Why do I never sleep the night before I travel?

Going home for three weeks. Well, Pittsburgh and home. I'll probably post from home, but that's the sitch. Later, folks.

International conspiracy / Making fun of college fashion.

You know how you work on a paper for a really long time and become committed to your topic even though after a certain point you realize you really should have written on something else? I now see that if I wanted to write about Colombia, I really should have focused on this:





PABLO ESCOBAR AND DANE COOK ARE THE SAME PERSON. That's right; the U.S. military didn't kill him. He hid out for ten years and then became a comedic pop culture icon in the United States. Bold move, Pablo, but I'm onto you.



Also, I posted this on Facebook already but couldn't resist also doing so here.


Does this not remind you of all the undergraduates in Ugg boots, stretch pants, and short puffy coats with huge hoods? Because it does me.

Graaaaaading.
<3.

Procrastination and photos of my apartment--for those who haven't been here.

What do blogging, baking, and laundry have in common? First, they are great ways to procrastinate. Also, I am doing all three of them right now.

Okay, Kevin made the pie. And he will be very upset if I do not give him his due credit. But I am watching it in the oven, so now going into the kitchen every five minutes is my responsibility. Oh no! I have to abandon my shitty project to tend to a pie! You can't ignore the dinging of the timer. It's very important. So is laundry. That constitues an every-35-minutes interruption. And then there's the blog, the final nail in productivity's coffin.

I hate this project. I hate this class. If I worked for the next two hours without stopping I would be done. But so strong is my aversion to working on it that I will likely make only sporadic progress spaced out over the next six hours, thus accomplishing the feat of letting this one minor thing ruin my day. That's how I roll.

Plus, I have to do laundry. And bake. And blog. Have to.

I finished my first term paper. It was called, "Multitemporality, Hybridity and Violence: Cinematic Identity in a Simultaneous Colombia." It was about how Colombian film both expresses the violence of its national identity and the anxieties of Latin America as a whole, which is both premodern and postmodern simultaneously. And how this hybrid identity tells us it is neither useful to talk about Latin America as a whole unit nor about nation-states as independent from regional influences. Yeah. It was kinda cool. I liked doing it.

And yes, I used the mandatory "_____, ______, and _______: Nonsensical Juxtaposition" titling format. That's Eric's joke, by the way. Look at me go, giving credit to other people. I felt I had to use this format for my first term paper. It's a rite of passage. Also, I thought up my title 2 minutes before printing and handing in the paper.

I should do another 15 minutes of work on my project. Then I will need a break, so I will come back and post the apartment pictures I keep promising. Ready, go.

And I'm back. I think three paragraphs, another load of laundry, and taking the pie out justifies my continuing the blog. Right. So where was I? Oh, right, pictures of my apartment. Here you go:


This is our badass living room. Note the badass hardwood floors and the badass fireplace and the badass built-in bookshelves. (You can't really see those, but they're on either side of the fireplace.)

This is another view of our badass living room. Note the badass bay windows and the badass curtains.

Yet another view of our living room. That glass door in the back leads to the study and the sun room.

This is our badass sun room. It has those windows on three sides, but I couldn't get them to fit in the picture. It's also got a lot of plants. We've only killed about half of them. Check out the sweet hanging pot that makes fuzzy pink caterpillars. It's called a chenille plant. It's badass.

This is our main hallway. To the right is our living room, study, and sun room. The doors on the left lead to our bedroom, library, and kitchen. I'm standing in the bathroom to take the picture. Kevin likes to slide down this hallway in his sock-feet, a la Risky Busines.

This is our bedroom. It's kind of plain. But all we do in there is sleep. I will decorate it next semester.

This is our "library." We had so many extra rooms we didn't know what to do with them, and this one became the miscellaneous room. It's not really the library. Most of our books are in the living room. But it has a sofa and a bookcase, our music, my photography supplies, and my clothes. I use the closets in here, and Kevin uses the ones in our bedroom.

This is our kitchen. It's my least favorite room. It doesn't match the rest of our apartment. It's like someone had an extra bucket of white paint and nowhere to use it. But it is spacious. And we're going to get a bird feeder for the window.

The bathroom. Claw-foot tub. Weird.

The study. Ahahaha, it is always this messy.

The end. Hope you enjoyed.

24 pages down; 6 to go.

Oh my god, I am so close to being done with my term paper. This is the part I hate. I have systematically worked around all the technicalities like citing, preferring instead to let my brilliance stream forth uninterrupted, pausing only to insert things like (CITE THIS LATER) and (WHERE THE HELL DID I READ THIS). Now I have to go back and fill all that shit in, and I don't wannnnnnaaaaa. Oh, and I also still have a chunk of it left to write, but it's the easy part. I even have a conclusion already. You might say, Hey. How do you have a conclusion when your paper's not done. I say, Fuck coherency. Better to take a bunch of extra shit that isn't really fitting in, throw it at the bottom, and call it a conclusion. Tah-dah! Jessie's guide to paper-writing.

I really wish I didn't have a full day of other things before this class tomorrow. I could use going to bed right now followed by five or six hours of work tomorrow. But alas, I teach and then have another class. So, boys and girls, what does that mean?

ALL-NIGHTER!

Also because I'm posting on my journal right now instead of working....WTF.

7 pages down, 20 to go.

Davita, in the process of opening her birthday card and spreading birthday cookie around the office like delicious confetti, found the following on the floor: a folded-in-half note, addressed to no one, that read...

It is in your best interest(s) to meet me upstairs in (3) 17-19 minutes.

*What's in (parentheses) had been crossed out with an X.

Where upstairs? Meet whom? What was wrong with 3 minutes? Why the specificity of 17-19 and why not just say 18? More importantly, what was happening upstairs?? It is now the office mystery.

It's sad that I think the middle of the day feels warm. The middle of the day today was 20 ("feels like" 12), as compared to the morning temperature of 6 ("feels like" -1). About 2pm it was downright balmy. I stopped clenching the muscles in my back.

And so begins the weekend of work. Term paper, ahoy!

Come on. Really?!

Time: 7:24 AM
Status: Sleepy, getting ready to teach
Temperature: 5
"Feels Like": -11

That's right. -11.

One more week of school. I can't wait to sleep in and watch movies.

Procrastination for dorks

Ohhhh, Megan. Screw you for getting me hooked on this website. Just a very few of my favorite words.

Dammit.

It's early.

Time: 7:43 AM
Currently: Getting ready to go to school allllll day.

Temperature: 5
"Feels Like": -4
Forecast: snow.

Wisconsin snow removal = D, in danger of failing.

Wisconsin is really disappointing me so far this winter. It snowed again on Friday--and I have to say, it freaked me out, because not only did I not see it snowing, but I also didn't even know it was supposed to snow. So I woke up on Friday morning, and as I was wandering through the apartment in my sleepy state, I noticed it was a bit brighter than usual. Because there was fresh snow everywhere. I have a feeling this will become normal.

So the point is, it only snowed 2-3 inches. But yet, TWO DAYS LATER, the side streets were still totally white. I fishtailed in Erinn's car (cover your ears, E, everything's fine) while driving to my super-secret Saturday morning thing.

Come on, Wisconsin. Aren't you supposed to be, like, the champ at this sort of thing? Isn't this kind of what you DO? Who do you think you are, Delaware? Get on it.

The real temperatures have been hovering around 25/15 (high/low), and the "feels like" temperatures at around 15/0. Here we go, winter.

Wait, wait.... nope. Still not a genius.

Now it's cold. Sixty to zero in two days. Okay, so I just wanted to invert that phrase. It's not zero. It's actually thirteen. But that's pretty damn close. Plus, I live on the Ameri-tarded measuring system, so thirty-two is my zero. The point is, it's cold. And I made an important discovery, which is that my coat stops being effective somewhere between thirty and thirteen degrees. Which means I need a new coat. A Wisconsin coat. Anybody know where I can buy parkas that aren't ugly?

It was sixty degrees over Thanksgiving weekend. We went for walks every day. We visited the arboretum. I mean, everything was brown and crunchy, but at least I was outdoors without wishing I were dead. And speaking of brown and crunchy, I have to say that Madison in the winter is disappointingly drab. Aside from the older neighborhood streets--which is thankfully where I live--the architecture here would make an incredible case study in why not to build an entire city in the 1970s. The spirit of Madison seems to bubble up over the boxy prison-buildings, and there are parks and trees everywhere, people with dogs, the lake full of sailboats, sidewalk cafes.... oh, wait, all of that is only in the summer. Now the trees are bare and hide nothing; the lake is gray and empty; all the people shuttle by in puffy coats and fuzzy hats*; and sidewalk life, dog walking, and lingering conversations in the street have given way to an intense desire to be indoors NOW. So now I can see the buildings. And they're ugly.

*Why, oh why, didn't I buy a fuzzy Russian hat while I was in Moscow?

I still like Madison. She's my dog.

So this was the first time I hosted a holiday. My mom came here and slept in my guest bedroom. She offered to help me with my dishes. I took her on fun little outings and excursions. I thought it would make me feel old, but it didn't. It made me feel like my mom was old. It made me think of us hosting my grandmother for holidays--she'd fly in by herself, shuffling through airport security and take up awkward space in our house for a few days, seem sort of small and disconnected. My mom does none of those things. She's active and fit, energetic, and young. Still in her 40s. But it made me see her set apart from our home, adrift like my grandmother. It changed the way I saw our dynamic, and that made me see her as old, as less attached to a set of symbolic anchors, somehow drifting apart. I don't know. I guess I can't explain it. It seems like something DeLillo would explain perfectly (I'm reading White Noise right now, which incidentally is incredible).

As if my mother sensed that I passed an entire weekend without feeling old, she sent me the link to a story about a child music prodigy. And within four seconds I went from feeling like a reasonably self-assured twenty-something who's pretty cool and has a whole adult life with which to do great things... to feeling like a giant dried-up waste of good organs. Then I stopped making it about me and decided that this kid (Jay Greenberg) is pretty damn cool. He's 14 and hears entire symphonies in his head, just like Mozart did, which is... absurd and phenomenal. He could name instruments before being taught to and could write symphonies without knowing how to play any of the instruments. He goes to high school and Julliard at the same time. He's being called the first real musical genius in a couple hundred years. I read a bunch of articles and watched the 60 minutes special on him, and the one thing I wondered about, which no one brought up... are his pieces any good? Or is that a stupid question? Okay, he has an almost supernatural ability to hear and write music. That's so astonishing as to defy language. But is that kind of genius necessarily accompanied by creative genius as well? Is it possible to have a Mozart-like genius for musical comprehension but to hear and record derivative drivel? Or is this kind of prodigy-level of fluency all by itself the measure of "good"?

I am consumed with the hope that this kid is the real deal. I'm really fascinated by this stuff, because I don't understand what it is. I mean, seriously. Explain it to me. Is it a genetic mutation? Is this the beginning of the wimpiest X-Men ever? There isn't even a musical history in this kid's family, and he hears symphonies. I've often wondered if the age of the classical prodigy is over, now that we give that kind of music so little cultural space, and kids rarely grow up exposed to it in the same way they used to. But the idea that without any exposure this kid knew how to write symphonies suggests something very elemental about that kind of music. I've feared sometimes that we've murdered our modern-day geniuses in the crib with Jessica Simpson and flourescent lighting. So what's the explanation? We all have talents, that's what makes us different. But this kid is abnormal. Is it mutant DNA? Reincarnation? Growing up on a nuclear test site? Honestly. Let's talk about this. I don't know what the answer is, but I think it's pretty cool.

Feel like crap now? Me, too. So if you'd like to see something at which I achieve brilliant levels of mediocrity, check out my latest book review in the City Paper.

I will post pictures of my apartment next time.

And for an update: I am still burping a lot. Like all the time.

Excuse me for one second, I need to whine.

It is currently 39 degrees and raining, which is probably the worst weather I can imagine. You might say, "How about 33 degrees and raining?" But the closer you come to freezing, the more likely it is that what you actually have is a wintry mix, which, while horrendous, accompanies the possibility that school might close or that it might turn to snow. No, 39 and raining is the worst.

And I must point out that it was simply 39 and cloudy when I left my office 20 minutes ago to walk to the library. A block from my destination, when it was stupid to stop, take off my backpack, and dig out my umbrella, God poked a hole in his waterbed. In an absurdly short amount of time, my jeans were soaked. You know how that is. When you're walking in the rain, for some reason, your thighs take the worst of it. Which is so awesome, because that also happens to be where your pants are the tightest, thus not only clinging inescapably to your skin but also drying incredibly slowly!

And you know the only way to really deal with a situation like this is to take off your pants and put on something so amazingly dry that you do a little dance inside your warm, dry pants. But here I am, all settled into the library for a day of studying, with wet, cold, clingy jeans. Oh, and it's not raining anymore.

I'm taking my pants off.

Also... in other absurd news, Jada Pinkett Smith has a metal band?

Study study study.

My subconscious is a HUGE DORK.

So I had this dream.

In which Samuel Taylor Coleridge and John Keats were engaged in a kind of vicious rivalry. Yes, that's right: a poet-rivalry. And one evening, by chance, they found themselves in the same tavern. And again by chance, a bar fight broke out. Keats was right in the thick of things, and when shit got heavy, he ended up killing a man. Well, Coleridge was hanging out on the sidelines, and he captured the moment of the murder... with a daguerreotype. And later had a crisis of conscience about whether to publish the daguerreotype in a periodical. He wanted to, because it would bring down Keats, but he didn't want to be vindictive.

Nevermind that the daguerreotype antedates Coleridge's death by 6 years and Keats' by 19.
Nevermind that you couldn't really print daguerreotypes in newspapers.
Nevermind that the daguerreotype took several seconds to expose and thus could not freeze-frame a murder in a tavern.

I think the thing to focus on here is how AWESOME my subconscious is.

On flakes, Fergie, and faith

It snowed again. It was only an inch and a half. But it was real snow. And it's still out there. I looked on weather.com to see how things were going in good old Maryland, and it's in the 60s this week. So maybe the weather is making me grumpy. But I'm pretty sure not even in New Zealand on a crystal beach could I abide the new Fergie song. Non sequitur? Whatever.

I had some trouble with the Black Eyed Peas signing on what was obviously not much more than a pair of tits. I had a bigger problem when they released a song containing the line, "my lovely lady lumps." I blamed Fergie. Now I'm sure. She is in fact incarnated evil in the form of bouncy fleshy merchandising. WHAT THE HELL DOES THIS MEAN:

"How come every time you come around, my London, London bridge wanna go down?"

IT DOESN'T. MAKE. ANY. SENSE. It's a children's rhyme morphed into some bizarre meaningless sexual allusion. I mean, I went there with Beyonce when she called it 'jelly.' I even went there with Ciara when she called it a 'milkshake.' But a giant iconic piece of architecture? Which part of you, Fergie, is like a bridge? What does it mean for that to collapse? Just because you gyrate and bite your lip at the camera does not mean that you can turn any combination of words into a sexual reference. AGHHH. But I'm getting worked up at the wrong person. She's clearly just a pair of tits. Some jackass in a suit wrote this song. In about five minutes before the staff meeting. And a group of suits said, "GENIUS!"

I'm not naive. I know that for years and years now we have stopped demanding quality in music. But are we really at the point where nonsensical crap isn't even something we can identify? Okay, a lot of great music doesn't make sense. But this isn't great music. In fact, I'm pretty sure that not only does the chorus not make sense, but the verses are a complete rip-off of "Tipsy" by J-Kwon. So we're stealing, and not even from a good store. Son of a bitch, Fergie. (Though I have to admit to kind of liking the J-Kwon song. See, I'm not a total music snob.)

Also, the new Outback Steakhouse commercial features a cover of "Wraith Pinned to the Mist (And Other Games)" by Of Montreal. The cover goes, "Let's go Outback tonight / Life will still be there tomorrow." Instead of "Let's pretend we don't exist / Let's pretend we're in Antarctica." I think the guys at Pitchfork said it best: something along the lines of, "who hears bouyant Elephant 6 indie pop and thinks, 'STEAKS!!'" I don't know what I think of it yet. Just that it's bizarre. Most people I know have never heard of Of Montreal. And then I was sitting on my couch watching TV and there they were on an Outback Steakhouse commercial. I can't decide if they're sellouts or if they just think that's kind of ironic.

____________________


Moving on from pop music. A Jehovah's witness came to my door last week.

ME: (opening door)
HIM: Hi, I'm spreading the word of the Gospel.
ME: Oh. Thanks, I'm not interested. (shutting the door)
HIM: (shouting through the door): HE'S COMING!!!

Yes he is. And he is the police.

I think it's one of Kevin's teachers who invites Jehovah's witnesses in, acts interested, and then says, "Wait, only 144,000 of us are going to be saved? What if I'm taking your place? What if I'm bumping you out of heaven?" Seriously. Why do they proselytize? Doesn't every new convert reduce their odds? He's coming. Aren't you going to feel like an ass when you're number 144,001. And I'm standing in front of you. Ha ha.

What the hell. The things people are willing to believe.

_________________


The Democrats are my unreasonable faith. I need to believe that they're going to finally extract their balls and do something in office. Investigate corporate kickbacks. Make a plan for withdrawal in Iraq. Impeach the president. It's going to happen. It has to.

Yeah. And the guy at my door will be one of the 144,000.

Throw out your televisions

also on my election night rant... WHY ISN'T THERE CONSTANT NEWS COVERAGE? WHY IS LAW AND ORDER ON WHEN WE ARE ENGAGED IN KICKING ASSHOLES LIKE SANTORUM OUT OF OFFICE?

And on a similar tangent, why is everything on TV now an 'event'? It's a fucking ER 'event' every single episode. The last time I checked, an event was the Million Man March, 9/11, or, I don't know... AN ELECTION.

Next week is a "very special Deal or No Deal." I'm not kidding.

Here lies Jessie; she died in a fit of patriotic agony.

Elections get me all worked up. It's some kind of combination of deep lurking patriotism and heartburn. The waving American flag graphics on the news, the thought of millions of families in their living rooms waiting to see what form the government will take--it's almost enough to make a girl well up with democratic pride. I think, too, it takes me back to a very particular era for my family. You know, when we liked each other. Election '92 I was 10. Only dimly aware of the electoral process. My parents, being news junkies, had kept me somewhat in the loop about the Arkansas cowboy who'd grabbed the nation by the balls--and the nation liked it. But I can't say I really cared about the outcome. I sensed that my parents cared, but I had no idea why. Then, on Tuesday--a school night--my dad drove me all the way out to my uncle's house, two hours away. My family used to get together a lot, but a mid-week party was unheard of. We were up late into the night, or what seemed late for a 10-year-old on a Tuesday, and when the news anchors called the victory for Clinton, my entire family broke into "Happy Days Are Here Again," and my grandmother started crying. I had no idea what was so important, but I knew that something serious had happened and that it made me feel like I wanted to be a part of it. I think that's part of how I still feel on election days. I know; it's cheesy. Sometimes that shit gets me. Despite appearances, I am a patriot.

And, I think, that's why this election in particular is so important to me. It's not just that the Democrats have a chance to take the House and the Senate; these are good things, but I can't convince myself that they will change the course of the next two years so dramatically. The Republicans are already moving away from Bush.

And it's not just that I've been burned in every election I've so far participated in. Though I have. This was my fourth time voting. Let's review. 2000: Bush steals the election. I stay up all night and fall asleep after crying. 2002: Bob Ehrlich wins the governorship in Maryland. I stay up all night and fall asleep after crying. 2004: Kerry comes close but falls short; almost all of my faith in the country falls apart; I stay up all night and upon hearing the official result in the morning, have a quick cry before work.

No, it's not just all of those things. Though for once it would be nice to vote for the guy who wins. (The only races in which this has happened are, to the best of my knowledge, uncontested Sentate seats and maybe the executor of wills.) No. I don't even care so much if the Democrats win because they're Democrats. I care because I need to believe that our nation has any threshhold of political indignation. My patriotism is on the line. If Michael Steele wins in Maryland... I just... I don't even know what will happen to my faith in the voting public. How can we stare down the barrel of en endless mideast quagmire, corporations running a congress which has its dick in every intern it can find, and a looming energy crisis the administration seems to want to ignore... how can WE NOT DEMAND CHANGE. Is so very much of the country so very wedded to the idea of gays not having abortions that they will not stand up for education, the future of the planet, and the 18-year-olds dying in the desert? It boggles the mind that anyone can watch the news and go to the polls and vote red. BOGGLES.

This is what happens to me every election night. I have palpitations.

The early returns are in, and the Democrats have picked up two Senate seats--Ohio and PA (go the eff home, Santorum!). But this is how it always happens. It looks very, very good, and then Dan Rather says, "wait, it seems Al Gore has NOT won Florida." So I'm not holding my breath just yet.

Everyone say a prayer for Maryland.
<3.

Trick or Tricked-Out Sluts.

***Update: the man I referred to in the third paragraph is actually playing a piccolo and is commonly known as Piccolo Pete.***

Madison's most notorious holiday came and went, and the city is still standing. No mace, no broken windows. Just a whole lot of titties.

State Street was not quite the freakfest I was hoping for. It was more like a freak petting zoo. We walked down and back up--about 45 minutes--which is more or less what everybody does. You get drunk and go for a walk. Some 20,000 people do this. Walking the gauntlet of State Street, with all of its stadium lighting and drunk high-fiving, allows you to simulaneously do all the ogling you want and also be admired for your own costume creativity. It's really all about swapping props. For many a Madison man, however, the emphasis is on the viewing. There were plenty of guys in what could only loosely be described as costumes, who were clearly particiapting more in the voyeuristic side of the holiday.

But most people chose to embrace possibility. There was something for every fetish: the ghouls, the walking puns, the puking partyers, nurses, bo peeps, sluts of every variety, and of course, lots and lots of bouncing flesh. The closest I came to seeing actual knockers was a guy wearing fake plastic boobs and a plastic Twister sheet around his neck (get it... a titty twister?). But I did see a fleet of girls dressed as "slutty referees," a take on the "slutty noun" costume I hadn't seen before. And boy did they run with the genre. To say they were wearing skirts would be a generous way of describing red belts that happened to have some swish, hovering above entirely exposed ass cheeks. There were also four guys dressed as the Jamaican bobsled team. Respect.

And my personal favorite... the guy dressed as UW's best local street personality. I don't want to call him a homeless guy, because I don't know that he is. Nor do I feel comfortable calling him a crazy. But he's not in the same category as the street musicians on State, who look like they have well-appointed living rooms they sit in when they're not busking. He's entirely distinct. He has a big fluffy white beard and sits in front of the university bookstore, dressed in hazard orange from head to toe, playing the recorder. This wouldn't be so great, but what makes Mr. Orange a full-blown personality is that he's always accompanied by a little kokopelli, also dressed in orange, also playing the recorder. He sits with his little buddy and plays and seems mostly oblivious to the comings and goings of students. And I just like the guy, because, well... he has his own doppelganger. And that's badass. I don't know whether the guy on State Street this weekend was dressed as Mr. Orange as a joke, but I like to think it was a token of respect.

At any rate, it was my favorite sighting.

And I just like a city that goes apeshit for Halloween--and does it at the feet of the state capitol. You've gotta get behind a sanctioned festival of hedonism. Even if it's not really what the holiday is about.

~~~~~~~

In other news, I've decided to come to terms with the things I will never be good at. This week: titling emails. It's my worst social inadequacy. I am spectacularly bad at it. I can't leave them blank. No one likes an email without a subject. It's suspect. So I consistently send off inquiries to very professional people, whom I admire and who might someday prove pivotal in my career with subjects like, "A Question," or "Hello," or "I'm a Giant Douchebag." It's hopeless. No matter what I try, the conveyed message is always, "you have new mail....... from a huge tool."

~~~~~~~

My final thought on the weekend: I just learned that medium vs. dark roast has nothing to do with caffeine content in coffee. Huh. I guess that makes sense. I've been proceeding on unexamined assumptions, which would explain some of my recent unfortunate buzzes. Those of you who go to In the Company of Thieves on E. Johnson, the house blend is the most-caffeinated. Just so you know. I didn't.


Happy actual Halloween. Don't turn your lights out and hide. It's not nice, and you will have to scrape egg off your door.

Boo.

And the end is increasingly nigh.

***Weather update: It flurried again this week. And we're already averaging 46/32 for the high/low, which is too much like a mid-atlantic December for my tastes.***

In a matter of five minutes this afternoon, I came to the conclusion that Rachael Ray is the devil.

Let me stress the context here. I had just awoken from the most incredible coma on my couch, the kind where it actually feels like you sink into the cushions and a heavy dark blanket of near-death envelops you. I woke up and made a sandwich and needed five minutes of television to facilitate my reentry into the world. Since it was 2:15 in the afternoon, I knew nothing would be on, but I put on NBC, thinking I might get Dr. Phil, the least evil of all daytime programming. (He's still pretty evil.)

But no, Rachael Ray came on. Rachael Ray, who I didn't even know had a daytime network show. In fact, I knew very little about her. I thought she was a cook...? On the food network...? I've heard good things about her cooking, her recipe books, and her personality, so, though I had never really seen her, I had a generally positive sense of her, collectively-constructed via my most savvy friends.

I only watched five minutes, but I am pretty sure she's the devil.

She IS a cook, right? All I saw was an officious interrrupter asking inane questions to reified teen poster David Boreanaz. "Okay. It's 3am and you're walking your dog. Do you scoop the poop or not??" She showed a clip of his show without introducing it and then CLEARLY lacked the vocabulary to talk about things like characterization in the hour-long drama, which he was painfully attempting to discuss in that, "okay, I'm just the talent, but I can at least spit back the director's pre-crafted sound bite about the sublime uniqueness of his particular crime drama" kind of way. And her response was--yet again interrupting the man--to turn to the audience and say, "Pretty watchable, eh? Eh??" thus underbidding Boreanaz's already very low cultural offer.

Who gave this woman a talk show? She's a cook, no? Shouldn't she cook? Shouldn't we all be doing our dao, as it were, and not stinking up the cultural channels with more steaming piles of meaningless words?

I mean ........what?

Some Lake Mendota photos

Pictures I took a few weeks ago ...free from the usual rambling monologue. Click the thumbnails for a blowup.

The Once and Future English Major

Perhaps that will be the title of my personal statement for my inevitable application for reentry into the coterie of the literarily-inclined. Ahhhhh, J-School. How insistently you remind me that I don't want to be a journalist. I'm not sure that's what you're going for.

The coffee from the shop on my block is intense. I'm now a cup-a-day drinker, to the extent that I get headaches if I do not have my daily cup. So I would think, considering that I'm starting from a defecit each morning, that I could handle fairly intense intake of caffeine. But I consistently order a small cup, spend an hour drinking it, and spend the next eight hours opening and shutting everything in my apartment and discerning the shape of my heart by the impressions it's beating into my chest. It's unnerving. I've also discovered that there's a strong correlation between my being jazzed the eff up on caffeine and my stress level. When I'm in a normal state, my brain is also fairly chill. "Hey, everything's gonna be cool," it says. When my little blood cells get the souped-up drag racing upgrade from the coffeeshop, my brain follows suit. It gets all high-pitched and squeaky and tries to convince me that my workload is impossible and that I should just quit school. So, why do I drink the coffee? Because I neeeeeeeeed it.

I got my always-delayed buzz this evening listening to a panel called the "New Wave Fabulists," which consisted of Peter Straub, Neil Gaiman, and Gary Wolfe. Sitting in the Orpheum theatre, I suddenly felt as if I had passed through an electric fence, which made me very restless and for some reason translated into me checking the time every four minutes. Which says nothing about the content of the discussion, because though it was a bit discursive and unorganized--as any unregulated discussion between authors rightly ought to be--they talked about some interesting things in regards to genre. And Neil Gaiman being my husband. Though this last part was not discussed explicitly, it was quite clearly on all their minds.

The room sort of came to the conclusion that "genre" is a nasty little word. I see where they're coming from, since they are extremely successful writers who bend, break, and otherwise defy genre-ization. But we can't really do without the term, can we? How else to describe a Danielle Steel or a Tony Hillerman? Or the works they create? I think more to the point, we should differentiate between genre-workers and writers. After all, a writer ought to defy genre, no? A writer is a creator. It's a shame that someone like Neil Gaiman is discussed as a reaction to uninspired form writing. "He's a genre-bender." No, he's a writer. Daniele Steel is just a genre whore, and her work does not deserve to be the springboard off of which we discuss the Neil Gaimans of the world.

Just you all wait until I'm in charge of the Language Department in Erinn's New World Domination.

I had to yell at my students this week for doing a shoddy job on their weekly turn-in-something-ANYTHING-related-to-our-discussion-and-earn-credit assignment. I really enjoyed it.

I have a tendency to get really into things for a short period of time until my interest burns out, and then I drop them like they're hot. And simultaneously around the world, a thousand chairs fall over from shock. Okay, no big revelation here. I know an awful little about an awful lot. My deep, deep hope, however, has always been that grad school would be my shot at becoming an expert in something. And now that I despise J-School, I'm worried that I'm just doing that grass-is-greener thing I've always done and that I'm going to turn into Lynn from Girlfriends, a show I am in no way embarrassed to love. Point being, she has like 8 master's degrees in just about all the major social sciences and humanities and lives off of her friends because, well, they're all pretty much worthless. The degrees, not her friends.

I think all I really want is to be in school forever. Oh my god, I am so dysfunctional.

Brian and I have been sporadically working on learning-up my web-building skills, so I'm hoping to have some idea of what I'm doing by the end of the semester and a website up and running by the start of the spring. Details TBA.

And now for one last non-sequitur. Some of my friends and I have noticed a trend in the Wisconsin service industry to answer requests with a tongue-in-cheek, "No, you can't have that, sorry." No, no, I'm sorry. It's obviously my fault for both failing to frame my request as a command and for presuming that you are in fact being paid to fulfill that request. It happened again the other night at Qdoba.

Scene: Qdoba.
Players: Me, hungry. Employee, un-funny.

"May I please have a queso burrito?"
"No."
"What can I have?"
"Nothing."
(tornado of teeth, hair, and tortilla shells)

Okay, so it was more like:

"May I please have a queso burrito?"
"No."
"What can I have?"
"Nothing."
".........."
"Of course you can! Hahahaha."
".........................."

During which silence I wondered what about Wisconsin--the cold, the snow, the cheese-heavy diet--destroys the sense of humor. I'm a nice person. I chat up the help. I spent the last ten years of my life being the help. But it's not a very good joke to begin with, and after hearing it six or eight times, my somewhat convincing titter of amusement has turned into a painfully forced "Ha. ....Ha. Give me the emeffing burrito." The same joke in every local establishment has really lost some luster for me, and besides... you do not get between a girl and her burrito. End of story.

For real.

Coming to terms with snowflakes.

Lately I've been burping excessively. Couldn't tell you why. I rather enjoy burpring, though, so it's kind of okay.

I've been including photos in my posts, and I should give them some context. I went around Madison two afternoons at the end of September and took a bunch of pictures. Like... a bunch. So far I've included some that show the neighborhood around my apartment and some that show scenes from the campus periphery. Included below are some from campus itself. The leaves remain yellow in the photos because they are still the ones from three weeks ago. The reality here is different. Most of the leaves are down... already.

So far I'm actually adjusting to Madison weather pretty well. But then I did spend two months in South America and had three hours of rain the entire time; I was prepared to be disappointed by everything when I came back. So Madison hasn't been too bad. Plus, I've been too busy to much care about the weather. Tuesdays I don't even look out of a window between 9am and 6pm. And when it's shitty outside, I only concentrate better on my work. So I feel an emotional disconnection with the weather. But I can acknowledge that it has been disappointing. As soon as the semester started, it turned cold and rainy. And apart from exceptions I can count on my fingers, it never looked back. I hear tell this isn't typical for Madison autumns. Neither are the leaves changing color in September. Everyone reassures me that Madison is usually temperate through most of October and the leaves change sometime around then and it never rains this much. I can only assume they are lying, as these are all people with a stake in my not fleeing the state.

...Which I swore I would do if it snowed before my birthday. So I've got about half of my stuff packed, and I just need to figure out how to get out of my lease. I never thought to look for an out clause based on premature snow. One of my students says it doesn't count, because it didn't stick, but I say semantics. Air temperature, the movement of fronts, weather goblins with tiny snow machines... whatever. White stuff fell from the sky. I know what that is. It's snow. Peace out, Midwest.

Really, I love it here. I love that I live one block from the lake. I love the public transportation. I love the hippies with strollers and the farmers market and the negligible population of Republicans. I love that there's too much going on for me to do even half of the things I'd like to. I love the draw of a liberal Midwest capital city that brings Andrew Bird, Mark Danielewski, and Neil Gaiman in the same month. I love Erinn, and I love Kevin, and I love my apartment.

Just don't talk to me in mid-January. I'll be sitting in front of my fireplace with a two month supply of food and a bad attitude.











This is Bascom Hill, which is UW's version of a central campus mall. It goes steeply uphill and its buildings contain nothing I will ever use. I never walk up Bascom Hill. But it's pretty.









This is the Union. A couple of posts ago I uploaded a picture of the lake terrace. That's what's on the other side of this building. Inside there's coffee, food, beer, and some other random stuff. I spend most of my time on the terrace outside.










This is the Red Gym, probably the strangest and most-photographed building on campus. It houses the visitor's center and probably a whole bunch of other stuff, considering its size. But I couldn't tell you what those things are.









This is yet another building I like but never set foot in. Pretty picture.




As you might guess, most of the buildings I actually use are very, very, very ugly.

The prospect of a Mets-Tigers world series... well, it actually makes me want to watch.

If I am the Commander-in-Chief of my life, then I guess it would be appropriate to deliver a State-of-the-Jessie every year on my birthday. Well, everyone, the Jessie is stressed out. Goodnight, and thanks for coming. God bless.

I am a year older, a milepost in which I constantly discover new facets of meaninglessness. This year it meant lots of people being unduly sweet to me and an excuse to throw a party. So for those 36 hours my birthday was rich with import, but as for the age thing, well... so what. 24 is a good number, I guess. It adds up to 6, and it's divisible by many things. It's a full 2 years away from the terrifying "late-20s" designation. So, sure. Why not.

Perhaps significantly, I passed my birthday minute (12:59 PT, in case you care) on a fabulously misguided bus tour of Madison. The mischievous Friday the 13th forces at work? Having gone to the pharmacy, I found myself attempting to take a new bus route home to my apartment, and though I won't belabor the details, let me be clear that I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that I spent 90 minutes on a series of buses. For what should have been a 20-minute ride home. Through various false assumptions and generally ill-informed choices on my part, I wound up navigating an entirely useless circle around the city that took me to places I will probably never go again. And since I managed--I think for the first day since I've been here--to be without iPod, book, or cell phone for this voyage of discovery, I had ample time to contemplate the irony of passing my birthday minute driving useless loops around the university.

I use the word irony, because I am currently driving myself crazy over my academic future. Though I am nothing if not an obsessively self-assessing person, I am in a new place, which means new features to my madness. It all more or less boils down to the following series of realizations:

1.) I don't want to be a journalist (brilliant job, Jessie, enrolling in J-School).
2.) I am an academic; there's absolutely no fighting it.
3.) I should get a Ph.D.
4.) The Communications department does some lovely things.
5.) I am interested in none of them.

It's well and good for my friends in Communications to tell me that the department is incredibly flexible (it is) and that I can study almost anything I want under its guise (I can), but two facts remain: The first is that at some point a communications Ph.D. requires quantitative research. The second is that even if I find a way to get around all the crap I don't like in the department, my future career will be in Communications. So, whatever. It doens't matter right now, because I'm getting a free master's degree and tons of great experience (teaching, being a grad student, etc.). But I can't help feeling that while everyone around me is moving toward an end goal, I am moving away from one.

Aside from righteously depressing self-evaluation and mistaken buses, I had a lovely birthday weekend. Kevin and I threw a mostly-successful party with a fire and lots of snacks. And in other related activities, my office-mates up in Vilas provided cake and a giant Orlando Bloom poster, who they managed to make picking his nose (you had to see it). Erinn made me a Boston cream pie (my favorite of all pies), and I got lots of wonderful presents from her, Kevin, and my mom.

Mark Danielewski came to Madison the day before my birthday for a reading/signing. And the day after my birthday, Andrew Bird was in town for a show. Perhaps augmenting my self-reflection was the arrival of these two creative geniuses who are so clearly doing what they are meant to do with their lives. You look at them and you just know it. And I think I envy the certainty I perceive in this, even though it probably doesn't exist for them. Or maybe it does.

Danielewski may be moving into dangerous territory with the experimentality of his books. House of Leaves toed the line to perfection, but I've found myself disinclined to read Only Revolutions. Listening to him read made me think I should get the audio version. It's hard to read a book so dependent on sound. I've skimmed passages and not even been able to get a handle on the umbrella narrative. But his reading made me want to try.

The last time I saw Andrew Bird I thought he was one more highball away from going completely unhinged. But this time he expressed his obvious musical genius in a coherent way, which for him is still pretty fucking nuts. He's a classically-trained violinist who writes delirious apocalyptic songs and whistles like an effing train. His whistle might even be stronger than his singing voice, which is impressive. He plucks, bows, and smacks his violin, plays the guitar, sings, and whistles, creating loops with pedals at his feet. It's incredible to watch one man with virtuostic mastery of multiple instruments actually create full sound on stage in front of you. And from the sound of the new songs he played, his forthcoming album will be a return to the style of Eggs, which makes me happy in the pants.

A nice wrap-up would be great, but I'm fresh out. So to close this birthday ramble, I give you more pictures, this time closer to home.

This is one of the little sidewalks running through our apartment complex. We live on the second floor of that building on the right. The squarish part sticking out is our sunroom; the bay windows are one-half of our living room. If you were to keep walking though this little alley and cross the street on the other side, you'd come very quickly upon Lake Mendota.

This is the coffeeshop just down the block from my apartment (see those brick buildings on the right?) where I spend most of my weekends.





These are the Blues Brothers dancing gaily inside the coffeeshop.









Stay tuned for actual pictures of the inside of my apartment.

Well, I've never read it, so it can't be that good.

According to askyahoo.com, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown is the best-selling novel of all time. The Bible is the best-selling book of all time. The authorship is lovely here. God (or a group of historians with a motive, depending on how you see it). A hack fiction writer borrowing heavily from other sources (or a historian with a motive, depending on how you see it).

Catholicism and Catholic subversion. Interesting, our mental dichotomies. Or rather, our shifting sensibilities over time, because it is probably worth noting the periods of most intense sales for these books. The Bible has had most of literary history to achieve top-dog status; Brown's novel does not come close to eclipsing the Bible, but it reached the top of its genre in a matter of months. And I wonder what the drop-off in Bible sales looks like over the last 100 years--because I'm sure there's been one.

I'd like to see the stats for the number of households currently in possession of a copy of each of the two books. And then again for the number of each sold copy that has actually been read.

I guess it's no surprise--what with population blooms, mega-mass-production, and globalization ushering in an age of international trends and zero-cost translation--that current pop culture would overtake the sales of even the most widely-read classics. 100 years of teachers assigning Crime and Punishment cannot compete with a global feeding frenzy in 2004. So I would postulate that record-holding power is lessening. Look at other fields. It seems every Olympic year, yet more records are broken. We are a culture obsessed with being the best, and since there are about a billion more of us every decade, there's increasing likelihood that the best will soon be bested. How long it takes someone to swim the 100m freestyle is a fairly objective measure of greatness. The best are getting better, even if only by hundredths of a second. But book sales? Consumption quite obviously does not equal quality. In fact, this may be an unfortunately universal axiom.

If the reign of the best-selling novel or the highest-grossing film shrinks with each incarnation, I have to wonder also about the trend in the quality of the champs.

Is the Bible's record going to fall to a tell-all by Colin Powell?

Meaning is impossible without ellipses

So says one of the film studies scholars we've been reading for Globalization of Mass Media. He's referring to the idea that, both in terms of the physical senses and in terms of narrative text, we require the ellision of a vast amount of material. There is simply too much to process, and it is only through the carving away of certain information that the rest reveals itself as meaningul. Interesting, I thought. God really is in the details, in the sense that both are too omnipresent for us to grab hold of. It makes me wonder, too, about people who exert selective hearing in order to construct the meaning they WANT to be there (isn't that all of us, after all?), and how depending on a.) your particular experience and b.) your mental ellisions, you will have your own personal semiotics over the course of your life, different from everyone else's.

As you can see by my ridiculous academic opening to my first blog entry, I am in grad school now. And I thought I'd start a new blog to hold what are sure to be all of my fantastically trenchant displays of intellectual superiority. Because I'm a grad student now, and I don't know if you know, but that means I'm smarter than you.

And the sad thing is that there are grad students who believe this, and they roam free, lurking in bars waiting to pounce on impressionable undergrads with arrogant windbagging about half-understood theoretical texts, giving all the rest of us who need the moral support of our equally coffee-ridden colleagues just to keep from dropping out every day a bad name. I have class with some of these people. They are predators and should have to sign a registry and announce their presence in neighborhoods.

But aside from the shiny thought-nuggets I'll be mining from my fertile brain, I hope this will be a kind of Jessie-in-Madison blog, for photos, new experiences, etc. I got sick of my old blog in many ways and wanted to start fresh. So, how can I properly sum up the last two months, which is how long I've been here. Hmm, well, to quote James: "Two words come to mind. Shit and show."

Stellar apartment, tornado sirens, darts, dinner parties, reading, reading, reading, new friends, mixed feelings, mid-life crisis. There, that about does it. In ever so many ways, I feel like a new person. I'm going to go off on an academic rant again, but it makes me think of the Tibetan idea of the "bardo," or the between-state after life and before death. They saw this nebulous non-state as a place where your actions would have consequences far more magnified than ones you were ever able to effect in waking life. So, when you made bad choices in life, you mildly screwed with your next life's potential, but in the bardo, you could make small corrections and go from reincarnating as a slug to reincarnating as a... well, something better than you were before. I forget all of the levels. The point is that it represents a moment when things move at this hyperspeed and when small alterations in your trajectory wildly affect your ultimate destination. I think the last two months have been a bit like this for me.

I moved to Wisconsin. Big deal. But I think that the differences in who I am now as opposed to two months ago are much greater in scale than those from any recent comparable period of time. I simultaneously reached new levels of: relationship structure, personal freedom, professional maturity, and intellectual process. And it's giving me a mid-life crisis. In a good way.

There will be more on this in future entries, I'm sure. All in good time. For now, I leave you with some photos.



This is the street running from campus (directly behind the photo) to the capitol. It's 10-ish blocks long and filled with delicious things like Urban Outfitters, used bookstores and Chipotle. The carts in the foreground are the various smoothie / ethnic food trucks that park there on Library Mall (so named because one of the libraries is right off to the left there). Note also the yellow leaves, as well as the date of this photo... SEPTEMBER 29.



Here's the lake terrace at the student union. Live music often at the stage, lots of local beer. Good times.



Here's another view of the capitol, as seen from my walk home. The building is more or less a symmetrical X, bounded by a traffic square. All around that square every saturday is a huge state farmer's market. Mmmmmm.