard day you realize you have but a shoddy mastery of the material.

MST3K: Hamlet

Much better than Mitchell - and I don't think it was just the movie, I think the commentary was actually funnier. It may be the case that I just like the Mike episodes more than the Joel episodes, which I guess would be a sin in the MST3K fan world, because Joel was the original and true fans always prefer the older to the newer. But I can't help it. Mitchell (and Manos) joked more on certain themes (like how Mitchell was fat), but I think it's more amusing for them to riff on absurd gestures and accidental silliness.

Watching this version of Hamlet (an old German dubbed version) made me wonder: is it ever possible for Hamlet NOT to be boring, or was this a property peculiar to the badness of this version? The MST3K premise invites you to think that it's just this version that's exceptionally bad, but I'm not so sure. Everything in Hamlet deals with the theater of the psychological inner life, which seems intrinsically to be lacking in action and excitment. I think what you're supposed to enjoy is the poetry and complexity, but how easily does that get lost in a performance! Even a good, compresible one (and the German dubbed Hamlet was actually pretty lucid, albeit slow).

MST3K: Mitchell

Have I reached the end of my MST3K tolerance? I didn't enjoy this one that much, and it followed on the heels of Manos: Hands of Fate - so I had high hopes for redemption. Perhaps it has to do with the kind of movies I keep picking. I need to go back to the campy horror stuff, instead of the more run-of-the-mill D-list stuff. It's an interesting experiment on the aesthetic qualities of camp: why are something good-bad, while others are just bad-bad?

Welcome Readers!

Congratulations! You have officially made it to my roster of people who don't creep me out. Now I'm at liberty to talk all the shit I want; and more importantly to you, you can be sure that you're not getting shit talked about you.

At some point in the future, I may be making the blog public again - but this is still on the DL. I first want to shake this unknown reader who keeps checking my blog from the Michigan Union...who very well could be Sanjaya (aka VJ, aka Gianormous Tool). This is the real reason I went private, because this unknown person obviously knows that I keep tabs, and so he went out of his way to go to a public computer, where I couldn't verify the identity of the reader. Creepy!

Ha! Ain't that the truth?

If your gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough
When you get knocked down you gotta get back up,
I ain't the sharpest knife in the drawer but I know enough, to know,
If your gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough

Well, I drenched my brain with Rot-Gut whiskey
'Till all my pain was chicken fried
And I had dudes with badges frisk me
Teach me how to swallow pride
I took advice no fool would take
I got some habits I can't shake
I ain't the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I know enough to know
If you're gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough

If you're gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough
When you get knocked down, you gotta get back up
That's the way it is in life and love
If you're gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough

I've been up and down and down and out
I've been left and right and wrong
Yeah, I've walked the walk and I've run my mouth
I've been on the short end for too long
But if they gave medals for honky tonk wars
Hell, I'd put mine in my chest of drawers
With my irs bills and divorce papers and all that stuff
If you're gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough

If you're gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough
When you get knocked down, you gotta get back up
I ain't the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I know enough to know
If you're gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough

Going Private

I forgot to mention that I'm planning to privatize access to my blog soon. I think you can sign in using your gmail account, so please send me your gmail address, and I'll put you on the green light list.

Worst Week Ever

I found out today I failed my Latin qual AGAIN. I don't know what more they expect me to do. Last time I failed they told me that I was really close, so naturally I took that to mean that they wanted me to take more classes. So I took more classes - and I might add, I took more Latin INSTEAD of classes that I'm actually interested in, on subjects that might actually matter to my professional career. So I'm doing all this Latin bullshit at the cost of everything else, I took the survey courses, I took not one, but two prose composition classes - one of which was not even required - and I spent last semester spending 2-3 hours every week on Friday afternoons reading some extra Latin poetry. THERE IS NOTHING MORE I COULD DO FOR SOMETHING I HATE. You might as well ask me to throw in some neuroscience while I'm at it. It's a waste of my fucking time. Not only that, I actually think there's nothing else I could do PERIOD. Insisting that it's still not good enough is basically like telling me that I should leave the program.

So I got the message at 12, had to teach a class at 12:10 (when all I wanted to do is go home and cry) and at 1 I had to take another Latin test (midterm for class) - you know, after just hearing that I suck. And that midterm was the world's longest exam. What was supposed to be 1.5 hour exam got cropped a lot, but it still took me 2 hours to get through it.

So in conclusion:
Monday - the bat fiasco
Tuesday - computer broke
Wednesday - parking ticket
Thursday - see above

The worst part is the week still isn't over.

Sliver of Good

In the midst of all this catastrophe, I forgot to mention that I finally uncovered what I've so long been looking for: the best dance party in town.

Smited by the Gods

As if last night's BAT affair - perhaps the single scariest day of my life - weren't bad enough. My computer is breaking AGAIN. It keeps shutting itself down for no reason. Why do you hate me, computer? This is twice this semester.

It must be because I gave my computer an ill-omened name. I wanted "Lolita" to convey that it is the light of my life and the fire of my loins, but the little shit is turning on me like a cold-blooded gangster. Next time I'm naming my computer Happy or Lucky or something.

Heart Attack American

Not only a thrash song, but me tonight. I walked into my apartment and there was a FUCKING BAT FLYING AROUND. At first I thought it was a bird, which was scary enough, but then it perched on my door and it looked like it was hanging upside down and it started scratching itself and shuddering and junk...and I wept with despair, it was one of the most repulsive things I've ever seen. Twenty minutes trapped in my apartment with that awful flying rodent, I could have died with fear.

KEVIN DICUS is the motherfucking MAN. He earned himself my firstborn son when he caught that horror of horrors and took it away. The rest of you all, the next time you save my life like that, I can only promise you my second-born.

Current Audio

Independents
Boney Fiend Needs Beer

I Should Start a New, Secret Blog

Once again I'm facing a dilemma that not only requires some second opinions, but it's also just so irritating that I want to write about it and get it out of my system. But I can't because it could potentially make my professional life difficult. Ask me about it if you talk to me. And if you don't, I bet you can guess. Clue: rhymes with "pianormous bool."

Old Dolls Hidden Track

"Babe I'm getting tired of this, seeing your face every night through the window. Oh, there's one thing though, one thing about this winter. We got the New York Dolls coming to the Academy of Music, on Friday night, February 15th. We got our own St. Valentine's massacre, honey...since all the deco got stacked up.."

Addendum: Humorous Observation

How funny is it that 50 odd years ago, Frank Sinatra was cast to play the stock character of the wise-cracking ethnic guy? Ha, some things never change: those ethnics are so funny!

I'm also wondering if the boxer might also not be an older archetype, made American - say, Hamlet or Achilles, to cite the big ones.

From Here to Eternity

What is it about the former boxer that is so gripping to the American imagination, not to mention my personal heart? Prewitt makes it number 3, at least: Camino Real's Kilroy, On the Waterfront's Marlon Brando, and now From Here to Eternity's Beautiful Montgomery Clift. And I am certain there are serveral other compelling incarnations besides those three.

Note to self: when writing my great American novel, write in the self-abnegating boxer, who could be a champ if he went for it, but for whatever reason he's retiring himself and is willing to endure all manner of degradation if only he can stay true to his principle - and not, in a moment that ironically becomes weakness, submit to fighting.

How much harder it is to walk away than to fight for what is yours! Cf also that powerful scene when Deborah Kerr says her farewell to Burt Lancaster.

The thing I like about this movie is how painfully it captures the no exit feeling you get when all the people on top are evil, slimey, or lame - and worst of all, their toolishness is exactly what lands them in the peculiar position in life where they have near despotic control over your immediate fate. And you can wait and wait for the good guys (who in a just world are even higher up than they sadistic ones - not always so in our reality) to step in and set things right...but you just might die first! And yet, I like to think that there are some of us out there - yes, even the beautiful ones, who COULD get every slimey thing they ever wanted at the snap of their fingers - who would rather die than compromise.

Not to say that I can convince myself that this is true, as much as I want it to be. I can't help but feel so awestruck every time at Monty's beauty (yes, even with all his sensitivity and depth and intelligence, so incompatible with beauty) that it shocks me utterly to think that people are NOT falling at his feet and worshipping him as a god. Things should be so easy for him, I imagine - and I have to remind myself that they were not.

Well, nothing wins over my devotion so much as disappointment and acute suffering. Perhaps Monty wouldn't look a tenth as beautiful as he does to me if his characters always got their way.

Narcoleptic Tuesdays

Same thing happened yesterday as a week before: I got home and couldn't stop sleeping. It started at around 9, with a bit of a break between midnight and 2, and lasted until 9. Predictably I wasn't able to get much of my work done, though luckily this time I had some stuff finished ahead of time.

Yet this overdose of sleep may be a good thing, in preparation for tonight's Valentines festivities. I've been invited to a Guys Night In, involving food, drink, possibly poker (but I hardly know her) and probably video games. Shout out to Que-Ni for feeding me; it's like having mommy around, because those are the only times I get decent food. As last weekend proved, I would rather dress well than eat well.

When I say I'm in love you best believe I'm love, L-U-V!

Happy Valentines Day - to all you rotten motherfuckers who aren't going to die alone.

How Embarrassing

You know how you (or at least I) bumble through life committing a thousand embarrassing acts a day, and sometimes the recollection will come flooding over you and you suddenly realize what a doofus you are? I just had one of those right now, after I a took a nap and woke up thinking, "wow, my face sure is red." Basically I have a problem with silence, so whenever I meet with it I say the first thing that comes to my mind, and in (one of) today's episode it happened in class, and the first thing I thought of saying actually turned out to be completely irrelevent to the topics in the readings. Oh well. I guess this is consistent with my experience elsewhere that every other minute of life would probably be too excruciating to bear if we didn't construct these elaborate worlds of denial. In my case, it's the denial that the panorama of my life usually strings together to spell "doofus."

Pearls Before Swine

Here I am sitting in my office looking as cute as button after this weekend's shopping - and there's no one here who could appreciate it. This makes me angsty, because it's like what a waste of effort. There is a very dreamy-looking guy I see on Mondays in my philosophy class, but I don't ever have a chance to talk to him, and besides, I don't even know anymore what I would say if I did have the chance to talk to him - that's how unoptimistic I am. So here I am, alone in all my cuteness. I feel like a fifteen-year-old boy in the basement listening to records, except without the kind of longing that would stem from hope.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Is it just me or was that movie pointless? I loved the other three Harry Potters, so I know it's not a simple matter of taste. From beginning to end I thought it was totally dumb, or else I was it was too sophisticated for me to get. Was there ever any doubt, from the minute Dumbledore announced that there would be a wizard contest - and that Harry Potter was too young to enter - that Harry Potter STILL would win? Was everyone truly so dumb that they didn't suspect the spastic bionic man with his peeping bionic eye? Since when did Sirius Black have an eastern European accent? The awkward teenage romance and the completely implausible magic were also more excruciating than usual.

It's quite possible, however, that this movie was too sophisticated for me to get. I was watching it after a long day of 10 hours of shopping. Yesterday was supposed to be Ladies Day and Night, in which we originally planned to drive to the outlets an hour+ away, starting at 11am, then to do lunch and more shopping at a different outlet mall, followed by dinner and a Night on the Town. Unforunately, the Ladies Night part of the itinerary fizzled out because of exhaustion, and though we heroically pulled ourselves through a great and delicious dinner, we had to throw in the towel before the drinking and dancing. So, instead of going out after 11pm, I crawled into bed and watched a movie - and not even a tough movie, but a baby-food version of movies...and yet, it still might have been too much.

On the bright side of things, I made some kick-ass steals in the fashion department. I'm gonna look hella cute next week.

Caught Red-Handed!

Oh my, I'm such a jackass. I was teaching today and one of my students was saying something very insightful, I'm sure, about the chorus in the Bacchae - when I started to wonder how I was going to evaluate participation at the end of the term, ie how often should each person be expected to contribute to the discussion, especially considering that the class is huge, so maybe it's not reasonable to expect everyone to say something every day in order to get an A in participation, and maybe instead of daily participation points and average each day as an A, B, C, D, F or 0, I should just add up the term-total points...except then how could I take into account absences and punish accordingly (in my current system X number of points is an 97, attendance without participation is an 85, and an absence is 0) -

Suddenly my student was done talking and I realized I didn't have a clue how to respond!

"Yeah. Yeah. Um, that's a really great point." The jig was fucking up! "I'm sorry, I just had a space-out. Okay then, let's look at the previous choral passage and compare it to what we were just discussing..."

Inept cover-up. Admission of guilt. Quick, change the subject!

Tired on Humpday

I'm getting really fed up with my stupid computer. It was working fine after I got the hard drive replaced, but now all of a sudden some of the applications aren't working, like iTunes and iPhoto. Do I call Apple support, or do I take it to technician? I tried downloading all the updates, so I suspect might not be a software problem.

I was so tired yesterday, for whatever reason, that I didn't do any of my homework, so today I'm just zombie-ing my way through all my classes. I did go swimming, which was wonderful, but it might have drained me.

Or it might be this extreme cold that I'm tired of. I glimpsed in my closet today a fluffy girly dress I would wear in the summertime to brunches and afternoon parties, and suddenly I felt so sick of dressing like a goddamn man all the time. Sometimes I think the extra extra accessorizing is fun, but today is not one of those days. Today I wanted to pretend that I could feel the breeze through my hair and the sun on my back and the grass through my feet, so I put on a summer dress...only to realize that it was like zero degrees outside and I would have to layer it, at best, over thermals and jeans. Not to mention the hat, scarf, gloves, coat, leg warmers, etc; but I put my foot down on the lumberjack boots, because I'm sick of looking like a man.

I also discovered my first wrinkle. It's one of those crazy double-wrinkles that look a bit like a raised scar, and that is extra-noticeable. Needless to say I've been trying to moisturize the shit out of it.

Axl Rose turned 45 yesterday. Oh, sigh. I'm not the only one becoming grotesque.

Politics to Match the Mullet

Twice in two days makes me think I should write about it...esp because I think I might have offended some people yesterday by standing up for the Christians.

I agree that Bible-thumpers are super-duper annoying, and I hate it as much as the next person when they try to get me to join their praise groups and sing songs about Jesus. Nevertheless I want to stand up for their right to be annoying because I think people are down on Christians too much these days. HDG explained to me that it's because they're historically overrepresented, so they have more of an obligation to make room for other people's voices. That's probably true. But I think it's important to consider that not every praise of Jesus is meant to be a pissing contest, and while they're often trying to convert you or convince you that Christianity is numero uno, a lot of the times it's completely innocuous, just a habit or a way of life that makes them feel good about who they are; and when that's the case I think people should be a little more charitable.

Take for instance yesterday's Superbowl victory speech. The coach made some comment about how proud he was that both teams were headed by black coaches, for the first time, and Christian coaches. You can imagine the umbrage people took that last part. Looking back on it I can see how it came off sounding like, "a Christian won the Superbowl, so this proves that God loves us best," but at the time I didn't hear that, and given the context, I don't think that was the spirit in which it was delivered. I think it was just another one of those things people say when they shout out to their communities, which to me is a good thing. Like saying that you're proud to be black. If there's one thing Momma Bikini taught me, it's that you should never apologize for where you're from, whether it's the Bikini family or my ethnic peoples or my home town or Cali or America or earth. Sure, it's often the case that inclusion in a group leads to the exclusion of another group, but competition is inherently a positive influence (howevermuch it can be perverted), and I do think that feeling that sense of identity is important to people. What's more pathetic are those people who feel that they have to be ashamed somehow of being American, or whatever, because America has achieved that peculiar position of being successful but imperfect. One should always claim one's communities, even if it's a community of assholes.

Anyways, the other thing that makes me stand up for the Bible-thumpers is that I have to admire people who have genuine conviction, however stupid it might be. This is not to say that all Bible-thumpers are genuine, because a lot of them surely do it for some kind of ego trip; but in a world so discouraging that a little part of you dies inside every day, I have to tip my hats to those who still find something to believe in.

Check It Out

Prince is playing the halftime show.

Mullet No More

I noticed these last few days that my mullet has finally grown out a bit and my hair is lying flat on its own, like a cultivated person's. I guess I'm denying my white-trash roots...no, I was never into Nascar, but my home neighborhood votes Republican.