Look, Ma, no hair.

I cut my own hair this last week. The LAW, in her way, approved: "It doesn't look nearly as bad as I thought it might." Seriously, though, I thought how hard can it be? Use a #8 on top and a #4 on the sides; that was my compensation for my lack of expertise (when I have someone else cut it, it's a #7 and a #2). Besides, good gel can fix a variety of ills.

I've been reading pulp/thriller/detective novels: Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child's "Pendergast" series: Relic, Reliquary, Dance of Death, Cabinet of Curiousities, etc. A couple by Elizabeth Sims, including Holy Hell; T. Jefferson Parker's Blue Hour and Red Light.

And that's just in the last week.

At the same time, I've been trying to finish up my part of a paper I'm writing with Jonathan, so I've been re-reading Donna Haraway and cursing my brain for its slow, pudding-in-a-lint-trap behavior on matters professional.

An excerpt, to show I care:

To explore this phenomenon, we will bring together two key discussions in contemporary composition studies: (1) emotion, affect, pathos; and (2) the extent to which our students (and we, ourselves) are “cyborg,” to borrow from Haraway. In looking at the intersections of these topics, we will explore how today’s writers might make sense of subjectivity(ies) and literacy(ies) in the new media era. To what extent do we attempt to colonize students’ subjectivities through insistence on old technology/ textual models? To what extent is this colonization a preemptive strike against cyborged subjectivities more fully coming into being? What we want is a strong sense of how we discuss, with our students, technology and subjectivity in ways that extend beyond the cool critical thinking skills we can develop with videogames, or the *** of working with iMovies. Indeed, we want to push for something more, a (dare we say) humanistic, but still critical, approach to technology, particularly the new communications technologies.

I'm it!

I've been tagged by Gregory.
The rules:

1. Players offer eight random habits/facts about themselves.
   
2. If you're tagged, you need to write your own blog about your eight things and post these rules.
   
3. At the end of your blog post, you need to choose eight people to tag and list their names.
   
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.
   

My Random Stuff:

1. I still have five baby teeth.
   
2. I type 100 wpm.
3. I used to collect X-Men comics, and I think boxes of them are still stored in the closet under the stairs at my parents' house.
   
4. I've owned eleven cars in my lifetime, including several old VWs, a Vega, a Pinto, a '65 Mustang, a couple of Fords, a Datsun pickup...
   
5. I almost always have a song stuck in my head.
6. I'm thinking of adding on the LAW's last name as a sort of second middle name (like a lesbian confirmation name!)
   
7. I have a scar above my left eyebrow that I got from cracking my head open on the eaves of my house (I was 10 yrs old).
   
8. I haven't worn a skirt in 14 years.
   

People I'm tagging:

1. Christi, who would write the most fabulous blog in the world. Look alive, number 5!!
   
2. Brian, who really needs a blog of his own, because he thinks deep thoughts and is also a funny guy. No, not quite in that way.
   
3. Terri, who reads a lot of blogs, and a lot of books, so surely she has plenty of time to write about blogs and books, too?
   
4. The Simpleton
   
5. Donna
   
6. Jonathan
   
7. Sofido, which should count as three.
   
8. Chloe and Robert
   

C&W, again

Here, a visual representation of a textual representation of a fantasy representation: Shehun, my old DaMOO character. I miss DaMOO. I'm on SecondLife (in the cheap seats), but it's not the same (duh). This .gif was part of the hypnotic Captain-and-Tennille performance that we gave: Jonathan speaking, me accompanying with image, repeated image, text, repeated text. Iteration.

Working on my C&W paper

Really, I just want to be Laurie Anderson. Or have coffee with her.

High holy days

Yes, 'tis the season--this week marks the anniversary of my coming-out (23 years ago). I'm celebrating with wall-to-wall meetings at work: prep for the University Curriculum Committee (UCC); the UCC itself; Grad Council; thesis students; department Graduate Committee; a dozen other I'm forgetting; etc. Maybe I'll persuade the LAW that this momentous season deserves an extra-friendly date.

Last night, we had dinner with Charybdis and Mr. Charybdis. Now I'm trying to figure out whether the charbroiled shrimp or something else caused my, hmmm, active dreams: (1) all of my caps and fillings were falling out and my back molars were dissolving; and, later, in a separate bit of entertainment (2) I was pulling long gobs of stuff from my throat, after discovering I was possessed by a demon--and that this was the only way to exorcise him.

So this morning I'm just bemused by the broken and evil things my subconscious thinks might emerge from my mouth. But really, maybe it was the shrimp.

By the way, favorite new music discovery: Kathleen Edwards, whose performance I caught on Austin City Limits the other night as I was flipping through channels looking for Mission: Impossible reruns.

Finally!

If only this were required reading.

And you?

My Linguistic Profile:

60% General American English

15% Upper Midwestern

10% Midwestern

5% Dixie

5% Yankee

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

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.

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.

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.