I Saw the Figure Five in Gold

Annual Year-In-Review Survey

2011-01-02T12:49:00.000-08:00

As I'm sure you'll remember from last year, I've done one of these every year since 2003 or 2004. And here we go!

1. What did you do in 2010 that you'd never done before?: So much. Went to couples therapy. Discovered roller derby. Interviewed for an actual salaried position. Stayed in a hotel by myself. Kept a cooking blog. Larped. Had a play I wrote performed. Acted in a lead role. Joined a rock band. Directed a show.

2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
These were my resolutions for last year:
1. Keep up aikido regularly at least until I move. (Failed. Turned out neither of us liked it all that much.)
2. Make it back to swing dancing at least twice a month. (Succeeded, for as long as I was living in Champaign-Urbana.)
3. Apply for graduate school by December 15^th. (Succeeded!)
4. Find a job and activities in Chicagoland that will take my mind off of living in the suburbs again. (Became irrelevant.)

My resolutions for next year are as follows:

1. Be more athletic, specifically keeping up with roller derby and dance, but also getting out to exercise outside of these activities.

2. Put more effort into the relationships that matter to me, and particularly being more attentive and maintaining a better balance with Andy.

3. Have more direction to my life. Hopefully I’ll get accepted to grad school and make this easier, but I’d like to have something more concrete to aim for by this time next year.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?:
Not that I recall.

4. Did anyone close to you die?:
My grandfather.

5. What countries did you visit?:
Wisconsin?

6. What would you like to have in 2011 that you lacked in 2010?:
Further improved communication, to be more direct, an academic program to follow.

7. What dates from 2010 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?:
Most of it—it’s been a memorable year. Specific dates include the end of February (for various shit hitting the fan), July 15^th (moving day), October 8^th and 9^th (the weekend of Theatre Noir), October 22^nd (Whately larp), Thanksgiving and Christmas (last ones in my childhood home).

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?:
Partnering with Chris Snapp to pull off the Anarch City show—working as a playwright, director, assistant director, actor, production manager, costume mistress, and logo designer. It was more work than I thought I was capable of doing well, but one thing I keep finding out is that I haven’t yet hit the limit of the work I’m capable of doing well. Although there are lots of things we can do next time to make it less insanity-producing for both of us.

Also, getting in my grad school application. I think I’ve done things better this time around, and I’m excited to see how it turns out.

9. What was your biggest failure?:
Failures of communication, compassion, and integrity. I spent the first half of this year being much more thoughtless and self-absorbed than I realized, and it hurt some people about whom I care very deeply.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?:
Lots of stress-related stomach problems—I lost a borderline-unhealthy amount of weight that my cooking is now quickly packing back on. Other than that, a few colds.

11. What was the best thing you bought?:
Show props, derby gear, Saint-Germain, a pair of really cute boots.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?:
My family and friends, for pulling me through the rough patches when I could very easily have self-destructed. Andy, for tackling a host of new and thorny issues and for remaining constant.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?:
My own, in many instances. Also, that of the majority of Wisconsin voters. Seriously. SCOTT WALKER?!

14. Where did most of your money go?:
Rent, gas, food, bills, moving, the show.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?:
Moving, derby, seeing friends, Sprklfck (the band), my Epic interview, anniversushi.

16. What song will always remind you of 2010?:
Yoko Kanno “Be Human,” Billie Holliday “One For My Baby,” Tub Ring “Invalid,” JoCo “Still Alive,” Leonard Cohen “Famous Blue Raincoat,” Ludo “Skeletons On Parade,” Tim Minchin "Drowned" (and everything else he's written), all of the Sprklfck music

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
i. happier or sadder? Happier.
ii. thinner or fatter? Slightly thinner.
iii. richer or poorer? Poorer.

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?:
Working out, honest communication, self-examination.

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?:
Procrastinating and wasting time on the internet.

20. How will you spend Christmas?:
I spent Christmas morning making cinnamon rolls with Andy at our apartment, then went to work for four hours. Then Andy and I drove down to Cary, where we split the evening between his family and mine.

22. Did you fall in love in 2010?:
I continued to be in love.

23. How many one-night stands?:
None.

24. What was your favorite TV program?:
Sherlock, Community, QI, Doctor Who (perennially), lots of Food Network stuff.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?:
No.

26. What was the best book you read?:
I can’t possibly judge. I read so many good books this year. Among the best were The Blank Slate, Mansfield Park, Lying Awake, the Coldfire trilogy, The Secret Life of Words, jPod (a reread), and a few my therapist assigned me.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?:
The Flashbulb, Tub Ring, Yoko Kanno, rediscovering Cake, Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, the Eigenharp, that I can scream like a rockstar.

28. What did you want and get?:
To move to Madison, the show to go off successfully, my mother’s oak kitchen table, to find a way to save my grandmother’s piano, lots of kitchen equipment, blue hair, a second chance.

29. What did you want and not get?:
Lots of things, but most of which it turns out it’s better I didn’t get.

30. What was your favorite film of this year?:
The only one of this year’s films I saw was Inception, but I liked it pretty well.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?:
I turned 25. I went up to Madison with Ryan, went to a roller derby bout, drove back to Cary, had delicious birthday breakfast with Andy, stopped for an appointment, and drove back down to Urbana.

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?:
Foresight that’s as clear as hindsight.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2010?:

Blue hair and Chuck Taylors. Finally free of educator casual, I’m now going with eclectic weirdo.

34. What kept you sane?:
I stayed sane?

34a. Okay, what kept you less crazy?
Therapy, my family, my friends, and breakfast in bed.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?:
Kaylee from Firefly.

36. What political issue stirred you the most?:
The Wisconsin elections. FOR REAL, GUYS? TEA PARTY WACKJOBS?

37. Who did you miss?:
My father. Every day.

38. Who was the best new person you met?:
In alphabetical order, and I’m counting people with whom I was acquainted but who I really didn’t get to know until this year as new meetings: Ali, Brandon, the Brotherhood, Doug, Elise, Fauna, Gretchen, Jian, Ron, Ryan, the Sin family.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2010:
Don’t ever rest on your laurels. Thinking you’ve got everything figured out can lead you to become dangerously unobservant.

40. Quote a song lyric that describes the past year:
First half:

“Staying inside, lying in bed, noticing something that’s not there

Follow my heart, follow my head—I’ll follow anything that might get me somewhere…”

-Jonathan Coulton, “Big Bad World One”

Second half:

“The life I used to know when I was busy, always on the go

Left me with nothing to show

Now I feel that I can honestly say

I’m living a suitable life

I’m glad I finally got it right…”

-Of Montreal, “The Gay Parade”

Leave of Absence. Possibly.

2010-12-23T05:40:00.000-08:00

My blogging may be a little light this week. Before Christmas, every waking moment will be spent finishing up the insanely ambitious volume of knitting I have (as usual) taken on for holiday gifts. After Christmas, I'll be helping my mother pack up her house and thus sequestered from internet. So happy holidays, everyone.

Trip Report Tuesday: A Brief Catalogue of Awesome

2010-12-21T21:33:00.000-08:00

This is going to be a whirlwind trip report for two reasons. One-- it's late and I am the sort of tired and stupid that comes along with having a head cold. Two (and this is the best kind of reason) I've accomplished so many awesome things in the past two weeks that I can't explain them all in detail. The highlights are as follows:

First and foremost, I completed and sent in my graduate school application. Given that six weeks ago I was worrying this wouldn't even be possible this year, I'm pretty proud of that.

Today marks three years of the First Mate and I making things work, despite and because of our many differences. I love you, Andy, and I'm thoroughly amazed you still put up with me.

After years of reflecting wistfully on how much I loved having blue hair in college, I've dyed my hair blue again. Because I wanted to, damn it, and I don't need a better reason than that.

I determined to go out for the roller derby rec league as my project for January.

Most astonishingly for long-time readers of this blog, I finally did that which I considered might not even be humanly feasible: I finished the Rasputin Sock. After having to undo and redo it about seven times, I held my breath as I bound off the last stitches, thinking that I was inviting some sort of meteoric apocalypse. But no, the sock is done and the earth is still standing.

Karma Has Something To Say on Etymology Monday

2010-12-20T15:37:00.000-08:00

This is what I get, dear readers, for missing two weeks of updates-- karmic punishment in a truly painful method. I signed on to write a post about one of my favorite words, "ignominious," and as with all of my Etymology Monday entries I appealed first to my holy of holies, the OED online. I was shocked to find that the entire site had been redesigned, but the full horror of the situation did not become apparent until I tried to log in and was confronted with a request for my e-mail address.

I have a confession to make. My access to the OED is not strictly on the up-and-up. As far as it is concerned, I am a student at a small British girls' school, and I have a login and password that keeps up this charade. I do not, however, have an e-mail address to correspond with it.

Oh, loud were my lamentations when I contemplated a future without the Oxford English Dictionary at my fingertips! Great was my woe as I considered having to stoop to dictionary.com! I was about to begin the gnashing of teeth and the rending of garments when I found the regular login screen again, merely moved to a slightly different link. Crisis averted, but a doleful reminder of the sorts of things that can happen if I ever cease my vigilance.

"Ignominious," by the way, is a simply marvelous word. It is formed upon ignominy, which comes from the Latin negative prefix in- added to gnomen, meaning name or reputation. An ignominious man, then, is in such shame and disgrace that he has un-named himself. Mentioned in the definition is another marvelous word, obloquy, coming from Latin roots meaning "to speak against" (ob- + loqui, "to speak.") In Middle English it became mingled with "obliquity," which is connected with "oblique" as in angles, but is also figuratively used to mean "divergence from right conduct or thought; perversity, aberration; an instance of this, a fault, an error." The current definition is acknowledged to be an admixture of both.

To Quote Half Man Half Biscuit: It's Cliche To Be Cynical at Christmas

2010-12-05T22:14:00.000-08:00

I have a confession to make. I'm feeling merry.

I know, I know. I'm supposed to be ironically un-festive. I went to an ugly sweater party and I have a Flying Spaghetti Monster tree topper, so I'm doing my part. I have to admit, though, that the holiday radio station is on in my car and I made a special effort to decorate the apartment and put up a tree. I was even positively giddy at the first big snowfall on Saturday, despite the fact that it took me half an hour to dig my car out to go to work.

Now, some people are Christmas People. They have perfect cards with perfect photographs that are always out by December 15th. They own Santa hats and wear them to work. They have special Christmas hand towels which guests are not actually supposed to use. They visit the Christmas village displays in the back of Hallmark regularly during the spring and summer to get their Christmas fix. I'm not that kind of Christmas person. Previously, I've treated the holiday with typical irreverence, making the usual sneering remarks about rampant materialism and maudlin nostalgia. Now that my mother has sold the house in which I grew up and my siblings have scattered across the country, I'm realizing that it's unlikely that we'll have another family Christmas, and it's making me more wistful than I anticipated.

It's not as if I'm bereft. The First Mate has a large and inclusive family who has welcomed me for holidays for years, and I'll be celebrating this one with them. I'm working Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, though, and when I first found out I was kind of at a loss. I've never been away from my family on Christmas Eve. Then I had one of those adult moments that keep sneaking up on me. I am my family, I realized. I don't need to latch on to someone else's conventions. I can make up my own traditions, and I can be filled with good cheer if I goddamn well want to. And, I have decided, I do. Despite the carnival of consumerism (which I deplore) and the religious background (which I'm moving beyond) I genuinely like the Christmas season. People are actively encouraged to celebrate the things they appreciate about each other and to be kinder to their fellows, and who doesn't need more of that? Also, everything is twinkly and I am easily entertained.

I trimmed a tree and listened to the Vandals singing "Oi To The World," I'm being closer to the people I care about, and I will wake up Christmas morning to fresh raisin bread, my family of cats and boyfriend, and a city full of my dearest friends. What better gift could I get?

I Am Having Way Too Much Fun With The Text-To-Movie Platform

2010-12-02T21:50:00.000-08:00

I present to you: How Not To Chat Up A Linguist.

Etymology Monday: For Extremely Large Values of Monday

2010-12-01T20:50:00.000-08:00

I've talked about English words I love, and English words I miss, and words in other languages that English should take on. Today on EMonday (I'm never allowed to call it that again) let's go one step farther and make up some English words?

I had a head start on this with "gymnosophy" (see the sidebar), but I was reminded of the subject by a conversation with some friends of mine a couple of months ago. One of them expressed dismay that English had no succinct word for "so bad it's good" and invited the rest of us to coin such a word. Another friend contributed "flawesome" and it has somewhat stuck. Sure, it's punny, but it's also pretty evocative. You know flawesome when you see it. MegaShark vs. Giant Octopus was a flawesome movie. 80s cartoons are pretty flawesome if you try to watch them now. The invention of Whisquila was a high point in flawesome science. (As a friend of mine described it: "Whisquila! For when you absolutely, positively have to wake up in jail!")

There are plenty of concepts for which English lacks a pithy word, and I urge you, dear readers, to submit them to me. Perhaps I will compile a Figure Five dictionary. From the First Mate comes bananosity ("the intensity of banana flavor in a food item, with, for example, a typical bread rating at approximately .67 bn and "banana" Laffy Taffy approaching 3 Kbn, and a banana itself given a value of 1 bn.") He also contributes cuddlinary, "of or pertaining to the act of preparing food with a lover, spouse, or other romantic partner as a means of emotional bonding." Now it's your turn! Leave your words and definitions in the comments.

The Triumph of No-Cynicism November

2010-11-28T21:30:00.000-08:00

Hello again, everyone. I hope you've all had as excellent of a holiday as I have. I ate more food than I should reasonably have been able to fit inside me, luxuriated in the company of good people, played the piano for hours and hours, and basically worried very little about most things. It was bliss, and exactly what I needed.

I say "most things" because of the nerve-wracking adventure Toshi had over the weekend. The First Mate and I left our abode on Thursday afternoon for our suburban hometown, where our parents live down the street from each other and have done for almost twenty years. My laptop bag came down in the first wave of packing the car, and I was sure it had been loaded when we left. Much to my chagrin, upon unpacking the car Toshi was nowhere to be found. We texted the landlord to let him know to look for it, but that was about all we could do from out of state. The First Mate insisted that he didn't remember me taking it down at all, and reassured me that Toshi was probably still in the apartment.

Upon our return home, we discovered that Toshi was not. A call to the landlord and the building manager confirmed that no one had turned anything in. The cynical thing would be to assume that the bag was stolen from the parking lot while we were bringing down the second load, and I have to admit that's the first thing I did assume. But I made "MISSING" posters anyway and went to post them in the hallways.

The three teenage boys who lived downstairs laughed at me when they read what I was putting up. "Ain't nobody going to return no laptop. It's not missing. C'mon. It's stolen. Somebody took it and you're not going to get it back." I told them that I knew that was probably true, but I had to try. It's a million to one chance, yes, but on that one chance I don't have to buy a new laptop, right?

Just then one of the apartment doors swung open. "Pardon me, did you say you lost a laptop?" The woman who lived there brought out my briefcase with Toshi still safely inside. "I found it in the parking lot and I didn't know whose it was." I was so happy I could have hugged her; in fact I think she was a little bit taken aback that I called her my hero and promised to bake her cookies. As I took Toshi back upstairs I said as I passed the openmouthed boys, "YOU SEE!? Sometimes people are good!"

Sometimes they are. Thank you, woman who lives downstairs, for restoring both my laptop and my faith in humanity.

Today, WTF Means "What (I'm) Thankful For"

2010-11-24T23:26:00.000-08:00

First, you should know that I'm going to my mother's for Thanksgiving, and my mother, as I've mentioned, doesn't have an internet connection. I'll try to track one down somewhere for Thursday and Friday, but dear reader, I make no promises. If I don't manage to post, rest assured I'll return on Saturday just as full of wit, nerd rage, and non sequiturs as I ever was.

It is, of course, the season, and since it fit my acronym I found it doubly appropriate to say a few words about the things for which I'm thankful. I'll get the obvious, schmoopy one out of the way first. I am incalculably grateful for the people in my life. I have a joyous collection of some of the best, truest, most caring, most clever friends I could imagine. I have a First Mate who challenges, supports, and inspires me (and whom I made laugh until he cried earlier this evening, and I am proud even though I suspect it was laughing-at and not laughing-with. OKAY I LIKED LOVE ACTUALLY SHURRUP.) I have a close-knit, warm, accepting family that actually delights in each other's company. I have three cats who are generous with the snuggles. Truly, life could not be more full of wonderful characters.

I am thankful for sprklfck, which is too cool for vowels. (This being, for those who don't know, the nascent glam-punk spectacle band for which I provide vocals.) It's exciting to learn a new genre and to collaborate creatively with talented people. Practice always makes me feel like I am ten ninjas. There's nothing better than getting to hang out and play music with people you love. (Except perhaps spontaneously meowing the entirety of "Bohemian Rhapsody" en masse.)

I am thankful for the encouragement I've received in the past month as I struggle to get over the academic hump once and for all. I've found strength in the most unlikely of places, and from people I was at first afraid to approach. I love having my aimless paranoia proven wrong.

I'm thankful for the large collection of music I have at my disposal. For the past few weeks I've always been able to find the perfect song for the moment, and it made each of those moments that much more poignant or epic or hilarious. I'm also thankful for all of the people who are willing to share their favorites and keep my library expanding.

I'm thankful for coffee, without the near-constant consumption of which I would probably not have the sterling performance record I currently maintain at work.

I'm thankful to be living in a place I enjoy. I'm thankful for the university and the culture it brings with it, for the eco-conscious and socially conscientious people who live here, for the view as I take John Nolen into downtown, for the free zoo and the arboretum and the botanic gardens and the capitol square. I'm thankful for the good beer and the good cheese and the fact that this state gave us Russ Feingold, the Dictionary of American Regional English, Summerfest, and my mother's partner.

I'm thankful for Anarch City. I'm thankful to have poured myself into a creative project and to have it actually pay off. I'm thankful for the fantastic education I receive by working with Chris and with the cast and with the crew. I'm thankful to have proof that the question "What would you do if you assumed you could?" has fewer limits than I ever imagined it might.

I'm thankful for a host of other things, too; among them are Iron Chef, summer grills, having a real vacuum, the Inferno, Saint-Germain elderflower liqueur, Daft Punk doing the soundtrack to the new Tron, the dolmades at Husnus, CSO comp tickets, my car continuing to work, swing dancing in town, the library, The Flashbulb's new album "Arboreal," the fact that someone has uploaded QI to YouTube, friends who know computers, the wealth of ethnic restaurants in town. I am floored by how much I have to be grateful for. I hope you all find yourself in a similar position this Thanksgiving. Thank you for reading.

Trip Report Tuesday: Lightning Round!

2010-11-23T21:03:00.000-08:00

Please do not take this unnecessarily terse trip report as an indication that I'm dissatisfied with my progress this week. I'm about to succumb to a massive food coma and am not in the mood to write much. I'm actually still pretty proud of myself, though. Today I met with a professor and have two of my letters of recommendation sewn up. This looks more likely to work out with every step I take toward it.

Next week's goal: talking to people I've been putting off talking to. Acquaintances I haven't quite gotten the nerve to invite out. Friends I owe apologies or explanations. Thank-you notes I forgot to write. Administrators for test scores and transcripts and whatnot. Wish me luck.

Etymology Monday: True Colors

2010-11-22T22:09:00.000-08:00

When I was just a wee nerdling, I had a lot of trouble sleeping, and I'd usually have to read myself down. (I still do, especially if I'm feeling sick or hungover.) One of my favorite things to do was to page through an ancient dictionary of the thousand most commonly used English words. At least, that's what I remember it being, although I can't remember the publisher or find it on Amazon. At any rate, I was fascinated by the way they defined colors.

What does it mean, to define a color? When you think about it, it's a pretty difficult task. There's the technical definition, of course-- red being light of a wavelength between 700 and 635 nm, etc. -- but that means very little in practical terms. The most common way is to describe it in reference to an object that is that color, as, for instance, the OED defines blue as "of the colour of the sky and the deep sea; cerulean," and then in the second definition, "Said of the colour of smoke, vapour, distant hills, steel, thin milk." First of all, I understand how "blue" refers to each of these things, but I wouldn't say that any of them are definitively blue. Second, of course, is the problem of all self-referential definitions; it depends on the ability to perceive and identify the color blue, and anyone who cannot will never understand it. No blind person will ever get an accurate sense of color by looking it up in the dictionary, and no one with chromatic vision would need to. Who, then, are these definitions written for? I got the sense, reading them, that they were written for the pleasure of the lexicographer. They are richly associative and often, as in the case of the OED's rhapsody on blue, surprisingly poetic.

Where do the color words themselves come from? In blue's case, it is glossed in the OED as "a common Romanic word," and also a Germanic one, so it seems that different forms of the stem were borrowed into English from different languages depending on the period. In some languages, the root meant "yellowish-grey," and the etymological entry in the OED suggests that color names were fairly fluid. The roots of blue all seem mainly to have meant "the color blue," but in the case of green, it comes from the same Old Teutonic root which gave us "grow," equating the color with its predominant appearance in nature. Both green and red are among the earliest Old English words, and red traces all the way back to Sanskrit (and, I imagine, Indo-European before it) and shares roots with "rust" and "ruddy." Black is described as "a word with a difficult history"; the entry goes on to say that, fascinatingly, the word "black" and a word meaning "shining, white" were in Middle English nearly identical-- "often distinguishable only by the context, and sometimes not even by that." Orange is a comparatively recent (1300s) loan from French, and pink came to us later still (1500s); before borrowing these words, "red" was used for these shades as well. Purple was also originally red, or rather, it was a particular shade of red dye obtained from the shellfish purpura and used to denote high-ranking officials. Yellow, also ancient, appears to derive from an Indo-European root which also gave us "gold" and "gall" (the yellow bile of humorism.)

I used to find a peculiar comfort in reading these definitions, and now, revisiting them, I still do. They are small sensual moments in the middle of the technical and self-important dictionary bluster, reminders of the intimate connection between word and world.

No Obligations

2010-11-21T20:22:00.000-08:00

My weekend has been wonderfully full of music. After the CSO concert I stayed at my mother's and spent the whole afternoon playing the piano. In the car on the way back home I sang along to all my Chicago Masters Singers repertoire. I need more classical music in my life.

I've been too busy living my life to blog about it today. That's a good thing, isn't it? My mother and I had a long talk over homemade bread this afternoon, part of which was a discussion of obligation. Do what you are passionate about, says my mother, and don't do a thing because you feel like you ought to if it doesn't speak to you in any other way. In that light, I've honestly got nothing else to say. I'll talk to all of you tomorrow.

Unplugged

2010-11-20T07:26:00.000-08:00

I have a most delightful weekend ahead of me, but it's going to leave me out of reach of wireless connection until mid-Sunday, so I thought I'd jot a quick note this morning just so I wouldn't have missed a day. My best friend's husband works for the CSO, and he has quite obligingly gotten the four of us (including the First Mate) comp tickets for Beethoven's 4th piano concerto tonight. I'll be traveling to Chicago right after work and staying with my mother, who lives nearby. My mother does not have an internet connection. Or TV or a landline, for that matter.

Now, I went a month without my own internet connection when we moved, and it was one of the most frustrating months in my recent memory. Sure, I missed my daily memefeed, and since most social gatherings are arranged very quickly over facebook I also missed a lot of those, but the worst part was I hadn't quite realized how used I had gotten to having instantaneous access to collective human knowledge. Okay, I've always got access to books, which are the more permanent dissemination thereof, but I-- and a lot of my generation, most likely-- have come to view Google search as an extension of our own memory. I don't know what, say, the chief export of Bolivia is, but I can ask the metamind, as my friends usually put it, and that's just as good, isn't it?

Well, no, frankly, it isn't. For the next two days that storehouse of experience to which I catch myself feeling entitled will be inaccessible. It doesn't bother me not to be immediately able to, say, produce a list of the major exports of Bolivia, but when I struggle with questions like "How do I get downtown?" or "How long do you boil an egg?" or "What was on the program of the concert I went to on my 21st birthday?" I know I'm in trouble. And, of course, without a blog audience I'm going to have to corner people and talk rapidly at them, and that never works out as well.

Have a good weekend, metamind. I wish I knew how to quit you.

Short Fiction Friday: "Eight Minutes," Part 2

2010-11-19T17:53:00.000-08:00

For the previous part, go here.

Once I got past the strange-woman-in-my-apartment panic, I had to admit she didn’t look threatening. She actually looked vaguely like me, with a round face, unkempt kinky hair, and Buddy Holly glasses. She was probably a few years older, though, and had a weary, defeated air about her. She wore an oversized man’s shirt, a sloppy patchwork skirt, and sneakers. There was a pencil poked behind her ear, and she carried a small, worn notebook in one hand. I motioned for her to sit down and cautiously laid the shard of glass on the bedside table.

“There. Happy? I’m only going to ask you one more time: who are you and what are you doing here? I can have the cops here in five minutes, just so you know. You’d better talk faster than that.”

She rolled her eyes again. “I’d be gone before then, not that it would matter. I already told you why I’m here. I don’t owe you any more explanation than that. I don’t even really owe you an explanation at all. Nobody else is getting one. You should count yourself lucky, Cady-me-girl.”

“What do you mean you don’t owe me an explanation? Who’s trespassing on whose property here? And how do you know my name?”

She sighed. “I’m Abby. I’m the writer.”

“I don’t know any writers.” Actually, I was pretty sure that one of the twins had dated a writer once, but I thought she was the one in jail. Or had she killed herself? I could never keep the twins’ lovers straight.

“I mean, the writer. Your writer. I created you, and Zillah, and the twins, and all of this.”

Great, a crazy. Just what I needed at—I checked the alarm clock— four in the morning. What I couldn’t figure out was how she’d gotten in. I triple-bolted the door and locked it with a chain every night; you can’t be too careful in a city like this, and after my sister was assaulted last fall, I wasn't about to take my chances. My windows were well off the ground, and I couldn't see this woman climbing hand-over-hand up a fire escape. Oh well. I’d let the police handle it once I’d gotten her the hell out of here.

“So write yourself into a straightjacket. I'm calling 911.”

She rolled her eyes. “Ever the skeptic. I suppose you're going to want the dramatic make-me-a-Ferrari take-me-to-Prague type of proof, aren't you. You'll have to settle for this: Your name is Cady Huffington. You're twenty-five, left-handed, allergic to latex, and not a real redhead. You have a sister named Trina and parents from whom you are estranged. Your ex-girlfriend Zillah put every picture of the two of you in a shoebox in her closet when she moved out, and she is at this moment trying to decide whether to burn the box or to look through it and cry. You are currently wracked with guilt at the secret crush you've had on the short barista with the pierced lip at Starbucks and wondering if Zillah had somehow guessed. Don't worry, she didn't. Your best friends, Leo and Lucas, are identical twins who are currently hospitalized after a life-threatening car accident. They'll pull through just fine, but one of them is about to be diagnosed with leukemia. If there were time, the other one would agonize about overcoming his fear of surgery so he could donate his bone marrow, but I guess they dodged that bullet, at least. Your dearest dream as a child was to be on the Gong Show, you always put your left sock on first, and you have an endearing habit of mispronouncing the word ‘ricochet.’ Also, you are pregnant after all. Congratulations. There, you satisfied?”

I gaped, not sure what to say. She must have taken my silence for incredulity. “You sure are a hard sell,” she said, with the eye-roll again. “Here. I'll clean up the glass for you.” She thumbed through the notebook for a moment, then took the pencil from behind her ear and erased a few lines. The broken glass on the floor disappeared. “That do it, Miss Doubting Thomas?”

Meaningful And (Possibly) Unknown

2010-11-18T22:16:00.000-08:00

A cherished friend of mine who blogs at Olyphant poses this challenge: "in the further interest of self-finding and self-making known, i’m going to list five things you probably don’t know about me that are meaningful to me. i haven’t planned what i’m going to say; this is as much about me figuring out what i care about yet keep back as anything else." She goes on to exhort all of her readers to do so too. So I am.

It's rough for me to know where to begin here. In a lot of ways I fear that I already habitually disclose too much about myself. Frequently, however, people who spend a fair bit of time with me confess that I'm kind of baffling to them, which leads to:

1) I think I'm more rational than I am. There's a huge disparity in how well I feel I'm communicating my viewpoint and how clear it is to other people. I believe this is due to my unfounded trust that I'm, at the core, a fairly logical person when in reality I'm nothing of the sort. I tend to assume that my feelings are written all over my face and that my motives are pretty transparent, but when I'm far enough removed from the situation to gain some perspective, I realize that I jumped to all kinds of neurotic conclusions. Even those might not be so hard for someone else to follow, but the entire process never leaves my head because I figure that everyone else is tracking with it because, after all, it's logical, isn't it? From the outside, it must look like *reasonable stimulus -- BIZARRO RESPONSE.* I'm trying to realize when this is happening and nip it in the bud, with varying degrees of success.

Hand in hand with this one goes:

2) I get a lot more attached to people than I let on. Usually this is because I assume they already know how I feel (see #1.) Despite this, I'm pretty terrible at keeping up correspondence regularly (I'm pretty terrible at doing anything regularly.) It's not because I don't care. I care a lot. I love people quickly and unabashedly (and sometimes ill-advisedly, too) and I tend to be intensely interested in the people I care about even if it's a platonic sort of caring. Being aloof most of the time is generally my attempt to keep from being a nuisance to people-- I figure that if people want to spend time with me, they'll seek me out because they know I'm willing. (Again, see #1.)

3) I keep mementos, letters and cards for years. I have boxes of love letters dating back to high school. I have all the notes of condolence people sent me when my father died. Doodles and clippings and tokens and what-have-you are stashed away in secret places all over my apartment, even after the Great Pre-Moving Purge of this summer where I pared down most non-essential things. I also have every journal I've ever kept, and I've been keeping longhand journals since I was five. I occasionally go through binges of nostalgia wherein I read through all of these. The only thing missing from the catalogue is the online diary I wrote when I was 16 and 17-- the site went under and it was deleted before I could back it up. I felt like I lost a chunk of myself and I still mourn.

4) I hate talking on the phone. As Tuesday's anecdote about calling coworkers probably made clear. I especially hate calling people I don't know very well, whether or not I have good reason to. I will do just about anything to avoid it and am delighted that nowadays most business can be conducted by e-mail. There are very few people with whom I can hold a phone conversation for any length of time-- generally I will need to have been on close terms with you for upwards of 7 or 8 years before I'll be able to manage to keep it together. I am also absolute rubbish at answering machines. I just panic and say anything.

5) Despite my shyness and reluctance to communicate, I take great pleasure in knowing people well. This may make my friends feel flattered, or possibly stalked, but I remember things like what you like from Applebee's or what your license plate number is or your drink order or that inside joke that ran for way too long our freshman year of college. I like to get to know people, and I like it when people get to know me. This makes me good at selecting appropriate Christmas gifts and recommending books and music and remembering the funny things people said at parties. This makes me not so good at ever shutting up once I've actually brought myself to be comfortable talking to you.

Now that I've finished this list I'm actually rather nervous to post it. I guess that means I'm doing it right? Of course, you may all already know all of this. I'm kind of a poor judge of what I'm projecting. See number 1.

WTF This Week Will Mean "Wow, That's Fascinating!"

2010-11-18T05:54:00.000-08:00

First of all, I didn't realize until I woke up this morning that I had forgotten to blog yesterday. I have really, really good reasons that I won't bore you with, but I figured I would write first thing this morning just to make up for it. Regular Thursday entry to follow tonight.

In keeping with my No-Cynicism November, I'm still not thinking too hard about the things that make me want to thwack my head against tables. One thing the First Mate frequently mentions is the importance of being selective about the messages you consume. (Do not, for instance, watch "Hostel" right before your trip to Europe. Learned that one the hard way, too.) This month I'm trying hard not to focus on things which will put me in an unhelpful headspace, and I'm doing all right at it too, I think.

Here, then, are some things that are way worth consuming-- cool ideas, fascinating accomplishments, things that encourage you to sit up and take notice.

Radiolab. Engaging, accessible, fascinating explorations into science, technology, and their implications to our daily lives. Why do we sleep? Is death a disease that can be cured? Where do you draw the boundary between language and music? How does your brain keep track of your body? Cleverly presented and with guests like Oliver Sacks, one of my heroes. Check it out.

Above Everything Else and The Third and the Seventh. These are just glorious. I could scarcely believe that they are entirely CG, but they are. The Third and the Seventh, a short film, is especially a banquet of gorgeous visuals.

That's all I have time for, as I have to run to work, but what has fascinated you this week? Please share.

Trip Installment: In Which I Accomplish Things And Let Myself Be Happy About Them

2010-11-16T20:51:00.000-08:00

First of all, let me take a moment to be proud of myself. I've buckled down to this graduate school application like never before. I still have a ways to go, but I've done an excellent job of networking, and that means a lot to me because it's always been terribly hard. When I needed to switch shifts with someone at work, I was so uncomfortable asking a coworker for a favor that my mother had to dial the phone and thrust it, ringing, into my hand while yelling "YOU HAVE TO DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT NOW!" So when I say that I met with two students in the program and have a meeting with a professor next week, that's a big deal for me.

One of my foremost rules of motivation, I've decided, is never under any circumstances to listen to "Creep" before anything important. I went into my meeting with the grad students thinking "What the hell am I doing heeeeeeere... I don't beloooooooong heeeeere..." Luckily, I am way better now at realizing when I'm ringing the "crazy" bell. What the hell am I talking about, I thought. Literally every other person in view is a bookish kid in a winter coat carrying a notepad full of half-formed ideas for dissertations. So shut the hell up and rock this thing, alright? And lo and behold, it was as easy as that.

I can't even describe how good it felt to be on campus, pursuing an academic goal. I felt like I'd spent the past two years living in a foreign country and I had finally heard my native language again. I even, apparently, seemed organized and goal-oriented and all that other stuff I never feel like I am. So, success.

No-Cynicism November is a slightly trickier proposition. I hadn't really realized how cynical I tend to be, and that a lot of the time I'm afraid to admit to being anything else. Cynicism is what all the cool kids are wearing this year. I'd come to rely on it as a protective coating, which isn't all that logically sound, is it? Does failure hurt less when other people think you expected to fail anyway? I find I'm more upset to think that other people will consider me naive and gullible for getting my hopes up than I am not to get what I want. I have kind of a paranoid fear of being taken advantage of, but expecting that to happen leaves openings for it all over the place, doesn't it?

I've been making a conscious effort to leave that protective cover off, and it's not been easy. All the things I've been worried would end in my seeming naive and overoptimistic, though, have worked out wonderfully. I'm not calling it a lesson yet, but it's a good start.

For my next trick, I suppose I will tackle my fear of success. Any good ideas about how to handle that one?

Etymology Monday: Oft-Overlooked Words

2010-11-15T22:12:00.000-08:00

The English language really is a magnificent beast, with a word-hoard full of treasures. Some are simply the perfect word for a feeling, conveying in a neat package concepts and circumstances other languages take paragraphs to describe: wistful and awkward come to mind. Others are beautiful: lucent, tranquility, mellifluous, susurrous, celadon, nevermore. Today, though, I want to look at the oddities-- quirky, fun-loving words that never get to shine anymore.

Let's start with one of my favorites: tatterdemalion. The OED has this as "a person in tattered clothing; a ragged, beggarly fellow." (Have I mentioned in the past fifteen minutes how much I love reading the OED?) Surely this word is more useful than ever, given the proliferation of hipsters in thrift-store clothing wearing hobo beards. They'd probably love this word. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before there's a neo-slowcore band called Tatterdemalion.

Another delight is addle-pated, which I learned from a poem by Jack Prelutsky called "The Addle-Pated Paddlepuss," a magnificent creature which could play ping-pong with its head. "Addle" came from Old English "adela," meaning "stinking urine," and an "addle-egg" was an egg which had gone rotten before fully hatching. "Pate," of uncertain origin, is a Middle English term for the head or crown; thus, an addle-pated fellow is someone whose brain died in the hatching. Our addle-pated fellow probably often finds his thoughts jargogled, an obsolete term meaning jumbled or confused. He should be careful whom he trusts, however, lest he find himself a victim of pettifoggery-- "legal chicanery or trickery, quibbling" or other tanglesome ways.

Many of the best words, of course, are now completely obsolete. Try bringing back words such as forswunk ("exhausted with labor"), darg ("a day's work, the task of a day; also, a defined quantity or amount of work, or of the product of work, done in a certain time or at a certain rate of payment"), or eftsoons (which means, astonishingly, any of the following: a second time, moreover, likewise, quasi-, soon afterwards, occasionally, as soon as, repeatedly.) Or you could call your grandparents eldmother and eldfather and refer to your tobacco as drunkwort. (This may, however, raise questions about exactly what sort of drunkwort you are smoking.)

Going even further back in Anglo-Saxon history, we have kennings, the lovely evocative compounds which make Old English poetry so beautiful. A small translated sampling: slaughter-dew (blood), flame-farewelled (an honorable death), swansroad (sea), sun-table (sky). As you might expect, some of the prettiest ones are the most violent: the body as bonehouse, the sword as the wound-wolf, the shield as the Viking's-moon. Slip some of these into conversation, or make up your own. English is an amazingly combinatory and lexically wealthy language, full of gorgeous history-rich words that usually are relegated to the thick dictionaries with the onionskin paper. Let's take some of these out of the box and play with them, hmm?

Rambling on Domestic Matters

2010-11-14T20:39:00.000-08:00

First of all, you've all got wonderful six-word autobiographies, and I like hearing from you. Keep it up!

Sundays are domestic day at Casa Five, and they have their own Sunday routine. Sundays are the only day that the First Mate and I have off, so this usually begins with sleeping in until the late morning and then making a huge and delicious breakfast. Afterward comes what my grandmother used to refer to as "One Great Hour of Swearing," wherein we do all the tedious but important regular chores like vacuuming the carpet, scrubbing out the tub, and cleaning all the burners on the stovetop.

Once the apartment is clean, Sunday afternoons are adventure time with the First Mate. We try to check out places we haven't been or discover things that are interesting. Today, for example, we went to the Arboretum and took a tour of the effigy mounds. I learned that they were built in the shape of birds and something called a water panther, which shapes are fairly dimly visible from the ground, but still. The more you know. Normally I'm terrible at domesticity and even worse at routine, but it's nice to have this as an anchor to my week. The First Mate and I are generally busy and have fairly disparate interests, so it's good to have committed time for finding common ground.

It's also good, I find, to have designated cleaning time. When you cook as much as we do, work as much as we do, and don't have a dishwasher, things can get fairly horrific fast. I have, however, reached the age where I just can't let a cluttered living space slide like I did in college. All the old tricks like eating ramen noodles with a staple remover or drinking out of quickly-rinsed margarine tubs no longer seem even marginally acceptable. I used to motivate myself to clean house by watching YouTube clips about compulsive hoarding and thinking "There but for the grace of god and a few loads of laundry go I," but that's probably pretty voyeuristic and damaging. Much nicer to fill up on pancakes, blast some Cake, and tackle dishes with a partner.

I go through phases of nesting, where I like to think about establishing routines and having days in to clean and planning for eventual upgrades to the living space. In between these, I swing like a pendulum into free-spirit mode, where I am always on the verge of selling all of my possessions, buying a van, changing my name to Coyote, and driving west to Find America. (I have a sneaking suspicion it will turn out to be throwing up malt liquor behind a 24-hour Super Wal-Mart.) This, coupled with my pattern of keeping jobs for a year or two and then moving a few hundred miles, occasionally raises doubts about how well I'll ever manage to stay in one place. Does this happen to everyone my age, I wonder? Clearly not, as most of the people with whom I went to high school are married already. All pendulums eventually settle to a comfortable center, don't they? Here's hoping I do too.

One Minute Writing Prompt

2010-11-13T20:58:00.000-08:00

I was feeling a little low on inspiration today, so I nipped over to the One Minute Writer to check their prompt. It was "In 60 seconds, describe your life in six words." Fair enough. I decided to see how many I could come up with.

"So far, really no boring bits."
"She seems to be catching on..."
"I could stand some more weird."
"You can do better than that."
"Well, I'm enjoying it. So there."
"What do you mean, 'why?' Because!"
"Vexing interruptions in between good books."
"On the whole, pretty all right."
"Riotous creativity interspersed with crippling neuroses."

Best of all, though, is 10) "It just keeps getting more beautiful."

Now you. No, I mean it. I'm turning on anonymous commenting and everything. Everyone who reads this entry, leave a comment describing your life in six words. C'mon, I dare you. Let me know you're out there.

Short Fiction Friday: "Eight Minutes," Part 1

2010-11-13T01:20:00.000-08:00

Short Fiction Friday is becoming a theme of convenience, because more and more often I've actually been going out on Friday nights (a problem I did not have the first time I committed to this blog.) Tonight after work I played Guitar Hero with a handful of friends, and then I went out to a post-apocalyptic rave. Yeah, all 1994 and everything. I donned my glowsticks and proceeded to flail delightedly to the O Fortuna techno mix, just as though I hadn't been first too young and then too lame to enjoy the 90s the first time around. The point is I don't really have the energy to update, so I'm going to give you a chunk of a story I once turned in for a creative writing class. If you want to hear more of it, comment here and I'll see about serializing it in coming Fridays.

Eight Minutes

"I thought you might want to know that the world's going to end at approximately noon tomorrow."

"What?" I had been just on the edge of sleep, and I was not at all convinced that the voice I was hearing was real. I hadn't been sleeping well lately. Zillah had moved out last month, and I was still adjusting to sleeping without the comforting warmth of her hip cupped in my palm. Then came the twins' car accident and the test results and lately the best I could hope for was a few snatches of true REM sleep as I drifted in and out of nightmares. I rolled over and fumbled for my glasses, sure I had put them right beside me before drifting off. Apparently not. My hand hit the glass of water on the night table. It fell to the floor and shattered. "SHIT. Shit shit shit." I was as good as blind without the glasses and there was no way I was going to make it to the light switch without cutting my feet up.

"Here, let me get that for you." Someone spoke out of the darkness, and I heard footsteps cross the room. The light snapped on and I winced. I can barely see my hand in front of my face without my glasses on. Across the room, I could only make out a smeary blur of features and what I thought might be dark hair.

"Zillah? That you, baby?" It was farfetched— Zillah had thrown the mate of the water glass now in pieces on the floor at my head on her way out, and when Zillah got mad enough to throw things she generally stayed mad for a good long time—but it wasn't impossible. I finally located the glasses under my pillow and put them on. The mottled blob at the foot of my bed coalesced into a woman, not Zillah. I had never seen her before in my life.

"What the fuck are you doing here, lady?" Oh God. Oh dammit. There was a can of pepper spray in my purse, but both she and the broken glass stood between me and the coathook in my closet where it hung. I grabbed one of the larger shards of glass on the floor and waved it at her in a way I prayed was menacing enough. "Stay away from me or I swear I'll stab you right in the eye with this thing. I mean it. Right in the damn eye."

The woman rolled her eyes. "I forgot how annoyingly paranoid you are. Put that thing down. I'm not going to hurt you."

“Yeah, sure you’re not. Who are you and what are you doing here? And where do you know me from?”

“Hey, hey. Calm down, hotshot. I promise, I mean you no personal harm. Look at me. I’m about as intimidating as a bowl of soup. And no weapons, see? Not even pockets. Now will you please put down the glass and let me explain?”

In Praise Of Gastronomy

2010-11-11T21:11:00.000-08:00

I kind of shudder to begin any public statement with "I was reading Good Housekeeping magazine today..." if only because I am a literary elitist and also kind of a terrible housekeeper. Does it help if I say that I was taking a break from a dense volume on the history of the English language and it was one of the only magazines available at work? No, it doesn't, because I could have chosen the New Yorker. Okay, I like reading women's magazines sometimes. Shut up.

Anyway, I was reading Good Housekeeping today and I got to their regular column encouraging women to get over emotional eating. (I was kind of surprised that they have this as a regular feature, but I suppose our culture does make it kind of a problem. Because heaven forbid we like eating.) This month, the columnist asked the question "What would you do if you knew you had a year to live?" Surveyed women often said they'd go right off their diet and eat all the delicious things they wanted to. When the question changed to "What if you only had a day to live?" nobody said they'd binge on chocolate. It was all "hug my family," "watch the sunrise" stuff. (Not a single "be shot out of a cannon," ladies? Do I have to do all the awesome around here?)

The columnist went on to point out that this proves that eating is really not as vital a part of our emotional well-being as we think. This I'll agree with, and I admit that my tendency to demand ice cream when I'm feeling low is probably neither healthy nor helpful. She went farther than that, though, to declare that the experience of eating should be secondary to the idea of putting fuel in our bodies to take us to all the other stuff we want to do. In principle, I suppose, but this rubs me the wrong way, and since in our weight-obsessed culture we don't often hear women talking positively about food, I'd like to speak up.

I love food. Like, for real. It's not just that I like not being hungry, or that I like tasting things that are good. Eating is a sensual, cultural, communal experience that connects people like nothing else can. Granted, the kind of comfort eating that happens at midnight and involves shoving fistfuls of Oreos down your gaping maw is, to use the parlance of our times, Doin' It Wrong. That's not the kind I do, though. Really satisfying eating is not about quantity. I can take ten minutes eating one bite and make it look like so much fun it should be illegal. (Just ask the guy behind the counter at DB Infusions chocolates. Or rather, don't. I'd be embarrassed if he still remembered my name.)

I particularly love making food, even if I'm not the one to eat it. I like combining ingredients creatively and seeing what I can come up with. I like cooking with people-- the way a pair works together in a kitchen can say a lot about who they are. And it's really, really satisfying being able to make a dish for someone that he or she will love.

So yes. This is written to a) attempt to explain why I have tahini in my hair right now and b) stand up against the idea that food should be stressful-- at best a guilty pleasure, at worst a constant battle. I don't count calories, unabashedly cook with butter, eat bites of other people's meals, and whenever I can, I choose to eat what I can most wholly enjoy-- physically, socially, spiritually. If I had one day to live, I would take the people I love out for sushi, then finish up with chocolate, wine, and cheese. And I would relish the living hell out of it.

A Kinder, Gentler Wednesday

2010-11-10T23:55:00.000-08:00

Due to my No-Cynicism November efforts, I'm putting WTF Wednesday on hold. Rather than focusing on the ways in which humanity makes my brain hurt, I'm going to make Wednesdays a more generally appreciative day. And I'm going to kick it off by finishing my "Fifteen Authors" post.

8) Neil Gaiman. His inventive storytelling and utterly charming mix of quirky British humor and chilling fantasy elements sold me the minute I picked up the first volume of Sandman. I read them straight through as soon as the library got them in, and the minute I finished the last volume I picked up the first one again. When I moved on to his novels, I found them all just as addictive. It takes a prodigious talent to be equally scintillating with poetry, graphic novels, short stories, screenplays, and novels. American Gods is one of my favorite books. He is also notable because it was through him I discovered Dave McKean, who will surely be mentioned if I ever do a "15 Artists" list.

9) Daniel Pinkwater, or D. Manus Pinkwater, as he is sometimes credited. Daniel Pinkwater writes young adult books that are impossible to grow out of. They're really uncategorizable-- just delightfully, refreshingly weird from beginning to end. As I grew older and reread them, I kept noticing little references and asides that I had completely missed all the other times through. The best books improve with each rereading because they show up the way you have grown in the interim not by seeming shallower but by unfolding to greater depth.

10) Thomas Harris. I expected a good thriller with a captivating villain when I first picked up "Silence of the Lambs," and I got it. I did not expect Harris's gorgeous, lyrical prose. After a few times through the series I honestly am not bothered when Hannibal Lecter starts eating people, because even the grisliest scenes are written so beautifully. Lecter is my favorite literary monster precisely because I like him better than most heroes, which elevates him from shocking to truly terrifying.

11) Noam Chomsky. Love him or hate him (and I certainly do a bit of both), as a linguist one defines one's philosophies in reference to his theories. Despite the comparatively little of his actual work I have read, he's definitely influenced me strongly just due to his pull in my field. (My eventual field? I don't know if I can legitimately count myself a linguist.)

12) Pablo Neruda. He writes gorgeous, earthy, aching poetry. It makes me wish I knew Spanish, so I could make my own translations. As you continue in relationship with me, the probability of my eventually sending you Neruda approaches one.

13) Dorothy Parker. I worship her scathing wit. I want to grow up to be her, except without all the suicidal depression. With the gin, though. Definitely with the gin.

14) Jessica Neiweem. She's been published, so yes, she counts. I grew up reading her writing and having her read mine, and we helped each other figure out how to be writers. Reading her poems (particularly her older ones) is like discovering a new room in the house you grew up in, one that you don't remember ever being there before but which is familiar the moment you step in.We collaborate on occasional projects, all of which inspire me to be fired up about writing again no matter how many times I profess to have given it up.

15) Arthur Conan Doyle. I was a ravening Sherlock Holmes fanatic when I was in elementary school. I read the entire Holmes canon before I was twelve. Rereading them thirteen years later, I was struck by two things: the casual racism (which I did not absorb) and how frequently Holmes disregards the law in favor of his own morality, turning in the people he thinks deserve it and being merciful to the people he thinks were justified. That and the superior delight of the unsolved puzzle are what keep me coming back to the series.

Trip Report Tuesday: No-Cynicism November

2010-11-09T22:47:00.000-08:00

When last we saw each other, Trip Report Tuesday, I declared that I was going to do something every day that would get me closer to graduate school. Now I get to do one of my favorite things-- follow up on a successful weekly challenge. In the past week I've called and spoken to the graduate admissions representative; I researched, contacted, and have kept up correspondence with the professor whose work is most interesting to me; I enlisted several friends to help me proofread my portfolio of writing samples and got materials sent off to one of my three recommenders; I have also made sure I know all the deadlines, begun the application, and am in the middle of scheduling my visit to the department. Not bad work for a week.

One of my goals for the next week is simply to keep it up. By Friday I want to have contacted my other two references and finalized a meeting with the professor and admissions people. My other goal arose from the research I've done the past week. For every piece of helpful advice about how to introduce yourself to professors and exactly where you put the apostrophe in master's degree, I found one of these:
http://chronicle.com/article/We-Need-to-Acknowledge-the/64885/ width="480" height="390">

Witty, yes. Possibly even true. The time for considering these problems, though, is while I'm trying to decide whether to accept an offer of admittance, not while I'm desperately trying to motivate myself to follow through on my application. And even then, anything else I might choose to do will certainly have its downsides. Times are, as cliche as this sounds, tough. I could let dire predictions derail me from making a try at what I really want, or I could act as though I soundly believed that my efforts are worth something and see where that gets me. In fact, I think I will.

I'm calling it No-Cynicism November, and the idea is not just to stay positive or to be blindly optimistic and naive as a substitute for effort. I'm staying on top of my shit and working hard. My goal is to stop being glum and paranoid that all my effort is ultimately futile because the system is broken, there's a glut of Ph.Ds, something else will inevitably fail, or people are supposed to be mean and life is supposed to be difficult. It's trusting that the patient, friendly answers I'm getting from the professor mean she's happy to help me, and not that she thinks my questions are painfully obvious. It's recognizing that the job market will be tough when I eventually finish my Ph.D. and still trusting that it's worthwhile to act on my dream of being a professor anyway. It's not assuming that people will think less of me for being nervous, or eager, or not as knowledgeable as they are. Above all, it's having faith that I'm generally competent, reasonable, talented, intelligent, possessed of decent judgment and problem-solving skills and just as deserving of getting the things I want as anyone else.

I was about to make a comment that if I manage all of that this week I'll try my hand at flying next, but that would be Doing It Wrong.

Etymology Monday: Who is Josh?

2010-11-08T21:53:00.000-08:00

Fret not, dear readers, for part 2 of my 15 Authors post is still coming. I have a request to honor for Etymology Monday today, though, so today we find out something I hadn't even thought to consider before; when you are "just joshing someone," which Josh are you invoking?

My hypothesis before researching this was that once in the mists of etymology, there was a guy named Joshua and he was kind of a dick. As it turns out, that's not too far from the truth. The OED attributes the verb "to josh" as a reference to Josh Billings, the pen name of an American humorist named Henry Wheeler Shaw. Shaw lived from 1818-1885, and Wikipedia has given him the honor of being " second most famous humor writer and lecturer in the United States in the second half of the 19th century after Mark Twain."


Although they're neck-and-neck in moustache cultivation.

Josh Billings went in for misspelled folksy wisdom (unlike Sarah Palin, who manages only two out of three) and was apparently the man who popularized the saying "the squeaky wheel gets the grease." Other immortal joshes include:

"As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand."
"About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment."
"Don't take the bull by the horns, take him by the tail; then you can let go when you want to."
“I think when the full horror of being fifty hits you, you should stay home and have a good cry.”
"I wud as soon take a ten dollar kounterfit bill on the Kodfish Bank ov Nufoundland, as tu marry a woman with false hare, false teeth or a false buzzum."

Scathing. When you tell someone you're just joshing them, it's this guy you are emulating. Which means, I think, that in order to josh anyone, one should first be required to grow that moustache.

Fifteen Authors, Part One

2010-11-07T22:37:00.000-08:00

The latest thing to go viral among my facebook friends has been this "15 Authors" list. It encourages you to list fifteen authors "who have stuck with you." That seems a little vague to me. "Stuck with me" why? Should, say, the worst book I've ever read make this list? What about the first book I ever read? (Superstitious by R. L. Stine and You Make The Angels Cry by Denys Cazet, respectively.) I'm choosing to interpret it broadly and describe fifteen authors whose work has influenced me as a writer, as a reader, or as a thinker. Because I'm inclined to verbosity, I'm splitting them up. Here are the first seven:

1) Stephen King. I know I will not necessarily impress any hipsters with this one, but it's true. I picked up Four Past Midnight when I was nine years old, curious because my father had been reading it and itching to move on to adult literature. I grew to appreciate and occasionally emulate his conversational style, his feel for regionalisms, his facility with metaphors, and his human and poignant mixing of the wistful with the horrifying. The advice he gave in On Writing is still advice I try to follow.

2) T.S. Eliot. I remember vividly my first encounter with T.S. Eliot-- I was reading The Waste Land aloud to a woman with whom I was in the throes of forbidden love. Perhaps I can blame the hormonal cocktail somewhat, but I was intoxicated. Poetry (which I had thought kind of cliched and tedious up to that point) opened up for me.

3) J.R.R. Tolkein. Of course. He whetted my appetite for created languages, for fantasy epics, for political intrigue and battle descriptions, and for capital-H-heroes that are still likable and believable, and he wrote a series which was the pinnacle of all of them.

4) Edward Gorey. I discovered him long before I really ought to have been exposed to him. He gave me a taste for the morbidly bizarre.

5) Stephen Pinker. His research causes me to think more critically about the act of thinking, as well as about prescriptivist grammar and the structure of language. He is one of my main influences in going back for another linguistics degree.

6) Douglas Coupland. I'm just coming off of a period of being really disgusted with him. He coined the term "Generation X" and has written a dozen or so fiercely dry and ironic meta-novels which use the small, sad lives of suburban losers as a micro-history of our culture. (Doesn't that just sound like I came from a liberal arts institution.) Despite how jaded and sneering he sometimes comes off (jPod, Everything's Gone Green) he can also fill me with surprising hope (Microserfs) and either way, his turns of phrase are addictively quirky and clever.

7) Plato. I had to read The Republic (or parts of it) three times: once for World Lit in high school, once for Freshman Studies in college, and once in a political science course called "Founding the Just Regime." Each time I learned something new from it, about philosophy or the structure of argument or what makes a civilization fair. Even though I kind of think Socrates is a dick, (or Plato, vicariously, is a dick) I learned more trying to argue against him than I would have agreeing with him. Wrestling with Plato, together with the guidance of the professor who taught both those classes, taught me most of what I know about academic writing.

Question Time: What If You Had A Ridiculous Amount of Money?

2010-11-06T23:30:00.000-07:00

We're not big on rampant capitalist greed here at Figure Five, to say the least. Having money is one of those things I generally assume happens to other people, and for the most part that doesn't bother me. I am confident in my ability to make enough to support myself, if not extravagantly, at least not over-frugally. I've been fortunate never to have been proven wrong in this. Tonight's question, though, is this: Suppose you had a ridiculous amount of money. What would you do with it?

Let me define "ridiculous" here. I'm not talking about win-the-lottery money. If I won the lottery I'd pay off my student loans and go back to school and make some smart investments and start a fund for my friends who need medical care and generally do reasonable, ethical things. I'm considering "ridiculous" to be "money enough that after you've done all the reasonable, ethical things you can do, you still have money left over." Assume the hungry are fed, the homeless are housed, sustainable infrastructure is put in place, essential scientific research is comfortably set up, and you still have more money than you know what to do with. What is the most frivolous thing you can enjoy doing?

My list goes a little something like this:

Acquire a Savannah cat. Crossbreeds of Servals and housecats, these are gorgeous animals that are friendly, intelligent, play fetch, stand about toddler height, and can leap seven feet. It would be like having your very own Hobbes.
Go total eclipse chasing. Pick an eclipse and follow the path of totality across the globe.
Take a private space-flight. One where I can attempt things in zero-G which no proper astronaut would let me do.
Offer a huge cash prize to the first person who can build me a working time machine.
The hell with that, actually. Go get several advanced science degrees and build one myself. In my evil lab at the center of a dormant volcano. Where I will have android lab techs.
Eat something delicious in every country.

...I'm running out of things. Most of the self-indulgent, fun stuff I would do boils down to traveling to interesting places, eating tasty food, and building or crafting cool things. I'm sure some of you are more imaginative. What would you do?

Short Fiction Friday: From "The Librarians"

2010-11-06T00:35:00.000-07:00

Today has been a day of revelry, and since Fridays were supposed to be for short fiction anyway, I'm taking the opportunity to include a snippet of a science-fiction universe I was batting around a few years ago. I'm not quite sure where it's going, and I'm hoping that trotting it out in public will bring in fresh ideas. Here, make of it what you will.

Sukey was tired. Her eyes were scratchy and her head swam, and the knot in her shoulder throbbed every time she handed a book-case over the huge library desk. At the end of her shift there would be a cup of hot tea and music on the radio and Beau would work out the kinks in her muscles with his deft white hands, but the end of her shift was still three hours away. There were books to be pulled and signed out yet, books upon books, so many that the shelves groaned with the weight of them. Sukey heard and groaned too.

The shelf-room stretched away behind the desk, vast and gloomy and high-ceilinged. It was always dim in the library, so dim that she could not see where the rows of shelves stopped. Sukey had never been to the back of it; it was someone else's job to cart the books back and forth, yet another someone's job to arrange them on the shelves. Sukey was a recorder, and what she did was this: when the carts of requested books came up to the desk, she recorded the date and the time and the title of each one before sending them away with the runners. When the carts of books whose use was no longer required came back to the desk, she signed each of them back in with the precise date and time, then sorted them all by number and date and location onto the carts for the shelvers to take. The work was tedious and the brown leather cases that held the books made heavy lifting and there were still carts and carts of them tonight.

The books were beautiful, Beau said so, and although Sukey was not allowed to open the cases she believed him. He could tell, he said, by the way they felt, the way they smelled. The pages were soft and fine and the frontispieces were buttery scraped vellum and the covers were supple and tooled in intricate patterns. Sometimes he liked to press his cheek against them and breathe in the musk of leather, the spice of old paper. The librarians, if they saw, did not chastise him. Perhaps they would do the same, if they could.

Sukey was in awe of Beau, of his fingertips and the skin over his eyes, milky and translucent as rice paper. Beau was a turner, and like all turners, he was blind. His optic nerve was cut and rerouted, wired to transmit by means of a cunning device; only the librarians could see through his eyes now. Every day he took the elevator to the reading-room at the very top of the library, took his seat at the desk and put on his wireless transmitter and waited. They were whisper-quiet as they took their seats behind him, and he didn’t always know they were there until the first book was laid on the desk top and the great hot reading-lamp above him clicked on.

“Turn the page,” they would say when they were ready to begin, and, with great care not to fold or tear the onionskin paper, Beau would. They would read through him the words he himself was unworthy to know, and when they had finished they would say “Again,” and he would turn the next one. It went on and on, book after book and page after page, until the edges of them had worn Beau’s fingerprints away like sandpaper. The librarians spoke among themselves, sometimes, low sighs that Beau could not understand. He would strain to catch the soft inflections in them, wonder or consternation or surprise, and tried to guess what they looked like. Their shapes must be very strange—they could not read the books themselves, or they would not need his weak eyes. And Beau would feel the prickle of the transmitter across his scalp and marvel at his fortune to be their conduit.

“Again.”

Beau turned the page.

“Again.”

Beau turned the page.

“Again.”

Silent Five Swallows Her Pride And Starts Her Statement of Purpose

2010-11-04T22:17:00.000-07:00

"The time has come. The time is now," as was famously told to Marvin K Mooney. The time to which I refer is the looming deadline for graduate school applications, and I'm going to take this opportunity to do something I would kind of rather be disemboweled than do: admit I'm frightened and ask for help.

Grad school is my white whale, my idol in a trap-filled cave, my gorgeous redheaded starlet who makes me feel like shit about myself. (Although if Scarlett Johansson wants to apply for that last position she is more than welcome.) And for the past few years, I've secretly been terrified it would be my Waterloo. The minute I graduated college I was consumed with the desire to go back to academia. I miss the sheer joy of immersing myself in research, of seeing disparate pieces of the puzzle suddenly link up. I miss the hungry feeling behind my eyes when I just can't read fast enough to satisfy my curiosity. I miss the way my worldview is constantly being transformed. I miss the energetic, passionate, luminous person I become when I'm consumed by a project. So every year I set out to apply for a graduate program... and every year I hit a wall.

I start thinking "What if my research interests are too diffuse? What if I haven't networked enough? What if I don't know the proper etiquette for contacting professors? Where do I start the whole process? And while we're at it, what have I done that makes me worth noticing? I mean, I want it and I'd be good at it, but surely there are millions of people who can say the same. What makes me think I deserve..." You get the idea. I've built the application up in my mind into a symbolic act that combines my fierce desire to prove myself, my harsh self-criticism, my conflicting feelings toward authority, my fear of rejection, my tendency to be motivated only in short spurts, and my feeling that everyone expects this to be easier for me. It goes down like a cocktail of Valium and Drano. I panic, and I freeze, and I don't apply.

Well, not this year. I'm nervous as hell, but I'm going to do it, and I realize that the thing that will make all the difference is in reaching out to people who have done the same. I'd like to ask that all my readers who have advice about the graduate application process please let me know what it was like for you. What do you recommend, what made it easier for you, what do you wish you'd done differently? My other reason for posting this is for accountability. Don't let me retreat from this, internets. Believing in myself is sometimes a struggle for me, but I know this can be done, and I am proclaiming before all of you imaginary friends that I will do it.

(And then, of course, next year I'll be whining about how swamped with work I am and how little money I have and who the hell goes into English linguistics anyway. Bitch bitch bitch. )

WTF Wednesday: In Which WTF Stands For "Wisconsin Trashed Feingold!?"

2010-11-03T21:58:00.000-07:00

I will spare you all the lengths at which I am capable of decrying the results of yesterday's election. It's been a draining day, and it would have been even if Republicans hadn't taken the House. I couldn't let WTF Wednesday go by, though, without mentioning what I consider the worst casualty of this election: Russ Feingold. Phrases like "one of the last true progressives," and "the most reasonable senator" are being wailed at the top of blue lungs all the way across the state. I would have a moment of silence, but my style is really more a moment of screaming like this: WISCONSIN, WHAT THE HELL IS YOUR PROBLEM!?

People on both sides of the aisle consider Feingold one of the good guys. He checked his own spending and demanded accountability from himself and from his colleagues, doing things like refusing raises, relying on individual donations, and sponsoring the McCain-Feingold act to reform campaign finances and limit lobbyists' financial influence over sentators (notice the other name on that bill, red-staters.) He was the sole senator to vote against the PATRIOT act-- take note, goverment-interference-shy tea partiers. He voted against the Wall Street Bailout. Even taking into account the fact that his social views are more in line with, say, mine than with, say, Sarah Palin's (and I think I can be just as much of a Mama Grizzly while still believing in universal health care, thankyouverymuch), he sounds like he's one folksy metaphor away from a tea party darling.

And yet. Wisconsin has replaced him with Ron Johnson, about whom, again, I could say a lot more than I will. Two choice anecdotes from his Wikipedia entry to illustrate Ron Johnson to you: "opposed a Wisconsin bill that would have made it easier for child sex abuse victims to sue their abusers," and "Johnson has called scientists who attribute global warming to man-made causes "crazy" and has said the theory is "lunacy." He has said the source of the climate change is "sunspot activity or just something in the geologic eons of time." "

When I moved here, Wisconsin, I thought you were better than this.

What A Long, Strange Trip Report It's Been

2010-11-02T21:46:00.000-07:00

I almost don't know where to begin here. In my last Tuesday entry I challenged myself and my readers to do something we'd never done before. I always have to overachieve, don't I?

Since April, I've done all of the following:

Gone to counseling.
Left education.
Moved to Madison.
Took a job specifically because it was low-energy and low-commitment.
Co-founded a theater company.
Directed a play.
Had a show I wrote performed.
Acted in a lead role.
Joined a band.
Started a cooking blog.
Took up larping.
DM'ed a game. (Although I can hear the First Mate telling me to run more often from here.)

There's been more than that, of course-- those are just the things that stand out. I've faced a number of turning points in the past six months where I had to choose what was painful over what was wrong. I've been getting better at that every time it comes up, and as the list above hints, I've covered a lot of ground in the "making-my-life-more-awesome" department. I'm proud of myself.

My challenge this Tuesday is not to rest on my laurels. I want to do one thing every day this week that moves me closer to grad school. Some things I need to do are e-mailing my references, researching professors, contacting the department office, and beginning my essays. I'm not committing to do all of these things this week, but if I can at least make some progress every day, I'll feel more confident in my ability to pull the whole thing off.

Figure Five Runs Screaming Back Onto The Scene

2010-11-01T19:39:00.000-07:00

November appears to be the month for trial by ordeal. Both NaNoWriMo (that's National Novel Writing Month, for those of you who live under rocks or not on the internet) and Movember (that's the November facial hair growing contest, for those of you who have never iced anybody) turn this month into a contest against oneself, one's inertia, one's fears of success, and one's face. Now, I've considered entering both of these events, but I am still squeamish about the tome of self-indulgent verbiage that a month-long novel might produce, and I can't seem to grow a moustache (which is too bad, because my place of work is offering baked goods to the one who's most in touch with their inner lumberjack come December 1st.) This October, however, ended much the same as last October did; that is to say, with my friend Jacob yelling at me for not being awesome enough and asking why the hell I didn't update my blog anymore. Clearly I had to do something.

That something is the return of NaBloUpMo, wherein I attempt to update this thing EVERY DAMN DAY. I did it last November and it seemed to be well received, so I'm pretty confident about my ability to keep it up. Huzzah, tomorrow old-school Figure Five updates begin once more, starting with one hell of a Trip Report Tuesday. Turns out I've been up to a hell of a lot since April.

What about you kids? I challenge all of you to start blogs and keep them updated, because I'd appreciate being able to stalk you back.

No Longer Behind The Times: Figure Five Finally Plays Portal

2010-05-16T20:37:00.000-07:00

Today the First Mate and I celebrated the fact that we both had a Sunday off in much the same manner as two-toed sloths: We spent the day eating, sleeping, and playing Portal. (Okay, I'm assuming these two-toed sloths all have PCs and remarkably flexible claws.) I normally do my gaming with a bulging bag of many-sided dice and a binder full of stat sheets, so I was a little leery. I don't really have anything against electronic gaming, but I am really uncoordinated. As such, it tends to make me feel pretty terrible about myself when I spend fully 75% of play trying not to run into walls, and failing at it most of that time. Portal came very highly recommended to me, though, so I figured I would give it a shot.

I didn't get up until seven hours later. It was one of the more engrossing entertainment experiences I've ever had. The concept is ingenious, and it's really well implemented in the game. Andy and I traded off levels, and I conscripted him to go through some of the more fiddly bits of mine, but even so, gameplay was smooth and intuitive enough that even I could manage it. Most importantly to me, the writing shines. The whole thing was so clever I was practically clapping my hands with delight. (And yes, fine, I did place two portals immediately facing each other and then spend five minutes running an infinite loop and yelling "WEEEEE!" Shut up.) When we made it through the whole thing, we decided that celebration was in order.

Pictured: Celebration. Not Pictured: Companion Cube tribute montage.

So the point is, I suppose, that now that I've finally decided to get into more technologically advanced geekery I'll have to pick up some of that damned hand-eye coordination I spent my childhood avoiding. The other point is that if you're one of the other people who was living under a rock when Portal came out, go download it now. It's even free until May 24th, so you really have no excuse.

Unsurprisingly, My America Playlist Is Not Patriotic At All

2010-05-15T19:41:00.000-07:00

Some of the best discoveries are accidents. Chocolate chip cookies, for example, and microwaves, and penicillin. My accidental discovery for the day is the random search term playlist. Looking for a particular track, I typed "america" into my media player and listened through whatever it gave me. This created a surprisingly listenable mix of tribal flute music, classics, punk, and indie pop, with the Allen Ginsberg poem I was looking for as a nice cap to it all. It also, perhaps, says a good deal about my political leanings that most of what turned up was at least vaguely protest-oriented. Here's the list, for your listening pleasure. Please post your own random search discoveries here-- I'm always on the lookout for new music.

"Flightless Bird, American Mouth"-- Iron & Wine
"We'll Meet Again" -- Johnny Cash
"Dance of the Warrior" -- off a compilation CD of tribal music
"Sick Boy" -- Kill Hannah
"Franco Un-American" -- NOFX
"Drug-Free America" -- NOFX
"American Errorist (I Hate Hate Haters)" -- NOFX
"Kiss Distinctly American" -- Q and not U
"America" -- Simon & Garfunkel
"Because" -- Elliott Smith
"Miss America" -- That Handsome Devil
"Winds of Life" -- off a compilation CD of tribal music
"American Music" -- Violent Femmes
"America (Closing Time)" -- Tom Waits & Allen Ginsberg

Figure Five Links Rodeo

2010-05-14T20:54:00.000-07:00

I run across lots of amusing, outrageous, or thought-provoking articles that make me think "Wow, I really need to blog about this!" The ones which inspire some sort of personal commentary I do blog about (see this week's WTF Wednesday, for example). A good number of them, though, are things to which I have nothing to add other than "Seriously, go read this! It's funny/good/interesting/totally messed up!" I do want to share them, though, so they wind up perpetually open in tabs which clutter up my browser and make me feel like I've got lots of unfinished business. Hence Links Rodeo, a general purge of these things in list format with a brief summary. Go hog wild!

This fascinating letter from a student of linguistics details how creating fantasy languages for the upcoming A Game Of Thrones miniseries would also offer an unprecedented opportunity to study how the brain generates language. Recommended Reading For: People interested in language, neuroscience, or fantasy epics.
In a similar vein, this study created an online game to simulate the evolution of an alien language... and it's working. Recommended Reading For: people who are intrigued by language change or who spend too much time on addictinggames.com
From The Onion, "Exhausted Noam Chomsky Just Going To Try And Enjoy The Day For Once." Recommended Reading For: Snarky radicals, discouraged activists, cynical bastards, fans of America's Finest News Source, people with tongues superglued in cheek.
This letter to the editor is reprinted as "The Best Thing I've Read All Year." It is one of the best things I have read all year as well-- a well-written, levelheaded appeal to opponents of gay rights. Recommended Reading For: Everyone. This is a side of the story that you should hear.

There may be more Links Rodeos to come; there are a lot of things I wish I could make people read. In the meantime, please do check these out. I very rarely read links that people send me unless they've passed my stringent vetting process, and I can vouch for all of these.

What AREN'T I Reading?

2010-05-13T11:13:00.000-07:00

Librarians have been looking askance at me from the time I was nine years old. To be fair, I imagine it must have been somewhat disconcerting to see a stack of Stephen King novels in the arms of this lisping moppet who could barely see over the front desk. Since then, I've always wondered if librarians form secret preconceptions about patrons' characters from the books they check out. My favorite assistant at the local library told me as much once. "Yeah," he said, "I'm judging you right now." I enjoyed watching the expression on his face as he scanned my armload of knitting patterns and treatises on the occult. "What is wrong with you?" he asked me.

What is wrong with me is, in this case, that I have eclectic and eccentric taste in literature. An average trip to the library usually results in my bringing home a mixed bag of subjects: politics, linguistics, neuroscience, poetry, psychology, religious studies, crafting, comic books, science fiction, sex, a documentary film or two, and at least one cookbook. Frequently I have hauled home one of all of these. I rarely make it through all of them in the allotted time, and I could practically finance a new wing of the building with all the fines I pay. So yesterday I attempted to cut down. I intended to pick out a movie and spend the evening vegging out. No new books. Well, maybe one cookbook.

Forty-five minutes later I walked out with the following:

Two cookbooks (The Joy of Cooking and a collection of sensually evocative recipes unfortunately named Booty Food)
An exploration of poetic syntax
Two collections of neurological case studies by the incomparable Oliver Sacks
A copy of Wuthering Heights
An Agatha Christie mystery
A three-part Nova miniseries on string theory
A documentary about the state of the planet narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio

Is it sadder that I have so little restraint, or that honestly, this is cutting down?

WTF Wednesday: No Words

2010-05-12T21:28:00.000-07:00

I am speechless with rage at this news, and thus I am grateful that Mary Alice Carr has spoken more eloquently on the subject than I can. There's a new law in Oklahoma which states, as Carr writes, "that a doctor is protected from being sued if he or she chooses not to tell a woman that the baby she is carrying has a birth defect... Under this new law, a doctor may withhold information, mislead or even blatantly lie to a pregnant woman and her partner about the health of their baby if the doctor so much as thinks that fetal test results would cause a woman to consider abortion."

I cannot fathom what doctor would consider this. Beyond the damage it does to the doctor-patient relationship, beyond all consideration of medical ethics, imagine what it would be like to be those parents. Say, a woman whose doctor told her to expect a healthy child and who finds out when he is born that he will only live a few days. Or a young couple given no time to research how to care for a son or daughter with special needs. Imagine finding out that your doctor willfully denied you the chance to prepare yourself and your family for the difficulties you and your baby would face. How would you feel? How could anyone sworn to care for and heal people justify putting someone in that situation?

On the heels of this article I was sent another one, this one detailing a Missouri bill that is supposed to "promote 'heterosexual marriage' by making divorce more difficult." The article describes the consequences this bill has for victims of domestic abuse; namely, that by prohibiting divorce except by mutual agreement or in cases of narrowly defined "marital irresponsibility," it opens a frightening number of loopholes for domestic abusers. The article sets out several examples wherein a spouse who is clearly in danger would have no grounds for divorce, and may even have their custody taken away for alleging that abuse is occurring.

Individually, these stories are outrageous and sad. Together, they fill me with fear for what they might represent. Both laws are designed to protect "family values," but deceit, self-righteousness, cruelty, and tacit acceptance of violence are not values my family shares. I shudder to think that I live in a country where these things are considered an acceptable price for the illusion of wholesomeness.

Trip Report Tuesday: New Things

2010-05-11T22:20:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago, my posted projects were thus: Find an interview outfit and lead an elementary school needlework club. I am pleased to report a rousing success on both counts. The elementary schoolers love knitting, crocheting, and making lanyards and bracelets. I also looked adorable at my interview, which went tolerably well and from which I am still waiting on results.

In the intervening time I have had the following new experiences:

Stayed in a hotel all by my lonesome
Ordered room service
Was reimbursed for a travel expense
Learned to play pinochle
Acquired my very own giant wall calendar
Visited the Morton Arboretum

My goal for next week? More new experiences. What new things have you experienced recently?

Etymology Monday: A Quotidian, Intimate Discipline.

2010-05-10T21:02:00.000-07:00

I spend the last few hours catching up on my aunt's Flickr photostream. She's a talented photographer, and she's documenting the year she turns 50 by taking a self-portrait every day. In her blog post on the project, she describes how each day's photo is one of dozens of outtakes with slight differences, and also how as the days go by themes and patterns emerge serendipitously. It made me think about the discipline of doing something every day, about how it can be both tedious and profound. When I began this project I blogged every day for a month, which occasionally felt tedious, but the response I received was, in fact, profound. The friend who inspired this blog told me that he felt it was one of the great things he'd done that year, and being that he volunteers with Food not Bombs, pickets the School of the Americas, and hacks his way through Alaska punching bears in the face, this is high and heady praise.

I want to reaccustom myself to this kind of discipline, if I ever was accustomed to it, and this brings me to my word today. Quotidian comes to us from Anglo-Norman, which took it from the classical Latin quotidianus, meaning "occurring every day." I have always felt the word in English to have a connotation of dullness. OED defines "the quotidian" as "mundane or everyday things as a class," but one of the example sentences for this entry, from the Times in 1902, refers to "that which for want of a better term we agree to call the natural and by which we really mean the quotidian, the familiar, the intimate."

The intimate. Being a restless creature, I tend to think of having to do the same thing every day as stifling and humdrum. Looking at my aunt's portraits, though, I begin to see it differently. Far from being stifled, my aunt is unfolding and blooming in each day's photograph. The depth of perception gained in following the same subject also allows for surprising variety, and even in shots which are similar there is always some new warmth or humor or wisdom. Intimate is the word-- Latin, "pressed into, inmost, deepest," that which is within being brought to the surface.

Can I do that with my blogging, I wonder? I tend to be irreverent and glib rather than intimate, and I worry that this will become tedious to the reader, if not to me. Daily practice changes you, though. It makes you wiser, more capable. It's a discipline, and discipline is that which is taught to a disciple, which comes from the Latin word discere, "to learn." So bear with me as I learn how to be a writer, and in so doing learn to put what is within on the surface.

What I'm Reading: The Coldfire Trilogy

2010-04-29T20:53:00.000-07:00

I read a lot of books-- a book a day, on average. I like to talk about the books I read. My Twilight review made the biggest stir of anything I've posted here (even including my challenge to Scott Adams, who has yet to agree to a duel), so I'm interpreting that to mean that my readership also likes to talk about books. If you just come up and ask someone if they've read any good books lately, though, they assume that you're trying to pick them up. (And to be fair, they're usually right.) Enter: What I'm Reading! So you can all be snarky and elitist about books with me!

The First Mate recommended the Coldfire Trilogy to me with the words, "I don't know that you'll like it, but it's interesting." He was, perhaps, justified in his reservations: The Coldfire Trilogy is a 1500-page high fantasy epic which mixes space travel and Dungeons & Dragons-esque pseudo-medieval archetypes in a way I usually find fairly jarring. The language is stereotypically flowery, the raiment is ostentatious and always well-described (why should I care what your adventurer is wearing? I'm not having cybersex with him, for crying out loud), there's a night-elf looking guy with a glowy sword on the cover of each of them, and the main character is a paladin. For the record: I. Hate. Paladins. And all the lawful-stupid whining they generate.

Despite my trepidation, I dove into Black Sun Rising, the first book. I had to fight the compulsion to stop reading after the first fifty pages, finding them full of tedious universe setup and (in my opinion) riotous and unchecked descriptive adjectives. (Yes, I know they are fun to write, people, but they're not half as much fun to read!) At about that fifty-page mark, though, I consciously put aside my quibbles with the genre, most of which are probably rooted in snobbery. Lo and behold, the universe being effusively described was actually pretty interesting. The story is set on the planet Erna, home to a remote colony of refugees from a long-forgotten Earth who have since lost all Terran scientific and technological knowledge. Erna teems with semi-sentient natural energy, which is psychically responsive to the needs, fears, and desires of the planet's inhabitants. The introduction of humans into this environment triggers devastating and unpredictable change as all of humanity's basest nightmares, as well as its most noble aspirations, suddenly become flesh and feed on their creators.

I am currently halfway through the second book, When True Night Falls, and so far I've enjoyed both far more than I anticipated. The science fiction and space travel are woven into the fantasy conventions well enough that the juxtaposition doesn't feel incongruous, and the culture and physics of the world are both richly developed and fairly original. The stories are cut from the same sparkly, rune-embroidered cloth as most fantasy epics (Save The Princess, Save The World!) but unless you categorically hate that kind of thing, they've got enough emotional resonance and tricky clever bits to keep you interested. The characters do play true to type, but those types keep showing up in fantasy for a reason-- at their best they're inspiring and relatable and at their worst they're amusing. Unsurprisingly, I like the rampantly evil one best of all, and the paladin, at least, is now becoming jaded enough that he doesn't come off as such a sanctimonious prat. And best of all, the books have more depth than just being ripoffs of the Lord of the Rings, which puts them above most of the popular fantasy novels I have read.

In short, if you like fantasy, you will like these books. If you don't like fantasy, you may still like these books. If you, like me, are too much of a literary wanker to admit to liking fantasy (with the exception of Lord of the Rings, of course. Because it's etymologically significant.), then the rewards of getting off your high horse and onto some three-toed fae beast which glows at night would seem to be greater than you might think.

WTF Wednesday: Xenophobia Is Even Harder To Stomach Than It Is To Spell

2010-04-28T21:32:00.000-07:00

It seems the mayor of the town where I currently reside posted a YouTube video in which he questioned the authenticity of Obama's birth certificate. The letters column of our local paper has been buzzing about this for weeks. There are a few opportunists calling for the mayor's resignation and bringing to bear a recitation of his other dick moves. There are several people pointing out what I first thought when I heard the report- namely, that birthers are old meme now. So 2008. The man's already been president for two years, and the legitimacy of his citizenship has been demonstrated to the satisfaction of the courts, making the birthers about as politically relevant as JFK assassination theorists and tinfoil-hat-wearers. I was surprised at how many letters the paper received howling that Obama should just produce the birth certificate. Hey, sounds reasona- WHOOPS HE HAS.

Now, I realize that most of these people don't actually believe that someone born on foreign soil is incapable of being a good public servant. They're just looking for any way to discredit Obama because they don't like him. This method, however, rubs me the wrong way in the same way it does when people make much of Obama's middle name being Hussein, and not just because by that same logic everyone named Ted is in league with the Unabomber. It shows the ugly face of American xenophobia. Xenophobia is, broadly, the fear and hatred of anyone unlike you. (Which is different from Xenu-phobia. Fear of Scientology is, in my eyes, totally justified.)

This same prejudicial sentiment was demonstrated to a frightening and disgusting degree in Arizona this past week. The Arizona governor signed into law the most stringent immigration restrictions yet. The bill makes it a state crime to be in the country illegally and mandates that all non-citizens carry their immigration papers on their person. It also states that without proof of legal residency, people may be arrested and detained on suspicion of violating this law.

Let me say that again. This law allows police to stop anyone without cause, ask to see their papers, and arrest them if they cannot immediately prove that their presence in the country is legal. To put this in perspective, think about all the times you've run to the grocery store or the post office and forgotten your driver's license. Now, imagine that any of those times, you could have been taken into police custody and threatened with deportation. If this doesn't bother you, it should. This isn't just an attack on immigration, it's an attack on personal privacy in the most repugnant way-- oppression masquerading as patriotism. Incredibly, proponents maintain that it won't lead to racial profiling, but I'm pretty damn sure the Arizona cops aren't going to be pulling over a carload of white men in suits and asking to see their passports. This law codifies racial profiling in its presumption that Hispanic people are guilty of illegal immigration until proven innocent.

The thing that perhaps troubles me most about American xenophobia is how it smacks of hypocrisy. With very few exceptions, we are all descended from immigrants, and we are all squatting on stolen land. Tea partiers and immigration reformers would do well to remember that. Time was, multiculturalism was considered one of America's strengths, even its cultural backbone. In this rich and various soil innovation, determination, open-mindedness, and compassion could thrive. I've said it before, about many other issues, and I'll say it again: We, as a country, are better than this. This sort of vindictive, hostile defense is beneath us.

Trip Report Tuedsay: Ask Not For Whom The Mall Tolls...

2010-04-27T11:18:00.000-07:00

...it tolls for me.

This week my projects are twofold. One is to continue to lead the needlework club at the elementary school where I work--I'm teaching the students how to knit and crochet-- and the other is to find an outfit for an upcoming job interview. An interview at a real company, where real people work. ("Real" in this instance, being "actual career-path, as opposed to just-fell-into-after-college.") The needlework club is an ongoing project and it's going pretty well. (And speaking of ongoing projects, yes, Mother, I'm still working on your sweater!) The interview outfit I didn't anticipate would be so complicated.

My personal style shifts fairly wildly from "angry hipster" to "classy broad," but lately it's settled of necessity on "educator inconspicuous." None of these are images I want to project at a job interview. I was hoping for, at least, "intelligent professional person who is still stylish and has a life." The trouble is that I've lost about 20 pounds since I last could lay claim to looking professional or having a life, and none of my interview-appropriate clothes fit me anymore. This means I have to brave The Mall.

I'm short and curvy, so clothes shopping has always been a hassle. Nevertheless, I actually rather like paying attention to fashion; it's like making myself into an art project. As such, I think of shopping as a treasure hunt. And if I am the Indiana Jones of fashion, then the mall is my deadly trap-filled cave. I'm going into territory fraught with peril and crawling with hostile natives to seek some legendary item which may not actually exist. In Indy's case, it's a golden idol; in mine, it's a button-down shirt that will actually button down and a pair of pants that don't end six inches past my feet. While at least the Nazis don't steal my find the moment I leave, these items have proven just as elusive as Jones's quarry.

I called my sister for moral support. My sister, who answers to the nickname "Fabulous," is five gay men with their own TV show trapped in one snarky lesbian's body. She has drilled me on appropriate hem lengths and educated me about "suit alternatives." She has told me I'm gorgeous over and over again to inoculate me against how drab, pudgy, and stunted dressing room fluorescent lighting invariably makes me feel. And this past weekend during my preliminary reconnaissance, she consoled me as I spent five (5) hours in the mall and acquired one (1) top-- which I can't even wear by itself. This week's project? Mallrats II- This Time, It's Personal. I am going back and not leaving until I look sophisticated and employable. Or until I die. Whichever comes first.

Etymology Monday: Reader Mailbag

2010-04-26T21:04:00.000-07:00

The title is somewhat misleading, I suppose, as I didn't actually receive this question in the mail. Like many of these updates, it began with the First Mate yelling down at me through the sniper window in his office loft/nerdcave: "Hey, etymology question. How come..."

Today, the sentence ended "...the German word for poison is 'Gift' and the English word 'gift' is nothing close? Did one branch change the meaning and retain the word, or do they come from different roots? Or are they just being sarcastic?" This brings up a topic which fascinates me as a student of lexical borrowing: false cognates, which are terms that mean one thing in one language and something quite different in another. I first encountered these slippery words as a fumbling French exchange student discovering that confus actually means "embarrassed" (which, to be fair, I usually also was.) I haven't catalogued an exhaustive list, but I would guess that English was exceptionally prone to false cognates, given our propensity for absorbing foreign words and also for not really knowing what we're talking about most of the time.

So whence cometh the Gift/gift disparity? According to my new best friends, the American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European roots and the Online Etymology Dictionary, both words originate from the Indo-European *ghabh, "to give or receive." The suffixed form *ghebh-ti-, "something given or received," seems to lead fairly clearly to "gift." In English, "gift" is a gift from Old Norse, supplanting the similar Old English word giefu. ("Gift" existed in Old English, but it meant "dowry or bride-price.") The Germanic *geban, meaning "to give," is the more immediate ancestor of both of these words, so at some point after the divergence of Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon, the word for "something given" evolved in Germanic to mean something more sinister.

Here, the trail ends, at least the one I can find on the internet. Yahoo! Answers suggests that at one time, "vergeben" meant both "to poison" and "to forgive" (how's that for irony?) but it became too confusing and so poisoning became "vergiften." Then again, this is Yahoo! Answers, so I might just as reputably have used an Ouija board to contact Arminius and asked him. It seems a not unlikely jump from "something given" to "something given in your rival's ale while he isn't looking," and by that point the Norse, English, and German branches of Germanic were far separated from each other. I do have to wonder, however, just how much cynicism I am justified in reading into this evolution. I also have to wonder if German tourists are ever endearingly confused in gift shops.

WTF Wednesday, One Day Early: Gay Rights Are Human Rights

2010-04-19T21:40:00.000-07:00

I was fiercely glad to read that Obama recently ordered hospitals to allow patients to choose who has visitation rights. This is a step which seems, to me, to be simple human decency. I can't imagine anyone denying the request of a dying man to be with the people he loves. The fact that a desire this basic is being granted as though it were a concession, as though we should look magnanimous for deciding not to strip the dying of comfort, and not only that but the fact that it took this long, unsettles me. At least now our administration is taking steps to make it right.

My friend Tiana wrote an excellent essay around the time when people were voting on one of the shifting incarnations of Prop 8. In it she said something I've often paraphrased (mostly because I can't find her original wording to quote it verbatim) about how mistaken we are to assume it is appropriate to put another person's human rights to a majority vote. It is the responsibility of all political leaders, and indeed all thinking people, to insist on equal rights no matter how many dissenting voices are raised against them.

This same friend passed on a link to me today which shows with heartbreaking clarity the human consequences of silence on this issue. An elderly gay couple in Sonoma County, CA were separated despite their legal paperwork protecting their right to make end-of-life decisions for each other and placed in different nursing homes against their will. The county took possession of their belongings and auctioned them off and surrendered their home to the landlord. One of the partners died in the nursing home alone. The surviving man is left without a home or possessions, without reminder of the life he and the man he loved had shared for twenty years.

I am angry for these men. I am furious that our society could have failed them so cataclysmically. I am even angrier to hear that the friend who passed the link to Tiana said he could imagine the same thing happening to him and his partner one day. If the majority believes that this is an acceptable outcome-- that these men deserved what happened to them-- then the majority is cruelly, dangerously wrong.

Thank you, Obama. I can only hope that you continue this course, that setting things right is more important to you than political maneuvering and the illusion of popular support.

WTF Wednesday: This Is An Intervention

2010-04-14T21:26:00.000-07:00

It's impossible to be unhappy while reading in a tree. Especially a crabapple tree in full bloom, and most especially in perfect spring weather as the sun is going down. Listening to the birds singing and smelling the fragrance of the flowers as pink petals rain gently down on my book-- utter bliss, isn't it?

If, however, you ask me what I was reading, I will like and say "Linguistics textbooks." Or "feminist theory." Or even "a yellow-back novel like they sell in the saloons and burlesque shows." Because that would be less shameful than what I was actually reading.

This is where the WTF comes in. I disliked the Twilight saga intensely from the minute I first tried to hack my way through it. I tore it apart in my earlier review, and my opinion has not changed. Twilight is, at best, vapid and poorly written. At worst, the relationship between Bella and Edward provides a destructive model for impressionable teenage girls who don't realize that Edward's behavior, vampire or not, constitutes emotional and physical abuse. And for some reason, I'm reading it again.

The best explanation I can think of is that I've been feeling frustrated and overwhelmed lately. Orchestrating a move out of state, trying to find a new job, my mother putting our childhood home on the market, and a number of other tensions have got me down, and it felt good reading about someone who's more whiny and emo than I feel. To crib a phrase from a fanfic review I once read, there's enough angst in Twilight to kill Trent Reznor. I mean, my problems may be annoying, but at least I'm not an uninteresting high-school martyr-bunny inexplicably enamored of an immortal abusive asshole. And it's not like I actually like the series. I'm just rereading it to laugh at it. I can quit anytime I want to.

Then again, I once had a friend who started listening to Manowar ironically and wound up on a slippery slope that led to her getting a "Sister of Metal" tattoo. Friends and readers, I count on you to intervene if this gets out of hand. If I ever start dusting myself with body glitter so I too can sparkle in the sun, stake the hell out of me.

Trip Report Tuesday: Always A Production

2010-04-13T20:53:00.000-07:00

I think that Trip Report Tuesday is collapsing under my own ambition. My last project was to send e-mails to linguists, and I did send one. After that, I was in the middle of orchestrating my spring break and a job interview, along with planning a move and dealing with some tricky personal issues, and the linguist e-mails just fell by the wayside. I feel like my life is enough of a project right now that I can't afford to give myself new ones. Therefore, my project this week is merely to continue updating... and to finish that damn sock. I've got to the point where I'm turning the heel and I want to wear the stupid thing already.

Do any of you want projects? Let me know!

No Shit?

2010-04-12T21:18:00.000-07:00

I can't remember where I first heard this amusing etymological trope. I may have read it in one of the popular linguistic travelogues I've been devouring lately. I may have seen it on the internet, which I also devour. At any rate, someone asserts that the word "science" and the word "shit" come from the same Indo-European root. To which I exclaimed "No shit, really?" And then set out to find proof.

Holy Writ (by which, of course, I always mean the OED) traces "science" to the Latin word scire, "to know." Looking up "shit" in the OED gives a vaguer origin, along with a sense of intellectual shame and a fit of the giggles. The farthest they trace it is an Old Teutonic root, skit-, which they do not gloss but which was handed down unchanged into Swedish and still means "shit." The roots are very similar on the surface, but seem completely separate in terms of meaning. Are they really related? Oddly enough, yes.

Germanic and Latin share a common heritage; both of them are descended from the Indo-European family of languages (which also includes such far-flung members as Sanskrit, Celtic, Hindi, Yiddish, and the Romance and Slavic languages.) The American Heritage Dictionary's appendix of Indo-European Roots (available here) lists both "shit" and "science" as derivatives of skei-, meaning "to cut or split." It is related to the root sek-, which also means "to cut"; the Latin analogue secare, which gave us words like "transect," "secant," and "dissect," came from this second root.

So, conceptually, how do you get from "to cut" to "science" and "shit"? Scire, which furnished "science," began life meaning "to discern," "to tell one thing from another," logically linked to the division of knowledge into categories. (This same link led to the word "nice," another scire descendant-- it once meant "precise" or "exacting.") "Shit" is, once again, vaguer. The American Heritage Dictionary traces it, along with "blatherskite" (a Middle English term for a contemptible, long-winded person derived from skite, "diarrhea") and "shyster," as being "all from Germanic *sktan, to separate, defecate." This sense is echoed in the Greek root meaning "split" which gave us "schizophrenic." Why separate and defecate, though? Why pack these two into one word? Is there an obvious and disgusting allusion to be made here? Well, no science, Sherlock.

WTF Wednesday: One from the Vaults

2010-03-17T20:31:00.000-07:00

Today, most of my research time has been taken up with yesterday's Linguist E-mail, so I haven't had time to foam at the mouth about anything current. I did find this little snippet of spleen in my files, though, and it's as true now as it was then, so I thought I'd dust it off and take it out to meet the neighbors.

A Few Words About Feminism, circa 2007

I had been following the nomination process for the new Bishop of Chicago, and I read the profiles of the candidates with interest. I was delighted to see that almost half the nominees are women, but not necessarily surprised—the Episcopal Church is historically among the more progressive denominations when it comes to women’s issues. As I read the female candidates’ statements, they all mentioned in some aspect the challenges peculiar to women priests. One of them even recalled the warning of one of her professors at seminary: “When large numbers of women begin to be bishops, the office will have lost its respect, power and prestige – not unlike what happened with school teachers in the United States and doctors in the Soviet Union.”

Oh, surely not, I thought. Look how far we’ve come; society must have moved beyond misogyny by now. For instance, a recent article about generational differences in the workplace in Working Mother magazine highlighted several amenities offered to today’s working women that our great-grandmothers would scarcely have believed. (And yes, I know it’s odd that I read Working Mother magazine when I am not a working mother. I was, however, a working receptionist who was frequently bored enough to read all the magazines in the waiting room.) Young women of my generation are fortunate enough to live in the world our foremothers dreamed of creating—we have immeasurable opportunity to pursue our diverse passions, and many of the overt obstacles to our success are things of the past. In fact, the situation of American women has improved to the point where many young women see feminism as a thing of the past as well—and this is what worries me.

My youngest sister thinks that she doesn’t need to pay attention to politics at the age of sixteen because “it doesn’t affect her life.” My friends start Facebook groups called “Misogyny: An Enlightened State of Mind.” The Chick Lit phenomenon, in the name of women’s empowerment, spews out vapid, materialistic fiction about shopping, sniping at other women, and snagging bland commitment-phobic hunks as examples of what women are supposed to like. And one rarely hears the term “feminist” when it is not immediately preceded by “bra-burning.” Perversely, this could be taken as good news—the fair treatment of women has become obvious enough to my generation that it doesn’t really warrant our attention. Ceasing to take it seriously, however, is a huge mistake; what is it they say about those who forget the past, after all?

No, I don’t really think that anyone is literally out to abolish the 20^th amendment and banish women to the kitchen, the sewing-room, and the menstrual hut. I’m not a tinfoil-hatted paranoiac, after all. Still, just because there are now decades of legal precedent for women to demand fair treatment doesn’t make the rape statistics any less alarming, the assault on women’s self-image any less infuriating, or the casual taking for granted of all we have achieved any less worrisome. Worse, the people who call attention to continuing problems in the treatment of women are painted as shrill, bitchy harpies even by other women. Women denigrating feminists? Let’s not let misogyny be one of the traditionally male pastimes that “empowered” women claim as their own. Women’s rights, remember, are human rights, because women are people, not a “special interest group.”

This brings me to my final point—feminism as a movement may have achieved its goals, but feminism as a way of life will never be “over.” As in any relationship between men and women, it takes attention, communication, and tireless work towards mutual understanding and compassion to maintain the respectful balance feminism symbolizes. More than that, it takes awareness and initiative to remain arbiters of our own best interests, and this means being socially and politically informed as well as being willing to stand up for ourselves. Despite the saying’s domestic overtones, it still rings true—a woman’s work (or that of any feminist) is never done.

Trip Report Tuesday: Linguistics and Fear and More Linguistics

2010-03-16T20:45:00.000-07:00

I have been shying away from assigning myself Tuesday projects on the grounds that my whole life is a project these days. I have a lot to get together: a move, a new job, a host of creative ideas that I would dearly love to see come to fruition. But I was reminded of the original purpose of Trip Report Tuesday: "there's usually something little and accessible that you can do right now to take yourself closer to any goal."

One of my dearest and most far-reaching goals is to get into a graduate linguistics program. To that end, the First Mate suggested that this week, I process two e-mails a day either from or to linguists to ask for their advice. Now, I usually hold professors and actual working linguists in the kind of reverence people reserve for film stars and rock gods and the like. I couldn't imagine myself actually talking to them; I'd feel too much like a fangirl, too uneducated. That, however, is actually bullshit, isn't it? I mean, I want to be one of these people. They're not academic demigods, they're future colleagues, and I shouldn't feel at all sheepish about approaching them.

So I start tomorrow. Eee, terror and anticipation!

Anyone else want to hop on the terror and anticipation train? Do one thing this week that scares and excites you, then write and tell me all about it.

Naked Came the Etymologist...

2010-03-15T10:41:00.000-07:00

This week's Etymology Monday starts off with an absolutely wonderful word: gymnologize. This obsolete gem comes from the Greek - ("gymno"), meaning "naked" + ("logos"), meaning "speech." To gymnologize, then, is 'to dispute naked, like an Indian philosopher.’ I don't see why the Indian philosophers should have all the fun, though. Granted, the prevalence of dick jokes in everyday debate probably doesn't need any more catalyst, but surely some of the poncier liberal arts academies could be convinced to field a gymnology team as an underground adjunct to their forensics programs, couldn't they? (St. John's College, I'm looking at you.)

This gives rise to an entertaining exercise: Using the prefix gymno- and some elementary Latin and Greek, one can spawn a whole slate of interesting fields, of which it pleases me to provide a small taste:

-gymnobotany: A branch of plant science which of necessity focuses fairly strongly on identifying poison oak.
-gymnogogy: What happens when all your courses are taught online and your students never actually have to see you. Alternately, what got Mary Kay Letourneau put in jail all those times.
-gymnography: Drawing dirty pictures in your lecture notes.
-gymnochondria: The sickening feeling that you're actually naked all the time.

I am particularly championing one of these words, so much so that I'm making it the Word of the Week despite my having made it up: gymnosophy. From "gymno" + "sophia" ('wisdom'), it refers to all of those profound and bizarre thoughts that only seem to come to you, say, in the shower, or when you're ruminating lazily in bed with your partner as the hours slip on toward dawn. Things like "I wonder why you never seem to see a baby pigeon," or "Now that you think about it, are Gary Busey and Nick Nolte ever photographed together? Is there any proof that Nolte isn't the Jekyll to Busey's Hyde?" In the habit of English lexicographers replacing good sound Germanic compounds with frillier derivatives of the Classical languagues, I propose it as a slightly upscale alternative to "pillow talk."

If anyone's got any particularly insightful or ridiculous gymnosophy to share, please leave it in the comments. Also, if anyone's got proof that Nick Nolte and Gary Busey are separate people, please leave that in the comments too.

Wednesday is the New Tuesday

2010-02-24T20:29:00.000-08:00

...because it's time for a Trip Report. The Vagina Monologues wrapped this past weekend, and it was an amazing experience. I had a crew of supportive family and friends (possibly even a motley one) there to cheer me on, and these family and friends were surprised and moved by the content of the show. It's important material for anyone-- for everyone--to think about. A lot of really terrible things happen to women around the world. Even so, the horror and brutality of violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo does not invalidate the less pressing but still keenly felt issues of women in this country coming to terms with their womanhood, and with the cultural attitudes which surround it. Examining this process and these attitudes is crucial for us as we learn to be in the world.

On a more personal level, the show made me realize that I miss doing theater. Not that I ever really Did Theater-- my post-high-school acting career consisted entirely of a small group called Artistic Masturbation Theater. I did not, in fact, masturbate artistically on stage with this group, although I did once have a role which required me to fake an orgasm. The company began with a group of my friends who wanted a place to produce the scenes, monologues, and vignettes they wrote. It was a brilliant idea, and during its run I was involved as an actor, a writer, and a director.

College is, of course, the sort of place where one does these wildly creative things. It should not, however, be the only place. Why doesn't everyone put on their own productions? What's stopping them? I don't know, but I'm going to find out. I'm planning to move to Madison in July, where a large collection of Artistic Masturbation founders and collaborators live. My first project while there is to start an independent theater group and produce some of the things we've written.

Now, I've got no idea what, practically, is involved in such an endeavor. Renting a space, marketing a show, all that stuff-- I guess I'll figure it out as I go. Adventure!

This leads me to my second order of business: A Project for Emily. My first plan for this theater group is to put together an evening of Film Noir-inspired scenes, because I've already written one and I have a friend who is filming one. Two scenes does not an evening make, however, and so I plan to solicit submissions from any aspiring and talented writers who would be excited to see their pieces performed. Emily, your mission, should you choose to accept it: Write a one-act play that involves some of the conventions of Film Noir. Subject matter is open, but aesthetic must fit the theme. If the result is workable in the show and with the resources I have to hand, I'll produce it whenever I get this crazy biplane off the ground.

WTF Wednesday Brought To You By Stephen Fry

2010-02-10T21:38:00.000-08:00

I'm not writing a WTF Wednesday post today partly because I am post-rehearsal and exhausted, but mostly because I think that your time would be better spent watching Stephen Fry talk about the Catholic Church. He makes a brilliant, moving argument that the Catholic Church as an institution is no longer a force for good in the world, if it ever was-- while being compassionate toward believers and generally wise and humorous. Check him out.

Trip Report from Vagina Country

2010-02-09T18:55:00.000-08:00

Trip Report Tuesday is back with an update on my longest-running project. I auditioned for the Vagina Monologues in December, as well you know (Eddie Izzard voice). I didn't try out with any particular part in mind-- my main goal was just to follow through on a spur-of-the-moment impulse. Just to prove to myself that I could do it.

Well, I did it. I sailed through callbacks and was cast. I have two monologues: Hair and Not-So-Happy Fact. For those of you who have seen the show, you know the incredible range of women's experiences it chronicles. I'm lucky to have one of the very funny bits and one of the very sobering bits. When I started out this was a throwaway endeavor, but now that I've committed to participate, I'm very glad to be a part of something so powerful and far-reaching. Also, I get to say the word "vagina" an awful lot.

For those of you who may be interested, the show runs Feb. 19-21 in Gregory Hall on the UIUC campus. Drop a comment for specific dates and times.

I'm already thinking about my next project, but February is going to be rather packed. One of the things I'm considering is a sign language class. There's one which starts in April and for which I can get a pretty awesome discount. I've always wanted to learn sign language.

Opinions? Ideas? Anyone want a project of their own? You know what to do.

Etymology Monday EXPLODES onto the scene!

2010-02-08T21:55:00.000-08:00

So, it has been brought to my attention that I fail hard for allowing this blog to lapse for so long. Fair enough, and where better to start than with my favorite new feature: Etymology Monday!

Philology is one of my foremost passions, and today's Word of the Week pretty handily illustrates why. It's a perfectly ordinary word, albeit an awesome one: explode. Chances are you've used it today, especially if you're Bruce Willis. When it was suggested to me as a topic for today's post, I didn't expect it to be particularly diverting. But get this: Its roots are the Latin ex-, meaning "out of," and plaudere, meaning "to clap." It was originally a theatrical term, meaning "to hiss or clap a player off the stage." The Oxford English Dictionary has its earliest appearance in English in the 1530s, where it is used to mean "to reject with scorn." Throughout the 1600s, the definition broadened from impromptu drama criticism to the more general " to drive away with expressions of disapprobation; to cry down; to banish ignominiously." ("Banish ignominiously"-- I love the OED.) In the late 1600s and early 1700s, the focus seems to have shifted from the act of rejection to the loud noises which accompanied it. It came to mean "to drive forth with sudden noise," and began to be used to describe gunshots, lightning, and coals ejected from the fireplace. By the 1790s, to explode meant "to go off with a loud noise," which the Online Etymology Dictionary quotes as an Americanism. Its use in the current sense, "to burst with destructive force," is not reported until 1882.

The OED also reports a similar verb, displode, which arose in the 1600s. From the same Latin root, but with the ancient prefix dis-, derived from a Proto-Indo-European root *dvis, meaning "two, in two ways" and by extension, "asunder, in twain." Latin displodere meant "to burst asunder," and the English word "displode" is glossed as "to drive out or discharge with explosive violence." It seems a far more likely verb for our current needs, but "displode" fell out of favor. Its last attestation in the OED is in 1812. Why "explode" and not "displode?" Was it more familiar? More evocative? I don't know, and this is what fascinates me about etymology. Even the most ordinary word carries within it a secret history not only of the language, but of the people who speak it, of their preferences and their prejudices. Words are like geodes-- scratch the surface and you'll find shimmering layers of meaning.

Admitting You Have a Nacho Problem is the First Step to Getting Help

2010-01-15T07:20:00.000-08:00

Nacho Problem, one of my most frequent commenters and (full disclosure) my uncle, is a pretty cool guy. If you dig the stuff I write, you'll probably also dig his blog (in the blogroll as "The Unbearable Lameness of Being.") His recent post on gay marriage will likely result in my linking to it every time the subject comes up and saying "...Yeah. What he said." He can also help you discern whether or not you have married a box turtle, which is harder to tell than you might think.

So yeah. Check him out.

In other news, still no word from Scott Adams. It'd be damn cool, though, wouldn't it?

Exciting Developments?

2010-01-11T21:03:00.000-08:00

As you all may have noticed, I challenged cartoonist, author, blogger, and generally well-known individual Scott Adams to a duel a few months back. My goal was mostly to see if he'd actually notice, and secondly to be amused by the prospect of a Nerf duel. I didn't really expect anything to come of it.

Now, someone has commented upon that entry purporting to be Scott Adams. I figure this can mean either that Scott Adams has actually found my blog, or that the internet is full of liars. An equal welcome to either Scott Adams or internet impostor! Mr. Adams, if that is indeed your name, I admire your work-- I was particularly fond of Stick To Drawing Comics, Monkey Brain-- and I promise this project wasn't meant to be as creepy as it probably sounds. If you wouldn't mind, I'd be excited to get some confirmation that this is really you. You could link to me in your blog or, if that smacks of blatant self-promotion, slip a phrase like "My hovercraft is full of eels" in there somewhere. At any rate, thank you for dropping by and making your presence known.

I don't know if you have any plans to be in the Midwest anytime soon (or anytime, ever) for speaking arrangements or secret world-running business or what have you, but if you do, my challenge still stands. I will provide Nerf guns and propose Millennium Park in downtown Chicago as the field of battle (just because it's central.) I have a second lined up, and you are welcome to bring one as well. The first to be shot buys a round of beer, after which I would like to buy you a second one, for being whimsical enough to duel an unknown blogger with Nerf guns in public.

I look forward to your response, Mr. Adams.
Regards,
Susan G.

Goddamn Blue Terrists!

2010-01-07T21:54:00.000-08:00

WTF Wednesday was postponed due to birthday festivities, but there's plenty of WTF to go around, and today conservative blogger Dr. Richard Swier is serving up a hearty helping.

Dr. Swier, it seemed, didn't enjoy the film Avatar. Not because it was "boring, predictable, and very long," as his moviegoing companions thought, but because it was "pure eco-propaganda." Here, I actually agree with him. Hell, James Cameron agrees with him; he's said in an interview that his goal was to use the emotional appeal of the film to encourage people to internalize a sense of personal responsibility towards the environment. My problem with Sweir's analysis is twofold. First, he equates all environmentalists with violent radicals and seems to suggest that wanting to limit the use of resources is un-American. Chris Tackett of treehugger.com has written a more detailed and better rebuttal to these points than I could hope to do, and here it is.

My other problem (well, my other problem aside from the Youtube video Swier posted making all environmentalists out to be communist/socialist, and the insinuation that socialism is one of those argument-stopping accusations. And his statement that "the enemy of the environmentalist groups is the human race." And... maybe I shouldn't have said my problems were twofold when they are, it seems, manifold.) The other problem I had in mind when I started this entry was his view about the dominion of man over the other creatures. I hear a lot of people quoting scripture to justify this view. And I can, to some extent, see their point. Whether or not humans are the only animals with a sense of the future or of morality, they seem to be the only ones who have willingly disregarded the idea of balanced consumption-- or, at least, the only ones in a position to get away with it. I would argue that this does give us some measure of dominion over the earth.

Where Swier and I differ is that I don't consider the nature of our dominion to be an inborn right to use its resources as we like. He says that "American Conservationism aims to preserve natural resources expressly for their continued sustainable use by humans. That, I believe, is the proper world view when it comes to our planet and its natural resources." I take objection to "expressly" and to "sustainable" in that sentence. First of all, I don't think our use of resources is sustainable by any stretch of the imagination, nor does it appear that sustainability has even historically been a goal until very recently. (Granted, this is my perception-- anyone who cares to dispute this would be welcome.)

He linked in his comment section an article about how buggy 2010 was going to be due to harsher restrictions on pesticides as being counter to our rights to use our environment as we see fit, which brings me to "express human use." I think that by now I can only claim to be a formerly religious person, but still I can't see how anyone could believe that God would condone the loss of biodiversity. There are many scriptural references that say some version of "The earth is the Lord's, and everything in it." If you're going to make a religious argument, wouldn't it be more compelling that humans' task to "have dominion over the earth" compels us even more to protect it as it was given to us? Mountaintop removal, clear-cutting the rainforest, and threatening habitats are perhaps all immediately beneficial to humans, but I can't see them as anything other than an affront to a Creator who has made such an astoundingly beautiful, diverse, and well-balanced world.

Aaaaand Scott Adams.

A Brief Interlude

2010-01-06T10:41:00.000-08:00

WTF Wednesday will follow this evening, but first I'd like to say Happy Birthday Number Seven to my First Mate, Andy.

No, he is not seven years old. I am saying twenty-six happy birthdays to him, through twenty-six different media. This is the seventh.

To Andy-- go look for the other 25. To everyone else-- update tonight.

Preview of Coming Attractions

2010-01-05T21:31:00.000-08:00

One of my New Year's resolutions is to do more with this blog, specifically update at least four times a week and branch out in terms of content. Here are the things I'd like to do:

Keep Trip Report Tuesday and WTF Wednesday running.
Continue to update the Word of the Week on Mondays, and expand it into Etymology Monday. This is mainly because I love going on and on about words, and I used to coauthor a whole blog for the purpose. (Still do, but both of us are awfully busy of late.)
Update the Silent Top Five on Top Five Thursday.
Add something new- Fiction Friday. I used to do a lot of creative writing, and I'm trying to get back into it. This will involve me inflicting bits of this creative writing upon you all, to mock mercilessly as you see fit.
Make the Figure Five Home Game more involved. One of my favorite corners of the Internet was the show with zefrank (link in the blogroll), because through his daily videolog he inspired comic and creative genius from his viewers. The Earth Sandwich project (in which two pieces of bread were placed at opposite points on the earth,) the contest to see who could make the ugliest Myspace page, and the user-created Friday shows were my favorite projects because they brought the interwebs together in the name of absurdist comedy. This is something I aspire to emulate. So let's do some crazy fun things, internet friends!

Suggestions? Leave 'em in the comments! Scott Adams? Leave 'im in the comments!

Pop Politics? Political/Entertainment Crossovers

2010-01-04T20:53:00.000-08:00

Guess what Nicolas Sarkozy, Kim Jong-Il, and Gordon Brown have in common?

They are all heads of state and major players in world politics.
They are all controversial figures, to varying degrees (as if any head of state isn't.)
They all made the 2010 GQ Worst-Dressed list.

If you answered "all of the above," you are correct. I discovered this from the same Yahoo News rundown that told me that Rod Blagojevich was going to be a contestant on Celebrity Apprentice. If I remember correctly, this show used to feature real people who were really trying to launch a career in business. Okay, or grub for money from Donald Trump, but the point is they weren't already established. Blagojevich, who was already rejected from "I'm A Celebrity- Get Me Out Of Here!" for being ~~insufficiently famous~~ ~~fucking annoying~~ prohibited by the judge in his trial for conspiracy charges, seems to be trying to reinvent himself as one of those celebrities who's famous for...being famous. (cf. Paris Hilton, Tila Tequila and the entire Kardashian family). This is presumably so that people won't remember that he's actually famous for attempting to sell a Senate seat in the most obnoxiously brazen way possible.

This leads me to two points. One is that there are two accepted ways for people to become famous for nothing, and I'm really, really glad that Rod Blagojevich went the reality TV route rather than having a really slutty Myspace page with a leaked sex tape. The second is that we seem to have lost the distinction between our political figures and our popular entertainment. Now, some people might argue that there wasn't much of one in the first place, but most of the crossovers I know involve entertainers breaking into politics, not the other way around. Ronald Reagan's presidency, Ah-nold's term as the Governator, Al Franken's senate seat, and Jesse "The Body" Ventura's political career are a few examples.

Entertainers who later moved in political circles, though, were at least acknowledged to have made a career shift. Now, it seems that the drive is to bring the political circles into the realm of popular entertainment. How else do you explain Michelle Obama hosting an episode of Iron Chef in the White House garden? (Can you imagine, say, Mamie Eisenhower allowing a TV crew into the White House garden?) Or Joe Biden appearing on the Daily Show as a sitting Vice President? For the record, I love the Daily Show. I think it's TV's most reliable take on current issues and the more serious politicians we can get on there, the better. Still, having the Vice President on a talk show is a new level of media access.

This means that the political world seems more accessible in everyday life, which is both a wonderful development and a double-edged sword. I think that in a world where breaking news is Tweeted and people expect to give their leaders real-time feedback, a truly open administration could make people realize that none of us can afford to be ignorant of politics, that regardless of who is wielding the ceremonial power, every decision is in part our decision. I was delighted to find The Obameter, a website which tracks action on President Obama's campaign promises. This is popular media in politics at its best-- holding politicians accountable to the people in a way that the people can access and understand. Even the publicity appearances can do some good-- there's something to be said for putting a human face on policy, for showing the similarities between those at the top and the rest of us. Hell, even Michelle Obama's Iron Chef episode could convince people to try kohlrabi or greens or gardening.

The other edge, though, is that politicians have an unprecedented ability to market and trade on their image-- and the media has an unprecedented ability to cash in on politicians. I'm not claiming that reality TV is ruining American politics, exactly. It does, however, take the focus off the serious business of leading a country, or of legislating, or even of bothering to research voting records before you vote for the candidate with the best campaign ads and the nicest hair. Take the Obama campaign. Metaphorically speaking, Obama stage-dived into the presidency, borne aloft by pogoing supporters shouting "YES WE CAN! OI OI OI!" The problem with image politics is that images are mutable and can easily become divorced from actual action. I know people who are quickly becoming frustrated that Obama has not fixed healthcare, solved the climate crisis, and averted the recession, all while convincing everyone from Patty Murray to John Kyl to hold hands and sing Kumbayah-- and he still hasn't been President a year. Judging by his falling approval ratings, people who were willing to back Obama's image now don't seem willing to give him the time and trust it takes to make towering dreams real and practical-- which is certainly longer than one-quarter of his term.

I applaud the new visibility and openness of political leadership, but it does seem like we're getting closer and closer to a future where we airlift all our presidential candidates to a remote island and let the American public vote by phone to see who gets elected and who gets a hole poked in his canteen by Ron Paul. Even if our politicians don't always deserve respect, I think the process of government does. And while honest criticism and well-directed satire could actually help refine that process, all the Reality TV treatment will do is turn it into a sideshow.

P.S. Scott Adams, I haven't forgotten you, you know. Call me!

Regular Schedule Resumes Tomorrow

2010-01-03T16:07:00.000-08:00

Yours Humbly returns from my week-long Christmas vacation tomorrow with a return to the old, more structured, more content-heavy update schedule. This includes the Word of the Week, the Silent Top Five, Trip Report Tuesdays, and WTF Wednesdays.

In the meantime, I've added a new link to the blogroll. My little sister wrote to me thus: "Now, everyone knows that b...logs are hardly any fun if no one reads them, and since a bunch of family members/mutual friends read your blog, would you mind including a link to mine in your next post? Feel free to call me shameless, merely piggybacking on your successful (and most likely more interesting) blog, but whatever." So go check out my shameless sister, who is merely piggybacking on my successful (and most likely more interesting) blog.

Merry.

2009-12-25T06:07:00.000-08:00

"A week from today we begin a brand new year
Let us all be hopeful, men & women of good cheer
And resolve to fight against stupidity and fear
It's Christmas morning

And as awful as the world can be we are still alive
And if we're very careful we might well survive
There are cures & solutions & there is compromise
Christmas morning "
(Loudon Wainwright III, "Christmas Morning")

Merry Christmas, Scott Adams. And Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzaa, Blessed Yule, Happy Festivus, and have an excellent Decemberween.

Year in Review Survey Tradition

2009-12-23T17:24:00.000-08:00

Every year around Christmas, it is my tradition to post in my blog a recap to my year. This goes back to the days of my whiner Livejournal, and I compare them every year. This year, since I've jumped blogs, this be the place. So here we go:

1. What did you do in 2009 that you'd never done before?:Held two jobs, was honest-to-god financially independent, bought a laptop, took a martial art, talked about my own marriage as more than a hypothetical concept without having a full-blown panic attack.

2. Did you keep your new year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
These were my resolutions for last year:
1. Be more decisive. (Maybe? I'm getting better at it.)
2. Stop apologizing for things I'm not sorry for. (FAIL.)
3. Write more. (Success! Just look at this shiny new blog!)

My next year's resolutions are as follows:
1. Keep up aikido regularly at least until I move.
2. Make it back to swing dancing at least twice a month.
3. Apply for graduate school by December 15th.
4. Find a job and activities in Chicagoland that will take my mind off of living in the suburbs again.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?:
My choir director, my friend Ja Nelle, some people I knew in high school.

4. Did anyone close to you die?:
My grandfather, my friend Craig, and my cat Tabitha.

5. What countries did you visit?:
Uh, just this one. Does that count?

6. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?:
A better sense of where I want to go in life and more initiative to make it happen.

7. What dates from 2009 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?:
Blues workshop in Purdue, July 11 (Katie's wedding), November 1 (the day I started this blog).

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?:
Planning and executing a whole slew of traditional Maid of Honor duties for FloBus, making it through a summer of unemployment and finding not one but two jobs afterwards, raising $750 for diabetes research and doing Step Out, finding a women's choir that I love and getting a solo with them, starting this blog and keeping up with it, building a life with which I am more satisfied.

9. What was your biggest failure?:
Once again, shying away from graduate school and Fulbright applications because I fear being rejected again.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?:
I had the flu for about two days but otherwise I've been pretty healthy.

11. What was the best thing you bought?:
Toshi, my Nokia Twist, my kitty Ferdinand, a whole bunch of Exalted sourcebooks.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?:
My family's, once again. Out of a tragedy which could easily have pulled us into depression and stagnancy, all of us have instead grown and reinvented ourselves. Especially my mother. She's broadening her horizons in ways I never imagined she would, and she's become much more easygoing and much less narrow-minded. Thus also does Steve's behavior merit celebration, for showing my mom that there are other ways to live and for generally being a swell guy. Emily's behavior merits celebration because she's grown up so much, and she's become much less antagonistic and learned to temper the drama with reason. Josh and Becca merit celebration for going out and building themselves functional lives. Yay, all of us! Also, Andy's. He's really thrown himself into his business this year, and it's really starting to pay off. I'm always in awe of his determination, and I'm really proud of him.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?:
My students'. Sometimes they make me, quite literally, weep for the future of our country.

14. Where did most of your money go?:
Rent, gas, food, bills, books, yarn, the occasional gadget.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?:
Gaming, Katie & Kyle's wedding, vacations at my mother's, acquiring a new kitty, eventually finding out what surprise Andy's been holding over my head all year (pretty sure I'll still have to wait a bit more).

16. What song will always remind you of 2009?:
Jonathan Coulton's "Thing A Week" set, Death Cab for Cutie's "Soul Meets Body" and "I Will Follow You Into The Dark", Fun's "Be Calm," YACHT's "Voodoo City," all the Amasong music, and Smashing Pumpkins' album Adore.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
i. happier or sadder? Happier.
ii. thinner or fatter? About the same.
iii. richer or poorer? Richer, just barely.

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?:
Academic pursuits, research, community involvement.

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?:
Procrastinating and wasting time on the internet.

20. How will you spend Christmas?:
Relaxing at home with my family and probably visiting Andy's house a bit.

22. Did you fall in love in 2009?:
I continued to be in love.

23. How many one-night stands?:
None.

24. What was your favorite TV program?:
Doctor Who (still), Black Books.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?:
No.

26. What was the best book you read?:
I kind of broke up with fiction this year, and read mainly nonfiction on a host of subjects, mainly linguistics, education theory, and religious studies. I can't remember the names of all of these. The few fiction books I have read this year included Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, which I had some prejudice of my own against reading, but which I actually enjoyed quite a bit.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery?:
Busdriver, Girltalk, Regina Spektor (again), Fun, Dan le Sac/Scroobius Pip, some fun techno.

28. What did you want and get?:
A laptop (after a year of saving up), my job at the high school back, a solo in Amasong, a callback for the Vagina Monologues, to attend my grandfather's memorial service, a visit from Katie Floeter for my birthday. I got a lot of great stuff this year.

29. What did you want and not get?:
Accepted to grad school, my dad.

30. What was your favorite film of this year?:
Watchmen and Avatar, which were the only two films I saw this year.

31. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?:
I turned 24. It was my golden birthday and I got myself a bottle of Goldschlager to celebrate. Katie drove down with two dozen cinnamon and espresso cupcakes with homemade vanilla bean frosting and yellow roses on top. Then she, Jessa, Eric, Andy, and I went out to White Horse and had beer and burgers and sweet potato fries and artichoke dip. Then we went back to my place and and mixed up a pitcher of Pink Panthers, which contain lime juice and grenadine and simple syrup and bourbon and bourbon and bourbon and bourbon and club soda. Then we all fell over on my couch and in the morning had hangover pancakes. All things considered it was a pretty great birthday.

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?:
I don't want to seem materialistic, but it would be really nice to make more money.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2009?:
Educator/sellout casual, but personalized with pretty scarves and Chuck Taylors.

34. What kept you sane?:
I stayed sane?

34a. Okay, what kept you less crazy?
My family, Andy, my friends, and my own dogged insistence on continuing to function.

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?:
David Tennant.

36. What political issue stirred you the most?:
(cf. the rest of my blog)

37. Who did you miss?:
My wonderful Yuais, and my wonderful father.

38. Who was the best new person you met?:
The swing dancers, my Amasisters, several of my students, Chris and Ja Nelle, and a large group of Andy's friends.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2009:
Once you make a decision once and for all, your whole life feels easier.

40. Quote a song lyric that describes the past year:
"So enjoy yourself, do the things that matter
Cause there isn't time and space to do it all
Love the things you try, drink a cocktail, wear a tie
Show a little grace if you should fall

Don't live another day unless you make it count
There's someone else that you're supposed to be
Something deep inside of you that still wants out
And shame on you if you don't set it free"
Jonathan Coulton, "A Talk with George"

Things I Learned About Medicine From Watching House

2009-12-22T09:21:00.000-08:00

Medical conferences have '80s dance parties. All the doctors attend. All the doctors rent costumes.
Many low-grade ailments can probably be cured with the judicious application of swishy blond hair, a dreamy Australian accent, and blue eyes that can melt butter at 50 paces.
It is accepted practice to do the medical equivalent of throwing darts-- don't know what the hell he's got? Start him on Atropine, Prednisone, Ativan, Vioprin, dialysis, chemo, and abrade his marrow. Something's gotta work, right?
Nobody ever has only one disease, injury, or rare genetic condition at once. There are always at least two and usually more. One of them is probably sarcoidosis.
Order as many PET scans as you want. It's not like we pay for those things.
There is actually such a thing as a "Department of Diagnostic Medicine." Because they don't diagnose people anywhere else in the hospital
It is possible to be a world-famous diagnostician, famous enough that all your bad behavior gets swept under the rug, without giving a single TV interview, publishing a single paper, or writing a single book.
Diagnostics-related breaking and entering is not only not criminal, it's virtually undetectable.
The five million people worldwide who have lupus are all fucking liars.

That said, I do like House. I got sucked in by Hugh Laurie's perfect American accent and stayed because I am an easily amused hypochondriac.

Scott Adams, please pardon me for neglecting you in my past few entries. I'm still just as eager as ever to duel you.

Happy Avatarsery To Me!

2009-12-21T20:19:00.000-08:00

Two years ago today, I handed Andy an envelope with
WILL YOU GO OUT WITH ME? CIRCLE ONE:
YES NO ASTRONAUT
written on the front. Andy handed it back to me with both YES and ASTRONAUT circled. This was, obviously, the right answer. Happy anniversary, First Mate.

In celebration, he and I went to see Avatar. You, also, should put down your mouse and go to the nearest theater and go see Avatar because yea verily, it is fucking rad. The graphics are... unghhhhOHMYGOD. Scintillating. Exquisite. I'm having a nerdgasm right now just thinking about it. The plot has been characterized as Fern Gully with guns. Yeah, kind of. So? Fern Gully was a good movie, even with Robin Williams rapping in it. Guns just make it better. The point is that humans are dicks and THE GRAPHICS ARE AMAZING GO SEE IT RIGHT NOW GO GO GO GO GO!

...I will wait here for you.

Where Have All The Twentysomethings Gone?

2009-12-19T11:44:00.000-08:00

Now that my Week from Hell is over, I can luxuriate in two weeks off of both of my jobs. Two weeks to be the person I really am-- not the exhausted, officious, sanitized, artificially perky version required at work. Two weeks to remember that I am, in fact, not as old as I always feel. (Between spending the majority of my time with people who consider Wayne's World "some really old movie" and being too tired to go out when I'm done with work, it gets easy to sink into the students' mindset that I am some ageless creature who disappears into a file cabinet when my supervising presence is not required.) Two weeks where people will address me by my real name. I didn't realize how big of a deal this was until I discovered upon reflection that I'd gone weeks without hearing my first name without "Miss" in front of it.

Naturally, I'm celebrating this by sleeping in and eating fudge. So much fudge that I have a headache now. Who knew fudge hangovers were possible?

On Wednesday, I began my celebrations a few days early by going to hang out with one of my friends who's still in undergrad. He's a lovely fellow who I hadn't seen in a while, and he was having a few people over, so I figured I'd drop by. This is when I realized that if you are heading into your mid-to-late twenties and looking to feel interesting and relevant, hanging out with undergrads is not going to help you much. As the evening began, my friend proposed that we go pick up some drinks to bring back to his place. Another of his guests asked "Am I the only one who's not underage?" I raised my hand. "Oh," she asked, "you're 21 too?" Sheepishly, I corrected her. Judging from the faces of my companions, it seems that "twenty-five" must be some newfangled college slang for "must have gotten lost on the way to Bingo Night at the VFW hall." Kids these days. (The evening's conversation generally revolved around finals, their diet's conspicuous lack of real food, and "that one time when I was so drunk." I mostly sat in the corner smiling indulgently, rather like a den mother. Then I ducked out early because I had work in the morning.)

The incident recalled my consternation a week before, when I was looking for something to wear to a wedding. Weddings are hard to dress for to begin with, especially winter weddings, but I didn't think my request was that unreasonable. I just wanted something warm and reasonably classy that wouldn't make me look like a slut or a Golden Girl. In the places I can afford to shop, collections are generally grouped into "Juniors," "Misses," and "Women's." I am not entirely sure where I am supposed to fall on that spectrum, so I started in the Juniors department.

It was immediately clear that I was looking in the wrong place. Anyone who is old enough, even barely old enough, to remember the '80s the first time around should know better than to wear any of the things I found in the Juniors department. Did we all forget that leggings, tapered acid-wash jeans, and puffy satin sleeves are, in fact, really hideous and unflattering? After a cursory browse revealed nothing that wouldn't make me look like an extra in Heathers, I moved on to Women's. I expected sweatshirts with teddy bears, pleated mom jeans, and necklines that revealed little or no neck from Women's, and that is exactly what I found.

Then I moved on to Misses, which I had figured would be my best bet-- not as ridiculous as Juniors, but more flattering and figure-conscious than Women's. What it turned out to be was... gray. Everything was gray. Gray button-down blouses, gray creased pants, voluminous gray turtleneck sweaters. Here and there would be a black or turquoise accent. What's more, everything seemed to be designed for Maria von Trapp-- expandable to fit several plump Austrian children inside with relative secrecy. Is this what women my age are supposed to wear? I couldn't even find a little black dress. (Although I did find a large gray one.) Most of Misses was exactly like Women's, except with fewer bright colors and fewer shoulderpads.

So it appears that I fall into a gap both in fashion and in function. I am too old to be fun, but not yet old enough to be consequential. I never meet anyone my own age. How long does this last? Because I kind of want to hurry up and turn thirty already.

All Teenagers' Internal Monologue Is Written By John Hughes

2009-12-16T22:00:00.000-08:00

I've been somewhat remiss in my blogging lately. I'm sorry- I've been having a really horrible week. And by "horrible," I mean "full of depressing reminders of how little I get paid and how much disrespect I put up with." Occasionally, I really love my job. I love explaining things, and I love the bright, hungry look on a student's face when he or she finally gets it. Lately, though, there's been less of that and more insulting sass from teenagers who think they're being clever. I know I shouldn't let it get to me, but sometimes it's hard to stomach.

The thing is, that is their job. It is all high school students' first task to be jerks while they're young and get it out of their system. This is the developmental stage where they are learning how to be in the world and function within a society, and they just haven't learned how to temper their self-centeredness with social responsibility. That's what this time is for. When I hear bright students complaining about how pointless high school is, how much busywork they have to do, I'm always a little frustrated because, truthfully, that's not the point. The most important thing you learn in high school is how to deal with people. Successful social interaction is like riding a bike-- you fall off a lot before you get it right. It's better to have those early awkward attempts be in a place where very little of what you do will follow you into later life. Hence high school. It seems like an unrealistic social setting while you're there, but the farther I get out of high school the more I realize that the rest of the world is still exactly like that. Well, except for college. College is like a greenhouse in Iceland-- a completely artificial environment that stimulates all sorts of growth and creative fruit, but which bears no relation to the world outside at all. Most of the stuff there can't even survive outside of it. Like, I know a student who spent weeks sitting in the middle of an amphitheater typing the same haiku on a typewriter while mandalas were projected around her. Genius? Possibly. Transferable skill? Hell no.

Next year, though, I'm going to stick with kindergartners. They're more mature and have more remorse when I catch them doing something wrong. And they let me finger-paint.

Scott Adams, what were you like in high school?

Twilight for Beginners

2009-12-13T20:29:00.000-08:00

I have a student who's really into reading. He's one of those shy, quiet guys who always looks surly, and he scarcely said two words to me until I happened to ask what he liked to read. A huge smile lit up his face and he immediately wrote me four pages of book recommendations. Over the semester he blossomed into a sweet, talkative kid who's always discussing literature with me in the hallways. It's one of those teaching success stories that keeps me going-- but for one little detail. The book that got him out of his shell? Twilight.

This is all the proof I need that I am really good at my job: In order to have something to talk about with this guy, I actually forced myself to read the entire Twilight saga.

If you've never read the Twilight series, I envy you. Just in case you are ever in a similar situation, though, allow me to summarize it for you:

1. Glamorous, sparkly vampire with A Dark Past and A Monstrous Ego meets wholly uninteresting self-absorbed teenage girl. For some reason, Edward Cullen decides that Bella Swan is his Twu Wuv, despite the fact that her shining accomplishments to date are managing not to walk into traffic or swallow her own tongue.

2. Edward, who has decided that the best way to show his Twu Wuv is through psychological abuse, is alternately distant and smothering. Bella remains wholly uninteresting, but for some reason this nets her another superhuman suitor. (What, is white-bread teen wangst like Spanish Fly to these creatures?) Werewolf Jacob is as badass as Edward would be if he weren't busy being such a huge pussy all the time. The two of them snarl at each other and get all shirtless and pouty. Bella, meanwhile, realizes she's too boring to live and does things like piss off vampires and jump off cliffs and confront elite undead overlords.

3. A whole bunch of bullshit teen drama goes here which I totally didn't care about because I was hoping that the rest of the series would be about the elite clan of undead overlords who are way more noteworthy than any of the main characters.

4. Bella complains that for what she's putting up with she should at least be getting some hot vampire nookie. So there's a huge wedding and a vampire baby, because Stephenie Meyer is Mormon.

5. Bella becomes a vampire and is actually less interesting as a result, because she has twice as much time to spend fawning over her brooding hubby and blood-sucking offspring. Jacob the werewolf relinquishes all his badassery by falling in love with a three-day-old child. Yeah, really.

5. The undead overlords threaten war with the Cullen clan, because... oh, who cares? Finally, some kickass vampire battles! A whole bunch of previously unmentioned characters show up with a whole bunch of previously unmentioned powers. Tantalizing glimpses of action presage a cataclysmic vampire/werewolf apocalypse. It looks as though the series might actually become mildly diverting.

6. About a million billion supernatural creatures assemble on the field, poised to rip each other's lungs out. Immediately before widespread carnage is unleashed... the key players decide to resolve their differences with a pat on the back and a "Can't we all just get along?" and they go their separate ways, leaving me with a serious case of vampire/werewolf-apocalypse blue balls.

That's basically all you need to know, in 2,999.5 fewer pages than it took La Meyer to lay it out.

Saturday Culture Infusion: Translating Rimbaud for Emily

2009-12-12T12:28:00.000-08:00

My littlest sister and I were talking about poetry, and I mentioned Arthur Rimbaud. Rimbaud is my favorite figure in French modernist poetry-- an enfant terrible of equal parts genius, badass, and douchebag. Some background: Rimbaud was a decadent, a libertine, a blazing talent who burned himself out and died young. Even at fifteen he was writing brilliant poetry. He ran away from home, drank like a fish, lived in a commune, and had a torrid relationship with Paul Verlaine, another poet. Rimbaud and Verlaine lived in poverty and fought like dogs, and the relationship ended when Verlaine, in a fit of suicidal despair, shot Rimbaud twice in the arm and was sent to prison.

He stopped writing at the height of his career, giving it up completely at twenty-one. He enlisted in the army, deserted, and wandered across Europe on foot. He lived in Java and in Africa, holding jobs here and there and taking mistresses, eventually ending up as a coffee and weapons merchant in Ethiopia. At thirty-six he developed an excruciatingly painful cancer and was carried back to France in a special wagon. He died at thirty-seven.

Here are two of my favorite poems of his, in my own translation (with some phrases cribbed from other translators):

Vowels

Black A, white E, red I, green U, blue O: vowels,
I will tell one day of your secret births
A, black hairy corset of brilliant flies
Which buzz around cruel stenches,

Gulfs of shadow; E, blankness of vapors and of tents
Lances of proud glaciers, white kings, shivers of cowslips;
I, crimsons, spit blood, laugh of beautiful lips
In anger or in ecstasies of penitence;

U, cycles, divine vibrations of viridian seas,
The peace of pastures scattered with animals, the peace of wrinkles
That alchemy imprints upon broad studious brows;

O, supreme Clarion full of strange stridencies,
Silences traversed by worlds and angels,
O, Omega! Violet ray of Her Eyes!

***

The Star Has Wept Rose-Color

The star has wept rose-color into the heart of your ears
Infinity rolled white from the nape of your neck to the small of your back
The sea broke russet at your ruby nipples
And Man bled black at your sovereign side.

Breakfast Only Comes In EPIC

2009-12-11T20:27:00.000-08:00

A brief glimpse of typical life chez Galasso-Seleen:

Andy suggested that we begin annotating our grocery lists to make them more amusing. Next time we go shopping, we are to acquire:

Bisquick, the gift of the gods of Pancake and Biscuit
Erdnussbutter, the spread of life
COFFEE, upon which caffeinated river all commerce in the universe must depend
Grape Jelly, the preserves of happiness
Cold Cereal, DOOOOOOOOOOOOOM OF A THOUSAND WORLDS
Parmesan Cheese (~~w/cellulose~~), the once and future condiment.

This is pretty much standard for our day-to-day interaction. You wish you could be as nerdy as we are.

I know Scott Adams does, anyhow. He probably cries himself to sleep at night in envy of our disgusting geek love.

CUNT. James CUNT. or: Two Topics That Have Nothing To Do With Each Other

2009-12-10T22:03:00.000-08:00

First, a trip report on my Vagina Monologues audition:

I got to yell "CUNT" at the top of my lungs in a library.

All right, the real trip report: And I had a great time doing it, too. I hate auditions normally, and so I expected to be entirely flummoxed to find that not only did I have to audition, I also had to fake an orgasm during an audition. I gave myself the little pep talk I usually do in such situations. All right, Susan. You can do this timidly and it will suck, or you could do this to the hilt. It may still suck, but at least it will suck enthusiastically. So I did it to the hilt, and you know, it didn't suck. At least, not in my opinion, and as I'm not particularly invested in this venture (as I said before) my opinion is the only one that counts.

And now to this installment of the Figure Five Home Game: Cast The Next Bond Girl.

This came about as a result of tomorrow's Date Night, which will include at least one Bond movie and possibly two (A View to a Kill and Quantum of Solace, the latter because Andy hasn't seen it and the former because Christopher Walken is the villain.) I haven't seen very many Bond movies (only the newer ones). Of the films I've seen, Eva Green as Vesper Lynd in Casino Royale is my favorite Bond girl-- smart, gorgeous, and (for a change) well-written. This is, of course, if you don't count Dame Judi Dench as M. Dame Judi Dench is my favorite everything, ever. It is my goal to lead such a life that she would be able to play me in the movie.

After discussing previous Bond girls, Andy and I got onto the topic of who our ideal future Bond girl would be. I suggested Rosario Dawson or Jennifer Connelly, and Andy mentioned Rachel Weisz. Some other contenders didn't quite make the cut. Cate Blanchett and Uma Thurman disqualify themselves by being more badass than Bond (in my opinion; there is some dissension in the ranks), and Catherine Zeta-Jones was already a fake Bond girl in Entrapment, so she doesn't count. I think that 007 should branch out into redheads more often, so I originally named Bryce Dallas Howard, but on second thought, she seems too fragile and pouty to pull off the Bond-girl mystique. Dita Von Teese is damn near my hero, and she's got the edge, but I don't know if she has ever acted with clothes on. Acting ability is not necessarily a high priority for Bond girls, but her public image is kind of one-dimensional. I pick her as the secondary love interest who has a brief fling with 007 early in the film, but then turns out to be a villainess and is dispatched in some suitably ironic way. (Like Rosamund Pike, who was stabbed through her copy of The Art of War in Die Another Day.)

What makes a Bond girl? Well, being ridiculously gorgeous, of course, but with that particular vaguely-exotic, so-effortless-it's-actually-kind-of-insulting glamour. She has to have spunk and smarts, but not enough that she's reluctant to sleep with a self-centered player who's always getting her shot or stabbed or kidnapped and who's probably had a go with every venereal disease in the British Isles. She's got to have grit and fortitude (cf. shot, stabbed, kidnapped) and she should probably have at least one dirty secret. Most of all, though, she's got to have the presence. Bond girls are intoxicating. Their attitude would seduce you even if they were wearing a giant paper bag on their head. So, Home Gamers, who do you think is Bond-girl material?

Wait. No. Tell the long line of hopefuls we're not auditioning anymore. Scott Adams is our new leading lady.

A Whole Slew of Projects

2009-12-08T20:26:00.000-08:00

I posted my project yesterday, and I'm still planning on following through. I'm excited. My usual performance anxiety is decreased by the fact that it doesn't really matter to me whether I get in or not. I haven't got my heart set on it, so it wouldn't bother me not to be cast. It's going to be fun to audition, and I'll meet some great people (by all accounts.) It's really refreshing to have a project on which I haven't pinned any crushable hope. Generally, I'm so emotionally invested in most of my ideas and plans that I shy away from following through on them, in the event that they fail and I get all sad and mopey.

I feel I should mention the rousing success of my last completed project (the duet.) I got rave reviews at both concerts this weekend, and our choir's researcher/orator, a former professional vocalist, encouraged me to look into a singing career. After I got done doing the giggly *squeee* dance, I reasoned that although I don't know if I want to try to break into such a competitive field, I really ought to be doing much more singing.

This segues nicely into a list of projects I want to undertake, possibly using this blog as a medium for accountability and trip reports.

Put together a combo and do some jazz or lounge singing. Possibly in a jazz lounge.
Explore Baroque and Renaissance repertoire, which fits beautifully with my voice. Possibly start lessons up again. Eventually look for some singing gigs.
Get back into community theater, musical or otherwise.
Volunteer at the Independent Media Center.
Write a letter to the editor, because I've always wanted to.
Find a professor who is doing research that inspires me and write to them. (This is also a crucial part of my grad school quest.)
Refine the collaborative story that my friend Jessa and I wrote and assemble it into a chapbook. Possibly illustrate it.
Draw more of the several comic strips I've worked on. (Ducks of War you all have seen. My other projects include House Quotes, which is a semi-autobiographical strip chronicling the stupid things we say at casa Galasso-Seleen, and another collaborative project with Jessa about her characters Hart and Mandy.)
Relearn how to use the sewing machine I inherited from my mother.

My project list is telling me I need more creative pursuits in my life. Either I need to work less or work more creative jobs.

Hey, Scott Adams! Feel like becoming a patron of the arts? I could knit you a pointy-haired hat or a binder cozy!

Monday is the New Tuesday

2009-12-07T11:22:00.001-08:00

Remember how I said I was going to stop assigning myself projects until I could handle them? That's one of those things that I say knowing I don't mean it, kind of like "I'm going to be more productive this year" and "I swear to God I will never drink again." I got an e-mail about cold readings for the campus production of the Vagina Monologues today. I love the show, and although I haven't been onstage for years, I secretly miss it.

"Andy," I asked, "I'd be crazy to add another activity, right?" Knowing something was up, he asked what activity. "Talk me out of auditioning for the Vagina Monologues," I said.

"Actually, I think you should go for it," he replied.

One reason I love my first mate so much is that he realizes that half of the time I ask to be talked out of something, I'm really waiting for someone to talk me into it. He reserves the right to talk me back out if I can't handle the schedule, but as it stands, I have an audition on Wednesday or Thursday. Wish me luck and judgment, people. God knows I naturally lack both of them.

CBP, continued.

2009-12-06T20:57:00.000-08:00

I'm back, after two successful concerts and a headache, to finish what I started on Friday-- namely, talking about why the Conservative Bible Project makes my head explode. (Maybe that's where the headache came from.) In case you missed the first installment, I'm referring to Andy Schlafly of Conservapedia's plan to re-translate the Bible in the image of his conservative ideals. So what might a more conservative Bible look like? Its first stated goal is to remove the "liberal bias, which has become the single biggest distortion in modern Bible translations." Their list of methods includes not emasculating the Bible (i.e. removing gender-inclusive terms and adding back in mentions of the unborn, which apparently has some relation to emasculation), combating addiction by using "gamble" rather than "cast lots", including "free market parables" (which ones?), and "accepting the logic of Hell"

Scanning the CBP's wiki pages on Conservapedia gives an interesting look at the dialogue between editors. Removing instances of "the socialistic word comrade" and the liberal-friendly "government," deciding what to use for "peace" now that the modern word means merely "an absence of war," (which I don't believe for a second), and other language-related questions are among things the Conservative Bible Projects editors are "prayerfully considering." (Christians love to prayerfully consider things, probably because they are also confident of Jesus's position on split infinitives.) And you know what? Fine. Translator bias is real and it has been addressed in many different ways.

The thing about this project that irks me the most, however, is their two examples of liberal fabrications--- the story of the adulteress Jesus saved from stoning and his words on the cross. According to the CBP, the adulteress story is a late addition to the Bible (as is most of the Bible, technically). You may remember this story from the line "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." Apparently, this is a problem. "Why is the emphasis on this passage increasing? The answer lies in its liberal message: do not criticize or punish immoral conduct unless you are perfect yourself. Liberals cite this passage to oppose the death penalty, a misuse that has been criticized." Even then I can see where they may be coming from, but the last example takes the cake for me.

The Gospel of Luke states that as Jesus hung on the cross, he said "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." Bullshit, says the CBP. This contradicts the idea that there is no forgiveness without repentance, which is, they say, a basic tenet of Christianity. This passage is, as far as I am concerned, at the heart of the Christian mystery, partly because you don't need to believe the doctrine to appreciate it. That a man could have such love and mercy for his fellow men that even as they murder him, he intercedes for them-- whether he is the Son of God or not, that's behavior worth emulating. CBP, by removing these passages from the Bible, you remove the mercy, the compassion, the hope. Is that what Jesus would do?

Oh, and I don't know. SCOTT ADAMS, I guess.

It's Beginning To Look A Lot Like Wednesdaaaay...

2009-12-04T20:52:00.000-08:00

...Because everything makes me raaage!
From my landlord's bumper sticker that says "Limbaugh 2012!"
To the fact that no one pays a living waaaage!
It's beginning to look a lot like Wednesdaaaaaaay!
Soon, the rant will start
And the first thing I have to say
Is if you get in my way
I will eeeeat your heaaaaart!

Sorry, this blog is not called "Singalong with Silent Five*"; I promised myself I'd deliver some actual content tonight. (Un)luckily enough, every day is WTF Wednesday these days!

This week, my rage stems from the American Conservative movement (where else?) Now, conservative objections to popular media are nothing new. Neither are their attempts to create sanitized, "family friendly" versions for their own consumption (cf. Conservapedia, Clearplay, "alternative Halloween parties," and Branson, Missouri.) So a conservative edit of a piece of popular literature that's just chock-full of corruption, sex, murder, incest, sodomy, hippie radicals, disrespect for authority, and socialism shouldn't be a surprise.

Except it's the Bible.

Yeah. For real. A text which still includes lines like "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" (Exodus 22:18) and "...women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the Law says, If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church" (1 Corinthians 14:34-35) is not conservative enough for some people. Go figure.

I'll go more into this in the second half of my post tomorrow, but tonight I'm going to retire. I've drunk a delicious thing which I call an Eve's Temptation, and it's making me feel warm and sleepy.

Merry Wednesday to all** and to all** a good night!

*Although maybe it should be.
** By which I mean Scott Adams.

This Is Why This Entry Is So Short.

2009-12-03T21:04:00.001-08:00

Toshi must not like having songs written about him, because now he's not working.

*facepalm*

Two Little Songs About Toshi

2009-12-02T19:56:00.000-08:00

Because I told you I'd occasionally write down my little songs. Didn't I? Didn't I tell you? Oh, I thought I told you.

(To "My Bologna Has A First Name")

My computer has a first name
It's T-O-S-H-I
We stay awake till midnight pwning n00bs and eating pie
I use my Toshi every day
And if you ask me why I'll say
"The intertubes all route my way
With T-O-S-H-I-B-A!"

And another, just because I love you all that much.

(To the "Flipper" theme)

We call him Toshi! Toshi!
Faster than liiiiiiiiiiiiightniiiing!
A silver and red
Extension of my head!
And we know Toshi, Toshi,
Opens a world full of won-DEEEEERRRRR!
Charging there un-DEEEERRRR!
Under my bed!

Yes, Christina...

2009-12-01T20:36:00.000-08:00

I will keep blogging! And I will begin by postponing Trip Report Tuesday indefinitely, or at least until my real life stops being so full that adding projects would make me go crazy. I will say that I did some more work on the Rasputin Sock, but like its evil Russian namesake, it just won't die. The four days I spent at my mother's were wonderful and rejuvenating, mostly because I allowed myself not to do anything, including work on that sock. It was bliss, and it makes this week seem even worse by comparison. I didn't update at my mother's because I didn't have access to a computer, and I feel too overwhelmed by the idea of playing catch-up to write the extra entries now, so I'll have to deal with an incomplete November. I've internalized the daily schedule to the point that it annoys me when I don't have time to blog, even if I don't have anything to say. I guess that's one thing this blog has already helped me clarify about my life-- I can't do ten-hour workdays without becoming frazzled and whiny and neglecting the things and people I care about. After this year, I quit.

I'm considering quitting at the semester, even. There's a lot of turnover in the after-school program that is my second job, and nobody would be all that surprised. The thing that keeps me there is the kids. I love my kindergartners, and I don't want to explain to them that I'm not coming back. Also, I'm good at my job. I have consistently garnered great performance reviews (they make you do performance reviews every two weeks there, another reason I'm so keen to leave) and all the kids are fond of me and love my fun and creative lessons. Then again, I do tend to talk myself into staying in situations I don't enjoy because I feel like I'm needed there. This is, among other things, pretty egotistical. I'm sure the program would not cease to function if I left.

Interwebs, I put it to you. If it were you, would you leave the job? The money is nice, but not absolutely vital to my lifestyle. How do you weigh quality of life against extra cash for the move this summer?

The extra cash was, at least nominally, to save up for the new laptop, which I have now actually acquired. In fact, as we speak it's upsetting my cat by usurping his place on my lap. It's shiny and new and I've named it Toshi. My previous round of electronics was named after Shakespeare characters, and so I shouldn't have been surprised when they all died tragic and dramatically appropriate deaths. This round is going to get Japanese names, which will hopefully lead to them being way more technologically sound than I am.

And that's all the blog that's fit to blog right now. The Silent Top Five and the Word of the Week are off this week, but I'm interested to know if people miss them. Should I continue?

Scott Adams, your vote counts double in both these informal polls.

Placeholder and A Bit of Materialistic Glee

2009-11-30T21:09:00.000-08:00

I could talk about a lot of things right now. I could talk about what I'm thankful for, this being the season and all. I could talk about how daily blogging has helped me this month, and about why I finally took a weekend off this past weekend. I could talk about the political discussions I had with Steve over the holidays, or the political discussions I'm trying to figure out how to have with my co-workers. But right now I'm so tired I could cry, so I'm going to bed instead. I will say this, though:

I FINALLY GOT MYSELF A LAPTOP AND IT'LL BE HERE TOMORROW!

*dance!*

Oh, and Scott Adams, I hope you had a great Thanksgiving.

An Update Limerick

2009-11-27T22:48:00.000-08:00

Scott Adams Scott Adams Scott Adams,
Scott Adams (Scott Adams) Scott Adams!
Scott Adams Scott Adams
Scott Adams Scott Adams;
Scott Adams Scott Adams Scott Adams.

Still no time for updates of substance; until regular schedules resume, you get this. Lucky you!

I HAVE EATEN SO MUCH TODAY

2009-11-26T22:30:00.000-08:00

I wish to say that I am thankful for all of you who read my blog, and even for all of you who don't. I hope you all have a wonderful day, and that you all can think of things to be thankful for.

Now I will go digest things for 20 hours. I may not move before then.

P.S. I'm also thankful for Scott Adams.

WTF Wednesday 4: In Which I Am the Subject

2009-11-25T17:21:00.000-08:00

Today's WTF Wednesday rant was originally going to be about the Catholic bishops threatening to withdraw licensed social service programs from Washington DC if a proposed gay rights law passes. Tomorrow, or possibly Friday, I will revisit this topic, probably loudly and with vigor. Tonight, though, I'm driving to my mother's for the holiday, so I haven't got time to give injustice the justice it deserves.

Besides, it has come to my attention that I have committed the unthinkable faux pas of admitting I have no damn idea who Lady Gaga is.

A student of mine made a reference to her looks, to which I answered that I've never heard her and I don't know what she looks like. The student looked at me with the goggle-eyed horror I usually associate with Charlton Heston's discovery that the Planet of the Apes is actually Earth. "You don't know who Lady Gaga is?" she yelped. "How can you possibly not know who Lady Gaga is?" I told her that I didn't have television or own a computer, and that I mostly listened to NPR. "You mean you don't have cable, right?" she asked. I assured her that no, I had no access to television broadcasts of any kind.

By now the conversation had attracted gapers. "Have you ever been in a store? Ever? In your life?" asked another student. I replied that of course I'd been in a store, but I didn't have the money to shop for fun. "So do you just go home and go right to sleep?" he said in disbelief. "What do you even do?"

"I read," I replied. At that point, they all went back to their classwork, assuming I was just messing with them.

I don't know whose WTF was bigger.

Trip Report Tuesday #3-- Almost!

2009-11-24T10:53:00.000-08:00

As Trip Report Tuesday falls upon us again, I have a still-clean apartment and half of a sock to go. I don't feel bad about this because I knit valiantly all week and I'm making progress. The sock project continues on to next week, which should be easier because of Thanksgiving break.

This week's projects are as follows:
1) Purchase a Christmas present for Andy's brother-in-law, whose name I drew in our gift exchange. This is kind of tricky because I know very little about him, but we'll see how I do.

2) FINISH THE RASPUTIN SOCK.

3) Come up with wittier ways to link to Scott Adams.

Aaand I'm not going to be much more ambitious than that, at the moment. Anybody out there have a finished project? Anybody out there want one? You know what to do!

Musical Episode! or: On The First Day of Blogmas, Figure Five Gave to Meeee....

2009-11-23T20:55:00.000-08:00

...A blogger who's short and angryyyyy!

On the Second Day of Blogmas,
Figure Five gave to me--
Two weekly features
And a blogger who's short and angryyyyyy!

On the Third Day of Blogmas,
Figure Five gave to me--
Three weeks of posts,
Two weekly features
And a blogger who's short and angryyyyyyy!

On the Fourth Day of Blogmas,
Figure Five gave to me--
Four Ducks of War,
Three weeks of posts,
Two weekly features
And a blogger who's short and angryyyyyy!

On the Fifth Day of Blogmas,
Figure Five gave to me--
The Silent Top Five Thiiiiiiiings!
Four Ducks of War,
Three weeks of posts,
Two weekly features
And a blogger who's short and angryyyyyy!

On the Sixth Day of Blogmas,
Figure Five gave to me--
Six rants on social justice,
And the Silent Top Five Thiiiiiiiings!
Four Ducks of War,
Three weeks of posts,
Two weekly features
And a blogger who's short and angryyyyyy!

On the Seventh Day of Blogmas,
Figure Five gave to me--
Seven crazy projects
Six rants on social justice,
And the Silent Top Five Thiiiiiiiings!
Four Ducks of War,
Three weeks of posts,
Two weekly features
And a blogger who's short and angryyyyyy!

On the Eighth Day of Blogmas,
Figure Five gave to me--
Eight steps to adulthood
Seven crazy projects
Six rants on social justice,
And the Silent Top Five Thiiiiiiiings!
Four Ducks of War,
Three weeks of posts,
Two weekly features
And a blogger who's short and angryyyyyy!

On the Ninth Day of Blogmas,
Figure Five gave to me--
Nine girls named Barbara
Eight steps to adulthood
Seven crazy projects
Six rants on social justice,
And the Silent Top Five Thiiiiiiiings!
Four Ducks of War,
Three weeks of posts,
Two weekly features
And a blogger who's short and angryyyyyy!

On the Tenth Day of Blogmas,
Figure Five gave to me--
Ten mentions of Scott Adams*
Nine girls named Barbara
Eight steps to adulthood
Seven crazy projects
Six rants on social justice,
And the Silent Top Five Thiiiiiiiings!
Four Ducks of War,
Three weeks of posts,
Two weekly features
And a blogger who's short and angryyyyyy!

On the Eleventh Day of Blogmas,
Figure Five gave to me--
Eleven folks who comment**
Ten mentions of Scott Adams*
Nine girls named Barbara
Eight steps to adulthood
Seven crazy projects
Six rants on social justice,
And the Silent Top Five Thiiiiiiiings!
Four Ducks of War,
Three weeks of posts,
Two weekly features
And a blogger who's short and angryyyyyy!

On the Twelfth Day of Blogmas,
Figure Five gave to meeeeee--
Twelve more months of madness
Eleven folks who comment
Ten mentions of Scott Adams*
Nine girls named Barbara
Eight steps to adulthood
Seven crazy projects
Six rants on social justice,
And the Silent Top Five Thiiiiiiiings!
Four Ducks of War,
Three weeks of posts,
Two weekly features
And a blogger who's short and angryyyyyy!

*Including this one.
** At latest count.

Happy Holidays!

2009-11-22T20:22:00.000-08:00

Today is International* School Uniform Appreciation Day. Happy Holidays, all!

*And by "international" I mean "made up by me."

Let me say that I love the holidays. I do appreciate the light dusting of peace and goodwill that, like snow, covers most towns, even though they both melt away pretty easily. I like singing Christmas carols. I enjoy the smell of pine. I'm always delighted with the tradition of covering one's house with shiny, twinkly, blinky things. (I cannot drive during the holiday season because I spend too much time staring at the pretty lights.) Most of all, I enjoy my family's thoroughly dysfunctional holiday traditions. A few examples: There was "Pirate Christmas," where we all dressed up in costumes for dinner. At every holiday we have a postprandial drunken Apples to Apples game, which lasts until someone wins, we get tired of shouting at each other, or we run out of wine. And who can forget the year when, in lieu of a tree, we wrapped Christmas lights around my father's IV pole and stuck an angel on top? (That was not the first or the last time my younger sister accused us all of ruining Christmas, but it was certainly the funniest.)

By and large, though, our winter holidays have become expensive, stressful purchasing competitions, more about showing off how much you made that year and trying to spend a week with your extended family without killing them. This is why most of my favorite holidays are made up. Like International School Uniform Appreciation Day, which I celebrated by wearing white stockings and a plaid skirt. Mad genius Jenna Borgstrom has already declared January 15th Writing Real Person Slash About the Pope Day, a holiday I plan to celebrate to the mind-searing best of my ability. I will then share the fruits of my excruciating labors with you, because we always hurt the ones we love. And I love you, illusory internet friends. I love you hard.

Your turn, Figure Five Home Gamers! Let's make up some new holidays and see if we can get them to catch on! (Like Festivus, except with less Seinfeld.) How about Scott Adams Day, where we all wear curly ties and spend the day saying withering things about management?

Saturday is Existential Dilemma Day

2009-11-21T13:40:00.000-08:00

It seems like all the weighty posts seem to come to me on days when I'm on timed sessions in the library. What I want to write about now is Christianity and its political connotations. I was raised Episcopalian, but I have drifted fairly far from my conservative religious upbringing. (Well, "fairly far" in the sense that Africa has drifted "fairly far" from South America.) Thus, I hadn't heard about the formal separation of the conservative Anglican Church of North America from the denomination, even though the process had been going on for a year and the new group's canons were officially ratified in July.

The split is the result of controversy in the Episcopal Church (the American branch of the Church of England) over issues such as the ordination of women and gay men as bishops and the flexibility of scriptural interpretation. Its constitution states that its members are “grieved by the current state of brokenness within the Anglican Communion (Anglicans’ worldwide church) prompted by those who have embraced erroneous teaching and who have rejected a repeated call to repentance.” (from the ACNA website.) It is expected to prohibit women and gay men from becoming bishops-- they are apparently acceptable as priests, but not as leaders in the wider communion.

Now, one of the reasons I hung on to Episcopal practice for so long (besides the gorgeous service music) is precisely its openness to women and homosexuals in its worship and its leadership. This split underscores the issue which, I am coming to realize, has almost completely driven me out of the Christian faith: In today's society, Christianity connotes foremost not a spiritual but a political mindset, and that mindset is one with which I cannot agree. Yes, I'm talking about the "Christian Right" and its radical fundamentalist agenda, but I'm also talking about the social expectations that accompany church membership. Even in my fairly liberal church, stratification by social class and political affiliation create a culture that is wildly out of line with the loving, inclusive message Jesus Christ is supposed to have died to bring us.

Most of the people I see wearing WWJD bracelets are likely to be doing the opposite of what Jesus would do. Would Jesus picket an abortion clinic and scream accusations at the women who enter? Would Jesus send a letter to my mother expressing his disapproval of my gay sister's participation in their events? Would Jesus campaign to deny two people who have been loving partners their whole lives the right to visit each other in intensive care? Would he require parents to face prison time for failing to turn their gay children over to the authorities for life imprisonment or death? (This is a provision in the Anti-Homosexuality bill introduced in Uganda in 2009, a bill championed by evangelical Christian groups.) Would Jesus focus so much on church initiatives and social events that the spiritual needs of a congregation fall by the wayside? I think not. If this is, in fact, what Jesus would do, then I don't want any part of it.

This is what I believe: I believe that all people deserve love and respect, and that the responsibility to treat others the same way is a joy, not a burden. I believe that which symbol you respect or which holy dead guy you believe in is completely immaterial-- what's important is the way you live your life, and whatever you think of the afterlife is no justification for treating people poorly now. I believe that forests, ancient ruins, institutions of learning, or small circles of people listening to each other are more sacred than megachurches with their own gift shops and fast food courts. I believe in wonder, in amazement and reverence for the extravagant abundance and mysteries of the universe, and I believe we each are bound to protect it in all its forms.

And yet, I still believe in really good service music. I guess that makes me... what? Episco-pagan? It may not look snappy on a bracelet, but it works for me.

I believe that Scott Adams is an atheist. That's fine, too.

It's Friday Somewhere

2009-11-21T12:36:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, as I'm sure you who are hanging on my every word have noticed, I missed my post. By the time I get off work on Friday, the library is closed, so if Andy's not home, I have no opportunity to write. A lamentable state of affairs, you say! We missed you so! Yes, I know, I know. So here is my report for Friday:

Same old same old.

Well, not quite. I did finish one sock of my promised pair and cast on for the next one, so I may actually finish that project late on time. I also very nearly went out to a bar with a coworker, but in the end social anxiety won out and I went home to read feminist literature and feed my cats. One day, says I, one day I will make friends. Probably just in time for me to move away from them.

This is exactly why Scott Adams, cartoonist, should take me up on my offer. I need to meet more people.

(I've added "cartoonist" because the ever-thoughtful Steve raised a good point-- Scott Adams is a fairly common name.When I Googled "Scott Adams," most of the results were for the cartoonist, but Scott Adams the game designer, Scott Adams the attorney, and Peggy Scott Adams the gospel singer also made an appearance. Any of these people are also welcome to duel me if they so choose, just in case.)

Q: Where Do You Get Your Ideas?

2009-11-19T11:20:00.000-08:00

A: I don't know, but wherever it is, everybody is on vacation.

I'm tired and frustrated today-- Thursdays are my longest days, with both jobs and then choir keeping me out of the house from 8 AM to 10 PM-- and I'm drawing a blank on witty things to say. Instead, I'll post something from my huge file of incomplete story ideas. Some of the ideas are full pages, some are outlines, some are just one or two quotes I know I want in something someday. If you have similar things, feel free to post them as well. If you have ideas for where mine ought to go, same deal. Right now, I got nothin'.

"My brothers and sisters have perfectly ordinary names—John and David, the eldest, and then Sarah and Maria and Thomas—but my mother, when I was born, would not hear of any other name for me than Barbara. My father was somewhat taken aback—I was the first girl, and he had wanted to name me Alice, after a recently late aunt. He spent a week attempting to wheedle my mother into a more suitable choice, but she would have her way, so Barbara I stayed.

I suppose it’s a fairly common name now, but when I was born children were not named Barbara, as a rule. To my mother it must have been exotic, the syllables remnant of the coarse speech of avenging queens. I hated it growing up, hated it even more when it came back into vogue a generation later when I was naming my own children. My girls brought home a half-dozen little Barbaras as playmates; I cringed every time a new one was introduced. Barbara. What a barbarous thing to name a child."

EDIT: You know, I almost forgot: Scott Adams. What a barbarous thing to name a child.

WTF Wednesday 3: A Heartwarming Rant, for once?

2009-11-18T21:38:00.000-08:00

I spent most of today, as befits a WTF Wednesday, discussing politics, rhetoric, and social issues. (As you can see by this week's Silent Top Five, I have had lots of these on my mind lately.) I had a very amiable discussion about labor practices and the pros and cons of unionization with my supervisor, which was the most refreshing of these. The most exhausting was probably the shouting match with the first mate about politically charged terms and the way they polarize issues. (He and I even fight like nerds-- we have civil, caring, and productive discussions about our actual problems, but we can work ourselves into argumentative fits over things like political issues or whether Transformers has any merit beyond product placement.)

The upshot of all this is that I don't have the energy to rage at the world this Wednesday. Instead, I'm going to talk about the finest citizen our country has to offer. And he's only ten years old.

Will Phillips may be a fifth grader, but he knows when shit be freaky. He's refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, on the grounds that a nation where gays cannot marry cannot be said to provide liberty and justice for all. He's doing it respectfully and unrelentingly, and most impressively for a ten-year-old, he's standing up to incredible pressure from his peers. By fifth grade logic, only a total gaywad stands up for gay rights. (If only people actually outgrew fifth grade logic after fifth grade!) Yet, in the face of teasing, bullying, and the disapproval of authority, he stands up for what he has decided, independently, is right. When asked what it means to be an American, he says “The freedom to disagree. That's what I think pretty much being an American represents.”

This is the legacy we were meant to take from generations of civil disobedience, protest, and organization-- a country where even a ten-year-old knows better than to be silent in the face of injustice. Will Phillips, I support you with all my heart, and I hope that my children are just like you.

P.S. First Mate Andy is going out of town for a conference, so I will be out my computer access until Sunday. As such, Thursday's entry may be brief and Friday's entry will likely either be a sentence long or not happen at all. If that's the case, I'll post two on Saturday, because I love you anonymous internet people.

P.P.S. Scott Adams, what do you want for Christmas?

Trip Report Tuesday #2- EPIC FAIL

2009-11-17T21:13:00.000-08:00

My project for today was to finish my pair of socks. Simple ankle socks, I figured, one of which was just about done, were a challenge, but a doable one. How did I do?

About like this.

To be fair, I had what I consider good reasons for not completing this week's challenge. Both my first mate and I are up to our eyeballs in work, and additionally, he has a full course load to manage and commutes six hours every weekend. Among all these pressures, the housework sometimes falls on the list of priorities.

Okay, by "falls on the list of priorities," I mean "I'm gone from 8 AM to 8 PM most days, so I come home exhausted and fall into a book, and meanwhile he's working like crazy on homework and business responsibilities and doesn't have time, and I'm often distracted by shiny things which is why half of my stuff doesn't end up put away in the first place." So this weekend my project was to clean the whole apartment before my long-suffering boyfriend finally stuffed me in the freezer.

The apartment looks beautiful, actually. I did a bit of decorating and relocating of pictures, and now it looks like the sort of place you'd want to show off. Which is lucky, because the landlord is showing it tomorrow. Andy and I are moving in July (to be closer to our families and his office) and are just now entering the whirlwind of exhilaration and pain-in-the-ass that entails. Although I love my town and I am, for the most part, delighted with my apartment, I get such a charge out of moving that it's almost enough to override all of the stupid annoyance of it. Almost.

Anyway. My project for this week will be, once again, to finish the socks. There'll be an additional one, though-- to keep my apartment as pristine as it is now. Let's see how that goes.

Also, muchas Snap(p)s to Chris for his rewritten play, which he sent to me. Damn good work, and classy as always, old man. I hope we eventually get to work together again.

And finally, click here for the Scott Adams sex tape.

In Which I Do, In Fact, Challenge A Celebrity To A Duel

2009-11-16T21:37:00.000-08:00

So, I have this tendency to undertake crackpot projects. This is another one of those. But hilarity will, I'm sure, ensue!

This one was sparked as I wondered whether celebrities Google themselves. My sister assures me that they do. She knows this because apparently last summer she was a camp counselor for the daughter of a prominent musician, and said daughter confirmed it. This means that, through my sister, I am now fewer than six degrees from Kevin Bacon. It also means that, through our mutual insecurity and dependence on technology, we are now closer to our appointed luminaries than we have ever been. Interactive experiences are now possible with the rarefied world we usually just watch. More to the point, I can now mess with celebrities' heads too.

My idea is this. If I called out someone famous on my blog, how likely is it that a random Google search would turn up my blog and they would take me up on my challenge? I don't know, but I'm going to find out.

Now, in order for this to work, I have to pick my celebrity carefully. My criteria are as follows:

It has to be someone only moderately famous. People like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt know exactly what people think of them. It's in just about every magazine you see at just about every grocery store. I'm sure they employ people to Google their names for them so they can concentrate on adopting African children and allegedly fighting with each other.
Public opinion must still be vital to them on a smaller scale. There are plenty of people who are famous enough that everybody could suddenly decide to hate them and it still wouldn't make too much of a dent in their lifestyle. They don't need to work, and they get almost as much publicity mileage out of being a has-been as they do out of being a star (cf. Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, everyone who was ever in a boy band.)
My target needs to be someone who's likely to have a devoted Internet following, so that random blogs would more accurately represent their target demographic than, say, Us Weekly. (Which should more honestly be named People Who Are Nothing Like Us Weekly.) They also need to have enough of a technological bent themselves to be likely to self-Google and blog-surf for fun.
They must possess a sense of humor to which dueling an anonymous twentysomething in the Midwest would be amusing. Or at least the sort of thing that could be milked for witty commentary.

I choose Scott Adams, cartoonist and author to the wonky-tied, cynical, weaselly common man. I choose him for all the above reasons and because I'm reading one of his books at the moment. Also, he has my dream job-- to have people pay you gobs of money for the privilege of listening to all the clever shit you say. From what I can tell, he's pretty responsive to reader e-mail and blog comments, so this sort of thing may not be entirely outside his sphere. Also, the six degrees of nerd separation virtually guarantees that someone I know will know someone who knows someone who used to fix his air conditioner. Or maybe Kevin Bacon's air conditioner. That's close enough.

The challenge is the simple, time-honored one of old: Nerf guns at dawn. At fifty paces I will turn and fire to defend my honor, almost as though I still had any. The loser will thus be shamed and probably have to buy a round of beer or something. (This was going to be the first in a veritable dorkathalon of events, but I didn't want to scare him off. Also, I mostly just liked the idea because I got to use the word "dorkathalon.") So, Scott Adams, the gauntlet has been thrown! Until you respond or I forget to do it, I will make the odds of you finding my blog more likely by including asides to you in each entry.

And there we have it. Check out the new Word of the Day, and goodnight, Scott Adams, wherever you are.

This is the first access I've had to a computer all day...

2009-11-15T21:15:00.000-08:00

... so instead of my usual scintillating commentary, you get a quick rundown of what's in my head.

Which, right now, is this: I just watched Julie Taymor's adaptation of Titus Andronicus, which is like glorious visual porn for literature nerds and sadomasochists. Titus Andronicus, if you haven't heard of it, is what the Reduced Shakespeare Company called "Shakespeare's Tarantino phase." And, for some reason, this is what it set running in my head:

My milkshake brings all the goths to the yard
And they're like, it's darker than yours
Damn right, it's darker than yours
I could teach you, but you just wouldn't understand...

These are the things that kept me out of Harvard.

TOMORROW! Fabulous things are coming to this little blog. Stay tuned as I challenge a celebrity to a duel!

Ten-Minute Post

2009-11-14T12:04:00.000-08:00

My library time is short today because I've got to make it to a Deep Listening workshop with composer Pauline Oliveros. The choir I'm in is performing one of her pieces this December, a very nontraditional work called "Wind Horse" and written as a mandala. Yes, really. It's pretty challenging to go from Beethoven's Ninth to telling stories and making sounds as internal metaphors for the wind, because I have no idea what to do if there aren't notes on the page. But hey, neat, right?

In other "Susan Is Boring" news this weekend, I babysat for a nine-month old boy last night. We played for a while before I put him to bed, and I discovered that (shocker!) infants are even more satisfying to talk to than cats. They still don't mind if you monopolize the conversation, and they may even respond to you in ways you can follow. Also, this kid is going to be a great percussionist when he grows up. He was banging away on those empty formula cans like there was no tomorrow. For a while I beatboxed for him and he danced and laughed. It was pretty rockin' awesome.

Speaking of things that are pretty rockin' awesome, check out the heavy metal monk. Although he's recently retired because, as he says, "Satan made me too famous for my own good," Cesare Bonizzi was in an honest-to-God heavy metal band called Fratello Metallo. He is also an honest-to-God Capuchin monk (as opposed to an honest-to-God capuchin monkey.) Way to go, Fra Cesare.

Won't You Zhoin Me In My Irrrrritating Leetle Zong?

2009-11-13T11:21:00.000-08:00

I am sad to say I have a mind like a steel beartrap. That is to say, it usually holds on to the big thigns, the ones that will rampage through your cabin and kill you if you don't get them under control. The smaller things, though, either slip through or go around it entirely. Hence why I always pay my bills on time, but I can lose paperwork without even touching it. Or go for weeks without realizing my oil light is on. Or forget to return phone calls, get time cards signed, do dishes, or lock doors.

This problem is compounded by the fact that I am ~~a terrible listener~~ not an auditory learner. Yeah, let's go with that. Part of it is really that I don't hear so well, but mostly I just don't retain things that people say. I have no idea why this is. It's not that I don't want to listen and remember. I do. When people start talking, part of my brain is extremely attentive, but the part that makes short-term memory is probably off playing with itself in a corner. Someone will be giving directions and I'll nod and repeat them-- and they will glance off my mind like a ping-pong ball off a plate-glass window and be gone. I've spent the whole morning trying to remember if my first mate asked me to do the dishes this week. He probably did. Probably twice. But since I didn't get it in writing, I can't recall a single time.

As you can imagine, this occasionally leads to a perfect storm of unintentional thoughtlessness, which is one of my least favorite things (right after "perfect storm of badger feces," in fact.) I've tried system after system to keep myself on track, but all the planners and lists and routines only work for a week or so before I just forget to do them. (Apparently all the detail-tracking mechanisms themselves count as details.) I'm trying a new method, though, for which I have high hopes, and which leads me to the subject of this post.

I'm great at remembering song lyrics, so I've started setting my to-do lists to music. I use popular classical pieces mostly, so I can't possibly forget them, and I write the lyrics down (to give me the all-important visual cue.) I'll sing them to myself in the mornings as I get ready for work, and they'll stick in my head all day. Today's little song goes like this:

(to the tune of Kill the Wabbit)
Call the laaand-lord
Ca-all the laaaaaaaaand-lord
Ca-all the LAAAAAAND-lord
Vaccuum the staaaairs!

The one from October 30th is as follows (students' names have been changed):

(sung to Ode to Joy)
Good morning, Susan! Please remember
Karen's birthday PBJ
Bring Delilah's German tapes
And don't forget it's Robot Day.
Call Maureen and check your e-mail
Look up Sascha's new address
Hit the library on your lunch break
Thanks so much! That's all, I guess.

The point of telling all of you this is partly to apologize for being so flaky and partly to explain why I may be singing to myself. But mostly it's to say the following: Please submit all requests in writing. Thank you, the Management.

All I Want for Christmas Is... A Two-Inch Doctor?

2009-11-12T20:40:00.000-08:00

Around this time of year, my first mate starts asking me for my Christmas list to pass on to his mom. This makes me a little bit uncomfortable-- Christmas presents are a big deal in his family in a way they never were in mine, so I'm always caught off guard to be getting gifts in the first place. One of the things I love about first mate & co. is that they are about the most inclusive people I've ever known. If you've spent much time with them, you're family, and not only that, your family is family. My mother and siblings are always invited to their big holiday meals, and have been even before Andy and I were serious about each other. When I was growing up, my family was just the opposite-- to the family patriarchs, even being a blood relative wasn't necessarily enough to get you accepted into the tribe. I can probably count on the fingers of both hands the number of times my parents invited multiple non-relatives to dinner. It's a bit of an adjustment to make, but it's a positive one.

My other problem with Christmas lists is that I don't really care about getting stuff, nor do I like asking for specific things as gifts. I prefer to leave it up to the giver, presuming that they know me well enough to know the types of things that I like. That way, I know people aren't just getting me a gift because they think they're supposed to. I do, however, have a Christmas list of completely unreasonable things. Things that may not even exist, let alone be possible to obtain. I don't feel bad at all about passing that one around. So here it is.

A pocket-sized David Tennant who will sit on my shoulder and say "WHAT??" in his adorably confused way whenever something unexpected happens to me.
A taxidermied squirrel adorably posed in a tableau of my choice. This, like most other wonderfully appalling things, can be purchased on the internet. From a guy who claims he "can mount any squirrel in any position or style you would like." (How about reverse cowgirl? Zing!)
Moron-canceling headphones. Wouldn't it be great if you could get a pair that only blocked the frequency of people you found particularly annoying? As a high school employee, I would use those things all the friggin time.
Any merchandise from the SPAM museum, World's Largest Ball of Twine, Wall Drug, or the Santa Cruz Mystery Spot. Or, barring that, my very own crappy roadside fiberglass dinosaur. A giant Abe Lincoln would also be acceptable.
Accordion lessons.

Now, isn't that more interesting to hear about than stuff I might actually hope to receive? And doesn't it give you some idea of the sort of thing I might like for Christmas?

I rest my case.

WTF Wednesday 2: Ten-Second Irritations

2009-11-11T09:45:00.000-08:00

First of all, check out the new Silent Top Five in the sidebar-- Geeky Lingerie That I Am Not Making Up. I've provided links to prove this point. You can actually purchase all of this stuff on the interwebs. (And, like all internet merchandise, I presume it will arrive neatly packaged and shot out of your end of the series of tubes.) Whether you would want to is something else again.

...Oh, who am I kidding. I'm a flaming nerd. I'd wear all of this stuff. (Except maybe the GPS undies, because I'm not sure my tinfoil hat would do an adequate job of blocking the signal from the gub'mint.)

Anyway, on to your regularly scheduled programming. I kind of blew my WTF Wednesday wad with my two-part rant on the health care legislation, so today is devoted to fleeting annoyance rather than righteous rage. A-like so:

People who use the phrase IMHO (in my humble opinion) on internet debates? You are not all that humble.
Stop running contradictory health stories already, newspeople. Eggs are good for you but bad for you, red wine is healthy and unhealthy, and now exercise is going to either save or ruin your body. Since all of these stories just boil down to "do what common sense suggests without going overboard," running all of them only encourages people like me who are easily frustrated with unclear directions to give the whole thing up as a bad job and spend the evening eating unbaked cookie dough with a spoon.
On a related note, if the raw cookie dough has been pasteurized, don't even bother putting "BAKE BEFORE CONSUMING" in big letters on the packaging. You're only kidding yourself.
Critics are complaining that selling better test scores as a fundraiser might "send the wrong message." I both agree and disagree with them. I agree because, obviously, being able to buy your way into grades you don't deserve further trivializes the value of education and gives students from well-off families yet another advantage over their less affluent classmates. (Because, you know, the rest of our educational system does not do that quite shamelessly enough.) Unfortunately, in the real world, you usually can buy your way into things you don't deserve, so the message, though spurious, is pretty accurate.
I went to check foxnews.com, so as to be bipartisan in my annoying news coverage. I found, to my irritation, that... well, there were plenty of things that I found, to my irritation, and any of them could become its own WTF Wednesday. So let's just say that FOX News still exists and that's annoying.
Nobody has yet invented a little transmitter which will allow you to understand what your cat wants when it stands on your knee and meows pitifully at you even when its food dish is full and refuses to be petted.

And that's all I got for now.

Trip Report Tuesday #1- Double Success Happy Time!

2009-11-10T20:27:00.000-08:00

If you'll recall, my two projects for this week were to audition for solos-- despite having barely learned one of the three-- and to finish and scan my Ducks of War series. I am pleased to report that both of these things have happened. Not only have they happened, they have happened favorably. Observe!

I had three excerpts to perform at my solo audition, two of which I had already memorized and sung a million times. The third one was a complicated Renaissance duet part that I had maybe looked at once by the week of my audition. I almost decided not to bother with it at all, but then figured that wouldn't be in the spirit of the challenge. I sat down with my little audio file and whipped it into shape the day before my audition, then went in figuring that at least the other two were in good shape. I made one obvious mistake during my whole audition-- in that excerpt. Meh, I figured. I wasn't really going for that one anyway.

Of course, guess which solo I got? Yeah. I have no excuse not to try anything anymore. The part is beautiful, and of course I'll have a month to get it right. Those of you who'd like to come hear the concert should let me know, and I'll get y'all details.

*squee!*

As for finishing Ducks of War,

(Click for big.)

Next week's project-- I have one of a pair of cute little ankle socks knitted. This week I will finally knit that other sock.

Anyone else have a trip report? Leave it in the comments! (Sock puppet relationship discussions, I'm lookin' at you.) Anyone else want a project? Get in touch with me, either here or elsewhere, and I'll give you your very own blogpost all to yourself. Otherwise, this week's generic project is: tell someone, somewhere, exactly how you feel about them.

"Real Adulthood," whatever that is.

2009-11-09T22:03:00.000-08:00

When I enumerate my daily accomplishments, I often catch myself saying something like "I (took out the trash/paid my bills/had dinner with a couple of friends/removed my own appendix) just like a real adult!" People who hear this usually respond in one of two ways: a) shake their head and say that I am a real adult, or b) pat me on the head and remind me that I will never be a real adult. I will leave it up to your mercies to decide which is truer.

The thing is, what is "real adulthood?" Before I was supposed to be a real adult, I thought of adulthood as something that would inevitably happen when I reached the age of majority, i.e. the condition in which one finds oneself when one is no longer a real child. Then once I turned 18, I assumed real adulthood would land upon me when I left college and went out into the "real world." (At least I realized even then that college was an idyllic fantasyland that bore little resemblance to the way my life would actually go.) Now, two and a half years out of college and eyeball deep in the real world, I still don't feel like a real adult.

I read in a book on parenting (don't ask why I read books on parenting; no, Mom, I'm not pregnant) that people in this country consider the age of real adulthood to be twenty-six. This makes me feel a little better in that I've got another year and a bit to go, so there's still time to figure how to make it work properly. That just leaves the question: If I don't feel like a real adult now even when I'm living on my own and making my own money, what has to happen before I do? And can I make all that happen by age twenty-six?

Here are some things I consider to be milestones that point to real adulthood:

Relative financial independence. This comes to mind because I've just spent two hours on hold waiting to take over my mother's iPass account, the last apron string but one. (I am still on the cell phone plan shared by the whole family, but I pay for my line and my usage, so I feel okay about that one.)
Planning and executing your own vacation. Technically, I've done this. I've even done it in a foreign language. This was, however, during my semester abroad, which was entirely sponsored by the generosity of various extended family, so I don't feel it counts. I will need to decide to take a vacation, fit it into my work schedule, save up for it, book it, and return from it alive in order to earn the real adult merit badge.
Having dental insurance. Now, I've got medical, thanks to the bizarre happenstance of being a government employee (seriously, that's really weird to think about.) I did not opt into the dental plan when I was hired, because I was medium-impoverished at the time. I think there should be a dental merit badge too, because nothing says "adult" like actually remembering to floss.
Knowing things about wine. Classy things, like how to identify a "floral nose" or "undertones of chocolate, peat moss, and dismembered vintner's apprentice."
Hosting at least one dinner party to which you invite more than two people you're neither related to nor dating. I have not done this, because I consider "dinner party" to be more elaborate than "Jessa coming over and the two of us raiding the fridge." Also, I know very few people who do not fall into one of those two categories.
Being able to make small talk about the stock market without sounding imbecilic. My first mate is a financial adviser. He's made valiant attempts to explain several economic theories to me, and he's had his best success with a metaphor involving squirrel trafficking. I feel I may need a more sophisticated understanding before I bring the discussion out in public.
Becoming more centered and spiritually fulfilled. Or at least coming to a better understanding than "Uh, I kind of believe in the Force, I guess? Also, don't be a dick."
Owning a black cocktail dress. Which you actually wear out for cocktails. Someplace where the football game is not on a gigantic screen on the wall and where most of the people are not undergraduates. Speaks for itself

So there we are. I don't know if I can get all of these in by January 24, 2011, but I'm sure going to try. Otherwise I may never be a real adult. And wouldn't that be a shame.

P.S. Check out the Word of the Week to your right. See if you can use it at least once this week!

The Stupak-Pitts Amendment, Part II, or "...and by tonight, I mean tomorrow."

2009-11-08T18:32:00.000-08:00

Too much abortion for just one post, obviously, so I'm breaking it up into two. To carry on where I left off, legally the decision to abort a child must be the prerogative of a woman and her doctor. The Stupak-Pitts amendment not only bans abortion coverage in the public option, but also bars women from using their own money to purchase abortion coverage. Language in the bill already provided that public contributions to private plans be segregated so as not to fund the abortion coverage. This was not enough, apparently, for proponents of the Stupak-Pitts bill. Under its restrictions, any plan purchased through the exchange would be forbidden to include abortion coverage, even when its premiums are entirely privately paid. This could cause people who already have abortion coverage to lose it.

I consider this in direct violation of the decision handed down by the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade. By restricting even private insurers' ability to cover abortions, Congress is effectively taking the option off the table for many women, especially lower-income women. How can the abortion question be truly "left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman's attending physician", or indeed of the pregnant woman herself, if their decision is colored by government-mandated unavailability of coverage? The previous stipulations that public money not be used directly to fund abortions were, I concede, reasonable. This, however-- this strays way too far into the territory of legislating morality.

I found myself in the same Catch-22 in which pro-choice Democrats in Congress found themselves this weekend: I want a health-care reform bill to pass. We sorely need this legislation. But we do not need it like this. We do not need it at the expense of the rights of the people it's supposed to be protecting. I hoped, despite my support, that the bill wouldn't pass. But it did, with the Stupak-Pitts amendment in it.

Things like this scare me, just like the repeal of Maine's gay marriage law scares me, and the election of a Virginia governor who once wrote a thesis stating that working women and feminists are "detrimental" to the family scares me. How can a nation in which I'm expected to put so much faith have so little faith in me?

The Stupak-Pitts Amendment, or WTF Wednesday Came Early This Year

2009-11-07T13:15:00.000-08:00

Falling asleep while listening to NPR leads to some rather strange dreams. Last night I recall huddling in my bathtub wrapped in a towel while hiding from some creepy window-peeper who eventually broke into the house, all while serenading me with "Fly Me To The Moon" and a variety of other crooning songs. I didn't really understand why that was happening until I woke up in the middle of an interview with Michael Feinstein.

...And now for something completely different.

IT'S!

Abortion and the health care bill!

I became aware of the debate surrounding HR 3962 and abortion funding via a community entitled "Feminist Rage." From this context, it's probably not hard to discern my feelings on the matter. Quite frankly, the whole abortion debate exhausts and infuriates me, right down to the rhetoric each side uses. (To borrow a term from lifenews.com: "Abortion advocates," my ass. They're hardly giving them out at BOGO sales or having Abortion Fairs, are they?) I, personally, believe that it is vital to women's health and safety to have regulated, professional abortion facilities available to everyone. I also believe that I have no business telling you what you should consider moral, just as you have no business telling me.

I will, however, tell you what is legal. Roe v. Wade provides that

"This right of privacy, whether it be founded in the Fourteenth Amendment's concept of personal liberty and restrictions upon state action, as we feel it is, or, as the District Court determined, in the Ninth Amendment's reservation of rights to the people, is broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy" and that "..for the stage prior to approximately the end of the first trimester, the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman's attending physician." Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973)

The fetus is not afforded any "right to life" under the 14th amendment, which does not include protection of the unborn. (Says the court, "We need not resolve the difficult question of when life begins. When those trained in the respective disciplines of medicine, philosophy, and theology are unable to arrive at any consensus, the judiciary, at this point in the development of man's knowledge, is not in a position to speculate as to the answer.")

My library time is about to expire, so I'll finish this tonight.