Tuesday, August 9, 2011
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.
Sunday, July 31, 2011
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?!?!
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?!?!
Wednesday, July 20, 2011
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.
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.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
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. ;-)
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. ;-)
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
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.)
Monday, June 13, 2011
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.
- 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.
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
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.
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.
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