Zugenia's Procrastination Salon

D, last night, concluding some rant against something:

I guess the problem is really that I'm just an asshole.

My husband wishes it to be known that I, Lady Z, am responsible for his latest haircut—specifically, this:



He thinks it's important to note that he is speaking at a conference in four days.

I think it is important to note, in my defense, I did tell him, when he bought these clippers, that I had no idea what I was doing with them.

Good news for those of you in the Northwest Arkansas area: this Sunday night, D will be hosting a Mystery Train night at Fayetteville's new whiskey bar, Smoke & Barrel. See video promo:


Mystery Train: Live @ the Smoke & Barrel Tavern from Derek Jenkins on Vimeo.

See you Sunday.

So Arkansas is doing that weather thing where it's 78 sunny degrees one day and 34 bone-chilling degrees the next day and I am not even exaggerating for effect, this is actually how warm it was yesterday compared to how cold it is today, and I'm having the kind of day where I can't not take it personally. Walking into work, I tried to go over my mental to-do list and figure out what has already been accomplished this week and what remains to be done, and I remembered doing several things that I hadn't even thought to put on the list, like redeeming a $5 coupon at Nightbird books and making a phone call to someone I know from somewhere and having a breakthrough insight on a conference paper I was writing, and then as I approached campus I realized that all of those things happened in dreams. This was a very disorienting realization, not only because it suggested that my dreams have been overtaken by my mundane life, but also because if my dream-life becomes categorically indistinguishable from my mundane life, then it's going to be very difficult to sustain a realistic sense of which mundane tasks I've actually addressed and completed for actual real.

One thing is certain: I have had neither dream nor actual lunch, and I am hungry.

I also dreamt last night that I couldn't decide whether the midterm exams I'm giving tomorrow are too difficult or too easy, which is the same thing I was thinking about while awake just before falling asleep and just upon waking up, so I'm not even sure what the point of being awake or asleep is anymore.

In other news, it's my mom's birthday (HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOM!!) and my niece Penny was born this morning (HAPPY BIRTHDAY PENNY!!).

I received the devastating news this morning that a very dear friend of mine, known around here as psychoprince, died a few weeks ago. For the past decade, he's been a professor of English at Texas A&M, but I first met him when I enrolled in his section of Logic & Rhetoric my freshman year at Columbia. (If we ever find ourselves chatting in person over a drink, remind me to tell you the story of our first day of class. It's a classic, best told in person.) He turned out to be the craziest, blazingest, most brilliant firestorm of mental energy I've ever spent time with in a classroom. Several students in the class found him infuriating; I thought he was magnificent. He delivered an impromptu lecture one day on the conceptual link between the written word and flights of meaning, which he explained by telling us that the Phoenicians based their written characters on bird tracks, and that George Lucas had used recordings of birds squawking to create the sounds of the spacecraft in Star Wars. Somehow that helped me understand Derrida. He confessed later in our friendship that he wasn't sure every fact he offered in the classroom was actually true, and I told him it didn't matter if it helped students understand things for real. As I type this, I realize how much my own pedagogical tendencies are indebted to his.

In his class we wrote weekly papers. I wrote one on Kafka's short story "The Bridge" that changed how I understood language. On one of my earliest assignments, he wrote that if he could convince me to go to grad school in English, he would notify the establishment that there was a new enfant terrible storming literary criticism. I looked up "literary criticism" and decided that's what I wanted to do. And now here I am. I was planning on writing him soon to tell him about my move to McMaster. I've always credited him with launching this career I'm in.

At the end of my first year of school, he gave me a copy of Speculum of the Other Woman, perversely inscribed, "A little summer reading for a superb reader and writer." I spent that summer—1995, the summer I turned 18—back in Rochester, answering the phone at the front desk of my high school by day, drinking coffee at Java Joe's coffee shop by night, longing for New York all the time. I was in love with PsychoPrince—I dubbed him "PsychoPrince" as an homage to both his work on Shakespeare and his ferocious craziness; I was "Kamizu," my online moniker in those days—in that way where you save up the right words to describe things, and all of life becomes a story you plan on telling one person. I just dug out my journal from that summer and found that I was mostly writing poetry. This is my last poetry journal. (I also find that I was thinking a lot that summer about another crush of mine, my friend Victor, who died tragically a few years ago. My two dead friends are all over my last book of poems.) I remember at the end of the summer, I typed up a few of the poems to show him, and one of them resurfaced months later in a letter of recommendation he wrote for my application to the Oxford study abroad program:

in the cradle

slightly spread, knees are mountains
pointing up. these predicaments
always come in twos, deflated
yins and yangs crawling
into each others' skins. my name
is something metal on a chain
where light melts off like mercury.
the sea rides jetties into dusk;
you roll your form over the landscape of a body;
in a pocketbook of frayed edges
for a moment I hold you—
a bright wet coin
landed star-like
in a newborn country.

(Lest you think I did nothing but read feminist psychoanalytic theory and think deep thoughts that summer, here's another one of my works of that era:

cry about it

you wanna escape but you don't have a car
you wanna get smashed but can't go to a bar
you think yer so bad but really yer not
you think yer so deep but yer head's full of snot

you drink diet coke but yer still pretty fat
nobody likes you not even yer cat
you drove too damn fast got yer license revoked
life stays the same even though jerry's croaked

wegman's ID'd you for yer camel lights
no money no honey and no goddamn rights
you could have a life but you don't even try
yer at java joe's hoping chicks will drive by

you can't play guitar and you can't stay out late
you look like a skater but you can't even skate
in yer friend's car you hear a good song
you pump up the bass but you can't sing along

yer not a genius and yer not a fool
yer a loser but not enough to be cool
you can't get a job and you can't surf the 'net
you can't find the remote to the tv set

you try to write poetry 'cause that's where it's at
but you bore everyone with yer angst-ridden crap
you'd do something if you had more than two bucks
-- born and bred in the suburbs where everything sucks
)

PsychoPrince was the one who first told me to listen to Radiohead, Portishead, Wire, The Golden Palominos. As recorded in the early entries and comments of this journal, he regularly supplied me with music while I was in school to keep my brain buzzing. The last time I saw him, at a conference in Portland last March, I failed to make time to hang out with him and his new girlfriend, whom he really wanted me to meet. (She was with him during his illness, and was thoughtful enough to send me the note I received this morning.) The last time I hung out with him, in Washington D.C., he took me out for dinner and to a strip club (my first and only time) to celebrate my successful completion of seven MLA interviews, one of which turned into my current job. Other first-time adventures he gave me include my first ikura sushi, my first lesson in poststructuralism, my first time making a waiter in an Indian restaurant blush, my first all-nighter with Freud, and my first fantasies of academic celebrity. I realize now that I assumed he would always be around, looking over my continued accumulation of experience. The world feels completely different without him in it.

One of my mom's favorite Valentine's Day stories is about the year (second grade?) she stayed up all night helping me hand-write a pile of Holly Hobby valentines, one to each kid in my class, only to find the next day that I'd forgotten them at home and didn't really care much about it. "I forgot them," I said at the end of the day.

Well, this year I have not forgotten; I give to you a whole bunch of free vintage V-Day cards courtesy of Vintage Holiday Crafts.

In other news, I have decided that Valentine's Day is also Daisy Mae's birthday. Because she is the sweetest sweetheart that ever hearted.

You can see more puppy pics from the past year here.

Our power came back on yesterday, so I am able to give my husband the gift of a day free of my whinging and self-pity for his birthday! Yay us!

I just had the best weekend of my life. To date.

I'll have fuller albums available once the official photos start coming in, but for now here's some preliminary documentation courtesy of my Aunt Georgia, who took a series of amazing shots.

( Wedding pics! )

For the past few years, my dad has been leading the fund-raising and development campaign at the Brooklyn Children's Museum, which just reopened after an enormous, top-to-bottom renovation.

From the NYTimes review:

Many museums, serving far less troubled neighborhoods than this one does (Crown Heights) are coming to think of themselves as community centers and alternative schools. How much more effective might they be if play and information were intertwined, with children’s museums leading the way?

Perhaps because of this potential, the Brooklyn Children’s Museum’s fund-raising was immensely successful, with more than $80 million coming from public and private sources. And the museum spared little expense in its redesign. In its 104,000-square-foot reconstructed building it has almost doubled its exhibition space, to 20,000 square feet from 12,500, and added another 10,000 square feet on the rooftop, where bleachers frame an outdoor theater. It expects to increase annual visitors to 400,000 from 250,000. Its architect, Rafael Viñoly, has created a new second floor that is light and clean and functional. The building is green, with waterless urinals, token solar panels and geothermal heating and cooling. Many of its exhibitions will undoubtedly amuse and teach. There is much to appreciate here.

Awesome work, Greg from Riverdale!

This past weekend, D and I traveled to my hometown of Rochester, NY for my grandparents' joint 90th birthday party. It was a blow-out family reunion organized around an incredible Chinese banquet, with more cousins and aunties and uncles than I've ever seen all in one place before. I met clans from California and Beijing for the first time. I ate abalone for the first time. (Abalone used to be over the "too Chinese" food line for me, so this was a form of cultural progress. I still wouldn't try the jellyfish, which D tells me was delicious.) I saw my baby sister Emma, who flew in from London, for the first time in ages. She met D for the first time. Saturday, Emma and D and I stole some time at the end of the night to bond at the hotel bar (big thanks to Mom and Dad, who footed the extraordinary bill, at Dad's insistence, by the way, Mom) and the next thing I know, we're the only ones up to entertain my mom's mysterious cousin Robert, whose flight was delayed for eight hours, so that he arrived post-banquet, as most people were drifting toward bed, only to have to head back to the airport first thing in the morning. It was a mind-scrambling weekend, equal parts fun and drama, but it's left me feeling that I only barely saw my close family before being snatched away by my life again.

While in Rochester, when I wasn't reunioning, I couldn't sleep enough. Now I'm back in Arkansas, facing a last week of teaching and a pile of overdue projects, and my insomnia is back. For several weeks, I haven't been able to sleep through a single night. I thought maybe a long weekend would jag my brain back into working order, but at 4:50 this morning I was wide awake with deadlines and Sufjan Stevens's rendition of "Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing" coursing through my head.

Daisy Mae spent the weekend boarded at the kennel for the first time. D and I missed her like the crazy puppy-parents that we are. She just came trotting into my office from the yard reeking of shit and I can't tell if she's been eating it or rolling in it. I am so not ready to face today.

One week ago, my colleague, friend, and karaoke rival Sweet Voice C lost her apartment, bed, furniture, lip gloss, and shoe collection to an electrical fire. Since then, she has been living in a hotel contemplating her loss, and occasionally calling to request pancakes and vodka "because I'm homeless." Last night was apparently a rough one, if my email inbox is any indication:

SC to me, 8:00 pm:

Subject: Shelia's Busy Day

She slept until noon.
She washed her face.
She brushed her teeth.
She didn't shower.
She put on the same clothes that she had on last night.
She ate at taco bell.
She talked to Gwynne ( who is the worst mother in the world b/c I'm homeless)
She took a nap at 2.
She was awaken at 4:45 by a phone call.
She got a pedicure (at a different place than usual, and she likes them better than the Target people)
She ordered sushi.
She drank a bottle of wine.
She is now back in bed.

Good times :)

SC to me, 11:12 pm:

Subject: (none)

This time last week, my apartment caught fire. I am now homeless.

SC to me, 11:26 pm:

Subject: (none)

Tell Derek's mom that even though you guys are living in sin, you are still good people because you are nice to Africans.

SC to me, 11:38 pm:

Subject: Shelia Writes the Hits

I'm thinking of submitting these to Mariah.

"Can't live"

I can't live
If living is without shoes
I can't live
I can't go shoeless any more.

I can't live
If living is without shoes.
I can't live
Can't live without shoes anymorore, 'orrrrrrr

"Last night a smoke detector saved my life"

Last night a smoke detector saved my life
Last night a smoke detector saved my life from a burning bed
Last night a smoke detector saved my life
Last night a smoke detector saved my life with a long beep

SC to me, 12:20 am:

Subject: (none)

did you know that donkey was one of the favorite local cuisines in china/

And, with that, our homeless heroine must have passed out.

Remember in "I'm the One that I Want" when Margaret Cho says, "I save my mother's messages because my mother's messages are worth saving"? Well, I post my baby sister's emails for much the same reason.

Latest missive from Baby Sister, sent to all members of immediate family:

Dear Family,

I am concerned about 2 things:

1. I know more about what is going on in my sister's dog's life than
her own, because she does not get in touch with me but does update her
dog's blog regularly

2. I now know from the dog's blog that one of my parents is sending
mail (pretending to be the cat) to the dog

If all of you have so much time on your hands you should come visit me
in london.

(K is completely excluded from all ridicule as she not only came
to visit me in london but also calls and emails me more regularly than
anyone else)

Love,
E

Despite the fact that several of his freelance employers are behind in paying him, so that we are lately eking out a living by not spending superfluous cash or, more frequently, feeling guilty when we do, D's quiet infiltration of mainstream culture continues apace. See this piece in the Arkansas Times, which tracks the buzz on his article in last summer's Oxford American on singer Teddy Grace: it received a shout-out from Ben Greenman at the New Yorker website, and may be the source and inspiration of a track on Elvis Costello's new album.

Also, tomorrow we hit the road so D can interview Judge Reinhold at the Little Rock Film Festival. I sense that an episode of Lady Z Gets Drunk with Judge Reinhold and Asks Him Too Many Questions About Fast Times at Ridgemont High is likely, if not inevitable.

It will make excellent material for my future testimonials on "D: The E! True Hollywood Story."

What else? The other night we went to see "Iron Man," and I agree with everything o_jenny said. It was way fun, everything that "Transformers" should have been and was not. Much of that had to do with the presence of one Mr. Robert Downey, Jr. He is at the top of my list of Celebrities I Am Allowed to Go Home With If Ever Given the Opportunity. (Incidentally, I believe the existence of such lists is entirely necessary to a healthy long-term relationship. Some time ago, however, I heard from a friend who experienced a crisis of sorts when the opportunity to go home with a member of her list actually materialized, and she wasn't sure if the list—or, more precisely, its permissions—were "real" or not. I suggest ironing out such details preemptively with one's partner.) The ONLY thing that might have made the movie better is if it had been the movie D and I fantasized about on our way to the movie theater, in which Robert Downey, Jr. actually plays himself hitting rock-bottom in the Hollywood spiral of leisurely self-destruction, checks himself into rehab, and there, fashions himself a flying robot suit and emerges a shiny superhero.

What else? Our house is infested with tiny ants. It is extremely annoying. They are also in my car.

What else? Pretty much all puppy, all the time. See dog blog for further accounts of cuteness and destruction. Life with puppy, today, means waking up at noon on the couch with a wet, snorfling nose in my face—not knowing how long I've been lying here or whether I managed in my early morning somnambulism to feed her, but certain that the moment I sit up I will find evidence of Bad Behavior.

What else? My office iMac completely self-destructed last week, and, armed with only my new MacBook, a firewire cable, and my Googling skills, I managed to diagnose the problem (a "kernel panic" of sorts) and, after three days of strife, to fix it (by doing some fancy footwork with the system folder). It seems my years of procrastinating on Macs have turned me into a semicompetent computer technician. Does that count as a marketable skill?

So D and a couple of his cronies, Shane and Sarah, have been conspiring to improve the quality of life here in Northwest Arkansas, and the result is The Film Alliance of the Ozarks. Here's their mission statement:

The Film Alliance of the Ozarks is comprised of filmmakers and citizens working together to better integrate film into the daily life of our community. We seek to reclaim film as an essentially social project by organizing skill workshops, collaborative events, and social initiatives designed to (1) involve members of our community in the process of filmmaking and (2) document the sights and sounds of our region.

You can also hear D and Sarah talking about the FAO on our local NPR station. They had their first general interest meeting last night at the public library and the turnout was fantastic. The first planned even is a children's super 8 film festival in the summer—they've got a bunch of cameras to hand out to kids for a day in the park, and then they'll collect and process the film and compile the shots into a film to screen for all the families. It looks like this thing is really happening, and it's freakin' exciting.

I'm sitting in the Northwest Arkansas Airport waiting for my indefinitely delayed flight to Newark via Chicago to get here and pick me up, wondering if it's okay to eat chicken salad for breakfast, even in an airport, or whether that question is entirely voided by the more urgent question of whether it's okay to eat airport chicken salad at all—and hoping that the answer is, at least in this case, yes, since there's no going back.

Since I'm about to go home for a week and answer questions about my boyfriend—who, though not "new" anymore, neither in spirit nor in fact, is still kind of a novelty to sillygirl84, who lives in London now, and New Zealand before that, neither of which is remotely near Arkansas, which has thus hindered the epic meeting of the minds that shall inevitably occur someday, but not today, since D has to stay here and work—I thought I'd take the time to sing his praises to the world at large. And since, when with my family, I'm likely to talk about all the efforts I've made in the ongoing process of Moving In Together, like how my endurance for college football Saturdays is way up, even if my understanding of the sport has stalled somewhere around This Team Wants To Go This Way, That Team Wants To Stop Them, or how I'm developing a passion for late-night domino matches, or how I almost always remember to feed D's cat before leaving the house for the day, I'll take the time now to highlight some of the heroic efforts D himself is making toward our domestic happiness—like the totally awesome DVD shelves he made for the living room, and the life-changing chili he made for dinner last night, and his infinite patience with my utterly perverse CSI/Law & Order addiction. I particularly enjoy the Learning Moments, such as this:

Me: [trying on a potential outfit for work] Do you think I can wear these boots with this skirt?
D: I do not even understand the nature of that question.

Or this:

D: [calling from downstairs bathroom] Baby, do we have any more hand soap in here?
Me: There should be some in that box under the sink.
D: I don't see any...
Me: Really? I thought I saw some in there the other day.
D: Wait, what's a "cleansing bar"?
Me: Soap.
D: Check. "Cleansing bar" equals "soap."

But it's not just me who thinks D is the bomb. He was recently featured in the culture blog of the Arkansas Times, so you can see for yourself how much my baby rocks.

P.S. I took the mug shot. That's my fault.

People keep asking me who won Wednesday night's epic battle. Let's do as Gil Grissom would do and let the evidence tell the story, shall we?



EZ'S CREW: This is why they're hot.

( The Evidence )

So who won? I think the answer is clear. As always, the KARAOKE won. It shall not be defeated.

This morning, as I refilled my coffee cup at Common Grounds, I overhead this breakfasting middle-aged good ol' boy say to his wife, "The thing about the Yankees is that they simply have no sense of history," and I had no idea whether he was talking about my team or my people.

My apologies to those of you unable to tune into The Pop Tart last night—our internet stream was all messed up for some reason. I'll look into it and try my best to have it fixed ASAP. By the way, as long as you've got your KXUA feed set up in your computer, you should tune in Mondays from 6-8 (Central Standard Time) for Derek's show, Mystery Train, which features Blues, R&B, Rockabilly, & Doo Wop, and describes itself on the station website thus: "The Mystery Train came 'round the bend long about 1953, pulling behind it sixteen coaches of raunchy decadence and earthy heartache. Blind Derek Jenkins unpacks the musical load that gave birth to Rock & Roll every Monday night." Filthy boy!

I taught Swift's Tale of a Tub today—a feat which involved performative digressions on Britney's VMA debacle, the mere fact of Perez Hilton's career, my own sick penchant for E! news and catty celebrity-watch blogging, and the time I inadvertently dismantled a friend and colleague's newly hatched professional persona with an admirably Swiftian email—and I'm exhausted. Tonight Derek's giving a talk on the camp legacy of Irma Vep for TheatreSquared's production of "The Mystery of Irma Vep." I feel like I need a coffee just to get me through his schedule.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, sillygirl84!

On the phone, from my 7th-floor office to SC's 2nd-floor office:

Me: Why is my office so cold? I'm freezing my ass off in here.
SC: I don't know.
Me: I turned the thermostat up to 76, and it's still freezing.
SC: I turned mine up to 86 and now it's okay. Didn't you bring a sweater or anything?
Me: No. It was so nice outside I left my sweater in the car.
SC: You want to borrow mine? I have one I leave in the office just for this kind of situation.
Me: Why are you so much smarter than I am?
SC: Because I'm black.
Me: Oh, right.

I completely forgot the main reason for today's post. It's my sister's birthday!



HAPPY BIRTHDAY, K!

This holiday season, I cannot stop listening to Sufjan Steven's Songs for Christmas. If I had been more on the ball, I would have sent copies to all my LJ friends in time for Christmas, which, as you may have noticed, friends, I did not. My apologies for hoarding the holiday goodness.

But I would like to send thanks and love to everyone reading this journal for being there in all your different ways. It's been a strange year, and I'm still getting oriented to the life I wake up to each of these days, but it's wonderful to know you're all out there, and to be able to communicate with you. Be happy and healthy, folks.

KL: Hey, are you awake?
Me: ...
KL: Your feet are twitching.
Me: It's a fun game.
KL: It should be a game.
Me: It is a game.
KL: How do you calculate the points?
Me: I don't know, but if we could, I'd be winning.
KL: We should figure out how the point system works.
Me: You get a point for each twitch.
KL: [laughs openly at the druggy Lady Z, as do the nurses eavesdropping on our conversation]
Me: But then we have to figure out the handicapping system, because some people are better at foot twitching than others.
KL: Yeah. Your feet are twitching a lot.
Me: I'm really good.
KL: So what about people with only one foot? Because they would be at a real disadvantage in this sport.
Me: They get their own Olympics, because they are actually handicapped. They compete in the Special Olympics of foot twitching.

[The above exchange is recreated from the report KL gave me later; I don't remember a thing, seeing as how I was stoned to the gills on whatever delightful concoction the nurses pumped into my veins. Incidentally, my colon is impeccably healthy, as well as ridiculously goddamn clean.]

It's Thanksgiving weekend and I'm staying with my sister K in her new house in Rochester. There's lots to say about Thanksgiving, obviously, but it basically all comes down to eating oneself silly with family, and then staying up late, finishing the wine and watching movies, while mutually engaging in such mentally stimulating philosophical quandries as the following:

K: So Arkansas is an hour behind?
Me: Yes.
K: So an 8 o'clock show is on...
Me: At 7.
K: When is the 11 o'clock news on?
Me: At 10.
K: But then what about Letterman?
Me: 10:30.
K: But...when are Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy?
Me: At 6.
K: But then when does the evening news come on?
Me: At 5.
...
K: I just don't understand where the missing hour goes.

To be fair, I mock, but K owns her own home. Which is newly painted in the living room region, and delightful.

What I like, or one of the things I like, about motoring is the sense it gives one of lighting accidentally ... upon scenes which would have gone on, have always gone on, will go on, unrecorded, save for this chance glimpse. Then it seems to me I am allowed to see the heart of the world uncovered for a moment. —Virginia Woolf

My dad recently reminded me, after I told him my NASCAR adventures, that years ago he tracked down a collection of writings for me called Ladies, Start Your Engines: Women Writers on Cars and the Road. I imagine he thought to buy it for me because I was obsessed with Matchbox cars as a kid, and my adolescence was fueled by visions of Jack Kerouac and cross-country drives—I wrote a poem when I was sixteen, right after my high school graduation, about escaping in a life-sized Tonka truck—but my romance with cars had cooled over the past decade, the victim, perhaps, of my college love affair with the sidewalks of New York City, and the untimely demise, in my second year of grad school, of my little red Toyota Tercel in an encounter with a Volvo station wagon on I-95 during Hurricane Lloyd. This morning I took the book off the shelf for the first time in years, and rediscovered the above epigraph by Virginia Woolf. Though not a scene unfolding through the window of a passing car, my NASCAR weekend was undoubtedly a chance glimpse into something already in motion, with its own life that is indifferent to my own, and letting it unfold before me was very much like staring into the fiercely beating heart of a venerable creature.

( The adventure continues... )

Back when I was a wee smartass teenage lass, my parents sent me to summer brain camp at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA to study music theory. One of my fellow burgeoning music theorists was a quiet, friendly young man named Norm. I was quite fond of Norm—I may have flirted with him just a little bit at our first brainiac dance—and so I was a little heartbroken when Norm was sent home early with an unfortunate case of mono.

While a potential summer romance was thus cruelly thwarted, however, a more interesting and (I daresay) enduring case of pen-pallery was born. Norm and I wrote letters all through high school, and when I occasionally dropped my end of the correspondence (which I do, as an enthusiastic but ultimately flaky letter-writer), he'd let me go for a few weeks, or months, and eventually years, and then he'd surface again, having traced me to college, then to grad school, and now to Arkansas, to shout howdy.

Norm is now a filmmaker in LA, no doubt living the glamorous life he always deserved. But the latest news is that he was recently kidnapped by a bunch of puppets, who forced him to make the following video, which does answer the question, Just what does one do with a half-session of advanced high school music theory under one's belt?



If the song is now thoroughly entrenched in your head, as it is in mine, you can go to the sing-along version and kill the rest of the day doing political puppet karaoke. Procrastination, ho!

Thanks to the Salon's British correspondent BC for the following story from the BBC:

China Stamps Out Poor English

China has launched a fresh drive to clamp down on bad English in the run-up to the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Previous attempts to wipe out Chinglish - the mistranslated phrases often seen on Chinese street signs and product labels - have met with little success.

Emergency exits at Beijing airport read "No entry on peacetime" and the Ethnic Minorities Park is named "Racist Park".

Beijing city authorities will issue new translation guides by the end of the year, Xinhua news agency said.

The booklets would be handed out to hotels and shopping malls, on public transport and at tourist attractions.
Chinglish has become a running joke among many foreigners in China, and several websites have been set up listing humorous examples of mistranslation.

A road sign on Beijing's Avenue of Eternal Peace warns of a dangerous pavement with the words: "To Take Notice of Safe; The Slippery are Very Crafty".

Menus frequently list items such as "Corrugated iron beef", "Government abuse chicken" and "Chop the strange fish".

The mistranslations arise because many Chinese words express concepts obliquely and can be interpreted in multiple ways, making translation a minefield for non-English speakers.

The municipal government in Beijing first tried to stamp out the problem just a month after being awarded the 2008 Olympics back in 2001.

A year later the Beijing Tourism Bureau set up a hotline for visitors and residents to tip off examples of bad English, and said results would be reviewed by a panel of English professors and expatriates.

I admit that this linguistic clean-up initiative saddens me. In much the same way that I love spam poetry, I adore both unwittingly funny translations and weird signage, and have often taken pride in my people's excellence in both fields. (Fayetteville, incidentally, also proffers the occasional gem—for example, the delightful sign near the one-lane bridge that declares "Road Closed When Underwater.") Still, thanks to the BBC for making the most of the Chinglish situation by giving us the following visual, with original caption:

Occasionally, a sign makes sense.

In other news, today is Z's birthday, so direct all your warmest thoughts his way.


Add 33 years and make a wish, Z.

Some things I've learned during my time in Arkansas:

1. If a friend mails you a package decorated in art that proclaims "SATAN IS A LESBIAN," you will not receive it.

2. There is a world of difference between working for Wal-Mart and working at Wal-Mart, and it is best to respect this distinction when meeting, say, the spouses of new colleagues.

3. It is inadvisable to match an employee of the U.S. Air Force round for round in Jager shots at the karaoke bar in exchange for his singing "Every Rose Has Its Thorn," even though it obviously seems like a fair deal at the time, because you will inevitably reach that tragic moment of clarity in which you realize that in exactly 30 seconds or so, you will not be able to stand, you will not be able to speak, and you will not be able to extricate yourself from the karaoke bar and return to your place of residence without major assistance, so you must, before the impending loss of all motor skills including those involved in the operation of a cellular phone, send out some form of distress signal, so that some local hero will come to your rescue, namely your trusty friend KL, not to be confused with that other guy Kal-El, because not even the Man of Steel would perform the feat KL does in retrieving you and carrying you home as you, when not saying inexcusable things about his mother, engage him in the following philosophical conversation:

You: Hey, is the "air force" a thing?
KL: ???
You: Like if I say, "the air force," does that mean something?
KL: Yes.
You: Huh.

See? I teach the people of Arkansas, and they teach me right back.

Life provides few joys as pure in their simplicity as the performances of Tim Curry and Ernie Banks in the phenomenally bad 1995 film Congo—Mr. Curry as the Romanian treasure hunter Herkermer Homolka, who sounds a bit like Boris from the original Rocky & Bullwinkle Show, and Mr. Banks as Captain Munro, who explains his role in the doomed jungle expedition thus: "I'm your great white hunter, but I'm black." The film also features a lovable talking gorilla named Amy,¹ played by someone named Lorene Noh, whose only other credit in IMDb is some 1999 television project called Primal Force, in which she played "Baboon patriarch." If this isn't enough to convince you to watch it for yourself, then a.) You and I clearly have very different notions of an ideal Sunday afternoon, and b.) The least you can do is read Amazon's compilation of quotations from the film, which includes such gems as "Are you serving that ape a martini?" and "Oh, no! The bad apes have the crystal lasers!"²

---

¹Also the name of my childhood dog, a deeply disturbed pound puppy—part beagle, part doberman, and all crazy—who regularly tried to kill our houseguests and never learned that the way to a human family's heart is not by, say, devouring their Easter baskets, plastic grass and all, and then puking up bits of chocolate bunny and colored aluminum foil all over their home and belongings for the next 24 hours, for example. Amy appears in my dreams more frequently than any figure from my childhood, with the possible exception of my unrequited high school crush.

²As far as Z and I could tell, this line was not actually in the movie, though it obviously should have been.

P.S. The second thing cable taught me this weekend: there is a Law & Order MOVIE. Who knew??

"I am rich in snot," he said. "I am a millionaire of snot."

At the Northside Tavern the other night:

Me: When you were in college, did everyone you know have those drunken smoking scars?
Z: ???
Me: You know, from when you're smoking a cigarette while trashed, and you go to take it out of your mouth but it sticks to your lip so your fingers slide down the cigarette and you get burnt on the insides of your middle and pointer fingers? Everyone I knew in college had those scars.
Z: That's why we wouldn't have you at Harvard.

My sister sillygirl84, lately M.I.A. somewhere in the Maine wilderness teaching youngsters to weave god's-eyes with popsicle sticks and hunt moose or some such summer-campness, has long been traumatized by our mother's tendency to tell anecdotes with no perceptible narrative arc. To wit: "So I was on my way to pick up the car, and then I noticed that artichokes were on sale at Fairway, and later I was going to meet your father at the Cornell Club, and we've been meeting there a lot; I like to use their gym..." and then she trails off, and sillygirl84 says, "And?" and mom looks a bit surprised and says, "That's it," and sillygirl84 turns to me with that look of painful disbelief that says, "Can you believe what this woman does to me?? I have been enduring this abuse for years!" and I say, "I'm opening another bottle of wine."

Eventually my put-upon sister, in a mood of self-preservation-oriented generosity, devised the following solution to my mother's wayward storytelling: that when mom had (mistakenly) determined that the "story" was finished, she add, "And then I found five dollars," thereby giving the anecdote some semblance of form, if not particularly scintillating content.

It has worked amazingly well.

In a similar spirit, Unfogged suggests the following community project:

So it occurred to me that in a more perfect world, many, if not most, poems would end with "Fuck you, clown." For example...

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
Fuck you, clown!
-----
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Fuck you, clown!
-----
"Leave my loneliness unbroken!- quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!"
Quoth the Raven, "Fuck you, clown."
-----
so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

fuck you
clown.

I find it works particularly well with the Mad Lady Poets, such as Emily Dickinson:

In the Parcel – Be the Merchant
Of the Heavenly Grace –
But reduce no Human Spirit
To Disgrace of Price –
Fuck you, Clown!

Anne Sexton:

What a lay me down this is
with two pink, two orange,
two green, two white goodnights.
Fee-fi-fo-fum—
Now I'm borrowed.
Now I'm numb.
Fuck you, clown.

And, of course, Sylvia Plath:

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.
Fuck you, clown.

Mad props to Bitch Ph.D. for the link.

So, I'm lying in bed in our hotel room flipping through the glorious number of channels available on our cable-equipped hotel TV, when somewhere around C-SPAN Z says, "Oh, I know that guy." And I'm like, "That guy? The one on TV?" and he's like, "Yeah. I went to school with him."

This would not necessarily be worth noting if it were not for the fact that only two nights ago, I began reading King Dork by Frank Portman because the Bookslut kids are always going on about how great it is (and yes, so far it's pretty great), and I noticed in the author bio that Frank Portman is in a band, and just to make civilized conversation with my boyfriend (who is also in a band and, you know, listens to music and stuff), I'm like, "Hey Z, ever heard of the Mr. T Experience?" and he's like, "Yeah, we played with them."

Does he personally know everyone in the world? Or am I at the center of some weird Truman Show–esque conspiracy, and you people are all in on it? It's clearly one or the other.

Z and I are cruising the American heartland. The primary purpose of our trip is to find Z a place to live in Cincinnati. Our secondary purpose is to see Willie Nelson play Louisville. (Willie Nelson has long been on my list of People I Must See in Concert Before They Die. Knock on wood, etc. If he can make it through Wednesday night, we're good.) Our tertiary purpose is to stay in a classy B&B in St. Louis, where I intend to dance around singing the "Meet Me in St. Louis" song until Z makes me stop and even then I probably won't. Meet Me in St. Louis is one of my absolute favorite movies of all time with a cherry on top.

So far nothing interesting has happened. All I have to report is that there are a surprising number of porn superstores off the interstate in Missouri, and that gas is slightly more expensive in Illinois than in any of the other 5 states we traversed today. Assuming you all really are collaborating on the script of my life, I suggest you liven things up a bit or we're all in for a long week.

I barely survived graduation weekend. Not because of the pomp, the circumstance, or the critical mass of beloved family and friends, but because I managed to have my left tonsil colonized by an angry mob of bacteria, which I unwisely chose to ignore for the sake of ritual and ceremony, deigning only to try to drown it occasionally in champagne—a treatment that they must have interpreted as a celebration of their new residency, because they gleefully multiplied. By Monday I was incapacitated with throat pain, so that one of my first dignified actions as the newly hooded Dr. Z was to call my mom and beg her to take me to the emergency room for "lots of drugs." Indeed, they gave me lots of drugs, specifically an evil concoction called erythromycin, which dutifully began killing off the creatures in my throat but also completely decimated my internal organs à la Patrick Dempsey in Outbreak (directed, incidentally, by Wolfgang Petersen, also director of currently playing remake Poseidon, which is only worth seeing at an IMAX theater with ButtKickers installed, such as the theater at the surreal Jordan's Furniture Store in Natick, MA, which not only contains an IMAX theater with ButtKickers, but is also fashioned after a street in pre-Katrina New Orleans, with costumed robots ranging from dapper to of-ill-repute greeting you from second-story French Quarter balconies as you enter storefronts like "The Crawfish Cafe" in order to peruse luxury leather sofa sets—but I digress). So I spent the next 36 hours bent over various containers heaving out my liquified insides as movers came and took all my stuff to Arkansas, until I came to in an empty shell of a body in an empty shell of an apartment sometime last night.

But to see me on graduation day, you'd never know the impending carnage:




They say it's some kind of homage to the hallowed tradition of academe, but I maintain that they make us wear funny hats to distract the masses from the overwhelming prospect of our collective brain power. Or to keep them amused through five hours of procession and ceremony.

Despite the fallout, I'm glad I dressed up in my funny hat and paraded around for my family. sillygirl84 also graduated from Brown, and our sister K gallantly chauffeured grandparents and other well-wishers down from upstate New York, so at least we had each other to see us through. Much of the weekend looked just like this (with subtitles):


OK, we're smiling! Take the picture so we can finish eating dinner.



Ohmygod, will someone take the picture already? Why are we still standing here?



It is hilarous how stupid we are going to look in all of these pictures!

So that's that. Now I'm feeling much better, thank you, though still tragically unenthusiastic about food. And the wireless signal came back to our apartment, just in time to see us off. We hit the road to Arkansas tomorrow morning.

If you email me your address, I'll send you a postcard from the road—perhaps with my new Waterman Carene fountain pen.

Last night:
Me: Who do you think would play me in the made-for-TV movie of my life? One of the Olsen twins?
Z: Both of the Olsen twins.
Me: Yeah, each one could take a side of my very complex personality.
Z: Who would play me?
Me: A monkey.
Z: Could I do it with the Olsen twins?
Me: No, stupid. The monkey playing you would do it with the Olsen twins. You would do it with me.
Z: Are you twins?
Me: This conversation is over.

Me: How would one would make a Brokeback Martini?
sillygirl84: Well, it would have to be something really manly, but also, um...
Me: A little fruity?
sillygirl84:Yes.

Thus we shall be drinking something along the lines of a scotch-and-raspberry/cranberry cocktail. I also stocked up on Jake's Fault, a.k.a. the "I Wish I Knew How to Quit You" shiraz.

See you all at the other end of the red carpet.

( Update 1 )
( Update 2 )
( Update 3 )
( Update 4 )
( Update 5 )
( Final update )

Happy birthday to Mozart, Donna Reed, André the Giant, and my sister Kathryn.

Happy 136th anniversary to Kappa Alpha Theta, the first college sorority, founded at a college at which I will be giving an on-campus interview in two weeks.

Happy commemoration of the Paris Peace Accord, which ended the Vietnam War in 1973.

Happy belated Australia Day.

Happy Friday.

ETA: As grendel1031 points out, it is also the birthday of Colette, sexy French author of GiGi and the wonderful Claudine novels. And, I have just discovered, it is also the birthday our beloved Bitch Ph.D. Damn, busy day.

Apparently some twisted tardbag stole a baby penguin from an English zoo.

Baby penguin to tardbag: "Who you callin' jackass, jackass?"

Police said Thursday they feared the worst for a baby penguin whose plight has prompted headlines around the world after he was stolen from a British zoo five days ago.

Toga, a three-month-old Jackass penguin, was snatched on Saturday night from the Amazon World zoo on the Isle of Wight, off the south coast of England.

Zoo managers think he might have been stolen as a Christmas present by thieves inspired by the hit documentary film "March of the Penguins."

But they warned that unless the brown and white colored Toga was swiftly returned, he would die.

This is so sad I can't even bring myself to joke about the stunning fact that there is such a thing as a "Jackass penguin."

In less depressing news, I made a quick run back to Philly yesterday to pick up some things from my apartment (student papers, books, several pairs of Potential Interview Shoes) and found a flurry of lovely Christmas (and other holiday) cards in my mailbox. Thank you, card-senders from around the world! And a big thank you to all my LJ friends for being an essential part of this enormous, eventful past year. I never imagined, when I started a LiveJournal last January, that I was embarking on a series of important friendships.

Okay, here's why I shouldn't get sentimental while typing and eating lunch at the same time: I just spilled couscous all over my computer. Fuck.

Final note: Today's soundtrack thoughtfully provided by the magnificent madame_urushiol, who sent me a CD of pirate shanties by singing outfit The Jolly Rogers. Cutlass, Cannon and Curves gives "bootylicious" a whole new meaning.

Okay, here's my contribution to the delightful series of Cute Couples. I should point out that, as our service staff seems to be on permanent vacation, these were self-portraits taken by holding the camera at arm's length. As such, I had to take a series in order to make sure that at least one contained both of our heads. And, as you'll see, I believe the series is best viewed with the dialogue that accompanied it.


Me: Ready? This is just the first one.


Z: You smiled. You're not supposed to.
Me: Me? I didn't smile.
Z: [impishly] Yes, you did.
Me: [indignantly] No I didn't!


Me: I didn't! I didn't smile!
Z: I think you did.
Me: I ... are you just trying to get a series of my Mad Face?
Z: [suspicious silence]

So there you have it, folks. Happy holidays.

[Cell phone rings. I see it’s Z.]
Me: Hi!
[silence]
Me: Hello? Are you there? [Moves around trying to get the signal.]
[Call ends.]
[Cell phone rings. It’s Z again.]
Me: You hung up on me!
Z: No I didn’t.
Me: Yes you did. You called me up and then deliberately hung up on me.
Z: Well, no, I don’t think I did. I think you hung up on me.
Me: Whatever. I hate you. This conversation is already making me cranky.
Z: Well, me too.
Me: Whatever. So how was your day?
Z: What?
Me: [moves closer to window] Can you hear me now?
Z: Yes.
Me: I said, “How was your day.”
Z: Oh. Fine. How was yours?
Me: Okay. Class was fine, but I couldn’t get them excited about Milton…. [goes on at some length about the trials and tribulations of trying to get freshmen excited about Milton]
Z: Wait, I lost you. What did you say?
Me: When?
Z: The last thing.
Me: Well, what’s the last thing you heard?
Z: Something about Milton.
Me: That I couldn’t get my students excited?
Z: Yeah, I heard that. What did you say after that?
Me: More of the same, really. It doesn’t matter.
Z: What?
Me: [moving toward other window] I SAID IT DOESN’T MATTER.
Z: Oh. Okay.
[silence]
Me: You still there?
Z: [garbled]
Me: [waving phone around in the air looking for signal] Wait, I can’t hear you.
Z: Hello?
Me: Hi. What did you say?
Z: When?
Me: Just now. Whatever you said, I didn’t hear it.
Z: I asked if you could hear me.
Me: Oh. I couldn’t.
Z: I figured. [garbled]
Me: [sighs] This sucks.
Z: Yeah. I better let you go.
Me: Yeah. I’m pretty tired.
Z: Okay. Well, have a good night and… [garbled].
Me: What?
Z: I said I love you.
Me: Oh. I love you too.
Z: I’m going to assume you just said “I love you” and not “Fuck you.”
Me: Sure, whatever.
[Call ends.]

Apparently someone just needed to get aggressive with the weather around here: today is pleasantly cool. I can only imagine yesterday's letter was taken to heart by the powers that be.

Today my last birthday present from Z arrived on the doorstep, all the way from Hong Kong—a squashy, plushy Totoro!



He arrived just in time, as I've been going through a weird cutesy phase lately, spending way too much time looking up pics of fuzzy puppies on the internet (I even joined an online society of Tibetan Spaniel enthusiasts so I could peek at people's pictures of their new pets, which is pretty sick, a kind of scopic canine pedophilia), and trawling through Petfinder.com's online listings, cooing like a crazy lady at the poor little strays, which we all know is a dangerous game. Since I really can't afford a pet right now, it's good I now have an inanimate cuddly to keep me occupied.

Today was going to be a work day—finalizing dissertation paperwork, beginning revisions on my last chapter to turn it into an article manuscript, planning classes—but then it turned into a killing-time-before-Mirabar-karaoke day. Sometimes that happens. In honor of not working, I give you some quick book reviews.

Andrea Lee, Interesting Women
The cover of my edition of Lee's short stories is slightly misleading. Between the gritty Vogue-ish photo of an elegantly dressed woman's back, the gold script font of the title, and the dominant blurb by Elle Magazine on the back, you'd think you were in for some classy chick lit. What you get instead are a series of expertly crafted, sophisticated literary gems. With precision, control, and deadpan wit, Lee sketches a series of female characters who find themselves at cultural crossroads: ex-patriots living in a new language, cosmopolitan professionals dating across racial lines, first-world citizens figuring out the terms of their status in the greater world, individuals making sense of their various, conflicting cultural legacies. There's not a single weak story in this collection. I particularly enjoyed "Brothers and Sisters Around the World" and "Anthropology."

Michael Ondaatje, Anil's Ghost
Another book by an important Asian American writer that I read to see if I might teach it in the future. This is a hard novel for me to wrap my mind around. Anil is a young forensic anthropologist working for a human rights organization who travels to Sri Lanka during the civil war of the late 1980s and ends up working on the skeleton of one of the masses of "disappeared." (Incidentally, now would be an opportune moment to read about this historical moment, as Sri Lanka is back in the news for related political unrest. I finished this book a day before the Foreign Minister was assassinated at his home.) It is a novel about history, and politics, and war, and (most of all) haunting, but it was difficult for me to discern what it was suggesting about any of these Big Topics. Ondaatje's writing is exquisite, but in an almost oppressive way. For the first fifty pages I was entranced, and then I became, I don't know, tired. His sentences look sparse, but as a whole each page feels almost stagnant, and moving through them is, after a while, like trudging through still water. His prose is cerebral in a minimalist way—it seems to be doing its thinking somewhere in the literary stratosphere, and doesn't offer enough clues to help the reader follow. Ondaatje was primarily a poet before bursting onto the fiction scene, and I think his poetry might be more effective. I plan to read some soon.

Peter Dickinson, Eva
My dad gave me this book when I was a kid, and the opening chapters always stuck with me: a teenage girl waking out of a coma following a horrific accident to find that her mind has been relocated to the body of a chimpanzee. It's a seriously haunting premise. I couldn't remember the rest of the story, though, so I recently reread it to see if it was still good. And it's wonderful. Set in a mundanely nightmarish future, in which the natural world has been all but destroyed by human industry, and most wildlife is extinct, and every bit of space on Earth—physical, virtual, and conceptual—is controlled by corporate interests, this variation of Kafka's Metamorphosis imagines the breakdown of modern humanity and humanism with a kind of fearlessness uncommon in young adult literature. Eva's father is a chimp researcher, and Eva herself has a precocious understanding of and comfort with chimps before her accident. As she comes to consciousness in her new body (that of the chimpanzee Kelly), Eva survives only because she understands that she must learn to be a new kind of creature—not human, not ape, and not something simply "in-between," but an entirely new category that she must create by consciously living it:

You couldn't just invade a chimp body and take it over with your human mind, like a hero in a history book—you'd never get to be whole that way. Eva's human neurons might have copied themselves into Kelly's brain, but as Dad had said, that left a sort of connection, an interface, a borderland where human ended and chimp began. You couldn't live like that, with a frontier in you like a wall, keeping your selves apart. The only way to become whole was to pull the wall down, to let the other side back in, to let it invade in its turn, up into the human side, the neurons remembering their old paths, twining themselves in among the human network, until both sides made a single pattern. A new pattern, not Eva, not Kelly—both but one.

This passage actually reminds me of one of the highlights of my own intellectual career. When I was ten, my family was interviewed for a local news program on interracial families. It was pretty weird—they wanted shots of me and my sister assisting my mom stir-frying our dinner, and managed to edit the interview with my parents so that my dad did all the talking while my mother looked on dutifully. I assure you, this was not the normal way of things in my family. But in the interview they did with me and my sisters (ages 7 and Baby, respectively)—in which they kept asking us inane questions like "Do you ever wonder why you eat Chinese food at your Grandma Ruby's house, but American food at your Grandpa Frank's house? Do you ever feel more Chinese or more Polish and Italian on certain days?"—they captured me explaining that when you're a combination of races or ethnicities, you don't feel like "two things," you feel like "both, together: one thing." I think that might be the smartest thing I've ever said. I peaked at ten, people.

But I digress. In addition to taking on complex questions of identity with energy and intelligence (I think it would be awesome to pair this book with something like Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians on a syllabus), Eva offers wonderful descriptions of processes of socialization, both human and chimp. It reminded me of all the things I loved best about books when I was a kid: naturalist research, tales of survival, precocious kids analyzing the nutty adult world around them and strategizing their escape. And apes. Fierce, fuzzy, tantrum-throwing, game-playing, bug-eating apes.