You are currently browsing the monthly archive for January, 2008.
I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.
- William Faulkner
I’ve had a really hard time writing this last week. At least, anything that would be something good for this space. I did splice together a very bizarre introduction to my portfolio and gave it out to two of my three committee members. I felt it necessary to let them know that the end product will not be as direly cynical as what I gave them. They want me to connect the dots of this brief education; they want me to claim I have mastery in this area - but…I will not lie about that. That said, I will reflect. That is what I have done these last two years. From the guide on how to do our portfolios:
The portfolio is meant to demonstrate that you have strong writing skills and that you can use your studies–both theoretical and applied–in the writing and design of various documents. A portfolio also provides writing samples for use in applying for jobs or for Ph.D. programs.
I have a resume for that and just to think of going to school four more years brings out the heebie jeebies in me. So how am I supposed to do this?
Provide an introduction to yourself as a writer, the influences on the pieces you have chosen to present, and some indication of the theory and research that shapes your work.
Appetizer
How many times per day do you usually laugh?
Real laughs - three to five times. Maniacally - as often as necessary.
Soup
What do your sunglasses look like?
I’m trying for a Matrix look, but sadly, with the shoddy type of metal that they’re made of, just setting them down morphs them into another shape and not in a cool “Whoa” way. Boo, three dollar shades, boo.
Salad
You win a free trip to anywhere on your continent, but you have to travel by train. Where do you go?
I’d go to Vancouver. It seems like it would be the longest by train and by the end I could up my maniacal laugh count.
Main Course
Name one thing you consider a great quality about living in your town/city.
It’s not in Texas.
Dessert
If the sky could be another color, what color do you think would look best?
Clear. We’ll all realize that we’re just hurtling mindlessly through space, there would be anarchy, and thus, more maniacal laughter.
All that is left to one who grieves
Is convalescence. No change of heart or spiritual
Conversion, for the heart has changed
And the soul has been converted
To a thing that sees
How much it costs to lose a friend it loved.
It has grown past conversion to a world
Few enter without tasting loss
In which one spends a long time waiting
For something to move one to proceed.
It is that inner atmosphere that has
An unfamiliar gravity or none at all
Where words are flung out in the air but stay
Motionless without an answer,
Hovering about one’s lips
Or arguing back to haunt
The memory with what one failed to say,
Until one learns acceptance of the silence
Amidst the new debris
Or turns again to grief
As the only source of privacy,
Alone with someone loved.
It could go on for years and years,
And has, for centuries,
For being human holds a special grief
Of privacy within the universe
That yearns and waits to be retouched
By someone who can take away
The memory of death.
- Herbert Mason’s Gilgamesh, 2003. The earliest versions of Gilgamesh are dated circa 2150-2000 BCE.
I watched Atonement at the beginning of the week which led me to grab anyone I could by the shirt collar and shout, “You must see this film!!1!!11″ It’s insanely beautiful - vibrant and laced with colors that helped elevate the scenes to a more sublime level. It’s great film if you like love stories. And while I don’t particularly want a sad love story for myself (I’ve had my fill with that lately in real life), I would dig the kind of passion that the main characters had. Not a spoiler, but in one scene the woman clings to the man and strokes his face where he’s shaking with rage and whispers, “Come back to me. Come back.” He looks into her eyes and you can see that she just takes his emotion into herself.
Aaach! *clutches heart* …Plus they get jiggy with it in a library. That’s always a bonus.
I was slightly disturbed by the casting of the young girl. She looked eerily like me, down to the mole on my check. Even the same darn haircut. Not only that, but she liked to write and is obsessed about having things in their place (this is more alluded to in the book)…So I, um, am glad I don’t have an older sister whose life I could muck up.
I’ve noticed this similarity between people more in the last couple years. It seems that the more people I meet the more they tend to look the same. I wonder if this happens for the same reason I read about how the passing of time changes the older you become. I tried to find the link but was unable to, but let me recap the idea. The general hypothesis was that time passes quicker when you’re older because you’ve already created a pathway in your mind for a certain activity or experience. Thus, the mundane seems to go quicker because you’ve already etched those onto your mind. The repetition then glosses over the moment of time you take to do it. More reason for having unique daily occurences, I would think.
I may get used to this thing called being an adult. I realized that it comes with its own instances of fun irresponsibility. It reminds me of that thrill I used to get in elementary school; I realized eating dessert first at lunch was a decision I could finally make.
Now it’s decisions like: should I take a shot NyQuil for my cold or finish the rest of the wine in the fridge instead? Should I find out what that rancid smell is in the kitchen is or should I just light some more incense?
These decisions are easy!
At the literacy seminar, there were a range of different people, about twenty of us, all there for different reasons and motivations. As I stood by the refreshment table, as I’m wont to do in a room full of people I don’t know, I hear someone say to me, in German with a confrontational tone, “So…I hear you speak… German.”
I had an awkward hunk of cantaloupe in my mouth so I just shrug and say, in English, “Well, yeah.”
He has that strange, old man, macho masculinity stance going on, head tilted slightly up in order to look down at me, feet spread wide. It was too early on a Saturday morning for this sort of thing. I rattled off in completely suave and fluent German, with him hesitatingly punching in sentences. When I noted that his German had a Bavarian accent, honest to goodness, he took a step back from me. I haven’t spoken German that well in a while and was later rather impressed with myself. I do attribute how well I did to the utter lack of esteem I held for someone who has to confront me about a language at 9 on a Saturday.
What I thought about while our teacher rambled off on how we should not use sarcasm with our tutees [No, really? Damn.], was how incredibly awesome it is to have that reach into different languages. If you know even just one more language, think how many more stories of life and love and emotion you can gather. It’s mind-boggling to me. Even if those things are universal, to feel the touches of culture, environment, and individuality on those universals shows you that everyone has a different path to own these experiences and can share them as long as there is that exchange of language.
Don’t let school get in the way of your education.
- Mark Twain
I have a lot of guy friends. In fact, out of my four closest friends, only one is female, who sadly is 9 hours away. What is up with that ratio? I realized a while back during the year’s mandatory “Crap, all my good pants have holes” shopping extravaganza that I really could have used someone that tells me that my putukas does not work that pair of pants. J will tag along, but he tends to get narcoleptic on me, sleeping in dressing room chairs.
To betray the home team, it’s not just all about clothes shopping. Not really the biggest fan, I’m too cheap and it is a lil’ boring. It’s something else I’m missing and I can’t quite put my finger on it.
The last girl that I really clicked with came from Austria. We hung out and did quintessential girly things, like admiring guys and dying hair. Our illogicality linked in a way that we both thought that we must be related. This wasn’t too far off. When discussing our backgrounds, it turned out that her grandmother and my grandfather grew up in towns about twenty kilometers away. Small world. Sadly, not small enough when she went back to Austria.
The thing that I like about men, even my friends who are a bit more in touch with their sensitivity, is that they are focused. They are logical, they do have the Problem = Solution way to address situations, and they do extend my thinking away from the neurotic. I sometimes severely need this. This though might be why I get frustrated with my sense of femininity, I don’t have anything to really reflect it.
But I think I would like that solidarity that was probably brainwashed into me when I was a 12 year old Spice Girls convert. Turns out Girl Power was a crock. Now I try to hang out with girls, but…at my age I think, how do you make close, female friends? How do you establish solidarity? How does that work? There are girls that I would love to just hang out with, but damn, asking them out to coffee feels like such a lesbian angle to me. There it is: it just seems icky.
Maybe I’ll ask them to go play ping pong with me.
I’m currently on lunch from a seminar on basic literacy education. It’s a program that the county does to teach potential community volunteers for literacy outreach. It’s spanned over two Saturdays and this could be entirely condensed into a four hour session. I get a certification for this (woo?), but I feel a bit like I’m detention.
I promise never to have altruistic thoughts ever again! I promise to never to have altruistic thoughts ever again! I promise to never…
[I never actually have been in detention. Hmm.]
In order to better relate to our students, our instructor handed out a passage from a graduate text book. Essentially, it was about truth vs. lie (a book for linguistics to better understand formal logic), but written in such dense, typical grad lingo, that everyone shook their heads. One woman said, “This isn’t really saying anything.”
Yep, some authors like to write so that they can show they’re so literate that they form mazes for their readers. A little against the idea of conveying meaning…but that is a whole other can of worms.
[Not that I do that. *cough*]
Of course we had one girl who needed to impress others with her verbosity. She tossed her curly hair and stated, “Now when talking about truth functionally…”, and lured in the instructor. They have at it until I leaned my head onto the table with a thump, where then the instructor comes out of her philosophical stupor and shakes her frazzled hair.
“This doesn’t matter!” she screeched.
And this is why you don’t feed the budding philosophers.
The cycle keeps repeating itself. Five years ago, I watched someone in a white T-shirt walk away from me. Today, I watched the same person walk away from me in a white sweatshirt. It’s sad that as far as I’ve come, I’m still chasing the same ghost.
Verse 71
Academia confuses knowledge with knowing
Most everyone applauds the memorization of the 10,000 trivia
Beware! These schooled addictions are not just myths -
They are a form of mental illness
Any fragment of the mind,
divorced from heart, spirit, human community,
and from the primal reality of the universe,
is an abomination of the Great Integrity
Let us prepare for the Great Integrity
by cleansing ourselves of all these cobwebs
of cluttered fragments that paralyze the mind
In this way we will function as our own holistic physicians
- Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, translated by Raplh Alan Dale
My hair aspires to be more than it is. More often than not I do absolutely nothing with it, so my hair usually skips the chain of command and does what it wants. Sometimes I walk into the bathroom in the morning, screech to a stop against the linoleum, and admire the work my hair did overnight. Shapely textured and correctly folded over a daring part, I can’t help but appreciate the effort. Then my hair sighs softly to itself as I step into the shower and pull it back into the librarian hawtness look. My hair and its efforts does sometimes get a reprieve because I’m lazy and it’s the weekend, and god, who again am I trying to impress?
As I sit here, waiting for the dye to adhere to my head, let me take an embarrassing trip back in time to see where I’ve been.
“It surprises most people because I’m outgoing and friendly and, in fact, very far from shy, but I prefer one person and one conversation at a time. I fought this for years, always trying to be someone else. I made myself go to parties; I tried to fix what I thought was “wrong” with me. It didn’t help that other people would press, “But you’re so good with people,” as if being introverted meant living on the dark side.
I’ve learned to spot my like-minded peers, though. We’re the folks walking toward a festive house saying, “How long do we have to stay?” Or we’re the ones in the center of the room assessing others’ interactions, and slowly backing toward the door. Introverts crave meaning, so party chitchat feels like sandpaper to our psyche.
Here’s what introverts are not: We’re not afraid, and we’re not shy. Introversion has little to do with fear or reticence. We’re just focused, and we prefer one-on-one because we like to listen and we want to follow an idea all the way through to another interesting idea. That’s why small talk annoys us. So does pretending to be happy or excited or anything that we’re not.”
-Diane Cameron, Happy Introvert Day
…and it’s totally back. Once the legwarmers and asymmetrical haircuts made a comeback, I knew neon tights and broad swatches of unflattering eye makeup wouldn’t be far behind. Now this I can handle. Makeup that takes in those with no artistic ability? Sign me up; I’ve been doing this for years.
Oh, and the song is also most excellent.
