BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: December 2007
Monday, December 31, 2007
Benazir Bhutto Assassination
I hope everyone's heard about her assassination, but it's gotten interesting in the days after, since the official Pakistan government story appears to be a pathetic attempt at a coverup. Watch the video from Britain's Channel 4 and see what seems like pretty clear evidence that she took at least one bullet to the back of the neck or head, seconds before the bomb goes off.
The odd thing to me is that the Pakistani government seems to think their version of events is better, in some way. They're freely admitting that a seeming total lack of security allowed the leading political candidate to replace the entrenched leadership to be killed as the direct result of a gunman who fired at her from point blank range, an action immediately followed by a bomb-packing accomplice detonating himself and killing more than twenty bystanders, presumably including the gunman. But wait, says the Pakistani government; she wasn't actually hit by any of the bullets; she died ducking to avoid them, when she hit her head on the car's sunroof.
Even if you accept that account, what's the difference? An assassin got to within several feet of her and shot at the back of her head without any interference from security, and another guy set off a bomb from equally-direct range. Even if you believe that the shooter was an astonishingly bad shot, and that Bhutto had astonishingly bad luck with pointy car parts when she ducked down, the failures (intentional or otherwise) in security are identical.
Some federal employees are more trusting than others...
I filled out a form to get my mail delivery stopped and the mail held at the post office before my week in San Diego. Yesterday, after buying a bunch of half price calendars at Borders and wrapping them up to send to people I'd just seen over Xmas, and failed to gift with anything more than cards since I'm a poor past/future college student, I headed to the post office to mail them off and pick up my accumulated mail. The lines were long, as always pre-post Xmas, and there weren't even any nubile young females to while away the time, eyeballing. This is true of most places/times in life, I've found. Unless you're wise enough to have brought along your own nubile young female, which I've been lucky enough to do quite often over the past few years.
I was not so blessed on yesterday's visit to the post office though, and thus I waited alone, until my turn came. I handed over the two packages I had to mail, and after paying what I thought was a fairly exorbitant sum to mail them off, I told the clerk that I'd been out of town for a week and needed to pick up my mail. She said okay, looked at the packages I was mailing, and said, "This is the address?"
I had affixed a return address sticker to the upper left corner of both parcels, with my name and address visible, as one does with packages sent forth into the toothy maw of the United States Postal Service. I replied in the affirmative, and that was all the proof she needed as she headed off into the bowels of the warehouse to retrieve my accumulated junk mail, bills, and pre-approved credit card offers. As she left, it occurred to me how woefully inadequate the mail security was. I'd turned in the "hold mail" card a week and a half previous without any form of ID, or even eye contact. I just wrote on the card and slipped it into a box set up for that purpose. Now that I had come to claim "my" mail, I had not been in any way challenged to prove it was in fact mine. I had a return address sticker, but that proved nothing; my stickers are simply computer printed labels on a page of stickers; plain 9 point black Verdana on a white sticker. Nothing preprinted or embossed or requiring more than a $.20 sticker page and a printer to create.
Now true, most mail in the US is delivered into wholly unsecured boxes that sit open at the street, inviting anyone who might wish to violate federal law by delving into them to do so freely. And the post office clerk might have been more suspicious if I looked shifty, or I lived in a poor area where people were routinely stealing Social Security checks from the mail. But still, it was hard not to get that feeling you do at some stores when you need merely swipe your credit card and sign absolutely any name in any handwriting, on an imprecise digital screen, to buy things. "Don't you want to like, check my ID? Or something?"
Spy and grifter movies never bother with mail-stealing scams since they're just too easy, I think. It's fun to watch criminals rip off a bank or rob a jewelry store or a casino. Real life crime, such as the basically effortless and risk-free pilfering of checks and cash from the mail, isn't depicted since it's not glamorous, and it's so easy any meth-head can, and does, do it to finance their particular chemical dependency. Cogitate on that next time you stick a bunch of checks into paper envelopes and put them in that box located at the end of your driveway; a box specifically situated to make opening and emptying it quickly, from a motor vehicle, nearly effortless...
I've seen a few movies this "holiday season" and while I hope to post full-sized reviews in the days to come, I'm going to at least touch on them here, before I forget/get caught up in other activities. Again.
Dan in Real Life. I saw this on a date with the new Imaginary Girlfriend. She suggested it and I didn't know anything about it, but didn't object. It's not a movie I would have seen in the past, but that's at least partially since it's not the kind of movie Malaya would have wanted to see, and since we mostly saw movies we both wanted to see when we were a couple...
Quick plot rundown of Dan in RL. Mildly spoiler, but no more so than the trailer itself. Dan's a widower and a single dad, late 30s, with daughters who are about 10, 14, and 17. His wife died 5 years ago and he's apparently not dated since. Much to his surprise, the morning of the annual family Thanksgiving weekend reunion, he's off on his own at the local coffee shop when he runs into a woman who he clicks with immediately. They have a long conversation, lose all track of time, and she has to run off when she gets a phone call from her new boyfriend, who she was on her way to spend the weekend with. Dan gets her number, but thinks he's missed a great opportunity. Back at the family compound, he meets all his brothers and their families and the parents and kids etc, and when his younger brother brings out his new girlfriend... of course it's the woman from the coffee shop.
From there various dramedy complications ensue. Dan and the woman keep stealing moments to talk, while hiding the fact that they know each other from the rest of the family, Dan's youngest daughter feels neglected, the middle daughter is going through a slut phase and is in passionate puppy love with a boy she met three weeks earlier, all his daughters and the rest of the family love the brother's new girlfriend, Dan's torn between his fatherly duty, his brotherly love, and his own reawakened desires, etc.
At the time both the IG and me enjoyed the film. Me a bit more than her, since I appreciated the cleverness of the writing. Not so much the dialogue or characters, but the plot events dovetailed nicely. Oldest daughter is dying to get more driving experience, and when Dan loses his license she is able to come to the rescue. Middle daughter is wracked with puppy love issues and Dan can't relate, until he unexpectedly falls into infatuation himself. Plus others I can't remember at this point.
The day after seeing the film though, the IG and me were trading emails, and she said she hated the movie, in retrospect. She felt it was very manipulative and that the characters were flat and one-dimensional, especially Dan's parents. She hated Juliette Binoche, Dan's love interest. She didn't like Dan's 3 daughters, who were all one-note character types.
I agree with all of her points, but they didn't bother me as much. I did feel less charitably towards the movie the day after seeing it though. To the scores:
Dan in Real Life, 2007 Script/Story: 7 Acting/Casting: 6 Action: NA Eye Candy: NA Fun Factor: 5 Replayability: 5 Overall: 5
This one boils down to expectations, as so many movies do. I had no expectations going in, and was pleasantly surprised by a lot of the film. I enjoyed it at the time, and would have given it a 7 immediately after seeing it. It rotted quickly though, and by the time I wrote these scores a couple of days later (a couple of weeks ago), a 5 seemed generous. For me the movie hinges on the writing score, and that one is so arguable. The writing for the plot, continuity, dialogue, and the main characters (Dan and the woman) was good to very good. The writing for most of the supporting characters was awful, and they were almost all thumbnails of real people, cliched stereotypes who could all be comprehensively described with one or two adjectives. Adorable youngest daughter. Responsible oldest daughter. Insightful mother. Wise father. Horndog younger brother. Etc.
Furthermore, and again in retrospect, the plot was so featherweight that it felt entirely inconsequential, and perhaps even insultingly pointless. There was no real drama or emotion. Nothing important was ever at stake. Everyone has a happy ending after a minimum of difficulty.
If you go into the movie wanting a light, non-serious, non-thought provoking, minor-conflict, happily-ever-after family reunion/love story/comedy, you'll enjoy it. If you want more, you'll sort of enjoy it, until you wake up the next day feeling like you want your $8.25 back.
I've almost completely forgotten this movie already. I will have totally forgotten it by February, and will one day look at this review like a dog hearing a high-pitched noise; turning my head from side to side as I try to remember the movie in question, or the act of writing about it. At this point my most vivid memory of the movie was the really good bowl of stir fried noodles I ate beforehand, and the fact that the IG and me were the only two people in the theater during an early afternoon showing, and were thus able to discuss it in our normal speaking voices as though one of us lived in a great mansion with a hell of a private theater.
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead. I saw this one with Malaya and a mutual friend in mid-December and wasn't real impressed. I knew almost nothing about it going in; Malaya wanted to see it after hearing a co-worker talk about how awful and dark and unredeemable the characters and events depicted in the film were. So off we went, and it wasn't bad, but it wasn't good enough to be the nasty noir it aspired to be. It's got lots of interesting characters doing awful things, but that sort of works against it since the performances and especially the writing isn't good enough to sustain the levels it sometimes hits. So it's uneven, but also it's like a good movie trapped inside a great concept, like two men in a horse suit impersonating a thoroughbred.
My view on this one, I must note, is far from the consensus. This is one of the year's best reviewed films, with tons of 4-star scores, and a very high average on RT and Metacritic. To my scores:
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead Script/Story: 7 Acting/Casting: 7 Action: 5 Eye Candy: 2 Fun Factor: 3 Replayability: 3 Overall: 6
Lots of reviews compare it to Tarentino, to his incomparably brilliant Pulp Fiction, presumably, but I don't feel that's a very fruitful comparison. Before makes liberal use of non-chronological scenes, Pulp Fiction style, but they feel showy for the sake of being showy, rather than like they're an integral aspect of the picture. There's sort of a mystery that's unfolded during the flashbacks and forwards, but you know the whole story almost immediately, and the flashbacks don't present different takes on the same scene from different POVs, or give you info that's only explained/elaborated on by later (in the movie) earlier (chronologically) scenes. Furthermore, BtDKYD has a lot of colorful characters, but they're pale shadows of the wildly-engaging, almost mythological individuals who populate Pulp Fiction, and there's not a line of dialogue in the whole film that's as snappy or funny or catchy or intriguing as Tarentino's verbal ballet in Pulp Fiction.
The film BtDKYD most reminded me of was Fargo. It's nowhere near as good as that very dark bit of noir, but it aspires to be. The similarities come in with small time, incompetent crooks who plan a minor caper that painfully involves family members, which then spins wildly out of control. Avenging senior citizen fathers feature prominently in both films, losers trying to pull fast ones fail in every direction, etc. BtDKYD lacks the humor of Fargo, or shocking moments of sudden violence and pathos, and none of the characters are as detailed or interesting, and the plot isn't as surprising, but it's much more like weak Coen Brothers than weak Tarentino.
Much of the praise for the film seems to stem from the fact that its director, Sidney Lumet, is old and esteemed. Ebert, in his 4-star ode, says, "[Lumet] has made more great pictures than most directors have made pictures..." That's fine, and I thought Twelve Angry Men was brilliant the one time I saw it like 15 years ago, but don't let the fact that you admire the guy who made this film blind you to the fact that it's merely an adequate film with pretensions of brilliance.
National Treasure 2. I saw this with my mom and stepdad earlier this week, while vacationing in San Diego. It's essentially the first movie, which was surprisingly fun, with the plot slightly tweaked and the suspension of disbelief made far more difficult. Like National Treasure, this one will collapse like a house of cards in a high wind if you give the plot any real thought, so I recommend you don't dwell on it.
The history is wonky, the hidden treasures are unbelievable, the character actions and motivations are absurd, the bad guys are comical and non-threatening, the comic relief characters know their place, the riddles and mysteries are always unraveled in five minutes or less, the dialogue is stilted, and so forth. That's true of every Bruckheimer movie, though. I could overlook most of that. What tripped me up on enjoying this one was how cheesy it all felt.
In NT1: Cage's hero character was vulnerable and driven, and that made him sympathetic and likable. The bad guys were believably nasty and dangerous. The budding romance was fun to watch and semi-believable. The treasure was borderline believable and mysterious. The history was well-integrated, and the mysteries were fun and tricky, but still believably solvable.
In NT2: Cage's hero character is smirky and cloyingly noble and lecture-y. The bad guys are initially identical to the ones from NT1, but quickly fade in menace and become merely misunderstood (and in some ways, more sympathetic than the alleged "good guys") by the end. There are two budding romances, neither of which are very believable or compelling. The treasure is initially interesting, but quickly becomes absurd. The history is slapdash and about as well-researched as a wikipedia pop culture entry. The mysteries are very easy to solve once discovered, but getting to them requires unbelievable coincidences and conveniences.
To the scores:
National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets, 2007 Script/Story: 7 Acting/Casting: 6 Action: NA Eye Candy: NA Fun Factor: 5 Replayability: 5 Overall: 5
It's not a bad movie, if you don't take it too seriously or expect too much from it. It does what it sets out to do, and is about as good as you might expect if you were mildly pleased by the first one, and have seen the trailer for this one. My biggest objection in the end was how cheesy and faux-noble everything is. There were some interesting twists and turns, but every time Cage's character opens his mouth, out comes an impassioned, noble, modest, decent, appealing to higher values, monologue that brings the movie to a screeching halt. His speeches might as well have subtitles reading, "How a good, civic-minded American would feel about this turn of events."
Speaking of turns of events, and movie reactions, I must mention the downfall of Roger Ebert. On Ebert's site there's a link to his newest book, Roger Ebert's Four-Star Reviews, 1967-2007. The forty year time frame (41, actually) gives the title a nice symmetry, but with that 40 year span in mind, it's lucky Ebert didn't start writing reviews a couple of years earlier. If he had, and this book was 1965-1995, they'd damn near have a second volume ready to go, with the scores he's been passing out since narrowly surviving his lengthy illness.
His reviews are still well-written and entertaining and informative, but when he likes every movie, (he's got six reviews up this week; four are 4-star and the other two are 3.5 star.) his opinion becomes a lot less valuable to me. True, he's only reviewing movies he wants to, and he's posting a lot of reviews of films he saw when he was too sick to write about them, and only bothering to write reviews of ones he saw and enjoyed, but must he like everything? Didn't he see any movies when he was sick that he thought sucked badly enough that he wanted to go back and vivisect them now that he's got the strength to wield his scalpel?
It's the man's prerogative to want to write about movies he loves, but as someone who much prefers reading 0-star reviews to 4-star reviews, especially when they're of movies I'll never see anyway, I must respectfully register my disappointment with and disagreement towards Ebert's altered career path. I must also point out that Ebert's approval of a film has now become essentially irrelevant. Since he likes everything, on one level or another, I can't take his opinion seriously. It's like judging tennis ball quality by timing the speed with which a golden retriever runs them down.
Case in point: Sweeney Todd. I've not seen it, and I'm very unlikely to do so. Malaya did see it, while I was in San Diego, after a friend talked her into it. She didn't think she'd like it; she was not enraptured by any of the previous Tim Burton/Johnny Depp musicals, and while she enjoys horror movies and Johnny Depp, she didn't want to see this one with the singing. She went anyway, and said she only kept from walking out on several occasions by exercising the utmost self control.
Unsurprisingly, Sweeney Todd's getting rave reviews. Critics always like movies that do things differently and originally, even if they're not actually any fun to watch. You'd feel that way too if you saw 120 mediocre formulaic crapfests a year. That's not very useful to us in the general public though, since we don't see 100+ mainstream Hollywood films, and therefore are not primed to enjoy anything that provides some novelty value.
On the other hand, Malaya absolutely loved Alien vs. Predator 2, which she also saw with a mutual friend while I was in San Diego. Awesome action, great battle scenes and a huge body count. What the first AvP movie should have been if it hadn't been written like it was some sort of very stupid videogame adaptation. She liked it enough that she says she wants to see it again, so we just might do that. Plus, AvP2 is not a movie the IG would be interested in, so there's no conflict there. We don't have any pending movie plans, with her out of town for another week+, but we both want to see Juno at the very least, so that should happen sometime early next year. Hopefully by then we'll have come up with a proper nickname for her! I could use a new one too, for that matter. I've been sick of "Flux" for years, but haven't cared enough to think up something new, or to simply transition to something eponymous. It seems a bit absurd to inaugurate a new online alias past the age of 30 anyway. Although, since this June I will be 29, again, I don't see why that should apply to me?
Forty-three degrees (6c) and wet feels a lot colder after a week of 65 degree (18c) sunshine. Last night and today I've had the heat turned up much higher than usual, I've been wearing more clothing than usual, and I've still been cold.
For the corollary, I was wearing sneakers, jeans, and a t-shirt all week in San Diego while natives were in boots and jackets, since 65 and sunny felt like summer to me, after weeks of 40s and 50s up here. And, next week, when my still-nicknameless imaginary girlfriend returns from two weeks visiting relatives in eastern Canadialand, she'll probably break out the flipflops and belly shirts, reveling in the Bay Area 50s after trudging through two weeks of snow and sub zeros in the frozen north.
Still, knowing that doesn't enable mind over matter, and I was cold all day Friday, wearing boots, jeans, 2 shirts, and a long leather jacket to run errands I'd usually have taken on in sneakers, cargo pants, t-shirt, and sporty long sleeved top. Oddly, Jinxie seems to be affected by my discomfort, since she's been sleeping in front of the heat vent for the first time ever, and took to burrowing under the comforter last night. And she spent the last week at Malaya's condo in the East Bay, which it's usually a few degrees colder than it is up here in the North Bay.
I wanted to go for a long mountain bike ride Friday, to burn off some of the pecan pie, chocolate chip oatmeal cookies, dessert wine, and assorted high-calorie entrees I shoveled down while visiting the parents over Xmas, but um... no. Hell no. I walked outside, looked at my breath pluming, eyed the lowering gray skies, and concluded that I didn't own enough layers to go pedaling into that abyss. Tomorrow, perhaps; warmer temperatures and drier days are forecast over the weekend.
I'll blog something about the vacation and post some Wild Animal Park photos later today, once I take care of some errands and wash clothing and catch up on the online news and other fun post-vacation activities. I wanted to share a link first, though. I've not posted much about sports this year, likely to the relief of most of you. That's not going to change any time soon, but while I've not been blogging about the various national pastimes, I have been reading about them. But not watching them, since I had my free cable turned off in October, and haven't missed it enough to pay $40 a month to have it turned back on.
(My cable was left on when I moved into this apartment in January 2007. I called Comcast and told them I didn't really want it and they said not to worry about it, since it was left on when new people moved into an apartment and that it would be turned off soon. I next heard from them in October. Yes, 10 months of free cable. No, it didn't make the occasional TV show I watched any more entertaining. I don't know if they'd ever have noticed, but they were upgrading the cable box to my apartment complex and checking on all the subscriptions and trying to sell us on premium packages, or cable modem/home phone bundling, etc. And they must have noticed that I wasn't a customer, but that I had cable, and when they finally asked me about it, I told them to turn it off. It was mostly self-preservation; I'd hardly watched any TV all year, but since college and pro football season had begun in September, I'd been pissing away an alarming % of my weekends watching games on tape, and with all the college work I had, that wasn't wise. So I've had no TV for more than two months, and haven't missed it. I'd have liked to see a few football games, but I got over it, and NFL.com has HQ video highlights of every single game, with far better production and detail than the highlight packages I used to watch on ESPN. Better yet; no Chris Berman!)
So, no watching football on TV = no blogging about it, at least until now. I have followed the sport/league during the season, watching the highlights each week and paying some attention to who wins and which teams are good, though I have almost no rooting interest in anyone. I've enjoyed the Patriots' run towards a perfect 16-0, in large part because there are so many haters who take the failure/success of their favorite, or non-favorite, football teams so insanely seriously. I read a lot of political blogs, that write about subjects that actually, you know, matter, and I've never seen 1/10th the insanely slobbering passion over any world-shaking event that I do on most MLB or NFL news items on ESPN.com, FoxSports.com, etc.
In addition to the Patriots' 16-0 effort, the second most amusing story this season has been The Sports Guy picking every game, and losing almost every week, to his utterly-disinterested wife. Bill Simmons is probably the most popular online sports columnist, at least in America. He follows basketball, baseball, and pro football, and he's a knowledgeable sports guy, but more key to his success is that he writes entertaining, pop-culture studded columns that are generally interesting even if you don't care about the teams/sports he's discussing.
I don't know what sport Simmons would say is his favorite, but he spends the most column space on the NFL (aside from his all-Red Sox all the time binge during fall 2004) and fancies himself quite skilled at analyzing the league, predicting player and team success, figuring out the gambling lines, etc. Which is why it's been so amusing to see his non-fan wife whipping his ass all year, especially considering that she gave birth in September, and has seen about 10 minutes of football all year. This week's version of Simmons' NFL picks column is by her, and the introduction is amusing, but the picks are just classic. Simmons' wife goes into her rationales and logic and theories and motivations for her choices, and it's just brilliant. I can't imagine the tooth grinding and wailing being done by gambling addicts as they read the reasons for her picks, given that she's dozens of games better than one would achieve by chance, and dozens more ahead of the picks of most die-hard gamblers.
Gamblers; there's a reason casinos and sports books just keep getting bigger and more profitable. You! You and your logic and reasoning and certainty that you know better than all those other sports addicts out there, and the fact that you remember your occasional wins and forget all those other weeks when your favorite team won by 9 but the line was 10.5 and you lost $200 because all the other bandwagon bettors drove the line up 2.5 points during the week. Some quotes:
Bengals (-2.5) over DOLPHINS
If it's an all-animal matchup, I always try to weigh that accordingly. Dolphins are cuddly and nice. I don't understand why any NFL team would wear aqua blue unis and call itself "The Dolphins," then not expect to get its butt kicked. They should go with the Spearfishers. I would have taken them if they were the Spearfishers.
Seahawks (+1) FALCONS
This was an easy one: I really love Seattle so I usually pick the Seahawks, and I rarely pick the Falcons because I don't like their name. If I had to pick five American cities that I'd live in other than Boston, I think I'd go Seattle, San Fran, New York City, Austin and Portland, Ore., in some order. I can't tell you the No. 1 city where I wouldn't want to live because I already hurt Dameshek's feelings once in this column. But let's just say it rhymes with "Schmittsburgh."
I'm not going to contrast Simmons' past picks, or excerpt and compare some from an insane gambling addict website, but I think it's fairly safe to say they wouldn't express confusion about team nicknames and uniform colors, or include their personal livability index.
And even if they did, they certainly wouldn't factor such considerations into their over-analysis of which team is likely to score more points.
I'm off to San Diego to visit the parents for a week. As usual when I'm not home, my computer time will be fairly limited, and you'd be wise not to expect a great deal of updates in these parts. In lieu of a big, clever, going away post, wherein I elaborate on the various notes and ideas I've had for blog posts but haven't gotten around to writing yet, I'm going to type very few words, hit post, and go write some Xmas cards and pack a suitcase. Just the sort of quality entertainment you've come to expect from the internet!
Seasons Greetings, Merry Christmas, and Happy Holidays, to whatever extent your inner atheist can tolerate such vapid well-wishing.
During the past year I've taken a ton of photos of my new apartment, along with other places/people/pets/practices of note. It's been forever since I posted any, and I'll probably put up a whole page of apartment pictures at some point (I took over 100 during the moving in and unpacking and furniture assembling stages, primarily for the edification of my parents.) but for now I'm just going to post a few pictures every few days. Or at least do it this once, before I forget and post photos again in like, April.
I signed up for DSL when I moved, since I didn't really care about watching TV, and DSL was much cheaper than cable modem service since I would have had to get cable TV with it. They'll start you of at $25 a month for the cable modem, but it goes up to $40 pretty quickly, and cable TV is about $45 right from the start. So it's $65 at the cheapest, and $85+ not long after. Instead of that, I'm paying about $35 for my phone and DSL, though I pay more for a cell phone which I actually use, unlike the land line, which I never use at all and only have because otherwise my dad will lecture me about what I would do in an emergency if the cell phone service was down. (Answer; I'd die. But until then, I'd have $16 more every month.)
DSL isn't as fast as cable modem; my download is capped at 200k/sec; but it's not too bad. I gripped a bit when I moved in, but I've gotten used to it. I only noticed the speed angrily while spending 7 or 8 hours to pull the 3.5gig HGL alpha/beta clients.
The photo here is of part of my AT&T DSL installation kit. You can pay to have a technician set it up for you, but I just had them mail me the install kit. You get the DSL unit, which is basically a cable modem with slightly different plugs, some ethernet cord, and install instructions which are glossy, full of colorful pictures and diagrams, written in about 22 point font, and clearly intended for the use of the utterly technically illiterate. Best of all, there's a backup CD that functions as a sort of tech support placebo. There's nothing on it but the 100k install file you automatically download when you first go online, but if you can't get online to download that file, it won't matter if you've installed it from a CD or put the CD into your toaster.
In my case that was irrelevant, for reasons you can clearly see in the above photo. I didn't drop it; it came out of the protective sleeve in this um... slightly suboptimal condition.
One of the biggest improvements in this apartment from the one I formerly shared with Malaya is that this one gets a lot more sun. I wouldn't necessarily have considered that an improvement at times in my past life, but after watching plant after plant slowly wither and die in Malaya's sparsely-windowed condo, and on her very shady, roof-covered back patio, I've had a lot of fun growing houseplants of all types in my sunny kitchen and on my open back patio.
I'm on the second floor, so it's okay to let Jinx sit out back, and earlier this year, after I'd planted tomatoes in big pots, but long before they were large enough to need wire support to keep growing up, she chose this perch one evening. I thought it was impossibly cute, with her on the little plastic lid throne and everything.
A shot of the tomato seedlings, shortly after they came home to live with me. I thought the pots I put them in would be more than sufficient, but by September there was hardly any dirt left in the pots; it had all been consumed by the plants and displaced by roots. I got quite a few tomatoes out of the 5 plants though; certainly enough to pay off the dirt/water/plant costs 50x over, and that's not even counting the superior flavor of homegrown tomatoes, and the enjoyment I got watching them grow.
Well, I didn't actually sit and watch them; I'm not quite that taken with agriculture, but I did measure them every week or two until they were shooting up well past the top of their metal cages and putting out so many shoots that precise quantification of their dimensions became impractical.
I don't actually have any shots of them at full size, tragically. It's too late now; they're still alive, much to my surprise with overnight lows in the 30s (2-4c) lately, but well past their prime. There are four plants left; I had to put one underachiever out of its misery a month ago, and while no new growth is going on, there are quite a few green fruits on the plants that are slowly, slowly yellowing. I pick them once they get orange and put them in a sunny windowsill, where they ripen beautifully. Even now, at damn near Xmas, they taste so much better than store bought tomtoms.
Dusty came to visit for nearly two months during the summer, while Malaya was traveling abroad, and encountered some health problems, as his defoliated tummy demonstrates. Sadly, the prognosis was not good. More news on him in a future update.
He did rally from his health problems after some expensive vet time, and was his active, normal self for most of his stay. Here you see him in one of his favorite perches here; halfway up the bookshelf I converted into a cat tree, gazing out the sliding glass door and patio. He greatly enjoyed looking out the windows here, and lying in the sun on the back patio, which is odd since he didn't spend much time outside or window looking at Malaya's place.
To follow up yesterday's ramble... I ended up going to get a frozen pizza, baking it, and eating half while drinking two full glasses of semi-fine red wine. It wasn't great pizza, or shiraz, but they meshed nicely, and motivated me enough to turn away from the computer and put on a DVD for the first time in weeks. It was the first time my TV had been on since early October, in fact. I haven't bought a new DVD since 2006, more out of non-desire than any desire to budget or deny myself, so I just stuck in Bourne Identity 2, and enjoyed the first hour of that smart action thriller. At that point my viewing was temporarily interrupted by a phone call, and I answered it to speak to my mom.
She was calling to congratulate me on my email notifying her that I'd passed the math CLEP and was actually done with college and had successfully earned my degree. It was an interesting conversation, since we talked for about 5 minutes, and it all felt normal and typical to me, and yet she seemed ready to get off the phone. And at that point I realized that I was drunk, or at least pretty thoroughly-tipsy, and that it must be affecting my personality, since my mom never wants to end one of our phone calls that quickly into the affair.
I don't believe I'd ever (previously) talked to my mom before while drunk. That's not a real surprise since I've only been drunk about half a dozen times in my life, and never with my mom (a couple of times with dad on wine tastings, two or three times with Malaya when we were doing shots for fun or Scrabble success, and a few times alone, most of them within the last year of post-breakup aloneness and occasional loneliness and often school stress) around. But neither she nor I have much patience with drunks, especially not trying to talk to them, and since she'd asked me what I was up to, and I'd admitted to the pizza and vino, she wasn't trying to guess what was my major malfunction. She knew, and it was probably obvious, though I don't think my rambling verbal stories were any much different than they usually were. Still, if you can't get sloshed the day you clear the last hurdle between you and your degree, after a long and very work-filled semester, when can you? Though admittedly, there should be more warm beer and keg stands involved.
Today's been more of a usual day, though it began rather late since yesterday's non-sleep and math test study stress combined with warm covers, a cold room, and no weekend deadlines to let me sleep for almost 10 hours, or about 4 more than usual. I didn't regret it a bit, either. I did wander around aimlessly in the morning afternoon, but some leftover pizza and caffeine got me on track, and I set to work cleaning and vacuuming and moving furniture. I'd grown tired of the arrangement of my apartment over the past year, and with school finished with and seven or eight months of non-academic work awaiting, I wanted to change things around. The hope is that my mental state will reflect the physical condition of my domicile, so I moved everything around. My desk went over to the side wall, turning 90 degrees in the process, a bookshelf switched walls, the TV moved to where my desk o used to be, and my Ikea futon/couch also turned 90 degrees, to face the TV across a much less yawning chasm than it previously spanned.
None of this means anything to anyone other than the half dozen or so readers who have actually seen my apartment, but the objective was to shake up my working environment, while also making the apt a bit more accessible to other people. So my desk no longer squats in the center of the room, the couch has open space in front of it and is near the open space kitchen/dining area, the TV is close enough to the couch that it could be used to comfortably watch a movie, (ideally a female someone I could put my arm around) etc. It's by no stretch of the imagination a "bachelor pad," but it was never intended to be. I do hope it's a bit more welcoming to some potential, largely-hypothetical female guest, and that it'll help me work more and be more focused on things I should be focused on. Slightly cryptic though that statement might be.
As of yet, it's neither of those things. In fact it's make me feel rather sideways. I suspect the floor in this cheap apartment is slightly concave, since I feel a bit like I'm falling downhill to my left. It's been 11 months, but I have vague recollections of feeling like I was falling to my right when I set up my desk and chair in their former position. Since my left now is towards the center of the room, which was formerly to my right, that's evidence of the floor sagging, or at least evidence that my delusions are consistently delusional. In the final analysis it doesn't matter if i feel crooked because the floor is, or because I'm delusional. In either event, I can take comfort in the fact that the same thing happened back in January, and I got used to it after a few days, thus have cause to hope I'll do the same now.
Even though I'm sideways.
One welcome benefit of all the rearranging was that I had to turn my bookcase 90 degrees as well, which rendered everything on it... backwards. It's one of those Ikea bookcases made up of multiple small square compartments, so there's not back on the back; in fact,it can be used as a sort of room divider if you so desire, turning the back into a second front. I'm using the second front now, but not the room divider since my apt is far too small for such activities. I had to turn all my books around once I moved the bookcase, but that was okay since it gave me an excuse to pull most of them out and rearrange and organize them.
I did so, packing the good stuff together by author and theme, stacking together all my leftover college books that the bookstore wouldn't buy back at even their insulting "pennies on the dollar" rates, (it's always fun to sell them a used book for $2.50, then walk over and see the same book on sale "used" for $14.50) and generally condensing my holdings to free up more cubbyholes for non-book storage in the 4x4 array. There's something soothing about sorting and arranging and putting disparate objects to rights. As evidenced by the popularity of various "collecting" hobbies, most of which require/allow their collectors to spend far more time arranging and sorting and fussing over their collected items than would be tolerated in any other circumstances outside of a mental ward.
I was surprised by one thing though; the sheer amount of books I own that I've never read. None of them were purchases, but Malaya and me haunted various library book giveaways during our time together, and at almost every such event I obtained half a dozen titles that I never got around to reading. Malaya sorted through all of our joint books when we split up and I moved out, and quite generously packed me off with every book of even slightly dubious provenance.
So now I have two full cubbyholes of books I've never read, most of them by authors I have, at best, a passing familiarity with. The prime example of this is are the four titles by Stephen Donaldson. Hardcovers of "Forbidden Knowledge" and "The Lost Story" and paperbacks of "Lord Fool's Bane" and "The One Tree." I don't recall picking any of those from the endless rows of cardboard boxes, and yet here they are. Worse yet, I've got no idea who the author is. His name sounded familiar, but I think I was confusing him with famously hawk-faced television journalist Sam Donaldson. However, I don't believe that other S. Donaldson is an author, and if he is I wouldn't be moved to read his work. Even for free.
The author Donaldson is not a writer I'm familiar with (at least not yet) but looking at his offerings on Amazon I see a fair number of fantasy-looking titles. None of the ones I have here look much like fantasy from their covers, but most likely I, or perhaps Malaya, had in the past seen his other titles with Merlin-looking dudes on the front, and the name bubbled up when we saw it in the stacks at the book giveaways.
Other noteworthy books include "Jian," by Eric Van Lustbader. I've never read anything by him, but he's got one of those names you never forget once you hear it. I'm not sure if it's a good name, or not, for an author? It's certainly memorable, and not just because we share a first name and middle initial, but it's outrageously fake, even if it's his given name. It's a better name for a male porn star than a novelist, though I guess we can be thankful it's not "Lustbladder" or worse, "Lustbatter," which would really be porn-centric.
Another author I've long meant to try out is Terry Goodkind. He's the author of The Sword of Truth, one of the most popular fantasy series going, and is blessed with a memorable last name, and at least in this book, the 1994 hardcover "Temple of the Winds," an absolute LOL gem of an author photo. He looks like a younger, pony-tailed version of General Zod, the bad guy in Superman II. Intentionally, I assume. You see the shot here, assuming it didn't make your eyes water so badly that you had to close your browser and give up on reading the rest of this potentially-neverending blog entry.
Goodkind's intense posing presents the best/worst example, but a very common theme in these library freebies, most of them published between from 1965-1985, are their awful author photos. It's not real surprising; no one becomes a novelist because they were so good looking that they grew weary of the constant demands of modeling agencies, and most people look pretty stupid in any photo more than 20, but less than 50, years old. But still. Dude! I think the key, demonstrated conversely by Senior Goodkind here, is to not try so hard. You wrote a book. No, it's not the easiest thing in the world, but it's not exactly an unheard of achievement. Just pose. Be Mr. Serious Writer Man if you can't bring yourself to smile or have bad teeth, but don't be a douche bag. And that goes double for authors of cheap pulpy fantasy/sci-fi/mystery, which sums up most of the books I looked through today. I shouldn't complain, though. The time capsules of clothing choices, hair styles, and silly poses were almost worth the price of the books by themselves. Which were um... free.
I posted last week that I was all but done with my degree. I was done with the semester and had no mystery about passing my classes; the only doubt there is if I'll get a 4.0 for the term or not. I think I will, but an A- could creep in from Speech & Rhetoric, the only non-major, non-upper division class I was taking (and the one I put by far the least importance on). Not that my grades matter, for any reason I can think of. But if I'm taking classes I'm interested (for the most part) in, I figure I might as well get something out of them. And in almost every class I've taken in my (now-concluded) return to college, getting an A has almost been an unavoidable result of coming to class, keeping up with the readings, and paying attention to the lectures.
I did as little of those things as possible in high school, since I wasn't learning anything interesting, and I hated having to be there. In college, this time around at least, I've done it willingly and paid quite a bit for the privilege, so of course I'm paying attention in class and trying to learn from the material. My objective wasn't to slide through with a degree while making as little effort as possible; my objective was to learn from and enjoy the experience along the way. And I did, for the most part, and as a natural extension of that effort, I got good grades.
So I passed everything pretty easily, including the final hurdle, a math competency exam I took this morning. Great success! I was worried going in, since I hadn't exactly been killing the practice tests (more on those in a bit), and if I didn't pass the test I would have to enroll for the spring semester, simply to take a single piddling math class to meet my graduation requirement. Why a Humanities degree requires a math class, I couldn't entirely say. I guess it's just part of the whole well-rounded, liberal arts education concept. I never used any math in any of my classes.
The exam, as longed for and simultaneously dreaded as an accurate account of Jennifer Love Hewitt's measurements, was called the CLEP, and as the official site discusses, these tests can be used to meet basic requirements and save time/money at college. I took the basic English Composition test before I resumed my college career 18 months ago, since I was not about to sit through English 101 when I could dismiss that requirement, and earn 3 units, with one 60 minute, $90, computer-scored exam. I remember nothing about it, other than that it was almost entirely sentence structure and reading comprehension and vocabulary, acquired writing skills that I roll 18s in, at this point. At least in comparison to the average incoming college student.
I knew I needed to take the CLEP College Math exam too, or else take a 3 unit math class, but I put it off, and put it off, until finally I was a month from graduating, with every requirement set to be met... every requirement except that math competency test. So I scheduled it for mid-November, and then postponed it since I was just swamped by other work and didn't have time to study. The next test date was December 14th, and that was the last time I could take it and still have Fall '07 be my last semester. So it was on, and if you're about to suggest that I spent the week+ since my last final studying diligently for this crucial math test... you must experience a lot of disappointment when your expectations fail to mesh with reality.
I'd talk about the test now that I've passed it, but 1) I'd be talking about a math test, which has to be pretty much chloroform in print except for some small, deviant population of math geeks that I might belong to, and 2) I'd be breaking the law. Well, not the law, but before starting the computerized test I had to click through about five pages reminiscent of those software installment agreements we all skim over without reading and then proceed to break without a hint of guilt. In this case, I'm going to shu' my mouf', since included in the terms of taking the CLEP were things like, not transmitting any info about it, including via email or other online sources, with penalties like having my exam score invalidated. I can't imagine anyone would ever know or check or care, but just in case... Besides, see point #1 above. You're not missing anything.
I will point you to the official College Board page for the math test though, and quite briefly (and selectively) from it. Here are the topics covered on the test, with their approximate importance. See the linked page for more details.
10% -- Sets
10% -- Logic
20% -- Real Number System
20% -- Functions and Their Graphs
25% -- Probability and Statistics
15% -- Additional Topics from Algebra and Geometry
If you want more detail (I'm sure most of you are simply quivering for it), check the test books section of your local library or bookstore, and you'll see numerous competing guides. I bought books by The Princeton Review and Research and Educational Association, and checked out Peterson's CLEP Success. All of them have basic info about the tests, study material, practice tests for a variety of CLEP exams. The verdict? They all suck.
Well, let me clarify. I would not have passed the test without studying these guides, since I was way, way, way out of practice on most of the skills required (since high school, in many cases), but the quality of instruction and information vary widely between the various books, and none of them did a very good job preparing me for what would be on the actual test. I was able to relearn and remind myself of things from working through these books though, and my overall comprehension of the math issues was sufficient, so I can't really complain. The test has 60 questions, only some of which are scored. I don't know how they weight the questions; all are supposed to be equally important, but 80 is a perfect score. I needed 50 to pass, and I got 65, and knew I was fine 20 minutes into the exam, when I was sure about my answers on maybe 28 or 30 out of the first 35.
That stood in marked contrast to my experience with almost all of the practice tests, which were all much harder than the actual exam, and simply choked with trick questions, sneaky definitions, deceptive wording, and much more difficult problems than they presented in the pre-test review material. The Peterson's book was both the best and worst. It had about 20 pages of excellent basic math review on everything I needed for the CLEP. That part was great. It followed those pages, and the numerous review problems that concluded each review section, with a 65 question test that had questions written by some sort of malevolent cyber-professor, out to crush the spirit and desire of the worthless meat units.
I spent about 4 hours last night going through the whole Peterson's guide, figuring out all the sample problems and background info, solving every review question, and feeling like I had a pretty good handle on things. And then I got to their sample test, and often found myself laughing out loud at the questions, they were so unrelated to the review material 5 pages earlier. Routinely I'd read a question, curse the imaginary math gods, and flip back to the review section to see if it was as completely removed from the sample test question as it seemed to me. In almost every case the answer was yes. Yes it was.
Happily, the actual exam was not all full of weird problems, trick questions, or super-complicated equations that vastly exceeded the basic competency-testing point of the exercise. So I passed, and now I'm actually done, save for the registrar completing paperwork and approving course substitutions and getting the official results of my CLEP exam, etc. Which once again begs the questions... what now?
Well, short term I'm trying to relax and enjoy some vacation time. I'm going down to San Diego to visit the folks for a week over Xmas, and plan to do quite a bit of nothing while I'm there, and perhaps eat too much. I can probably stand to, since I've lost weight from all the work and stress during this past semester. That and my main recreation/fitness activity/stress reliever has become bike riding. There are some really nice mountain bike trials all over a small mountain/nature preserve a few miles from my condo here in San Rafael, and I've taken to riding 2-3 hours there a couple of times a week. I cover about 25 miles each time, at least 15 of that up and down rather steep hills/rough terrain, and while I've got no idea of the actual mileage or what my heart rate is, I'm as fit as I've been in years, and certainly have the flattest, washyboardy abs I've had since about 22. No, no pics. Do try to control your disappointment.
Extended periods of non-stop pedaling along winding, occasionally-precipitous forest paths is a great deal more fun than walking in place on a gym machine, though I must admit the lack of any opportunities to eyeball nubile young women in spandex is a drawback. Well, they're not entirely lacking, it's just that the few I see are usually flashing past on their own bikes, which isn't quite the same as seeing one take her turn in the buttblaster leg lift machine. Pleasant as the imagery it evokes may be, I have to admit my comparison is flawed, and entirely hypothetical. I've not been to a gym since I moved 12 months ago, and the gym Malaya and I went to was almost entirely populated by aging housewives anyway.
Yes, I digress. Too many thoughts in my head today.
So I passed the math CLEP, and found out the minute the test was over, since it's computer graded. It was about 11am then, and since I'd gotten just a 2.5 hour nap before the test, after staying up until 6:30, I had my sights set on a nap. Driving home I called back a friend who'd just texted to wish me well, then spent a few minutes giggling and shrieking in relieved happiness, before parking my car, walking into my apt, and finding Jinx still nestled deeply into my heavy comforter, where I'd left her 2 hours earlier. Way to miss Daddy, little kettle!
I wanted to pace and scream and shout, and I was hella hungry, but I settled for undressing, lying down, turning on the wall heater, propping my cold toesies in front of it, and texting the news to Malaya and my parents. Next thing I knew it was afternoon, Jinx was lying halfway over my right shoulder, my neck was sore, and I had nothing approaching the energy or gumption to get out and bundle up for a bike ride, even though the day was sunny. So I dozed a while longer, then got up and started pacing. And I'm still at it, 4 hours later. I've been surfing peripatetically, doing housework, washing dishes, watering plants, playing with Jinx (who finally woke up to go sit in the living room window and enjoy the last of the day's sun), and wishing anyone I knew in real life had time for me tonight.
For the last few months I've been friends with a lovely young woman I met at college. She's curious to see herself blogged about here, but hasn't been able to come up with a satisfactory alias yet, so at this point I'll just call her IG, short for "imaginary girlfriend." Which she is. To me anyway. We're good friends and have been talking, texting, and emailing all semester, and have gone on a number of "dates" since our bi-weekly, history-class meetings came to an end in late November, but she's not ready to commit to anything more than companionship. I'm not sure if I am either, but I wouldn't mind moving kinda in that direction. And who knows; maybe we will. At any rate, she's the person I've been spending most of my social time with, and we had a great time doing a mutual celebration of the end of the semester. Unfortunately, she's busy with family obligations tonight and has to work and do other things all weekend, so we can't get together again until next Tuesday. With IG off the social menu, I tried to turn to my ex-girlfriend but still good friend, Malaya. She's been incommunicado all afternoon/evening though, and would probably have had other work-related tasks tonight anyway.
That left... no one. I know various other people, through Kali and school, but none of them are people I socialize with, or want to be around when I'm happy and wanting to have fun. Or vice versa, I suspect. The penalty of being a relatively private person, or at least one who's picky about who he socializes with.
The irony is that in the old days, i.e. anytime before about July, I'd have been quite happy being alone tonight. I spent a decade enjoying my own company more than that of anyone else, and was much happier writing, or surfing, or gaming, than doing anything social. That was always the case when I lived in San Diego, and it didn't change much once I moved up to the Bay Area to live with Malaya. I just had a girlfriend who was about as close to a soulmate as I'm likely ever to meet, and we had highly overlapping interests (hence my soulmate mention) and generally enjoyed doing the same thing. Eventually it became clear that she liked to go out and do things more often than I did, and that was a source of some friction.
Ironic friction, since in retrospect I can now empathize with her, since I've been doing similar academic activities to the ones she was frequently laboring through, and now I want to go out and do fun stuff after days or weeks or months of heard school work. Pity I didn't get into the back to university thing 3 years ago, or we'd have had that much more in common, and could have really enjoyed relaxing and partying when our semesters ended.
So now I've got no one to party with, at least tonight, and as this entry keeps getting longer and longer, and I keep falling victim to distraction and diversion, then returning to continue its interminable construction composition it. I considered going out, but I can't find enough restlessness/interest to do that on my own. Where would I go? What would I do? Movies and eating out aren't any fun solo, and I can't think what I want to eat anyway. Maybe I'll go get a pizza once I post this: I haven't had one of those in weeks.
I don't have any interest in going to a bar, especially not a singles bar, and I don't play arcade games anymore, nor even know where an arcade might be found these days, other than in the lobby of a movie theater. I don't want to watch a movie, or a DVD, or buy/rent a new one, and I had the cable turned off months ago, so even if I wanted to watch TV, I don't have that option. I'm too restless to get into a book, even though I've got a stack of good ones I've been itching to get into all semester. Worst of all, I've got no desire to play videogames. I've not had time for that since the summer, aside from what I stole to spend doing some Hellgate: London alpha/beta testing. I didn't buy a copy of the game upon release though, since I wouldn't have had time to play anyway, but also since I was waiting to hear from Flagship's moribund community relations team if they'd be providing copies and monthly subscriptions to fansite admins. (That's the industry standard now; people who run ites that cover games like World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, etc get free games and their monthly subscriptions paid for by the manufacturers.)
Apparently the answer about free games was "no." since I could never get an answer beyond "We'll look into it." so I finally ordered a copy of HGL through my own "buy crap" link, for that big 4% payback, and it arrived last week. I've played about 2 hours since then, and even though I was spending a lot of time studying for the stupid math test, I could have played more. I didn't really want to, though. It's not the game, I think it's fun and potentially addictive. I've just grown out of the habit of playing games for longer than 10 or 15 minutes at a time, and I'm not sure I want to get back into it. I feel like a 14 y/o who's just "discovered girls," but honestly, I'd so much rather spend time talking or shopping or eating lunch or just taking a walk with an interesting young woman than I would sitting at my computer and killing pixels with other pixels, that the whole concept of videogames seems kind of quaint at this point. The fact that my IG isn't a gamer probably factors in there somewhat (Malaya and I played a lot of D2 together in the early days.), but it's mostly about me. I've gotten used to doing so much stuff, with the hours of school work and thinking and being active, that returning to my old, self-despising ways of gaming to kill time seems uninviting. The fact that I'm supposedly running an HGL fansite is a complicating factor in that equation, but not one I'm prepared to address at this point, either in thought or in blog.
So, I don't know what I want to do tonight, or this weekend, or next week, other than on Tuesday when I've got a date with the IG, and then martial arts class that evening. I don't need to figure it out at this point though, since I'm off to San Diego Thursday morning. The interesting time will come in late December and early January, when I'm back here without any pressing school projects of any kind, the IGs still out of town visiting relatives, and I won't be able to put off "what do I do now?" considerations any longer. Stay tuned.
I do have huge plans for work; RL work, of the kind that provides financial remuneration, as well as hours a day booked for working on my fiction/novel, more time to redesign and re-engineer and relaunch this website, and hours more (in theory) on the HGL site, as well as considerations about apply to/preparing for (maybe) grad school come the fall. But will that be enough? Not that doing more is required for humans, and most of us don't fully engage in life, since just doing what's got to be done to get by is much easier. I don't want to slip back into that, though. Too many years have passed, leaving me little more than unwelcome memories and balky knees. Enough. Time for better.
This one completely confuses me. It's the trailer for Speed Racer, a movie adaption of the infinitely-cheesy cartoon that I assumed would be insipid, family-friendly garbage along the lines of a children's version of Transformers. I used to watch Speed Racer when I was about 8, and I hated it even then. I watched it anyway, since it was a cartoon and I loved them, and it ws anime before anyone knew what that was, but even at that age I was appalled by the idiocy of the characters and bored by the absurd, repetitious plots.
The wikipedia page is a geekfest and goes into infinite detail about the original Anime, the Westernization of it, and talks about the great, complicated plots. I'll admit the possibility of those elements if you are very forgiving and you watch every episode in sequence on DVD, but for me at age 8, watching one episode a day at my grandparents' house during summer vacation, I got none of that. I enjoyed the car racing, thought the assorted bad guys were too silly to believe, wanted Trixie to die in a gas fire, and hated sidekicks Spritle and Chim-Chim with a passion. Even decades later, my memories of how stupid every car race was in Speed Racer remained strong enough that they ruined the Pod Race scene in Episode One, since it was essentially a recreation of every Speed Racer cliche. Automotive sabotage to overcome, the hero catching up in 10 seconds after a 5 minute delay, cheating enemy drivers with illegal weapons on their vehicles, an annoying sidekick in the trunk, an unsustainable body count, frequent closeups of the worried relatives/friends in the stands, pro wrestling-like officiating, bad guys set to win until their scheming hubris did them in, and the hero improbably overcoming impossible odds to pull it out in the end. All Lucas needed was a miniature, simianized version of R2D2 in red overalls and the homage would have been complete.
With those thoughts in mind, I clicked the link to view the Speed Racer trailer with a sort of resigned dread. I knew it would be bad, but rubbernecking style, I had to see just how bad it would be. I've watched it three times now... and I'm still not sure. I think it might be good? It's being done by the Watchowski brothers siblings, or at least the trailer claims it's by the "creators of the Matrix trilogy," and while they've got an uneven track record, they are a creative pair.
If the Speed Racer trailer accurately reflects the film, this is going to be one of the oddest, genre-bending major motion pictures ever released. It appears to be about half-cartoon, with every scene of the race cars slightly less realistic than the NASCAR action in Pixar's Cars. It's kind of like the uncanny valley look of the characters in the new Beowulf movie, but Speed Racer has human actors, not just computerized motion capture nightmares. It's like they shot the whole thing in front of a bluescreen, and then processed it to look intentionally cartoonish. The overly-stylized villains and race tracks and costumes and acting seem to go along that same theme, and after watching the trailer several times, I think they're doing it as a sort of live action anime. The action scenes are being left cartoonish, but the characters are staying super melodramatic like in anime, there are moments of overwrought, overserious drama mixed in with madcap comedy, the costuming is highly distinctive, there are random sections of martial arts and physics-defying action scenes, the logo and graphics are super high tech and seem out of place compared to the cartoonish everything else, etc.
If you're familiar with the conventions of the anime genre, you'll recognize all of them in trailer, down to camera angles, dramatic poses and angles, stark and vivid backgrounds, etc. It's kind of a live action anime in the same way that Sin City was a live action American comic book. Or so it seems from the trailer.
I'm curious to see if that style shows up in the movie, and if so how it's received. Anime is definitely an acquire taste, with the broad characterizations and mixture of comedy and action and violence, and it's a taste that's very strong in niche markets, and among a lot of young people on the Internet, but it's not mainstream pop culture. It's entirely possible that people who know nothing of anime could watching Speed Racer and not get any of that wavelength and still enjoy the movie as a sheer entertainment spectacle; and I guess we'll find out.
A more conventional and much darker trailer is available for the sequel to the recent Batman movie, which relaunched the series with a more adult sensibility. I didn't like any of the previous 4 Batman movies; the first 2 by Tim Burton were tolerable, but too absurd and flamboyant for me to get any emotional connection to them. The 3rd and 4th were disasters I've only been able to sit through bits and pieces of. I enjoyed Batman Begins though, and thought it held up well when I saw it again on DVD, so I'm eager for the sequel. I wish it could be rated R and really be dark and grim, instead of just PG-13 semi-adult in theme, but they did a great job getting in scary, subversive stuff with the Scarecrow and the civilization destroying ninjas in the last one, so I've got high hopes for the Joker actually being evil and scary and psychotic in this upcoming version. He certainly sounds it in the teaser, which has zero scenes from the film, but some nice voice over dialogue, principally from Michael Caine as Alfred, the surprisingly-philosophical septuagenarian butler.
Check out the teaser if you haven't already, and feel free to click the smaller size link to get it sooner; there's nothing visual to it that you'll appreciate more at 1024 than 240 pixels wide.
This clip from The View is making the rounds, for good reason. It's funny, but also quite painful. Check it out, and wince at the ignorance. Worse than ignorance, really.
The clip is from a US TV show called The View, a daytime talk show I've only heard of when one or more of the female hostesses says something newsworthy celeb blog-worthy in its stupidity. This happens less often now that Rosie O'Donnell quit and Elizabeth Hasselback is on maternity leave, but apparently the producers managed to find a grinning idiot named Sherri Shepherd to fill the dumb void Rosie and Liz left behind.
Who? I'd never heard of her before, and her wikipedia page is notable primarily for discussion of this latest embarrassment, and one earlier one, from The View, when she said that she wasn't sure if the earth was round or flat. That earlier case she's kind of got an excuse. I'll quote Wikipedia, despite the [sic]-worthy punctuation:
she was asked by co-host Whoopi Goldberg "is the world flat?" She first responded "...I don't know" and expanded that she "never thought about it", the co-star of two network programs continued that it was more important to her that she thought about how she was "going to feed my child". Barbara Walters replied to this defense of her scientific illiteracy, "You can do both." She then went on to quote scripture.
The next day, Shepherd explained that she never had to defend her religious beliefs before, and that she became overwhelmed with the many questions that were being thrown at her. By the time Goldberg added her question, Shepherd was nervous and did not fully comprehend what was being asked. She stated that she knows that the world is round.
I'll give her the "overwhelmed by questions" defense. After all, it's not as if she's paid to work on a talk show and enunciate her opinions. Oh wait...
I would like to direct your attention to her claim that she's never had to defend her religious beliefs before. I'll take her at her word on that, since it seems to be the key to this whole issue. She's never had to defend them, which means she's never given them, or much of anything else, any critical thought. She's just taken whatever ridiculous fables she's been given and swallowed them whole, since like Barbie with math, Sherri + thinking = hard. Her wikipedia bio says that she started out as a Jehovah's Witness before becoming a Born Again Christian, a dumb to dumber devolution that certainly fits with her demonstrated cognitive abilities.
We've all had fun laughing at the various blonde Teen Miss America types in recent weeks, who thought Europe was a country, and other similar crimes against thought. But in those cases, the people just didn't know. Sure, it's sad when someone doesn't know the planets revolve around the sun, or that Europe's a continent full of individual countries, but at least they're just ignorant, and they know that they don't know what they're talking about, but they were put on the spot to answer a question.
Sherri View here is ignorant, but intentionally. No one asked her if there were Christians in 1000 BCE; she volunteered that information, and then defended it when corrected, ever-so-gently, by people who seem to know only slightly more than she does. (Though I think Whoopie knew pretty definitely; she was just being polite.) She's sure she knows about things she could not be more ignorant about, and she's happy to leap in and state her uninformed opinion when given the opportunity.
If you're wondering, I might as well briefly lecture, since we covered this exact issue about 4 weeks ago in my World Religions class. I think it should be fairly obvious to anyone smarter than Sherri that there were no Christians before Jesus Christ. Just as there weren't any Confucians before Confucious, or Buddhist before Buddha, etc. The names kind of give it away, huh?
Judaism has existed as a religion since around 3200 years ago, when the (mythical) exodus from Egypt occurred. According to the legend, those early Israelites wandered the desert (basically modern day Jordan, or northern Saudi Arabia) until they reached Mt. Sinai, where Moses spoke with God and the Covenent was formed. The Covenant states that the Hebrews are God's chosen people and that if they life their lives in upright fashion, the one true lord will sustain them and bring them to the promised land. Caanan in those days, also known as Palestine, home of the Philistines. Had you always wondered who the "Philistines" were? Me too; I'd never connected that with Palestine, oddly enough. Just a slightly changed pronunciation in 3000 years.
The people settled in that land, now known as Israel, and lived there in a semi-constant state of low level warfare with other neighboring tribes for hundreds of years. While there they continued to create a religion, adding to the earlier writings and editing and codifying (Dead Sea Scrolls type stuff; tons more written than preserved in later editions). The Hebrew holy writings compiled in canonical form are called the Tanak. The Torah is the first part of those writings, and they were codified and finalized and closed to further addition in about 100 BCE. This is what Christians now refer to as the Old Testament.
Jesus, a probably-historical figure, came along a few years BCE. Not 0, scholars are fairly sure, but in that general range. And no, it's fairly certain he wasn't born any time near Christmas. The spring is most likely since it corresponds to some parts of the mythos, since that's when shepherds are out in their fields at night, helping their ewes foal. Sheep and shepherds are in caves staying warm at night in December. There's also speculation that Joseph and Mary were in Bethlehem for Passover, which falls on April 2nd. It's very certain that there's no point in debating events of Jesus' life, since if he even existed, there are no records from his life, none of the gospels were written less than 30-40 years after he died, and none were written by anyone who actually knew the man or was around at the time before he was crucified.
Jesus, whether he was historical or wholly fictional or (most likely) a composite of a real man with a great load of myth and legend and lore heaped on top to make a better story, lived about 33 years, was crucified around 30CE, and spent the last years of his life as a crusader for religious reform of the Jewish faith, raising a ruckus that upset the leaders of the Jewish powerful in Jerusalem, who were then happy enough to let their Romans take care of the rabble-rousing prophet.
To digress a bit, it's fairly clear from Biblical scholarship that Jesus did not set out to found a new church. He wanted to reform some of the corrupt and caste-like practices of the Jewish faith, not become the basis of a splinter sect. Furthermore, it's very clear that almost all of the magical acts attributed to him (AKA miracles) are evidence of the creative license taken by his chroniclers, decades after his death. Primarily by the Gospel of John, which is non-synoptic; meaning it does not agree (at all) with the events told in the other 3 gospels.
All of the gospels have major disagreements; all four tell very different stories about the resurrection, in terms of who first saw the empty tomb, who was there when it was seen, when the resurrected JC was first sighted, etc. But John goes a lot further, and makes almost all of the biggest supernatural claims that evangelists swallow uncritically. In the other gospels JC frequently denies being anything special, being holy, knowing God, having any relation to God, being able to work miracles, etc. Boring! So almost all the money quotes are from John, the last of the four gospels to be written, and the one that takes the most creative license to spice up the story. Numerous events are described in John and other, earlier gospels, and in every case John's version has more magic and miracles. John is the source of almost all of the famous lines, like that John 3:16 you see crazy people holding up on signs, about God so loving his us that he sent his only son to die for our sins.
Not according to Jesus, he didn't. There's nothing like that in the other gospels. In fact, there was a great deal of argument over that in the first few centuries, and not until the Council of Nicea in 325 (invoked by Roman Emperor Constantine, whose conversion to Christianity led directly to it becoming the official faith of the fading Roman Empire) was it decided that yes, the doctrine of Incarnation (which is utterly illogical) was part of canon, and that Jesus was both fully human and fully divine, and worked miracles, etc. Interesting to flash back to Sherri View's first faith, and note that Jehovah's Witnesses take a pre-Nicean viewpoint, and do not believe in the Trinity, or the Incarnation. Which is why I don't hesitate to say that while they're dumb, the Born Against are dumber.
Anyway, miracles and creative biography aside, the first influential followers of Christ were not his apostles, and none of them wrote a damn thing about him. All four gospels were written in educated Greek, and the peasants and fishermen hanging with Jesus spoke Aramic and were largely illiterate. Not one thing Jesus said in life was recorded (quite unlike Mohammad 600 years later, who claimed direct dictation from God, usually via Gabriel and had most of his bits of wisdom accurately transcribed during his life) and every quote or teaching or sermon in the gospels and the Bible was invented, or at best, recreated, usually without any witness testimony, decades later. The first major evangelist of Christianity was Paul, who never met Jesus and was a skeptical Jew until the famous "scales fell from his eyes" blindness cure. Paul then became a one man traveling revival show, touring around the eastern and southern Mediterranean, mostly through Turkey and Greece, from around 48-62CE. He really got people to start converting, though Christianity remained a persecuted cult until 313, when Emperor Constantine converted.
So, to return to the original argument much, much later, there (obviously) weren't any Christians until Jesus, and there weren't enough to matter until several decades after his death, and there weren't a lot until after 313CE. Major civilizations such as those in Sumeria, Babylonia, Egypt, China, and others rose and fell thousands of years before Abraham, Moses, Isiah, and other foundational figures of Judaism, the faith which Jesus was born into many centuries later. No one, even young earth Creationists, deny this, so in a way, Sherri's View (ignorant) views are kind of irrelevant, since they're just laughable. Even the craziest people in her own faith don't believe what she says she believes; it's just sad that a woman with a major American TV show for a mouthpiece could be so abysmally ignorant of not just human history and culture and the historical rise of her own religion, but even of the largely mythical teachings of her own religion. I imagine her preacher or reverend or whatever smacked his forehead when he saw this clip.
The bigger issue, I think, and something I talked about in one of the speeches in my stupid and pointless GE requirement Speech/Rhetoric class, was how silly any religious/mythological beliefs are, especially those that claim to be the one truth. Very, very briefly, and I may elaborate on this one at some point since I've already got all the notes typed up on it: Modern humans, homo sapiens, have existed on Earth for a minimum of 100,000 years. Most anthropologists and archaeologists would put it closer to 200,000, or 250,000, but no one with any knowledge in the field would say less than 100k. There are countless fossil finds, campsites, burial sites, animal bones showing tool damage, etc, all dating back that far, or further. Those people had religions and origin myths. No culture any anthropologist has ever studied, present or past, has lacked a religion. Humans have always, always, invented creation myths and legends since we've had brains big enough to do so.
The three big questions must always be answered, in some fashion: Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going?
Since no humans, until very recently (on a geological timeline) had any scientific, verifiable answers to these questions, people had to invent myths and legends, religions, to get them through the night. There are estimated to have been more than 100,000 such religions, a number arrived at by estimating how many distinct cultures and societies there have been in homo sapien history, and multiplying that number by 1. (It's obviously an imprecise figure, since many cultures have more than one religion, and the line between a sect of a religion and a cult that's a new religion is very fuzzy.)
The point though, is that every society, culture, and even tribe has had their own religion. All different, all with some overlapping elements, and that none of them came up with anything in any way resembling Judaism, or its same diety offshoots, Christianity or Islam. So if one believes in any of those faiths, all of which say they're the one true, (Christianity and Islam most stridently) one must believe that God created all this, kicked back and watched for a few hundred thousand years, before finally deciding to intervene and give out his true nature to Moses on Mt. Sinai, or by sending down JC a thousand years later, or by having Gabriel finally dictate the true version of the faith to an illiterate caravan driver in Saudi Arabia in 600 CE.
Which is more likely; one of those myths, which means that all the 99,999 other religions humans invented before and after were bullshit, bullshit God saw no reason to correct for tens of thousands of years, or that all religions are human inventions. After all, it's undeniable that they all reflect the values, ideals, technologies, gender relations, location, etc, of the cultures that created them, and that they all look exactly as they would if they were creations of man, rather than divine revelations.
The answer seems pretty clear to me. I don't know how it went over in my speech class, though. I was the only student in that class over about 21, and none of the kids seemed too ready to think critically about the issue, or to consider the odds that the one faith they believed, which was (coincidentally) the one their parents fed to them from infancy, might not be the one true faith ever revealed on this earth in 200k years of human culture.
My last final was Wednesday evening, and after breezing through it I wandered out to my car and drove home, wondering what now. I'm done, finished my degree, B.A. in Humanities, and yeah, I should probably be more emotional at this point. I had a semi-hysterical breakdown Monday night, but in a good way, after making it through 2 finals that day, after having been up all night finishing my senior project and getting it printed up and bound at a 24 hour Kinkos. The senior project was an insane rush to finish, thanks to my procrastinating on it, and my primary reader was too busy last week to look over it. He was supposed to get on it over the weekend and get comments to me over the weekend, and when Sunday night came and went without any word from him, I was a little panicked. I went ahead and finished a last edit/draft, and took the 34 pages to Kinkos to get it printed up in two copies on good paper and bounded (spiral folder type thing), and sent him a late night email with the final .doc attached, saying I'd drop off the hard copies at his office in the morning and that they were due that day, and I needed his signature on both copies.
I got to sleep around 5, set my alarm for 10, and at 7:45 when my alarm clock/cell phone singing, I picked it up with no idea who it was. It was helpful that I was too asleep to speak or think, since it was the man I'd been so eager to contact, and he had good news. He'd read (well, skimmed) my paper and thought it was very good, and would be happy to sign off on it, and would meet me in his office early that afternoon. So that was that, worries over with, but I was too relieved to get back to sleep. So I laid in bed for 3 hours, sort of dozing but mostly thinking about everything, then got up and took a long shower and spent an hour studying for my first final of the day, then headed out to get his damn thing so I could be rid of it.
That went smoothly, and I went from his office hither and yon, getting the other required signatures and turning the two copies in at last. From there I went right to my first final, making it through a ridiculously long and overdone exam (for a stupid GE requirement Speech/Rhetoric class that hadn't taught me a thing all term) writing with a pen that might as well have used liquid manure for ink, as much bullshit as I wrote on that test. From there it was over to the library for 2 hours studying for my second final of the day, and then another Pepsi with a bag of sour cream and onion baked potato chips, before the World Religions final.
I usually am very careful on exams. I always force myself to read all the multiple choices to be sure there aren't any tricks, on the test or in my mind, and I check over my answers, etc. Not this time. I'd done all the readings and paid attention in lectures and gone over the material so much that I knew the answers at once when I read the question, and my unblinking eyes were soon scanning the ABCDE options not to read them all and evaluate, but to find the one correct one as quickly as possible. Sometimes before I even finished reading the question. I'm sure I missed a few Qs because of that, but it won't matter, since I didn't miss much, and I knew all the 6 extra credit map questions. Besides, I'd gotten an A on the first paper in that class, and the midterm, and I never got less than an A on any full-length paper I did in my 3 semesters, and I knew my research paper was good too. I could have gotten a B on the final and still had an A in the class, what with the various extra credit options I'd fulfilled.
It's funny; I had a horrible GPA in high school, since I didn't care at all. I had several Fs in classes I just chose not to participate in or attend at all, and ended up with the minimum units required to graduate. No idea what my GPA was. Literally, no idea. I couldn't name 2 classes I had my senior year, and don't know my grade in any of them. Probably 2.2 or something like that, since I did get As in classes that were hard/interested me, and those averaged out the Fs and Ds in boring classes I did nothing in for 8 months.
In my first swing through college back when I was 19, 20, etc, I got something like a 3.6 GPA, without really trying. I didn't not try, but I didn't really care about my grades. I did the work in college since it was interesting and sometimes challenging, but mostly since I had about 12 hours of class a week, each class only met once or twice for a total of 3 hours, and I could take classes at times I wanted to take them at, instead of being trapped in the busywork hell of high school from 7-2:30 M-F.
This time I've not really worried about grades either, but the classes have been largely interesting to me, and since the work is all reading and writing and thinking, and I do that for fun, my GPA is enviable. I think I had a 3.96 over my first 2 semesters, (There are no A+s, honors classes are still just worth 4.0, which you get for an A, 3.7 for an A-, and so on down.) and I'll be surprised if I don't do a 4.0 this time, for my 20 units. I don't really feel any pride in this, since I just expect to get an A. I feel bad when I get less. And I should feel bad, since it's not a stretch to say that I'm smarter than most of fellow students, especially when I consider that few of them can write, plus they're like 20 and are still pretty much 13th-grading their way along on mommy and daddy's $32k a year.
Well that's invidious of me to mention, since the other students don't matter, since almost nothing is graded on a curve. So forget that. I should get As since the work I'm doing is all squarely in my skill set. I'm gifted/skilled at reading comprehension and especially at writing. Earning less than A means I didn't apply myself. I'm sure it would (will?) be different in a grad school level class, with higher standards and other students who are also very skilled at this pursuit, but at the undergrad level I've been able to breeze to an A in almost every class I've taken. Not that I'm uniquely talented; I'd have to work much harder for a C in biology or comp sci or calculus than I do to get As in English or History or Humanities. I'm not unable to do hard science or math; I actually scored higher on the Math than the English of my SAT lo those many years ago, but since I haven't spent most of my semi-adult life working with numbers or in the sciences, I'd have to do a lot of relearning and thinking in areas that are not second nature to me.
While I'm on the topic, I had an email asking me why I did Humanities rather than English or Writing. Logistics, mostly. I chose to major in Humanities rather than English since my transferred units went further towards the Humanities degree. Well, that's not entirely true; they were so old that they only counted as lower division/electives, so I had all my electives finished when I enrolled, but had to take all my core major courses, and needed to finish other GE reqs and needed everything upper division. An English degree required something like 42 units, while Humanities was a bit less at about 36, and there was a much wider array of possible classes in Humanities. Stuff like world religions, art history, musical theory, ethics, Anthropology, sexual morality, great books seminar, Asian culture, Italian Renaissance art/history, and so forth. I've taken all of those, and more.
I do not think I could have done the 64 units I needed to graduate in 3 semesters of English, and not just because of boredom and being forced to take all the elementary writing classes I knew enough not to need, but would have had to take anyway since you can only test out of so much stuff, when you need X number of UD units to graduate. Worse yet, as English majors frequently told me, the University had real problems offering enough English programs for the major, especially for those taking "English with an emphasis in writing," which is what I'd have wanted to take. Required classes were only being offered every other semester, or every third, and they were always filled up instantly, with others who had to take that class for their degree not able to enroll.
Naturally, the guidance/placement counselor didn't mention that, but fortunately I was steered to Humanities anyway, and now I'm done. It's kind of sad; as I look at how well I've done in the intellectually-challenging, non-time-wasting college classes, I can't help but remember the utter waste of 4 years that was my high school experience. I've blogged on it before, but how I wish I could somehow tell my 15 y/o self that if I really wanted to I could apply myself and take equivalence exams and graduate at 16, and move onto college with classes in subjects I was actually interested in, and not full of other disruptive idiot 16 y/o's forcing the teachers to spend more time controlling them than instructing us in the 6 weeks of material and 6 months of busy work that was stretched to fill an entire school year.
Anyway, lengthy, "I'm a good writer" disproving digression aside, let's return to Monday evening. I had my soda and chips and got ready for the World Religions final, and knew I was going to do well. I had it all in my head, I'd done the readings and read over the lecture notes, and as other students around me were spending time on their last minute cramming and asking each other about reading questions they hadn't gotten around to answering (since they hadn't done the reading in the first place) I knew them all. Five Pillars of Islam. Giblah is the direction one must face towards Mecca during the five daily prayers, dhikr is the endless "Allah" chanting the Islamic sufi mystics engage in, shirk is idolatry, the worst sin for a Muslim, etc.
And then test time came... and I went through it like Michael Vick's pet shop through a kindergarten class on rub-yourself-in-ham-day. Six pages of T/F and multiple choice with a few fill in the blanks, and I was done in about 12 minutes. Finished it just about as fast as I could turn the pages and write in the correct letters. I was the first one done, and as I got up I saw that the woman next to me was on page two. But almost halfway through page two! I laughed, more in glee at myself than at her, but a little of both, since I was giddy with relief and caffeine, and because I'm kind of an asshole who thinks he's better than other people, all real life evidence to the contrary.
The prof looked kind of shocked that anyone was done yet, but he took my exam and when I went back to my seat to get my jacket and bag, he got up and met me at the door, opening it and proceeding me outside. Where he stopped me in the hallway and said how much he'd enjoyed my final paper and how it was a really interesting topic and very well researched and presented. I enjoyed hearing it, since, unlike most of my research papers, I'd actually put in a fair amount of thought and analysis into that one. I thanked him and we talked for a moment and than we shook hands and I was off -- thinking once again that he'll be one of the profs I ask for a recommendation letter if I do continue to grad school, since he's a nice guy, speaks well, and is actually quite well known in the field, with several books that are often used to teach various comparative religion courses.
After that I began laughing. Walking to my car I was like Dr. Fucking Evil. Just manic cackling, mostly at how completely I'd been on top of that final, and how the senior project thing had turned from "ohshitI'mfucked" to "no problem," and how I was all done but for an Art History final on Wednesday that I knew I'd blow through since I knew the material very well. The whole drive home, mad cackling laughter, clapping hands, shouting like a football fan watching the home team rock one home, and shedding actual tears of joy; something I don't think I'd ever done since (or before) the time several years ago when I realized that I was actually in love with Malaya. That was a bigger deal than being all-but-done with my BA, but this was pretty good too, and I wasn't nearly done laughing by the time I finished the short drive to my apartment, so I rolled around the block a few times, with the windows rolled up so I could scream in relief and happiness without causing anyone to call the cops or throw a rotting pumpkin at me.
Compared to that, Wednesday night was nothing. I finished the art history final, which was about as easy as I'd expected it would be, walked to my car, drove home, threw off my jeans and jacket, and hopped into bed beside Jinxie where I could warm up under the covers and pet kitty and enjoy the 70 points of blue light coming from the two $2.25 strings of Xmas lights I'd bought the day before. Before I got lost in, "What now?" thoughts I traded texts with a few friends, read sixty pages of a book on male/female sexual psychology I checked out for a final paper but kept to read for personal interest (after it was useless for said paper), and eventually got up and made food, ate while surfing, and then wrote this.
One thought I had Monday, when I was bubbling with relief and happiness, was how this was but a dim reflection of what Malaya must have felt when she got her PhD last summer. I just finished 3 semesters of fairly easy university work, more than a decade after my first 3 years of desultory undergrad work. To get her PhD she did what most people do. Four years of undergrad, several more years of grad school, 2 years of research and field work to prep for her thesis, and then more years to write a nonfiction book on her research, while working full time. So yeah, as happy as I was on Monday, after 3 semesters of work, I can imagine why she was grinning like a well-battered pinata, about to disgorge its load of cheap candy, after a decade of far more intensive labor.
Wow, bad metaphor simile.
Speaking of (Malaya, not bad similies) it seems just months ago that I was scoffing at her suggestion that I return to college to finish my degree. She mentioned that several times to me during our first couple of years together, but I never gave it any serious thought until early 2006, when she was finishing her thesis and approaching her PhD graduation. Watching Malaya receive her PhD in the summer of 2006, seeing how happy she was, and seeing all of the others there to receive their masters and doctorates, and how many of them were in their sixties or seventies, I got motivated. I kept thinking how long they must have worked at it; how many late nights and long hours they'd put in after working and raising families, and it seemed an interesting pursuit. I was also interested in learning more; I felt my mind fully engaged sometimes during conversation, and also when writing fiction, but like most people, I was pretty much coasting through the rest of life, in terms of how often I had to work my hardest and think my best.
I have indeed gotten to read and think and work, though I have to admit that very little during the past 3 semesters has actually been a challenge. This semester was insane, but only because I was taking 20 units (usual full time student is 12), and thanks to procrastination during October and early November, I rolled into the Thanksgiving holiday weekend with 5 research papers to finish, plus my senior thesis. From Wednesday the 21st through the day my last paper was due, Thursday the 29th, I worked at least 10 hours every day researching and writing papers. Then put in another 20 hours Thursday night and over the weekend to finish up my senior project/thesis.
The craziest one was a psych paper on hypersexuality that was due Thursday night. I'd done nothing on it as of Wednesday at midnight. I started then, after my Wednesday night class, and did nothing but search out and read psych journal articles for about 8 hours straight. Cutting and pasting the good bits and bibliography info into one word document, adding in notes from other online sources, general info from wikipedia, etc. I went to bed at 7, with no idea how I was going to get a 12 page, 10 source paper out of that, since I had shit for info. The 7 books I'd checked out were useless, and the vast majority of online papers were crap too. Lots of mentions of hypersexuality occurring after brain surgery to correct severe epileptic seizures, historical info about the old days of nymphomania diagnoses, etc, but almost nothing about the actual condition itself, why it isn't listed in the current DSM, treatment options other than drugs, etc. Worse, the paper was supposed to be about treatment, not just info. How I'd handle a patient with that if I were a shrink, insurance coverage for the disorder, etc. Not to worry though, it was only 40% of my class grade.
I woke up at 10 for a morning class, talked to a female friend for a while after class to chill out, drove home for lunch, and then set to work furiously condensing my endless quotes and notes into a paper. The psych class was at 6, and I was willing to get there at 7:55 and meet the prof in the hallway after class if I had to, to finish the paper. I purposely didn't look at the clock all afternoon, just worked as fast as I could, and when I finished quoting and writing bullshit to fill the gaps and boiled the whole thing down to 11.5 pages, with a bloated 27 cited sources in hate-you-so-much, no-one-fucking-cares-about-page-numbers APA style, I was astonished to see that the time was 5:40, and that I might only be a few minutes late if I hurried. So I did, since after all, proofreading is for the weak. I changed clothing while the document printed, grabbed it and an apple, and was out the door.
I laughed Thursday night while driving to class, even though I knew I had 8 hours of senior thesis ahead of me that night, just out of exhilaration at having finished that paper in 18 hours, including sleeping (about 4 hours) and attending a day class. It was inarguably the worst paper I'd done during my 3 semesters back to college, but it covered the topic, more of less, and it was probably deserving of an A just for the abundant, steaming masses of research I'd done for it, and made very evident by almost entirely constructing it from generous quotes from said research.
And no, that's not what I mean about paying attention in class and making the work easy. I'm sure everyone else in the class, even the 19 y/o's, did a far better job at managing their time and putting in coherent hours on their psych papers. It is what I mean about reading and analyzing and writing being my skill set, though. If I tried that on an assignment in a fact-based class, one in which I had to work out problems or memorize things, or conduct experiments, I'd have failed miserably. But since it's in a writing/reading type class, I can pull it off even when I'm writing on a topic I didn't (and still don't) know that much about. It's actually something I've been trying to get over, since I last minute flashed through a number of papers that way in my first two semesters, when I was procrastinating really badly. The fact that I can do it that way and get away with it doesn't mean that I want to keep doing it that way. Though, obviously, it's a nice luxury to have.
Not that I need to worry about that problem for a while, with no more papers, or classes, or finals in my immediate future. There might be come the fall, since I'm seriously thinking about grad school. No idea where yet, since from what I've been told, graduate school is mostly where they do your field of study, and to find that out you've got to conduct some research. I want to study literature and creative writing, but also analysis and criticism and research in nonfiction too. Not really journalism; I don't want to be a reporter or work in a newsroom, but I do want to write articles and maybe even books on subject that interest me enough to research them. And no, I don't really *need* graduate school to do that. I could do it now, but I've gotten a lot better at writing nonfiction and analyzing material and making coherent arguments (not that this blog post is evidence of that) during my 3 semesters at college, even though none of my classes have explicitly taught those skills, other than by forcing me to practice them to do term papers.
I would like a class that really drilled down into the science of organizing long works of fiction; with techniques to keep things organized and keep the plot moving while working in character info and interesting scenes and such. I don't know if anyone really teaches that, most lit programs I've read about are very artsy-fartsy and non-commercial, and while I'd like to write better fantasy and horror than most of what's on the market (which isn't saying much) I do want to produce work that's commercially successful and accessible to the masses. Ignorant and lacking in elite academic credentials though they are. *cough*
So maybe grad school come the fall, but lots of work on my novel(s) in the meantime, and if I have success pursuing publication... I'd probably still want grad school, for self improvement and knowledge. It would just be more fun if I weren't starving and living on loans and grants while attending. Plus it's fun to imagine the bitterness and jealousy the serious, emo, artsy college "literature" writer types would manifest towards me if I were a successful, published author of something so plebeian and common as horror or fantasy, while studying in the same classes as they were in their pursuit of higher values of literature, none of which would ever hope to sell more than 500 copies through some pseudo-vanity press.
What's that you say? Have I given this particular fantasy any thought? No, not so much.
Another thing about grad school; connections. Most of life, especially in regards to a career, if who you know. What you can do helps, but if you know someone to give you a chance to do it for $, or in a good place, that's a huge leg up, and that's why people major in fields related to their career. Or post-grad in those fields. In my case I'd meet agents and editors, my profs would know people in the industry to recommend me to, there are internships and other ways to get into the industry, etc. I hope I don't require that, but it certainly wouldn't hurt.
As to where... no idea. As I said, it's all about the university and the program they offer for grad schools, and while there are any number of fine institutions in the Bay Area, including USF, Berkeley, and Stanford, I don't know if any of them have the sorts of profs/programs I'd be interested in. And even if they did, there's no guarantee I'd be accepted. I assume I'd be applying to a lot of programs all through the US and maybe even internationally (Oxford and Cambridge keep popping up in my life lately; meeting people who attended or meant to, who lived nearby, etc...) and seeing who was interested in me.
I like this part of the country, but if I have to move (for a few years, at least) to pursue higher life goals, I would be willing to do so. If I don't do it now, while I'm still relatively young and unhindered by a job I can't give up or a house I have to pay for, when will I? And if you're wondering about another long term attachment I've not mentioned... there isn't one. As I've hinted at and alluded to (on this blog), but never actually stated thus far, Malaya and I are no more. We broke up last December, and in January 2007 I moved to North Bay to be nearer my university.
I've lived alone in a small apartment a very short commute to school for the past 11 months, and while I was planning on moving down to East Bay or somewhere else in the Bay Area once I graduated and my 12 month lease ran out in December, it doesn't look like that's going to happen. I'm paying a bit over $1000 now, but there's nothing too much cheaper in the Bay Area other than tiny studios, and I can't tolerate that. You can get down to $800 or so if you're willing to live in the projects in Oakland or parts of Emeryville, but in either case you'll probably spend more repairing your broken car windows and replacing your stolen property than you're saving by living there. Although, learning to sleep through the sounds of sirens and gunshots and drunken brawls at 3am might be a handy talent later in life. Anywhere else is as or more remote than the North Bay where I live now, and it's not worth the trouble to pack and move and unpack, along with all the associated fees, just to save $150 a month, when I'm probably going to move in 6 months for grad school.
I sort of skimmed over the real news there to get to pointless apartment rental talk, so let me double back. I am single now. Malaya and I split up last December, and I didn't post it on this blog since she didn't want all of our mutual acquaintances (in real life) to know and ask questions. I told various people I knew online, and our relatives found out, and our real life friends have long since been told, so I really have no idea why I didn't mention here. I guess I was just waiting to talk about that and college at the same time; when I graduated. And since that time is now (well, I'm done, but I won't actually graduate until paperwork and more is completed) I'm talking about it.
I do not want to get into why we split up, but it was a painful experience for us both, though we were committed to remaining friends. I've never lied about it on this blog, though I obviously didn't tell the whole truth. Malaya and I have been hanging out at times; we've gone to dinner semi-regularly, seen some movies together, and she drove up here several times to play HGL on my computer during the alpha and beta test. I mentioned many of those events, I just didn't say that was the first time I'd seen her in 2 weeks, or whatever. Not that anyone really cares anyway.
I'm not going to speak about Malaya's personal life, but I can say that I've not found anyone else, nor have a I really looked. I have made a few friends at college but even if I were actively looking for a GF, the age range isn't good for me there. I'm too old (or they're too young) for the 20 y/o undergrads who make up most of the students. In addition to those kids there are a fair number of adult students, who are almost all 45+. Which makes them too old for me. I'm the oldest student in most of my day classes, and the youngest in most of my night classes, and no, I can't really say why I'm not pursuing some cute little 20 y/o coeds for sex. I guess after 4 years in a LTR with love and cohabitation and all of that, casual sex doesn't really hold any appeal to me, and the 20 y/o who was mature and interesting enough to be worth considering something more LTR with would be quite a rare and lovely creature. And even more so if she were interested in that with me.
I have gotten to know a few girls in that age range, and the results were not real pleasing. They were flaky and superficial and flighty, and not worth the trouble to try and get to know or spend time with. I could probably have gotten one or two to hang out, or taken them out to drink beers or something, but I don't enjoy that sort of time-wasting bullshit with a person who isn't interesting to me. I love spending time talking with and hanging out with an interesting person, but for that TV and alcohol aren't required or desired. Dumb, boring people hang out endlessly with time killing crap, since they can't find anything better to do with their time, but I don't want to be one of those people, or be with them. I don't think anyone really does, but most guys are horny enough that they'll sit through hours of bullshit and cheap beer if it means they might get some pussy. I won't, so I don't, and I haven't.
I guess that's another potential benefit of grad school. Intelligent women older than 20?
So, that's a rambling catch up on what's been up. I'll probably blog on the issue some more in the days/weeks to come, especially as I spend December decompressing and figuring out what I want to do with the next six-eight months of my life, while preparing for what I do with the decades after that.
