Summer Doldrums, Over and Over

I started today by failing to kill a mosquito. A sitting duck on the bathroom wall. I slapped at it with my flip-flop, then flailed in anger as it floated away. Two minutes later, it bit my ankle while I brushed my teeth. Spiteful bastard.

I've been traveling all summer. Like, non-stop. First, NYC for PPPCon. Boston. Then Buffalo, to drive to Chicago for brother's commencement. I enjoyed the drive. Always loved driving west on the 90. Always felt like an adventure, a new undertaking -- Go west, young man, and all that. Towards Chicago, City of Industry. This time it felt solidly like a return, which was interesting. Took 10 hours, as usual. We entered Indiana around 5pm, and spent the next few hours eagerly exiting it. The state of Indiana obliged by allowing us to legally drive 5 miles faster per hour, which was thoughtful. Soon enough, the smokestack-skyline of Gary, Indiana loomed before me. We were done. I was back.

It was fun to drive through Chicago again. I love cities planned on grids. My parents have a thorough distaste for city driving, so I was given free reign to drive us all over the place. Evanston, Lincoln Square, Streeterville, the Loop. I took the parentals out on the museum campus one clear night for a photo-op:

Lovely trip. More thoughts on the Midwest, and the theme of Returning, later, perhaps.

(I've fallen in love with commas, a bit. The hesitation, the halting, waffling, a step, forward, back, so on, so forth. It suits my state of mind this summer. It's all crap.)

Long story short: after Chicago, Knoxville for a week. Boston. Then Santa Barbara for three weeks. I'm currently wrapping up my three week stability-grounding phase in Cambridge, soon bound for Buffalo, Cleveland, and finally Yosemite. FINALLY, COMMA, YOSEMITE. To be honest, I am eager to be on the other side of August. Perhaps when the new school year starts, I will regain my inherent stylistic distaste for hesitation, and commas, and waffling, and return to straight, direct prose. Here's hoping.

-R.

Spring Forward, and All That

March. March? Really? Ok, I guess.

It is my quals semester. I should be stressed out, but I've been conscientiously reading some other dude's PhD thesis watching Alex Cabot episodes of SVU and practicing the secret extra verse to the Fresh Prince of Bel Air's intro rap (watch Season One, fools). 

It's getting warmer, and Cambridge walks are wonderful. Garden Street, ever-menacing, fed my deep-seated fears of being lured into captivity once more: Wednesday morning, I counted twenty to thirty brightly-colored candied oblate spheroids strewn between Grey Gardens and Robinson. Orange, yellow, brown. Thought: If M&M's, not likely to be effective child-trap. Reds and the greens are crucial to maintaining visual appeal. Second thought: probably Reese's pieces. Reese's pieces?! A bit lavish, no? I guess jelly beans didn't pan out very well, huh? Third thought: most likely explanation presumably involves inadvertent candy-loss by children (primary consumers?), notoriously unable to hold on to anything. Children of North Cambridge: stop spilling candy everywhere. It's a waste of good sugar, and it makes me anxious.

Walking on Huron Avenue a couple nights ago prompted further contemplation. I was trudging north, grocery-laden, when my peripheral vision picked up on a dark masculine figure emerging from a doorway to my right. Not quite emerging. Lurking. Inexplicably holding a large dry sausage. I'm not resorting to crude euphemism here: the guy was just standing in a doorway, looking out over Huron Ave, holding sausage, preoccupied. Note to self: If at any point you absolutely must be in possession of a large dry sausage, do not lurk. (We mustn't lurk in doorways. It's rude --Ed.). I'm sure this guy was waiting to go out to some dinner party and had decided to bring sausage, which is thoughtful.

Anyway, it's high time I did something productive with my day. Hope all is well, regards,

R.

The R--ts

I somehow bought the clean version of The Roots' Phrenology, which is essentially all just bleeped out. The Seed (2.0) is especially ludicrous. Beware of poorly-labeled Amazon downloads.

Is it weird that I hesitate before typing "ludicrous?" As though "Ludacris" might actually be the proper spelling?

A Thought About Carrots

Eating an adult carrot is somehow much more satisfying than eating an equivalent mass of baby carrots. Perhaps it feels like more of an accomplishment, having vanquished the behemoth root. I ate a carrot, dammit. Much better, more heroic than having gnashed my teeth over a handful of tender, defenseless little orange carrot nubs. Well, defenseless is a loaded term -- I shall not inject morality into this comparison, especially with regard to vegetables that are, in actuality, fully grown*. But the heroism -- this is a surprisingly accurate reflection of how I view my relationship with food: meal conquered, I digest. I congratulate myself often, after meals.

Psychology aside, I think adult carrots exhibit superior taste and texture.

*Baby-cut carrots are whittled from imperfect grown-up carrots to reduce food waste.

Monsters in Bed

Prediction: Zombies will never be sexy.

Vampires, werewolves, even mummies I can sort of see. But zombies -- eyes vacant, unromantic; drooling bits of brain -- will never be sexy. The gauntlet is thrown; a challenge; let all writers of popular prose take heed. Make zombies sexy. Just you try.

I've been watching a lot of Bones lately. The show offers a winning combination of sexual tension and the temperately grotesque: Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz are terrific, and clean bones are not that scary. Given one's tendency to saturate when watching gore-heavy crime dramas, this is a nice thing.

* * *

On topic, you should all take a listen -- carefully -- to Lady Gaga's second album, The Fame Monster. First let me declare that Lady Gaga is brilliant. The Fame was pure, odd, trashpop brilliance. There was something foggily familiar about much of the music, and Gaga was decidedly kooky yet I felt like maybe she was actually holding back to build pop appeal. And, I loved it.

With The Fame Monster, the familiarity is still there (take 'Alejandro;' compare with 'La Isla Bonita' by Madonna), but it's not what's important. The tracks are infectiously, joyously danceable; Gaga's pop sensibility is flawless. The icing on the cake is thematic: the album is filled with blankly-delivered non-subtle references to monsterhood, embracing the current pop obsession with sexed-up humanoids (see Twilight) and simultaneously stepping beyond it into grittier, kookier territory. Gaga's vampires would not sparkle, benign, in the sunlight. They would consume us, darkly, in the dark (primal fear! darkness of soul! darkness of environs. teehee. anyway). She casually croons to us about half-wired broken jaws, heart-eating, brain-eating (flirts with zombie-territory, big points in my book), and her offhand delivery demands that we accept these all as reasonable lyrical sentences. It is great. I particularly enjoy 'Monster,' 'Alejandro,' and 'Speechless' (aside from 'Bad Romance,' of course).

***

Anyway, enough of the grisly/macabre. I have a bad headcold, and will take a nap.

Happy New Year!

Happy 2010, my friends. A few notes from winter break:

- A public health service announcement in Logan airport proclaimed: "If you have hands, wash them." This seemed to me a needless cruelty, a needle in the consciousness of the handless.

- I have read Mrs. Dalloway. I felt while reading that this book was just enormous. Now that I've finished, it's clear that I'll be peeling back, unwrapping, poking at this book for years to come. It's gorgeous; an enormous book.

- After devoting 251 minutes of our lives to the Twilight movies, K and I declared ourselves (a) confused and (b) Team Jacob. What could be more clear? Jacob Black was dependable, gruffly handsome and, most importantly, comparatively good for Bella Swan. Edward was a drama king (always with the biting and the wanting to bite, and then with the revulsion and the random, sudden misgivings). However, to address (a) I committed to sitting down and reading the novels. I suddenly have greater appreciation for Kristen Stewart's deadpan monotone: Bella was written that way (by the way, I love it -- Kristen Stewart's deadpan monotone). I haven't gotten too far yet, but I hear that I will appreciate Edward more via written word. I look forward to a new view.

Other things have occurred to me, but I'm blanking on them now.

Till later,

R.

Returns, Some Triumphant, Others Incurring a Fine

It is winter here in Cambridge. The statement is false, but serves to better illustrate the blogger's state of mind. We are experiencing a frigid mid-October, and it is difficult to reconcile myself with this. I did not fully notice when it was summer; perhaps this explains the shock and resistance to a rather expected and incremental change.

I went for a walk to return a library book (overdue -- evidently one does not grow up, one only grows taller), and remembered that Harvard Yard in autumn is nice. How sad, that I had not crossed the Yard since the late summer: crisp air, red leaves, the notebooks tucked away under elbows, all came as a surprise. I struck an irregular (but deliberate) path across it, pausing briefly at the old stops, examining the old rocks. We are grading our students on rock identifications around University Hall, you see. A responsible TF would refresh her memory, you see; I had a reason to be there. Mostly I just wanted to see them again.

*     *     *

On that topic, teaching is a blast, teaching is a treasure. Teaching is the highlight of my week. Once a week, for three hours, I win. It is a brilliant feeling to TF the same first introductory course that you took in your future field. That said, it will not do to have the sleep-deprived leading the sleep-deprived. This seems to me a disastrous concoction.

Hope all is well,

R

*There are many facets to returning to one's alma mater for graduate school: academic, emotional, geographical. The Yard has taken on the quality I associate with hometowns: a place well-loved; left; regained. But I'll switch focus to the academic-emotional, rather than the geographical-emotional.