Today, of course, is the ten-year anniversary of the car crash that killed Diana, Princess of Wales. Although I was a self-described anglophile for most of the 90s (and I'm still a bit of one today), I was never into the royal family all that much. I was still taken in by the activities which followed Diana's death, though, particularly as a couple of very important things happened in the weeks that followed, one of which will be the lead-in to next week's Friday entry. Now that I've teased you with that, let's play the friday5.org Friday Five.
1. What’s something you suspect you regularly overpay for?
Well, I got Pizza Hut this past Saturday, and I don't understand why their pizzas cost about twice as much as everyone else's. They aren't even my favourite, by far, but I just happened to be in the mood for Pizza Hut while I was out last Saturday.
2. What’s something you suspect you regularly underpay for?
I found a Little Caesars location south of here that sells Italian Cheese Bread -- aka edible cocaine -- for just three bucks a pop. I have to travel a little ways longer to get it, but once hockey season starts back up that's going to become My New Regular Saturday Night Thing.
3. What’s taking up more of your time than it should?
(Okay, what's with all the questions making me think of food-related answers this week?) I need to cut down on the amount of time I spend preparing lunch. What I'll probably start doing here is pre-making certain items on Sundays (like toasting tortilla chips for my homemade nachos), so that I can save time on those days when I teach.
4. What’s causing you stress only because you let it?
Pretty much everything. I have an annoying tendency to take on every burden I can possibly fit onto my back for some deep-rooted reason that I'm pretty sure I don't want to try to uncover. The whole "kids who think the Internet is their personal toilet and dump on everyone in the name of cheap laughs" phenomenon has been heavy on my mind (again) lately.
5. If all your karma were based on your positive and negative attitudes, would it be in good shape, in bad shape, or perfectly in balance?
On the balance it would be positive, but I've still got too many bad thoughts in my head that I'm trying to purge. (I've actually been doing a bit of reading on Buddhism lately.)
It only really occurred to me as I was getting up this morning that today is the last day of my "summer break," as I start teaching tomorrow. I don't know if I can really use those words to describe teachers, though; I mean, at the age me and my students are at, of course breaks from school aren't the same as they are for younger children because of the responsibilities of jobs and the like (in my case the freelance writing I was doing after graduation). In the future I actually hope to teach over the summer, if I can get some of the few summer teaching jobs that there are around here. Still, though, there is something about the summer that makes one yearn for the days when summer meant a total lack of any responsibilities, and I doubt that the allure of those days ever fade, even if you're lucky enough to find a job that you love.
For some reason I got to thinking about summer reading earlier today. I actually had summer reading the summer before I went to Antioch -- I had to read a book then write a paper on it as a diagnostic for my writing skills -- but I guess summer reading, for me, will always be tied to the private school I went to. My junior high and high school years there were bad enough, but in terms of English teachers I had one okay teacher and a slew of really, really bad ones. That may be why I kind of moved away from English when I was younger, only to rediscover my love of it several years later. I loathed summer reading, and usually put it off until the last minute -- one year this meant speeding through Jane Eyre -- and never did that well on the invariable first-day-back quiz we always got. As much as I love English, I don't think summer reading is a good thing for anyone; break is supposed to be break, let the kids have their time off and don't give them a reminder of "lifelong learning," they'll get that soon enough.
I'm not really all that nervous about tomorrow. I have a feeling that I should be, because even though I've taught before, the circumstances here are much different (community college versus university, Michigan versus Ohio, Comp II versus Comp I). I have never had that much confidence in myself, but I am an excellent teacher, and these students I'm about to see for the first time tomorrow are going to get the best education I can possibly give them. Maybe they won't go for it, or maybe the college won't like the way I teach, but I'll cross those bridges if I ever come to them. For now, I'd just like to put the final touches on my handouts and get a good night's rest in preparation for class tomorrow. I know my students probably won't be as enthusiastic about the start of class as I am, but I'll keep things toned down because, believe me, I remember that feeling all too well.
Earlier this evening I went up to work for a workshop on how to use the distance learning functions there, as well as for a couple of social gatherings. I want it duly noted that they served dessert at one of these gatherings, and by dessert I mean various pies and cakes and cheesecakes, as well as brownies and all that other good stuff, and I just stuck with my water bottle thank you very much. I had been hoping to get out of there early enough to check out a new place to play dancey games in Ann Arbor, but I didn't want to get back here too late. (I'll probably head up there Thursday after I teach my first class.)
This was the third time I've been on campus, and the second time I've had a chance to mingle with my fellow instructors. I guess I'm kind of having a hard time adjusting to the fact that Monroe County, for lack of a better way to say it, isn't UT. I mean, I definitely had my share of good and bad times at UT, and to be honest I don't ever see myself returning to teach at UT for a number of reasons. (At least that's how I feel at this moment; I've actually changed position on this topic several times since graduation.) Still, when I was in the cafeteria with all the other instructors for the big social function of the evening, I couldn't help but look at people and go, "Hey, that person kind of looks like so-and-so from UT." If anyone I knew from UT is at Monroe County now, I'm certainly not aware of it, and even though I was kind of in need of a fresh start after UT, I also can't deny that there's a very large part of me that wishes that I had one or two friendly faces, known quantities, there to help ease me into this new stage of my life.
I suppose that now, more than ever, it's striking me how much of a curse it is (in addition to being a blessing) that I'm in a position in my life where I still have so many options available to me. There's little doubt in my mind that once I've been at Monroe County for a few years, I'll be able to snap up a tenure-track position and make my home there. However, I can't deny that as much as the "life of the ivory tower" is antithetical to my personal and social beliefs, there is a certain romantic allure to the idea of going for a doctorate in rhetoric and composition studies. I may yet decide to go and get my MFA in creative writing. Maybe I'll find some other writing-related task to put food on my table and warmth in my heart, or maybe I'll return to my music or ... I don't really know. I have a lot of possibilities open for me right now, and I'd be lying if I said that they weren't terrifying me a little more than usual lately.
Writing about Charles Rocket on Friday made me think about Saturday Night Live a bit more than usual, not that I've regularly watched the show for, oh, well over a decade at this point. (I only catch the show these days if there's a musical guest on whom I like.) I don't have any memories of catching Rocket on SNL, but I do have the vaguest memories of catching the later days of Eddie Murphy and Joe Piscopo's tenure on the show. (I can remember catching Murphy's "Mister Robinson's Neighbourhood" skits at an age where I was far, far too young to understand the social commentary at work.) I regularly caught the show in the late 80s, though, and I guess to me that's "my" SNL: Dana Carvey, Jan Hooks, Victoria Jackson, and Dennis Miller back when he was still funny. (I think Miller's departure from the show pretty much ended me catching it on a regular basis, particularly since I never thought Kevin Nealon was funny in the slightest when doing "Weekend Update.")
In a similar way, I guess "my" MTV was back in the 1990s. Although I think MTV reached its peak in the late 1990s with the peak of Lilith Fair and Daria, I watched regularly through most of the 1990s. I liked a lot of the alternative music in the early part of the decades, and the cartoons that came out under the Oddities name were quite good as well. More than the music and the shows, though, I think what ties me most to that era of MTV are the personalities that were on the network back then; Kennedy, Matt Pinfield, Kurt Loder, Tabitha Soren, and Alison Stewart are the five that come to mind most readily. Although I stopped watching MTV that much once the sugar-pop wave hit near the end of the decade and they started doing all that self-important stuff at Times Square, I still get a kind of happy feeling inside when I think of watching MTV back then.
Perhaps I'm thinking of that era of MTV since Alison Stewart's been guest hosting Countdown so much these past couple of months. Last week, though, I had this strange nightmare involving Tabitha Soren, although in retrospect I was probably thinking of someone I used to know who bore a passing resemblance to Soren. Still, I kind of really liked Soren, and I liked her as more than just a journalist to be honest. Although I've always enjoyed Kurt Loder's dry wit (although not enough to try enduring modern-day MTV to catch him), I kind of wish that Soren would find her back to television here, whether on MTV or elsewhere. Daily Show correspondent, perhaps?
... of Saturday Night Live alum Charles Rocket, were it not for his suicide nearly two years ago. For people who were alive during his SNL tenure, he may perhaps be better known for blurting out the f-word live on the show long before Norm MacDonald ever did, and at a time when the general tone of society made the utterance much more shocking than MacDonald's. For me, however, I will always remember Rocket as Ned Grossberg, the evil network boss on Max Headroom. Rocket's portrayal of evil was so convincing that even to this day the character still shows up sometimes in my nightmares. If you have never checked out Max Headroom, I highly encourage you to do so, as the show was so eerily precient that I probably wouldn't have believed the show was produced when it was if I hadn't watched it when it first aired. On that note, let's play the friday5.org Friday Five.
1. What were the circumstances surrounding your last all-nighter?
My last all-nighter was probably an "accidental" one where I actually tried going to sleep but I wound up just laying in bed all night without actually sleeping. This happens sometimes when I've got a lot on my mind and I can't get my brain to shut off, or, less frequently (especially since I've managed to stick to my diet for so long here), when I've just put too much sugar in my body for it to process properly. The last deliberate all-nighter I pulled was probably back late last year when I was finishing my MA paper off.
2. What’s your favorite stay-awake-and-alert food or drink?
When I'm dieting, it's pretty much just green tea with Splenda, or, if I really need it, a sugar free Red Bull. If I'm not dieting then pretty much anything goes, but my favourite drink would have to be a drink that our local coffeehouse chain does which is basically a Frappuccino with smoothie powder; not only is it super-charged with sugar and caffeine and a little "good stuff" from the smoothie powder, but the combination of chocolate, coffee, and malt powder in the smoothie powder is absolutely delicious.
3. What are you most likely to be doing when you’re up in the late, late hours of the night?
Until recently I tended to do my best creative work in the wee small hours of the morning, but these days I tend to be too tired by then, so if I am up really late, I'm usually trying to squeeze in a bit of video gaming or something along those lines.
4. In what way does your personality change when you are sleep-deprived?
Well, my wit tends to get sharpened, and sometimes I have some creative brainbursts, but on the whole the main thing that happens when I get really sleep-deprived is that I tend to say stuff without thinking about it as much as I should, and getting in trouble for it later. This is why, as much as sleep deprivation can sometimes help me in some aspects, I try to avoid it whenever possible.
5. If you get home extremely tired and extremely hungry, which need are you most likely to satisfy first?
If I'm at extremes in both those areas, then I pretty much have to eat something, because if I'm really hungry then I sleep very poorly. Of course, once I eat something then I have to wait a while for it to digest before my body will go back to sleep, so that's not a good situation for me to be in no matter what.
Jeff Passan: "Accidental Villain" (Yahoo! Sports)
Ever since Jose Offerman got charged with assault for charging the mound in a minor-league game with his bat, hitting both the catcher and the pitcher who had just beaned him, I've had to think about the relationship of violence to sports. Actually, I'd been thinking about it earlier than that; during the lead-up to Barry Bonds breaking Hank Aaron's MLB home run record, my British brother-in-law kept suggesting that someone should fund an effort to get pitchers facing Bonds to deliberately hit him in the head with their pitches, in an effort to make sure Bonds didn't break the record. (This was before I stumbled on that article that talked about how all the extra gear Bonds wears makes it possible for him to fearlessly crowd the plate.) I suppose the fact that my hatred of violence does not extend to fighting in hockey also kind of plays into this as well.
Still, the Passan article brings up the fact that a baseball in the hands of a major league pitcher can quite easily be a lethal weapon, even taking into account all the protective gear that batters wear while they're in the batter's box. This raises an interesting question for me, because I'm not sure exactly where the line is being drawn in the Offerman case. He was quite deliberately beaned before he charged the mound, so the notion that Offerman's conduct merited additional action on the part of local law enforcement kind of puzzles me, because he was just attacked by a potentially lethal object himself. Yes, the tradition of pitchers beaning opposing batters at key moments is somewhat of a characteristic of the history of baseball, but that doesn't make it any less dangerous. The notion that the only thing differentiating Offerman's conduct from the conduct of the pitcher that beaned him is a mere sense of tradition doesn't make that much sense to me.
I don't think I've ever been able to create a fully plausible explanation as to why I tolerate, and to be honest really really like, fighting in hockey when I'm so opposed to violence in the rest of my life. I mean, part of it has to do with the fact that the players seem to police themselves much better through fighting than the league could ever hope to do (witness the rash of injuries to star players several years ago when the NHL made fighti instigation an automatic game misconduct), part of it has to do with the fact that the NHL probably wouldn't survive if they took fighting out of the game, and part of it has to do with the fact that it's kind of hard to put your weight behind a punch when you're on ice skates. Still, there have been instances in the past where I think a fighter's conduct has gone beyond the pale, such as Claude Lemieux nearly killing Kris Draper, and Todd Bertuzzi ending Chris Moore's career, although in both cases there was an element (hitting from behind) that clearly differentiates them from the normal "throw the gloves down" hockey fight.
I'm still trying to figure out the Offerman scenario, though; there's no question that he shouldn't have charged the mound with his bat, but at the same time I'm trying to figure out what makes that worse than the fact that the opposing pitcher deilberately threw a baseball to hit his body. Is there something I'm not seeing here?
At the end of my seventh grade year I went on a school field trip to Washington DC for a week or so. As with so many other things at that private school I went to, this was not exactly a happy time for me for a lot of personal reasons, and we also just happened to go to DC a couple of days before the Tiannamen Square Massacre, which made things all the more interesting there. Perhaps what was most noteworthy about this trip, though, was that it marked the first time in my life I had ever left the Ohio-Michigan bistate area, as in addition to DC we also traveled through Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Virginia. Then, for close to sixteen years after this trip, I once again never left Ohio and Michigan, what with a lack of money combined with a family that doesn't particularly care to travel that much.
That changed during my spring break of 2005, however accidentally. I went down one Sunday to Cincinatti to go to a couple of places, and in the process of getting lost in a city I'd never been to my entire life, I found myself in Kentucky for all of about five minutes, just long enough to make a U-turn. I can still remember how once I crossed the state line into Kentucky, it seemed like every other building housed a discount cigarette outlet. The following March, I made my big trip to North Carolina for my 30th birthday to take part in a dance game tournament and meet some Internet friends; in addition to North Carolina, I also passed through Virginia again, and drove through West Virginia for the first time ever. I wasn't in school this past year, of course, so I didn't have a "break" per se, and at the time I didn't feel like doing any traveling.
The thing is, this past winter I went to Cleveland for another dance game tournament (this last time as only a spectator, not a participant), and traveling the Ohio Turnpike brought my mind more to travel. I've never really been into cars that much -- although considering how much of a car nut my father is, I may have kind of a skewed view there -- but I do find something soothing in taking a good long drive somewhere, at least when it's not the dead of winter and the roads are slippery. I also have to admit that I have a strange attraction to cheap road food, the kind of overpriced, greasy, three-hours-under-a-heat-lamp, bad-for-you junk that you can only find in service plazas on the highways. As much as I love a high-quality pizza, scuzzy pizzas also hold a special space in my heart, although with me dieting and all I don't get to have them very often.
Anyway, all of this kind of culminated this past Saturday when I drove to Indiana for no other reason than to drive and to say that I had stepped foot in Indiana. It was only about an hour's drive each way, and it's not like I visited anyplace in Indiana save a couple of service plazas, although given that Indiana recently privatized its turnpike I got to learn even more about why privatization is not always a good thing. (Three words: Golden arches everywhere.) Looking at it from a logical standpoint I really had no good reason to make this trip, but I guess there's a part of me that feels better for having made it, and if nothing else I've now been to nine different states and DC.
The big irony here, of course, is that it'd be much less travel and hassle for me to go to Canada now than to visit another state. I'm not sure where I want to go next -- I think Illinois is the next closest state to me, and if I stay on the turnpike then I'd pass so close to Wisconsin that there wouldn't be any sense in not going there -- but again, I'm not sure if there's much of a point in going to these states just to say I've been there, except that, for whatever reason, it feels nice to say that I've been to another state. I suppose I shouldn't worry about this until next spring or summer, though, and who knows, maybe by then I'll have a compelling reason to venture out further from my homebase here in Toledo.
Toledo summers have been getting hotter and hotter these past few years, and by this coming Wednesday we're supposed to be getting back around 90 degrees in the afternoons. As I type this right now, though, it's only about 63 outside, which is lower than it usually gets at the dead of night this time of year, and it won't be getting much hotter tomorrow. It's also been raining nonstop, and with all the rain we have in the forecast this coming week I'm sure that flooding is going to be a serious problem for this region. (Thankfully we live on very high ground, so we shouldn't have any problems in the neighbourhood.) Although it's not like the leaves have turned red and gold yet, they certainly aren't as bright as they were a month or so ago, and that, combined with the unseasonably cold weather, kind of makes it feel like autumn is rapidly approaching, if it isn't already here in a weird sort of way.
What perhaps makes this all the harder for me to ignore is the fact that UT begins its fall semester tomorrow, and this is the first time since 2000 that I won't be a part of things there. Granted, I start teaching up in Michigan in less than two weeks, and although not all of my memories from UT were that pleasant it's not like I actively dislike the place, but still, it is a very weird feeling for the school year to be starting with me not getting ready to be a student myself. (I mean "student" in terms of being on the other side of the desk; certainly I have a whole lot to learn from my students this upcoming semester.) In the years after I left Antioch, I would always get some serious depression this time of year, not just because of the whole seasonal shift and the constant reminders of death and decay all around me, but because I felt like I left a part of myself at Antioch that I never fully reclaimed. Now I'm beginning to wonder if I might have a similar feeling now that I've left UT.
On the one hand, I can't begin to describe how happy I am to be teaching again, and how excited I am for the upcoming semester. I've been busy re-reading all of my favourite teaching books, and I'll be putting the finishing touches on my syllabus later this week. On the other hand, going to the local office store to get a nice attaché for my school stuff instead of a purple backpack like I'm so used to doing, not buying my customary binder and notebook paper and Avery pocket dividers, is a strange and altogether uncomfortable feeling. I've hardly ruled out ever going back to school to get another degree (whether a doctorate in English or, more likely, an MFA in creative writing), but at times like these I can't help but wonder if I shouldn't be making plans to go back to school sooner rather than later.
... of the compact disc. If that makes you feel old, rest assured, you are not alone. On that note, let's play the friday5.org Friday Five!
1. What were your after-school hours usually like when you were in high school?
Either I'd stay after to use the computers at the school, or I'd head to my father's office to do some menial tasks for minimum wage for him. Every once in a while I'd head straight back home, but I can't really recall doing much of anything once I got home, other than trying to sort out whatever new angers that school brought out of me.
2. What are the first moments like when you finally get home after a long day?
Usually I shower, then turn my computer on and check my e-mail. After that there's no real set plan.
3. Where do your thoughts normally turn after the December/January holidays have passed?
I guess by that time I'm usually sick to death of both having to drive on icy Toledo roads and having to deal with other drivers who think the strong possibility of spinning out and dying in a fiery crash is worth the possibility that speeding up on slick roads might shave an extra minute off of their commute home. Therefore, my thoughts turn to the summer, where the drivers are still as crazy but at least the roads are dry.
4. When did you last allow someone to cut in front of you in line?
I honestly can't remember, but then again I don't tend to get stuck in queues that often. Thankfully Toledoans don't much care for self-checkout lanes in stores, so I'm able to speed through them in a hurry.
5. What are you going to do right after you finish answering these questions?
Probably do a bit of reading in preparation for the upcoming semester, then hit the garage for some arrow-stomping.
I'm nearly certain at this point that I'll be building a new computer sometime in the next month or so. It may take me a while to get all the parts just because I don't start getting paid for my new teaching job for another month here, but my old computer is starting to show its age and from what I've been able to tell from window-shopping online, I should be able to build quite a respectable system without breaking my bank account. Ironically enough, now the problems I've had accessing certain job Websites from the home computers here have spread over to my ability to access NewEgg, which really stinks, particularly as UT starts classes this coming Monday so now it will be much harder to get a computer at their labs in order to do my shopping there.
In addition to building a new computer for general use, I may also be looking at buying a cheap refurbished computer, likely from Tiger Direct, to build a system for the garage. I play my dance video games out in the garage because it's got a nice solid concrete base to play on (especially important for someone my size), and although I've amassed quite a collection of them, playing on my consoles is kind of limiting. Even after I modded one of my PS2s to play Japanese games and bought all the Japanese DDR releases (for PS2, anyway), there are still a number of arcade songs that I don't have access to. In addition, there likely won't ever be a home release of In the Groove 2 (cutting off an awful lot of songs for me), and the home releases of Pump It Up force you to use the game's packaged soft pad, and in addition to being unreliable, soft pads aren't that good for people as heavy as I am. Thankfully there's an open source game called StepMania that lets you basically mimic all of those games, along with any other rhythm-based games you can think of. Putting that on a PC in the garage would not only let me do all the things I already do with my console dance games, it opens up a world of fan-based songs and steps, and would allow me to create my own songs and steps. (It's not like the makers of dance games are knocking down Tori Amos' door in an effort to license some of her songs for their games.)
The thing is, I've been messing with Stepmania on Yggdrasil Mark I a lot lately, trying to figure out a suitable system for how I'd like to play in the garage in terms of the interface and scoring systems I'd like. Unfortunately, neither the current version nor the beta of the next version seem to want to operate that well for me, and I've gotten so frustrated with the whole experience that I may just give the whole idea up. I've posted for help on my LiveJournal, which due to its nature is seen by my dance game friends much more than the .org, and I haven't gotten any help there. I've Googled pretty much every error code Stepmania has spit out at me, and haven't found help there either. I realize that Stepmania is free and that I should expect to get what I pay for, but still, this is driving me batty and I've lost far too much time here messing around with it these past few days.
Playing football on a video game console has never really been too high of a priority for me. There are some games I like, and there have been times when I bought the games themselves. I can still remember going with Mom to the local Montgomery Ward back when the first Joe Montana Football came out for the Genesis, and buying that instead of the just-released John Madden Football because Montanta was five bucks cheaper. I bought Joe Montana II a year later, the first console sports game to have an announcer call all the plays. After that I didn't care that much for video game football, but right after I got my PlayStation 2 (the day it came out) two of the first three games I bought were NHL 2001 and Madden 2001. I picked up NFL 2k1 for the Dreamcast in the system's dying days when all the new games were being sold for real cheap, and then the last football game I bought was NFL 2k3 for Playstation 2 when it got discounted down to ten bucks, and even then I bought it less because I was desperate for a football game and more because I was so astonished it was down to ten bucks.
Although I don't play video game football that much, it's kind of hard to avoid how it seems to have developed its own culture in recent years, particularly around the Madden brand. The fact that people playing Madden actually got its own series is kind of astonishing, and with every year it seems like the release of the latest Madden game becomes more and more of a mainstream event. I don't think that stores opening at midnight to sell the game is that big of a deal, but this year in particular news stories about Madden's release seemed to hit every mainstream news outlet I keep tabs on, even in the Business sections. I'm not sure what exactly this says about how mainstream video games are getting, but it has to say something.
Still, in recent years I haven't exactly been that thrilled with Electronic Arts. First, I think it was kind of nasty of them to get the NFL and NFLPA to sign an exclusive licensing arrangement for them, especially given that everyone I know who plays a lot of video game football says that over the years the 2k Sports football games were getting better and more innovative than the Madden games. Then a couple of years ago I read the EA Spouse LiveJournal, and that kind of made me very uneasy about Electronic Arts, to the point where I've deliberately avoided buying any of their games ever since. I mean, I know the tech industry pushes coders to the breaking point and beyond -- that's one of the main reasons why I never thought about pursuing a computer science degree, even though I seem to have a knack for that sort of stuff -- but Electronic Arts seems to go above and beyond the call of duty to make their workers' lives a living hell. It's not a big loss for me, but I do wish that the choice in video game football this year didn't boil down to Electronic Arts and a company that licensed O.J. Simpson for their game.
It's kind of been a recurring theme in our culture over the past dozen years or so that right-wing politicians and pundits will often make pronouncements about certain television shows or movies or albums or what have you without actually having seen the media in question. Stephen Colbert parodies this quite effectively with his "Movies that are Destroying America" segment on The Colbert Report. This is why I've held off on making comments about the recent GLBT-themed Presidential candidate debate on Logo, because I don't get Logo on my cable and I haven't been able to get the online feed of the debate to work on my computer. I did, however, read news coverage of the debate online and also catch Alison Stewart's recap of the debate on Countdown, and for lack of anything better to go on, I think I'm going to have to make comments based on these secondhand accounts instead of the debate itself.
If there was one thread that tied together all the recaps of the debate I've ingested, it's that on one side you had Kucinich and Gravel, who are both for legalizing gay marriage and doing it now; and on the other side were the other Democratic candidates (or at least the ones who bothered to show up) who weren't. (Although, correct me if I'm wrong, but Obama hasn't actually said he is opposed to gay marriage, he's just pushed civil unions to the nth degree.) The common theme among the other candidates seemed to be this notion of what was "possible," this idea that legalizing gay marriage isn't "possible" now but civil unions might be "possible" under the right circumstances. Not that I'm going to question all the polls and such that point to public opinion about gay marriage, but pretty much any politician, let alone one as visible and powerful as the President, is supposed to transcend notions of possibility. Indeed, one of the marks of the great public figures of our time has been to challenge the notion of what is possible, and to encourage others to do the same. Does anyone think the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. allowed himself to be concerned with how "possible" it was to achieve full equality for African-American? Does anyone think Gandhi was concerned with how "possible" it was that his non-violent protests might effect change of how the British Empire treated India?
It is bad enough when we allow politicians and the like to talk to us about what is "possible" as opposed to what should be, but it is doubly damning when groups -- from the labour unions the Democratic candidates spoke to before the Logo debate, to the GLBT community and the like -- also allow themselves to think only in terms of what they perceive as "possible." Kucinich and Gravel both offered the GLBT community what they want: true equality under the law. Yet, if the GLBT community had any kind of overarching group to give an endorsement as the labour unions do with the AFL-CIO, everyone knows full well that they wouldn't be giving their endorsement to Kucinich or Gravel because of course it isn't "possible" that either could get elected because they don't have the big money or they don't have that "Presidential look" or whatever nonsense disguised as the "Current Political Wisdom" says about anyone not named Clinton or Obama at this point. What does it say about us as a people that so many of us are willing to elect politicians who do not promise to give everyone the same treatment simply because we've been led to believe that change and equality is not "possible" for us?
In the 2004 campaign, Kucinich summed up the gay marriage issue perfectly: this is a civil rights issue, and civil rights issues should never be subject to politicial whims or notions that somehow things might improve if we postpone them. Gay couples deserve the same rights as heterosexual couples (whether that be government-sponsored "marriage" for all or, as I favour, doing away with government recognition of marriages, leaving that word to the churches, and giving all couples civil union status), and they deserve them now. More to the point, this country deserves a President who will put the principle of full equality above and beyond any other concerns, and will motivate the American citizenry to do the same. If the Democratic Party refuses to field a candidate who will put equality above this insulting notion of "possibility," then I don't see how they should possible expect to get my vote, or the vote of anyone else who has even the slightest concern about all Americans receiving equal treatment under the law.
... of Jimmy Dean. Rock on. On that note, let's play the Friday5.org Friday Five!
1. You’ve always wished for it, and your wish has come true: There’s now a twenty-fifth hour in the day, but you have to spend it the same way every day on something you don’t have enough time for now, and it can’t be for sleep. How will you spend this extra hour every day?
Writing. Probably for more personal stuff than stuff for money, but still, I never have enough time to write these days.
2. As if that weren’t enough, an extra day has been added to the calendar, and you can insert it anywhere you want, except the day immediately before or after a holiday, and you have to spend it the same way every year. How will you spend this extra day each year, and when on the calendar will it appear?
I'd probably put it at the start of November so I'd have an extra day should I ever attempt to do NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). I may actually do that this year, now that I don't have classes (as a student) to worry about.
3. Someone is giving you an extra twenty dollars per week (or its equivalent, if your country uses a different monetary unit) to spend any way you want, but you have to spend it the same way every week, and it has to be on yourself (no charity or gift-giving, and no investing or saving!). How will you spend this extra twenty dollars per week?
Given how little I've played dance games at the arcade lately, and how much I've enjoyed doing so lately, I'd spend the money on both quarters/tokens and gas money. These days, the latter would probably end up costing me more.
4. Wow! When you woke up this morning, you noticed that someone snuck in and added a new room to your living space! The room is for your exclusive use, and it can serve only one FUN function (and it can’t be used as a bedroom or storage). What fun activity will be reserved for this new room?
I don't know if writing would count as a "fun" activity, and even if it did I find that I write better when I switch locations frequently (inside of the house, outside of the house, a coffeeshop). I'd definitely like a more climate-controlled room than the garage for doing stompity at home, though, so let's say a dance game room.
5. A magic backpack appears at your doorstep. It will hold any one thing you can normally carry by yourself, it will render that item weightless, and it will collapse to the size of a small pack of gum. What will you carry in it?
I can't say that I travel light, but my purse is hardly that heavy, and the only things I usually travel with that I don't put in my purse are tissues and my cell phone. I guess my Xbox is sometimes a pain to carry down to the garage, so let's say that.
(Geez, what's with all the writing and dance game answers today?)
Yesterday I drove up to Michigan to check out where I'll start teaching later this month. (Monroe County Community College, for the record.) I had to do the whole employment paperwork thing, and even though I could have mailed the forms in, I decided instead to go up there so I could get a feeling for the campus. The good news is that the campus is easy to navigate and quite lovely, although it doesn't look like I'll be able to rearrange the desks and such so that everyone sits in a circle, which I find to be more conducive to my pedagogical approaches. The bad news is that the trip up was not exactly that fun.
You would think that after Yahoo! Maps led me astray so many times before (most notably underestimating the travel time for my trip to North Carolina last year by three hours each way), but I trusted them with directions again for some unknown reason. (I think that sometimes my loyalty to other Yahoo! services gets in the way of my good judgment about their other services.) Not only did they say the trip would take much less time than it actually did, but at one point they said one road became another road, when in reality the roads intersected, so I didn't know which direction to go. Of course I went the wrong way and didn't find out until the road turned into a dirt road, which caused me to be even later than I already was because I didn't know it would take so long to get there.
The other thing that bothered me about the trip was that I had to take a lot of backroads to get there. I have nothing against backroads, and I've always said that Michigan has the most beautiful scenery in the world. However, for one thing Michigan's roads aren't that well designed, and also, for nearly the whole trip after I got off of the highway I couldn't find a speed limit marker anywhere. Judging by the other drivers around me, though, I was supposed to floor it and go as fast as I could get the van to go, even over uneven railroad tracks and in the places marked by signs as areas with deaf children. Also, I passed more than a couple of houses that had signs up front that made it clear that the family inside were a bunch of fire-and-brimstone types, and I shudder to think what might happen if I were to have a car break down in front of one of those houses. Looking at a map of the area, I'm beginning to wonder if I wouldn't be better served by cutting over to I-75 to go up there instead of using US-23; it looks like it would add more distance overall, but it would mean fewer backroads and it looks like it might even save time. I guess I'll figure it out soon enough just by trying it out.
Barry Bonds' HR Record Tainted by Elbow 'Armor'? (Editor and Publisher)
I can't say that I haven't been following Bonds' chase for the Major League Baseball home run record, but I haven't exactly been ignoring it either. This is probably because I can't sort out my opinion of Bonds; there's little doubt in my mind that he used steroids for at least part of his career, and he's certainly shown himself to be somewhat of a jerk off of the field. There's still some part of me that wants to like him, though, and I can't tie that feeling to anything, really. (I actually had a nightmare a few weeks ago involving Bonds and Mark McGwire, although the nightmare was more about me trying to sort out my feelings about the Benoit tragedy than anything to do with baseball.) As a result, I hadn't exactly been keeping close tabs on Giants games for the past few days or so, but after reading about Bonds tying the record online, I have kind of made a point of catching ESPN2's coverage of the games.
This article about the equipment Bonds wears, along with Keith Olbermann's recent coverage of Bonds' chase (most notably his excellent piece on last night's Countdown about the other "asterisk records" in baseball) just makes you think all the more, though. Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth's record before I was born, and in my lifetime only Cal Ripken Jr. breaking the consecutive games played record and McGwire breaking the single-season home run record seemed to generate as much press. In both those cases, though, I think the press was perhaps a bit exacerbated by Major League Baseball basically looking for some good story to follow after the 1994 lockout and cancellation of the World Series left a bad taste in sports fans' mouths. If anything, Major League Baseball seems to be pushing attention away from Bonds' chase, albeit for good reason.
Still, I think there are a couple of things that aren't being considered by people as much as they should be. First of all, not to take anything away from Aaron or Bonds, but limiting home run records to Major League Baseball tallies is, I feel, kind of elitist. Even if you just want to look at baseball in America and throw out Oh Sadaharu's 868 home runs in Japan, Josh Gibson hit somewhere in the neighbourhood of 800 home runs during his years in the Negro Leagues. However, as always, Major League Baseball still has something stuck in its craw about the Negro Leagues (witness the travesty surrounding Buck O'Neil's non-induction into Cooperstown), and so it is exceedingly rare, even as many people seem to be looking for ways to diminish what Bonds is about to accomplish, for people to bring up Gibson's record.
The other thing to keep in mind is that for all that baseball likes to romanticize itself as part of the great, pure American tradition -- something that I will admit to sometimes doing quite deliberately when defending baseball against others -- baseball still has had a long and checkered past, from small things like spitballs and corked bats to the widespread corruption that led to things like the Black Sox scandal. I wouldn't dare to suggest that Hank Aaron used any illicit means to achieve his home run record, but as much as those of us who love baseball hate to admit it, there is a certain baseline of corruption in the sport that has held true for its lifetime. Perhaps Bonds' increased head and foot sizes are a more obvious indicator of what has gone on in this generation's baseball than anything we saw before, but trying to romanticize that there was a time when baseball was clean and pure is, for lack of a kinder word, foolish. I mean, sports medicine -- the legal kind -- improved at least tenfold between when Lou Gehrig set his consecutive games record and when Ripken broke it. Gehrig's streak couldn't have continued because of his ALS, but who's to say that other players in that span couldn't have broken the record if they'd had access to the kinds of (legal) treatments and medicines and equipment that Ripken had access to throughout his career? The fact is, if you look hard enough, pretty much any sports record has countless reasons why it should have an asterisk beside it. Bonds just happens to be, like everyone else, a player of his time, and unfortunately his just happened to be the steroid era. This isn't to excuse his behaviour, but I think it does need to be put into better perspective than others have been doing.
I hope that I will be watching when Bonds breaks the record sometime in the next few days. I say this not as a fan of Bonds or a fan of baseball, but just as someone who wants to witness the history myself. (I was watching The Screen Savers on ZDTV when McGwire hit his 62nd home run that one season.) Perhaps this will all become moot if Alex Rodriguez breaks the record himself in a few years (which I suspect he will), but if nothing else, even if you don't care much for baseball, you have to admit that this makes for an interesting spectacle.
Survey of public attitudes makes Kucinich the frontrunner (kucinich.us)
Now, Web polls like this always need to be taken with a healthy dose of salt. Not only don't they really count as surveying (since the participants are self-selecting), but they can be easily influenced by campaigns or third parties who direct people to fill these things out and tilt the vote for or against a particular candidate. I get enough stuff from the Kucinich campaign that I think I would know if they themselves tried to influence this particular poll, but they never sent me anything about it, and I only know of the poll because I went to the Kucinich for President Website a few days ago. On the other hand, I've followed the poll's real-time statistics regularly since then, and it's been hard not to notice Gravel's showing in the poll leap way up in that time; given how many pro-Gravel comments seem to get posted on the Kucinich campaign's YouTube videos, it kind of seems like the Gravel campaign may be targeting Kucinich supporters for whatever reason.
Still, I think that on the balance this poll does shed a reasonable degree of light on just how much political campaigns these days get judged more on flash and style and money than on the actual issues themselves. (Note that the top Republican vote-getter in the poll is Ron Paul.) This isn't to say that the person who is elected doesn't matter any -- there could be someone out there with whom I agree 100% on every issue, but if that person seems either incapable of making the tough decisions required of a president or unable to successfully complete some of the tasks of the position (such as dealing with other world leaders on issues of global policy), then s/he is unlikely to get my vote. However, a poll like this, as problematic as its methods may be, still shows just to what extent image and money have overtaken the actual issues as reasons for voting and/or campaigning for a given politician.
For the reasons I listed in the above paragraph, I don't think I could support an actual election system where people are voted into office solely based on their stance on issues in the kind of "blind taste test" that this poll purports to portray. I still can't help but think, though, of how different this campaign season might be if the press hadn't turned things into the Clinton and Obama Show (with John Edwards in a small supporting role) so early, and if they actually gave candidates like Kucinich and Gravel a fair shake. Don't even get me started on the media's portrayal of third party candidates. The fact that Kucinich may not be getting a fair shake just because corporate media doesn't like him or people want to rag on him for his physical appearance just irks me to no end, and I'd like to see a big-media outlet like CNN try doing a poll like this just to see what kinds of results their more formal research methods produce. (Knowing them, of course, they'd probably just do results for the "big candidates.")
As a general rule, I don't set too many goals for myself on weekends. Back when I was still in school, Saturday would be my "me day" for me to do pretty much whatever I wanted, and then Sunday I'd hit the books really hard. After I graduated this past December, the pattern has been more along the lines of Saturday for actual activities for myself (shopping, eating out, etc.), and then Sunday for laziness minus, I hope, a trip out to the garage to stomp arrows and try to take some more weight off.
There's a general problem with this schedule, though. Saturday is the day I take off my diet, and while I try to eat reasonable portions of stuff, it's also the only day of the week where I have soda. Even though I drink a lot of tea throughout the week, the high fructose corn syrup in soda still kind of messes with me in a way that caffeine alone doesn't. I wish I could say that I saw even the slightest hint of a pattern in the way that drinking soda affects me, but one week it won't really bother me at all, another week I'll have a bit of a sugar high and a bit of a sugar low, and then there are weekends where the sugar low is just so tremendous that it wipes out most of my Sunday.
I think I would have had a good-sized sugar low today -- something I definitely felt, but not something that totally wiped me out -- but unfortunately a series of events led to me not getting enough sleep on top of that. We had a huge rainstorm in here earlier today, which lowered the temperature nicely. (Unfortunately the dip in temperature only lasts through today, and tomorrow we head right back up to the 90s for highs.) However, in its wake it has been incredibly humid outside, and this caused the smoke detectors in the house to go off earlier this morning because one of them was somehow being triggered by the humidity in the air. We closed the house up and the problem went away, but I couldn't go back to sleep. As a result, I've been a little bit groggy here today, and I haven't felt up to going out to the garage.
The hardest thing for me to deal with right now is the fact that if I just went out to the garage and worked out, I would feel okay about how the weekend went. Even if I didn't do anything else of note this weekend, just knowing that I still found my way out to the garage to work out would make things better somehow. As it is, though, now I feel like the weekend went to waste, and that even though I don't give myself that many responsibilities over the weekend, I've still underachieved from what I set out to do. I seriously wish I could find a way to do away with this sweet tooth of mine, because that would make things so much easier for me.
... American author Flannery O'Connor passed away at just the age of 39 from complications of lupus. O'Connor is probably one of those authors you're unlikely to have heard of unless you've taken some kind of creative writing course in college; I myself had never heard of her until my first creative writing professor in college asked me if I liked her work, since my stories were so obviously influenced by her. I found this quite funny considered I'd never heard of her up until that moment, but needless to say I found her work to be highly charged. Want to buy some of it for me? (Sorry, but I had to try.) On that note, let's play the friday5.org Friday Five.
1. Who’s your favorite of the Looney Tunes characters?
I don't know if I ever really have had a favourite. My sister is one of the biggest Marvin the Martian fans on the face of the planet -- I can remember buying her a huge stuffed Marvin one Christmas over at Media Play, which unfortunately was lost in the house fire, but I'd say I like them all fairly equally. If you really pressed me, though, I'd probably say Bugs Bunny just because of the similarities to Groucho Marx.
2. What have you done too much of lately?
Given the stiffness in my legs, I think they're trying to tell me that I've been doing a little too much arrow-stomping lately. All things being equal, though, I'd kind of like to get as much of that in as I can this month, since my schedule's going to become even more packed at the end of the month when I start teaching again.
3. When did you last play cards?
Cripes ... it would have been nearly four years ago, a game of Egyptian Rat-Screw I played with other Spectrum members at our weekly social gatherings at the coffeehouse near UT's campus. I didn't even start the game as a player, but I slapped in and still wound up winning it. *grin*
4. Where were your keys the last time you couldn’t find them?
I can't remember the last time I lost my keys; I always keep them on the same place on my desk (to the left of my printer, along with my thumbdrive and my MP3 player), so it's hard to lose track of them.
5. Why didn’t you do today everything you were supposed to?
Um, the day's still too young for me to know whether or not I did everything I'd set out to do at the start of the game, but if I don't get to everything, it'll probably be because I decided to go brave 90-degree weather to stomp arrows in the garage again.
Paul Slansky: In Defense of Nader-Bashing (Huffington Post)
Going after Nader and the Green Party is kind of old territory at the Huffington Post. Back in its early days I can remember one blogger there (I haven't seen his work on there lately) who pretty much devoted every piece to talking about how Nader allegedly destroyed America because he ran for President in 2000, and how anyone to the left of Arlen Specter needs to vote Democratic because there is no other choice. (My comments to his blog entries, although they were always respectful, kept getting taken down, which is why the Huffington Post kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth to this day.) You'll note that Slansky's blog entry was written over a week ago; it's literally taken me this long to calm myself down to the point where I feel I can write something coherent about it without getting too angry.
I don't want to retread over every counterpoint to Democrats' claims that Nader allegedly spoiled the election; Slansky himself seems to admit nearly every one of them. (He seems to get some points wrong; for example, I can remember that leading up the election everyone was talking about Nader potentially turning one of the Northwest states or maybe one in New England, but no one I saw on television thought he'd be a factor in Florida.) He also seems to take the old line about hindsight being 20/20 to an extreme, somehow thinking that Nader should have somehow magickally known how far to the right Bush would pull the country when given the opportunity. More to the point, though, he ascribes Nader's involvement in presidential politics to Nader having some kind of oversized ego, which anyone who's even bothered to read up on the slightest on Nader knows not to be the case.
That Slanksy would pin this on Nader's ego is richly ironic considering that he posted this on Arianna Huffington's Website. I was one of the few people I knew who welcomed Arianna to the left when she made her big political transformation, and I was tremendously excited for her campaign in the 2003 California gubernatorial recall election. Unfortunately, that campaign ended early when Arianna suddenly pulled out and instead tried to keep Grey Davis in office, and since that time Arianna, although she still talks a pretty good progressive talk, constantly tempers that with reminders, from both herself and her Website's bloggers, that voting Green is "just like voting for the Republican." I also can't help but notice that for all Arianna tries to talk about the Huffington Post being this serious Website, there sure seems to be a lot of Hollywood talk on there, endless articles about Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan and the like. I have no direct evidence, but looking at Arianna's behaviour, I can't help but wonder if Arianna's so concerned with her own celebrity status that she's placing it above her personal and political beliefs.
I find the timing of this article particularly distressing given that, in as much as we can figure anything out about the nominations for the next presidential campaign right now (and I'm sick and tired of everyone on the news talking about the campaign like we're just hours away from getting Super Tuesday results), it looks like Hillary Clinton is well on her way to securing the nomination. We had her husband in office for eight years and he and his cronies at the DLC turned the Democratic Party further away from its progressive base than any Republican could have ever dreamed to do, and from Hillary's rhetoric on the campaign trail so far, it certainly sounds like we'll just be in for more of the same if she gets elected. How anyone who gives even the slightest concern for progressivism can think that a vote for Hillary can possibly help our cause just utterly mystifies me. Making matters worse, all the Nader/Green fear-mongering the Democrats did in 2004 wiped out nearly all of the progress and access to ballot lines that the Greens got thanks to Nader's 2000 campaign, so now it will be even harder for them to get a true progressive choice on the ballot for those of us who actually vote our conscience. This whole situation just sickens me to no end.