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[12 Oct 2003|01:50am] |
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A teacher who recently lost his son in a sudden recurrence of illness reminded me how much pain there is in the world, and a great dinner with friends reminded me that happiness is very much an intangible thing. I've got to be more mindful of these things.
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[12 Oct 2003|01:19am] |
Thanks to those who sent me good wishes - I believe, without preemptive hope-baiting, that I did very well. It's harder to have that faith, though, when every answer I got was (rightfully) a monster floating-point; I guess Math doesn't believe in integers in the land of the M.A. anymore.
Thanks to Borders Books and Music and a lack of self-control I now find myself in possession of a great many more movies: Sergei Bondarchuk's 6 hour long "War and Peace", Ingmar Bergman's Trilogy (Winter Light, Through a Glass Darkly, and The Silence), and Kurosawa's "Throne of Blood" and "Rhapsody in August".
Opinions ... take them or leave them. It has come to my attention that Anti-gay preacher Fred Phelps has announced intentions to erect a monument to Matthew Shepard the gay college student. The monument will be no memorial, however; Phelps says the monument would be 5 to 6 feet tall and made of marble or granite. It would bear a bronze plaque bearing the image of Shepard and have an inscription reading:
MATTHEW SHEPARD, Entered Hell October 12, 1998, in Defiance of God's Warning: 'Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind; it is abomination.' Leviticus 18:22.
There have been petitions to stop him -- I say let him go on with it. Let him say what he has to say and exercise his right to free speech. Maybe it will make people realize how useless and utterly thoughtless literalist religions really are.
And, for those who believe it's wrong, would you want Fred Phelps to say nice things about you? How about Idi Amin?
When I say this next postulate, it is certainly not meant to denigrate the pro-active causes in social and political justice organized religion ameliorate. They can, and have, done much to make the world a better place. However, it just seems to me to be an utter waste of time to talk about the evils of homosexuality, female priests, or birth control when there are far more pressing, obdurate concerns in the world at present.
Honestly -- without consulting a holy text what is so wrong about homosexuality or making women priests? Do these things make people any stupider, meaner, or sadder? How do they hurt the world? If religion wants to continue to condemn such practices that seem - without some dogmatic theological background behind it - utterly devoid of an ethical or moral context maybe people may finally wake up and realize what phthisis the superstructure of it all is anyway. IMHO, while knowing the Mysteries may bring people meaning, so does having a well of empathy. Indeed, the latter seems more important and relevant in my mind.
I hate to reiterate such a basic point here, but perhaps the reason in and of itself is that religion, with specificity but without sufficiency to Christianity, was formed as a reformist movement that existed outside of the law or the will of the majority. When Constantine embedded religion within the state it ceased to challenge the system and became the system itself.
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[11 Oct 2003|12:09am] |
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I take my first grad school midterm tomorrow. If you read this please send some good wishes my way. I really want to ace this - and, without overconfidence, I believe I've done what is necessary to accomplish that.
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[09 Oct 2003|10:33pm] |
Addenum ..
it looks like, fingers crossed, I won't need a sigmoid colectomy after all. I like not being gutted like a fish a second time, so it's a small comfort.
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| true ... |
[09 Oct 2003|10:29pm] |
Well when you're sitting there in your silk upholstered chair
Talkin' to some rich folk that you know
Well I hope you won't see me in my ragged company
Well, you know I could never be alone
Take me down little Susie, take me down
I know you think you're the queen of the underground
And you can send me dead flowers every morning
Send me dead flowers by the mail
Send me dead flowers to my wedding
And I won't forget to put roses on your grave
Well when you're sitting back in your rose pink Cadillac
Making bets on Kentucky Derby Day
I'll be in my basement room with a needle and a spoon
And another girl to take my pain away
Take me down little Susie, take me down
I know you think you're the queen of the underground
Send me dead flowers every morning
Send me dead flowers by the mail
Send me dead flowers to my wedding
And I won't forget to put roses on your grave
Take me down little Susie, take me down
I know you think you're the queen of the underground
Send me dead flowers every morning
Send me dead flowers in the mail
Say it with dead flowers in my wedding
And I won't forget to put roses on your grave
No, I won't forget to put roses on your grave
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[09 Oct 2003|09:29pm] |
Another thing ...
I think people are too afraid to recognize that Hitler was a man, and that men are capable of things that are viewed as completely amoral. It's undoubtedly the behaviorist in me: give a man - any man - a wrecked economy, a disgraced government, a nation-state where groups like the Freikorps stormtroopers are a true source of power and it will happen again, whether or not the man wears a funny moustache.
I worry that those that protest too much, such as the eternally-present-on-my-shit-list ADL, serve the effect of not awakening man to the danger of unitarianist Fascism but in merely melodramatizing acts of phthisis in the world. Put a little moustache on anyone, or a swastika near them, and the person has become the face of evil. Nothing on earth could be more evil than Hitler was.
What good does this thought process do anyone except those in the Cultural Oppression Olympics?
I hold to what I perceive as my historically correct view: the Third Reich only sought about the mass extermination of those who had forcibly worked for them in the past when Hitler and the High Command knew the war was lost, shortly after Stalingrad. To understand Hitler, imho, was to understand a man with a chronic gambling addiction that had been on a winning streak since 1932. That, in and of itself, is something.
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[09 Oct 2003|09:15pm] |
I've got a midterm on Saturday - I hate the quarter system, but at least I feel pretty prepared for it. The problem is that, as a Applied Mathematics course, I have to rely on faith. This means that I don't get whole roots or numbers that make any intuitive sense. I get answers that are in logarithms with bucketsful of variables attached - answers that mean nothing to me. Of course, there's always substituting items into the original equations, but even then without faith one can never expect that an answer that makes sense should. I'm not very good at that.
In fact I generally have no self-confidence at all. A former department head once said that there are four kinds of teachers, and it operates on a life cycle: the kind that are bad and know they're bad, the kind that are good and think they're bad, the kind that are good and think they're good, and the kind that were good about 10 years ago and now need to retire.
I would say something abour Arnold being elected, but the entire principle seems to be symbolic at best. He's got a month to learn how to govern a state so he can fight with politicians ad terminum and get nothing done, after all.
I've got plenty of reasons to hate Bush but so many of them revolve around the fact that, in some ways, he reminds me far more of a celebrity and less of a diplomat-statesman. His grandiose speaches, full of the ever-present sound a fury that accompany a geopolitical idealist, and his utter disregard for truth and logic (beyond the old Cold Warrior geopolitical Zeitgeist Cheney fellated him with) make him, in my mind, more actor than Schwarzenegger. Schwarzenegger takes off the mask he presents at the end of the day and presents a fairly balanced platform. The fault is that Bush's world is not his stage - his stage is his world, and simulacra hardly make appropriate material for crafting dreams.
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[06 Oct 2003|09:38pm] |
Three day weekends are great. Man, life must be wonderful in France.
I've come to the conclusion that I suck -- worse than I suck at anything else -- at Chess. I really want to be good at it but I think that the Chessmaster must be a little bit of a schadenfreude because I really don't like losing to 6 year olds. I don't think anyone likes to lose that way - one of my burning jealousies hatreds is for those kid geniuses, and so it really smarts to lose to one of them, even if it's a computerized robotic one. Fuck you and your denying my gambits, Larry Sellers. Fuckin' Social Studies.
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[06 Oct 2003|11:34am] |
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I nominate, for the Greatest Song of the Century, Grim Reaper's timeless piece,"See You in Hell". The fact that the lead singer looks like an Ugnaught or that the album cover has a skeleton on a motorcycle driving through a church's stained glass window has nothing to do with my choice, I assure you.
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[05 Oct 2003|11:32pm] |
I want to offer this world a toast.
A toast to you, world mad and wise - to the gambles we've made, the paradigms we've rented, and the fleeting time we have left together.
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[05 Oct 2003|12:45am] |
I wrote something and removed it - because I had a conversation that reminded me of the ramifications and consequences of what being what you want to be really are.
Moral of the story: be whatever the fuck you want to be.
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[04 Oct 2003|09:48pm] |
As far as I'm concerned both of the major political parties can go to hell - though one of them, of course, can go to a slightly lower level. I accept the fact that politics brings with it degree of machination to it. To be honest, I think just about anyone could do a better job than our current leader and his Cabinet of Melodramatic Villainy, but there are times that I think that any of the ideologues running for President on the Democratic side would only be marginally better. And I hate myself for saying it, but it's how I feel right now.
The reason: the economy looks like it may be finally improving, as employment - a economic indicator that has been stalled on the list of items necessary for economic revoery - looks like it may finally be coming around. Instead of the Democratic party accepting it, however small it may be, they countermanded the statistics which have been on the table by the impartial National Bureau of Economic Research.
As a Libertarian I haven't yet voted Republican. However, for as much as I generally don't like Republican ideology I do accept that Reagan won us the Cold War, and I accept that Republicans, being humans and not being monsters worthy of Armageddon, can do things very well. Karl Rove, for example, can pull strings on puppets on a level worthy of Cardinal Richelieu. The fact is - as much as I hate to say it, right now the Republicans play the game better. I don't like that, but I do have to respect that.
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| Synthesis |
[01 Oct 2003|09:01pm] |
Thanks to a recent entry by  birdseyeview I think I've tested my steel. I'm pretty sure I believe in equity between the sexes, not necessarily in equality.
I'm here all week. Enjoy the buffet.
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[01 Oct 2003|05:38pm] |
I went to Best Buy, hoping (though certainly not expecting) to find a copy of Ingmar Bergman's infamous Trilogy, but instead I found a nice copy of Krzysztof Kieslowski's "The Decalogue", a stunning and annhilating series of 10 films about the Ten Commandments. The first time I saw them they destroyed me.
This was good. Best Buy Bazaar had other sellers of fare that foul day: there was some sort of a promotion going on in the hallowed halls for some radio station. They were giving away Sting tickets - if you won their raffle. To be honest, I don't hate Sting, and I think that the early Police recordings are some of the best music of the 1970s-1980s. This doesn't mean I want to see his old ass with his new shitty band singing music that reminds me of shitty Eric Clapton. If they were GIVING away tickets, sure. I'm not about to let some radio station sign me up for any adult contemporary music mailing list for a risk like that.
So as I was procuring Hong King 1941 (my other item of import for the day) one of the hired radio goons paid employees offended my wa asked me if I'd like to sign up in a raffle to win some tickets.
I politely responded, "Sorry, I don't like Sting".
To which his riposte was: "What's that supposed to mean?"
... Huh?
If I were wittier of more celeritous in my thought patterns, I might have elicited one of these far better remarks:
"Can you go back in time and get the Sting that didn't suck and the Sting that didn't sound like he date-raped Phil Collins while his band stole all of his songs?"
"Will he put me in the Scorpion Deathlock?"
"Will Michael Bolton and Eric Clapton be performing with him?"
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[30 Sep 2003|07:51pm] |
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Buffalo Nuggets are back at Popeye's. Hot damn.
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[29 Sep 2003|08:04pm] |
I really treat this thing as my confessional. The problem is sometimes I tell Death things about my chess game.
Anyways, the wedding was good, and I think my period of incredible stress will be ... dimming, if not disappearing. For those unschooled in Greek Dancing (like myself) it can be an incredibly unsettling thing. The songs were about 10 minutes long, and if you get caught in the middle ... you're kind of stuck! Besides that small junction of unease the wedding was very well done.
Back to work!
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| Lost in the Mise-En-Scene |
[28 Sep 2003|08:55am] |
Thanks to everyone that wished me a happy birthday. Ceteris paribus it was better than I thought it was going to be.
I woke up at around 7:30 am, opened my presents (an alarm clock), went to grad school until 5:00 pm, and then ate at Mongolian Barbecue and hung around the North Side a little bit. A note about grad school with a lot of other teachers: there's nothing that makes me want to kick someone in the crotch more than bad etiquette during an 8-hour long class. A piece of annoyancegirl next to me graded papers nearly the entire time. In a small classroom with terrible acoustics, the incessant flipping of papers intertwined with the deeper, more pronounced flicking on a red pen is like Chinese water torture - especially considering she was frequently louder than the professor. At least the class seemed to come to a consensus that she was seriously offending the wa, yo.
Mongolian Barbecue would have been about 10 times more fun had I actually been hungry ... that's not the place to go if you can only finish about one plate like I could last night. It kind of felt as though I wasted the experience and like the entire birthday was wasted as well - not that I wanted to celebrate that much to boot.
Hellsing is great, in part because there is so much English said in Japanese. My personal favo(u)rite quote of the series so far is when "Yo Bitch!" becomes "Hey Bitch!" in subtitles. It's not quite as good as the (in my mind) legendary Tiger on the Beat, where a gui lo says, "You've got a pretty sister, you motherfucker" in English and is subtitled as "Your sister is very good looking." It makes me wonder how accurate most of the subtitles I've read really are ...
Also, one last aside: it's not quite that I'm a sports fan, but I've never really liked the Cubs much. Being on the North Side last night certainly didn't rekindle any love lost for them.
As this week (and weekend) dissipate, I can already feel my stress lifting. Test review this week, which means easy street for me.
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[27 Sep 2003|10:56am] |
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So it's my birthday.
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[25 Sep 2003|11:07pm] |
I just don't give a shit anymore.
After seeing the doctor about my bleeding (which concerns me more than I'd like to admit), I went to see the surgeon today. In that ambiguous medical myopia, what he foresaw sometime soon, were some dark times. Assuming my never-ending wound doesn't have a tumor, a growth, or cancer (which is hopefully rare, but could be a cause of the bleeding - and I'll find out for sure next month) I'll be in for another 6 weeks of recovery this summer. I'll have another angel-kiss in the form of another gaping abdominal scar - as if the ones I had already weren't enough to make me still wince occasionally - and another round through the land of nasogastric intubation with a side of no food or drink. When he told me I felt like I did years ago, those days when I held back tears and clenched my impotent thumos in my fist. The tears felt like a delapidated summer home; they were the kind that flowed more freely when the illness groped my hopes with its claws. I thought I was free.
For a moment, when I mentioned the bleeding I saw the terror in his seasoned, toughened eyes, and I felt my soul freeze and my heart sweat like in those times past when I was sure life could not get worse, and invariably did. Right now I just don't give a shit anymore. I'm going through life's motions, knowing that at this rate I may never get a lasting tenure in health or happiness. If I could give up I would, but there's no enemy general in sight and I'm waving a white flag to an open sky and no one's coming to collect.
I wish I could put something happy in this, but for now this is the best I can do. Thanks to everyone for hearing me out.
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| An Attempt to Drive the World From My Door |
[22 Sep 2003|09:37pm] |
There are a million things I'd love to say and there's so little time I have in which to say them. It's one of those nights.
I'm in one of those moods when I look forward through my life and see only tons of graded papers, aggravated and uneducated students, and wasted years of sorrow. As I can't blink and make myself old enough to retire, I feel like throwing myself into an ocean to save the funeral bills. I could really use some precious time with oblivion right now - or use some time, any time, to be able to be myself and not have to worry about doing anything for anyone, being someone for anyone, or even existing for anyone's sake.
Part of this is because all I do is work. I wake up at 5:30 every day, get to work where I stay until 6:00 or 7:00pm, and then come home and generally do more work until I go to bed. I go to sleep at 11:00 or 11:30 so I never get enough sleep, and then I do it all over again. On Saturdays and Sundays I wake up at 7:00 am to go grad school. I'm sure I'm going to have a lot of money saved up because I never have time to shit, let alone spend any of it. My body is atrophying since I don't have time to work out, and my intellectual growth has actually become somewhat stunted since I don't have time to read. Right now I feel as though this surely isn't the kind of life I ever wanted to live.
On top of it I'm pretty sure I suck ass at what I do. I'm a shitty teacher. If I'm any good someone should tell my students, at least, as they never seem to learn anything. That's pretty evident from the last round of quizzes. I feel as though I'm merely taking up space in the classroom, and I feel worthless and useless in this world.
I did have a moment today, though; I saw two of my old students (when I student taught) on the way home from work today. When they saw me their faces lit up as though I actually made their day. They were always nice students, though, and the time I saw them was fleeting. I'm pretty sure they would have done the same thing had they saw the worst teacher in the world - which is probably me, anyways. I'm glad I didn't break down in front of anyone today.
Blues are in the ocean, blues all in the air
Can't stay here no longer - I've got no steamship fare
When my earthly trials are over, I'll cast my body out in the sea
Save all the undertaker bills and let the mermaids flirt with me
My body aches all through my life, some solace I cannot find;
The only thing I can call my own is a troubled and a worried mind -
But when my earthly trials are over, I'll cast my body out in the sea
Save all the undertaker bills and let the mermaids flirt with me
I do not work for pleasure; earthly peace I'll see no more.
The only reason I work at all is to drive the wolf from my door -
But when my earthly trials are over, I'll cast my body out in the sea
Save all the undertaker bills and let the mermaids flirt with me
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