Where are we going, and what are we doing in this handbasket?

Snow in Redlands, California? Mais oui! Things are funky with the weather, so much so that the U.S. government might even start snapping their fingers and believing in Global Warming (see "Better late than never"). One wonders, really, if "late" or "never" really counts, but of course, one is cynical. In related news, the Brit scientists have reset the Doomsday Clock to show that we have moved two minutes closer to our eternal midnight.

On the bright side, I finally finished Richard Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale (all about evolution!) and am comforting myself with the idea that at least twice in the last billion years, life (mostly) got wiped out and rebounded....slowly. Once the giant reptiles vanished, our little nocturnal shrew-like ancestors made mammalian hay with the whole thing. What happens when we (the new giant reptiles) blow ourselves up? My money's on the cockroaches.

And speaking of giant reptiles, I've moved on to reading Eragon.

My favorite part of the MLA convention...

My friend Jonathan and me--balls, balls, balls!

Sometimes, the best thing about the day is the diner you find yourself in.

So winter quarter is less than 48 hours old. Yesterday, they closed campus because of high winds (so I had some extra time to finish reading schedules and syllabi); today, cleanup ensues--there are several downed trees and lots of trash blown about.

Today's adventure, on a personal note, was of the locking-myself-out-of-the-house genre. "No problem," I thought. "There are spares." Then I remembered that all of our spares were inside the house, since we had regathered them from housesitters and friends upon our return from Boston. Our dogsitter, the intrepid Marianne, wasn't answering her phone. "In the meantime, no problem," I told myself. "I'll just scale the fence and get the spare from the back house."

And so, with a boost from the front-porch bench (all 75 pounds of it, which I dragged to the side of the house), I got on top of our 6-foot cedar plank fence (yes, the gates were also locked), jumped down, and went out back. Dear reader, you already know this--there was no spare key there, either.

I climbed back over the fence to hang out with Morrigan, who was leashed to the front door waiting for me. Marianne appeared, let me in, and I came in to work.....after some salutary eggs and pancakes at DJ's with my friend Hossy.

at left: the view from DJ's

Fun at Blogthings

My Pirate Name Is...

Dirty Jack of the Baltic

What's Your Pirate Name?

Done, done, done!

I finished the essay ("Lesbian Spectacle and the Disruption of Desire") at 7 p.m. Pacific Time and emailed it away. The LAW has read it and pronounced it intelligible, and she approved my decision not to end the piece with "And we all know Paradise is chock-full of lesbians." Too bad.

It was good to finish it--I think I've proven to myself that the brain still works in interesting ways, although I'll have to beat the lobes back into their cold, conjoined torpor by Monday, when Winter Quarter starts.

Just what is a "chock," and with what does one fill it?

A new turn.

I'm trying to re-focus myself. Really, what I want to do is reach a level above "Dan Quayle" in my Civilization IV game, but I suspect that obsessive gaming will not help me finish the article that's due this week. An excerpt:

Again: any techne of lesbian sexuality will do well to embrace the Spectacular as a force that makes fleshly bodies temporarily readable through its sustained jumbling of representation and desire. I won’t rehearse decades of psychoanalytic and/or French feminist and/or poststructuralist thought here, but instead offer one small proposition that we might agree upon: the body—the fleshly thing that carries us around, this ugly bag of mostly water, as Gollum would have it—is never really our own, never in existence apart from representation and desire. Perhaps we can express this relationship thusly: our self at its most simply speakable or readable is comprised of ratios between the nodes of Body, Representation, and Desire, much like the classic rhetorical triangle of speaker, audience, and subject.

Now if I could just remember how to write complete sentences so I could finish the other 18.5 pages.