Each part of my life is in some way therapy for each other part. I escape emotional interpersonal tumult with academic pursuit. I release academic pressure with books and videogames. Of work, I am simultaneously enthralled and terrified - waiting for someone to call me out for naively acting like I am capable of handling anything more basic than scanning books and (maybe) shelving them in some semblance of order. I worry that I'm not doing enough for the kids, for my Saturday storytime crew; I worry that I am failing them, because I don't have the innate serenity or motherliness of some of the professionals I see around me. Yet, these kids are the brightest point in my week. Watching them learn and grow gives me a sense of hope, for myself and for the world at large. I find myself wanting desperately to create a safe space for them and for their parents, to harbor that vital sense of community which I fear is largely lost, yet sorely needed, in this mercurial urban life.

Perhaps this sense of protectiveness is also self-protection as well. I am a selfish creature, and as such am subject to feelings of perpetual assault from all sides. In part, this is an illusion, an attempt to protect my constructed sense of integrity from what I perceive as a nonsensical world in which rationality is the lesser sibling of self-interest. I wish to protect the kids from the same strange forces which I imagine have assaulted me, and at the same time they are my redemption; I can foster in them the sense of simple, wordless joy which has sustained me in my own worst times. I hope it reaches them by osmosis, for any attempt to vocalize it will always turn to cheese, or sound creepy. We have all become acculturated to fear spoken affection, especially from "strangers". It's nobody's fault - too often the smile has proven to be a predator's disguise.

I digress. That's okay, too. It's how I cope, largely. That said, it's been getting bad. I have daily panic attacks. I am terrified of not being able to finish school. I am hurt by other peoples' neuroses, weary of trying to be the better me. I am worried about my own burgeoning sense of fury, ever-present of late and magnified by the slightest provocation. It's a function of my personal history that all negative emotions, hurt, sadness, frustration, all turn to anger, which I do largely try to keep to myself on the basis that expressing it will only cause more damage. Yet, still, selfish creature that I am (and we are all selfish creatures), I lash out, because if there's one thing anger is good at, it's convincing you that it has a right to be there.

Righteous indignation a trick the mind plays on itself, desperately seeking an excuse to act out unreasoning aggression. It is predicated on an assumed sense of entitlement and the presumption that retaliation is some sort of earned reward for having the moral high ground. Ironically, that mythical moral high ground is lost the moment the "righteous" party becomes consumed by their own pious wrath. I am not above this. I am not immune to it, and I'm not too good to get caught by it. All I can hope is to fight it off when I recongnize it, and apologize when I can. Sadly, that is never the easier route, and usually just fuels the other party's sense of justification. Obviously, if I admit to wrongdoing, then I am that much more valid a target for the fury of my "betters". After all, I admitted that I was in the wrong, right?

See how slippery it is? I admit defeat, recognizing my anger for what it is, but even that leads to more anger, because now I can feel put-upon by people who aren't as "enlightened" as I am. It's a chess match between hatreds, and there is no winner. Even worse, half the time we aren't even in a position to quit the game. However much I try, my rage will still be there.

I wish I could protect what I have come to think of (and suspect that many teachers, storytellers and daycare workers do as well) as "my" kids from this idiotic, infinitely frustrating, vital, lethal emotional game. It's a social disease, built into the firmware (so to speak). Instead, the best I can do is try to teach them (by osmosis) to balance it out with love and reason in equal measure, to try to forgive themselves, each other and the world that made them, and to create art from a piece of paper, a crayon and a handful of dried leaves.

Forgiveness means nothing if it wasn't difficult to do.  This is an essential hypocrisy of so many Christians; to worship a God of forgiveness while according that same courtesy to none.  To believe that you are saved, to convince yourself that you are a righteous soul in the presence of so many sinners, is to indulge in a profoundly selfish sensibility.  To enshrine such selfishness within such a selfless image goes beyond irony, into monstrosity.  To employ the facade of a loving God as an instrument of petty, personal distaste is far more sacrilegious than any sin of the flesh. 

I believe in forgiveness, I do.  I don't claim to be christian, but there are things I like about the underlying message, and that's one of them.  Yet, in this moment, I despise you.  Yes, you, whomsoever you are.  You, who voted to remove someone else's attempt to claim a little dignity for themselves.  You, so privileged you can't imagine how anyone else could be dissatisfied with your sanctimonious, vacuous demand that all people should be the same as you, and those who are not belong in some lesser status than you.  You, who let yourself be blinded, not even by faith, but by simple, stupid, petty spite.

You didn't vote out of faith, you liars.  You voted out of malice.  You voted because the thought of two boys, or two girls, doing things you find distasteful with each other, want to share something with each other that you, in your sickeningly trite, self-righteous superiority, can't "approve" of.  Well, who gives a fuck about your approval?  Why should you have such a say in the lives of others, personal or private?  There is no justifying this: you, in your vast capacity for pompous, self-serving fictions, have convinced yourself that it is your personal duty to oversee the rest of the world's adherence to your arbitrary morality. 

You voted for this.  You voted, not to "protect" anything, but to keep it away from others.  You voted because your religion enables you to hate with impunity and grace, forgiven by a higher power such that your conscience can't be held to account for anything you do.  You voted, which means you chose, and you acted.  You decided to take an active part in preventing the happiness of thousands and thousands of other people, and you lied, to yourselves and to everyone else.  Your pastor is not to blame.  Society is not to blame.  Your faith is no protection from the fact that you went behind that handy little curtain and cast your ballot in favor of hatred, supression and stigmatization. 

In this moment, I despise you.  I demonize you.  I think the least of you, and wish you ill.  I see the fundamental flaw in all the structures that support you: not for creating you, but for giving you a place to hide, to pretend you are made of higher materials, to cleanse yourself of responsibility for your own choices.  I hate you, and the system in which you flourish, and the fictions and fallacies which nourish your arrogance, selfishness and greed.  I hate you, terribly, deeply, with such resounding force that, should it be manifest, it would shake the sky and rattle the earth; I could tear it all down, laughing all the way, see you petulant little egos tremble before the vastness of my rage; the rage at all your stolen history and fictional goodness, the lies you've convinced yourself of because you just can't bring yourself to see anyone else as an equal.  I hate you because of your blindness, you choice to be blind, to pretend it's out of your hands.  I hate you because you are, despite every wish and dream and optimistic delusion of my own design, still the majority, and unlikely ever not to be.  I hate you because you make goodness the exception, kindness the less probably option.  I hate you because you are my disillusionment, because, in this moment, I discover that you are not, after all, capable of growth; because I discover that everything good and loving in this world is the exception, because people will convince themselves of anything if it means seeing the other person suffer and pretending it isn't entertaining.  

You are the flaw from which History aborts itself, deranged and screaming as it revels in its own evisceration and self-loathing.  You are the monster species, zombie plague, let loose upon itself and in a perpetual state of feeding, breeding and regression.  You are my despair, and, in the end, I hate you because you are hate, and there is no other response to such a massive response in favor of institutionalized inequality, born out of paranoia and bigotry.  Tomorrow, I will try to get on with my life, find my joy despite your every attempt to the contrary, but for now, in this moment, I want you to know (and know you never really will) how much I loathe you.


Fragment, to be finished later

No more, the fiction future to be sought,
with mechanism's murderous intent.
The murder is in killing the machines,
which into complex chromosomes have rent.

Taste sex in silicon, in interface,
in rough-hewn robot carnival delights;
in which you are the potter, wheel and clay
make love to process, spinning in the night.

What have been the lessons of this semester so far?

Identity, in all its forms and permutations, is a social construct rooted in physical manifestation.  Gender, race, class, sexuality, knowledge: these are determined by culture, inescapably so.  The individual chooses to accept or reject these identifying markers, but this is still participation, engagement.  Objective reality exists such that water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen, objects drifting in space follow a causal trajectory, and only .004% of the known/knowable universe is composed of the materials from which every object in this solar system is made.  History has a dual nature: the objective reality in which only events occur, and the subjective, narrative variety in which motivation becomes a factor.

Science fiction is, intentionally or not, laden with the social constructs under which the author operates; its popularity is a measure of social resonance, and therefore sci-fi is a viable avenue of social inquiry.  Cyborg imagery means what the observer thinks it means, because the audience, too, is laden with social constructs.  Context is construct; the motivation of the speaker (motivational or not) is subject to historical narrative-building, just as all history is subject to the motivation of the historian.  If history is a narrative, then all historians are, at best, writers of realistic fiction.  Anything more than that is objectivity, which, while true, is also meaningless.

Nevertheless - subjectivity is subject to objectivity.  Reality is that it is, and trumps intent.  If an objective truth is knowable and known, then any narrative which incontrovertibly contradicts objective truth is, by elimination, untrue.  A history in which no one dies is untrue.  A history in which water flows uphill is untrue.  History in which whole populations are invisible?  The difference between history and fiction is in structural integrity.  The steeper an incline, the more the force of descent will resemble gravity.  The same for narrative and reality.

Time, like history, is dualistic.  Objectively, it is the meaningless progression of immeasurable moments; a continuum relative to space and motion.  Subjectively, it is the tool of "tradition" and progress, social change and stability.  It is a narrative weapon; "this is how it always was", "this is how it was before".  It enables illusion, delusion and immersion.  Truth: Oscar Wilde's great grandson is only thirty years old this year.  Marriage today does not mean what marriage meant five hundred years ago.  Neither does sex, or religion.  There is no such thing as "always"; yet the word is used, consistently, to create or demolish narratives subject to the purposes of the narrator.  The goal of history is not to be more true, but to affect narrative truth, to alter constructs or destroy them.  

The individual is a process, reflected in and reflecting the social narrative.  The direction of that narrative is a choice, independent of objective reality or metaphysical possibility.  Since metaphysics are literally beyond physics, they are immeasurable, and therefore largely irrelevant.  Whether there is a God beyond, above or through the cosmos, or three gods, or ten, Heaven, Hell, Shangrila or nothing at all, the truth of this specific reality is the decision of physically manifested beings within this reality.  That is to say, while decisions may be informed by an individual's belief about what may or may not exist outside of physicality, the actions taken, or not, are the product of a choice, made by an individual incorporated into this objective history, and the consequences are bound in physics and construct.  

Conclusion?  Hybridization.  Objectivity holds, while subjectivity gains relevance.  The molecule matters, and the individual matters, and history is the story we choose to tell ourselves.  The narrative of social history is the measure of the society that creates it, and, like science fiction, reflects upon the constructs from which it derives.

Today was beautiful, taxing and revelatory. Here's a rundown:

8:00 - Wake up, leave for school.

9:30 - English; we talk about the last few chapters of Dream Boy, by Jim Grimsley. The discussion includes in-depth analysis of the motivation behind the main character's rape and murder at the hands of a boy who may or may not be in crisis because of his love for the character's lover; the nature of the damage caused by child-molestation in the home, the meaning of death and rebirth in the narrative. Before leaving class (we're all a little teary-eyed), I speak with my group-mates about getting together tomorrow to rehearse the play I've written for us to perform Thursday as a group project about the Labouchere Amendment and the Trial of Oscar Wilde.

11:00 - Anthropology; we watch a video about the lack of genetic evidence to support a biological argument for race. It is pointed out that there is at least as much genetic variation between members of any specified "race" as there is between members of different races. Hence, race is a social construct, no less real for all the lack of supporting evidence (much like religion, it is construct maintained by mistrust of objective reality). I question my lack of faith, come to accept it, am simultaneously heartened and saddened by the nonsense, foolishness and paranoia which laces human history like a hardy cancer.

12:00 to 2:00 - Lunch and study; I pick up a roast beef sammich, a bottle of soda and a bag of chips, and settle in to an in-depth reading of Donna Haraway's "Manifesto for Cyborgs" (1985), in which she uses cyborg imagery as a rallying point for reversing the "taxonomies of feminism" (15) which are the result of the left breaking down into seemingly disparate parts in the heart of Reagan-era Cold War politics. She declares that cyborg feminism is the appropriation of the illegitimate child of partriarchal warmongering for the express purpose of transgression; she owns it as her "ironic faith, [her] blasphemy" (7).

2:00 - physics discussion; we learn about the properties of gasses under pressure, and the life of Pascal. We also discuss the measurement of the final velocity of a wheel-within-a-wheel rolling down a plane on an indeterminate angle from a given height.

2:50 to 3:30 - I read the introduction to Anne Balsamo's book Technologies of the Gendered Body, which is a collection of her writings analyzing various complexities and implications of gender-specific applications of technology in and out of science fiction and reality.

3:30 - physics; we talk about the successive scientists who contributed to the development of hydrostatics and hydrodynamics. We talk about the units of measurement and applications of force, Avogadro's number, and the insurmountable complexities that result from trying to apply Newtonian mechanics to every molecule in a given quantity of gas (five points of relative rotation over three spatial dimensions). It is strange and fascinating to learn about this from this particular professor, who uses language differently enough to give fresh perspective to familiar concepts - I contemplate the nature of scientific pursuit in the context of language.

5:00 - dinner; salad, more reading, this time "Ghost in the Shell", because everyone needs to have fun sometimes.

6:00 to 9:30 - homework; two pages describing and explaining my chosen research question for the cyborg paper. I have to describe my use of primary vs. secondary sources, how I chose my topical and chronological parameters, how my paper fits into the existing historiography of my chosen subject. I spend an hour and a half panicking because I think I don't know what I'm doing, and worry that someone will eventually figure out that this is the case. I spend the other two hours writing a halfway decent analysis of a question, the creation of which felt ridiculously like birth. I contemplate postmodernism, cyberpunk, privilege and class consciousness.

I finish my day writing this ersatz retroactive schedule. I worry about the dozens of social engagements I've probably forgotten while I sit here blissfully burying myself in academic pursuits, which are for me the height of personal pleasure, even when I am panicking over them. I think of the many, many people I keep intending to call, but never get around to doing so. I wish I could impart to them the depth of my gratitude for their existence, my warring impulses; to be social, to be a proper student, to be an adult, to wander off.

Now I will go home, and sleep, and in the morning I'll come back to campus, blissed out because I have the day off of work tomorrow, which allows me more extra time to do school things. I am happy and sad, and wish I could write sufficiently to convey the perpetual current of congruent thoughts and feelings in which I drift, every day.

Love to everyone who reads this.

PS: If my life used to be a Kevin Smith movie, it has now happily evolved into a play by Tom Stoppard.

She's too hilarious not to be my new lj icon.





Watch the ridiculousness here.

Recently found the transcript for one of Bill Maher's New Rules:

"New Rule: California Hatin'", by Bill Maher

Lay off California. The rest of America loves to laugh at crazy California, but let's remember this: California has a lot of people. And the reason it does is that lots of people from other states end up saing, "Fuck this, I'm outta here," and then they come here, where people ask them, "Don't you miss the winters?" No, strangely enough, I don't, just like I don't miss a car door slamming on my hand.

Make fun of California, but if it weren't for California, East Coast Rappers would have to shoot musicians from Branson. If it weren't for California, there'd be almost no TV, and you'd have to go home at night and actually talk to your family.

The rest of America feels about California the way the rest of the world feels about America. They hate us because we do what we want to do. Just the way people think Americans are too blessed and too free, and it makes them nuts in the dreary hovels of Kabul and Tikrit and Lubbock, Texas. They pray to their threadbare gods that we'll get what we deserve, but it won't happen because we'll always keep you guessing.

We elected Ronald Reagan and Jerry Brown. We're home to Disney and also Hustler. The Partridge Family and the Manson Family. We can drink a Mudslide and a Sex on the Beach during an actual mudslide while having sex on the beach. Our farms feed the world and Calista Flockhart lives here.

We have bears and great white sharks and even our washed-up actors are allowed to kill one blonde chick. We invented surfing and cyberporn and LSD and the boob job. And if we didn't, we would have.

We have oranges. Free oranges. Everywhere. What grows on the trees in Scranton?

We have a real hockey team named after a hockey team in a movie. We give our illegal aliens driver's licenses. We have a governor who digs group sex.

Would anywhere else in America trade places with L.A. or San Franciso in a piss-soaked New York minute? You bet they would, because I don't recall anyone writing a song called "I Wish They All Could Be Rhode Island Girls."

Know what? I've been guilty of hating on California myself, and usually for exactly the same reasons as everyone else hates California - it's the coast Americans go to when they're trying to escape America without actually leaving. It's also a geographical pin-up model; we fantasize about her while trying to convince ourselves she's got AIDS and a bad personality. It's a heady mix of sour grapes and punch-drunk love. I'm probably going to end up in California some day, with Topher, and we're probably going to do all right there, because (believe it or not) we work well together, and we have just that right mixture of pretensions and ambition, escapism and self-interest.

Besides, where the hell else do you go after living in the Nation's Capital? New York City? Too bitchy, too self-destructive and too much the all-consuming monster. Southern California may euthanize people, but New York swallows them whole. The South is a big old "no" for me, Texas is laughable, New England might be nice - when I'm ready to retire. The Midwest is a bit too flat, a bit too red, and a bit too full of nothing I could ever want. The North Pacific coast is a bit gray. What's left?

Anyway, there it is. I'm sorry, California; and, though I know we'll probably have our disagreements over the specifics in the future, I have made my peace with you.

Now, quit fucking around and legalize gay marriage already!

Me: I'm very hungry.

Topher: We can pick something up at the food court.

Me: Yes, otherwise I'm going to start gnawing on your arms.

Topher: Why is it always my arms? When you're eating chicken, don't most people start with the legs?

Me: In Buffalo, we always start with the wings...

This derived from a conversation with a friend, Gus, over ze Yahoo chat. I rework it here because I think it's a pretty good summation of much of my personal philosophies and the logical/emotional framework from which I derive most of my day-to-day interactions, romantic or otherwise...

Nick: I have a personal motto, actually: I say it to Topher all the time: "Never trust in the inherent rationality of other human beings."

Gus: interesting

Nick: Do I sound paranoid yet?

Gus: No, you're just a person who's been hurt, and it makes sense to not trust anyone. Ze hedgehog's dilemma...

Nick: It's not about me; me being hurt individually has not much to do with overall trends.

Gus: but it does have a lot to do with how you view those trends. It's all a game of perceptions

Nick: Not necessarily. I'll admit my father has a lot to do with it; not because I was hurt, but because he liked to point out the general viciousness of human history and predict its ultimate demise on that basis (and religion, of course)... It's pattern recognition; the belief that all things are temporary, including civilizations, species and solar systems.

Gus: Right, and the people who you trusted not to hurt you who did anyways? Those just have nothing to do with it...

Nick: Growth emerges, true, but it comes out of destruction, chaos, murder and strife. You should understand something about me; I don't think I'm all that important in the grand scheme of things. No individual is.

Gus: You are though! We all are: we all are masters of our own destiny.

Nick: I argued this with Topher, once, too. He also thinks it's a self-esteem thing.It's not. We are masters of very little - a tiny personal fiefdom which we create around ourselves to avoid having to face the infinite immensity of the universe around us.

Gus: ...But human experience is a collection of these fiefdoms, and for all intents and purposes, the universe is us until we find out otherwise.

Nick: Human experience is the collection of static around a dust mote, floating in an infinite dust cloud...

Gus: Bah! That's just fatalism

Nick: Actually, it's quite freeing. I believe that my choices are the only thing I have, so I cherish them (even the wrong ones).

Gus: they are! They're everything! Why deminish them?

Nick: To me, they are, but I hold no illusions about my importance compared to the sum total of all other things. It's about perspective, right? But this is all a side-track - What I'm trying to say is, I don't think my worldview needs to stem from things that happened to me.

Bad things happened - tough. Lots of worse things happen to lots of better people. Basically, I don't like to think I'm petty enough to project my own little horrors onto the world at large, and judge history by them. If I seem pessimistic about human nature, it stems from human history, from which I also derive my optimism.

I have the choice, in any moment, to try my hardest to transcend ingrained behavior patterns. So do you - and both of us have at some point or other.

Gus: Yes, and that shows just how important our choices are, because we can make that choice.

Nick: Right. So in that, we can agree that your individual choices are important to you -

Gus: and important in general!

Nick: - However, there are billions of people whose choices have nothing to do with you, and over which you inevitably have no control...

Gus: Right...

Nick: ...Hence, your worldview should not derive from your experiences, but from objective analysis and a hearty dose of skepticism; at least, that's my philosophy.

Gus: ...But if we all sit still for predestination, then nothing would ever happen.

Nick: Predestination is as much a scientific quandary as a spiritual one.

Gus: But that's what makes life fun and exciting!

Nick: Fun and exciting, yes, but also incredibly dangerous. I'm not talking "I may get killed" dangerous; I'm talking "civilizations crumble beneath our feet" dangerous: not something any single person is capable of actively worrying about (it's too immense), but not outside the realm of distinct possibilities.

Gus: I can make guesses about their behavior based on their past, sure, but see, I always err on the side of human behavior being unpredictable. I'm not other people

Nick: We're having two different conversations now.

Gus: Then merge them together.

Nick: You're trying to assert that I am the product of my own life, which is true.

Gus: Yes, and that we are all products of our own lives. Otherwise ... there's no responsibility for anything or anyone.

Nick: Responsibility, as such, is fairly arbitrary. I'm trying to assert that history and human patterns exist recognizably, and can be recognized without relying on individual experiences.

Gus: But my point is that's all we have! History is a collection of individual experiences.

Nick: We choose our own moral and ethical codes in each moment, and act accordingly (or not).

Gus: But we still choose.

Nick: Yet history transcends the individual.

Gus: History is a collection of individuals, and of other individual's view of those individuals...

Nick: It's iterative; the individual is affected by history as much as the reverse is true. Whole civilizations act as an organism with little relative consent or recognition between itself and its component parts, just as you are unlikely to ask the cells in your pinkie toe what they think before you take a step.

Gus: Not anymore! Times have changed my friend; we're all connected.

Nick: We're connected, but minuscule.

Gus: see, you're retreating to that.

Nick: How so?

Gus: Our size makes no difference.

Nick: I don't follow.

Gus: We are, relatively speaking, minuscule, but we do not perceive ourselves that way...

Nick: It doesn't matter how we perceive ourselves at this level; I am not apathetic to the individual, but I recognize the vast difference between the person and the society of which the person is a part. Thus, my view of my own philosophical unimportance doesn't stem from low self esteem - it comes from macro-perspective.

Gus: What is society, though, but a collection of individuals?

...

Nick: I care about me, I do.

Gus: I'm not saying you hate yourself.

Nick: No, but you seem to think me having been hurt has something to do with my social perspective. To me this implies pessimism derived from low self-esteem. I am just trying to point out the difference.

Gus: I just think that it's hard to separate your experience from your views, that's all.

Nick: I suppose... If anything, I will say that my personal experiences are probably what cause me to isolate myself from my world-view as much as possible.

Gus: But no one can, because all we have is our experiences.

Nick: I disagree. We also have reason, which I truly believe transcends experience; good neoplatonist that I am.

Gus: But we can only access reason through our experiences.

Nick: Do you define the act of abstract study as personal experience?

Gus: Yes!

Nick: Then, by that definition, a study of humanity can't transcend the fact of learning about it.

Gus: Right.

Nick: However, I still maintain that study can transcend the intrinsically "personal" emotional experiences of love, hate, etc. That said, I do still believe that it is at the very least theoretically possible for reason to transcend experience, say, in a mathematical sense.

Gus: We can't escape the fact that all we have is our experiences; it's that brain in the jar. The matrix conundrum...

Nick: I never bought the Matrix as a concept. It relies on man's obliviousness and irrevocably tight personal emotional orbit. However, I suppose the whole point of the movies was that the Matrix couldn't ever work, because there will always, inevitably be those who look beyond themselves and see the inconsistencies.

Gus: I'd say it revolves around that we only have our flawed experiences to rely on. For example, there is no such thing as a straight line in nature, and yellow is a shared hallucination.

Nick: Sure there is, and yellow is not so abstract as all that...

Gus: Not in 3d space; Yellow does not exist except that we perceive a spectrum of light as yellow.

Nick: yellow is simply a product of light and biology; we all see it as yellow because it is the movement of a light wave/particle at a specific frequency, which our eyes (by nature of evolution) translate in a demonstrably similar way. The frequency is measurable, and so is the eye that absorbs it, and the connection between the eye and the brain that interprets it.

Gus: But we measure it - Heisenberg...

Nick: - Over-used, and never correctly. The reason we can't ever measure both the position and velocity of an electron is that the act of observing it the way we observe it causes it to shift...

Gus: Yes...

Nick: ...and since light is both a particle and a wave, its entire existence theoretically changes, not in some mystical sense of the word. More like pushing a slinky to the side with a pair of binoculars.


End of Part I...

I done created a new blog with the help of a lovely co-worker from another branch of the library. The blog is called Spooky Books for Strange Children; pretty self-explanatory title, I like to think.

School begins again in two weeks, and I never did get around to writing a catch-up post. Things have been no less hectic/busy/strange, and then a lot of times I'm just not feeling up to writing a lengthy bit of writing.

So much has gone on, and there's simply no way to recount all of it.

Topher and I got our domestic partnership certificate in the mail yesterday. Next step is to get him on my insurance through work. He's now unemployed, though he's been working diligently to rectify that. With the nation stuck in a (thus far) bloodless civil conflict over the economy and health-care, everyone is living with a tight wallet these days; we've done well for ourselves, but only by acting as a family-unit in terms of food, bills and whatnot.

This fall I'm taking four classes: Introductory Anthropology, Physics, GLBT Literature and Gender and Science, Technology and Society (a historical research seminar). Heavy on the reading; the science classes will be a cakewalk. In addition to this, I'll be of course writing book reviews for the blog, and probably will find some other things to fill what I laughingly refer to as my 'spare time'.

For now, I'm reading The Engineer Trilogy, by K.J. Parker. Amazing writing, great characters and a penchant for witty dialogue and the sort of disconcerted amazement and wry humor you don't get to see much in fantasy novels. I hesitate to call this fantasy, as there is no magic and there are no Gods; however, the world in which the story takes place is entirely fictional and for the most part pre-industrial (with one glaring exception, which is well accounted for and part of the plot). What I truly like about it is that it's as much a story of corporatization and regulation as it is a fantasy love-epic.

Read it.

More at some later day.

I haven't been posting here lately, because quite frankly I have too much to say, too much to turn over in my head for the time I actually have to write it. In lieu of that, I've been posting links to facebook and twitter to articles which have caught my attention, mostly to do with how utterly paranoid Americans are.

I could swear I grew up here, but I feel so outside of the culture. I can't connect, on any level, with people whose values are so thoroughly grounded in paranoia and terror that they'd rather let millions of people die starving in the street than consider taking care of their own. It's not even selfishness or greed, at this point - that would require some kind of self-interest or planning. No, what I'm talking about are people so worried that the other guy is going to get one over on them, they'll let themselves fall before helping someone else up.

Republicans are so afraid of "Socialism", and most of them don't even really understand what that means. How horrible, to think that everyone has their most basic needs taken care of, so that we can actually get on with being a great country instead of trying to convince ourselves we already are. I heard a woman on television actually arguing that schools shouldn't provide lunches because this promotes laziness, and "hunger can be a positive motivator". I don't think she even hears herself talk anymore. I don't think most people really hear themselves talk anymore.

The United States of America is a third world country, or fast on its way to becoming one. When California's solution to a massive economic crisis is to reduce social services, and Republicans can seriously argue that providing health care for the poor will ruin America, and people are so caught up in racism, sexism and homophobia that they'll abandon their own value systems and commit violence on account of it, then Barack Obama is correct in his (largely overlooked) assessment that this nation has "lost its moral compass".

I watched "Underworld III" last night. I know that pointing out the flaws, logical fallacies and continuity errors in these movies is a bit like wrestling a two-year-old. However, since I've been told that I shouldn't be so critical of the Transformers movies because "they're summer blockbusters; they're supposed to be shallow fun", I feel it's within my rights to extend that argument - I derive basic, visceral entertainment from ripping bad movies apart. If it's too easy, well, that's really what these films and their abominable sequels are for, isn't it: shallow fun? This is my cheap entertainment. So let me just grab the nearest lucha mask and we'll get to it.

First, a general complaint: Why, in a movie about vampires and werewolves, do we see no vampires ever actually feeding on human beings? What is it that makes them vampires, exactly? Unlike Twilight, these vampires at least have the decency to be allergic to sunlight, but are otherwise just as badly conceived as their Meyersesque counterparts. They don't ever seem to get hungry; when we do see Victor taking a drink, it's out of a glass. Granted, there are human prisoners, but they are obviously not being fed on, since we see them being lined up and forcibly transformed into "Lycans" - a term which, by the way, sticks in my fucking craw for the pretentious white-wolf/otherkin nonsense it is. As I recall, Michael shows that he can't eat cooked food in the second movie, indicating that he can only eat a fresh kill (which we don't really get to see him do). In the newest installation, you have two rather gigantic populations of creatures who are known to feast on blood or fresh prey, respectively, yet there doesn't appear to be human or animal stock on hand capable of supporting either.

I know that in many stories we don't bother showing the characters eating or shitting without good reason, but when your whole premise is based on a war between predators and parasites, it strikes me as odd to completely ignore the species most inclined to be their host/prey. In the third movie, the only time Victor interacts directly with a non-slave human, he throws him into a wall. He's trying to instill fear in the other humans: why not show him drinking one? Wouldn't it be more effective than just being able to snap their necks? The werewolves are even sillier - they are supposed to be brutal, violent and vaguely rapacious, but they always appear to be holding back on the humans.

My bigger problem with the third movie is the continuity and plot. "Underworld III" had a really difficult task in the first place: retell a story we'd already learned about in the first two movies, and tweak it enough to keep it interesting as a standalone story. Not easy, I admit. The trick is in the delivery, which struck me as alternately absurd and underdeveloped. The characters are supposed to be immortal plotters and schemers.

The only one who comes close is the librarian character, Tannis. We've met him before, in the second movie. Best characterization in both movies, in my opinion. He's the only one with a sense of perspective, but even he's simpleminded, considering that he's supposed to be many centuries old and an immortal schemer. Of course, almost every vampire story I've ever read or seen comes into this problem. The character may be thousands of years old, but is inevitably limited to the writer's imaginative capacity. That said, the writers of these movies have a limited capacity indeed.

Down to the most basic - the final battle, the confrontation between Victor and Lucien. I felt cheated. We knew from the beginning who would survive, who wouldn't, and how. Again, it's the delivery that counts. These two have been psyching up for a battle from the beginning - their story is Shakespearean tragedy, their rivalry epic. Each blames the other for the death of woman (who, btw, was also less impressive than she ought to have been, though still more interesting than either of the men). The plot was there. The payoff wasn't.

The rivals' fight was short and limp-wristed, and was brought to a conclusion by simultaneously invoking a cliche and a continuity error. Lucien realizes that the ceiling is really poorly kept, so he pulls holes in the ceiling, exposing Victor to daylight... except that the battle was taking place in the middle of the night. Naturally, there's an underground river into which Victor can fall, healing himself despite taking the sort of wounds which have been consistently killing his vampiric brethren throughout the film, and thus escape into his steampunkmagicaltwirlylock coffin. Any number of loose ends, but that's fine. We know how most of the surviving characters die, though, and since there really weren't any introduced that we hadn't already met future versions of, the viewer is left to wonder - so what?

A good prequel ought to leave us with some new revelatory information, something which puts a new twist on the story and tests the assumptions established in its counterparts, without violating logic or continuity. "Underworld III" accomplishes none of this. The story is told exactly as it was in the earlier films, with almost nothing fleshed out except to point out the involvement of a couple of characters that we already know are going to die - except now their deaths seem that much more disappointing, since none of them actually accomplishes anything they set out to do. None of the characters learns anything, nothing is introduced that could make the later movies more interesting, and the setting is just as lackluster in its "heyday" as it appears to be later on. Are vampires really just that bad at simple housekeeping?

It's a point of bitter irony for me that, since I love vampire stories so much, I'm increasingly dissatisfied with them. Genre storytelling is the easiest and hardest to accomplish - the author is given a number of elements to work with and a cultural history kept alive by rabid fans who are as unforgiving as we are obsessed. The trick is in the telling, in the spin and the perspective. It is still possible to tell a good vampire story (see "Let the Right One In" for a very recent example), but this requires some faith in the material and the ability to make it more interesting to the audience. Naturally, I'm now feeling compelled to tell my own vampire story, just to prove to myself that I can. Heaven deliver us from shoddy work.

Another song which strikes chords whenever I listen to it.

Forty Six and Two
lyrics by Tool

My shadows
Shedding skin and
Ive been picking
Scabs again.
Im down
Digging through
My old muscles
Looking for a clue.

Ive been crawling on my belly
Clearing out what couldve been.
Ive been wallowing in my own confused
And insecure delusions
For a piece to cross me over
Or a word to guide me in.
I wanna feel the changes coming down.
I wanna know what Ive been hiding in

My shadow.
Change is coming through my shadow.
My shadows shedding skin
Ive been picking
My scabs again.

Ive been crawling on my belly
Clearing out what couldve been.
Ive been wallowing in my own chaotic
And insecure delusions.

I wanna feel the change consume me,
Feel the outside turning in.
I wanna feel the metamorphosis and
Cleansing Ive endured within

My shadow
Change is coming.
Now is my time.
Listen to my muscle memory.
Contemplate what Ive been clinging to.
Forty-six and two ahead of me.

I choose to live and to
Grow, take and give and to
Move, learn and love and to
Cry, kill and die and to
Be paranoid and to
Lie, hate and fear and to
Do what it takes to move through.
I choose to live and to
Lie, kill and give and to
Die, learn and love and to
Do what it takes to step through.

See my shadow changing,
Stretching up and over me.
Soften this old armor.
Hoping I can clear the way
By stepping through my shadow,
Coming out the other side.
Step into the shadow.
Forty six and two are just ahead of me.

The last couple of weeks have been an incredible, heaping cluster-fuck punctuated by moments of benevolent revelation and quiet absolution. Grandma Billie is still in hospital, and will likely be there for at least a couple of weeks. My uncle Buddy has had hospital issues as well, though the nature of his visit is less definitive. His son, Eric, also in the hospital after sneaking out of the house at 2am, only to get beating up and pistol-whipped in what is probably a gang-related incident. En route to Buffalo last Thursday, JD and Topher hit a deer at about 2:30am, just thirty miles south of their destination.



Both of them were miraculously unhurt, but JD's truck was more-or-less totaled, depending on who you ask and in what context. Sharon ended up driving us back down to DC, with my stuff once more loaded into her van.

My great grandmother seems locked in a ever-deepening spiral of poor health, and the last thing I heard her say (though she didn't know I was in the room) was that she wanted to be done with it. She was saying this to my step-mother, whose immediate was to try convincing her this wasn't true. I'm not so sure. Grandma mentioned wanting to "get in" when she was morphine-delusional, and though she told us she was talking about Las Vegas at the time, I was left with the profound impression that wasn't what she was talking about at all. For her, Las Vegas has always been a sort of philosophical dream-place; a fond personal heaven of nostalgia to which she returns when she needs to be reminded of better times and lives.

That last time I got to see her, I got to introduce her to Topher. She was lucid, then, and told me she liked him and approved of him, and gave us her blessing; she said she'd love me always, and then told me not to come back. It was after Topher and I left the room and Sharon went back in to say hello that I pulled an Orpheus and went back anyway, thus hearing her confirm what I already suspected. She isn't suicidal, exactly, but she's about as prepared for death as she'll ever be. I suppose that's about as much as anyone could ask for at that stage.

She is still alive, and not even verifiably dying, but I find myself reviewing my memories of her: a bundle of momentary impressions and longstanding themes, repeated phrases and conversations that lasted far into an infinite number of summer nights when I would visit for a month or so. I remember the walks we used to take when I was very little, staring starry-eyed at the city lights and their far counterparts in the sky; amazing, how lush the clouds looked, pregnant with reflected, violet luminescence. Details come back to me, chased in gold and caramel like the sofa she always kept clean by draping it with a sheet, mirrors lining every wall to reflect the mellow light of her apartment, vines climbing lazily up macrame planters amidst a modest collection of impressionist paintings.

There's a replica relief of Pan with two nymphs, which has been hanging on her wall as long as I've been alive. She got it in Vegas (a little piece of Heaven?), and I've been in love with it for years. For months, she's been telling me to take it with me when I get to Buffalo. While there, I did manage (despite a number of obstacles) to get all of my belongings - but even with her permission, I felt like a thief taking that statue when she wasn't there. It was all so unceremonious and last-minute. I'm sure the feeling will pass over time, unless it doesn't.

Father's Day (Satherhood?) was nice enough, though I keep seeing more and more evidence that the family is in a state of decline and fragmentation. Forgiveness is in short supply, by and large; some branches of the tree seem to be in the process of falling off, some more or less lamentably than others. Grandma thinks everyone's being obtuse and suicidally stubborn (and who would know better?). Last time I spoke with her on the phone, before the second surgery and the morphine, she told me she wished they'd all sit down together and straighten things out. I doubt that will happen, but it's a worthwhile dream.



Buffalo is less and less home to me, more and more a trip into memories bitter and sweet in equal measure. Family is there, and so are a few friends. I don't hate the place like I used to, but there's also little to no attachment. Most of the places I had any interest in before are now closed. Stimulants and the Continental come to mind. Every school I went to before high school has closed, Hutch Tech has been renovated from the inside, and so looks unfamiliar even from the street. Allentown, while nice, was never really one of my haunts. In fact, it occurred to me that I don't really have any "old haunts" left there, except maybe Spot Coffee and Prima Pizza, and that little stretch of Main Street we more or less laughingly refer to as the "Theater District" - it's nice, but two square blocks does not a district make.

I am faced with the sudden realization of my own adulthood. Part of me is relieved; some of me is afraid. Less than I would have expected. The onslaught of inevitability, imagined futures and memories given their rightful place and perspective, all brought on by my grandmother's illness, has wrought deep and necessary changes in me. Grandma is still alive, but I already feel unburdened in the aftermath of my merely-imagined mourning. What I'm feeling isn't stress, it's growth; the shedding of skins, fears and illusions. If she lives to be a hale hundred years old, I'll still have changed today.

It turns out Twitter has become a gateway drug. Seemed innocent enough at first; a little dip in my own private datastream; realtime news, micro-blogging, and tiny tidbits of information to read or skip over at my convenience. All of it bite-sized and easily processed.

At the same time, I've been blogging semi-regularly (as you may have noticed) over at the Watha T. Daniel library page, which has made me passing familiar with Blogger. Then there was the facebook group, which is turning into a blog, which started me on GoodReads. Between my new exposure to Blogger, Twitter, GoodReads and Facebook, Google Earth, Google Images, etc., I suppose it was inevitable that I would end up with a Gmail account (facsimilesmiles@gmail.com), and subsequently a Google Reader account. Today I discovered Gizmodo, Digg and a handful of interesting blogs. Tomorrow I will probably drown in a sea of information.

To make my life easier, I'm abandoning Yahoo (been planning that one for a long time anyway) in favor of Google; and I'm eliminating all extraneous feeds from my lj f-list, since all of those feeds are available in an easier format on GoogleReader. My livejournal is pretty much going to become strictly an outlet for personal ranting and musings (should I ever again have time to vent them) and a venue to keep track of friends who still use this site.

More another time,
~N~

Today is the first in our Paul Robeson film series, every Sunday in June. Today, we'll be playing his earliest extant movie, "Body and Soul", a silent film in which the actor played a double role as a corrupt minister and an unassuming inventor, each vying for the affection of the same woman. Very controversial for its scandalous depiction of the black church (everything Robeson did was controversial for some reason or other).

If you're in the area, come to the Watha T. library in Shaw at 3pm. It's at 945 Rhode Island Ave. NW, next to the skate park and across the street from Seaton Elementary.

Couple of comments and a link to Bruce Sterling's article "18 Challenges to Contemporary Literature" up over at the WTD blog. The original article can be found here. It's quite interesting for a number of reasons.

Also? I'm creating a new Blogger and GoodReads account for Spooky Books/Strange Children. Will update as it happens (and maybe eventually find time to wax philosophical about life, the universe and everything).

---

On another note: Why do they keep making Sun Shang Xiang more and more dainty? Wasn't she supposed to be some sort of bad-ass warrior woman? (Yeah, we just got DW6 - it rocks but for certain details. The horses are much better; far more maneuverable, and it's nice that you can kill them if they start to crowd you. I'm not thrilled with the new weapons system, though, and the character advancement is reminiscent of FFX. Haven't gotten around to unlocking much, but overall I'm pleased.

/geekery

I feel vaguely guilty about linking here to all the stuff I'm doing not-here, but since there's never any time to post journal entries because of the other stuff I'm doing, I suppose it makes sense that's what I'd post here.

All this by way of prefacing my next shameless plug; I've created a new group on Facebook, for those of you as have accounts there, called Spooky Books for Strange Children. It's basically a niche interest group for those with an interest in compiling a list of childrens' books for parents and library-people who want to share their love of gothic horror, science fiction, fantasy and speculative fiction. Non-parent, non-librarian types are more than welcome to join, just for the hell of it.

If the link doesn't work, let me know and I'll see if I can't fix it.

Love to everyone,
~N~

I've put together a Paul Robeson film series here at the library, Sundays in June, starting at 2pm. We'll be showing "Body and Soul", "Proud Valley", "Emperor Jones" and "Jericho"; all tremendous movies starring one of America's unsung heroes of the civil rights and labor movements.

Yes, he sang "Old Man River", but no, we're not going to show that one. As a sop, here it is:



Enjoy!

My God, I'm sad I missed that decade. O.o

I just kicked my last paper's ass! Sooooooooooo done with that shit, and ready for a Summer of debauchery and gardening. Exams will purify my soul with the fire of ejimacation. Then shall I conquer the brambles of my heart....