Here’s some beer

It’s beer alright

And School Starteth

Tomorrow’s the first day of the school year, beginning my second year as a doctoral student here at OkState.  The change from summer to school has been very abrupt – summer was days and days of nothing to do but hang out with friends, and Orientation Week was a frenzied mania of test grading as starting international TA’s took various tests to be able to teach.  Hopefully the actual school year will be less insane.  I’m presenting at a conference which will make things more insane, but only over a brief period.

I’d been playing World of Warcraft again for a good while, and have recently quit, again.  I think my problem with it at the moment is that there’s virtually no way to be a casual player once you reach a certain point.  A low-level character quests and runs instances, the sort of thing where you can log in, romp around for an hour, and leave.  A high-level character raids.  This is generally a three-hour solid block of time, and if one is in a raiding guild, they do this several times a week.  Of course, you don’t have to raid, but when it’s the only thing that people your level are doing, your other options are limited.  Most any time I’ve stopped playing WoW has been for the same reason – the good, smart players all trickle into raiding guilds, so this is pretty much your only hope of fun social interaction and finding decent groups.  At the same time, these people are all pitiable and scary as hell.

Not due to their demeanor, mind you.  They’re by and large friendly, witty, eloquent folks.  But their lives are pretty damn frightening.  Log in in the morning, there’s Stoffie.  Log off for lunch, go run some errands, eat dinner, hang out with friends, get home at 11, and log in to check your auctions.  Stoffie has been playing WoW the entire time.  As have probably ten other folks in the guild and a couple hundred other folks on the server.  Often I’d see that my guild had done a raid six nights out of seven in a week.  Many of them are parents, which is unimaginable to me.  How do you not do real-life stuff with your kid, so you can do fake stuff in a game?  Stoffie recently told us she had 163 days of play time put in (that’s 163*24 = 3912 hours of playing WoW.  Allowing for 8 hours of sleep a night, that’s the equivalent of doing nothing but WoW from the moment she wakes up ’til the moment she falls asleep for 245 days in a row.  Gaaaaaah)

I am fortunately nowhere close to that, but the bottom line is that there is a really, really depressing undercurrent that comes with playing the game past a certain point.  I’ve had enough of it for right now.

Summer Winds Down Well

Wednesday was a day of helping my friend move, and I don’t think he believed me when I said so, but it was really pretty fun. There’s a certain feeling of being alive that you get from hauling heavy shit around. Later that evening was our group’s weekly trip to the casino for $5 poker night, and everyone did pretty abominably. I was among the first out of the tournament, but this meant that I got to use my voucher for free food that I’d earned the week before – go in with pocket aces and lose and they give you a $10 meal card. Considering the tournament itself only costs half that much to enter, losing the hand is pretty much the better buy. 😉 I got the ‘Blackjack Combo,’ which was a ridiculously large platter of steak, shrimp, chicken fingers, and ribs, and everyone got a bit of the feast. Later that night we played Last Night on Earth at Kim and Louis’, but which was fun, but I hadn’t realized how absurdly dice-driven it is. Although the theme of players trying to outrun a town full of zombies is badass, you could basically play the game as such: ‘the human players flip two coins, the zombies flip three. Whoever gets heads the most wins.’ On the other hand, the guts of some games *coughWorldofWarcraftcough* are even simpler and still remarkably addicting.

Thursday was kickball, which is rapidly coming to encompass sizeable chunks of the English department. This time we actually had enough people on each team for pitchers, shortstops, catchers, and dedicated fielders! Not only that, but the scores of the games plunged as folks are starting to get pretty excellent at catching balls. The proceedings were hella fun, and I’m happy that we’ve done this enough that I wasn’t hobbling about after with sore limbs.

Tonight was a joint birthday party by friends James and Karen, who have closely nested birthdays. Much pizza was consumed, and plenty of general hanging out was… erm… hung? (darn passive voice) We’re pretty well obsessed with Werewolf/Mafia here, and we played some great rounds of it tonight. In the game I moderated, the wolves masterfully kept suspicion off themselves and didn’t bat an eye when they got handed a couple random surprises. I also got stuck as the werewolf in two others games and we won both times, which almost never happens. As a rule I’m a terrible liar (and thus a terrible wolf), but I managed to get people thinking I was nervous because I was a special beneficial role instead of a horrible, slavering monster.  We made sure that any ‘safe’ people were killed off so the village was in the dark, and then closed in for the kill.  Gruesomous.

The party went for a good long time, and after the ranks thinned, we Rock Banded for a while.  It’s been a particularly excellent week, and after having a little too much alone time, it’s been very cathartic to be spending such quality time with such good folks.

I continue to be pleasantly baffled at how I wound up somewhere with such a great cadre of people – Stillwater pretty much keeps providing new additions on ‘What I Really, Really Hope My Social Life is Like Once I Land a Professorship’

*groan*

When I lived in Lansing in 2002, I taught at a community college, working with immigrants to teach them reading and writing skills – it was all very practical stuff like how to get car insurance, visit a doctor, things like that. At the same time, we were writing textbooks to be used around the state (particularly in the prison system) to help people prepare for their GED. The idea was to build up the person’s vocabulary enough so that they could actually read the prep textbooks. At the start of 2003, Michigan cut its Adult Ed funding by 80%. That’s for the entire state, mind you.

Those textbooks we’d printed up? They sat unused – the institutions we’d sold them to either closed their doors or had no money to use them. And since my job was funded by a government program, I and the other teachers all got the axe. State-funded adult education was gutted.

And now, what a freaking surprise, no one can read??? I spent most of my formative years being told that the only valuable thing for a man to do with his life was crank out SUV’s, and they’re finally wondering if that wasn’t the most solid use of their time?

Science?

My previous angsty post was brought on by a sense that what I’m about to suggest has been known/disproven for ages, and I’m the last to find out.  Still, this is more the sort of thing where I’m interested in finding the answer than claiming academic ‘turf’ for myself.  Anyway.  I’m very curious to know if you’ve heard of anything like this before:

Short explanation: I think human processing can take advantage of environmental knowledge to give far simpler commands than a computer would need.  Rather than having to load complex actions into memory (even if they’re automated), your mind can essentially ‘fire and forget,’ giving an extremely basic instruction, knowing that when the instruction completes, you’ll know what to do without having to actively consider it.

Long explanation:  So I was in the grocery store and needed bread.  I headed off in the direction of the bakery, got about halfway there, and then realized I’d forgotten why I was heading that way.  I stopped for a second, remembered, and then went and got my bread.  Pretty common thing to happen to someone, yes?

Earlier, I was getting ready for a shower and grabbing some clothes.  I have a bin that I keep my shorts on top of, and I went over to grab a pair.  However, I’d recently unpacked from my trip, and thrown a pile of shirts on top.  So what I did was walk over, grab a shirt off the bin, and got halfway to the shower before I realized I’d grabbed the wrong thing.  Importantly, I went the right place but took the wrong item.  I stopped, went back, and got what I wanted.

In both cases, I mentally checked myself and finished what I was trying to do.

The thing that interests me about this is that I think these were cases where human processing is noticeably different than a computer.  As I understand programming, an operation like ‘Go to the bakery and get bread’ would be a process of front-loading variables and sub-routines into memory.  You define a ‘bakery,’ you define ‘bread,’ and you run a program called ‘Pick’ to get some bread.  Go to X.  Pick Y.  Memory’s allocated for the variables and the actions, and off you go.  Clearly, humans can do this.

Humans also perform ‘shortcutting,’ – Get to be a good enough driver and your body starts doing it by rote.  Rather than saying ‘Turn steering wheel, look left, push gas pedal, check mirrors,’ your mind just basically says ‘Drive’ and you’re good to go.  Shortcutting automates complex tasks so that your cognitive function can still be intact as you do them.
This is analogous to a sub-routine in a computer program.  You set up all the parameters of ‘Drive’ somewhere else, and then you just summon it as needed.  ‘Drive’ becomes a chunk, a complex thing that your mind treats as a single entity for easy processing.

I suggest, however, that our minds further save on processing power by giving incomplete instructions, unlike what a computer would do.  The important thing with a subroutine like ‘Drive’ is that all of the variables and conditions exist within the program, they’re just running automatically.  You’re still running commands to grab this, pull that, look here, push there.  And of course, ‘this’ and ‘that’ are all variables, which means they’re all loaded in memory.  ‘Drive’ isn’t using your active, cognitive mental resources, but it is still taking up space.

I think we save space by giving a vague command and counting on the environment to activate the necessary sub-routine (or ‘schema.’)  I think when I forgot why I was walking toward the bakery, it was because I had no instruction to ‘go to the bakery and get bread’ or even ‘go to the bakery.’  Instead, I suspect the only command that was issued was ‘Turn left and walk.’  Consider, if I had a specific instruction, why would I get confused?  If I’m ‘driving to the movies’, I don’t stop mid-way and think ‘what am I doing here?’  A complete command leaves no confusion, but it also requires more resources.  Getting to the theatre requires turning on several streets – forgetting what I was doing mid-way through would be pretty darn inefficient, so my mind is going to devote active memory to it.  Plus, when I get there, I need to do things that require active thought – find my friends, get a ticket, go to the right movie, and so forth.

However, in the store, my objective is simple.  Go to X, get Y.  Not only is the process automatic, but I can also call on my prior knowledge of what I do in the bakery – I go there to get bread.  Moreover, I know that if I happen to find myself in a bakery, I’m probably there to get bread.  And here, I think, is where we diverge from the computer program.  Rather than loading a set of programs for what I’m going to be doing, my brain does one step of heavy lifting:

“I need bread – where do I go?”

This is the single step of active processing that takes place.  A decision is made – ‘That way,’ and a command is given – ‘Go that way.’  Note that ‘Go that way’ is vastly simpler than ‘Go to the bakery and get bread.’  ‘The bakery’ is a whole collection of symbols and ideas and tasks, ‘get’ is a separate sub-routine from ‘Go,’ and ‘bread’ is another front-loaded variable added in.  ‘Go that way’ is about the simplest possible command, leaving maximum resources available for anything that happens in between.  I head that way with no further parameters given, and soon I run into a bakery!  Actually being in the bakery fires off all sorts of mental symbols, and since I was walking toward it, it must obviously be where I was going.  And since I was going there, I surely need some bread.  In this case, the symbol of the bakery itself is what does all the work, and that work is all automatic.  I know what to do the moment I get there, because I’ve done it a hundred times before.

I think something like this is fundamentally different than normal shortcutting.  Shortcutting makes complex tasks automatic, but this is a case where your brain makes a judgment call on exactly how many resources should be allocated to getting a task done.  Your mind is judging if its base of symbols is detailed enough so that you’ll automatically know what to do when you get the right place.

The reason I forgot where i was going was because I was never told.  Not only did I not have ‘Go to X and get Y,’ I didn’t have an object to get or a place to go when the instruction was given.  The downside of this is that it allowed me to get distracted, and without specifics, I forgot what I was doing (or did the wrong thing, as with the shorts).  But the advantage of the vagueness is that I’m left with a maximal ability to judge saliency.  If I’m going to the movies and actively searching for the place, I’m also actively ignoring everything else (except ‘Drive,’ which is being handled automatically).  If a building was on fire, I might not see it right away.  On the other hand, not loading in variables for a destination leaves resources open for passive observation.  In the store I’m looking at other shelves as I pass, and if I see something really salient, I’ll stop.  Big sale?  Less chance to miss it if I’m not totally fixated on the bakery.

I’d see this as a major evolutionary advantage.  ‘Go to the tree and get fruit’ might be too narrow of a focus – what if you pass a better tree on the way?  And shouldn’t you be watching for snakes?  ‘Go that way’ leaves more resources available to passively notice better fruit and actively look for snakes.  If you get distracted, it’s generally by something more important, so no harm done.  And if you forget what you were doing, it probably wasn’t that vital anyhow.  (If it were, you wouldn’t be getting vague instructions)

To conclude, the neat thing about vague commands like this is that they would be extremely efficient.  The only active processing given is right at the beginning, where the appraisal of importance and where to go is made.  The intervening time until the act has no cognitive demands upon it, and when you arrive at the correct place, schemata fire up that allow for maximized automatic processing.

Angst

One of my few intense frustrations of living in our age (or perhaps of being my age in our age) is a feeling that any great idea you have has already been thought of.  Came up with a good story concept?  It was made into a movie five years ago.  Discovered a new element?  Someone older than you already discovered it.  Pretty much whatever niche you might try to make for yourself already has an Expert Blogger or five, milking the living fuck out of it.  Back in the days of Newton or Shakespeare, you were basically a world visionary by default – if you’d ever seen a damn book before, you were likely the founder of its field.  The internet has interconnected a lot of intensely smart people, which adds to a feeling that you are the least of them.  David Malki with his little bullshit ‘!’ after his name makes movies, webcomics, edits film, and flies jet planes – and what have I done with my life?  Our current culture of celebrity doesn’t just cover bimbos alone.  National Enquirer reminds you that there are always people fabulously more wealthy and beautiful than you, but Boing Boing equally well reminds you that you will never be as affluent, cultured, and intelligent as the people that produce it.  No wonder anime stormed this country – we’re obsessed with constant reminders of how unattainably perfect life could be.

The unhealthy thing about such reminders is that they’re all basically porn, and porn is really good at making you turn up your nose at something that’s actually good.  Your girlfriend doesn’t look like some sculpted harlot?  That harlot is always there to remind you what you ‘could have had.’  You saved someone’s life?  David Malki saved a busload of schoolchildren with his shoulder-mounted laser cannons!

And the truly stupid part is that you might not even want the harlot or schoolchildren at all, but we live in a culture that demands that desire from us.  Of course you want to be Brad Pitt, even if he’s miserable and hates the fact that he can’t just go out by himself and get a damn Big Mac.  Of course he’s better than you, and puts all of your own petty accomplishments to shame.

I know lots of folks supposedly get inspired by these people, but I have to wonder how many get crushed as well.

Netflix!

So I’m trying out Netflix, and so far they seem to have everything completely backward.  The way it’s currently billed is

“You get movies in the mail!  The more you pay, the more movies you can get sent to you in the mail!  …oh yeah, and you can stream stuff, I guess.”

when they should bill it as

“You can watch what you want to RIGHT NOW, and there’s stuff in HD!  You can still get the streaming even with the cheapest unlimited plan!  …oh yeah, and you can get shit in the mail, I guess.”

Unfortunately, they’re still operating under the assumption that the Getting Shit in the Mail is the most desirable thing, and so most of the streaming is still pretty limited.  Under TV there’s a few current programs on each network, and a bunch of really old crap.  Same with movies.  ‘Bout the only streamable HD movie is Terminator 2, which is sad because the quality is really pretty good.  Of course, it may actually be the movie studios that are scared of streaming, which wouldn’t surprise me at all.

So far there seems to be enough content available to warrant the service, but I’m assuming they’ll start adding more streamable stuff as time goes by.  Without that it would seem considerably less interesting.

Plant!

My dad got this interesting catalog of Bonsai trees, and asked me if I’d like one as an early birthday present.  Never having had such a thing, I took him up on it.  It arrived today.  We were both a little curious as to how one ships a live plant, and so we were curious to see what arrived, if it was still alive, and so forth.  The catalog hinted at special packing methods to ensure its safe delivery.  They did not disappoint.  Behold!

To the uneducated rabble among you, it might appear to be a simple cardboard box.  But it is SO MUCH MORE.  It is in fact…

… a simple cardboard box, filled with packing peanuts.  Truly, technology that is beyond all human reckoning.

Removal of the tree, as you can see, was a simple, cleanly process.  As an added bonus, I got to use my new snow shovel!

The fully birthed tree, in its native habitat.  It looks great, and remarkably no worse for wear after being sealed in a box for days.  My dad is awesome.

Settling In

So yes, the relocation from aging Livejournal to shiny WordPress has been made, with all previous LJ writings fully intact.  WordPress is just that bitchin’.  The best part is that there’s all sorts of really cumbersome software online to do this, and LJ itself is no help.  LJ lets you export your journal one month at a time to .xml files, and then there’s various online converters to merge those files and convert them over to whatever format your new blog uses.  Oh, and you don’t get to keep your comments.  WordPress instead offers the competitive option of ‘Push one button and it does everything, you just walk away and it does everything, and you get comments too.’

I don’t really know if I have a ‘readership’ or not (my guess is ‘not,’) but in case I do, I feel like I should say that I don’t tend to blog with a singular purpose – blogs seem to have mutated since I started writing on them.  Facebook and Twitter seem to have taken over day-to-day updating, whereas blogs tend to be more professional or topic-based.  I feel like since I’m making a WordPress blog it should be called something like ‘Tip of the Tongue – the Ramblings of a Linguistics PhD student,’ and that I should just be talking about interesting findings in linguistics or happenings in the department.  And then if I made such a blog and made a post about ‘Me and Troy got so wasted last night!!!!’ that I’d be violating some sort of internet code of ethics that would be punished severely by Cory Doctorow.

Instead I will risk his wrath and continue writing about whatever, keeping a sort of hybrid life chronicle/writing practice environment going.  I don’t want to limit my life chronicling to 160 character status updates, and although I do like to write essays and pontificate, there’s more than enough places that do that full time.

If you’re a new reader and deciding whether this thing is worth any of your time, below are some examples of some previous posts:

Mass Effect and Science Fiction – How the game Mass Effect serves as a barometer for the current state of sci-fi
My Irrevocable Damnation – a completely factual and non-embellished tale of true-life horror
Confluence – an essay suggesting that anime got a foothold in the US due to the weakening influence of musical theatre
Story – a short piece I was working on for a contest

Epitaph

One artifact of the past that our children will never know is the dreaded AOL CD.  Utterly ubiquitous in the 90’s, both the shitty company and their shitty CD’s were simply unavoidable.  Always at the forefront of jackassery, AOL reached its pinnacle when it bought Time/Warner – at the time the media company was the ‘old dog’ being picked up by the hip new company of the future.

Today CNN announced that Time/Warner is spinning off AOL into its own company – aka, sending it off to die.  Yes, the mighty giant has been laid low, largely due to its moronic clinging on to dial-up when the world has moved on.  Life was grand for them when they could monopolize content ("News for subscribers only!"), but the web quickly made allof their exclusive content redundant.  Now all they have as their main site is a crappy portal that’s just a copy of Yahoo’s front page, which isn’t that good either.  While they do still have AIM as a viably useful service, Trillian, texting, Twitter, and Facebook are all steadily devouring its dominance.

Unless it very doubtfully creates some sort of new innovation (which it’s failed to do in the last eight years, why start now?), AOL has been effectively put out to pasture.  It is now the "old dog," ironically being turned out by the even older (but much more relevant) dog.

I think of all those damned CD’s, and of the living hell it used to be to cancel your service (my parents both used AOL for a while, *shudder*).
I know the company isn’t truly dead – like 3D Realms did, they might stumble around for a few years before finally collapsing.  But I’ve written this epitaph so that when the day finally does come, it can be pinned to the back of their fallen body as they’re left unburied to rot in a field.

Cheney Next?

Conservative talk radio host Mancow tried out being waterboarded in an attempt to disprove it as torture.

He lasted six seconds, after which he said: 

"It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that’s no joke,"Mancow said, likening it to a time when he nearly drowned as a child.  "It is such an odd feeling to have water poured down your nose with your head back…It was instantaneous…and I don’t want to say this: absolutely torture."

Christopher Hitchens apparently had earlier done the same thing and commented:
"Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture,"

Although I’m sure there is a sadistic few, I have to wonder how popular this practice would be if anyone that called for its use had to be subjected to it.

Summer in Stillwater is Awesome

Thursday the 9th: Saw the new Star Trek movie with James and Karen.  It was a fun movie, but felt a little over-the-top silly for my taste.

Saturday the 11th: ESL Potluck at Gene’s and then Game Night at Louis and Kim’s.  Got to say farewell to some of the TESL graduates and then headed over for Rock Band and board games with a lot of folks that hadn’t been there before.

Monday the 13th: Had Louis and Kim over for fried chicken, played games and showed each other new apps on our iPhones.

Wednesday the 14h: Went to campus and got some writing done.  Afterward, watched Lost with a bunch of folks at James and Karen’s, played with their cats.

Thursday the 15th: Ry and Lindsey had people over for games before they leave town to visit family.  Many rounds of werewolf, with the wolves losing surprisingly often. 

Friday the 16th: James and Karen had people over for a ridiculously awesome turkey dinner with cheesecake and pumpkin muffins.  Catan was Settled, cats were played with.

Free Marketing

 made some points on free markets and government regulation that I want to respond to.  She was talking about the new credit card bill:

"The bill is nonsensical for at least two fundamental reasons. First, it assigns government the authority to regulate business. Second, it violates the right of individuals to freely enter into contracts. Such is the psychology of the nanny state: people are not sovereign individuals with the authority to control their own lives, but irresponsible and needy wards of the state who require government protection against their own ignorance and shortcomings."

I’m generally in favor of a free market, except that I don’t believe that’s that’s what we’ve been having.  I think we’ve been having a rigged free market, and that’s when I think government intervention is needed.

For example, if you had an entire industry mutually decide ‘let’s just rob people’ like healthcare has done, no one would have the power to stop it.  Consumers can’t pick a ‘better’ option because there are none.  A company would be insane not to rob people in this environment, because they’d get crushed by the competition.  The ‘free market’ can’t repair itself on its own in this case.

Credit cards are arguably similar.  A large number of people want credit.  To start a business, it’s practically essential.  With the way credit works, it’s not always easy to move debt around if your credit card is suddenly a bad deal.  Let’s say you get a credit card with a low interest rate.  You have a balance, but you make your payments on time.  However, your credit isn’t good enough to get multiple cards – maybe you’re young and starting out.  If your credit card company just randomly decides to triple your interest rate, you are screwed, and the ‘free market’ can’t help you.  You can’t get more credit to swap the debt with, and depending on what you bought, you might not be ableto pay it off quickly.  Even if you made a responsible decision at the time of getting the credit card by finding the best rates/etc., the rules of the game have suddenly changed on you.  If the grocery store had doubled its prices, you could just go to another store.  But with this credit card, your debt is immobile until you pay it off.  It’s possible, in fact, that the tripled interest rate makes it so you can no longer afford all your bills, which causes even more trouble.

Your woes will hurt the company by making potential new customers go away, you say?  With ZERO oversight, there are moves that companies will inevitably make because they look good on the balance sheet.  Not out of ‘evil’ or anything else, but because it’s good for the company financially.  If their competitors follow suit, there may be no one to question them except government or law.  I’m not saying it should be government, but we really have no other organized method that has any teeth.
Consumer mobs can react to things like ‘ZOMG LEAD PAINT,’ but they’re incapable of studying finer aspects that can make a bigger difference.

As for the idea that people are incompetent to care for themselves, I don’t like that way of thinking either.  BUT, some of the problem (particularly with the mortgage crisis and with financial planners) is that people were being lied to by experts.  If you go to a doctor and she says ‘You have cancer’ and then you go to two more doctors and they say ‘You have cancer,’ you’re going to be pretty much convinced you have cancer, right?  Particularly if they show you X-rays that point to lumps, and tell you things that agree with any of your own independent research?  Now imagine that all doctors on earth are in cahoots to make you think you have cancer.  Now replace ‘doctors’ with ‘mortgage brokers.’ 

You and I are the sort that will dig around and look for information on our own, but will we do it for everything?  If your dentist says you have a cavity, will you disagree?  If your maintenance guy says you have termites?  Much of how we operate is based on trusting experts, and also on the idea that at some point you have to trust a diagnosis and run with it (even if you did the diagnosis yourself).

This is very, very exploitable, particularly if you have an entire industry built to exploit it.  Even worse if it’s an industry you can’t reasonably operate without or that is very difficult to not use, like a mortgage broker.  Again, I think some sort of external oversight is necessary, someone that’s not a part of the system but has power to make changes to it.  Government’s not the best choice, but it’s the only entity at the moment that fits the bill.

And while we are currently undergoing a free market ‘correction’ and shady mortgage companies are going down in flames, the problem was allowed to fester so long that the correction has had disastrous consequences for everyone – foreclosures, debt tightening up, and so forth.  Even people who handled their money responsibly have been impacted by higher prices, higher rents, minimal credit.  If someone had stepped in and broken up the problem before it got this bad, the free market could have had a correction without getting it all over everyone’ faces.

Rawk

A well-spent day – talked to my dad for his birthday, went to the TESL party and hung out with folks, then went to Louis and Kim’s and played games.  There were some new faces there, which was nice – several friends we’ve been trying to lure to game night made appearances, and I think they enjoyed themselves.  Excerrent.  🙂

Semester’s done, which leaves my time basically open until August, although I do have independent study that I’m taking with Dennis.  I’m daunted by allured by the months ahead – I tend to be bad about wasting free time, but I see the summer as a serious opportunity to get some
writing done.  I’ve got graphic novel work to do, and I want to get some short fiction put together into a circulateable state.  A bunch of OSU’s creative writers will be in town for the summer and I want to squirm my way into their feedbacking and workshopping – I want to read their stuff, I want them reading mine.  The graphic novel’s almost entirely plotted out at this point – I just need to sit down and write the damn thing.  I think part of what’s daunting is that I have no freaking idea what you do with a graphic novel manuscript that you are completely incapable of drawing or publishing on your own.  But I guess I’ll be finding out.

Two More Days

The scourge of end-of-the-semester paper writing still looms, but progress is being made.  I’ve got two 25-30ish page papers due, one tomorrow, one Wednesday.  They’re both at 15 pages so far, and should be fine by the time they need to be in.

Kim and Louis and I went cheese hunting today – Dennis had had a party for all of us in his class last week, and had served really good cheese.  Not knowing that really good cheese was obtainable in Stillwater, he informed us of a few hole-in-the-wall places that sell such arcane things as organic produce, cheese that isn’t American or Swiss, and coffee that hasn’t been ground yet.  We resolved to make an outing to these places today.  The outing was made, and really good chese was found and purchased.  Amazingly, we ran into Dennis at the very store he’d recommended!  We went to a couple little shops, my favorite was one that was a cross between a Hallmark store and a Whole Foods.  One half was mugs, cards, and kitschy crap, the other half was a cooler full of Emantaller, Gouda, and more, along with shelves of crackers, dips, and sauces.  It was pretty awesome.

We went to their place and devoured our spoils, had some burgers, and then adjourned for paper writing, which is what I’ve (mostly) been up to for the evening.

A Solid Day

Went in this afternoon and hung out with Louis – he’s my best bud here in Stillwater, and he just acquired Photoshop, so we messed around in that for a while.  Sociolinguistics class was fun, people were presenting today and they all had pretty cool things to say.  Dennis had a party for us afterward and had a ridiculous amount of delcious food.  He was kind of miffed that the chicken salad sandwiches all got devoured, but the tuna salad plate was pristine.  Had a nice time chatting with professors and classmates, and found out that the doctoral students no longer have to take the Comprehensive Exam!!!  Instead it’s like MSU where you have to submit two papers that your committee judges as ‘publishable,’ which makes sooo much more sense.  Writing papers is going to be your job as a professor, not taking tests.
Had a nice, long talk with my dad on the phone, and it was good to catch up with him.  Conference reimbursement finally came in, swelling the coffers considerably.  As the semester winds down, life is doing nicely.  🙂

People Younger than Me Are Going Bald on Their Facebook Pics

What the hell?

I’m supposed to be terrifying them by looking like a middle-aged man, not the other way around!

Pet Peeve of the Day

People (usually girls) who make their profile picture on something like Facebook one of the following:

1) A picture of them and their significant other, with the significant other filling almost the entire picture.

2) Their kid.

You’re still allowed to have an identity of your own, even if you have a boyfriend and/or child.  Your kid/boyfriend/husband is not YOU!!!

A Month Already? Jebus!

So since I last wrote, I’ve been to Vegas, come back to Oklahoma, spent a week being sick, recovered, and generally milled about as a grad student for a while.  More on that in a moment – first, this thought:

I just made my second attempt at liking The Office.  It is so…. fucking…. passive aggressive… that I want to go punch my fist through a cow, pull out its steaming viscera, and devour them messily – anything to counteract the 20 minutes of pathetic half-smiles and mumbled sniveling that is that show.  I’m further perplexed that someone could go and work in an office for 8-10 hours and then come home and watch that.  …ahem.

Of actual importance, Vegas was a very nice trip, and I’m glad my mom got to see it – she hadn’t been there in 50 years, so things had changed a bit.  🙂  We saw Penn and Teller and Ka, a Cirque di Soleil show.  Both were excellent.  Penn and Teller was much more laid-back than I expected, a sort of thoughtful musing on deception and what it means to master something.  Many of their tricks were centered around the idea that the feat was not the result of magic or even talent, but shitloads of practice and time.  Ka was totally different – an utterly thunderous spectacle with acrobatics that I can only describe as ‘beyond nuts.’ Most of the show was built around preparing you for the idea that they were about to do something completely insane, and then doing something five times more insane.  And again, the theme of mastery through raw repetition was everywhere – this was a flawless that came from inconceivable amounts of rehearsing.

We spent a lot of time in the Bellagio, even though we weren’t staying there.  There was a sort of serenity there that the rest of Vegas doesn’t match – it’s a place where you can sit in a pair of chairs in a walkway and hear yourselves talk.  There was a conservatory and gardens and all sorts of things that don’t come to mind when you think of a casino.

Our own hotel was Planet Hollywood, which was far, FAR nicer than my first Vegas hotel, the Imperial Palace.  We stayed in the cheapest room at PH and still had loads of space, a plasma screen TV, and one of the nicest hotel beds I’ve ever slept in. 

Since it was March Madness, every hotel had giant rooms devoted to basketball betting, which was pretty amusing to watch – boisterous manly cheers would periodically erupt when something happened.  I’m sorry my Spartans lost, but they were pretty much David and Goliath, with ‘Goliath’ being one of those mechs from Starcraft that fires anti-aircraft missiles.  Alas.

After I got back from Vegas I was sick for a while, which sucked, but now I’m in good shape again.  There’ve been various social gatherings, the latest was the English Department’s Spring Mixer, which was a very good time.  Lil’ Smokies were consumed, cash bars were patronized, and after a while we retired to the Stonewall, which is sadly the grad student hangout bar.  I say ‘sadly’ because right down the street is Eskimo Joes, which has  awesome burgers and booze.  Instead, we frequent the one bar in the freaking universe that sells NO food!  They don’t have a kitchen, but hell, if they microwaved freaking Hot Pockets they’d make a fortune.  I’m always amazed when people think to themselves ‘The last thing I need is for my business to be raking in money hand over fist.’  Alas.

Two weeks of class left, then finals.  No idea yet if I’m teaching over the summer, but I should hopefully find out soon.  I definitely want to get back to mitten-shaped places before the fall, and I can’t plan anything quite yet.  Alas.

I’m working my way through Sandman, and it is magnificent.  The seventh book is the last one I finished and probably my favorite so far – four books yet remain, and I’m trying not to finish them too quickly, since there’s no more to come.

But now, as it’s very late and this entry’s very long, it’s bedtime.

In Arizona

So I’m back in AZ for spring break, hangin’ out with my mom.  We’re doing a trip to Vegas starting tomorrow, which should be great fun.  We’re staying at Planet Hollywood, in the center of the Strip – going to see Penn and Teller and a Cirque show while we’re there.

Returning to Arizona is sort of strange – I’ve been gone long enough that it feels far away, like someone I know lived here, not me.  The time I spent here is almost a thing I piece together.  Rather than saying ‘I lived here, and so I know where all the roads go,’ I say
"I know where all the roads go, so I must have lived here."

We watched Milk for the first time today, and neither of us was very impressed.  The movie feels weirdly passionless, and much of the story happens without explanation.  I used to complain at poetry slams that the poem about being black and/or gay was automatically judged Best In Show, and this feels similar.  While Sean Penn’s acting is phenomenal, all the other characters are utterly forgetable, and the plot feels like a standard-issue hero biopic stamped out of a press.  The fit and finish is just plain uninspired. Are we seriously at a point where all you have to do is acknowledge homosexuality and you’re an Oscar contender?  

*shrug*

Things otherwise go smoothly – Mom looks good, Arizona looks good, it’s nice to be in a big city again.  We got in a traffic jam and I was practically taking pictures – I haven’t seen that many cars in one place in months!