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Sunday, February 3rd, 2008
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10:13 pm
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I got to touch a miohippus yesterday.
And rare minerals including one that was just discovered called creedite, and some other fossils, and the skull of an ichthyosaur (?), and some other cool awesome stuff.
Every week it's like I get to live out the wildest dreams of a five-year-old boy. Which is weird. But it's hard not to slip into that mood, really, and instantly be reduced to saying "wow!" to yourself gape-mouthed because damn, we get to do some awesome shit in grad school. Who wouldn't kill to have some guy in a museum say "if you wanna see something just go ahead and slide out the drawer and hold it, just don't break it" when you're surrounded by entire epochs and billions of years of history?
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(comment on this)
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| Saturday, February 2nd, 2008
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12:39 am - Thundersnow
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Our apartment complex and the immediate surrounding blocks were host tonight to an extremely rare meteorological phenomenon called thundersnow. It consisted of a small handful of intense, loud, and dangerous lightning strikes and thunder claps, and about an inch of snow in a very short time.
Seeing it snow and then seeing the flash of lightning without the thunder clap, my first thought was in fact lightning since the computer speakers crackled and the hair on my arm stood on end - then confusion, because snowstorms don't have lightning. Then I thought maybe one of the hospital's helicopters had crashed nearby. A little bit after that, we heard the thunder clap, which was more like a percussive roar. Now, this may seem confusing. If the storm is directly overhead, shouldn't the thunderclap be right on top of the lightning? Not in thundersnow. The snow particles mess with the sound and contain it within a very small geographical area - one square mile, whereas you can hear a normal thunderstorm four to five miles away. It also delays the sound and muffles it, so if the thunderclap is as loud as it was (it set off car alarms here, made the dog nuts, and gave me a mild headache) it means get the fuck away from the windows.
To give you some sense of how rare this is:
- Only 0.07% of snowstorms produce any sort of thunder or lightning.
- Most of these are technically sleet-based or sleet-and-snow mixed; at least on our block it was pure snow, and a couple other blocks are reporting pure snow as well.
- Most of these thundersnows occur directly in the mountains or very near large bodies of water. If they happen in the US it's likely to be in the Great Lakes region.
- Most of the meteorologists studying this phenomenon have not gotten the chance to experience it for themselves, but amateur meteorologists practically wet their pants over it.
- Because it is so rare, it is very understudied.
Our storm occurred far away from a large body of water, happened too far away from the mountains, and produced a legitimate strike to the ground. A house across the street from the apartment complex was hit (no injuries, nobody home).
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| Thursday, January 31st, 2008
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9:29 pm - This is why I need a gang of toughs.
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So this is what happened to me before my 4:00 class today.
3:40ish, I go to the vending machine and it takes all my money. 2 bucks. I'd forgotten my credit card at home so this was gonna be my entire lunch, dammit. A kind stranger takes pity on me and buys me chips. Well, insists on buying me chips. I let him be nice, and it was a terribly nice thing to do. I popped half a Vicodin from some mild post-surgery discomfort, and go to grade the last of my papers by my classroom while waiting for the class before it to get out.
3:55, the class gets out and I am done grading papers. I gather my stuff to get out as the class walks in the center of the hall, as people do.
A HUGE BITCH IN BOOTS, not looking where she's going, SLAMS into me. Instead of, oh, looking at what she's slammed into, she keeps going - she kicked me once in the ribs, and once in the abdomen. You know, where I'd just had surgery. Then she finally stopped and looked down, and then stepped over me and went on her way talking with her friends about how many crack pimps she'd blown the night before or whatever the hell stupid whores talk about. Halfway down the hall she finally says "oh sorry" and giggles, but I've just been physically rattled or in shock or something and I'm stunned and can't speak yet. At no point does she actually stop and ask me if I am okay, or if she has injured me in any way from KICKING ME TWICE.
The answer to that, by the way, is yes. I had to go to urgent care, then the ER, to be checked out for internal bleeding. Thankfully she did not mess up the surgery or rupture anything, though how I'm not more hurt after being KICKED BY BOOTS IN THE SURGERY-PLACE is beyond me. The laundry list of what she did to me:
1. Strained back, particularly around the left side of my rib cage. It hurts to take a deep breath or to twist to the right.
2. Bruised ankle, which happened because when she slammed into me the impact ground the protrusion on my ankle into the tile floor.
3. Bruised abdomen.
4. And I'm just finding out that I also have a strained knee, because it hurts like hell.
Swedish Hospital asked me if I want to press charges. The thing is, even though I could and she would get nailed for negligence (no intent for assault even though I could at least charge her, but not stopping even casually to check on me is clear negligence), I frankly do not have the time or patience for some goddamn police thing. I also could sue her for pain and suffering and medical expenses - but I have fantastic health insurance, and I'm too lazy to get a lawyer even as it would be fun to make her cry and be poor at the same time.
REDACTED-but she will not be getting away with no guilt or remorse. No, no physical threats. I am not psycho, and am way too lazy to cause physical harm. It's just - she doesn't know that, now, does she? Sometimes the best revenge is letting them wait for the other shoe to drop.
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(2 comments | comment on this)
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| Wednesday, January 30th, 2008
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9:29 am
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| Tuesday, January 29th, 2008
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11:44 pm
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I never thought I would say the phrase
"not safe for work due to barnacle penis"
in my whole life.
I feel compelled to tell you I was not searching YouTube for "barnacle sex" or any other less-than-wholesome purpose.
Also:
Clowny Clown Clown! Not safe for work due to clown toe-sucking and clown burlesque dancers. Oh, hey, more phrases I never thought I'd ever type. In fact, I wish those phrases never existed.
And the guy who originated that "John 3:16" business at sporting events ended up pretty tragic.
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| Monday, January 28th, 2008
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1:20 pm
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After the House applied censure to Douglas Bruce this week, God apparently felt the punishment was not... earth-shattering enough and showed his displeasure more directly. Hey, the county does bear [i]some[/i] of the blame for having that nozzle in a position of authority.
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| Friday, January 25th, 2008
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2:40 pm - Social Privilege
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Beneath the cut is an exercise designed to facilitate sociological discussion. If you reproduce it for your own blog, be sure to include the discussion and copyright information.
Americans are screwed up when it comes to class and privilege. We don't like to think of ourselves as having advantages that have nothing or little to do with hard work, or contemplate that a large part of our success and failure in life is due to our upbringing. The patronizing "bootstraps" plan of American success, wherein even the poorest crack-addicted baby can become a captain of industry if only he was willing to work for it like the rest of us upstanding citizens, necessarily includes the idea that the poor are not deserving of our help and charity Interestingly, politicians and leaders who claim to be the most religious are the biggest proponents of bootstraps; Christ's extensive ministry to the poor and message that all are deserving of our esteem and dignity are never part of the program for even "compassionate" conservatives. (Note: Not a Christian, but I think helping the poor is a terrific idea. It's why I want to teach at Metro, because I believe open admissions helps level the playing field.)
Paradoxically, "bootstraps" for the poor exists in the same mindset and is propogated by the exact same people who manipulate class sentiments and tell the middle class they are justified in feeling as though they deserve more breaks than other social classes. If the rich get breaks, it's because the system is designed for them; if the poor get breaks, it's because some pink bleeding heart liberal wants them to have a free ride. The middle class never get breaks, man. They work and slave all their lives (at companies making profit from outsourced and underpaid lower castes in other countries which also give them tax breaks and freedom from regulation) to get the house (financed by banking laws and regulations) in a suburb (constructed via a complex network of tax breaks to developers and infrastructure cost-shifting to inner cities), send their kids to a decent school (subsidized by yet another complex tax-shifting scheme to lower middle class property taxes), and afford basic medical care (insurance subsidized by negotiated cost breaks and employers at the expense of the uninsured and the hospitals that sometimes deign to serve them). They do this to get a better life for their children (which earns them tax credits) and send them to college (in large part subsidized by research grants and the federal government). Even though the mere existence of a middle class indicates that a United States citizen exists, in a global context, because of massive amounts of privilege. Almost everything I see when I look around my apartment is, in some small way, the economic result of pushing someone else's face in the mud.
And yet you might say I grew up poor. I know what it's like to sleep with roaches and go to school with trashy people, swinging from the poverty line like the the apes the Reagan administration said we all were. Yes, even the kids - Reagan Republicans extended being poor as a personal failing to even the children. I know that there are people who didn't start working until they were 15 or 16, but damned if they weren't lucky they never had to work under the table or get up at 4 am to finish a before-school job or shovel shit. Yes, shovel horseshit. And be happy to have the opportunity.
Part of this exercise in privilege is to take a detailed stock of how people have different kinds of privileges. It's as much mental and intellectual as it is financial, and none of these criteria are supposed to be cut-and-dried. For blog purposes, bold what applies to you, add comments where you wish, and add them all up.
If your father went to college before you started
If your father finished college before you started
If your mother went to college before you started
If your mother finished college before you started
- My mother finished her master's degree before I started college. Consider that she was a teenage unwed mother, that she bounced from crap job to crap job between undergraduate and graduate school, and that she didn't go to grad school until I was a teenager and she'd had damn well enough of being poor. BUT consider also that the support of her family allowed her to complete her undergrad instead of having to drop out. And consider that even thinking that an undergrad degree and a master's degree for someone in her situation is usually wildly inappropriate. In this case, the privilege does not lie in having an easy road to college, but in being allowed the freedom to presume to go. Most people in her situation would be told, through a variety of lifelong ingrained social cues, that she fucked up and college was now out of the question for the rest of her life. Her privilege, and mine, is a supportive extended family. Edit: I don't agree with the mindset that teenage mothers should not go to college, of course, but tons of people do.
If you have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.
If your family was the same or higher class than your high school teachers
If you had a computer at home when you were growing up
If you had your own computer at home when you were growing up
If you had more than 50 books at home when you were growing up
If you had more than 500 books at home when you were growing up
If were read children's books by a parent when you were growing up
- Starting with the questions about computers, here the lack of response is misleading. In this area I had an immense amount of privilege. As a teenager I did finally get an old hand-me-down Mac SE, but more importantly I had access to a school that also had computers and the resources to teach me how to use them. That's huge. Also, we may not have had a lot of books, but we had a large, well-staffed community library that had not been forced to close from lack of budget, been destroyed by a natural disaster, or forced to hire unqualified personnel because they're cheaper. I spent most of my afternoons there after school and read just about everything I could get my hands on. Also, I learned how to read at an early age. A shocking and depressing percentage of families are aliterate - they do not read, and they raise children who struggle with reading their entire lives. These children also struggle with reasoning and analytical skills. Why don't parents read to their children or take them to the library? Like most aspects of poverty (intellectual or economic) this is probably cyclical. Parents whose children struggle with reading usually struggle themselves. Their parents didn't read to them either. They attend overcrowded schools where teachers don't have the time to do anything except prepare them for the next standardized test. We tend to repeat the patterns we grow up with; rebellion against the things we didn't do as kids is an exceptional event, sociologically and educationally. For a child of a non-reader to become a reader is rare and usually the result of luck of geography or finding that one person who is willing to take the time.
If you ever had lessons of any kind as a child or a teen
- I had horseback riding lessons through 4-H and a private trainer. I cleaned stalls, groomed and exercised my trainer's horses, worked at horse shows, and helped teach beginners. I also entered horse shows to win tack and equipment as well as the occasional cash prizse. I had a job outside of horseback riding to afford these things. I didn't pay for it all myself, but on the surface even horse ownership looks like an immense amount of privilege - when in fact we did it on the cheap, and it was closer to subsistence ranching than the country club. Still, though, this was an option that was open to me. While it's not as much of a privilege as it may seem on the surface, often privilege exists in merely having the freedom to choose your hobbies and interests.
If you had more than two kinds of lessons as a child or a teen
If the people in the media who dress and talk like you were portrayed positively
I am a white person of Midwestern origin. The anchorpeople on the evening news look and talk like me. That's huge. This is a subtle, but very effective, way of teaching children to accept later roles of authority and expertise. People who do not look and talk like you delivering the news teaches you only to accept a hierarchy of authority that does not include you or people like you.
If you had a credit card with your name on it before college
If you had or will have less than $5000 in student loans when you graduate
If you had or will have no student loans when you graduate
If you went to a private high school
If you went to summer camp
- Girl Scout Camp. We learned how to survive in the wild and we milked goats and learned how to operate a farm from a bunch of butch lesbians. It was a weird camp for the '80s. My mother's car barely made it up the mountains every year to take me, but still - I got to go, and the lessons I learned there have gotten me out of many scrapes.
If you had a private tutor
(US students only) If you have been to Europe more than once as a child or teen
(International question) If you have been to the US more than once as a child or teen
If your family vacations involved staying at hotels rather than KOA or at relatives homes
If all of your clothing has been new
If your parents gave you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them
- Still, I had a car. Not bad, even if it was falling apart. See, someone died, nobody wanted his shitty car, and I got it. It ran - just barely.
If there was original art in your house as a child or teen
- My grandmother paints, so of course we had her paintings. On another message board someone questioned the inclusion of "original art," specifically because art produced by family isn't in the same league as having an original Picasso hanging over the mantle. However, in thinking about this question family art should count, and count a lot. Seeing your family and other people you know as creative allows you to imagine yourself creating art or other types of media. Being a creator and not a drone is a form of privilege, often moreso than seeing yourself as an attorney or doctor because it involves risk with little hope of financial reward.
If you had a phone in your room
If your parent owned their own house or apartment when you were a child or teen
- Thanks to HUD and the fact that nobody with any goddamn brains wants to live in Pleasant View. But it was a huge step up from where we were before. For one, nobody decapitated their significant others.
If you had your own room as a child or teen
- Only child. This is questioned, too, by people - what if you're an only child, and so had your own room by default? However, being an only child means that your mother had both access to and freedom to use contraceptives, that she was not forced to stay with men who would forego contraceptive use at her expense and have another child, and that she does not have multiple children in the hopes that one of them will be able to grow up and support her in old age. Family planning in an IMMENSE privilege, globally and nationally. Simply having enough private space in your house or apartment indicates that family planning was likely successful and allowed.
If you participated in an SAT/ACT prep course
If you had your own cell phone in High School
If you had your own TV as a child or teen
If you opened a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College
If you have ever flown anywhere on a commercial airline
- As cheap as commercial airfare is these days, can you think of many poor families who can afford to spend $150 on a place ticket for any reason?
If you ever went on a cruise with your family
If your parents took you to museums and art galleries as a child or teen
- Again, this is privilege of outlook and intellect. My mother took the time to make museums a priority, and I went to schools that could take us on field trips as well.
If you were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family
- I was insulated (har!) from knowing the cost of energy bills, just not much else. Aside from being connected with the knowledge of what it takes to survive in the U.S. on a basic level, parents privilege their children by allowing them freedom from financial anxiety. Even though I grew up with plenty of financial anxiety, it wasn't as bad as many of my poorer friends.
My total is 14. So there you have it - I was privileged growing up. These exercises are important because we are not encouraged to think about our advantages, or the fact that some people don't have them. There are a million other things they could have included on this list that also indicate privilege - more about utilities, personal safety, victims of violent crimes - but I think this is meant to be more about subtle advantages and privileges we may not even pause to consider. And none of this is meant to indicate on a black-and-white level whether one person is quantifiably more privileged than another; there are plenty of people who have had all the advantages in the world and still can't seem to convert them to real-world success. But it never hurts to consider these issues every now and again, and there's nothing wrong with leaving the exercise feeling damn lucky.
I disagree with some statements in the exercise directions. The intent in saying that some people have had to work harder than others - that people with privilege have had to work less - is contradicted by the last part of the directions in exercise. Because this is meant to spark facilitated discussion, I wouldn't worry about it too much; however, I have been in classes in which the rich were automatically the devil because of their advantages. People sitting there, in college, white, wearing clothes likely made in south-of-the-border sweatshops, will stare at a depiction of life amongst the rich and just hate. Hate Paris Hilton all you want, but tarring the rich with the brush of callow uncaring does not make sense when people like Bill Gates or the recently-departed Astor matriarch use their money for the greater good. It makes no more sense to hate someone for being born rich than it does to hate someone for being born poor. Properly applied, I then hope that the examination of non-monetary privilege can show that finances can take a backseat to mindset and the availability of good upbringing regardless of money. While rich parents must carefully teach their children to not rely on their trust funds and treat people with kindness and dignity, poor parents must teach their children to create opportunities and take advantage of everything that can get. Simply because someone grows up not having to worry about food and shelter does not mean that they are happy or functioning human beings or have never faced hardship of any kind. Conversely, simply because someone grows up worrying about their personal safety and food supply does not mean that they cannot appreciate activities not directly central to daily survival. That is what it means to live in the American class system, which does exist but is not so rigid and immovable as a caste.
( The Social Privilege Exercise )
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| Thursday, January 24th, 2008
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6:09 pm - Watch the passive voice! C+.
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Musings apropos of a first day as a fledgling - very fledgling - educator and the past few months of slavering for the slightest bit of professional mentoring and development I could lay my hands on. ... Teaching allows me to experience personal growth moreso than any other profession I've ever held. I don't mean that teaching limited to a college setting or even to the work I'm doing now, but any time I have had occasion to teach another being how to become something more, I feel like it's what I'm supposed to be doing.
The first teaching I ever did was as a peer educator in elementary school. This sounds more formal than it is. I grew up a very advanced reader. In the third grade I had a teacher, Ms. Purcell. (Possibly Purcelli.) I became convinced that she hated me and was unnecessarily harsh on me. I know I complained to my mother about this a few times, but children aren't always the best judge of what is and is not harsh. In a public school, what was Ms. Purcell supposed to do with a child who far outstripped even the advanced reading and writing groups in her class, who finished books in a half hour that were supposed to last several months of education?
Ms. Purcell sacrificed my personal opinion of her in order to make sure I got an education. She recognized that regular public school was not the place for me, and it can't have been easy to deal with outliers of any degree in a classroom of so many students. In the third grade, though I hated going to her classroom, she suggested an alternative school that could better educate the gifted and talented. The next year, that's where I went. Somehow, I bypassed most of the extensive waitlist - and I don't doubt for a second, now, that she was a large part of making it happen.
She did another thing for me. As I said, I was an outlier, particularly in reading. Once or twice a week, she sent me out of the classroom and to an outbuilding that contained an overflow of kindergarteners. In those days kindergarten students were expected to have at least some grasp of reading. There was a group of more independent readers who needed less direction than those who were more beginners, and the school gave me the informal responsibility of helping these kids along. Ms. Purcell gave me some tips and told me about sounding it out and being patient with them, and I remember being glad to help out - and extremely gratified when one of the kids figured out a difficult word at my urging. Never had a clue the entire time that this was as much for me as it was for them.
Since then I've taught in a variety of settings. I've trained animals from various backgrounds and traumas, and each time one of them made an intellectual or psychological leap I was so proud I could bust. I helped my horse trainers teach beginning riders, particularly during warmups, and even though I've been dedicatedly childfree practically since birth, watching someone I'd helped win a ribbon at a show or master a concept they'd thought of as impossible was like a drug. I taught students from high school up to my peers about U.N. procedures and debate, and saw many of them outpace me in skill - it didn't occur to me to be jealous, just proud that this person would use their skills to make the world a better place and I had something to do with that. And then I wrote procedural and technical manuals for my co-workers, and though they took it the wrong way most of the time - shades of me and Ms. Purcell, really - teaching and training was not about having authority, but sharing knowledge and acknowledging the tremendous privilege of being in that position.
I have had a few professors over the years that I place in positions of reverence and awe. This is not the academic pedestal, but an acknowledgment that I would consider it an amazing accomplishment if I ever had one-tenth the impact on another student that they've had on me over the years. Even though I do know what it's like to enrich someone through teaching, it's difficult to look back on relationships with teachers and truly identify yourself with the skilled lecturers and instructors you admire. It seems too egotistical, but more than that, impossible for us to consider that as teachers we are consciously placing ourselves in a reversal of our previous roles as students.
I think teachers, and particularly beginning teachers, continue because they remember their time as students and in their work pay homage to those select few people who formed their outlook. Not just on education, but on life and in ways parents can never approach. Teachers are the first outside authority a child must accept, and the first non-relative who in the best of worlds is dedicated to the child's wellbeing. We owe our parents life and they are responsible for our shelter and love and safety, but it's taken for granted and even enforced by a considerable criminal justice system. A parent can be brought up on legal charges if they abdicate their responsibility. A teacher, recognizes the student, is under no such obligation - it's their job. If they don't want to do it, they can ignore your questions in class, treat you like a lesser student, grade you harshly, or just quit. Lord knows plenty of them do it to plenty of students, some of whom deserve it and most of whom do not. Just as we all have that teacher who's been special to us, we all have that teacher who behaved absolutely heinously with little to no recourse other than mustering through the year as unscathed as possible.
This is not to say that the work parents do is not special or vital or even less significant than the job of teaching (it's more significant and special, of course); but to children, accepting a non-familial authority is arguably the largest sociological leap they will make. To teachers, advocating for a student and accepting a huge amount of responsibility for them is done outside of the family bond as well. A parent gets to see the results of what they do as a child grows. They have reasonable hope and expectation that the child will, given time, recover from those turbulent periods of rebellion and sass and grow into a relationship of mutual respect and productivity. A teacher pours work and advocacy into a revolving door of students, 99.9% of whom they won't even see the next year let alone as adults with professions of their own. They have no assurance that their impact will be remembered, but they do it anyway.
It's easy for us, being practiced adults, to accept our role as students. We spend over 1/5th of our lives purely as students and learning to accept authority where it is deserved, not adopting it and wielding it ourselves. Once the veil of that role is lifted when we become teachers, we still hold on to the gratitude of having been taught. Considering ourselves as peers with the same educators we once revered is as alien to us as when, later in life, we may serve as caregivers to our own parents. The paradigm shift is radical and nearly inconceivable, as much as we know intellectually and rationally that we have adopted these roles of authority by degrees.
I've spoken with many of my former professors about educational development and academia. By degrees, they have been pushing me into the role of teacher for several years now whether they realize it or not. Every time she attends the library book sale, my old history advisor Dr. McCall plucks books from the piles and tells me to read them. I always do. Curiously, I don't remember her doing this with a single history book. No, she recommends books on intellectual development and the art of education and where we are going as an educated society. I imagine she hands out these recommendations flippantly and because she enjoys the books in question, but the fact that these help with professional development adds something to the act. She goes outside her role as my professor and starts contributing to my development as a potential peer, a level of esteem unexpected in someone who is placed in the selective and holy pantheon of my lifelong instruction. Paradigm shift - there it is, subtle but effective. There are other professors, of course, whose roles in pushing me above a simple student role have had huge impacts; I could go on all day, but I already have. This is just one example of how a small action from a dedicated professor can have a big impact in how I see myself as a student and as someone capable of educating another person.
Rarely do professors say these things explicitly, but I imagine many of them are as affected by their relationships with us as we are. I want to teach at Metro because I owe it more than any other institution. As I drop in to talk to my former professors, I perceive a difference in how they relate to me and I to them. They are no longer responsible for my grades and under no obligation to talk to me. They're in my building, but I go to a different school so no longer is there an expectation of a professional wall, the boundaries professors carefully construct to maintain their classroom authority. No matter how advanced you are as a student or how beloved, even if you're convinced that the professor delights at seeing you on the enrollment list, the wall is there. And there is a noticeable difference when it's not. Sure, our professors are human and we know it - they have their flaws and frailties. But when we're their students, they're different. So when I find a professor has remembered, out of the thousands of assignments over the past few years they've had to grade and read, something I've written it's not because they have to any more. It's because teachers learn from what we write as students, they just can't (and shouldn't, while they're still teaching us and under the same department in any way) admit it. We have our own wisdom as students and our teachers help us develop it - but the good ones look for validation and even solace in us as much as we do from them. Or else, what would be the point in teaching through the revolving door?
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| Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008
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5:00 am
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So far this year, I have:
1. Gotten my front tooth fixed.
2. Got new glasses that actually fit.
3. Got a kick-ass job.
4. Possibly have another kick-ass job.
5. Read several excellent new books.
And in a few hours I will have my plumbing rusted shut, so to speak.
This year is getting off to a splendid start!
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| Friday, January 18th, 2008
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1:02 am
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Friday-Monday: Colossal amount of homework and other work, and my semester doesn't even start until Wednesday.
Tuesday: Surgery.
Wednesday: Buy books. Sign papers to begin down the long, long road of teaching in academia. I'm actually excited about that and amazed I even got a position and actually hadn't thought about even looking because I'm only a first-year, but these things do fall into my lap don't they? Then class. Probably on painkillers most of the day, oh well.
Thursday: Introduce myself to students and hopefully get some feel for their experience and enthusiasm via osmosis maybe, then go to my own class.
Friday-Monday: Die. And update CV.
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(comment on this)
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| Monday, January 14th, 2008
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5:29 pm - Avant-Garde Garfield/Billy Idol crossover.
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| Tuesday, January 8th, 2008
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1:11 pm
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I did not get the job at Bessemer. But before I get condolences, remember:
1. I was not even looking for a job.
2. I will now be able to get Intro to Public History over with.
3. I was underqualified and I believe they knew this.
4. Had I gotten the job, I would now be panicked about how the hell I was going to do all of it. Which, well, I could have come up with a roadmap and planned my way out of it, and I would have done a fine job - but they don't know that I can plan and improvise my way out of anything, and that doesn't as much enter into the equation.
5. I made it a lot farther into the selection process than I thought, and considering this is my first professional job query, that's damn good. A phone interview on the first try? Awesome!
6. The interview was a great experience and taught me a lot about what to expect and what kinds of answers to give.
7. Without such a steady responsible job to keep me tied, I can continue me road-tripping practices unabated. AND I can do trivia, and pipe band, and all the stuff here I wouldn't be able to do if I'd gotten the job.
And I think most important of all, 7. Whoever did get the job has to relocate to Pueblo.
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| Wednesday, January 2nd, 2008
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11:19 pm - I got porn!
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I get on the most awesome mailing lists from being a member of the American Library Association!
I also got Book Row in the mail from Amazon, which is awesome. I can think of few people who would be interested in a very thick history of bookstores in a certain area of New York during the Progressive Era. Fortunately a good portion of those few people are my friends so they generally don't mind me prattling on about it.
Okay, on to the porn. It's the Demco catalog, bringing sexy pictures of brazen shelving and cataloging equipment right to my doorstep! And holy shit do I want integral double-faced shelving right now. If you know me, you know that's sadly not a joke. Any height or base width or color, though I covet the 48" height most of all because I am wee. And I could hang stuff from the top, or whatever. I even have a place for it. The husband, however, refuses to subsidize my book habit further, particularly when furniture is involved. He's right to do it, but.... COVET. Okay?
Also, for my sad obsession with tracking down every single town that has ever existed in Colorado - and also because, like the guy in Memento, I put important facts for long-term projects on index cards because I cannot be trusted to remember shit - a card catalog! Yes, they still make them! Not like I'd need a stand - it's just, I got so flustered with keeping track of all my index cards for my thesis and eventually one day I dropped them in a mud puddle, along with a bottle of black ink, which broke, and after that they were no longer usable. Fortunately I made backups for a lot of the information and was scrupulous about citations, so I can track everything down again for revision. BUT STILL. A front-facing card catalog that fit 3x5s would be awesome. I don't think the Demco ones do, sadly.
On the more useful side, I also covet this booktruck. See, sometimes I like to study in the library, sometimes in the living room, sometimes in the bedroom, sometimes on the deck. It would be AWESOME to have this booktruck which I can keep all the long-term projects on and just wheel wherever it is I want to study. Or any booktruck really, like the metal ones or whatever, but I like these wood ones best.
My previous wishlist is also still valid.
OH and I got my grades but I didn't, like, broadcast it or anything. Yes, the semester from hell. If I passed everything I would be lucky. I thought I had failed the class where I kept having to leave and go have crying jags.
( The grades )
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| Wednesday, December 19th, 2007
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1:54 pm - Awwww.
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It's Chibi Pennywise. He's soooo happy to see everybody. Click on him to see his facelift!
From here. The entire point was to take scary pictures and make them happy, and it turns out normal Pennywise is in fact the least horrifying incarnation.
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| Thursday, December 13th, 2007
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3:58 pm
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So, I heard that the shooting script as well as the book for Charlie Wilson's War contained numerous references to Wilson's support for and bankrolling of the mujahideen in Afghanistan, among them a lil' precocious whipper-snapper named Osama bin Laden.
Yes, if you're wondering, Wilson's the guy responsible for the Taliban, and set in motion a politicization of religious wars in that area that ultimately caused bin Laden's alienation away from the highest bidder. Something about Texas politicians makes 'em love those testy kooks, 'cause George Bush gave them quite a lot of taxpayers' money a month or so before 9/11.
Anyhoo, even though the Wilson-bin Laden BFF thing has been common knowledge and he hadn't been ashamed of it by any means, the entire effect of everything he did as well as the major players to come out of it SOMEHOW did not make it into the print. HOW CURIOUS. I'm thinking that if Molly Ivins were still around today, somehow that would be more of an issue than it currently is.
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1:37 pm
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My name is Yon Yonson, I come from Wisconsin. I work in a lumber mill there. The people I meet when I walk down the street, they ask me my name and I say my name is Yon Yonson, I come from Wisconsin. I work in a lumber mill there. The people I meet when I walk down the street, they ask me my name and I say my name is Yon Yonson, I come from Wisconsin. I work in a lumber mill there. The people I meet when I walk down the street, they ask me my name and I say my name is Yon Yonson, I come from Wisconsin. I work in a lumber mill there. The people I meet when I walk down the street, they ask me my name and I say....
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| Saturday, December 8th, 2007
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11:26 am
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| Tuesday, December 4th, 2007
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8:51 am
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Here's how the war on dirty sinful reefer is going:
First, medicinal marijuana was passed statewide by voters.
Arrests of medicinal marijuana users under federal drug charges brought whopping fines of $75.
Arrests of medicinal marijuana users under various federal and city laws with pre-diagnosis but without a permit brought... whopping fines of $75.
Convictions of federal marijuana possession charges started specifying that medicinal marijuana then be returned to the user anyway.
Judges started seeing cases of growers with and without medicinal conditions or permits.
Judges started finding loopholes in the law and harshly interpreting search warrants, everything from specifying the wrong exact number of plants to the locations of those plants.
Casual, personal, non-medicinal use of marijuana gets passed at the citywide level.
Personal and non-medicinal use and possession is now the lowest law-enforcement priority, as it has been in many places in Colorado.
Cases of medicinal growers must now be proven with existing, live plants. Which means in order to garner a conviction, police can no longer toss plants in an evidence locker: they must care for them and continue to grow and harvest them, or have the cases thrown out because it's harder to prove it's the defendant's particular strain on a dessicated plant. (And yes, this is a really big load of horseshit as far as reasons to throw out a drug case.)
Then the police must return the plants afterward.
And now, if the police for any reason allow plants to die or do not harvest them properly, the department has to compensate the growers.
So, the police are now prohibited from sticking their necks out to arrest anyone for medicinal marijuana regardless of amount or permit, or for casual use under a certain amount; once arrested, they must be so specific in warrants as to make the process inordinately lengthy and impossible to do correctly; they must care for and cultivate live plants when those are seized; and they must pay for it if they don't. Under the best of conditions, if they get a conviction, they go through all this effort for less than a hundred bucks - and then have to return the drugs regardless of outcome.
I think this is a pretty strong sign that judges are really, really sick of seeing these cases.
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| Monday, November 26th, 2007
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12:34 am
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"You Can Beat The A-Bomb" is this awesome Cold War propaganda piece about how there's a lot of unnecessary fuss on nuclear fallout and radiation. It's really not that bad, folks. People in Hiroshima are back to normal, after all. (No really.) And did you know that the heat from a nuclear blast makes the radiation rise so high, nobody can be affected by it? And then it incinerates itself. Don't worry about fallout, The Authorities will tell you what to do - it'll be about 24 hours. After that, just stay away from puddles.
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| Thursday, November 22nd, 2007
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10:46 pm
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Pants Man! Wee wee comes out!
Brought to you by WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH JAPAN and DISTUHORRIFILARIOUS THE NEW ADJECTIVE THAT DESCRIBES EVERYTHING ON THE INTERNET (TM)
Also:
Goddammit, Jimmy Dean, why you gotta fuck with a southern person who don't eat maple but need that 16 oz. sausage to use as a condiment on T-Bones?
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