too bad you can't make out with writing

somewhere along the line, my brain seems to have made a dramatic decision without informing me. this happens a lot; like with puberty, for instance. but we won't go into detail there.

anyway, i was sitting today reading a bit and waiting for my class to finish up with their writing (which is apparently when i think these really deep thoughts that always spawn blog entries that nobody cares about but me) when i started sort of thinking (as i often do) about my (apparently someday-to-exist) career and what i would like to do for work. obviously, i've been thinking about this more and more the older i get and the more i generally suck at doing anything consistently enough to make it worth my while. well, generally when i start thinking about this, i think of a lot of different things i could do with myself and then ponder the imponderables about each for awhile. lately, however, and specifically today, i found myself just thinking about the different types of writing i could do and where and how i could do them - nothing else really sprung to mind (interesting. firefox spellcheck accepts "sprang" and "sprung". but not "firefox".). anyway, it was then i realized that somewhere, on some level of my brain, i had decided just by default that i wanted to be a writer of some sort. this is pretty cool, i guess. just a little shocking. but the more i thought about it, the more it made sense. based mostly on two things:
1) i've finally reached the point where writing is just writing.

after years of high-minded, well-intentioned speeches about this to my students, it's finally true for me. there's no longer a vast divide in my mind between "fiction", "non-fiction", "poetry", "songwriting", "essay-writing" and whatever else. i mean, obviously each of these genres have some of their own expectations that have to be met, but otherwise...it's not really being obsessive about how you write that determines the end result, but what that end result is trying to achieve. for example, if i'm writing a seminar paper for a class, i'm now using bits and pieces of skills i've gathered from each of those types of writing to write that essay instead of trying to split my writing into various paradigms that don't cross over and meet in any way. it's a much more comfortable style of writing, better and more interesting (i think) and i'm finally not a huge hypocrite when i'm teaching. and that's always good.

2) a good career is like a relationship (the squeezy, gooey kind, not the high-five, butt-patting kind).

i should start out by saying that i think there's a sort of inbred bastard child idea of the american dream that says that there's basically a career out there for everyone. i mean, i even remember taking tests all the way up through high school that supposedly told me what i was meant to do with my life. i'm not sure i necessarily agree with this idea and more than i agree with the everyone-has-a-soulmate idea, but, like that idea, this one is so thoroughly grounded in our culture that at least in some respects, i'm willing to roll with it.

so. whether there is or isn't a job that you're destined to do, the odds are very much in your favor that there will be one thing that you'll do for 30 or 40 years to keep yourself from starving to death. that said, most of us fancy-ass white people have a say (at least to a point) in what that thing is. else we wouldn't all be going to college, picking majors, etc. well, the problem is what happens when you finally get to this job and it's not all cake and ice cream (or if you're a troll, onions and tubers)? i don't know. that's what i'm trying to deal with. i may not buy the idea that everybody has a soul-job (that sounds a little gross), but obviously there are some things that some people enjoy doing better than other things. i like teaching better than retching. writing better than wringing. walking better than christopher walkening. etc. so if we're going to live inside the idea that you sort-of get to choose your profession, what happens when you suddenly get to 26 and realize that there is no "perfect" profession for you? my answer is thus: pretend like your career is a relationship. actually, don't pretend. because it is.

some days you're going to wake up and your job is going to have forgotten to clean the hair out of the shower drain, it's going to have left toothpaste smears all over the sink liner (or, in rare and strange instances, the toilet bowl), and on some days it's going to send you flowers and give you free baked goods. awesome. that's the way the rest of life is, why shouldn't your job be the same way? now, i'm not trying to be a martyr complex apologist. if your job is, per se, beating a raping you every morning, then you should probably call the police and get the fuck out of there. but. expecting your career to be the be-all and end-all to your fulfillment and not being able to accept occasionally hating what you're doing is probably a little disingenuous. i mean, you're not going to dump someone because they forgot to do the towels with their laundry once, are you? i mean, maybe you are, but if you are then you're probably a jackass and don't deserve a cool job anyway. i'm not sure if this metaphor worked, but it seemed great when i thought of it. but then so did that rewarmed pizza from two days ago when i first ate it. and now i feel like it's reenacting Burning Man inside my stomach.

because all these words with no pictures make-a me sad, have a picture.

a little bit o' the baldwin fer ye

so my students are reading "Stranger in the Village" as a run-up to the first paper assignment, and while they were reading and i was skimming today, i came across probably my favorite section of the essay ('Notes of a Native Son', page 157):

"I do not think [...] that it is too much to suggest that the American vision of the world - which allows so little reality, generally speaking, for any of the darker forces in human life, which tends until today to paint moral issues in glaring black and white - owes a great deal to the battle waged by Americans to maintain between themselves and black men a human separation which could not be bridged. It is only now beginning to be borne in on us - very faintly, it must be admitted, very slowly, and very much against our will - that this vision of the world is dangerously inaccurate, and perfectly useless. For it protects our moral high-mindedness at the terrible expense of weakening our grasp on reality. People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster."

i pretty love this entire essay to death, but that's my current high point; picking a best tidbit is like picking a favorite track on the Stones' "Exile" or the Cardinals' "Cold Roses". but you get the idea.

anyway, i was thinking about this quote a bit in the oh-so-pregnant silence of my in-class writing period, and then the issue was sort of forced on me later by a student who inquired after class about my purpose for starting off class with what is essentially a monologue about racial injustice and privilege in america. his insinuation was that i was simply including such a piece as a display of tokenism, like "hey, i'm multicultural...i'm a white dude that teaches baldwin!" this is probably a reasonable assumption for him to make right off the bat, and i did in fact have to hesitate for a moment before telling him that wasn't my reason for using the piece, so i could make sure it really wasn't the reason before i opened my mouth. but i don't think it is.

i don't use pieces like baldwin's "Stranger" in class because i'm trying to make a shallow display of multiculturalism - i'm an upper-middle-class white guy who's lived his entire life in america and (by global standards, at least) pretty much had everything handed to me on a silver platter. i have very little say from personal experience on multiculturalism. i don't even use pieces like this in my class because it might be encouraged by our curriculum; i simply use them because i think they inspire good dialogue. they inspire critical thinking, and make people who aren't necessarily used to contemplating why they have what they have and why they are where they are contemplate exactly those things. in the pursuit of inspiring such dialogue, though, i've occasionally encountered this idea in the past: that i teach baldwin to make it look like i care about non-white issues, that i have a black or indian friend simply because now i can go out and brag about how accepting and diverse i am. and that's simply not the truth.

i think that members of other cultures and races, etc. have a lot to say that i/we (i suppose i'm defining myself as a card-carrying member of the rich american white guy club with that "we") can easily choose not to hear if that's what we want. i think about how i actually conceptualize my relationships with other people, and i find that, for the most part, people who aren't a part of "we" are the people that i interact with with more of an expectation of learning, criticizing, expanding, etc. largely, my friendships and interactions with other mid-20s, rich (again, by world standards), male americans are (in my mind) based on comfort. we hang out, we get dinner, we see movies, whatever, and on some level they reinforce to me that the way i am is okay, that what i think matters, and that i can continue acting the way i act because they accept me. again, this isn't meant to reflect on any of these people or their personalities at all; i'm merely saying that this is generally how i perceive of my relationships with them.

on the other hand, most of my relationships that i perceive of as being critical, more challenging to engage in, or outright more constructive (in the sense that i learn new things instead of reinforcing old things) are relationships that i have with:
a) women
b) people of different races
c) people of different ages
d) combinations of these three things

essentially, i guess i'm saying that people who are less like me are more challenging to interact with, which i suppose is like "Big Fucking Deal", right? yeah, but i think in terms of my response to said student today, i was just trying to get the point across that straight-up learning from/interacting with writers like James Baldwin or one of my 60 year old female friends is really constructive on its own and doesn't need the sort of assumptions of tokenism that people seem inspired to make from time to time.

another rant forthcoming. buckle the seatbelts.

did you ever wonder...

...what it would look like if you got your senior high school picture taken with a contrived background not of a bunch of fake trees or a fancy sports car that you don't actually own, but instead of a bunch of drunk people? i sort of think it would look like this.



a few more blackmail pictures from NYE 2007:

mellow mood

do any of you trey fans out there know if "mellow mood" is a trey original or a cover? i'm guessing cover, but you never know with our old boy.

i think something may have happened electronically in my apartment complex over break because i was wailing on the epi dot last night and the hum was almost completely gone. this sort of confirms my hypothesis that the problem is/was caused by either: 1) someone else's electronic stuff on the floor above or below me 2) shitty wiring in the complex exacerbated by someone else's electronic stuff on the floor above or below me. maybe someone moved out, or hasn't come back yet, or whatever. but whatever the reason, for now at least, my amp sounds like a space dragon. it's great. the reverb is killer, and could probably substitute for THC, if i was still into that sort of thing.

anyway, i don't want to talk about music too much because the time i've had to work on new recordings and mix the old ones since i got back is so scant it depresses me to think about it. so far classes are looking good, though teaching 4 hours a day instead of 2 1/2 is a little difficult (and the same thing three times in 4 hours, no less). i do like the feeling that maybe, just maybe, my classes are long enough to actually accomplish something this semester, though.

today was the last really big day (or so i hope) for plowing through all the beginning-of-the-semester organization and paper work filling-out. with that behind me, i'm ready to queue up about 10 cardinals shows in winamp, hit shuffle, and rip into figuring out this course calendar.

actually, as much as i was looking forward to diving into the new cardinals' material when i got back from ohio, i've been listening to phish a lot today. i had 7/26/98 on earlier, an AUD/SBD matrix, and it was really, really solid, both sound quality wise and show quality wise. the first set ends with a particularly good "Good Times" and the second one starts with a spot-on cover of "La Grange". the second disc seems to be missing the last encore, which was "Bittersweet Motel"...that sort of pisses me off because i love the hell out of that song. fortunately, i just recently got the Bittersweet Motel documentary, so i guess that's a decent...umm...what's that thing that makes you feel better? consolation. that.

now i'm listening to 12/29/98, also a SBD. the first set was great...velvet underground's "Rock and Roll", "Funky Bitch", "PYITE", and "Horn"...the second set is a lot slower and funkier, which is okay, but i'm sort of sleepy as it is, so i sort of just wish that Trey would shred the shit out of something.

going to try to finally get the car in to get worked on tomorrow. it's getting close enough to my cardinals mini-tour that i can't really put it off anymore. i'm still thinking, though, even if i do get it fixed, that i'll rent a car to go out to oregon and seattle. partially because i might be going with a friend of mine, and i would sort of hate for the rotors on my car to explode again and have to die knowing that my laziness had in fact killed more people than just myself.

i'm beat and i don't know why. i've been sleeping from 11pm to 7am pretty regularly and i can't seem to muster up the energy to even waste and entire night playing starcraft, let alone doing anything constructive or social past like seven. this makes me uncomfortable. maybe i've reached the point where i need so much diet coke just to be functional that i'm dysfunctional by default.

speaking of PC games, and for my three dorky-madden-screenshot friends, i haven't been posting screenshots of the new preseason mostly because we're getting absolutely pwn4d. i was a little fed up with 4 seasons of near-total dominance and outlandish performance by our team, so this year i've resolved to set the difficulty level on the game up a notch. the result of this so far is an 0-4 preseason and four really shitty games. we'll have to see if things get better in the regular season, or else we might be looking at a miami dolphins-esque season this time around.

buckeyes. fuck. that is all.

i've changed the EP tracklist around again (big surprise, i know) based on some of the songs we played over christmas that i think should be on it in their current forms. also, i'm taking caroline off, because, really, how many officially recorded versions of a nine-minute delta-blues murder ballad does one need? i think the answer is "one".

i kind of miss being home, but at the same time there are a lot of excellent people around here that i generally just never talk to because i'm a reclusive loser. trying to get better at that. also trying to get better at not being too lazy to cook decent meals for myself. it's all about quality of life. dude.

on that note, i'm off to pay some dude a ridiculous amount of money to make sushi for me. peace out.

apnea? play a didgeridoo!

that was a comedy gem bestowed on me by google ads this morning. is it "jem" or "gem"? i should know these things, but instead i know other things. like i think i'm dying of african sleeping sickness. today is day five of the bunting sleep-from-five-to-seven-in-the-morning-not-on-purpose diet. not as marketable as the south beach diet, i'll admit. but it has its perks. like insanity, for one.

NYE was phenomenal. it wasn't superior to last year (a feat our gang has been claiming as impossible for a whole year now anyway), but it was just as good in different ways. the everest summit of inebriation of 12/31/06 was still far out of reach when we stopped drinking around 2am, and then the fun really started. i'm actually about to bounce for a morning hike, but later i'll get into details.

woke up yesterday morning on the uncomfortable couch (if you think the comfortable couch is uncomfortable, look out) and thus began january 1st, which for at least five years has been my favorite day of the year, for reasons i'll also explain in my forthcoming new years adventure post. now, in the fading of the party-and-hangover-football afterglow, i'm trying to pack my shit up and get ready to fly back to pullman. today will likely be my last day in kent for at least five months, which is an epically depressing prospect.

fortunately, apparently all i need to do is buy a didgeridoo and play it and all my problems will turn into butterflies and fly up my nose into my brain, where they'll lay eggs and i'll eventually die of a huge, butterfly-induced stroke.

okay, that was sort of a paraphrase from the apnea website.