Paint it Blue
I'm sitting in a hotel room in Detroit and just as certainly as no one reads my blog, democrats have won control the House and Senate. Old news? Yes. But a strange slow truth. The drama and thunder of '04 are well passed; was the importance of that shift in my own perspective or was it real? It probably is irrelevant. But perhaps this is a promise; this ridiculous project in my Politics of the CJ System class has only further established we cannot be gluttonous for power. Our convictions are irrelevant if we cannot concede, cooperate. The chance is on the table to reach across the isle; the lines are blurring.
I really can imagine voting for McCain in '08.
The Village Voice
A few months ago I heard a rather unorthodox info speech on vocal polyps which can devastate a voice. To the best of my recollection, the causes were overuse and abuse. As someone who just finished a rather restless speech season while still being one of the most loquacious people I know, the chronically sore throat antibiotics haven't killed a month later and the voice that has been brittle and cracking since Gainesville seem daunting symptoms. A rousing chorus of ballads from "Wicked" while doing laundry about a week ago reveals that my range and musicality are dead in their tracks. Now I've never exactly aspired to a career in musical theater, but I know that those are the signs of the problem manifest in a singer. This might be preemptive, or a tad psychosomatic, but the idea of a six week self-imposed silence with no promise of recovery is a bit too much to bear. ET knew the speaker before her voice went, and she knew Mrs. Grimes too, so at this point any alternate explanation, be it strep, gonorrhea (haha, j/k), or even mono, seems preferable.
On a brighter note, I've just discovered the rather life changing Panic! At The Disco. To be fair, ET didn't so much "discover" P!ATD as she burned her brother's girlfriend's copy after downloading the single after Kady played it in the van. And to be fair, ET was about as contemporary in this epiphany as when she found the Postal Service CD in her car while cleaning it out after wrecking it into a ditch and listening to and falling in love with the "Give Up" album almost a year after it was burned for her. But still, fresh, evocative, and a little profound music is a welcome relief. After all, not to embarass myself anymore than necessary but "I Write Sins Not Tragedies" has such utterly delicious tie ins to some of my authorship that it just resonates as one of those songs that feel written for my escapist narratives.
Let's Get Loud
I was excused from class today to attend the AAUP rally in the student union. My attendance was not as altruist an action as I wish it had been, spurred as much by the prospect of avoiding another of my professor's exhaustively dull lectures and seeing Sherrod Brown (who was there speaking on behalf of the facult, bless his heart) as it was genuine sympathy.
The most disturbing question a professor has ever asked me is if I would support a student walk out. While the tone of the rally was upbeat and focused on productive action, I could not shake the feeling that the nuclear option is on the table. One day Luis and his nine vice presidents might just come to work and find out whether or not 200 trees, a rock climbing wall, and a Starbucks really constitute a university.
Curtain Call
After finally mastering the art of the all-nighter, I stood in the lab and toyed half-heartedly with the Taung Child BoneClone, tempted to re-enact the Raymond Dart impresssion. 'Dr.' Reeves was giving his fossil lab mini-lecture for about the third time as more people were filling the room and I was just exhausted. I wasn't really paying attention to his movements, yet suddenly he seemed to be taken over by rage and began to furiously sieze craniums from around the room, constructing a new timeline in the middle of the careful evolutionary tree some better medicated professor had dutifully assembled. "I don't get it! I just -- I just don't get it! How -- how can deny there are intermediate forms? Look at this! What are these if not intermediate forms?" The new line in the middle of the table showed a haunting progression. He had culled the line of human descent down to six well chosen skulls. They sat before us like eerie stills from a flipbook; certainly if Reeves just passed them through his hands quickly enough they would animate and I could watch WT-17000 morph and melt into my face. At the end of the illustration, Reeves was not satisfied with the human child skull and held it aloft as he finished his thought more calmly for those who had been unable to keep up. It was a very, "Tobeornottobethatisthequestionwhethertisnoblerofthemindtosuffer" kind of moment. I wandered to the edge of the room and sat down, watching, anticipating, not ready to leave.
"How's it that we found all these fossils but never found Adam and Eve?"
He too had sat down at that point, opposite me, the specimen table between us, and shot me a look that said something between "She has got to be fucking kidding" and "Don't laugh; she's your peer." His reply could have been any number of evasions or platitudes, but instead he replied he hadn't the foggiest idea how to explain it as Adam and Eve had clearly never existed. He curtailed the snarkiness in his tone abruptly and asked her if his class had ever forced a belief on her. She said no. Was it contrary to her beliefs? She no longer was certain of those beliefs. The beliefs she was raised on, though, did his course challenge those? She told us her parents told her it was a sin to even be in this class, much less rationally considering them. Reeves replied, "That's sick, it's repulsive." He explained that he had gone to an ultra-conservative school and it wasn't until high school he ever questioned. He had been assigned a paper in which he was to refute the geological time scale with Christian "proof." "I realized as I was presenting my paper to the class, 'This is bullshit. This doesn't make sense; I don't believe a word of what I'm saying.' And that was it, I started down an irreversible path." Faith is certainty, it is confidence, and often it is easy, comfortable answers, he explained, while the academic world is rife with the discomfort of confusion. The pursuit for knowledge may be the noblest of quests, but it is one of unease and complexity. Conservative America, he continued, wants to continue stupefying you, removing all challenge and replacing truth, fact, and all that is good and true about science with indoctrination. We need to fight, he concluded, fight tooth and nail to preserve the integrity of academia.
I had never heard anyone speak like that before. Perhaps a friend in a car or cafe, but never a man in a position of authority, never a man in the midst of those whose opinions and loyalties were utterly unknown. While he made it explicitly clear that he loves his family and respects the need for personal autonomy, especially in the realm of creed, there was no "I respect their beliefs" bullshit, for in the end we all knew. This was a man of science defending everything he treasured; not some politician on a soapbox in an avant-grande ideological gesture, but a professor finally, blessedly professing. And curtain. I wish I could say, as I read the "Voice of the People" that it constitutes a happy ending.
Greed, Merchandising, Endorsement ... the Dark Side are they
I would like to interrupt your regularly scheduled intellectual ramble to point out that Darth Vader, dark lord of the Sith, does not buy slurpees at Seven-Eleven, hire MnM's or challenge the Burger King to staring contests. Thank you George Lucas for not only producing the most insipid, incoherent prequels known to man but then whoring out my idols to any commercial wanting character rights without actually having to hire an actor. Here's a hint, Lucas: you're trying to drum up interest in a film more anti-climatic than Titanic and the closest thing you have to Leonardo DiCaprio is Hayden, who will spend half the film stomping around in a plastic suit committing acts of genocide. We already know what happens to the protagonists of Revenge of the Sith and thanks to the goddamn spoilers you leaked to anyone who would listen, I already know more than obvious introspection would grant. Oh, and for fuck's sake man, who allows the novel and graphic novel adaptations of his crowning work to be released two months before the film itself? Now the wonder of the film dies a little bit every time some asshat on the boards forgets how to code the HTML for spoiler tags. Lucas, the Sith are calling, they want their avarice back.
Intellectual Property
I do not own the Beatles. I do not own the Beatles. Of all the things to be worried about, as I am driving home tonight, exhausted, the most frustrating thing in the world is that Jessie's Xanga reported she was listening to the Beatles 1 album. I feel this overwhelming possesiveness, this need to declare that conservatives shouldn't be allowed to listen to my Beatles, as though I have some supreme understanding of their music because when I listen to CSNY I physically ache with certainty that this is not my era. Even as I fume over this, I cannot believe it is actually bothering me; how utterly absurd. When I love some book or song or film and discover that others have found it as well and they are saying terribly sophomoric things about it or simply loving it for the wrong reasons, I want to fight, defend its honor. It's easy to brush aside the attacks of those who couldn't possibly understand me and my favorite things, but when they start to damn my passions with faint praise, it intimidates, calls into question. I feel like a horrible person. But maybe I'm just human.
Judge not . . .
The end of the semester finally looming, all University of Akron professors have begun their cycle of evaluations. Today was the last I was asked to complete and the first negative evaluation I have written. Yes, even PMB received high marks as in the end I was forced to admit it was my distaste for philosophy and her accent that drove me to annoyance, both beyond control. On the other side of the scale, it was stupid of Chad to hand back the last exam and then hand out evaluations. Honest, but stupid.
It really was not a personal issue that made me shade "2" and "1" bubbles on Chad's evaluation, but rather it was his overwhelming apathy towards the subject he was instructing. Disinterest is contagious and I am highly susceptible to said disease. As he stood before the class every morning and read aloud the bullets on Child Development from the PowerPoint beside him, I swiftly lost interest. I know that it is as much my fault as his, but the fact that I will now have to work for a 'B' in the course serves as my evaluation. Sorry to say it Chad, but as a member of academia, you fail. This is a university, not a business, regardless of what the administration might have you believe. There is no call to be dry, detached, and devoid of passion. Here's a revolutionary suggestion: do not dictate, do not simply teach; profess.
