Cyborgy

Breakfast in New York. I'm testing out mobile blogging--yep, dear reader, this post is from my cellphone.

I don't know why, but it's worth watching.

Hey, it's finals week. I must rely on others' creativity.

Just in time for CCCC

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?

Wait, you mean I had to come back?

New York was great. Good food, lots of people wearing black, and snow. I did manage to finish my paper (it had to do with immersive technology, representation, and post-cyborg ironies...trust me), and so earned my scholarly keep. The LAW and I strolled around her old stomping grounds (NYU) and almost crashed an Official Event, but I nixed it once I saw the Ukrainian folk dancers in native costume. I just couldn't do it.

One highlight was the Museum of Modern Art--more specifically, Van Gogh's Starry Night, which I managed to see in its lovely thick-paintiness just before MOMA closed and they kicked us out. I didn't realize it was there, and had wasted entirely too much time downstairs looking at idiocies like Martin Creed's "The Lights Going On and Off." Yeah, right. My next piece, for which I hope MOMA forks over tens of thousands of dollars, will be, hmmmm, "Sometimes You Step in Sticky Things," quickly followed by "The Room Smells Bad," or my signature piece "The Lights Go Off and You Get Hit With Pillows for No Reason," all of which would add to Creed's postmodern protest against "things" and "consumerism" and also explore "the qualities of 'nothing.'" What a crock of s***. Oh wait, that's my next piece.

Start spreadin' the news....

That's right, New York/New York. I'm presenting a paper that I'm still in the process of writing.

So I took a job compatability test and found out that I'd be great in a job involving things rather than people. But what if I just think of people as things? Does that count?

Seriously, though, raspberry farming and writing comic books up in the wild northwest looks pretty good. I'm not sure that I can convince the LAW (who'd have to bankroll the endeavor) of the value of this new life.

I'm here.

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.

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.