I typically hate memes, but this one was cool. And I'm supposed to be writing a paper, so... you know.

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OH MY GOD SO AWESOME.

This story involves everything I love. The 19th century. Pre-Raphaelite art. Fucked-up children's lit. Wombats.

Read on.

From the Wikipedia page on Dante Gabriel Rossetti:

During this time, Rossetti acquired an obsession for exotic animals, and in particular wombats. He would frequently ask friends to meet him at the "Wombat's Lair" at the London Zoo in Regent's Park, and would spend hours there himself. Finally, in September 1869, he was to acquire the first of two pet wombats. This shortlived wombat, named "Top", was often brought to the dinner table and allowed to sleep in the large centrepiece of the dinner table during meals. Indeed, this is said to have inspired the dormouse from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Lest you think this is a case of Wikipedia hacking, like the Eric-discovered description of Machiavelli's philosophy as "testiculogical" (as opposed to "teleological"), here's an article on the very subject.

I'm peeing and dying of joy at the same time.

It's April, isn't it? My calendar, can someone check... it's working, right?

I don't ask a lot from Madison. I know more or less what I'm getting into. The winters pain me deeply, but I smile and put on four coats because I chose to move here, and I'm a big person (personally, not physically... though, with four coats on...).

But look, Madison. In return you could at least live up to your average temperatures. It's April now. And I have the internet, so you're not fooling me. The average high is supposed to be in the upper 50's. That's not exactly fucking balmy, but compared to the last four months it's certainly liveable. Jacket weather, that's all I'm asking. But the ten-day forecast doesn't go above 48. Lots of highs in the 30s, lots of lows in the 20s. And... snow.

COME THE FUCK ON.

I know I was warned about this, too. Everyone reading this who's been in Madison for a couple of years is saying: "Oh, isn't that precious. The new girl is still upset about the slow spring." Well, YES. YES I AM. I don't like winter very much. I steeled myself for it, and I handled it. It's spring. I'M DONE HANDLING IT NOW.

Playing Magic in the library over spring break is like masturbating to a chess competition.

A guy sitting in a booth in the library cafe is on his cell phone, talking loudly. It's spring break, and there are only about six of us sad sacks in here doing work, so his conversation is more or less filling the room. I was tuning him out pretty well until I just heard him say:

"Yeah, last night was pretty cool. We just played a bunch of Magic. I brought my big deck over to show people, and yeah, everyone was pretty impressed with what I could do with it."

If you're imagining the guy saying this with a kind of Napoleon Dynamite voice, you're pretty close. I'm not judging Magic players (okay, I am a little bit). But I am judging someone who gets his self-validation from reporting his skill at it. And who also uses the word "deck" a little too much like the word "penis."

And the loud cell phone conversation brings me to a social etiquette rant I've been meaning to go on for a little while. There are literally thousands of breaches of social responsibility that I could go on about. Leaving a wet counter in the bathroom. Farting in an elevator. Not tipping. Dropping a deuce so large it won't flush and then just walking away. But here, I will focus on three, ordered from least annoying to most homicide-inducing.

1.) Getting your stuff together to leave a class while the professor is still talking. Yeah, we're all attuned to the impending-freedom clues, buddy. It's not just you who has a super-psychic sixth sense or a specialness-goblin whispering in your ear to alert you to the code. When the professor's voice lifts a little, when she starts talking about what's due next week, when the second hand is moments away from colliding with the big 12... We all get it. Here's the thing. You think you're being all quiet and sneaky, soundlessly shifting your papers back inside your folder, maybe closing your water bottle top. But the next thing you know, you find you need to scooch your chair back a little. Now we're talking audible sound. And then everyone else around you starts doing it, and before you know it, the professor is completely drowned out. What's the big deal, right? She's just doing a syllabus-drone that everyone knows is literally seconds away from becoming a see-you-next-week closer. IT'S FUCKING RUDE, THAT'S WHY. You know why it's rude? Because you don't have anywhere to be. Universities design time between classes for just this reason! You'll make it to your bio lab, I swear! I will grant that 0.5% of students in any given class have an immediate and pressing appointment. But you probably don't. And you signed up for the class. So sit the fuck down and attend it. You are not more important or valuable than your professor. You just aren't.

2.) Taking up two seats on the bus. Okay, look. The bus is small and often of a temperature that's an ill match with the season. And above all, no one likes to touch strangers. We just don't. I, especially, do not like to touch strangers. Some of us do, and they probably ride the bus in the middle of the day, but we're not dealing with those folks in this particular case. No, I'm talking to people who--like me and the rest of the world--don't like to touch strangers but who go to inconsiderate lengths to be sure that other people will have to touch strangers before they will. You know the bus game. People fill the bus in a checkerboard pattern, taking all the seats that don't have anyone next to them (much like urinal selection, I'm also told) until this is no longer possible. Then people have to start sitting next to other people. Some try to avoid having their neighboring seat taken by placing a backpack or shopping bag there and then becoming "absorbed" in some kind of reading material or window-gazing and pretending not to notice that the bus is filling up. You know what? Just because you went shopping doesn't earn you an extra seat. The bus is actually quite often used to take people to the store. And I don't think they built it with 25 EXTRA SEATS FOR TOTE BAGS. You are not more special than other people. You're not. Other riders simply move to the aisle, leaving their window seat open but inaccessible. Listen, the likelihood is that eventually the bus will fill up and you will have to touch a stranger. All your delaying does is cause kind people like myself, who also don't want to touch strangers, to pay the price of touching them first. I'm not sure if this makes me so mad because it's rude or because I secretly wish I had the stones to do this, because I hate strangers so much. BUT OH MY GOD MOVE OVER.

3.) Poor door-holding etiquette. This comes in two forms. First are the people who walk through a door in front of you without looking back to see if there's someone behind them to hold the door for. This results in the familiar door-slamming-shut-just-out-of-your-reach problem which is actually worse than walking up to a closed door, because you do this awkward little lurch to get to the door, but then you miss it, making you both mad and embarrassed. No good. Far worse, however, is the second type. This takes the form of a person--oft-accompanied by a cell phone stapled to the side of the head--walking behind you. You, being the considerate sort of chap you are, hold the door open for the person walking behind you, waiting that extra second or two for said person to reach out their very own hand and take the door as they pass through it. Only, this particular douchebag doesn't put her hand out. No, no. She just walks on through the door, past you, and out into the world (or library) without even looking at you, much less saying thank you. This one baffles me. Are there really people in the world who have no trouble using their fellow human beings, who are simply extending a kindness they are not obligated to extend but do, as butlers? I have particular trouble handling the several-years-younger-than-me, several-brains-stupider-than-me fucking chippy talking on a cell phone and wearing a puffy coat that's wider than it is long ASSUMING I am there to hold her doors. ONE OF THESE TIMES I AM GOING TO CHASE YOU AND STAB YOU IN THE NECK AND YOU WON'T HEAR ME COMING BECAUSE YOU'LL BE LISTENING TO YOUR DADDY TELL RACIST JOKES ABOUT YOUR ACTUAL BUTLER WHILE YOU WAIT FOR AN OPENING TO ASK FOR MORE MONEY TO BUY A NEW, PUFFIER COAT. Agh.

Reach out. And take the fucking door. You are not more special than me. And you won't look as cute with a broken nose.

Don't all three of these problems really boil down to people thinking they are more special or more entitled than other people? Maybe we should all take a generation off from telling our kids that they're special. And send them to summer camp on a socialist farm.

Just hold the door.

A thousand rescue St. Bernards, STAT.

Last night was the snow-pocalypse. Actually, this entire weekend is the snow-pocalypse. It snowed about 5 inches on Friday night, which was somehow the perfect backdrop for my getting slightly drunk at 6pm. The Department held its annual Graduate Student Conference on Friday, and somehow I got assigned to moderate the final panel and thus give the final little talk of the day. Who.. what? Guys, I don't know if you know this, but... there are a lot more, better candidates in the graduate school for this. Like people who have been here long enough to know things about the department. But I threw down some writerly skillz on that and delivered a speech most people seemed to like. And then three pints of Bass in an hour seemed like the way to go.

Which brings me back to the snow-pocalypse. I heard it was supposed to snow a lot this weekend. Specifically, Saturday. So when I exited the City Bar on Friday evening into swirling snow, I was a little surprised. But when it had snowed 5 inches, I thought, well, I guess the snow came early. Because though we have had consistent snowfall ever since the deep freeze ended two weeks ago, we haven't really gone above 6 inches in any one snow "event."

Oh, but the snow did not come early this weekend. It came three times. Last night was the actual snow event that people had been talking about, and it snowed another 9 inches. And by tomorrow we're supposed to get another 3. All told, that makes... 18 inches.

Friday night the snow was accompanied by one of those freaky, bright, daytime skies in the middle of the night. And it was radioactive yellow. Last night the snow brought thunder and lightning and blizzard-condition winds. SWEET. Wisconsin is trying to kill me. Snow-pocalypse style.

Also, my work is trying to kill me. In my lit class we have a paper due already, which is strange, because we've only read two novels thus far, so there's not much subject matter to choose from. And while trying to accomplish this head-scratching task I have two weeks of dense theory to read for the same class. Presumably this is to help me conceptualize my paper, but I don't know how I'm going to have TIME to write a paper when I have 275 pages of Fanon to get through and another 200 of Bhabha. And then, the week AFTER the paper is due... we don't have class. What.....

But my Critical and Cultural Studies class continues to rock hard. And I have to say, what I really like about this semester is reading the big names. As opposed to reading lots of articles where people cite Foucault and Anderson and Adorno, I'm actually reading those people all semester, which is great. I feel like I'm finally building up my smart-arsenal. And someday I will blow shit up.

Right.

Supa Bowl Weekend.

Current time: 7:31 pm
Current temp: -6
Current chill: -24

Damn.
I can't wait to see what it's like in another five hours.

Professionalism, Shprofessionalism.

Go look at the 10-day forecast for Madison. I'd cry, but my tears would freeze to my face in little icicles of sorrow.

I'm a teacher. A college teacher. That's so weird. I'm actually "teaching" right now. My students are doing group work, and I'm writing in my blog. I teach wearing ripped jeans, and sometimes I project Natalie Dee and Married to the Sea cartoons on the wall while my students are working. I think sometimes someone's going to come into the room and say, "Oh, no no no. You come with us. There's been a terrible mistake made here." But I got my evals back from last semester and they were very good. So at least I'm popular.

Super Bowl this weekend. Aaaaaaand I'm out of things to say.

Everything is frozen.

I'm starting to think that Wisconsin isn't playing around. The lake finally froze. I say finally because December and early January were unseasonably warm, so the freezing process was late in the year (avg. freeze date Dec. 20), not because it took a long time. Once it got going, it only took about 4 days. That's fast. And it's a big lake (almost 10,000 acres). Big up to Wikipedia for the factoids. One morning in December I rode past the lake on the bus and saw this low layer of mist rising up from the middle of the lake and rolling quickly out to the shores in waves. Two different people told me it was the lake "giving up its heat." The next day it was partially frozen. I imagine, if not for the following warm spell, it would have gone through that whole process in a couple of days. Like a big yawn and then it closes its mouth. But it took a month-long hiatus and was nice enough to wait for my return to this tundra wasteland.

Which brings me to the 10-day forecast. The average high over the next ten days is 18; the average low is 4. (This blog entry is full of data; it's so official-like.) There's a light snowfall every couple of days. The big snow from last week is still here. Everywhere. Deep. I've never lived someplace where it snows and then the snow... doesn't melt. It hasn't been above freezing in weeks. It doesn't look like it's going to happen anytime soon. I feel like I live inside of a giant freezer. You know that lumpy, white build-up of ice you get inside of freezers? That's what Wisconsin looks like right now.

Erinn's 25th birthday was Thursday, and I made a lot of fun of her for being old, rounding up to 30, being a quarter-century...however you want to look at it, she's ancient. To celebrate the occasion, we went bowling, ate cake, and almost died. That's right. Kevin almost got us hit by a train. I'm not talking about cutting across the tracks a few seconds before the barrier goes down, while the train is still a ways off. I'm talking about not realizing we were sitting in the middle of an intersection through which a train passes and trying to figure out which way to turn. He chose a right turn (thanks to the urging of our own Backseat Angry Dad, Eric) and four seconds later, in the rear-view, a thundering train passed a few feet from the spot we had just been occupying. A left turn would ACTUALLY HAVE KILLED US. But my point here is not that this was Kevin's fault. For all that Eric and Andy maintain there was ample warning, I only heard bells. Which are loud and can be heard from some ways off an actual train crossing. It was dark. I never saw tracks. If you're not familiar with the local streets, what's to tell you that the train is coming through your intersection and is about to murder you? Where's the little white mechanical barrier, Wisconsin? They're not expensive, and you know what? I OBEY THEM. Happy birthday, Erinn. I hope you like the near-death experience we got you. You can't exchange it.

Belly-up to the lazy buffet.

Snow. I'm officially calling this my first real Madison snowfall. We had a dusting right before my birthday (much too soon for a snowfall in my opinion) and a couple of two-inchers at the end of the semester. Then it got fucking cold and the lake began to freeze. But then it got all 40-degrees and dry for weeks on end. My return to the midwest has been hailed with real snow.

It's currently still snowing, though I can't really believe that the small blowing flakes are contributing any more to the accumulation, which seems to be about 5 inches. When I decided that I was moving to Wisconsin, I used this new-fangled internet thing--which I hear is full of all kinds of facts--to look up Madison's annual snowfall totals. When I found the answer to be 5 inches, I was doubtful. The midwest is supposed to be full of snow! But how could the internet lie to me?? Since it's now January 15th and our total for the winter thus far is about 7 inches, I feel a.) relieved that the midwest will live up to its white reputation (and oh, how that applies in more than one way) and also b.) disappointed that the internet is not, in fact, a digital Delphi.

Snow is sweet.

So, yes, I'm back in Madison. I won't say much about my vacation. Except that I was surprised by own capacity for regression into the state of a sullen, angsty, family-hating fifteen-year-old. And that it's a good thing it took me most of my time at home to figure out how to connect my laptop to the internet, for this saved me from posting a ridiculous blog rant about hating my life. All I will now say in retrospect is that going home for the holidays at this age is hard. And that growing up has done a lot to contribute to a changed perspective on my family. And that I wish I had brothers and sisters. It's strange to spend the holidays with just my mother, as much as I love her.

I've done jack shit with my vacation. I need to learn to be okay with that. I always schedule myself more things than I can reasonably do, which leads to the ridiculous practice of making to-do lists months in advance. During the semester, while I'm buried under academic readings, I begin to wish I were making more progress on other, less soul-sucking projects. There's not enough of a sense of completion involved in academic work. It's cyclical. So I make fantastical, optimistic lists of all the things I will actually "take care of" when I have my time to myself. Things like, finishing the blanket I started crocheting two years ago. Building my website. Reading books for fun. Scrapbooking. Then vacation comes around, I look at that list, and think, ".............no?"

This particular to-do list has looked much the same for YEARS. These projects are all unfortunate enough to fall in the interstices between semester busy-ness and post-semester laziness. I will never do them.

So I have spent three weeks watching television. I feel a bit bad about myself at the moment, actually. I have read .5 books. I think I will go home right now and read. Or maybe watch a movie...

I keep telling myself I need this. That I must build up a good store of waste-of-life-ness to counterbalance the draining level of productivity I must sustain for the next four months. But I think I'm lying to myself. Because I kind of feel like shit. I'm not usually like this. All my life I have denied myself vacation time, and now I'm freaking gorging at the all-you-can-eat lazy buffet. And I can't stop. Someone please call for help.

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.