so this post stems from my reading this article, in which it is revealed that megaupload's legitimate (and illegitimate) user files are soon to be deleted. apparently the department of justice has already (in a frighteningly efficient move for our government) retrieved all the evidence it wants to use against megaupload's CEO/other people and so the rest is just going to be flushed.
as the story goes, this data is ultimately going to be deleted because megaupload has (presumably) megabandwidth bills, and with its assets frozen after the recent government takedown, it's unable to pay those bills any longer. makes sense, in a way: why should the megaupload's internet hosts continue to support their massive bandwidth if megaupload can't make their payments?
the subtext to this whole deal, of course, is that all of those files constitute evidence in the coming case between megaupload and the government, and it's a bit problematic that nobody's stepping in and saying "no, you can't just flush gigabytes of files down the drain in the middle of a case". in fact, one could make the case (as many have) that allowing these files to be destroyed constitutes a sort-of obstruction of justice on the part of the government. you could even make the case (as many have) that allowing these files to be destroyed is not terribly unlike burning down an entire neighborhood because you know there's a criminal in one house: from this perspective, those files are the owners' property, and since a lot of people store legit files on megaupload, their hard drive backups, photos of their wedding, etc. are being destroyed indirectly by the government despite the fact that they themselves did nothing wrong.
as i see it, there are big gaping problems with both of these arguments, but at the same time the government's lack of interest in acknowledging that not every single person even marginally associated with megaupload is a criminal is definitely troubling. it is a bit like, as one internet commenter put it, renting a garage on a storage company lot, and then finding out one day that your garage had been torched overnight because the owner of the establishment was laundering money through the business. maybe all you kept in that garage was some old furniture. maybe you had no idea the owner was a criminal. but now your shit's gone, and there doesn't really seem to be any recourse.
maybe this is another one of those new internet-changes-the-way-the-world-works things. after all, if the government's going to make a habit of shutting down online storage sites, the effect that those shutdowns have on the millions of people that use them is going to be immense. and probably something that, legally, the government is allowed to just totally overlook. imagine, if i can be hyperbolic for a moment, a situation in which the government suddenly decides "well, fuck, there sure is a lot of child porn being distributed over facebook. better shut 'er down!" and boom, out go the lights. it's an extreme example to be sure, but two assumptions that underlie it are, i believe, visible in the megaupload case as well: 1) that the "one bad egg ruins it for everybody" approach is justified in cases like these and 2) that it's okay to not be interested in hashing out exactly what "due process" might constitute in terms of determining guilt/potential punishment.
i'm absolutely certain that megaupload's CEO is guilty of whatever our government says he's guilty of, and i'm absolutely certain that the majority of users of megaupload used it to traffic in illegal content. but our law says you have to prove those things in court rather than just assuming that they're true and then acting according, and even if you do prove them, not every megaupload user was "in on it". once again, we've got prominent government offices acting just like they were regarding SOPA and PIPA: like old white guys who are too rich and too busy to bother learning about this newfangled technology, and the result is that they're reacting like megaupload was a physical business, located in a physical building, dealing in physical goods (read: one copy only) with physical customers. and that's just not the case.
but all the blabber isn't really what worries me. what really worries me is this sudden desire to pigeonhole all online storage as bad and infringing. because a lot of the stuff being shared on these sites is legal, and has been posted with the understanding that it will likely be there for awhile. not forever, of course, but take for example a music site called the midnight cafe. i've been following this site for years, as it generally posts a new live music recording every single day (or at least a few times a week) from a variety of different artists. these "bootlegs" are legal recordings, uploaded on the author's own time, just so that they can be freely available for anyone who wants easy access to them. recently, the site posted this, and then shortly after, this. there are a lot of music projects like this out there. another example is the phish spreadsheet, which is the work of one guy who spent a major chunk of his life tracking, tagging, and uploading every single phish show ever recorded into one well-organized spreadsheet (and again these are free, legal recordings) just improve ease of access and to provide a digital archive that could, in theory, last for damn near ever. now i know that most people aren't too keen on phish, but if you know anything about music, you know that they are mostly known for their live performances. this spreadsheet project is in a sense the culmination of thirty years' worth of taping and trading (nowadays done online and through torrents, but originally done for years and years using the mail and actual tapes), and yet if the site that hosts all of these shows is the next to go down, then it's all gone.
oh, not permanently, of course, as i'm sure there are backups of these sorts of things. but what's lost is the worldwide access to the music. i don't much care if someone's birthday photos are going to be lost when megaupload is purged. if you don't backup your personal files locally that's your own fault, as far as i'm concerned. but these sites are used as much more than a backup service for individuals. they're also the hubs of legal, vital online archives and similar communities. and, sure, if one site shuts down, another will always rise to fill its place, but how many times are people going to want to bother uploading 2000 individual phish shows if their hosting site gets taken down every six months?
i'm not sure what the solution to this problem is, but it's definitely more nuanced than the current department of justice/megaupload response looks to be.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
how we once are
this semester, i'm team-teaching a 300-level undergrad course in 20th and 21st century literature with my dissertation director. while "team-teaching" might make it sound like we take turns tagging each other "in" during the class period or like there's a family double dare-esque exchange of flags or some other sort of physical comedy involved, it (unfortunately) actually just means that one week i teach the class, and the next week he teaches it. so pretty much every other week i get to sit in the back row of a sixty-student undergrad lit seminar and just observe the goings-on.
this course is basically the analogue of the KSU courses that i found so engrossing in, say, 2000 and 2001 that i decided to change my major to english (from computer science), therefore in large part making me the me that you know and anonymously read the blog of (and love) today. when the aforementioned diss director announced to the class today, in reference to eliot's the waste land something along the lines of "most of you will hate it, and that's fine, but a few of you might become obsessed with it", he was describing me a decade ago, when i had been in those students' place (the waste land wasn't necessarily my watershed text/epiphany moment as i didn't really have one, but i was pretty obsessed with it, and still am). my work was suddenly jumping out and grabbing me in a way that i didn't think work could.
so being a fly on the wall now is pretty fascinating, especially in that large of a class. i walk over to the classroom twice a week, bright and too-early in the morning, with just my pen and a pad of paper and the class text (no laptops allowed, so it's just like in the old days), and i sit there for an hour and a half and i listen as our entire class tries to tease meaning out of primary texts. somehow the earnestness of this has gotten lost for me in a lot of ways after years of reading and studying abstract critical theory...theory's important and enjoyable in its own right, for sure, but the higher up you get in english studies, context seems to outweigh text. so, it's fun to go back and just look at a poem, or a short story, and say (aware of, but otherwise removed slightly from all the -isms) "what does this do to you when you read it?" i mean, that's how i got here in the first place, through the appeal of answering that question, and then following the progression of questions that the answer raised in turn, and so on, and so forth.
during class, i often find myself wanting to raise my hand, just to have a conversation with these students who all seem so very invested in the idea that studying the text for the sake of studying the text is important. teaching literature to a roomful of english majors has a very satisfyingly reinforcing quality to it: nobody asks "well, why does it matter what this poem means?" or "who cares that eliot was writing right after the first world war?" it's a given that in that room, at that time, those questions matter. after what seems like a never-ending process of having to justify the worth of my field (generally) and my research (specifically) to everyone in the universe, it's sort of amazing to suddenly find myself in a room where sixty people have just decided to read, say, sassoon's war poetry and are ready to spend the next 90 minutes telling you what they fucking think, man.
that's not to say, of course, that it's unimportant to question the validity of english studies, etc. but at some point, self-critique becomes self-flagellation, and the innocence (in a professional sense, at least) of the students in this class is a nice contrast to that old cycle.
it makes me more aware than ever that i enjoy reading a lot and enjoy writing even more. i enjoy talking about both of those things with other people who do them, and i absolutely don't mind getting paid a barely-living wage to do so, if that's what it takes. i enjoy getting paid to fly to conferences and present my research, and it's sort of amazing that i've essentially gotten paid to have a year off to write a book, let alone the fact that i've gotten to go to school for free, more or less, for six years now in a beautiful part of the country and in a great department with great faculty (and staff). i'm here because i'm convinced it matters, even if it just matters to me, and i definitely consider myself lucky...sitting and watching classes like the one i was describing above just reminds me even more of the truth of that. so many grad students (and faculty) i've known over the years don't seem to feel this way about this job at all*. instead, they're hostile, exasperated, uninterested beyond what the job requires of them. it makes me wonder why they don't just do something else. this isn't a career for going through the motions. not when you have students like these.
*this isn't a passive-aggressive gesture at anyone in particular. it's just a general statement made from a bit over a decade of experience in various english departments.
this course is basically the analogue of the KSU courses that i found so engrossing in, say, 2000 and 2001 that i decided to change my major to english (from computer science), therefore in large part making me the me that you know and anonymously read the blog of (and love) today. when the aforementioned diss director announced to the class today, in reference to eliot's the waste land something along the lines of "most of you will hate it, and that's fine, but a few of you might become obsessed with it", he was describing me a decade ago, when i had been in those students' place (the waste land wasn't necessarily my watershed text/epiphany moment as i didn't really have one, but i was pretty obsessed with it, and still am). my work was suddenly jumping out and grabbing me in a way that i didn't think work could.
so being a fly on the wall now is pretty fascinating, especially in that large of a class. i walk over to the classroom twice a week, bright and too-early in the morning, with just my pen and a pad of paper and the class text (no laptops allowed, so it's just like in the old days), and i sit there for an hour and a half and i listen as our entire class tries to tease meaning out of primary texts. somehow the earnestness of this has gotten lost for me in a lot of ways after years of reading and studying abstract critical theory...theory's important and enjoyable in its own right, for sure, but the higher up you get in english studies, context seems to outweigh text. so, it's fun to go back and just look at a poem, or a short story, and say (aware of, but otherwise removed slightly from all the -isms) "what does this do to you when you read it?" i mean, that's how i got here in the first place, through the appeal of answering that question, and then following the progression of questions that the answer raised in turn, and so on, and so forth.
during class, i often find myself wanting to raise my hand, just to have a conversation with these students who all seem so very invested in the idea that studying the text for the sake of studying the text is important. teaching literature to a roomful of english majors has a very satisfyingly reinforcing quality to it: nobody asks "well, why does it matter what this poem means?" or "who cares that eliot was writing right after the first world war?" it's a given that in that room, at that time, those questions matter. after what seems like a never-ending process of having to justify the worth of my field (generally) and my research (specifically) to everyone in the universe, it's sort of amazing to suddenly find myself in a room where sixty people have just decided to read, say, sassoon's war poetry and are ready to spend the next 90 minutes telling you what they fucking think, man.
that's not to say, of course, that it's unimportant to question the validity of english studies, etc. but at some point, self-critique becomes self-flagellation, and the innocence (in a professional sense, at least) of the students in this class is a nice contrast to that old cycle.
it makes me more aware than ever that i enjoy reading a lot and enjoy writing even more. i enjoy talking about both of those things with other people who do them, and i absolutely don't mind getting paid a barely-living wage to do so, if that's what it takes. i enjoy getting paid to fly to conferences and present my research, and it's sort of amazing that i've essentially gotten paid to have a year off to write a book, let alone the fact that i've gotten to go to school for free, more or less, for six years now in a beautiful part of the country and in a great department with great faculty (and staff). i'm here because i'm convinced it matters, even if it just matters to me, and i definitely consider myself lucky...sitting and watching classes like the one i was describing above just reminds me even more of the truth of that. so many grad students (and faculty) i've known over the years don't seem to feel this way about this job at all*. instead, they're hostile, exasperated, uninterested beyond what the job requires of them. it makes me wonder why they don't just do something else. this isn't a career for going through the motions. not when you have students like these.
*this isn't a passive-aggressive gesture at anyone in particular. it's just a general statement made from a bit over a decade of experience in various english departments.
Friday, January 27, 2012
"a meditation on feminism" or, "short skirt, long jacket"
"the idea of a vernacular gender was widely misunderstood in the antagonistic atmosphere of the 1980s, in the anger that repudiated four thousand years of male sovereignty. men and women are unlike because of their evolution, a matter not to be deplored but to be celebrated and fulfilled, with the caution that power over the other is not part of the difference. roles and duties are divided, but not to make inequality. a vernacular society, divided in many of its social and familial responsibilities and privileges, would be inappropriately dominated by either gender. men and women have different roles int he group, similar but different bodies and psyches, shared but also different satisfactions, desires, fears, and sorrows."
-paul shepard, coming home to the pleistocene
so here's a thing that encapsulates that feeling that all guys occasionally get (or that for some seems to be a constantly-burning fuse of rage in the back of their caveman skulls): the fact that girls are different and that that is sometimes weird.
getting people to accept this is often a lot like trying to get white freshmen from the west side of washington to understand that yes, racism actually still exists, and no, they don't really "get it" because they live in a country and a culture where they are the majority (and no, once having a black friend long ago doesn't fix this). this lack of awareness isn't anyone's fault (except for when it's intentional, like in the case of the hypothetical cavemen referenced above who aren't actually hypothetical because i used to work with some of them), but more a cause of the "everyone's equal!" rhetoric that we superficially layer atop all of our discourse nowadays. now,"everyone's equal!" is a nice sentiment, of course, but the reality is more complex. some races (read: different melanges of cultures than the melange that makes up american white people, with different amounts of melanin in their skin) are different from others in significant ways. women are different from men in significant ways. to completely ignore this is to do violence to one's identity.
it matters to me that i am a man and not a woman. i didn't choose to be a man and i don't (in an abstract sense) prefer it to having gotten to be a woman. but, if someone were to tell me (as my students often do) that men and women are "equal"...well, that's kind of silly, because i'm aware of a lot of ways in which my biological/embodied experience of the world as a man is fundamentally different than that same level of experience is for a woman, and i know that that difference informs my thoughts/actions/what-have-you on less fundamental levels like how often i'm asked to help people move cabinetry or push cars out of snowbanks. telling me men and women are equal is sort of like telling a firefighter who finds meaning in his/her firefighting that "everyone can fight fires equally well!" you just hurt my feelings, man. seriously.
it's sort of like that. sort of.
[reheats cinnamon tea, sips.]
anyway, back to my fun story. so i was walking past valhalla (the horrifically trashy undergrad bar just on the legal side of the border between pullman city and campus proper) the other night, and there was a group of girls crossing in front of the building in front of me. they were clearly bar-hopping, but couldn't have been older than 21 or 22. despite the 20 degree temperatures and freezing wind, they were all dressed in short skirts and those wrap-things that pass for shirts these days (no long jackets were in sight, alas)*.
so, valhalla has recently renovated its top floor. this means that while you can still go drink and make out in its creepy, creepy basement if you so choose, you can also sit upstairs at a table and drink or eat cheeseburgers while you look out the gigantic front window at the sidewalk. well, these girls crossed directly in front of the window, pretty much every curve of each of them either visible or outlined by their clothes tightly enough that there wasn't anything really left to the imagination.
as they walked by, of course, the eyes of every single guy in the bar locked onto them and followed them for the length of the window. they weren't unaware of this, and as they finally passed from view, one of them remarked "ugh. i cannot believe how disgusting that was. i hate how every guy at the bar is always staring at my ass". then they proceeded down the street, turned right, and walked directly into the next bar down.
so basically the point of this post is for me to say: ladies, please explain this to me because it makes no fucking sense.
from my perspective as a guy, this is what i see:
first, i see women expressing disgust at the concept of the bar as a device for men to check them out and then choose their mates from the pool of women available. this disgust makes sense. bars are (generally) disgusting places, with people not on their best behavior. when it comes to men, young twentysomething ones are (generally) disgusting when it comes to their behavior around women. if i was a woman (and we've established that i am in fact, not), i would probably never go into any bar full of twentysomething men after, say, eight o'clock for this reason. but, i've "accepted" the fact that the dating M.O. for most kids nowadays is to go to the bar, get smashed, and try to make out with someone in the hopes that afterwards, when they've regained their inhibitions and their actual personalities, they'll somehow be compatible enough to function in a long-term, non-sex-centric relationship. and so...
second, these girls were obviously engaging in that exact same process, whilst criticizing the grossness of it. they didn't want to be ogled by the guys at valhalla...so why go into the next bar, where the same thing will happen while you are stationary targets for a goodly amount of time?
third, if you're not trying to draw sexual attention to yourself, why dress the way that you're dressed at all? this is sort of the crux, here. i'm forced to assume that maybe dressing scandalously is just a status symbol among young women nowadays? maybe you have to dress this way for your female peers to consider you cool, in the same way that guys apparently have to wear tank tops, basketball shorts and a backwards baseball cap for their brahs to think that they're cool. is that it? if that is in fact the case, isn't there some other "cool" way that women could dress amongst themselves that isn't so baldly sexual? i wonder about the side effects of young women essentially parlaying their sexuality into social currency among their "girlfriends" while seemingly assuming that that shift in intention should make that same sexuality suddenly invisible to guys. because it doesn't. obviously.
following this (possible) line of inquiry makes me sad. every single woman i've ever known (including the ones i've found extremely attractive) have had many other qualities that make them potentially "cool" to others besides how physically attractive they are or how revealingly they dress. i certainly don't promote my own sexuality in the way that i dress, and yet i have a lot of friends who respect me (some despite having seen me make a drunken asshole of myself while trying to impress girls at bars in lifetimes past) and at least one person who (for some reason) finds me attractive. so actually trying to get others to respect you without wearing short shorts can work. have we really reached a point where not just any sexuality but egregious, totally public sexuality is assumed to be the primary currency for negotiating social and sexual relationships for the majority of our young women?
i'd like to hear what people (and especially women) think, because i just don't get it. you know, on account of my penis and all.
*incidentally, both men's and women's refusal to dress practically for inclement weather is a whole other blog post entirely, dealing with an all-consuming rage that is fueled by my years of winter survival training and prizing of pragmatism over the desire to look "pretty" or "cool" for a large crowd of people who don't even know who you are...i can only hate one thing at once, sadly.
-paul shepard, coming home to the pleistocene
so here's a thing that encapsulates that feeling that all guys occasionally get (or that for some seems to be a constantly-burning fuse of rage in the back of their caveman skulls): the fact that girls are different and that that is sometimes weird.
getting people to accept this is often a lot like trying to get white freshmen from the west side of washington to understand that yes, racism actually still exists, and no, they don't really "get it" because they live in a country and a culture where they are the majority (and no, once having a black friend long ago doesn't fix this). this lack of awareness isn't anyone's fault (except for when it's intentional, like in the case of the hypothetical cavemen referenced above who aren't actually hypothetical because i used to work with some of them), but more a cause of the "everyone's equal!" rhetoric that we superficially layer atop all of our discourse nowadays. now,"everyone's equal!" is a nice sentiment, of course, but the reality is more complex. some races (read: different melanges of cultures than the melange that makes up american white people, with different amounts of melanin in their skin) are different from others in significant ways. women are different from men in significant ways. to completely ignore this is to do violence to one's identity.
it matters to me that i am a man and not a woman. i didn't choose to be a man and i don't (in an abstract sense) prefer it to having gotten to be a woman. but, if someone were to tell me (as my students often do) that men and women are "equal"...well, that's kind of silly, because i'm aware of a lot of ways in which my biological/embodied experience of the world as a man is fundamentally different than that same level of experience is for a woman, and i know that that difference informs my thoughts/actions/what-have-you on less fundamental levels like how often i'm asked to help people move cabinetry or push cars out of snowbanks. telling me men and women are equal is sort of like telling a firefighter who finds meaning in his/her firefighting that "everyone can fight fires equally well!" you just hurt my feelings, man. seriously.
it's sort of like that. sort of.
[reheats cinnamon tea, sips.]
anyway, back to my fun story. so i was walking past valhalla (the horrifically trashy undergrad bar just on the legal side of the border between pullman city and campus proper) the other night, and there was a group of girls crossing in front of the building in front of me. they were clearly bar-hopping, but couldn't have been older than 21 or 22. despite the 20 degree temperatures and freezing wind, they were all dressed in short skirts and those wrap-things that pass for shirts these days (no long jackets were in sight, alas)*.
so, valhalla has recently renovated its top floor. this means that while you can still go drink and make out in its creepy, creepy basement if you so choose, you can also sit upstairs at a table and drink or eat cheeseburgers while you look out the gigantic front window at the sidewalk. well, these girls crossed directly in front of the window, pretty much every curve of each of them either visible or outlined by their clothes tightly enough that there wasn't anything really left to the imagination.
as they walked by, of course, the eyes of every single guy in the bar locked onto them and followed them for the length of the window. they weren't unaware of this, and as they finally passed from view, one of them remarked "ugh. i cannot believe how disgusting that was. i hate how every guy at the bar is always staring at my ass". then they proceeded down the street, turned right, and walked directly into the next bar down.
so basically the point of this post is for me to say: ladies, please explain this to me because it makes no fucking sense.
from my perspective as a guy, this is what i see:
first, i see women expressing disgust at the concept of the bar as a device for men to check them out and then choose their mates from the pool of women available. this disgust makes sense. bars are (generally) disgusting places, with people not on their best behavior. when it comes to men, young twentysomething ones are (generally) disgusting when it comes to their behavior around women. if i was a woman (and we've established that i am in fact, not), i would probably never go into any bar full of twentysomething men after, say, eight o'clock for this reason. but, i've "accepted" the fact that the dating M.O. for most kids nowadays is to go to the bar, get smashed, and try to make out with someone in the hopes that afterwards, when they've regained their inhibitions and their actual personalities, they'll somehow be compatible enough to function in a long-term, non-sex-centric relationship. and so...
second, these girls were obviously engaging in that exact same process, whilst criticizing the grossness of it. they didn't want to be ogled by the guys at valhalla...so why go into the next bar, where the same thing will happen while you are stationary targets for a goodly amount of time?
third, if you're not trying to draw sexual attention to yourself, why dress the way that you're dressed at all? this is sort of the crux, here. i'm forced to assume that maybe dressing scandalously is just a status symbol among young women nowadays? maybe you have to dress this way for your female peers to consider you cool, in the same way that guys apparently have to wear tank tops, basketball shorts and a backwards baseball cap for their brahs to think that they're cool. is that it? if that is in fact the case, isn't there some other "cool" way that women could dress amongst themselves that isn't so baldly sexual? i wonder about the side effects of young women essentially parlaying their sexuality into social currency among their "girlfriends" while seemingly assuming that that shift in intention should make that same sexuality suddenly invisible to guys. because it doesn't. obviously.
following this (possible) line of inquiry makes me sad. every single woman i've ever known (including the ones i've found extremely attractive) have had many other qualities that make them potentially "cool" to others besides how physically attractive they are or how revealingly they dress. i certainly don't promote my own sexuality in the way that i dress, and yet i have a lot of friends who respect me (some despite having seen me make a drunken asshole of myself while trying to impress girls at bars in lifetimes past) and at least one person who (for some reason) finds me attractive. so actually trying to get others to respect you without wearing short shorts can work. have we really reached a point where not just any sexuality but egregious, totally public sexuality is assumed to be the primary currency for negotiating social and sexual relationships for the majority of our young women?
i'd like to hear what people (and especially women) think, because i just don't get it. you know, on account of my penis and all.
*incidentally, both men's and women's refusal to dress practically for inclement weather is a whole other blog post entirely, dealing with an all-consuming rage that is fueled by my years of winter survival training and prizing of pragmatism over the desire to look "pretty" or "cool" for a large crowd of people who don't even know who you are...i can only hate one thing at once, sadly.
Thursday, January 26, 2012
voulez-vous THE BUS?!
i've got a bunch of half-finished posts about smart things in my queue for today, but instead i'm just going to complain about my life because why else have a blog nobody reads?
i'm extremely tired today, and for once i don't even have a good excuse. i've just stopped sleeping, for some reason.
those of you non-existent readers who know me know that i used to have horrible, terrible insomnia problems. over the last few years, they've pretty much abated, quite possibly as a result of me finally taking the time to get a lot of my other emotional/mental shit together. but for a long time they were quite bad. i mean, i always have been and likely always will be a "night person", and if i continue working in higher education, my night-person-ness will likely continue to be exacerbated by the fact that will always have to take my work home with me and that work will always require the occasional late night. but. for most of my life between the ages of...oh, say fourteen to twenty-four i slept much less than eight hours a night every night, due to stress, overuse of caffeine and just generally being a total nutjob. once i got to wsu, it somehow got even worse because the insomnia collided with a suddenly massive workload. then, i was often working 12-16 hours a day for weeks at a time, but still only sleeping 3-4 hours a lot of the time.
anyway, the point is that it was bad. but, just like that year of college where you drink yourself into oblivion (everyone does that, right?), i didn't really realize how bad until i stopped sleeping again over the last few days. basically, having some time off from being crazy and then returning to it really put into perspective just how crazy i was.
the experience has been extra weird this time because my inability to sleep doesn't really seem to be caused by anything. i mean, i'm stressed over not having a job lined up for fall, and i'm stressed over needing to finish my dissertation, but i feel like those stresses are within normal levels. otherwise, i'm pretty normal-feeling in terms of my brains and my thinkings and my word stuff things go cant gonna be for now
last week, lindsey and i went sledding twice, right after the first and second big snowfalls that we had here in pullman. during the first night, i banged my legs up quite a bit, because right before we went out, the snow turned to rain for a few hours, which built up a thick crust of ice on top of the inches and inches of snow. the result was a sledding surface that was fast, but prone to breaking and catapulting you off the sled onto a sheet of ice with little ice-knives sticking out of it that made ice-holes in your body and caused you ice-pain. it hurt a bit, but i was fucking excited to sled and thought little of it. the next morning, i could barely move. anything. anywhere. so what did i do? go out sledding again the next night, of course. this was on softer snow, but i still added new bruises atop my bruises and was less than happy the next morning. later that same morning, i slipped on a patch of black ice and fell in the parking lot. and i mean fell, as in i saw my feet above my head before i hit the ground. this felt like it had probably broken every bone in my entire body, a feeling that persisted for at least 12 hours. 36 hours later, i still couldn't move my head to the right without pain, and sleeping started getting difficult. now that i think of it, that's probably where the problem started.
three nights ago, i couldn't get to sleep until about 5am, which was unfortunate because i had to get up for class at 7. this seemed a bit odd to me, considering that i should have fallen asleep quickly because i had only slept for about five hours the night before...but i didn't think too much of it. i was much more weirded out the next night when, on 2 hours of sleep i couldn't fall asleep by 6am. a bit confused and panicked, i jammed a ton of melatonin down my face and finally nodded off around 7. i got up at 10:30 or so to go to work, and it felt like it took the melatonin about 12 hours to get out of my system. nonetheless, i managed to spend a decent amount of the day at work, and i even Accomplished Things. then last night, somehow, i didn't fall asleep till 5 again, and i had to get up at 7 to teach.
throughout this entire process, i've been able to feel myself slowly becoming more and more impaired, sort of like getting drunk slowly over three days, but without the part where it's fun and you're screaming obscenities good-naturedly and riding a skateboard uphill backwards naked while on fire.
anyway, i'm not really sure why i spent a ton of time writing all of this. i guess it's a long way of saying that i've finally realizing how much of a difference actually sleeping a decent amount most nights a week makes in making me an emotionally functional, socially useful person. because i am totally not that right now.
also, if i never fall asleep again and die from exhaustion, this will be my pointless, pointless three-day memoir. it will be ALL THAT REMAINS OF MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH WORDS
oh, and also, this entire sleep-deprivation weirdness episode has played out while i've been reading mike doughty's new book the book of drugs, which is a memoir about...well, drugs. it's certainly supposed to be a sad book, mostly (i think), but there's something about lacking sleep that makes drugs (especially nicotine) seem charming. also, listening to lots of soul coughing when you're not even entirely sure that you would pass that self-awareness "mirror test" is not a good idea. i feel like the music is making paint drip out of my hair follicles in all of the primary colors.
i should probably take a nap.
i'm extremely tired today, and for once i don't even have a good excuse. i've just stopped sleeping, for some reason.
those of you non-existent readers who know me know that i used to have horrible, terrible insomnia problems. over the last few years, they've pretty much abated, quite possibly as a result of me finally taking the time to get a lot of my other emotional/mental shit together. but for a long time they were quite bad. i mean, i always have been and likely always will be a "night person", and if i continue working in higher education, my night-person-ness will likely continue to be exacerbated by the fact that will always have to take my work home with me and that work will always require the occasional late night. but. for most of my life between the ages of...oh, say fourteen to twenty-four i slept much less than eight hours a night every night, due to stress, overuse of caffeine and just generally being a total nutjob. once i got to wsu, it somehow got even worse because the insomnia collided with a suddenly massive workload. then, i was often working 12-16 hours a day for weeks at a time, but still only sleeping 3-4 hours a lot of the time.
anyway, the point is that it was bad. but, just like that year of college where you drink yourself into oblivion (everyone does that, right?), i didn't really realize how bad until i stopped sleeping again over the last few days. basically, having some time off from being crazy and then returning to it really put into perspective just how crazy i was.
the experience has been extra weird this time because my inability to sleep doesn't really seem to be caused by anything. i mean, i'm stressed over not having a job lined up for fall, and i'm stressed over needing to finish my dissertation, but i feel like those stresses are within normal levels. otherwise, i'm pretty normal-feeling in terms of my brains and my thinkings and my word stuff things go cant gonna be for now
last week, lindsey and i went sledding twice, right after the first and second big snowfalls that we had here in pullman. during the first night, i banged my legs up quite a bit, because right before we went out, the snow turned to rain for a few hours, which built up a thick crust of ice on top of the inches and inches of snow. the result was a sledding surface that was fast, but prone to breaking and catapulting you off the sled onto a sheet of ice with little ice-knives sticking out of it that made ice-holes in your body and caused you ice-pain. it hurt a bit, but i was fucking excited to sled and thought little of it. the next morning, i could barely move. anything. anywhere. so what did i do? go out sledding again the next night, of course. this was on softer snow, but i still added new bruises atop my bruises and was less than happy the next morning. later that same morning, i slipped on a patch of black ice and fell in the parking lot. and i mean fell, as in i saw my feet above my head before i hit the ground. this felt like it had probably broken every bone in my entire body, a feeling that persisted for at least 12 hours. 36 hours later, i still couldn't move my head to the right without pain, and sleeping started getting difficult. now that i think of it, that's probably where the problem started.
three nights ago, i couldn't get to sleep until about 5am, which was unfortunate because i had to get up for class at 7. this seemed a bit odd to me, considering that i should have fallen asleep quickly because i had only slept for about five hours the night before...but i didn't think too much of it. i was much more weirded out the next night when, on 2 hours of sleep i couldn't fall asleep by 6am. a bit confused and panicked, i jammed a ton of melatonin down my face and finally nodded off around 7. i got up at 10:30 or so to go to work, and it felt like it took the melatonin about 12 hours to get out of my system. nonetheless, i managed to spend a decent amount of the day at work, and i even Accomplished Things. then last night, somehow, i didn't fall asleep till 5 again, and i had to get up at 7 to teach.
throughout this entire process, i've been able to feel myself slowly becoming more and more impaired, sort of like getting drunk slowly over three days, but without the part where it's fun and you're screaming obscenities good-naturedly and riding a skateboard uphill backwards naked while on fire.
anyway, i'm not really sure why i spent a ton of time writing all of this. i guess it's a long way of saying that i've finally realizing how much of a difference actually sleeping a decent amount most nights a week makes in making me an emotionally functional, socially useful person. because i am totally not that right now.
also, if i never fall asleep again and die from exhaustion, this will be my pointless, pointless three-day memoir. it will be ALL THAT REMAINS OF MY LOVE AFFAIR WITH WORDS
oh, and also, this entire sleep-deprivation weirdness episode has played out while i've been reading mike doughty's new book the book of drugs, which is a memoir about...well, drugs. it's certainly supposed to be a sad book, mostly (i think), but there's something about lacking sleep that makes drugs (especially nicotine) seem charming. also, listening to lots of soul coughing when you're not even entirely sure that you would pass that self-awareness "mirror test" is not a good idea. i feel like the music is making paint drip out of my hair follicles in all of the primary colors.
i should probably take a nap.
UPDATE: it has been suggested to me by various sources that my sleeplessness might have been caused by the sun. THE SUN! well, fuck the sun, then.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
i cover a gillian welch song. in my office, using a shitty webcam. hooray!
here's what i got up to last night between writing breaks:
if you prefer, here's gillian welch herself doing a much better job of singing the song:
and just for shits and giggles, here's the tragically-cut-short ryan adams cover that led me to discover this song in the first place:
also, i found out today that if you type "phish" into youtube search and filter by "videos longer than 20 minutes", wonderful things happen.
if you prefer, here's gillian welch herself doing a much better job of singing the song:
and just for shits and giggles, here's the tragically-cut-short ryan adams cover that led me to discover this song in the first place:
also, i found out today that if you type "phish" into youtube search and filter by "videos longer than 20 minutes", wonderful things happen.
things i heard today
this might become a regular feature, but even if it doesn't...whoo-hoo, today was a whopper for in-public oversharing:
1. [On the Hello Walk, 3:10pm] Girl 1: "I made out with Eric and Mike right after they both threw up...and then once I found out that they had thrown up, it made me throw up. Then I passed out until this morning!" Girl 2: "That's amazing! Awesome!"
2. [Outside Valhalla, 12:10am] Girl 1: "Hey, bitch!" Girl 2: "Yeah?" Girl 1: "Is my ass hanging out?!" Girl 2: "What?!" Girl 1: "Can you see my ass, is it hanging out?" Girl 2: "Umm..." Girl 1: "Is my fucking ass hanging out of my skirt, can you see the bottom part of my ass?!" Girl 2: [Looking] "No, I don't think so..."
3. [D Street, 12:15am] Girl 1: "Katherine! Kate! Kat! Slow down!" Girl 2: "Sorry I'm walking so fast, Mike's got coke at his house and I need to get some before he goes to bed!"
1. [On the Hello Walk, 3:10pm] Girl 1: "I made out with Eric and Mike right after they both threw up...and then once I found out that they had thrown up, it made me throw up. Then I passed out until this morning!" Girl 2: "That's amazing! Awesome!"
2. [Outside Valhalla, 12:10am] Girl 1: "Hey, bitch!" Girl 2: "Yeah?" Girl 1: "Is my ass hanging out?!" Girl 2: "What?!" Girl 1: "Can you see my ass, is it hanging out?" Girl 2: "Umm..." Girl 1: "Is my fucking ass hanging out of my skirt, can you see the bottom part of my ass?!" Girl 2: [Looking] "No, I don't think so..."
3. [D Street, 12:15am] Girl 1: "Katherine! Kate! Kat! Slow down!" Girl 2: "Sorry I'm walking so fast, Mike's got coke at his house and I need to get some before he goes to bed!"
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
that's when i knew if i stopped running, i would die [/melodrama]
and that's not some emo-blog metaphor-y statement this time, oh no. it's literally how i felt an hour ago running a five mile loop from my office out along terre view and back.
i do this route pretty often, but i haven't done it recently because, well, it's winter and it gets windy out there, and i can't run in pants because it feels weird. running shorts + winter = bad. BUT...i haven't run much lately because i was home for break for three weeks and i've been slammed with work (and the accompanying stress) since i've been back. so today i came in to work a bit early so i could be sure to finish in time to run before i went home for dinner. i finished at 8pm. unfortunately at that point the animal-brain part of me that thinks mountain climbing in a snowstorm is "fun" took over and i decided i was not only going to run in shorts in weather that "feels like" 15 degrees, i was going to run FIVE FUCKING MILES.
fortunately, i'm in good enough shape at the moment that the physical exertion of running those miles was something i could pretty easily handle. however, exposing a lot of bare skin and a torso that had to power a really busy circulatory system to 15 degree temperatures for the forty-five minutes it took to run that far was a bit tricky.
ultimately, it was more of a mental challenge than a physical one (i.e. it's hard to keep up your morale when you're trying to run and shiver at the same time), and there were a few moments when i thought about turning around...but of course that was at the halfway point, which made things sort of hopeless either way, so i kept going.
note: i'm pretty well trained in winter survival, so i'm smart enough to not actually freeze to death, in case you were wondering that at this point.
on the home stretch, when i reentered the main part of campus by the football stadium, i passed a few large groups of students that were actually rooting for me, which was hilarious, considering the usual (and frequent) comments i get from students about being a "faggot" or a "faerie" or a "homo" (from men and women alike, oddly enough) when i'm running. the first group i passed (a group of girls) actually just shrieked in terror, one yelling "what's wrong with you?!" another yelling "how are you running?! it's so cold!" and another just yelling "fuuuuuuuck!" the next group was mixed-gender, and one of the girls yelled "DO IT!" at me in such a super-intense, drill-sergeant sort of way that i had no choice but to high-five her as i ran by, yelling "YEEEEAH!" in response.
it was a good time. oh, and i finished in 45:55, which is a super fast time for me, even when it's not bloody freezing.
i do this route pretty often, but i haven't done it recently because, well, it's winter and it gets windy out there, and i can't run in pants because it feels weird. running shorts + winter = bad. BUT...i haven't run much lately because i was home for break for three weeks and i've been slammed with work (and the accompanying stress) since i've been back. so today i came in to work a bit early so i could be sure to finish in time to run before i went home for dinner. i finished at 8pm. unfortunately at that point the animal-brain part of me that thinks mountain climbing in a snowstorm is "fun" took over and i decided i was not only going to run in shorts in weather that "feels like" 15 degrees, i was going to run FIVE FUCKING MILES.
fortunately, i'm in good enough shape at the moment that the physical exertion of running those miles was something i could pretty easily handle. however, exposing a lot of bare skin and a torso that had to power a really busy circulatory system to 15 degree temperatures for the forty-five minutes it took to run that far was a bit tricky.
ultimately, it was more of a mental challenge than a physical one (i.e. it's hard to keep up your morale when you're trying to run and shiver at the same time), and there were a few moments when i thought about turning around...but of course that was at the halfway point, which made things sort of hopeless either way, so i kept going.
note: i'm pretty well trained in winter survival, so i'm smart enough to not actually freeze to death, in case you were wondering that at this point.
on the home stretch, when i reentered the main part of campus by the football stadium, i passed a few large groups of students that were actually rooting for me, which was hilarious, considering the usual (and frequent) comments i get from students about being a "faggot" or a "faerie" or a "homo" (from men and women alike, oddly enough) when i'm running. the first group i passed (a group of girls) actually just shrieked in terror, one yelling "what's wrong with you?!" another yelling "how are you running?! it's so cold!" and another just yelling "fuuuuuuuck!" the next group was mixed-gender, and one of the girls yelled "DO IT!" at me in such a super-intense, drill-sergeant sort of way that i had no choice but to high-five her as i ran by, yelling "YEEEEAH!" in response.
it was a good time. oh, and i finished in 45:55, which is a super fast time for me, even when it's not bloody freezing.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
the return of the king
by "return" i mean "a return to this blog", and by "king" i mean "me".
i've decided to revamp this blog and start using it again, partly because i found an acceptably uncomplicated way to simplify my once oh-so-crowded template and partly because i just got a new android phone and so it just makes sense to migrate everything more firmly to google. plus, blogger integrates with google+ nicely now, so that's fun.
i've left links to ye olde tumblr (the shortest-lived of all my blogs to date!) and my old livejournal (which is still active for some reason) above, in case you discover that you prefer old me to current me (i don't, but you're entitled to your opinion, of course). otherwise, prepare for some more pontificating on meaningless topics, inane babbling about important topics, and probably a little hand-wringing and discussions of personal issues that will probably make you feel a little awkward for having read them on the internet. because that's what i do.
since i posted a bathory video to celebrate the end of my tumblr, i'll post a fila brazilla video to celebrate the beginning of this one. because that totally makes sense. to me, at least. and, as you'll quickly learn, that's all that really matters around here.
i've decided to revamp this blog and start using it again, partly because i found an acceptably uncomplicated way to simplify my once oh-so-crowded template and partly because i just got a new android phone and so it just makes sense to migrate everything more firmly to google. plus, blogger integrates with google+ nicely now, so that's fun.
i've left links to ye olde tumblr (the shortest-lived of all my blogs to date!) and my old livejournal (which is still active for some reason) above, in case you discover that you prefer old me to current me (i don't, but you're entitled to your opinion, of course). otherwise, prepare for some more pontificating on meaningless topics, inane babbling about important topics, and probably a little hand-wringing and discussions of personal issues that will probably make you feel a little awkward for having read them on the internet. because that's what i do.
since i posted a bathory video to celebrate the end of my tumblr, i'll post a fila brazilla video to celebrate the beginning of this one. because that totally makes sense. to me, at least. and, as you'll quickly learn, that's all that really matters around here.
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