Archives for the Month of April 2009 on Cereal Monogamist
My sister loves to e-mail me these...
USING ONLY ONE WORD
Not as easy as you might think! Now forward, change the answers to suit you and pass it on. It's really hard to only use one word answers. Be sure to send back to the person you received it from!
Where is your cell phone? nightstand
Your significant other? Jeremy
Your hair? ponytail
Your mother? Dana
Your father? Royce
Your favorite thing? laughter
Your dream last night? ghosts (elaboration: watched Medium before bed last night)
Click for more.
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House hunt update
Friends and family know that we are currently looking for a new place to live. Here’s the latest news on that.
We decided against all of the six places we looked at several weekends ago. Jeremy had found a really promising post on Craigslist and we pursued that place for a few weeks. We toured it, we liked it; we met the neighbors, we liked them. We played phone tag with the landlord for a long time, and it soon became abundantly clear that she really wasn’t interested in housing us (i.e., people who wanted things like broken screen doors and vomity old carpet fixed) or our dog.
Of course, it was all her right, but it made me angry, especially the unwarranted dog hate. In fact, she suggested to us that non pet-owning tenants would have had all the problems with the place fixed no question, but that people with a (mature, house-trained) dog don’t deserve a new carpet. (From our discussion with the neighbors, also tenanted by this woman, we learned that people with small children don’t deserve a new carpet either.)
Well, Jeremy found another place (Craigslist having a basically endless supply of duplexes and small houses for rent in the area) and we looked at it on Saturday.
It was lovely. Two bedrooms instead of three (the other place had three) and about 50 bucks more a month, but it’s in a slightly nicer neighborhood and had several things to recommend it—a huge kitchen, built-in shelves in the living room, and tons of storage space, among other things. We told the landlady, who was showing us around, that we were interested and asked for an application.
This is the point when the previously normal-seeming landlady turned from Dr. Jekyll into Mrs. Hyde. (Hyde’s the bad one, non-readers.)
Click ahead for more.
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Tally of accomplishments, vol. 3
Today was my last official teaching day for the year! Something like 65 lesson plans, approximately half of them successful in execution, and not another one to make until the fall!
Today's reward (the DVD of an awesome movie that until today I only had on VHS):
Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of one of the most remarkable books of the 21st century, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting by in America. That book, which I’ve read at least three times, details Ehrenreich’s experiences as an undercover journalist attempting to make it on minimum wage. She's a waitress, a maid, and finally, a Wal-Mart drone, and in none of those situations does she manage to even make ends meet, much less save any money and pursue the American dream. The book was meant to shine a spotlight on a socioeconomic group some people still don’t think exist: the hard-working poor. (If you follow that link I provided and read some of the reviews, you will see that some people remained unconvinced—they think Ehrenreich just didn’t “try hard enough.” I will say nothing about this except that denial is what keeps broken systems in operation.)
Anyway, in the introduction to Bait and Switch, Ehrenreich explains that people of her acquaintance asked her, after Nickel and Dimed came out, why the blue collar workers were getting all the attention, when so many white collar workers are struggling in the face of outsourcing, forced retirement, and lost pensions. And thus was born Bait and Switch, in which Ehrenreich looks at people who “did everything right,” got great degrees, joined the rat race, and played by the rules, yet whose fortunes did not smile upon them. She talked to forty-, fifty-, and sixty-year-olds who are endlessly attending resume workshops, mock interviews, networking luncheons, and skill-building seminars, who are paying hundreds and thousands of dollars to consultants, who are spending hours and hours a day filtering the job spam out of their Monster.com accounts (“Work From Home! $25 AN HOUR!”) in the weak hope that they’ll find an actual lead there. Of course, Barbara Ehrenreich wasn’t going to research this topic without getting her hands dirty. She scrubbed toilets for her last book, and she hits the corporate job hunt in this one, going to great lengths to appear as a viable job candidate (who, needless to say, is not famed journalist Barbara Ehrenreich).
I found the book to be quite enlightening, if not quite as crushing as Nickel and Dimed. As expected, Ehrenreich found that white collar workers on the job market are dealing with exploitation (in different forms) just as their working class counterparts are. Her resume consultant strung her along for weeks, often changing a comma, then changing it back (and actually giving poor advice—telling Ehrenreich that her resume could be three to four pages when common sense dictates that it should be restricted to one). Her resume was only deemed perfect when she informed the consultant she would not be paying anymore.
Also, the majority of the networking and job-finding events she attended were sponsored by or based around an organized religion—sometimes explicitly, and sometimes as a fun surprise. A resident of Florida, Ehrenreich went to most events in the nearest metropolis, Atlanta, where she was advised that if she found God, a job would find her. Even the events which were professedly non-religious were the hacky, new-age feelgoodery that Little Miss Sunshine made such accurate fun of. (Greg Kinnear! He was hilarious in that.)
Ehrenreich’s conclusions were much the same as what can be found in Nickel and Dimed: it’s not the people, it’s the system. She seemed quite relieved to leave the corporate world at the close of the book and offered the ray of hope that more humanities-based industries, such as higher education, did not seem to be showing the same symptoms of self-destruction.
Still, it won’t be long, will it? For-profit universities are springing up like weeds. Every raise in tuition means a drop in enrollment, but underenrollment means the university has to cut its budget, means…, etc. etc., vicious cycle, yada yada. Department budgets are fractions of what they were ten or fifteen years ago. An advisor at my former institution told me that tenure-track positions (basically, a professor job with a built-in future) are dwindling and assistant professorships or lecturer jobs with no hope of tenure (a “here’s something you can do for two years while you continue to look for something that will sustain you indefinitely” job) are increasingly common.
Too bad that the whole Ivory Tower of Academia thing is a myth, or becoming one. It would’ve been nice.
Harper's Island: Sigh
I don't have a lot of time tonight for a real entry. I can say that this show never tires of becoming stupider, or more boring, and that, regardless, I have no intention of giving it up just yet.
So I'll just make a few observations:
Big band music at the rehearsal dinner? What the hell year is this?
Depressed girl continued her record of un-depressed clothing tonight, wearing a string bikini in the first scene. But what am I saying? The bikini was black. Depression-approved. She's also been hitting the abdominizer, from the looks of it.
The "the previous serial killer has come back from the dead and is our current serial killer!" thing? We all know that's a red herring, show, so please dispatch of this as quickly as you can. People watching these mystery shows are not novices, OK? We've read everything Agatha Christie has to offer. Better hope that your ending is half as clever as the ending she orchestrated for And Then There Were None (from which you have borrowed, liberally).
Two more observations, under spoiler alert.
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Fun with words!
Just found this on the Internet. Apparently, it circulates as one of those "true stories" we all get through e-mail, but its real origin is a humor piece written by Steve Martin for The New Yorker in '99. (See it on his website here.)
Forgive me, Mr. Martin, because I'm going to reprint it in its entirety. Loved you in Baby Mama!
Disgruntled Former Lexicographer
The following definition was discovered in the 1999 edition of the Random House dictionary. The crafting of the definition was the final assignment of Mr. Del Delhuey, who had been dismissed after thirty-two years with the company.
mut·ton (mut’n), n. [Middle English, from Old French mouton, moton, from Medieval Latin multo, multon-, of Celtic origin.]
1. The flesh of fully grown sheep.
2. A glove with four fingers.
3. Two discharged muons.
4. Seven English tons.
5. One who mutinies.
6. To wear a dog.
7. A fastening device on a mshirt or a mblouse.
8. Fuzzy underwear for ladies.
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Tally of accomplishments, vol. 2
Last night, I finished all my reading for my theory course--the reading for today, Friday, and next Monday, which is the last day of classes. This involved reading a lengthy passage by Kant sometime after midnight, which I would not recommend to novices.
My reward: two episodes of The Office before bed.
Tally of accomplishments, vol. 1
The responsibilities and demands of my school year are slowly but surely dissipating into the air. Today I turned the last page of Richard III, the culmination of required reading for my Shakespeare seminar.
My final paper for that course is still in progress. Still, I believe in giving small rewards for small accomplishments. My reward:
And I moved here on purpose, too
Hey, did everyone know that Cleveland leads the nation in drifters?
I *heart* the Cleve!
They're dropping like flies at Harper's Island
I was reading some Internet posts about this show, and one person commented something like, “If I had to go to a wedding that was going to last for a damn week, I would be killing people by the end of it.” For real, that’s a long time to be celebrating someone else’s relationship. Luckily, there are events! Tonight’s episode sent all the wedding guests (the ones who aren’t already dead—oh my!) off on a scavenger hunt of the most boring variety. Later, there was a bonfire. Also a character referred to the groom’s “wedding week,” heh. It’s like those people who spread their birthday out over a week. “You can’t say that to me today! It’s my birthday on Friday!”
But we already know that this show is not shaped for realism. The main indicator for me in this episode was the main girl, who, despite her haunted past and tortured present, apparently decided to get up in the morning and drape a scarf jauntily around her neck. “I’ve returned to the site of my mother’s murder for the first time in years and I’m receiving threatening messages, but my real problem is that this T-shirt and jeans seem so plain on their own… Oooh, a scarf! Perfect. Now to return to my personal problems already in progress.”
Who thinks that Hollywood doesn’t understand how depressed people dress, and who thinks that they know but don’t care?
The clothing in general, I’m afraid, will be joining the dialogue and the characterization as things this show does exceedingly not well. Either the outfit is not representative of the character, as in the main character and her perky neck wear, or the costumers have tried too hard to portray character through clothes. See: the English guy who WEARS AN ASCOT. Want to know what this guy’s about? Well, he has a foppish accent and he WEARS AN ASCOT. All right, character development done. How about the groom’s brother, with his black clothes and greasy hair and the sign around his neck that says “P.S. I am a screw-up! In case you didn’t get it from how I’m dressed, see also my extremely subtle acting choices like skulking around with a hunchback and looking shiftily at things!” Remember the brother from Wedding Crashers?
This guy’s like that guy without the fun. Follow the link for spoilery criticism.
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When Nerdiness Knows No Bounds
Jeremy and I once went to a casino, and I was playing slot machines, mostly unsuccessfully (what a money suck, for real). The ones where you just press a button are so pointless; the computer poker games involve some skill, but I mostly didn't have any skill, and so that money disappeared very quickly as well.
An hour or so into that trip, I had the epiphany about what would make me enjoy casinos. Logic puzzles, for money. In fact, if such a casino existed, I know of two things for sure: 1. I would never leave that place 2. because it would be my new career. Puzzles, mostly of the online variety, are responsible for the majority of my time management issues. Just get me engrossed in some kind of puzzle, and I will forget that I have a Shakespeare paper due, or the dog needs to get walked, or I have laundry in the dryer. Or I'll forget that it's time to sleep. Or that outside is a place where people go sometimes.
Word searches are too easy, as well as too arbitrary--you see it or you don't see it. Crossword puzzles vary in difficulty, of course, but again, there's a lot of arbitrariness involved (in whether or not you know that fact or not). Especially annoying is the fact that a lot of the clues in your average crossword puzzle make cultural references I'm about fifty years too young to know about.
My favorite puzzles are those which don't require any outside knowledge, but do require reasoning skills. I started with Fill-Ins--they can have numbers or letters, and basically you start with one keystone entry, and all the other words (or numbers) need to be slotted in around it.
Of course, I spent a good two years of my life (give or take) doing Sudoku, which is undeniably amazing. In my heyday, I could do a hard puzzle in maybe ten minutes. Mediums (and needless to say, easies) could be done as quickly as I could get all the numbers filled in. (There's a great puzzle online here--I used to do this puzzle first thing every morning when I still worked in an office.)
The newest puzzle trend is KenKen, which I've finally figured out. It's like Sudoku but with basic math. I'm still kind of slow at this, but I can finish the medium puzzle pretty much every day.
I love logic puzzles, also, even though the stories that go along with them can be ridiculous. (Five people enter a gardening contest! Determine which person grew which plant using which magic ingredient! Suzie didn't use plant food. The person who used milk was not Brad. The person who used olive oil was not female.) Jeremy makes fun of these puzzles, but he was the one who hooked me on them a few years ago when he bought me a book of them because the grocery store was out of Sudoku. I found the online cache of them myself. Have I done all the puzzles on that page? I won't answer that question, but I will say this: I was unemployed last summer. For the whole summer.
How about good, old-fashioned jigsaw puzzles? There's a daily puzzle here, where the pictures are sometimes strange, but where you can change the shapes and the number of the pieces. Mostly I do Pogo's Jigsaw Treasure Hunter. That site has figured out the draw: compound wins. Every puzzle contributes to raising you up level by level. I'm at like, level thirty-five and I will be playing this thing until I hit the ceiling.
I even like the old-fashioned kinds of puzzles, where you fit the little pieces together with your hands! On the occasions when my kitchen table is not covered in books and mail and whatever Jeremy has emptied out of his pockets that day, it's usually got a puzzle on it.
I think this is why I'm getting along with my engineers so well. They are also puzzlers, though of very specific kinds. I understand how they want to learn, by piecing together the details until they can see the whole picture. It makes sense to me.
I caught a kid doing Sudoku in my class the other day, incidentally, at the same site I linked to above. I told him to close it down or go for the five-star level, because he was doing two-star and that was just lame.
Every semester, like clockwork
For me, the academic semester is a continual cycle of motivation and energy, and despairing burnout. The problem seems to be nothing more than that 16 weeks is a long time to sustain the workload (to say nothing of the engagement required to sustain the workload) of grad school. (Or, I have some kind of severe mood disorder. Also quite possible.)
The most severe stage of burnout usually happens between weeks 10 and 12. This is not unrelated to the fact that most grad classes assign 2-3 major assignments (large-scale research projects, papers) over the course of the semester and midterm is usually when the first major project is due. When these projects are turned in, I rebound. My life becomes manageable again. Just a couple weeks ago, I was flying high. I created schedules meant to streamline the production of my final papers. Preparations were being made for summer—a change of houses, a summer job—and, a few snowy days notwithstanding, it’s been feeling like spring outside. The weeks of school were waning.
Yet, as of this weekend, I have reached the second wave of my despondency. Basically, I have no procrastination time left; my final papers must be begun. But they’re big projects; they involve tons of research and writing and idea-making. They’re hard. And the majority of the work is on the other side, the “not done yet” side.
In this mood, in the past, I’ve frequently blown off my academic work in favor of a TV marathon, or even a novel unrelated to my studies. In fact, I can reproduce the titles of a number of those Distraction Novels. Sophomore year, spring semester, there was The Age of Innocence during final exam week. Senior year, spring semester, I read The Nanny Diaries the same week I defended my senior thesis. Fall semester of last year, I put off final projects for a whole day to read The Catcher in the Rye. (That one…does not take very long to read.) This novel reading is a sort of deflection. I want to avoid thinking about the work I have left to do, and yet, I feel the need to accomplish something, like finishing a book.
The potential for distraction expands beyond my completion of necessary tasks. I’m also having trouble lately committing to (even the idea of) a field of study. It’s been a year since I’ve been allowed to study American lit (not counting some brief encounters with Faulkner last semester) and I keep having these basically laughable impulses to drastically change course and study weird things. I’ve been putting ridiculous suggestions on my summer to-be-read list all month, like Balzac, and “something about the Wars of the Roses.”
It’s times like this when I begin to question why I’m in school, and if I wouldn’t be better off just learning at my own pace, under my own direction. This is a legitimate question, and one it doesn’t hurt me to ask myself every now and then.
My usual answer to myself is this: “You had four years off from school. What did you accomplish then?” Point taken.
Quotation for a Friday night
I'm studying theory tonight (I know, it's Party Central up in here--Friday night, baby!) and I came across this excellent quotation by 19th century British poet and all-around know-it-all Matthew Arnold:
Let us think of quietly enlarging our stock of true and fresh ideas, and not, as soon as we get an idea or half an idea, be running out with it into the street, and trying to make it rule there. - from "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time" (1864)
What really makes me laugh is that this idea is totally antithetical to blogging, which is ALL about taking halves (and even smaller fractions) of ideas and running out with them into the street. Arnold could have never forseen the Internet...
Also, no one feel bad about the fact that I'm studying on a Friday night because (stage whisper!) I'm doing it with a Jack and tea by my side. Makes theory so much more palatable.
Harper's Island: My New Weekly Fix of Cheesy Horror
This show is gonna be some awesome cheese, people. Here’s the awesome. It’s cut and shot like a horror movie, a big fancy expensive one. In fact, the first few moments of the show—murdered people hanging from trees and whatnot—were genuinely creepy. Also in typical horror movie style, the first extra-gruesome death happened before the fifteen minute mark, and then the scenes where something actually happens began to be significantly outnumbered by the scenes where nothing of importance happens. Modest radio hits are playing in the background of every scene to trend things up a bit. Little droplets of mystery are being spread everywhere—someone’s getting mysterious phone calls! Someone else hints at a cloaked past! People “don’t want to talk about what happened”!
The dialogue is terrible, a determination I made two minutes in. “That’s why you’re my best friend!” one character chirps to another, to ensure that all of us at home are clear on the character’s relationships. “How do you not know that story?” one character says to another. “Let me tell it to you at length so the viewers at home have the benefit of hearing it as well!”
Characters? Also playing exactly to our expectations, every cliché accounted for. Otherworldly child? See below. Fat party guy with sideburns? Check! But he does know the word “debauched” so good on him. Mean girls? Absolutely, and they all talk like Paris Hilton and have the exact same hair. Earthy, ponytailed, denim-jacketed girl with the tragic past? And as soon as the director was sure we were rooting for her plain Jane charms, they hotted her up in a pink satin sheath dress! Pill-popping drunkle (drunk + uncle)? Harry Hamlin’s on the job. Sweet-faced groom who’s too good to be true? He’s there and I hope he’s the killer.
Unanswered questions: Why is everyone walking around the damn woods so much? Does the hotel not have indoor bathrooms? Also, why are people talking endlessly about the original murders (other than that they will definitely be somehow connected to this series of murders)? You’d think no one had ever been murdered in the history of the world except on this island. “People died here,” drones the requisite creepy girl who probably has the shinning. People die everywhere, moppet.
For the spoiler report (i.e., what the predictable huge twist at the end was), follow the jump!
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Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! (Fannie Flagg)
This is an in-progress review; I'm only halfway done with the book. It's the work of Fannie Flagg, who wrote the immensely popular Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle-Stop Cafe (the book that became the movie, whose screenplay she apparently also wrote). Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! (exclamation point included, such an annoying title) is clearly one of her minor works.
I haven't got any affection for Dena, the main character, yet. The book may be set in the seventies, but it was written much later than that (2001), and I feel like Dena's particular brand of prickly, self-destructive commitment-phobe isn't as fresh as Flagg seems to think it is.
What's really been grating is the characters who occupy Dena's "cutthroat" world of television. Clearly, we're supposed to find them ruthless and sinister, but they all have this de-clawed quality, like a production of Glengarry Glen Ross that's been censored for twelve-year-olds to perform it. Probably the main problem is that Flagg seems to have limited herself to polite language (i.e., no swearing). "Whaddya mean by that, buster?" does not exactly send shivers down my spine.
I don't mind the "down home" characters from the South, and I quite liked the two psychiatrist characters, too, at first, but all the secondary characters have grown to share the same problem: they only discuss Dena. And we already established how boring she is.
30 Rock and the Comedy Rule of Three
This episode, “Apollo, Apollo,” aired a few weeks ago, but I just rewatched it this weekend and I can’t over how hilariously the gag of Kenneth the page seeing the world muppet-style played out. I’ve realized that the path of the joke perfectly illustrates the Comedy Rule of Three. A basic description of the Rule of Three is that everything is funniest in groups of three. A more specific variation on the rule suggests that the perfect multi-layer joke rolls out by first establishing a premise, next by reinforcing the premise, and third by upending the premise in an unexpected way.
Early in the episode, corporate shark Jack Donaghy expresses admiration for Kenneth’s optimistic innocence, saying it must be incredible to see the world through his eyes. A shot of Kenneth establishes a first-person POV shot and then we see Jack the way Kenneth sees him: as a muppet, complete with power suit and slicked-back hair.
Later in the episode, Kenneth and Jack talk to Tracy Jordan, who has been tricked into thinking he’s orbiting the earth in a space shuttle. We get a brief bit about how Tracy sees the world (everyone’s a Tracy) and then Kenneth views Tracy in the guise of a muppet as well.
BUT! Almost immediately after muppet-Tracy, the joke is stepped up a notch by muppet-Liz.
The way the episode cuts from Kenneth’s POV of muppet-Liz to actual Liz, still flopping around like she’s constructed out of felt, brings a new and unexpected twist to the established joke—just one of many reasons why 30 Rock is, and continues to be, awesome.
Looking for a new place (update)
So, we viewed six potential living spaces today. We saw two 'no way's, three 'this is not quite what we're looking for's and one 'we could live here'. Jeremy will continue to scout new places and possibly make new appointments, but the one place is affordable, spacious, in a great neighborhood, a five-minute drive to campus for me, a lot of good overall.
Something I have learned: I need to quit giving myself hell over my lackadaisical housekeeping. Other people live quite literally in squalor and allow their landlords and other people to traipse through without the slightest embarrassment. My pile of unanswered mail is a drop in the bucket.
Plans for the Weekend
So, not being the type of people who are content to laze around on a Saturday morning, here's what Jeremy and I are doing tomorrow:
9:20am: appointment with Eileen to look at a duplex
10:00: appointment with Joe to look at a 2-bedroom rental
11:15: appointment with John to look at a 2-bedroom rental
12:00pm: appointment with Carl to look at a 2-bedroom rental
12:30pm: appointment with Carl (same Carl) to look at a 2-bedroom rental
1:30pm: appointment with Debra to look at another 2-bedroom rental
If this doesn't seem punishing enough, consider these factors:
Jeremy will be doing all this after his Friday night shift at the major chain seller of coffee and pastries where he is employed.
We'll be bringing the dog with us. (Some of the landlords wanted to see her to make sure she meets size and behavior restrictions they have. For the record, trying to find a decent place to live and also having a dog is a trial all on its own.)
For example, this place had a strict "no pets" policy.
Shucks.