Happy New Year. I'll be back in January.

My focus group has just been canceled. Seriously. They were going to pay me to talk about cigarettes. Say what you mean to say. Super Ego ID Ego Etc. Cat sits on desk while authentic blues play on record player. Monday morning still need to finish grades. Going to see Tron this afternoon will be stoned by Disney. Today's Chautauqua is about this blog. Is that boring? Feedback. Authentic blues. Scratched record repeating on unintelligible fragment. Simply: if there is no risk involved in the project forget it. Do something else that is more interesting. Watch a movie. Make out. This semester the project has been a simple one: consistency. To stick to a schedule. In the past there have been more interesting projects, memoir projects or projects where the posts themselves I was not sure of. There have been plenty of those in the last four months: things that I'm not sure I should put up for all to see. This fear of saying too much, something stupid or embarrassing; the presence of this feeling tells me I'm doing something right. Fear equals risk imagined or real who cares nobody will remember anyway. East Saint Louis. But one poor lousy dime. What an imagined reader might think of anything is impossible to know or predict. Following one's own sense. Hard to know what one's own sense is, what direction attention leans. Requires health. Quiet. Some space. Two weekends ago Steven told me about a dream he had: sitting on some jagged rocks and it suddenly it occurred to him that the secret to sitting on the rocks was "balance and triangulation." His waking self didn't know what this meant but was amazed by its specificity. Be specific. As if our dreams can be kept secret. Make me a pallet on your floor.

The semester is over! Six weeks of (unpaid) furlough! Filing for unemployment! Final grading! Christmas shopping! Wisconsin! Christmas! New Years! Chicago! It's raining! Thank you! Good afternoon!

Sorry about all the political stuffs as of late but wait a minute one more thing: an interesting little editorial from Sunday's paper about the Obama tax cuts. Instead of politics, Ishmael Reed uses sociology and race to explain Obama's compromise. "What Progressives Don't Understand About Obama." Psychology and class are useful ways to talk about politics, don't you think?

**

Tomorrow morning will be the end of the digital photography class where there were three students who needed my help. Five actually, but by the three quarter point two of them mysteriously disappeared. Like Batman. Feedback and critique is mostly what will take place on the last class, but like a lot of critiques, it's mostly the teacher who does the talking. In my experience with writing workshops, a helpful critique depends mostly on if the other people in the room are interested in each other, and by extension, each others work. In a studio class (as opposed to a seminar) where everybody is just trying to keep up, it doesn't leave much time for developing group dynamics. Then again, like the current incarnation of my creative writing class, even though we've had plenty of time to 'bond' the workshop hasn't exactly gelled. There are too many variables to possibly understand why some groups work and some don't. Maybe it's a time issue or an effort issue or a homework issue or a confidence issue or a scheduling issue or an economic issue or a personal issue or a teacher issue or an attendance issue or a classroom issue or not. I'd be lying if I said I didn't take it personally, and there lies the problem. And the solution.

One of the students that I've been supporting in the digital photography class has been having trouble with the instructor's critiques, not exactly satisfied with the idea of talking about possible interpretations rather than hard line direction as to what she should or should not include in the photograph. The idea that our creative decisions are our own rather than the jurisdiction of larger governing aesthetic bodies; idea of classics, and canons, and way that things should be. Rather, with this instructors critique, the road to justified creative decisions begins with the awareness of possible interpretations. That you can't control something if you don't know it exists. An approach I tend to favor but for many students coming from East Asia, this is strange way to go about education. "It's the American style!" Freedom to figure things out on our own. And the freedom to fail if we don't have enough time and/or money to do so.

Whew. Back to normal a gray day in San Francisco it's the last week of the semester. Today I'll go to my story boarding support class and watch final projects. I probably will not be needed to reiterate whatever feedback comes up from American English into International English but it will be fun to see the culmination of the students' work this semester, short films shot with a Super 8 camera. Come home and do laundry. Finish reading the Sunday paper. Tuesday afternoon I'll finish the pronunciation classes I've been running, and on Thursday and Friday I'll finish in the writing lab. As the main even,on Thursday and Friday I'll finish my creative writing and rhetoric classes. Mucho change coming very soon. "Preparing for the dive is always a tense time." samples the Boards of Canada. It's been a pretty good semester. I'll be sad to see it go.

"if self can be compared to a raccoon" (click to enlarge)

How disappointing Obama's presidency has been. For a while, compromises on bailouts, health care, wars, etc. were like, "okay, the benefit of the doubt for you Mr. community organizer Chicago pragmatic first African-American academic liberal sympathizer President" but the extension of the Bush tax cuts is kind of 'it', as far as my faith in the guy. It must be difficult to be in charge of running the entire world! Bombarded by one thing after another I don't know how anybody could possibly keep up with all that, much less keep in touch with their own beliefs. Jon Stewart made the observation that since the World Trade Center attacks the media has been on a 24 hour breaking news cycle, and we've been collectively stuck in that gear ever since. This makes sense to me. And though it doesn't excuse the president's misguided decisions, it gives them cause.

Another collaborative poem as written by my current section of Creative Writing. This one is an exquisite corpse, lightly edited.

Sugar Skulls

Old grapes are sour but sweet.
____"Hella deep man." The cold cat said
smoking his own brain.

Meanwhile another weed tends the garden
____until its hands are bloody. Its glass eye
rolls lazily around its skull.

People tend to like sugar skulls but why?
____Too many questions and not enough answers
that don't always lead back

to the questions of life, a stream of endless heartaches
____cured with pills, for its better to taste mud
than to get it in your eye, a

deep dark hole into the soul where love or hate
____can be found at its most desperate
state and religion will both burn when the volcano
________erupts.

Two Dreams I Had While Playing Fallout: New Vegas

I am somewhere but at the end of its path, standing in a corner in front of a pair of window frames that extend from the height of my waist to a couple feet above my head. There is no glass in the window frames and I can see outside: a tree, some hedges, and a bird feeder. What feels like a mid-western backyard. Instead of stepping through the window I have to retrace my steps. These are the rules. But even before I can do this, I have to finish the conversation I am having with the person on the other side of the window. There are dialogue options. What I am about to say is yellow. What I could say is orange, and I'm moving quickly through the conversation, trying to finish so I can get out of here.

*

I am walking down a hallway and there are doors on either side like an apartment building. I open each door and talk to people. I do not know who these people are, but cannot move forward until I talk to all of them. One person in each room, standing just inside the room to receive me as the doors swing inward. At the end of the hallway there is another hallway, bending almost 180 degrees so that the next wing is almost parallel with the first one. Same deal, doors on either side and I have to talk to everybody before I can leave.

Yesterday after work S and I wandered through the MOMA partly because we wanted to, and partly because with our school IDs we get in free. Downtown was cold and dark and its much more fun to go into a museum when there's no pressure to make the most of your money. As if I have to justify going to a museum. Who am I talking to? Anyway, up on the fifth floor there was a little shop set up by the Miranda July exhibit selling little art stuffs, and on one little shelf was a cat drawing. "This reminds me of something I heard on the radio," S said, about cats falling from buildings, that they can survive falling five stories and higher than eight stories, but in-between five and eight the extra time and wind resistance screws up their landing gear and they tend to not survive. Meow. Kitty Girl (KG) one of my cats I was told fell out of her old owners apartment, three stories, to the ground below and seems to be fine. Jinx, the other one, walks around like he's made out of old sticks, creeky and stiff. It looks painful for him to hop down off the bed or descend steps.

KG on the other hand is just as old but still pretty spry. She's a 'ragdoll'

***

DO DO DOOT - DO DOO DOO DOOT
***

I have to interrupt this regularly scheduled blog posting about my cats to talk about all the recent Wikileaks stuff. After typing in the word 'ragdoll' I went to Google images to confirm that KG was in fact a 'ragdoll' (yep) and then clicked on the wikipedia link for 'ragdoll' and then clicked on the message "Please read: A personal appeal from the author Joan Goma" (?) which lead me to this page where I donated thirty five dollars to Wikipedia because after using it for as long as it's been around, for personal reasons as well as work, I thought maybe now that I have a little extra money from working tirelessly and heroically this semester I would donate to them, seeing as even places like NPR are getting attacked in the media and having their funding threatened maybe I'll donate. Sorry about that last sentence. Anyway. That lead me to check my bank account which reminded me that rent was due so I wrote a check to my roommate and handed it to him, sat back down and then, with all these Wikipedia thoughts wondered if Wikileaks was part of Wikipedia (it's not) and wondered if Wikileaks would come up as the first hit on Google and it does, once you get past the news. Which brings me to the present moment, sort of, and the question, well, what's the news?

The news about Wikileaks is this: Julian Assange, the guy who runs it is being followed by the British secret police, the site has been censored in China, Hillary Clinton says the U.S. is taking 'aggressive steps against' Wikileaks, Assange has been accused of rape, thier site is being bombarded with by cyber attacks, Amazon 'ousted' their servers, and most interesting to me, Wikileaks is about to release a bunch of classified information about The Bank of America. All that is to say that the powers that be really don't like what Wikileaks is doing, i.e. the fact that they are releasing all kinds of information that is supposed to be kept secret. I don't know about you, but the fact that banks have been making records profits in the last two year, the U.S. is engaged in two insanely stupid wars, our economy is shit, out politics is so screwed up Obama has been rendered a wet noodle, our corrupt politicians have assured us that nothing important is going to get done for at least another two years (like, say, environmental issues), and locally, teacher layoffs, tuition, general malise and hopelessness that...you know what I'm saying. Anyway, an organization devoted to transparency is under attack from the most powerful governments in the world and the corporations that benefit from things continuing as they are. Please read more about about Wikileaks, their mission, and continue to observe the corporate and governmental reaction to this organization. Have a nice day. I'll finish my cat story later.