I Wanted to Write an Email

2012-01-17T10:42:00.000-08:00

___________

Tomorrow I'm going away for a little while, about twelve days, for a meditation course. Also known as a "retreat", which isn't exactly an accurate word as sitting for twelve hours a day ten days on end actually brings most things a little bit closer, but, the point is, I won't be around. No email or cell phone, and no blog postings. The semester begins day after I get back, so will all of a sudden be back in the swing of things, Spring 2012 until the middle of May. Non-stop, and I'm sure you'll read me complain about it many times between now and then.

The good news, at least in my own lists of things to do, is that most things that I set out to accomplish in these last three weeks got done: finished my grad school application to the best of my ability and will hear back sometime this spring. Spent a couple intensive weeks working on two collections of poems, improving little bits, here and there, sequencing and sorting. That and sending out some submissions, individual poems and manuscripts, as well as submitting to a residency. I didn't get to finishing any music projects, cleaning up old files well enough to share them (I counted 78 MP3s of "songs" that were borderline finished) but there's time for that when I get back.

So as, like many, I've been busy, and now I don't have too much pressing as I head out tomorrow. It's nice to have time to work, though it's necessary the person who teaches reading and writing actually have time to read and write, or else one ends up teaching the same thing over and over again, like a boring high school history teacher. At any rate, in the spirit of automation, please enjoy this video while I am gone. The world is full of mystery. See you in February.

2012-01-09T10:49:00.000-08:00

Greetings from Oakland California. This post is not a post but a way to put off working on the personal statement that I must complete to complete my application to graduate school that is due is six days. I should of written it earlier and I did but it was bad, twice, and now I'm on my third foot dragging draft of trying to explain my desires in a way that doesn't transparently pander and stays true enough to the nebulous and unformed ideas of what I like to call myself. I'll get on that in second, but first, no news but no news, I've been very busy this last week working on a couple different writing projects, mostly prepping pages to send out to publishers, collecting and revising and stringing together days in a row of writing time, which unfortunately never ever happens during the semester. So it's been really productive. It feels good to get back to these things in earnest.

But, even though it's been a week since I posted last, I figured all anybody really needs when it comes to reading is that last paragraph I posted (see below). Probably one of my favorite little pieces of writing, though it actually comes at the end of the book, so as, maybe I fill that paragraph with all that came before it and maybe it doesn't stand alone on it's own. Don't know and won't know. Not much else to report, no thoughtful short essay or joke to make or picture to post. The weather has been warm and the cats have been sleeping. Saw A Dangerous Method, the Freud/Jung movie, that I quite enjoyed, have been watching basketball, running a little, hanging out, and also getting over a little bronchitis, which actually, though it was kind of painful, forced me to keep a reasonable schedule that lead to getting much done, unlike today, where it's eleven in the morning and I haven't started. Okay. That's enough. See you.

But oddly because that was two paragraphs I feel compelled to write a third solely for the sake of symmetry or balance or something like symmetry or balance like lining up a fork with the wood grain on a table, folding a napkin neatly or lining up my foot along the edge of concrete the mildly OCD impulse to square things up live, in action. Of course it's difficult when there's not as much to say and instead the only impulse that fills space is the impulse to fill space and if I were you I would just stop reading right now because I'm not going to say anything interesting or of note for the next six lines, entirely self-referential makes me think of a little article I read in the paper about Animal Studies, studying animals outside the context of biology and instead in a field like philosophy they cited Derrida who wrote, "An animal looks at me. What should I think of this sentence?"

2012-01-01T15:10:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year.

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their back were vermiculite patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

_______________________________-Cormac McCarthy, from "The Road"

2011-12-30T12:57:00.000-08:00

I heard them because I accepted the limitations of an arts conference in a Virginia girls’ finishing school, which limitations allowed me quite by accident to hear the blackbirds as they flew up and overhead.

John Cage from “Lecture on Nothing,” 1959. It occurs in a passage where he's talking about structure, that we need it to see and hear life. That life without structure goes "unseen" but structure that contains no life (read: heart/reason for being) is dead. Take for example a mediocre Hollywood blockbuster or network sitcom. Things that go through the motions quite competently but ultimately don't move us or leave us with anything meaningful, or worth remembering. The new Mission Impossible movie probably fits that bill. Or on the other hand, those who have a lot to say but don't intentionally push into mainstream channels don't get heard. Without structure, one that makes sense to others, one that is visible, the content and quality of ideas can be lost.

He goes on to talk about his experience at the "Viginia girls' finishing school," that there he was, listening to a lecture, and he looked out the window to hear birds rising from a field. Simple, but he was only able to experience this moment, to hear this "sound de-licious be-yond com-pare" because he "accepted his limitations." What exactly are his limitations? He accepted his situation, whatever that may have been. From the passage, it reads as if he was a little bored, maybe bored with the speaker, and turned his head to look out the window. What's remarkable is that he was ready to hear these birds. It's one thing to turn distractedly away from a thing, be it a speaker or a TV show or a man on the street holding a sign, but it is entirely different to recognize this impulse to do so. And once he does, he's able to accept where he's at, and move on.

Easier said than done, to accept where we find ourselves. And it's hard, and at least for me, takes a lot of talking and processing to even begin to understand the "limitations" of a situation. But it's a quote I always come back to, partly because he doesn't seem to blame his situation. That a thing can't be anything more than it already is. The speaker was not boring, but the arts conference was not for him at that given moment. It is from this same distance, this same perspective, that allows him to hear the blackbirds rising from the field. A kind of ethic or posture, and in his terms, a kind of structure that allows him to experience clarity. Once he comes to the one moment of clarity (which may have taken him days/weeks/years to arrive at. Who knows) it's no coincidence that the world suddenly becomes beautiful. That his ears and eyes are suddenly in tune with a bigger world.

2011-12-27T10:58:00.000-08:00

Whell, back in Oakland. It's sunny but a little chilly, not warm and not cold. In Wisconsin the newspaper said it was going to be a "brown Christmas." Meaning the landscape was going to be muddy and gray. Grey. I don't know. Either way I was back here. Went for a hike on Christmas proper and ate Chinese food. Saw a movie but left before it was over, as it was putting D and I both to sleep along with some other patrons at the movie theatre. Because I don't want to use this platform to spread slander I won't name the movie ("The Artist"). On Boxing Day, after sleeping in for half the day we got some groceries and made breakfast. Later I watched bits and pieces of basketball games over the internet, and now, Tuesday, it's back to work. Not school work but writing and other projects. Which is really really really really really really nice, to have nothing pressing to do. No big stress or immediate deadline for the next month. It feels good.

2011-12-23T09:06:00.000-08:00

Mr. Exstein helped my brother and I learn to play tennis when we were kids. Mineral Point. Summers in the late eighties. He would stand in the middle of the court with an old wooden racket. He didn't have to move, and couldn't really anyway because he was old and frail, and I'm not sure what we actually learned from the handfull of hours we spent with him, but I remember the drool that would fall out of his mouth when he would talk. A string of it with a bright wad at the end. He'd wipe his mouth with the back of his hand. A couple years later my dad took us to see him in the hospital. I don't remember what was wrong, but my dad thought it was important to visit an old man who didn't have much family or hardly any other visitors coming through. I asked a few questions about tennis, not that I really cared, and we sat there for fifteen minutes in the glow of a television, and left.

I think my dad wanted me to experience the ambience of the hospital, and demonstrate a kind of ethic. There were others. Florence, who lived in Dodgeville, was another old person that us kids had nothing to say to, or do with. Yet he made a point of all of us going to dinner once a week during the summers. Either Pizza Hut or Hardee's or possibly Narvey's, it didn't make sense to me why we were spending time with these people who we didn't know and really couldn't wait to get away from, to get home and get back to video games.

Yesterday I went up to visit him at Clearview, where he's been for the last six or seven years. They just openend a new building, much more modern than the fifties insitututional architechture of the old one. Juneau, Wisconsin. He was slumped over in a wheel chair and drooling. Like a baby, his back muscles are too weak to support his body after the many years inactivity. Mentally it's a wash and has been for a long time, but physically his body gets weaker and weaker. I wiped his mouth a few times and tried to get him to sit up straight. Some nurses came over and wheeled him into his room, and he went right to sleep as soon they got him into bed. After all that, I thought. After all that here he is, surrounded by strangers. I don't know what this means. It's been 12 years since he was diagnosed, and there's not much left to visit. After all that. I left him the clothes my sister ordered, some sweatpants and a shirt, kissed him on the forehead and drove back to Madison.

2011-12-21T13:14:00.000-08:00

Dispatch from Wisconsin: it's not that cold. At the barber shop today the lady who disinterestedly cut my hair said she wouldn't mind having a cook out in December, and I wouldn't mind that either but I was starting to get annoyed by the clippers that were running a little bit too fast over my head that pulled it as much as cut it and I paid up and left a two dollar tip and went to go eat breakfast. It was eleven in the morning. I spent the next couple of hours doing a little Christmas shopping and now I'm back at my mother's house working towards a nap. Which may or may not happen but Jerry just yelled at the dog because the dog is barking at the ice cream maker and earlier Jerry said "I know you hate that noise" to the dog and then she barked again and then I said "I didn't know she didn't like that noise" and now I do and now we all know she doesn't like that noise and Jerry keeps telling her to keep quiet and now she's outside barking.

Yesterday I sat down in the blue chair that sits in the living room and finished reading my student's papers for the semester. That felt good, to finish, and it generally felt good to grade my student's papers, as it's the last round and these papers are usually in the best shape. Last semester I kind of did a half-ass job grading the final round so this semester I made sure to be careful and considerate. It took about eight hours, all told for both classes, to finish these papers, and calculate the final grades. I really wish I got paid for this time as in a sense my employer encourages me to do a half-ass job as one "gets what they pay for" and we are supposed to be thankful for just having a job. But the good news is that it's done and I have six weeks of unpaid furlough to recuperate and regenerate and remember what it's like to read for pleasure.

All in all it was a good semester, a long semester full of Occupy and Dara, but also full of classes, two good ones, and international students. BUT MAN, I'm tired. I didn't realize how tired until the plane ride here, though I got plenty of sleep the night before for I just passed out. And then yesterday while grading papers I just passed out. And as soon as I get done writing this I'm going to go pass out. And as the semester came to a close I wondered to myself if I was going crazy but now I'm realizing I was just tired, and instead of sitting down at a computer or with a friend and distracting myself silly it's good to be here in Wisconsin, where there is not much continuation from Oakland. And that is all. Like John Cage says, "If anybody / , / is sleepy / let him go to sleep / ."

2011-12-13T12:35:00.001-08:00

Well, the port shut down was successful in Oakland last night. It was a lot of walking, a little talking and a little listening, and then we went home. It's really strange how long it took (four and a half hours) compared to how long it felt it took (about an hour). Time flies when you're doing things that I'm not sure are good. And there it is: I'm still not sure blocking the ports was a good idea based on the comments and news stories I've been reading. On the other hand, it really feels great to be out there with everybody, amidst the chaos and the conversations and the signs and spontaneity. Who did the blockade hurt? The workers? That seems to be what most newspapers are reporting, as well as what the sentiments of the comments pages generally leads to.

As an alternative here is an excerpt from a Democracy Now news story, which seems to represent the perspective of the blockaders:

AMY GOODMAN: And the media quoting many of the truckers saying, "Why are you doing this? You’re hurting us more than you’re hurting the corporation. We are the 99 percent," they are saying, Anthony?

ANTHONY LEVIEGE: That question was asked a lot throughout Monday’s protest. And I decided that I’m not going to even respond to that question, because that’s just a device to keep people from dealing with the real issues at hand, because today’s action, if that hurts the trucker or anybody, that’s a sign of the times, that we do need change, that people are so dependent on missing one day’s pay, that they can’t make it if they miss one day’s pay. Those are some of the reasons why we definitely need to have change.

Anthony Leviege is a member of the ILWU and Amy Goodman is a journalist. The rest of the interview can be found here, but herein lies the problem: that on the one hand the larger system, the one that makes it impossible to miss a days work, needs to be changed, whereas, when other people who are not directly invested in the specifics of this change are advocating for it (for example, I do not work with the port and did not lose a days work), it can feel "paternalistic," that those who don't work at the port are deciding what's best for port workers.

Most of the commentators and comment-ers and editorials cited this lack of official support (that is, support not by individual members, but by the union leadership) and the harm a port blockade would do to the longshoremen and truck drivers' daily wages. Oakland's mayor said that the 1% would be laughing at the action as it was so obviously misguided, and suggests that the blockade will ultimately weaken the general public's support for the Occupy movement. As I write this, I don't mean to reiterate these points because they make me feel like a dupe for coming out last night. They make so much sense yet, I'm on my way somewhere else, more along the lines of Anthony's point, that to frame the conversation in oppositional terms of who did who to what is to overlook the big picture. "Paternalistic" is really just a word to end the conversation (boo! scary!) and paints an ugly picture of the Occupy movement as a misguided and elitist group of irresponsible 20 somethings.

Which is a problem if you're like me, the kind of person who believes pretty much whatever they read. I think, yeah, those are good points. But what's important to note, is that these commentators and opinions that float around (where do they come from?) don't actually have any more claim on the truth than you or I. And if I had to choose who to throw my lot in with, I would rather be with those who aren't living on a diet of didactic cliche, and rather, be with those forging into unknown territory. Aesthetically (which does matter), one of the most revealing and meaningful aspects of Occupy is that it is not a continuation of the political and cultural rhetoric that got us here in the first place. Refusing to participate in these tired discussions, and instead, stumbling towards one's own vocabulary, means and methods, making mistakes and breaking eggs, is how beautiful things get made. For this reason alone, the experience of Occupy itself, de-intellectualized and lived, I come to being once again.

2011-12-12T10:56:00.000-08:00

Happy Monday. Today is the West Cost Port Blockade, coordinated by the Occupy movement. Here is, in the words of Occupy Oakland, why this is happening. Or here is why it's a good thing in the words of the 100+ thousand American Port Truck drivers who are heavily effected in their day to day by the multinational corporations who own and ultimately, make the policies that run these port. Coming from the drivers themselves, this letter is the justification I needed to participate with a clear conscious in these closures that have been widely decried by the media at large (as usual) and in particular, by the San Francisco Chronicle. Which almost, almost, convinced me that these blockades were doing more harm than good. I really need to stop reading that thing but I do like to read the sports and the comics.... Thus, as of eleven AM today, The Ports of Oakland and Portland have been shut down, while San Diego and Long Beach have, from what I've read, been not as successful. Seattle is in progress. I get off work at four and will be joining the second shift. Come out and show support if you can.

2011-12-09T10:13:00.000-08:00

Niece

The streets of San Francisco,
She said of herself, were my

Father and mother, speaking to the quiet guests
In the living room looking down the hills

To the bay. And we imagined her
Walking in the wooden past
Of the western city ... her mother

Was not that city
But my elder sister. I remembered

The watchman at the beach
Telling us the war had ended--

That was the first world war
Half a century ago--my sister
Had a ribbon in her hair.

_________-George Oppen

2011-12-08T09:08:00.000-08:00

In the last couple weeks in the pronunciation lab, now that we're past the initial curriculum of the three parts of stress, word reductions, and linking (and why spoken English sounds nothing at all like written English) we've been moving into sentences, sentence meaning and emphasis patterns. The idea that I can take a sentence like "I never said she stole my money." and depending on where I place the emphasis, the meaning of the sentence changes. So as, "I never SAID she stole my money...(I implied it)." Or, "I never said she stole my MONEY...(I said she stole my pride)." Pronunciation wise, the work is not so much the meaning (which is fairly evident from our animal ability to read emotional nuance) as much as what emphasis sounds like; how to embody these little melodic patterns in ways that are clear and comfortable.

To do this, we need not just CAPITAL LETTERS, but some pretty sophisticated recognition skills. For example, "Did you eat breakfast yet?" sounds more like "J'eet breakfast yet" when we're out there in the "real world." We talk fast and not so clearly. In the latter version, I only actually hear two words: breakfast and yet. The first part of the sentence I hear as a cluster of sound, one that I've heard before many times and can recognize as meaning "did you eat," like a word in itself: j'eet. Now, I'm not going to get into the hardcore linguistics theory about what all this could mean (in part because I don't know the hardcore linguistic theory about what all this could mean) but what's interesting to me is the idea that we don't actually listen all that carefully to what each other is saying. Instead we only hear a few key words, and assume the rest.

I don't know if this is cultural, or having specifically to do with American English, or 2011, or internet conditioned attention spans, but it's hard to put in the necessary time and energy to actually listen to what a person is saying. And at the same time it's hard to say exactly what we mean to say. The non-native speaker wonders, how is it that they can understand each other, because I could only make out a few words....The answer, unfortunately, is that we don't actually understand each other all that well. You could look at American politics or the one billion and one forms of dysfunction we're immersed in and come to the same conclusion. Whereas, on a micro-scale, like a dog tearing after a squirrel twenty yards away but ignoring the sparrow flitting around in front of its nose (unless it's a bird dog but that's another story), we don't see what we're not looking for. And we don't hear what we're not listening for. My point is, it's hard to listen.

2011-12-05T10:53:00.000-08:00

Two weeks left in the semester. This year, when it's over (all over), mi familia is aborting Christmas. My brother and his wife are going to be in Paris, my sister and her family (brother-in-law, neice, nephew) are too complicated to travel to Wisconsin this year, and my Mom is going to Africa two days after Christmas to ride horses. Which is all very exciting but doesn't make for much of a family gathering, so I'm traveling to Sconny (Wisconsin) for four days, and leaving before Santa notices that we have no tree. The last time I missed Christmas was in Japan, and Aric (who was visiting) and I went out into the cold night to observe the romantic holiday that Christmas is in Japan. It's a shopping season for couples and close friends to buy each other gifts and is not so much the firmly realized family tradition it is here. New Year's fits that bill. But to be perfectly honest, I didn't miss it much asides from the being with family part.

So I will be here but won't be alone, am excited to do things a little differently. There's a lot of writing and other projects that I'm really looking forward to having time to spend on during the later days of December and the first half of January. The second half January is for a meditation course and then the semester begins again. In the mean time, two weeks left and asides from the the stack of tests next to me, grading the final essays, and calculating the final grades, the bulk of the work is done. It's been a pretty good semester but it's winding down and we don't mind. In other news, a week from now, today, Monday, the Occupy Movement is coordinating a strike to shut down all the ports along the West Coast. This will require an enormous effort from a lot of people to get the word out, and to get bodies into the streets. I will be there.

Last, this coming Saturday is the George Oppen memorial lecture, hosted by the Poetry Center (in SF). Here is one George Oppen poem:

Boy's Room

A friend saw the rooms
Of Keats and Shelly
At the lake and saw 'they were just
Boys' rooms' and was moved

By that. And indeed a poet's room
Is a boy's room
And I suppose that women know it.

Perhaps the unbeautiful banker
Is exciting to a woman, a man
Not a boy gasping
For breath over a girl's body.

2011-11-28T11:57:00.000-08:00

Hi. Good to see you. Happy Thanksgiving. I mean I hope you had a happy thanksgiving. If you celebrate Thanksgiving. I'm not saying that you do. I hope I didn't offend you. I'm really sorry for presuming that you celebrate Thanksgiving. Again, sorry. Meanwhile, I was down in LA to see J & G, and on the way back saw J&J and their new child, J. Drove a truck. Living large. It was fun. When I got back on Saturday I finished off the last two episodes of Mad Men, so as, now I am caught up. Not that that means anything, but it's nice to come to an end thus far, and now I can talk about it with others, like my mom. One of my favorite parts of the show was its pacing. That is, a lot of these TV shows rely on the cliff hanger to get you through, whereas with Mad Men I felt like I could watch an episode, maybe two and go to bed satisfied. A show like The Wire was intense and non-stop, and was really difficult to pull myself away from. It didn't feel good. It felt bad, like when you're looking at the last third of a roll of cookies and thinking, well, I may as well just finish it off. So thanks Matthew Weiner for not jerking me around. Okay. School work to get to.

2011-11-21T12:20:00.000-08:00

On Thursday (and Friday) in class we discussed this article, about putting a tax on junkfood and using that money to subsidize healthier foods. Tied up in this equation are the current government subsidies for corn, which explains why it's cheaper to buy a Dr. Pepper than it is to buy a pepper. That there's a much higher demand for corn syrup than fresh vegetables, and that's why obesity, and the healthcare costs that come with it are such a problem in this country. Because it's more profitable for big food companies to feed us junk. Anyway, we read it in the context of the Proposal Argument (the third essay that students are required to write for the rhetoric class) because it's such an elegant solution to many problems all at once. A solution than not only makes people healthier, happier and takes the money out of the hands of the powers that be, but also pays for itself and generates additional revenue. The question we discussed in class was not the question of do you all think this is a good idea (which, lefty Bay Area us all, there wasn't much "The government can't tell me what to eat!" represented in the room), but the question of if this is such a good idea, why doesn't it happen?

Stephen, the ESL supporter in my Thursday class, brought up the tobacco companies, how it took twenty years for the facts of the relationship between smoking and cancer to gather enough political will to actually lead to legislation. That it takes a long time for a new idea to rise out of these facts and into our our collective imaginations. The parallels for the Occupy movement are obvious, and in this context of long term change, the come down that the Oakland Occupy movement has experienced (or maybe that's just me) does not necessarily mean the end of anything.

In that light, there was a march this Saturday in Oakland that felt redundant and purposeless. It was mostly younger people, not a particularly diverse crowd. We marched through downtown and around the north side of the lake and then stopped in front of the Grand Lake movie theater. There was a truck with a lot of speakers that played dance music that we walked behind for most of the route. It was kind of fun, but it didn't have a whole lot to do with, say, taking money out of politics or putting money back into schools. It seemed like a street party with a vaguely political theme. Later, after we left, some of the occupiers moved to a vacant lot to reoccupy it. Which was cleared by police the next day. The Snow Park encampment, the one just down the street, was cleared this morning. Compared to the Oakland General Strike, which had a real sense of purpose and a real turnout, it was kind of depressing.

Which I think is an unfashionable tack to take but oh well. So be it. Occupy continues. The events at UC Davis were serious, as were the events in Berkeley last week. This Davis video is remarkable for a number of reasons, one of them only happens if you keep watching: how the human microphone actually seems to make the police officers leave. About seven minutes in. Keep watching. And really, if you're interested in all of this, you don't have to camp or scream at police officers to show support, but simply, talk about it. Ask your friends and your family, what do you think?

2011-11-16T19:58:00.000-08:00

Today I made this in a support class:

2011-11-15T12:08:00.000-08:00

A sunny and warm day in Oakland. It's a little past noon. Yesterday morning the occupation of the plaza in Oakland came to an end. Today there is a march up to Berkeley to support their occupation of the campus and tomorrow the General Assembly will discuss where next to occupy. Which is the question right now, what to do next. This coming Saturday there is another larger march planned, akin to general strike, which is supported and backed by many unions here in Oakland, which partly answers the question of what to do next but only in the short term. Personally, I'm not sure where my support lies, as I agreed with the main stream narrative that occupying downtown was not going to accomplish much more than it had. My hope is that the occupy movement continues to raise awareness, moves indoors, now that they have some funds, and continues to do the work of organizing people towards practical solutions to the immense, long term problems that center around the economic injustices we perpetuate. It moves on. Here is a comment from an article in the Times (name withheld). Regardless of you how you feel about people in a park, here's some hope:

I have an MBA in finance and work in investment management on Wall Street – and I love money more than any Republican. But I see a lot of shallow comments and mixed-messages posted from all over the country criticizing OWS protesters as ne'er do wells and anti-capitalists.

They should appreciate that the protests have inspired introspective dialog among many thoughtful business professionals – top to bottom. Not all wealth trickles down and capitalism is as virtuous or evil as the people involved.

2011-11-14T10:00:00.001-08:00

Hi!

2011-11-08T14:34:00.000-08:00

Today is my 33rd Birthday. I am 100 years old. I heard Tom Waits say on the radio that when he was young he wanted to be old. My cat just fell off a slippery coffee table. She is getting old. The other cat is already old. He is very wise but not very smart. My sister and brother sent me a frying pan in the mail. It will be awesome. I will make two pancakes at one time. Ratios are old. Like Euclid or Donatello. The one with the triangles and the one with the bo staff, respectively. About me: I am one billion years old. Did you ever read that Dune book, God Emperor of Dune? The one with the sand worm king who lived to be thirty five hundred years old. That's not old. One billion years old is old. Have we been around that long? I don't know. The dinosaurs have all changed into birds. Earlier today we killed off the Neanderthals. Psychosis is one of the oldest professions. When I'm older, I hope to be a professional young person. Like MF Doom says/raps, it's nice to be old. But I guess it's relative. By that I mean some of my relatives are getting old. And some of them are getting young. Can we say that? Is this thing on? Sorry, I'm not good with technology. I need to go eat supper. Goodbye.

2011-11-07T09:03:00.001-08:00

I haven't had much to do with the Occupy movement since last Thursday morning, briefly surveying the remnants of Wednesday's general strike. Except for closing my bank account at Chase, which, finally was possible after about two weeks of little steps; opening a new account, dropping direct deposit, and changing a few billing plans. When I went to the bank on Saturday it took about five minutes. The bank's representative asked why I was closing my account (Chase makes me feel bad) and if large bills were okay (yes). Easy. And now I can feel good and and righteous about where I put my money. Cleaning the platform on which I stand, and from which I speak and write. It's an impossible and entirely vain dream to be all of one thing, to be all good (or all bad), but the few moments I gain from not having to enter Chase's ubiquitous corporate temples twice a week, I'm happy to have.

But back to occupy, I was a bit depressed about the whole thing following Wednesday's decent into chaos. In particular, this video that shows somebody (black bloc? paid police instigators?) messing up a Whole Foods (where I occasionally shop) and punching a few protester's who were trying to stop them. If you read the comments attached to the video, most of them suggest that these provocateurs were not part of the movement and were paid by outside forces. Personally I think that's true, but unfortunately it doesn't really matter as whoever did it was successful in taking the focus off of Occupy's message(s). Obviously they need to do a better job in preventing these kinds of small groups, whoever they are, from creating this much havoc, in order to keep the support of those whose are still not sure about the Occupy movement.

Kind of like me when I'm reading the newspaper, which is why I felt a little foolish on Thursday. Did I get swept up in the hype machine? Did I actively support a movement that didn't represent my interests? Was I fooled? Short answer: no. Of course not. Occupy is absolutely correct in their criticisms of our economic systems. Sympathizers in the media at large have been to saying yes, I agree with Occupy but they need to become political in order to be effective. Criticisms closer to home, have been more about the damage that the encampment has been doing to downtown Oakland businesses (though this report contradicts that report. I'm so confused). It's difficult. Making omelets and breaking eggs. Something is going to have to happen soon with the encampments. One idea it to move the occupation to indoor spaces that have been foreclosed on, which makes a lot of sense, not just for occupy but for people who have lost their homes. And is already happening. When there is so much available space and work to be done why does so much of it sit empty? But the best part so far is this, what we did.

2011-11-03T11:11:00.001-07:00

Briefly: last night was huge. Ten thousand people? I have no idea but when we arrived at the port, a couple miles walking, I had friends who were just getting started. That many people. Short version is the actions were a success. The port was shut down. Why is that important? To send the message that if we wanted to and were somewhat untied, we control our fate. Or more directly, that we're "producing for an economic system that doesn't produce" for us. And we have a choice in the matter.

The long version, and the one that will be and is being covered in the media (it's unbelievable how wrong places I trusted have been) will focus on the violence, which was carried out by a handful of misguided people and instigated, in part, by the police themselves. For those who say, "you're crazy and paranoid...the police wouldn't do such things." Think about what you would do if you had a week to prepare for an action against your authority. Would you come up with a counter plan? Or just let 'these people' do what they want to do. The police are as smart as any of us, and of course, it's in their interests to overshadow the days' successful actions and in turn, weaken the movement. They just want the occupiers to go home so the streets will be peaceful, and their jobs will be made easier. I can relate.

Anyway, I need to get ready for class. If you're interested, dig around for the real story and skip the The New York Times.

2011-11-01T14:15:00.000-07:00

Poetry is a Religious Act

I thought I saw God
in a dark mass of rain
in the puddles on the roof.

I am not prone
to hallucinations or hauntings
but a shape swirled

like a galaxy forming
out of raindrops gathering
on tar paper, bits

of blackened sand
carried by the invisible current
of rain.

Time stopped as I
watched it spin from one darkness
to another.

2011-10-31T10:06:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I paid off the rest of my student loan. "Pay Off Account" and I clicked the little circle next to it and then it was done. Eleven and a half years. I wondered when I first started paying my school loan, living in Seattle and writing checks for the first time, where will I be when I pay it off? What will I be doing? Now I know.

**

Tuition at my undergrad has gone up more than ten thousand dollars in the last ten years. Living the wealthiest country in the world; the rate of poverty, education, healthcare, etc. in comparison to other places that have far less than we do, is astounding. Today is Halloween. Tomorrow is November, and Wednesday is the Oakland General Strike. Below is a pretty good primer on the movement:

Your browser is not able to display this multimedia content.

And here is a radio show from this morning that was on NPR, a discussion:

2011-10-27T13:02:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was a big, peaceful protest in Oakland. Lots of people and lots of enthusiasm. Plans made for a general city wide strike on November 2nd, but the more immediate good news to come from the last couple of days, Mayor Quan has said "nonviolent protesters would be allowed to re-occupy the area near City Hall." Wow. I mean, wow, I guess this protesting stuff actually works.

2011-10-26T14:24:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening around six I walked through Snow Park, that for the last couple weeks had been an outpost of the Occupy Oakland protests. It was over spill from the full up Oscar Grant Plaza, but yesterday it was empty. The police must of taken it down, I thought, and when I got back home I looked it up via the Occupy Oakland Twitter Page and saw that yes, the helicopters I had been hearing all day were part of the police effort to evict the occupiers. And I also learned that people were assembling and marching downtown, about four blocks from my apartment so I put on my shoes and locked the door and found my neighbor doing the same thing. And we walked down there together to join the tail end of the march from the plaza down to Snow Park, and then back again.

An hour later, when we arrived back at the plaza it began to get a little tense. Lots of police officers were lined up around the plaza and the march halted, the organizers organized and then proceed another block to the intersection of 14th and Broadway where there was the biggest mass of police officers. I stood and waited and watched with the thousand (at least) or so others for a few minutes before a recorded announcement that told us the assembly had been declared unlawful, and that we had five minutes to leave before they would use force. Five tense minutes went by and then a few more, and then they fired tear gas canisters and most of us hurried down 14th away from the gas.

The march resumed down 14th and then circled back to the plaza, though in-between, I witnessed an over excited kid break a window with his skateboard, and at that point decided to head back to my place. When I turned down a side street there was a line of police in riot gear so I went back the march and went down a different street and made it home. I ate a piece of toast, had my picture taken as I looked out the window by errant marchers walking down my street, and then went back out, this time a little more prepared with a scarf to wear over my face just in case I got gassed, back to the plaza, and found my neighbor again. Occupied the plaza until others suggested we keep moving, occupied 14th and Franklin where my neighbor and I met up with Sarah, and we hung out there, in the middle of the street until they police fired tear gas again into the intersection of 14th of Broadway and we, along with the throngs, went back down 14th away from the trouble.

I went out one more time with Dara, around eleven thirty, and the crowd at 14th and Broadway had shrunk considerably. There was still a large enough mass to hold the intersection but this time we didn't stay around long enough to be gassed, and went back to our respective homes. These are just the facts of my experience. I'm not going to get into the why . But I will say, beginning at six, there's a general assembly (GA) at 14th and Broadway in Oakland. I don't know what exactly is going to happen but I can't imagine things will be any easier for anybody (protesters, police, citizens of Oakland) tonight. Regardless, I'll be there (I live there!), if for no other reason other than to be there.

2011-10-25T12:37:00.000-07:00

"It isn't normal to know what we want. It is a rare and difficult psychological achievement."

_____________-Abraham Maslow, from Motivation and Personality

(the image above is the Michelangelo sculpture "Atlas Slave." This is this blog's 500th posting.)

2011-10-21T09:52:00.000-07:00

Hi. I want to write something but I'm a little short for time right now. Not super busy but headed to work in a half hour and have a few things to do first (do my hair). Today inbetween classes I'm going to open an account at a credit union, in preparation for pulling my money out of my current bank, which only became my current bank because Chase bought Washington Mutual. Remember that? And then expanded their empire just like that. The national day of closing accounts is November 5th. So as, I have to do some leg work now so I can still write checks. Right? "Another technique for fending off suffering is the employment of the displacements of libido which our mental apparatus permits of and through which its function gains so much in flexibility" if you know what I mean...

2011-10-18T14:28:00.000-07:00

(previously there was a sestina here. i have removed it from the blog in order to do some revisions. have a nice day. my apologies for any inconvenience.)

2011-10-14T08:19:00.000-07:00

A little preface for this Frank O'Hara poem, it appeared on an episode of Mad Men (which I've been watching and enjoying). From the fourth section of the poem "Mayakovsky":

4
Now I am quietly waiting for
the catastrophe of my personality
to seem beautiful again,
and interesting, and modern.

The country is grey and
brown and white in trees,
snows and skies of laughter
always diminishing, less funny
not just darker, not just grey.

It may be the coldest day of
the year, what does he think of
that? I mean, what do I? And if I do,
perhaps I am myself again.

2011-10-11T10:40:00.001-07:00

Yesterday when I got off the BART, downtown Oakland, I couldn't help but notice the hundreds of people at Occupy Oakland protest taking place at Oscar Grant square (at the 12th Street BART station). Hungry, I got a cheap slice of pizza (Pizza Man) and found a perch to listen to the speakers and soak in the ambiance of the drizzly evening. People spoke, handed out fliers, chatted, ate, made eye contact, clapped, and cited websites. Last Friday I intentionally visited the Occupy San Francisco protests at the corner of Market and Drumm, where the Embarcadero BART lets out, though on Friday I was a little late for the speeches, coming after work. There were still plenty of people hanging around and talking and disseminating information. I have not attended too many formal protests for lack of any strong political convictions (the 2003 Iraq War protests in Portland being the last I intentionally joined. Informal protests is another story, easily confused with passive aggression), however I believe in 'the message' of the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Which, from conversations I've had about it, seems to be a sticking point: uncertainty about what exactly the protesters are protesting about. If you read the signs, they're all over the place, from anti-war to anti-bailout to 'tax the rich' to moral messages ('greedy bankers') to support for unions and teachers and nurses. My favorite sign read "Trickle Down Bullshit." Obviously prosperity has not tricked down from the richest of us, and instead, all that we've gotten is bullshit. Not that that needed explaining, but right now, it doesn't really matter what these protests are about, at least as far as a singular message (read: soundbite). The point is not to advocate for a particular political change, but to raise awareness that they way things are, the status quo, is not working for us. To have this fact acknowledged by the media and politicians and ourselves, is important.

The world is complex. Things happen for many reasons. To reduce the complexity of our lives and our ourselves to didactic soundbites is to ignore the contradictions and mysteries that make life interesting. It's hard to understand each other. It's hard to speak, and be heard, and to listen well enough. Our words are such pale imitations of the things we feel and of the things we do. They do not begin to hold what we are capable of. For those who criticize Occupy Wallstreet for having "no common cause," I ask, what is your cause? What do you believe in? Is it something that was given to you? Something that you find yourself a part of? Are we all complicit? Born into it? Or is it something that you came to on your own? Something that you made, through the terrifying work of finding a place in the world. Not to say I know any better, how to live or what to do, but a nuanced message, I believe, is a welcome change of pace.

2011-10-07T10:53:00.000-07:00

Social Engineering

Under the controlled conditions of the laboratory
scientists have observed Americans turning to
their rights after exiting the train. The stairway
is to their left. I turned to my right, disoriented
on the platform. [Black bird's shadows
passing overhead] They might observe us
doing or saying the same thing repeatedly, oblivious
to which shoulder we throw our towel over,
which side of our mouth we use to chew.
I believe I am clever but the same fear,
and feeling. No mercy,
no love or compassion in the all seeing eye.
No room for sentiment or preference. Just facts,
cold as glaciers.

2011-10-04T10:36:00.000-07:00

"I prefer an unjust peace to a justified war. No matter what the ideals are, if they are going to lead to war, I prefer a corrupt, immoral, unprincipled, unredeemed peace."

__________-Nishihara Wakana
___________from Japan at War: an Oral History

2011-10-03T11:53:00.000-07:00

Happy Monday. Here are two poems by Matt Turner, who has recently come back from a four year stint teaching in China. Enjoy.

THE CHEF'S SONG

I'm facing south here,
leaning forward
like a shriveled tree.

Surely here,
yesterday,

I had points to make.
Really?

So, do I
hear pipes

even if I hear
wind?

Sometimes
openings resound

like a terrifying
mountain or forest storm -

hundreds of spans round,
like noses, mouths, ears, sockets -

like a crashing
gong.

**

JUST HOT AIR

Humans eat meat, however
crows will still enjoy
deer.

__"Righteousness

feels like burning deserts &
lightning which can split

clouds and seas."

2011-09-28T12:08:00.000-07:00

Sam Told Me This Dream:

She was sitting at a rectangular table in a creative writing class. I was also sitting at this table. The teacher had selected my story to read to the class because it was the best one. Instead of reading the story as a story, some of the other students had scripts to read, and performed the story in front of the rest of the class. The first line, read by another woman in the class went "no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no."

2011-09-26T09:24:00.000-07:00

I've been reading an interesting book: "The Art of Cruelty" by Maggie Nelson, a poet and academic who lives in Los Angeles. It's a book about cruelty in the arts, beginning with Artaud's call (you know Artaud!) for a "theater of cruelty" about the need for audiences to be violently pulled from their passive spectator-ness. The book goes about exploring the idea of cruelty in everything from movies to books to performance art, how the avant-garde has run with the idea of using violence to shock, and now, how much a part of the main stream Artaud's idea has become. The book is not about the good or bad of cruelty, but where these specific pieces of art lead us and leave us. So it's nuanced and not really didactic at all, which is a little frustrating as two thirds of the way through it still hasn't really arrived anywhere. Instead it's explored different sub-genres, ideas, and trends with a poet's rhythm; one that has a pace and a way unto itself, and it's beginning to dawn on me that this pace, this way of looking at cruelty is, in fact, the argument.

Which might be kind of frustrating to some readers or radio interviewers who want a straight answer/judgment as to is this particular kind of cruelty good, or bad. But it's made me think about my own work, including writing and teaching and being with other people, some of the habits I have such as "brutal honestly" perhaps aren't as blameless as I've believed. I wonder if I subject my students to forms of cruelty, making them read out loud or answering questions on the spot (short answer: no). Over the summer a student came in an hour late on a day we were work-shopping in small groups. Since all the groups had been formed, to add this student would be to create more work for one of the groups. Pissed as I was, I assigned the student to a group and made the late student distribute the extra work, thereby instead of me giving the group extra work, the late student was the one who did. I felt it was a just penalty, a kind of humiliation with the intent to make the student see how their lateness causes problems. This punishment came from an angry place and in retrospect, I think it was cruel.

My action was intended to teach (as well as harm) and this student did not come late to class again. It worked. But this student also did not participate much in the class discussion, and did not seem to invest much in the class or in their class work. Of course I don't know what this student was thinking, and can't know what motivated them, but my action did close some doors on any opportunities I may have had to get the student more engaged. The lesson for me: that when I lose control, it opens the door on choices governed by emotion. Which, in this case, I feel did more harm than good. In a larger sense, this example also sheds light on the dangers of increasing class sizes and overwhelmed teachers. That cruelty is a kind of tool we teach others how to use. And when times are tough, it can be a fast and easy solution to problems. But in the long run in creates a world we might not be too happy living in (fascism?). All that said, I'm lucky to have choices in the first place, to know that there are alternatives to cruelty.

2011-09-22T11:20:00.000-07:00

"Privilege of connecting two things remains privilege of each individual (e.g. I: thirsty: drink a glass of water); but this privilege isn't to be exercised publicly except in emergencies (there are no aesthetic emergencies)."

___-John Cage
____from the essay "Seriously Comma" as found in A Year from Monday

2011-09-12T13:16:00.000-07:00

Well, the GRE is over. Done with. It took about four and a half hours, Saturday morning, and overall, I did as well as I needed to do. It asked me to write a couple essays, to answer forty math questions, and sixty English questions. I learned about goosebumps, the imaginary town of West Marin, and the field of musicology. By the last section I began to experience feelings of apathy concerning the correct answer, but I pushed through, and am so glad to be done. Here is a poem by Philip Levine, the new poet laureate. It's a good one about "The Man." Have a good one.

2011-09-06T11:20:00.000-07:00

School started last Thursday. Two full classes plus three support classes and ten lab hours. Plus I'm taking the GRE this coming Saturday (in the two-digit number jk, the value of the digit j is twice the value of the digit k), writing sestinas on the typewriter that K the cat sitter is letting me borrow, and trying to figure out exactly where I'm going to be applying this fall. For awhile I was sure that Rhetoric and Composition programs were the place for me, but now I'm thinking Linguistics. Capitalized. It's been difficult to narrow my interests down to one specific field. I guess that's what you get for never specializing, that is, a thousand tentacles of interest that take awhile to corral into a single direction. Like a death ray of intention shooting from the glowing disk on my chest.

But really, the big question right now is which of the following statements are supported by the above passage? Is it A) The majority of insect orders are capable of both advancing and inhibiting human interests; B) The male blue-tailed iguana will chew down some of its spines to appear more masculine; or C) The relationship cannot be determined from the information given. Most of the time I want to answer C, and append the answer with, And not only can we not determine the relationship but we don't even really care to do so. I mean, why can we just let y= (x+3)^2? You know, let bygones be bygones? What harm is there in the value of y when x =1? Why can't we just let the mysteries of the universe be? Let them answer their own questions. Who are we to interfere with the length of segment PQ? 8a + 8b=24? So what?

But sometimes the test can be kind of fun, and this resentment doesn't come up as much in the verbal section, where I feel like I have a fighting chance to get every question correct (of course I never do), and where it seems directly applicable to reading and writing and teaching, say. Whereas in the math section, there are some processes that even though I could learn, I refuse. Strange ideas about violence to the soul, that by learning, really learning/burning certain techniques and ideas into my brain, I will somehow do damage to myself. "Dismiss that which insults your soul" wrote Whitman. Though I have a hard time judging which parts of me are my soul and which parts are my ego.

My sister, an expert on standardized tests sympathized with my tendency to question the premise of the test, but suggested I get over myself, just a little, and deal with the fact of test scores. I can't help but think about my own students, art students, some of which probably feel about writing the same way I feel about the math: it's interesting and deep but these are not the problems I want to spend my time solving. Nothing but respect for those who can honestly come to that conclusion but still, we have to deal with the fact of test scores, so to speak. Though hopefully writing and argument is a little more relevant than if the number of female general surgeon physicians in the under-35 category represented 3.5 percent of all the general surgeon physicians, approximately how many male general surgeon physicians were under 35 years? After all, writing is the act of becoming, of speaking and making ourselves real. Unless we're mute, or a cat. Wish me luck.

2011-08-29T12:22:00.000-07:00

my nephew's teeth

2011-08-11T21:51:00.000-07:00

Grades are done and it's the first semester in four years that I didn't fail a single student. Yay. Twas a hard working class. Now to pack and be off to the middle west. Please enjoy this picture while I am gone.

2011-08-08T10:23:00.001-07:00

In the paper on Sunday was this editorial entitled "What Happened To Obama?" by an academic named Drew Westen, who teaches psychology at Emory University. The editorial is a kind of psychological analysis of Obama's political decisions, and more or less trashes them/him. It's a powerful piece of writing, talking about how Obama has lost his sense of self and is bullied and how his language has lost its poetry, and how all of the above contribute to his failure of leadership. Westen makes this observation regarding the Democrats in general:

In fact, the average American had no idea what Democrats were trying to accomplish by deficit spending because no one bothered to explain it to them with the repetition and evocative imagery that our brains require to make an idea, particularly a paradoxical one, "stick."

Which I think is key, making sure there are real world analogs to go along with the sound "reasoning" of the left. That our two wars were launched not on the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans (a fraction of how many Americans die, say, of obesity yearly), but on the image of airplanes crashing into New York City. Or at the very least because of a combination of the two. The importance of poetics, or poetry as a memory aid. Numbers are unreal and unconvincing, and if you want to move people you have to tell a story. At least that is part of Westen's argument.

But who are we to make pronouncements about the person of the president? I guess it's a public office and one puts themselves out there, but if the president were standing in the room with me, of course I wouldn't have the nerve to criticize him on that level. A couple weeks ago I wrote a little about the Women's World Cup Final (Japan won, the US lost) but what I posted here, under my own name, was heavily edited compared to what I posted semi-anonymously on the comments page of the Times. That to call someone out is easy when you're sitting alone with some cats on a sunny morning in Oakland. Regardless, the article is interesting, as is this editorial on Westen's editorial.
**

This Friday I'm off for the glory of Madison Wesconsin in August: crickets, humidity, warm nights, and a relatively empty downtown. Of course there is my mother and step-father, which is really why I'm going, to visit for four days and then, driving down (in my aunt's car) to Indiana (via Chicago) to visit some professors and current graduate students at Purdue's composition and rhetoric program. The one I'm applying to this fall. Then to Kentucky (Ken-tuck) to see uncles and cousins and sister and clan, and then I'll be headed back to 'sconny' for a day and then back here for a week and a half of pre-semester meetings, adjusting curriculum and hanging out in Oakland. That is to say I'm going to be gone for a little bit.

2011-08-04T09:44:00.000-07:00

The semester gets over this coming Wednesday and it's been a challenging one. In part because I've been really stressed about money, not having as much work as I need to pay bills. Imagine if your college teachers had to pick up painting jobs on the weekends to make credit card payments. Imagine John Boehner picking up dog shit. Imagine buying a BMW on a whim. Imagine, wait, actually you don't need to imagine any of this. Two comments from the article linked to just a few lines above, Otis writes:

"So sick of these comments about the rich not paying their share. Do folks know that the top 10% of wage earners pay 70% of all the taxes collected? Do you know what percentage the bottom 50% pay in federal taxes? 2%. That's right 2%."

And Kevin responds:

"Do you want to know why they pay 70% of all the taxes? Because they own 85% of all the wealth. Pretty straight forward. What if they own 100% of the wealth and pay 100% of the taxes? Would that still be unfair to them?"

Unbelievable. I was having dinner with Amy last night and naturally, we were talking about debt ceilings and the economy and the turned worm of America's fortunes, and man I wish we let those investment banks fail when we had the chance. Hardship for all, possibly, but from my perspective, I really don't have much to lose. I've been out of college for twelve years, and have been working in two of the least valued fields in the country: education and art. Asides from my two years in graduate school (a full scholarship that was barely enough to live on, but was still a step up from what I was making) I've had one job that provided health insurance, and I'm not even going to talk about my debt. If it's like this for me, a person of relative privilege and very relative talent, what's it like for everybody else?

As our global rank declines in terms of education, income, livings standards, health, and obviously, happiness; where exactly are we headed? In the last couple years I've transitioned from a vaguely optimistic, though cynical perspective on politics and opportunity, to being sullen and bitter and straight up angry at the obliviousness we are invited to marinate ourselves in. The best advice I ever got was from CD (Wright), during a workshop somebody was ripping into somebody else's work, and she said, "Put your anger into your work." I find this advice, and this kind of propellant, to be helpful.

2011-07-25T10:22:00.000-07:00

This morning I dropped off the rental car. I pulled it into the garage and a lady came out, and asked, would you like a receipt? I said no, and turned and left. "Was that the right thing to do?" I asked myself. Not about the receipt but about the damage, which occurred just after I left San Francisco, got on the 880 south and hit a scrap of tire that had been ejected from an 18 wheeler. I saw it ahead of me, and looked to go around it but I was blocked in by a car to my right. By the time I looked back to the road and to my left, I was upon it, and it thunked, and immediately a ticking and flapping sound started coming from the car. I slowed down and a mile later took the first exit off the highway, somewhere around Mountain View.

The piece of plastic that protected the undercarriage of the right front portion of the car, including the wheel well, about a square foot of it, had been torn. There was nothing damaged mechanically, but the plastic bolts that held this black piece of plastic to the bottom of the car had been sheered, and the flapping sound was the plastic getting chewed up as it was battered between the road and the rotating tire, like a can being dragged on a string. It was easy to see what had happened and it was a relief that the damage was not more serious. However I did not buy the insurance that covers this kind of damage. What will I say, and will they charge me eight hundred dollars to get it fixed? I don't know but I'd like to get going, and I picked up a couple of sticks from the ground, a little larger than the diameter of the missing bolts, and reconnected the protective piece to the chassis of the car. It held relatively firmly and I got back in the car and continued south.

The jerry-rig held until Sunday, and when it came undone we stopped at a truck stop, bought some duct tape and resecured the plastic in a way that did not show the silver sheen of the tape. I returned it this morning, bringing me back to the original question of reporting the damage or not. On the one hand it's possible that the rigging will hold for a while and nobody will notice it. The rental car company can afford to pay for it, and I cannot without putting it all on a close to maxed out credit card. On the other hand, it's "the right thing to do" to own up to a mistake, and possibly avoid any mishaps for future drivers. Obvioulsy I've made my choice, but there's the question of will they notice? Will they call? Will I end up paying for it anyway? If they ask will I say it was like that when I got it? Will I continue to lie? These questions have followed me around this morning and soon they will make a little nest somewhere in my body. And they will live inside of me until I am held responsible.

2011-07-21T10:39:00.000-07:00

The Doppler Effect (Stephen Hawking Poem 2)

"This should not unduly worry us: by that time unless we have colonized beyond the solar system, mankind will long since have died out, extinguished along with our sun!"

Light emits waves. Shuttering
orgasmic pulses
of life. As light moves away from us
a red tint appears. As it moves closer
a dense, sucking blue. ____We find the truth
of these qualities by subtracting
our own experience. Our blazing sun
not in Heaven
but turning in abandon. Like Stephen Hawking
sorrow expands into the distance between us
______ the terminally dense blue
of night's approach.

2011-07-18T10:36:00.000-07:00

Ahem. NICE WEATHER WE'RE HAVING ISN'T IT? Yes. It is nice weather. Sunny in Oakland. Temperate. Monday morning. Yesterday I watched the Japan/U.S. women's football match. DID YOU SEE IT? It was the first sporting event to bring tears of joy to my eyes. Maybe I've been strung out or maybe it was that book of Japanese stories during the second world war but I was so happy to see them win. It's been a difficult year in Japan, with the earthquake and the Fukushima nuclear plant, and the Japanese economy falling from the number two position, and the general loss of prestige that Japan has endured. It made me feel sooo happy. As happy as I felt watching Dallas beat Miami in the finals this year, to see the Japanese coach smiling and joking in the shootout huddle when the stakes were high, as if playing football could somehow compare to the life and death situations people find themselves in. “I feel we have given some kind of encouragement and joy to the people back in Japan,” said Ayumi Kaihori, the Japanese goal keeper. Can you imagine a player (or person) in the United States saying the same thing? To include everyone, and not just the people who agree with them? That is all. Have a fine Monday.

2011-07-14T12:29:00.000-07:00

Stephen Hawking Poem

"What did god do before he created the universe?"

The universe has a beginning point.
We know this
because the sky does not shine
like stars. Light
travels and if it has been traveling
____ forever?
even the most distant stars
would emerge in the night sky.
(But there would be no
night sky.) Our world is split
because time projects
from a single point.
You could disprove this idea
if we could be here
enough
to prove forever.

2011-07-11T10:29:00.001-07:00

2011-07-07T10:12:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I got back from work around five thirty. Sat on the couch, took my shoes off, unbuttoned my work shirt and hung it up in the closet. Meanwhile the cats bumped their heads into my hands, walked across my lap, and we all went into the kitchen where I opened a can of food. I then switched into shorts and changed my t-shirt, put on tennis shoes and got my bike out of the closet and rode out to Sunset View Park, the south-western most corner of Oakland, down South Harbor Road past the car junkery, the train yard, and the many shipping operations punctuated by 24 story high great white cranes. A long, wide road with a slight incline and nobody on it.

I locked my bike to a pole and inspected the crane closest the park, watched the boat from Norfolk and the people on it for a while. I read a placard: the crane was built in Shanghai and it's controls were made in Sweden. One of the workers waved at me and I waved back. I walked to the end of the jetty, past the couple hanging out in the tower, pissed behind a bush, took a picture of some grafitti on a trash can and walked back to where my bike was parked. By then the crane had started to unload the cargo from the boat, and I sat down and watched them work.

Oakland dockworkers. It made me think of season 2 of The Wire, of the big military ships I've been reading about, the loud noises and steel and of teaching in comparison, what a different job unloading boats is. It looked fun, satisfying and probably paid well. I smoked a cigarette. Listened and watched and amazed at how accurate the crane operator was, moving rectangles around with such precision. I wondered if a good crane operator is slightly OCD, or develops a little bit of a natural OCD, trying to line things up just right. Drawing cubes in the margins of note pads. After a while I got back on the bike and rode home. Made a couple phone calls, made dinner, took a shower and got into bed. Read for an hour and went to sleep. Wednesday.

2011-07-06T09:33:00.000-07:00

Strange dreams. They kind I was happy to wake up from. Not because they were scary, but uncomfortable. And boring. Dreams that seemed familiar, familiar places and scenarios and themes. Plus a heavy feeling like I was being pressed on. Physically. Something heavy was laying on top of me. Which probably relates directly to my body, how I was feeling, the fact that yesterday I walked three miles to class and back, stood for three hours in class, and then walked another three miles to my therapist and the grocery store. In my new work shoes, that are more like heavy boots, and aren't exactly made for walking long distances. Or maybe they are. I don't make boots. But they are heavy. On the last leg of the journey I walked slowly, like a caveman after a long day in the jungle. Sings Bill Callahan: "Peace on your hand / don't be silly. / Peace in my bah-dee / when I'm tired and beaten."

But it could be worse. Always. And actually yesterday was a good day. Just tiring. Though not tiring like the Japanese death march through New Guinea, as I continue to read accounts of the fighting on the Pacific islands during the second world war. Every time I put the book down, to go to sleep or get off the train, I say, either to myself or out loud, "this is the craziest shit I've ever read." And keep reading. One thing I'm learning from the Japanese perspective was how defeated they all were long before their government surrendered. Marching for a year, starving and sick with no food and no ammunition to fight a war, and no choice to surrender. If you refused to charge to your death you were shot anyway by your commanding officer. "My own company broke camp in Pusan with 261 men. I was the only one who boarded a transport ship bound for Japan and home after the war."

From the Marines' perspective, the Japanese were fearsome, self-less warriors, jumping bonzai style into their foxholes at night to stab a few Americans before blowing themselves up. Whereas from the Japanese perspective, those 'fearless' soldiers probably had no food or ammunition, and no option to surrender. A suicide attack was just about the only thing they could do asides from waiting to be killed. In many of the accounts by Japanese soldiers, there is a moment where, after seeing a fleet of American bulldozers or tanks or an airfield built in a day, or from the account of a film maker who spent time in the Hollywood, to witness the wealth and abundance of American resources, that many of these soldiers had the realization that victory was not possible. And not because of bogus ideas of national character or racial whatever, but because the Americans we're rich and could build thirty times as many planes, and can feed and clothe and provide their soldiers with ammunition. "The only one who wept at the actual news of Japan's defeat was the commander."

2011-07-04T11:55:00.000-07:00

Happy 4th of July! It's hot in Oakland! Fireworks were canceled! Budget Cuts! So was summer school! At least they didn't shut down the libraries! They are staying open! Of course they're not open today it's a holiday! Independence day! We are free! No work! Last night I played virtual basketball with Bill until past midnight! Whoa! Whoa now hey! Hey now slow down! We sat at the bird sanctuary as it got dark and drank beers! Canada geese climbing out of the water and settling in for the night! A raccoon snuck into the fenced-in area! A dog bit a goose! Pelicans fish in groups! There's probably a name for a group of pelicans other than a "flock"! Sorry about these exclamation points!

Hope it's not annoying! We are free! Free to go watch fireworks somewhere else! Free to buy half priced coupons from the internet! Free to turn down invitations! Free to give up on our relationships! Free to read a book! Free to sit in the park! To watch the drunk couple go stand by the dumpster! Free to draw a cube! Free to have friends over it's my own goddamn apartment I can do whatever I want with it! Freedom! Free to afford freedom! Free to make circular statements! Free to read about enslaved Guatemalans picking flavorless tomatoes in Florida! Free to read the stories told by Japanese Kempeitei during the occupation of parts of China prior to American involvement in WWII! Free to share this quote completely out of context!: "It might sound extreme, but I can almost say that if more than two weeks went by without my taking a head, I didn't feel right."

Free to be like whoa! Free to say messed up things! Free to forgive! Free to forgive if that's at all possible! Free bird! Free to be told by a literate international student that they don't read American books! Free to wonder why! Free to speculate that it has something to do with the amount of insulation from the problems of the world our wealth provides us! Free to consider that a Westerner uses 300% more of the world's resources in a lifetime than a non-westerner! Free to be insulated even from ourselves! Free to commit ourselves to health! To stop smoking! To design iPhone apps that help us rent more movies! To write books about the future of cloud computing! Freedom! Yes! It's true! And it feels good! Most of the time!

2011-07-01T18:55:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday it rained. Heavy all day and cleared up at night. My raincoat is good one, picked out specifically so I could ride my bike in the rain and stay perfectly dry. It works; or worked until the cuff of the right sleeve began to turn out. Maybe the glue stopped sticking or maybe it was a loose thread, but the rain runs down my right arm and somehow curls around to get up into the sleeve. By the end of the day, my arm was sopping wet and cold while the rest of me was dry.

I looked up the warranty policy and it sounds like they'll replace it, or fix it. The problem is that it'll take a little while, four weeks at least and I'm not sure how much I'll need it in the next couple months. When it's sunny out like it is today, hot and dry, it's hard to believe that it will ever rain again. It will, I know, but it's hard to imagine anything other than what's right in front of me. I want to send it off but experience tells me I'll be sorry.

**

This morning I came to the realization that the little bell that's been ringing in my head this last month is "morality." At least that's how she put it. Something to keep the clan from splitting apart, to let me know I'm putting the social order at risk. Thanks biology. I'm not going to get specific, but it's funny how things hang around until we notice them. Or are driven to drink. We're out of cat food. It's hot out. End of the second week of school. Is it just me or has the Huffington Post gotten less left and more something else since AOL bought it? Not that it isn't a free country.

2011-06-30T09:41:00.000-07:00

On Sunday mornings my father took me and my brother and sister to the congregational church. The "Congo" church as he called it, and I thought of Africa. But everybody was from Wisconsin. So that couldn't be right. I later learned that a congregational church is a church with no denomination. Anyone is welcome, and you don't have to be a part of a particular group, or believe in a particular way. I didn't like going. This I believed; that it was boring, and so I met the requirement. Instead of sitting in the pews with my father and siblings, I opted for Sunday school, an opportunity to hang out with other kids.

Because Sunday school started an hour before church, I never got to see the last ten minutes of Jem and the Holograms. I also didn't get to eat Pillsbury biscuits and eggs. Instead I sat at the two low tables pushed together with the other kids. The Sunday School teacher talked about the bible for forty-five minutes, and then we went up stairs to a little room above the main chapel and sang. I didn't know anybody, and they didn't know me. I just tried to get through the hour and a half without attracting attention so I could be done with it. Had I chosen to go to real church, my dad would of made me interact. On my own, mingling was not an issue.

One morning I wore a Gumby basketball sweatshirt I had gotten from my aunt. I thought it was pretty cool, especially since the small town kids weren't hip to Gumby. I had a snotty cold that morning, and when I sneezed a wad of yellow sticky snot came out of my nose and stuck to my fingers. Too shy to get up or ask the teacher to get a tissue, I wiped the snot in the armpit of the shirt and tucked my arm in like a chicken wing. I assumed nobody saw me because I assumed everybody was in the same boat as me, just trying to get through. We continued singing but I heard some of the kids laugh. One of them said, "Gumby got gummed." I pretended they were talking about something else.

2011-06-29T08:34:00.000-07:00

Grace standing on the corner talking about refusing to work for peanuts. Me in a short sleeve with the wind blowing. Shivering. Her private teaching practice earns her five times what she makes working for our school. Suzie Orman and the virtue of not selling yourself for less than you're worth. I left the street corner and descended into the BART, wondering if I got it wrong. If my ideas of what's important are a perfect example of the Nietzscheian "slave mentality," to put off dignity because, as Sarah Palin put it, "your reward is in heaven."

Or as Cannibal Ox put it, "the meek shall inherit the earth / why not? / we can sell it to the frail / and feed em fairy tales." Being taken advantage builds character. And according to Grace, eventually some of us learn this lesson well enough to take advantage of the situation ourselves. The wisdom of misery. A former teacher wrote me back about the recommendation request: hard up for time but if you send me a bio I'll write you one. One draws the line. Time is precious. Joel says to me on the phone, "I wasn't asking for your permission to bring the dog."

In conversation with one of the department heads last week I talked about streamlining my methods to keep up with the work load: no more than ten minutes a student paper. The kind of gains in efficiency politicians dream of when they cut budgets. I mentioned this in the context of teaching full time, that I'd love to but couldn't keep up with the work load. In response she said that full timers get by because they don't agonize over one student or another. And again, this strange desire to suffer comes back into the conversation. No answers.

2011-06-22T10:09:00.000-07:00

Semester started yesterday. One rhetoric class that meets on Tuesdays and Friday. Today I have writing lab and the 'special' pronunciation group where we read dialogues. I'm not really sure if it helps improve pronunciation but it probably doesn't hurt. Plus it's kind of fun. I found a copy of Raymond Carver's short stories called What We Talk About When We Talk About Love that I've been reading on the BART train, and was thinking of using it for the pronunciation group. Pretty amazing, and also pretty bleak. Spare and unadorned. I started to write out a line from the book but then erased it thinking it wouldn't make any sense outside of the context of the story, and might make me seem like a violent misogynist. Knowing nothing about Raymond Carver other than a lot of writing is described as "Carver-esque", it's very possible that he was just that, but I refuse to read a wikipedia entry about him right now so if you know better please, with grace, allow this sentence to pass.

But mostly the stories are about sadness and relationships falling apart: affairs, sickness, disappointment, booze, violence, fathers, mothers, and divorcees. The kind of short stories, really short stories that thud with the last line and make you want to go back and re-read the details. I have to admit that it's a little hard to write at this moment. Like squeezing toothpaste out of a mangled tube. The last ten days of the break I didn't do any writing at all. On Sunday I went to see The Tree of Life, the new Terrance Malick movie that happens to have Brad Pitt in it. When I spell check Malick it suggest Metallica. Ride the lightning. But it was kind of an amazing movie. The rare movie that when somebody asks, was it good? The question doesn't really apply, because it's not really a movie. At least not in a narrative sense, though there is a narrative, but it's not really what the two some hours in the theater are about. I hate to say it but it's more like a poem than a movie.

The first five minutes are worth the price of admission and if you throw in the scene with the dinosaurs (!) you're already in the bonus land of speculative pleasure. In other movie news I also saw the movie Super 8 during the last couple weeks of the break, and I can't remember three things about it. Though I can remember two things: train crash, alien eyeball. More than that I remember how delicious the nectarine was that I ate while watching it. I'll stop there because I need to get some things together and put my socks on. The best part about this semester is that unlike last semester I have a lot of time to write. Looking forward to remembering why I do all this in the first place.

2011-06-19T19:58:00.000-07:00

2011-06-08T09:04:00.000-07:00

Washington DC. It's supposed to get up to ninety-eight degrees today, and humid. It's hot, but the heat is a novelty. For the first time in my life I am rooting for a Texas team. Tomorrow it's back to California, what I've heard has been rainy. Rainy Briggs. Third and Fifth grade and saw him working at a hat store about eight years ago. Feel like we were friends though never spoke or paid attention to each other. Race relations. Lincoln Elementary school, bussed across the city like they do in San Francisco. Forced mingling win the lottery no choice but a chance. Sitting in a cafe just did some copy editing. Twenty-five dollars and hour. Should ask for more. Bagel and egg and cheese and cranberry lemonade out of a bottle. There is no I in team. They didn't charge for the bagel. Stealing is wrong. Stealing is against the law. Bank robbery is punishable by twenty years in a federal prison. Phillip Glass. Mishima.On Monday we went to the beach. My new nephew James is cute. Like a larvae. Not really capable of much but can smile a little and look. Accompanied my niece to music class yesterday. Humiliating. Don't want to talk about it. Personal blog.

Need to get back to work. Am really not into computers these days. Rant: people get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to make baubles for iPhones while thousands of teachers are laid off. Really smart and clueless people. Man its hot. What is this world coming to? Save the whales. Know thyself Thales. Tagline at the end of an email. Was going to teach on-line this summer but took too long in getting back to the powers that be. Bummer. Would of freed up my Monday. Three day weekend boyeeee. Georgetown. Look up and out from the window a cafe. Planning on visiting the bookstore that I don't know is still open or not. Internet. Sit at the window with a bag of chips and diet coke. Someone else. Not me. Caffeine free. Caffeine free all natural soda. Caffeine free all natural cherry flavored soda. Keep drinking. Snake it back. Lifeline. Would you like to call a friend? The soda machine was all out of cherry coke. That should be capitalized. Do not turn left in in front of this vehicle. UPS trucks rarely turn left. Recalculating route.

At the beach the Eastern shore of Maryland we stopped for some food before the three hour drive back to DC. The name of the restaurant along the boardwalk was Gus' Fried Chicken and the owners were Greek and they served fried chicken. I've been trying to avoid meat. At the table next to us we were sitting in a booth two over weight ladies and an overweight man sat down. The lady with the blond hair teased out said "I'll just have a cheese burger with bacon." I keep thinking of that, the word "just." And the expression on her face. She looked resigned. On my way here there was a group of little school kids trying to cross. Cars kept whizzing by so one of the teachers went out in the middle of the street to try and stop the cars. They stopped and a man got out of one of the cars and said "what the fuck?" Since I used that opportunity to cross the street as well and was close, I said to the man, "Dude. It's just a bunch of kids. Relax." Just. Back out into the heat I go. See you in California.

2011-05-30T10:25:00.000-07:00

Slightly overcast day in Oakland. Later, Amy is coming by with a green couch that her and her husband want to get rid of. I'm excited to have it but it's going to change the complexion of my apartment. Change is hard. Cat island, two uncomfortable orange wedges are going to have to go. In all likelihood. I'm waiting for her call back to check on the dimensions. But the green couch is a nice couch, and with it I will be able to have more than two comfortable seats. I could invite you and your friends over. We could all sit and laugh at the jokes we make. Or talk seriously about our childhoods. Or sit awkwardly. Or spill juice on each other. Or watch the cats sharpen their claws. Or look at pictures of clowns together, all five of us sitting comfortable. I write "clowns" because when I wrote "claws" I mistyped.

It's hard to type because last Wednesday I got hit by a car. Sounds bad right? It wasn't that bad, but the old lady's side mirror gouged my left ring finger deeply (s,w,x on a qwerty keyboard) and I've got a couple of movement restricting bandages on it. Trying to keep it from getting infected and letting it heal. It's going to leave a funky looking scar, like Greg Norman's shark logo in reverse. The old lady pulled in front of me, turning into a parking lot and cutting me off. It was raining, and I think the bike took the brunt of the blow, because it destroyed her side mirror and all I got was this lousy gash on my finger. She held her hands over her face, head slightly bowed, for a good eight seconds and I motioned for her to pull into the parking lot. I said, "It's alright."

Which it was, though I was pissed off, as I saw it coming, that is, saw her coming and saw her not see me and was unable to stop quickly in the rain. She asked me not to call the police and told me that she was close to home. She repeated that she was close to home, and I'm not sure what she was really trying to communicate by that phrase, as if I was concerned that she was going to hit another biker. But I didn't have time to call the police or insurance or anything like that, as I was being picked up at my apartment in a half hour to go up to the meditation course and needed to buy some pants to sit in that were relatively thin. I asked her for a paper towel which she had, and went into Ahn's 1/4 Burger and got some napkins, which I wrapped around my finger and taped with a band-aid and proceeded to the Gap where I got some comfortable pants for ten dollars. The clerks there didn't seem to notice the bloody wad taped around my finger. The end.

2011-05-25T11:03:00.000-07:00

Hi. The semester is over. I'm eating an old piece of pizza. Grades are done. In a couple hours I'm leaving for a short meditation retreat. And then when I get back I'll leave for DC to see my sister. I miss you and will see you when I get back.

2011-05-14T13:04:00.000-07:00

A little late but still on time. As in before the end of the world which according to the advertisement on the BART is a week from today. "Man Spends Life Savings on Promoting End of World" says the headline. Good for him. At least he didn't invest his money in a tech start up or hedge fund. Next week is the last week of the fifteen week semester. Week fifteen as we call it. The cat keeps yowling. Really annoying. He wants something but I don't know what: cat food? Check. Litter box? Clean. Temperature normal. Maybe he's bored? Such is life in a studio apartment. Maybe he misses women. Or another person. I sometimes feel guilty that I'm not exciting enough for them. Weird displaced projections of self onto animals. "If the lion could talk we would not understand him." Says Wittgenstein. Vit Ghin Stein.

I must admit that I've been a little over extended this semester. Part of it due to the move, and part because I was working more support classes this semester, but the most important part has been the two full sections of the writing class. Last summer I adjusted the number of drafts for the two argument papers from two to three, and up until this semester I've been able to keep up. Not so much this semester. Though I've kept up, it's not been without more stress than called for at my fair University. Talking to a few other instructors, I'm going to make a few adjustments to the schedule and the workshop for next semester, giving myself a little bit more time to read and designating more responsibility to the students. Outwardly, I've been a bit ornery with students, and though I don't mind appearing that way, I would rather feel more relaxed and less pressed for time in class. Just like students, I have to make adjustments to my "drafts" of class. The system that worked a year ago no longer works as well as I want it to, thus its time for a change. No blame.

Yesterday I finished reading "With the Old Breed" by the WWII vet E.B. Sledge. Unbelievable. His account of two campaigns with the Marines during the war with the Japanese: Peleliu and Okinawa. Those who have seen me in recent weeks may have heard me read a passage from the book, hundreds of which are so insanely terrible, and true. Not as an argument for or against "war," but as an argument for luck, and our capacity and incapacity to live in hell. Towards the end there are some pictures of Sledge and a few other Marines after the Okinawa campaign ended. To read into these pictures, into their expressions and postures, the three hundred pages of precisely detailed horror that came before, is like contemplating a sky full of stars: the depth of their experiences so vastly unknowable no wonder most of those who made it back never said much about it. A brief passage near the end of the book:

Among my letters was one from a Mobile acquaintance of many years. He had joined the Marine Corps and was a member of some rear-echelon unit of service troops stationed on northern Okinawa. He insisted that I write him immediately about the location of my unit. He wrote that when he found out where I was, he would visit me at once. I read his words to some of my buddies, and they got a good laugh out of it.

"Don't that guy know there's a war on? What the hell does he think First Marine Division is doin' down here anyway?"

Someone else suggested I insist not only that he come to see me at once, but that he stay and be my replacement if he wanted to be a true friend. I never answered the letter.

2011-05-04T09:47:00.000-07:00

Hotter than it used to be and in Oakland. The cats feel like it. They splay in the sun and roll over with their feet in the air. Then get out of the sun for awhile and splay on the wood floor. And then go back to the sun. Jinx is a "Sun Horse". Kitty Girl has a "Cookie Face." Now is the warm part of the year. Come June and July it will get cold. Nobody believes it who doesn't live here, but it's cold during the summer. It's confusing during the summer. Two weeks and a remainder left in the semester which in the last three weeks has really begun to fatigue me. I've been working a ton of hours plus not doing any writing, which has a cumulative effect of bringing me down. BUT I know this happens, and will happen, and I'm ready for it. Over the weekend I got some rest. Didn't play basketball went for a run. Wrote emails and did some planning for the month long break. Saw a movie and went for a walk.

Watched the final three episodes of The Office, cried, checked in with a few others to make sure they cried too, and finished "The Possibility of an Island" a Michel Houellebecq novel that took me forever to read partly because I was tired and partly because it wasn't that good. At least as a social satire. Though as a science fiction novel, it was kind of interesting in the same way that the Dune books were interesting: imagining where ideas + commitment will take us over time. The book ends on two notes: 1) the narrator's language begins to falter ("I would never reach the goal I had been set.", and 2) the narrator spend sixty years lying in a pool of salt water. It's a long, not particularly interesting story about a comedian who becomes part of a growing religious movement, but it did make think, particularly about getting older. On Sunday I began to notice some prominent white hairs not just on the sides of my head (which are pretty much white) but on the top of my head. Add that to hair loss, and it seems likely that in ten years I will be a gray haired bald man.

I started a new book last night: "With the Old Breed" a WWII autobiography by Eugene Sledge, a Marine who fought in the Pacific theater. I saw "The Pacific", an HBO mini-series six months ago and was really amazed at the insane fighting conditions. No wonder those guys didn't say much about it, though this book is by one of those guys who did. What some people go through is impossible to know, but maybe we can come close to at least having an understanding. Speaking of death, reading the paper this morning about the basketball game last night: "... [The Miami] Heat had the crowd sing the national anthem, in recognition of the successful mission to kill Osama bin Laden." And speaking of grotesque cynicism (the book I just finished), what the hell? It's one thing to get closure and share the experience of release, but it's another thing to celebrate another person's death. As Thomas Friedman, renowned NYTimes columnist writes, "We did our part. We killed Bin Laden with a bullet." Lord. As if this will change anything.

2011-04-28T13:28:00.000-07:00

2011-04-27T10:28:00.001-07:00

Nope. Nothing. Not one thing to say.

2011-04-20T09:07:00.000-07:00

2011-04-18T21:30:00.000-07:00

On Saturday I was at Trader Joe's. Saturday morning. So I was standing there. I was standing there holding a red basket looking at the crackers: "Sesame Melba." So I was standing there looking at the Sesame Melba crackers and this lady. This old lady was also standing there with me. Standing there with me looking at the Sesame Melba crackers. She spoke. She was standing next to me when she spoke. "They look like pieces of toast." She said they looked like little pieces of toast. Standing next to me in Trader Joe's on Saturday morning the little old lady said the Sesame Melba crackers looked like little pieces of toast. She had a thick accent. She spoke in her thick accent "They look like little pieces of toast." She spoke in her thick eastern European accent "They look like little pieces of toast." I smiled. I smiled and looked at her. I smiled and looked at her and looked back at the crackers. I smiled and looked at her and looked back at the crackers and said "Yes." I smiled and looked at her and looked back at the crackers and said "Yes they do." I smiled and looked at her and then looked back at the Sesame Melba crackers and said, "Yes they do. They look exactly like little pieces of toast."

2011-04-13T10:42:00.000-07:00

This morning my sister had her second child. On the kitchen floor. She wasn't aware of the contractions until it was too late, but the dula was there, as well as a grandma, who is an experienced mid-wife. 11:15 AM East Coast Time. On the west coast I was meditating. No trans-continental psychic premonition to report. I haven't actually spoken to my sister about this, as they went to the hospital soon after, but my mom called to tell me the news. She also reported that they didn't have a name for the baby yet, but it's boy, and now I have a nephew. How exciting! I'm totally going to reenforce stereotypical gender roles every chance I get. Somewhere in this conversation my mom also reported that when I was a little child, I was called the baby until one day, one and a half years old, I overheard them talking about me and said my name wasn't baby, but Tyler.

In 1987 Tyler was reported as the number one male baby name. Therefore there are a a lot of 23 year old Tylers running around, and quite a few also have my last name, which I discovered after having to click 'next' six or seven times to find my profile on Facebook via a name search. The anonymity of having a common name is kind of nice, as I can almost pass off some of these embarrassing blog posts as written by somebody else. And it helps that I'm a little bit older than most of the Tylers out there, which explains my first name last name gmail address, and the fact that I get all kinds of email from other people's parents, Honda dealerships, and contact lens suppliers. For a while I was on a mailing list for a church group in the Philippines. It sounded like they were having a lot of fun over there.

Since I don't have any children, and my two cats were pre-named when I got them, I don't really have much experience naming anything asides from poems and songs, and usually, unless the name is self evident, it's really difficult to think through to a good name, though I tend to favor keeping it simple and unsymbolic. For example, instead of naming a poem "Violent Rainbow" I would tend towards "Puke Bucket." The mineral fact of calling it what it is. Anyway. I need to get ready for class. Here is today's birthday horoscope for April 13th, which may or may not apply to a newborn:

You'll make a difference in the lives of others. Over the next six weeks, your glowing smile attracts good fortune. In May, work provides the opportunity to recognize your own power and assert yourself. You'll begin a new regimen in June, and loved ones will follow your lead. You'll give your domestic scene a makeover in July. Aquarius and Virgo people adore you. Your lucky numbers are: 4, 25, 40, 19 and 16.

2011-04-07T11:27:00.000-07:00

In second grade we watched a film strip about Europe. In the middle of the strip, while the lights were off, I raised my hand and announced to everyone that I had been to Europe on a family vacation. Mrs. Rocco said "How wonderful!" and asked if I would bring in some pictures, but I told her that my family had forgotten the camera. A couple weeks later, when my friend Aaron's dad came by to pick him up after a sleepover, he asked my mother and I, standing in the doorway about our European vacation. I muttered something and wandered away. I was never asked about it again.

Seven years old, at the Platteville Invitational Swim Meet huddled under blankets with a bunch of other kids, mostly older, I announced that I was gay and had AIDS. 1985. I did not know what either word meant. Encouraged by the attention, later I announced that when a dog pissed, I would stick my hand in the hot stream of urine, and when a dog shit, I would smear the shit with my fingers. Because I went to school in Madison, they had no way of knowing if any of it was true, no context. But in retrospect, maybe they were just amazed somebody would claim such things.

Later that summer, in love with the game Discs of Tron, one afternoon I walked up to the little arcade on main street and quickly lost two or three games. The adults there asked me where my dad was, and when I got back he asked me where I got the quarters. I found them under the couch looking for a lost library book, I said, though I actually got them from the bathroom, quarters falling out of my dad's pants as they always were. I don't know how he knew, but he didn't believe me. I wasn't allowed to ride with him on his motorcycle until I told the truth.

2011-04-06T10:49:00.000-07:00

To continue on this dream thing, because I've been dreaming a lot lately or at least have been remembering my dreams a lot lately, two nights ago I had a dream where I met Jesus. I was in an old cabin, that used to belong to Susan, and had found a box of crackers that were pretty old but I thought were still good. I carried it around and looked at the dusty books on a book shelf in the middle of the room like you might find in a book store. When I went outside Jesus was standing there. I was a surprised that I was taller than him, but then thought about it a little bit, how people are generally much taller now due to diets high in protein than we were back in the day, and it made sense. I don't remember what we talked about. He was serious and a little intimidating. During the conversation it seemed to make a lot of sense to become a Christian, but I was a little worried how my friends and family might take the news.

Recently in an issue of the New Yorker there was a long article about a guy who got deep into Scientology and got out, eventually. Apparently one of the tenants is that when you advance to a certain level you are expected to cut off ties with anyone who is not also a Scientologist, including your parents and your children. The logic being that since this is the first generation of Scientolgists, some painful sacrifices will have to be made. During a latter part of the Vipassana Meditation course that I've taken the last two summers, Goenka (the teacher) talks about when you "plant the seed of Dharma" you have to build a fence around it, so the cows milling around don't munch on the growth. A lovely metaphor that practically applied, for me at least, means make time for meditation even if I have to say no to friends. Which is the hard part. Like MF Doom says, "Is he still a fly guy clappin' if nobody can hear it / And can they testify from inner spirit."

Like that crazy dude in the park doing kung-fu moves with headphones on. Last night I dreamt of taking a walk through the woods with an ex-girlfriend, and just like in my waking life, felt insecure. I was not actually in the woords but I did actually feel insecure. Jesus (the one my dream) was just a culturally convenient vehicle. Last night Bill and Erika came over for dinner. At some point, talking about Oakland because they also live in Oakland, talking about the move and all the bad juju that I moved to Oakland with; I said my attitude wasn't about Oakland but about how settled I was in San Francisco, and the fear of leaving that behind. And now settling into Oakland, I'm feeling just as content at I did in SF, and I'm thinking maybe it has nothing to do with the place at all. A cliche I've heard many times, but has taken awhile to prove true in my actual life. It's really easy to get confused about reality. Anyway, Wednesday. Time to get ready for class.

2011-03-30T09:39:00.000-07:00

Jinx is laying on his back in the sun. Legs spread. His foot just twitched. It's supposed to get into the seventies today and tomorrow get a little warmer, possibly the low eighties. Back to work this week which has felt good, recharged and properly settled into Oakland, and ready to resume. Though I have been having strange dreams recently. In one a student killed one of my colleagues. In another an old roommate broke all of my dishes. Old news but oddly anxious. To me that's a sign that I should probably get back to writing. Something trying to push forward from the back of my brain so as, I should be ready to catch it when it comes out. Like a bloody tooth laying on the pavement after a street fight. Street Fighter II. Street Fighter II Turbo Edition.

Or maybe it's simpler than that. Since I'm thinking about class on Thursday during my waking hours maybe it's only natural to be dreaming about the (mildly) trouble making student. Since I ran into a colleague of my old roommate at work yesterday and the conversation we had lead me to old thoughts about my old apartment maybe it makes sense to have dreams about all that. Ever since the first meditation course, almost two years ago, the meaning of dreams has been not as interesting. Have not been nearly as mysterious. Sitting all day long, working hard to focus the mind and bring it back and notice its wandering and bring it back and really work that sixth sense, seriously occupying the brain all day the opposite of letting the mind wander; at night I had the craziest dreams. Removing the eyeball of a Saint Bernard and sucking on it for a while, putting it back quickly when the leather jacket wearing owner came back. Eventually the eyeball broke, like an egg, and I stuffed it into the wall mounted garbage shoot. Asides from the familiar feeling of guilt over something I wasn't supposed to do, I do not believe that the specifics of this dream (Saint Bernards, eyeballs, leather jackets) have any more meaning than the items laying on my desk right now (a stack of blank CDs, a stapler, a notepad, a pencil case).

For example about six months ago I had a dream about wires sticking out of an electrical socket in my old apartment. I was worried that I or my roommate might walk by and get shocked. So as I tried to fix the wire that was sticking out from it, with a vauge sense that I was the only one paying attention to this danger. Not in a righteous, nobody else cares kind of way, but in a no-blame, gosh I should fix so I don't get shocked kind of way. Regardless, the dream was a vehicle to communicate this worry that I must of gone to bed with. The outlet was not a symbol for anything. It was completely and totally banal as most of my dreams are, just replays of the day's anxieties. Ted used to have a Saint Bernard when I was kid. And the dream leads me to my vague memories of that, but only because I willingly go there. "It's not like it's a mystery." We know, or at least have a pretty good guess, where our dreams come from, if we first consider our sensations in the dream rather than the semi-random objects and people our dreams are populated with. All that said, I still would like to get back to writing.

2011-03-23T10:54:00.001-07:00

Is it just me, or did the United States declare war on Libya over the weekend? Just for the record, and I don't know if this is a left or right idea, but for fuck's sake, can't the U.S. just stay out of it for second? I realize that it's an "international coalition" but it's not exactly clear how much support for the revolution there is within Libya, and besides, if there's five or six countries who are willing to take the initiative to intervene, maybe we should just let them go ahead and do that without us. Nobody likes Ghaddafi. Yes. We get it. But if Libya didn't have major oil resources would we really care all that much? Maybe Al-Qaeda is putting hallucinogenic drugs in our water. (Post Script: Good news. NATO is taking over. Yay.)

Anyway, I'm going to keep this post short because it's Spring Break. It's raining and I have papers to grade. Papers to grade before I can truly relax. Yesterday friend Steven and I went for a hike up Mt. Diablo. I got us a bit lost at the Devil's Elbow but we found our way back to the safety of the parking lot. IN POETRY NEWS, new-er work of mine has just come out in Volt #16, a beautiful print journal that publishes really high quality work. It's printed on extra large paper (9x12) but not awkwardly; emphasizing forms and visual orientation as well as the writing. When I started writing, Volt was one of the magazines I always dreamed of getting published in, so as, dreams come true? I am a goal oriented person? Now what? Celebrate? Grade papers? Put on pants. Do dishes. Relax. Continue.

2011-03-16T10:36:00.001-07:00

Somehow the sun has made it through the thick layer of clouds covering the sky for the last five days. A man with a shaved head and a black t-shirt walks by. Spent the morning reading Japan stories and watching videos and interactive NYTimes features, trying to figure out what exactly is happening with the nuclear reactors. This is a pretty helpful graphic explaining what is going on. The good news is that my two remaining friends in Japan with who I'm in contact with are both just fine. Toshiko reported that the earthquake knocked her off her feet but her family is fine and she, in Tokyo, is also fine. Jude reported that his office "shook like fuck" but asides from the inconveniences, nothing much has changed in the big city.

Which is in stark contrast to how it's been reported here, where NPR and the BBC are constantly talking about the possibilities of a nuclear meltdown. Maybe in Japan people are trying to just stay calm in case they actually have to deal with a disaster. Whereas, here, maybe there's no harm in letting a little reckless anxiety guide our interests. I have no idea. Though I have to say the one thing that has made me a little mad has been the story of investors pulling out of the Japanese market. What a bunch of assholes. I realize that the job of investors is to make money but it sort of feels like kicking somebody when they're down, or when Britney Spears shaves her head everybody walks away. Maybe it's not a fair comparison, but isn't it in everybody's best interests, including investors, that Japan be well? That taking one for the (global financial) team is preferable to a shortsighted pursuit of profit?

The photography teacher I support on Tuesdays began the class by acknowledging that Japan's problems make the problems of teachers and students, deadlines and assignments, pale in comparison. A keen observation, that oddly, makes me work just a little bit harder as I feel a little bit of gratitude to sit with a student and talk about the next conceptual photography assignment as opposed to digging through rubble, or hashing out an evacuation plan. To be honest, I'm not often prone to personally identifying with global causes. I don't know if this is due to selfishness, ignorance, or respect for privacy. Regardless, having lived in Japan and still having friends there ups my steak in the whole thing. Same goes for the protests in Wisconsin. However, democracy in Egypt, as much as I like that idea, is more of a reach. Which is a complicated way to say that I identify with Japan more clearly than Egypt. How one sees themselves and what's important. When I see a crazy old man wandering in the middle of the street I feel sad. Same with a happy expression on the face of the developmentally disabled person. We are strange. Now I need to get ready for class. Spring break is next week.

2011-03-09T10:48:00.000-08:00

Now I live in Oakland. It's been a couple weeks since we last spoke for a couple reasons. One of which is that my internet has been M.I.A. and finally got it back up and running yesterday, though it took about four hours due to old wiring in the basement ("It'll be another week and a half before you can come back? I'll give you fifty bucks cash if you come by now."), and then the wireless wasn't getting recognized by the computer which lead me to IM-ing with Jaya (India) for a good hour and then another half hour talking to Mario (Texas) on the phone. Yet, it works and is kind of fast and I'm a little afraid of how much the monthly bill will be once taxes and all that stuff is added on but there it sits (looking at my router and imagining the blinking green lights that I can't actually see because I'm not wearing my glasses). My cat threw up four times this morning.

Which was kind of a protest against the Wisconsin union crisis but was also because I wasn't getting up to feed her. It's important to keep the ball rolling and when it stops, one has to take action. If she didn't make a fuss it's possible that she would starve to death. So after I threw her out the apartment, cleaned up the puke and went back to bed, I had the idea that next time maybe I'll run her under some water. I know it sounds cruel and maybe it is, but four pukes is two pukes too many. Not that the transition has not been difficult but "It's been difficult for all of us, Kitty Girl." Yes, I live alone now. Jinx's health has been failing but that's a story for another day.

It's been a big transition. Moving weekend was great. Four great friends helped me move out of the Valencia apartment and into this one. I took Friday off of work, spent the day packing. Spent Saturday moving and then spent Sunday and the next week unpacking. Weekend. A few days and then today, and the shock of leaving SF has largely dissapated and I'm happily settling into my new neighborhood. Which is amazing in it's own ways, for example, empty wide streets filled with beautiful old buildings. Like they built a city and nobody came. Or it turned into Detroit. Or some combination of the two, at least in my immediate vicinity. Then there's China town a block to the south, the lake three blocks to the East, downtown and the BART four blocks to the West, and then there's the North. Home of the mysteriously named "Snow Park." This is my new neighborhood. All for about four hundred dollars less what I would be paying in SF for a similar space.

A couple weeks ago I was talking to a collegue who, along with her boyfriend, were looking for a place. I told her I had just found a good one in Oakland and she said that because she was a life long San Franciscian, she would never consider living here. Which made me wonder, why is that? Beyond the obvious of one person's preference, there's a huge difference between San Francisco and the East Bay. I loved living in San Francisco because it's an amazing city. So much everywhere, full of interesting creative people. There were three books stores within a block of my old apartment, whereas now I have to travel a mile to get to a (non-christian) book store around here. SF is dense with people like me: book reading burrito eating bike riding hipsters (more or less). Whereas in Oakland it's a lot more "diverse." Culturally and economically and socially. It's not just homeless and tech people and artists here, it's them and everybody else as well; families, phone guys, and all those people who teach at Oaksterdam University. Inescapable Buddhist truth: "From all that he loves, man must part." Something like that. Come by when you can. Hope you're well.

2011-02-23T11:14:00.000-08:00

The good news is that I've found a place to live and I'm moving on Saturday. So excited and exciting to be leaving this apartment, which as been great, don't get me wrong, but wow, I am so glad to leaving. Great in that it's been awesome living in San Francisco, living on a busy hip street above shops and restaurants, and really, I've always wanted to live in a place like this but now I get to live on my own plus two cats in a really great space over in Oakland. I looked at around twenty five apartments over the last six weeks. Of those twenty five, the one I'm moving into is the only one I got excited about. Yesterday my roommate said moving to Oakland is a good idea. More like a good feeling. Searching searching searching and stressing for a while is a productive process. Like writing a poem or teaching a class. Thank you for your support.

But about that housing search, this city is so crazy. I've lived in five big U.S. cities and I've never had to work as hard to find an acceptable place to live. And I'm no slouch. The story is that the dot com people really changed the landscape as far as affordability in the mid 90's. A huge influx of people with money came to the area and ever since the powers that be have been catering to them as well as the standard corporate interests, which of course, is nothing new. Gavin Newsom did not do nearly as much as he could of in terms of keeping affordable housing in the city, and I've read that the homelessness problem in San Francisco can partly be attributed to Newsom and Brown's development policies. The working class have largely been pushed out of the city. That said, sometimes new comers like me luck into affordable situations like the apartment I've been in. I had no idea how good I had it until trying to find a comparable situation elsewhere. And then there are the people that have always lived here, the family that live on the second floor of this building, Six people in an apartment the same size as the one my roommate and I have shared with two cats.

It's hard not indulge in bitterness or cynicism around this whole process. The stencil on the sidewalk reads: "Sanctuary City for the Rich." And there is some truth in that, but more personally, I want to live in a humane space, i.e. a space with room for everybody, a little sun, a heater. Last Saturday I met the property manager at my new place, walked into the apartment, looked around, thought, wow, this is amazing, and said, wow, this is amazing, I'd love to rent it, and she said okay, send me your stuff, and that was that. There wasn't an involved process, there wasn't twenty desperate people trying to make a good impression, there wasn't a fax machine or rental application or gigantic impersonal landholder involved. So simple! They way it should be. In other news, an old poem was recently published by the journal Bath House, along with an audio version of the poem which is kind of cool. Have a listen.

2011-02-20T19:07:00.000-08:00

Two Found Poems from Chinese (Teach Yourself 1991)

Exercise 1.3

1. Mr King invites me to drink Chinese tea.
2. Mr Li greatly dislikes Mr King. (Mr Li can't stand Mr. King.)
3. Mr King doesn't like Mr Li much either.
4. You don't thank me so I don't thank you either.

Exercise 20.3

1. All Chinese like eating Chinese food.
2. Any branch of the Bank of China has the same exchange rate for changing money.
3. Current accounts and deposit accounts have different rates of interest.
4. I have to change my traveller's cheques into US dollars today.
5. When you go abroad you have to take your passport (with you) otherwise you can't leave the __country.
6. Asia and Africa are very different from a historical point of view.
7. Do you still remember her telephone number? Don't forget to give her a call tomorrow whatever __you do.
8. Politically speaking European countries are pretty much the same with a few minor differences.
9. Regardless of whether you've signed (your name) or not, I want to look at your passport.
10. No matter whether the bank clerk had counted the money several times or not, he wanted to (had ___to) count it (once).
11. What you're saying is that you'll only get to know him if you happen to bump into him, is that it?
12. I won't do it like this unless there are regulations.

2011-02-16T09:34:00.001-08:00

Yesterday evening I went to look at a studio in the Mission. It was pretty small. Not enough room for my big sweaty body and two full bodied cats. Bodice. Bodie. Broom stick. It's impossible. To find. An affordable apartment in San Francisco. I'm slowly going insane. I also went to look at a studio in the Tenderloin. At 4 o'clock. Yesterday. Sharp. It was a nice place. However it was in the heart of the heart of the heart of the Tenderloin which is quite possibly the nastiest place in all of San Francisco. Not necessarily dangerous though it is, but in my experience the strung out drug addicts generally keep to themselves. San Francisco values or something like it. Tolerance, coupled with an implicit agreement to not cause problems. Shit on the sidewalks. Chinese food and no grocery stores. Three blocks in and three blocks out. Jones street.

Really sorry to keep complainin' but I'm hopin' this folksy turn in mah prose will make this post a lot o fun to read. End. On the bright side of things school and classes are going well. Two large but good groups of 202 students, and the support classes, though a little boring, are nice work (if you can get it). Pronunciation lab has also settled in with a couple groups of steady students. Barak Obama. The stress is on the second syllable of his first name which tells us that it's not a name with English origins. Like Andy. Or Susan. Um. Did I mention that one of my cats has been falling over lately and I had to take him the emergency veterinarian two nights ago? His diagnosis: "lameness on the left back limb." The good doctor provided pain medication, either to treat his sprain or arthritus, but either way nothing is broken and he seems to moving around a little better today than yesterday, so as, it's was just a little injury not a life ending neurological disorder.

Asides from the above I have nothing else to report. Scott Walker is messing up Wisconsin. It's exciting to be reading about what's happening in the middle east and I'm so glad Twitter is no longer part of the discussion. It's been raining here for the last couple days but has stopped as of this morning. My other cat is snoring. Every time I see a car with a for sale sign in it I think to myself, "maybe I could live out of that car." So sorry. Housing is all I can think about. I should go. By this time next week I will have either found a place or really be freaking out. See you later!

2011-02-09T10:56:00.001-08:00

Yesterday evening I went to go look at a studio in the Haight. It was pretty nice. Two rooms including huge kitchen and a bathtub that seemed to be dug out of the ground. It was priced at the usual close to a thousand dollars a month that most studios that are somewhat close to downtown are priced at, so as, it was a good deal relatively speaking. Because it was a deal, there were twenty people in and out of the apartment while I was there, filling out the application, and I really doubt it will be offered, which is just as good because I really can't afford to pay that much. Two hours previous to that I rang Kristen's doorbell to discuss renting her room but unfortunately she did not answer. I imagined the other roommates looking down at me from the windows as I rang #25, and deciding not to answer the door based on my appearance. A lady walked by with a dog and I asked her, "Are you Kristen?" No, she was not.

But it's still early in San Francisco March housing match play fantasy playoff round robin sudden death tournament. By next Wednesday I will start to freak out a little bit more noticeably. Ariel is in the same situation, and as we talked about the misery of the search while sitting at the part-time ESL computer terminals, we smiled, but only because it's inappropriate to appear despondant at an education institution. Night termors. Cold sweats. Terrible dreams. Bursting into tears while watching a New York Times video about safe injection clinics in Vancouver, and the line, "I have to get clean so I can be with my family." But really, it's not that bad. I'm exadurrading. Really. I have faith that I'll find a good situation, as I always have before. It's just an unpleasant process, and very time consuming. Like, consuming the entire month February, not to mention packing. Yeah.

After viewing the studio I met up with Steven to attended a "class" at the the Free University of San Francisco on Nietzsche, which was more like a discussion group but it was interesting and worthwhile. A good idea, a free University, one that needs a lot of work, but I'm into the idea of not having to pay for self improvement. Some things, like poetry for example, work better when one's livelihood is not part of the equation. At at at at at at any any any any any any rate rate rate rate rate, the semester has also become insanely busy: nine hours of ESL support on Monday followed by three hours of ESL support and three hours of teaching pronunciation on Tuesday make for a draining two days. I'm glad I have the work and need the money, but I always have to be careful about taking on too much work, as when I start to get drained in a particular social/spiritual way it leads to lapses in self-care. So far so good though. I have to get ready for class now. See you.

2011-02-02T10:36:00.000-08:00

I start teaching today. The semester started Monday where I supported an Industrial Design classs called Industrial Processes, a six hour class that let out around ten thirty in the morning because there was nothing to do with the six hours until the students started in on their projects, supporting the argument made by students who don't show up on the first day because "nothing happens on the first day." These were graduate students though, so everybody was there. With the rest of the day off I did some reading and looked for apartments, sat in a chair with a hot water bottle on the small of my back which I tweaked the other day while vacuuming up cat hair. Yes I own a vacuum and yes my life is really that boring or as my aunt put it to me a while back, facetiously I think though one never knows, sometimes not even the speaker, "so you've decided to live a life of the mind." Heart and body too I hope.

On Tuesday I supported a class called The Language of Photography which sounds really exciting but actually seems to be the same stuff I supported last semester in a Digital Photography class. The upshot is again, it's a graduate school class so maybe the content is more interesting. Both of the support classes this semester are taught by seemingly pretty accomplished folks, for example the Photography teacher helped make Sketchers' first ad campaign. Which is not only impressive, but courageous of him to admit. Just kidding. I'm sorry. I don't mean to be snarky. I just wanted to use the word "courageous." Over winter break when I rode up to see Adam with Ted, Ted told me that when somebody would tell my father a really stupid idea, my father would respond that he thought it was courageous of them to attempt it. I'd like to think he was being more earnest than snarky, trying to find a way to stay open to possiblity.

Which brings me to Today, teaching an actual class at three thirty but the morning and early afternoon are clear for this blog, class preparation, and a little writing. On Thursday the schedule is basically the same, with the morning here replaced by a morning at the writing lab. Anyway. This is boring. Which is somewhat intentional because I'm looking for apartments, and I just assume that when I sign my name at the end of an email some potential roommate will run it through Google and end up at this blog. Because it's important to check people out. Sometimes. Which is why I'd like to reiterate if you're new to this blog, that this blog is a kind of journal, but it's also a writing project, and I'm a totally awesome roommate. Would you also like to live with two cats? I have a one nice rug (6x4) and am very clean. Looking for apartments sucks. See you on Craigslist.

2011-01-26T19:43:00.000-08:00

11TH SUICIDE POEM IN NOVEMBER

The next child I won't father we will name
Nomathamba. We will call her Thembi for short
She will be exactly like Pharaoh drew her. She
Will smile several hours each day. Her teeth
Will come on like white Christmas. She will crawl
Into bed with us to see if we
Are fucking. She will never be scared. She will
Speak Xhosa. I will buy her a dog named Mardi Gras
And she will learn what it is to lose something
You love. She will grow up.

___________________________-John Ross

2011-01-24T14:40:00.000-08:00

Why does this electrical outlet not work? It worked just a minute ago but now it's not working. In the library. Working in the library, my new pseudo office, caused in part because my censored's censored in town for the last ten days, eleven nights in the beautiful Mission district who was really nice to have around, clean respectful a little female energy to cut the stale smell of passive aggression and dirty dishes delete delete delete edit internet skip ahead impending home stay in a low privacy one bedroom summer cottage three days before the eagle landed. Like the moon or Apollo 7. Ocean's 11 and 12. Crime capers starring attractive men who bankroll progressive social causes with Hollywood schlock.

Yep. It's really nice to work in the library. There is something about being amongst the homeless and those like me with homes who want to get out of them or can't be there that makes it easy to focus. A kind of bed of nails to keep my back straight. Last Thursday I sat down at one of these broad oak tables at 11AM and didn't get up until 7PM. Which was totally weird. No water. No bathroom break. No talking no running or spitting or playing ball. Nope. Just sitting there, doing research on Ph.D programs which lead into emails to program people explaining my situation leading into thinking about teaching and the little essay that appeared that evening. It was weird. Not like a demon had possessed me but I knew that if I got up I wouldn't finish, and after about three I stopped being hungry. Is this cruel and unusual?

At any rate at any rate at any rate at any rate at any rate at any rate at any rate at any rate at any rate it's the last week of the six week furlough from teaching. Back at it soon, meetings this week, prepping for the semester, finalizing the schedule, which is a word that I've just recently learned to spell: schedule. Not scheduale. But schedule. No a. This is proof that it's possible to learn stuff, that education does have value. Write your congress person. From this week's New Yorker article about Oprah Winfrey's new television channel, 24 hours a day of continuous programming. Oprah says:

I am very much aware of the energy that the television is transmitting all of the time. That's why I don't allow--up until now, I have never allowed it on in my house, unless there was something specific that I wanted to see, because I don't want all that energy coming into my space.

2011-01-20T18:53:00.000-08:00

One of the central questions that has come out of teaching non-traditional students has been how to make writing appeal to a group of people who have typically had little success with writing in the past. A group of people who generally are not strong readers, and generally did not do as well in high school as many of their peers. A group of people where the typical class will range in ages 18 to 35, and contain people from five different countries. They do not have very much in common with each other, much less anything academically in common, such as agreed upon standards or shared skills. Some have written ten page papers and some have trouble with basic grammar. Some read science fiction novels and keep blogs and some get all they need through their friends and television. Some are there to study advertising and some are there to study movie make up; the difference between a fashion designer and a fashion merchandiser or an industrial designer and an illustrator. "Commercial arts" is the banner all these different areas of study fall under, but they each require a particular knowledge and skill set. At the beginning of every course we could not be more different.

As the course moves forward, through introductions, games, lectures and assignments, we begin to get to know each other. This happens through the structure of the class and our shared experiences, as well through all the little asides that come out of being together. I saw a movie last night. Oh me too. What'd you see? Nice shoes what are you eating it smells good and we begin to make friends. Meanwhile something else is happening. We are writing about our lives and what's important to us. Each student takes a risk: what if this isn't good? What if other students laugh at me? What if the instructor fails me? Some risk more and some risk less, but regardless, we are putting ourselves out there in a form that is as unmediated an expression of self as there is: what do you think?

For non-native speakers, this risk involves not just the risk of self expression but the risk of misspeaking.The question stands: what right do you have to be here if you do not even speak the language or understand the culture? While this question is illustrated clearly by the problems that come with mastering a second language (when does one become a master?), its existential root can be found everywhere. For the student who barely survived high school because they were more interested in drawing pictures than preparing for No Child Left Behind, the risk involves years of bad grades and all the memories that come with. What right do you have to be here if you do not even have the most basic of skills? For the student who came back to school after twenty years of office work, leaving stability and self-sufficiency behind for instructors with no time and Facebook obsessed twenty somethings, what right do you have to be here? For the minority student, often the lone representative of their ethnicity in the room, and all the cultural trappings that come with that fact, what right do you have to be with all of these people who don't look like you? For the wealthy who don't have to get jobs but all thier friends do, what right do you have to tell your story when its subsidized by your parents? And for the underpaid teacher who has no idea what he's doing, what right do you have to stand up and lecture? To pass judgment on the quality of work? It goes on and we go through it together.

To come back to the original question, how to make writing matter, is difficult. What motivations would a person have to put into writing when there is so much that surrounds the act of writing before one can begin? It's as if the work load for the non-traditional student is doubled when compared to those who do not have such keenly developed neurosis surrounding the work of writing. Then again, judging by the way professional writers talk about procrastination, it seems like anticipatory dread is part of the act of writing, even for those who have made writing a large part of who they are. Regardless, these students need to work twice as hard to reach their college ready peers. In a more general sense, if writing is an act of self realization, finding words for the thing, the act of naming, like Adam named the animals or parents name their child, this is this, this = this, translating what we feel into words, our most fundamental definition of what it means to be human; it is important work to me. Thus, from here we lift off in hopes that the energy these beliefs provide is enough to push through the doubt.

2011-01-17T10:17:00.000-08:00

What is the connection between cats and dogs? People? No, I mean what's the connection between writing whatever and avoiding the question? People? No, I mean what's the connection between writing on a computer and writing in real life like a reality television show or during a war? People? No, I mean what's the connection between being relatively content and the quality of artistic work? Merit? No, I mean cake. Delicious. Like chocolate but not the kind I helped make the other night. Frosting that turned out badly postscript: don't beat whip cream after it has whipped it turns into cheese or butter or chunky liquid. Like toast, how does something change so dramatically with air or temperature or tickets to the circus. Nope. Not really. Trying to write something down but letting the chatter box rule. Not trying too hard to stop it. Where does it come from? Radio in your mind. Legs like dead weight no longer able to swim my lower half bent like the blade of a pocket knife. Jack knife as they say, jack knifed across the highway. Highway to Heaven. Necessary Angel. Okay, back to the mean topic, what's the relationship between contentedness and artistic output? Seems to me that when I'm happy my work gets sloppier, not so worried about quality control. Fine how it is like a poetry student always the idea that it's fine how it is. Original sentiment but the sentiment isn't original. "Pedestrian" was what it was called. Question: Problem: what exactly do I have to show for ten years of working on poetry asides from a few publications? No joy but in the work itself not the world it's for. Double negative stopped to pick my nose. Coherant thought forget it back to work my cat is cute I'm moving out of this apartment at the end of February this is crazy fog is gone whew no to work I go.

2011-01-11T12:40:00.000-08:00

San Francisco is no longer warm or beautiful. But if I turn the lamp on the light bulb gets hot and a little heat comes off. The cats figured this out not me. Three weeks until school starts and I have a list of things I'm working on. I'll spare you. Hard earned time to work on projects. And to stay out of trouble. Plan to see many a movie in the coming weeks. Last night I saw Hadewijch at the Roxy. Six Fifty Monday special. Matinees are also a good idea. I really enjoyed that movie. Here, please enjoy these selected clippings:

60 First Graders, 4 Teachers, One Suspect’s Odd Behavior Born or Made?

“Ewww,” squealed a boy named Ethan when he was told that the class would plant a banana tree later that day. Other children began mimicking the sound, which they had been making earlier. “Ethan, stop it,” said his teacher, Pepe Gutierrez. “I don’t know why you are screaming.”

*

Mr. Ali, 26, continued: “He presented a poem to the class that he’d written called ‘Meathead’ that was mostly just about him going to the gym to work out. But it included a line about touching himself in the shower while thinking about girls. He was very enthusiastic when he read the poem out loud.”

*

Dr. Burt found that, among 289 pairs of male twins, all born in the ’70s, those who exhibited lower levels of antisocial behavior at ages 17 and 20 were more likely to be married by age 29. This she sees as evidence of a selection process, in which well-behaved men were winnowed off while their antisocial buddies were left to the bachelor pad.

2011-01-03T12:35:00.001-08:00

Back in one piece. San Francisco is warm and beautiful.

2010-12-27T18:13:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-20T11:23:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-12-18T12:17:00.000-08:00

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!

2010-12-15T12:00:00.000-08:00

Excerpts from the article "What Does It mean To Be Cool?" by Dr Thorsten Botz-BorNsteinas as found by the printer in the ESL department on my way to the restroom, originally published in the Oct/Nov issue of Philosophy Now.

The aesthetics of cool developed mainly as a behavioral attitude practiced by black men in the United States at the time of slavery. Slavery made necessary the cultivation of special defense mechanisms which employed emotional detachment and irony.

The stylized way of offering resistance that insists more on appearance than on substance can turn cool people into untouchable objects of desire. On the other hand, to be cool can be seen as a decadent attitude leading to individual passivity and social decay.

A president is uncool if he clings to absolute power, but becomes cooler as soon as he voluntarily concedes power in order to maintain democratic values. This does not mean that the cool person needs to be an idealist. On the contrary, very few of the coolest rappers are idealists.

...

In a phrase: the cool person lives in a constant state of alienation.

Hmmm. Very interesting. I'm not going to draw any conclusions from this but this seems to directly link with article posted just below this post, about Progressives and Obama. In the meantime, here's a rainbow as rendered by my 1.3 megapixel camera phone! (squint):

2010-12-13T10:10:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-12-08T13:06:00.000-08:00

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

2010-12-07T10:00:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-12-06T10:00:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-12-05T17:15:00.000-08:00

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.

2010-12-01T11:34:00.001-08:00

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.

2010-11-29T10:04:00.000-08:00

hi nice to see you sun's out but it's brisk not cold but cool wear gloves and a scarf gives me an excuse not to reach into my pocket to pull out change was sick the whole weekend not uncomfortably so not dying of flu but mild discomfort a sore throat and congestion, a fogginess that didn't lift for five days but now its gone i'm back to health full health asides from a little cough and a little congestion which will be good proof of my illness in case anybody asks what i did over the break i can just say i was sick and that will be the end of it but it wasn't i consumed eighteen cups of tea i accomplished two things over the break the first was to catch up on school work and i did that graded evaluation arguments, read and commented on work for the creative writing class then calculated progress grades and that was that one night played cribbage with Q lost again goddamn its strange to consistently lose at a game that i've been consistently competitive in and the next night played chess with S and lost again played videogame basketball with B on thanksgiving evening and come to think of it lost that too hmm a weekend of losing maybe but more like a weekend of playing anyway when i wasn't playing games or school work it was reading and the music machine though its hard to compose when my head is full of sand. IT WAS NICE AND RELAXING. that goddamn videogame had taken over my life for a little while but i had made a decision to lay off it for the TG break and that's exactly what happened feels good to be free feels free to be good without periods like erma from a sit com that got canceled i've officially decided that Fallout: New Vegas is evil no doubt about it something that consuming should be encased in concrete and buried underground or shot into the sun i think my mom said to me five years ago i forget the context "we shouldn't of let you play so many videogames when you were growing up" and i didn't think much about that statement until recently playing Fallout when i thought to myself "i shouldn't let myself play so many videogames"

2010-11-24T11:35:00.000-08:00

I've taken on a mild cold and went home early from work yesterday. Which is something that I didn't used to do. Instead, if I was feeling sick I would make huge efforts to be 'at' work. At some point in the last couple years I realized that 1) It's not actually that important for me to be there 2) My system gets better much faster if I make a serious effort to take it easy and 3) Sick pay. Sick pay might be the deciding factor. What a concept. Before teaching I always had to be there to get paid. If I didn't get paid, then I was in some kind of trouble in my mind. Sitting around at home being sick produces a weird, existential "what am I doing with my life" kind of feeling, and sometimes it's easier to be at work to avoid this feeling. Kind of the like the dilemma of the upcoming winter break: a month and a half off (unpaid but I collect unemployment) is a ton of time. Enough time to run out of 'things to do', get knocked unhappy, moan, get a hold of myself, plan, do, acclimate to the new schedule, get busy, and by that time school starts again and the whole cycle starts again.

Change is difficult. Which is why I like to go away as soon as the semester gets out. Being ramped up, especially as the semester climaxes, and then suddenly having nothing to put all that energy into is a weird let down. So as, dislocation and confusion pops me out of my schedule. This year, school lets out on the 18th of December and I don't leave for Wisconsin for Christmas until the 23rd. There's a little extra time, but not too much. Thus I try to regulate my emotions but controlling the situations I find myself in. It's like controlling a character in a video game. Speaking of which, I have been playing a video game pretty steadily for the last three weeks. The game machine tells me I've logged 48 hours playing the game. That's a long time to be in a fantasy world. After about three hours I begin to feel parts of my brain beginning to atrophy. Parts of my body. I successfully stop sometimes. Sometimes not.

On Sunday in the newspaper there was this article about the effects of technology on young people and their education/future. That fact that technology is addictive is not exactly news, nor is the idea that people have shorter attention spans these days. What is news is that now we have some data to prove it. For example, studies have shown that video games destroy your vocabulary and sleep patterns. I can attest both of these. Both my roommate, who has been watching me play, and I, have been having weird and terrible dreams. In one of my dreams, while talking to a real (dream) person I had 'dialogue options', choosing what to say from a list of options like I was in the game. Ugh. Anyway, I have some errands to run before I go off to work today so I'm going to go. Happy Thanksgiving. Hopefully you get to spend it with family, or if your family makes you feel weird, hopefully you get to spend it with friends. Thank you for reading.

2010-11-22T10:15:00.000-08:00

It's gotten cold and rainy in San Francisco. Which is in stark contrast to the warm border line hotness that we were experiencing a couple weeks ago. It's a little bit of a relief that November isn't going to feel like August, which would make August feel like May, May would have to switch places with December and June might have to get its weather imported from Vietnam or wherever the oversees weather shipping rates are low, which is hard to predict. But a cold rain has been visiting on and off since Friday, for example five minutes ago it was raining but now the sun is shining. One of my co-workers who lived in Ireland for a long time told me that the Irish, when greeting each other, often complain about the weather, but it doesn't come off as whiny. More like small talk. Whereas here, somebody who always complains about the weather might come off as a bummer. So as, "I love the cold moist air in my lungs." I've missed it.

I had a busier than usual weekend. On Friday was the Encyclopedia reading, which, though I was increasingly nervous for for a couple weeks, was really fun. About sixteen people read/performed/played a video/showed drawings, which initially I was dreading as long readings can be not much fun, but the diversity of projects and quality of work/entertainment was really high, and it was a totally energizing two and a half hours. Totee. There were a lot of people there, co-workers and writing friends and even some students came out. It was cool to be out. It had been a while. Saturday afternoon I went to see some friends stage a reading of a co-workers play, and on the way home got caught in Saturday evening's rain. I have a good rain jacket but nothing for my bottom half. It was kind of fun to get miserably wet but only because a warm shower was waiting.

Saturday night I played poker with my politician friends. Elections being over people have more time. Doc helped Malia win district 10. Q is on a paid furlough. Ranked choice voting is not all that great when there are twenty candidates to choose from. Apple and the Beatles are making a lot of money. People from Marin have better manners than people from San Francisco. But the best part of the weekend in a long term sense is that I finally figured out the latency issues that I had been having with my music machine, where because of the sound system that Windows uses, all the music/sound that I've been playing with for the last couple years has been without steady tones and resonance because I didn't realize switching to an ASIO sound driver was really really easy. For example, this song. Please note the steady and warm tones. That's new. Plus, my sister and brother pitched in to help me update my version of Ableton Live, so as, I'm no longer limited to eight tracks and four effects. Right? You know what I'm saying? My throat is feeling a little scratchy I'm going to go swallow some zinc.

2010-11-20T10:19:00.000-08:00

2010-11-17T11:08:00.000-08:00

Lately there has been a little ripple about the term 'hipster' because of this book or more concisely, this essay about what the term actually means, and its oddly derogatory use. The essay is pretty helpful for putting the phenomenon into a context beyond who is and who isn't a hipster. In reference to all of the above, I can't help but think the rootless desire for space is related to whatever desires I have to be cool. And that the desire to be cool has a lot to do with not having a firm idea of what I actually want to be. The more I identify with being a teacher, with being something based in my own experience, the less I care about what I'm not. A quote from the book Laura Warholic by Alexander Theroux, that I've been trying to find a context for for years:

I decided at one point in my life that I never wanted to be anything that would not allow me to be anything else I wanted to be…I ended up being nothing that I can currently identify, which I suppose means I got my wish.

In other news, this Friday I am reading, with 14 other people, as part of the Encyclopedia Volume 2 release. If you're in the big city, here's the flyer. It's the first time I've read anything in public (not including student readings) for four years. Wow.

2010-11-15T19:14:00.000-08:00

In the laundry mat tonight I did laundry. Nothing amazing happened. I didn't have any funny conversations or experience anything profound. I put seventeen quarters into the washing machine, turned it to 'permanent press' and got a slice of pizza (garden). I spoke with my step-dad about possible work in Wisconsin over the winter break in teaching. Got back and pulled the wet laundry into a rolly cart, pushed it around the banks of washers, and loaded two dryers, one with t-shirts, socks, and underwear, and the other with towels and dish towels. It was weird that I dried the dish towels separately, and wondered for a few instants what the professional laundry ladies I was standing next to might say about it.

I read last weeks New Yorker, picking up where I left off in an article about Rory Stewart, an interesting British politician who walked across Afghanistan, amongst other things. My favorite excerpt:

He recently described the concepts of counter-insurgency and failed states as fragments of "metaphysical structures" no more real than the parallel universes filled with demons and bodhisattvas imagined by eighteenth-century Mahayana Buddhists.

I love that one day, people will look back, maybe, and see a gigantic blind spot where we thought we were being smart and insightful; that all our great ideas about how the world works are anchored to our time and place, and don't last. It makes me wonder what it is that I'm doing terribly wrong that I don't know about yet...the Internet? Facebook? Cellphones? Laundry? Pizza? Step-dads? Winter? Magazines? Quarters? But really I just like thinking of policy analysts as religous zealouts.

I folded my laundry and went home. The most significant part of doing laundry was running into Liz on the way up and talking about the semester. I then went to the grocery and picked up some fruit. I talked to Nate about PhD. programs on the way. This is one of those blog postings where if you read it you might get an idea of what my life is like, so as, you don't have to call or write emails. But this isn't true. Even if you read this you should still call or write. I don't know how many hours there are in a week but I usually only spend two or three of them writing in this blog. Speaking of which, I've added a new on-going list of songs I like, forget about, and then remember and find on Youtube; and have added links to them to the right. Scroll down. It's on going. Hope you're well. It's been a pretty hot November, so far which is totally weird. California.

2010-11-12T10:32:00.000-08:00

last night the good year blimp passed over just as I got off work

2010-11-10T12:02:00.000-08:00

Found this in the Moma yesterday. With many other museum goers. The European guy got a phone call and when he walked out I noticed his pants were acid washed (?) in the back to the point of being completely white. It looked very European and I judged him harshly with my lizard brain because his cell phone was loud and everybody knows you don't start talking on your phone in a crowded gallery! I then wondered if I was homophobic, turned the word over a few times, concluded nothing, and kept looking at the Henri Cartier-Bresson photos that were hanging up. Really great!

Photography is a medium that I had never been too interested in until these last couple semesters. Before supporting the ESL students and their awesome instructors in conceptual photography and digital photography, and going to a museum with someone with which I might need to negotiate with in terms of how our time is spent together, I might say things like, "You know, photography has never really been that interesting to me." because paintings or whatever were more my thing. Generalizations so broad they mean nothing. "Politics have never really been that interesting to me." "Country music has never really been that interesting to me." And then we learn something and are given a lens to look through...a personal context/stake from which to instill meaning!!! Meaning!!

The quote was interesting to me for two reasons: 1) because I've been into 'life' lately, and 2) because I've been playing a new video game (I won't say which one but it involves hit points and dialogue options if you know what I mean) where I walk around a little world. The point of the game, or fun of the game, is to 'discover' this little world. So as, if by discovering myself...than I am discovering the world...and my self is a pixelated woman with a mohawk and a shotgun who walks around with a guy wearing a space suit in a closed post-apocalyptic world designed by a group of well paid designers then I... don't know what that quote means. Just what am I discovering by exploring this world? Oh video games! You're so easy to criticize!

2010-11-08T09:37:00.000-08:00

Today is my birthday. I am 32 years old. What's it like to celebrate a birthday on the Internet? It's like nothing on Earth. Only my fingers, wrists, and language functions (?) get worked. Not like a bath or a sun beam on a cat's belly. More like receiving a text message or hearing the Parks and City workers weed wacking the park next door. One of my favorite birthdays was when I lived in Portland, 2002, and Aric, Joel, and Dave came down and we had a night of it. I drank whiskey until I threw up. Last year I went hiking in a new pair of shoes with a girlfriend. Two years ago I went camping. Three years ago I went camping. This year I have dinner plans on Wednesday and a full work schedule.

I have to be honest though: I get sad on my birthday. Not sure why. Something about being 7 years old. Questions like what kind "what kind of cake would you like?" still throw me. If I really got what I wanted, my favorite cake would be decided for me and it would be delicious. Red velvet cake? Chocolate? Angel Food? It all tastes good. I even like the grocery store cakes and their lard frosting. Vegan cakes are good too. That is to say, it's not cake that I want, but reassurance I am understood. C pointed out the other day that I like to bring her little gifts, a sign of affection that is just as much a demonstration of how I want to be loved.Through reciprocation we come to an agreement, learning over time how to be with another person. What I really want for my birthday is to hang out in a womb. Just for a day. To be all of one thing.

But, obviously, it's too late for that. We are condemned to freedom. Sartre said this, at least according to the international student who wanted my feedback on his essay about Sartre. His grammar was excellent! In other news, my brother ran the New York marathon yesterday for the 3rd or 4th time (I forget ) and broke three hours. There were 45,000 people who ran it and he was in the top 2%. Not bad. There is a street in Spain named after the Super Mario Brothers and my niece started the first year (preschool) of her academic career. My sister sent me six cupcakes and three candles in the mail. My mom bought me a coat. Here is a link to the Mu-ziq song "Green Crumble". Happy birthday.