December 6th, 2006

I once again have the internet at home for the first time in almost three years, when I learned by receiving a nine-hundred dollar phone bill that AOL was connecting me using a long-distance number. I will be more careful next time. You may not see me in real life for a while.

I have been using chopsticks more than is necessary. In fact I have been planning my meals so that I can use them as much as possible. That's not pretentious, is it? If it is, I'll stop, but they are more fun to use than forks. I'm not very good at using them, but it seems like something  I should know how to do.

I have more work to do in the next few weeks than I have time for. It's eight in the morning and already today I have written a play. I need to get back to it.

August 9th, 2006

I'll be myspace-deprived for the next week or so, so don't think I'm ignoring anybody. I'll be in Copper Harbor, Michigan, which is way up at the top of the UP. I hope not to be using any alternating current. We'll see.

May 25ish, 2006
L'esprit d'escalier It's sometime after midnight, eastern time (a time zone that for many reasons I prefer over the Central Time I have been so cruelly oppressed under for these last few years.) (That's hyperbole by the way.) I have finally turned in the grades for this semester and am feeling a strong sense of one of the first things I taught my classes, that ever so useful French phrase above. The literal translation is the spirit in the staircase, but that of course makes no sense unless you know that en Francais the word for spirit is the same as the one for wit, so the phrase then refers to the brilliant witty comebacks you think of after it is too late to use them, which to me is an appropriate metaphor (or more properly synecdoche, right class?) for oral communication in general. I spend most of my time in conversation either not saying what I should be or saying what I shouldn't.

This makes up much of the appeal of writing for me: revisability. This is why I should be spending more time writing and less time standing in front of a classroom talking about writing. Those who teach have no time left over to do what they're teaching, which is the excuse I am using. I am second-guessing, as usual, some of the grades I gave. There's the pressure from the administration not to inflate grades, but of course this strikes a sour note with students. The A's are the easiest. Those who got them deserved them, but for different reasons--natural talent in writing, hard work, thoughtful and memorable contributions to class discussion, and thoughtful papers. I had to fail some students, but only those who owed me several papers.

There were some students who came back late (mentally) from spring break. The ones who made up for lost time ended up doing just fine, but there is another category of students, the ones who were on top of things until right until the very end. I gave them incompletes instead of failing them, which I am happy to do for any student who for one reason or another needs some extra time. But some of the incompletes I gave this semester scratch at some pretty fresh wounds, much in the same way that a grammatical error might not bother me in the first paper I read, but will in the thirteenth, forcing me to make sure I am not holding that thirteenth student accountable for the mistakes of the ones before them.

What it comes down to is that I am too friendly for my own good, a topic I will take on more thoroughly some other time, but my gregarious nature, combined with my relative age and other factors, leaves me feeling somewhat taken advantage of and unappreciated and rethinking my whole direction in life.

I can't just end there, I suppose, though I'd rather not get into this much more in such a public forum until I know whether this is a passing feeling. I suppose if the whole problem is that I am not aloof enough to be teaching, then I suppose I should start right now by shutting up. Class dismissed.

March 27, 2006

I never thought this would happen to me. I've become one of those computer nerds. I mean sure, I was mildly interested in computers as a kid--as interested as you might expect any gawky kid with glasses, braces, and nervous mannerisms would be. I took a BASIC programming class with my Dad, where we learned how to make rocket ships out of equal signs and angle brackets (which the computerati erroneously call carets, much in the way almost everyone these days thinks that hyphens and dashes are the same thing (carets are the insertion marks that point up; hyphens are short and connect words; dashes are longer and separate sentence elements) and others might know as those alligator-mouthed greater than/less than symbols, the ones that won't show up if I type them as they enclose html tags). I was particularly proud of a blackjack program I designed. Rather than simply generating random cards, it had a matrix that kept track of which cards had been played, so it was possible for Rain Man types to cheat by counting cards. What good is blackjack if you can't use a freakish memory to stick it to the man! Looking at the massive amounts of coding it took to make even the simplest of programs did much to dissuade me from pursuing a career as a video game designer. Even Pong seemed beyond my reach.

I took the PASCAL programming class that my high school offered, which taught me whole new ways to make rocket ships move across the screen. Once my Atari 800 (which had, I think, 64 kilobytes of RAM) became obsolete and clogged with dog hair, I lost most of my interest in computers.

By the time I got to college, I was fully convinced that computers were a stupid waste of time. Kenyon College had a DOS-based e-mail system, and people would spent entire days and nights in the computer lab in Gund Hall, firing off missives to people who were sitting right next to them. It seemed rather sad and pointless to me. So I avoided computers altogether, writing all of my papers on an old manual typewriter, which seemed more romantic than using a word processor.

I was probably a junior in college when the first version of Windows came out, but I didn't pay much attention. I didn't have occassion to see what all the fuss was about until the end of my senior year, when I had to take a statistics class, and the only one that fit my schedule was on computers. It was the first time I had ever used a mouse or heard the word icon used in the context of computers. The professor kept telling us to double-click this or that icon, and I naturally assumed that, since the mouse had two buttons, double-clicking meant pushing both buttons at the same time. I got about two weeks behind before I learned the fallacy of my thinking there. Or the fallacy of theirs.

When I moved to New York, my first job was a fun but low-paying position at the bookstore at the Museum of Modern Art. My dear friend Donna got me an interview at Michael Wolff Publishing. They made Internet guidebooks, but went under before I ever started working. For my interview, I had to write three website reviews. "What's a website?" I wanted to ask. I had never used the internet before, so I was working up a sweat trying to get the damn thing to work.

So I became a bit of a Luddite when it came to computer technology. They were those frustrating things that took too long, crashed all the time, and were out of my price range. After I lost a twelve-page paper in graduate school when sitting down in a chair that proceeded to break apart under me caused me to spill a bowl of cereal right into the keyboard of my laptop, frying the hard drive, I was more convinced than ever that the old manual typewriter was the way to go.

It was about this time that I came to regard the entire computer culture with derision and disgust. People who wrote (and spoke) in acronyms (IMHO, LOL, WTF?) bore the brunt of my scorn. So when the word blog began to circulate, I met it with a shudder. First of all the very word blog is ugly and annoying, somewhere between blot and clog. It sounds too like blah, which I suppose is the reaction prompted by most blog entries, including this one. My main objection is that the word seems pretty unnecessary. It's the computerese equivalent of utilize, which is just use in Sunday clothes. I'm sure that the same type of people who throw words like blog and write things like OMGWTFIELOLFF and expect to be understood or taken seriously like to use the word utilize instead of utilizing the perfectly serviceable use. Of course they might object to utilize as it does take longer to type, but they would probably be more likely to abbreviate it Utlz. than use good old-fashioned (OF?) use.

I had no intention of signing my soul over to Tom and Rupert and joining the so-called myspace revolution. All I knew was that it was a pervert's paradise and something the kids enjoyed. One afternoon in the U-Rock library, a student (Hi, Amber, my first myspace friend) was looking at her account, and it struck my curiosity. I saw that it might be a way to learn html. What I learned was that it would have been much easier to start from scratch than it is to manipulate the code that is already built into a myspace profile page, as you have to undo everything that our mutual friend Tom has saw fit to do for you. Nevertheless, I've spent countless hours adjusting and readjusting this page. To be honest, I don't even spend much time looking at other people's sites, knowing that I am bound to come across half-naked women sprawled on floors, loud and busy layouts, and more internet acronyms than I can handle. Nor do I think too much about whether other people are looking at this site or reading this . . . blog. In fact, this whole thing smacks of narcissism to me. Even mine, I suppose. And I don't even consider myself narcissistic. Perhaps I am deluding myself. Perhaps we all are, just as we do in regular-old conversation, waiting for the other person to shut the fuck up so we can talk. It's not hard to imagine a world of bloggers that never read anybody else's blogs but their own. Most so-called pimped-out pages

I did not even realize that people had subscribed to read what my meaningless opinions on meaningless subjects are, which caused a bit of embarrassment a few weeks back when I was trying to move the colossal lists of bands and movies and whatnot from my profile page into blogs because my page was taking forever to load and all the silly images I had been amassing kept making the text shift down the page as they loaded. Poor Chili, Neil, Steve, and Jeremy were subjected to forty-some emails because I kept posting, deleting, and reposting those pages, trying to figure out whether the address of each page stayed the same, so I could index them somehow.

That is bound to happen again, by the way, because now I have a plan. Instead of having hundreds of blogs on sundry topics, I'm just going to set up a few under broad categories. Deal?

The blog features on Myspace bite it hard. There seems to be something weird going on with the text, because if you use your own style sheets, it reverts to the default when on hover. Why isn't Dateline NBC covering this? This is the real Myspace scandal! We're not all perverts, are we? I'm not, at least, which I should specify as the previous sentence might have implied that.

So I have been reading other people's blogs. Mostly little updates in people's lives or observations or various forms of self-aggrandizement, or gloryboating (a word made famous by the Whack Brothers, if not coined by them outright. (See Google for Whack Brothers or Gloryboating.)¹

The best blog I have come across, by the way, is that of the lovely Humble B. Wonderful, which I highly suggest checking out. Evidently she's well on her way to becoming a myspace celebrity, though I'm not sure I should be saying she, as there is some speculation that she is not really a she at all. I'm not sure what the reason for said speculation, but I imagine that it's that the photos on her site are of a face far too beautiful in some people's minds to belong to someone who knows as much about anime, immigration, and flash animation, someone who swears brilliantly, someone who is too wonderful to be one person at all. Regardless, her blogs are the funniest thing I have read since David Sedaris and some of the funniest things I have ever read. The woman is the Dorothy Parker of our generation and deserves a book deal now. I'll admit I'm smitten, and perhaps a bit obsessed. I'm in the process of reading through her hundred or so blogs, and I am falling more in love with her with each one. Just look at her. This is the woman who has given me occassion to use that most hated acronym, LOL, because that is what I have been doing all afternoon.

Isn't She (Humble B.) Wonderful?

Anyway, I'll keep working on this, but diaries aren't my style. I am a meticulous reviser, principally because everything I say is shit the first time through, so for the most part I'll just keep adding to the little sections, or blogs, or gloryboat pages. In the meantime, be sure to make friends with the girl of my dreams, Humble B. Wonderful.

1. One of the very best features of myspace, besides the blogs of Humble B. Wonderful, is that its networks generate so many links to your page that it is easy to end up as the lucky link on a google search.

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