Ahoy! Avast! and such.

The first time I did this quiz the result was dumb. So I tried again. Now the result is less dumb.

My pirate name is:

Dirty Jack Read

You're the pirate everyone else wants to throw in the ocean -- not to get rid of you, you understand; just to get rid of the smell. Even through many pirates have a reputation for not being the brightest souls on earth, you defy the sterotypes. You've got taste and education. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from piratequiz.com.
part of the fidius.org network

I suppose you could argue that all internet quizzes are dumb. But what do you expect? Its teh intarwebs. Dumb is what we do.

I Am Amused!!!!!!!

I found an entertaining article on Slate about the exclamation point, its historical significance, and its overuse in electronic communication. Read the article here!!!

My favorite line:
"Like 24-hour cable newscasters, we compensate for the unworthiness of our meanings by being emphatic!"

A Note on Role Models

There's a lot of noise on the news right now about Michael Vick and dogfighting, and rightly so. Dogfighting is heinous, and people who can use animals that cruelly need harsh punishment.

But the people who whine about how Vick is supposed to be a role model piss me off.

Vick is a role model, and he's a good one. If the role you need modeled is that of a football quarterback, or that of an athlete, he's far beyond excellent. You couldn't ask for much better.

But if the only role you know Michael Vick in is that of a football player, why would there be an issue with how he acts in other roles? If you want a "whole person" model, you probably need to look somewhere where you know the whole person. If you buttonhole a celebrity who performs one thing admirably as your whole-person model, you're a moron.

And the world needs fewer morons.

Bottom line: Michael Vick is a great role model, but a terrible human being, and, therefore, a terrible choice for a whole-person model.

My Ears! My Ears!

My mentor at OCCC turned me on to Pandora radio. It's friggin awesome. Songs I haven't thought about in years are coming up on my playlist. Right now? Megadeth's "Hangar 18."

I recommend this.

In other news, I have a mentor at OCCC.

Another Quiz

Why my wife is taking a quiz about the type of people she attracts is beyond me, but it turns out her results were correct.

Clearly, mine were less accurate.

What type of person do you attract? Your Result: You attract Yuppies! You attract the very well-dressed, job oriented type of people. They usually have their finances together, are 'middle of the road' on most topics, generally happy with the 'main-stream' of things. If it is stability you are after, these are good people to attract, if you seek adventure, it may be time for an overhaul.
You attract artsy people!
You attract geeks!
You attract rednecks!
You attract unstable people!
You attract models!
What type of person do you attract? Quizzes for MySpace

It's the "middle of the road" and "main-stream" bits I question.

Dumb Things I Have Read

I had a good week teaching, and now I'm looking over the Incoming Assessment essays my composition students wrote on Thursday. The essays are mostly what you'd expect: some students already know what they're doing, and I'll need to find ways to challenge them beyond the basics; some kids can put a sentence together but can't organize a body of thought yet; and others can't find their asses with both hands.

In her introduction, one of my students wrote this sentence:

“This statement is very true for the most part.”

That sentence provided an unfortunate first impression of what was actually a competent essay. It's an indication that this student is in the right place--if her writing had no flaws she wouldn't need my class, and if she and I both do what we're supposed to she'll stop writing like that soon.

But I couldn't help laughing. And retyping the sentence in a file marked "Dumb Things I Have Read."

The first year I was a teaching assistant we were all forced into Portfolio Assessment. Every essay our students wrote during the semester was revised and placed in a plastic folder, their names were removed from their work and replaced by numbers, and the piles of folders--huge, slippery stacks of yellow plastic--were given to other TAs at random.

We had two days from the time we could pick up the portfolios to the time we had to submit them. Most classes had around twenty students, and each of those students wrote about five essays. That left each of us with about 100 essays to read and only 48 hours to read them in.

We crammed into our office, a converted classroom with eight desks for sixteen TAs. And a nasty couch. Everyone made an appearance, and some of us were there for the whole day. I spent sixteen straight hours reading essays, and at some point something broke in my mind. I'd read an essay and the errors caused me hysterics. I laughed until I cried. The unintentional comedy of freshman writing imposed on my overstimulated mind was too much.

Weeks later I wished I had recorded some of the sentences that made me laugh so hard. The next semester I started my file. It contains some real gems:

“When this happened the world was hit with many sexually transmitted diseases and soon the condom was being enforced to use more during intercourse.”

And any subject could produce a winner:

“I have one word of advice for young ladies that might be in the same shoes as I once was, never give up on your dreams because of your economic status.”

“But a inhumane act on a developmentally disabled person is an act of utter repulsion and insolence.”

I continued recording these nuggets through my Intermediate Writing class and while I taught Intro to Creative Writing. Short stories seemed like a rich source of nonsense:

“While standing at the proofing machine, Jamie was sitting at her desk slumped over just waiting for some work and had a look on her face as if she could have been doing something better than sitting there.”

“My supervisor came rushing over like a busy bee trying to shuffle for work to conjure up for the people in the napkin area.”

“Now my tears came pouring down like an erupting water fall.”

“Jane, trying to remember who Claire was, started to shed tears, realizing that she couldn’t even remember what she had done the following day.”

“The call was made to Susan’s parent who lived in a small farming community outside of Chattanooga Tennessee at eleven thirty six p.m.”

And this is why I teach. To help students learn how not to do this. And to amuse myself. Some ill-considered sentences, while uncomfortable, are great for a laugh:

“I remember opening the door and seeing nothing but plain white walls, ceramic tiled floors, a very tiny window, and my new roommate sitting at his desk with his computer in his boxers.”

Ouch.

It's a Boy!

Well, no. It's a blog. I decided that I needed a second forum for discussions that would either bore the hell out of most people who might read this blog, or would suffer from being mingled with my more mundane everyday observations. So, if you're interested, check out the second blog. It's listed on the right of this page, at the bottom.

A New Look at an Old, Dead Woman

Or should that be "a dead old woman?" On the news today I saw a report about the diaries of Mother Theresa of Calcutta.

I've known people who admired her and those who reviled her, but somehow my attitude about her stayed completely ambiguous. Those who admire her cite the obvious: that she felt a "calling" to minister to the poor, that she lived among those people and shared their circumstances for half a century, that she was always cheerful in any circumstance. Those who disliked her talked about how she diverted funds that could have cured lepers so she could buy medicine that eased their pain while their flesh rotted, and while she pushed for their conversion. I never found either credible as a complete picture of the woman.

What is undeniable about Theresa's life is that from the late 1940s on she lived to serve unfortunate people. It matters little to me why she chose to do that, or why she felt she had to do it (frankly, it's more valuable to me if it happened without compulsion), but true character (I think) is measured in how often a person can forego her own wants or (especially) her needs in order to help others. In this Theresa can't be faulted.

Christopher Hitchens, a British atheist, was called by the Catholic Church to provide counter-arguments regarding the issue of Theresa's beatification. He claimed that she told him her work wasn't to help the poor, but to convert them to Catholicism. The Catholic church beatified her despite Hitchens's contribution.

Now Theresa's diaries are being published. The diaries reveal that, except for a five-week stint in the 1950s, Theresa felt no connection to God or Jesus, didn't feel their presences (or is it just one presence? I get confused with the logistics of the Three-In-One Oil of the Deities) I have to tell you that I'm intrigued. I had no interest in a Macedonian girl who became a nun. I had little interest in a nun who claimed God told her what to do, even if it was something noble. I am intensely interested in a nun doing God's work while feeling no connection to God or Jesus, yet staying true to her religious order. That fascinates me.

But I still think she was a woman suffering under a mass social delusion, and who let that delusion limit the horizons of her life.

Earworm Alert

I found the quiz for the last post on Steven Brust's LiveJournal and since it was amusing I did it. Then a few other people did it, too. And Michele had to go and give her post a title that got a song stuck in my head.

The song--and the accompanying video--is here.

You may remember them from the Quiznos commercials from a few years ago. They really cleaned it up for the commercials, and the voice got more irritating.

Go ahead and blame me if that song sticks in your head for three days and wakes you up in the middle of the night as you shriek "or dirigibles or zeppelins or light bulbs!"

Looks Just Like Me!

You are The Hierophant

Divine Wisdom. Manifestation. Explanation. Teaching.

All things relating to education, patience, help from superiors.The Hierophant is often considered to be a Guardian Angel.

The Hierophant's purpose is to bring the spiritual down to Earth. Where the High Priestess between her two pillars deals with realms beyond this Earth, the Hierophant (or High Priest) deals with worldly problems. He is well suited to do this because he strives to create harmony and peace in the midst of a crisis. The Hierophant's only problem is that he can be stubborn and hidebound. At his best, he is wise and soothing, at his worst, he is an unbending traditionalist.

What Tarot Card are You?
Take the Test to Find Out.

So Far, So Good . . .

Two days into the semester and I'm still standing. I think my Logic class was in shock the whole hour on Monday, but I had enough time with my two Comp classes today to make them comfortable. That's more important in Comp anyway, since they're going to rely on each other for feedback and honest criticism much of the time. I really enjoyed my 8:00 group this morning. They made me feel really good to be a teacher again. Really. And I like the word "really."

The schools here seem to rely heavily on adjuncts--more than the Minnesota schools did, as far as I could tell. I've already had people who adjunct at Oklahoma State University and at Rose State College say they're going to try to promote me for sections at their schools for next semester. I would like that. Especially Rose State, which is even closer to home than OSU is. Obviously, OU would be the best choice from a travel standpoint, but they have TAs to cover a lot of their Comp sections, so my best hope there would be Creative Writing courses (which I would love--I'm just saying . . .)

Michele seems to be settling in at school nicely, making friends and such. Maybe she'll blog about that some time soon. The weekend, maybe.

And no new bug problems. That's good, too.

The Cats Be Buggin'

I declare August 19th "Flea Day."

Michele said all there is to say about it here.

Where's the Beef?

When I started to take a serious interest in philosophy, sometime in the mid-nineties, my focus wasn’t all that good. I didn’t know where to start reading, or even what my specific interests within philosophy were. I tried reading about religion, language, logic, ethics, and politics. I found that I was interested enough in all of the fields that I could pick any and read until I knew everything. That kind of naïveté is also an indication of how much I needed to read. Know everything. Heh.

One of the books that made an impact on me early on was Peter Singer’s Practical Ethics:

Singer’s an Australian ethicist and animal-rights activist who has become infamous in America for taking some startling positions regarding abortion, such as the idea that any country (such as the U.S.) that routinely advocates the slaughter of animals for food can’t make coherent anti-abortion laws, since animals are more person-like than fetuses are.

Whether I agreed with Singer or not, he got me thinking. Two of the most fundamental parts of what I considered my identity were the simplicity of my meat-and-potatoes upbringing (heavy on the meat, please) and my love for animals. You’d think these two inclinations would clash, but until reading Singer I hadn’t given much thought to the fact that a hamburger was shredded cow muscle. I knew it, intellectually, like I know the capitol of Minnesota is St. Paul, but I hadn’t considered the implications carefully. Once I read Singer, though, I was forced to take responsibility for that awareness.

From that point on I’ve been considering vegetarianism. I’ve never taken a serious stab at it because of that other fundamental component of my identity: I’m a carnivore. Not only was I raised a meat-eater, I enjoy it. Something about the texture, the moisture, the flavor excites me on a primal level. Even full of knowledge, the idea of tearing muscle fibers with my teeth, liquefied animal fat running down my chin as I grind the flesh in my molars and swallow it in a thick gob, satisfies me in a way that chewing a mouthful of corn never can.

But it’s still just a matter of preference. I can survive without eating meat, and my conscience has been unsettled since I first considered this. So I’ve tried on occasion, halfheartedly, to avoid meat. Every time, though, the cravings have become so intense they’ve overridden my conscience and my consciousness, and I’ve gorged myself as only a dedicated gourmand can.

A couple of weeks ago Jess emailed me with news about a wedding she attended, and she told me about the people she saw there. One of those people was Greg, another Mankato MFA who’d relocated to Michigan. She said he’d gone vegan. That shocked me, because Greg and I used to sit in the office and talk about food instead of getting work done. Greg was more serious about food than I was, more gourmet than gourmand, and he wasn’t shy about meat. And now he was vegan, and had been so long enough to have dropped about fifty pounds. I could never be vegan, giving up eggs and milk and cheese, but that kind of dedication really impresses me.

Jess’s email was the last trigger I needed, I guess. Michele has also been trying to avoid meat (for some of the same reasons, and for others that I don’t share), so we decided to try a version of vegetarianism: pescetarianism. It’s like vegetarianism, but the diet includes fish and shellfish.

For the last couple of weeks we've bought no meat and prepared no meat-based meals. I finished the last of the sliced turkey yesterday, and now we have no meat in the apartment.

I don’t see pescetarianism as ethically superior to eating meat—it’s morally indistinguishable from it, as far as I’m concerned. But it is a step in a more ethically-coherent direction. If I can handle this, it should be a short step to eliminating meat altogether. And then my conscience can rest.

All I can do is try, right?

Meeting the Neighbors

This morning I had a meeting on campus with the professor who has been teaching OCCC's Intro to Logic class for the last few years. He gave me all of his class materials and some advice for how to maintain some semblance of sanity while teaching logic to eighteen-year-olds. Nice guy. I'm glad he'll be around so I can continue to pick his brain.

As I was leaving the apartment this morning I heard a harsh quacking sound, as though a fifty-pound duck were hiding behind the stairwell. I turned and waited for the assault, but instead of a hyperglandular waterfowl I saw a stocky little chihuahua. She was barking, and the sound was so funny I couldn't help laughing as I reached down to pet her. She sniffed at me and licked my hand.

And then she was joined by a second dog--same size, probably a litter-mate. As he got closer I heard the neighbor lady yelling, "Chica! Paco! Come here!" Chica kept licking my hand and Paco got close enough to sniff me. Neighbor Lady said, "She's fine, but he'll probably snap at you."

I said, "I think your ducks are barking at me."

She didn't laugh. She called for her dogs again, but they were reluctant to stop sniffing me. They finally left, though, and I went to campus.

But now I've met the neighbors. They look like this:

On Unusual Anniversaries

Today is the thirtieth anniversary of Elvis Presley's death. I don't remember that day, but I remember the next day, when my friend Judd (yes, that was his name) said, "Elvis died yesterday."

"Elvis who?" I said.

I had no idea who Elvis was, though I'm sure I'd heard his music more than a few times in my life. My mom liked his music, even if she wasn't a fanatic about it. A few months later my brother and I would get a double-record set of Elvis's fifty greatest hits for Christmas:

But as momentous as Elvis's deathdday is, I usually remember August 16th as the day I left for basic training. In 1988. Nineteen years ago. When I was eighteen years old.

Ugh.

I feel old.

August 16, 1988 was a traumatic day for me--part of the worst year of my life. It was the last time I saw my father alive, and even though I didn't know that would be the case, I should have. He was too sick then for any other possibility. Only my emotional numbness kept me from realizing it, from considering the possibility that maybe I should wait a while before leaving my family. A week later I took leave, bought an overpriced, last-minute airplane ticket, was suited up in a hastily-tailored set of dress whites, and flew home to attend his funeral.

And then I went back to the navy. It took me a while to realize I hated working on electronics, a little longer to realize I was a pacifist, and maybe another decade to want to be a human. And now my life has come together so well it's like that year--those years--happened to someone else. I think of my desperation in the months following basic training and I know I'm not capturing how disabled I was. I know I can't recreate the emotional paralysis I felt. And I don't want to. There was a time when I thought I'd never feel any differently, and now I can't even remember it completely.

This sounds like a seventeen-year-old's poetry.

Suffice it to say that life is much better now. On August 16th.

And as an added bonus, here's a blurry copy of my boot camp picture:

August 16th is also a day of famous arrests: Charles Manson in 1969 and Ted Bundy in 1975. Bundy escaped, though.

I did, too.

Want To Get the Life Sucked Out of You?

Go to the Department of Public Safety in Norman.

First of all, it's damned near impossible to see from the road--just a poorly-marked door between a "laundry-mat" and a convenience store. There are forty people in the waiting room with disgruntlement floating in a noxious cloud over their heads. The one person behind the counter is taking care of everything, including written driver's tests, and has the calmest demeanor I've ever experienced. Thirty-seven hundred times someone would walk up to his counter and ask questions that were answered on a sign they had to walk past to get to him, and thirty-seven hundred times he calmly recited the instructions on the sign.

When we walked in shortly after 10:30 this morning the sign showed he was serving customer number 16. Michele became number 26 and I signed on as 27.

When we left--just after 12:30, having taken all of five minutes each at the counter--I couldn't think. Michele kept trying to start a conversation, but I couldn't participate. I could grunt. I could blink. But that was it.

The Department of Public Services isn't where you get your license plate or registration. You get those at the Tag Agency. It isn't even where you get your driver's license--you get that at the Tag Agency, too. You have to go to the DPS to get your information in the system, get your picture taken and your fingerprints entered, so you can go to the Tag Agency and get your driver's license. And what do they do at the Tag Agency? They take your picture again and check your fingerprints against those you just entered at the DPS.

So after all that waiting, and the tiniest amount of actual processing, we went to the Tag Agency and got our new Oklahoma driver's licenses. That took about seven minutes. My picture reflects the brain-deaditude I suffered at the DPS. I tried to take a picture of my license picture so I could share it with you, but our camera won't go close enough to show it.

Some New Experiences Are Bad

We've had some fun here in Oklahoma, and for the most part we've learned a lot of things that we appreciate, and that benefit us. Today we experienced a couple of things native to Oklahoma that we'd rather not repeat. Michele blogged about this here.

The first was a bout with the insect life of the state. We've had a slow drain in the master bathtub since we moved in, and over the last few days I've tried some chemical treatments to fix it. Today I had poured some Liquid Plum'r down the drain and was flushing it with hot tap water when I thought I heard some squeaking. I shut the water off and turned to find Michele hopping up and down in the doorway with a grimace of discomfort on her face. My first thought was that she needed to use the toilet, but that wouldn't be a problem here as we have two bathrooms. She continued squeaking.

"Comehelpmecomesavemecomehereandgetit."

At least, I think that's what she said.

"Huh?" I said.

"There's a spider in the laundry it's on your shirt come and get it off."

At least now the words were identifiable. I walked down the hall behind my little wife, who was skipping and hopping and shuddering. She's had some girly-girl moments since we've been here, demanding that I dispatch bugs, from the formidable pill-bug to the less-formidable dead beetle. I wasn't all that alarmed as spiders are the worst things in the world as far as Michele is concerned. (Though earlier in the day she had stopped in the Target parking lot to pet a grasshopper--go figure.)

When I looked into the clothes dryer (which is in the guest bathroom) I saw a small brown lump on my blue shirt. I almost grabbed it with my fingers and tossed it in the toilet (which is what I normally do), but as I bent closer I thought, "That is kind of an ugly spider." So instead I picked up the shirt that the spider lay on.

Michele said, "Is it dead?"

"Yes." What she didn't know wouldn't hurt her. The spider curled its legs a little as I picked up the shirt, and when it was floating on its back in toilet water its movements became more frantic. I flushed it and closed the lid. Michele was still shuddering and hopping.

I wanted to know what kind of spider it was, so I looked on the internet. The first picture that looked like a match was this one:
It's a brown recluse spider. Poisonous.


The second experience was gastronomical. Yesterday we picked up a new wine for dinner tonight. We decided to try an Oklahoma winery, and we settled on an "Oklahoma Shiraz" from Nukaya Winery. It should have concerned us that they called it an Oklahoma Shiraz, since that's the Australian term for the American Syrah. American = Syrah. Australian = Shiraz. It should have bothered us that we were buying a wine from people who didn't know the terminology as well as we did.*

We didn't heed that warning. Dang it.

When I popped the bottle open I was surprised to smell something like char on the cork. Then I poured it, and it came out thin, with a golden hue and a muddy tone. It looked a lot like brown lake water. The mouthfeel was fine, but the flavor was more in line with a bourbon whiskey than a Shiraz--woody and sweet with a harsh alcohol aftertaste.

The assessment we agreed on was that this wasn't a bad beverage, but it certainly was a bad wine. I wonder what my reaction would have been if it had been presented to me in a snifter or a goblet with the request that I try Beverage X.

*Actually, both terms are used in the United States, but I feel like being a wine snob. Even if I'm a dumb one.

I Hate When Newspapers Are Dumb

So, over at the Star Tribune there's a story of a guy who cut off a rattlesnake's head, but was bitten by said rattlesnake anyway, after the head was severed. That's a weird story, and in this age of filling every space with information, no matter how banal or trivial, I suppose it qualifies as "news."

What irritates me about the story is the headline:

Rattlesnake's decapitated head bites man

To "decapitate" means to cut something's head off. I'm aware that the semifunctional drone at the Strib means to indicate that the head was cut off and then bit the man, but in the interest of packing as much drama as possible into the headline he's (or she's--women can be morons, too) mangled his semantics. The problem is, for a head to be decapitated, its head has to be cut off. But I'm not sure how you cut off a rattlesnake's head's head.

The headline writer had a couple of options to make sense: either

Decapitated rattlesnake bites man

or

Rattlesnake's severed head bites man

would work just fine. If they felt the need, they could have used some Sean--er . . . exclamation marks:

Undead Rattlesnake's Severed Head Injects Innocent Child With Zombie Venom!!!!

I prefer my understated versions, though.

Something I Didn't Expect

This afternoon Michele wasn't feeling well, so I left her at home while I ran some errands. I was determined to find something to eat that was interesting, and since Michele wasn't with and wasn't hungry in any event, I didn't have to worry about her delicate stomach or her line-in-the-sand-type food hangups. If I wanted I could get a big, sloppy cheeseburger or the most toxic Mexican this side of Tijuana. I could have gotten deep-fried barbeque calves' brains if I could find them (and if I was totally insane). So I had my eyes peeled for something interesting.

What I didn't expect to find was a really good Indian restaurant. I was pulling into the parking lot at Blockbuster (to return the Narnia movie) and I looked between the trees, to the other end of the strip mall. A green sign read "Taste of India." I was surprised, because we had come by this mall a few dozen times in the last three weeks and hadn't noticed that sign.Hoping that it was a restaurant and not a grocery store (like the one nearer campus that advertises hookah pipes and belly dancing as well as a full selection of Indian groceries) I wandered over. The menu looked great and there was some indication that take-out was available, so I went in.

Inside, two men were relaxing. One, an older gent in a turban and traditional Indian clothes, sat at a table eating a yogurty substance. The other, who wore a white Oxford shirt and black slacks, was stretched out on a blanket on the floor taking a nap. He sprang to his feet when I walked in and he said he'd have my food ready in ten minutes.In figuring what to order I now had a dilemma--Michele wasn't hungry, and she wasn't expecting food, but if I came home with Indian takeout and there wasn't enough for her to try, my life expectancy could shrink a bit. So I did what I could.

I ordered chicken curry, Aloo Paratha (a wheat bread stuffed with potatoes and spiced peas), and Gulabjamun, described on the menu as "cinnamon flavored pastry balls, soaked in sweet syrup flavored with rose water, sprinkled with pistachio." The man did not lie--the food was ready in ten minutes. When he rang up my purchase he said, "You're not from around here. Michigan?" I hadn't said much--the guy was pretty good with accents.

I also realized while I was waiting that their hours of operation were 11:00 am to 2:30 pm and from 5:00 pm to 10:00 pm. I had wandered in at about 4:15. What a dunce was I. So I apologized for disrupting their schedule and thanked them for accomodating me. I also tipped them something like 25%. And then I took my food and went home.

The food was amazing. Michele especially appreciated the basmati rice that came with the curry, and we could only eat two of the three gulabjamun--they're great, but man are they sweet. Imagine a cold doughnut hole that's so saturated with liquid it's heavy. The syrup was thin and subtly sweet--not cloying at all.

The people at Taste of India will see me again. They have an all-you-can-eat lunch buffet.

Lots of Input These Days

We actually got around to renting a couple of movies we've been intending to watch: Pan's Labyrinth and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Neither of us realized how similar the films were until we finished watching them, but the common elements are striking.

The IMDB page for Pan's Labyrinth describes some of the overlap, which is acknowledged by Pan's director Guillermo del Toro:

both films are set around the same time, have similar child-age principal characters, mythic creatures (particularly the fauns), and themes of "disobedience and choice." Says del Toro: "This is my version of that universe, not only 'Narnia,' but that universe of children's literature." In fact, del Toro was asked to direct The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe but turned it down for Pan's Labyrinth.

There are even more commonalities than these, though. Pan's Labyrinth takes place during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 while the story of Narnia occurs during the German bombing of London of 1940-1941. In both films the children are sent to strange homes where they feel unwanted (or even endangered). Both films carry religious overtones (those in Narnia having been well covered), and each ends with a frothy message of hope (though the ending of Pan's is a little obtuse, and perched on a heap of ghastly violence).

I'm glad to have seen both, and I'm glad I rented them--I'm not sure I'd be interested in owning either. Pan's Labyrinth is unique, but I can do without the graphic cruelty at the spine of the story, and Narnia is tainted by its blatant--ham-handed, even--Christian allegory.

I also just finished reading Nathanael West: The Art of His Life by Jay Martin.

It's a compelling biography, but only if you're particularly interested in West and his work already. I found a copy online for eleven cents (plus $3.99 shipping), and I've wanted to read it for a while, so I got my chance for cheap.

West was the epitome of the obsessed and frustrated artist. Though he published four critically-acclaimed novels he never met with popular success--mostly because of bad luck, such as publishers going bankrupt. He foresaw cultural shifts, but wrote about them too early, such as A Cool Million's 1934 prediction of fascism that people dismissed, but which became an indisputable reality a few years later.

West was a notoriously terrible driver, and he died behind the wheel--running a stop-sign in southern California on December 22, 1940.

If this biography teaches me anything, it's the usual: you don't have as much time as you think you do, so write/do/say/accomplish what you have to right now.

The Pre-Draft Draft is Drafted

I finished my pre-draft draft this afternoon. It came in at 31,815 words--two thirds of which were written in the two weeks we've been in Oklahoma. Twenty-eight chapter summaries with ideas for two more. This feels good.

Now I'll set it aside for a while, finish my syllabi, draft a short story, and come back to it in a week or so. I need to sort through my note fragments (about 200 pages) and see if I missed anything. Then I'll fiddle with my structure, print it all out, and read through while taking notes.

Then I'll put it aside again for a bit, work on another short story, maybe an essay or a screenplay, then write a first draft of this pig.

I have a plan. And that plan includes going to cook hot dogs and french fries in a minute.

If I had no couth.

If I were a terrible human being I'd say something like: "This is what happens when you trade away the best and most likeable basketball player ever."

But I don't believe in fate.

Heh.

Burning Bridges

We were sitting around tonight--we'd been goofing around and waiting for later to watch a movie--when we got some shocking news. My aunt told Michele that Minnesota was having a problem. Holy crap was she right. The Mississippi River bridge on I-35W collapsed with rush-hour traffic on it just after six this evening.

Holy crap. We lived just 15 miles south of there two weeks ago. So far they're saying three people died, but there have to be more. How do you adjust when the bridge you're driving on collapses into a river?

Wow.

I'll write more later. I'm just happy that I've been able to contact my mom and Sly, and Jam has checked in, and Michele has been able to contact some of her friends.