Where High Theory and Fan Fiction Meet

Five months of intense rhetorical study, and yet it took an afternoon of reading fan fiction to trigger the realization that I am and always have been firmly on the rhetoric-as-dialectical side of things. Goes to show, I guess, how very important a role extra-academic experience and thought plays in developing systems of belief about the world.

This is a particularly interesting epiphany for me as I suspect it'll help me put into words some of the annoyance I have with overly Aristotelian views of rhetoric - in which knowledge is only employed, never created. And also to reconcile the view of logic as a dominant/superior mode of persuasion with the importance of local situation. But then...I guess the remaining sticking point then is persuasion. Dialectic is by nature not persuasive. And I do think rhetoric is. Is it simply a midpoint, a question of attempting to persuade while also remaining open to the influence of identification? Hmm. Might (and I can't believe I'm typing this) have to dip into Perelman again...

What's the opposite of an eye for detail?

...so it appears I've had my timestamp here set to Pacific time? Or maybe just some of the entries? Goddamnit. Now years from now when I try to use the timestamps from these posts to make an arguement about the pattern of my work habits I won't have a leg to stand on.

This is a small matter, I recongize. But still. Annoying.

Life After Prelims

So I passed. Cue great rejoicing. Although really, all I felt at the time was this distant, unreal sense that it was over and that no one would make me do it again. But I'm thawing out and waking up now, in part simply due to the passage of time but also through my slow reintegration into the world of the living. Here's a brief look at some of the things I've done since Wednesday afternoon that I probably could not have done before:

* Had friends over to hang out and drink wine.
* Put in contact lenses to teach. (My students were adorably/annoyingly confused by this change - "can you just like, not see, or are you wearing contacts?")
* Happy hour and last-minute dinner with fellow comp/rhet-ers
* Spoken to my immediate family on the phone 5+ times.
* Spent the night somewhere other than my own apartment.
* Made an extensive set of playlists for things like Singing Along, Rediscovering Classics, and Rocking Out.
* Cleaning. Hours of cleaning. Totally overhauled my room and brought the bathroom back from the brink of alarming. Words cannot express the catharsis.
* Had a major singalong while doing aforementioned cleaning.
* Began constructing a list of my favorite Community episodes. (Harder than one might think!)
* Big celebratory dinner out with friends and drinks and delightfulness

And that's not even touching all the things I did in the two weeks between passing in and the defense that I could not have done before finishing the essays. It's been a really...expansive few weeks. I'm reclaiming my life, my time, my priorities, and it's still unclear how they'll be redistributed. But I'm not to worried. I am so much more alert to what and who is around me, so much more able to reach in and put a hand on the core of myself...I don't know. I can't quite explain it. It's like before, I couldn't contextualize anything that happened to me in the personal realm with any depth or accuracy. I had truisms and gut reactions, but that was about it. And now I once again have intuition, hindsight, educated speculation, and confidence with which to assess events.

Confidence. God, I've missed you. Confidence isn't even the right word exactly. It's...the sense of myself. The knowledge I've built over 27+ years of who I am and what I can (and can't) do. What I'll always be and what could change over time. It's similar to what I felt on my road trip summer of 2010, just in a lower-key and less dramatically exciting vein - that slow realization that everything I was before is still there if I reach for it. I can't head off on a major adventure now like I did then, sadly - but it seems like I'll find other ways to accomplish the same kind of breaking with status quo that may be just as effective. Things to collide with that highlight the rest of me, the parts that have been in cold storage for the past 5 months. I love new people and new situations. I am energized by the right kind of challenge to my non-academic abiities. I am not as uptight and old and inexorably set on the path to traditional middle-class academic life as I might sometimes feel or fear.

I'm still the same as I've always been. If anything I'm better - just out of practice. I can have what I want. I can surprise myself. I can be the friend/daughter/sister/niece I want to be. And I can win battles no one's even expecting me to fight in.

But bottom line: I'm alive again. And it's going to be awesome.

The Big D

Defense is tomorrow at 1pm. I actually...can't wait. Well I mean, I can - still gotta type up an opener and some ref notes. But I'm ready for this. Bring it.
-------
And now, for the record's sake, my paraphrasings of the questions I was sent as prep:

* What role do binaries play in my own answers (V/V, Acad/public, lit/oral, theo/prac, etc)? BC dude girl, you talked about them a lot.
* What's the value of imbalance? How would I reply to challenge that rhet/ped/etc are most "generative" when out of balance?
* Why "Contemporary Writing" as a term/label?
* Is print comp conservative by nature?
* What's up with Design as rhetorical?

It's become clear that this is the darkest timeline

From a GChat convo with Justin S. tonight:

Justin: Heh
I miss 9-5, no lie
You get shit done
And more importantly
Then you're done
me: yup
for this reason my holy grail is a strict personal schedule
so i could once again feel entitled to relax fully that was at established times
...that's the worst thing i have ever written
18 year old me is crying her face off right now


 

Things I've written in my prelims essays:

- On how abstraction facilitates comparisons between systems of discourse: "It allows the comparing of apples to apples, without the confusion of having to account for whether they came from pie or sauce."
- On Anne Wysocki's reference to a major literacy studies scholar: "The shout-out to that legacy is particularly loud in her essay."
- Working title of my third section: "Modern Playout: The (Rhetorical) Voyage Home
- On examples of pure persuasion-based rhetorical acts: "Hipster culture is another example, based in persuading outsiders of the superiority of their fashions and tastes and disdaining those fashions and practices at which that persuasion becomes too successful." (Footnote to this sentence: "Q: How did the hipster burn his tongue? A: He drank his coffee before it was cool.")

---

We Were All Thinking It

From a FB convo tonight:

justin: i don't really understand the virtue of "surviving" a zombie apocalypse anyway

justin: that's like, the definition of a pyrrhic victory

justin: you understand they won't have iphones then, right?

Prolific

So I've been wanting to get my livejournal printed and bound for awhile now, and so today, as a means of putting off work, I took the initial step of running it through LJBook's pdf creation app (which can then be edited and submitted to one of numerous online book publishers). I figured it would be too long for one volume, so I set it to include everything through graduation - the first four years I had it.

...that shit is *1100 pages long.* More than 375,000 words. I knew I wrote in it a lot as an undergrad but daaaaaaamn. By comparison, the next four years take up a mere 187 pages - granted I moved my public blogging here in the middle of that time and also did a lot of paper journalling for awhile in there too, but still. Wow.

Adventures in Analogies

Being pleased instead of upset when mistaken for younger than you are : growing up :: feeling creeping horror rather than pride/elation when you realize your paper is going to be much too long : becoming a grad student

Sigh.
------
Two-year anniversary in the Kingdom today (this account - I'm pushing a decade in total). Two years of wasting dramatic amounts of time and a not-insignificant couple hundred bucks or so in pursuit of cultural references, line-drawing aesthetics and completionist joy.

Worth it. Totally worth it.

-----
Text I just received from Kyle: im going to start telling people i live on the kanye westside so it sounds cooler

Writing is slow today - can you tell? I'm not sure why...out of practice probably, which always sends me relapsing into bad habits. How can it take so much time to write a totally reasonable 25 pages of answer when I already know exactly what I want to say?? It's so irritating.

Time to read me some inspirational Elbow quotes (helpfully listed on a sticky on the inside cover that I drew up last time I was having this issue), make a plan of attack, drink some more of this smoothie for energy and rally up.
-----
11:20pm. I'm calling it. I don't feel like I have nearly enough pages to show for my day, but I do have some - 6 to be precise, plus a solid pre-version of maybe 2/3 of the next one. I'm starting to see where I'll have to make cuts and where I need to allow time for more significant reshaping of material from my initial draft. I'm also getting a sense of where I'll be spending my limited strong-claim capital and where I'll be dressing up lit review in new clothing.

Wow I'm cracked out and tired and hungry and verging on incapable of recalling basic vocabulary. I need to step awayyyyyy from the keyboard - or at least the act of typing words, especially ones related to my draft.

I've become increasingly and somewhat uncomfortably aware lately of the extent to which I think in status-sized chunks.

Slide!

The events of the past week or so are making me increasingly convinced - or perhaps more accurately, resigned to the fact - that Brandon Flowers is my spirit animal.

Adventures in Drafting (for 100 - to be clear)

It's a small thing, but it gave me a real sense of satisfaction to set up Thunderbird to send/receive emails for my E100 admin job. Despite my whole "digital writing = gist of my professional interests these days" thing I can be slow at updating software, adding new applications and programs to my daily routines, and other such tech-for-daily-living endeavors, so when I do take the time and initiative it feels good - and oddly empowering, especially when the directions fall a little short and I have to troubleshoot a little via instinct. I may not be a digital prodigy but damn it, I was brought up in a tech-friendly house and I am much more computer literate than I give myself credit for.

Spent an hour or so today doing my students' first writing assignment to use for all-class review tomorrow. It took more time than I expected even though I was pretty good about not revising as I went and just writing down what came to me - probably good to know in terms of assessing the workload I'm handing out. And it was enjoyable. The task was to "use your own life as evidence to research/explore a concept about writing." I chose the idea of writing as a means to an unknown end, and wrote about discovering that the reason I love writing in a journal/blog is because of the occasional yet amazing moment when you write your way into a truth or realization about yourself, the world, whatever, that you didn't have before.

But perhaps most interesting about the process was how heavily audience and rhetorical context shaped what I wrote. As instructors we're always lamenting that our students write for us, wishing they'd write for a wider, more specific and realistic audience - or even just write what they truly think. But it's kind of impossible not to consider audience, even when (as in this case) it's a piece that's supposed to seem written for a different imaginary audience (an instructor) than its actual one (my class). It wasn't even conscious (though vaguely so at times). But I wrote a very different essay than I'd have written for myself, or even for a 201 class. There are obvious sides to this - for example, I plan to tell them I wrote it at the end of class and so it can't reveal anything too personal or too authority-compromising. But more subtle ones too - I chose a different voice than I probably would have otherwise, wrote with a different sentence flow (lots of creative-runons, mounting clauses, etc). And then since it was for an all-class review, to model the idea of their first workshop Tuesday, I used a structure and a selection of points that doesn't fit as neatly, doesn't all seem totally relevant, to give them plenty of traction. I wasn't deliberately making it bad, by any means - just steering my SOCish writing away from connecting up points and towards making new ones. And such.

Anyhow, it was fun and interesting and a great way of putting off prelims for another few hours. Which I have *got* to stop doing.

Semester's going pretty well so far (aside from the "not enough prelims time" issue). Still enjoying being back on a schedule. Appreciating the arrival of fall (though it's accelerating a bit fast this week - don't rush it, Weather, it's officially summer still til the 22nd). Hoping to pick up some social slack and starting seeing people more regularly before long.

It could be a good term. I'm optimistic.

omg wtf xkcd

Hovertext: well, sex is like a velociraptor: despite your movie-fueled lifelong neurotic obsession, unlikely to be found in your house.
----------

Now that it's getting cold out I'm remembering how annoyingly cold my fingers get when I type for extended periods in a house below 68 degrees. Though the semi-numbness from the chill does distract from the tingly-numbness from my compressed nerves. Look, I know I keep whining about this, but it's really fucking annoying. You know how if you *really* hit your funny bone - not a slight ding but the full-on slam into something that feels so incredibly not-good that you'd almost rather be in actual pain than have that feeling - the tingling in your last two fingers and the twinge in your elbow linger for a good while afterward? It's like that except in both arms any time I type for more than half an hour at a time. So. Lame. I'm getting an MRI next week (for reasons that aren't clear to me, but whatever), but I know that it'll boil down to "do these exercises and take Advil," only one of which I'll actually do on any regular basis, eventually leading to God knows what other kinds of issues. So yay.

In other news - I never thought I'd say this, but I really did enjoy reading my students' first papers. Why is that so surprising, you ask? Because they were personal narratives. With other components as well, but still - largely personal stories. And they were interesting (for the most part anyhow - this isn't MagicLand where everything is perfect and I have six ponies to pull my bejeweled carriage and a cushy tenure-track job)! I have some sharp-ass kids this semester.

First weekend back in the game

Ten years ago today I walked into homeroom after Senior Assembly just in time to see the second tower fall. My memory of the scene is incredibly vivid - particularly Mr. Raymond watching, how he was standing, his complete fixation yet lack of visible outward emotional sign. (This incredibly vivid visual recall of the moment of realization is something I know is incredibly common, and is one of the things that fascinates me most about 9/11 from a public memory perspective - that despite the incredible attention paid in academic work to the visual impact of media images, for me and many others the most vivid and personally "iconic" image of the event is relatively banal.) I remember seeing the first crash on TV while in Bio and laughing, everyone thinking it must be some stupid lost pilot in a Cessna. I remember wanting to feel it more deeply/seriously than I did, but really just reacting to the drama. How little I knew. How young I was.
-------
I'm reading through my long rambly draft of my prelims question to prepare for my meeting with Christa tomorrow, and it's actually kind of encouraging. I had been dreading it, but it turns out there's really a lot of good stuff here. And it reminds me that I often am capable of being a pretty damn good writer. Which in a time where I'm feeling pretty insecure about my ability to finish this shit and pass, is a welcome feeling.

It was a remarkably full/eventful weekend. [Aside - I have *got* to kick this habit I've fallen into of using slashes rather than making relatively simple word choices. It started in late spring in an effort to facilitate faster drafting, but it's gotten out of control.] I did a very respectable amount of work while also having two major social nights (each of a very different flavor to boot). After an August of the same monotone lethargy-tinged shit over and over day in and day out this is a nice change, but also an adjustment. It's hard to wrap my head around the fact that tomorrow starts another whole week full of activity, obligations and social potential. But while it's a change it's one I welcome. I'm tired, sure. But I'm alive again. The rhythm of the semester is cutting through the paralyzing influence of anxiety and grief - and for that I'm thankful.

Even if such liveliness, both personally and professionally, can sometimes be a pain in the ass..

From the Journal of Don Draper

"She's a sweet girl, and she wants me to know her. But I already do.

People tell you who they are, but we ignore it. Because we want  them to be who we want them to be."

It's like spotting a mythical beast

The feeling that comes from slowly but surely gaining from my prelims a picture of the evolution of my discipline and the threads within it is really a wonderful one. If only that characterized the process (which is not so far-fetched given than it's, you know, the whole point of the thing) rather than panic, mental strain and isolation.

Coda to my Deneuve Post

Just grabbed a used copy of Belle de Jour on Amazon (with Prime shipping no less!) for 2 bucks. It's the first DVD I've bought in almost 8 months. It reminds me of the more or less forgotten (or, perhaps more accurately, sidelined) pleasure I get from buying in "hard copy" the movies and shows I truly love - immediately on checking out I was driven to go back and search for Les Choiristes and Umbrellas of Cherbourg.
 ---
And edit: Umbrellas is apparently so out of print a used copy is cheap at $22? Lock up your copy, Mom and Dad - that piece of knowledge is probably enough to kill my last objection to appropriating it.

Well this explains a lot

"I always like new things, and I like meeting new people, and it will be in AMERICA. So this is good." -- My rationalization for going to graduate school circa May 2007. Taken verbatim from my journal.

May the Odds be Ever in Your Favor!

So as someone who recently read all three Hunger Games novels back-to-back (during that whole "family crisis that really makes reading for prelims tough" period of the summer), I have to say that the casting report, as listed on Wiki, seems pretty amazing - down to Elizabeth Banks as Effie Trinket. And I can't believe I'm even saying this, since I actually didn't think the books were that good outside the raw concept and some innovative details and in fact that they suffer from a distinct lack of sexuality in terms of their ability to connect with the teenage experience (now where was I? oh yeah), but I kind of can't wait to see who they cast as Finnick Odair - the sexy, trident-wielding, fetish-for-madness, 24-year-old victor who looms large in books 2 and 3. And I'm a bit ashamed of myself for it, needless to say.

Also - I'm still torn between embracing and hating Jennifer Lawrence. On the one hand, she's taken some bold roles and so far seems to be doing her best to steer clear of the overt objectification so many Hollywood starlets her age fall into. On the other - bitch is 20 YEARS OLD. How dare she?!?!

Random Thought from a Hot and Sticky Writing Day

You know, I love Blink 182's "I Miss You." I did the first time I heard it years ago at AU and I still do. I find it heart-wrenching, actually - which seems like the last phrase you'd use to describe a Blink song, especially from a 2011 vantage point, but it's true nonetheless. It's so starkly emotional, so straightforward, with the contrast between the deeper mellowed first verse and the more Blink-ish rasp of those following...

I don't know. It gets me. It feels so sad. Hopeless before she even hears it.

----

In news closely enough related I decided to append it here rather than devoting another tiny post to it - I've decided to add "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea" by Neutral Milk Hotel to my list of all-time favorite songs.

The Perils and Peculiarities of Online Dating

So it's no secret that I've been dabbling in online dating for the last year or so. I feel like there's not much stigma left attached to it at this point - especially in this town, where it increasingly seems you can't find a single person between 25 and 32 who hasn't at least signed up for an account at some point or another. As I've realized that I've come to be more or less entirely OK with admitting I've played with it and sharing some of my experiences and/or opinions of the practice as a whole.

And most of those experiences (the ones that make for interesting sharing anyhow - no one wants to hear about how, for example, I once froze up so badly during a date that I literally could not make conversation about anything but television shows for almost two hours) somehow come back around to that fact itself - namely, that within the borders of the greater downtown area pretty much everyone and their mother (perhaps literally in some cases?) is on OKCupid.

[I feel I should take a moment here to say that while I sign on to OKC semi-regularly to browse my messages and sometimes the profiles of people who send them or are suggested to me, I haven't used or viewed it as a serious means of meeting duded for like 6+ months now. This is for two roughly equal reasons: A) I'm not enamored with the format of meeting someone one-on-one for the first time in a more-or-less formal date context where you're both more or less explicitly evaluating the romantic-relationship potential of the other, and B) it requires an energy, excitement and time investment that I simply haven't been able to invest in non-work pursuits for awhile now. So all this crossover? It's from occasional mostly voyeuristic browsing and a handful of dates dating back at least half a year.]

This density of use and the possibilities it creates for odd crossovers manifested itself only gradually. . For example, within my first three or four months on the site I went on dates with two dudes who both worked at the same (very large) company in town. "Huh..." I thought to myself at some point after my date with the second one, "wouldn't it be weird if somehow they knew each other and discovered they'd both been out with me. Weird." This seemed to me unlikely, both then and in retrospect, but given how OKC charts and almost gleefully displays viewing and contact statistics not at all impossible.)

I've come to see however in the months since then that this is an OKC/IRL collision so distant and with such minimal power reach back to me as to be almost adorably quaint. Because within this strip of city - everyone you know is looking at your profile right now. Or near enough as makes no difference. You may or may not ever see the effects of that - but probably you will. You may not be looking for information about the personal, sexual, or daily lives of people you know when you're running through QuickMatch - but you're going to run into some probably 2/5 times. You may never ever message that dude whose profile you cruised while tispy and bored at 2am last Wednesday night, but that won't stop you from recognizing him at the next TAA event and remembering that he's looking for a woman who wants to take latin dancing lessons with him at Monona Terrace this summer.

Because this isn't Facebook here, my friends. OKC profiles and questions cover a lot deeper ground, get more personal, get more graphic, get more revealing - ethically, sexually, personal-history, and otherwise. Sure, one can argue that you know what you're getting into and as adults we should act according to the risk we're willing to incur in terms of these potential inadvertant OKC/IRL collisions - and I do keep that somewhere in my mind when filling out questions and such. But it's also an environment that breeds a somewhat deceptive sense of, if not anonymity (the picture is more than half the game, for God's sake), then at least comfortable detachment from the eyes of people IRL. Because after all - you can't be searched for by name. Most of the people you know are probably already in stable relationships (those bastards) and have no reason to be on there. And it's a mutually-assured-embarrassment kind of thing if you should run into someone, which further cushions the sense of risk. So before you know it you're admitting in writing that your job really is slowly destroying your ability to enjoy life and that you could maybe imagine a scenario in which you'd have sex with someone you otherwise hated.

And so when those crossovers do happen, there's a fairly potent "...oh my god" kind of feeling. Here's a partial list of OKC/IRL collisions I've experienced in roughly the past 4-6 months (so like, half the time I've been on there):

- Running into the profile of the fairly adorable but married dude who did the home renovations for the family I nannied for my first two summers here and used to chat with frequently there and discovering in this manner his (presumed) divorce. (Guess that explains the visibly increased fitness level I noticed when I passed him going into the Secret Beer Store a few weeks ago.)
- Apparently being listed as a Quiver match for someone from my grad program - particularly awkward as we were barely friends at the time as it was.
- Having an ex-student with whom I've stayed in touch realize that his first-ever OKC message back in Dec (a month before I had him in class) was in fact to me. I cannot impress how narrowly I feel I dodged the World's Most Awkward Semester bullet here.
- Mentioning to a student this spring that I'd gone on a blind date recently with someone who worked locally in the same general business field on which she'd recently done a project - only to have her ask his name and then reveal that he was her husband's employer. Her: "Didn't he get a divorce really recently?" Me: "Yeah maybe I don't know SO what are you doing for your next project?"
- Attending a social function of people my own age to which I was attached only by one person (whom I knew only slightly) and realizing that the reason so many of the people there looked familiar was because OKC regularly suggested them to me as matches.
- Meeting a pair of fun and friendly dudes in a neighborhood bar, having OKC use come up casually in conversation; one of them then falls silent for 15 seconds while looking at me fixedly, then says "I've got it - [my user name], right?"

This is a selection of the most notable. I could keep going. And of course all that's not to mention the all-too-frequent times I run into people I've been out with in the grocery store, on campus, at the corner bar...or even avoid certain places entirely to prevent such run-ins. And when you consider that really, only one of my dates ended on an actively negative note and all but that and one other on reasonably non-awkward ones - I feel there's a lot to support my theory that (for many people at least, myself very much included) using OKC in this town does far more to breed awkwardness than to breed romance.


Which, I mean, is not the worst thing. There's part of my that finds it kind of hilarious, and maybe even (slightly) welcome, in this day and age of fiercely locked down FB profiles and aggressively monitored Google results pages. And should I ever have an experience that really throws or mortifies me, it's easy enough to trim back on the offending material.  And one thing typing this post and crystallizing these realizations has done for me is made me realize that there's a part of me that enjoys the evidence that  there are all these little threads (however random, awkward or of questionable compatibility with my professional life they may be at times) connecting me not only to this city but specifically to other people of my age and in my somewhat transient and unsteady life position. That I have an actual life here that extends beyond my work and into the community -with all the complication, mundane or otherwise, that that implies.

That said - I do not see myself going on an OKC date anytime real soon. Shit's a little too close to home already. ;-)

Thanks a lot, Emily

Forget ever hearing the tune without also hearing these lyrics - I may never stop having them stuck racing through my head. (Do I secretly find this fact deliciously geeky? Yes. Am I therefore fully pleased about this? No.)

Some Thoughts from A Really Scattered Weekend

- The girl two machines in front of me at the gym today had a ridiculously nice ass. Like the Platonic ideal of what a white girl's ass should be. To quote Ron Burdgandy, I wasn't even mad, just impressed. I was tempted to tap her on the shoulder and ask what her strength routine is but I decided in time that that was kiiiind of creepy so I abstained.

- Big shout-out to Dmitri for drunkenly hassling me about learning and using the multi-touch shortcuts on my new computer. Because man, they are amazing. It's not quite as "how did I live without this?" as when I first switched to a Mac and learned about keyboard shortcuts, but it's definitely increased the ease with which I navigate documents, especially in terms of web surfing and reading long articles. It's a good reminder to me not to be a secret Luddite who never upgrades her software because learning about all the "improvements" is too much of a pain. Turns out calling them "improvements" is not merely a scam to make you reboot - software upgrades are useful! (See also: my giving numerous students higher grades on presentations because I didn't realize that the reason their powerpoints looked so much better than mine was because they were using a version that didn't predate the Bush administration.)

Also - considering how much money I didn't have I paid for this thing, it only makes sense to get as much out of it as possible.

- Holy crap my back is sore. (Doo-dah, doo-dah...) 

- After a successful (almost too much so) day at the mall with Marshelle and Jessie, I realize the reason I feel like all my clothes are boring and plain is not in fact because it's hard to find any other kind these days, but merely because I almost never go shopping anymore (and when I do, for the past year or so it's pretty much exclusively been at Target).

- I've been starting to think that the question of whether or not a given dude has any potential traction as someone who'd fit well with me (and vice versa, of course) is not in fact as difficult to shed light on as I've been feeling it is for the past year or so - but simply a matter of asking myself if I could imagine him working at a Tarsa family Christmas. Not necessarily instantly fitting in like one born to the role (I'm looking at you, Tom Harper) - just that the idea of them there doesn't make me wince in discomfort. I feel like much wasted time in my romantic history could have been avoided if I had realized this earlier on. But then - such is youth.

- Writing that last point started off being about dudes but definitely ended up being about my family. And has made me realize that I really miss them. I think a lot of my distance from them over the past year or so is more a defense mechanism than anything else. I can't see any of them more than a few times a year at this stage in my life. There's nothing I can do about that. I was brought up to value opportunity over geographical fidelity, and my life to date reflects that. But damn - sometimes I wish that was not among the family values (especially the ones I got an extra-large dose of as the oldest) and we'd all settled down within an easy drive of home. (Which would still be in New Hampshire in this fantasy, btw.)

- This weekend has completely fucked my sleep cycle and is threatening to set off my anxiety issues about falling asleep. Joy. Hopefully I can drag myself out of bed early enough tomorrow to start repairing the damage. 

- Some really great, productive reading and thinking for my prelims question this weekend - somehow, between the not sleeping and the staying out too late and the shopping excursions. Looking at a few theoretical approaches to the word vs image question in regards to meaning-making and then finishing with what amounted to a practical-minded and applied consideration of the same issue by Edward Tufte (whose Beautiful Evidence I am 100% assigning next time I teach 201) was incredibly useful. It highlighted the benefits and shortcomings of both theoretical and practical approaches to the question (and all questions, I guess) - both from a scholarly standpoint and a pedagogical one. 

And less convolutedly - if you're looking for a good starting point for thinking about how to begin bringing multimodal work into your teaching (or your own writing), this is a really great book to check out. It's by no means perfect -  its focus on quantitative content doesn't always result in a clean map onto Humanities writing, and he's kind of a jackass at many points. But by jettisoning all the anxiety about the word-vs-image hierarchy and simply asking "how can we use the visual to present evidence in as effective and beautiful a way as possible?", he's able to come up with some truly incredible ideas and illustrations of them.

Ode to Catherine Deneuve

She's amazing for some many reasons. Her acting is strong, her choice of roles varied without being crazed and directionless, her presence and sense of self constant. But perhaps what I find most notably remarkable about her is the way she's let reality touch her beauty at nearly every stage of her career.

For example, tonight I saw her in Potiche, a cute fairy-tale account of a bourgeouise housewife in her 50s reinventing herself in the light of new-wave feminism. And unlike so many American actresses of her age, she looked her age. And yet still beautiful.

But her beauty-as-reality extends as far back as Belle de Jour, probably the role in which she was most highly sexualized. Take this frame - you'd never see such openly real depiction of a film's sexual heart today:

Her body looks real - something unheard of today (even in European cinema, I would argue - at least among ingenue shots).

...as I'm writing this I realize that much of what I'm arguing is as much or more about the conventions of the times or the region as about Deneuve herself. But because I find her so incredibly beautiful, so talented, so strong an onscreen presence, it heightens the effect for me. She's gorgeous at all ages even when she looks less than contemporary-Hollywood-perfect. And I find that both engaging and oddly empowering - like a look behind the veil.

I got to get myself a copy of Belle de Jour.

Snapshot from Maurader Life Overseas

Jamie: haha you know how tom and jim have insane amounts of wool/

me:  yes

Jamie: one time they found a stray cat

Jamie: and brought it home because it was miserable

Jamie: and it just sat and stared at the wool shelves

I scream, you scream

Theorizing about whether or not the ice cream truck in my neighborhood sells drugs and if so how and what kind has recently become kind of a significant preoccupation with me lately. [Edit 6/14: This is like the worst sentence I've written in awhile. I was going to edit it but decided to leave it because it's almost humorous in its badness.] For those of you who've never seen this thing, this is less idle a speculation than it would be with most ice cream trucks. For one thing, this thing is *ancient.* I think significant portions of it are actually made of wood, it's so jury-rigged and generally all-around ghetto. In other words, it doesn't so much look like this:

As like this:

 Now imagine that baby but a model about 20 years older, painted a sickly light blue/grey with some kind of paint that's demonstrably not intended for automobiles, with "ice cream" hastily stenciled on both sides and the roof. That's more or less what we're talking about here. But I haven't come to the best part, the clincher that makes theorizing about its potential secondary wares so inescapable: roughly 3/5 of the time, it's playing Christmas carols.

The weirdness that brings is upped even further by the fact that I first heard it come around this year in like, late February or early March - some time in there when it was clearly and fully still winter. But also clearly and fully not Christmas either. Let me tell you, when you're 3/4 through a Wisconsin winter and nearly insane for some sign of spring's approach, there is nothing more surreal than seeing that symbol of golden summer afternoons, an ice cream truck, amble past while loudly playing "O Come All Ye Faithful." Now that it's the ice cream truck's natural season, it's been coming around more frequently - but still playing carols at least half the time, if not slightly more. I'm also not sure I've ever seen anyone buy from it (though I'm sure they must).

All of which adds up to it being impossible not to imagine this baby peddling drugs. And like, more than just a little pot - it's so bedraggled and worn-looking, so kind of half-assing its efforts to appeal to children (presumably, were it a legit ice cream sales venue, its target audience), so bereft of the lazy yet heartwarming colorful sloppiness of a stonermobile, that it's got to be something darker - more along the lines of meth. (Though admittedly that might be the 25-odd episodes of Breaking Bad I've watched in the past 5 days.)

My current operating theory is that it plays Christmas music to signal that it's open for non-ice cream related business. Because honestly - why else would you play Christmas music from your ice cream truck in May when you could be playing "Camptown Races" or "Farmer in the Dell" or any number of other chimey staccato renditions of classic non-seasonally themed favorites? Shit's got to be some kind of code.

In other news, prelims reading begins full-time in 6 days. God save me. Maybe I should look into buying some of that ice cream meth.

Note to Self: Do it Right the First Time

So when I got my new computer I was (understandably, I think) too eager to start poking around on it and experiencing its amazing new speed and clarity and much louder speakers and such to transfer my files properly; rather than use Migration Manager or whatever the hell it's called, I simply used a portable drive to ferry over my music, photos and documents wholesale. This worked fine in the short term, but cut out all the associated information with my photos and music - playlists, play counts, events, etc. And as I am a huge packrat when it comes to personal records of all kinds, this has been annoying me. I've actually managed to put off plugging my iPod into the new machine so as not to lose the old playlists and settings. And for some reason, I decided that this afternoon was a good time to import all those settings and such.

It's a huge pain. Half the time the directions from Apple are ambiguous about whether a particular transfer technique will preserve the info I want (play count is a particular bitch in that regard), and the other half my old computer just isn't up for the task. Below, a selection of my thoughts on the process:

- How cute and somewhat twee that Apple has updated the Energy Saver light bulb icon to be a compact fluorescent.

- This is so easy. Well, not for what I want to do now - but it would have been if I'd just looked up how to do it in the first place. Goddamnit.

- Wait, is this going to make duplicates of all the files I already imported? All 67 gigs of them? Shit. [rushes off to move iPhoto and iTunes libraries to alternate locations]

- ...4 and a half hours?? Fuck that noise. I'll run it while I'm at Benoit's thing tonight.

****

Things I Learned This Winter (a selection)

- I am a compositionist first and a rhetorician second.

- A truly awesome pair of shoes can make you feel better about everything in your wardrobe and are 100% worth investing in.

- "Oh well, it probably won't make much difference anyhow" is NEVER the right attitude to take on insulating your apartment.

- It's also a bad position to adopt towards paying parking tickets on time, letting your registration expire, and eating Valentine's Nerds and Hot Pockets 2 meals a day for three weeks.

- My instincts are usually right when it comes to ebay auctions, when I don't need another drink, and men. Just, you know...fucking learn to listen to them.

- Polo will always knock his water over. It doesn't matter where I put it.

- Renee + me + Plan B = never a bad idea. Except when I'm not listening to that second instinct above.

- I kind of really do have a boner for digital writing. I'm where I belong.

- Many of my academic insecurities could be lessened if I would just make more time for reading in my field. (Cue prelims!)

- I'm happier when I pay my bills on time.

- I enjoy myself some genre fiction from time to time, but round about the 10th book in a row it stops being a refreshing change and starts being a rut.

- Don't put 3/4 of your winter clothes away after the second 60+ degree day in April. This is a huge mistake and will result in your wearing the same 4 outfits for the next three to five weeks. (I cannot stress this one enough. I've been all "damn...I have *no* clothes" for weeks now, and tonight when I went to finish the job I was like, "oh...that's why.")

- No matter what their official titles may imply, my professors are not really all that interested in giving me personally tailored advice or mentoring outside the obligatory.

- Getting some time in outside is incredibly good for my mental health, even if it's very very very cold out and hard to make myself do it.

- My writing is good. But it could definitely be better, and for that to happen I'm going to have to work at it.

- It's always a good idea to brave an epic blizzard for a Snoop Dogg show.

- Remember how you used to listen to music all the time - walking, on the bus, working, writing, walking? Do that again.

- It's hard to un-care for someone once you open that door.

- People exist who think you are genuinely good at your job.

- You may be considerably above average at winter driving, but you're decidedly mediocre at knowing what to do once actually stuck in a snowbank of some kind.

- Relatedly - I have some pretty sweet neighbors scattered through the nearby blocks - friends and semi-strangers alike.

- Wisconsin winters are incredibly hard on me. I know blaming Mother Nature is the world's biggest cop-out and I'm not saying I couldn't do more to mitigate their effects. But looking back on the past 12 months the correlation between the quality of my mental state and general lifestyle and the season is too strong to deny - winter Fucks. Me. Up.

And so I'm that much happier it's spring. It's waking me up, and I'm excited to start a new phase, where what I'm learning is less about enforced work and disappointment and cold and more about passion for my field and possibility and Ralph Lauren photo shoot-esque outings on Mendota.

Life's not so bad. I need to be more positive. There's a lot on the horizon worth being happy about.

I've got 99 work-related tasks but finishing my prelims list ain't one

Because that shit is D-U-N done. Just gotta meet with Christa to get the official okay on sending it out to be approved at the meeting this Friday. Feels good. Now I just have to track everything on it down - which, counted individually, would probably put my task count actually at or over 99. But such an itemization would still not include any bitches, so I feel the allusion stands.

I'm rich! I'm a wealthy miser!

I got both my tax returns and my paycheck last week, and checking my account for the first time since - wow. I have not had that much money in my checking account that wasn't immediately needed elsewhere in a long time. I know the feeling of wealth and security is *completely* illusory as this money has to last me through the summer and part of September to boot, but still. Let me bask for a second.

*bask*

Knowing this moment was coming, I decide a week or two back that I was going to capitalize on the feeling of having "means" by doing all the things that I've been putting off stupidly for ages now because they cost money and I rarely have any I'm willing to part with for things that aren't monthly bills, food/booze, or enjoyment. So once I get this whole "end of semester" nonsense behind me, here's a selection of the exciting things I'll be using this faux-windfall for:

- taking both my cats to the vet for checkups (neither has had one since before I got them and as I would probably cry so much I'd look like the guy from Indy 3 who drinks from the wrong cup if anything happened to them that I could have prevented by providing regular and responsible vet care, this seems like a Thing Worth Doing) (also I'm pretty sure Penny's had a cold since November at this point)
- stocking my medicine cabinet - I'm down to my last palmful of Ibuprofen and that's about it. And I can't tell you how depressing it is that I'm excited about doing this.
- getting new running shoes so my knees last another few years
- getting a single pair of cute multifunction summer shoes because I have not bought such a thing in 2+ years now and the gladiator-style sandals I bought then now look like they might have belonged to an actual gladiator.
- changing the oil in my car (and possibly getting it a tune-up as well, but since I am 100% sure they'll then tell me they need more money to fix things, I'm not sure I have the guts)
- paying an overdue UW parking ticket for which my registration was revoked by the state more than 6 weeks ago
- paying UW-Plattsville for a copy of Multiliteracies for a Digital Age that I have never been able to track down and which I've been getting increasingly menacing letters about for months now
- filling my gas tank to the BRIM (if only so you all can benefit when prices inevitably drop the next day)
- getting an eye exam and buying new contacts. So I can seeeeeeeee.

...wow. How lame a list is that. But hey - at least then I can start the summer fresh, with (nearly) all my affairs in order.

The quirks of buying local

I realized tonight that I've come to characterize the four local liquor establishments I frequent very much by their staff - more so than by selection or even price. There's the one staffed by jocular adorable middle-aged men, the one staffed by hipsters, the one with the primary clerk who's a regulation hottie, and the one where all the cashiers are disaffected high school girls.

If only the one less than a block from my apartment wasn't the one with all the hipsters.

I'm seeing more spinning wheel than cursor over here

My new computer cannot get here fast enough. Ever since I ordered it in the wee hours Friday night it's like a veil has been lifted from my eyes and I see that life with my current one is and has been for months now like being nearsighted but never having had glasses: you have a vague idea things aren't working quite as well as they could be, but can continue to live with it because you don't really realize just how shit things are.

Right now I'm like a nearsighted person who's been to the doctor and looked through the proper set of lenses in that flippy-lens machine/mask thing, but is still waiting for her glasses to arrive. The scales have fallen from my eyes (oh mixing metaphors) and man - my computer is *awful.* SO slow, SO loud, SO prone to rebooting itself one out of every 5 times I close it.

Home Improvements

So I just had one of those moments where I realized that I've unconsciously crafted a life for myself that in many little quirky ways (and some less little and less quirky ways) adheres to the values and habits of my own family - specifically in this case my mother. (This is a totally random opener, I'm aware.) Moments like this are almost always positive for me - they make me feel good about the adult I've become, about how my background has stayed a part of me through it all (even if I sometimes feel like there's nothing left to me but work, my love for my cats and a growing case of OCD about neatness).

What was it you ask that triggered this feeling? Scissors. Or more specifically, the realization that I own three pairs (four if you count the kitchen shears) - and thus can always, always find a pair when I need them. This felt surprisingly good - like realizing you've unconsciously managed to live up to some small but significant parental expectation. Which I guess is kind of what it is. Like Grampa and his perennial insistence on always having a flashlight in the car (something that's become a staple family in-joke at this point), always putting the scissors back in their place so they are they for the next person is something I remember being a thing growing up. Except the reason I likely remember it is because no one ever did it. Like, ever. So it was always hell finding some when you needed to wrap a gift, clip an article, cut a tag. (This is why I have the incurable habit of ripping my tags.) So as a result our house eventually just had scissors more or less everywhere. Junk drawer? Ancient slightly rusty black-handled scissors that looked like they'd been around since prohibition. Top drawer of the sewing machine? Slick uber-sharp heavy-duty mauve-handled shears that Mom would kill you if you didn't put back. Drawer of the huge heavy metal desk in the basement? More old-school metal ones. My top right desk drawer? Normal paper-cutting scissors. Kitten's room? Some safety scissors. Sewing basket? Embroidery shears.

...I'm digressing. And possibly exaggerating somewhat. But the point is: today I needed scissors twice in quick succession, and was able to quickly locate a pair in two separate locations, right where they belonged - and then I instinctively put them back. And it made me feel good about the life I'm building, a reassurance that there's always going to be more making me up than the last three years, and that graduate school is temporary but being a Tarsa is forever.

And thank God for that.

Thoughts while working

April 7th
- Wow my back hurts. Words cannot express how much I regret missing that Groupon for the massage place across from the Coop.

- A student today reaffirmed my recently slipping belief that the vast majority of students see anything below a B as an actively bad grade, which makes me feel better about my grading this year. I've been trying to toughen up my standards but I still sometimes worry I'm too lax - but if it is in fact true that most of them are upset at receiving a C (rather than indifferent with a splash of "darn," as I'd been starting to think), then my usual spread of a few in the 90-95 range, a few in the 72-78 range, and the rest in between puts my course about where I'd want it to be in terms of difficulty and standards. Not that every assignment every semester plays out in that range, of course. But the point is - I'm much less afraid now that I'm either too hard or too easy.

- I'm loving this weather. Is spring finally here??

April 18

- HOW did it take me this long to start using Zotero?? While I don't quite have the hang of how best to use it yet I can already tell it's going to save me a lot of time. That is, unless I become unreasonably anal about how everything is organized and waste hours arranging things for no reason aside from my own neurosis.

- My search for prelims readings just turned up an article entitled "Review Essay - The Internet."

- ...wow. So the Council of Writing Program Administrators just put me through literally 10 attempts at making up a password secure enough to be deemed worthy of defending my WPA conference submission form and the like - strictest most annoying standards for a password I've ever encountered in a civilian context. And then when I finally found one and finished registering, they promptly sent me an unencrypted email containing my new super-secure password plainly written out. Amazing.

[sings] Just blog-post while you work, doo dee doo doo doo dee doo...

Some work-related thoughts!

- "Of course, those students, like students today, say that they aren’t influenced by advertising (or song lyrics or any other aspect of popular culture that one attempts to bring into focus so it can be studied)." - Judith A. Wooten, on the popularity of asking students to analyze ad jingles back in the 80s. I found this quote today in Judith Wootten's 2006 CCCC address, and god damn it's the gospel truth. It's like once you ask them to analyze how something's going about fulfilling its goals, they instantly regard all such attempts as inherently flawed and ineffective, regardless of whether it was written by FDR or Charlie Sheen on a coke binge.

- How did I forget for so long what a bee I have in my bonnet about the limited role given to student voices in comp pedagogy scholarship? Oh wait - because I realized that unless I put in some massive reading time to back myself up it was too risky, as nothing pisses people off like being told by an unremarkable grad student they're irresponsible and exploiting their discourse position.

- This week feels really weird, with everyone gone for CCCC (Cs/ C's/Sees/Seize/ however the fuck one best expresses that in brief). Tomorrow and Friday especially - it's very strange to have nothing on Thursday except teaching, and two Fridays in a row without a staff meeting? I feel like I'm in BizarroDepartment.

- Some of my students did amazing work on this last project. True, I might have wished that the best project didn't forcibly remind me of my online dating experiences, but I suppose one can't have everything.

- Scene from my office hours today:
Me: "So I think that's pretty much it...do you have any questions for me?"
Student: "Yeah - what's on your shirt?" *points directly at my chest*
Me: "...Ben Folds."
Student: "Cool. Now I can stop staring."
*awkward pause*
Me: "...alright then, see you in class."

Facebook and Mechanical Perfection - On Faina's response to crediting her with discovering DamnYouAutoCorrect.com:

First comment to Faina (actually published): I strive to keep the balance between me and everyone else as close to 50-50 as possible when it comes to contributing to that project.

Second comment to Faina (only published here because it was that much too shaming): ...which can take effort, since my spending 3-4 minutes constructing the above sentence in order to subscribe to my increasingly particular aesthetic mechanical demands is becoming more and more typical.

...I'm not even going to tell you how long it took me to format the title of this post and determine if portions of it should be placed in the body instead. I think I'm being haunted by the Ghost of Current-Traditional Rhetoric.

Priorities

I'm watching the first episode of The Walking Dead (itself a commentary on my priorities) and amidst the zombies, mayhem, shoot-outs etc I find myself most in awe of how incredibly warm and pleasant the weather there looks. That seems like the most unrealistic thing.

Practice Spontaneous Acts of Quasi-Humerous Passive Agression

I know I'm probably in the minority here, but I'm going to go on record as someone who kind of loves heated gradlist discussions. I'm a big fan of their increased frequency lately, and if someone doesn't make a Follies sketch about that shit it'll be a damn shame.

Just Like Old Times - Plus Cats

Sitting at my desk commenting on papers and listening to Jamie on Radio Clash. Oh, memories.

I've been here awhile, huh? Weird.

The Absence of the Picture of Dorian Grey

The empty space over my bed - or more precisely, the question of what belongs in the empty space over my bed - is starting to feel vaguely symbolic. I'm not sure what that means exactly... it's both mildly unsettling and a bit affirming. A sign that my life has a plot, even if I'm not able to see what it is.

Why I Will Always Love Kingdom of Loathing: An Example