Of the sea...(blub)

Salvaged Poetry #3

2011-12-31T23:55:00.000-08:00

evaporation

jumping in an oval

shape uncurling selfhood

long, glove-like fingertips

the hair's growing on knuckles

with blisters, hot and cool

on waning shadow beings

transparent, those and flesh

clouds aren't milky

just the thin little sun

shedding its many shells

I flee to the sky.

Salvaged Poem #2

2011-12-28T22:16:00.000-08:00

Wrap the lye-dipped apple in a layer of caramel,

stab it on a stick, and shake ten or twenty sprinkles

over it like confetti in preparation

for some grand occasion or another.

Bringing together one's bosom companions

invitations will go out to that man of

Whitechapel, Boston, and Chicago

(the latter dressed in his clownsuit)

We'll all gather together in the most haunted house in town

lock ourselves inside and the flashlights outside

Find rest another night in some graveyard or another

Claw at the ground and scream to be admitted

There's the chain smoking of menthols

atop the roof of that condemned building

with shoddy framework, asbestos, and lead

You stare straight at the sun for hours and hours on end

On the coldest night of the year, we will stand naked

Beneath a sky that weeps large shards of ice

and that moon, that moon, and that moon

Walk slowly to the middle of the road

Then run down its length until you reach the highway

(The road is icy and everyone has stayed at home)

We'll stand there, as long as it takes

All those flickering stars of eyes

see how we survive.

Salvaged Poem #1

2011-12-27T23:51:00.000-08:00

Never step into the light without
surveying the darkness around you
first for signs of a river.
Land disapparates with the appearance
of suns, flourescence, and bioluminicity.

Take a breath and swallow it.
This will create a pain in your stomach
that works as a makeshift barometer.
Walk to the highest point and exhale
continuously until consciousness is lost.

Make for yourself a new name.
Write this name ten thousand times
on various parts of your body.
This will take twenty-seven years
of your life. Tell no one.

This book of instructions composed
in accordance with the predefined
date of our last correspondence.
Do not burn after reading but hide
in the garden at noon on Sunday.

Proud Editing

2011-12-27T00:34:00.001-08:00

I'm pretty happy with how this scene's been edited. It is out of context. I shall leave it as such for you.

Swallowing

Coffee. Black. Because that's how all the great PIs drank it in my sepia imaginary. Like the darkness of the coffee had to meet, match the dark of the logic-bound soul. That antipathy toward all things sweet. Nothing in the eyes but that dark dark darkness.

"Of course, you know she didn't fall per se.”

His voice was dry and deep. To the point where an illness was inevitable.

Jones didn't drink coffee, but instead had ordered a large hot chocolate with many particulars. He had whip cream on his nose. Not literally, but in some truth, there it was.

That’s the kind of person he was. Or is.

Perhaps in a place closer to our reality, he wore clothes that were quieter. It memory, it serves us best to brighten things, spruce them up so that they can remain in our minds for longer. Maybe his suit was dark and his shirt blue, his tie a diamond-print maroon. But I can only remember his outfit as white slacks with a yellow t-shirt. The suit jacket draped over the back of his chair, the tie a purple and loosened.

Es tan corto el amor, y es tan largo el olvido. It is so short, love, and so long, the forgetting. Oblivion is so long.

She wouldn't fall, of course. June, I mean.

I thought it but did not speak a syllable, though I had intended to say it aloud and to him, leaning forward and intimate. Instead, "oh" was all I said, more a sharp inhale than a word at all. I may have slumped back in my chair.

"They wouldn't believe me."

"Probably, they’d have just thought I was drunk or something. Maybe LSD."

"Which is kind of a pretty thought, because she was in the sky with diamonds, you see."

"She just stepped out and the clouds, they just took her away. Almost as if she were made out of paper. It was almost digital the way it happened."

"In any event, she didn't fall."

"She's still alive. Somewhere."

Which I knew. But still, it was so nice to hear.

kind of a freedom, there

2011-12-26T01:28:00.000-08:00

The more I read books that really resonate with me on some subconscious level, the more confident I feel in my own writing.

Think of it-- we can do whatever we want.

I just read Anne Carson's "Glass Essay" and realized a lot of my prose was secretly poetry via the sentence. Then I panicked at the distinction. Then I remembered that it didn't matter. The titles supplied by others don't change the writing at all.

As I edit, I pull some of it into broken lines. It looks more like traditional poetry that way, though still sentence-based for the most part.

I became worried that it would all need to look this way. Then I reminded myself that it could look however I want. So I started leaving some in the standard prose form.

Reading Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, I strongly felt the lack of real plot. A boy has a key and wants to see what it goes to. But it isn't so much a quest as a curiosity. What are important are the details. People and pretty situations-- lovers building museums to each other in their homes. Living at the top of the Empire State Building.

Even the telling of stories within a story and purposeful run on sentences. Sections with red marker. Sections with missing words. Line breaks. Photographs. Lines printed over other lines. Invisibility.

There really are no rules to writing. Isn't it lovely?

I don't make New Year's resolutions. I've said this before. The Earth rotates around the sun and a circle has no start. January 1st is an obscure choice, a random end and beginning to the circular path. My orbit has been beginning in September with the book goal. I'm abandoning the 52 books per year goal because I far surpass it each year. This isn't vanity, it just is. Making goals that you know you can easily achieve is like cheating at solitaire.

But if I did make a new resolution, which can start today because it's as good a point of start as any, I'd tell myself to stop being so self-conscious with my writing. If it is crap, it will stand out as such (i.e. "endless sky"). Otherwise, it can't be that terrible. Everything is coming temporarily out of my scrap parts bin; all writing will be treated as salvageable for the time being.

Least importantly but still noteworthy, I will stop worrying about my comma placement. I know I overuse commas. The truth is, I put commas where I want you to pause. It is a poet's mark. Comma= short pause, period= longer pause, paragraph break= significant pause, section break= stop for a second and think before proceeding to next section!

Therefore, I will continue to overuse commas in all creative writing. And try to love my words more.

writer's melancholy

2011-12-24T01:17:00.000-08:00

That's the truth of it, what happens when I go about editing.

I went back to my Nano novel from last year because I've been watching Lost and kinda like to do some sci fi editing for a bit. Even though I intended it to be steam punk, it really is just mainstream sci fi. Anyway, looking back at it, I can't help but be extremely bored.

There's the rub.

Of course it's unexciting. It's a rough draft. I'd just like for once to write something that isn't completely crap in its initial stages. You know, pump out a brilliant piece the first go around. Just once.

And then realizing that it's not only crap but 50,000+ words of crap to wade through and turn into something worthwhile. Well, that's just exhausting.

In any case, I don't imagine much will be coming of Clover any time soon. Back to this year's "novel," which may secretly be a prose-based poetry piece in the long form.

Onward!

Nano Prosody Madness

2011-12-22T01:51:00.000-08:00

I wonder if the indentations and whatnot will translate. Anyway, here is the first section, edited! I told you I would do it! Hurrah for the first vignette done!

Remember-- nice words only. This is barely edited at all :|

Winter and a soul

You don’t expect to miss the cold. Not that

brisk breeze of a cold, the whooshing cold

that likes to pull at your hair and grab your jacket tighter. It’s the

missing

of that real cold that won’t go away even after ten cups of coffee

and a long hot shower.

You aren’t supposed to be any

thing but happy when the sun’s come out. Maybe that’s just from

being of a place that’s full of rain that touches bone. You have to

take the brighter weather as a call

for optimism and breathing

in enough Vitamin D for the whole year. But all I really

want is one frost-smitten day to don my

fuck-the-world feelings, crash through puddles, and scare children with my indiscriminately cruel-frozen mien.

This is the justification for a rage denied.

Sometimes, you can get that emotion when you drink, really drink, all alone someplace you aren’t meant to be.

The stacks. In the basement, through a broken win-

dow. Down the stairs.

Walk to the very back where the light can't reach

when the fluorescence reeks its worst. Dusty, musky

place of dead things and books forgotten, covers torn

off decades ago, and a thousand thinning stamp printed dates.

A melancholic place. A place to think, really. A place to drink.

Leaning against Chaucer and Dante and all those

dead men. Lushes themselves, I suppose.

The last bus home only slightly remaining in the mind, cast

aside like the ego, and those drinks become all.

Still though, it’s not the same. You need some

one around to throw that

rawanger

off of, or you don’t get anything out of it

but the inkling that you are slightly

losing it and may one day commit

mass murder and make a spectacle of your

self lasting many generations or not even fifteen minutes of infamy. Wikipedia entry: Your Name (Serial Killer). You have to spill that bad mood onto someone else, feel empowered

through the ruining of someone else’s good time. Raw anger. Rawanger. You only say it through clenched

teeth, spit out without a moment’s pause between.

But all those I know to drink with, they become happy drunks.

Drink away the philosophy and hurt and all the jazz in Paris and New Orleans and Tokyo and my old hometown.

They play darts and miss the board entirely,

or place bets on billiards and can’t manage to touch the ball with their well-chalked sticks.

But these small failures are nothing but amusements in the now.

They laugh so easily at themselves.

Me and June… anyway, we go out to the ocean with raw-

anger. Take our wildness out to sea. It doesn’t feel

much like Melville’s ocean, nothing to draw

you to it but boredom, sweet ennui, borrachas. Nothing better

to do

but breathe in all that salt

water, let it seep into our pores and eyes so that sand joins with our blood streams.

It’s the same one though, our ocean.

It doesn’t much feel like an ocean, not a real one that spits out, bubbles and debris, ignores broken bottles, plastic bags, and even our bodies thrown to its wiles.

Not the kind that would really want to eat trash like me or

a true beauty, my Junia.

When we get a mind to drown ourselves here, we end up back on the beach,

landlubbered sans free will.

And still, at night our tries dry straight

away. The footprints and the cut

remnants.

Not even the sharks would eat us, if there were any. This shallow in the waves. So they say.

The night’s too warm. All they

do is sleep with their mouths

open and hope something good floats

in. Accepting less. Excepting less,

they prowl. I suppose.

“Come to bed,” she says, using that one voice she has that is kind of like the cold only

too fleeting to be real, an Indian winter in a white Summer,

“No more thoughts tonight.”

Secrets in Television

2011-12-21T00:12:00.000-08:00

It is always a tricky thing to have a protagonist with a great secret in a television series. Unlike in books or in films or plays, you have to wait sometimes years for even a single person to come upon this secret.

There is a dumb show coming out soon that appears to be stealing a plot from Tootsie but extending the cross dressing as woman for work into setting of the modern economic crisis.

I am not referring to this sort of secret. (Nor do I condone such terrible, terrible shows in general)

The example sitting in my head right now is BBC's Merlin in which the eponymous wizard must hide his powers. Because people performing magicks in Camelot are put to death. Very tricky secret, that one. I've been watching it just shy of four seasons now and again am convinced that with the next episode (season finale) everyone (or at least one person, which we know for sure) will learn of his magick.

But they always have something tricky. Like they'll find out and then lose memory of something.

I think the show I'm thinking of is Jake 2.0 but I don't remember him telling someone in a strange situation in which they forget (that he has tiny robots inside him that let him interface with technology via brain waves). No, I must be thinking of Drop Dead Diva when she tells Grayson a zillion times that she's actually his dead girlfriend but it always turns out to be a dream.

Oh! But in Lois and Clark his Superman-ness was revealed to his love interest in the first season. But that kinda detracted from the other seasons.

Moral of story-- don't tell secret! Only to certain people at certain points. I.e. Lancelot is going to be sent off somewhere at end of episode, may as well let him know about Merlin's magicks not Jake telling his girlfriend and her thinking he's a jackass and dumping him (effectively leaving show). There may be nothing worse than the telling of secrets and the not only not believing (which happened in Drop Dead Diva) but dumping.

Maybe it's just because his girlfriend was a jerk.

Anyway, I now sit on my brain in anticipation of the Merlin finale. I am hoping at least one more person will learn of his power!

Eek!

"The sky is an endless blue" - A Preliminary Review of Labyrinth

2011-12-17T00:43:00.000-08:00

Not the one with David Bowie. Obviously that Labyrinth is brilliant. Jennifer Connolly did a crap job but we were too busy looking at the bulge in Bowie's pants to notice.

Anyway, I am speaking to Kate Mosse (not Kate Moss)'s Labyrinth, the book about "three secrets. two women. one grail."

First off, you should know that I've only got the book because there's a miniseries coming out via the BBC with Katie McGrath of Merlin fame in it. And she's lovely. So I want to like it very much. I'm hoping the series has better qualities than the book.

That said, I've only read seven pages.

But lor' how those pages drag. No, that isn't fair. The character is mildly interesting and digging for evidence of a Paleolithic settlement and seemingly finding one in the first four pages (apparently it actually started on page three as there are some starting quotes and a map).

The thing is, the language is just very boring.

Choice lines: "Above her, the sky is an endless blue" (3-4). Alright, let's search "sky is an endless blue" in quotes via the Google. 2,790 results. "Endless blue sky"= 2,270,000 results. Just tweak it a bit to, say, "the sky is an infinite blue" and you get 416 results or, for "infinite blue sky," 183,000 results.

Moral of story, if words are flowing that easily, consider using a thesaurus. The phrase "sky is an endless blue" is clichéd. I was pretty solidly asleep by that line (and thus sleepreading, ever so coolly).

Second choice line occurs after a boulder comes rolling down the mountain at a fast speed almost killing our protagonist. In response, we have: "Too close for comfort, she thinks." Honestly, when is a boulder falling down a mountain far enough away to be comfortable with? But anyway, it is such an obvious line. Especially in the context of someone almost getting killed. Plus now she's in the eponymous labyrinth, which is just very quick.

I am so bored with this book, I want to give it up already. I'm mildly interested in her falling into this labyrinth-y pit but also pissed off that one of the archeologists didn't get to have the find. She didn't want them to because she wanted to "prove herself" though a temp summer volunteer.

Plus, the back cover has a quote by the author wanting to write about the grail legend from a woman's perspective. Because, apparently, Mists of Avalon never happened. And she's a bit giddy about the women having sex and I really hate poorly written sex scenes and, given the crap of the first four pages, I'm guessing they'll be lousy.

In any case, I must give it at least through the first chapter.

Still, if it is a good story it will make a nice mini-series. So long as they give up the author's terrible internal dialogue (haven't had any external yet).

On a Theme

2011-12-13T00:12:00.000-08:00

1.
Did you know that
once a poinsettia has blossomed
it may, in fact, turn green?
They are also
somewhat of an allergy
for cats
(both domestic and maneater)
but that said cats
will accomplish many feats
in effort to eat
green plants.

2.
Dead thyme smells
almost as delicious as living
thyme.
This is not a metaphor
but an actual
herb- a creeping thyme-
if you must know. But,
of course, you should know
that thyme can often look
dead but is actually
merely resting its eyes.
If you will,

3.
Basil plant, also dead, lived
to its lifespan and was
promptly eaten by
jungle cats parading
about my flat as
though they had come from
an animal shelter versus
possibly Brazil.

4.
Tiny pine tree
with penguin
also snowflakes
you were so much
cheaper than
your be-lighted
counterpart.
When you are big
you will ever so
sneakily be
planted in the dirt
outside my apartment

5.
The highlight of our collection
the potted herb garden
was actually cheaper
than another basil plant
all by itself. Interesting,
since it has, according to the
label, five different herbs.
More interesting, the felines
ignore this plant altogether
despite the presence of basil.
Maybe it is just basil death
that they prefer.

Something... Dramatic!!!

2011-12-12T01:00:00.000-08:00

Well, I've absolutely nothing interesting to write about whatsoever.

...

Have big plans to drop of library book tomorrow. And do yoga.

Possibly some other things will go down.

On account of there are twenty-four hours in a day and those maybe take three if I'm moving at yoga speed. (this is where you are meant to slightly giggle in somewhat awkward manner)

I'm pretty sure I can train one of my cats to dive into a box a la Maru. He already does that but with a bag with a whole in the bottom. We just need an appropriate sized box. Also, it turns out he really will eat anything. This whole narrative sounds a bit kinky.

...

I'm going to bed before I write something I really regret.

Good plan.

Therapeutic Unkindness

2011-12-08T19:10:00.000-08:00

Sending unkind thoughts to a certain person but don't want to be too mean.

Thus, the following mini means are wished in recompense for a great cruelty:

Premature balding
Unanticipated reruns versus new episodes of favorite shows
Strange song stuck in head for days on end
Favorite pen run out of ink
Misplacement of wallet and/or briefcase/keys
Accidental buying of 96% brightness versus 100% brightness paper
Clocks five minutes off
Pillow mark on face all day
Only decaf available
Too much salt in dinner (unless will send back, in which case, retract)
Unmitigated dust accumulating on desk
Bird poop on car window (if no car, on bedroom window)
Cowlick
Strange noise of refrigerator that will go away after two days
Food mess (not staining) on front of shirt
Romantic comedy turning out to be horror movie that keeps up for at least an hour at night

I'm out. I think that is a lot of ill will. Feel much better though. Le sigh!

Poem inspired by Frankie

2011-12-08T14:14:00.000-08:00

Whose poetry is lovely. There you have it.

A Flat Major, Treble, Four Four, Piano, Legato

One two three and a
One and three and four and
One two three and a
One and three and four and
One two three and a
One
One two three and a
One
One and a three and and
One and a three and
One and a three and and
One and a three and
One and a three and and

One and a three and

One and a three and and

One and a three and

One and two and three and

And two and three and four

And two and three and

Anyway, that's page one. I'll get to page two later and complete it. Not as exciting as it was in my head...

the third!

2011-12-08T14:02:00.001-08:00

Continuity!

for the record, I can edit

2011-12-04T00:37:00.000-08:00

I edit poetry all the time. I think I just need to think of this novel as a chapbook. Individual sections more than entire chapterpaloozas.

Right, will go section by section. Bird by bird, right?

The trouble is, I've also got to remember the flow. Because there's an unstated twist (that's how cool I am) and I want to make sure it's hinted at but not explicitly said.

Because it is a spoof on the noir detective story in the sense that nothing much happens.

In that way, the writing is more important than anything that happens, because nothing much happens. I'm a poet. Write? <--- pun!

Anyway, going to think as each chapter as chapbook and each subsection as poem. Will rearrange in wild manner until each chapter makes sense, then go from there!

You are free to be impressed.

Stages of Editing?

2011-12-04T00:31:00.000-08:00

Okay, so I just realized I've got Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, which is about the writing process. The trouble is, I can't tell from the contents what chapter is about editing. Or chapterssssss. I'm pretty sure Part One: Writing is more about getting the piece out. The second section is "The Writing Frame of Mind," which I don't really intend on ever reading... The third part is "Help Along the Way" which tells me how to get other people to edit for me. The last section is on publication...

In any event, Elizabeth tells me there are three ways to edit, and she is v. wise. Those three ways of editing are:
1) copy editing
2) content editing
3).... the other one...

Well, obviously that cannot help me until she wakes up. Will send out "wake up" messages via telepathy. Maybe if I stare at her through the wall, she will wake up. And it will be so effective, she will just tell me the third and I'll continue.

...

Anyway. I've read the first page. That is a start. I am pulled toward copy editing because that's easiest. But I must instead read for overall flow! That must be the place to begin. Make sure the thing makes sense. Then say "y' need more 'ere, luv" or whatnot when such times approach. And cut! As needed!

The trouble is, then I'd have to go back through to edit for lame writing bits and make them shiny.

Then I'd have to read through again for copy editing.

This is assuming my first go throughs of stages work out well enough to continue.

Where is Ezra Pound when you need him?

editing, step one

2011-12-03T08:35:00.000-08:00

Am going to super congratulate myself for doing the hardest step of editing. Which is to say that I printed the book out... In any case, now it is printed and sits on my shelf taunting me, saying terribly cruel things like, "You killed the rainforest for no reason if you don't finish meeeeee!" (Imagine Jacob Marley voice from Muppets version)

But I think it may be a monster. It may have come from watching "Blink" of Dr. Who. That episode has weeping angel statues that come to life and run to kill you whenever no one's watching them.

Obviously, if I ignore it long enough, the manuscript will come to life and paper cut me to death.

Although, dying in such a way may make novel famous despite lack of editing...

Decisions decisions.

words, return!

2011-12-02T12:16:00.000-08:00

It is difficult to write anything other than a novel when you are writing a novel in a month. In any case, have successfully written fifth novel as part of Nanowrimo and for independent study.

Which really begs the question, what has become of these novels?

Mostly, they just sit in wait. I imagine until someone who can actually edits takes them up.

The truth is, there is absolutely nothing I hate more than editing my own work. I used to have a beta reader when I wrote angsty fanfiction. Those were the days, my friend. (Imagine it cold and I am smoking from a pipe and wearing a fedora)

In any case, I will be trying to write more, especially about the random things I am reading.

At the moment, I am rereading Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World by Haruki Murakami (I don't like it very much so I only read it when I go to the gym), Underground, also by Murakami (I've had the flu and read this quite a bit while waiting to puke- ah, romance!), Best New Zombie Tales, Vol 1 on my new Kindle (only on bus-- the first story was kind of lame, but I remain hopeful!), and Cadaver Dogs by Rebecca Loudon, which is a poetry chapbook (I read this when I make myself think because it is lovely and deserves my attention). Oh, I'm also rereading Bridget Jones's Diary but I'm doing that in secret because I don't want the other books to know I'm cheating on them with pleasure reading that requires no thinking whatsoever because I've read it at least five times.

Finishing the quarter and am thus in frazzled mind-state. Will most likely somnamble into ocean and drown. C'est la vie.

letter

2011-10-09T00:52:00.000-07:00

Letter to a love now faded

Arms so corpse-like
thinning
cool steam rising
greyish-brown ash
sinew

Cold can be so cold
just enough
brain cells eroded
empty hippocampus
release

Forever, you said,
ah, forever
can be longer than now
infinity was vanity
swollen

If we lived in another time
You would have eight souls
And me an afterworld of loving
Your secret name, I’d know
But mine
(there’s the rub)
I’d’ve never told you in the first
place
(there's the rub)

Eight lifetimes was enough
we lived
we died so many nights
to live and possess each other
visitations

You will haunt my memory
Still, of course
I can't write you away
"Fade," the pen screams, "fade"
corporeality

This I know
Cold is the only truth
this voice on the wind
hair in my sink
is all that remains
of eternity.

Haunted Roads

2011-10-08T21:20:00.000-07:00

on the lights-

of course they glow
but it's unnatural
in many ways

thousands of eyes
white or red and looking
always planning

you see things, there
assuming it just is
but, knowing, always

the unsaid all
hides in the middle there
and is, at night

what she said-

it will, of course, consume
much like a rat with cheese
at your ego and all

attaching to the psyche
your memories are what you are
you is, I suppose

won't say PTSD, won't
(but really, that's it)
a rather haunting

ghosts of that what happened

and escape-

truth though
truth
freedom
it's there in that haunting
a reason to admit it
all that's happened
things
things like poltergeist
sitting there
and we drive
see the whateveritis
explanation
thank god

To the Healthcare Professionals

2011-10-07T23:00:00.000-07:00

part of a project. anyway...

Dear Nurse Forgot-Your-Name,

Trazadone is addictive
so is Vicodin
we both know this

you use scare tactics
don't/take medicine
so I do/n't

the truth is, your scrubs
are all I remember
about you at all

just a good patient, I guess
but a rotten respecter
of all your nonsense

-- I just can't write lately. Frowny face.

Olive Tree

2011-09-23T23:27:00.000-07:00

It's really more like three trees all mashed together. Conjoined triplets stretching out toward auto-trifurcation. Then there's the skin, trying to pull off as well. Leaves crunch on the ground. These trees or this tree, whichever it/they may be, is falling to pieces, and one must wonder if its a defect of the breed. But then it may in fact be an extension of self, the trees make their presence known three hundred miles away with the support of the Santa Ana. Still, the tree looks tired, hunched over and all with ash burnt in from someone's cigarette. They'll say, someday, it fell from weak roots.

a poem about my feet

2011-09-23T21:01:00.000-07:00

many pieces of feet
falling about
more red than creamy
and awkward tan lines
so many signs of fashion
scarred into flesh
and all that walking
all that trying to impress
impressed upon the skin
bruised and blistered
and warped nailed in
dirt that won't wash away
callouses and dry patches
creaking toes
anxiety of life
stilled lifed into
peripatetic feet

3:15 Experiment, Day Twenty-five

2011-08-26T13:20:00.003-07:00

Until the matter's settled
we will wait here and expect
something amazing will happen
and waiting's not so bad as it used to be

3:15 Experiment, Day Twenty-four

2011-08-26T13:20:00.001-07:00

temperature find temperateness
the polarized degrees
hit the skin like poison
that book- ingested via the skin
my pores and lungs
in comes the wild change
the night is a strange time to live

Magnificat

2011-08-26T11:06:00.001-07:00

*reposted because it is too amazing to be buried

Magnificat
(for Sian, after thirteen years)

oh this man
what a meal he made of me
how he chewed and gobbled and sucked
in the end he spat me all out

you arrived on the dot, in the nick
of time, with your red curls flying
I was about to slip down the sink like grease
I nearly collapsed, I almost
wiped myself out like a stain
I called for you, and you came, you voyaged
fierce as a small archangel with swords and breasts...

you commanded me to sing of my redemption

oh, my friend, how
you were mother for me, and how
I could let myself lean on you
comfortable as an old cloth
familiar as enamel saucepans
I was a child again, pyjama'ed
in winceyette, my hair plaited and you

listened, you soothed me like cake and milk...

when we met, I tell you
it was a birthday party, a funeral
it was a holy communion
between women, a Visitation
it was two old she-goats butting
and nuzzling each other in the smelly fold

Michele Roberts

3:15 Experiment, Day Twenty-three

2011-08-23T09:36:00.001-07:00

the trouble with two
is that two become interchangeable
equally loved/needed/whatever
the possibility of not

necessity of watching
need to know need to know
employees only
do not disturb, DNR

the thing about poetry
growling imagination imagery
open yourself up to terrible thoughts
let the witch lead you to her den

3:15 Experiment, Day Twenty-two

2011-08-22T12:52:00.001-07:00

intricacies of a firefly
how does she glow?
take flight to spread messages
not all night power rests
with moons and stars and men

3:15 Experiment, Day Twenty

2011-08-22T12:51:00.001-07:00

eugenicide
postpartum
stuff us all back
in the mother womb
patron saint of gimps

Handwriting

2011-08-19T16:45:00.000-07:00

The big trouble with the 3:15 Experiment is that I can never seem to read my handwriting when I wake up. And I do a lot of typos and misspellings (i.e. "two" versus "too") but feel I shouldn't correct them if I'm to keep them in the raw. But what to do when I can't read what I have written? Especially when I write something phonetically similar but with such a different meaning ("con-like," I'm pretty sure, was meant to be "dog-like"). Something appears to say "askance" but I didn't know what the word actually meant until I looked it up ("With an attitude or look of suspicion or disapproval"), which doesn't even make sense in the context.

In any event, the month will end soon and I will fix up the poems all pretty. I like that I'm getting many night poems again. I might try to put together a chapbook on night meanderings. Which may mean extending the 3:15 Experiment for my own personal use. Lack of a collective wakeful writing mind, but still that stealing intention from dreams. Or, as of late, nightmares.

3:15 Experiment, Day Nineteen

2011-08-19T09:11:00.001-07:00

The morning comes with scythe
A dark cloak and metaphors
Fancies herself a god or mother
Rebirthing some into the waking world
The somniad can only fill his bag
Tremble sand flakes on the grass

3:15 Experiment, Day Eighteen

2011-08-18T11:37:00.000-07:00

askance
butterfly effect
pinned to a wall
bought yellow tag
at a thrift shop
where he sold it
to finance
more divergence

3:15 Experiment, Day Seventeen

2011-08-18T11:36:00.001-07:00

I dreamt (again)
    I won the lotto

except it wasn't the lotto
    but a grant
and it wasn't for me
but a group of us

Giant stacks of papers
    Good news
Where is PR to document it?

3:15 Experiment, Day Sixteen

2011-08-18T11:35:00.001-07:00

They lied to us, didn't they?
the new tomorrows
live next door

integration into our lives
was never the intention
survival of the violentest

They will never take us to space
the poor, the hovering masses
the lying on the floor reaching up

next door will live forever
with a robot heart and mind
supercomputered into infinity

it's like cats' lifespans
humans live so long now
but cats still live so briefly
someone should get on that

I sometimes wonder if that's the trouble
humans were never meant to reach Babel's top
but no cat I know of ever committed genocide

the next door neighbors have no pets
but they type 200 WPM
and live on green leafy vegetables

the future is pleasureless

then again, we won't be there, will we?
a living eugenics
survival of the richest

Maybe Leona Helmsley's dog can stay
maybe Astro was wishful thinking

3:15 Experiment, Day Fifteen

2011-08-16T11:42:00.001-07:00

gnawing at night
the bones the bones the bones
sinewy tasty bits
propensity to slurrrp

a thousand tiny teeth
pointy- slump and shine
typewriter clicks
piranha intact

egalitarian mouth
indiscriminate munching
necks and hands and backs and shoulders
frontal lobe to boot

gnawing at night
chewing con-like by day
regurgitate my sanity!
at last some part of "me"

3:15 Experiment, Day Twelve

2011-08-16T11:41:00.005-07:00

inutil
never associated

3:15 Experiment, Day Ten

2011-08-16T11:41:00.003-07:00

sometimes
it feels
fishes in the ceiling
tons and tons of pressure
just above
my head

3:15 Experiment, Day Eight

2011-08-16T11:40:00.003-07:00

nociceptors 3

feathery touch
breeze, goose pimples
two hard "two hard"
one must be fragile
hand tearing specters
stalks and sucks of the wounds
filing "don't forget me"

3:15 Experiment, Day Seven

2011-08-16T11:40:00.001-07:00

(wow, I plagiarized from myself...)

she had one of those accents
like she could be a host
on Saturday morning TV

one of those hairdos that
must have been chosen by
her mother back in the day

those nails that one both bites
at and peels away- thin
from too little calcium

earring holes in her lobe
stretched from too heavy
of hopes

I'd like to say she was
smart or funny or charming
or even interesting

Lord knows her mundaneness
was enough for me

a song I know all the words to

2011-08-06T23:32:00.000-07:00

It took me awhile to get back to this exercise. It must be a measure of youth, a rite of passage if you will, to listen to the radio and devote to mind the lyrics to two thousand terrible songs. I feel old now, but those songs that made the top 40's lists in the late nineties have made the "golden oldies" station. The eighties has been solidified melodically among the ranks of Frank Sinatra and the Beatles, so it was only a matter of time. Still, I can begin to imagine what it will be like in forty years when I'm beginning to get old.

In any case, there are literally thousands of songs ingrained in me. Remember back in high school or maybe community college when they'd tell you about oral story telling and you couldn't even imagine having not only the Iliad but the Odyssey memorized as well? Going around town to town selling your wares in the form of a well-told story, sending out a brass bowl to collect the days coins.

Maybe in the future all of us of the MTV generation will travel around singing out those many songs whose lyrics probably amount to an epic poem or two and whose many tones have the true feel of an emphasized tale. Sure, hats are far more in fashion, "pass the hat" and all that, but it all amounts to the same. Even Homer must have been kicked from a street corner or two for "loitering."

Unfortunately, so few of the songs etched across my brain pan have any true effect. And perhaps this, above all things, is the tragedy of my generation.

3:15 Experiment, Day Six

2011-08-06T23:21:00.000-07:00

the good feeling
    is warm like
a cat on the hottest day of the year

it evelops fast and
    uncontrollable, sunrise,
that night has ended

the knowing that loneliness
has passed affects
the retinas first

when they ask, they,
    a thousand years from
now, you'll remember only sun

ears, you command, stop
    your searching
wind is simply wind

the tiny cat tongue
    can cut in a way but
recognize this is love

the purring is not
    a sign to self loath
a message from an angry world

feeling those vibrations
    under empty hand
the heart's trembling will calm

and that good old feeling
    is the universe ever expanding and large
and always inescapable

3:15 Experiment, Day Five

2011-08-05T08:55:00.001-07:00

the Truth

capital T

spills more like

puked out

food poisony

but longer

dream a little dream of me

then nothing

silence in chest

mind whirls

be still

I've fallen and I can't get up

expectations

talk talk talk

not enough, T

or too much

just human

little more

lot less

take a pitcher

scoop it up

carry it all

to the water

pour it away

capital t Truth

drown away

3:15 Experiment, Day Four

2011-08-04T09:10:00.001-07:00

She couldn't say no

when asked directly

the thought of being nuisant-ly

was enough to drive her outward

abandoning the thoughts of the self

and all its many idiosyncrasies

the self-born inability to be burdensome

facilitated the transformation of self

into someone else

who was still she-y

but also very much

an apparition of the requester

with all the touch

of a Tokyo godfather

Yakuza bossesque

she maybe would cut off the fingers

of her lieutenants and her clients

saying it's all the same

even as they morph themselves

into someone very much her

only an exhale before

3:15 Experiment, Day Three

2011-08-03T08:59:00.001-07:00

night noises internal

one knowing, the certainty.

"the cat plans to eat me"

not simply when I've

gone and

"shed this mortal

coil" but with the

knowledge that mortal

coils are a rare

delicacy themselves

3:15 Experiment, Day Two!

2011-08-02T23:11:00.002-07:00

Note: I remember being super sore from yoga....

Step forward, slide right
Weight carries forward, diagonal
To the closet, to the mirror, to the door
Breathing meticulously
Straw with hole sound
and a tuff tuff tuff
depend upon your stomach
much like a hair tie
snaps so often and fails
the floor does not
h-a HA! six seconds
fingers tied beneath the chin
and shoulders low
elbows elevated
meditation is sometimes
quite a bit like dying
in all its many forms
weight to left let
weight to right leg
balance, breathe
go back, far back, way back
change

3:15 Experiment, Day One!

2011-08-02T23:11:00.000-07:00

Note: Remember, this is unedited stuff-- I haven't even read it yet! The 3:15 Experiment has a bunch of silly folks waking themselves up at 3:15 a.m. all through the month of August to write random dream thoughts down. The whole point is not to edit them or even read them 'til the end of the month. Cheers!

Silence would be best.
In truth, it mostly succeeds.
But then, where it fails
the end slowly wanders in
more oozing or dripping
than anything human
and what it ends
one couldn't say, mostly
because the fear is there
intense and coming
from someplace deep
making it feel profound
but truly more profane
we sleep to forget
the confusion of change
occurring far more often
than anyone, anyone
would ever care
to admit.

Song that Reminds Me of a Certain Event

2011-06-26T21:50:00.000-07:00

You know, it's weird, but Pomp and Circumstance reminds me of graduation.

... seriously though, I can't think of a song that reminds me of a certain event. I've been thinking on this for a week or so.

Of course, now that I type that out, a song comes to me. Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called to Say I Love You" reminds me of Emmy's birth, because the episode where he and Mrs. Huxtable sing it in a recording booth played in the hospital waiting room when Emmy was off being born. We watched a LOT of TV that day. And ate a lot of food. Although, I just remembered that I was watching my figure, so actually I didn't eat much because all that was available was kinda bad for you :|

Anyway, I love Stevie Wonder, though why couldn't he have sung "Isn't She Lovely?" with Mrs. Huxtable? Wouldn't that have been the perfect song to have heard the night of your niece's birth? :_) Mrs. Huxtable has such a great voice ^_^ This is a very sweet scene anyway.

Three months?!?!?!

2011-06-17T23:10:00.000-07:00

Dear Dr. E,

You are a crazy lady. For reals.

Let's start from the beginning. I came to you today, leaving work early and losing moneys by doing so, because I've been feeling pretty lousy all week. I've been really dizzy even just sitting, super nauseous, lacking in appetite, sleepy, and achy in the general ear/sinus region. The worst is my balance. I told you how I do hot yoga and have pretty durned good balance, but have been falling over a lot this week (super embarrassing!).

What tests did you do? Well, you took my blood pressure and temperature. Oh. Well, actually, you didn't. The nurse did. You listened to me breathe, checked my ears, and looked at my throat. And then you pronounced (wait for it....)

That I've got viral labyrinthitis. You told me to drink lots of ginger ale (you actually said lots of sugary and salty drinks versus water), ginger tablets (whatever those are), and Pepto Bismal (should be called Pepto DISMAL ... fail... seriously though, it is icky). You didn't want to put me on any medications (and apparently think I'm allergic to amoxocillin. Not sure why).

You explained that viral labyrinthitis is contagious. It affects the inner ear, so it throws off my equilibrium. Which explains the falling over and what not. You explained that it was causing my "vertigo" making me think of a Hitchcock film, can't remember what it's called (this is a lot funnier in my head). Something about chemicals.

Oh, and then you said it would heal naturally in, oh, THREE MONTHS. It would take three weeks for any improvement, you explained.

Ugh. Think maybe I'll get a second opinion. I don't want to feel crappy for three months!!!

Woe to me. Ginger tablets, really? Has anyone heard of this??? What are they, and where do you get them? And she said I should take them "if I could get them down." So I'm guessing they taste awful.

rats.

Love,
Mandy
who is sick
and will be
for three blankety blank
months
:'(

p.s. just looked it up on Wikipedia, and apparently it can last years and cause permanent damage. Ugh!!!!

Song that Reminds me of Somewhere

2011-06-17T22:58:00.000-07:00

Definitely Octopus' Garden. Octopuses'? Octopus's? Anyway...

So, I started this Pavlov's Dog-ian experiment about six months ago where I listen to Octopus' Garden during my cool down at the gym. My thinking was that if I kept listening to it during the peaceful post-killed-myself-in-work-out period, I'd eventually get that pleasant place of mind whenever I heard it. These are the weird things we do because we don't actually want to learn how to go about things. ... (Distracted trying to figure out if I should say it is a Beatles song or a Ringo song. Anywho, onward, post!)

I actually am not sure I've listened to the song at all outside of the gym though. I don't know how long is long enough before testing to see if it works.

Still, I really like the tune. It also reminds me of the movie 500 Days of Summer (I am not doing a great job italicizing/quotationicizing/underlining these titles, but it is Friday). Zooey Deschannel's character, the eponymous Summer's favorite Beatle is Ringo. Joseph Gordon Lovett's character finds her the album in a record shop. It is all very sweet. Actually, I think it is sad in the context of the movie, but I think that Joe's character is so cute that it cheers me up even if it doesn't woo Zooey. There you have it.

I'm not checking my spelling in these post either. Self-conscious!!! In any case, now you know this song's special significance!

Song that Reminds Me of Someone

2011-06-17T08:56:00.000-07:00

This song reminds me of C :_) When we were living together, she would play 4ever by the Veronicas over and over and over and over. Seriously. For a period, that album just kept repeating 27 hours a day 13 days a week (it bent the space/time continuum just to harass my eardrums).

Anyway, I actually do like this song, and I can happily listen to it again now that I've had a break from it. But still, ever time I hear it I think of C and am amused.

I'm pretty sure we had a chat about the album at some point :| because I got so exhausted from it! But anyway, I don't remember. I think I vetoed it being played in my car (it appeared on many a gifted mixtape).

Possibly I sneaked away from the car issue by getting C to read books aloud doing all the voices. The best one was "There's a Boy in the Girl's Bathroom" because C did all the voices of his toy animals ^__^ And they'd randomly be from all over (I think the bear was Southern[and named Benny] and maybe the deer was English??). Good times. Veronicas-free times. D'oh!

Sad Song!

2011-06-10T00:03:00.000-07:00

The saddest song I can think of is Patty Loveless' "How Can I Help You to Say Goodbye?". It is a country song my mom used to listen to when we went to visit my uncle and aunt in Idaho. Really sad song. It's about a woman going to her mother whenever she loses someone-- I think the first two are a childhood friend who moves away and her husband via divorce. The last person the narrator loses is her mom. Seriously sad stuff.

Anyway, I haven't heard it in a long time because I heard it once when I was younger and sobbed. That was back when I had really bad asthma, so I got to having an asthma attack. After that, my mom didn't play the song anymore. My lungs were a real problem back then, and I bet my mom felt terrible.

I'm just happy, though, that I never had to hear that damn song again. It is seriously depressing. I get sad just thinking about it.

Old-ish Writing Experiment

2011-06-09T23:58:00.000-07:00

Found this and am putting it here for safekeeping.... because it is how I roll.

Hateful Things

* After "Hateful Things" from the Pillow Book, attributed to Sei Shonagon.

It is most annoying when someone finds one's nervous habits annoying. There is a need for such things as loudly smacking one's gum, cracking one's joints, and pulling at scabs. When one is told to put an end to such habits, that is most hateful.

One must bite into the juicy apple to reach its taste, and the crunch is delicious but the sound attacks the ears and burns.

Of course, one worries about things, and so arrives early to a doctor's appointment. One is kept waiting, however, for nearly an hour. When brought to the examination room, the doctor hurries one along, so that one forgets all the nuances of the condition which brought one to the doctor in the first place.

A person will often say that she "knows how you feel" in times of great suffering.

People who are ill-treated often ill treat others, as though they did not understand the difficulties of their own situations.

I really hate it when people do not say "thank you" when I hold the door open for them. It is simply rude.

To be concerned about showing concern is a tricky and irritating thing. It is, of course, annoying to hear a person whine each day for hours on end, but a bit of time now and again should be allotted.

One has just finished putting the final layer of polish on one's nails, but smears it instead.

One has surreptitiously tiptoed off for a midnight snack-- how embarrassing!-- and is caught red handed.

One is in bed, trying to sleep, but simply cannot fall asleep. After hours of tossing, one finally gives up, and tries to read, but it too tired to concentrate.

One is eating the most delicious cookie ever invented, and someone breaks in asking you if you aren't on a diet anymore.

One is drinking a soda and someone reminds you you've given up caffeine.

It is very annoying when someone calls at 3 a.m.

One finds out that the neighborhood "stray" one has been feeding for months actually has a home. He is in the habit now, and will never stop coming and whining for food.

A friend calls in the early afternoon, and laughs at one's sleepful voice, calling one a "sleepyhead," telling one to "rise and shine" and the like. One has been up late studying. Annoying.

An ex with whom one would like to be reunited offers paragraphs of praise for a new lover.

The phrase, "not bad, if I do say so myself." As well as, "not to toot my own horn." Though not self-praise in itself.

A night with no moon is always hateful.

I cannot stand a post office. I avoid it at all costs.

I hate sentences that go on for pages with no punctuation of any kind. They really give one a headache.

Sometimes, such a person will use very long words that one has never heard of, while still ignoring the basics of sentence construction.

It is annoying when, after referring to someone by their first name, another person adds a title prior to the last name. It makes one seem rude.

A favorite pen that has run out of ink.

Catching every red light during one's morning commute. Even more so if running late.

The feeling of guiltiness for disliking someone or something for no particular reason.

The neighbor who sets off New Years' or Fourth of July fireworks from 1 p.m. to 5 a.m., driving the cats into a frenzy.

When a lover has one very odious quality or habit, such as halitosis. Of course, one cannot say anything for a long while, for the romance would be gone. For many months, one simply puts up with it, and just when one is in a stage where one might start making hints, the relationship ends.

Equally annoying is when a new lover feels the need to point out all of one's flaws, seeing herself as entirely flawless.

A good lover will also feel the need for romance.

There will be poems, special songs, and dancing. Candles are also quite nice, as well as surprise mini-breaks.

Indeed, those are the kinds of romances that make one grow accustomed to and love even those things that would otherwise be hateful.

The Audience Has Two (or More) Faces

2011-06-09T23:46:00.000-07:00

I'm inclined to think that Barbra Streisand has all but destroyed any expectations I have for myself as a future educator. In cultural studies, we talk a lot about knowing our audiences and writing/speaking to them. As Michael Pryke explains in "Situated Audiences," audiences aren't just there for the reading of our pieces, to take them or leave them and interpret them however they want (163). The act of writing does not happen within a culture-less bubble, but is impacted a great deal by the various cultural forces that surround the writer. Spivak suggests that audiences themselves be thought of as "co-investigators," allowing us to consider how our works may be interpreted outside of our own bubbles (qtd. Pryke 180).

This quarter in the IAS Graduate Research Colloquium, I thought a lot about audience and particularly my role as a member of these researchers' audiences. As a response to the first reading, Dan Goldhaber's "Is It Just a Bad Class?: Assessing the Stability of Measured Teacher Performance," I could only really note that I was not a part of Dan's intended audience. The piece utilized a great deal of primary and secondary data analysis techniques, which, while potentially useful for my future work, have little to do with the language and aesthetics studies of my current research.

Perhaps as a result of seeing how patients' words became quantified via the McGill Pain Questionnaire in my research on pain mapping, I am extremely leery of using numeric values as stand-ins for the rainbow highlighter-based coding version of grounded theory developed in my current program. Recently, it occurred to me how my research, which challenges the position of power wielded by the physician in doctor-patient relationships, might easily irk any doctor who came across it, in much the same manner in which I became instantly uncomfortable with Dan's work. Even in terms of the Streisand piece there is an audience member, in this case the male lead, Jeff Bridges, who misunderstands the lecture, in this case because he has left too early.

It may be impossible to truly account for the various levels of interest and familiarity various readers/listeners bring to my work. Yet, another professor, Jin-Kyu Jung, offered a partial solution to the widespread/diverse audience problem through the effective manner in which he spoke to a spectrum of peoples in both his written piece, "Computer Aided Qualitative GIS," and lecture on the same topic. In particular, Jin-Kyu used his visuals quite adeptly, so that his powerpoint was not merely a crutch reiterating the same points being spoken or something to keep the eyes from him as a nervous speaker, but a tool that truly complementing his talk. At various points, definitions appeared on the screen for those of us less familiar with GIS, and, when maps appeared on the screen, he explained them himself, rather than depending on a caption. Yet through the questions of more GIS-proficient audience members, it became obvious that Jin-Kyu is not only very familiar with the material on which he spoke, but an expert on its various nuances and vocabularies.

Perhaps in the middle of these two paths is the talk given by Gwen Ottinger on communities surrounding oil refineries. A lot of the science in this talk was beyond my understanding, yet the methods were extremely familiar to me, particularly the "kitchen table talks" defined by Ottinger as "loose, off-the-record histories[...] strategic stories better consider larger ramifications in the case that such a story were made public" (3). Now, similar to Dan's talk, I felt much that I was not the targeted audience, though, in this case, I knew a fair amount Gwen's topic. In particular, I am well informed about the possibilities of "kitchen table talks"/"dinner table conversations"/"coffee table chats" and one important reason why these words are often chosen: they allow one to slip around having to file an IRB. I'm pretty sure that Gwen had to go through this process anyway and perhaps she speaks more at length about this topic at another point in her book, but it felt odd that she brought up this language without speaking to the way sneaky grad students use it. Or at least that's how I felt, being a sneaky grad student.

In the end though, all of these talks demonstrated that the professors had some familiarity with their audiences. The published pieces were, after all, not written explicitly for the colloquium, while the talks were aimed at interdisciplinary arts and sciences graduate students. These were not required sessions, and thus the professors knew we all had some "extracurricular" interest in learning for learning's sake (and/or impressing our capstone advisors). We were there to learn, not to get regaled with amusing nuggets as the 300+ students in Streisand's fictional class appeared to be. And learn we did, which, in my opinion, makes these successful talks.

Of course, some people, like the professor below, may not be so lucky.

Works Cited

Goldhaber, Dan. "Managing the Teacher Workforce in Austere Times: The Implications of Teacher Layoffs." IAS Graduate Research Colloquium. University of Washington Bothell. Bothell, 5 Apr. 2011. Lecture.

Goldhaber, Dan, and Michael Hansen. "Is it Just a Bad Class?: Assessing the Stability of Measured Teacher Performance." CEDR 2010-3: 1-58. Print.

Jung, Jin-Kyu. "Computer-aided Qualitative GIS: A Software-level Integration of Qualitative Research and GIS." Qualitative GIS: A Mixed Methods Approach. Eds. Meghan S. Cope and Sarah Elwood. London: Sage, 2009. 115-136. Print.

---. "Qualitative Geovisualization for Community Planning: Masten District Neighborhood Plan in Buffalo, NY." IAS Graduate Research Colloquium. University of Washington Bothell. Bothell, 7 June 2011. Lecture.

Melzack, Ronald. “The McGill Pain Questionnaire: Major properties and scoring methods.” Pain 1.3 (Sept. 1975): 277-299. Print.

The Mirror Has Two Faces. Dir. Barbra Streisand. Tristar, 1996. Film.

Ottinger, Gwen. "The Biopolitics of the Fenceline." IAS Graduate Research Colloquium. University of Washington Bothell. Bothell, 3 May 2011. Lecture.

---. "Dangerous Stories." Refining Expertise: How Responsible Engineers Solve Environmental Justice Challenges. Unpublished. 1-52. Print.

Pryke, Michael. "Situated Audiences." Using Social Theory: Thinking Through Research. Eds. Michael Pryke et al. London: Sage, 2003. 163-180. Print.

Happy Song

2011-05-17T23:48:00.000-07:00

Happy happy song to me! 一半女生(Half the Girls) by Twins.

Well, to tell you the truth, I don't have much to say about it. I don't think an English translation is available online anywhere yet. The only part in English is "Bye bye love, bye bye happiness" which draws one straight away to a particular English language song (cough!). Anyway, from what I can gleam of auto-translate features on Google, the lyrics really are sad and about lost love.

But the tune is just so cheerful! And look at that video (so cuuute!)-- they sure SEEM happy. Maybe they are like, "bye, love but at least I still got my sister and that's what really matters." I like to think that anyway ^__^

I came across the CD this was on back in high school when they still didn't have more than twenty albums in the East Asian music section of the public library. That's how it's classified FYI, even though a lot of the artists were from South Asia. I've got a lot of songs on my computer still from those days, though this was by far the sweetest. They are so durned cute!

And I can sing in Mandarin (apparently their first Mandarin album-- previously mostly Cantonese with a few English albums thrown in) when I listen to this... because I randomly memorized it. Don't know what I'm saying, but still! I want to harass Mandarin-speaking friends to know what they are saying!!!!!

So cuute!

Least Favorite Song

2011-05-16T23:19:00.000-07:00

I'm not even gonna post the video because I don't want to make ya'll witness to the crap that it Sheryl Crow's "Soak Up the Sun." I was going to be all deep and post some song that I associate with something awful or a sad time or at least something important, but instead, all I could think what Sheryl Crow singing the most pointless lyrics ever composed along with a boring ass melody. Seriously. Girlfriend needs to learn notes beyond an octave.

Having just learned via Wikipedia that I often mix her up with Shania Twain, who at least has the benefit of her good looks, I am even more startled by this woman's success. I know I know, I am very mean. Seriously though, she also did that crap remake of "The First Cut is the Deepest." Oh, wow, she ALSO did "Every Day is a Winding Road". I hate that song too.

Anyway, I'm sure she's a lovely person, she just needs to stop singing.

But more importantly, why was "Soak Up the Sun" singled out, apart from its boring, pointless, pathetic lyrics? Well, my friend, not only have I had to listen to it on the radio at least once a week for the past ten years, but I had to PLAY the damn thing. That's right. It was one of the songs we played and routine'd to in marching band. Thank the Lord I escaped high school the next year.

Oh, but that isn't the worst of it. Guess what song it accompanied in the routine- what amazing, glorious, timeless piece? That's right- Thriller.

Okay okay, no song that great really deserves to be turned into a marching band tune, but it actually turned out okay. Plus, I think we did Oye Como Va with it, and that song is forever and always amazing.

Ahhh. Still though, I hated marching band and I hated that song, and it was a stupid ass piece to play in the middle of winter when we were all freezing off our unmentionables. And I still have to hear that crap song all the time because, apparently, I'm the one person who really hates it. Yuck.

30 Day Song Challenge

2011-05-15T22:47:00.000-07:00

Well, I've been doing a pretty crap job at blog updating for both this and the other one, so I'm gonna try a theme for a bit here and see if that helps at all. Talking about songs can often resurface buried memories, and certainly more than a few come to mind right off the back for some of the themes listed. Anyway, it's a Facebook thing-- finding a song to match the theme for thirty days.

Here is the list of themes:
day 01 - your favorite song
day 02 - your least favorite song
day 03 - a song that makes you happy
day 04 - a song that makes you sad
day 05 - a song that reminds you of someone
day 06 - a song that reminds you of somewhere
day 07 - a song that reminds you of a certain event
day 08 - a song that you know all the words to
day 09 - a song that you can dance to
day 10 - a song that makes you fall asleep
day 11 - a song from your favorite band
day 12 - a song from a band you hate
day 13 - a song that is a guilty pleasure
day 14 - a song that no one would expect you to love
day 15 - a song that describes you
day 16 - a song that you used to love but now hate
day 17 - a song that you hear often on the radio
day 18 - a song that you wish you heard on the radio
day 19 - a song from your favorite album
day 20 - a song that you listen to when you’re angry
day 21 - a song that you listen to when you’re happy
day 22 - a song that you listen to when you’re sad
day 23 - a song that you want to play at your wedding
day 24 - a song that you want to play at your funeral
day 25 - a song that makes you laugh
day 26 - a song that you can play on an instrument
day 27 - a song that you wish you could play
day 28 - a song that makes you feel guilty
day 29 - a song from your childhood
day 30 - your favorite song at this time last year

Without further ado, song one: my favorite song. That would be 粉雪 by レミオロメン -- Konayuki (Powder Snow)by Remioromen.

Anyway, that is my favorite song. I actually haven't listened to it in a while, which is weird. Sometimes it just makes me really sad, I guess. The lyrics are quite beautiful, though difficult to translate while maintaining the lovely rhythm. It's from a Japanese drama, which must be super cheerful, as it is called "One Liter of Tears." I've never seen the drama it's from, and I actually have no idea when/where I cam across this song, though it was one of my favorites even before coming to Japan.

One of the best parts about living in Tokyo was how pervasive this song was. Seriously. I heard if everywhere. Folks had it as their cell phone ring tones. I'd hear it on commercials. I even overheard people listening to it on their iPods while on the train. When I told my friend K my favorite song, she knew what it was :) It was nice to have that sense of connection, even if I did feel a little less cool in my obscurity.

I'll have to check out the lyrics again. I just know it comes across as very romantic in Japanese. The idea of there being something so far beyond science and even the possible. In a crowd of thousands, he sees her instantly. I'm guessing "power snow" refers to her skin, although the model in the video obviously does not have snow white skin. She is pretty darn tanned. So I like to think it is the mood that fills the world when it has been enveloped in powdered snow and the way sound is consumed and everything slows down.

Who knows though? Even the vagueness makes the song beautiful.

Poem Experiment

2011-04-25T20:12:00.000-07:00

We randomly pointed at words in books and had to use them in a poem-- I got "culture," "mistakenly," and "Hell." Oh, this was at the PacRim Conference :|

Some guy once told me, “We,
We’ve got a culture of pain.”
mistakenly figuring
we know
who “we” is
any more than we know
some heavens bend sideways
and some hells just float there
all atheistically greying in the clouds
of an otherwise halfway decent day

You will know me

2011-04-09T23:08:00.000-07:00

You will know me by the way I walk
Like I don't know
where the hell I'm going
to but maybe want to get there
quick as a rock swung
out from a slingshot
arcing up'ndown as I move

And you'll know me more by that look
right there on my face
not askin' what you're staring
at but tellin' you "keep walking,
keep walking, jackass"
while I clutch my keys one
by one by one by one between
my fingers like brass knuckles

You will know me by my spit
trickling down my chin 'til
I wipe it away on my sleeve
I'll spit again at your feet
mucus/saliva mixed with blood
a few teeth fresh from fighting
a few chiclets chewed up good
formed into a tiny bubble

But, baby, I won't know you from no one
so I've been acting this game out all day
maybe all my life even as I
tough it all out like you're meant to
turning my vulnerabilities into sin

You'll know me, that's for sure
so when you see me, just let me know
stomp my toes beneath your heel
give a little wave-smile
and say, "don't I know you from
somewhere? Yeah, class of '82."
It'll make no sense
'cause that's the way we are

Letter One

2011-04-09T14:03:00.000-07:00

I started off a writing chain with this piece. Didn't have much time for editing :| but here's hoping it turned out okay!

Muy señor mío,

My voice is screaming torture sounds out through my fingers in wild cursivesque letters, transcribing class quote unquote notes. I crack my knuckles again to keep my inner space in check, prevent the noises from entering the auditory world in a more profound way beyond the click click click. The shifting up and down and sideways in my seat, the rough hand-squeezing of my neck, the sensuous rolling of my shoulders, the sitting up straight and slowly coming back to a slouch are all signs that the psyche is ever-so-slowly slouching, crawling toward a secular Bedlam.

Elaine Scarry tells us that what is so impossible for the person in agony to ignore is identical to that which is so impossible for her companions to notice: the reality of her suffering is perceived by her, alone in a private universe. In my brain, that irksome muscle that is the center of this pain with its nociceptively-attuned cerebral cortex, I can tell myself that this suffering is useful for sustaining me in the now. I do this using electrical signals or chemicals, or whatever it is the neuroscientists now clutch to as Truth. It will be outdated by the next sentence. But then, there’s no point in becoming a creature of the present if all that truly exists is of the scientific and quantitatively recorded in a database, analog world.

Of course, you would teach us your science as though it could do no harm. As though Blumenbach never severed humanity into five parts like a ruined, fingerless hand. Gey never took and did experiments on a terminally ill Black woman’s cells without her consent or knowledge, sharing what remained of her life for all the world to toy with. And Descartes never sliced a living animal open to see its parts moving in agony, proclaiming, “It has no espirit—it cannot hurt.”

You talk to us as though we don’t know there were ever such things as A-Bombs, or H-Bombs, catapults, guillotines, electric chairs, AK-47s, nooses, ballistas, canons, gunpowder, warships, bayonets, tanks, knives, boomerangs, slingshots, howitzers, katanas, submarines, battleships, EMPS, shivs, iron maidens, brass knuckles, sniper rifles, lobotomies, tomahawks, machetes, spears or javelins or IEDs. In your simplified psychology of the world, we circle pictures of ☺ or ☹ to show our mood, and Kitty Genovese, Patty Hearst, Kinsey or, come to think of it, John Money and Silas Weir Mitchell are all forgotten. The physician, not the actor.

In the motherland, when someone dies, all the mirrors in the house are covered in cloth. They say the soul of the deceased wanders after leaving the body behind, and can become trapped in mirrors on the way to the next world. My first girlfriend was an astrologist who did our charts weekly to see how long our love would last. I read runes and did tarot readings. We thought, one day we’d open a psychic practice. Who can say which of us first knew the romance was slowly winding to an end?

“Poppycock!” you say, “Superstitious nonsense.” But we know better. I watch the ghosts sit among the desks and chairs. Sometimes the politely ask why we read about the British Light Brigade but never las soldaderas. Sometimes they give voice to my screams heard only by the third ear you also have no use for and the eyes you claim are a mutated form of the color blue. La Llorona weeps for this, the thinking that brought about the end of her children.

The fantasmas lean over my shoulder and whisper radical discontentment into my head, dialoguing with me telepathically and clairvoyantly in whispers, screams, sign, gesture, and spit. Kitty wonders aloud how the violence against her could so have been transformed as to be remembered only through the context of the people around her, her name given to the group of secondary murderers who were her neighbors.

“We’ve all been there, baby,” someone says, and I think it must be true. After all, we still are here, aren’t we?

My physicians have told me that stress increases the pain of my condition, such that too much can leave me bedridden for days like a Charlotte Perkins Gilman story. And this ache is continuously growing as I sit in your unhumbled presence. So, when I eventually and quite self-assuredly daydream myself away from this place where the word “imposter” is written 10,000 times in invisible ink, try not to take it personally.

It is simply an “old world” form of self-medication against those who know all except how to even brush their fingers against revelation.

Cordialmente,

Mandy

So You Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities

2011-03-25T20:39:00.000-07:00

Funny and depressing video shared by another grad student at the conference. :)

The Innovative Critical Essay: Hybrid-Form as a New Direction for Cultural Studies Scholarship: A Roundtable

2011-03-25T08:51:00.000-07:00

“Hybrid essays”

Ames Hawkins

The form of the academic essay is often taken for granted—a linear, four step process:
1) make an observation
2) define the terms
3) provide examples
4) discuss the relationship

The prose employs a particular discourse, reasserting a particular discourse. Ames proposes that cultural studies should work beyond the rhetorics of academic convention. This new form of writing is called the critical hybrid essay.

One example given by Ames includes narrative prose, poetry and lyric, drawing upon a previous more traditionally academic work. Another example, “Manifesting New Media Writerly Processes One Really Bad Flash Piece at a Time,” Ames utilized digital media, using ones and zeroes (binary) to consider queering language. In particular, the linear is abandoned. Footnotes become a space for prose commenting on an email above.

Ames further looks at the forms of writing when looking to write a memoir about her father as he was dying from AIDS. In particular, zie looked at the idea of love letters and Gemara. Zie took the envelope from the first letter from hir mother to hir father, and surrounded it with commentary and commentary on commentary.

Arielle Greenberg

Coming from the background of an MFA in poetry, focusing much more on form. She speaks to the ways in which college and college writing practices work to limit the ways in which students can write. She cites Susan Sontag and Joan Didion, who write beyond a traditional academic audience.

What does it mean to be a scholarly writer versus a creative writer?

In particular, the fine arts consider how form drives content, as opposed to the taken-for-granted nature of traditional academic writing.

Arielle has recently (Birth/Work- poletics) worked on a transgenre, collaborative, nonlinear writing piece, drawing out from an original thought seed. The piece itself, she explains, should not be linear because it speaks to a nonlinear issue- home birth.

She read from a book called Girlesque, for which she wrote one of the two introduction. The piece speaks to the idea of girlhood as something not to be taken seriously, invoking a voice of the silly, in your face, and generally ignored. Like girlhood, cultural studies is seen as silly and frivolous, and thus we should not be pulled or draw ourselves intentionally toward traditionally, serious writing forms.

“Visual Geographies: Ways of Embodied Looking and Urban Representation”

2011-03-24T22:35:00.000-07:00

“Visual Geographies: Ways of Embodied Looking and Urban Representation”

Representations of Trauma, Memories, & Identities: A Visual Negotiation for History, Territory, and Progress it Northern Irish Cities
-Alexis Buckley

This presentation considered violent conflict depicted through murals and the politics surrounding murals in Northern Ireland. Alexis spoke to the seeming disconnect between peace talks and positivity surrounding these relations in the media and broader discourse as opposed to on-the-ground conflict in Irish and British Ireland communities. There is a desire to talk about these issues, such as the painting over of paramilitary mural with “peace-devoted” murals, that is addressed somewhat in the murals.

The politics of these murals occur at two levels, the painting of murals and the removal of and painting over of murals, either sponsored by the government or through “paint bombing”. Whereas the original painting of murals speaks to issues surrounding violence and corruption that might be silenced in other ways, the painting over of murals is like a secondary silencing—the issues cannot be spoken in traditional ways, nor addressed through arts-making. “There are so many people who just want to be heard in this post-conflict conversation,” Alexis explained.

For example, the story of shared histories and conflict/violence is both addressed and given an opportunity to be spoken by the presence of these murals: “I know he [Ramond McCarthy] killed my cousin Walked right up and shot him on his front steps. (long pause- We used to play together as children. He was our friend.”

*Alexis wanted me to emphasize that these are individual opinions expressed, such as the view of McCarthy as a “murderer.”

The Politics of Homemaking: Black Women Transforming Politics in Newark, New Jersey
-Zenzele Isoke

Talking about the stories of Black women in Newark, New Jersey. How can we get beyond the rhetoric surrounding Newark--- a dystopic image of gentrification, deindustrialization, and chronic Black unemployment?

Zenzele created a portrait of Black feminist subjectivity, talking with folks from 20 to 70 years old in various locations and contexts. She came into contact with many of these women through gender justice and anti-violence organizations.

“Politics of homemaking” as a politics of resistance within the so-called private sphere. These women considered and developed what they meant by “identity,” rather than drawing upon traditional definitions. It is a politics of not forgetting and not looking away.

Three distinction of homemaking:
1) Politics of creating living history of resistance- Creating and participating in community resistance that consider Black history and engage in community activism.
2) Politics of reclamation- A politics of cultural and racial history–reclaiming Black cultural spaces in the city. Telling the story of Black local resistance. Reviving counter-narratives of Black activism.
3) Politics of selling in- Dedicating community and public life to the reclamation and uplifting of the city. Reveal and share these Black histories.

Zenzele told stories of women in the Central Ward, a predominantly Black district of Newark. These women talk about grappling with the histories of oppression difficulties surviving and educating, and engaging in community activism. In these stories, trauma is turned into action. Neo-slave narratives are transformed by these women into stories of empowering the Black woman in Newark through politics, reclamation, and public criticism.

In her research, Zenzele works to reconstruct Black women subjectivities through spacial geographies. The complexities of these women’s special stories were both therapeutic and disturbing, showing dire economic and social circumstances but also active spacial activism.

*Zenzele asks that feedback be sent to her. I'm not posting her email here, but it should be pretty easy to find online :)

Free Breakfast!

2011-03-24T10:03:00.000-07:00

Alright, Cultural Studies Association Conference program makers. You forgot to include the most important aspect of the Conference-- free breakfast. I just had a delicious cheesy Einstein Bros bagel and two cups of coffee. Why? Because I am a dope, and misled us around downtown Chicago for a bit but it turned out fine because we got exercise galore and fresh air (Times Square). Anyway, we missed the first session, but are going to check out the book and journal exhibits.

Also found out there will be free breakfast, lunch, and (except today) dinner. Hurrah!

All That Jazz?

2011-03-23T17:05:00.000-07:00

So, downtown Chicago hasn't exactly endeared itself to me yet. Of course, I only got off the train about an hour and a half ago. Going to hope that things are better the next three days, though I won't actually have any opportunity to sight-see until Sunday. On a related note, how the devil are you supposed to spell sightsee? Sight see? Sitesee? Site see? Sight-see?

So, after the two hour late start (we got delayed another hour in the runway), I finally got to O'Hare Airport. They have these fancy automatic toilet seat cover put-on-er things. ... Most people had layovers or stayed with the plane on to Boston, so there were only like twenty of us waiting for our luggage at the baggage carousel. That part went quick at least.

I took the L train to my stop. It took probably an hour, but it was a nice opportunity to stand. I also saw a guy who looked a lot like Darren Cris from A Very Potter Musical and Glee. I really hope it wasn't him though, 'cause this guy was kind of an ass. Very handsome, but not handsome enough to be an ass. Tsk.

But I got a bit lost after getting off at my stop. I came out the wrong exit >.< genius! And it was raining and pretty cold. So I was not happy to be lost. And I had to keep putting up my "don't fuck with me" facade because I was scared of getting all my stuff stolen.

Eventually got directions from a drug dealer. Didn't know he was at the time, but someone came and got what looked to be some crack right after he talked to me. No judgment. Still though, there were cops everywhere, so that dude's got some serious balls.

Then I finally got to the Travelodge, and the guy at the front said I'd have to show used to reserve/pre-pay for the room. But my mom paid O.o so he said I'd have to get her to fax him a copy of it and all this other stuff. Good thing my mom is clever- she suggested I just pay with my card. He had no problem with that- phew!

Now I am all unpacked and a bit rested. I think I will go try the Thai and sushi place downstairs (Thai Spoon). Hm, 3 out of 5 stars. Not great. But we'll see. I am not picky.

Airport

2011-03-23T08:24:00.000-07:00

So, I am on my way to Chicago for the Cultural Studies Association Conference. Well, not on my way actually. Sitting in the airport.

Apparently, there is heavy lightning in Chicago (the Weather Channel says it may snow there tonight O.o). Anyway, it sounds as though an earlier flight (at 6 versus mine at 8:40am) also got delayed, and a lot of folks switched over to this one. Our flight just got delayed to 9:30. I don't mind waiting the extra hour or so, but I am a bit worried that the weather in Chicago will be so bad that I can't fly in today. And the conference is tomorrow! I present on Friday with D, so I guess it wouldn't be the end of the world not making it today, though quite annoying. I just hope I can get there-- have been so excited about visiting Chicago and attending the wonderful conference!

So, that's out of the way. Now, let's chat about the airport.

I didn't think security was too bad. Although, I did get in the shortest line and it took the most time. The x-ray lady kept making people open their bags because she either couldn't see well enough or there was something that looked suspicious. Everyone I saw got their bags opened, except me! Hurrah for not being suspicious or carrying anything that looks suspicious in an x-ray.

Also, I noticed that the bathrooms are super ADA compliant. Which made me quite happy ^_^ The soap dispensers, sinks, and such were much lower than the "usual"/ableist bathroom model. So while I had to stoop a bit to get soap, I was pretty durned happy. Although there was only one wheelchair accessible stall in a pretty gigantic bathroom. Would have liked to see two!

What else? There is free WiFi in the airport... That's all I got >.<

Burnt Out

2011-03-17T22:34:00.000-07:00

Well, today I got a gigantic envelope from the UW. I thought it was from Comp Lit, and the thickness implied acceptance. Actually, it was just an envelope stuffed with the disability resources newsletter.

It is a bit draining to get your hopes up for a few moments then see them crash on down.

Still have five programs to hear back from, but since I've got to do responses by April 15, I'm getting pretty on edge (wrote "edgy" first, but then realized that meant something else...). I got a financial aid offer from SFSU, but haven't actually got accepted there. I looked it up, and I guess financial aid is pretty separate from admissions, so it doesn't mean anything. So that was an anti-climax as well.

UCSD's TA application deadline got bumped up to the last week in April. Which means I'd better get started drafting my cover letter. Even though I may not go there. I guess it'll be good to have something to draw on anyway.

A bit down today.

And now... a tap dance

2011-03-16T00:50:00.000-07:00

(a rant)

May I just say, just put it out there, that I happen to have some experience as a community college student, 4-year college undergrad, and graduate student. I've been all three! So don't you get all bitchy but smiley with me, pretending you know the first thing about conversations going on among the grad students on campus or grad life in general as you go about your undergrad education.

I explained how most grad students are working at least 20 hours a week (with many working full-time), while raising kids and attending class. She said that undergrads do this too. But the POINT is that grad work is like undergrad work on crack. For every course paper, you are expected to research- and that don't mean just 3-5 articles that may or may not come from a peer-reviewed source. That means BOOKS, chica.

Plus, you are working with folks that are eventually going to be determining whether or not you graduate. If you turn in a lame ass term paper, is it really going to lead to graduation? Well, probably you could pull through even with crappy papers, but it sure as hell doesn't help your portfolio/thesis review.

Then there is that long-term grad project (portfolio, capstone, thesis) that you have to work on outside of class. So you spent 8.5 hrs a week in class (most quarters- and this is if you DON'T overload, which I do) plus, assuming the whole 2 hours of work for every one hour of class, which sure seems to hold true, an addition 17 hrs on readings and homework, AND a bare minimum of 10 hrs a week on your final project. And that don't include any conferences or other CV-related things you've got to get involved with, like TAing for an additional 15 hrs of work a week because it makes you more hireable in the end. Then you got your job on top of it, and if you're lucky, that's only 20 hrs a week. Which adds up to 87.5 hrs a week. Let's assume you sleep 6 hrs a night-- that adds up to 42 hrs a week. There are 168 hrs in a week- minus sleeping, working and school you have 38.5 hrs a week, divided by seven is 5.5 hours a day to work on conference proposals, publications, extra courses, applying to PhD programs, bathe, eat, commute, get ready in the morning and night, etc. etc.

Now, I've also got a disability, which takes up about 10 hours a week, just to give some idea. I have to work out at least five days a week, or my pain is uncontrollable. I go to acupuncture twice a week.

So when I say I want to work with other grad students to set up a grad student union of some kind so that I can count my TAships as TAships in name, because without union rights we've got to call them "reader/grader" or "peer facilitator" positions, which don't make sense to no one, understand why I find it important. And why I think your work to plan movie nights on campus is idiotic. Sure, important to kids who have the three hours to have fun or whatever, but that ain't me. And it sure as hell isn't any grad student I know who is actually going to graduate.

So don't you go thinking you can represent, when you don't have any damn idea the cyclonic pressure that goes into being a grad student.

Bitch.

...

I feel much better now. Thank you for listening.

Excuses

2011-03-13T01:34:00.000-08:00

Let's just go with the one where I was too mesmerized by the beauty of my past post and the image's complete complementing of the blog design to write anything else.

Anyway, it's been a busy month. I'm just about to finish the quarter (ecstasy!) but that really doesn't mean much in terms of a graduate program (face plant!). Working on a paper with a colleague tomorrow- we've both been working separately, so here comes the big "putting it together" party. Then there's just the editing of my portfolio paper and sending that baby in for editing.

Oh, but after that...

The same paper I'll be co-editing and mashing tomorrow must be prettified to be presented at the CSA Conference. Plus, I've got to finish a proposal, which I actually think I might be able to get done tomorrow- hurrah! That is for a summer digital research institute, which is lower cased, so obviously not the precise name (if I was Bruce Wayne, my super alter ego would be brucewayneman). Then I've got a bunch of other stuff-- getting the IRB turned in (getting approval for working with humans in research) for a research group, editing my capstone some more, possibly applying for TAships at wherever I'm going next year, reading materials for a seminar at the CSA Conference, working on putting together a Grad Student Union, trying to pass along the Graduate Women of Color Collective, possibly working on two other projects that I've got proposals in for, and possibly some other stuff that I've forgotten >.<

Anyway, at this point, it looks like I'll be at UCSD creative writing-it-up next year. But I still have to hear back from five more programs, so who knows?

La Jolla?

2011-02-24T00:55:00.000-08:00

Well, I've been thinking a lot about the possibility of moving to La Jolla for the next few years (or longer) to attend UC San Diego's MFA program in Creative Writing. It is a wonderful opportunity, as they will cover my tuition in return for me TA'ing. Which is a real win-win, because I need teaching experience. Upon graduating, I'd be pretty set to teach at a community college, the lower division at a university, or any creative writing classes at a university level.

La Jolla looks really nice. Even the Catholic Church there is beautiful-- it is called "Mary, Star of the Sea." Here is a picture (click on it to go to their photo gallery and see just how gorgeous the building is, in addition to the church's amazingly poetic name):

Furthermore, La Jolla is supposed to be beautiful, sunny, and full of culture as a whole. Of course, you might say that any place is full of culture. ... I suppose what I meant to say is that there is an active literary arts scene, a number of diverse museums, cultural centers galore, and, well, the ocean. Plus, UC San Diego is a Space Grant college, which means they've contributed significant resources to the advancement of space research. Cool much?

So really, what isn't wonderful about living in a lovely, seaside, sunny town writing poetry, teaching, and philosophizing for two years without paying any tuition for it?

Well, let me tell you. I don't want to leave my niece and future niece/nephew! I feel like it is harsh not to mention the rest of my family, so I will say that I would be sad to leave them as well, but they aren't going to forget me! I want to be part of my babies' lives!

Ugh. Well, best not to worry until I hear back from the rest of the programs-- 9 more left! I have receiver four denials so far (UCSD Literature PhD, U Oregon Comp Lit, UC Davis Cultural Studies, UW Geography) and two admittances (UCSD MFA, CalArts MFA). Wish me luck- even though I don't know what that would look like!

Let's Plan a Fake Outfit

2011-02-20T00:33:00.000-08:00

Because it is fun! And I am procrastinating on going to bed. Which makes absolutely no sense. Anyway.

Fairy chic! All items are from Etsy and were available from linked sellers (click the pics) last I checked.

(bracelet)

Now all we need are some wings, and we are ready to go :) Anyway, I'm thinking of being a fairy next year for Halloween. So I'd better start getting supplies now! Very silly post...

I don't want to post

2011-02-14T23:02:00.000-08:00

Just being honest. I'm gonna get this puppy done and then... work on homework? Who knows? I do have a lot of things to do.

Anyway, today was lousy. Apart from the whole spending Valentine's Day alone thing, which really didn't bother me but still, I got a rejection email from UW's Geography program. That's two nos and one yes so far. Still though, no fun to get a rejection email in the middle of the day. Kinda put a damper on the general mood of the me. Plus, I got an email from WSU and had to call them and fix an app error, which was very stressful.

Not much else going on...

Stuff to Apply For!

2011-02-09T00:53:00.000-08:00

More of a list for my own brainery. It is hard to remember all that is going on!

Submit piece to Gnovis Graduate Journal- due February 15 (http://gnovisjournal.org/submit)

Submit piece to Clamor- early submission February 22 (http://www.uwb.edu/ias/publications/literaryandartsjournal)

Submit piece to the Policy Journal (maybe)- priority deadline March 1 (http://www.uwb.edu/ias/publications/policyjournal)

Apply to WOCC Dialoguing Difference Conference- due March 4, 2011 (http://students.washington.edu/wocc/?p=21)

Apply to Digital Research Summer Institute- due March 30, 2011 (http://depts.washington.edu/uwch/projects_digital_research_summer_institute.html)

Submit D and I's paper to the CFP publication of essays on House M.D.- due June 15 (http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/40263)

Submit paper to Intersections- rolling submissions (http://depts.washington.edu/chid/intersections_Autumn_2010/Call_for_Papers/index.html)

I think that that is it. I've also got four or five conferences to attend and present at in the coming months. Yikes. But it is all a CV-building/fun having process! Let me know if you guys have any other ideas :)

Hearing back from schools!

2011-02-09T00:43:00.000-08:00

Yikes, it is stressful to think that I haven't got any clue where I'll be living for the next 6-8 years of my life (a number roughly estimated based on the ratio of shadows in my room to dust on the furniture). I can't even honestly say what my first choice would be, though I do think I'd be happier in a PhD versus MFA program. Well, not happier per se, but it would cut some time studying in a student capacity in the long run.

So, I heard back from the first program, UCSD, and I am in to their MFA in Writing program. I'm pretty excited, because San Diego is just a fantastic location, apart from it being far away from home and all. It is close to the border and the ocean and Arizona (shout out to L!)! It seems very dreamy to think of writing poetry in the sun :)

Of course, it is like $40,000 for the first year alone. Yikes. Crazy out of state tuition!

Still, it is nice to think that I will end up going somewhere. Won't just be all non-admitted and weepy. Will still be weepy when each rejection letter comes in, but am trying to stay positive! The next result apparently comes at 8:00a.m. Friday from UC Davis's Cultural Studies PhD program. I know it is at 8a.m. because they sent me an email with the precise date and time. How... punctual?

I'll let you know as I know. Think I will write poems using the rejection letters, as this seems to be a fun practice other folks do :)

So, this is why I never post anymore

2011-02-09T00:37:00.000-08:00

So, today, the fellow I've been sort of flirting with/kinda interested in/somewhat curious about came by my desk again. He works at the same place as me, so this happens quite a bit. Anyway, we talked for like five minutes (am a bad worker... x2!). Lots of questions about applying to places and so on.

Well, I really thought he was going to ask me out, and I was gonna say yes, despite certain policies in place*. I got pretty excited because, well, Valentine's Day is coming up. I'm thinking of going to a lecture on coercion and caregiving in the U.S. anyway. Pooh pooh.

Anywho, I really thought he was going to ask me out, and then... he didn't. So... anticlimax. Probably seeing someone anyway because EVERYONE is, even people about whom I get an interested vibe. And they all seem to be monogamous. Drat!

Which just goes to show that I have nothing much to write about. Because things sorta happen or almost happen but not much is really going on. Well, it is, but, really, do you want to hear about my homeworks? I think not. "Unfollow" clicked.

*Wait... what policies? Oh that's right, the whole "I'M TOO BUSY TO CONSIDER DATING ANYONE OF ANY GENDER BECAUSE I'M TOO BUSY WHICH IS REDUNDANT BUT TRUE" policy. Ahh.

The Cape

2011-01-29T00:21:00.000-08:00

As many of you probably know, there is this new show (a midseason replacement) on NBC called "The Cape." It follows the ex-cop Vince Farraday after he is framed for being the masked baddie "Chess" and then supposedly blown up on TV (he escapes through a vent).

So anyway, obviously Farraday is pretty PO'd at the real Chess, who both framed him and has gone around being criminal-y. So, after (wait for it) being rescued by a circus/band of thieves ("Carnival of Crime") and taught all their tricks, he dons a semi-magickal cape and mask, and becomes "The Cape" after a character in his kid's (oh.. yeah, he has a wife and son who think he's dead and a baddie) favorite comic book.

Anyway, it isn't genius or anything, but I rather like the show. Mostly, because it isn't pandering to the non-nerdly masses flocking to the Superhero genre nowadays. It is very comic book-y versus comic-book-made-into-a-movie-y. Seriously. The shots, the cheese, the catchphrases, all of it comes straight out of comic book lore. From those books all us true nerds read and got bullied for before the popular kids opened their eyes to the genius of our genres.

From what I've read review-wise, it isn't terribly popular with the critics, but I'm hoping the true nerd fanbase is enough to sustain it. Even when I'm cringing from the corniness of flashback scenes between Vince and his son, I'm still happy that it stays true to the comic book genre.

Also, and possibly the most important reason I've been watching the show, "The Cape" stars the ever-gorgeous-and-under-appreciated Summer Glau. She is much like the show in remaining true to the nerdlings who worship her. After "Firefly" was insanely cancelled, she hopped on the "The Terminator: Sarah Conner Chronicles" train, guest starred in "Big Bang Theory," "Chuck," and "Dollhouse (side note, she also guest starred in "Angel" before "Firefly." Presumably, her amazingness stunned Whedon so much that he wrote the show as a tribute to her).

Well, I'm pretty happy watching it. It reminds me of my childhood. And of watching Eat Pray Love because strangely, that film is the only other thing the lead actor, David Lyons, has been in that I've seen. Yes yes, he really was the nude Australian who (unsuccessfully) tried to seduce Julia Roberts' character.

If you've seen it, let me know what you think ^___^ Though I have a hard time believing it would appeal to the nerdless. Just saying...

Stress Makes Me Mean!

2011-01-24T23:48:00.000-08:00

Ugh, I know it is one thing to think mean thoughts and another to think and then say mean thoughts, but man was I grumpy at the gym today. That sentence made a lot more sense in my head.

Anyway, as many of you probably know, gyms are seriously overcrowded in January until maybe halfway through February as a result of New Year's Resolutions. I'm sure I've noted it elsewhere on this blog, but I don't do New Year's Resolutions, because the solar/Gregorian new year (and the lunar one come to that) is based on a rotation, like a lap around a field. While a running track may have a mapped out start point, the stars and whatnot have no such thing. Therefore, calling January 1st the New Year is really just derived from nothing (or a celebration of Janus, if you want to believe the Wiki), because there is no real stopping or ending point to an arbitrary circular path. Everyday is the day of a new year, because it has been a year since that day the previous year.

End segue. So, anyway, it has been crazy busy at the gym. Luckily, I get off work at 3:30, so usually I'm at the gym before the biggest crowds (i.e. before 5:00). But today, when I got to the gym at around 4:00, it was pretty packed. I got on the stationary bike and did that for a half hour, because I wanted to do another machine as well. But, alas!, every single machine in the place was being used. No joke.

I was pretty durned grumpy. Mostly because I had a particularly stressful day and it will be a busy and nerve-racking week. I should hear from UC Davis Cultural Studies PhD program this week (or next, if they are running late). While I know that getting rejected wouldn't be personal, I also know that I tend to take stupid things personally. It is annoying how difficult it is to meld beliefs with feelings. When I am stressed, I like to work out longer. So I was irritated.

Particularly at the New Years worker outers. While I really should be hoping that they stick with it as a general group, because it is good for them and all, I really just want them to leave so I can have free reign over the machines again.

Obviously should take up jogging.

Hey! I'm linked!

2011-01-22T00:38:00.000-08:00

I just learned how to see when someone's linked you. Now am feeling super important. Obviously need to type up more poems that aren't online and put 'em up for ya'll to see. Am geniusly and with little effort uprooting the status quo *^^* or not. Still, it is nice to be linked.

I haven't really been listed by many sites, but I was linked from KUOW. I listen to this radio station- our local NPR station- all the time. Hurrah! And I'm linked from a piece on Dr. Chapman, who is just amazing. Feeling pretty happy right now!

I will try to put up more obscure poems that are IMPOSSIBLE to find online. I was pretty annoyed that Ruth Forman's poetry was so inaccessible online in the first place, which is why I typed out "If You Lose Your Pen" and "I Will Write Genius to Myself."

Although, I'm sure you can also get in trouble for this :| Art should be free though! And I suppose it I properly cite, it should be okay. I will just be more careful with my citations from now on. Good plan.

Calendars

2011-01-22T00:26:00.000-08:00

I've had quite a shift in my calendar situation the past few years. Seriously. It's annoying. They suddenly stopped producing some of the calendars I'd grown accustomed to hanging on my walls. Which is just irritating.

This year, I've got a Georgia O'Keeffe and an African American art calendar (two separate calendars... not one wildly themed one). So far, I'm quite enjoying them. Well, maybe not so much the African American art one actually, on account of January picturing a young lad who appears to be Jesus. Maybe the lad isn't him, but he sure appears to be from this distance. So I feel like Jesus is all staring me down and making me feel guilty when I'm in bed. Which makes for a boring bed. Just saying...

Last year, I had two pretty boring calendars. One was this random artist's drawings of fairies, which was sometimes fun, but all very similar. The other was old pictures of France. I don't know why I got it, but it probably had a lot to do with it being super cheap. But why would I want to look at old pictures of Paris? I'm not much of a francophile. Not that I dislike Paris or anything, it's just, you know, not a place I am particularly attached to emotionally. Really, I don't think I like many place pictures period. Three p's. That's alliteration that is.

The past three years before that, I got a Little Prince calendar along with some sort of Edward Gorey calendar. Neither seems to have been printed this year. What is up with that?

So, what calendars do you all have? Any good ones?

Reading

2011-01-21T01:10:00.000-08:00

I've become a bit of an eclectic reader of late. My general strategy in the past has been to look about the bookstore or library until a book's binding or title pops out at me. It is amazing how much you really can tell about a book by those two elements. Of course, you can also do the "short book" game, detailed elsewhere on this blog.

Lately though, I've fallen back into the habit of reading less stressful books. Really, if a book is going to make it into your soul/stay with you for life/all that, it has to be pretty dramatic an a bit stressful at time (i.e. Never Let Me Go was a lovely book, but not very cheery). But I'm pretty well stressed lately, so I've been defaulting to easier reading choices.

I read a fair number of children's books (obviously). The reasons are pretty simple: children's books are generally pretty low stress (except The Golden Compass which was just unpleasant) with happy endings. A lot can go on, and I actually do have a deep respect for the amount of work that has to go into these books, but they also do tend to be short and easier to follow. That, and I write a children's book series (not a published one, but still), and it is important to see what others are doing.

One really unusual reading habit I've gotten into lately is the multiple readings of books by the same author in a row. I've never really done that before, but now it seems more like becoming familiar with a certain feeling. Like Cherie Priest's work and those of Nick Hornby. There's a general emotion to reading them. It is the same for series because, nearly always, they too have the same author or authors throughout.

Then there is the Japanese light novel. Ah, they are nice. Pictures and everything. Quick reads with generally happy endings.

What I don't read, however, are mystery books (or suspense). I think I've watched too many cop shows, 'cause I generally figure it out pretty quick. That, and they seem to play on the assumption that the reader is ignorant to some element of the script- i.e. a setting ("Let's set it in New Mexico!"), a time period ("World War I sounds good- no one knows about then!"), a character trait ("Oh ho! Let's give her OCD!"), or a particularly creepy crime (use your imagination). I almost always dislike them, even if I enjoy the characters.

A wonderful way to find a book is to look for the fantasy plot in a general fiction context. Like the sneaky sci fi/fantasy book that is considered good enough to be placed in the general fiction section of the bookstore/library (i.e. Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel, Never Let Me Go, lots of works by Haruki Murakami). They are pretty hard to find though :| Requires lots of patience.

I also read comics, because I'm awesome like that. Nerdy. Yes. Anyway, I usually go through other peoples' favorites lists. Things pop up fairly often. I can also search by theme.

Themes. Hm. I love distopias in general (The Handmaid's Tale in particular), as well as afterlife-focused books (Lovely Bones, Elsewhere, The Great Blue Yonder, Afterlife). Pre-life themes are even more exciting to me, but quite hard to come across. I'd give an example, but this sort of thing often comes as a twist.

Going to sleep now- cheers.

It is a good thing I am pretty...

2011-01-19T23:33:00.000-08:00

she says, coyly.

Anyway, I'm pretty sure my brain is shrinking. Seriously. Well, not seriously... But you know what I mean.

I felt quite the idiot in class tonight. The truth of the matter is, I've got a bit of a gigantic gap in my education. Which is to say, I haven't a huge understanding of what went down in the U.S. in the 1980's and 1990's. I was too little back then, and they didn't make it into history books when I was in high school. I did Running Start (community college as high school student), and U.S. history just went through the 1970's. Drat -_-

So, I always look pretty silly when it comes to issues around that time frame. Plus, I pretty much never had to study European history (apart from Russia- I did take a Cold War course) or pretty much any African history (except for Somalia- I studied the Somali pirates in relation to the country as a whole). So all this stuff ends up being pretty new to my brain!

I think my references are too obscure as well. I'm pretty good with Asian history in general (like, every country in Asia, including Russia which is in the fuzzy zone between Asia and Europe), but it seems like most of what I know relates to Burma, Tibet, Vietnam, Japan, and China. See how ridiculous I am- I don't want to be the fool that misunderstands Japanese or Chinese policy in front of the folks who actually know quite a bit (i.e. people who studied in Japan for years or are from China). Vietnam seems the best option for my examples, but it seems like most everything slides back into a conversation about the Vietnam War. And a lot of people in the class definitely were alive during, so I'd feel silly.

Gah! No more self-conscious ranting. Shall firmly make a fool of myself by using Zambia as an example, knowing that many people in the class are more expertly than myself (and that all my knowledge of the country comes from them).

Anyway, The Mysterious Benedict Society is quite good. I read the first page, got hooked, and even set the next Lemony Snicket book down.

Am also thinking of writing a series of poems about zombies and other supernatural creatures. Because, well, why not? It sounds like fun. Also have thought of writing a poem for each photo mentioned in Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others and each photo I took of the weeping monk statues in Kawagoe (五百羅漢- 500 Disiciples of Buddha). Good times.

But not really, because I've stayed up too late writing nothing of consequence. Drat. Good night!

Need to find a new children's book series

2011-01-17T23:24:00.000-08:00

Hm. I am on the search for a new children's book series to read. And by "new" I don't mean chronologically, but unknown to me at the moment \(^o^)/

The problem is, I've been reading the How to Train Your Dragon series and the Series of Unfortunate Events but have hit that point when the books are no longer available used except through Amazon.com or other online used book sites. They must be paperback so I can break the spines as I read while working out-- hardcover books will not stay open on the stands! And while I'd be willing to pay for new paperback books, provided they were less than $5, it seems that the same books that are hard to find used are hard to find in paperback, even when published!

I thought about doing a big ol' Facebook post asking for suggestions, but really I don't want more people telling me to read His Dark Materials. I hated The Golden Compass. Having your soul animal ripped apart is just scary and there is way too much war.

So, I've just finished wandering through the book shelves, and have found first books from a few series that I shall at least try. They include:

A Wrinkle in Time- Madeline L'Engle-- I read this series a long while ago. Tried to read it a few years back via book on tape, but they were read by the author, who has a lisp. ...I am a lot less shallow in non-entertainment contexts... Anyway, she was a rotten reader. I will try reading the thing via book this time

Fablehaven- Brandon Mull-- My mom got me the first book a while back. I couldn't get into it last time I tried, but am feeling more optimistic this time! I do like the holographic cover...

Ramona series- Beverly Cleary-- I've actually got Ramona the Pest which isn't the first one, but I do remember her general background pretty well from being a kid :) Let's see if I still like her!

Little House on the Prairie- Laura Ingalls Wilder-- I hate this series. I mean... hated this series. I don't see it going past the one book, because I really disliked everything about the films, books, and tv series as a youngster. I haven't gotten that much older that I'd change so much. But I did like playing Oregon Trail as a kid >.<

Magyk- Septimus Heap-- Not sure when I bought this book, but they are always pretty cheap. New books always come out in paperback versus hardcover- hurrah!

The Mysterious Benedict Society- Trenton Lee Stewart-- My mom thinks I'd like this series. About smart/nerdy kids. I suppose I will relate? Being a nerdy kid myself.

Anyway, I am now waiting a few books coming out in paperback. Here is my mini-list:

Series of Unfortunate Events:
The Grim Grotto
The Penultimate Peril
The End

How To Train Your Dragon
How to Ride a Dragon's Storm (2008) (in paperback U.S.- June 7th)
How to Break a Dragon's Heart (2009) (?)
How to Steal a Dragon's Sword (2011) (?)

Wish me luck! I may run to Half Price Books to try and find some more used copies for Unfortunate Events!

There She Is!!!

2011-01-17T01:33:00.000-08:00

The videos from this lovely series, linked for your enjoyment ^____^

I am so happy to have such lovely things shared with me via Facebook. I don't care if it makes me look like a techno-nerd/Generation Y2K junkie/needs a life thing, I will defend social networking and the interwebz to my grave (not literally... make lurve not war!). Anyway, I got to this lovely series via another video linked by a friend on the Facebook.

It restores so much faith to know that this series is loved and has been created with such care. $^o$ (/o^)/

... obviously, I am brushing up on my super cute emoticons as well.

Plans are Boring Anyway...

2011-01-17T01:23:00.000-08:00

Hurrah for spontaneity.

Anyway, the plan didn't so much go down like I'd hoped. By which, I mean that I haven't even finished what I'd meant to get done on Friday. I'll have to buckle down and really work on things tomorrow. Will put off editing the papers until next weekend. In any case, this weekend really was better for poetry writing and philosophizing.

And yes, dear commenter (thank you for commenting-- it always cheers me up. Even trolls bring up my spirits because I feel so powerful deleting their comments *^.^*), I do rather make short-termed sort of plans. It is more of a one day at a time approach right now. It feels like making long-term plans lead one toward the path of wishing away one's life.

I look forward to April and going to Hawaii, but I think skipping right on ahead would be awful too, however much I need a (working) vacation. I'd miss lovely things like Emmy's second birthday, Valentine's Day, St. Patrick's Day (and green gin and tonics-- my favorite bar day of the year just because of the dye), and all that growing up some more. I dream of June and graduation, but what would be the point of skipping ahead? Grad school is too expensive to give up all the things you can learn in five months. I wouldn't deserve it if I skipped right past.

I say/write this now, knowing that I so often slip into the mindset of dreaming of future days. Come tomorrow night (or rather, tonight I suppose... how did midnight get here?), I'll be dreaming of the weekend and regretting I didn't get more work done this weekend.

It feels as though I've spent all my life wishing for the future. In grade school, I thought it would all be better once I got to high school, and I could drive. Then, of course, I just wanted to graduate and get to college, where people would be mature and treat each other kindly. But undergrad had no such dignity, so I dreamed of graduation again. I am happy with my life now, apart from some small things (like pain, which I guess isn't small in my case), or at least at peace. Thinking of the now seems like a sweeter way to live.

Perhaps it would be best to think of one thing each day that I am grateful for, however hard things are right now. Even happy, I am tired. Reading children's novels to give my brain rest in the non-study time. Cats that stay up 'til the wee hours of the morning to give you company. Finding new music to listen to and love.

Hoping I can find more peace <3

The Plan

2011-01-13T23:33:00.000-08:00

I've got to plan this four-day weekend carefully. That is the start of the plan.

Tonight:
Read the two articles for independent study, if you can stay awake!

Okay, so tomorrow:

Friday
Wake up (....)
Work out
Go to library-- print out the rest of next week's Development readings
Read for Development and post!
Read first half of Birth of the Clinic
Call Dr. R!

Saturday
Wake up (or not?)
Work out
... except Emmy's coming over...
Anyway- read the rest of Birth of the Clinic.
Return dress

Sunday
Edit capstone essay three, rewrite capstone essay two
Read other reading for IS

Monday
Sleep in...
... (hopefully edit and finish Nano novel- I got the 50000 words but didn't actually finish the final chapters. Oh dear...)

Ugh. But I want to go to sleep or otherwise screw around rather than read. Drat!

Super stressed out!

2011-01-13T23:18:00.000-08:00

I am super stressed out. About something I really don't need to be worrying over. But still, knowing that doesn't make me worry any less.

For the second time, I am involved in a student aspect for a hiring thing. I am being purposefully abstract. I've always been pretty panicky about what I can/cannot say out to the world, but now I'm more than panicky, I'm paranoid.

Anyway, so this hiringy thing for some college or something somewhere or maybe not. Basically, one of the students in the group asked a question that is technically illegal. And the candidate called him or her out on it, and then kinda lectured us all.

Then we get three emails from higher-ups involved in the process reminding us what we can and cannot ask candidates. They were pretty polite, but still. I am feeling pretty awful. Sure, I wasn't the one who asked the question and the person who did ask really meant no harm, but I'm stressing over it anyway.

Mostly, the thing is, that the candidate was really scary. After the question was asked, s/he still acted pretty nice but was also very preachy and went on and on about why it was important not to ask certain questions.

Then this person also gave a story about someone at hir (his or her) old university where a white male married candidate couldn't get a job (for like two years). He eventually pretended to be gay (I guess acted stereotypically "gay" and hinted at a gay club nearby) and got hired. When the folks called to hire him, a child answered, and when they talked to the guy, they could hear his wife happily crying in the background. But the thing was, our candidate mentioned how weird they thought it was to hear a child. I don't understand- is the implication that gay folks can't have kids?

Anyway, the whole thing was so uncomfortable, I'm sure it affected at least the poor person who asked the question's views on this candidate. But to be more honest, I am more worried that all the important people involved (not that students aren't important people... I'm just trying to be discrete and simultaneously burying myself into a rhetorically problematic hole) will think I was the one who asked and think I'm a maroon. Which is a nice way of saying "moron." Not that the person who did ask is a dolt or anything.

....

See how insane my logic is? Anyway, I'm worried. And there's not much to be done about it.

Untitled- Kanoko Okamoto

2011-01-12T23:48:00.000-08:00

Cherry petals
each disintegrating
its flowery form
mingles with the small gravel
trampled by people who pass

Untitled piece by Kanoko Okamoto

Obviously, I am not in a great mood. I'll just let the above piece speak for me, if it's all the same. Good night.

Edit: I have fixed the weird font thing. Sorry it was so tiny!!

Number of Posts

2011-01-06T13:57:00.000-08:00

I need to try to write more this year- jeez. Lookit those stats at the left there. Every year, I seem to post less and less. Of course, 2008-2009 I was in Japan and posting so folks knew what I was up to, and I was sightseeing a lot so there was actually a point in posting. But still...

What to post about?

Conferences? Sounds good.

I just got in to the Women Who Rock Conference at Seattle U and UW (cosponsored). Here is the description:

Get ready for the "The Women Who Rock Conference"!

If you are interested Call for Session Proposals
Deadline: November 30, 2010
Submit your session proposals by November 30, 2010. Proposals should be 500 words or less and include a description of the session format. Please also include a 50-word biography.

Send proposals for sessions to quetzal@uw.edu.
Group and individual proposals or performances will be considered.

Questions? Contact Quetzal Flores, quetzal@uw.edu.

Conference registration at: https://catalyst.uw.edu/webq/survey/quetzal/111906

UW's address : 1959 Northeast Pacific Street

SU's address is:
900 Broadway
Seattle, WA 98104

-- P and I are presenting/facilitating on women of color in Seattle's musical theatre scene. The event is really coming up quick- February 17 and 18!

Then in March there is the big Cultural Studies Association Conference in Chicago at Columbia College. Here is that description:

The Cultural Studies Association (CSA) invites participation in its ninth annual conference. The theme of this year’s conference, New Directions in Cultural Studies, encourages the submission of proposals that reflect on the past(s) and present(s) of the field of cultural studies and endeavor to lay the groundwork of its future(s).

NEW DIRECTIONS IN CULTURAL STUDIESColumbia College Chicago Chicago,
Illinois 24-26 March, 2011
Deadline for Proposals: 17 September 2010

-- D and I are presenting on House M.D. and presentations of pain and opiate therapies. This is a pretty huge conference- the biggest CS conference in the U.S. Kinda stoked.

Then, there is the Pac Rim International Disability Studies Conference in April.

The Pacific Rim International Conference (Pac Rim) on Disabilities has been widely recognized over the past 25 years as one of the most “diverse gatherings” in the world. The event encourages and respects voices from “diverse” perspective across numerous areas, including: voices from persons representing all disability areas; experiences of family members and supporters across all disability areas; responsiveness to diverse cultural and language differences; evidence of researchers and academics studying disability; stories of persons providing powerful lessons; examples of program providers, natural supports and allies of persons with disabilities and; action plans to meet human and social needs in a globalized world.

Each year the conference hews to its traditional areas which have bred much of the interdisciplinary research and educational advances of the last three decades. But each year new topics are introduced to foment discussion and change. The intent is to harness the tremendous synergy as generated by the intermingling of these diverse perspectives, thus, creating a powerful program which impacts each individual participant in his or her own unique way.

-- D and I are presenting basically the same paper as at the CSA Conference, though I expect we'll have some edits by then.

... yeah, that's all I got. Most of it was copied and pasted too. Lame.

Jealous

2011-01-06T00:24:00.000-08:00

Man, I was jealous tonight- really jealous- for the first time in a while. Usually, I get simultaneously jealous and happy for the person getting whatever it is I'm a'wanting. But tonight, I was just jealous. I'm hoping to morph it into feeling happy for the other person overnight.

Anyway, this dude in my cohort (if you're reading this, which I doubt, I'm sorry for the lack of nice feelings!) gets to spend the quarter doing a one-on-one ten-credit directed reading with his capstone advisor. They both read the same four or so books a week and then meet to discuss them. It sounds like a lot of reading, but it really is pretty doable when you are working part-time and that is your only class. I'm reading about two books a week and definitely feeling underwhelmed with the work load.

I wish I could meet one-on-one with my capstone advisor and just read for my project. Very jealous. That sounds like a dream quarter. If I wasn't so happy with my elective this quarter, I'd probably be a green monster by now. Green-eyed monster? Can't remember the expression.

Well, at least I get to just work on my capstone for 5 of my credits. Getting a lot of work done. I need to get editing. Feeling strong!

Observer

2010-12-31T01:20:00.000-08:00

Okay, so maybe one of the reasons my blog entries end up so short is that I'm purposefully trying not to be whiny or judgmental- that's what my pain blog is for. You know, that one is more or less a diary that I just happen to put online because it's easier for saving and, well, more fun, quite frankly. But this blog seems to have gotten more or less PC in tone. Like I'm afraid of offending you all.

So, let's complain. Just to shake things up.

I really really really did not want to get out of bed this morning. It isn't uncommon for me to want to burrow under the covers and pretend to be a dead-like thing. But today, I really thought I could do it forever. Then my second alarm went off and I got up. I think that having cats to cuddle with makes it harder. They really hate the cold that comes when you leave. Er, when I leave...

I basically didn't have much to do today, so I copy edited the department newsletter again. Which is really boring, and hard to do when you are a receptionist. Because folks keep being noisy and distracting. I can't listen to music either, because it would distract other people. Oh, how lowly I am. Anyway, I got a little irritated, because people were really being noisy today, and it was insanely hard to concentrate. Here's hoping I caught most/all the typos and grammatical errors.

I'm not really irritated anymore though, so it's silly to say anything at all. I was just a little peeved at the time. But I know that people were tired from the busy end of the year rush. So really, I feel bad for being annoyed. Obviously am crap at this.

Going to bed...

Holiday?

2010-12-31T01:13:00.000-08:00

What is the deal with this holiday eve eve becoming a holiday in and of itself? On Christmas Eve eve, almost everyone went home early or stayed home the whole day. Today, the day before New Year's Eve (aka New Year's Eve eve) I was one of two people who stayed until 5 p.m. What madness is this?

Wow. I don't know how people do it, writing paragraph upon paragraph about their lives. I'm trying to write longer and more often, but it seems the only way to do that would be to post poetry all the time. Which would just be boring....? I did write a poem today, but I'm posting it to my pain blog, on account of it's all related-to-pain-y.

I finished writing the third third of my capstone today (rough drafts). A lot more exciting than it sounds. Got to talk about Invasion of the Body Snatchers. As a metaphor for pain. Yurp...

Tomorrow is New Year's Eve. As you may recall, I randomly do my New Year's resolutions/goals in September. Because time isn't fixed/is arbitrary- so really it doesn't matter when you do your resolutions. Of course, what I do isn't really a resolution, so much as a goal to read 52 books in a single year. Rereads don't count though. If you look to the right, you'll see my count for this year, which I think is at least one behind at the moment. I didn't count academic texts/texts read for my research or school last year, but I decided to this year. As Gertrude Stein said (sorta) a book is a book is a book is a book.

My computer really needs to get restarted or something. Probably I've got oodles of updating to do. The computer is taking many long seconds to type what I am trying to make it type with this keyboard. It is really annoying when there are typos. Mostly the caps carrying over to an additional letter.

Wow, this post is boring.

Scatterbrained me

2010-12-25T00:07:00.000-08:00

I'm just going to tell you and get it over with- I lost a Christmas present. Retrospectively, the whole matter is a bit amusing and obviously meant to be, but I was pretty upset yesterday and this morning. I got the gift months ago, and have been pretty durned proud to have got all my Christmas shopping done during Hanukkah, since it came so early this year. But alas, on wrapping last night, I realized that the certain present was missing.

I looked everywhere. Not kidding. I sent hounds out, I tried yelling "accio present" with wand a-waving, I even consulted a ouija board. The best I can figure, the thing has got itself to an alternate reality. Worm holes are tricky suckers.

In any case, I went out and repurchased it. Man, were the stores crazy today though. Well, store anyway. I only went to the one. Didn't lose any others (she says, cockilly).

Plus, I wanted the thing myself (even thought about getting myself one when I went to get the other), but I held off. So, whenever the thing pops its head out, I'll be ready to pounce and claim it as my own [insert evil cackle here].

Moral of story- when you want something, buy it, or terrible things will happen and you'll have to buy it twice anyway. (Obviously, I am quite superior to silly Aesop)

Bucky, Jason Todd, and Uncle Ben

2010-12-21T23:15:00.000-08:00

Bucky, Jason Todd, and Uncle Ben

Except that what all there is now
is the will-one-day-be-retconned reality
people wondering where I’ve been
what can I tell them, except that
once in 1988 some jackass called in
over and over with a computer
voting that I’d get blown up

except that I didn’t blow up, not entirely
they’ll say I was in suspended animation
locked up in a block of ice after botching
an attempt at defusing an explosive
but really this revolving door
leading in and out of a certain heaven
that might be no place really

except that I was in reality 616
where maybe my wife is dead
(it's hard to remember now
what with all this coming and going)
but maybe I’m just camouflaged
killing a just another one of me
mostly just to pass the time

except there's nothing much I know
whether I died or not,
blown up or drowned
shot by some burglar
killed myself while not myself
all that remains
is a revolving door plot
and a god with writer's block

Copyright 2010 Amanda Martin Sandino

A Blog Post!

2010-12-15T23:34:00.000-08:00

Because acc. L, I haven't been updating much lately. Which is ridiculous... 'cause witches, they were persecuted, Wicca good and love the earth and women power and I'll be over here.

I'm including the video for reference, in case you all (all two of you...) aren't as nerdling-y as me (I?). Even though there were none on Youtube of high quality. What is that about? Honestly, Youtube gods-- yer powers are gettin' a wee bit weak.

You can tell I'm tired because of the way I've suddenly forgotten how to spell words. I first spelled weak "week." Earlier, I spelled panic "panick." There are other weird things like this-- I need a good nap. Saturday shall be declared Dead Day. Except it can't be. Drat. So then, next Wednesday will be Dead Day, Autumn 2010. I need to defeat Twilight Princess. Although I must admit, I have gotten myself stuck in the City in the Sky- which is pretty pathetic for a hero hell-bent (heaven-bent?) on saving all of Hyrule.

Plus, I was laid out for five days-ish do to a crazy pain crisis. So, now I have yet another med. Which means I am even more broke. Am so broke and busy- it is not funny. On positive note- I will have the whole of my capstone rough drafted by the start of next quarter. Less work then- hurrah!

Ugh, the last thing I want to do right now is look at a computer screen, so I'm going to go and get an ice pack and read my new steampunk novel some more. It actually last ended on a cliffhanger- Civil War folks (we're not sure which army it is) are trying to blow the dirigible out of the sky! Yikes! <-- G-rated version of what I actually thought. ^^*

What happened to emoticons, btw? Am I now the only one who uses them? So outdated...

Good night!

A Novel Approach to Cultural Studies?

2010-12-11T18:15:00.000-08:00

Amanda Martin Sandino*

"The oxygen and hydrogen will now have the honor of combining before Your Majesty."
- John Henry Pepper (creator of the illusory technique Pepper's Ghost) to Queen Victoria, quoted in Jim Steinmer's Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear, also quoted in Clover as a cheesy metaphor for love.

It is astounding to me the number of ways in which my academic and nerdy artist lives have intermingled over the past year. I've written poems drawing upon Audre Lorde's theories of poetics, made a radio show in tribute to hooks, Said, Halberstam, and others, and, alas, as of November 30th, written the great Cultural Studies U.S. American novel. I use the word "great" loosely, as, so far as I know, I'm the only one to have written a cultural studies novel at this point, though I'd be pretty thrilled to be proved wrong.

I've always been pretty self-reflexive as a fiction writer, which is possibly the main reason why I never get any novels done save during National Novel Writing Month (Nanowrimo) each November, when would-be novelists are encouraged by the Office of Letters and Light to write 50,000 words of a novel starting at November 1st at 12:00 a.m. and ending at 11:59 p.m. on November 30th. For the past four years, I have been successful in these attempts, writing A Shiver in the Distance (general fiction, 2007), Dedication (general fiction, 2008), The (Mostly) True Story of Ms. Bertha P. Collins, Grandmother, Showman, and Sometimes Usurper, as Told By the Terribly Unfortunate, Blister-Thumbed, Hortensia Higgory Hernandez, Volume 1 (children's fantasy, 2009), and, most recently, Clover (steampunk, 2010). All of these books were written while attending university, the first while an Asian Studies student at Seattle University, the second in the same program but as an exchange student at 上智大学 (Sophia University) in Tokyo, and the third and fourth while a cultural studies grad student.

This most recent session, I was even more self-reflexive (self-critical, panicky about undermining my own intentions, and harried) than the previous years, while simultaneously considering whether or not the novels written in the first two years of my Nanowrimo experience ought to be trashed. We do a lot of critiquing in cultural studies, but, in my eyes, no one is more harshly critiqued than the self.

Cultural Studies and Zombies

I've also been interested in linguistic questions, such as the idea of cultural studies as a non-discipline/anti-discipline. Recently, at a graduate research colloquium, a certain professor demonstrated an archive of multi/mixed media materials pulled together during a summer 2010 study abroad to South Africa, expressing displeasure at it often being referred to as a "scrapbook." Perhaps a better term might be "non-scrapbook"? In any case, I've been considering the linguistic understandings of non/anti-discipline in terms of the word "undead" to refer to zombies and the like, the reanimated dead as it were (and vampires, sometimes, but let's not get into polemics). What does it mean to be "undead"? Well, realistically the undead are dead, technically, as they have died in some form, but this death has far more implications than the conventional death. After all, this isn't an idle death, but one full of transformation and movement, as well as the continuous daming (not too be confused with "damning"--"siring" simply felt too patriarchal) or turning of the living.

What does this mean in terms of cultural studies? Well, in case you haven't followed my rather obtuse metaphor, cultural studies as a non-discipline works outside of traditional understandings of a discipline. Stuart Hall, a grandsire of cultural studies in a strictly Whedonian sense, explains:

Cultural studies has multiple discourses; it has a number of different histories. It is a whole set of formations; it has its own different conjunctures and moments in the past. It included many different kinds of work. I want to insist on that! It always was a set of unstable formations. It was "centered" only in quotation marks, in a particular kind of way which I want to define in a moment. It had many trajectories; many people had and have different trajectories through it; it was constructed by a number of different methodologies and theoretical positions, all of them in contention... Now, does it follow that cultural studies is not a policed disciplinary area? That it is whatever people do, if they choose to call or locate themselves within the project and practice of cultural studies? I am not happy with that formulation either. ("Cultural Studies..." 278, emphases mine)

In Barnes and Noble, cultural studies as a "genre" seems to imply "something that just didn't really fit anywhere else" or anthropological investigations of subcultures (Fruits, a Japanese magazine on street fashion, was once found there). When I search the store for books needed for classes in the cultural studies program, however, I have found authors in various sections: bell hooks alone spanned Education (Teaching to Transgress), Memoir (Ain't I a Woman?), Cultural Studies (Teaching Community), African American Studies (Killing Rage), and Literary Studies (Feminist Theory from Margin to Center). While inconvenient, this spanning is demonstrative of the undisciplinary nature of cultural studies. Even when one of our number makes a "scrapbook" it is far more than a conventional scrapbook-- the text is not simply a memory book of random photographs, captions, dates, and aesthetics-- it also acts as a critique of the traditional scrapbook in itself. The photographs are driven by theoretical understandings of what a photograph can do and mean. A photojournalist in my program uses his photos to critique racism, and considers what race means in terms of photography. In a recent mapping assignment, dates were reconsidered in less quantitative terms, drawing instead upon significant news items, popular songs, and television shows of those particular times to create a greater understanding of the dates she discussed.

Even the word "scrapbook" has a number of connotations, many negative and perhaps a bit stereotypical. Literally, we are referring to the archives we create as a "book of scraps," which feels a bit underrepresentative of the thought going into this professor's project as a whole. Yet there is also the connotation of womanhood and a woman's art similar to that of quilting, which may be positive yet, historically, has been underappreciated, as my cohort explains in her dissertation proposal:

Economic models all look at the same three categories: production, distribution, and consumption, but they leave out a critical fourth category, resource maintenance (Sampson, 2008). These crucial jobs include social reproduction, caring labor, domestic labor, community building, and care of the local environment. These activities are the crucial foundation of any economy, yet are ignored because they are feminine, or femin-ized work. If women did not perform these services, the entire economy would collapse, yet no one has made a development model that valorizes these activities. (Brown 1, emphasis in original)

Methods (of Vampire Slayery)

One of the most liberating aspects of being in a cultural studies program is the methodological freedom. It doesn't even extend simply to what methods I can use for my own work, but to the texts of those we study/with whom we study as well.

(A Cultural Studies-y critique how Twilight romanticizes stalking, via a dialogue with Whedon's self-proclaimed feminist vampire dramedy, Buffy: The Vampire Slayer.)

In particular, I had the pleasure of understanding research surrounding South Africa and the world cup from a variety of affiliated voices through a number of media types, including video, theoretical research article, autoethnographic article, newspaper article, unscrapbookery, and lecture. Two of the larger products of this research (these researches) was Krabill's book Starring Mandella & Cosby and the My World Cup project. Yet even within these methods, other media types are brought in, such as song, dance, and graffiti art. One of the pieces that most resonated with the research slipped into my recent novel, was the video "Waka Waka: The Official World Cup Anthem":

Waka Waka from Angelica Macklin on Vimeo.

What is so wonderful about this video to me is the way it addressed various viewpoints surrounding the song "Waka Waka." It is a joke within my CS cohort that our work is producing no answers, only more questions, which is certainly exemplified by the contradictory opinions on Shakira's primary involvement in the performance of the 2010 World Cup anthem. Yet, this video was produced in South Africa, so it would be interesting to include viewpoints within other countries as well, such as Shakira's native country of Colombia. For example, Shakira is an extremely important figure for many Latin@ Americans, because she is such a success in the U.S. while simultaneously producing songs in her native Spanish. The professor of my core CS course this quarter spoke similarly about the many perspectives surrounding Christopher Columbus, primary: 1) CC as the discoverer of the U.S. and a hero, 2) CC as a murderer of native peoples and whose crews mutinied on him twice, 3) CC's importance as 1 for Italian and Latin@ Americans as one of the few U.S. national heroes with whom they/we can relate.

Another speaker in this series spoke about her work with the Senegal-based non-profit Tostan, including the production/writing of a pamphlet on the organization and an academic article co-authored with the Tostan founder. Before this lecture, I had already shied away from non-auto ethnography due to an unfortunate reading of Snyder and Mitchell's chapter on "Compulsory Ferali-ization" in Cultural Locations of Disability. In this piece, the authors essentially argue against any type of disability studies in the academy, citing that people with disabilities (hereafter PWDs**) have been mistreated by the academy for long enough and that modern approaches to working with PWDs as research subjects are in no way superior to the sequestering and subsequent study of PWDs a hundred years ago (200). Since the last thing I want to do is "reproduc[e] aspects of an oppressive culture"(201), I switched my research so that I will no longer be interviewing with other people with chronic pain***, but instead drawing from my own experiences as one with chronic pain.

Yet, this professor's talk on her work with Tostan and the ethical considerations of working with predominantly Black poor East Africans as a White U.S. American member of the academy was eye opening. One of the ways in which Western imperialism is addressed in the organization, as explained by Gillespie, is through a bottoms-up, community-led approach, wherein the people in the towns where the organization's programs are implemented are the leaders:

Tostan honors the local context of our participants. Our classes are held in local African languages, and we hire and train culturally competent and knowledgeable local staff. Classes are taught in a participatory manner and emphasize dialogue and consensus building, highly valued skills in African societies. Learners create songs, dances, plays, and poetry inspired from traditional culture to reinforce new knowledge. (Tostan website)

In my own research, I am predominantly focusing on the creation of a poetry chapbook, a theoretical essay considering the self-other problem in relation to pain, and an autoethnographic paper on pain depictions inside and outside of medicine, drawing upon my poetry as one with chronic pain. Yet, I also work through blogging, have created a website, and consider my research through a variety of other methods. I hope to be less panicky at the prospect of ethnography in the future, however, because Gillespie's work has helped me to remember that, while no research can be perfectly ethical, particularly since "the good" is in itself subjective, researchers have come a long way, generally speaking, in self-reflectory and well-meaning research praxes. Furthermore, wide generalizations, such as those of Snyder and Mitchell, should be considered as problematic in themselves (which is academese for Snyder and Mitchell can go fuck themselves in an ultimately unsatisfying manner****).

Steampunk'd: How Cultural Studies Bogarted My Novel

Without further ado, I will dig into how cultural studies infiltrated Clover in November 2010. I will do it via a list, because numbers make me feel quantitative, even if it is merely an illusion.

Anyway, at risk of even more ostentatiously allowing my "geek flag" to fly, I will need to briefly sum up this year's novel. So, basically, steampunk is a science fiction sub-genre wherein one reimagines the Victorian era with futuristic advances, traditionally with inventions steam-powered (popular examples: The Time Machine, the new Sherlock Holmes, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea). Of course, as all good ideas tend to do, this one went off in far less solidly-defined directions (a lot has been done with the U.S. American Civil War), before becoming an un-sub-genre of sorts.

So Clover essentially follows a plot based around the idea of a new sort of plague (ever so Star Trek-ian-ly referred to as "The Disease") hitting the world as a problematic whole in a more-or-less modern-ish era. As is the usual course of apocalyptic action, groups with money and/or power head up to the skies to escape the airborne disease. Our hero is a young boy who sneaked aboard one of these ships, and has had the cure hidden in his bloodstream.

Well, I never did claim to be Shikibu (if that was her name). In any case, this rather silly, and rather purposefully silly, novel considered a number of cultural studies concepts. Seriously. At least three, if you're to believe my fancy list. And here they are:

Formulating Silences- Trouillot speaks of how certain historical events are made to become invisibilized, particularly explaining formulas of erasure and banalization (96). In particular, Trouillot considers the virtually disappearance of the Haitian Revolution from U.S. (and other countries') history textbooks, and how this came to be. He talks about how the Haitian Revolution is often listed as simply an independence struggle that occurred by following the examples of the U.S. and France (banalization), and how nobody discussed the revolution in Haiti even at the time-- a strong, and fairly successful, attempt was made to hush up its existence as a whole (erasure).

One of the major historical events in Clover is the period when the airships took off, leaving everybody else behind to die. Well, it would be pretty difficult to invisibilize this event for the folks left on the ground, but I wanted to consider how the event would be portrayed for survivors on the airships. In any event, this process most unintentionally followed Trouillot's explanation in "An Unthinkable History: The Haitian Revolution as a Non-event." Thus, if the abandoned earth is to be as Haiti, wherein the history of the separation is well understood, then the airship dwelling elite more or less ignore that the separation occurred. It is portrayed as one of many such unfortunate but necessary happenings; commonplace and, well, banal. Furthermore, the control of information makes it such that one cannot access non-Manifest Destiny-type understandings of this event.

In fact, the rhetoric also largely draws from a key scene in Doctor Strangelove when the eponymous Strangelove plans for how humankind is to outlive a nuclear holocaust. Although the scene is part of a comedic film, some of the elements as well as the tone are sadly realistic. In particular, the nostalgia meant to be associated with the dead-- a rhetorical device similarly attached to the lives of those lost in war (fighting the good fight and all that). Similarly, the way in which the power to survive is portrayed as a necessary burden rather reeks of the White Man's Burden.

Spaces Within Spaces- The idea of space was considered in far more depth this year than the previous novels. In particular, Neil Smith's "Contours of a Spacialized Politics: Homeless Vehicles and the Production of Geographic Scale" and scales of space most surreptitiously slipped into my thinking. Smith outlines the following spacial regions: body, home, community, urban, region, nation, and global (66).

In particular, the concept of body as space is deeply considered and perhaps plays a key role in the motivation for the creation of this piece. In particular the idea of the body as an inescapable space for one with chronic disease, and the body as tool in a Kantian sense are two of the key philosophies considered in this work. Throughout the novel, people with the Disease are continuously put into forms of quarantine, yet it might be argued that the diseased body is in itself the quarantined space, wherein one is made to become other. Yet the body of the story's protagonist is further the space of cure, and he is come to be treated much as Kant's second premise of the Categorical imperative teaches against: "conduct is 'right' if it treats others as ends in themselves and not as means to an end" (30).

Yet the prison of external space is also considered in relation to the idea of perspective, particularly drawing on Hejinian's metaphor of Kaspar Hauser:

He [Kasper] encounters the enigma of space. Daumer [his teacher] points to the tower at whose top is Kaspar’s room. But that’s impossible. When in the room, Kaspar sees it everywhere around him. When standing below the tower which is said to contain the room, he can turn his back and it is gone; Therefore the room is bigger than the tower. (n.p.)

"The Resistance" or "The Resistances"?- One of the key concepts considered in my first quarter as a cultural studies grad student was that cultural studies as an un-discipline did not originate in a single location and does not have a single grandsire. While there may be one attributed university wherein cultural studies first developed (Birmingham) and a number of names most tightly associated with its origins (Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams), additional programs and people are further considered, including by Stuart Hall, existing outside of both the academy and the West.

Essentially, this thinking infiltrated my own less overtly cultural studies-y writing with regard to classic and contemporary sci fi alliances and resistances. For example, Star Trek has the United Federation of Planets, Star Wars has Rebel Alliance versus the Galactic Empire, and Firefly has the Alliance versus the Independent Faction. While a sometimes nefarious but also sometimes positively portrayed hedgemonic power is put in place, there generally is a simple singular rebel faction. This line of thinking was questioned in this novel through the existence of resistances on multiple fronts, often working actively against one another and with various motivations.

A singular in-power group versus a singular working-for-power group is thus problematized.

*If you steal this, I will not only hire the best pro bono intellectual property rights lawyer that money can't buy, but will use my knowledges of the old religion to put a non-violent curse on you.

** Referring to people with disabilities as PWDs is probably very problematic. But, quite frankly, I find all terms referring to people with disabilities either offensive or annoying, and I am quite tired of typing out "people with disabilities" seventeen times a day, often in reference to myself. "Handy-capable" has the feel of "Freedom Fries," by the by.

*** You see what I mean? Getting that we don't want to be defined by our disabilities [insert Derrida quote here], I still get exhausted with all the wordplay involved.

**** Because, really, how is "go fuck yourself" an insult? In fact, I was once told this by an ex-lover, to which I may have replied, if I'd been more quick on my feet, "Well, I suppose that is the way it will go tonight, but I imagine it'll be far more satisfying than any fuckery done with the likes of you."

Works Cited

Brown, Debbie. "A Dissertation Research Proposal Overview." 2010. Unpublished. Print.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Dir. Stanley Kubrick. Video. 1964.

Gillespie, Diane, and Molly Melching. "The Transformative Power of Democracy and Human Rights in Nonformal Education: The Case of Tostan." Adult Education Quarterly XX.X (2010): 1-22. Print

Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies." Cultural Studies. Ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Threichler. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. 277-294. Print.

---. "The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power." Formations of Modernity. Oxford: Polity in Association with Open University, 1992. 276-295. Print.

Hejinian, Lyn. "Figuring Out." How2 1.7 (Spr. 2002). 3 Dec. 2010. Web.

Kant, Immanuel. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals: On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns. Trans. James W. Ellington. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993. Print.

Krabill, Ron. "Surfing Into Zulu." Starring Mandela and Cosby: Media and the End(s) of Apartheid. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010. 65-180. Print.

Krabill, Ron, Anjelica Macklin, and Georgia Roberts. "My World Cup." Lecture. University of Washington, Bothell. 7 Dec. 2010.

Martin Sandino, Amanda. Clover. 2010. Unpublished. Print.

---. Dedication. 2008. Unpublished. Print.

---. The (Mostly) True Story of Ms. Bertha P. Collins, Grandmother, Showman, and Sometimes Usurper, as Told By the Terribly Unfortunate, Blister-Thumbed, Hortensia Higgory Hernandez, Volume 1. 2009. Unpublished. Print.

---. Shiver in the Distance. 2007. Unpublished. Print.

"My World Cup: 2010." University of Washington. 7 Dec. 2010. 11 Dec. 2010. Web.

Smith, Neil. “Contours of a Spacialized Politics: Homeless Vehicles and the Production of Geographic Scale.” Social Text 33 (1992): 54-81. Print.

Snyder, Sharon L., and David T. Mitchell. "Conclusion: Compulsory Feral-ization." Cultural Locations of Disability. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2006. 185-203. Print.

Tostan: Community-Led Development. Tostan. 2010. 9 Dec. 2010. Web.

Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. "An Unthinkable History: The Haitian Revolution as a Non-event."Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Print.

Tokyo for Cheap- A Map

2010-12-05T18:57:00.000-08:00

Stage One: The Map and Blog Post that Started it All

Subject: Mandy, the Cartographer

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Here is the map I made a few years ago after going on the longest walk in history with my friend Kayoko. It was through various districts of Tokyo and full of us getting lost, buying things, and photographs. In any case, I think this map emphasizes quite well how lost we got and how far we went.

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_GM9jdq6aUSo/SXHrqnWMXqI/AAAAAAAAALs/RIIaxhfrePs/s1600-h/Map.png

Enjoy.

Stage Two: The Blog Entry that Started it All...First?

Saturday, January 17, 2009

Walked EVERYWHERE

I think Kayoko and I walked for like 3 or 4 hours straight. It was intense. We went from Meiji Jingu Mae to Ebisu Metro Station by foot, and pretty much back. My old old body aches. Crazy men tried to pick us up, and, strangely, we both pretended we didn't speak English ^^*****. Well, you know how it goes.

Here is an artist's map of our route, rendered in lively colors for your enjoyment:

Glaciers, I'm beat. I also got some fun shopping done. Bought Bridget Jones II, the book, because I need something light for the airplane (there is not much that is lighter). Also an Ozaki tribute album (as though you know what I'm referring to ^^*) and THE Spice Girls Album (I guess there were more than one, but only one made number one, yo!). Also got some Matcha Candy at Meiji Jingu. I wanted to get the tea but it basically just looks like normal tree leaves and I didn't think it'd make it past customs. Pooooooh! T.T

Anyway, I's gotta get to bed so's to get up early and bring my sweet self over to Kawagoe. EXHAUSTED.

<3 Posted by Amanda Martin Sandino at 6:21 AM

Stage Three: The Subway Map

Subject: RE: Mandy, the Cartographer

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tokyo_subway_map.jpg (758.221 Kb)
So you can tell where we actually walked, here is a Tokyo subway map. Ah, Tokyo is gigantic. Good luck finding the places-- we went from Meiji Jingu (nearest station= Harajuku), to Ebisu (station= Ebisu) and back to my apartment (Yoyogi Uehara). Actually, they are really nearby each other on this map- though they are farther on foot.

Stage Four: My Second Map
Available here, because I cannot load PDFs to Blogger.

Subject: RE: Mandy, the Cartographer

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TokyoSubwayMap.pdf (3.663 Mb)
So, I was more inspired to mark up the previously linked Tokyo Subway map to more or less match (and add to) the map I made showing my walking tour. This post largely draws on the radical mapping ideas/concepts presented in An Atlas of Radical Cartography-- let's just say I was quite inspired. The marked up map instead marks everywhere I traveled while living in Japan. The point is not to make you see how cool I am (though I am pretty cool), but to make us think about 1) WHO this map was really made for, 2) what this map does not show, 3) what this map highlights.

First off, this map is definitely not for people who are native Tokyo-ites or people living in Tokyo for the long-term who speak Japanese. Notice how the map is marked A-F, 1-4 in the margins. I updated this aspect to be instead (or actually, in addition, because I had some computer troubles)あーか and 一　through 四 using the Japanese alphabet in hiragana and kanji numbering.

Secondly, look at the key at the bottom. What sites are being highlighted?
* Tokyo Tower (an architectural feat) [dark side-- people have been known to get crushed in the doors. This is also located in one of the most theft-heavy areas of Tokyo]
* Ueno Zoo (largest zoo in Japan-- really crowded by the by) [Ueno Zoo-- overcrowded and said to abuse animals]
* Tokyo Dome (large sports venue, but also a musical and events venue) [insanely expensive, and the subway line there is super dirty-- usually smells of vomit]
* Meiji Jingu Shrine (cultural and religious site-- also a big spot for cosplayers)[this shrine was actually rebuilt in the 1950's, though it is still marketed as being hundreds of years old. Also, you have to go on the vomit-y subway line]
* Tsukiji Fish Market (famous for having "freshest fish in Tokyo"- sushi places go here early early to get fish)[Well, I'm not sure what you would do here as a vegetarian, but then again, I never went]
* Imperial Palace (where the Emperor lives... more or less)[You pretty much have to walk for forever from the subway. Also, there is a museum commemorating Japanese WWII victories along the way- which seems kinda problematic to me]
* "Electrical Goods" (Akihabara is marked this way- it is famous for having lots of computer things, and is also otaku central-- lots of cheap cosplay items)[Akihabara is known for so much more than electrical goods! Like free anime stuff all over!]
* Kaminari Mon (old old Japanese buildings, market, shrine, not-so-old amusement park, and a Hollywood-like hands in the cement thing for kabuki stars)[I'm actually pretty happy with this one. Many different things to do. Although, if you want to see Kaminari Mon itself- which is a gate- prepare to be disappointed. It is behind a fence so thick that you can't see much on account of vandalism]
* Narita Airport (one of two Japanese international airports)[The map is really deceptive here- Narita airport is about an hour and a half out of Tokyo on a bullet train]
* Tokyo Disneyland (Tokyo Disneyland is famously NOT in Tokyo but Chiba)[Not in Tokyo either, and much farther away than, say, Ghibli Land]
* KDD Otemachi Office (big place for business travelers to go for work)[Um, there isn't really anything to see in Otemachi. Unless you need to go to a bank. And it is REALLY easy to get lost]
* KDD Shinjuku Office (see above)[At least Shinjuku has some culture, but still, this is pretty obviously aimed at visiting businessfolks.]

Now, what is most annoying, is that most of these sites are super commercialized and cater to English-speaking tourists (which is not to say they do not get a huge number of Japanese tourists and non-English-speaking international tourists as well). But certain things are pretty obviously aimed at American tourists, such as Tokyo Disneyland; Ghibli Land is similarly a theme park based on an animation franchise, but actually a Japan-based animation franchise, and might have also or instead appeared (it is in Mitaka, which must be on the map somewhere, but was really hard to find, even knowing where it is). Also, things like Shinjuku Station, the busiest (and largest) train station in the world, is not highlighted at all (though the rarely used Haneda airport is shown).

If I was going to replace these sites, I would instead highlight:
1. Shibuya Station- Hachiko statue is here!
2. Shinjuku Station- cost of travel (above)** I lied, Hachiko is at Shibuya station
3. Roppongi street musician and celebrity watching sitting place- free (versus Tokyo Tower, which is really expensive)
4. Yanaka- Old old graveyard, also the guardian animal of this area is the cat, so the community takes care of a large number of stray cats. If you go to the stray cat center, you can help feed, groom, and play with the cats-- all for free.
5. Tennozu Isle- Ah, it sounds so nice, but it is actually a big place for storing trash. There is also a ton of graffiti. Also, where one must go if you want a stamp to visit Korea. You may have figured, but most of the sites included above are pretty durned clean-- they make Japan look "perfect" in a Big Brother type way. Free.
6. Mitaka- To go see the Ghibli Museum! It is about $15 or so, and well worth it. You also get a movie ticket with the price of admission.
7. Ikebukuro- They have a festival here pretty much every weekend. I went to one that celebrated the opening of a new business. And it was a HUGE festival.
8. Ueno- The zoo is terribly busy and I'm told the animals are known to be mistreated (i.e. prodded if they fall asleep during the day, because it is bad for business). So, it is better to go see the gigantic "America Town" and buy "authentic American goods." Or, you know, not buy them- because they really don't seem authentic. I actually saw a U.S. flag that used purple instead of blue. Good times.

Thirdly, which subway lines are depicted on this map? As Martha already mentioned, these are ONLY private lines being depicted, the public JR lines (i.e. the cheaper ones that Mandy usually took to save money) only appear as a dotted line across the map (and the tracks extend far beyond what is depicted).

So, the map in An Atlas of Radical Cartography depicting "Latino/A America" got me thinking of the personal element to mapping as well. I think that an interesting future project would be to more Google Maps-y document these places in Tokyo, and include personal stories that link, such as the blog posts I wrote for those days.

In any case, the readings this week have made me a lot more conscious about how maps are political. After all, this Tokyo Subway Map included Tsukiji fish market and a zoo that abuses its animals-- kinda makes me want to go out and protest, anyway.

Stage Five: The New Map

View Tokyo- Cheap in a larger map

Gabriel García Márquez Quote

2010-12-05T14:14:00.000-08:00

When it was opened by the giant, the chest gave off a glacial exhalation. Inside there was only an enormous, transparent block with infinite internal needles in which the light of the sunset was broken up into colored stars. Disconcerted, knowing that the children were waiting for an immediate explanation, José Arcadio Buendía ventured a murmur:

“It’s the largest diamond in the world.”

“No,” the gypsy countered. “It’s ice.”

José Arcadio Buendía, without understanding, stretched out his hand toward the cake, but the giant moved it away. “Five reales more to touch it,” he said. José Arcadio Buendía paid them and put his hand on the ice and held it there for several minutes as his heart filled with fear and jubilation at the contact with mystery. Without knowing what to say, he paid ten reales more so that his sons could have that prodigious experience. Little José Arcadio refused to touch it. Aureliano, on the other hand, took a step forward and put his hand on it, withdrawing it immediately. “It’s boiling,” he exclaimed, startled. But his father paid no attention to him. Intoxicated by the evidence of the miracle, he forgot at that moment about the frustration of his delirious undertakings and Melquíades’ body, abandoned to the appetite of the squids. He paid another five reales and with his hand on the cake, as if giving testimony on the holy scriptures, he exclaimed:

“This is the great invention of our time.”

- Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Nanowrimo 2010

2010-11-28T20:48:00.000-08:00

I just hit 50,000 words, which means, I have won Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) for the fourth year in a row. Woo hoo! Anyway, for fun, here is a word cloud of my novel. The words on this cloud are what I use the most throughout the book. Kinda embarrassing really, but it is still fun :)

Explanation on some of these puppies:

Ryo is NOT the main character, but the main character's lover. The book is written in first person and the word "I" is eliminated (as are all of the most common words in the English language).
The main character uses the word "really" and "pretty" and "just" an awful lot in his narrative. I felt self-conscious about it for a bit, but whatever. I use them a lot when I talk too, so I suppose it is just normal.
"One"? I have no clue. I must've said it a lot, but I can't think of a single instance. Can't think of (wait for it) ONE instance.
"Know" and "knew"- that's more from things that avoid omnipotent narrator stuff. "I knew he was upset because he was crying," except not that lame. Same goes for think
"Anyway"is on there twice. He says that a lot. "Anyway" and "real" were speech habit choices, as were "really" and "pretty," so I don't feel one bit bad.
Lily is also a character.
"Blood"- ha! Oh dear. I don't want that on my word cloud.

Feel free to ask away. I am curious as well!!!

Towel thief!

2010-11-19T20:52:00.000-08:00

The unimaginable happened at the gym yesterday. The UNTHINKABLE. The everyone's worst nightmare at the gym ness. For reals. Someone stole my towel while I was in the shower.

Now I knew they were plotting against my towel, vicious childlings. I could hear one say she had forgot her towel, then the other say to just take one on the other side. So I kept checking my towel and glaring at the girls. But then, when I went to check the last time, it was GONE.

Okay okay. While it isn't pleasant walking across locker room's in one's birthday suit, I sucked it up (and sucked it in, if you know what I mean). I got a few weird looks, which I am now going to reinterpret as ogling and appreciative looks. But it was more or less okay. I am not scarred for life.

The trouble is, I think I've probably caught my death. I couldn't dry off, you see. So, of course, I couldn't put on my fancy outfit and get them all soaked. I put my somewhat soggy workout pants, that became more soaked by my general wetness. Then put on a clean tshirt. And went out out out into the cold as ass night.

I am sure I was mere seconds from having my hair freeze to my head. Being soaked and out in freezing weather is pretty much the coldest thing you can ever imagine. I STILL feel cold, and it's been twenty-four hours!

Suffice to say, I got a hot chocolate to warm myself up. But if I ever see those punks again, they are GETTING it. By which I mean, I will glare at them some more and keep my towel in the shower with me. Wet or not, it's better than getting freezing and walking across the locker room naked at peak hours all in the same day. Rawr.

hands

2010-11-14T16:50:00.000-08:00

hand
fingers spread
only mountains
growing steeper

getting closer
becoming more
than simple beat
syncopated

interesting sounds
childhood blankets
empty diaries
suddenly filled

hopeful noises
at a disco beat
surprisingly sweet
fingers clasped

hands.

Not applying to stupid Berkeley!

2010-11-03T22:05:00.000-07:00

Yeah, Berkeley can kiss my Latina booty.

Somehow I missed it, but those you-know-whats apparently require the GRE English Literature test. Note on the "English" part, okay. For I shall tell you many reasons for why this is a very good reason to not apply. Another reason is that awful sentence. But I digress.

Why the GRE English Literature Test can crawl in a hole and die:

This test is in addition to the GRE general test, which is already quite awful. I'm not sure if I complained on this blog (in addition to my other), but the ETS pretty much denied me disabilities accommodations. They didn't "actually" do it- just requested a very unreasonable (and my disability advisor says illegal) amount of paperwork. That test is ableist, sexist, racist, and other "ists" in a bad way. It is also super expensive- $160. So, how much is the English subject test, you ask? Oh my, an addition $140-$160 according to ETS. Which puts my Berkeley application at about $300 to apply to. Yuck.
The English subject test is described as follows: "Each edition of the test consists of approximately 230 questions on poetry, drama, biography, the essay, the short story, the novel, criticism, literary theory and the history of the language" (emphasis mine). By "the language," I assume they mean English. Yet one of the texts they claim to draw from is "the Bible." I wonder- which Bible? I assume not the Jewish one. Oh, and what language was the Christian Bible written in originally? English?! That is certainly the suggestion. But if we are opening it up for works in translation, I'd sure like to see some secular literature.
The test, like so many things in US society, is divided into British, U.S. American, and "other." Nice.

Well, I got tired. But I am not applying to stupid Berkeley anymore. They can suck my clit, punks.