what i would look like as a care bear.

From Spring '10

great (potentially UE-related) graffiti on campus last week.

From Spring '10

From Spring '10

teaching and learning

so i'm teaching a sort-of lit class for the first time this semester.  and it's been great so far.  i got to choose the books, and as per the class requirements, they all had to be books published recently.  so i picked a lot of books that i simultaneously thought were interesting to talk about based on their own literary merits and were interesting in a cultural context.  now not only do i have a class where we can talk about characterization, plot, setting, ethos, believability, immersion, etc., but also race/class/gender/place AND technology, apocalypse, wilderness, conservation, zombies, home, and all that jazz.  so.  it's a pretty thematically dense discussion class.  and it's so fucking fun my eyes want to pop out.  of course, they also want to pop out because it's at 9am and i have to get here three days a week before 7am to get prepped for class (they have to submit questions online every morning and i have to be able to read them all and draw up a class plan around them before class starts that day).

anyway, i'm having a lot of fun, and the students in class who enjoy talking and discussing seem to be enjoying themselves.  now that i'm over the initial shock of the joy of teaching something i'm actually directly invested in (teaching comp is fun, but it has nothing to do with what i care about directly, and requires that i have an entire "comp" section in my brain that i switch over to each monday, wednesday, and friday), i'm starting to get that nagging doubt in the back of my head that i get every time i remember that nothing in life is perfect.  maybe this is just my latent comp pedagogy reflex taking over my brain, but my fear is that i'm not actually teaching these students anything.

granted, the only real goal of this class as it was explained to me was to talk about reading and talk about how it is relevant and important in today's society (BOOOOOOOM!).  and i feel like i'm definitely doing that.  i guess i'm so used to the lecture model, the skill-teaching model of a class that i feel like a failure just going in, talking about reading, and enjoying myself.  it feels too easy.  at times, when i'm being easier on myself, i feel like maybe the learning that's taking place in a class like this is really just less tangible that it might be in a comp class (and that's less than it might be in a science class, and so on).  i mean, i'm running this class pretty similarly to some of the seminars i've taken in grad school, and i learned more from the discussions in those classes than i have at pretty much any other time in my life (at least in a school environment).

i certainly lecture from time to time briefly about certain character archetypes, or certain literary techniques, and those kinds of things.  but these students are all experienced readers.  they infer these things if you hint at them.  they don't need to learn what the hero's quest is.  they can see it, and talk about it, and understand its value and also the value in deviating if you're a writer.  i also have lots of small checks built into the class to make sure they're keeping up on the reading and paying attention in class (and two big checks in the form of a midterm and a final).  but it's just strange.  i've never taught a class like this, and it's odd to have a class that puts most of its value in discussion rather than lecture and regurgitation/revision.  it's odd to think that students will come out of this class having read 8 new books, and that's (largely) it.  when teaching comp 101 (and even 201), we sort of have this idea impressed upon us that we're the gateway to our students' ability to write at a college level, which in turn is the gateway to the rest of their entire future success.  of course, that's aggrandizing and a little ridiculous in some ways, but i guess what i'm getting at is that with the impression we're giving as budding comp teachers, it's easy to convince yourself that you're doing god's work if you have an off day.  there's not a lot of room for crisis of purpose.  that's not the case anymore.

that said, we're finishing up talking about Snow Crash tomorrow and we'll be moving on to neil gaiman's American Gods on friday.  can't wait.

pictures of things i did this weekend

bought these two donuts, which were both larger than my hand.

From Spring '10

fulfilled my lifelong dream of owning one of those 3 foot tall care bears.

From Spring '10

finally got my turntable working.

From Spring '10

From Spring '10

revisiting the gorge

finally sat down today to take a cold, hard objective listen to the tapes from the phish gorge run this summer.  i wanted to see how good they sounded when i wasn't sitting amidst thousands of screaming fans while, well, screaming.  i learned lots of fun things.  however, i need to take notes for work tomorrow right now, so i'll have the full write-up later.  i may also (gasp!) have my first mixtape in quite awhile.  something about getting a new (used) cd changer and a turntable has gotten me to go back and start listening to all my old albums again.

pics-b-gone

as a way of motivating myself to start taking pictures again, i deleted about half of the photos i have up on my picasa account tonight to make room for new ones (i'm down from 92% used space to 43%!).  the downside is that a lot of pics linked in old posts on this and my previous blog may no longer work.  i'm going to guess that this isn't going to be a crippling emotional blow to anyone, but on the off chance it is, let me know.

twitter is hilarious

and here's why.  check out my twitter follow notifications for yesterday (you may have to click on the image to get a higher resolution).

From Spring '10

nerd alert

i just finished the original Starcraft campaign for what i'm pretty sure is the fifth time (since 2004 or thereabouts).  it was as fun as ever, though being so familiar with it makes the last four or five protoss missions (each close to 3 hours long) a bit of a drag.  i'm going to jump into the expansion pack and see how far i can get before i have to start work again.  it's one of the most (if not the most) ridiculous gaps in my gaming experience that i have never finished Brood War despite being obsessed with the original Starcraft.  maybe it's finally time to right this years-long travesty.

wordles

if anyone else out there does wordles, you can check out mine thus far on this page.  they're all based around my various seminar papers except one, which if i remember correctly is based around some series of blog posts i made awhile back. 

checking in

i had thought (mistakenly, obviously) that i would have a lot more time to blog about random, potentially fun things over break.

somehow, i always envision winter break as this wonderful sort of "eye of the storm" moment where i get a chance to recharge before next semester starts and to catch up with everyone in ohio that i don't get to see most of the rest of the year.  in reality, it always (ever since WSU shifted their calendar back a week, anyway) ends up being this rush where i get back into town 2 days before christmas, then rush from about the 28th to new year's trying to see everyone that i know in the area outside of canton, then come back home to do all the work i didn't do between christmas and new year's before i fly back to pullman in my last 4-5 days in town. 

now, having said that, i've made it all sound much less pleasant than it actually is.  it's really great that i'm able to come back home for christmas every year and that i'm also often able to find a lot of time to visit with my friends in the area as well as my family.  it's just not what i'd consider a "break".  it is what it is, i guess, but it's just always a little disorienting when i get to this point in the break, three days before i fly back home, and realize that i'm really no more rested or calm or relaxed than i was rushing to the airport right before christmas right after turning my grades in. 

anyway, it's been a really great break.  got to see pretty much my entire extended family over christmas eve and christmas.  got to see Avatar again, this time with my parents and brother, and they seemed to like it.  i forgot how incredibly huge theaters are here - as in, it actually makes a difference whether you sit in the front or the back.  i was spoiled (as usual) by christmas: got a new digitech effects processor pedal, a good starter turntable (can't wait to start buying vinyl instead of CDs), and, mostly importantly, a GPS.  like an actual, legit, fancy GPS, not a phone with a GPS unit (though i also got a new phone for renewing my contract).  i haven't used it for anything geocache-wise yet; i downloaded a ton of geocache locations for the surrounding area, but then we got a billion inches of snow before i could get out and find any of them.  excited to go back and recheck the University of Death caches using it, and to start logging more caches around the pullman/moscow area.  there are a lot of 'em.

i didn't get to spend as much time up in kent this break as i normally like to, partially because of the weather and partially just because of what i mentioned before: namely, that i've just been so beat, having fun just hasn't sounded fun...if that makes sense.  had a great time over new year's, but after about two days of tromping around kent, it just sounded more fun to sleep in my bed for 12 hours than it did to do anything remotely adventurous.  with luck, i'll be able to spend some time up in kent this summer and have a chance to make up for my current lethargy.

watch m. ward rock the universe

i'm taking a break from syllabus-writing to watch youtube clips, and came across these two which, while not the same performance that i saw in eugene last spring, capture the essence of that performance quite well.  the sound is a little wonky halfway through the second one, but if you like guitar, you owe it to yourself to at least watch the first one.

i love "married to the sea"...

...and here's why.

best response to copenhagen...

...i've seen thus far is from ben stewart (greenpeace).  it's a sign of the times, i think, that i'm looking to greenpeace for reason, but there it is:


"The most progressive U.S. President in a generation comes to the most important international meeting since the Second World War and delivers a speech so devoid of substance that he might as well have made it on speakerphone from a beach in Hawaii. His aides argue in private that he had no choice, such is the opposition on Capitol Hill to any action that might challenge the dominance of fossil fuels in American life. And so the nation which put a man on the moon can’t summon the collective will to protect men and women back here on Earth from the consequences of an economic model and lifestyle choice that has taken on the mantel of a religion.

Then a Chinese Premier who is in the process of converting his Communist nation to that new faith (high-carbon consumer capitalism) takes such umbrage at Obama’s speech that he refuses to meet – refuses, in fact, to do much of anything beyond sulking in his hotel room, as if this were a teenager’s house party instead of a final effort to stave off the breakdown of our biosphere.

Late in the evening the two men meet and cobble together a collection of paragraphs which they call a ‘deal’, although in reality it has all the meaning and authority of a bus ticket, not that it stops them affixing their signatures to it with great solemnity. Obama’s team then briefs the travelling White House press pack – most of whom, it seems, understand about as much about global climate politics as our own lobby hacks know about baseball – and before we know it the New York Times and CNN are declaring the birth of a ‘meaningful’ accord.


Meanwhile a friend on an African delegation emails to say that he and many fellow members of the G77 block of developing countries are streaming into the corridors after a long discussion about the perilous state of the talks, only to see Obama on the television announcing that the world has a deal. It’s the first they’ve heard about it, and a few minutes later, as they examine the text, they realise very quickly that it effectively condemns their continent to a century of devastating temperature rises.
By now the European leaders – who know this thing is a farce but have to present it to their publics as progress – have their aides phoning the directors of civil society organisations spinning that the talks have been a success. A success? This deal crosses so many of the red lines laid out by Europe before this summit started that there are scarlet skid marks across the floor of the Bella Centre, and one honest European diplomat tells us this is a ‘shitty shitty deal.’


Quite.


This deal is beyond bad. It contains no legally binding targets and no indication of when or how they’ll come about. There isn’t even a declaration that the world will aim to keep global temperature rises below 2 degrees C – instead leaders merely ‘recognise the science’ behind that vital threshold, as if that were enough to prevent us crossing it. The only part of this deal anyone sane came close to welcoming was the $100bn global climate fund, but it’s now becoming apparent that even that’s largely made up of existing budgets, with no indication of how new money will be raised and distributed so poorer countries can go green and adapt to climate change.


Not all of our politicians deserve the opprobrium of a dismayed world. Our own Ed Miliband fought hard on no sleep for a better outcome, while President Lula of Brazil offered to financially assist other developing countries to cope with climate change and put a relatively bold carbon target on the table. But the EU didn’t move on its own commitment (one so weak we’d actually have to work hard not to meet it) while the United States offered nothing and China stood firm.


Before the talks began I was of the opinion that we would only know Copenhagen was a success when plans for new coal-fired power stations across the developed world were dropped. If the giant utilities saw in the outcome of Copenhagen an unmistakable sign that governments were now determined to act, and that coal plants this century would be too expensive to run under the regime agreed at this meeting, then this summit would have succeeded. Instead, as the details of the agreement emerged last night we received reports of Japanese opposition MPs popping champagne corks as they savoured the possible collapse of their new government’s carbon targets. It’s not just that we haven’t got to where we needed to be, we’ve actually ceded huge ground. There is nothing in this deal – nothing – that would persuade an energy utility that the era of dirty coal is over. And the implications for humanity of that simple fact are profound.


I know we greens are partial to hyperbole. We use language as a bludgeon to direct attention to the crisis we’re facing, and you’ll hear much more of it in the coming days and weeks. But really, it’s no exaggeration to describe the outcome of Copenhagen as an historic failure that will live in infamy. In a single day, in a single space, a spectacle was played out in front of a disbelieving audience of people who have read and understood the stark warnings of humanity’s greatest scientific minds - and what they witnessed was nothing less than the very worst instincts of our species articulated by the most powerful men who ever lived.


I will leave the last word to the late Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who would have given voice to the insanity of Copenhagen better than I ever could, and whose poem Requiem is perhaps appropriate at this moment: ‘When the last living thing, has died on account of us, how poetical it would be if Earth could say, in a voice floating up, perhaps from the floor of the Grand Canyon, “It is done. People did not like it here”.’


a downer of a first blog for after christmas, but there it is.

MIXTAPE: yankee hotel foxtrot demos compilation

okay, so i know i promised a new mixtape this week.  and i got piled on by work and lack of sleep and i haven't listened to anything new or started piecing tracks together.  but one thing i did do was dig into the demo sessions for wilco's yankee hotel foxtrot for the umpteenth time.  for some reason, though, this was the first time it really struck me that within the two or three readily available sessions from the recording of the album, there are nine songs that ended up on the cutting room floor.  not only is this an album-length number of songs in and of itself, but the quality of the songs all the way around are good enough that, though they might not stand up to the version of YHF that we actually got, they make a solid "album" on their own.

so i figured i'd pick what i thought was the best version of each of these tracks, put them in the order most beseeming a cohesive album, and upload them.  this collection actually includes a few of my all-time favorite wilco tracks: "cars can't escape" and "venus stop the train".  i also really, really like "not for the season" and "magazine called sunset".  to my ears, a lot of these songs actually strike a better balance between pop sensibility and sonic experimentation than the tracks that actually comprise YHF do, which is funny since that's what that album is known for.  then there's "venus stop the train", which just stomps on your guts at the end.  i included an alternate version of "alone" as a bonus track just because there are three or four versions, and while the one i included earlier in the playlist is most reminiscent of that YHF sound, the other version is also pretty great.

if you're a fan of YHF and haven't heard any of these demos before, i highly recommend getting both sets of demos (one is a 21-track set and i believe the other is an 18-track set).  a lot of the tracks that actually ended up on the album are on these demos in multiple incarnations and some are pretty incredibly different ("poor places" comes to mind).

note: the reason i'm making an exception to my usual rule here and uploading more than one song by an artist is because i've seen the sessions these songs are pulled from all over the place online, including a few very well-known wilco trading sites.  so i'm assuming this is kosher.  if it's not, of course let me know and i'll remove the link to the files right away.  

here's the tracklist:
01. Not For the Season (l/k/a Laminated Cat)
02. Magazine Called Sunset
03. Nothing Up My Sleeve
04. Alone
05. Cars Can't Escape
06. Let Me Come Home
07. The Good Part
08. Won't Let You Down
09. Venus Stop the Train

10. Alone (Alternate Version)

here's the tracks.

end of more teaching

today is a weird day: the last day of teaching for me for the semester.  usually (and especially my first few semesters of teaching) the last day is sort of momentous.  i usually feel (even if my students don't, and most could probably likely care less) like we've all sort of come through this long, complicated, unique journey together and it feels sort of awesome to me to reach the end of it.  it helps too that all my classes thus far have been portfolio-based, so even the students who participate the least and miss tons of classes or whatever still end up turning in a hefty, significantly involved packet of papers they've written.  it's a nice sort of landmark moment in a way and (i'd like to think) even for them it's sort of an encapsulation of everything that they've gone through to get to the end of the class.

as such, usually at the end of a class, as i leave the classroom for the last time, it's a little hard not to reflect a bit on what i've learned and how things have gone.  this probably hearkens back to the first time i finished teaching a class for the semester, in 402 bryan hall, and after i turned the lights off i just stood there in the room for about five minutes, just amazed that i'd actually survived.  increasingly, though, and especially today, my inclination was to just speed out of the room and get back to my office to start working on the newest project, or paper, or whatever.  and, i'll be honest, i find that depressing.

one of the best things about my "year off" two years ago teaching just comp as an instructor here as WSU was the fact that i actually got to experience teaching.  it wasn't something that i had to muscle through while taking seminars and worrying about publication and dissertations and theses and, you know, real-life stuff like relationships and making time to cook food.  all throughout my master's program, i had enjoyed teaching, but i was also acutely aware that every moment i spent on teaching was a moment taken away from time i could have been working on my own papers.  so it was a really great experience to be able to just teach and know that giving a student an extra ten minutes was just cutting into my TV-watching time (which is, obviously, a pretty easy decision to make if you like your job, which i do) and nothing else.  i felt the same way about my summer class this past summer...i had some trouble fitting 15 weeks of class into six weeks for sure, but teaching that class was fucking fun.  those experiences gave me the evidence to be able to honestly say that yes, i like teaching and i'm extremely lucky to be able to do it as a job.  i could not have said that during my master's program.  i never had a chance to think about it.

now, as much as i'm loving the ph.d experience, my one great regret is the backstep i've taken from teaching-as-profession back to student-first-work-second.  i'm really looking forward to this changing next semester when i have a little bit more time in general.  not less work, of course, but at least more freedom to shift that workload around more.

lots of music is available for listening in the world

it's true.

i've been so enmeshed in phish- and wilco-land since early summer (tackling wilco's catalog and live shows with a voracity near that of my once-Cardinals obsession, and geeking out on phish after that transcendent Gorge experience) that i think it's ruining my music life.  lately i've hardly been listening to music at all.  which is pretty much the opposite of every day of my life for the last 15 years.  part of it, of course, is just the business of this semester and the fact that now that i have a lot of friends, i don't spend a lot of time alone in my office.  i'm often in my office, but there are also usually seventeen other people in here as well.  which is generally awesome.  but i feel more bad about blaring music in that case.

i've also realized, though, that i'm in a bit of a musical rut.  i haven't been writing, i haven't been listening to anything new, i haven't had (or haven't been making) the time for either.  so here i sit, day after day, spinning the same wilco and phish discs over and over again and though they are generally all awesome, admittedly, it's all starting to bleed together.  the new mason jennings was a good distraction, and i also actually really like the new norah jones record.  the new live gogol bordello disc is great, and all the phish shows from the summer tour are interesting.  but i want to hear something i haven't heard before.  i'm hoping that over christmas i can spread out a little bit, find out about some new bands.  how do you find out about new, unique bands now that "indie" has become mainstream?  i don't want to listen to the newest grizzly bear impersonator, i want to hear new, interesting stuff, even if it was written in the 70s.

i'm listening to loose fur right now.  it's helping a little.  maybe i'll throw on some minus 5 next...

it's christmas time, bitches!

so, i have a new grain of sand to add to the beach of shameful pop culture admissions i've made on this blog throughout the years.  every year i listen to a shitload of new christmas albums in the hope of finding sparkles of brilliance.  sure, christmas is a huge, mean, nasty, soulless commercial enterprise, but we all have those warm, fuzzy moments of one christmas or another, either as a child or an adult, or else we wouldn't spend years and money and travel thousands of miles at the most dangerous travelling time of the year every year in hopes of resurrecting those warm, fuzzy moments.  right?  RIGHT?!

well, most of my warm, fuzzy moments involve christmas music, whether it was the listening to, or the caroling of.  and even in the 21st century, sometimes hundreds of years after many of these songs were made, occasionally a version of an old song or even more rarely a completely new christmas song ("all i want for christmas is you", anyone?) comes along that is actually worth listening to.  besides, i need something to prop up the leaning tower of my sanity come the end of fall semester each year, and what better way than to listen to a shitload of relaxing christmas music?

so this year, i've listened once again to a decent amount (yes, including bob dylan's christmas album, but i'm not ready emotionally to talk about that yet).  not as much as i usually do, but that's okay because early in my survey, i've discovered what is undoubtedly 2009's christmas music masterpiece.

even better, you can download it for free.

this.  is.  so.  awesome.

sure, it's christmas tunes rendered as if through a midi synthesizer or an old NES sound chip, but there are tons of brilliant little moments in here that deserve discovery.  this wasn't just thrown together as a sheer gimmick; each song shows a lot of interesting touches and more brilliant little details come out with each listen.  check out "god rest ye merry gentlemen" if nothing else.  it's ridiculously cool (note for young people: the voice isn't auto-tuned, now get off my lawn!).

also, there's a great, moody version of "greensleeves", which is my favorite christmas song.  so that doesn't hurt.

new band name idea.

"the inevitable heat death of the universe".

mother(fucking) nature!

so it's been a really nice, mild winter so far in pullman.  and for that, i'm grateful.  however, in the last three days, the sudden massive drop in temperature has coincided perfectly with the hours and hours i've been spending outside scouting locations for University of Death...and it's freaking cold.  it was coincidental enough that i felt compelled to whine about it.  in other news, working on the game is way more fun than working on my other papers/projects.  in fact, it's quite possibly my favorite thing i've ever done in grad school.  it's going to be fun.  hopefully it'll be fun for people to play, too.  that's sort of the point.

if you want to check it out, click here.

tweetblog!

it's oddly foggy tonight.  i forgot that happens in winter in pullman.  i have sad feelings.  mike prewett clone is following me home.

warcraft 3: the frozen my-ass in the computer chair for a long, long time

so, as i've mentioned a few times previously, despite being mega-busy this year, i've still managed to get some pretty fantastic game-playing done after midnight on the nights i can spare a few hours of sleep.  this trend has more recently manifested in my manic consumption of Warcraft 3 and it's attendant expansion pack, The Frozen Throne.  Having been a huge fan of Orcs and Humans (ah, the old days), Tides of Darkness (even more fun), and of course Starcraft (which is currently my #1 game of all time), i really can't explain why Warcraft 3 came out in 2002 and i'm just now, seven years later, getting around to playing it.

i think part of the problem was that, at the time, i wasn't even that into Starcraft yet.  i was, at the time, more obsessed with civ-building games like Medieval: Total War and shoot-and-destroy games like Unreal Tournament and Serious Sam, and mostly i was completely fucking obsessed with Jedi Outcast.  actually, i still am.  and why not?!

also, what really made me love Starcraft (at the time) was that the battles were so much bigger (actually, everything was much bigger) than in previous Blizzard strategy games.  when the marketing push for Warcraft 3 became basically "this is sort of like Diablo,  and sort of like Starcraft with smaller battles", i think i just lost interest.  i've never liked Diablo and otherwise it sounded like Warcraft 3 would be a regression.

so in a way, i think it's probably better that i came to it when i did, now that i'm a bit better equipped to appreciate nuance in game design, and especially in RTS games.  now that there have been enough RTS games released on the PC to (literally) build a second moon for the Earth out of, i've had time to figure out what makes an RTS really worth playing to me.  and generally that means i will play Blizzard-made RTS games and not really much else (though i liked Ground Control and Kohan a lot).  i can't really articulate what it is about their RTS games that make them so much more fun than others; it's just an immutable law of life, like gravity.

anyway, i really, really liked both Warcraft 3 and the expansion, and am now looking forward even more than before to Starcraft 2.  it's also going to be really difficult to not go back and try to beat both games on the Hard difficulty setting instead of doing the work that will allow me to keep my job.  but somehow i will persevere.

for now i'm playing the original japanese non-dumbed-down version of Final Fantasy IV, which has a free downloadable fan translation.  it's pretty freaking good.  considering it's really the game that solidified my obsession with video games, all those years ago the fact that i find a different version of it even more entertaining almost 20 years later (yikes, i'm getting old) is pretty great.

finals "week"

"week" in quotation marks of course because the last three weeks of pretty much every semester all glom together into one horrific jack-bauer-esque day wherein the standard human ideals of linear time and cause-and-effect become indiscernible and perhaps even non-existent thanks to lack of sleep and overabundance of brain-paralyzing work.

that said, i realized today that this is one of my favorite times of the semester, quite the opposite of the beginning of the semester, which is always my least favorite part.  starts of semesters always involve tons of inane paperwork that you've filled out thousands of times before, getting to know your students' names and going through the whole process of introducing them to your class(es) - which you've also done hundreds of times before - memorizing your schedule, buying books, etc.  the minutae is enough to drive me absolutely fucking bonkers every time.  i mean, i end up with a to-do list with about 25-30 things on it a day, and each of those things takes about 10 minutes to do.  that's pretty much my worst nightmare.  end-of-the-semester, on the other hand, (or "EotS, OTOH") means there's one thing on the to-do list, and it takes about 3 weeks.  sure, it's stressful to have all your grades basically come down to 20 page papers, and to have to write 3-4 of them in a three week period every semester, but there's something calming for me in knowing that (for the most part) i can come into my office every day for the next three weeks and have very little between me and a huge pile of books and notes that i need to transform into seminar papers through sheer force of effort and clever outlining.  it's fun.  the writing part is the part i like absolutely the best, better than teaching, or reading, or anything.  it's why i became an english major in undergrad in the first place.  it's just hard to find time for while you're doing a million other things and i have to be forced to do it even when everything else is done.  that doesn't mean i don't love it.

maybe it's my long history of playing video games, but i like the idea of just having one last, huge, all-encompassing obstacle in my way.  if i'd been in jurassic park, i would have died like nedry, not like gennaro: the tiny, swarming things eating me alive instead of the huge, lumbering t-rex.

i feel like i should be more stressed, but it's hard for me to get stressed about big things, just little things.  i mean, ultimately, what happens if i do a shitty job on a paper, or don't finish on time?  i mean, the absolute worst thing that could happen at some point would be that i don't graduate.  and even that, on a larger holistic-life scale, is pretty insignificant.  i mean, i fully intend right now to do this job for the rest of my life, but in reality it probably won't happen that way.  i've lived (if i'm lucky) less than half my life at this point.  i can't imagine i'll be doing the same thing 30 years from now that i'm doing now.  the world just doesn't stay still for that long.  so if i have to get a different job, i don't see how that's a completely life-crushing happenstance.

of course, i don't see getting fired or anything actually happening in reality, i'm just talking hypothetically, from the "why get stressed because what's really going to happen if you don't come through?" standpoint.  i want to come through, i fully intend to, but if i don't...what?  the world won't explode.

not for another 3 years, at least.

and even if it does, we can rest in peace knowing that john cusack survives.

why everyone not using twitter is dumb.

okay, that's obviously a slight exaggeration.  slight.  but, people seem to be realizing the usefulness of the twitter platform more and more widely as time goes on.  what i've seen with people's reaction to twitter is, i think, the exact same phenomenon that you see whenever a new form of popular media takes hold in the culture: whether it's the cinema, jazz music, the record player, video games, internet chat rooms, etc. there's also a mass of people who explode in consternation and condemnation of this new technology, usually linking it to the devil, or moral decline, or just sheer cussed laziness.

there's always a variant of this more general reaction with new social networking/information aggregating phenomena: MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, (to a lesser degree) RSS.  there's this idea that these things don't actually serve any useful purpose, that they're usually just abused by people who have problems interacting in the real world, as a way to cushion the impact of real life, or to overly-aggrandize their small accomplishments.  sometimes there's some merit to these assertions, just like there's merit to most stereotypes, i'll admit that (okay, do we really need to see 110 pictures of your new baby on facebook?  i mean, i want to see one, sure, but the others are probably fine just on your hard drive, just for you).  but, what's at the core of these new technologies, what has always been at the core of them, is the development of a new way to aggregate, network, view, and share information.  i mean, MySpace (although a bit anachronistic now) helped revolutionize the way companies advertised online, and more specifically the way artists made their music available electronically.  facebook accomplishes a lot of the same things, but over an even wider (and less neon-colored) spectrum.  RSS and twitter strip away the expectation for you to "put yourself out there" at all.  you can just tune in to the stream of information and avoid the egoizing (if that's how you want to see it) completely.

sure, there are always bad, silly things that these technologies are used for, and often they're used for these bad, silly things but the majority of the people who use them.  but how is that new?  has that facet of human nature (i.e. give someone a soapbox and a megaphone and they'll probably use them, and stupidly) just sudden come to be thanks to the internet?  i'm guilty myself of sharing lots of pointless, potentially self-aggrandizing things online that nobody cares about, i'm sure.  but at the same time, MySpace let me share a bunch of music online when i was just starting out that allowed me to get feedback and get in touch with other starting musicians that i never would have met otherwise.  it let me learn about bands i wouldn't have heard of by reading even independent local magazines.  facebook straight up makes it easy to organize social events.  i type up what i want to do, where i want to do it, who i want to invite, and BAM, the whole conversation can take place live, right there, much more fluidly and simply than even over email.  twitter is just fantastic, like RSS in a tiny box that just gives me pop-up notices and if i don't think that "telling everyone what i ate for lunch" is important (it's usually not, unless it's gourmet grilled cheese) then i DON'T HAVE TO WRITE ANYTHING.  if i'm following someone who tweets inanely 21 times a day THEN I CAN STOP FOLLOWING THEM.  the information flow control is entirely in your hands, and it's pretty damn easy to learn how to use (except occasionally in the case of facebook, but that's another story), so you can filter out the bad and you can use the good to make you aware of everything you actually want to know.  how many of those links you follow and how many twitpics you look at are then entirely up to you within the time constraints you have.

i'm trying not to just whine in the post (even though i'm failing), but things like twitter are (i believe) revolutionizing the way we interact with information, which is more and more becoming a foundational part of our day-to-day lives as more information becomes available and as we (professionally at the very least, if not otherwise) will become more and more responsible for that information.  this is why i got into a lot of the stuff i'm currently studying, because it's not going to go away, it's just going to become more and more ubiquitous, and more and more the people who refuse to take part in things like twitter as they come into being are the people who end up having to (not choosing to) give up and join in a few years down the road when it becomes obvious that this stuff isn't going away.

i guess i'm also just naturally curious and figure you might as well get in on the ground floor when something cool comes along.

also, as an unrelated note, i am honest-to-god certain that the sangria's tofu vegetarian burrito is the best food i've ever eaten in my life.

reading NOOOOOOOOOOW!!!

i'm finally teaching a lit class (sort of) in the spring.  it's a reading/discussion based class, and the curriculum seems pretty open (basically i have to use books published after my students were born, so post-1990ish).  anyway, i've tried to sprinkle the reading list with a lot of things that will inspire talk about some of (what i see as being) the prominent cultural concerns of the last two decades, like:

1. globalization (and what this does to our ideas of place, race, class, gender, etc.)
2. apocalypse and environment
3. the intarwebs

yes, that's a really freaking broad list, but the way i understand this class, i'm not supposed to be lecturing, but mostly just facilitating discussion; so i want to start broad and only narrow down when/if necessary.

anyway, i just sent my booklist off, so here's what we're going to be reading:

Terry Prachett and Neil Gaiman, Good Omens (Novel)

Neil Gaiman, American Gods, (Novel)

Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (Novel)

Peter Chilson, Disturbance-Loving Species (Short stories)

Frank Miller, 300 (Graphic novel and film)

Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Novel and film)

Max Brooks, World War Z (Novel)

John Krakauer, Into the Wild (Novel and film)

Note: The film version of The Road may be cut from the schedule due to time constraints and depending on when it becomes available on DVD.

Note 2: I'm really pumped about using WWZ to talk about politics and cultural assumptions, etc.  And also zombies.

I'm really excited to teach the class, though at the same time I had to sort of throw this booklist together when in reality there were about 20 more books I wanted to read before choosing which ones I wanted to teach.  Apparently they usually offer the class in the fall only, which would have given me the entire summer to decide on books, but instead I got about two weeks.  So I'm hoping my choices will work out.  I'm just glad to actually be teaching about books.  more on this later.

oh my GOD, who left this blog laying here?

i just found this old thing and dusted it off.  seems to work okay.

it's thanksgiving break, which means instead of working 16 hours a day, i'm working like 8-10 hours a day.  which means i might get to blog a few times.  i spent the weekend in post falls at lindsey's parents house, which was really fun.  that place always makes me think of rivendell, for some reason.  maybe it's because every time i go there, it's on the heels of some sort of utter madness (the first time it was after the ohio-northwest crossing of 2009, the second time after an 8-day sinus infection).  it might also be because there's a sort of relaxingly predictable rhythm to life there, which goes something like this:

1. wake up earlier than usual and eat breakfast (actual breakfast, not just cereal)
2. sit around for a bit and work on my own work (usually grading or something)
3. go do something outside that involves strenuous physical activity
4. return from said activity and make a huge heaping dinner of some sort (eating dinner at actual dinner time)
5. continue working (alternating with watching the history channel) in front of the fireplace
6. at some point in the late evening, go scrounging for food because i ate dinner at actual dinner time
7. eventually fall asleep in front of the fire, wake up, drag self to bed.

it's pretty elven (or elfish, if you want to make tolkien spin in his grave).

other than that, i've been pretty much just working on grad school stuff all semester.  in the small breaks that i do have, i've been going out to dinner with people, or watching that 70s show in its entirety with lindsey, or playing some video game because i'm too exhausted to do anything smart.  which means i haven't made any progress on any outside interests such as book-writing or song-playing, but i'm willing to put that on the back burner for the moment, as the end of classes is in sight (i only have to take ONE class next semester and teach one, and while i'll be doing diss stuff as well, i certainly won't be as busy as i've been for the last 1 1/2 years).

i'm getting some next effects pedals and such for my tube amp, so i'm hoping that'll inspire me to write some more songs, once i finally have time to sit down and think straight.

in geek-hobby land, it has in fact been a pretty awesome semester though, as i've gotten the chance to play a lot of games i hadn't previously played, like KoToR 1 and 2, all three prince of persia games (minus the new one, which i don't yet), and all three homeworld games.  my new obsession is warcraft 3, which i somehow didn't play when it came out in 2002.  i'm just now at the point of finishing up the expansion campaign, and am looking forward to playing the whole thing over again on the higher difficulty setting once i decompress from RTS land for a month or two.  hanging high over my head also is the fact that i've still NEVER finished brood war, despite having played it for no doubt hundreds of hours in the last 10 years.  but i think the next thing on the time-wasting, fun-having plate is a run through final fantasy 4-6, and 9-12.  which will probably take the entirety of my whole life.  i'm skipping 7 and 8 out of principle because, although i love both games, i hate replaying them because there are WAY too many "stop and level up here for 5-10 hours" sections in both of them.  i've never played 10 or 12 before, so that should be a good time.

i'm teaching a (potentially) awesome class in the spring.  but more about that in a minute.

old livejournal link

in case you're ever bored and looking for something to make you feel better about yourself, you should check out the level of craziness on regular display here.  it's my old livejournal blog (2004-2007), and it's fantastically old school.

ruminations on careerism

so i've been mulling over this for a bit, as lindsey and i were talking about it on the way home...and by "it" i mean the whole question(s) of "why do you do what you do?" and "what should i do for the rest of my life?" and i've realized that my own attitude has changed pretty significantly since i last considered those questions seriously, but my justification for the new attitude hasn't really been thought through at length.

i want to argue that a lot of people do what they do for the wrong reasons.  and i fully accept that this will potentially start a comment war amongst a few particular readers.  if they still read this blog.  but anyway, i have a pretty strong opinion on careers and professional motivation, so i'd be happy to belabor my points if anyone wants to discuss.

as i see it, the two main problems with the typical cultural answer to "what do you want to do with your life?" are these:

1. "i want to help people" is an unreasonable desire, based on a whole lot of assumptions that you can't reasonably make about other people and their situations.

for the first 25 years of my life, this was what i wanted to do.  and from the time i entered college as a computer scientist, then changed to an english major (neither of which are very "people-helpy" professions), i felt guilty that i wasn't a doctor, or a vet, or an army sergeant.  but at some point along the road, i realized that wanting to help people, while noble, is also silly.

we all want to help other people (unless we're sociopaths), at the very least just because if we're nice to them, or give the appearance of being nice to them, they'll be nice to us and we'll get stuff.  however, i don't think you can honestly know when you're helping or not.  people lie (to you and you to yourself, if expedient) all the time.  now, if life were really black-and-white, like a lot of people like to think it is, then sure, "helping people" would be awesome.  however, let's take a look at "doctor" for example to see where the "help" starts to fall apart...

okay, so you're a doctor.  you keep people's hearts beating.  you keep people from dying of infections.  people tell you how happy they are that you saved their lives.  that's pretty badass.  however, you also probably occasionally don't help people.  people you can't fix, who come to the hospital assuming that they're going to get fixed.  people who come to the hospital and actually get worse.  in the worst case, which hopefully happens very seldom to never, you kill someone.  maybe someone who would have been okay otherwise.  this is why doctors have huge insurance premiums.  not because they help people, but because occasionally one of them (or the hospital) kills someone.  of course, you can chalk this up to ben parker's mantra all you want, but the fact is that "helping people" is complicated and relies on a TON of assumptions on your part, assumptions that you often don't or can't share with the person you're supposedly helping.  sure, you save a kid's life who has a broken leg that otherwise would have resulted in infection.  that's nice (it really is).  but, you could also look at the same act from this (extremely cynical) angle: the very health system and hospital your job and your "helping" is built on propagates a medical system that has widespread negative economic, environmental, cultural, etc. effects all across the globe.  most likely, people in other, poorer countries died indirectly so that your medical machinery could be built to save the kid you saved.  am i inferring that doctors should go to work everyday feeling guilty because they made some third world country a little poorer so we can keep americans alive?  of course not.  but at the same time, that's the reality of the situation...and from that you begin, maybe, to see how difficult it is to help someone with no strings attached.  you simply can't trace the chain of causality far enough to know you're only helping.  on some level, you're lying to yourself.  which sort of leads into my other point...

2.  ...which is "when did we decide that the only time you can make a difference in other people's lives is the 8 hours a day you're getting paid?".  if you are the charitable type and you want to help people, why does it have to be during your job?  can't you help just as much if not more in your day-to-day non-work life?  i think a very significant part of this problem is that we're so obsessed with creating concrete identities for ourselves that we'll jump at the chance to be able to say "i'm a teacher" or "i'm a musician" or "i'm a sculptor" and the dark side to that is then we believe that that particular sub-identity is the only one of worth, simultaneously putting too much pressure on what we are at work and devaluing what we do with the rest of our lives.

so what do we do then?  i believe the only thing that really makes sense is to find something that makes each of us happy, and do that for a job.  you're the only one you can be completely sure that you're helping, and if you're happy and content with a significant portion of your life, that's going to bleed over into how you interact with other people.  work on improving yourself and the rest will follow.  at least that's the theory i've been trying to work under.  and it seems to be working, mostly.  at least as much as it can be expected to, considering how little i actually have control over.  i mean, we have the ability in this country to be well-off enough in a global sense to have a measure of control over "what we want to be when we grow up".  unfortunately, this creates a situation similar to the one that Pollan addresses in In Defense of Food; we have so many kinds of food and as a result so many layers of confusion about which foods do what, that we've literally forgotten how to feed ourselves as a culture.  given simple, raw produce, or a plain old dead animal, the vast majority of our country wouldn't even know how to prepare it to save themselves from starving.  similarly, we have so many choices in terms of careers that we're making it harder than it has to be, believing that if we choose "the one" that we'll be able to singlehandedly better humanity...when in reality the point of having a job should just be to find something you feel relatively satisfied doing each day in a personal sense, and which earns you enough money to keep food in your mouth and a roof over your head.  i'm not saving the world being an english teacher, but i became a much better and happier person when i realized that i didn't actually have to.

note: i'm still a little sad that i'm not a doctor.  doctors are awesome.  i only ripped on them because they're the poster-children for the whole "get a job that helps someone" idea.

note 2: i was reading my old livejournal today.  hilarious.

note 3: HOW AM I STILL HUNGRY?!

note 4: i will try to blog more soon.  it really IS fun, just time-consuming and not as fun/meaningful/expedient as tweeting, playing with friends, doing homework, reading shit that's not homework just to learn about the world, writing poetry and/or music, watching good TV/movies, playing video games, eating, or sleeping.

been a long time...

so i've obviously been pretty busy lately.  this is my last semester taking classes, and i'm taking 3 while teaching 2 and trying to juggle a few conferences and the requisite paperwork, random school functions and social obligations.  also, the small amount of free time that i do have is more and more often spent hanging around with friends and having weekend get-togethers, hikes, and those sorts of things.  this weekend, for instance, it was a jam session on friday, conference all day saturday, wrapped up by a rico's night last night and then working on presentations for this week all night and day today.  i find there is much less time and desire to blog when i'm increasingly out and about doing, you know, fun real-life stuff.

also, twitter is actually pretty badass and it's easy to get enmeshed in it.  usually the things that have in the past flowered into 1000 word posts on here have started from a sudden idea or two that popped into my head while i was out walking around or grading papers or whatever.  with twitter, i can just hammer out that idea in a sentence, hit send, and not only save time, but also get the idea out to a wider audience (which isn't really my primary goal, but still a draw for sure).  i can easily post links to youtube videos, new music downloads, interesting news stories, etc. there (and in a much easier way that i can on blogger or even tumblr).  and i hear back from 50+ others on a day-to-day basis, in a way that's easier and quicker to read than a whole blog post, and in a way that's easier to access than RSS (twhirl just sits in my sidebar).  so i guess what i'm saying is that mini-blogging has really put how much "unnecessary" time i've spent blogging for years into perspective (i put "unnecessary" in quotes because i'm not entirely convinced it was unnecessary, but i digress) and it's really hard with my current schedule to say to myself "well, i'd really like to comment about how i feel about the current administration's handling of organic foods" and then follow it up with a context-heavy 1000 word post that takes me 30 minutes to write when i could just hammer "new administration's organic food policy problematic? [link]" instead and move on with my life while being reasonably sure that that tweet will get me some feedback and possibly more related links from my peers.

having said that, i could have probably also expressed this entire post as "long-form blogs dying off due to popularity/access/efficiency of twitter?"

but i didn't.  and now there go 10 minutes i'll never get back.

the count so far

i've gotten something like seven or eight responses so far regarding which songs i should play at open mic (thanks guys!), and here's how things are lookin':

3 votes for millie
3 votes for not california
2 votes for molly
1 vote for palace
1 vote for the melody
1 vote for sunshine
2 votes for better to be loved

especially interesting because i figured people would think "better to be loved" was boring.  and because i like "love song in d" and apparently nobody else does :)

keep voting!  DO IT!

for any twits (or, as @rainnwilson calls them, "twacolytes")

from now on, when i tweet anything marginally interesting and germane to this blog (so, basically anything), i'm going to attach a #defiantlymaybe hashtag.  not that anyone cares, but hell, the hashtag isn't being used, so why not?