Sunday, April 29, 2007

Brokeback Mountain

SNOOZERS! Nothing happens! People don't talk to each other (one of those movies that communicates through "meaningful eyes"), there's no continuous story line (more like a montage of scenes: mountain landscape, gay innuendo, rural depression (from my POV)), totally slow paced, AND it went on for about 20 minutes too long at the end. I could kind of see that tragedy of a doomed desire, but I get really frustrated watching people just shoot themselves in the foot instead of trying to do something to improve their lives.

Also, watching that man-on-man sex scene with my mom wasn't the least awkward moment in my life. (In my defense, it was either this movie or Cannibal! The Musical, as my Netflix luck would have it.) She questioned how appropriate it was for an unmarried person to see that stuff (the adult version of "aren't you too young for that?"). I thought of a good comeback afterward: it's not I'd witness anything like this in my marriage! I mean, I'm hoping...

Saturday, April 28, 2007

Current Audio

Tommy Sosebee
That's What I Call Love

Eddy Arnold
Why Should I Cry?

Friday, April 27, 2007

Top Words Causing Giggles Among Pre-Teens

During the extreme boredom of my last paper, I relieved myself with old jokes from the Onion vault. Here's a gem from April 2000:

Top Words Causing Giggles Among Pre-Teens

2% Parts
1% Slot
15% Ball-peen hammer
8% Mastication
7% Receptacle
16% Titular archbishopric
13% Pu-pu platter
5% abreast
11% Lake Titicaca
12% Penal system
6% Opening
4% Moist

Nightmare

I just had a dream that I got seriously pissed of at one of my students. Something like she stole my attendance sheet and wouldn't give it back because she started writing notes on it. It reached a point where I was like, "Please leave," and she was like "No," so I pushed her out the door - and just for good measure, I emptied out the bottle of water I had (about 1/4 full) into her purse. As soon as I did that I KNEW I was so much trouble. Actually, I knew it even before, but i went ahead and did it anyway, because I knew it would be worth it. She screamed to Arthur in protest, and he fired me on the spot. I tried to say that he can't fire me because I quit, and he already knew that, but for some reason I used this appealing tone, like I was asking not to be disgraced at the eleventh hour. Arthur shook his head and said he was glad he got a chance to tell me off.

Thursday, April 26, 2007

Done and Done!

:-p

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

I Suddenly Figured Out How to Write a Paper

That is, aside from my tried and true method of forced efficiency by waiting til the last minute, hehe.

WRITE SHORTER PARAGRAPHS.

it's a lot like blogging in that way. Complex syllogisms and shit will trip you up. Stick to one idea. Say that one idea. Move onto the next paragraph.

Tuesday, April 24, 2007

Ali G Interviews James Baker

I guess this counts as another British comedy I enjoy.

How does you make countries do stuff you want?
Well the way you deal with countries in foreign policy issues - I think that's what you're asking me -
No doubt.
...is you deal with carrots and sticks.
But what country is gonna want carrots, even if there is like a million tons of carrots that you was giving over there?
Well "carrots," I'm not using that term literally. You might offering foreign aid to - money, okay? Money.
Money is better than carrots. Even if a country love carrots and that is like their favorite national food. If they get given like -
But don't get hung up on carrots. That's just a figure of speech.
So would you ever send carrots? You know, is there any situation -
No. No.
What about in a famine?
Carrots themselves? No.

Maybe what I don't like about British comedy is when it tries to be cheeky and clever. The ones I do like, I like because they're half-baked and asinine.

Stoicism Paper

The age old question undergrads must be asking themselves every semester (unless they're one of those know-it-all types): "How do I write a paper when I know jack shit about the topic?" So it goes for me and this Stoicism paper - which is pretty much representative of how I felt about the entire course. A blank "dunce" look would just sweep across my face whenever we started talking about Zeno and Chrysippus and Panaetius and preferred or dispreferred indifferents and the cosmopolis and the duties of our 4 personae, and later Seneca and Epictetus and Nero...

I guess my basic thesis statement is that all lot of the seeming incoherence of the Stoics' moral and political imperatives comes from the fact that (Cicero's account of) their doctrines does not take into consideration the reality that not everyone in the world is a sage.

So I'm reading up a bunch of articles that look like they might address the difference between the sage and non-sage: Gill, Schofield, Kidd, Annas. The conclusion? I still don't have the foggiest idea what I'm talking about. My research has made one thing, and only one thing, clear: that Stoicism will be promising fodder when the time comes for me to write a law school application - you know, in such a way that I don't look like I'm selling out. Especially because that's exactly what I'm doing.

All is NOT in vain! Hehe

What a Crazy Schizo

VJ just requested to be my facebook friend. Why do people seek out confrontation? Like it's not bad enough that I have to diss him out in real life, now he wants me to do it on the internet as well. For crying out loud. I should just get rid of my facebook account and start writing down people's birthdays on my calendar.

On a completely unrelated note, I have this weird mark on my face. At first I thought it was chocolate ice cream (I have a small child's enthusiasm for it, which sometimes leaves me with mustache marks), but it doesn't come off and that patch of skin is all dry and scaley. What the hell is it? I'd like to stop looking like I have food all over my face.

Monday, April 23, 2007

Current Audio

The Adicts
Bad Boy

The Motors
Dancing the Night Away

Jeeves and Wooster

Some of my colleagues started having these Jeeves and Wooster viewing parties. This is the first bit of British comedy I think I really enjoyed.

From episode 2.01, "The Cow Creamer":
Why wasn't Finknottle at dinner?
Perhaps he wasn't hungry.
I'm looking for him.
Oh, right. Well, any message if he should turn up?
Tell him I'm going to break his neck.
Break his neck, right. And uh, if he should ask why?
He knows why. Because he's a butterfly, who toys with women's hearts and throws them aside like soiled gloves.
Do butterflies do that?

From episode 2.02, "A Plan for Gussie":
You can't be a successful dictator AND design women's underclothing.
No sir.
One or the other. NOT both.

Sunday, April 22, 2007

Jokes

From tonight's episode of the Sopranos (my first):

What did the blind man say when he walked past the fish market?
Good evening, ladies.

A man comes home to his wife one day and gives her flowers. "I guess this means I have to open my legs tonight," she says. "Why? You don't have a vase?"

There were a hatful more, but I'll have to wait until someone posts them on imdb before I can retrieve them. Because I can't retrieve them from my memory. Besides the grandpa jokes,it was actually a pretty touching episode about becoming old and irrelevant. Going from big shot to Depends and medication, or possible getting whacked because growing old by yourself makes you lonely, and you start talking too much.

Dueling Pianos

Last Thursday, I had my first experience with the dueling piano bar - a bona fide Michigan institution, I'm told. For those of you have have never been, it's basically all request live music, mostly Elton John-type stuff because the musicians play piano (2, in fact; hence the dueling) and sometimes drums. But we gave them hell for our money, requesting things like Motorhead and Joy Division, which proved to be too much of a challenge.

I just thought of an even more perfect challenge a minute ago, while I was in the shower: I should have requested some Paula Abdul! "Forever Your Girl" would have been wonderful!...and I may never have the chance to request it again.

Saturday, April 21, 2007

Senioritis, Again

Here's one theory as to why I can't focus: for some time now I've actually stopped listening to music. I just now realized it. It must have happened around the time I was having internet troubles. Replacing that minor distraction with a major one (celebrity gossip) might have been a fatal move, because instead of working for long periods with less concentration, I have the 100% boredom which I can't endure, and so I just get up and do something else.

Of course, the more likely theory is that I'm simply getting dumber.

Youth Youth Youth

Here's another little quote from my bathroom reading (= TransWorld Surf, March 2007):

"You don't need me to tell you that we live in a youth-driven culture. Its a fact that pervades every level of our consciousness. We fight an un-winnable war against aging like no other society in the world ever has. We're more scared of growing old and irrelevant than of terrorism, grizzly bears, and dying in fiery car wrecks all put together..."

So you think you know what you're in for, and you grip yourself to face it, and stay relevant as best you can. Trouble is, the loss of youth turns out to be a little different from what you thought it would be. For example, I always thought that growing old would mean that I'd at least be getting wiser. I guess I defined my expectations too broadly. It's true that I have more perspective and information to work with, but I never dreamed in a thousand years that I'd be trading in a bunch of other wisdom stuff, like say stamina, concentration, and a long attention span. Who knew that even certain properties of smartness were doomed to our past? Like it's not bad enough that we have to lose our prettiness, innocence, health, etc. We also become more dumb.

Juniors and seniors used to warn me about this when I was a freshman: "yeah, I used to work like you too, but at a certain point your body just refuses, and you have to go to bed by 2." I didn't really take this insight to heart. It's true that I don't sleep 3 hour nights anymore (they've been upped to about 5, plus weekends), and I have enough discipline to get through a fully functioning day (actually a lot better than my narcoleptic college days). But amazingly, I think my productivity has gone down drastically. I used to think nothing of doing classes and activities and other homework all day, and starting my Greek at midnight and going until I was done at 5. I mean, that's like a good 8-10 hours of SOLID WORK that I used to pack in every day, at least. Now I feel like I'm lucky if I get in 4. I mean, I sit at a desk for about 8 hours, but my concentration levels are so low that I can't sit in one place for longer than 2 hours at a time. And once I get up from my desk, it becomes even harder to resume work. As a result, I usually have very little to show for a day's work. I really miss those days when I hardly even noticed the long stretches of pure labor, and without interruption.

Old age. Senioritis. God, I wonder if I'm EVER going to feel like I'm kicking ass again.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

Thank You for Smoking

What a god-awful movie. It's not often that I find myself agreeing with Plato about censoring art for its morally objectionable content. But this one counts. It doesn't help that nothing else about it was particularly well done either, except for cutie-pie Adam Brody's 5-minute cameo, so what I remember most is that represents everything in this world that I find repellent...well, everything except for insects and serial killers.

Speaking of serial killers, there's another example to Plato's view that we should censor immoral art: John Wayne Gacy's oil paintings. When I read that the buyer of most of those pieces immediately burned them upon acquisition, I found myself giving a hearty nod of assent: I don't want that stuff on the same plane of existence as me. But one of the problems that Plato's censorship poses is, who gets to decide what art is acceptable? how do you pick your morality police? In the Gacy example, I think the answer is easy: anyone who has the means and inclination should be allowed to destroy those paintings.

Of course, some people might feel the same way about Tennessee Williams' plays, which I generally consider to be gems. But then, those "gems" tend to be the more famous plays. There are others, lesser known, that have to do with cannibalism and shit (Summer and Smoke I think is the one that made it most to the mainstream; but there is at least one other, whose name escapes me, that has the same cannibalism theme, except complicated by more disturbing class/race/sexuality power issues). Even I, the most ardent Williams reader, don't find that much to like in a play like that. Hence the censorship problem.

I just looked up the title: it's a short story called "Desire and the Black Masseur." Unforgettably sick.

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Sick Interest

Don't ask me why I did it, because I don't even know, but yesterday I got this morbid fascination with serial killers, particularly Jeff Dahmer. I really wish I could erase that information from my head, because I hate gore and violence and horror almost as much as I hate hairy-legged, compound-eyed insects. Okay, I admit I could never hate anything as much as insects...my true, irrational phobia.

Anyways, a lot of the Dahmer stuff of the early 90s was new to me because I was, thankfully, shielded from that mess when it went down. Full-time necrophiliac, part-time cannibal. Eegh. But what really got me mad was the story of one of his victims, a 14-year-old Asian kid named Konerak Sinthasomphone. Look it up, it's infuriating. Sinthasomphone was one of the lucky victims who managed to escape between the time Dahmer drugged him and was about to kill him. Two black women found him wandering the streets, naked and injured, so they took him to the police. He didn't know much English, plus he was drugged, and plus his advocates were black, so the police totally didn't question Dahmer's story when he came in to claim the boy, saying that he was his 19-year-old boyfriend who got drunk, and they got in a fight. Against the protests of all the people of color involved, including the victim, the police drove Sinthasomphone back to the killer's apartment, where he was promptly strangled as soon as the police left.

If the police hadn't been so racist and homophobic, they would have found any one of these things to be extremely suspicious:
- that the boy was a minor
- that Dahmer was a registered sex offender
- that there was a bad smell in the apartment, and a dead body (victim #12) in the bedroom
- that there were photographs of other dismembered bodies all around the apartment
- that there were body parts in the refrigerator, acid vats, and formaldehyde jars, and skulls lying around

And now I come to the worst part of the story: the cops who delivered this poor kid straight into the hands of his killer are totally thriving now! They initially lost their jobs for their misconduct, but they appealed the firing, got REINSTATED WITH BACKPAY, and were voted OFFICERS OF THE YEAR by the union for fighting for their jobs. One of the cops, John Balcerzak, was elected PRESIDENT OF THE MILWAUKEE POLICE ASSOCIATION in 2005, got criticized for incompetence/injustice, put to a recall in a 2006 election ballet, and beat back the recall by a 209 to 397 vote. It's like he's being rewarded for his assholism with more publicity.

As for the family of the victim, the last news story I found reported that they were likely to settle out of court their case against the police department's racism and homophobia (and I think they should've added to that, reckless incompetence). The sum of the settlement looks like it was $850K.

Talk about fucking injustice. No wonder everyone in the world is angry.

I really, really wish I could give back that information I put into my head. I'm so disturbed.

Coincidence

About two hours before we heard about the shooting story, I had a conversation with one of my colleagues about leaving grad school.

"I understand what you're feeling. I fucking hate this place - I HATE it! Sometimes I just want to pack a U-Haul full of TNT and drive it up State St. and be like, C-ya!"
"Hell, if I had a U-Haul, I'd take all my stuff and leave this shithole town in the dust."

It's always there, even in non-violent temperaments. Most of us just don't act out on it because we happen not to be sociopaths. But I can understand the anger. It's true that people suck. I kind of wish that Cho didn't illegitimate the righteous anger of all other Korean-Americans, by going crazy, but I'd be a hypocrite if I said his freak-out was groundless. And it's not even a race thing in America, it's everyone: check it out, my interlocutor above was a white guy. But you know how it is, the media circus is already starting to make this about race (it was the first thing I heard about the identity of the shooter), and for the next few years Koreans aren't going to be allowed to so much as frown without getting shifty-eyed looks from people. Damn. The world is such a hard, hateful place. And, I didn't even get my free ice-cream cone yesterday.

Monday, April 16, 2007

Free Cone Day!

@ Ben and Jerry's, April 17 from noon to 8pm. Hooray!

MST3K: The Girl in Gold Boots

Gold boots, gold star! The best bad-editing job of EVER.

Friday, April 13, 2007

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

If I stay there could be trouble. But, on the other hand, if I go it could be double.

Damn! I'm so confused now. As I expected, once I say I'm leaving, people start telling me that things CAN change. So why do I find myself believing it? It's like those mail-in rebates, I should know by now that people will say anything right up until the point of sale, and then it's like, C-ya! No wait, it's more like those abused spouses who keep going back for more because the wifebeater is like, Babe, I swear I've changed! Right, because I've already fallen for that line once, when I was visiting as a prospective.

What's different this time is that I talked with my mentor, and he started suggesting solutions, and soothed my ego with protests that I'm too talented to quit...

Ah, vanity.

The bigger doubt is, as ever, that I'm being too easy a quitter.

Here's a crazy factoid I learned today (from one of the profs I talked to): the main guy who really lobbied for me to come here was...drum roll...VJ's mentor! Oh, the irony! Plus, it hardly makes sense. He does Roman and history, and I do Greek and literature. I was told that his adopted Chinese daughter gives him a soft spot for the advancement of Asian American women, but Jesus Christ! it's funny to think that that could inspire such fierce loyalty.

Thursday, April 12, 2007

Ah, Loneliness

I'm like an infant, I can't stand to spend two days by myself. I suppose this happens whenever I have a prolonged illness, but this one isn't all that prolonged. I think it has more to do with the scaffolding of my world coming undone. Nothing seems real. That's probably why I got sick in the first place, because I suddenly lost all sense of purpose - you know, like the way people keep their adrenaline going through finals and get sick once break starts. To make matters worse, my voice is nearly gone, so I can't call people up on the phone.

On a brighter note, I have awesome friends. I'm not even sure I did anything to deserve them. I'm actually a little surprised that more people haven't questioned my sanity or called me a quitter; and those are the thoughts that worry me the most. Instead I've been getting GIFTS (you know who you are!) and invitations to complain even more. It's pretty amazing.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

So Sick

Perfecto. Cough, laryngitis, puking, coooooold. Woe is fucking me. I know now that the only reason I had a relatively healthy month/year is because I still had the will to live. Someone, take me out of this suburban nightmare!

Sunday, April 08, 2007

Change of Subject

Ha, gotcha! I'm not going to change the subject, cuz there's only one thing on my mind. But here's a different way of talking about it. It has the advantage of paying homage to Ciara, of whom I'm always in awe.

Saturday, April 07, 2007

Beyond Checked Out

It was an out of body experience: I was hanging out with some friends today and it made me realize that I wasn't coming back to grad school next year. I had it in my head that I was going to try to resolve this conflict and see what happens, but even though my head was on the fence, my heart was no longer here. It made me feel very sad and alone. It felt like I was saying good bye to the friends here, I couldn't get excited about the plans and projects they were excited about, and I almost couldn't even hate on the people I normally hate because I'm now expelled from the community and no longer have the right. This is why all the power problems in academia remain intact despite hundreds of years of social progress: by the time a problem gets bad enough that you have to do something about it, you've lost all the enthusiam necessary for putting up a fight. But I have to remember that it's worth fighting for. Even if it's only so that I can prove to myself that I'm not an easy quitter, that this isn't just an accidental bump in the road, but a deep poison in my well. If I don't see it through to the end, I'll always wonder if I just had a paranoid freak-out for a few weeks, and what seemed to me to be the poison in my well was actually just a little pee in my pool.

Message from God

I just got one of those mass emails from one of my senior colleagues:

"I'm extremely desperate for summer employment (and employment after summer, but that's another matter). I got a job as a overnight parking lot attendant, which is a really pathethic use of a PhD. If anyone knows of anything, please let me know."

Thursday, April 05, 2007

My Dad's Advice

Don't overthink it. Do what I have to do when I feel I have to do it, like the way I eat when I'm hungry. When it becomes impossible, stop and walk away.

Wednesday, April 04, 2007

HOW Many Times Is This Now?

I've lost track of all the shafts I got this year. The latest? Remember that Great Books job that I worked really hard to get? AFTER I get it my department tells me that, oh nevermind what I had going on, they would prefer I teach Latin instead. They just can't stand to see me happy. After like the 12th time, it gets hard to believe that they're really not out to get me.

The alleged reason is that they want to have all the younger grad students teach Latin next year. News flash: by next year, I'm not that young anymore. I'm right at the middle. So that's obviously bogus. I'm meeting with the fellowship advisor tomorrow, so maybe I'll get a hint about what the real reason is. No doubt it's simply that they can't stand to see me happy.

Now is the time to draw the line in the sand. I came across a useful quote from Jayne Mansfield today: "If you're going to do something wrong, do it big, because the punishment is the same either way."

Yeah, really. I've gotten preemptively punished, so what do I have to lose?

The Girl Can't Help It (movie)

Initially I was interested in this movie because I'm doing a research project about camp and kitsch, and my professor lent me a book called The Encyclopedia of Bad Taste. One of the entries was Jayne Mansfield. Which meant that I HAD to watch one of her movies, after that: how could I resist the "poor man's Marilyn Monroe" especially after I've been promised that she's campy to boot? I just went with the one Netflix recommended to me the most...and boy, was I in for an impressive surprise! It was actually a ROCK N' ROLL MUSICAL. Like the beach party movies (contributing, I'm sure, to Mansfield's camp affliations), with all that meaningless singing, barely explained by the plot. so that sometimes you can't tell if you just turned on a 50s MTV. But anyways, it was delightful: Little Richard, the Platters, Fats Domino, and lots more. In particular I liked Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps.

Jayne Mansfield's body is ridiculous. A single boob and a single butt-cheek are each bigger than her whole waist! You know she feels the pain of it too, because she looks positively crippled when she walks.

Monday, April 02, 2007

Quotes on Kitsch

Baudelaire: "What is so intoxicating about bad taste is the aristocratic pleasure of being displeased."
Rostand: "Beauty, in art, is frequently only controlled ugliness."
Duchamp: "Good taste is the greatest enemy of art."
Wilde: "Art itself is really a form of exaggeration; and selection, which is the very spirit of art, is nothing more than an intensified mode of over-emphasis."

Sunday, April 01, 2007

Problematic

Can't stop eating. Good thing another cold spell is on the way (ie, sartorial necessities).

Glass Ceiling

I heard that there's a guy in my department who's been saying douchey things like, "We the grad students refuse to go to any more of the lectures because there have been too many commitments lately and it's unreasonable." I'm not saying he's wrong or anything, except that by "we the grad students" he really meant "I, Mike Sampson" (he's the grad student rep), since this is not anything we grad students discussed collectively - and I happen to know that it's a jab at those of us who didn't host during prospectives weekend, unlike schmucks like Mike Sampson, and he really wants to reminds how much woe is he. His complaint got passed along to the faculty, who were surprised: shouldn't the grad students be glad that our program is hosting this very prestigious lectures series, and welcome the learning experience? But because he's a dude and fits the "mold" (whatever that is; I just know it isn't me), he gets away with it! The faculty just nod and murmur, "oh okay," and he's excused from further obligations! Meanwhile I get back-stabbed, and a reputation for being uncooperative, just because I try to be conscientious and don't whine about my problems to people for whom it's none of their business . And because I'm a woman. Who is not a douchebag.

God, I'm so sick of this this system that rewards doucheyness. I guess I've been complaining about it for a good month now, but seriously: women's lib has got a long, long way to go. I'm just starting to realize how people can still bring you down even if it's institutionally not permitted.

Labels:

Champagne, Ramen, Nostalgia, Puzzlement

Friend's birthday party with a bottomless fount of champagne. Ramen twice in a week - my heart is hurting, I'm sure, with all the sodium. Nostalgia for those days when big rubbery platforms were in, so that even sneakers were high (enough to let you wear pants that were a bit too long for you) but didn't put you on an uncomfortable incline. Puzzlement over the A-/B+ grade I got on my last two prose composition assignments, after the B I got on the first one. I know for a fact that I forgot to translate a word altogether on the second assignment, because I was in such a hurry to leave for Canada that afternoon and I rushed through my homework. Not that I'm complaining or anything, but I get the feeling that he doesn't even read what we turn in.