While my next appt. is late...

The movie Pulp Fiction isn't about the briefcase, or the characters, the conversations or even the violence; Pulp Fiction is about rewatching movies, how every time we watch it, the context changes, and it becomes a new film.

A refrain I often heard from my Dad as a child was on the need to "grow up." I finally deduced what to "grow up" means: it means to suffer quietly. I will also note that I have no recollection of my Dad ever explicitly saying "Oh grow up" to me directly, I presume because that would be tantamount to him telling his own son, "Oh, go suffer."

When I was a child, I thought as a child, I spoke as a child, but when I became a man, I quit listening to Rush Limbaugh.

America loses its innocence a lot: at JFK's assassination, at Columbine, at 9/11. At what point did in between these did we regain our innocence? Perhaps, instead, we lost our naivety, which always comes back, if indeed we ever lose it. And given the number of people who still think Saddam was allies with bin Laden (they were blood enemies; we couldn't have helped bin Laden more in killing Saddam than if we'd cut al-Qaeda a check for $100 million, like we did with both in the 80s), or who think health care reform is like Hitler, I'm forced to conclude that America has a very stubborn naivety.

Dictatorships are the only places where you are not allowed to call your President a dictator. So by all means, keep calling the President a dictator, it only proves he is not one.

Relationships are not safe; relationships are inherently risky, dangerous, even violent, in every sense of the word. It takes courage to be in a relationship. To quote TV on the Radio, "Love is the province of the brave."

Birthday: A Collage

27 years and the Universe hasn't killed me yet--I march in triumph, and trust one day it'll succeed at last and I'll gain all.

I born Reagan's (Great Communicator) first term, middle of a recession, Cold War, cassette tapes new tech, Apple II state of the art, Calvin & Hobbes not in papers, rumbles about Iran:

I turn today Obama's (Great Communicator) first term, middle of recession, Terror War, cassette tape quaint tech, Apple iPad state of the art, Calvin & Hobbes not in papers, rumbles about Iran:

More change, more same, except Rumsfield no longer shakes Saddam Husein's hand.






26-Prepping for finals 25-Joint birthday/cousin's graduation 24-Wondering the streets of Monterrey 23-"Nobody likes you when you're 23..." 22-Bring on the Illinois 21-Sizzlers, converts, Fajardo, Puerto Rico 20-Mesclando cemente en Humacao, Puerto Rico 19-Mariners game??????? (I think they lost)

28-Hanging from a cliff over the amazon 29-high-speed smart-car chase through Mersaille 30-Walk away from giant explosion I caused without looking back--

I have beheld the abomination of desolation...

...and it is the KFC Double-Down.

I tried it for the same reason one attends a freak show--sheer morbid curiosity, despite knowing you'll feel awful about yourself afterwords.

I went up to the counter and said to the cashier, "It's my birthday tomorrow, get me the double-down."

"Why, so you won't have any more birthday?" she said back. I had no witty retort.

I somehow felt ashamed to be eating that thing alone in a public space, so I took it back to my car to examine. It is in fact as advertised: two chicken patties serving as buns, with cheese and bacon in between. There is no good reason this thing should exist.

First thing I notice is that one of the chicken patties is split in half. For a moment I consider indignantly marching back in to complain about the poor quality of my sandwich, but quickly I consider that once one has ordered a double-down, one has abnegated all one's rights to complain about food preparation.

As I read on-line once, the double-down, like grief, is experienced in stages. The first stage of course is denial. I considered that is wasn't all that large, that really, it's about the same amount of chicken I would normally eat anyways when visiting KFC. Now, I don't normally eat bacon with my chicken, but that's neither here nor there.

I was legitimately hungry at the time, so I scarfed it down rather quickly. One does not regret the double-down while eating it, you see; no, the regret comes immediately afterwords, as that unholy mass settles in your stomach and stays there the rest of the evening. Even alcoholics at least have until the next morning to experience a hangover.

Your body rightfully punishes you for daring consume such a monstrosity.

Yo Mama

"I just don't understand it, Sarge," said Detective Callahan, "A bank robbery! In broad daylight! How is it even possible?"

"Clearly, a highly organized conspiracy," declared Sgt. Steel, overlooking the crime scene, "involving the skills of a safe-cracker, an electronics surveillance expert, an electrician, an escape artist, a make-up artist, possibly some ninjas, along with an intimate knowledge of the bank schedule and security system. Obviously there must have been someone on the inside, possibly bribed by the Corleone mafia. I want a background check of all bank employees and--"

"Yo mama."

"Excuse me?"

And onto the scene merrily waltzed Reginald John Dandy III, impeccably clad in his all white suit, shoes, and tie, striding easily on his cane, cavalierly twirling his mustache; no dirt ever seemed to stick to him. Independently wealthy by inheritance, he'd decided to become a big-city private eye for the sheer sport of it. His keen eye for detail and devastating wit rendered him a thorn in the side of criminals and cops alike.

"Yo mama!" repeated Dandy airily, "I believe I caught the cadences correctly?"

"Get outta here, Dandy-boy!" sneered Steel, "This ain't one-a your small-time petty thefts or adulterous trists to solve with a flourish of your wrist! This is the big time, for big boys only, involving a highly organized criminal outfit that is quite outside your pitiful--"

"Oh, ho-ho-ho-ho!" chuckled Dandy in that ineffable way that sent the women blushing out of amusement and the men out of jealousy, "My dear, dear Steel, you quite misunderstand! When I said 'yo mama,' I meant no insult or injury, but rather a statement of fact: the genius behind this very bank robbery is none other than thy mother!"

"Why, you no good, man-whoring scoundrel!" snarled Sgt. Steel, red-faced and shaking his fist, "I've gots half a mind to knock you on your pampered hind-end, and that before I have you arrested for interfering with official police business! Just where do you get off insulting my mutha--"

"These marks in the pavement," cut in Dandy, lightly touching shoe-shaped indents in the sidewalk with his cane, "Are these not your beloved mother's? Yo Mama is indeed so fat she registers on the Richter scale, does she not?"

"Well, yeah," said Steel, flustering more than blustering now, "But that's neither here nor there--"

"And indeed a (admittedly insignificant) 3.4 earthquake was registered by the bank earlier today at roughly the same time of the robbery, was there not?"

"She does that every time she walks outside!" protested Steel, "I mean, c'mon, she's got her own zip code--"

"Yes, yo mama's so fat NASA has satellites orbiting her," added Dandy, "And if I'm not mistaken, that's one of them lodged in the rafters right now," he said, pointing gingerly up at a GPS satellite wedged into the roof of a neighboring building, squished in as though between a rock and an exceedingly hard place.

"Ok, ok, so she was here!" shouted Steel, "But she's also so stupid it takes her 2 hours to watch 60 minutes, so how the heck is she gonna rob a bank and disable its security system, huh, Mr. Smarty-pants?"

"Ah, my dear Mr. Steel!" smiled Dandy charmingly, "Yo Mama's so fat that when she visits the bank, the security cameras turn off, do they not?"

"Well, uh, on occasion she's been known to..." stammered Steel, "But! There are security guards--"

"My dear Steel, yo mam's so smelly when she plays in the sand box the cat comes and buries her," replied Dandy, "She so smelly her deodorant went on strike! Surely such a lethal biological weapon had no problem incapacitating the guards within seconds of raising her arms."

"It's true!" said Callahan, "The security guards all reported being knocked out by an overwhelming odor of shrimp platter, raw sewage--"

"--and kitty litter, I know, I know!" said Steel angrily, "I'm familiar with the smell! Alright, Mr. tighty-whitey, so my mother was here at the time of the robbery! So what!? How on earth could she break open the safe then--"

Dandy chuckled again. "Oh, my good officer, you really must excuse me, I find such naivety among the police quite amusing! Good señor Steel, you must be quite aware that yo mama's so fat, she doesn't open doors, they surrender; I doubt she experienced any further difficulty with the safe door."

"Fine!" shouted Steel, "But, then, where would she hide all that money?"

"Good monsieur, yo mama's got more rolls than a Thanksgiving dinner!" said Dandy jovially, "More than enough hiding places for the precious loot, all and all."

"But how could she get away?" fumed Steel, "You don't just miss a woman that size carrying a load of money out of a bank--"

"Oh, my childish Steel," said Dandy, "Yo mama's so ugly when she looks out the window she gets arrested for mooning the public..."

("It's true, I was the arresting officer," said Calahan.)
("Shaddup!" said Steel.)

"...What finer place to hide all those millions than in the most obvious place, the giant sack-o-lard that everyone avoids looking at the most?" concluded Dandy, dandily examining his finger-nails in the air.

"Very entertaining theory, Dandy," seethed Sgt. Steel, "But you're forgetting two things! First, motive..."

"Yo mama's so poor she thinks an elevator's a mobile home," said Dandy offhandedly, "One need not look far for her motive, even if she needs look for her own feet..."

"Second," interrupted Steel, "Intelligence! How could she concoct this elaborate plot all by herself? Remember, she so stupid she brought a spoon to the superbowl..."

"Ah, at last, a valid question!" smiled Dandy, "Indeed, yo mama so stupid she put out the cigarette butt that was heating your house. No, I'm forced to concur with your hypothesis that there was indeed a conspiracy, though none of the grandiose nature as you initially posited. No, my dear Steel, I'm forced to conclude someone much closer to her put her up to it..."

"Just what are you implying, Reginold Dandy?" said Steel, narrowing his eyes.

"Sarge! Sarge!" said Callahan, getting off the phone, "I sent a patrol car to check on yo mama, and since she's so fat she can be seen from space it wasn't hard to do so; all the bank money was found on her!"

Steel went pail. "Did she give any info on her... I mean, on the, uh...the, uh..."

"My dear Detective Calahan!" declared Dandy nobly, "Sgt. Steel's mama so fat she eats wheat thicks. Might any of these delectable wheat thicks be found on his person now?"

Calahan checked. "There...are....Sarge, where did these come from?"

Steel went white, blubbered for a moment, then turned off sprinting. A pile of cops soon tackled and cuffed him. "I'll get you, Dandy!" he shouted as he was carried off, "No prison can hold me! There's no place you can hide!"

"Of course there is!" laughed Reginald John Dandy III, striding off triumphantly, "Yo mama's so fat when you roll of her you gotta roll twice!"

Abe

I once read an Abraham Lincoln quote to the effect of, "Whenever I hear of a man extolling the many virtues of slavery, I feel an urge to have the institution tried out on him." Or something. I spent about 90 seconds googling the exact quote then realized I had homework to do.

But though slavery is at least officially abolished in these United States, I sadly still find this quote still applicable today.

For example, I'll occasionally meet someone who not only excuses but defends the use of sweat-shop child labor in third world countries, extolling the virtues of putting children to work, of not spoiling them as we do in America, and the unique opportunity presented their suffering country to work their way out of poverty (at 14 cents a day). Whenever I hear such a person, I feel an urge to have that persons own children, or even themselves, put to work in a sweat shop, no school, no windows, no escape from starvation.

In the midst of the Iraq War, and I heard someone extolling the virtues of that war, I wondered why they themselves were not enlisting in the military--especially given the low recruitment numbers. I always wanted to say: "Dude, there are no restrictions on class, race, education or gender on military enlistment. If this war means so much to you, and if you really want to support our troops, why not do so in person?" I'm looking at you, Lee Greenwood.

And don't get me started on those in favor of torture and suspending due process.

And of course, most recently, a common argument against health care reform was that health care is free anyways, since if you check yourself in, the hospital has to operate on you. To which I've always wanted to say: "oh, is that why you don't have any health insurance? If no health insurance isn't such a big deal, why not go without it yourself? Save yourself a few bucks each month?" This especially goes for military personal and congressman, who all receive govt.-run, tax-payer funded health insurance. If you hate it so much, when are you getting rid of yours?

Random Hodge-Podge: Lolita, Adventure, Circulation

Lolita:

When I read it, I first was disturbed as to why Nabokov was writing a sympathetic portrayal of a pedophile; then I wondered why I myself was feeling sympathetic, and what that said about me.

Perhaps "Lolita" is just regular old shock value, just like Swift saying we should all eat Irish children. So, like Swift calling attention to the plight of the starving Irish, what is Nabokov shocking us into seeing? Perhaps the sexualization of pre-adolescence in America (a phenomenon apparent even in 1955, when it was published); that even as we've increased the age of consent far beyond ancient (and many contemporary) cultures, we've paradoxically, perhaps even hypocritically, lowered the age of accepted sexualization of young girls. Hypocrisy does indeed run rampant throughout "Lolita"; everyone's deceiving someone else, everyone disguises what an awful person they are, only one of them happens to be a pedophile.

Or maybe the shock value lies in the fact that all other forms of Romantic deviancy simply aren't that shocking any more; infidelity, for example, simply isn't as scandalous a plot device as it used to be, sadly. But a pedophile relationship, well, that's still guaranteed to push buttons. Want to show the self-destruction inherent in passionate love? This may be the last way to show it.

Maybe it's just to remind us that pedophiles didn't choose to be so, anymore than homosexuals; they perhaps merit our pity, for it destroys them as much as they destroy innocence.

Or perhaps it's not about romance or sex at all, but about time; the protagonist still pines for his lost love from when he himself was 12. He is continually trying to recover the un-recoverable. Perhaps the commentary is that a constant living in the past is itself a perversion.

Then of course there is the relationship between beauty and morality, for "Lolita" is an incredibly beautifully written novel, but it's still about a pedophile. Do beauty and morality have no inherent relationship? There are also zero descriptions of sex in this text; the language, much like make-up on a woman, conceals as much as it reveals. The protagonist constantly disguises his perversion behind a mask of suave sophistication and intelligence. The treachery of beauty, or at least the need to appreciate beauty for its own sake, and not rely on it to communicate truth, may be the final lesson of "Lolita."

In any case, the function of literature is to hold a mirror up to one's self; how you react to a text reveals more about one's self than about the author or text itself.

Adventure:

In class today, we discussed a theorist who argued that adventure, whether in medieval feudalism or late-modern capitalism, functions to fulfill the ideals of the dominant ideology. But I argue instead that adventure does fulfill the function of ideology, but rather ideology attempts to assimilate and subsume adventure which, by its nature, is outside the ordinary/conventional/dominant power structure. It is by definition extraordinary.

That being said, why not have a corpus of criticism about "The Princess Bride"?

Circulation:

In another class, we've been reading experimental prose works that have a micro-circulation--normally less than 100 copies ever printed, if that. But then I considered, given the general size of the human race, and how few people have ever actually read the complete works of Shakespeare, or John Milton, or Chaucer, relatively speaking, all literature has a micro-circulation. Most people are about as likely to read Paradise Lost as they are to read Tender Buttons.

Which raises the perfectly valid question: why study literature at all?

Why, precisely because it affects us; literature affects us, and the conversation affects us, how we think, who we are, and what we think we are, and there needs to be people willing to let it affect them, as well as show other people how to let it affect them.

Assurance

The assurance of Christianity isn't that there will be no more pain.

The assurance is that the pain will be worth it.

Cell-Phone Voice-Mail Scripts: A Phillipic

[a warbly Jay-Z feat. Alicia Keys] "New York Concrete jungle where dreams are made of, There's nothing you can’t do, Now you're in New York These streets will make you feel brand new, the lights will inspire you, Let's hear it for New York, New York, New York I made you hot n----"

[fractal moment of cassette-tape-hiss inspired silence]

Hello.

You've reached the automated voice message system of:

[inexplicable crackly sound] "Hey-uh, hi, this is, uh, Jon Doe's cell phone, if you'd just leave me a message with your name and number and time you called and stuff I'd really appreciate it, and I'll call you back just as soon as I can" [another inexplicable crackly sound]

is not available. At the tone, please leave a message at the tone.

Press pound when the message is complete.

Or, press 1 for more optionsTo leave a call back number, please press 5.

[another excruciating fractal moment of silence]

*beep*

Dear voice-mail script writers:

God knows how you made it this far with such a tortuously long script.

One that is somehow less efficient and more irritating than the old land-line answering machines.

One that stubbornly forswears the instantaneous convenience of all contemporary electronics.

One that preserves all the tediousness and none of the grace of courtly formalities.

One that never fails to tease the caller into thinking they can finally leave their message, only to yank the rug out from under them once more and barrage them with another banal list of options that no one in the history of America has either needed or wanted.

Seriously, why the hell would I want to leave a call back number? And why tack that option to the end of an already poorly-paced computer recording, without a beat pause, like a neurotic mother yelling at her kids running to the bus not to forget the ugly sweaters Aunt Martha sewed for them? It's thrown in like a super-important afterthought you totally forgot while stoned, and you guys wrote the frickin' thing!

It makes it sound like you're interrupting me. Seriously, it's like I'm at a party, trying to talk to my friend--and not even for long, I just need a to moment remind her about lunch tomorrow--and you're standing there, interrupting me. I just need to say, "Hey, Amanda, how's Himalaya Cafe sound tomorrow? Call me back," so that I can get back to my homework, and you're standing there, blocking my path, cutting me off, telling me about all the neat-o options on the voice-mail that can totally help you out and you're there if I need any help and do you need any help? cause I can totally help out--

You sound like a desperate date. If you were a real person I'd punch you in the face. But you're not, which only adds to my frustration. It's like you're trying to ensure that I'll be irritated by the time I call my friend, perhaps in hopes of ruining our relationship so that you can corner me alone again with your inane comments and keep me from enjoying the party. Again, the behavior of a desperate date.

Are you desperate, voice-mail script writers? Is this computerized female voice the closest you've ever been to a women? Is your poor sense of social skills and conversational timing the source of your inability to properly pace--quickly, efficiently, and kindly--a simple voice-mail script?

Perhaps you deserve your my pity, not my scorn. Perhaps your tedious scripts is how you vent your impotent rage against all the women and MFA programs that rejected you (but given how badly you botched the cell-phone script, I can only imagine how slow, boring and incompetent your writing samples were).

Maybe I'm too harsh, and voice-mail scripts are merely a failure of the free market; maybe there isn't enough competition between script writers to favor the more customer-friendly messages while weeding out the clearly inferior ones.

Maybe, more insidiously, you get to charge customers more if the voice-mail script causes the message to inadvertently cross over into the second minute, and hey, all those extra minutes of charged time add up! I hope you bought a nice hooker with those extra minute charges, she at least will talk to you, even if it is only to warn you that her pimp-daddy will mess you up if you don't pay.

In conclusion, my cell-phone script writers, if you could kindly--
*beep*
Message full. To leave a call back number, please press--
*click*

What is a PC?

All my life I've encountered people who proudly proclaim that they are not PC--and inevitably those same people are racist, misogynistic, homophobic, anti-semetic, and all around misanthropic pricks. Usually they justify themselves with some sort of quip like "Hey man, I'm not PC, I'm just keeping it real," or "I'm not racist, I hate everybody!" as though that's better. They construct some caricature of this PC enforcer that's this oppressive, condescending nazi, then proudly proclaim that their inexcusable behavior is opposed to this non-existent threat to freedom.

I remember being raised on tales of these evil PCers, and maybe I'm looking in the wrong places, but I have yet to actually meet this creature. Maybe this PC caricature does indeed graze here and there, but I promise you that it's the opposite that currently overburdens the land. More often than not they have a show on Fox News. I've long begun to believe that this rare PC creature does not actually exist, but is just an imaginary ghost created to frighten children at night and justify our own hateful behavior.

I'm starting to think that PC is just a euphemism for not being a prick. I can understand why pricks everywhere would be opposed to that.