You are currently browsing the monthly archive for December, 2007.
I’ll be glad when the clock ticks over. It’s really just in our minds that we conjure up meaning to things that happen all the time, but still the weight that the tradition of the New Year does provoke an existence and actuality for me that other holidays can’t. I explained it to J by way of this: the myth of Christmas or Halloween persists for the stereotypical family, but the happening is dependent on those celebrating it. You cannot have a Christmas filled with family if your family lives overseas. You cannot go trick o’ treating with your children if you have not made children with the fruit of your loin. (Etc.)
With New Year’s, there is a collective agreement that things will change. The simple act of people needing to change their habits by writing 2008 on checks, e-mails, and letters gives me a sense that there is an imbuement of power to the happening of the New Year.
This year has been trying. I’ve lost my father, lost people that are close to me, and am in the process of losing the route of guided “learning” that school has offered me. I’m actually not sad about that. I feel like in the last three months I’ve discovered the path I will walk for at least the next six months. Just having that level of security is comforting. I was hoping for the security of other things, but those are not meant to be for me right now and I will make peace with it.
It’s been a year of loss. I won’t be sorry to leave it behind, but I do understand that I will always carry it with me and at some point I will embrace it.
~
[Ed. Note: This was hard to type... and edit with J mentioning that I needed to change articles and my slightly inebriated self saying, "Sss, fine, what do you mean...oh, I'm lookin' at the wrong sentence. Okie, I change."
I'm getting a head start on the bubbly. *raises glass to everyone*]
During finals week, one of my classes, Rhetoric and Cultural Studies, gave a faux conference in order for us newbies to get our feet wet in the conference experience. [This would have been nice before the experience in October. *sigh*]
Thankfully this time I didn’t have to deal with deflowering stories or bloody heels, because by god, I was worn out and the fact that I was wearing pants and that most my hair wasn’t standing straight up was enough for me.
With the caveat that I did not go to all the panels, I do think mine was the best. It wasn’t my presentation that made it so. Lands almighty, the best thing about my presentation was my title, “Molding the Real from the Intangible: Blogging as Limina.” Fancy, fancy. The actual paper? Less so.
The fully amazing and riveting part of my panel was the reading of an essay by my classmate Aaron Goodman titled, “Deconstruction, Truth, Meaning: Personal Praxis in the Postmodern Everyday.” Coming back to get his MA after years working as an engineer in the Real World, Aaron has been in several of my classes and I’m always grateful. Aaron manages to ask all the brilliant and thoughtful questions, usually stirring up the best conversations.
He was the last reader of the day and he read slowly and movingly. He spoke to the changes of life and his insecurity of academia. The refrain echoing in his paper was to the akin the idea of that the more you know, the more you realize that you just don’t know. A rather long excerpt, but completely worth it:
Walking on campus this morning I realized that twenty-five years ago, at the age of seventeen, I began my undergraduate program in this very place. I see today that there are piles of rubble being created by the wrecking machines whirring and roaring along where now only a portion of my old dormitory remains. Since the early 1960’s it had stood on this little hill as a monolith in its own right, but now no more. The piles are being sorted out as if to make some sense of it all; chunks of concrete here, twisted steel there, things defying categorization over there. I think to myself that I once worked and played, studied and slept, laughed and cried within the walls now crumbled before me. Within the rubble is a part of me, and within myself is a part of the rubble. I do not force the issue, I do not bother to ask if somehow this could make for an apt metaphor; you know, the idea of rubble, and time, and trying to organize it all into proper stacks and piles as if it might still be put to use. Nor do I bother to ask myself why a tear flows over my eyelid, and rests at the top of my cheek.
You learn things—and unlearn things—as time goes by. You learn that time passes all too quickly, and you learn that things are only temporary; our own failures and successes most of all. You learn that rubble unavoidably comes with life, and that rubble can become life. You learn that rubble is okay, that it is about give and take, about falling down and about being made new, about compassion and grace—about loving and being loved. You learn that the mystery of all these things is flooding through and making beautiful this very day, this very moment of the everyday. And you learn that this is enough.
The new dormitory across the way, with its earth tones glowing softly in the morning sun, looks far more attractive and fun than its predecessor. I smile with a solemn joy at the site of it, and for all its residents I make a wish that each may find all the most wonderful, most beautiful things in life; things that as yet they cannot possibly comprehend nor imagine. I wish for them rubble, and I wish for them rebirth: painful, joyous, inseparable. I said this essay is about a journey, and it is.
You could have heard a pin drop in the room during his reading. At the end, a wavering male voice expressed my sentiments (and I don’t think we were alone) with, “Man, Aaron, why did you have to go and make me cry?”
After getting multiple people asking to read his paper, I can only point you to his site, which has a lot of great work on it, and ask you to please read the full essay. You won’t be sorry. This, my friends, is what the work of a real grad student looks like.
…that make me truly enjoy my job. I have no idea why it was in his papers, it just was. Don’t ask, just read.
Frank was a bit of a joker, and my quick googling tells me that this probably isn’t real; but damn, it’s a shame. I could imagine a spitfire like that. Hell, I’d want to grow up to be that.
I haven’t been sleeping well the last couple of nights. I’ve been having maddening dreams that don’t make a whole lot of sense. For example, in one I’m needing to find my Dad the perfect Carl’s Jr. burger, because he won’t let me buy him a $65 dollar burger. Concurrent with that, two people who seem to resemble Jay and Silent Bob and are for some reason traveling with us, shoot a happless video rental employee. My Dad and I leave them behind and get slightly chased by cops, who have the latest in police transportantion - a train the size of the Titanic, shiny, purple, and black.
I have a car. They have train. Therefore, slightly chased.
Phew.
My turkey turned out mindblowingly well. But the crowning achievement were my homemade croutons, which turned into homemade stuffing. I am well chuffed with my handiwork, let me tell you.
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Now for the rest of the pictures… Read the rest of this entry »
Beautiful shot taken by my mother in her “New Camera!!!!11!!” ecstasy. She claims she has no idea how she did it and “did not want this at all.”
I think it’s a conspiracy and she used to be a world famous photographer that had to go into hiding. That’s a much cooler story, Mom. From now on, I’m doing your PR.
I have to keep changing the intro to this post because I’m such a bad person. It has started with “A few days ago” and went to “A week or two ago” to “A couple weeks ago” and now I have to say it’s been at least two months. I’m not a nice person indeed.
She wrote a post about how she wanted to get cracking on her photo work and challenged people to comment on her post. The people who commented by the correct time would get a lovely package of goodies.
I got on that. I love, love, love, LUV mail!
Lisa, a cohort at Blogher from last summer, is off on a journey to experience authenticity and peace in her life. She’s been working on issues dedicated to peace and runs PeaceThings.com. From the site:
We created PeaceThings to offer a visual voice to all who believe that conflict can be resolved by peaceful means. We create and sell peace symbol apparel, flags, buttons and other peace things, so you can speak up for peace every day. We promote fair trade, and aim to offer all sweatshop free merchandise.
PeaceThings is committed to generating income to promote peace and prosperity around the world. Our efforts help to promote the Dayton International Peace Museum.
Lo and behold, I got mail!
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What’s great is that she wrapped it with all this inspirational stickers. The most esteem-boosting package I’ve gotten in…well, it’s my first expressly esteem-boosting package I have to say.
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The hazy tree is probably my favorite. My meditating cow likes the Asian garden vistas. You can find the cards here, and there is a whole host of other nifty things in the shop as well.
If we have no peace, it is because we’ve forgotten that we belong to each other.
-Mother Teresa
The boobs just don’t do it for me, so I keep looking outward for confirmation that I am, indeed, a woman. Last Thursday at the theater where I go with J to do concessions, I got a very stereotypical validation.
As I was counting the bills, I happened to catch movement out the corner of my eye. I look down only to see the eyes of a very small, brown mouse peering up from under the refrigerator not two feet away.
I launched myself about two feet into the air, bump backwards into the J, who is propelled into the counter, and emit the time honored dance of shrieking, jumping, and pointing. J, undisturbed beyond being shoved and immune to most of my antics, just stared at me.
“What the hell?”
Gasping and pointing, “Mouse!”
He slowly looks over, “That’s a stain on the tile.”
“Mooooooooooouse!”
Resident Mouse then precedes to come out from the other side of the fridge to look at both J and I. I point, shriek more, and utterly terrify the mouse who skids back under the fridge. My sounds echoing off the empty theater walls, J says, “So there is a mouse. Huh.”
More nervous, repressed yelps from me as we try to catch him with a bag and a few kernels of popcorn so that we can transfer him outside. Resident Mouse, however, does not fall for it, dashes into the bag, pulls out a kernel and runs back under the fridge. But before the theater opened, I was able to stifle my screaming with murmurs of “How cute” as he bravely dashed back into the nether regions of the pantry, not to be seen again.
J kept shaking his head. “It must be a woman thing.”
“What?”
“You and your noises.”
Sheepishly, “Maybe.”
He sighed, “You owned a mouse once silly.”
Um, yeah. I did.
Our campus has a lot of stray cats. Depending on the season, you can see little kittens hopping through the bushes and staring out at you from drainage pipes. I followed one today that veered out in front of me who looked a lot like my kitty. Sadly, thanks to brutes on campus and them just being feral in general, they are very scared of humans.
What brings a smile to my face is that I’m seeing more and more food left out for them. Left under steps, next to bushes, on concrete walls, out by the pipes are little cups of water, little mounds of food, bowls of food and water - dishes of ceramic and metal and plastic.
I’m sure there are the anti-animal naysayers on campus and they mutter that this is dangerous and disgusting and just aiding the mongrel population. Personally it makes me think that it’s just a heart-warming sign of human kindness.
Unless it’s actually a sign of zombification.
I remembered this article about the how the stereotype of Cat Lady may have a scientific explanation. I also remember reading about how this worked in mice. Toxoplasma gondii (which I remember correctly is what woman have to watch out for during pregnancy to protect the fetus by not dealing with cat poo) is something that when gets into the brains of mice and actually diminishes their ability to instinctively stay away from cats. In theory, the parasite creates a zombie out of its host with the goal of getting back to the stomach of the cat. Thus, the mouse gets manipulated to go over to a cat and get eaten.
The theory for cat ladies is essentially that they’ve somehow managed to ingest toxoplasma gondii and are now zombie peons for cats. Thus the food left out for cats? Should I expect to see glassy-eyed professors chained to stairs ready to meet their true masters?
I’ve known a few cat ladies and I am not finding this that hard to believe.
Well, there are really some moral truisms. One of them is that opportunity confers responsibility. If you have very limited opportunities, then you have limited responsibility for what you do. If you have substantial opportunity you have greater responsibility for what you do.
-Noam Chomsky, The Responsibility of Intellectuals
I have not fallen into a margarita stupor. I’ve been off doing adult things - jobs applications, resume tweaking, mindless worrying about the future.
I realized something important while brushing my teeth and talking to myself about a week ago. I’m not sure how I got on this topic of conversation with myself. It’s quite like how I end up on weird tangents with external sources - sometimes, but not always, with humans. Nevertheless, somehow I hit an epiphany while water dripped off my elbow and onto my foot.
I was debating whether or not a job offer I have would be a good choice for me (more information at a later date) and if it would be something I would want as a career. I’m hedging a bit because I’ve finally realized that what I do irritates me so much because it doesn’t truly seem to have an impact on any sort of forward movement. Untangling that line, what I do doesn’t really deal with the future. Day in and out, I dredge up the past. I am, writing this with a flair of dramatic, responsible for the portions of a person’s soul left behind in written material.
*cough* Less dramatically put - I’m currently an archivist in training.
It wasn’t so much my flirting with morbidity which was the epiphany, but I realized that, hey, I have concrete wants and desires when looking at what I would like to do in fifteen years (…if I actually mobilized my butt for action). I no longer just have “I don’t want this” or “I would go crazy if faced with that”, but actual, honest-to-goodness attributes to look for in a job.
Hallelujah. (’Tis the season after all.)
Tomorrow - new blogging. Today - more drinking.
“People may say I can’t sing, but no one can ever say I didn’t sing.”
-Florence Foster Jenkins
I’m not sure why, but I always seem to give myself a sturdy two days to accomplish writing a paper. Or multiple papers.
I get to write create meaningless sentences like, “They reconstitute thoughts, invoke political activism, express social theories, and change ideologies” or talk about blogging in the sense that it is a “democratizing aspect” and how it can clash with and/or “change value systems to which bloggers ascribe, emulate, or reside.”
Right. RIIIGHT.
So until Thursday at noon, when I swagger back to my blog with a margarita in one hand, it’s going to be a bit dry around here.
Unless I need to do some procrastination blogging. Outlook - good.
“He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”
- William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)
“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words?”
- Ernest Hemingway (about William Faulkner)
I’ve decided that I’ve lost a lot of ability to have fun recently. Now some of my life’s circumstances make that relatively understandable, but looking deeper at the reoccurring wellspring of my dour nature, which I would say has been trespassing over here at IP, I’m wonder when exactly I’ve lost “it.”
I say it and I mean fun. I’m back to listening to my podcasts at work and Escape Pod’s Stephen Eley had a comment on the nature of having fun and what that means in the science fiction society. He spoke to the passion that sci-fi enthusiasts in general tend to have and how they find a way of having fun without giving a damn to the consequential negativity that may arise from society due to their nonconformity. I thought, ‘When was the last time I said: I don’t give a damn, I’m going to do this anyway because it’s fun for me?’
Should just blame grad school like I usually do?
