Sly Boots

Reaching new levels of sleepy inconstancy

I seem to be backsliding into my former late-sleeping life. I was doing so well at the beginning of the summer, waking up at 6:30-7, exercising everyday, eating, well, not so well, but still. I felt like I was adulting up a little.

That being said, I feel I get plenty of exercise walking around campus in the massive, amorphous humidity shroud. And I suppose it says a lot that I enjoy waking up early at all, right?

On a completely different subject, I’ve got a presentation today on the Great Debaters (which Kev and I refer to as The Master Debaters because we are 12). I had to watch it again last night and I still didn’t care for it. Everyone else loved it though, making me more ashamed.

It has some beautiful shots, but it could have benefitted from some serious editing, especially considering what a fraction of the true story they actually told. It make me feel like they would rather advance their own agenda (which smells suspiciously of revisionism) than give an accurate portrayal of what is really an amazing piece of history. The plot moved molasses slow and while they were talking passionately about equal rights for blacks, they made sure their wives were locked away in the house, peeling potatoes and not getting involved in political matters. Which is sad, because the political matters (and I feel like this was, perhaps, a message of the film) need to be talked about, debated, by everyone.

White shame

I’m offically over the halfway point of the semester by about an hour. I am given little happiness from this when I consider how bottom-heavy with work the second half of the semester is. Yes, I know, all semesters are like this. I don’t care, I want a bigger feeling of relief.

I’ve got a 15 pager on a fairly obscure article from which I’ve formulated a very obscure paper topic, a 60-min class I’ve got to teach (which, I have to say, I’ve started a really sexy powerpoint for. It’s appropriate-it’s on the filmic gaze) and various other smaller papers and presentations. Not too bad, but as I said, when you see the finishing point in the horizon, it’s made less beautiful by miles of ugly mountains.

I watched The Great Debaters yesterday for one of my aformentioned presentations and I’m reminded of a sentiment by Benedict Anderson, something about not being a part of a nation until you feel shame. The Great Debaters really loaded me up with white shame, so I guess that means I’m an American? Or white? I don’t know, because I feel more anger about my shame and the way it was forced upon me than actual shame itself.

I think it just speaks to my dislike of any sort of art that demonizes a whole set of people. If it was a movie about women’s rights, I would get annoyed if every male was devious and unsympathetic.

Not Down with the Sickness and the mythical Panel of Truth

So I’ve got some sort of…ailment. I don’t know what it is, though, so I don’t know what to take to get rid of it. Sinus medicine? Cold medicine? Oxycotin?

So i’m just chugging nyquil before I go to sleep and taking excedrin during the day. If we were so intelligently designed, why didn’t ‘god’ equip us with some sort of panel that tells us what is wrong with us, instantly. You know, like cars have. ‘God’ designed cars better than people?

But I propose that this panel also tell you when you are being a dickhole and when you are doing something that you shouldn’t be. Like now, my panel would be flashing bright red and saying “Jessica, you need to stop screwing around on your pointless blog. Finish any of the piles of homework you have, go to CVS to get medicine for your as yet undetermined illness and stop thinking about getting coffee when the last thing you need is to be more dehydrated.” (It’s a big panel).

Wouldn’t that be nice? To always know what you should be doing? I would argue that it’s not always self-evident. This morning it is, but in, say, fights with your significant other, it would be nice to know who was really right so you could both shut up and move on with your lives.

I’d really like my Truth Panel (maybe I should patent this?) to tell me if I’m going down the right path with my decision to go to grad school.

But that would just be too easy, wouldn’t it? Eventually the Truth Panel would evolve and gain artificial intelligence, making all of our decisions instead of showing us the right path. So I guess its best that there was never any such thing. Besides the ethical and philosophical implications of having a box that new instinctively what was right and what was wrong (would it, in turn, become god?), it would probably lead to the end of the world. Or complete world peace. I guess we’ll never know…

Ever have one of those two and a half weeks...

…where nothing/very little seems to go right?

You have?

I should stop bitching because everybody has bad days and at least I don’t live in Guatemala?

I guess you are right.

But before I go and wallow, I just wanna say goodbye Bryant Park Project. You will be missed. Especially if NPR doesn’t leave your archives up on its website for me to plunder while at work.

Thank you NPR, for the image and for, well, everything.

Today sucked

Hang in there!

Week 3 Objectives

I think that henceforth I will start out the remaining weeks of Pedagogy Boot Camp (PBC) with a nice, strong, constructive list about my goals and duties for that forthcoming week.

Goals/Duties for Week 3

-Finish and present the Hall Powerpoint

-Well, Okay, read Hall first and then do the powerpoint

-Reread the Bridget Jones Chapter and write a kick ass essay

-Do all my readings for class in a timely manner

-Meet with the Humanities Guy and get my money situation straightened out.

-Deposit paltry joke of loan check.

-Go grocery shopping with money from paltry joke of loan check

-Look into prostitution or egg donation to make up for amount missing from paltry joke of loan check

-Limit coffee drinkage to one a day. It might just be one Huge serving, but still, only one.

-Try to stave off oncoming sore throat and the cold or some other such undesirable malady it will undoubtably bring with it.

-Get Started on week 5’s Powerpoint on Mulvey

-Okay, read Mulvey first. Get started on that this week.

-Do the laundry that you should have done this weekend while you were writing rambling blog posts and watching Unsolved Mysteries

(Jessica, this is the ghost of Robert Stack. Stop wasting your time making fun of the people who think they are psychics and get your shit together.)

-Flesh out some ideas about final paper for P-Core. I’m thinking Velvet Goldmine and the chapter on Queer theory. Man that movie kicks ass. I need to get the poster.

-Stick to daily calorie allotments and get some extra exercise by walking around campus. In the sticky heat or inevitable rain.

-By force of will alone, try not to allow car to die in decidedly unopportune time. Or at all.

There. That sounds good.

Unabomber + Zodiac....Same Guy?! (no.)

Seriously, when did it get to be Sunday? I feel like I was cheated, I want to start back over at Friday and sit on my ass for three days straight all over again.

Sundays would be the perfect day if not for the dark hovering cloud of Monday. Sunday almost forces one to be unproductive. Today has been especially bad, I slept in until 8:30 (scandalous!), watched cable (HGTV), took a nap and now I’m watching the laziest of lazy-inducing shows, Unsolved Mysteries. They are trying to convince me that the Unabomber and the Zodiac are the same guy. see? V

thanks for the picture, zodiackillerfacts! But I’m not convinced.

Also, I’m slowly coming to terms with that what has been a fleeting desire for coffee is morphing, with the help of Humanities boot camp, into a full-blown addiction. I want starbucks right now. I don’t need it; i’m not doing any school work today and I don’t need to stay awake. I just want it. I actually have an espresso machine still in it’s box. My kitchen was made, obviously, for infants or skinny midgets with no appliances so I don’t have room for it.

Speaking of Humanities boot camp- Well, let’s not speak of it.

What a day this has been/What a rare mood I'm in...

…okay, it’s not rare (contrary to the tone of the last entry), but I’m in a great mood this morning.

(I was trying to find a really obnoxiously happy sun. Think I did it.)

I’ve got the prospect of coffee waiting, my check is in the mail, my hair is doing well so far today (hell, I might just keep it long!) and i’m done with my second out of six weeks of pedagogy boot camp, it’s really flying by.

I even sat down and tried to write last night. I didn’t get far at all (four lines, but who cares!) but it felt nice to try. It felt nice to be proactive instead of just planning.

Now, on to bloggy, less touchy feely things.

My two favorite words of the week are: Longinus (a philosopher who theorized about the Sublime. Hated reading it, loved saying it) and caulk, as in the thing that my landlord is going to apply to my bathroom this afternoon. If you knew my landlord (who is lovely) and if you were 13 you would maybe find this funny too.

I've exhausted the internet? I've exhausted my life?

Usually, I wake up early in the morning (earlier lately) so I can have an hour or so to myself in the morning before having to enter the real world. As an only child who lives with someone (who I dearly, dearly love) I need a little Jessy time, it’s for recharging and recentering and blah blah blah. I spend it screwing around on the internet, looking for apartments and jobs in Chicago and Austin, doing a little extra contextual reading for my classes, checking email, facebook, checking for freelance leads, etc etc etc

(Is it still cool to use lolcats? I’m not hip, I still think the chocolate rain guy is funny)

Well this morning, I woke up and realized that even though the internet is seemingly infinite in its vastness, I’ve kind-of exhausted everything I usually do. I’ve got my routine down to about five minutes, which leaves the rest of my Jessy mornings to…yoga? No, because I’ll get all sweaty before school. Getting ready for school? Yeah, but that only takes about twenty minutes, I’m pretty low main.

Well, obviously it leaves that extra time for blogging. Durhan.

But that leads me to the horrifying thought that perhaps I’ve exhausted blogging topics. Which leads me to the even more horrifying thought that I’ve exhausted my life. Because what is going on now is still what is going on when last I wrote (freaking out about school, loving neko case, having huge, frizzy hair) and to write about it again would be breaking an unspoken blog of honor code (something about thou shalt not write about the same thing lest thou borest thy two readers).

How depressing. Is my life that boring? Am I misspending my Jessy time? Should I be using it to, like, join organizations? Plant trees? Or, heaven forbid, work?

I guess I just need to get better at writing about the minutiae of my life? Like thoughts and stuff and not just greater themes?

I’ll start now:

• Man, I am going to get some Starbucks today. Because talking about Hume and Kant for two and a half hours is going to make me sleepy.

• I wish I lived in an apartment with a fitness center. ‘Cause free step on wii fit is getting old, ya’ll
  

…okay still need a little work.

Maniacal Laughter...

…as soon as my loan money comes in I’m chopping my hair off. This shit is getting to be bananas.