This is how the year ends...

Two thoughts before I nap: (1) people really need to cover their damned noses when they sneeze in airplanes, at least to give the illusion that we're not all breathing each other's recyclables; (2) I wonder if the FDA approving cloned meat for human consumption will convince more people to go vegetarian...

sshhhhhhhh...................

I'm using the computers at Harvard's Houghton Library to make this post. We're camped out in the rare books collection, looking at 17th-century editions of Du Bosc and Scudery. No pens! No folders! No cameras! No food! Be quiet! We handle the old things lovingly, which, really, isn't a bad philosophy for books, life, sex, etc.....

Highlights from yesterday: a yellow curry with mango at Thai Basil on Newbury Street; chocolates and turn-down service at Jurys Boston; the crazy homeless guy talking to the Il Divo poster in Borders; singing "Happy Birthday" into my cellphone as I stood outside on Boylston Street and left a message for Hossy, who is a hossariffic "37" and just might get a souvenir Boston Baked Bean.

Despite what you remember from childhood, it's actually good to get underwear for a gift.

...because I tell ya, the last two times I've been on an extended trip, I've ended up buying extra undies and socks. Look out, Boston lingerie stores!

Actually, it's more like "look out, Boston discount department stores." Lingerie stores make me feel claustrophobic and nauseated. The last time I had to endure Victoria's Secret while the LAW was using a gift certificate, I felt like my flesh was going to POP OUT through my itchy nerve-wracked skin...Thank goodness I could recover in the Mac store down the street.

Yuletide!

I don't have much to say beyond that; Eliot and I are having an antiqued sepia yuletide moment here in front of the Mac. The LAW and I leave for Boston on Tuesday and are in the midst of packing books that we intend to read but know that we won't. Top of my intended-but-probably-won't-be-read list: The Omnivore's Dilemma.

...must....get....one....post....in

....before the internet goes out. Yes, it rained in southern California, which means that the pathetic little phone line that never should've been outside will give up the ghost and we'll be without phone service (and DSL). Our friend and contractor, the fabulous bundle of slightly crazy man-energy (let's call him "Fabio") is fixing it all this morning. Love to Fabio and his magic spool of phone wire.


Of course, internet access is hale and hearty at work, so I suppose I should just get my poop in a pile (as my brother Jim would say) and go in. No rest for the lazy!

Sad, but true

Well, maybe disgusting but true. Here I am, happily past fall quarter: grades turned in, letters of recommendation written. I'm ready to get my brain working in responsible scholarly-essay-generating ways. I think to myself, "hmmm, since the coffee place is closed on campus, maybe I'll just make a pot here in my office." What a good idea! So good an idea, so rare, so fine that the last time I had it (six weeks ago), the coffee was so lovely that I only needed one cup. Then, apparently, I didn't feel the need to dump the last three cups out of the insulated steel carafe. What a surprise for me today! It was almost like kahlua (not in taste--I'm not that stupid--but certainly in color and viscosity).

I wonder how long it'll take to clean this thing with the hand soap in the women's restroom.

I wonder if there's some coffee in the vending machine downstairs.

Nothing says "holidays"....

...like the Gay Men's Chorus from L.A.! Okay, yeah, the picture is crappy. I was trying to be polite with the cellphone (as if that's possible). Best song: "Boogie Woogie Hanukkah." Worst...nothing by the GMC(LA) but the opening act (Vox Femina) had some real snoozers. To be fair, Vox Femina is less a show choir than GMC--and the Romanian tunes were cool...but still--I'll say no more except to plead with my lesbian sisters to STOP MAKING SEASONAL MUSIC THAT INVOKES MOTHER EARTH. Ahem.

The visit

Wednesday: Went to work. Mom made pies and got everything ready for Thanksgiving.
Thursday: Up at 7. Accidentally dumped all the torn-up bread for dressing into the laundry basket. Followed 5-second rule.
Friday: To San Diego to tour the U.S.S. Midway. Learned useful terms for future online 'zines: "Riding the Meatball" and "Pickle Switch," both of which have to do with landing a plane on a ship. We listened to an audiobook of Lake Wobegon Days there and back.
Saturday: Thrift shopping with Mom. H&E is very cool. I bought a book. Goodwill is overpriced but cleaner.
Sunday: Delivered unused-and-stuck-in-closet-for-months exercise bike to a friend. Mrs. Alls and Hossy* came to visit. Dad told stories. We went to look at Christmas lights at the Mission Inn in Riverside. Kettle korn!
Monday: Mom and Dad leave. Sigh. Back to work.

*Not their given names, but perhaps their "real" ones.

Holidays

My parents are in town, having driven from Montana to spend some time in sunny southern CA with their (less sunny, but just as dry) daughter. Yesterday we stocked up for T'giving dinner, and today, while the LAW and I are at work, Mom wanted to stay home and get things ready. I tell ya--having people travel for two days in order to make you a big dinner is something to be really thankful for. Thanks!

Did you miss the CFA protest last week?

1500 CSU faculty (yes, I was one of them) and their supporters from campuses statewide protested outside the CSU Board of Trustees meeting last week to pressure the administration into re-entering contract negotiation. Here's one of several news stories about the protest, and here's the California Faculty Association website. We've had an impasse declared and are going into mediation. Job actions to come?

Updates

• My poem "Dubbel zoet" was accepted for publication in The Adirondack Review. Whee! Here it is.
  
• I found the shooting location for my early-stage-of-development Wine film. Stay tuned for the debut of my Nika-liscious star.

Oh, yeah, and the LAW is home and I haven't broken any dental work for days!

My bachelor self.

So the Lovely AW(tm) is away at a conference, and I'm doing the usual shehun-as-bachelor things: staying up late playing video games, sleeping with the TV on (nothing like infomercials at 3 in the morning to give you interesting dreams), not taking my vitamins, and eating popcorn for dinner (and leftover popcorn for breakfast). Now really, before the LAW entered my life and made sense of the outside world for me, I was (mostly) capable of taking care of myself. Something's happened!

I don't think I'm just trying to show how pathetic I am when she's not around and thus encourage her not to go off gallivanting to Baltimore without me. But if I were trying to show that, yesterday's adventure would be ample proof: I broke a temporary cap eating leftover popcorn for lunch, swallowed the cap, and then had to hie myself off to the dentist 15 minutes before the office closed to get a new temporary. (p.s. Many thanks to Albert of Inland Dental Center and his artistry.)

I did spend a few minutes rooting around in the popcorn just in case the cap was hiding underneath a kernel, but no, really, I could feel it chewing its way down my esophagus.

Sigh. She comes home tomorrow.

Finally! An opinion on the hot topic of the 2006 Oscar race!

Okay, I finally saw Crash last night. I'd had the DVD from Netflix for three weeks and thought, well, if I ever want to get the next diskful of Smallville episodes, I'd better watch this thing. One of the reasons I'd wanted to see it was, of course, I'd wondered if the movie had really deserved the "Best Picture" Oscar that it got--by surprise--over Brokeback Mountain. Now my questions have been answered:
NO, IT DIDN'T. THIS MOVIE SUCKED.
(Did you hear me in the back row?)
I'm not saying that every queerish movie needs its Oscars--I mean, Transamerica isn't really all that--but ferchrissake, Brokeback Mountain had Annie Proulx and Larry McMurtry and Diana Ossana and Ang Lee and all these wonderfully talented people writing and directing (so that when the good acting started, we could appreciate it). Crash has good acting--a bit--but a script so crappy that it's like watching great actors having to rise above the play your seventh-grader wrote about racial stereotypes for her civics class.

Let's talk about gender here, too, and sexuality. Crash is a lovely antidote to any anxieties Straight Guys in Power(TM) might have about their "l'il straight guy." In Los Angeles, apparently, everybody (regardless of race and class) is straight. Vigorously straight, in the "man-on-top" sorta way. A notable example, from one of the central threads in the film: The couple that Officer Ryan pulls over and abuses? Woman had her head in her man's lap. For this offense, Officer Ryan "emasculates" the guy by feeling up his wife in front of him. The woman, later, tells her husband that she feels sorry for him because he didn't have the power to stop things. That's right, it's his tragedy (and she's only there to be the vehicle for both her husband's humiliation and, later in the film, Officer Ryan's "redemption" anyway).

Go ahead--you play. How many women in the movie have jobs and lives of their own? When they have jobs, how many of them are caretaking jobs, like "maid," or "junior partner who is there to watch the emotional struggle of her man," or "assistant to Brendan Fraser who has no lines of her own?"

Two final thoughts:
(1) It's nice that white straight liberals can assuage their guilt about racism/prejudice by voting for the movie that legitimates the class/gender/sexuality system that keeps them on top (more on this at AlterNet); and
(2) Of course, this all begs the question of whether the Academy Awards are ever really believable indicators of merit.

Okay, enough. I'm still on my first cup of coffee and I have to go get my annual mammygram. But go see Brokeback Mountain. Or see it again. It's really a good movie, even as good as the Proulx story that it's based on.

Where I'm from

Florence, Montana--Home of the Fighting Falcons!

Today's time-waster....

I used to wonder how cheese and beer were ever invented (and yogurt!). I mean, moldy stinky food--I love it as much as the next gal, but who ever got the idea to pick up some nasty bit of goo and eat it?

Anyway, I used to wonder that, but I'm now pretty sure it was because of the Stone Age forebears of people who spend their time doing these Halloween Tampon Project sorts of things. Oh yes, and let us not forget the microwaving Peeps genre. We are nothing if not a species of creative time-wasters.

"Great fiery gods!" says Troya. "This sheepsquirt stinks."
"Like bad injured foot," adds Bloob. "Or man-droppings."
Troya nods, wondering if the white-covered goo that will come to be known as camembert is a secret way for sheep to stake out territory. "Taste it."
"No!" Bloob recoils in horror. The shimmering mass smells like it might expand inside her mouth and make her head implode. "You do it."
"I drank the bad potato water that sat in the sun until it smelled of a mammoth's secret place. Your turn."

Halloween Eve

Tomorrow's the big day--a thousand children will descend on my neighborhood (I'm not exaggerating--the guy down on the corner counted one year) and make off with all the candy, like African driver ants on a pig carcass. Last year, we gave out 15 pounds of candy (one piece at a time) to the eager young darlings. We sit out on the steps with buckets of candy in hand to keep the hordes from stumbling up our cement steps in a haze of sugar euphoria (one year, we didn't move quickly enough to stop a large[ish] Snow White from landing on her head).

Remember the coneheads? Fried eggs and six-packs--now that's Halloween. Here's a transcript of Beldar and the gang.

no, really--really?

I'm too effin' grumpy to post.

I'm back, yes, I'm back

Okay, I know it's been a while since I've posted--DAYS, even--but I offer as my excuse: (1) my DSL line was out and I'm too lazy to go online with dial-up any more, and (2) we had a party this weekend. So, basically, my little foray into dissolute libertinism kept me away. Mais mes chers, je suis là maintenant, et maintenant, et toujours.

Where did Shehun come from? When I was first teaching, way on back in 1990 when we had to walk uphill both ways through four feet of snow to get to our classroom and don't MAKE me stop this car, I had a dream. I dreamt that I was at school and had forgotten it was costume day; in a panic, I ran through the long twisty corridors of Brink Hall, looking for help. One of the other TAs lent me a horned helmet, a sword, and a fur. I said, in triumph and with a grand flourish of said sword, "Yes! I will go as JA-KAL the SHEHUN."

Anyway, I don't know why, but it's the only nickname I've ever had that's stuck.

Shehun of the Week

Collect 'em all!

If you're a fan of the time-wasting personality test (and really, who isn't?), check out PersonalDNA. Huh? Oh yeah, here are my results.

water, water everywhere

At work: The campus flooded this week, and we've been kicked out of our computer classrooms while the good folk of Balfor de-mildew and re-drywall things.

At home: My landline at home is out, which is good, because it made me go into the basement to look at the phone lines, where a bunch of water dripped onto my head. A minute later, I felt pretty butch holding onto a flashlight (of use) and a screwdriver (of no use at all), saying "yup" and watching the water drip under the sink upstairs. The kitchen faucet is broken so that water only comes out of the little sprayer hose thingy. As they might say in my old home in haddizburg mizzippi, "yup, iyaint gotta phone but i got me some runnin wadduh."

At the house of why, in the "Huh?" room: Good thing our president has declared this week to be National Character Counts Week, or else I wouldn't be able to make sense of the newly Bush-signed Military Commissions Act of 2006.

So last week, in honor of National Coming Out Day, I played with Photoshop and came up with this. It was pretty funny. A number of people were shocked and even awed by it--not that I was gay (everyone knows that) but that I made the cover of Time. Somehow it seemed more plausible that I'd made the cover than that I'd pasted my head on Ellen Degeneres's body. (Eh? No, Skippy, my digital head on her digital body. But thanks for the vote of confidence.)

What was interesting to me was that this cover, which I consider iconic, is not familiar to people "outside the fold." That is, unless you were like me, holed up with your TV in 1997 being thankful that your ABC affiliate didn't participate in the blackout of Ellen's coming-out episode, this white-loafered "Yep" doesn't resonate. Sigh.

god save the queen

So last night I saw The Queen, not because I have any particular interest in QEII or Princess Diana, but because I'd pretty much watch Helen Mirren in anything. If Helen Mirren appeared on crap TV like America's Funniest Home Videos, I'd watch it, even if Bob Saget were hosting and my mute button were broken. Certain folk are Sagetproof. Who else besides Mirren? Mikhail Baryshnikov. Gerry Adams. Vanessa Redgrave. Joni Mitchell. Anyway, the movie was okay, Mirren was Mirren, and the Indian feast I had beforehand also fabulous. But I was wondering about the movie's timing--why now? I didn't really feel sympathy for Tony Blair OR the queen, but I think I was supposed to.

I spent a lot of the day today working on the Women's Studies website, and then gave myself a headache trying to activate my new RAZR. I wonder what kind of cellphone Sagetproof people have...

one cat, two cat, red cat, blue cat

In addition to the lovely AW and my dog Morrigan, I live with three cats. This is me and my cat Eliot, also known as "Smee" and "assmahbigboyyyy" (say that last one slow and you'll get the knack of it). He's a 20-pound tabby trout. My cats don't like having their pictures taken with the webcam--it's been like wrestle-mania here this morning. How do cats see? With their eyes, duh. But can they really watch TV? My friend Terri lent me Video Catnip for my cats and Bijou did in fact watch it. Eliot couldn't have cared less. But then again, Eliot's a staid middle-aged cat and Bijou is a wanky teenager, so maybe it's a generational thing.

Okay, so I said I'd do it...

I made my students start blogs and promised I'd start one up, too. Now I have (2 weeks late), and I can see why they've been alternately amused and weirded-out by it.

I was finding links for them to explore and went to some archive of weird stuff, which led to something about Strawberry PopTart Blowtorches (really), which made me think about that old "microwave the Peeps" website, etc., etc. Sugar is highly flammable. I was stuck on the I-15 between Las Vegas and San Bernardino for hours one time as highway crews cleaned up the carcass of a burned-out semi that had been hauling sugar.

Anyway, back to the Peeps. YouTube has all sorts of movies in which people microwave their Peeps. I like this one which has a plot, of sorts, and apparently gay Peeps with bad French accents. Seriously, though, this "microwaving-the-Peeps" video is like its own new genre.