Birthday, Birfday, Barfday

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

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...

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

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?

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.