The Paroxysm Effect

My summer:

2011-08-22T20:02:00.000-07:00

- frantically search for jobs

- frantically search for place to live

- grieve for the end of childhood via Harry Potter 7.2

- attain a hodgepodge of various jobs that will hopefully manage to pay the rent

- panic more about housing

- work a lot a lot alot at various said hodgepodge

- tired tired tired far too soul-tired to blog

- hope desperately that after this all settles down and I am decidedly not living in a box, this choice of mine to stay in Davis for awhile in order to get my head on straight and figure out my shit is the right one for me and I won't regret it.

Yup.

Time and history and fire

2011-06-28T11:13:00.000-07:00

Cerro Grande aftermath, 2000

Time has some curious properties. We age, we separate from our pasts, learn new things, and on and on and still, there is repetition and a certain tinge of cruelty to the world.

When I was in fifth grade, 10-years-old, we lived in Los Alamos, New Mexico. In 2000, the Cerro Grande fire took out 50,000 acres of land and over 400 homes. We were evacuated for about two weeks, stuck in Santa Fe, and no one could do anything but watch the same scenes over and over and over on the news, very late into the night.

A 10-year-old child, I think, processes a natural disaster very differently than a 21-year-old adult.

These past few days I've been watching as Los Alamos once again burns, as its people are evacuated, and as once again threat to nuclear materials supersedes the protection of homes.

I have more distance from it this time, far away in California, but it certainly provokes the old memories. It is an eerily-similar situation to the one over 10 years ago, but watching a video of the line of cars creeping down the single mountain road out of the town has a distinctly different flavor from actually being in one of those cars myself, unable to see very far past the smoke plume and practically tasting the ash.

Even to this day, the smell of wildfire still provokes a kind of barbed jabbing somewhere deep in my abdomen.

Los Alamos is a complicated place. It has a shadow on its spine. Most towns arise sort of organically, I think. People plant themselves and say, we will cultivate a home for ourselves on this land.

That is not Los Alamos. Los Alamos was birthed for the singular purpose of nuclear research—of determining the most naturally unnatural way to ease destruction. Did the scientists of World War II realize that the work done at Los Alamos would have implications far beyond an atomic bomb? That it would tip the future of human beings into a perpetual global fear of total nuclear annihilation?

Probably not.

It is so complex, that place, the life it brings to its residents...the intensity of its beauty and its far darker underbelly.

When the Cerro Grande Fire ravaged the town in 2000, it was a disaster, the result of human stupidity—what should have been a “controlled burn,” gone awry.

Now, though, I have to wonder...another blaze...another eruption into fire. Los Alamos has had a history of death and trauma since its very conception. It is locked into this strange, almost mythical relationship with Japan, as well, and both populations retaliated and killed and now both places have faced tremendous recent devastation via natural disasters. There is still death and still pain and the people of both places have had no option but to face it all stoically and steadfastly.

I have time and distance now, but I can hardly know what the current residents of Los Alamos are feeling right now, especially the ones who have already seen the Cerro Grande fire.

Stay safe, everyone, and strong.

You are always in my thoughts.

Las Conchas wildfire, 2011

CELEBRITY REHAB 5

2011-06-20T16:22:00.000-07:00

THIS WEEKEND.

Life will be right once again!

Graduation!

2011-06-15T20:17:00.001-07:00

This week has been a whirlwind!

I'm done! DONE! I finished both majors, I wrote two theses, and I did pretty damn well considering everything I've been through!

Consequently, I am now having a total fit of nostalgia, and so:

Every Book I Read in College (not including essays or additional research books I read or everything that showed up in course readers!)

Psychology of Language (David W. Carroll)

Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad)

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (James Joyce)

Mrs. Dalloway (Virginia Woolf)

At Swim-Two-Birds (Flann O’Brien)

Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett)

The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (ed. Leitch, et. al.)

Creating Black Americans (Nell Irvin Painter)

The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 2 (8^th ed.)

Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)

The Buddha of Suburbia (Hanif Kureishi)

Wide Sargasso Sea (Jean Rhys)

Best American Essays (Ed. David Foster Wallace and Robert Atwan)

The Next American Essay (Ed. John D’Agata)

Textbook of Bacteriology (Kenneth Todar)

Lysistrata (Aristophanes)

The Taming of the Shrew (William Shakespeare)

Scapin and Don Juan (Moliere)

The Country Wife (William Wycherley)

Man and Superman (George Bernard Shaw)

The Complete Plays (George Orton)

Cloud Nine (Caryl Churchill)

The Eunuch (Terence)

Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume C

Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume D

Northanger Abbey (Jane Austen)

Paradise Lost (John Milton)

Introduction to Language (Rodman, Hyams, and Fromkim)

Norton Anthology of Poetry (Ed. Ferguson, Stallworthy, and Salter)

Doing Grammar (Max Morenberg)

Introducing Phonology (David Odden)

Gay Cuban Nation (Emilio Bejel)

Forbidden Stories of Marta Veneranda (Sonia Rivera-Valdés)

Before Night Falls (Reinaldo Arenas)

Understanding Scientific Reasoning (Giere)

Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry (J.D. McClatchy)

Good Woman (Lucille Clifton)

Another Republic (Ed. Stand and Simic)

Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett (James Knowlson)

The Sighted Singer (Alan Grossman)

Selected Poems of Paul Celan (trans. Michael Hamburger)

Word Formation in English (Ingo Plag)

Word Structure (Richard Coates)

Natural Language Syntax (Peter Culicover)

Exploring Language (Gary Goshgarian)

English With an Accent (R. Lippi-Green)

Language Myths (Bauer and Trudgill)

Petronius: Selections from the Satyricon (Ed. Lawall)

Petronius: A Handbook (Wiley-Blackwell)

Amphitryo (Plautus)

Manaechmi (Plautus)

Rome and the Mysterious Orient: Three Plays by Plautus (Amy Richlin)

De Bello Gallico (Caesar)

What is the What (Dave Eggers)

The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Volume B (7^th Edition)

The Blithedale Romance (Nathaniel Hawthorne)

A Room of One’s Own (Virginia Woolf)

1989 (Joshua Clover)

A Very Short Introduction to Literary Theory

The Craft of Research

Portrait With Keys (Ivan Vladislavic)

Jacob’s Room (Virginia Woolf)

Journal of the Plague Year (Daniel Defoe)

Ways of Dying (Zakes Mda)

The Heat of the Day (Elizabeth Bowen)

Texaco (Patrick Chamoiseau)

Selected Poems and Four Plays (W.B. Yeats)

The Playboy of the Western World and Riders to the Sea (J.M. Synge)

Dubliners (James Joyce)

The Last September (Elizabeth Bowen)

The Third Policeman (Flann O’Brien)

Endgame (Samuel Beckett)

North (Seamus Heaney)

The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume B

An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction (Ed. Paul Salzman)

Analyzing Grammar: An Introduction (Paul Kroeger)

Optimality Theory (Rene Kager)

Reading Latin: Grammar, Vocabulary, and Exercises (Jones and Sidwell)

Reading Latin: Text (Jones and Sidwell)

Dream Visions and Other Poems (Chaucer)

Troilus and Crysede (Chaucer)

Lexical Semantics (Cruse)

Logic in Linguistics (Allwood)

Now, after writing that list, all I have to say is this:

(which is just about the most accurate summation of the past four years that I can possibly think of!)

IMPENDING DOOM

2011-06-11T23:23:00.000-07:00

Gradumation tomorow! Too cellibrate mai edumakated braiyn! Wooooooooo!

All I can say is that this is so not where I expected to be in my life at the end of college (i.e. jobless-come-september/directionless/confused/distraught). But hey, I made it through. Lots of very bad and lots of very good and tons of stuff in-between the two.

So, the cap is ready to go. I am not ready to go, but I guess that's how it...goes?

ONWARD!

(more on all this later, I'm sure. Also, I have got to post about bowling at some point, because it has been just about the bestest thing to happen in my life as of late)

HOLY CRAP

2011-04-28T21:04:00.000-07:00

I am stealing this from Mustard Seed, who just did this on her blog under the title "Every Title of Every Paper I've Written as an Undergrad (for better and for worse)" and I thought it was a super cool idea so I'm stealing it!

In order, starting good-old freshman year (I'm also including the creative non-fiction essays I've done, with *s, because I think they totally count):

1) “Origins of the ‘African American’”

2) “The Great Migration”

3) “The Civil Rights Movement”

4) “The Ebonics Controversy and its Persistence and Implications in the Twenty-First Century”

5) “Milton, Free Will, and Prelapsarian Adam and Eve”

6) “Satire in Northanger Abbey”

7) “The Challenge of Reconciling Homosexuality and the ‘Ideal Cuban Man’”

8) “Prescriptive vs. Descriptive Grammars”

9) “What is a Language?”

10) “Robert Frost’s ‘After Apple Picking’”

11) “Yusef Komunyakaa’s ‘Facing It’”

12) “A.R. Ammons’ ‘He Held Radical Light’”

13) “A.R. Ammons’ Briefings”

14) “The Score of A Beautiful Mind and how it Underscores its Characters' Instabilities”

15) “Petruchio: Feminist Nightmare or Embodiment of Secret Desire for Ostentation?”

16) “Comedy as a Gateway to Philosophy in Shaw’s Man and Superman”

17) “In Memoriam of Floundering Faith: Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam’ in Scientific Victorian England”

18) “W.B. Yeats: A Bridge to Modernism”

19) “Privilege and Poetry”

20) “A Grammatical Analysis of T.S. Eliot’s Use of Gerunds and Gerundives to Achieve Parallel Structure in The Wasteland”

21) *“Farolitos”

22) *“A Brief History of Disease”

23) *“Final Essay”

24) “Medicine: Time to go Au Naturale”

25) “Ethics and Efficacy of Mycotoxin Regulation”

26) “The Convergence of Humanities Across Renaissance and Contemporary Travel Narratives”

27) “The True Sight of Terror in the Sermons of Thomas Hooker”

28) “‘Pettifogging’ is a Really Great Word”

29) “The Unreality of the Real in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness”

30) “Mrs. Dalloway and the Problem of Memory in Modernity”

31) *“Of My Father”

32) *“Eating the Upper Crust”

33) “T.S. Eliot’s New Criticism: So New It’s Actually Really Old”

34) “Benjamin’s Mechanical Reproduction as a Defense of Democracy”

35) “Warring Bodies: The Ongoing Conflict Between Corporeal Capitulation to and Resistance to Battle in Bordo and Contemporary Culture”

36) “Prodigious Puzzles: Sudoku and Song”

37) “How to Retain Humanity Under Threat of Impending Cyborgism: A Guide”

38) “The Converging Disjunctures of Joyce (Or: Reverse Fragmentation)”

39) “Caesar’s Use of Rhetoric as a Means to Immortalization”

40) “It Seems Professor Stem Was Right: Latin Grammar is Superior After All”

41) “Engaging the Urban Gorilla”

42) “Psychopathology and the Slum: Untangling the Manifestation of Schizoid Mechanisms in the Characters of Zakes Mda’s Ways of Dying”

43) “The Stodginess of Bowen, the Liberation of Chamoiseau”

44) “Thesis Prospectus”

45) “A Mafia-ized Translation of Plautus’ Amphitruo, Lines 335-379”

46) “The Culmination of War: The Misuse of Language Mythology in the Perpetuation of Language Prejudices”

47) “Blown-Up Bladders: The Function of Aphorism in Petronious’ Satyricon”

48) Critical Thesis: Emergent Love in the Early Poems of Samuel Beckett & a Consequent Theory of Equilibrium

49) *“The Maturation of Things”

50) *“A Brief History of Some Bamboo”

51) *“Some Conversations and Events, Real and Imagined, Between Various People and Animals in Various Places and Times”

52) “On Nature: The Transposing Ideologies of Emerson and Thoreau”

53) “A Love Paradox: Freed by Slavery and Bound by Utopia”

54) “The Dravidian Language Family”

55) “The Georgian Writing System”

56) “A Typology of Turkish”

57) “The Tibetan Language”

58) “Merciless Form, Beauteous Failure”

59) “Nought but Air Y-Broken: Chaucer’s Eagle as Symbolic of the Futility of Speech”

60) “The Latin Conditional”

61) “Why Beckett’s ‘Cascando’ is the Bestest Poem of all the Poems”

62) “Si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses (if you had kept your silence, you would have remained a philosopher)”

63) “Frege on Sense, Reference, and Idea”

64) “Jesperson, on Number and Count”

65) Creative Thesis: An Etymology of Silence

Looking at this list kind of makes me want to cry.

It's been quite a four years.

Life update what what

2011-03-28T16:03:00.000-07:00

So here's the skinny:

Winter quarter sucked some serious balls.

But it's over now. The crappy classes are finished, the sun is hopefully coming soon, and I only have to drag myself through two more classes to be done! Done!

My grudge against a certain professor will persist, however. To maintain some anonymity, let's just call her Legging Lady. We'll call her this because she seems to think that leggings are an appropriate substitute for actual pants.

Which they are not.

Anyway, I toiled all quarter in her patronizing presence, putting up with her three-page long essay prompts explaining how to properly cite, listening to her inane lectures in which she insisted on reading long passages aloud in Middle English just to hear her own voice, and having to hear her coo out, "Very nice! Goooooood! That's a great point...really lovely!" to every comment a student might make, however irrelevant or obvious it might actually be.

So why am I still so damn bitter? Because she gave me an A-. Now, that in itself is not too offensive. I've had much worse. The real kicker is that the thing that tacked that minus on was my participation grade. Yep. That's right. Apparently, my voice could not be heard over Laughing Guy's (in the front row, of course) outbursts of obnoxiousness at every single awful joke that Legging Lady would let forth from her mouth.

Some people just aren't funny. Which is something they should just accept and not try painfully to remedy in a college lecture. You are a Chaucer scholar. This is what you do with your life. Deal with it and move on. Unfunny people can make it in the world, too.

UGH.

I'M OVER SCHOOL.

This is an extremely immature rant. I thought I had gotten out my frustrations on her evaluation, but apparently not. I take full responsibility for it.

In other news, the one good thing that did come out of the quarter was my independent study project. As always, my quarters usually seem to boil down to the only thing I care about being my writing projects.

My original conception for the thing was going to be a piece about war. About violence and physical trauma and the fascination that exists in this world with cruelty, but it turned into something else.

I ended up with a hefty collection of poems and when I was writing new ones and combing through all of my old ones, I became very much aware of a deeply-engrained tension between silence and speech (in echo of my real life, I suppose).

Not too long ago I read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, which I liked very, very much. There is a particularly lovely passage, close to the beginning, where the grandfather, in a letter to his unborn child, writes about his post-traumatic stress following the bombings at Dresden. Of course, he doesn’t call it post-traumatic stress. PTSD didn’t even have such a name when such a letter would have been written. The grandfather proceeds to talk about how he systematically loses his capacity to speak as a result of the trauma, until he is reduced to tattooing YES on his left hand and NO on his right, in order to communicate at the most basic level. Then follows a very beautiful rumination:

Does it break my heart, of course, every moment of every day, into more pieces than my heart was made of, I never thought of myself as quiet, much less silent, I never thought about things at all, everything changed, the distance that wedged itself between me and my happiness wasn’t the world, wasn’t the bombs and burning buildings, it was me, my thinking, my cancer of never letting go, is ignorance bliss, I don’t know, but it’s so painful to think, and tell me, what did thinking ever do for me, to what great place did thinking ever bring me? I think and think and think, I’ve thought myself out of happiness one million times, but never once into it.

I've really begun to realize the massive role that silence has played in my life, and just how crucial poetry has been to overcoming that silence.

Alan Grossman insists, in Summa Lyrica, that “the creation of silence is the condition of the articulation of speech. Silence mediates difference” (19.7). I've wondered, does he refer to the difference between noiselessness and speech? Or, is "difference" more a reference to schisms that can emerge internally when speech is finally articulated from silence?

To even arrive at a place of possible differentiation, maybe it's important to ask how silence is birthed? Or really, why.

Trauma creates silence.

Emotional clamor creates silence in its incapacity to articulate itself meaningfully.

Awkwardness creates silence.

Silence is perpetually in the making.

If I gained anything at all from Legging Lady's class this quarter, it was Chaucer's House of Fame. There is a long passage where, after being hauled into the sky in the great beak of an eagle, the speaker is then forced to sit through the bird’s long diatribe about all sorts of things, from jibes regarding the speaker’s corpulence to the concentric nature of ripples in ponds. At one point, the eagle begins to discourse on sound, saying:

Soun in nought but air y-broken,
And every speche that is spoken,
Loud or privee, foul or fair,
In his substance is but air.

Silence, I think, is sometimes interpreted or defined as the absence of sound, but this is entirely problematic in its assumption that the natural human state is one already rife in sound or noise. Chaucer takes an almost diametrical position to such an assumption in his notion that sound is not the inherent state, but rather silence is, and that sound is inconsequential—merely broken air—and substanceless.

But then I thought about music. An air-breaker, to be sure, but one which ascribes its own intentions and meanings for the individual listener. That is to say, I hear a song, or a classical composition, and I am left without the burden of any established semantic ties or references. I can interpret it and feel what it provokes within me without the weight of etymology or history, with all its various connotations and vicissitudes and calamities which words encounter in their course. So surely then, not all sound is damaging or dangerous. Music proves this to us.

In another class we're always talking about “post-catastrophic poetic speech.”—how language in its most true and moving form arises from a moment of plenary upheaval—or, in Grossman's terms, the “occasion generative of speech.” Grossman always says a lot of important stuff, but among the most important are:

1) The ‘occasion generative of speech’ is some dislocation or ‘disease’ of the relationship of a subject and an object (for example, as between lover and beloved or a god and his world). Creation is not the speaking itself but the primordial disease or fall which thrusts me into a predicament in which speech is the only way (3.3).

2) The silence which precedes speech is the first representational event of the poem. It is the poem’s first artifice (19).

3)Poetry is a version of the unutterable in human scale. (25.7)

Unutterable. What can be unutterable? Let me say that I think silence is always rooted first and foremost in human trauma, in all of its manifestations. Poetry that finds its origins elsewhere holds no real interest to me. Those poems are boring poems because their speech occurs with a sort of ease. Poems with traumatic silence at their roots are poems which must heave language up from terrible and tremendous depths.

Utterance. It is what becomes impossible in moments of cruelty, or maybe love, or when a body destroys itself. There are times when speech just doesn't seem enough.

I think here again of Grossman: "We awaken in the poem. How did we come here?" (33)

To which he answers his own query: "Indeed, we came there because the straight way was lost" (33.2) (Divine Comedy, canto 1).

In our lives, the straight way is indeed lost and only something like poetic speech can have the potentiality to contain such badness.

Silence is what the poem overcomes.

Silence is displaced by the poem.

Without silence, the poem would have no function.

So, I called my project An Etymology of Silence. And it is that...a history of my silences, a study of origins, and something truly, inherently good and healing in the process of speech, whether written or not.

Phew! That's a whole lotta rambling. If anyone is still with me, I also have other news!

I spent Spring Break in Las Vegas, which is a fascinating and bizarre experiment in human behavior.

I saw the entire world there.

I saw Paris:

I saw London:

I saw Ancient Rome (finally got to put that Latin to use!):

And I saw Celine's back:

It was quite an adventure and quite an excellent way to celebrate both my recent 21-ship and my impending graduation and jobless future!

Also, I chopped off 9 inches of my hair! I've been wanting to donate it for a long time and I finally had enough.

Now I can use about 1/4 the shampoo I used to, and if that's not something good, then hell, I don't know what is!

This is a ridiculous life update. My life, however, is mostly ridiculous, so I guess it's fitting.

Good ol' fashioned procrastination

2011-03-06T20:55:00.000-08:00

Well. I'm completely stuck on my last paper of the quarter for this odious Chaucer class (but alas, not my last...there are others to follow this one. Meh.), so I figured it'd be the perfect time to update Blog!

Graduation fast approaches.
School right now is more of a drag than RuPaul.
Once upon a time I was a motivated human being.
Funny, how things change...

Anywho, a little ditty, then, because I've got nothing else:

Geoffrey Chaucer was a poet
he's kinda famous now, don't you know it
so the university decided it would be fit
to make the poor student masses sit
and write papers on his shit
Clearly, I've become so articulate
this is the penultimate class I need to graduit
O! Let this be done
let there be sun
let me find a job soon
or come June
I shall be screwed
My knowledge of Middle English won't pay the rent
gosh darn it my brain is spent
I have senioritis
I have no-more-essays-itis
I have what-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life-itis
and probably even more -itises beyond the aforementioned -itises.

WHERE IS THE CURE?
(not the band but the remedy the remedy?!?)

Yup.

In the meantime, I've taken to playing Neopets again, just like I did when I was, like, 8 or 9 or 10. And you know what? It's pretty damn fantastic. I think I appreciate it more, now.

And you know, it's good to appreciate things in life.
(just a little nugget from me to you, no charge)

Alright alright alright back to work bleeeeehhhhhhhhhhh.

Someday I will write something real and good here.

weirdness

2011-01-22T17:24:00.001-08:00

i am doing an independent study project/creative writing thing this quarter that is supposed to be done in 6 weeks and i have nothing nothing nothing right now but scattered everything

i thought to myself, when i decided to do this thing, that it might be about location

how location impacts psychological development

how where we locate ourselves in relation to others changes or stagnates our souls

how perceptions of the self and others change or don't change as we progress through localities

when i was reading the Satyricon last year, Petronius writes a line: ubique medius caelus est that is: everywhere the sky is in the middle

everywhere the sky is in the middle

everywhere the sky is in the middle

that's what i'm going to call this thing

everywhere the sky is in the middle

since we're talking about places, i bought some new coffee at trader joes it is from new mexico and i thought to myself, maybe it will return me to my days there and i might get some inspiration for all this

there is a tequila brand called chimayo and when i saw that i wondered the same thing as i did when i looked at the coffee, if i might be reminded of the place by consuming a thing with its name

i heard about chimayo in the news recently but i only now remember hearing the name and not what it was about though it was probably some miracle of the dirt

i went there so many times as a child but all i really remember is that the doorways are very low and even shorter people must stoop to pass through them and i also remember the tortilla stand outside my god those were amazing tortillas freshmade hot and with melted butter ahhh

that was back when there was pleasure in consumption but mostly now there isn't

blah i don't know why i am writing this right now los alamos was ages and ages ago but it has been in my head lately what with all this about childhood and location and understanding things

i have been trying so painfully lately to locate myself in or out of or beside everything

location location location locality local localizing locus locust locust swarm gross

ah what gross injustices

these days i only seem to think
in fragments and
in poems

- - -

where do you come from, child?
where were you cultivated
what aerated fields gave growth to you,
breathed in to you,
fed you to completion?

your response:
I am not complete

no, because nothing is
not the places you grew
not even your inhalations
you are growing still,
the things inside you snarl with
their age and with their bruising
and how their breaths sometimes
come only partially,
in halves

you know nothing surely but the
placenta that first littered your soil
the internal muck that spackled
the surfaces of your roots

you came from that, and even before,
from the rageful bearing down and
expellation of the male,
the terror of conception
to slightly more grown, plucked from
the sediments of your pasture
bred to feed maws that care nothing
of your origins

Oh, my poor, neglected Blog

2010-12-26T14:30:00.001-08:00

I feel a little bad for leaving Blog floating alone out here in cyberspace all this time.

All I can really say is that these months have brought with them a series of events and conversations and other things that have precipitated pretty much a complete and total overhaul in how I think about most everything in life.

This is probably a good thing, I think, in the long run. It is a process, to learn to silence the incessant noise that is created everywhere by people around us and to listen to yourself and only yourself. So that's what I've been trying to do and sometimes it goes and sometimes it doesn't, but try try try always will I be trying to know the soul.

In any case, whatever it is, whatever it means, I do hope that you who is reading this right now is having a very nice holiday season, whatever it is you happen to celebrate or not celebrate. Perhaps you are just enjoying a moment of rest. That's a very fine thing, too.

Anyway, I'm still here. Perhaps slightly less prone these days to long rambling blog entries, but still here. Maybe they will start again soon. Who knows. These are strange times, after all...

"Life is not intellectual or critical, but sturdy."

2010-10-16T17:22:00.000-07:00

I do not know what to say for life.

I have recently acquired legality. Consequently, I have arrived at the conclusion that the Davis bar scene is a peculiar one. But I will still investigate further...it's a whole slew of new, previously-untouchable characters, which is a cause for excitement.

I have no motivation anymore for anything. The closer the future gets the further behind I fall in order to avoid it.

Funny how that works.

Other things in a list because nicely-crafted paragraphs I don't have in me these days:

1) There is a reason I have avoided American Literature. Emerson and Thoreau just aren't broken enough. They are boring.

2) On that note, I am only interested in broken people these days. My patience for the non-broken and their contentment wears thin.

3) The one exception on the Emerson note is when he finally does become broken. After his son tragically dies, he writes an essay called "Experience," in which he finally begins to sound like a human being:

Of what use is genius, if the organ is too convex or too concave, and cannot find a focal distance within the actual horizon of human life?

and:

Never can love make consciousness and ascription equal in force. There will be the same gulf between every me or three, as between the original and the picture...Two human beings are like globes, which can touch only in a point, and, whilst they remain in contact, all other points of each of the spheres are inert; their turn must also come, and the longer a particular union lasts, the more energy of appetency the parts not in union acquire.

4) What makes a person good? Compassion? Integrity? The experience of loving and having been loved? What is good? What is compassion? Can we ever even know it? Are we all too goddamn broken to let it touch our internal spaces?

Do you ever see something very simple and very pure and you know it is good but the feeling almost hurts? How do we have such access to rage and hate and grief and shame and sadness and even joy, but to even allow the smallest moment of compassion seems infinitely more difficult than all of the others? And I don't mean compassion as in oh, that was nice, but compassion as in holy crap I think I might implode from the force of this foreign intrusion of something so completely diametrical to the standard state of the human being...

This hurts far more than all the other things that are made purposefully to hurt.

5) The best moments of my days are when I get a little break or right before work and I have a spare moment and I can feel the sun on me and listen to some music or do a crossword puzzle or even read the shitty editorials in The Aggie and there is a rightness to it all.

6) Coffee prices have gone up everywhere. Suckage. Big fat suckage.

7) I cannot believe Walt Whitman isn't even on the syllabus for this class. Who the hell teaches American Literature and leaves off Walt Whitman for bloody Nathaniel Hawthorne? Balls.

8) I have to take the GRE AND the GRE subject test in literature in less than a month. All I can do at this point is laugh when I think about this because if I don't I think I might cry. Ha. Ha.

Ha.

9) I feel like I have to get to 10 for this list because lists are better when they are nice and round and in 10s. They feel more manageable that way. A list of nine would just be awkward.

10)
what to do
what to do
what to do
where to go
who to be
what to say
what to think
who to love
what to study
by extension what to know
what to not know
how to fix the innards
how to understand traumatic things
what to feel
how to feel it
what the childhood was
what the future will be
how to be in the present
how to focus
how to situate the self in the world
what to write
how to learn words
how to learn to write words
how to heal
what to heal
how to define shame and wrongness and goodness and compassion
what is compassion
have you ever known compassion
have I ever even known compassion
what are these questions
what is this illness
what is that illness
why are we all so ill
what medicine might save us
what compassion might save us
can compassion save us

can we be saved from our brokenness?

wordage

2010-09-28T19:04:00.000-07:00

School is massively bleh.

I hope this quarter passes quickly.

Also, it is very very hot outside.

- - -

this heart has longly known silence and
speech has clunked for almost twenty-one years

language, always venerated, sheathed
in gold and placed beside the old crucifix of
the childhood home,
seems now to fail only wretchedly

similarly are all the idols wrapped,
anointed and made supreme with genuflection
sometimes knees get old, they age, begin to
crackle a bit when bent with unwarned celerity

my speech is old, it crackles, sometimes gets
stuck like indigestion in the abdomen,
sends nausea up instead

I would not wish to vomit on gold
I would not wish to expel the internal carcass
all across the hand-sewn silks of
whose faith this all is

silence thrives not in confinement—
a prisoner, it paces just beneath the flesh and
in its solitude it sings a dirge—
a crime-ridden shame-laden funeral song
for the corpse it has inlaid for all the years

I’ve watched many a prison documentary, heard
about the evils and the ills, seen how the
grotesque justice sends electric arcs through
a chair—a resting place—and I have seen how the
murderers are murdered

my mind returns then
to that faith of my youth, to the overarching
quiet, so submerged, to the prayers
they all hope will rise

let this rise, now—an elegy for the body,
for the silence, for the murder, for the murderer,
for the deafness that is everywhere

lamentation seems the only way to
fill the murderous and imprisoned spaces

Blahbitty blah...

2010-09-17T23:53:00.000-07:00

In some bizarre fit of nostalgia or something I bought myself this:

which was easily one of my favorite books ever as a kid. I always thought Claudia was pretty badass, what with her crazy-awesome planning capabilities and her running away from home and all (fight that suburban power, Claud!). So anyways, I bought it and read it today in one sitting and loved it just as much as I did when I was ten-years-old and was totally empathizing with her plight.

In other news, school starting next week makes my stomach hurt (or that might just be the muffins and cookies I have been gorging on...I've been so bored I've turned to baking! But I ran into a recipe for mocha chip muffins the other day and I had to try it. Oy. This is my life. I watched Oprah earlier, too. But it was really good. It might just have brought a tear or two to my eye. But then, so do Lifetime movies and that commercial about how you should love and adopt shelter dogs. Oh god...I am softening in my old age. Also, this is like the longest parenthetical side-note ever. Wat up with that, yo?).

Wow. Okay. ANYWAY. I'm just not ready for school again. Last year wore me out. I have not recovered yet!

Also, I didn't really achieve all of my desired summer goals. I was supposed to get a hobby. Which I didn't. Unless you consider making copious amounts of baked goods one. Well, actually, I have begun something new. I have started to journal. Ha. I've "started journalling" about 30 times in my life and have failed miserably every single time. However, this time is a bit different. I have things to say and ideas to scratch out and I think it might just be the solution to the maelstrom that exists in that big skull-cavity of mine where there probably ought to be a functioning brain. I find that writing is the only thing that works. And I have tried things...oh, believe me I have tried, but there isn't really a peace in anything like the one that emerges when fully-submerged in language. No no no there is not.

My other goal was to get off coffee. ... ... ... Yeah. I got nothing. Let's just say that my conviction for that one was never particularly strong to begin with, so I don't feel too bad.

I think my only other summer goal was to read a lot, which I did and did with vigor! Soooo many great books so many words so much goodness aaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhh!

I meant to say Big Important Things in this post, but I think the journalling sucked all the Big Important Things out of me. Oh, dear. That bastard. We'll have to find some sort of balance in the future, I suppose.

Right...so, this has been profound. Clearly. Ha. I guess I just needed to alert the world of my encounter with my childhood via E.L. Konigsburg, and to say just how much I am not looking forward to the suckage of having to write papers again. Especially because I saved all the classes I don't want to take for last. AGH. American literature and those horrible linguistics classes that are all about social issues. Bah. I don't care about gender issues in language or whatever reader-full of feminist journal articles I'll inevitably get stuck muddling through. It's like the soft option of linguistics, you know, the sociology major that couldn't cut it in all the theoretical bits (sorry, sociologists, but I think you are the only ones lower on the totem pole than English majors, and I must protect my own kind). Bah!

Okay, now this is just getting ridiculous. I will also be spending the quarter reading Chaucer in Middle English. Which is probably the most ridiculous of all the things but the one which I am looking forward to the most.

Alright. Maybe next time I'll be back actually with something to say rather than ridiculous ramblings about my ridiculously dull life. Oh, the ridicule. Oh, the ridding of the culous. Oh, this life. Oh...

Music that moves

2010-09-13T21:58:00.000-07:00

This band, Mumford & Sons, is something very special.

And after the storm,
I run and run as the rains come
And I look up, I look up,
on my knees and out of luck,
I look up.

Night has always pushed up day
You must know life to see decay
But I won't rot, I won't rot
Not this mind and not this heart,
I won't rot.

And there will come a time, you'll see, with no more tears.
And love will not break your heart, but dismiss your fears.
Get over your hill and see what you find there,
With grace in your heart and flowers in your hair.

I am boring. Bummer.

2010-09-07T16:09:00.001-07:00

My life these days follows a terrible pattern: coffee, work, more coffee, more work, sleep a bit (but not enough. never, of course, enough)

lather
rinse
repeat

It is dreadful.

Only one week left before I submit these damn scholarship applications to the powers-that-be who will decide my fate. I cannot wait to have them out of my hands; they have been an extraordinarily lonely process, and I will be happy to be through with it all.

The one bright spot this summer has been STEP. I've been working with the ESL/intensive classes this year and they are pretty awesome. I get to read their journals and most of the time I feel refreshed because they are not yet jaded and that is nice because I am and it is good to be reminded of alternatives to things.

Indeed.

Wow. Exciting life update, huh?

Some day my soul might be revived enough to find something to say.

Until then, I would love you all forever and ever and will shower you with cookies and ponies and stuff if you would keep your fingers crossed (or whatever it is you do to direct positive universal energy in one's direction) that I at least get an interview for one of these scholarships, because it will suck major salty balls if I don't :( So please, if you could help a gal out, that'd be really swell. (is it bad karma to ask? I try not to ask for much...)

Diagon-Alley

2010-08-17T16:49:00.001-07:00

I got it! I got it!

I have finally got a starting point for these damn personal statements.

CHIASMUS.

Chiasmus.

Inverted parallelism! It links everything together...literature, linguistics, misery, joy, disease & the body, love...especially love.

Even Beckett, who wrote:

if you do not love me I shall not love
if I do not love you I shall not love

YES.

Chiasmus.

More on this all later. For now, please just excuse the spaz.

DSM-ing Jedi Masters

2010-08-09T18:36:00.000-07:00

Since progress on scholarship applications has completely stagnated due to my inability to write a coherent personal statement about myself, I have turned to the internet.

Apparently, this is what I do with my time...read about two of my favorite things: Star Wars and personality disorders. Which, it seems, are not mutually exclusive.

Case in point:

Darth Vader: Borderline?

So of course, the logical step would've been to stick Anakin Skywalker into therapy before that pesky Dark Side managed to seep its way on in. Alas, I don't know the specifics on exactly what the state of mental health care on Coruscant was...but you would think that the Jedi might have at least a few connections to galactic shrinks for their best and brightest, eh?

Parhaps not, because we all know how it turned out...what with the brotherly betrayal and burning limbs on Mustafar and the rise of a totalitarian government and obliteration of almost the entire Jedi Order and all...But then, he redeemed himself in the end and that's what's important, right?

You know, Anakin does make a great case study. Which is probably why I stumbled across that article in the first place.

But then, everyone can make a case study if you spin their inner lives and external behaviors enough.

Let's see...

Yoda: Schizotypal or simply a singular soul?

Mace Windu: Obsessive compulsive or just a stickler for that moral code?

Obi-Wan: Dependent or a little too dutiful to those he loves?

Han Solo: Narcissist or merely not-so-humble?

Luke Skywalker: Histrionic or just still smarting from a bit of teenage angst?

You be the judge.

Also, I'm gonna go get a life now.

Oy.

The procrastination that forever characterizes my life...

2010-07-30T12:02:00.000-07:00

I am making dismal attempts to write personal statements for scholarships, but I spend an awful lot of time staring at blank Word documents. Tell us who you are and what you want from the rest of your life in 1,000 words or less!

Okay! Sure! I know exactly who I am and what I want! Yep. Let me lay it all out in a precisely-crafted piece of writing which successfully blends both my future research goals as well as who I am as a human being, and then I'll just season it with some sort of heartrending tale of poignant difficulty which I have overcome with flying colors! Yeah! Nothing like a little human misery to pull at the heartstrings of a scholarship committee!

Oy.

Anyway, to celebrate this absolutely terrifying task of finding what to say in these things, and to try with somewhat epic failure to cover up the fact that I am scared shitless of all this impending real-life business, I have chosen to distract myself with a redesign!

So, as a reminder that change is good and not too terrifying, please retain a warm welcome in your heart for Bloggy's new layout!

I think I like this one; I was getting awfully sick of those damn leaves that have been up there for a year.

Enjoy!

You are now entering the terrible twos...

2010-07-17T10:16:00.000-07:00

Happy second birthday, Blog!

Clinks and fireworks all around!
Here's to another year of blogging bliss.

It's gonna be a big one. There will be some graduating and some Big-Life-Decision-making and hopefully oodles more observing and/or mocking of the absurdities of human life.

Tumultuous times, these, but straight through them we will go!

Cheers!

Wallowing, and grammatical anatomy.

2010-07-15T19:32:00.000-07:00

My days these days are filled with monotony.

I work. I hand out pencils. Then I relocate to a different building and I try to tell people how commas work. Sometimes they nod like they get it but sometimes all I see is blankness in their eyes.

There are times when I don't really understand commas.

Then I watch television. I no longer have standards for what I watch. I mean, I knew it was getting bad, but I have arrived at a point where I actually record You're Cut Off! and find myself looking forward to watching it after my day of pencil-dissemination and comma-correcting and it doesn't even really strike me as peculiar anymore that the leader of this entire bizarre experiment is a "certified life coach" and I have no idea what it takes to actually certify a human being as proficient in life-coaching, but apparently this woman is. Actually, Wikipedia tells me that her official title is "Professional Life Coach and Life Strategist."

Maybe I should call her up and have her strategize my life for me.

Because graduation is this year and then what I don't know.

There is a period in the morning after the math placement exam begins when all the little freshies are tucked in and settled and they get 90 minutes for it and there is a good 30 or 40 minutes before one of them needs a new sheet of scratch paper, so during that time I find myself contemplating the future and I think I would like to be a sailor. They at least can grab an astrolabe and steer by the stars. Or maybe not a sailor but one who at least wanders and sees things and watches people and produces things.

But then I think that would quickly become terribly lonely.

Alas, in anticipation of my impending departure from this strange university place, I submit applications to things and look deeply into other things and ask the multitudes for advice on things and one says one thing and others say other things but of course there is no answer in the people who I know for what only my soul can determine for itself.

My 20-year-old soul is much too young to know firmly what it wants. Sometimes it feels much older than 20, though, and creaky.

Urgh. Enough of all this maudlin angsting. It's making me want to roll my eyes at myself. Things come as they will, fall into place as they do, and so on and on and on until death. It's just that classic summer ennui which brings with it far too much time to think.

In other news, I just read this book, The Discovery of Heaven, which I liked very much and think the world should read as well. It's kind of a brick, but worth it, I think.

Very strange, very full of ideas, and very good.

I may no longer make any effort to filter what enters my brain via television, but I do at least still maintain minimal standards for this reading business. Which is something, I suppose.

In other news, it's almost that time of year for Blog Redux. New layout! New layout! Thank goodness because I sure am sick of this one. Must get to work on that.

You know, commas kind of look like stomachs. Is it because they are ample breeding ground for ulcers and indigestion?

The lying lie of the lying and lying life of lies

2010-07-03T14:42:00.000-07:00

Lying seems to presently be the pressing theme of this summer.

(Un)fortunately I don't mean lying as in reclension but lying as in volitional twisting of language. Which of course births the question of if all the things we speak are untruths...but we'll get there in due time.

This recent fascination with such matters might be partially attributable to the fact that I really like this new show, Pretty Little Liars. It's pretty darn good, especially for ABC Family, I think because they usually try to at least work towards being concerned with morality and whatnot, but this one is just pretty shameless and gratuitously scandalous, which is probably why I enjoy it so much. Damn it just give me the melodrama so that I don't have to waste any time pretending to care about lingering issues of virtue, which are always such an inconvenience when you are just trying to immerse yourself in the smutty world of entertainment.

Anyway; so in high school I wrote this story and it was supposed to have an unreliable narrator (but then, aren't they always?), so I decided that compulsive lying would my fascinating-personality-quirk of the day. So my setting was the county fair, and my narrator is alone on the ferris wheel, when it suddenly grinds to a halt with her at the very top and all the screws start to pop out and the metal is bending in a terrible shrieking din and down down down she goes.

It might have all ended for her right then and there, but praise be to the deities, because she fell right into the lap of a sturdy man in the unit beneath her! (I have not a clue what they call the thing you sit in...cart? boat? Is there even a proper name at all?)

So she finally collects herself and manages to put herself upright and holy crap whaddaya know, she's staring right into the perfect bluegreen eyes of Matt Damon! So anyway, of course it is love at first sight and Matty instantly forgets about his wife and children and whisks my character off to Rome, where they get married by the Pope himself and then spend the rest of their lives walking along the beaches in Greece and sipping superstrong coffee in Italy and then they jetset off to Spain where they share a brief stint as world-champion tango dancers. Eventually, they return to the world of film where together they star in a the greatest and most epic movie ever made and they both win Academy Awards and their hot and steamy love only grows hotter and steamier as the years go on.

This is all a potential digression. Just a bit.

And when I was 15 I might potentially have been projecting my subconscious fantasies in my writing. Just a bit. I think improvement has been made in that now I can simply just admit to myself that I would like nothing more than to fall into Matt Damon's lap at the fair...

But what I am really getting at is simply the lies that are etched into every possible crevice of the lives we live.

See, whenever the University Writing Program assigns students a subject to write about, I inevitably end up having to read about 30 papers on the same topic at work, and this entire week I've been reading stacks of writing on lying, and it's been an interesting time.

They're all supposed to do a little stint of self-examination and think about the lies they tell, then categorize them and then come up with a nice neat epiphany about themselves and what big life lessons they can learn from engaging in this course of introspection.

So then there is me, and I am sitting there reading some dreadfully-personal papers about these people, all of whom are in various states of life-experience. It is quite fascinating, really, because they are all roughly the same age and yet the spectrum ranges from the worst of the lies being to the parents in high school so that they could actually go to a concert while pretending to be at a study group, all the way on over to lies that involve serious damage to people in matters of love and death and sex and all those things more crucial than a minor divergence from the truth told to the parental units in order to avoid trouble.

And it is not really the baffling range of such things as these, but the reminder that we have to conduct our encounters specifically to the individual. What might seem minor to one person can be far more acute to another. So, while to one person lying about not feeling well to get out of a social engagement might seem a most horrific of untruths, while to another the same might be hardly worth a second thought.

It's just yet another manifestation of the human clash, how we chafe against the ideals of others and of course there is always the perpetual option to either learn from it or to continue on in obstinate denial of that fact that the only way our souls will ever learn is when we let something outside ourselves teach them.

In that way, I guess that all lies are actually doing important work. They will inevitably be untangled, and even if not understood entirely or revealed completely, they will still cause mutations and (un)conscious undercurrents that will edge into interactions and language and they will incessantly be influencing the dynamics between human beings.

Thus, I suppose that it in the most broken of interpersonal systems, it is not in the overt lies that terror is cultivated, but rather in the silences. The actual verbal expression, truthful or not, is at least doing something. Perhaps it is something awful, but at least there is a simultaneous potential for resolution at hand, whereas the silences between people can cause only further damage. Say, for example, in the verbal narrative of a dysfunctional family or relationship in which language consistently and barely continues to limp along on life support. Yes, the unit functions externally but descending into the internal spaces of each individual will likely reveal very deep wreck.

Plato says false words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil. But while lies might be an infection, they do not encompass the deadly malignancy of entrenched silences and the secrets and evils that might be buried within such spaces. They infect the soul with evil, but the unspoken wrongs...it seems that might leave an irrevocable dent on the soul and while an infection might be cured with some sort of manmade drug, you can't exactly fix a dent. Perhaps surgically. But that's getting out of my realm. I have just come to think that even a lie might be preferable to the burying of language...

Plato kind of brings me to another small digression, involving evil, or perceived evil, or perhaps just a sort of swelling nothingness depending on how you choose to go about the world. I was in a coffee shop a few weeks ago, just having a chat with someone, and this man stands in front of me and stares at me very intently and then says, "Satan hates you." And I have not even the remotest inkling what to make of that but it is one of those moments that proves difficult to extricate from the mind.

I don't remember where I was going to go with that...

In fact, I don't really remember where I was going with any of this--if I was going anywhere in the first place. It just seems to be everywhere these days, the overarching tonality of lying and silences and madnesses within hearts.

And lies, almost inherently, don't exactly allow for conclusions. Yes, my narrator and Matt Damon lived happily ever after, but the damages they left in their wake were unaccounted for in my story. His wife collapsed into a deepest of pains after he left her, and his children would be forced to grow up in the flurry of fatherless trauma. The county fair incurred great debt from the lawsuits brought about by those who almost lost their lives in the ferris wheel incident, and the next year the ride was discontinued, much to the great dismay of young children who wanted to see things from greater heights and from young and old couples who wanted to share some kind of mythic intimacy whilst hovering in the air. The Pope who married the two was unaware of the details of this affair, and thus his Catholic sensibilities met an awful sort of maculation in allowing these two souls to join in what the religious canon dictates as sin. And of course, even though the story of our couple ends on a high note, happily ever after is of course no such thing because eventually there is death, and it is always one before the other as lives don't extinguish themselves contemporaneously, so either my narrator or Matt would have to watch the other age and degenerate and die and then there would descend a most terrible of lonelinesses and necessity would insist that what was once the passionate affair must transmute into the grief that arrives upon loss.

And so, always always always at the heart of a lie is grief, as is grief at the heart of rage and fear and shame and all the variations of brokenness that fill in the vast, lacking spaces of this world.

In the wise words of Homer Simpson, "Television! Teacher, mother, secret lover!"

2010-06-24T14:49:00.000-07:00

I think my brain is probably degenerating a bit.

It is great.

I also have come to think that this must be what life without persistent neuroticism is like.

See, I spend my time these days watching Lifetime movies. Soooo juicy. I don't know how they do it but gosh darn they just suck me in and get me every bloody time. My recent peregrination into this world has included such subjects as teen pregnancy, bulimia, custody battles, secret societies, rabid cheerleaders, and an entire slew of warmfuzzy-inducing dramas that inevitably end with all the members of an entirely dysfunctional family structure coming together to recognize all the ills of their lives and then have goodness and healing just spurt on out from every angle.

Yep.

Alas, back to work next week. Back to trying desperately to explain the ridiculousness that is English grammar and back to dragging my ass out of bed at 7 in the morning to hand pencils to green little freshmen who are all so perky and excited about their impending joyous college experience. Muahaha. Oh how quickly they will discover the truth. I suppose until then I ought to just let them have their naivete. It's actually almost kind of charming.

Man...if only I could persist with this gratuitous laziness and feeding of my emotional needs via television. Unfortunately, money must be made so that getting-the-hell-out-of-California can eventually be happening. Must. Focus. On. Big. Picture. Bleeeeehhhhh.

Oh, Lifetime, I hate that I must soon cut back on you and your meaty awesomeness.

What freedom really is:

2010-06-09T15:47:00.000-07:00

It's the weight of thirty library books off your shoulders!

Yeeessssssss!!!!!!!!!!!!!

We lost Descartes for a second, but fear not, he was recovered and made it safely into the book return. And speaking of Descartes, I heard a great one the other day:

So, Descartes goes into a bar and the bartender is all, "Can I get something for you today, Rene?" and Descartes is all, "I think...NOT!" and then he disappears from all existence!

Hee.

Hello summer, I love you

2010-06-07T22:05:00.001-07:00

My brain is tired.

My soul is tired.

This entire year has been a long massive extraordinary pain in the ass. Or, perhaps more precisely, pain in the spirit.

BUT!

I will never, ever again have to look at an attribute value matrix or figure out a conceptual structure or determine semantic roles or draw any more godforsaken syntax trees!

Also, I suppose I can begin emptying my brain of Latin and morphology and all things Beckettian, too.

Oh my goodness it doesn't really sink in easily that I can now watch SO MUCH TELEVISION. Without any kind of guilt or that nagging in my brain that says, gosh kid, you should really be at least pretending to do something quasi-productive with your life.

God I love tv.

So much.

It's so beautiful I could cry.

And I love summer. At least for the first bit before the acute boredom and restlessness set in. But at any rate, I might finally begin updating this thing again. And I'm going to take up some hobbies. I say that every year, but this year I'm going to try to commit. And oh my god I can read books again for fun. Yessss!

Oh and at some point I should probably figure out what the hell to do with the rest of my life.

But I should probably watch this entire past season of Keeping Up With the Kardashians first.

Priorities, you see.

Science that funny funny thing

2010-05-27T18:52:00.000-07:00

An empirical law of physics: the total amount of energy in an isolated system remains constant over time. Thus, energy can be neither created nor destroyed; it can only be transformed from one state to another.

Yesterday I was sitting in front of the library and there were two simultaneous occurrences:

1) Girl on phone was positively screaming at her poor boyfriend (Shawn, by the way...because apparently the world must know his name. Loudly). I mean, absolutely ballistic. No joke. And now, I don't know all of the details (though she wasn't exactly tight-lipped about their many many many problems), but damn...I felt for the guy. It just isn't good for the soul to have to take a yelling such as that one. The words "punk ass bitch" were definitely used at some point. All because he wanted some space and she felt like she couldn't give him it because he is never clear about his emotions and he just can't seem to ever talk about anything real about their relationship and she's tired of never being able to trust him and wondering where he goes all the time and why he can't just be honest and it's because of this that she read all of his texts and she just wishes that they could communicate and, oh baby, she's soooooooo sorry that she yelled at him like that but she just feels like he is slipping away from her and gosh darn it she can't hold on...

and

2) Different girl steps right into path of guy on bicycle. Guy goes flying. Guy's arm bleeds profusely. Girl is clearly distraught. He angrily insists he's ok. She goes into library and promptly comes out again with heavy-guilt steps, and she keeps talking to him and somehow they get onto some other topic and the next thing you know she is touching his arm and giving him doe-eyes and you can tell he's softening and their bodies are all turned into each other and close and she lets her hand linger on his arm and they are still talking five minutes later about what I don't know because other girl is still eviscerating poor Shawn over the phone so loudly I can't hear the other two. But no matter, because the next thing you know, guilty girl and bike boy are exchanging numbers, and whaddaya know, they both have a class in Wellman! Let's walk together! Okay!

So, phone-yeller-girl has to go to her lab and she blames Shawn, of course, because the entire conversation has made her late, and she hangs up in absolute rage and stalks off, the indignation practically rolling off her stomping body, and in the meantime, guilty girl and bike boy stroll off together into the sunset, girl pushing boy's bike for him while he tends to his blood-drenched arm.

So, there you have it, folks.

Physics.

In other news, I finished my thesis and thank god for that because now I need to start catching up on everything else that I have pushed aside whilst writing this 50 page Beckettian behemoth.

Boy oh boy does this quarter need to end.

Absurd, /æbˈsɜrd/, -adj

2010-05-10T22:45:00.000-07:00

This weather is absurd.
Human souls are absurd.
Obscenely absurd syntax is.

I have become singularly obsessed with this thesis to the point where nothing else really matters much at all. It is the only thing I care about. I think I might have some sort of separation breakdown when I finish it.

And that I find rather absurd.

- - -

I am reading Schopenhauer. Everyone laughs at that.
-Samuel Beckett

Talent is like a marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is like a marksman who hits a target which others cannot see.
-Arthur Schopenhauer

oh, Samuel. I read you every day that I might
scribble out something in the way of love
I do this as a moment in the ritual of academia—
the culmination of these purported learning years

this is more than ritual, though, I know that.
you have deepened me
cut me open and loosed this inside:
is it not better abort than be barren

I suppose it is these years, too, and not just you
which have opened me.

cemented in language and
cracked with disease have been the theses
and now it is you. you and
the emergent past
the same way a dandelion pushes through
the humanly-produced paving
weedy and ugly and graceless.
that is what arrives now,
all the graceless moments

occluded targets and the coarse brunt of
ascending memory are always in my mind now

and then there is you, a poet who
I think I know
in more than just the language.

your words are somehow steering me
through this wretched squall

if you do not love me I shall not be loved
if I do not love you I shall not love

NaPoWriMo (cont.)(cont.) and other nerdage

2010-05-01T14:34:00.000-07:00

Done! Wooooooooo!

- - -

April 5

like how the water globules
are shaken--with time--from the
nature they cling to,
words have finally been shaken
from inside the human cage

the illest of it now out,
seasons open

April 26

socket where once there was housed
and eye still might be there an eye
but dryness, too, has made its way in
the eye has diminished to make way
for the new incursion of the harmful
letting drip of all that makes an eye
an eye—a body of moisture contained
in the socket-skull it all leaks out now
there is feeling that might never cease

it always ceases, eventually,
leaving dryness and a peculiar itch
in the ducts which desire that
lubrication which all sloughed off in
the chafe—in those moments of brutal
internal scuffling. the sockets have been
scuffed, all their wetness has been
evacuated in heaving and cry
please rehydrate, eye, the wide swinging
between the drought and the flood
is like a bible erupting, causing
fissures in the sockets.

April 30

April is indeed the cruelest month
no lilacs have been bred
just the dead land and its barrenness,
clanging around dryly in my lungs

all has shifted across this month.
summiting has been the most
erroneous diseases, out of the mouth
now and mutable

a paralysis seems to have dispersed itself;
not the paralysis of the past, of overtaking
numbness and seizing misery or of
a suppression constricting all within

no, now it is a far more dreadful possibility:
to give in to a craving for internal fixing.
see, for twenty years now
has inside been a locus for storming and
tempest. but this is a different April than all
the other Aprils so rife with their deadly-bred lilacs

twenty years have passed and now I
wish to seize all these evils,
for the damages to ease, for breath to
finally begin taking gentler strokes
against the walls of my lungs and
begin to correct
everything that has ruined and
produced ruins

- - -

In other news, as a celebration of a most successful Undergraduate Research Conference, myself and the nerds I live with decided that baked goods were in order:

Now to just get through the rest of this quarter and summer (read: actual sleep) will finally be had!

NaPoWriMo (cont.)

2010-04-25T22:23:00.001-07:00

Woooo! Almost to the finish line and I'm not behind at all! Heeeeyyy!

- - -

April 13

sprigs in the great bouquet—
the oft-called baby's breath
more so it is the malnourished twig
bloomed with the many swatches
of wrongness a soul can be grown

I have never held an infant
I own no conception of
how they breathe, know not
if it is anything like the white nubs which garnish
the wider flowers in a marriage bunch or
the adolescent corsage
or the placement of such adornment
in the hair of the child
during the first forced
ritual communion

infants grow, too,
get fed the damaging faith
dance the awkward social patterns
commit themselves to other souls
all with the emblematic floral
embellishment like purity trying
to overlay the deeper wrongs
so sullied and
so perverse

April 18

sugar lump the erroneous sweetening
the bitter drink swill
there is nothing quite like
protective failure,
to let those acrimonious substances
dribble down the throats of the young,
those young housing minds which
cannot even grab for conception of
the evils drifting on these water bodies

once I found some shells on the beach
the salt was in my mouth I thought
I would never be able to rinse out the taste
there was still wet sand in the shell-crevices and
when it dried it diffused itself over everything

silence has desiccated like salt
or like the most bitter drink

if a shell is a suggestion
what, then, filled it once?

April 23

it pings around inside:
quicquid discis, tibi discis
this I know and let continue ping
my insides must be metallic to
allow for such a sound
language, too, must be metallic
to allow for such a sound

this is good:
it scatters that illusion
of learning as soft,
presents it as it is:
denting and durable
sonorous and sturdy

whatever you learn
you learn for yourself

A love note to syntax:

2010-04-20T22:18:00.000-07:00

NaPoWriMo

2010-04-17T15:10:00.000-07:00

I figure, who the hell doesn't love a nifty challenge with a nifty title? So I've been doing a poem a day for National Poetry Writing Month and telling myself that whatever drivel pours out will be fine with me.

- - -

April 14

today I watched a discussion
about asparagus

about how to cook it stew it chop it pare it
the acidity content and how it depends upon
the length of the stalk
about how many in a bunch
comparable prices
the way to season it depending on the season and
the way to eat it in relation to the speed of consumption—
how they must occur in tandem and how
depending on the seasoning and the
internal temperature and outside
the equilibrium can be so
easily disturbed (they must be considered together:
erroneous spicing in the heat of the day
or chilled night will lead to certain
inevitable calamity)

it is a most peculiar of bonds
between the stalk-creator and
consumer. they transpose positions;
with the pecuniary exchange he eats
and she eats and she loses what she has gained
and gains what he has birthed and lost

what he has cultivated she will devour
but devour it she will, lovingly,
the consumption
will penetrate her mouth with some
sort of learned pleasure
from their dialogue and from the
filling inside her belly

asparagus who would have known
in season in April
oh how we meet each other in April
how over asparagus, spirits converge

how curious how curious indeed

I can't get no satisfaction! I can't get no, oh no no no! Hey hey hey, that's what I say!

2010-04-10T20:26:00.001-07:00

I quite wish that I had something profound or funny or at least mildly interesting to write here, but alas, all there is to say is that real life has latterly exerted itself with a greater force, resulting in a growing apathy toward this education and a growing dissatisfaction with all things in general and the desire to do absolutely nothing with my life but not have to be in classrooms and instead lying outside on beautiful spring days and feeling the sun on me. It's the only thing that causes a sort of plenary internal warmth.

I think this state has been made worse by the fact that I recently discovered that I only need five more classes to graduate. Which is a terrifying prospect. I could theoretically be done in one more quarter (but will likely drag it out for longer). It seems that these past three years of academic masochism have put me in this peculiar position in which I am ahead but still completely unsure where to head after and thus confusion has only widened.

So I suppose that now it would do me better to simply focus on the present.

I have not written a word on Beckett since that 15-page behemoth prospectus was due at the end of last quarter and I spend my days now trying to wrench myself back into writing mode so I can get out the final product and I am currently without any literature classes which is sad and syntax is even sadder because it has always been the thorn in my linguistic side. It is the one area of language that meets nothing but internal barrier when I attempt it. My brain and this stuff just do not get each other no matter how much effort is put into it. And I hate and will always hate grammar. Blah.

But morphology is pretty rad. Yup.

This is sad. Unfortunately, human beings have been sadly lacking in any significant observable absurdity lately and thus I am fodder-less for this blog. Or maybe I have simply become unable to spot it.

I am reading Petronius, and he says:

Nolo quod cupio statim tenere
nec victoria mi placet parata.

or:

I do not want that which I desire immediately,
nor does easy victory please me.

To which I say bullocks, because this sense of uncertainty with life is a right pain in the ass, if I do say so myself.

But oh, Petronius, I will continue to wait and maybe great epiphanies will occur.

That would be nice.

There aren't really words to express my disdain at the fact that there is school tomorrow

2010-03-28T16:02:00.000-07:00

But I'll try anyway:

Aaaaaaaaggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Yeah. Find that one in the dictionary, eh?

Why is there school tomorrow?!? Why? Urrrghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

I think I really am over all this educational business. It's time to implement the American Idol Plan. This summer. Auditions. That's right.

In other news, Spring break was far too short. But adventures were had, including roomie-bonding road trip to Disneyland and the beach. First Seattle, now SoCal. Some day we'll make it off the West Coast and then slowly and systematically take over the world, which should always be the eventual goal for any endeavor in life, right?

And I sure hate SoCal but I do love me some beach. Oh dilemmas.

First, a tribute to what was one of my grandmother's favorite restaurants:

And then to get me in touch with my inner-child. The same inner-child that sees the price of a Disneyland ticket and cries a little bit inside because I have to think about just how many run-on sentences and grammar errors I've had to correct in order to pay for it...

Hahaha...I can never resist the man in flannel...my hero!

Hot damn, I've always wanted to see the Grand Canyon!

What's a pirates favorite element? Aaaaaaaarrrgon!

And then to Newport...it was a glorious day.

And as always it ends too soon and there is yet another quarter to face full of blahness like syntax and morphology and Beckett-researching and damn frackin' Latin (hee. rhyme!).

I think that Latin and me are going to part ways after this quarter. Ours is much too troubled a relationship. It'll be better for both of us this way. I didn't think the age difference would be so big a deal, but really, with a disparity of over 2000 years, not even some kind of linguistic-Viagra could hope to get things going again, if you know what I mean.

Okay. Deep breath. It's only 10 weeks and finals. Here we go. Again.

Sweet freedom

2010-03-19T21:17:00.000-07:00

These last two weeks have drained every bit of soul from me. 45 pages have I written and finals have I taken.

AND SO:

Term Papers: 0
Sleep-deprived-demoralized-but-very-much-finally-done-with-this-god-forsaken-quarter college student: 4

Uh-huh. That's right. They did not take me down. I am a WRITING MACHINE.

Finals: Last one submitted just now.

Victory: Mine. Muahahaha.

Only, victory isn't quite as sweet at this point of exhaustion.

Anyways, to celebrate the completion of what has been one long-ass winter quarter (as they always seem to be), some kind of debauchery must be had.

Meaning: I have some serious television-watching to do.

And I mean serious.

"There ain't no rest for the wicked/money don't grow on trees/we got bills to pay/we got mouths to feed/there ain't nothing in this world for free"

2010-03-10T22:08:00.000-08:00

My ass is getting majorly kicked here.

As the score currently stands:

Term papers: 3
Demoralized college student: 1

BUT! The little quote on my tea bag tonight tells me this:

Thanks, Abe!

Even if you were actually kind of a closet racist, you might just have given me a second wind!

Feel my rage, thief!

2010-03-02T18:23:00.001-08:00

Dear douchebag (or douchette, whichever you happen to be) who stole my umbrella today,

I hope you fall in a puddle.

Best,
Me

You know, it's a darn good thing it wasn't a baby or something because I swear, you leave something unattended for 10 minutes and the vultures just swoop on in.

So I then, in response to this dreadful event, went and racked my brain and recent history to see if there might be some kind of karmatic reason for this all. And the only thing I could really come up with was a few weeks ago when I laughed a little bit inside when I saw some girl's shoe fall off when she was riding her bike. It was raining and she was hopping around on one foot after getting off her bike and she was trying not to step on the wet ground and she was using her bike for support but it was teetering, and you can't really hop in high heels, so it was more just stretching out her body in an awkward way and it was all really quite a spectacle.

But then, UCD seems to have recently become a campus rich in spectacles, most of which are not amusing much at all.

In any case, and in my defense, high heels are generally not considered adequate rainwear, so it really was coming to her, a little bit. And I don't think the punishment here really fits the crime, so maybe the umbrella-stealing is actually in reference to something else, and in addition to that payback I am also still awaiting the universe's wrath for the internal-mocking-of-inappropriately-clad-girl incident.

How grand.

Elias Canetti tells us that laughter is, at its core, an expression of pleasure taken in food or in prey. And that tells us that the reason people laugh when others fall is because it's some kind of hearkening back to our innate animal instincts in which we reflect this shift in power dynamics, or the emergent vulnerability of the fallen one, in the same way that a predator bears its teeth when its prey falls before him. Canetti says that instead of eating, we laugh--that laughter is our physical reaction to the escape of potential food.

So what it really ultimately demonstrates is that human beings, over the whole course of history, have actually not progressed much at all.

Maybe my laughing at high-heel-girl really was my predatory instinct rising from deep within. Which could easily be true. But nevertheless, I can look into my apparent latent desire to eat high-heeled women some other time. For now, I still maintain the position that a) you shouldn't wear high heels in rain, and b) you shouldn't wear high heels in rain while simultaneously attempting to ride a bicycle.

That's sure some deep life advice if I do say so myself. Maybe I should start charging. I can't just be doling out all this uber-profound stuff to readers for free.

Anyway, I guess I'll leave with some Beckett because I started off this whole thing by talking about sticky-fingered-umbrella-thefting-vultures and it reminded me of one of his poems:

The Vulture

dragging his hunger through the sky
of my skull shell of sky and earth

stooping to the prone who must
soon take up their life and walk

mocked by a tissue that may not serve
till hunger earth and sky be offal

"Who else would soar above the view of men/And keep us all in servile fearfulness?"

2010-03-01T20:53:00.000-08:00

You know, there isn't really much to say about March.

Marching...towards finals. Ack. So bleak.

Ides of March? Caue.

St. Patrick?

I am reading a book by a guy named Patrick. Patrick Chamoiseau. Called Texaco. It is very good.

Boy this is dull.

But until the ratio of term papers completed shifts back over to my side, brain is quite poorly-equipped for anything beyond finishing this quarter with some kind of sanity. Whatever sanity is.

Current score:

Term papers: 4
Demoralized college student: 0

Oh, and also, this makes my life so much better: The Daily Puppy

Some victory at last

2010-02-22T20:26:00.001-08:00

It seems that the universe is finally coming to its senses and realizing its better attributes.

MSN has determined Celebrity Rehab to be one of "The Best Shows on TV You're (Probably) Not Watching," and I just have to say that I heartily agree with this assessment.

For how long now have I been shamelessly pimping out this show and all its variations? I now have validation of its amazingness! Booyah!

Their little blurb reads: This show is as addicting as the substances it's participants are being treated for. Don't feel guilty for eavesdropping on the personal demons of its stars, feel guilty that you haven't watched any of its previous incarnations (there's also "Sober House" and "Sex Rehab"). Though this season's cast is devoid of a Jeff Conaway or Gary Busey-type (read: totally bonkers!), it does feature Dennis Rodman, Mackenzie Phillips, one-time couple Heidi Fleiss and Tom Sizemore and the former bassist of Alice in Chains, who wasn't a hardcore addict during his band's heyday, but became one after his eventual firing. Yes, the show's stars are seeking publicity, but they're also seeking help -- and it's hard not to root for that. At the center of it all is Dr. Drew Pinsky, whose professionalism and warmth lend the show enough credibility to take it from farcical to fascinating.

I love Dr. Drew.

He's almost too damn cool for his own good.

Update: the LATIN MIDTERM OF DOOM saga comes to a close

2010-02-17T20:37:00.000-08:00

Alrighty.

First off, I would normally never publicly gloat about this sort of thing, but seriously, after almost giving myself an ulcer and a minor panic attack over this midterm...

Well, I think I deserve just one, teeny smidgen of gloat:

Hallelujah praise almighty Jupiter and Pollux and God and whatever damn thing/person/place/thing/idea/noun-in-general you happen to believe in!

Even Beckett is coming along. Massive-research-project-blob is finally finding some sort of shape...maybe I'll actually go into Spring with something quasi-workable.

The sun is out and the sky is blue again and it was a mighty fine day, indeed.

1 - 2 - 3 It's HAMMER TIME!

2010-02-10T09:26:00.000-08:00

Well, today is the day.

Today separates the strong from the weak.

It separates the prime rib from the veggie burgers

the Samuel Becketts from the Billy Collinses

the Pop Tarts from the Toaster Strudels

the Romans from the Gauls

The Matt Damons from the Brad Pitts

the Caesars from the Vercassivellanuses (and yes, that really was his name. Poor guy.)

the true Plautine-comprehendors from the neophyte Latinists.

I am coming for you, LATIN MIDTERM OF DOOM.

You'd best be watchin' your back.

The horror! The horror!

2010-02-08T22:48:00.000-08:00

The LATIN MIDTERM OF DOOM is approaching with an increasingly-alarming amount of rapidity.

Wednesday, the day of the LATIN MIDTERM OF DOOM, is suddenly only a day away.

Now, the only words in Latin that I really actually know are perii! Occidi! (I am lost! I am done for!), which are actually quite fitting for my current feelings toward this impending LATIN MIDTERM OF DOOM.

I might finally resume normal respiration only when the LATIN MIDTERM OF DOOM has been completed.

Oh, Plautus. Why did you have to be you? And why couldn't you just stick to one form of the subjunctive? And what's with the shitloads of pronouns? Oh, and while we're at it, why must you parataxisize so many of your verbs? Why why why?

DOOM DOOM DOOM

Ita statim stant signa, neque nox quoquam concedit die.

A few things:

2010-02-03T18:36:00.000-08:00

1) They have been selling bras and underwear in big plastic bins all week outside of the bookstore. So if you just have to have that leopard print thong that's at the bottom, you must first paw your way through an entire mound of unmentionables in order to nab it.

Discount if you mix and match.

2) I have come to find these so-called "study lounges" on campus to be places of particularly highly-concentrated misery, especially during winter quarter, and a total antithesis to the definition of the word "lounge." You walk in and it's a bunch of people hunched over their books or laptops, bloodshot eyes from teeny-tiny print and sucking down coffee like it's water, and about every fourth chair is occupied by some poor, sleeping student with his head slung back and perched at an awkward angle upon his neck and his mouth wide open just waiting for some spider to crawl in and die and on its way down have all eight of its little legs break off in said guy's esophagus.

More lounging and much less miserableness ought to occur in these places.

3) Today I saw a bus take out one of these things:
Just a big crack and then there it was, splintered wood on the ground and a fear-stricken bus driver.

It was a great moment.

This actually might explain a lot

2010-01-26T21:07:00.000-08:00

Apparently, Beckett regularly played chess with Marcel Duchamp, of artistic urinal fame:

Indeed.

Also, whenever I hear the word "urinal" I think of that George Bush joke where he and Laura get invited to a tour of the White House before his inauguration and he asks Clinton if he can use his bathroom and Bush is shocked to see a solid gold urinal and he tells Laura all about it and then later Laura tells Hillary at lunch how impressed George was with the gold urinal. Then, later that night, Bill and Hillary are getting ready for bed and she turns to him and says, "Well I found out who peed in your saxophone." Hee.

In other news, I have been reading so many different things lately they are jumbled in my brain and I cannot untangle them.

Virginia Woolf writes, in Jacob's Room, that a body is harnessed to a brain.

Yes. I can't get it out of my head. Harnessed. Shackled. Fettered to our bodies that begin degenerating from the moment we are born...

You know, she might have been a depressed, crazy feminist, but she sure had her moments. I also just read A Room of One's Own and funnily enough her best bits come when she is not drawing the distinctions between men and women. She says:

Life for both sexes--and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement--is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle.

Fo' sheazy, Virgie. Fo' sheazy. Hooray for the human condition.

And this somehow relates to everything else and love above all.

In the speech presenting Beckett with the Nobel Prize, it was said that:

(It is) in Beckett's pessimism...(that) houses a love of mankind that grows in understanding as it plumbs further into the depths of abhorrence, a despair that has to reach the utmost bounds of suffering to discover that compassion has no bounds. From that position, in the realms of annihilation, rises the writing of Samuel Beckett like a miserere from all mankind, its muffled minor key sounding liberation to the oppressed, and comfort to those in need.

I think it is not just Beckett. We all house a love of mankind and maybe that love breeds our desperation but it is still essential. He, I think, had an incredible desire to know humanity as well as a profound difficulty containing the sharpness of understanding fully human pain, and maybe from this inability to conjoin the two ideas arose his great ambivalence towards love. But it is really just a groping for some kind of clarity and in that reaching for sense there emerges an incredible sort of desperation. Compassion in Beckett really does know no bounds, as this speech suggests, and I think that boundless and infinite swell is the love in his poems and maybe it was all too much for him to grasp at once and that's why these labels get so easily attached to his name and work--misanthrope, pessimist, cynic, etc.

Anyways. I dunno. Beckett. One crazy bitch. For real.

And I have no answers but he might because he wrote:

my peace is there in the receding mist
when I may cease from treading these long shifting thresholds
and live the space of a door
that opens and shuts

And somehow all these things converge but I do not know how but if he knew anything then maybe he was right and in the receding mist there might be peace, for us.

Curious

2010-01-25T13:31:00.000-08:00

This increasingly-omnipresent crusade for high-fructose corn syrup has me perplexed.

But then, a great many things perplex me.

Rain rain rain rain pitter patter wind winter wheeze weasling weather

2010-01-19T18:40:00.001-08:00

Winter drags.

I am trying for the 50,678th time to get off coffee.

It is pouring outside and when the wind wakes you up before your alarm does it is ridiculously unpleasant. Just seems like it shouldn't be the natural order of things for nature itself to wake you before our mechanized world does.

Beckett is irritating me.

Winter drags.

I can't remember if I have yet pimped out Nameless Magazine which I work on and last year's print issue is finally out this coming week! Yay! Buy one! Shameless promotion!

Did I mention that winter drags?

I spend my days thinking up things I would like to do that don't involve formal education and classes and schedules and papers and Beckett.

I would like to swim in coffee.

I would like to be a Jedi and have Obi-Wan as my mentor because he's so friggin badass in a really restrained and elegant kind of way and I would totally dig learning lightsaber combat and I would really really dig being able to chill out with Yoda and meditate and have him offer me grand life advice about finding inner-balance.

I would like to spend all day every day doing nothing but watching Celebrity Rehab 3 and True Life and Keeping Up With the Kardashians and Intervention and Toddlers & Tiaras because observing other people and their miserable lives just seems to make sense sometimes.

I would like my love to die.

I would like some talent more instantly-gratifying than writing. Something showy and physical, like incredible acrobatic skill or extreme sports or to be one of those people who does gymnastics on horseback. Something that is far removed from poetry.

I would like the world to still speak Latin.

I used to want to be and would still like to be the female Titanium Power Ranger. I used to be in love with that man. He had such a story. So much angst. Very and dark and brooding. Good stuff.

I would like to run in my underwear through a field of promulgating flowers and then collapse like Dorothy--only without the opium overtones--and feel the naturalness of the petals to skin to skin to the curious velvety resistances of nature like when you rub a flower between your fingers and there is so much friction but it is more real than most things and it would be like marriage in the purest sense of the word without ritual and without religion and it would just be skin to petal and the body's indentation in a greater splay of colors and life and the soul the soul the soul and a frictionless soul just some kind of love and redolence of better days.

Mostly though I would like to learn contentedness.

Beckett writes:

they come...
different and the same
with each it is different and the same
with each the absence of love is different
with each the absence of love is the same

Love love love.

Always back to love.

Winter drags.

"what would I do without this world faceless incurious"

2010-01-11T21:14:00.000-08:00

Is it possible to be completely burned out after barely a week of a quarter?

Maybe it's just all the built-up exhaustion from my collective college experience coming to bite me in the ass during this particular quarter.

Plus, it's winter. And winter quarter historically just sucks.

Also, Beckett has consumed my brain. I am starting a big two-quarter project thingy on his poetry and I think about him all the time and I think I travel the entire spectrum of human emotion when I read his words. His language makes me love him and then I despise him and then I laugh and then I get angry at him and then I share his melancholy and oh man this is going to be one looooooooong endeavor. That's the only thing that is certain, currently.

He says, in "Quatre Poemes," in part 4:

I would like my love to die
and the rain to be falling on the graveyard
and on me walking the streets
mourning the first and last to love me

So my topic is love. Love and Beckett. Love and Beckett and poetry.

I hate writing about love.

But I love the love in Beckett.

I love that his love stands in such stark contrast to the modernism-ness of the rest of his work.

I will be probably be talking about Beckett a lot for the next five months so strap in.

Man. I love this stuff but I am also just so, so tired of this daily educational grind. I guess I'll just chalk it up to a little winter slump and hope it passes or this quarter is going to be one massive pain in the ass.

I would like my love to die

I would like my love to die

I would like my love to die

Dwelling in his poetry is some kind of alternate universe. I find him infinitely baffling and yet I cannot stop and I want to understand it more than anything. I want to know these poems better than my own language. I don't know if five months can ever be enough for that.

I would like my love to die

And go again we again go

2010-01-04T23:14:00.001-08:00

My stack of books for this quarter is even bigger than it was for fall quarter.

This fact makes my soul hurt, a little bit.

back to the grind
the mind-grind
incessant ground mining
yes I mind I mind I mind

I am not ready to again resume the necessary level of brain engagement with all the ridiculous things I study.

Blargh.

- - -

On another note, Bukowski wrote, in "the people":

true revolution
comes from true revulsion

J.M. Coetzee has a ton of that same sort of theme in his stuff, too, and I have been steadily working my way through his entire body of (incredibly amazing) work and it has got me thinking.

Oh, thinking. There really ought to be an on/off switch for the whole thought thing. It'd be awfully nice to sometimes get a break from it.

But, back to revolution and revulsion. I really like it, as an idea.

Will consider it further.

Also been thinking about quantification. How we seem to exist in a world in which there is this acute problem of ceding of the individual self and body to numbers and statistics and monetary figures. And why? Because everything is so sterile in numerics? And sterility breeds supposed safety, right? But I think that's really just one massive, terrible illusion.

But I think all that is for another day.

This is just me rambling about things that have piqued my interest as of late.

On the whole, brain is clearly still in break-mode.

Hopefully it will kick back into gear sometime soon.

Until then, have some Jon Lajoie. Because youtube is far more appealing than any form of real intellectual-functioning at this moment in my life.

2009 out out out but with melancholy

2009-12-31T15:08:00.000-08:00

Puppy died.

Part of the family, you know? And he was my make-out buddy for 14 years. Great kisser. And no strings attached. Open relationship, you see.

He was also kind of the weirdest dog ever. But I guess you can't really expect anything less from a member of this family.

Ay. Sad sad sad.

Lots of loss this year. Lots, indeed.

In any case, though, it is time for '09 to be done and over.

New year, new times.

Cheers to 2010.

Happy New Year, all.

Dum tempus habemus, operemur bonum
(let us do good while we have the time)

It's just a little crush...

2009-12-28T22:34:00.000-08:00

The love of my life was just on The Jay Leno Show.

I swear. I am so in love with Matt Damon it's becoming a problem.

The man is funny and charming and intelligent and nice and freaking gorgeous and for being a rich celebrity he just strikes me as wonderfully level-headed and humble guy and like a very kind person and I never see any crap about him in tabloids and he is also very sturdy-looking. Like he's huggable. I would like to hug him. Actually, I would like to do a whole lot more than just hug him, but we'll keep it PG here, for the children.

I don't even care that he's like, 40. He's so damn yummy. Mmm.

And he JUGGLES. Whilst reciting the Declaration of Independence.

A man of limitless talents.

Do yourself a favor and watch him and his amazingness right here.

Also, I'm normally not like this. But I will always make an exception for him.

School is out and my eyes still hurt from last quarter's work and so reading has ceased and television has since filled the void

2009-12-23T10:07:00.001-08:00

I have added yet another show to my growing list of favorite sources of totally crass/vapid/pretty-damn-amazing-and-brilliant entertainment.

I'm not sure why it has taken me so long to let Keeping Up With the Kardashians into my heart, but damn, I have been missing out. These girls make my life.

A dramatic portrayal of the classic American family: mom, dad, six kids, and dogs. It's like this generation's The Donna Reed Show. Only, instead of fighting about who gets the first slice of fresh-out-of-the-oven-pie, they argue about how their basketball-player husband (who they only knew for a month before marrying) won't let them buy a 6 million dollar Beverly Hills mansion.

Boy is life rough sometimes.

I actually blame my mother for all of this. She was the one who started watching it first and has since hooked me on it as well, and since it is a child's natural duty to blame the parental figures for all that goes wrong in their life, I am putting the weight of all of this upon her.

I haven't seen many episodes, but what I have seen is not enough. Especially now that this season of Toddlers & Tiaras is over, I've really been desperate for a fat slab of juicy meaty crap television flank steak. And hot damn this is even better than that. This is like the filet mignon of the television entertainment world.

Take, for example, when the entire Kardashian klan is hauling off Khloe to jail (though, with perfect hair and makeup, as she got it done before she left) and her sister Kim is sitting in the seat next to her taking a whole memory card worth of the classic Slutty-Social-Networking-Website-of-Choice-Profile-Pics of herself. It was great. A truly heartwarming display of sisterly concern.

God I love entertainment sometimes.

Actually, I love entertainment pretty much all the time. Pop culture is just about the greatest thing ever. It will never overtake literature, but you know, sometimes after a day of learning real crap you just want to sit down and slather up that big plate of drama with some A1 steak sauce and allow the brain a little bit of respite while you immerse yourself in the oh-so-treacherously difficult lives of filthy rich celebutantes. This designer bag or that one? Ohmahgod this wedding veil makes me look like a bee catcher. Does this shade of red make me look like a whore?

It's great stuff. And sure, I can then go read some poetry or Latin or some kind of other literary bullshit and feel slightly better about my life, but if I am being truly honest with myself chances are I am actually more interested in the fact that Paris Hilton just shelled out $4000 for this pig.

And in the end, I feel like I should really just stop even trying to resist this stuff at all. I love it. Love it. I eat up this crap like it's candy and it's just so, so delicious. Mmmmmm!

Also, Celebrity Rehab 3 is set to start in January, which might just about make my life finally complete. And I am super stoked about this season because Kari Ann Peniche will be back on, even though she got kicked out of Sex Rehab. She was great for all kinds of funsies.

Really though, she has a pretty horrendously awful story and she actually kind of breaks my heart a little bit with all the crap she's been through, but she sure was great for entertainment. But such is the case with so many of these people and I guess you just have to look at them and in order to justify the fact that they are completely exploiting themselves you have to think that hey, they volunteer to do this and also hey, at the end when they graduate and they have actually reassumed some qualities of human beings and not media automatons, you can sort of allow yourself to admire that there might just be some real component of resiliency to the human soul.

Though I am not sure any warm fuzzies or grand recognitions of the humanity in one another will ever top Gary Busey.

So anyway... *cough cough* I think I'll just go read a big thick book or something. That's right. Yeah. Literature.

I feel a bit like some kind of uber-macho man who just admitted he enjoys chick flicks. Except I've known about this love of inanity for quite a long time.

Righty-o. So I'm off to LA now, land of heaping pollution and home of the studios that produce this crap I love so much. May we all feel the same familial love this season that the Kardashians so exemplify.

Also, the fact that three of them were on Tyra is one of those moments of particular amazingness because, shit, I friggin' love Tyra. So much love in one place. Good times.

Happy holidays, all.

And remember: drinking eggnog is also drinking the distinct possibility of salmonella.

Seattle! Seattle!

2009-12-16T09:29:00.000-08:00

Finals are done. DONE.

Seattle is amazing. Or, was amazing, I guess.

Unfortunately, it is over and in the wise and wondrous words of Soul II Soul, it's now back to life, back to reality.

Blech. I want to go back. Forget all this practical, real life crap. Just let me return to the land of infinite coffee flowing and rain and sea and ships and good air and good water and a general sort of awesomeness that you do not encounter in California.

This is where I think one typically allows a histrionic sigh to escape from the throat. So:

SSSSSIIIIIIIIIIIIGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

Anyway...here's just some of the highlights in pictorial form because I am too full of woe at having to leave to actually compose a coherent prose narrative of the trip:

Ahh, yes...Nordstrom...one of the great bastions of American consumerism. I almost took a picture of a $900 pair of vinyl purple high heels, but then I figured it is probably mockery enough for the person who pays that just to encase their feet in such monstrosities...

Space Needle view, day time:

Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum

Quincy Jones' trumpet!

Hand-written Kurt Cobain lyrics. Pretty much the coolest thing ever.

Jimi!

My hero. A purveyor of light to the minds of mankind:

Beep-boop-beep-de-booooooop (that's may the Force be with you, in robot)!

!!!!!!!

Yoda again, because he IS just that badass.

I'm pretty sure this sign implies that men are robots. Which is not so far from the truth...

Space Needle, night view:

An original design for the Space Needle:

Hee! Talk about holiday spirit...

I was majorly bummed because this is called "Hammering Man," but the arm with the hammer was taken for repairs.

Some kind of sporting venues where sporty-type things occur:

The first ever Starbucks. And the conception of what some consider to be the decline of American society. Or American coffee, in any case. Also, Seattle supposedly has 490 Starbucks. Fun fact.

The original Starbucks logo. The guy telling us about it described her as "showing quite a bit more tail" than the current green logo.

Hippo butt!

Aw....kitty kitty kitty!

Alas. Departure. Agh.

In short, trip was amazing, I want to go back, and it hurts my soul a little bit that winter quarter starts in just about two weeks. I think I need about five more weeks just to recover from the fall.

But as always, we march on.

Farewell, WA and vacations in general.

Until we meet again.

Pointless to the point of pointlessness

2009-11-30T18:09:00.000-08:00

There is absolutely no point to this post other than for me to gratuitously complain about my stack of papers-to-be-written that somehow keeps replenishing itself and never, ever seems to get smaller.

complain.
complain!
com plain
comp lain?
com p(l)ain
come for the pain of the plain plan
comatose pain
com tose pain
combed toes pained
combed to espained
come to espaine
co met spain
comet spain
comet's pain
comet's plain
come, plain!
co me plain
complain
complaining
complaint
complaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn

Boy do I need to get a life.

And you know, the bummingest bummer of it all is that it gets you nowhere, this complaining thing. It just makes me want to regress to some kind of child-state where I cry my eyes out and pound my fists on the floor and wail "I. DON'T. WANNA." Bonus points for doing it in the middle of a supermarket aisle.

Because I really don't wanna.

How I've survived my education this long really kind of baffles me. I resist it so much and yet it all somehow always manages to get done.

Oh, quarter system! How I loathe thee.
Oh, literature! How I loathe thee.
Oh, world! How I mostly loathe thee but can't really because you do contain things like coffee and Matt Damon and crossword puzzles and idiotic television shows.

Oh, exclamation points! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! Exclamation points kind of look like baseball bats. Or those party horn thingies that extend when you blow into them and make obnoxious noises.

I could use one of those right now.

Oh oh oh.

It's like a song.

Music is great. Except when Pandora decided to start limiting listening time to 40 hours a month. That really put a dent in everything. It also made me realize that I spend way too much time on the computer.

Maybe if I had to write less papers I would spend less time on the internet trying to find ways to avoid working on them.

People think technology is destroying the world? No. It's not technology. It's analysis of Caesarian Latin. It's critiques of Flann O'Brien. It's comparisons of the contemporary and the Renaissance. It's analysis of literary theory written by a bunch of whack job academics. That's what's doing it. It's probably what is actually destroying the ozone layer, too, for all we know. It's not like you can really trust Al Gore, anyway.

On a different note (hee hee. note? music? music note? boy I'm losing it...), I'm really into this French guy named Bense. I mean, I'm into his music. Not him. I don't really know him. But maybe if I did I would be into him. Who knows? I've also recently been really digging French punk. I mean, I never much pegged French as a legit punk sort of language. Nasalized vowels don't exactly scream counter-culture in my mind, but it's really been growing on me. And I guess hatred of authority and teenage angst are universal enough themes that it works. Check out Guerilla Poubelle and Paris Violence.

Yep.

Urrrrrggghhhhhh. I don't want to work. I'm tired of work. Bleh.

Four more papers and then finals and then it's over. And then we can just start again in January. Oh, vicious cycles. How I loathe thee.

Seems to be the theme of the day, eh? Loathing and anathemas and blehness. And French music. Makes me want a baguette. Or some kind of funny-smelling cheese. How stereotypical. I mean, there is other stuff in France. But it kind of seems like it's either that or the Eiffel Tower which is just France's phallus like our Washington Monument is and I have neither the desire nor the energy to get into feminist interpretations of world landmarks at the moment.

Okay okay okay enough of this. Time to work.

Well, Tetris and then work.

Or maybe just Tetris and the contemplation of work.

Good plan.

Glad we got this all worked out.

Some pre-Thanksgiving cheer

2009-11-25T22:09:00.000-08:00

I feel like I'm in that holiday M&Ms commercial where Red and Yellow run into Santa Claus and Red is like, "He does exist!" and Santa Claus is like, "They do exist!" and then Santa and Red both faint.

I mean, I didn't just discover Santa Claus or anything, but I have emerged out of two weeks of paper-writing hell and today I really started realizing that there are people everywhere. I mean everywhere. And they are all existing, too. Crazy, right? I might be a little delusional. What else is new? But stress tends to breed obliviousness. In any case, there are now two glorious days off in which to overeat and watch too much television and generally enjoy the whole fact of existence, because you sometimes have to deal with it whether you like it or not so I guess you might as well just try to like it. Unless you are not existing, in which case you'd be dead, in which case I guess you don't have to worry much about the existing thing at all.

But I kind of wanted to talk about the other side of the death coin now, or, birth. Because Beckett said that upon our birth we inherit the fate of death. So it's all related. And the other day at work I read an absolutely horrifying essay. I mean, the writing wasn't horrifying (it was actually pretty good), but the subject matter...oh, the subject matter...

I guess I have just been wandering through my entire life completely ignorant about the biological mechanism that is breastfeeding. All I can say is thank god I plan on never, ever spawning because this paper gave a disturbingly descriptive account of just exactly how it all works and all I can really say is that there are just some actions that should never, ever have to go hand in hand with such descriptive phrases as suckling or expelling liquid or lactation propulsion or biting.

Yes. Apparently, those things BITE. As in bite. With their little pointy teeth.

Because as if already having to incubate the creature inside of you for 9 months isn't enough, you also get to push the thing out, and then, to top it all off, after they have thoroughly destroyed your body, caused tearing, bleeding, weight gain, stretchmarks, and potential future incontinence for the rest of your life, you then have to sit there while the thing nibbles at you. Because clearly, destroying the bottom half just isn't quite enough for those little soul-sucking demons.

I think the problem of all this was also kind of exacerbated by the fact that I just read this Seamus Heaney poem, "Act of Union," for Irish Lit and it's very disturbing and it's...well, have Section II and see for yourself:

And I am still imperially
Male, leaving you with pain,
The rending process in the colony,
The battering ram, the boom burst from within.
The act sprouted an obstinate fifth column
Whose stance is growing unilateral.
His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum
Mustering force. His parasitical
And ignorant little fists already
Beat at your borders and I know they're cocked
At me across the water. No treaty
I foresee will salve completely your tracked
and stretchmarked body, the big pain
That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again

Because if that doesn't just spurn warm fuzzies in the hearts of all, I don't know what can.

Oh, and also, if your lactation propulsion is not expelling itself copiously enough as a result of suckling, you are encouraged to take drugs in order to get it all going. Drugs that can eventually cause a whole entire range of super fun things like depression and insomnia and permanent muscle rigidity.

So three cheers for procreation!

Anyway, I'm sure that is all more information than anyone really wanted to know, but I just thought I'd share the good times because I felt a little bit sick when I was reading this paper and I think I might have a tinge of parturiphobia or something because just the thought of childbirth makes my viscera wriggle a little bit inside me.

But then someone came in with a paper on how Twitter is slowly destroying mankind and the world sort of seemed right again.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Read this book II

2009-11-10T21:53:00.001-08:00

I just finished a most brilliant of brilliant books and have decided to henceforth adopt all of its theories as my own new world views.

It's called The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien, and I think it's particularly pertinent in this age of angry angry world (with a steaming side of discontent). Actually, it's such a bizarre and amazing piece of fiction I'm not sure it really can be pertinent to anything at all, except maybe the state of our souls. In any case, it's kind of better than anything you encounter on a day-to-day basis within this spherical conundrum called Earth (and actually, if you read the book, it proves quite effectively that the world is actually sausage-shaped).

It's especially apt for anyone who lives in Davis, because it has to do with bicycles and hell. And by that I mean it reminds me of Davis because of the bicycles, not because of hell. Davis is far too charming to be hell. If, however, you are particularly interested in hell, I think it best to point you to good ol' Father Arnall's sermon in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the gist of which I suppose is his idea that "Hell is the centre of evils and, as you know, things are more intense at their centres than at their remotest points. There are no contraries or admixtures of any kind to temper or soften in the least the pains of hell."

But who really wants to talk about hell? Eternal damnation can be such a drag...

So the book introduces this idea of the "Atomic Theory," the gist of which is described:

Ask a blacksmith for the true answer and he will tell you that the bar will dissipate itself away by degrees if you perservere with the hard wallops. Some of the atoms of the bar will go into the hammer and teh other half into the table or the stone or the particular article that is underneath the bottom of the bar...

The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who nearly are half people and half bicycles.

And when I read this my entire world finally made sense. Everyone in Davis is a cyborg! I have successfully unraveled this perplexing mystery! Chalk Lady and annoying people and everyone else...they are like that because they are half-bicycle. Oh, Clarity! How thou bringst the sweet breath of knowledge to the life-organs!

In Star Wars, Obi-Wan Kenobi tells Luke Skywalker that Darth Vader has become "more machine now, than man," and holy cow George Lucas is like a genius or something with some serious psychic abilities (communing with Force ghosts, I guess), because the longer I exist the more probable it seems that we are all half-machine! And if not internally, then still we are incessantly controlled externally by the great turning cogs of bureaucracy.

I also find "Atomic Theory" to be quite an apt name for the whackness of atomic exchange in general. In fact, I think it's quite representative of the whackness of all of nuclear research (as it applies to war, anyway. Because I get that it has plenty of other potential applications, but when the government is involved then it is surely being cultivated for violence because that's just how things seem to work in this ridiculous world). My inclination is to believe a bit in karma when it comes to these things. The obliteration of life through nuclear warfare will bring with it a slow and painful retaliation. In fact, it's already started for poor Los Alamos: example A and example B and though I don't have a C yet, I'm thinking it's probable enough to think that it could be the taint that war will inevitably leave on all our souls. After all, if you birth a monster you have to be prepared to feel all the possible implications of its terror.

But I really, really do digress.

In short: the book is bloody amazing, nuclear warfare is sucky, and folks, be careful out there on those bicycles.

And thank you, Flann O'Brien, for bringing some clarity to my life. I needed it.

Oh, November

2009-11-01T21:55:00.000-08:00

Quoth the ever-optimistic Joseph Addison (clearly a fan of the month): the gloomy months of November, when the people of England hang and drown themselves.

How cheery.

It is also a month that brings with it all kinds of other goodies, including midterms, Guy Fawkes Night, endless essays, NaNoWriMo, hand-turkeys (see below), and all those various holiday festivities celebrating the commencement of the usurping of America. Not to mention the ensuing familial hilarity that comes along with all that pumpkin pie! Thank goodness for colonization, huh?

November is also National Pomegranate Month. Wouldn't want anyone to miss out on that.

November is also the centre of the quarter. And I am writing a paper right now about centres. And epiphanies. And gnomons. Gnomon is an exceptionally fun word to say.

You know, I think it is a true testament to the power of James Joyce that I actually enjoy writing papers on his stuff even though it is painstaking and my notes for this paper look a little like a modernist novel themselves, and I don't really have anything much to say here because it is midterm season and my brain is otherwise preoccupied, but I needed a break.

Gnomons (from the Greek for "interpreter") can be two things.

This:

or

this (it's the thing that casts a shadow on a sundial):

Pretty nifty, no?

I mean, they'd be a whole lot niftier if I didn't have to write a paper about them, but whatever. It all relates to Joyce's "A Painful Case," for which Addison's quote would actually make a very apt epigraph. It's a bummer of a story. But it's brilliant. Totally brilliant.

Anyway, it's full of gnomons and stuff. At least, I'm making a painful case (heeheehee) that it's full of gnomons and that the piece that is missing is the centre and that you can only get to the centre through the epiphany and the epiphany is here is the realization of all that poor James Duffy lacks.

Phew. So I think what I'm saying is that nothing equals everything and everything is that cavity in the heart filled with what is missing.

Something like that.

In any case (painful or otherwise), It would appear that during the schoolyear I seem to only update poor Blog when I have papers due or a midterm tomorrow (crap!), or am otherwise avoiding unpleasant tasks.

So back to it, I guess.

May your Novembers be full of pomegranates and gnomons.

Cheers!

Why I hate feminism

2009-10-25T20:55:00.000-07:00

Much as the theory that this world and everything in it is one massive, woman-oppressing penis amuses me, I want to seriously defenestrate this bullcrap (oh, and by the way, go me, using my GRE vocab words in practical application and all!).

Here I am, just trying to make some kind of progress into this ever-multiplying pile of reading, and I come to an essay called "The Laugh of the Medusa," by Helene Cixous, which includes some true gems, like:

Write, let no one hold you back, let nothing stop you: not man; not the imbecilic capitalist machinery, in which publishing houses are the crafty, obsequious relayers of imperatives handed down by an economy that works against us and off our backs; and not yourself. Smug-faced readers, managing editors, and big bosses don't like the true texts of women--female-sexed texts. That kind scares them.

and

Nearly the entire history of writing is confounded with the history of reason, of which it is at once the effect, the support, and one of privileged alibis. It has been one with the phallocentric tradition. It is indeed that same self-admiring, self-stimulating, self-congratulatory phallocentrism.

AND

Though masculine sexuality gravitates around the penis, engendering that centralized body...under the dictatorship of its parts, woman does not bring about the same regionalization which serves the couple head/genitals...Her libido is cosmic, just as her unconscious is worldwide...She alone dares and wishes to know from within.

And then she starts in on Freud. Ha. They're about right for each other.

Boy does this essay just make me proud to be a female and how we are clearly the superior gender because we have emotions and no man does. Cixous...she just inspires me. I tell ya. She really incites my heart with hatred for the male oppressor and makes me want to go reclaim my repressed libido and have it all overflow in a storm of brilliant writings that come straight from the soul and unrivaled reproductive organs because clearly only women know anything and all that we know we have had to learn in secret, on the down-low, lest any male come along and bind our creativity and minds within the soul-crushing manacles of the phallus!

Maybe I am just really ignorant. I have never taken a gender studies class and I never intend too. But like all other forms of prejudice, isn't writing an essay like this only perpetuating sexism? I always wonder, when people call attention to these sorts of things under the moniker of "activism," doesn't it only widen the aperture? It's easy to say, oh yeah, I believe in such and such and I'm gonna go fight for equality, but by even doing that there are all kinds of judgment and anger that arise around the issue and then even more negative energy gets pulled around the distinctions and prejudices that people claim to be trying to get rid of in the first place.

But, enough of that. I should get back to my reading, even if the syntax of our language is actually modeled after the phallus, like Cixous argues our male forefathers purposely did in order to wholly stamp out any kind or form of feminine intellect from literature. No matter, though. I just really wanted to complain about this stupid essay and how having to read it has been a total waste of my time. I could probably learn more about female behavior, or really, the predatory nature of mammals in general, by watching an episode of America's Next Top Model. It's the short-girl season. They have to be 5'7'' or less.

I wonder what Cixous would have to say about that. And Tyra. And Tyra's inspirational speeches.

Now that's an essay I would read.

Yet more shameless procrastination

2009-10-20T17:59:00.000-07:00

It's about this time that it sets in. 6 o'clock, the night is still young, there are a good 5 or 6 hours of general mental acuity left in the day in which productivity should be at a maximum and alas, all I really want to do is sit and watch hours and hours of True Life or whatever other inane crap happens to be on MTV at this moment.

When did I become such a slacker?

I sometimes think it would be a grand thing to give up this generally-ridiculous thing of academia and just sit under a tree that has a good sun to shade ratio and write poems all day long.

I mean, really, look at this work I have to do. Caesar was a brilliant orator and all, but he was also pretty much just another whack-job politician and as much as I love Eliot, he was really kind of a pretentious jackass, and sometimes when I readeth Renaissance literature I thinketh to myself how annoying it can becometh when everything has that "eth" tacked on to its endeth. And sometimes it's just like, shit, why can't life and the world just bow down to language and say to me, fine, kid, we finally realize the error of our ways and you were right all along and poetry is clearly the only worthy pursuit of your time, so just go for it and no worries about what you are going to do with the rest of your life or how you will ever make any money! You just keep cranking out that verse and the world will be better because of it!

I think poetry is just sort of the angry, acne-ridden teenager of the academic world who is like sooooo totally misunderstood. And maybe it's not poetry that has to grow up and out of its darkness, but rather everyone else around it, so that they can fondly look back and remember their own turbulent adolescent times and then they all might finally get it. And maybe they still won't like it, but at least they'll have a little empathy in their hearts for it. Right?

On a just-slightly unrelated note, Toaster Strudels are really not that great. I know that I shouldn't give in to advertising so easily, but I was watching the commercial and I thought to myself, gee would it be great to have some steaming, flaky, strawberry frosted goodness in my life. So I caved and bought them. And yeah. No. If you took one of those carnival hammer games and called it The Great Scale of Breakfast Pastry Greatness and you put a Toaster Strudel on it, the thing wouldn't even get off the ground. Pop Tarts, on the other hand, gross (yet still oddly delicious) as they are, would at least cause the thing to budge.

Curse you, Toaster Strudels. So disappointing.

So you know what? I think that all the poetry- and literature-haters of the world should just go off somewhere and stuff themselves full of Toaster Strudels.

They deserve each other.

You can do it!

2009-10-14T20:03:00.000-07:00

I am sitting in the library, making a dismal attempt at composing a quasi-intelligible paper at some point before 9 o'clock tomorrow morning when it's due, and T.S. Eliot and his little group of pretentious poet cronies (Aristotle and Sidney and Shelley) are giving me one massive, literary theoryish headache and oh boy I am out of practice or something with this paper-writing business because it just isn't happening.

Anyway. I've instead taken to entertaining myself by reading all the profound little inscriptions that people have composed on these desks and walls because it is much more interesting than trying to force out coherent ideas about all these essays that are about a bunch of crap I don't particularly care about in this moment. So, verbatim from around me, the thoughts of UCD students through the ages (or at least since the last time they painted this wall):

-Fuck all woman! Why won't this bitch love me???
-Haha shes probably not even all u think she is!

-Eff Ochem!

-The girl sitting across from me is totally giving me a boner

-fuck life

-someone needs to fire God

-Where are all the books?

-Who needs sleep?
-well your never gonna get it
-your grammar sucks!
-your face sucks!

-and the spider man is always hungry
-dude The Cure is full of friggin emos

-the arts of ?

-I really want Mexican food right now

-Oh baby!

-If it was a matter of life or death, would you rather do George Bush or Stalin?
-Bush for sure. Stalin's mustache would tickle too much.

-you can do it!
-lol...

Lucky for me, the you can do it! happens to be the one in my immediate line of vision.

The profound conclusion of this post? People are weird creatures. But I think we kinda already knew that. So maybe not so much profound as simply reiterative. Or something.

Alrighty, then. Back to paper-writing. Urgh.

2009-10-12T17:53:00.000-07:00

I like to imagine that Latin lingers still
in the mouth of the quiet doe,
that the old and complete language
is in both of us as her brown fur
falls away into
the soily carpet of the earth

I imagine she will say: pax tecum,
pax tecum, neptis

as near as my sister’s blood to mine and
as distant as to the tufted deer-tail,
the wisdom of that language,
the knowing of this life and all its
wild discontents
is clamped in the jaws
of the wise grandmother
she has held the knowing inside of her
for the longest of time

these mothers, the deer mothers
(my father always said to me: child,
the deer is the rare signal of
summative goodness
in the earth),
well they nudge softly their smaller selves,
their spindly-legged child animals,
through the deep tempests and out into repose

I imagine that above where she lies
this still continues—
that the mother bird drops
a worm into the throat of her
chick, to nourish it,
that she then urges flight to erupt
from the unpracticed wings,
that everywhere there is mothering
and building

you dear, you built two men from nothing
and their dears each built two daughters
and I, the youngest of this fledgling
daughter-crop, I stand beside my sister, now,
with your matter inside both of us,
and I think about when I saw you,
your hair brown and soft and unteased
and I wonder now:
like the young one whose fur has
not yet feathered
takes the worm from its mother,
who will fill the throat of my history,
with all its holes?

I am restless within
this absence
I wish a great calm
for you now
for both of us, now,
in the nature of these things

quies quies quies

for Grandma Eleanor, 1920-2009

Real-life interruptus

2009-10-07T17:42:00.000-07:00

I generally try to not get too into my personal life here... I mean, yeah, I yak about myself a lot, but there's a pretty big difference between knowing about things like my disdain for children and lettuce, and digging deep into my personal issues. This blog thing, after all, is more to me about ideas and entertaining and maybe a little bit of commentary (social or otherwise) than it should be about my life. That being said, though, I do author this thing, and so today I make an exception to the regular distance. So I have a bit of a request (and in return, I'll try to get back to the usual snark soon enough).

My grandmother is currently very, very ill.

So, if you pray, it would be nice if you could maybe direct some of that to her. And if you aren't particularly into that mode of spiritual reflection, maybe just give a few moments of your thoughts for her.

It'd be much appreciated.

You know, my experience with death is (thankfully) pretty limited. At least in the bodily sense of the word. I'm not sure, however, how you might characterize things like spiritual death or the death of parts of a still-living person or the death of the protective ignorance of childhood. Because I think we all know those sorts of death to some extent, but the line still gets a little blurred with it all.

But in any case, it's easier to talk about death abstractly or to research it and read about it and like so many things in this world, I can always comprehend the theory and the ideas but ultimately, the true understanding of a concept is very dissimilar to becoming immersed in it personally.

But no matter what, there is always one constant: good ol' poetry.

And good ol' Walt Whitman knew his shit when it came to death (and life...and sex [of course, ha!]).

From Song of Myself, 6

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for
      nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and
      women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken
      soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
And what do you think has become of the women and children?

They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not
      wait at the end to arrest it,
And ceas'd the moment life appear'd.

All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

So anyway, like I said, whatever spiritual modality you happen to operate within, your general procedure for this sort of thing would be appreciated, whether it be prayer or incense-burning or rain dance or ritual animal sacrifice or whatever. And if you don't have a particular thing and you consider yourself to work simply in the human modality, just keep my grandmother in your thoughts. And while you're at it, give a few moments for your own grandparents.

They are, after all, a critical part of all our histories, in whatever way or to whatever degree we might have known (or not known) them.

We are built from their substances.

"To feel inspired, to fathom the power, to witness the beauty, to bathe in the fountain, to swing on the spiral of our divinity and still be a human"

2009-09-28T20:11:00.000-07:00

So...what did we learn on Numb3rs this week?

Parts of the Milky Way have shown traces of ethyl formate. As do raspberries. The implications of that fact? Our galaxy could potentially taste like delectable red fruity goodness. Which I think is pretty spectacular.

And, you know, learning that came with a kind of intense joy because I feel like that's just the sort of particularly-whimsical thing that makes the universe awesome sometimes, despite all the crap that comes along with it. And to only add to the fascinating nature of nature, raspberries also show accordance with the Fibonacci sequence. As does this Tool song, should your mathematical inclinations tend more towards rock 'n' roll than towards fruit.

So then I went to the grocery store, and whaddaya know? Raspberries were on sale!

And not only do I love raspberries, but I also love a good sale, so, the fates, I think, are all working together these days. Harmonious for once. Putting their discord aside for a few brief moments to allow for things like imaginings of fruity atmospheres.

I'm reaching up and reaching out,
I'm reaching for the random or whatever will bewilder me.
And following our will and wind we may just go where no one's been.

Perplexing zodiacal offerings and the S.F. Academy of Sciences

2009-09-22T12:13:00.001-07:00

Okay...first off, am I just being incredibly dense to not get this horoscope?

When you're chopping vegetables, chop vegetables. When jogging, enjoy the view.

Look, clearly, hacking a finger off is never a great idea, but shouldn't you exercise that same caution whilst running? I mean, you could trip and fall and get run over by a stampeding deer and die, right?

Wouldn't the wiser advice be: When jogging, jog?

It's irritating. I just need the stars to offer me some direction in my life, not to provide me with annoying proverbial wisdom about observing the scenery. If I wanted that I could just sign up for some daily inspirational quote email or buy myself a bad self-help book.

But alas, astra inclinant non necessitant, or: The stars incline; they do not determine.

- - -

In other news, I recently spent the day looking at fish and taxidermic mammals and some pretty freakin' adorable penguins:

This guy was my favorite of the day. We totally bonded.

I think they were spooning, but I'm not really sure...

This guy is 26 years old, and in good health, I am happy to report (with the exception of some cataracts a few years back).

Penguin belly! Ha!

Bam-chick-a-wow-wow!

They are dead and stuffed. Good times. Well, not so much for them, actually.

I really don't like the whole stuffed animal thing...they creep me out and the fact that they have been contorted into looking like they are just hanging out, chilling, in their natural habitats...it's weird. Weird.

Toady McToaderson

(Hope that) good things approach...

2009-09-15T15:46:00.001-07:00

I am so close to freedom from Excel Abaddon I can practically taste it.

And it tastes a lot like never having to look at another spreadsheet again. Or at least hopefully not for a very, very long time.

My soul will finally get to ascend out of the pits of this ridiculous binary-riddled Gehenna and up into a land where existence is not encased in columns and rows and formulas and funneling and data analysis. It is a grand land, I hear. Tenuous, perhaps, what with the other people and all, but certainly better than the Excel cell hell circles that I have been immersed in all summer.

Oh to be in limbo, eh? Eliot wrote about it, and he's kind of my homeboy, so I'm gonna go with him on this one:

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

But see, despite the ever-perilous state of my soul, I still can't help but feel a little cheery at the prospect of a new quarter. I just love so much getting that big stack of shiny new (used) books because they're all so, so pretty and there's so much potential there for learning and for widening the soul with new ideas and for brain-sating and boy is it just good stuff.

I'm even feeling mildly optimistic about this 2600-page cinderblock that is the Norton Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism. It only weighs about a billion pounds...I'm pretty convinced that it was in fact what the Puritans used to press poor Giles Corey to death. I mean, they say it was with stones, but I think that is lies. What better way to kill someone than by placing the weight of a whole history of philosophers and poets and academics and hell, even Freud, upon them? It would smoosh anybody.

I just want to take these few coming days of quiet and no-work to enjoy it all before I have to actually accept the realization that I will very shortly be spending 10 weeks writing a buttload of papers on all this stuff. But for now, let's not think about that.

Here's to Year 3, eh? May it please be a good one...

Words words words...

2009-09-13T17:08:00.000-07:00

immersed now in the brawl is
a lifetime of pressed instances
packed down for such protracted time—
the girth of these things is clamping now,
the brunt of it all is colliding with within,
the weight-strung world is ballooning
inside the chest,
sickness is washing (waves crack,
the salty residue of disease envelopes everything
[the kind of salt that begets constriction—
the kind that makes swallowing impossible])

orality is monumental in these times
words come up but
they rise with limping mobility
oh how they inch up the throat
(surroundings fossilize
in the time it takes for these things
to crawl out of the mouth)
they ascend like
climbing the sleet-caked earthmounds
of an entire broken history
(that is, bladed equipment is required
for digging into the ice,
holding the unsubstantial grasp,
not allowing the force of all this
to cause avalanche)

probable cascade:
it is not the muscles giving way
it is not the overtaking infection
it is in the throat (and far beneath)
it is the pre-spun phrases still latched
with pained grip to the mind and fortified
by the silence of so many years

speaking has become the shrill itch
the swelling within
the tedium of answerlessness
overtaking

Edumakayshun

2009-09-10T19:10:00.000-07:00

Alas, long time, no writing.

Bummer.

But see, these days I spend my time alternating between a tutoring job I've really loved, and another job that that I have spent the past two months absolutely loathing. It actually makes me seethe a bit inside with hatred. Mostly it involves me staring at spreadsheets for hours and hours a day.

And that has become my life.

School needs to start so that I no longer feel the urge to gouge my eyes out as I apply the same formula over and over and over and over until all the 0s and 1s start to sort of blur together into one massive jumble of Excel hell. It's punctured something in me and my soul is seeping out, slowly, but steadily. A teensy bit hyperbolic, maybe, but it's really awful. And I don't get paid nearly enough for the tedium.

But, rather than dwell on that badness, I'd much prefer to talk about the job I actually enjoy. I've been a writing tutor for this thing called the Special Transitional Enrichment Program (aka STEP), and it's been very interesting, to be sure. These soon-to-be freshmen are mostly all part of the Educational Opportunity Program (aka EOP...oh how we love our acronyms in Davis), and they apply to be in this month-long program intended to help transition them from low-achieving high schools and into the world of university academics.

Basically, STEP tries to ensure that they don't crash and burn come fall quarter, and it's a particularly awesome program, in my humble opinion. I'm actually quite jealous of them. It's about 180 students, and over the course of the month they get a week-long orientation (as opposed to the three-days-of-total-bullshit that everyone else gets sent through) and they get some really intense personal advising not just about classes but all life things in general from people who really care a whole lot about the program and seeing these kids succeed. Everyone who works for STEP, whether hired coordinators or peer counselors who were once in the program themselves, has a giant heart, and they put tons of time and effort into it all. We can take a moment here and contrast that with the 30 minutes you get at regular orientation with a student orientation leader who is generally useless

The STEP kids also get the extra time to get to know Davis (because it's such a behemoth, chaotic metropolis, right? But in all seriousness, you could get run down at any given moment by a maniacal bicyclist...), they get to know each other, they have small classes (they all have to take writing and math...physics and chem are optional), they get priority registration, close contact and conferences with their instructors, and man it's just a pretty darn sweet deal.

So, I've been going to their writing classes every day and reading papers and tutoring at night and all that jazz, and it's been fascinating, to say the least. Eye-opening, for sure. I even taught a class one day. I stood there for an hour and tried to act like I actually know what the hell I'm talking about, and none of them fell asleep and I think that, for my first time ever teaching, it went pretty darn okay. Though, I think I would have done better with a more liberal topic...something that we could've talked more about their ideas on the subject. I ended up going over writing introduction paragraphs and thesis statements, which is all good, but kind of rigid. I'd rather have talked about something more literary. But it was cool anyway.

What I am especially interested in, though, is just the range in writing ability that I've seen. The spectrum is massive. I read papers so riddled with grammar and structure issues that it completely obscured the actual ideas, and then I read papers that were very good, even with a bit of flair to them, and I just find myself wondering: why is there such a massive disparity? I understand that we all have our various inclinations. That is to say, yes, I prefer words, but I still muddled my way through math and science in high school and I always put in the effort to do well. It might not have made me want to jump for joy, but I did it. And I do think that even of you don't love, or even remotely enjoy writing, there is still a certain level of technical proficiency that can be learned and developed (as is such in any subject, really), and when I read a paper by a student who is about to enter a UC campus and still doesn't know the difference between they're/there/their, or can't piece together a coherent sentence, I just find myself wondering where things didn't click along the way.

I don't think it's at all the fault of the student (unless it's blatant laziness, which just irks me). It's all contingent on a very, very flawed educational system where all the focus has shifted to achieving on standardized testing and away from actually reading and thinking and challenging students to in turn challenge their own thoughts and perceptions and knowledge. I've ranted on the idiocy of standardized testing before, and my opinion hasn't changed. When I think back to high school and its place in my preparation for college, I don't remember crap about the SAT or STAR or the CAHSEE, but I do remember and recognize how insanely lucky I was to have English and history teachers who really, truly gave a damn and recognized the fundamental, massive importance of language and critical thinking, and not just falling into the same line of thinking as some bullshit multiple choice test that has absolutely no bearing on the sort of thinker that a human being will become.

Of course, it also calls into question just how much ambition plays into success. Some of the students have an incredible fervency about them. They will tackle the most difficult topic and they will go beyond the expectations of the assignment, and yet their work is sometimes rife with problematic things, be it simple grammar issues, or a flaw in the reasoning, or stylistic issues. Now, like I said before, the technical side of things can be taught, for sure. It's just whether or not the student is willing to put in the time. Even if they aren't great, they can still learn to be good. But who will encourage them?

So I don't really have any grand conclusions. Sometimes it just seems that, like everything else in this world, even learning now has become so mired in bureaucracy and budget and the whims of the government and the idiots that operate it. And all I know is that American public education is completely fucked up, and so, so much depends upon finding educators who can somehow manage to work beyond the system and actually get kids to think. Because that is what the teachers I remember did, and their lessons have been seared into my brain and heart and all the rest of the crap has just faded away. But the problem is that teachers (especially in high school), are overworked and tired. They can't be reliable support systems for the growth of a brain when they have 125 kids shuffling through their classroom every day. Not to mention that this grand world of ours churns out broken and damaged families like no tomorrow. So all too often that option is out. Resources are limited, there's never enough money, lawyers take a million and one years to decide anything, etc etc etc. And it's the kids who get lost in the fray. And that really sucks. Especially when you can see that they have the drive and the ability, but there has been no one around to offer even just a little bit of validation.

That's a little off my original topic, though. I've just read so many papers over the month and the range of abilities is remarkable and I don't know what the answer is and I'll leave it up to those few good souls out there who actually have the patience to deal with systems and red tape to try to reform the way things work, and I'll just keep taking the good with the bad and just try to do my job and hopefully help someone out, somehow.

Because I'm always down for a new life theory:

2009-08-31T23:51:00.000-07:00

I saw it on a mug in Santa Cruz this weekend.

I suppose you can alter it to fit whatever your specific needs might be. If you aren't a coffee person (poor you, if that's indeed the sad case), then go ahead and make love or music or art or puns or cookies or lanyards or whatever things fill your insides with something that isn't war-lust.

Oh, Santa Cruz.

Damn hippies and their witticisms. I saw a bumper sticker that said, "Give me that old time religion," and it had a pentacle.

It was funny.

Anyway. Since I clearly don't really have anything much of importance to say, currently, I'll leave with a limerick (and my roommate's feet):

there is a land called Santa Cruz,
upon whose beaches people schmooze.
there was a dead jellyfish there
it quite gave us a scare,
wise are the ones who that creature eschew!

(I'm also gonna stick to free verse from now on. I think it's better for everyone that way.)

It all comes down to one another

2009-08-25T23:42:00.001-07:00

I sometimes feels like I am going to spend my entire life trying to figure out why it is such an intense, critical necessity to have other people in our lives.

I mean, clearly the perpetuation of knowledge requires other living, breathing souls. Sure, you can easily learn all sorts of stuff from observations of nature and the stars and animals and just things in general, but all that is very external. Without that life-force, that soul--the anima--the knowledge just doesn't seem quite whole. So then I guess the question is how do you get to the guts? How do you poke at the innards?

We spend so much time of every day just sort of colliding souls with people. Sometimes there's a Mack Truck of momentum and sometimes just a little push but in the aftermath of the meeting, however much force there might've been, the way we encounter things can be pretty rife with newness--the newness of shiny ideas and theories and a just a whole damn slew of potential. Or, okay, maybe it isn't always like that, or maybe it all doesn't ascend into the brain until a later date, but I feel like even these little moments at least cause things to start churning--to begin at least gathering the wattage needed to eventually give light to what lies far within us.

Look at, for example, getting morning coffee:

Coffee-purveyor-man asks what he can get for me and I say an iced coffee and he asks if I would like room for cream in that and I say just a little bit, thanks, and then there is monetary exchange and he hands me my cup and I say thank you and we diverge and maybe that's that, but when I think about it, I do think there was at least some enmeshing of our souls. See, he is now aware of my preferences regarding coffee temperature and creamery-level, as well as of my mildly-alarming dependence on caffeinated substances, and when I look at my cup and see that he wrote "li'l room" with a funny smiley face on the side, I have to conclude for myself that he is a naturally optimistic sort of dude who doesn't really mind the fact that he has to get up so early to do his job, and I also can't help but notice his correct apostrophe placement, and that teensy-bit-of-a-grammar-nerd part of my soul becomes charged with just a smidgen of happiness at our shared enjoyment of coffee and correctly-marked contractions.

And you know, maybe he and I didn't have the longest, most-intense conversation about the world or the meaning of life or why Star Wars kicks Star Trek's ass, but there was still that brief moment of human understanding before we continue on with whatever the hell it is we do with our lives.

That most basic interaction that we all engage in every day--it's like there's a collision and we bounce off the other, not really any worse for the wear, but the impact still shakes just a little bit of residue from each of us that mixes and stains and is permanent.

Of course, all our encounters aren't like that. Sometimes the impact with other souls is so intense that things can crack a little. Sometimes we get knocked down by the sheer force of the thing. But we also control it a bit. We decide how much we let other people into our absurd worlds and we like to think we can control what we take from them in exchange, but the truth is that we really can't. Some things will lodge inside forever and others will fade away but the point is that these things ultimately do make their way inside and with that internality comes a very different kind of learning than just a run-of-the-mill kind of scientific, empirical observation of the entities around us.

Beckett wrote, in "Cascando:"

saying again

if you do not teach me I shall not learn

saying again there is a last

even of last times

last times of begging

last times of loving

of knowing not knowing pretending

a last even of last times of saying

if you do not love me I shall not be loved

if I do not love you I shall not love

the churn of stale words in the heart again

love love love thud of the old plunger

pestling the unalterable

whey of words

The critical point: if you do not teach me I shall not learn. Everything depends on something (or someone) else. All these things of our lives are so tangled and they are virtually inextricable unless there is tearing of something else that surrounds it and that's somehow essential.

I believe a wise man named Bono once said something along the lines of: you can't always make it on your own!

You know, I'm not really sure what I'm even trying to get at here...I've just been finding myself spending an awful lot of time considering what interaction between human beings even is or what it means or what potential it has or how our souls mutate because of other souls and if it is a powerfully good mutation or something horrible or maybe something a little quieter that rests in between.

The only thing I know for sure is that something inside changes with every person we encounter, whether we love 'em or hate 'em or however miniscule or massive that change might be. What to do with it, though...well that's the question, isn't it?

I am also reminded of a Lucille Clifton poem, "island mary," where she says:

after the all been done and i
one old creature carried on
another creature's back, i wonder
could i have fought these thing?

And when I read that, I think to myself, probably not. Not alone, anyway. Not alone.

we are creatures
not built for solitude

we are not creatures
built for solitude

Harbingers of death! DUN DUN DUN!!!

2009-08-22T00:24:00.001-07:00

Why do these "health experts" always have to go and ruin my day? I mean, really now? Flip-flops? And here I was worrying about meeting an untimely death someday getting eaten by rabid ducks or run down by one of those big, red, student-driven buses that you sometimes see running into curbs around these here Davis parts or having to take another one of Chalk Lady's classes or having to go back and do pretty much any grade from 7-12 over again or getting blindfolded and having lettuce force-fed down my throat until I practically choke on it or waking up one day and realizing that all the coffee in the world has vanished and been replaced with decaf, and now it turns out that all this time I clearly should have been worrying about potential death via poor shoe choice.

You know, sometimes I wonder how people have ever managed to exist all this time without just constantly dropping dead of all the horrible things that could potentially strike down a human being. I mean, the list is massive--from actual disease to getting smited (smotten? smitten? smote? I actually think it is smote but I can't be sure) by some kind of deity. How do we do it? How do we go on?

A crazy world this is, I guess. People are fascinating creatures. Fascinating. Always trying to protect ourselves from the things we fear...

It reminds me of Scrubs (because, honestly, what doesn't?):

The stuff about stalling death, though, it's true. You can see it everywhere. In every medicine we take and in every "healthy lifestyle change" we make and it's also in every time that I see someone hauling around their little brat in one of those Oprah-endorsed-baby-cart-germ-protector-doodads. I mean, it's a little absurd, no? Kids have been playing in dirt and eating unidentifiable objects and sitting in grocery carts for a long, long time and clearly they made it out okay without needing some kind of thick fabric barrier to protect them from what is apparently the infested death trap previously referred to as a shopping cart.

Just consider, though, for a moment, something like Polio. Its occurrence in kids who were actually allowed to be kids and play in dirt was strikingly less than those kids kept indoors and "protected." Also, consider all the fully-grown people who are currently in existence. One could safely assess that no horrendous, life-ending malady befell them because their parents plopped them (unprotected[!]) into a cart at the grocery store back when they were kids in the pre-sanitized-child era.

But, hey, whatever. No matter what, the warning is out, now. Your flip-flops are brimming with animal crap and dog vomit and Staphylococcus aureus, so watch out or you may find yourself meeting certain horrible death.

Maybe we should just start bathing in Purell.

An ethyl alcohol cure for the world and all its ills.

Goody.

Poem

2009-08-16T14:12:00.000-07:00

curious, our examinations
of things

how we spend this time
digging through the tissues
and the entrails for symbols
and recollections,
how we tread blood,
limbs rotating
in that same systematic way
that young children are taught
to keep afloat—
to resist being towed
beneath the tide

I’ve yet to expose
the visible malady;
all that has been charted is that
my love for you is so delicate—
I tread warily
around it
(like I was taught when
I was very young)

if things were to bend now,
they would be too brittle—
the inevitable crack would
wake you,
and explanations are just
too tender

all this digging—
I wonder if it is worth it

see, I’ve dug through books
(so many books)
and still I’ve encountered
no equation for worth,
no numeric assignment
for any such idea,
nothing but the same
swelling subjectivity
in everything

always it has been that
learning the theory occurs
with such ease
but the practical application, oh,
they don’t tell you about
how your sternum will practically
crack open, how your
still-throbbing life organs
will be exposed to dust
and to inferences and
to every contagion
that dangles in the air

they don’t tell you that feeling
feels like being strung up
for operation,
incised without anesthesia,
and made to dive into
your own cavernous sciences—
the crippled but
life-sustaining equations you’ve
formulated for yourself
and for all your fighting

I only want to know
why things are as they are—
why there must be such
a concentrated,
accompanying ache

Holy the supernatural extra brilliant intelligent kindness of the soul!

2009-08-12T22:31:00.000-07:00

Holy crap do I love Ginsberg!

But we'll get back to him in a minute.

I saw this today and I laughed. And then I groaned. And then I sort of laughed again...

But then, I saw this, and my mood was lightened a bit, because apparently linguistics isn't totally useless!

So I suppose that when you put the two together, I might actually make one person with not-too-entirely-a-disastrous outlook for the rest of my life. Yay, me!

Anyway, since thinking about the future can really be a bit of a bummer when you know that you've willingly chosen to spend your college years poetry-writing and book-reading and dead-language-learning, I figure the Beats are a good place to go, because, hey, they managed to survive in a crazy world and they did it with poetry, so they must've known at least a few things, right? Though, they were arguably high for most of it...In high school, our teacher played us a (pretty hilarious) recording of Ginsberg himself reading "A Footnote to Howl" and the man was drunk off his ass. Which is a shame, because despite his substance-abuse issues, he had ideas. He had art in his head.

From Howl:

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human;
           prose and stand before you speechless and intel-
           ligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet con-
           fessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
           of thought in his naked and endless head

-

with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered
           out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand
           years.

-

I'm with you in Rockland
           where we wake up electrified out of the coma
           by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the
           roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the
           hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls col-
           lapse O skinny legions run outside O starry
           spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is
           here O victory forget your underwear we're
           free

-

Man, do I dig that man!

If only we could just read all day and not ever have to think about careers and what to do with our lives and my potential future fate as a Starbucks barista.

If only we could just listen to our souls (those holy things) and love art and love love and love words forever and ever and ever.

The bum's as holy as the seraphim! the madman is
           holy as you my soul are holy!

You say you want a revolution?

2009-08-09T00:02:00.001-07:00

Something came to my attention recently.

There is a dire crisis occurring in the land of greeting cards.

Seriously. I didn't really realize it before, but after spending way too long attempting to pick one out recently, I began to see that the bones of the overpriced-cardstock-skeleton that Hallmark likes to call "thoughtful paper cards," are all completely cracked.

As I see it, a really disturbing dichotomy seems to have emerged. The great majority of greeting cards can be separated either into multi-paneled glittery monstrosities with center-justified, rhyming poetry that nobody ever actually bothers to read (or maybe that's just me. My bad, for being more excited about the potential acquisition of monies than sickly sweet sentiments in hard-to-read cursive font), or else they are "humorous" cards that are actually really kind of offensive and/or sexist (i.e. bikini-clad women making porn-faces at a frosted cake, or a male stripper dressed as some sort of workman profession like fireman or cop or something that requires a toolbelt, or it might just be a card with a bunch of geriatrics on park benches cracking jokes about sagging body parts and memory loss).

Those are your two primary choices. I suppose most people eventually cave to one of them. But I was standing there thinking, were I to go with the sentimental, three-fold, flowery option, that'd really be a little sketchy, as I would never under any circumstance tell the receiver of this card such things to their face, and if I were to go with an excessively-chiseled male chippendale, it would probably just weird this person out, more than a little bit.

So I started exploring my other options, I thought, hey, how about we just go with a blank inside and some sort of generic-yet-highly-acceptable-picture on the front, like a flower or a puppy? But see, when you do that, you are faced with the whole issue of actually having to fill that blank space with your own word vomit. And unfortunately, I have more than once been in a position where someone has said, "You write a lot, and that's the best you could come up with?" and I wanted to be like, um, maybe I just didn't feel like wasting any superfluous creative energy I might have writing in some ridiculous card that you will probably only glance at once before tossing out. So forgive me, for not composing for you some kind of uber-profound missive for this cursory and obligatory expression of joy at your having been in existence for yet another 365 days.

So the blank card didn't work out so much. I then meandered over to my next potential option: the music-playing card. A fascinating phenomenon, to be sure. They must be gaining popularity, because there was an entire section of them. It wasn't a bad selection of music, either. Some good classics were covered. And some not-so-classic. There are a disturbing number of birthday cards out there that play Jonas Brothers songs. However, as amused as I was by the one that played the Harry Potter theme, I just couldn't bring myself to spend $5 on a greeting card.

But speaking of Harry Potter, I was thinking today that Snape's hair is really working for him in movie 6. Just sayin'. It's like he's been using new product in it or something. It suddenly seems to have a really nice sort of fluff to it. But alas, as much as I adore Snape and his brooding, misunderstood ass, his hair isn't really what I wanted to talk about, I just wanted to mention it, because it does look extremely soft.

Anyway, back to the birthday card debacle. After ruling out all the above, it doesn't leave many options. There are a few random cards speckled here and there, but I as I wasn't looking to congratulate anyone on their Bar Mitzvah or First Communion or 8th birthday, no luck. And we all know how much I love kids, but do they really need a whole damn section? They can't even read them. They don't even get the function of them. Not that adults do, either. At least, I don't.

I think I should start a movement. A revolution. 'Cause you tell me that it's evolution, well you know, we all want to change the world. Or, you know, something like that. It's time to bring down the ridiculous business of greeting cards altogether and make my life just a little bit easier. I'll finally be an activist for something and help out my fellow mankind! Love thy neighbor, and all that jazz. I always knew I had some humanity in me!

Just think, if all the greeting cards were removed from grocery stores across America, so many aisles could then be filled with replacement crap. You know how there is currently a small selection of paperback romance novels next to the greeting cards in a lot of places? We could just fill the entire aisle with them. I mean, who wouldn't want a whole aisle of Fabio's leering face staring down at you?

So, join me, friends, and never again will you have to debate with yourself about what piece of ridiculousness you should buy to accompany a gift. I have no compunction about taking down Hallmark. They've been too powerful for too long. They are in our heads. Urgh. It's time to fight the good fight and begin saving ourselves $3 on every gift given. Seriously. All the money I've spent on cards over the years could've been going to college stuff. Totaled up, that money might've bought me like, half a textbook or something.

You know, I think that Snape was onto this idea, too. He clearly stopped buying greeting cards between movie 5 and 6 and instead invested that money into his hair. And look at the results: softer and shinier.

This will work, I tell you. Pretty soon, all the world can have soft and shiny hair, too. And won't that just be grand.

Don't you know it's gonna be alright?

Friday ruminations...

2009-07-31T14:10:00.000-07:00

I know not why my brain insists on working this way.
But you work with what you get, right?
I wonder if you can train your mind to think alternately.
I mean alternately not like forcing positive thinking over negative thinking, but alternately like if thoughts are paint splatters ifyou could learn to think with a new medium, say, charcoal or pastels?
Like, do you think if I study Latin long enough I might eventually be able to think in it?
That would be amazing.
Caue ab homine unius libri, or, beware of a man who has just one book.
It's the same thing, isn't it, to only think in one way?
Beware beware beware. Caue caue caue.
Where does one obtain thought-watercolors?

Why does Orbit call their gum "Mint Mojito"?
Doesn't a mojito by definition contain mint already?
How very redundant, gum-namers.
This gum tastes neither like mint nor like mojito.
This makes me feel as though I was bamboozled.
Bamboozle is a good word.
All words should be more like bamboozle.
I would like to name gum for a living.
I would name it Berry Bamboozle.
Or perhaps Bamboozled Berries.
But, I suppose that like many things, it might become monotonous, the gum-naming.
However, if you saw someone chewing a stick of Berry Bamboozled, you could probably go up to them and say, hey person, did you know that you are chewing a little piece of my brain?
That would probably be awkward but really, what in life isn't awkward?
So I say just go for it.

My taste in television shows has been degenerating at a horrifying pace.
My newest favorite is Toddlers & Tiaras.
It doesn't surprise me too much, though. I've always had pretty questionable television programming preferences.
And maybe there are some things we just aren't meant to know about ourselves, but it has become a bit of an obsession of mine, to figure out why I get such disturbing pleasure out of watching this crap.
I think it is the suspension of thought.
You do not have to think about any aspect of your own life or world whilst watching those little girls drown in fake hair and taffeta.
All you have to concentrate on is the misery of their lives.
Really, though? Just give those kids a book or something. It'd be a lot better for them than the inhalation of all those hairspray fumes.

What would be the quickest and most effective way of getting Matt Damon to declare his undying love for me?
I briefly considered a love potion, but we all know what happened to Ron Weasley, when he ran afoul of that sort of shadiness.
I also went over numerous other plans in my head, most of which involve ninjas in some form.
And there's also that whole issue of his wife and kids.
Do you think the ninjas could handle the family?
They probably charge extra for that and I make not much more than minimum wage.
So, the plan maybe needs a little more work.

I also learned today that the feminine of "douchebaggery" is apparently "douchettery."

Why work is whack and what we might come to learn, from the whack

2009-07-28T19:54:00.000-07:00

Oh the things we do for a paycheck. Or, I guess I should say the things I do for a paycheck. I'm sure that maybe there does exist some species of mammals who actually find some kind of fulfillment in their work. Somewhere. And good for them.

But really, be it counting endless piles of scantrons and crumbling test booklets (seriously, those things go back to 1989. They are as old as I am.), or having some snot-faced freshman insist on getting a different pencil even though the one they already have is fine, or if it's sitting and entering what seems like an endless stream of data into an ancient laptop that uses what is possibly the trippiest software ever invented and knowing that in 40 years it will all come back and bite me in the ass when I will inevitably acquire yet more sucky medical maladies, like carpal tunnel, and it'll probably be because I have spent so many summers handing over my soul to these mind-numbing tasks, none of which are remotely ergonomic, and damn it, it's only for minimum wage, and the hope that someday I will be able to take my meager savings and say vale to California and finally confirm that there is indeed a great big world beyond what I know.

But, I do suppose that sometimes the occasional good thing does come out of all these wonky summer jobs. A few years ago I spent summer archiving boxes and boxes and boxes and yet even more boxes of records that nobody had bothered touching for about a million years. The work was kind of soul-crushingly boring ("kind of" being a rather light choice of descriptor), but if I gained anything from it, I did come to form a deep, intense bond with the paper shredder in the office. Shreddy, I called him. He really was a perfect specimen. He was solid and sharp and boy did he just purr after I oiled his blades. Sometimes I would just stand there and shred the giant stacks of papers one sheet at a time and it was a beautiful thing.

Oh, Shreddy. Boy do I miss that thing. The bastards I worked for actually had the audacity to replace him. They lugged in this brand new, hulking titanium industrial mammoth and called it better. Urgh. Let me tell you something: that hunk of junk had none of Shreddy's charm. It just chewed on through the paper like it was going to set some kind of paper-devouring award.

See, when Shreddy worked, the paper came out in these really graceful little strips, with perfectly straight lines. But when IndustrioRoboCrapShredder worked, it just spewed out the paper all jagged and torn into the basket.

No pride in its work.

And if you don't have any pride in what you do, then why the hell even bother?

Maybe it's a tiny bit peculiar to become so attached to a paper shredder, but let me tell you, when you spend 40 hours a week for three and half months in total silence because you can't have music and you are surrounded by stacks of boxes overflowing with totally superfluous paperwork that is really pointlessly being archived because no one is ever going to look at it again, but you still have to keep it just on the minuscule chance that something happens and asses need to be covered so as to not be wholly devoured by lawyers in this age of just-gonna-sue-anyway-because-hell-I-feel-like-it, you sort of have to cling to what you can, be it a paper shredder or otherwise.

You know, it's tough to lose the things you love. And I hope that Shreddy, whatever industrial waste dump he probably resides in these days, at least suffered minimal damage in it all. And I also hope that he managed to find a pretty little discarded toaster or iron or other small appliance to keep him company in the landfill for the next billion years while he suffers a terrible, non-biodegradable fate.

So maybe Shreddy came out of that summer. But the rest? What came of the rest?

I did receptionisting for awhile. That was a real hoot, let me tell you. Especially for someone like me, what with the exemplary people skills and all.

Not to mention that I really despise phones. I can't stand talking into the infernal little devices. I sort of put them in a category with grammar and lettuce and children and Charlotte Bronte. So, spending hours doing, "Good Morning, you've reached X company. How can I direct your call today?" wasn't exactly my finest employment experience.

But I have to consider what was learned from it. That being: be nice to your receptionists. They take a lot of crap; people can be really mean on the phone. They also deal with pms-ing copy machines and perpetual papercuts and people with their constant states of neediness when it comes to office supplies. It gets to a point where it's like, well, maybe I don't want to give you yet another paper clip when you could easily march your lazy ass on down the hall to the supply closet and get it yourself.

And don't even get me started on the summer I worked at a kid's day camp. I think I've blocked most of it from my memory, but I know the scars are still there. I also don't know that anything was really learned from those times except that I cannot be in the same space with anything under the age of 11 for more than about ten minutes or I lose my mind, and that I would rather spend the rest of my life on a telephone in a Shreddy-less office than deal with those loud, sticky-handed, petri-dish-cesspoolish things that people call children.

I guess I also learned that should I ever experience the loss of my common sense and make the decision to go and spawn my own DNA in the form of a little creature, it'd probably behoove me, and them, to just go ahead and set up a therapy fund for the unfortunate thing at the same time I set up its college fund.

How bleak.

Maybe kids have just been on my mind because it seems like everywhere all I've been seeing is this Jon & Kate drama. Now, I'd never even heard of them until I started seeing them on tabloid covers, and I thought it was kind of odd that the only thing they are famous for in the first place is for popping out 8 kids and then proceeding to plaster the details of their lives all over tv.

And normally, I really wouldn't care because entertainment can be a really gnarly sort of thing and people do weird stuff all the time to get famous, but the more I think about it the more I realize that those 8 kids who have done nothing wrong and are simply existing without knowing anything about just how idiotic their parental units truly are, are going to be feeling the awful brunt of all this drama for the rest of their lives, and all because their parents were too selfish to just live their lives; they instead had to go and use their kids to get some worthless fame. So, good job, parents! Well done. Really. Applause all around.

But enough about children and work and parenting. Such distressing topics. All I really wanted to say was that, at the end of the day, when I get that paycheck and I finally have money and I am still able to cling to my childishly-idealistic dreams of getting out and seeing the world with it, then I maybe can't help but be just a little bit okay with spending my life like this.

And everything's a learning experience, right? When I'm visiting Yeats' grave at Sligo in Ireland and scamming on the descendants of the gods on Italian beaches and being all neutral and stuff in Switzerland, I am going to be sure to remember all that went into getting there. All the bonding with paper shredders and getting snapped at by angry people over the phone who don't understand the concept of "she is at lunch right now, can I take a message for you?" and especially after the summer of dealing with kids, it'll all be totally worth it.

I will get there soon, friends. I will get there soon.

Also, Celan again (because, hell, the man's just a darn genius):

DO NOT WORK AHEAD,
do not send forth,
stand
into it, enter:

transfounded by nothingness,
unburdened of all
prayer,
microstructured in heeding
the pre-script,
unovertakable,

I make you at home,
instead of all
rest.

Ch-ch-changes! Turn and face the strange!

2009-07-22T18:47:00.001-07:00

Hey hey hey, new look!

My aesthetic tastes have apparently taken a disturbing turn towards minimalism. Urgh, right? But you know what? Blog and I are going to take this change in exterior as a chance to begin turning over new metaphorical leafs interiorily. Or literal ones. Or...something. I think. In any case, the makeover has already sort of grown on me. And hey, it's only until next year, when a re-do will probably occur again.

In short, I am considering all of this an essential step in the uncluttering of my life and brain.

It'd be a lot easier, though, if my life were like one of those Oprah episodes where they bring in organizer people to clear out the homes of people who are packrats and have stacked up many years of junk everywhere. Because, they seem miserable at first, but when they realize they can now actually park their cars in their garages, all that misery seems to just fade away! Like magic.

If only, eh?

I have also re-realized how much I don't enjoy the tediousness of colors and details and decorating. So I am checking anything having to do with such things off my list of possible careers. The list that is growing alarmingly thin. Not that it was exactly obese to begin with.

Anyway, I think, in honor of new layout, writing is in order! It's been occurring at an alarming rate. Soooooo much poetry. Words words words words words! So many words. These could all be separate but I think together they make something sort of coherent. Possibly.

And if poetry ain't really your thing, just take yourself a moment and enjoy the dulcet tones of David Bowie.

- - -

a creation story:

fire
everything burned

a man drew the
charred trunks
that were everywhere

his stump had a
sprout—three green leaves—
far-rooted in the black rings
(years elapse; things
grow old
slowly and oldly,
but they grow)

an ash flurry floated
in the pond
not unlike how your hair
now does—
eerily, a vacillation
of ripple and saturation

the few things that
still existed began to
realize the stomach-clenching
stench of the afterburn

a terrible knot was salvaged
from that debris

drought
life can be inseminated
where naturally it should
not have ever been at all

breathing arrives, the child
looses a yowl from its lips

the first time, it will not
be silenced

in the subsequence, though,
the mother presses silence

her hands are so much bigger
than this new thing's
hers are sun-stippled and worn
they are violent with her famines

the crevices in her skin
are ululating
the new-created skin
of the soft child
is ululating

child and mother,
they become so quiet

child and mother,
a raft upon the undulating
sand seas

aridity etches into itself
aridity stretches into
the grainy ache for drink
aridity etches desiccation into
itself and aridity
knows bareness like
that child and that mother
know bareness

oh how well they
both know aridity
and thirst

quake
I have spent such time
studying the great shifting earth,
struggling to core the depths,
sick with determining the origin
of the tremors

vanes have pointed
to the faithful supplicants
with their kneeling and
their recitation and their prayer
they call their routine faith
they say it rumbles
within them

well, I too, hear the piercing
rumble—it sounds so like
the motherless child-howl
it looks so like drowning
it feels so like drowning

oh, what stillness must feel like!
floating like your hair does
in the water.
what it must feel like
to not have the interminable
shifting of this affected religion
always just below

pray for a still moment
pray for the nonbelievers
pray for the ones who do—
that they might finally
know all the ruin their god
has caused

winter
so long to thaw
from the pitiless cold

what was once called
hibernation now
peals with the falsity
of that name;
it was in fact
a devastating solitude

we did not keep warm
like the others;
we became silent and
distanced—terrified that
speech would take
what little remained—
what was needed
to stave off the
incursion of that
awful freeze

but in splitting, states change:
solid sleet finds wetness
on its plane;
liquid drips and pools

fear transmutes—
the icy hyacinths are
newly watered
by the sloshing monsoon

flood
it has taken so much
from us,
all this drinking inward:
god and disease and
ceaseless aloneness—
these things have missed
the regular anatomical path,
strayed, and have instead
begun to fill our lungs

this is how drowning occurs—
not by a single gulping down
of the waters
but by a continual sipping

all I can see is your hair
fanned out in the gully-water
all I see are
thrashing waves (tossing about
like hurtling horse-mane)
all I see is your
hair becoming tangled
in the waves

war
no one remembers their first
child-cry—the scream that
confirms function,
that singular moment
of plenary life,
before the battles begin
to drape their silences

that fabric is violence
it is so heavy
it has been threaded with
the new slurry of feeling

digging feet into the silt,
closing eyes against the
tempest-stirred sand,
nature carves into all of us
with her serrated biology

our little raft splinters;
the bark points in an
arc of directions
all this terrifying sensation
has been in the offing
for so long

your entangled hair needs
combing. I cannot comb it.
it is the knot
from which we have begun
to shake a terrible flurry
of ash.

where is your god now

where is your god now?

Happy first birthday, Blog! Make a wish...

2009-07-17T10:38:00.001-07:00

After Piglet shows Eeyore the balloon he was going to give him that accidentally popped:

Eeyore: My balloon? My birthday balloon? Red. My favorite color. How big was it?

Piglet: About as big as m-m-m-me.

Eeyore: My favorite size.

Oh, blog. You seem to have blossomed into something very absurd and ridiculous and much more procrastination-enabling than I originally intended.

They grow up so fast, don't they? Pretty soon we're probably gonna have to have The Talk. You know, about not looking at spam and not getting taken advantage of by Bill Gates and not giving in to the temptation that is free downloading. I want my internetal-spawn to be upstanding citizens of the www, not shady, pirating hooligans.

You know, I probably ought to be spending my time trying to actually write a significant piece of work, like a novel or something, rather than yakking here about insanely random crap, but this is kind of easier than actually committing to something whole and coherent. I mean, who does that, right? Not successful people, that's for sure! Ha! But you know what? Ideas will come when they want to; trying to force-heave them out of the brain usually becomes not much more than a lot of fail.

Plus, I just greatly enjoy blabbering about stuff here, in general. I like words, you know? I want the world to like words, too.

Ah, the spaces of a year...so vast and so full of curious occurrences, eh? Some good, some really good, some pretty horrendously sucky. Lather rinse repeat.

I've also been thinking, since it's been a year and all, maybe it's time for a new layout?

Heraclitus: all is in flux; nothing abides.

So, perhaps. Will contemplate further, in any case.

No matter what, though, here's to another year of rambling idiocy together, eh?

Felix dies natalis, Blogius!

CRITICAL LIFE-IMPACTING ANNOUNCEMENT

2009-07-14T11:59:00.000-07:00

HARRY POTTER HARRY POTTER HARRY POTTER HARRY POTTER HARRY POTTER HARRY POTTER

At midnight.

That's all.

Testing...testing...1...2...3

2009-07-09T15:44:00.001-07:00

So I'm spending part of this summer proctoring placement exams at summer orientation.

Now, I've spent a fair amount of time in lecture halls; I know them pretty well. I also know my way around a test, having taken one or two over the years.

But man is it a little trippy to be on the other side, watching 300 soon-to-be freshmen scribbling away, clawing at their heads like they might be able to somehow drag the answers out, the sweat beads rolling off while they chew on their pencils and their nails and then they put their grubby freshmen paws all over everything and spread their saliva everywhere.

It's actually kind of intensely gross.

The nerves ratchet up towards the end...they glance up to see the remaining time at more frequent and frantic intervals, and sometimes you see one just sitting there staring off into space, maybe wanting to cry, maybe contemplating the previous first real night at college and ruing the amount of alcohol consumption that has made their liver weep a little bit. Or at least, that was what my roommate at orientation seemed to experience after she stumbled in at 4am and then somehow managed to roll her ass out of bed again at 8 to take her math placement test. I wonder what happened to that girl...

Or maybe they are just wondering what the hell they are doing up that early. In any case, the glaze in the eyes is just a little bit hilarious.

See, I feel like now that I've passed the halfway mark of college, there's enough distance between myself and this new gaggle of younglings that I can more openly ridicule them. It's a good feeling. Except that the omnipresent what-to-do-with-the-rest-of-my-life question seems a lot closer on this side than it did the first two years. And the fact that most days I still feel like a freshman myself. But they don't really need to know that as I laugh at their standardized testing woes.

I personally like the non-testing side a little better. Less pressure. Less oral fixation. It's kind of fun, because you can simultaneously empathize with their suffering and be grateful that you are not in their position. And I gotta hand it to professors who deal with the lecture halls. It would be insanely intimidating to stand in front of 500 people and yak on about your subject. Even if you know it incredibly well, there just seems to be 500 times the potential for screwing up. And that's scary.

That's the trade-off, I guess, for moving on in life.

Fear for fear.

Standardized testing has pretty much become the norm in modern American education. It's efficient, it's uniform, and hey, who doesn't just love filling in an endless sea of scantron bubbles with that trusty #2 pencil?

Even little kids get thrown out into the scantron circle sea and are made to swim for themselves. I remember taking those ridiculous tests all the way back to elementary school. The only part I liked was the essay, and only because once I got to write about a purple elephant that ran away from the circus. But anyway, you can call it what you want...aptitude measurements, "success" predictors, readiness assessments, blah blah blah, but it all really just comes down to being a highly systematic way of categorizing and evaluating people.

And though the scores produced might be hailed as an effective device for determining "readiness" (readiness for what, by the way? There's no amount of "readiness" for life, that's for sure), there is no accounting for any kind of creativity or individual thought.

Hell, the "What We Do" of the ETS says it pretty clearly:

All of our products and services — including individual test questions, assessments, instructional materials and publications — are evaluated during development to ensure that they

are not offensive or controversial
do not reinforce stereotypical views of any group
are free of racial, ethnic, gender, socioeconomic and other forms of bias
are free of content believed to be inappropriate or derogatory toward any group

Well, I know that I can sure sleep more soundly now, knowing that all the testing I've done over the years has been nice and PC and just perfectly (yet, unbiasedly) tailored to people who have some kind of weird knack for multiple choice tests.

I'm not encouraging racism or sexism or classism or any other "ism" out there, but I do encourage deviation from "proper" thinking, and I just mean in more general terms that according to those standards, there could never possibly be an actually good literary passage on any of those tests because, hell, good literature is almost always controversial, and if it's really great, then it's usually offensive, too, to some group of people or another. Normally, if you don't like it, you're more than welcome to challenge it. But see, these tests don't want to be challenged, they just want to establish a top percentile that knows exactly how to answer their questions in a way that pleases their sensibilities. And if you care about the number you recieve, then you might as well just check any of your own thoughts at the door and start thinking like an unbiased, appropriate test-writer would!

That has to be the only explanation for how the hell Billy Collins showed up on my AP English test senior year. Because that guy is just about as unoffensive as a poet could possibly be.

They might as well rephrase their entire mission statement to read: ETS: making boring our standard (and so should you)!

Because who doesn't love being evaluated on how well they can conform to the AP-style essay, right? (Never, ever forget to state a complementary tone!) Our heads were crammed full of this crap over the years, and only so that we might have a chance at getting the testing formula right and obtaining good enough scores to somehow eke ourselves into college. And just when you enter a university and think you're finally home free, you realize that if you plan on giving up your soul to a grad school or a law school or a med school or a whole host of other professions, you'll have to do it all again in just a few short years.

No reprieve no reprieve no reprieve!

Not to mention that test prep is probably something like a multimillion-dollar industry. Because hey, if you can make an absurd amount of money exploiting the desperation of students in the midst of all their life crises, why not, right?

But you know what? Have some faith, disheartened bubblers! Even if those tests haven't been kind to you over the years, somehow, someway, you might still be able to make it in the world. Hell, I've always really kind of sucked at standardized testing and somehow, I'm doing okay. I haven't completely failed at life. Though there's still plenty of time for that, I guess.

Anyway, if you are currently on hiatus from testing, take a moment and be grateful for that fact. And, if you are among the unlucky throngs that are currently engaged, or preparing to engage, in battle with that dreaded scantron sheet, you have my immense sympathies.

And do also know that I am silently and gleefully mocking you.

Optimism and Yeats' testicles

2009-07-04T01:22:00.000-07:00

for Mrs. H, may you forever rue the day that you filled out my report card

You know, praise be for spell check.

I still, after 19 years, can't spell "calendar" without first getting that blaring little red squiggly that underlines my misstep and practically screams: You call yourself a writer?! But no, not so much. More just one who occasionally writes stuff. And who apparently can't spell 'occasionally,' either. I just can't seem to get a handle on when those letters geminate and when they don't.

Maybe my 4th grade teacher was on to something. She gave me a D in spelling, on my report card. Way to strike down the self-esteem of a 9-year-old, eh?

But! Lucky for me, technology has allowed me to recover from that massive blow to my fragile 4th grade ego and bounce back from what might have turned into a lifetime of self-loathing due to my acute inability to spell things correctly.

I've been thinking about it quite a bit, mostly because I have nothing better to do these days, and I have come to realize that I probably come off here sometimes as a terribly-misanthropic pessimist. But, in all honesty, that's really only a part-time gig. I actually do like people. Sometimes. Anyway, I thought, since this world does contain things that do occasionally encourage intermittent optimism, like spell checkers, I'd consider at least a few things that are not wholly pessimism-inducing. I'm viewing it as it an important step on my way to self-betterment.

So, I came up with: Coffee, baby giraffes walking on their spindly little legs, baby animals in general (anything but the human variety), my recently-acquired love of cryptoquotes, Costco free samples, Matt Damon, Celebrity Rehab 3 later this year, the Bad Religion song that just came on Pandora, and the Star Wars marathon that is on tv this weekend.

It's a small list, but we're starting slow. Can't get too happy all at once, right?

Also, I should probably add proving my 4th grade teacher wrong to the list, too, because she made us run laps outside every single morning before class, even when there was three feet of snow and ice, and quite honestly, I'm still really bitter about that, and the D in Spelling, so you know, gotta make sure to really stick it to her.

I'm trying to tell myself that I really dig this positive thinking stuff. Like, hey, maybe tomorrow will be full of puppies and rainbows and the world will smell like just-baked muffins or something and we'll smile all day long and maybe we can have an awesomely-choreographed humongous dance number in the town square, just like they do in Disney movies!

The problem is, Yeats then pops into my head:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned

Not to be Debbie Downer or anything. It's just that once Yeats is inside you he isn't easily shaken out.

How dirty sounding.

He probably would've liked that.

You know that Yeats feared impotence so much that he underwent a surgery in which he implanted monkey testicles into his own scrotum in the hopes of making himself more virile?

So maybe extreme poetic genius doesn't necessarily equate to what might be considered healthy body-image, but, Yeats' testicles aside, let it be known that I did attempt the Sunny Life Outlook, however briefly and if only out of summer boredom and sleeplessness, and I've really gotta go with Yeats on this one (the thing about surely some revelation is at hand, not so much about the testicle thing, as that doesn't really apply so well in my case), that revelation being that sunshine and smilies are all good and grand but not nearly as much fun and meaty as discontent with the entire world. But fear not, I'm sure things will be back to normal soon enough.

At least I gave it a shot, right?

Read this book

2009-07-01T01:42:00.000-07:00

The best kind of literature--the only kind of literature that is worth it, really--is the kind that makes you intensely uncomfortable. Like when you recall some memory from the dregs of your brain and something in your gut constricts because of the rawness...it's that same feeling with the best, truest kind of writing. It is what's immensely troubling that teaches the most, that strikes something internally and remains there.

I've been in a sort of state, post-reading of a book that flooded me with something kind of indescribable. Ever since finishing it, I feel like it has taken root inside of me and all its barked limbs are gripping my insides and twining everywhere and its planting disturbed all the equilibrium of the soil and damn it this book really, really got to me.

J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians is a book that should seriously be made required reading for the world.

It is staggering.

I won't get too into the details; go read it for yourself if you care. But I will say that it deals with war and hatred and death and anger and torture and the absolute pointlessness of it all but it doesn't preach and it approaches it all with amazing, articulate, perfect language and this is what literature is. It's a reminder that while it might be tempting to pick up some kind of awful, predictably mass-produced McNovel (which, hey, I don't totally condemn...everyone needs some occasional fluff in their life), there still exists real words and real language and real ideas. Real. The kind of thinking that comes out of a great mind and preserves the mammoth energy of words and is a very sharp, very pointed reminder that literature has this incredible power to wend its way into the heart and actually mean something. Because it can. I don't care how much time is spent existing in this sort of hazy, unreal, 21st century world where everything and everyone sometimes seem to be surviving in this funky sort of paradoxical state where people and their souls have become so hard and sad and calloused but at the same time so, so fragile, like if you poke it it might crack and then cascade in shatters only seconds later. And maybe books don't mean that much in that weird penumbra that infects so much of what we know these days, but when my brain encounters a novel like this there is just this massive eruption in my soul of the charged electricity of ideas and everywhere there are words that can actually effect and when I read a book like this one where there is elegance in every phrase and ideas that are actually humble and real and true and not pumped full of idiotic modern steroids and popular thought, I actually feel hopeful (despite the bleak nature of the story), that maybe some things really are worth it and by god, maybe language is one of those things.

What, after all, do we live for if there is nothing we encounter that makes our insides quake and our minds rattle and disturbs us to the point that we act and do something and actually progress with ideas and work and living?

To the last we will have learned nothing. In all of us, deep down, there seems to be something granite and unteachable.

Coetzee writes that. Yes, he writes that, and maybe that is true, but I can't bring myself to think that as a reality, because even if that is the despairing narrator's sentiment, I do not feel it is the author's. Quite the opposite, actually...that maybe learning really can occur--that it is not the impossibility that moronic contemporary thought might lead us to believe.

At another point in the novel:

Ridiculous, I thought: a greybeard sitting in the dark waiting for spirits from the byways of history to speak to him before he goes home to his military stew and his comfortable bed. The space about us here is merely space, no meaner or grander than the space above the shacks and tenements and temples and offices of the capital. Space is space, life is life, everywhere the same.

everywhere the same
everywhere, man and men
we do not know
the human condition
I hardly know
my condition
I observe
your condition
there is no knowing it
you breathe
I breathe
the air is not
recreated for each
of our souls--
we share it,
we share the life
everywhere the same:
the life
the air
some kind of temper

Hey, I did warn that the book is on the bleaker side of things. Which is maybe why the title recalls a certain Waiting for Godot? As one of my literature professors likes to remind us, "Beckett always said that if his play had been about waiting for god, he would have named it that."

So, anyway, I don't really know what the hell the human condition is. But I do think--no, know--that literature in some kind of culmination probably does. All the words at once might finally come to mean something...to approach some kind of truth.

I feel like I am saying the same thing over and over. Is redundancy a component of the human condition? If it is then maybe I do get it, after all.

Anyway, all this talk of humanity and stuff reminds me of another part in the book, where the narrator shouts wildly after witnessing the public degradation of some of the so-called "barbarians:"

"Look took at these men!"..."Men!"

It definitely reminds me of another favorite scene of mine, from 1984, when O'Brien turns the naked, starved, demoralized Winston around to face a mirror and he says to him: "Do you see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity."

And this also hauls up from my mind the scene of Pontius Pilate as he presents a flogged and fettered Jesus to the crowds before his crucifixion: "Ecce homo!" Or, behold the man! (the scene has of course been depicted in art at least once a century ever since. My favorite rendering, I think is Caravaggio's [c. 1605], probably because if you consider Pilate up close the eyes are pained and full of conflict. Or maybe I just see what I want to see but, hey, that's art [and they also really are].)

They're all kind of seemingly disparate moments (from biblical to science-fictional to an unnamed magistrate in an unnamed land), but they all, I think, call into question the same ideas of humanity and what makes a man a man and how damn futile it can sometimes be to fight when there is nothing to be won.

Torture arises in the book, as a realization of something bigger and more terrible and also as a question of what damage the body might undergo before the soul, too, gives way:

Thereafter she was no longer fully human, sister to all of us. Certain sympathies died, certain movements of the heart became no longer possible to her. I too, if I live long enough in this cell with its ghosts...will be touched with the contagion and turned into a creature that believes in nothing.

What is rather amazing, about the torture in the book, though, is not that it occurs or that it is terrible, but that there is something so much more profound than just the bodily injury. It is something about the strength of the internal, the spirit. Maybe strength isn't the right word, more...protected? Encased within the body is something that can be totally unreachable, totally unknown and immutable:

Is this how her torturers felt hunting their secret, whatever they thought it was? For the first time I feel dry pity for them: how natural a mistake to believe that you can burn or tear or hack your way into the secret body of another!

It appears, at points, that the narrator is willing to cede himself to his captors and yet, there is just that most minute particle inside that remains untouched by whatever physical pain is being inflicted upon his body. Maybe that is also why I like the Caravaggio painting so much, because there is a certain internal serenity, or rather, security, in the rendering of Jesus, despite his being in a state of post-flogging and total demoralization. It does not necessarily have anything to do with god or religion or faith, but rather that there is an internal core--the soul--that will persist despite whatever torture the shell that protects it might encounter.

I often think: as a university student, I exist in a totally insular world. Academia is safe. It is comfortable. But it is certainly not a very accurate representation of the everyday experience of the general population that exists outside classroom walls. Intellectual stimulation or research or sitting through Chalk Lady's hellish classes are not a necessity to survival, or at least not as far as the perpetuation of life goes, despite what I would like to believe about its essential place in my existence.

So, being constantly immersed in this world, I really don't understand anything about war or torture as they exist in the far-away reaches of this world. But I do know something about fighting, and I do know something about conflict and I definitely do know something about existing in a tempest and maybe it is not on the same scale as torture or nuclear warfare, but we all fight our battles and sometimes we have an oar to help row ourselves out and sometimes we don't but always, always we have to find some way to weather the squall and that is some kind of veritable war. Oh, yes it is.

We fight and fight and fight and still there is this constant, ridiculous world that teems with prejudice and hate and sickness and call me idealistic and naive but holy crap we all suffer the same damn way so what the hell are we doing? What the hell are we doing but destroying ourselves with our painful clinging to the ideals we form for ourselves?

How do you eradicate contempt, especially contempt when that contempt is founded on nothing more substantial than difference in table manners, variations in the structure of the eyelid?

Despair sucks equally no matter what the hell you look like. People love the same way and they are born the same way, bloody and alien-looking and covered in placenta, and I'll be damned if we don't all die the same way, too, breathing one last time the same air that cycles through all our bodies and will still compose the atmosphere long after all of us and all of our idiotic injustices have been long fought and killed.

Anyway, that was more of a tangent that I had really intended. Just read the book. It isn't very long and you might find it actually means something. It really did to me, anyway.

He chews again, a single scythe of the jaws, and stops. In the clear silence of the morning I find an obscure sentiment lurking at the edge of my consciousness. With the buck before me suspended in immobility, there seems to be time for all things, time even to turn my gaze inward and see what it is that has robbed the hunt of its savour: the sense that this has become no longer a morning's hunting but an occasion on which either the proud ram bleeds to death on the ice or the old hunter misses his aim; that for the duration of this frozen moment the stars are locked in a configuration in which events are not themselves but stand for other things.