Short Notes on Excess

I've Moved!

2009-07-29T11:33:00.000-07:00

I've left Blogger for the greener pastures (and better architecture) of Wordpress. You can now find me at:

http://shortnotesonexcess.wordpress.com

Astor Piazzolla

2008-12-16T18:38:00.000-08:00

My writing soundtrack lately has been a bunch of stuff by Astor Piazzolla, arguably the greatest tango composer of the past century. He writes complex, textured, jazzy stuff. It's brilliant. A couple of selections:

Libertango - Yo-Yo Ma and, uh, Some Other People
One of my favorite recordings at all time. The cello part is just the bee's fucking knees.

Chin Chin - Astor Piazzolla
Arguably the finest jazz accordion solo you'll ever see. A strange and beautiful song.

Meditango - Moscow Quartet
And another song I love, in a bizarre (Eastern European) musical arrangement. Perhaps one of the best things about Piazzolla is the flexibility of his music, which seems to fill a huge range of possible instrumentations.

Target and Strangeness

2008-12-16T18:11:00.000-08:00

In order to actually be ready for our trip, JR and I went on an errand-running trip of epic proportions yesterday. We borrowed KJ's car and more or less spent an entire 9-5 workday amongst the soul-crushing strip malls that form a terrifying ring of consumerism around the suburban outskirts of Madison. In a weird way, it was the most compelling pre-trip thing that we've done so far. More than shopping for coats online, or researching the cost of a Navimag ferry in Patagonia, or booking hostels in Valpo, buying all the little things for our trip was what made it hit home that we were leaving for six months. There was something about buying toothpaste and razor blades and deodorant and Ziploc bags which made this all strike home as being, well, real. The past few weeks have been abstracted and dreamlike and, despite constantly reading travel blogs and trip suggestions on the Internet, I've never been able to put myself there. The research has felt like a mental exercise or a kind of fiction that I've built around myself to preserve my sanity in grad school; but that sense of dislocation, that patina of disbelief that hung around this trip, all that fell away the moment I picked up a bottle of sunscreen and thought to myself, "Just how much sunscreen do I actually need?"

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am lousy at projecting forward. But I'm at the point where I can see myself brushing my teeth in a hostel sink somewhere in Patagonia. And even as that dispels one kind of strangeness - the strangeness of planning for something I can't quite envision - it invites an altogether different one. This new strangeness is much more exciting, though it bears an accompanying sense of anxiety (an anxiety that very easily gets caught up in the usual end-of-semester and pre-holiday anxieties). But it's also made everything here feel even more bizarre.

On an unrelated note, it's snowing again - another 2-4 inches tonight. (That's what she said.) Or maybe that's a related note after all: looking at the snow, all I can think about is the fact that I'm going to a country where it's currently summer. And that the only snow I'll see in the next few months will be on the tops of the Andes. And that I'm happy it snowed so much before I left, because watching snow fall on sparse, gray days reminds me of snow days as a kid and traveling in Germany. Part of me is going to miss Wisconsin. But that part of me is definitely not the toes on my left foot, which are currently frozen due to Thieves poor heating system.

This is Not a Freak-Out

2008-12-14T14:21:00.000-08:00

So, I'm sitting in Thieves again, trying to write the remainder of my endless, deliriously-written paper on queens and corpses and tombs and Pygmalion and--HOLY SHIT WHAT AM I EVEN WRITING RIGHT NOW.

But I'm not really writing, because there are two women sitting across the shop from me, and one of them has - and I mean this without any hyperbole - the cutest fucking baby I have ever seen. She's a girl, somewhere between 0 months and 3 years old (I don't know how to gauge baby age). But she's tiny. And happy. And she basically just sits there and smiles and flails her arms about and squeaks. And every once in a while - and this is the best part - her mom hands her a Cheerio out of a bag, which she grabs with both hands and nibbles on very slowly, like a squirrel. It's just plain awesome. But I'm starting to creep out the mother, so I think I'll just pay closer attention to writing this. Cute damn kid, though.

On an unrelated (or is it related? I don't know anymore) note, we're under the two-week mark. As in, two weeks from now, I'll be on a plane careening over Colombia. That thought is giving me increasing horror, as my Big-Ass To-Do List still has pretty much everything on it. And another student just asked me to write him a recommendation. Crap crap crap crap fuck crap fuck fuck crap balls crap nutter butters. (Hello, working at home. My parents are going to kill me for being buried in my books for my first several days back in CT.) Oh, well. I guess it can't be helped.

Well, I'm going to go try to re-center my chi by watching the squirrel-baby some more. Creepiness be damned.

Work Break

2008-12-13T11:34:00.000-08:00

Dear god, how had I completely missed this video? I basically live on the Internets, so it alarms me whenever I miss an awesome, Muppet-related, gangsta-rap mash-up. Clearly, I should be on the Internets even more.

Enjoy.

Nutter Butters (See Earlier Post for Reference)

2008-12-12T11:56:00.001-08:00

I finished teaching today, which was both great and a little depressing. I liked my students a lot (though not always consistently) and, despite the growing pains of teaching a course for the first time, I was reasonably happy with my classroom performance. There are a lot of things that I'll do differently the next time around (i.e. structure my schedule around specific writing skills rather than these big abstract principles like "personal narrative" and "research"), but I think I communicated at least something to the majority of my students. I'll be interested in seeing my evaluations.

The depressing end of things comes from the fact that I didn't want to give extensive comments on these final portfolios. So, I took a gamble and told my students that they needed to put a self-addressed, stamped envelope in their portfolios if they wanted my feedback. I was thinking that - I don't know - maybe three or four students, tops, would take me up on this. This whole SASE thing is usually a pretty dependable deterrent. But, no. Eight of them included envelopes. Eight. I'm fine with several of these students asking for comments, but - and I'm going to be a complete cynic here - there are quite a few who just want to see their grade on this. Rather than a document envelope (a big orange thing), they gave me regular letter envelopes (a dinky white thing) and asked that I simply send them my comments (read: grade) that I type up and affix to their portfolios. I cry foul because I think most of them will just open the envelope, look at their grade, and toss the letter without reading it - that is, unless they take issue with their grade. And it's an extra three hours of grading that I need to do before I can see the end of my work. Boo.

I'm currently neck-deep in my writing process for my own papers. I'm still on my first one, but I'm hoping that, after spending several weeks compiling and organizing my notes, the writing will just kind of happen. Wing and a prayer. The thought of starting my second paper is already daunting, though, and there's just so much left to do before I fly out on Thursday. I was pretty serene up until this point, but now...now the dark side is taking over. Thus: nutter butters.

...And You Should Maybe Dance a Little Today. To This.

2008-12-09T12:18:00.000-08:00

The video is kinda "meh," but the song - oh, the song is catchy as hell.

Dateline: College Library

2008-12-09T11:22:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting at one of my preferred late-semester work spots - a booth in the Open Book Café - and taking in the milieu. College Library is a veritable shit-storm of undergraduate annoyingness after 6:00 PM and during finals week, but it is a surprisingly placid place during the late-morning/early-afternoon lull. There's stuff going on around me, but with my headphones in, they just make for white noise (or, rather, the visual equivalent of white noise, whatever that might be).

Occasionally, I'll mute whatever I'm listening to - typically, the soundtrack from The Motorcycle Diaries or an older Röyksopp album, both perennial study albums - and listen to the conversations around me. Today, for some reason, those conversations are almost entirely bad Spanish presentations. I have to fight the incredibly strong impulse to walk over to the table of frat boys next to me and explain how "¿Porqué no creer yo?" does not mean "Why don't you believe me?" (that would be, "¿Porqué no me crees?", douchebags). But I don't. Because it's untoward, and Sigma Chi Retard over there needs to learn an important lesson about how not showing up to class for three weeks has a direct correlation to looking like a dumbass in front one's entire Spanish class. Though I don't like it in my own class, I do like the idea of subjecting bad students to shaming rituals elsewhere.

I probably should shame some of my students, as more than a few of them are writing BAT-SHIT INSANE FINAL PAPERS. Yesterday's presentations were bookended with some real classics. The first student to present, typically one of my better writers, wrote about the similarities and dissimilarities between Barack Obama and - wait for it - Tupac Shakur. He never said why we should compare them and, more problematically, talked more about their similarities than their differences. And you can probably guess what the similarities were. This was followed by eight more or less acceptable presentations. However, the last presentation, complete with a sparkly poster-board thing, was about the history of vampires. THE HISTORY OF VAMPIRES. Holy shit. Holy, holy shit. Really? It turned out to be not terrible - she did not, as I feared, explain how vampires came to exist or how they immigrated to America via pork shipments from Eastern Europe - but there was no argument. None. Thus, it fails the assignment. Very troubling.

I should remind you, gentle Reader, that I am teaching a class on music. With this last project prompt, I gave them permission to go off the reservation and write on a subject that interested/was academically pertinent for them. And some students did just that, producing some great work. My best student, a Horticulture major, did a great piece on the fear of genetically-modified crops; my problem-student-turned-student-I-actually-get-along-with talked about the limits of gene splicing; and my very likable Gambian student made an interesting (though not entirely sound) argument for the legalization of organ sales (body organs, not the other kind). Nothing if not interesting.

But the rest proved that whole "enough rope=noose, self, hanging" axiom. Thank god I don't have to actually comment on their final drafts. I did some damage control today via student conferences and e-mail, but I'm more than mildly concerned that the idea of a "well-reasoned argument" has passed over my students, despite the fact that I spent an entire week discussing and illustrating just that concept. Quite upsetting.

I also met with a student today who more or less argued that, without religion, U.S. society would face inevitable and irreversible decay. (I had to quash the desire to hit him with a copy of Nietzsche's collected works.) What was troubling was that he's typically a thoughtful and intellectually-engaged student - his writing has been problematic but, more often than not, characterized by a desire to engage with his subject in a novel way (a trait often lacking from students here). For him to turn in a logically weak essay rife with quotations from pieces of religiously conservative, far-right propaganda - that was disturbing. It still astounds me to see the extent to which young, intelligent students get suckered into radical intellectual positions like this (on either side of the political divide). Most of our conference ended up being me unpacking the faulty logic that underpins the claims he cites. Luckily, he didn't get overly defensive or confrontational, as a lot of students tend to do in these situations, but I'm not entirely convinced he saw the logical fallacies I pointed out. A vexed encounter, I would say.

Well, back to tombs and corpses and whatnot. I need a big day today, so that I'm not bonered later tonight. But I probably will be. By Ned.

What the End of Semester Feels Like...

2008-12-08T10:52:00.000-08:00

Metaphors for My Life Right Now:

-- My pants are on fire, and I'm trying to swat it out with my hands, but then my hands catch on fire, which I try to douse by dunking them in a sink full of water, but the water is actually gasoline and I blow up. Small pieces of me rain down like snowflakes, and children shape those pieces into an ashen snowman that resembles my likeness, which then bursts into flames.

-- I am falling out of an airplane, and the friction from falling causes my head to burst into flames. I pull my parachute, which then bursts into flames and I fall into an active volcano, which then bursts into flames. Also, the volcano is full of lava sharks.

-- I am riding on a train that is going to Awesomeland, but somebody in my car has puked and the odor is slowly filling the car. The windows and doors are nailed shut, and though I try to look ahead and imagine myself in Awesomeland, it's unclear whether it really exists and, if it does, how I'll get out of the train car. Then, all of a sudden, I look down and, oh shit, I'm on fire. [Hint: Awesomeland is a symbol.]

-- I am in a hermetically-sealed room from which the air is being slowly drained. In order to restore air to the room, I need to run on a treadmill, but the more I run, the more oxygen I use. Finally, I become so oxygen-deprived that I drift off to sleep and lie down on the treadmill, which whips my comatose body into the wall. Fires can't start because of the lack of oxygen in the room, but I'm sure that, if there was air, I'd be on fire for some reason.

-- I am a bird that flutters from place to place, picking up bits of string and twigs to build my nest. I spend weeks and weeks doing this, methodically assembling these pieces into a nest. Finally, I finish collecting string, stand back, and look at my nest. What I thought was a nest turns out to be, in fact, a noose. I insert my neck into the noose. The friction from doing so causes my little bird-corpse to burst into flames. I burn on in the night, a beacon of desperation to my fellow birds.

Fun, right?

Book List - The Final Cut

2008-12-07T10:17:00.000-08:00

Depending on the amount of space that I actually have, here's what I'm cramming into my backpack, with a brief rationale for each:

Don Quixote by Cervantes
My huge honkin' piece of classic literature for this trip. I've long aspired to read it, and it's pertinent to my academic interests, so I won't feel like a total academic schlub whilst bumming around and drinking wine in Latin America. Though I'm cheating (for now) and reading the Oxford Classics English translation, I'm hoping this will be a springboard into reading the original Spanish version. And, deep down, I'm partly hoping that this will be a conversation starter with some Argentine literati, who will see me reading this in a street café and will then sit down and talk to me and Jessie about trends in world literature and we'll become best friends and they'll invite us to stay at their beach house in Puerto Madryn whenever we want...and...and... (Well, you get the idea.) Edifying in any number of ways.

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
I've started this book three times but never read past page 20, mostly because those three times I started it were between the ages of 16 and 18. So help me god, I'm finishing it this time. Another "literary" work, but arguably more entertaining than typical literary fare. And it'll make EV happy to have someone else who gets his obscure references. (There you go, champ.)

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami
I have a deep and undying love for Murakami. It's a bit upsetting, but I'm almost done with his catalogue. I went on a bedtime reading kick and made it through a number of his works in the last year (Kafka on the Shore being the best, I'd say). HBW is the last long novel of his I have yet to read. And while Murakami tends to linger on the border between pure entertainment and intellectual puzzling - I have trouble categorizing his work in that way - he is perhaps my favorite living author. And this book looks awesome.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
Though SH's Bolaño recommendation, the recently-translated 2666, was a bit too big to fit into my pack, I opted for an earlier work. Bolaño was born in Chile (and returned there to support Allende), so that seems fitting - despite the fact that he had a somewhat vexed relationship with his homeland. More to the point, he's one of the main Latin American literary figures of the last twenty years and, according to some critics, his work evokes Borges (but with a sharper edge).

Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges
This is my "if I have space" book. I doubt I will, and I think I can easily pick up editions of Borges (in both English and Spanish) while down there, but this is one of the best books I've ever owned. Hurley's translation here is virtually seamless - he renders Borges's work in limpid prose. And Borges's "stories" (I use that term loosely - he does some odd generic things in here) are a delight on any number of levels. I could probably read and re-read his stories endlessly, but - alas - even as a paperback this thing is pretty sizable (and I'm not even factoring in the fact that JR and I need to fit three guidebooks in our packs as well). Le sigh.

That's it for now. I'm pretty sure this is what I'll be bringing, but I also know my own caprice. I should probably write my term papers now, huh?

Every Day is Doomsday from Here on Out

2008-12-01T00:05:00.000-08:00

Dear Lord, I don't want to go back to teaching tomorrow. My sleep schedule is still shot to hell, so I'm going to get no sleep tonight. And then I'll probably return to a group of freshmen who will be equally exhausted from the potent combination of holiday travel and Sunday-after-Thanksgiving cramming. They will be uncommunicative and surly, and we're going to have to talk about the abstract concept of "making an argument" vs. "presenting a fact." I already hate them.

I also hate them for the fact that they want to do well in my class, so they're all going to miraculously appear at my office hours this week and next, eating time that I could spend writing my own goddamn papers and such. What they don't know - and what I'm often tempted to tell them - is that I already know what most of them are getting. I have 65% of their grade tallied at this point. Thanks to the ham-handed grading system here at UW, that makes anything beside a major deviation in the final project statistically insignificant. They only have to pass the "Did you royally fuck up this assignment?" litmus test, which for the majority of them consists of only turning in a final project printed in English and covering more than one sheet of paper. That's it. Game over. I'm packing my bags, and I'm out.

Speaking of packing bags...

Today, I occupied the first few useless hours of my day with this site about, well, packing. Seems like it makes sense. Completely useless for stuffing my travel backpack, to be sure, but worth trying out on my trip back to my parent's house. Perusing that took about 20 minutes, so I spent the rest of my time picking through the guy's Annotated Packing List. On the positive end, doing that helped to remind me of some key things I had forgotten to put on my own list: tweezers, a sewing kit, a compass, and - God knows how I forgot it - Band-aids. (I had Neosporin but not Band-aids...WTF.) But the downside was that I got severely depressed for a few hours.

This is the opposite of JR. She gets happy thinking about our trip, because she has the ability to project herself into the future - or, rather, she has the ability to empathize with Future-Jessie. I do not. Future-Kevin is an abstraction to me, someone completely disconnected from me, here, right now, stuck grading freshman writing while his toes slowly freeze in his woefully under-heated apartment. This lack of empathy with a future version of myself is, I also think, a contributing factor to why I procrastinate. Present-Kevin tends to dump a lot of shit on Future-Kevin (just as he's doing right now) simply because he cannot visualize and/or empathize with that future iteration. There you go. Case solved.

So, what I need to invent is a window that will let me look into the past, so that Present-Kevin can look through it and see how miserable Future-Kevin is whilst he comments on awful student concert reviews at 2:30 AM. Why can't science do anything good for me for once?

Yeah, There's the Pants-Kicking

2008-11-29T18:43:00.000-08:00

I just had a revelation that EV will probably like: I'm bringing Catch 22 with me on my trip. It's long overdue that I actually finish that book. I started it the summer before my senior year of high school but never made it past page thirty, foolish teenager that I was. I think it's just the type of book I would actually read on a trip like this. And it offers something more than mere entertainment. And I bet I could barter it for something equally good in one of the hostels along the way (another important factor to consider).

Hostel-book-bartering is one of the most enjoyable and, simultaneously, one of the most frustrating things about traveling. In my experience, the hostels that have the best books are also the stingiest about trading for them. I still remember a hostel in Grenada, Nicaragua that rejected a copy of Jude the Obscure that I had wanted to trade for The Corrections. I was a junior in college and, as an English major, well on my way to being a literary snob, so the idea that Franzen was somehow better than Hardy made me livid. To this day, I still refuse to read The Corrections, partly because it's tinged with that sense of rejection. A funny thing to say, because I'm fairly sure JR is bringing it on this trip.

On a completely unrelated note, I've realized that I have a series of catchphrases I like to use when I'm completely screwed by the dangerous combination of my workload and my tendency to procrastinate. Most common is "boner city." Ex. "Oh, crap, I didn't finish grading these portfolios yet. I'm in Boner City" or "Well, I'm just in a whole goddamn city of boners now, aren't I?" Usage and inflection varies according to fucked-itude. The new favorite is an evolution of me saying "Aw, nuts." (That's referential - my more diligent readers probably know the provenance.) Lately, I've been saying, in a Butters-like voice, "Nutter Butters." JR's usual reply to this is, "Oh, man, I could totally go for some Nutter Butters now." Girlfriends are great for empathy. These have both managed to supplant the tried-and-true favorite, "I can't have any more days like this." I don't think I've said that once this semester in any earnestness (and, no, this doesn't count).

I have some non-verbal catchphrases, too, the most frequent of which used to be balling up my fists and vigorously flailing them up and down. (According to JR, I once did that in my sleep, accompanied with the phrase "I can't have any more days like this.") And, more often than not, I just resort to bothering JR. Just ask her.

Alright, time to change locations (coffee shop --> apartment), in the hopes of jump-starting my work for the remainder of the day. Seacrest out!

The Day After Thanksgiving

2008-11-28T20:31:00.001-08:00

For graduate students everywhere, the day after Thanksgiving, more than any other day in the entire year, represents the greatest possible kick in the pants - especially this year, with the holiday falling so close to the end of term. That's because Thanksgiving is sweet oblivion, the one day in the whole semester in which I turn off the part of my brain that reminds me that I have to grade 40 papers and write two twenty-page papers and start researching things for my...I'm going to stop before I hyperventilate. But that switch is flipped nearly every other day of the academic year, even whilst we sleep, so being to turn it off for just a little while is a blessing.

Thanksgiving is my new Christmas. I get excited for it in the way I used to get excited for Christmas (but no longer do, Grinch that I am). We might chalk up part of that to the aforementioned brain switch, but it mostly comes from the fact that I love a) cooking food; b) eating food; c) drinking wine with aforementioned food; and, d) eating and drinking with friends. Don't get me wrong: family is great. Lovely people. But I can't drink a whole bottle of red wine in front of them (my family, at least). And I can't tell ribald stories or watch Forgetting Sarah Marshall or play a drawing game in which I present a rendition of a drunk guy taking his dick out at a company luau (great game, by the way). I can at Thanksgiving. And that's why I love it.

But now I get kicked below the belt, in the front and the back, by several different entities. English 100 is a grading hell at this point, I need to crank out a term paper in a little over a week, and J. and I need to tend to the hundred and three little things that need to happen before we ship off to South America. And that all happens within the next three weeks.

I'm less afraid than usual, largely because there is a very nice reward at the end of all this ($2 bottles of red wine at street cafés in Valparaíso), but the fear lurks. It lurks.

Books, and Doomsday(s)

2008-11-24T10:33:00.000-08:00

Well, thanks everybody for the book recommendations. I'm going to check out a bunch of those books, I think. (Sarah: Bolano's been haunting me for the past week. There was an article on him in Paste, a piece in the Onion's A/V Club, and just yesterday morning I saw a woman reading an article about him in The New York Times. It must be fate.) I've also been milling over a set of short stories by Hawthorne, the first book in George R.R. Martin's fantasy series, and maybe Foucault's Pendulum by Eco (which I've begun but never finished). I'm trying to balance the intellectual (since I'm skipping school for several months) with the entertaining (since this is more or less a vacation), so we'll see how this all shakes out.

But keep the book recommendations coming. Even though I'm quickly running out of packing space--actually, I'm probably already over-full--my list keeps get updated.

That being said, I have no idea how I'm going to fit everything in my 1.5 backpacks. My travel pack is only 40 liters (not that huge) and my day pack is about half that size. Packing for four seasons (since winter will be kicking in while we're in Patagonia) is turning out to be quite a challenge. My pack was perfect for summery travel in Central America and Bolivia/Peru, but I'm worried about fitting in enough clothing to cover everything from trekking in Patagonia in March to hanging on a beach in Honduras in June. Not a terrible problem to have, but my packing list probably exceeds my luggage by about 40% right now. Nuts.

That's a minor problem. The major problem is the grading and term-paper-writing bind I find myself in these days. I need to finish my students' portfolios by Wednesday morning, then immediately begin writing my term paper for my Renaissance tragedy class. And Thursday is completely shot to hell (the good kind of shot to hell) because of all the planned gluttony. And Wednesday is drinking and playing video games with Ben. But things need to happen, and fast.

I won't even go into the fact that the subletters for our place bailed last week. Bastards. So there's that, too.

Every day, I have to fight the urge to go to the medicine cabinet, swallow Jessie's entire supply of Xanax, and hope that it puts me a coma for precisely one month.

Solicitations

2008-11-22T16:57:00.000-08:00

Jessie and I are gearing up for our massive six-month trip to the far reaches of South America. And I'm figuring out what I'm going to cram into my 1.5 backpacks that will keep me warm, well-dressed, and entertained for that time.

So, I'm soliciting book suggestions from all y'all. Here are the stipulations:

(1) It needs to be on the longer side (a couple hundred pages is ideal)
(2) It needs to be printed in paperback (hardcover takes up too much space)
(3) It should be at least mildly entertaining
(4) I prefer fiction but will read just about anything

So far, I'm already bringing Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and probably a translation of Don Quixote, but that's as far as I made it. I think Jessie might be packing The Brothers Karamazov and some Gogol, but I can't say for sure.

Tell me what to read. Do it.

Birthday, Birfday, Barfday

2008-09-26T12:17:00.000-07:00

It was my birthday this past weekend. And it was pretty outstanding. In a weird echo of my 21st birthday, JR and I and some of friends went out to a hibachi restaurant and got stupidly full. Lucky for me, AK got waaay too much sushi, so I poached some of that--and stuffed myself with hibachi food to boot.

After dinner, we went bowling at what might be one of the best bowling alleys I've seen. Though it was a bit pricey--especially compared to the cheap, cheap college nights back at the bowling alley in DE--the place was almost empty (for a Friday night) and had a pretty decent bar. I was pretty pleased with my bowling skillz but the high point was coming up with the most apt nickname for KJ ever: Sarcastasaurus. That's a keeper.

And then we went to the Ring. Which was the perfect cap to the evening. Not only did I get to eat some of my favorite food for dinner and get stupidly drunk but--here's the kicker--I got to partake of two of my favorite propelling-shit-at-other-shit games (bowling and pool).

Oh, and I got schwasted. Like, drunker than I've been in years. The kind of slow, cumulative drunk that happens when I liberally pepper in a variety of shots with some methodical consumption of beer and mixed drinks. Somehow, BB and JR decided that I should drink one of every "major liquor" to fill out my celebration. That was not limited to: tequila, whiskey, Jagermeister, rum, vodka, liqueur (in the form of a Dirty Girl Scout with MW), and, last but not least, Goldschlager. BB set that last one in front of me at about 1:30 a.m. and I just knocked it back. Oops.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how I woke up with possibly the worst hangover I've ever had. Like, hands-down. The kind of hangover where I only got out of bed in order to refill my water glass and linger about the bathroom wondering if the trigger was going to get pulled (it didn't). I managed to watch most of the content on adultswim.com and then about ten episodes of Arrested Development. I pulled myself together around 5:30 and managed to eke out a relatively short evening at Gretchen's fancy-pants party. (I did, in fact, wear my fancy pants.) Otherwise, Saturday was just Bad News Bear (as JR has me saying these days).

JR made a delicious, delicious cake on Sunday, which included a central layer comprised of crushed-up Mint Oreos and vanilla frosting.

I also have to throw out that RT got me a print of, quite possibly, one of the best MTTS cartoons ever made--this guy:

Alright. It's Friday. I need to go pretend to do some work.

Reflections On My Career Choice

2008-09-14T22:03:00.001-07:00

I'm aborting the whole summer-summary thing I had going in the last post. Just too effing daunting, especially for my fragile mental state right now.

Why fragile? Because I'm grading again. And grading amps me up in a way that I can't really describe. I'm usually OK once I get going with it, but there are frequent periods of hyperventilation before I begin and much gnashing of the teeth as I read the first few students essays. Part of this can probably be chalked up to the fact that I'm still very unconvinced of my authority to evaluate anybody's work. And part of this can also be attributed to the fact that, despite having graded close to 300 student papers in the past year--thank you intro-level teaching assignments--I'm still slow as hell in my grading.

That last bit is mostly because I type up comments for all my students' papers. Like, right now, I'm typing close to a page of single-spaced comments for a two-page assignment. The conscious part of my brain screams, "No no no no stop spending so long you douchenozzle," but unfortunately for me, I grade with my hindbrain. And so I end up writing more than the students submitted to begin with. And that's just plain fucked up.

I set my timer and everything, but I just can't stop myself. It's infuriating. I got a good response from a few of my students last semester, but by and large I think my comments go largely unappreciated. So that's my personal goal for the semester: trimming down my grading time. Significantly.

I'm also freaking out right now because James just left this morning, and all the work that Mr. Fun-Pants-O'Leary made me forget about in a drunken haze is now hurtling towards me with the force of those tiny particles being swung around the Large Hadron Collider. And, similar to that contraption, there's a chance a black hole might spontaneously appear and suck me into oblivion. God, that would be fucking sweet.

What the Hell Happened to My Summer? Oh, Right...

2008-08-05T14:42:00.000-07:00

The last couple days, I've been snapping awake in the morning - well, early afternoon- with the realization that, oh shit, it's August. It's a similar sensation to those end-of-semester days when I wake up with the realization that, oh shit, I have to write twelve pages of my term paper today. In both instances, I get a bizarre shot of adrenaline that completely rockets me over the usual morning grogginess. More often than not, however, it lasts until just a little past breakfast and my morning shower, at which point I fall into the typical Facebook-Rotten Tomatoes-E-mail slump.

But seeing as how I haven't posted anything all summer, it seems fitting to offer up a brief retrospective account of the summer that has blasted by me in a travel- and booze-addled haze.

Phase One: Why Kevin Sucks at Life; Or, Parents, Ahoy!

So, here's something you probably already know about me: so far in graduate school, I have managed to turn in about 22% of my term papers on time. Most get finished a day or two past the due date but one (on average) lingers for a long time. This year, that paper was my spring semester paper for my Pope & Swift class. I made the awesome choice of writing on a topic which, A) I knew nothing about, B) we never discussed during the whole course of the semester, and C) attracts a particularly dry and cumbersome brand of criticism. So, I took an extra six weeks or so to trudge through a paralyzing morass of painful - excruciating! - work on Jonathan Swift's perception of economic affairs in the early 1720's. And this happened in June, ostensibly the best month in Madison, the pay-off for the purgatorial winters and ball-sweatingly hot late summer months. Yes, I'm that smart.

During that same period, both Jessie's mom and my own parents came to visit for several days each. While both visits were enjoyable in their own right, they were notably diminished for me by that Swift-shaped sword of Damocles lingering over my head. And, it also turns out, it's a huge, huge mistake to have one's parents stay in their apartment for six straight days. Much as I love them, my relationships with my folks has about a four-and-a-half day shelf, after which I slowly regress into a surly, despondent fifteen-year-old. Those first four days, though, were quite enjoyable - my parents had never been to Madison before - and we did all the stuff in the city that I'd been putting off for god knows how long. We toured the Capitol. We went on a tour of the campus. We went to the Farmer's Market. We got my mom addicted to 99. Fun.

Phase Two: Gypsy Life

Once I finally finished the paper - a glorified book report by the time it was done - and got rid of my parents, I spent the requisite week drunk. And then began Jessie's and my July gypsy life. We camped in a state park up by Chippewa Falls with Matt, KJ, Lee, and Jeff, drank a lot of Leinie's (the brewery was a stone's throw away), and played a lot of corn hole. It was awesome. We got drunk in canoes, we toured a brewery, we lit things on fire...a true Wisconsin holiday. I particularly enjoyed watching our friends bound for tenure-track jobs at Cornell enjoy their last days of pseudo-college glory. They really went out in style.

We spent the following weekend in a tent as well, this time with Ben and Renee at a musical festival in western Michigan. The festival, Rothbury, billed itself as an eco-friendly hippie-fest that was all about community and environmental awareness and blah blah blah. In reality, no, no it was not, it was fucking nothing of the sort. Our campsite was in the gulag of the festival grounds, a hastily-shorn hayfield nowhere near bathrooms and about 3/4 of a mile from the nearest potable water (which smelled like eggs). The organizers charged $3 for a pound of ice and $10 for showers and, on top of that, prohibited any food from being taken into the music area (so you'd have to buy an $8 hamburger). To boot, there was no shade, which made it impossible to sleep past 8:00 a.m., at which point you were woken up by either the suffocating heat in the tent or the douchebag across the field who was blasting Biggie AT EIGHT IN THE FUCKING MORNING.

All that being said - and those demons being exorcised - we had an awesome time. We saw some great music, including Modest Mouse (my #1 band to see), Of Montreal, and, in a throwback to our high school days, 311, DMB, and Snoop Dogg. All the shows were pretty awesome, which may or may not have something to do with the two handles of liquor and case of beer we polished off in the three days we spent there. However, the highlight was probably going to the on-site water park: eschewing the overpriced and generally shitty showers, we opted to pay the $20 per person to go to the site's indoor water park, which was actually pretty amazing. After not showering for two days (and spending most of those days in the sun), we got up early and made it to the park before the rest of the hippies filthed it up. God, it was so. Fucking. Good.

Overall, though, it was well worth it. Getting drunk in the middle of field with Renee and Ben, rocking out to a live version of "Down" by 311, shooting down a water-slide in a giant inner tube with three other people - all of it seemed like a page out of my late-teens playbook. And that's a good thing. I had some doubts about having outgrown the whole music festival thing before we went, but those doubts were quickly allayed by the combination of booze, dancing, and good company (that being our friends, not the obnoxious, self-entitled neo-hippies who made up the other 98% of the festival attendees).

Finally, Jessie and I went to visit her mom in West Virginia, by way of Raleigh, NC. It was, all in all, a spectacularly relaxing trip. We flew into Raleigh, visited her aunt's family for a little while, and then drove her grandmother's car through the Appalachian mountains to Jumping Branch, WV. Because I have paralyzing pet allergies - and because Jessie's mom is the most generous person on the face of the earth - she put us up in a resort/state park hotel near her called Pipestem. Our room overlooked the New River Gorge and a swath of mist-shrouded green mountains, the combination of which offered up some stunning sunsets. So, for a week, we just visited with Jessie's mom, sat by the hotel pool, went hiking in the mountains, and sat around our hotel room watching hours and hours of cable TV. God, I missed cable.

Well, I'm getting lazy now, so I'll leave off the rest for the next post. Which I'll write. Soon. Ish. ,

My Heart of Darkness Is Surprisingly Well-Lit

2008-02-18T14:17:00.000-08:00

JR and I are going to be broke soon largely because I'm too awesome at a certain game. That game is called "Grocery Shopping: The Game of Sustenance," and on Saturday, I beat my high score. Even I, a seasoned player in the game of Grocery Shopping, found myself audibly whispering "Oh, holy fuck" when my sworn opponent, Surly Teenage Cash-Register Chick at Copps, tallied up my final score. Granted, it was pre-card-swipe, but it still was so high that another opponent, Grouchy Old Gnome-Lady Only Buying 18 Cans of Catfood, bestowed upon me a look of absolute shock.

I can attribute this most recent food-victory to several mitigating factors. One was that, instead of going with AK or BT or even the elusive EV, I borrowed BT's car and went on a solo mission. On solo missions, there are no teammates to give me looks of quiet judgment when I put the $8 block of aged gouda into my cart or pick up the third package of Thick-Cut Double-Smoked Bacon. So, without those stern and disapproving stares (or, in the least, what I project onto them as being stern and disapproving stares), I turn into a creature of pure, food-directed id. Reality falls away behind me as I gaze longingly upon the perfectly-arrayed cuts of $12 a pound fresh-caught Atlantic halibut; my consciousness is overwhelmed before the prospect of sale-priced bricks of mediocre cheddar; my normally ethereal yearning for Little Debbie Swiss Rolls is consummated in a salivating, guilt-ridden trip down the bread aisle. People: it's all hindbrain once my feet hit those dirty linoleum tiles.

Another major contributor was the shopping list JR wrote, which only included four things: "aluminum foil, sage, ricotta, everything." Granted, our cupboards were (relatively) bare, but that kind of free reign should not be given to me. As most people who know me will attest, I have nothing even resembling self-denial. In my book, "everything" is shorthand for "everything you could possibly justify to yourself as conceivably wanting and/or needing, ever, so just fucking go for it dude because you know you want to and JR won't get this for you when she goes shopping so you may as well just get it now and not think about the consequences of buying so much shit."

I also managed to hit the special Bonus Round, the equally ill-advised "Copps Liquor Store That Is Part of the Regular Grocery Store." Even though I managed to keep it at just two bottles of wine (one for us, one for BT), it was more or less what pushed me over the top of my old high score. Luckily, there was literally no space left in the cart for me to put those cases of beer I needed.

Lastly, and I should know better by now, I went after procrastinating so much (thank you, "Enemy of the State" on the CW) that I became hungry. And shopping while hungry is never a great idea, mostly because A) it makes me shop with my stomach, and B) I make faster (and more ill-advised) decisions so that I can get home sooner to eat all of those ill-advised decisions.

There are probably other significant factors as well, most notably the fact that I went right before we were supposed to get a blizzard that never fully panned out and that, as a result, the place was mobbed. In those situations, my Apocalypse survival mode switch gets flipped and I begin picturing JR and myself holed up in our kitchen, shotgun in hand, waiting for the carnivorous zombies to die off from starvation. And I think to myself, "Shit, well that will probably take a while, so I better buy all these cans of chicken broth that everybody else is buying. I don't want to be stuck in my apartment with no chicken broth." So, like the other pre-storm hoarders around me, my ability to think clearly completely dissipates and I buy about forty cans of chicken broth that will expire in a month anyways.

That's the story of my high score. But now that I've set the bar that high for myself, I'll just have to work harder. With Easter coming up, I'm sure that I can fit at least $400 worth of ham alone into a shopping cart. And there's always the Scotch Section of the Liquor Store Bonus Round. Hooray.

If You Prick Us, Do We Not Blog?

2008-02-11T14:02:00.000-08:00

Sitting in H.D.'s seminar this afternoon, when I should have been wildly pondering just what the hell is going on with sexuality and gender in the end of "The Merchant of Venice" (answer: something about vagina rings), I decided to finally blog (or, rather, blog again, if you count the haiku thing...or the shit I tried to do in college). But, now, holy hell...where do I begin?

I'm writing now as I wait for a student to come meet with me, though at this point I'm fairly certain I've been stood up. This semester, following the advice of teaching guru DZ, I've been meeting with all my students individually for about 10 minutes or so. These little meet-and-greets are entirely social in their nature: I quiz my students about their majors, their hobbies, their career paths, their reasons for picking Wisconsin, their (often dubious) cultural preferences, etc. So far, so good, though there have been some hiccups. I've learned that asking the question, "So, what do you do for fun?", is not a good question to ask, mostly because students just shrug and say "Hang out with friends and do whatever," which is code for what they actually want to say, that being "I get black-out drunk on a shitty handle of Mr. Boston's Rum and proceed to make some dubious life choices that I'll lie to my future spouse about when they ask if I ever did anything I regretted back when I was in college." To which I'd still probably just nod and say, "Neat-o."

Most students have been cool in their own way, but there have just been some outstandingly awkward or "oh-fuck-what-do-I-say-now?" moments, too. In true Dubsian fashion, a brief highlight reel:

1.) Student H who, when asked about how he liked Madison, replied that is was "too diverse" and wanted to go back to his tiny town in rural Wisconsin.

2.) Student R who, when I saw his Radiohead t-shirt and asked if he paid for "In Rainbows" (the newest album that could be downloaded for free), gave me a weird look and scornfully replied, "What are you talking about?" [he'd borrowed the shirt].

3.) Student M, who told me that one of her hobbies is "making fun of people a lot," so I should be "prepared to get some shit from [her] this semester."

4.) Student K, who...well, pick a moment. She cackled (and I mean, cackled) at every third sentence, funny or not, and she spent most of the meeting looking either at the wall behind my left ear or the ceiling tile directly above her. Oh, and ask AK, who has had her as a student. Smart, but fucking nuts.

That being said, I think it's gone well. My own college experience was defined by the great attention I got from professors at Delaware, and that kind of personal detail was what made the school feel small and manageable. Especially here at Wisconsin, with its vast student body, I think it's important to go out of my way as an instructor to have that kind of contact with my students: I don't doubt that there are students who graduate having never once spoken to a professor, TA, etc. outside of class. And that bothers me. I think that, especially with higher education going the direction that it is--that is, getting more expensive but less attentive to individual students (because of the expansion of student populations)--this kind of one-on-one contact should be strongly encouraged. Frankly, it's an idea I wish I had last semester. Time-wise, the investment is pretty nominal (57 students x 10 mins. apiece = about 10 hours), but the pay-off, both for the instructor and the student, is substantial. I already feel like I have a better rapport with my students, and many of them actually greet me by name walking out of lecture, instead of putting their heads down and scurrying by (as many did back in the fall).

Alright. I have to go eat some Chipotle before orchestra rehearsal, so let's call it good.