In the Spring, Young Men's ThoughtsTurn to employment. And love too, I guess. Would be a crappy kind of love if you're broke though. Couldn't buy anything, go anywhere, see anything. You'd be like those couples in Uhuru Park, grass stems hanging from their lips, and air in their stomachs.
Not for me, thanks! I want gainful employment, even though "foreign powers" seem to be colluding to leave me penniless and turning tricks to pay the rent. Shame on you! Money has been poured to finish me!
Etc, etc.
I'm not dead, just tired of posting. I need to build up a store of experience before spilling it out onto the web. Poor neglected readers. I castigate other bloggers in my head when they don't post, but look at me. Hypocrite, yes. I'm OK with that.
My allergies are super-strong this season. What's up with that? Must be global warming. One more thing to blame Dubya for. I should put all my snotty tissues in a box and send it to the White House.
The
Million Pieces of Snot Campaign. Has a nice ring to it. Wonder if I can get Moveon.org to jump on board....
Moral Matrix
Your Score
Your scored -5.5 on the Moral Order axis and 4.5 on the Moral Rules axis.
Matches
The following items best match your score:
1. System: Socialism
2. Variation: Extreme Socialism
3. Ideologies: Activism
4. US Parties: No match.
5. Presidents: Jimmy Carter (79.04%)
6. 2004 Election Candidates: Ralph Nader (84.38%), John Kerry (69.22%), George W. Bush (37.42%)
Statistics
Of the 175893 people who took the test:
1. 0.5% had the same score as you.
2. 7.3% were above you on the chart.
3. 89.7% were below you on the chart.
4. 83.6% were to your right on the chart.
5. 11.6% were to your left on the chart.
I'm an extreme socialist! Quelle surprise :-)
Take the
test, see where you land!
Spring Break!Don't expect much by way of posting for the next week or so...
The World Won't Listen
I know I haven't posted about Morrissey or The Smiths lately, which is out of character, especially with Morrissey's new album, Ringleader of the Tormentors coming out next month. Check him out on Myspace and stream
"You Have Killed Me"I was excited to open my email today and learn about an exhibit at the
Wexner Center entitled
"el mundo no escuchará" by the Brit artist
Phil Collins.
Phil Collins
el mundo no escuchara
(2004)
Wed, Mar 1 - Fri, Mar 31, 2006
The Box
In March we're screening Wexner Center Residency Artist Phil Collins's el mundo no escuchara (the world won't listen), an exhilarating karaoke video "album" of Colombian fans singing along to tracks by 1980s' rock band the Smiths.
The British artist produced this project in Bogota, Colombia. While there, he recorded note-for-note backing tracks to the Smiths' 1987 compilation album The World Won't Listen with studio musicians and then captured local fans singing along to their favorite songs in front of an improvised film set. (video, 70 mins.)
The ongoing project reflects Collins's belief that the band piercingly captures the sentiments of isolation and being misunderstood experienced by fans in many countries. As Collins has learned on his travels, the Smiths' music speaks to "isolated bedroom devotees" from Bogota to Istanbul, Turkey, where he has since produced another version of the video.
I just came back from the video installation and it is brilliant. I never quite understood what a global following Morrissey and The Smiths has acquired over the years until I saw an article about the popularity of The Smiths amongst
Angelenos, and I began to wonder what it was about an all white band from Manchester that would appeal to so many people, from such diverse backgrounds. The blurb suggests that it has something to do with Morrissey's lyrics striking a chord with the disaffected and the disenchanted around the world.
I guess a parallel but dissimilar phenomenon would be the popularity of Bob Marley in frathouses across the country. The difference being the searing social commentary and call to revolution in Marley's lyrics do not seem to be resonating in those bastions of brute masculinity.
The video is in turns striking, funny and melancholy, much like the Smiths themselves, and the highlights for me were the man in a Mexican wrestling mask singing "Half a Person", and two women (sisters? lovers?) singing "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" in sweet soprano, one of them cradling a 3 month old baby. However, my vote for most impassioned performance goes to the middle aged man with straggly reddish blond hair and piercing grey eyes, who did an itense rendition of "Sing Me To Sleep", made all the more moving because the camera was in extreme closeup, and his eyes literally took over the screen.
This work makes me think about the possibiliies inherent in cultural production. Possibilities that open up dialogue between cultures and individuals, rather than instating relations of dominance and exploitation. If Morrissey and The Smiths can speak in a language that needs no translation, doesn't this mean that there is the chance for equitable global action? A little naive perhaps, for its probable that the very mechanism that makes The Smiths available to a global audience also entails relations of exploitation.
But still, there's something about watching these fans sing, with such passion that makes you wonder what could be...
I'm In the Nation!Well, my blog is only mentioned by name, as an illustration of the diversity of Kenyan bloggers out there. Not even a mention that I'm gay?
Full text below, link
here
SMART COMPANY
The diaries of mad Kenyan bloggers
Publication Date: 3/14/2006
Local online diarists are treading where professional journalists won’t dare to shape public opinion on everything from politics, economics to sex. Is this the birth of new media in Africa as faceless authors take on hot subjects? BEN SINGER reports
Nakeel updates her blog at a cyber cafe in Nairobi.Photo by ben Singer
Wambui Mwangi doesn’t look very mad. The political science lecturer at the University of Toronto, Canada, was animated, colourful and occasionally cerebral during the interview at the Norfolk Hotel recently. Could this really be the self-styled Mad Kenyan Woman whose online writings are read by Kenyans and foreigners alike all over the globe?
Ms Mwangi’s Web site, Diary of a Mad Kenyan Woman (madkenyanwoman.blogspot.com) is what is known as a blog (short for Web Log). Every day, from Nairobi cyber cafés to California campus computer labs, Kenyans like Ms Mwangi are online - and blogging. She’s part of a small but vibrant community of online journal-keepers, thinkers, diarists and poets. And some argue they are shaping the future of this country.
A blog is a simple thing: a regularly updated Web site that allows readers to leave comments and interact with the authors. Kenyan blogs have titles like African Bullets and Honey, The Future Diplomat, Nairobi Back in the Day and Invincible Kung Fu, highlighting the diversity in style and subjects. From serious political analysis, to personal diaries and even poetry, it’s all out there.
Mr Daudi Were, a Kenyan working in Manchester, UK, administers the Kenya Unlimited Web site (www.kenyaunlimited.com). It’s a sort of a gathering place for all Kenyans who blog or who want to. Mr Were started his own blog (www.mentalacrobatics.com) in 2003, but when he looked around for other Kenyan bloggers, he knew he needed to create more of a visible community.
“I decided to set up the Kenyan Blogs Webring (KBW) to bring us all together,” he said from England in an e-mail interview. “After a few months the ring started growing rapidly and I decided to set up Kenya Unlimited as the ring home.”
Political postings
The 27-year-old said the first month of KBW brought only three new members, but one-and-a-half years later, the group has nearly 160 and grows by an average of two per week. And this doesn’t include Kenyan blogs not registered with KBW.
Worldwide, the Web site Technorati.com estimates the number of blogs at over 27 million. The origins of the blog phenomenon dates back to 1996, but things really took off in 1999 when a San Francisco-based company launched the site Blogger.com, which uses an easy, non-technical interface to let people create and update their blogs for free.
By 2002 there were about 15,000 blogs and, by 2005, 50 were being created every minute. In the US, bloggers have even recently become major celebrities, appearing on magazine covers and striking multimillion-dollar book deals. Ms Mwangi — the Mad Kenyan Woman — has become one of the better-known Kenyan bloggers with her free-wheeling and overtly political postings. She started blogging last year after being impressed by a friend’s blog.
Online, Ms Mwangi tackles real issues from corruption to colonialism (her own academic speciality) but, on a recent visit to Nairobi, she said the format is a refreshing break from her research life. “(Blog) writing has been a way to keep my mind fresh and, my (academic) writing from going sterile and technical and basically gross,” she said.
Mwangi and Were, like many Kenyan bloggers, live overseas for study or work. Kenyans abroad often have faster and cheaper Internet access than those at home. Plus they are exposed to the blog-mad culture of countries like the US. But there are still many Kenyan voices blogging closer to home.
The most popular blog in Kenya, if media attention is any gauge, is the Nairobi-based Thinker’s Room (blog.thinkersroom.com). Known as “M,” the 29-year-old author’s witty and unflinching take on Kenyan politics and society has garnered quotations in major newspapers and is widely read by Kenyans who want to stay informed. In an e-mail interview, “M”, who works in information technology but wouldn’t reveal his identity for fear of being “pigeon-holed,” said bloggers “act as a mirror on society and an accurate barometer of the status quo.”
“They tackle issues that the media are either unwilling or unable to tackle, since bloggers do not have shareholders to account for and are not influenced by boardroom and public politics,” he said.
Western pundits have been quick to credit blogs with becoming the new Fifth Estate, a plugged-in, unfettered group of citizen journalists that would soon eclipse traditional media. A seminal moment for blogging came in 2004 when bloggers revealed false documents were used in an American TV news story about President George W. Bush. The result was much public hand-wringing and the retirement of national network anchor Dan Rather. Another watershed moment came in the lead-up to the 2004 presidential election, when the blogging community helped bolster the campaign of Howard Dean, a potential rival to President Bush.
But Mr Dean’s campaign fizzled and the great blogging revolution really happened. The Financial Times magazine recently opined in an article that the hype has been just that.
But Kenyan bloggers are not so cynical yet. “There is more than enough room in Kenya for both blogs and the traditional media,” said Mr Were of Kenya Unlimited. “The Kenyan blogging community gives voice to those who may not, for a variety of reasons, be able to get their opinions into the traditional media.”
Not all Kenyan blogs get political, though. Some resemble personal diaries that have been opened for anyone with an Internet connection to read.
Nakeel’s blog (nakeel.blogspot.com), for example, contains links to online cartoons, but the 21-year-old journalist in Nairobi, who didn’t want her real name to be used, also writes about personal experiences: the death of a close relative or a traumatic experience of witnessing sexual harassment at the Coast.
“I guess this is just a way to teach people about myself,” said Nakeel at Java House in the city. She said she was shy at first about putting personal posts online, but soon came to appreciate the comments and support of her blogging friends.
“Sometimes you go and read somebody’s post and then you feel this person with some attachment there...like a sister or a brother. You feel like it’s someone you know even though you don’t know them physically.” Some of Kenya’s bloggers know each other in person. There has already been one official KBW “meet-up” and another is planned for this month.
But not everything about the blogosphere is about love and support. Ms Mwangi, of Mad Kenyan Woman, recounted a run-in with an on-line “blog stalker”, who left nasty comments on her site, and even pursued her to other blogs insulting the comments she made.
Village bloggers
But that negative experience ended on a positive note. “I stopped responding to him and then all of these supporters I didn’t know I had jumped in to say, ‘Shut up! We don’t like you! Go away!’” she said. “And that was very exciting.”
While Nairobi is home to most bloggers in Kenya, up-country areas have their fair share. The Kenyan Villager (kenyanvillager.blogspot.com) writes from a rural perspective in Nyeri, while Mombasa-based Maitha (http://bangaiza.kylix.co.ke) may be the only consistent Kiswahili blogger in the country.
“The choice of language was mainly because I saw a lack of the Kiswahili language on the Internet,” said the IT worker who only gave his first name, in an instant message interview. He added the language situation is better, “over in Tanzania,” where, “there are a lot of Swa’ (slang for Swahili) bloggers who I interact with.” But seriously, this is exciting, no? It's good to see the Kenyan blogosphere getting the recognition that it deserves, and kudos to my
double double WM! and
thinker'sroom. How funny that right after I change the blog's name, it gets into the papers under the old name!
For anyone visiting for the first time, welcome! Look around, check out the archives, and leave me a comment! None of this going to hell stuff, I've heard it all before and don't believe a word of it :-)
The Only Black In the Village?"Through the challenges, the President has kept his human touch. Touring New Orleans last week, he met a man who had survived for days on canned goods before being evacuated to Utah. “Were you the only black man in Salt Lake City?” Bush asked."
Egads, only Bush can say something so stupid and think he's being a human being...
From Time Magazine
More Jake Gyllenhaal!Hot new pics from
Oh la la Paris
Oh la la indeed!
Changing NamesIn case you've noticed, I've changed the name of this blog. Why? I noticed most of my keyword traffic was coming here to learn kung fu. Ati me I know kung fu or something like that. And how the hell are you going to learn from a website?
Find a real teacher, shenzi nyinyi!
This new title is more expressive of my real interests: Buddhism and philosophy. The phrase "unborn, undying" is adapted from various sources, but most famously, the
Heart SutraThis sutra is short, easy to chant, and is completely baffling. What the hell does it mean? It means many things, and that's precisely why it is so popular. A "teacher" could make a lot of money trying to teach people what he/she thinks it means.
The byline is going to rotate every so often with pithy comments from people like Linji (Rinzai, Lin-chi - it's transliterated many different ways), Dogen, Kukai, Bodhidharma, Hui-neng and anyone else who strikes my fancy. I think the next one is going to be, "You don't drive a nail into the empty sky!"
Nudie pics for anyone who can figure out (correctly) what that means :-)
So now everyone who comes here wanting to learn about Jake Gyllenhaal being a Buddhist can find the following info. Yes, he is Buddhist. Probably Tibetan Buddhist as the esoteric lineages from Tibet are wildly popular, but then again he could be Soto or Rinzai Zen, or mystery of mysteries he could be Shingon! They do have a temple out there in Cali. Yes, his mom's Jewish but clearly you can be Buddhist and Jewish, or Buddhist and anything else for that matter...apart from serial killer or Republican. That would be too much to bear.
I mean just reciting the
Shikuseigan should make a Republican break out in hives!
"Sentient beings are numberless I vow to liberate them.
Desires are inexhaustible I vow to put an end to them
The Dharmas are boundless I vow to master them.
The Buddhas Way is unsurpassable I vow to become it."Oooh, random link time!
Ever wanted to know what the
ballroom scene is all about? Fabulous! Check out Rod's
summary for more links. And for a photo essay on recent competition check out
Frank Leon Roberts. Strike a pose, y'all!
What Dreams May Come...Must Give Us PauseWell I was certainly given pause by this one. Let me know what you think.
The dream starts on the down escalator of an airport which seems to be in Taiwan. Not sure how I can tell this, but I recall being surrounded by packages labelled in Chinese (yes, I know that Chinese and Taiwanese are different languages, but I knew the difference..somehow). I'm waiting for my luggage to come through airport red-tape with someone who might be my bf, or brother, I can't turn my head to look at him. I'm worried that something in my luggage will set off an alarm or something.
Everywhere, in this large room I'm standing in, are piles and piles of boxes, packages and crates all left here in the process of being confiscated for whatever reasons.
Tired of waiting I begin to look at pictures hanging on the wall off to my left. To my surprise I recognize two of them! One is of my Dad who is pictured leaning in to strap some kids I don't know into their carseats in a minivan. I try to see if I am one of those kids, because my Dad looks waaay younger than he is now, and I don't recognize myself or any of the other kids. I feel a distinct sense of unease at this point - how did the picture get here? Who took it? Where?.
The second picture is of a red, or reddish brown car flying off the broken span of a bridge, that straddles a deep green valley. Printed across the bottom are the words, " In Rememberance of [My Sister], 1986, done in that cheesy gold print lettering. You know the one I'm talking about? Feels like it will peel off at any minute? This is when I really begin to feel disturbed. That's the year my parents were in a car crash in Naivasha in our old brown Toyota Corolla, or was it just my Dad and my brothers and sister? I think the date of the real crash was earlier, because 1986 is also the year I have my first and clearest memories of hating my siblings. I remember feeling frustrated because they would not let me sit with them on the swing outside the house with their friends. I was "too young" to be out there with them, I should go inside and go back to Mummy. I was furious. Me, immature? Did they think I was going to misbehave and embarass them in front of their friends? Lookin back on it I think I had a crush on one of their pals and just wanted to be around them and hear them talk. It rankled then, and still rankles now. It was the first thing I thought of when I saw that picture. Did it also symbolize the 7 Years War brewing between my sister and I? That in itself is fodder for another post.
I took the pictures down so I could ask my folks what the hell these pics were doing in Taiwan. Suddenly, the scene shifts in the dream, and we are flying over a green hills and silvery lakes. I feel that we are in Africa now - in Nigeria to be exact. We are on some sort of game flight or something because the other mzungu passengers are talking about gorillas. In Nigeria? I look out the window as they talk about why racist discourse so frequently compares Africans to monkeys. One shouts out, "WM! Do you remember the reasons why they do that?" I say something about connotations of dirt and disease, primitivity and the primal, the almost human-ness of monkeys, the aggression.. The moment I say aggression, the plane just falls out of the sky.
It doesn't crash, nose-dive or spin. It just falls perfectly horizontally and suddenly. At the moment of impact, I unbuckle myself and start running from the plane. The plane has landed in some kind of marsh, shallow lake, or rice paddy, and somehow the other passengers are way ahead of me, running for their lives. They are all making good time, but I am floundering and fighting for every step. I can't tell whether it's because I'm swimming (can't swim worth a damn) or what, but I can't chomoka like those other guys. Everyone else is screaming for me to hurry, and I'm trying thinking that my asthma is going to kill me. Right then I start to hear gunshots.
As I struggle my way out of this paddy, trying to get across the tarmac road to the safety of the houses beyond, I get shot. I fall to the ground. I struggle back up, knowing that if I can get across the road, I will be safe. As I stagger/crawl/scurry for all I'm worth I hear laughter behind me, and see a vehicle pull up behind me, or to the side where I cannot see, and I get shot 2 or 3 times more, right in the chest. I was almost across the road, and would have made it had they not pulled up right then. The gunshots make it impossible to breathe, and as I lay there dying, gasping for my last breath, I see in the distance a shining African city, bursting with life in the light of an African morning (you know the ones, when the sun and greenery just seem to scream with life and energy), and a young boy with two buckets, out to fetch water.
I die, and wake up.
I was freaked out. What the hell was that about?
What Dreams May Come..I had the weirdest dream the other day. So weird that I did something I usually don't with my dreams. I wrote it down before the memory faded.
Watch this space...
Speaking of space, I've decided that I will write my dissertation on space and place in Japanese Buddhist philosophy. I like it, my advisor likes it, and it sounds sexy. To me at least.. :-)
I know I announced that I had returned from my silence, but I was stumped for something to write about. I think my next series of posts will be modelled on the Diamond and Womb Mandalas of my main man???, also known as Kukai, aka Kobo Daishi.
I have recently become enamoured with esoteric Buddhism, for reasons entirely unclear to even myself. It is almost reminiscent of the manner in which I was drawn to philosophy in the first place. So here goes my attempt at a mandalic blog series modelled on the Womb Mandala (Skt., Garbadhatu, Japn., Taizo-kai)
Meditation on the letter A
The Letter A is the mother of all mantras, and the source of all language, and is the seed mantra (bija) of Mahavairocana "If one sees the ultimate state of original non-birth, this is equivalent to knowing one's mind as it really is, and knowing one's mind as it really is corresponds to the wisdom of an omniscient one" (Kukai,
Ungi gi)
Kukai loves the Sanskrit letter A because this letter is inherent in all language. When you write Sanskrit (the script older than
Devanagari), the letter A is literally encapsulated in every word. If you don't add a modifier to the written word, the letter A is pronounced first. This makes for a perfect symmetry for Kukai, as A is the statement of the fundamentally enlightened character of the universe.
Where does the source of my spring lie? What lies at the core of who I am? What is my letter A? I found myself thinking about this last night as I realized that after nearly 3 years in Ohio, I can count the number of my friends on one hand (boyfriend included!).
Does something lie in the core of who I am that makes me "friendless"? Or maybe it's a manifestation of my inner misanthrope - while I do enjoy the company of people I like, I am not hesitant to express my distaste for the "masses". There's something about a seething throng of people moving aimlessly about, nattering inanely about this and that, and
getting in my way that makes me want to smack them in the mouth. Not very Buddhist of me.
People must be able to pick up on that. Maybe that's why I can't hold on to the friends that I do make, and have made. I'm a loner at heart, I feel. Nothing gives me greater satisfaction than a fine sunny day, spent with a good book and the windows open to let in a lavender breeze. Hmm, that reminds me, I should buy some seeds to plant.
Whatever the case, I do keep returning to this question of who and why I am...Don't we all? Maybe I just have a deep-seated fear of rejection, or a streak of selfishness that makes me disinclined to share myself truly with others. In part that's because I don't think people
really get me - and by that I just mean they don't really understand the way I think. To do that, they would have to share the same context for my thoughts, and I don't know how to communicate that.
I mean, how do you communicate the feeling of Nyeri sunshine on a 16 year old's skin as he stands outside the library at his school, watching his first crush walk down the hill in his finest grey trousers? I find some memories too precious to share with someone who may just say, "Uh huh, yeah" or "Wow" or "Mmmm." I would need to know that they are feeling exactly what I am remembering feeling or else my memories would be tarnished. That's what frustrates me about telling my bf stories that I think are funny. He just doesn't get them. Makes me go back and repeat the setup, explain the punchline, and then just goes "Mmmm" or which is worse, doesn't laugh!
Most of the time he takes it seriously, like when I joke about back pain, or my asthma, he starts saying I should see a doctor. If I wanted to be serious, I wouldn't have told a joke! So I don't tell him my funny stories, I save them for people who will laugh. Is that mean of me? Probably. I just couldn't go on telling jokes that fall flat like that. I can't tell him he's supposed to laugh, he's just supposed to, it's funny dammit!
And so I remain silent and cradle my wellspring.
Mudra: Wisdom Fist
My
doubly double WM has prodded me into coming back to posting.
I had taken time off to finish up my thesis about the esoteric tradition of "becoming a buddha in this body" [sokushin jobutsu, for those in the know] in the thought of Dogen and Kukai. Its completion was long overdue, and I took all of the Xmas break to recuperate.
So what's happened since I've been gone? I've been taking classes, teaching, and cursing this strange winter we've been having. First it teases you with warm spring like weather, then February hits you like a spitball down the neck. Yeccchh.
 | | The Playboy
Random Gentle Sex Master (RGSMm)
Clean. Smooth. Successful. You're The Playboy.
You're spontaneous, and your energy is highly contagious. Guys therefore find you fun to be around, and girls find you compelling. You have lots of sex, and you manage it all without seeming cheap or being hurtful. Well done. You probably know karate, too.
Your exact opposite:
The Mixed Messenger
Deliberate Brutal Love Dreamer | It's obvious to us, and probably everyone else, that you're after physical rather than emotional relationships, but you're straight up with potential partners. And if a guy you want isn't into something casual, it's no big deal. You move on. BEFORE sleeping with him. Usually. At least you try to. Such control is rare.
If you're feeling unfulfilled, maybe you should raise your standards. New conquests will only be satisfying if there's a possibility of rejection.
ALWAYS AVOID: The Mixed Messenger
CONSIDER: The Bachelor, The Poolboy |
Link: The 32-Type Dating Test by OkCupid - Free Online Dating.
My profile name: Tetsu-jin |
What I am Worth Must be significant because I've just received my first anti-gay comment! Yay! It is relatively well written for a bit of hate speech, and invites me to die of AIDS from taking it up the ass in toilets. Two points spring to mind: one, I'm the one who does the fucking up the ass, and two, the toilet scene is soooo '80s.
All the Streets are crammed with things/Eager to be held/I know what hands are for..
Could I make every post start with a Smith's lyric quote? You bet! I wonder if anyone's done a serious textual analysis of Morrissey's lyrics...
Anyway..
I had quite a moment in class today. Have you ever had one of those moments? Where a red haze descends over your eyes, your brain suddenly fills with a silvery fog, and the blood rushes to your hands and face? I did, and it was spawned by the racist trash that was spewing out of my student's mouths. Something to the effect that even though American history is littered with the bones and mass graves of the down-trodden and the exploited, that the survivors should just "get over it", quit whining about the past, and get on with their lives.
Naturally, this was upsetting.
I then began to think about that sort of reflexive reaction many Americans have to talking seriously about race, history and hegemony. Does this reaction stem from a refusal to countenance that "they" might be the "bad guys" of history? Or is it a consequence of fatigue stemming from a continual wave of readings and alternative viewpoints that are simply not presented in American high schools? Do these students even possess the critical faculties necessary to process what is being presented to them?
I tried to put myself in their shoes and imagine what my reaction would be if I was presented with evidence that my country/society/family are, quite frankly, evil murderous bastards. Would I respond in the same fashion? With denial, and a nonchalance that chills the heart to the bone? I would like to think not...
It must stem from the fact that there is no such thing as American culture either. They have nothing in their lives and history that would enable them to empathise/understand anyone who presents a history of oppression to them and demands that they take it seriously. My students are so used to thinking of themselves, their society and culture as the norm, that they cannot but take all others as the
Other.
It surely does not help that they must see me as just another minority person bitching about some past inequality. My subject position is definitely not neutral in this respect, but does that mean that my critiques of hegemony are indelibly coloured by their perception of me? What sorts of strategies (additional) do I need to bring to bear?
My first instinct is to say to hell with them, damn the bad evaluations, full steam ahead! I wonder though, if the conviction that many of them must be feeling when presented with these alternative voices/histories needs to be gently fed and nurtured...Why should I be the one to do that? To be the patient one, holding their hand and nursing them through their neuroses?
I can only say how sorry I feel for them sometimes. I look at them and realise that they have no sense of culture or belonging, of history or extended family..but that sympathy is dulled time and again, when I hear what comes out their mouths - with no hesitation or shame!
And they wonder why the world resents them...
I had intended to post about the concept of the "Public" and how them blogosphere is positioned in relation to that, but I may save it for another day
A boy in the bush/ Is worth two in the hand
I don't think I've posted about Morrissey and The Smiths before, have I? I'm too lazy to go back and troll through my own archives :-p
I recently purchased Morrisey - Live at Earl's Court. A recording of a live concert he did last year on his birthday, and it just blew me away.
I was introduced to The Smiths by my philosophy advisor. Well, not really introduced..she mentioned one day in class that as a teenage girl she would spend hours locked in her room listening to The Smiths and wading in existential angst. As she was teaching an upper level Existential Philosophy class at the time, it made perfect sense to bring them up at the time...Since I was rather enamoured of existentialism by this point (and of her, I must admit, but in a totally non-hetero way) I decided to download a few tracks and hear what they sounded like for myself.
Half an hour later, I had a representative sample. I queued them up in Winamp and hit play. The result was instant flashback.
Denmark, 2001.
I'm sitting in my host cucu's (grandmother, to you non-Kikuyu types) living room, watching Danish TV and struggling to follow along, when Top of the Pops comes on MTV Europe. It's early on a Saturday night and I don't feel like going out (no money, yechh), so MTV Europe will be about it for the night's excitement, unless my annoying roomie Kip comes home in a state of drunken nerdy spazz frenzy (silly boy). Two unremarkable performances later, they play a "classic" Top of the Pops moment.
Oh great, I'm thinking, 80's snyth, bad hair and skinny waifs singing in falsetto, when's the Top 20 countdown on? It takes me a couple of seconds to realize that it's a guitar I'm hearing and not a synthesizer...by then the singer had started the first verse and his voice just grabbed me by the nads... "I am the son and heir/Of nothing in particular"..His voice curls, sways and swaggers its way around the lyrics, contemptuous and venomous...and when he gets to this verse, no force on earth could have moved me from that couch
There's a club, if you'd like to go
You could meet somebody who really loves you
So you go, and you stand on your own
And you leave on your own
And you go home, and you cry
And you want to die
When you say it's gonna happen "now"
Well, when exactly do you mean ?
See I've already waited too long
And all my hope is gone When he got to the last line, he ripped his shirt open, and to this day, I'm sure I gasped, because I felt that he was singing my life at that point. Boyfriend less, sex-less, alone in a strange city, desperately trying to find someone to be with in Copenhagen, going out to bars alone, coming back alone. All the heartache and drama I had gone through before I left for Denmark came rushing back as he was singing. I felt like my heart would explode with the intensity of the sorrow and anguish that slight waif had made me feel, but it felt good all at the same time. I felt as if he knew exactly what I was feeling, he'd been there, done that and made it through, and for that I loved him. In the rush of that moment, I didn't catch the name of the band, but I knew that I would track them down if it was the last thing that I did.
New York, 2002.
I hit play, and hear that characteristic wail, and my heart leaps in my chest.
I had found them.
Ahhh, the beginning of the end...
So Happy err.. Long Weekend!
Too bad I have to work tomorrow and Sunday...8 hours both days..bah.
So while you are choking down your ribs, pilau and kachumbari, think of me will you? I will probably be sitting in the small Diagnostic Transport office with a book in my lap trying to stay awake until my shift ends at 11pm.
Well, enough with the shameless attempt at garnering your sympathies, on to the real substance of this post! Which is...err..Actually, I don't have much substance in mind, which is really indicative of my general state of mind these days. I don't have that much bubbling away in my brain since I started this job. Not that I'm blaming it for sapping my mental energy, it's purely coincidence. What really happened was that I installed a new strategy game on my computer and it has me hooked.
It so happens that I have been playing games in this series since the demo for the first in the series,
Shogun: Total War was released in 1999. I had played various strategy games ever since we got our first computer in 1996, mostly the Age of Empires series (that first computer also led to my first encounter with gay porn, but that story for another day) and I had enjoyed those a lot. Great way to while away those dull Sunday afternoons in Nairobi.
This game was something else - real time command of little animated guys on a 3-D battlefield. Amazing! The music, the voices, the setting all worked together to create an immersive experience that had you believing you were the leader of one of Japan's great samurai clans, destined to reunite a country at war and bring peace to the land...by the edge of one's sword if necessary..heh. The demo was a particularly divillish challenge, and I spent hours trying to successfully complete it. I really think that game is to blame/the reason for my fascination with almost all things Japanese. It was latent before I think, but this game just brought it out with a vengeance.
In case you think that when I say I was "hooked" I mean it in a vague general sense, consider this - I put myself $1700 in debt for this game. Yup, I bought a state of the art computer (for the time) just so I could play STW when it was released in the summer of 2000. Hooked doesn't even come close to describing the gaming frenzy that ensued afterwards. I would lock myself in my dorm room for hours and hours on end, emerging only to eat/drink/excrete so that I could spend more time playing. Hours could pass by like minutes when I was immersed and boy was I ever immersed..
I have bought every game that's come out in the series since, and I am currently hooked on the latest iteration, Rome: Total War, which brings the game fully into 3-D, from the strategy map to the battlefield. Yum! The highlight so far has to be the war elephant unit - 18 of the most pugilistic pachyderms ever to raid a maize plantation. Charge a unit of these babies and watch the soldiers fly (literally!)
So basically, when I am not working, cuddling with my bf,cooking,or watching one of the summer's skanky new reality shows (Kept, Strip Search, The Real World), I am playing at elephants and pancakes :-D
Not much time for anything else, now is there?
Been A While
Hasn't it? Soooo many distractions over the past couple of weeks. I mean, work alone is enough to keep me away from the keyboard. Here's some of the highlights of my work experience thus far...
Walked miles of hospital corridor. Seriously.
Seen more elderly patients than you can shake a walking cane at.
Pushed, pulled, rolled, slid, nudged, bumped, hauled, heaved,tugged, and dragged wheelchairs, beds and carts through those miles of hospital corridor.
Seen only my second dead person, and my first in a morgue cooler.
A basement full of blinking, beeping, whirling, lift using robots. Yes, robots.
I'll have to drop down to one or two post a week, as I am not only trying to survive my job, but finish an unfinished thesis as well as memorising about 3000 kanji by the end of the summer.
So far, I've revised only one chapter of the thesis and done about 250 kanji...yikes..
I Gots Bills To Pay
I guess he needs to pay some bills from his drunk driving arrest... :-)
That's just fine by me!
Work it!I will not be working at anything quite so glamorous this summer. I will be spending my time wheeling patients from one end of any of six hospitals to another sporting lovely tan Angelica brand scrubs..
Hardly the "height" of couture...hahaha, get it? "height"? eh? eh?
Anyway, since this job involves a lot of walking and lifting, I will probably lose some of the keyboard weight I put on this year - damn thesis writing... grumble grumble...
Buddha only knows what sorts of folks I will be meeting and talking to, but I am sure that they will be a rich source of anecdotes for many years to come, so stay tuned folks :-D
If only for the occasional man-candy..hehehe..
Telegraph | News | Secret papers show Blair was warned of Iraq chaos
Still more hard evidence that Bush and his lapdog Blair deliberately lied, manipulated, tickled and teased their way to war. It's been a long time coming, and finally I can dream of a real impeachment.
Strange Fruit
Reading this helps me put the Augsburg zoo story into the appropriate context. If we can no longer be lynched physically, we can at least be lynched in a specular fashion, once again the subject of mass spectacle, degraded in public for white enjoyment...
Rise of the Machines!
And so it begins, one hospital robot here, a car assembly robot there, next thing you know it's "Destroy All Humans!!" ringing out in the street, and we're all running for our lives. Matrix 1.0 can't be far behind...
Gay Warning Labels?Oh lovely, warning labels! What ever would they say?
Warning! May result in good personal hygiene, and fashion sense!
Obviously, this has nothing to do with
previous attempts to put warning
labels on people, does it?
Future gay
"leaders" think being gay is a sin..
Britney's got
cooties like you won't believe!
So these are the frontrunners for President, eh? Pssshhht..
Stolen from Afromusing
A Complete Idiot's Guide to having a Black Friend
Hahahaha! Wish I could print this out and hand it out to all my classes... Those whitebread cornfed types would have no idea what to say to this!
Camp Hetero Horror
Saturday horror story from Republic of T. I can't imagine what that poor kid is going through...
Tagged! (Deux) + The Friday Five
I was too slow to avoid Mshairi and I got tagged with the book meme...
Number of books that you own?
I'd say I own about 80 books right now, if I had my druthers it would be in hundreds. The only thing I dislike about books is how heavy and bulky they are when you have to move apartments :-(
Last book you bought?Bought two at a go (Thanks to Half Price Books. Best. Store. Ever!):
Deleuzism: A Metacommentary and Jane Sexes It Up
Five books that mean a lot to you?
I've read so many good ones! If I had to choose just 5 to go take in exile they would be:
1. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
2. Shobogenzo - Dogen
3.
Taiko - Eiji Yoshikawa
4. The Book of the New Sun - Gene Wolfe
5. Philosophical Investigations - Ludwig Wittgenstein
Last book(s) you've read?
The Ultimate Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
The tagging stops here! I want to start a different thing altogether,
The Friday Five!
Here's how it works. Put all the music you own onto a single playlist (on your computer, iPod, whatever), set the music to play at random, and post the titles of the first 5 songs that play. Simple, eh?
Here's my
Friday Five:
1. Marian Anderson - Go Down, Moses
2. Snow Patrol - How To Be Dead
3. Belle and Sebastian - Chickfactor
4. Morrisey- Let Me Kiss You
5. Biyouna- Tu es ma vie
There Are 14 Defining Characteristics of FascismWant to know what the 14 are? Clickety click!
The fight for human rights is being waged in America's
schools (free registration required). I hate it when they use the term "culture wars", as if this was about behaviour and habit, rather than real human beings whose lives are constantly under threat - from homophobes, from their own government, and now the judiciary as well. The Democrat's cowardly roll-over on the filibuster has allowed
3 virulently anti-gay judicial nominees to be confirmed with no end to the madness in sight. War? More like extermination to me...
"But I don't want a lover/ I just wanted to be tied to the back of your car" - The Smiths, "You've Got Everything Now"Ever since the Madwoman posted about political chickens coming home to roost, I have been wondering about what it is in the Kenyan/human psyche that makes our apathy possible. I've since come to the conclusion that the only way to explain this phenomenon is to realise that we allow it to happen: we want to have tyrants, incompetents, brutes lording it over us.
We want the very things we complain so loudly, and at such great length about.
This conclusion is by no means new, I must nod to Antonio Gramsci, Italian Communist, and long-term guest at Mussolini's Hospitality Inn, who wrote in his prison diaries that the only way to explain fascist regimes like the one in Italy, was that the people had been seduced/persuaded/convinced to support a regime that was extremely bad for them - nay, thrived on stomping on "the people" with hobnailed boots (what's a hobnail?).
A recent book I read called Nietzsche Corps/e would like to lay the blame squarely at the mustachioed German's errrr straitjacket. As part of his larger strategy of recovering Marxist critique from the perceived end of Marxism and Communism after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he posits that Nietzsche's theories are quite frankly the enemy of everything that the revolution is working for.
Rather than the democratic, egalitarian society that would succeed the capitalist state, Nietzsche seeks to install a masculinist autarchy of overmen, who would replace the slavish, herdish masses of all too human humans. Indeed, the appearance of the overman signals the end of humanity in it's snivelling, whining, distracted, life hating, heaven loving state. Nietzsche's fantasy man, is in a word, fascist.
Coded in his works, is his esoteric agenda of bringing about the appearance of the overman, and Waite makes much of the distinction between the esoteric and the exoteric, but only in the breathless tone of the spotty teenage who uncovers his father's stash of Playboy/girl in cupboard. Waite takes any usage of esoteric/coded speech or writing to be proof positive of sinister intention.
There are two points I would like to take exception to; 1) the characterisation of the esoteric as sinister - thinking of Satanic cults and human sacrifice perhaps? 2) self mastery as inimical to the leftist project and humanity as a whole.
Waite clearly has little exposure to the esoteric outside of Western thought. Even a cursory glance at Buddhist texts would reveal new depths (pun intended) to the concept of esotericism. The first being that the esoteric, rather than being mysterious, hidden, secret and veiled, is instead what is the most plain, obvious and available to the eye! The best place to hid something is in plain view, and the esoteric is similarly available and public, as long as one knows what they are looking at/for. A cogent case in point is the recent hit The Da Vinci Code, whose central thesis is that clues to Jesus's marriage, etc., have been placed in the most public, studied, scrutinised artworks in recent history - all in plain view.
A quick review of the writings of Kukai would reveal that the esoteric Buddhist teachings (subject of my soon-to-be-completed thesis) are actually being revealed to us all the time, by the world around us - the universe is speaking the "secret" in us, through us, next to us, around us, all the time, and we know it, even if we don't know that we know it. The esoteric teachings/rituals/ books, etc, are not to uncover, or display what is hidden, but rather to bring out what we already know, see, hear, touch, taste...
The "bringing forth" of what we already know, through esoteric practice and meditation, etc, is also a transformation of being. A transvaluation if you will, that reorients the self to itself and the world, that now speaks in a different register, because the self now has knowledge of itself and other that was not apparent and immediate beforehand. In essence, the self masters itself. As Dogen puts it, "The entire world of the ten directions is nothing but the true human body", meaning (among other things) that in mastering oneself, one has mastered everything. Indeed, the "goal" of Zen practice (if I may make such a crass statement as "goal") is to realise the self in all senses of the word.
I think that a large part of the critique of Nietzsche's proleptic goal of self mastery is fuelled by an inadequate understanding of mastery that equates it with narcissism and power. There are other models of self mastery in Buddhism that have opposite effects, and in fact suggest that once one has truly mastered the self, the narcissism, desire for domination, brutality, etc that are associated with self mastery in the West do not and cannot arise.
I do not have the space (or indeed the energy) to develop this thought properly, but in brief, self mastery closes off all the nasty bits....
I will also state the Waite inadequately treats the subject of Nietzsche's homosexuality, which has much to do with the masculinist imagery in Thus Spake Zarathustra for example, and may indeed change much of the perception of his work. In the end, all Nietzsche may have wanted was for one of the nubile Italian fishermen to tie him to the bed :-)
In the end, I think that fascism is not natural to the human species, following Deleuze and Guattari, I think it's the excess of capitalist schizophrenia, the ghost that haunts the edges of our supposedly democratic society. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are supposed to be somehow part of human nature, but what if the forces that make such a supposition possible also induce fascistic tendencies in us as well?
F DUBYA!
No,I'm not just being rude, see?
Anyone have
$5000 lying around that we can spend on a license plate no-one will ever see on your car?
I did have a post all planned out about medical technology as one more technique of biopower, how blood tests, skin swabs, immunizations just serve to further delineate healthy and unhealthy populations.
However, it is much too hot and steamy to be talking about biopower, or articulating how university decisions about the presumed health status of its international student body keep the very hierarchies of privilege and normalcy that they claim to be undermining.
I will only say that being forced to undergo a TB skin puncture test, even in the face of documentation that one has been immunized, has never had the disease, or even been exposed to it, really makes one feel like a sore-ridden, sewer encrusted, plague carrying, ship stowing rat.
And that's all I have to say about that.
Coming on a day when
Il Papa reiterates
his hatred for gays, gay rights, and gay marriage everywhere, it makes me want to bury my head in a bowl of icecream.
(Image courtesy of Towleroad)Well, since this is symptomatic of global anarchy, maybe I should be tossing scoops of icecream out my window into the street below, and screaming "Down with authority!!!"
On second thoughts, that's a waste of good icecream..
I wish they would give colourful bandages to adults...
I could have done with a Flintstones band-aid today. Been poked, prodded, directed, mis-directed and re-directed, peed in a cup, had my precious
sangre dribbled into plastic tubes, and all for what? 20 hours a week, $10 an hour.
Yippee!
I am also tired, and will have to post at length tomorrow.
I leave you with a short meditation on doubles, doubling, and dopplegangers. Courtesy of what was (until the guy that voiced Capt. Murphy died - sigh) the best cartoon show ever.
Sealab 2021.
In other news, I hear someone is doubting my
kung-fu....
Heroes and Villains
Like many last-borns, my childhood was filled with hand-me-downs; clothes, toys, shoes, beds, and books. Lots and lots of books. In fact, the whole house was filled with books, shelves upon shelves of them, with everything from the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew to dry business texts and settler accounts of the Congo. I spent countless hours browsing through the shelves, and peering into dusty cabinet corners, trying to find the holy grail, a book that I had not read 20 times already.
My mum says I started to read early. I used to pester my siblings to read to me so often, that to get me to shut up and leave them alone they taught me how to read. By age 4 or so, I was happily reading on my own, and the household breathed a heavy sigh of relief. Reading soon became a way for me to escape my own limitations - my lack of friends in the neighbourhood, my nagging sister, my persistent asthma, and books became closer to me than my family almost. I could always rely on books to take me away from it all, show me things that stoked the fires of my imagination, and could leave me feeling happy, or melancholy, or just in awe of what was possible. I soon had a mental catalogue of what books to read to suit my mood; WW II jungle stories when I was mad, Asterix to cheer me up, Steven King when I was pensive, Beano when I was in a silly mood..My books were my nearest and dearest, and I learned to not just read a book, I learned to ingest them, to fold in the paper and ink and glue into my being, hold them next to my heart, feeling the boundaries of the book, taking the words and pasting them over my bones. I learned to inhale books, to read at blinding speed, devouring hundreds of pages at a time, fingers flipping the pages furiously, until the end, when I would sit back with a sigh, and turn to the first page to dive in once more...
One day, I found a small stash of browning comic books from the 70's, and at the bottom was a Spiderman comic. Spiderman was more to my liking as a superhero, I found Superman boring, because he had no weaknesses to speak of, and I just couldn't relate to someone like that. I may have sought escape from my own reality, but Superman was just too much to swallow, I wanted to believe that
I could rise above my pudgy self, like Batman - strong, silent, conflicted, but ultimately, human. I digress, because the real treasure I found in the comic was Doctor Doom.
Ah Dr Doom.
Something about him appealed very strongly to me, as I eagerly read the thin, yellowing pages. His genius, his wit, and ultimately the tragedy of his story made me identify so strongly with him. As "the smart kid" at school, I felt isolated by all the knowledge I had accumulated through reading - no matter how much I read, it didn't really help me get along with the other kids at school. I felt Doom's pain keenly, and I wanted so badly to have a suit like his, and pound the dumb but popular kids at school into dust. They would regret their miserable, stupid lives when confronted with the full force of my intellect!!
I could never understand why my skills counted for less than Nicholas's soccer skills, or Jasdeep's killer hockey flick, and I wanted to make them taste the bitter ashes of regret like I had, so often.
Doom was my anti-hero, the geek who gets his revenge, who would stand up for all those who were teased for being smart, or for knowing all the answers to teacher's questions. For everyone who valued a book over a soccer ball, for all the pansies, the weaklings, the nerds, the socially inept, he would wreak a horrible vengeance.
God I hope they do a good job with him in the
F4 movie...
Freaky FridaySoldiers of Christ II (Harpers.org)This is some crazy, crazy shit..
Under Christian dominion, America will no longer be a sinful and fallen nation but one in which the Ten Commandments form the basis of our legal system, Creationism and “Christian values” form the basis of our educational system, and the media and the government proclaim the Good News to one and all. Aside from its proselytizing mandate, the federal government will be reduced to the protection of property rights and “homeland” security.[1] Some Dominionists (not all of whom accept the label, at least not publicly) would further require all citizens to pay “tithes” to church organizations empowered by the government to run our social-welfare agencies, and a number of influential figures advocate the death penalty for a host of “moral crimes,” including apostasy, blasphemy, sodomy, and witchcraft. The only legitimate voices in this state will be Christian. All others will be silenced.
To think that I may live next to, share the same air with, or even have taught one of these fanatical people gives me a severe case of the creeps. Execution for "moral crimes"? Give me a break!
What scares me most is that the people and culture that inspires this kind of blind hatred, is the very same that is behind (at least ideologically) the burgeoning evangelical movement in Kenya. The 700 Club, Rod Parsley, Focus on the Family, and other programs are regularly shown on television stations back home, where this sort of propaganda is passed off as religious discourse. It disturbs me most because when push comes to shove, these rich powerful white "christians" would not hesitate to sell out their black "brothers and sisters" if it meant hanging to their power and authority for one more day.
I mean, these are people who
believe that the tsunami was God's judgement on gay holidaymakers in Sri Lanka, Thailand, etc...and Pat Robertson has still not apologised for claiming that 9/11 was God's judgement on America for legalized abortion, separation of church and state and homosexuality. These people are toxic!
How can they claim to represent the Jesus of the New Testament? The one who welcomed all persons; tax collectors, prostitutes, lepers, children to his arms? How does peace, love and understanding get turned into self righteousness and holy hate?
I don't get it. I just don't get it.
For more on this Christo-fascism go
here
That's The End...
I'm so relieved that today's the end of my teaching for the spring. I can say goodbye to my 24 students, and "relax" for the summer. No more lesson planning, no more grading, no more second guessing myself, no more awkward silences in class as my students stubbornly refuse to answer my questions...
Teaching has been hard this year, and now that I look back on it, it's been hard the whole school year. I was really unprepared to teach a class on my own, particularly a class that is not directly related to my research interests. I mean, I know how to write, I know what works well in a paper and what doesn't, but that does not mean that I know how best to communicate those skills to students. Furthermore, the focus of the class is unclear, is it simply to teach writing skills, or to provide students with critical thinking skills? The official answer would be both! Impossible to do both in just 10 weeks. You will either produce better writers, or better thinkers in such a short period of time, not both.
That, however, is what I have been trying to do all year. Produce better writers
and better thinkers...no wonder I am exhausted!
It just goes to show that my department does not really care to fit its students more directly to their research interests. At the least, it seems they don't care about fitting
me with a class that I can
really teach. Case in point is the teaching assignment for the fall quarter. I am stuck TA'ing for an introductory 100 level general humanities course, whereas I would much rather be in a religion course, or quite frankly, a philosophy course - after all, it was only my goddamn major!
Now I made my preferences very very clear some time ago as to what I wished to teach in the fall, and it's now apparent that no-one was listening. Students with no seniority get the assignment that I wanted, and I'm stuck with teaching the intro course, or going back to teaching that schizo-writing course.. Not much of a choice, is it? Yet, I remember the official line being that students with seniority get their pick of what to teach...The summer teaching jobs? Gone, without so much as a "Oh, by the way, would you like to..?"
Suddenly, I am very aware of "my place" in this department. An awareness only sharpened by a recent email;
| Subject: | access to main office | | Date: | Tue, 31 May 2005 10:40:35 -0400 | |
Hello All,
I understand that some of you or all of you have the access code to the
main office. I believe that some of our faculty gave out the number not
knowing the department policy. Since it is our departmental policy not to
give students and lecturer's access to the main office after hours I have
deleted the code you have. If you need in the main office please be sure
to do so before 5:00 p.m. Monday through Friday. If you have any questions
please contact me.
Thank you.
XXXXX
|
| |
How snarky is that? I'm even more irked now because I was not given the code...
So what can I do? I feel taken for granted here, and yet, I need the money to pay bills and buy luxuries like food and underwear...Am I just being paranoid, or is there really an attitude of "Oh, he'll do anything, just give it to him"? Or am I not sufficiently "American" in my attitude and not pushing hard enough to get the things that I want, or deserve?
Madaraka Day SpecialOh la la Paris has some verrrry nice pictures of Gael Garcia Bernal from the movie
La Mala Educacion, which if you haven't seen yet, you should rush out to see. If only for this scene with the mucho caliente actor.
Well, truth be told, both he and Fele Martinez are sex on a stick....
Looks like the
Iranians are following the Chinese model when it comes to speech over the internet.
New report from
Behind The Mask on new trends in the Kenyan gay scene (what passes for one, at least. A "gay" club right by University of Nairobi? They must means Simmers or something like that. Needless to say, something to check out when I go home next. With this report,
the new book out on homosexuality in Kenya, and the recent surge
fairly sympathetic articles in the press, can a sea change be in the wind? Thanks
Rod
Tagged!
Looks like I'm "it" so here goes.. Thanks for the warm welcome(s) Mama Junkyard!
Total number of films I own on DVD and video Mmm, this is an easy one. I only have 2 DVDs that I can call my own at the moment, simply because I feel such strong buyer's regret whenever I do purchase something! Compound that with the fact that I can borrow movies from the public library at any time, and I subscribe to Netflix, and you come to the inevitable conclusion. I'm cheap as all hell. :-)
The last film I watched
The last movie I saw at the cinema was Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. A great improvement over the last 2 films, and arguably an improvement over Return of the Jedi and those indescribably creepy, furry Ewoks. The Ewoks cartoon they used to show on KBC was much less creepy, even enjoyable in parts, maybe because I can deal with weird things in cartoons more easily...
Last movie I saw on TV was Bubble Boy. I do love that Jake Gyllenhaal something fierce. Not the best demonstration of his acting range, but he does give a very warm and emotive performance that arguably carries the whole movie. Hard to do in a large latex bubble.
Last movie I rented/ borrowed was Kill Bill volume 2. If there ever was such a thing as an instant classic, this would be it. Swords, blood, plucked eyes, live burial and all....
Five films I watch alot, or that mean a lot to me
Kaze no tani no Naushika
How do I begin to say what this movie means to me? I saw it for the first time when I was 7 or 8 years old. I had asked my parents to get some cartoons for me from the video place at Sarit in Westlands. What was it called again? Anyway. Usually it would be a mish mash of classics like Bugs Bunny, Popeye (yechh), some 80s fare like Transformers, and the like, and I expected it would be much the same. This time, it was an entire movie, and I didn't know what to expect. It must have been a Friday night because Mum had made fish and chips, and she always made fish and chips on Friday night even though we weren't Catholic. So after dinner I settled down on the livingroom floor to watch the movie, and from the opening credits, I was hooked. There was something about the colour, pacing, storyline and music that just worked a spell on me that hasn't faded over the years. That movie made me cry, it made me hope, it made me happy, it made me melancholy, and quite frankly, it changed my life. It showed me another world of imagination, emotion and being that seeped right into my bones. I could never look out on the world again without seeing it through new eyes, and for that, I am grateful to whoever dubbed that movie...
Needless to say, I've been an anime fan ever since.
Donnie Darko
Hard to believe, but he did this film in the same year that he did Bubble Boy. Those roles could not be farther apart. This movie is impossible to summarize in a paragraph, and I doubt 20 pages would get much further, it has to be seen to be experienced. Jake Gyllenhaal plays the main character, Donnie Darko, a high schooler with a talent for drawing, a penchant for sleepwalking, and just maybe, is a paranoid schizophrenic. Or is he? If you love movies that make you think, this is the one for you...
Shichinin no Samurai
Kurosawa Akira at his very best. Seven samurai are hired to defend a village from bandits, that at least is the main story arc, but much much more happens over the course of the movie. Much of the movie is driven by Mifune Toshiro's excellent performance, but Kurosawa's eye for colour, sense of drama and exquisite pacing complete this excellent package. If you see one scene in this movie, see the one where Kyuzo reluctantly fights a challenger... His later work Kakushi toride no san akunin, inspired George Lucas to make Star Wars: A New Hope, and is a thoroughly entertaining movie as well.
Matrix Revolutions
The most philosophical movie of the trilogy, and oddly enough, the most Buddhist. The idea of a reincarnating salvific figure, cycles of world history, the potential for individuals to liberate themselves, are all very deeply Buddhist. I know the Wachowski brothers publicly speak about Gnostic influences for the trilogy, but I think the Buddhist resonance is much stronger. Besides, I'm a sucker for the "little-girl-as-saviour/destroyer-of-the-world" trope.
Kill Bill
Don't mess with women. Do a woman wrong, and she will wreak terrible vengeance on all those who stand in her way. No portrayals of her as weak, emotional, needy, man-hungry, stupid, "blonde" or any of the not-so-subtle messages that women are bombarded with these days. In a moment of crisis she reaches for her blade, not a hanky... :-)
Tag five people and have them put this in their journal
This could be difficult, seeing as I'm so new... I have no choice but to tag at random! Cirdan the Shipwright , Mshairi, delusions of grandeur, Thinker's Room, My-Own-Private-Mews
Phew! After all that, I think I need a nap...
Senate panel considers apology to American Indians - Yahoo! NewsAnd about time it passes too....How many times does this measure need to be brought before Congress before it passes?
I'm not that surprised. After all, the British have never apologized for colonialism in Africa, let alone for the misery and suffering they inflicted on Kenyans at places like Manyani, or during times like the Emergency, when
millions of Kenyans were either in detention, or just released. I tried reading
Imperial Reckoning by Carole Elkins but I had to stop after just 30 or so pages because I couldn't take it. The accounts of the torture that these poor souls underwent at both Kenyan and British hands was just too much. How is it that human beings can be so cruel to one another? Does it take that little for our empathy and human feelings to be turned off?
The North has much to apologize for. This is just a start.
As always,
Republic of T has a very thoughtful piece on this. Genocide? How could it be anything less? 30 million dead, lands occupied, people decimated, culture destroyed...
From the scientists that brought you
phrenology, prejudice is now an
evolutionary adaptation!There's still some
sense to be found in Texas...Thank you, Senfronia Thompson.
Oh the irony of looking to Germany for socially progressive politics. The leader of Germany's Liberals could head the next government.
Oh, and he's gay. What will they call his boyfriend? First Partner? Heee.. :-)
Gaaa! My eyes! What happened to my eyes! I can't seeee!!
Oh. Oh, shit..
Netflix: Welcome To Netflix
I'm addicted to Netflix. Fast shipping, great movie selection, and best of all, I do not have to deal with real people at a real store. The fewer people I have to interact with on a daily basis, the happier I am (friends and family excluded of course).
My hatred for 'people' stems from the fact that 9 times out of 10, they turn out to be dumb, Republican, or both. They block you in the aisles, nearly run you over in the crosswalk, talk shrilly about Kenny Chesney concerts, plaster their cars with "Support the Troops" stickers, never miss an episode of "Will and Grace" but vote against gay rights...
Unfortunately, I have to deal with my students twice a week *gag*, which doesn't help my people phobia at all. Netflix, however, does. That is why I love Netflix. And self-service anything.
I think I'm going to start posting here again. It's been too long since I've had the time or the will to vent. Perhaps joining the Kenyan Blogs Netring will get me off my ass :-)
It seems that you get what you wish for.
Last post I was bitchin and moaning about how my life seems to be stuck in a rut. Well, not 24 hours later, my apartment burns down. How do you like that?
I woke up at 2 in the am, to the shrieking of the smoke alarm. My first thought was that my bf had left something in the oven, or something on the stove like he does from time to time but when I opened the door, it was an inferno. Yellow flames licking up the front room, black greasy smoke everywhere, and all I could think about was grabbing my cellphone... Somehow, Justin got through to me and I called the fire department. They came not 5 minutes later and put the fire out. Thankfully no-one was hurt and the fire did not spread beyond our apartment. What a way to get what you wish for eh?
My Dad always said that the black spots on my tongue mean that I have the power to curse people, or put spells on them, but who would have thought that I would put one on myself? Don't these things have a failsafe feature? Or in my case, an idiot-proof feature? I'm scared to think or say anything now...
What A Difference A Year Makes
It's strange to think how much domesticity changes you.
I've lived with Justin for a year now, and boy do I wish we had a dishwasher (human or machine). It's funny how just a few plates and spoons seem to multiply into towering piles of dishes, into something else "to be done" when I get back from teaching or class. How is it that suddenly there is so much more to be cleaned up, floors to be swept, dust to be vacuumed now that there are 2 of us? I don't remember doing all this housework when I lived alone! Is there some unwritten law of cohabitation that automagically multiplies the mess and possessions when 2 people live together? Hmmm, I'd like to see
that equation thank you very much. Hmmph
What's worse is I think I'm becoming a sober, responsible adult. Why? It's been months since I've thought of going out. Can you imagine? I don't even lurk
here anymore to see who's playing when and where...Not till this afternoon when my brats handed in their papers and my quarter ended. Not till then did I think, mmmaybe I should go out. I feel like going out. When was the last time I went out. When did I go dancing last? Well, you know when? Last fucking year!
What's happening to me? I look at the archives and see all my impassioned posts from last year and think what died inside of me that quenched that fire? Was it ever there? Am I just posing or playing out a role for myself? What does that say about who I am?
I think this is all brought on because it's my birthday next week. 24 years old and in many ways my family still treats me like a child. Ah well...
I have such a fear of being boring but I think that's precisely what I have become.
Damn.
My Linux Desktop
Pretty pretty desktop...That's a shot of KDE 3.3, with my levitating robot wallpaper and running SuperKaramba on a MEPIS 2004.4 Debian system :-)
BRAVO > Project Runway
Mmmmmm...my new fave show! I needed a replacement for Manhunt, which quite frankly could have done with more nudity than just a single episode.
This show has it all; drama, glam, bitchiness and a generous dollop of sheer entertainment! Sure, modelling is fun, but how many times can you see a guy pose before you start to yawn? I'm rooting for Austin, not least for the fact that he plays the harpsichord! *glee* That corn husk dress took some balls to make, and I'm gald he pulled it off, shrinkage or no shrinkage. I'm even happier that Daniel, that prissy, shit for brains, cosmic nut got booted off. "I know what the judges want!" Yeah hun, they want your ass off the show! See ya!
Hehehehe...just in time for the end of quarter. I can't wait. This has been the quarter of hell, and lower and lower circles beckon until the summer. sigh. Least Justin and I get to spend a week in South Beach. :-)
TV 2 - The Julekalender
This has to be the funniest Christmas TV series I have ever seen. Sadly, it is in Danish. That is also it's greatest strength, because some a lot of the jokes do not translate into English very well. Or at all. Another note to TV execs, quit with the stupid remakes! I shudder to think of an NBC sitcom based on BBC's The Office for example...brrr...
The story has a comatose Santa, squabbling elves, a ditzy country farmwife named the Potato Woman, a downed elf-plane, sinister architecture loving vampire type person, a very cute dog and more singing and beer than 20 Oktoberfests. It's great. If you love me you would buy me the box set. And some beer.
Certainly not work-safe, but striking nonethless
A link for World Aids Day. People around the world are dying, the AIDS fund for Africa is woefully underfunded, and 1/3 of what would be allocated is going to abstinence education.
Another stupid idea from a dangerously stupid and uncaring Bush administration. I mean please, how is preaching abstinence in the face of this pandemic in any way the Christian thing to do? HELP THEM NOW!!
Turn your GMail account into a virtual filesystem
I'm thinking about trying this one out, just for kicks. Not that I need more storage but for the cool factor :-) Prolly would give me +10 geek points ....hehehe..not that I need more proof. I'm already in graduate school, that counts for at least 200 geek points on my scale.
How cool is
this by the way? I'm using it to brainstorm for my thesis and I love it. I can free associate and still think that I'm being productive :-) Once I'm through with my thesis I'll have all the bells and whistles mastered. How cool would it be to submit an entire thesis as a mindmap? Hahaha..I'd kill to see the greyhairs scratching their heads about that one!
Iron Chef
I know I'm not the only person addicted to this show! It's just soooo good. Very cheesy, very dramatic, badly dubbed but still....so good! I can't believe that they are going to air an American version of the show. Who will they get to replace the Chairman? No-one can replace him! Just look at his outfits...his flair for the dramatic, and those bizarre ingredients! Some of this stuff you just can't get out of Japan. Really, when are TV execs going to realise that some shows you just cannot remake in America.
Coupling, anyone? Nuff said
Behold!
I want one ! I'm tired of forking over cash for developing photos when I can just be lazy and leave 'em to pixellate on my hard drive :-)
Turns out that internet access in Kenya is both slow and prohibitively expensive..I wasn't going to spend hours hunched over a monitor just so I could update this blog. Besides, did any of you really miss me? Uh huh, I thought so..
I wonder what it is I'm doing with my Fedora Core 1 installation to make it randomly "forget" services and settings that I've painstakingly setup and customised. First it refused to recognise my CD burner, despite the fact that it worked just great before I left (you gotta love K3b!) and then 10 minutes ago it conveniently stopped running samba and threw out my printer configuration! I had it all nicely set up to print to my bf's printer and now....grrr... I think I'll be booting more often to my Slackware 10 partition. There's just something weird about this FC1 partition that makes me think it's haunted...muahaha...
Have You Been Counted?
Now that the grades are posted, the final papers shuffled through and sorted, the last emails sent, I can wash my hands of that most horrible of teachers - Davis. I will not bother to eulogise him and that class further than this. He doesn't deserve it. My students did deserve better than that, and I can only hope that they obtained some satisfaction out of my section, and are gentle with their evaluations :) It's over! That means summer is here - icecream, sunburns, languid afternoons spent over a book, beach sand crusting around your ankles... before all that, I did promise an account of my recent migration to Linux.
Migration. I wonder why it is thought of in that way- migration; it conjures up images of catastrophe, of drought or war, or some natural inevitable directive, like the impulses that pull wildebeest across the Serengeti. It is an odd metaphor to use for such a mechanistic event, we think of migration in terms of nature do we not? Birds migrate, not computers! Still, migrate I did, though I fought the impulse to do so for quite some time.
I bought my first distribution off EBay in 2002. Looking back that was a strange thing to do - after all the GPL is all about the free distribution of information. I suppose I wanted some kind of structure, some thing that I could obtain this revolutionary OS from. It is hard to think of a complete operating system being available for free to anyone with an internet connection and time on their hands. It seems so...hackerish...so illegal...you got what off the internet??
Well, I tried to install it a couple of times, foolishly thinking that I could do so from within Windows..haha, how silly I was..of course it did not work so I shelved my Mandrake 9.0 CD's and continued to fight with Windows - blue screens, crashes, frequent reboots, programs freezing..well, you know what it's like I am sure. All the while wishing that I could just screw up the guts to just jump over to the dark side...the penguin side..hehehe...
Fast forward a couple of years to around March when I fix my bf's computer just in time to prevent some nasty territorial disputes around the 'puter - we both use the computer heavily, him to browse his favourite lefty sites and plot GW's overthrow and I because the computer is my life; music, movies, games, work, you name it I do it on my computer.
Flush with that success, I decide that now is the time to make my move. I do my research on sites like
Distrowatch,
Linux Forums and many many others and I pick
Slackware as my distribution of choice; fast, stable and most importantly, not Windows! I picked Slackware on the strength of the Slax live CD which runs right off your CD-ROM drive, loads itself into your system RAM and doesn't touch your OS or HD at all. It's basically a whole OS that runs off a single CD - marvellous. Well I ran Slax for a couple of weeks and loved it, the look and feel of KDE, the security from pop-ups and nasty spyware and adware and the fact that it detected and configured all my hardware correctly. So I figured, what the hell! I'll give the real deal a spin.
I did not realise that Slackware was not the faint of heart...it uses the command line heavily for all configuration, tweaking and generally all customisation that you'll need to do to get it running to your liking. Needless to say, I was not anywhere near ready for that kind of heavy, non-GUI using work. I did however manage to compile a kernel all by my lonesome, rassled extensively with LILO (and hated it to death) and began to realise that a dual-boot configuration was not going to work. Why? Basically, my Windows HD partition table was fucked up by Partition Magic 8, the Windows MBR was overwritten by LILO and I had no idea how to recover it. Panic!! All my files were still on my Windows HD - years and years of mp3's, documents, programs all suddenly inacessible, including the paper I was working on that was due in a couple of days. I was in despair...until I began to google a bit and realised that I could mount my windows HD from a live CD, read my files and salvage my paper...yay!
Sick of Slackware, I formatted the partitions on my second HD and after much searching, I settled on
Fedora Core 1. I fell in love from the moment I saw the lovely graphical anaconda installer and we have been a happy couple for almost a month now. Last week I wanted to gve
SuSE 9.1 a try, and I formatted my windows HD completely and installed SuSe right over it. I don't like SuSe 9.1 too much, it looks and feels too much like Windows, much of the config is done auto-magically and after Fedora Core 1 I miss the control. What I don't miss is windows..once I transferred my files to my bigger HD I had no more need for Windows. I think I will use my former windows HD to try out other distributions but for me, this is it! No more windows...I'm freeee!
Next week, the bf and I are going down to spend a week at his parent's house on Hilton Head. Sun, sea, sand and some well earned relaxation. I can't wait.
Of course, no one would have anything to say to my last post...why would you?
Before I dash off to a seminar, I will promise new content on; 1) my move to Linux! Ditch that piece of shit OS Windows and come on over to the penguin :) 2) My trip home to Kenya this summer (if and when that comes to fruition) 3) General summer weirdness...
Not that anyone reads this anyway, but one day I will want to know what I felt and thought, and I would like to have a record of it somewhere where I can't lose it...
Remembrance
Not a single soul
Knows why he is born,
Or his real dwelling place;
We go back to our origin,
We become earth again.
Waking up this morning and reading today's East African Standard online, I was suddenly reminded that 10 years ago, the genocide in Rwanda began. Reading about the horrors that the people of
Nyamata village were forced to endure struck me with particular force - I say particular because I think this was the first event that I remember that forced me to confront not only the reality of death for the first time, but the inconceivable brutality that man can inflict upon other men, women and children.
The barrage of images that were shown on KTN night after night of terrified refugees pouring across the Ugandan border, of bodies swollen from decay and scarred by machetes clogging up rivers, of pools of blood ringed by black, swarming clouds of flies, and stiff, lifeless bodies lying in the middle of dirt roads. I remember reeling from the sheer immensity of the event, I could not even begin to make sense of it, or to comprehend it because I felt that I would go mad in the effort, and so I had to wall away all the emotions that those horrifying images brought up in me.
Much of the footage came from CNN and BBC news teams and one couldn't help but wonder why no-one was doing anything. That sense of outrage and despair coupled with the knowledge of one's own helplessness continues with me today. Now what I feel is guilt; guilt for surviving when so many thousands did not, guilt for not doing enough (anything) to help those who were being slaughtered, guilt because it is spring and there are so many people who will not feel the warm sun on their faces or see flowers bloom anymore, people who could have been my brothers, my parents, my family...
All I could do was play
Sigur Ros all day, particularly
dánarfregnir og jarðarfarir as a dirge to their memory, as I cannot visit the mass graves and offer my tears. I do not think that I will ever lose that sense of deep guilt but I also think that in many ways, that's quite OK - the continual remembrance of those who died will be my penance, and that nagging question, "Why didn't anyone do anything about it until it was too late?" will motivate me to hold those who claim to support truth and justice to their word, and to demand that such inconceivable negligence/racism/apathy never be repeated again.
What else can I do?
They are earth now, someday I will join them...and some day, you will too
In this world
Where everything, without exception,
Is unreal,
Death also
Is devoid of reality.
To write something and leave it behind us,
It is but a dream.
When we awake we know
There is not even anyone to read it.
Ikkyu-shi Sojun (1457)
Need I say more?
I do promise more content up soon: Judith Butler on queer marriage, boy update and more griping about school, if your lucky I may even talk about my first time...mmmhmm, you heard me right...
Well...tales of the demise of the comments links have been greatly exaggerated, in case you've been wondering where the hell I have been, here I am now! So like it!
Somehow I messed the comments up bigtime and now I can't tell who has been commenting and when and where and why...So that means I may have to delete the sordid little buggers altogether. Bah!
I'm such a nerd...
create your own visited states map
And how did I miss my 1 year blogaversary? By being lazy, that's how!! Graduate school is an insidious beast...
Birthday was great.
Holidays are here.
Whiny students stink.
Move out of apartment?
Not so yummy in my tummy.
I'm taking some time off for the holidays y'all :-D
HAHAHAHA!!
My last project for the quarter is done! What a lovely piece of shite it was too....
Heeheeeheee...Angsty Frodo!
Angry? Pshaw! A vague irritation! Much like the tickle you get when you pee and you have the clap. Believe me, I know....
Coo.. Horoscopes!
The good news, say scientists at Sweden's University of Uppsala, is that global warming will never melt the ice caps or create endless summers in Toronto. That's because -- here comes the bad news -- oil and gas supplies will run out far sooner than expected. There's not enough of the stuff left on the planet for humans to create a dangerous excess of carbon dioxide. The scientists believe oil reserves are 80 percent smaller than generally predicted, and will peak in 2010. Let this possible scenario serve as a stimulus for meditations about your long-term future, Sagittarius. What sources of energy, money, and love that you now depend on may be gone in 15 years? What can you do to begin cultivating replacements? Visualize the life you'd like to be living in 2018, and start planting seeds you'll harvest then."
Well isn't that just cheery? Start buying up land in the country folks...we're all going back to nature much sooner than you'd expect..hehehe..Can you just picture the chaos?
D'ja like the nifty new redesign?
I think I've been working my way through a case of the early onset winter blues so I need lots of bright colours to cheer my mood...ha! Who am I kidding? Everything's all pearshaped because I still do not know what I'm up to in this weird bovine town...As a sop to my bruised ego, I've bought one of these babies =D
Whoop whoop!!
My birthday's next week...haha!
Hmmm...I'm getting lazy with this blog..
Partly because I am no longer sure what I want to vent about these days. It seems that all the bile and vitriol has been squeezed out of me by all the wonderfulness that is time spent with J. Sheeeesh, I'm becoming domesticated! The tropical flower was right, I've turned into a docile lamb :-p Frankly, I'm not sure I would like it any other way..hehehe..just be happy that I do not spend hours composing paeans to his eyes, or his lovely long eyelashes or something of the sort *shudder* I'm not sure I'd like things to get _that_ far gone...
Aaaaaaaaaaand in other news, I've recently been wondering what the hell I am doing at OSU. Putting aside almost-end-of-quarter jitters, I have been wondering what exactly I'm gaining from being here for this year that Kasulis is off on sabbatical doing buddha knows what in Japan (the lucky bastard). I suppose that learning Japanese counts for a lot of it but somehow I feel that I am wasting time, I keep feeling this irritating itch between my shoulderblades that one day I will wake up and realise that I have a MA in nothing in particular and that I am eminently unemployable. I feel like I should be reading other books, and writing other papers, and attending conferences in other places and talking about subjects other than 710, tantra or how much we all hate Julianna and want to choke her with her own blood art.
WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING HERE?????
I don't even know what I'm going to do for my thesis...I know that no-one really knows but I'm beginning to question the very basis of why I am interested in Buddhism and the value of the work that I have done with it so far. I keep asking myself Erin's question, "So what?" Why does my interest in the philosophy of Zen matter? I thought I knew the answer to that question but not any more....I read work like Hugh's and I think to myself that I should be lucky to be doing work that's half as important or relevant...I mean who really cares that Dogen and Derrida might as well have been buddy monks in the 1200's? How does my interest in that change one thing about the shitty world that we live in? What's the relevance? So what? It all seems like so much intellectual masturbation now! How can I do something that really matters about Buddhism? More to the point, how do I do it with the little Japanese that I know now? What a lot of time I've wasted in the last year!! I could potentially be in my second year of Japanese by now...but that's in the past now, there's nothing I can do about that, but I can do something about the future and what's left of the present..whatever that really means! *snort*
Sitting in the bus today, dripping wet from the late autumn rains I was struck by how unreal it felt to me...in the past, I've felt that being on a bus, commuting to school connected me in some way to "real" life. As if stepping on that bus somehow brought me into a world that was larger than my own. It just brought home to me how disconnected my life feels from anything that I would consider "real". I feel like I have been living in a bubble, or some kind of dream from which I might wake at any moment.
Horror of horrors, perhaps I have it all backwards, and the "real" has seeped into my dream without my noticing it...I mean, it seems real enough to me; paying bills, counting my pennies, wondering what to cook for dinner...that's real isn't it? *sigh*
I just keep wanting to look over my shoulder, as if to give myself some warning as to when that wakeup call will come hurtling down on me.
I hope I won't bruise too badly when it does...
Armin van Buuren tomorrow night!
Why does it have to be so bloody cold? I suppose it will be much like last month with Tiesto, a long shivering wait outside the doors before they let everyone in. Despite the fact that we bought advance tickets! I mean, what's the point of advance tix if they let you in with the rest of the hoi-polloi? Hmmppph...
I'm mulling over whether I should go out tonight, if only for a short while to Skully's. Just pop my head in, dance a lil bit to some good ol' 80's grooves, and come straight back for some warm tea and an early night. Man, I'm aging by the second. If I had had the slightest inkling that I would be turning into my parents this early in my life I would have scoffed at the thought.
Bah. I suppose that means tomorrow night will have to be especially debauched....hehehehe.....not too hard considering J's coming with me... =D
Heeee....
mutter mutter sick mutter mutter mutter grumble.....
Wow, what an end to the Matrix trilogy eh? I'm just so happy and proud that in this day and age of xenophobic, racist militarism that a couple of filmmakers make the deliberate choice to cast an ethnically diverse multiplicity of actors and to give them the dignitas and gravitas that has been missing for so many years in Hollywood.
Take that GW..not all of us buy into your politics of fear and hate!
Yeah yeah yeah..haven't blogged all week. What can I say? I'm quite busy =D
Matrix! Yeah!
My brother's playing in a rugby tournament at OSU on Saturday, so I'll be quite glad to see him, and to see him play..hehehe..
Health Services sucks! I'm sure you knew that already, I just thought I'd throw in my two bits..grrr...
Sigh..it's hump day
Wednesday! What a great night that was, J. and I went to see a performance of
Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 3...my word, what a lovely piece of music that is..especially the first movement with that haunting first 2-3 bar melody.. just sticks in your head and refuses to leave :-p
It of course reminded me of my trip to Russia 2 years ago, when I stumbled on this famous
graveyard in the Aleksander Nevsky Lavra. The monastery was just across the street from the
Hotel Moskva and since we had the evening free I said what the hey! I'll pop across and maybe catch an Orthodox service with the incense and the priests singing that lovely Orthodox chant. As it was I caught the tail end of some service or other, and as I wandered around the now gently mouldering monastery I saw a small booth offering entry to the graveyards that flank the entryway to the grounds. Curious as to why they would be charging entrance to a graveyard, I paid my pittance and entered. To my surprise, I soon found myself in front of Dostoevsky's grave! I was so shocked that it took a few minutes for me to realise that it was
the Dostoevsky and not any other.. The list of famous Russians buried there is quite amazing as you'll see from the link. I was just annoyed that I had chosen that day not to carry my camera with me, and the sun was quickly setting. I decided instead to soak up the melancholy atmosphere; it was a lovely fall day, with just a light misting rain from time to time, the leaves were still golden up in the trees, and the wind swayed them gently in its cradling breeze. From time to time a crow would caw and startle me out of my reverie.. there was no-one else in the graveyard and it was just perfect for solitary meditation...It was a wonderful couple of hours that will stay with me forever, every time the leaves begin to turn and the wind begins to bite, I am transported back to that time and place that lies now forever in my memory...
Enjoy your Samhain folks, and take some time out to remember those who have passed on...
Mama say mama sah mama you suck! x 3
Rockin out to
Yoda and Greenpeace :-D
Are you ready for a break?
I'm not quite strung up by the wrists, but I am dying for a break from these sophomoric exams that I have to grade by the seemingly millions.. They sap the blood and tire the brain like hyperactive leeches.
Bah. Now I don't feel like going to kendo even though I skipped all last week 'cause of the cold I had.
Evil students.
We hates them we does.
Nasty
Tricksy
False
And while yet in my flesh...
Now I can say with Isaiah, "Woe is me, for my eyes have seen the glory of the Lord."
It was magnificent!
Of course, it had to be one of the coldest nights since I've been in Columbus! J. couldn't come with me (sadness) so I took the bus downtown just for hoots :-) There were plenty of hoots to be had! There were these three black girls laughing and joking all the way down High Street. It took all I could to stop myself laughing along with them. That would have been just plain rude :-p
I get off the bus, walk across the street and bang! There's the club, with a huge line already outside the door! It's 9.50pm and the line already stretches 1/4 way down the block. I zip up my leather jacket and settle in to wait. A blue Geo drives slowly by, the window rolls down and a bearded face pops out...."Tiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeessssssstoooooo!!!!!" Everyone in line chuckles at him as the Geo pulls around the corner and into the parking lot.
The line starts to move and we get in the club pretty soon. The interior is immaculate, a clean red and black colour scheme, an open plan interior with unobtrusive balconies and (the true sign of a great club) a DJ box visible from all corners of the club. Oh yes. Clean bathrooms! That blew my mind :-p
The warmup DJ's soon start spinning their stuff, first up was DJ Quantum I bet; playing chunky, funky house. Think Carl Cox with some of the edge taken off, toe-tapping, head nodding stuff all the same. The dancefloor is quickly crowded, but with people standing around and watching. No one is dancing yet. Seems they're saving their energy. Mark Mayhem comes on and begins to pump up the energy, playing some hard trance/hard house, energetic, hard nasty beats and it begins to get the crowd moving. The glowsticks come out and I make a move onto the dance floor.
The crowd's up for it; rave kids, yuppie metrosexual types, some clueless frat types, and a core of dedicated Tiesto fans t-shirts and laser message writers in hand. I even saw a small Dutch flag being waved at one point. Everyone's just waiting for Tijs to come out and the energy is palpable.
Midnight rolls around. Tiesto steps into the DJ box. The roar from the crowd is unbelievable! Hands up, flashes popping, people jumping up and down and screaming their heads off, chanting, "Ti-es-to! Ti-es-to!" and the man himself is just lapping it up, smiling and laughing as usual as he slaps on his first record. The crowd goes wild. The night has just begun. For the next 3 hours he had the entire crowd of 500 (?) by the balls. He played it hard, he played it deep, he played it nasty and most of all, he gave us what we wanted. Motorcycle- as the rush comes ? Yeah i got that. You want to hear my new single Traffic? Sure! How about an golden oldie, Radiohead- Street Spirit, just for kicks? It was one of the most intense events I've ever experienced. It was like I couldn't stop dancing even if I tried, he had us all in his spell, caught in a web of energy that just wouldn't let go. And when Tiesto started dancing with us as well, oh man, it just got louder, hotter and more energetic...
Trance is truly a
spiritual thing
The DJ is a modern day
shaman
The dance floor is the new church.
Perhaps.
All I know is, when a DJ I love and respect is on the turntables, I'm in ecstasy.
In Trance We Trust.
In a few hours, I will be at the event of a lifetime....one of the 3 Dutch Trance Gods, the right hand man of the Trance Trinity, Tijs Verwest aka DJ (muthafuckin) Tiesto will grace the hallowed ones and twos.
I"M SOOO FUCKING EXCITED !!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAA !!!!!!!
And the best part is, in a coupla weeks I get to do it all over again! This time with Armin (too sexy for my shirt) van Buuren....my joy knows no bounds.
In trance we trust
Amen.
This is the substance of the Way of the Samurai. If by setting one's heart right every morning and evening, one is able to live as though his body were already dead, he gains freedom in the Way. His whole life will be without blame, and he will succeed in his calling.
-Hagakure-
All the Beautiful Things
The wonderful thing about asthma is the fact that you never know which attack may be your last. Even if you have mild asthma like I do, and use meds only infrequently, at the back of your mind is that tiny voice saying, "What if today is the day nothing works, maybe today you'll gasp your last."
I suppose in an existential sense, this close relation to one's own death is desirable, but on the other hand, it tends to cultivate a very nonchalant attitude towards one's own demise. I mean the past 2 days have made me much more aware and grateful for the day to day functionality that I take for granted. Things as simple as getting up out of bed, or stripping for the shower take on new significance when you have to slow your movements, wince at the pain in your joints and breathe slowly and regularly to avoid hyperventilation.
The really odd thing is that I have had countless asthma attacks, and each time I say that I will appreciate more the simple things I can do without wincing at the pain in my chest: walking down the street, running for a bus, climbing up a flight of stairs. The feeling of gratitude lasts for just a couple of days and then it is back to the ho-hum, that lazy un-selfconscious bitchery that becomes so ridiculous when you are fighting for breath at 2 am, sitting up in bed because you cannot breathe any other way, fighting for every precious sip of air, always face to face, dancing with the
Jak o' Shadows
There have only been a couple of times that I have thought an attack would kill me, the last and most severe was at boarding school in Kagumo. It was 1998 and I was in Form Four, bunking with our house captain and my very good randy friend Kanyanjua (he was a daddy at 17 :-p). For some reason asthma likes to strike between 2 and 4 am, just when your body is at its laziest, and probablywhen your body's defenses are at their lowest functionality (which is bizarre if you think about it because asthma is a
hyperimmune response!)
So there I was, stuck with my ineffectual inhaler, waiting for the pill I had hastily dry swallowed to kick in, and I looked out the window from my bed, and watched the moonlight play in the jacarandas outside and what was running through my head then was what a mess I was going to leave for Kanyanjua if I died in bed that night. At that point I was past caring, all I wanted was death or for my meds to kick in, anything to make it stop! At this point Kanyanjua startled me out of my reverie, he'd been woken by my wheezing. I reassured him that everything was in hand, and reluctantly he fell back to sleep, obviously suspicious that all was not well... The meds eventually kicked in and I made it through that night though I was weak and trembly for a week afterwards, those attacks take a lot out of you.
In a way I like the state of mind that I fall into when I'm going through an attack; the slightly fuzzy, warm and yet razor sharp consciousness that comes with all the different medications surging through your bloodstream. I imagine that's what the moment of death is like: clarity without attachment, peace and warmth and cogent thoughts.
So what was my point? Oh yeah, take a moment to appreciate all the things you take for granted, you never know when they might be taken away from you.
It's Thursday, and as you all know, that means it's gooutandgetwastedinpreparationfortheweekend night...mmhmm..
Waaaaaaaaaah!!! Itai desu yo!!!
Man,
kendo is going to kill me one of these days
There's More to Life than Books you Know...
Ah Morrissey was so right, there's much more to life than Dan's dreary class and this weekend was just chock full of it. First things first,
Kill Bill What a gorgeous bloody outrageous gem of a movie! I think this is the year of the tossed plot line, away with intricate plots and sneaky surprise endings, give us self indulgent, glossy, wipe that blood out of your eye sockets, seat popping fisticuffs..We saw that with the second Matrix movie and now with volume 1 of what promises to be a whopper of a two part series. (This is also the year of sequels/trilogies/what have you but that's another story). If you haven't seen it yet, run out right now and do it! The humongous number of references to other films is much too large and tedious for me to catalogue here, I am sure there are countless anoraks doing that as we speak, but I will point out that the final fight scene with Lucy Liu, both in the teahouse and out is pure
kabuki theatre. Uma Thurman is clearly meant to be Bruce Lee in
Game of Death and....okay I'll leave it at that :-D
I MUST go see it again, and for those
kendokas out there, it'll put a little spring back in your step...hehehe...
This weekend was the first time I accompanied someone to one of "those parties" as their date. You know, the kind where the hosts say it's okay to bring someone which usually means that it's full to the gills with the usual hetero platter: girlfriends, wives, fiancees... That made it doubly pleasurable, first of all that I was invited *preen* and second that I was so obviously not on the menu! Thankfully there was one other black person there, I can only be a
synecdoche for so much at one time thankyouverymuch. I could just feel the wheels turning in all those puzzled heads when I arrived with J...ahhh it was pleasurable and yet slightly disturbing all at the same time. Ha! Mindfucks!
Then the rest of the weekend was spent in pleasant lollygagging about the apartment with J. until work reared its ugly head and refused to be put off any longer. Sigh. Well, the Propaganda Assassin Squad shall return to fight once more! Muahahahaha! (You had to have been there :-p)
Tiesto! 10 Days!
oh and errr *bouncy bouncy*
This time, for real...
Ahhh....thank Buddha the weekend is nigh
Assorted amusing quotes from yesterday:
"I get nervous when I hear things like penis envy."
"If God could part the Red Sea then maybe, just maybe, if you are reaaallly good, he can give you back your hymen."
(said to me) "Are you cheating on me with that lesbian?"
I'm going to
kendo practice later this afternoon even though I feel like a hippo stomped on the right half of my body after the last practice...it was the fault of the advanced student I was training with who decided I should learn the
kote and
men strikes with a red oak
bokken !!
Of course after about 30 strikes with the sword held up above my head, my arms were aching and the sweat dripping from my forehead. Those suckahs are heavy! The stance is a little difficult to get used to, this is where my previous training does not come in handy at all..I'm used to angling my back foot out a bit but that throws my hips all off square when I'm in
chudan or indeed any stance, so I have been practicing walking "square" all over campus...needless to say my thighs did not appreciate it! :-p
Hopefully
sensei will totter out and dazzle us with his swordsmanship. Apparently on Saturday he took on 4-5 challengers on one after the other and barely broke a sweat doing it...and the man's 70-something years old! If I'm half as sprightly at his age I will count myself lucky.
The good thing about
kendo practice is I get to wear my karate pants from back in the day..yay! If I can find them..hahaha
Ohhh..everything hurts! Well not quite everything but my back, arms and wrists hurt like a biatch and my palm's beginning to callus...so how soon can I go back? Heh. I liked it a lot actually, the class isn't too large and I like the idea of being handy with a stick ;)
Not that I'm not already, but errr umm...ahem...you know what I mean... :-D
Gave a kick-ass lecture today :-) It definitely does help when you know what you are talking about, and I do know Kikuyu religion pretty well..hehehe... Yeah!
Going to
kendo in about 30 mins, I hope I like it. Not sure whether to change clothes for it or not, since I am just going to observe and dekko the scene..maybe I'll just get my change outta my pocket, kneel in a corner and play mum :-p
Hooray for sublimated alpha male agression !! If I'm lucky I get to bop someone over the head with a
bokken..heee :-D
Heeeee! *bouncy bouncy*
A certain somebody is making me veerrrrrryyy happy !!
Heeeee! :-D
Ahhhh...i love my Dad. He's been a professor for more than 30 years so of course I emailed him about teaching and how I was a wee bit worried that I would suck at it :-p and he sends me a great email about his own expriences and assuring me that I'd get better at it and even grow to love it...he said "Like fine wine, you'd get better and better each day" Isn't that smashing! Heeeee...
So this week has been pretty interesting, the work's piling up, I'm lecturing on Monday and I haven't lifted a finger (well not quite true but at least I know what books I'm using ) I finally have money in my account, yay! which is a maaaajor step forward for me. It means I can buy tickets to see Tiesto and AVB...which of course I took care of as soon as I could..haha..
Oh and I keep meeting these wonderful people, just one after the next...it's incredible, and it makes me feel very very lucky. So perhaps I made the right decision in moving here after all :-D
OK, so maybe I don't have to spill *all* the beans but I can at least tell you all that for the first time in a while, I'm happy :)
Lawdy, do I really need to keep you all updated with the minutiae of my life? I think not...no-one reads this thing anyway...hahaha!!!
Be very afraid America, your children are retarded. I mean, if the patronising, insulting, ethnocentric, jingoistic comment I heard in class today is any indication of America's future then I weep...Sometimes I just despair at the depth and breadth of ignorance to be combated here, for how long must we struggle against this wall of resignation and arrogance?
Well, someone has to do it, and it may as well be me. Like the Right Honourable Robert Nestor Marley said, " Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery / No-one but ourselves can free our minds"
Oh and for a treat, go
here
Ohhh...hooray for retroactive posting! Blogger you rock!
Can you believe I went to a football game today? I can't either...what's even more shocking is the fact that I woke up at 8 am to go tailgating before hand. Now that was a weird experience for me, tailgating seems to be a strange amalgam of old fashioned generosity and a reaffirmation of White Middle Class Conservative values played out through and by a mainly African-American dominated team..very odd. As I was saying to a friend afterwards, while you are at one of these huge events, you can stop by almost any tent and get a beer and a burger but if you tried that at their homes, they would probably shoot you in the butt.. :-p
Prof Dan in my 700 level seminar today, "It's only 270 pages! You can do that over a weekend and write a thoughtful 3 page critique! This is the big pool now!"
Someone throw me a line
*EDIT*
On second thoughts, I should just suck it up and deal, I mean come on....this is grad school we're talking about.....sometimes I'm such a pussy :-p
Oh and while I'm in the mood for self-flagellation I may as well report that I did not test out of Japanese 101, my vocabulary is second year but my writing skills are not..I can't believe I blanked when
sensei asked me to write my name out in
katakana
Stupidstupidstupidstupidstupidstupid
Ahhh the first day of classes just ended..
All those luvly freshmen wandering about, looking so young and confused...muahahaha! Well, let's just say that I'll not lack for eye candy all year long. Oh the joys of a big university.
Ugh...lecture section is soooo huge! Just rows and rows of undergrads packed into that auditorium, I was afraid that they would also pack into my recitation sections but from the rosters it looks like I'll have a sensible number of folks in there.. that's good because discussion doesn't really work in classes beyond a certain number...neato :)
Ooooohhh..and I hope I can test out of Japanese 101. I mean, it's not that I appreciate the opportunity to recall how to say "hello" "goodbye" and "goodnight" but I dont want to waste precious credit hours doing that..especially when those hours dont count towards my MA....so here's hoping...
Mmm... so today was the Grad Queer meet and greet thing, and I must say I was surprised by the turnout! There must have been about 25+ people there, and for a first meeting, at least in my experience, that's quite a few :) The meeting was..eh, meeting-like but afterwards some of us trooped down to Union Station to booze it up..haha, myself not included of course ;)
Let's just say that there are some..interesting people in Grad Queers, not the least the guy we gave a ride to there and back..ahem..talk about full disclosure! I know you just met us, but please, save the juicy details at least until the third meeting :-p
However the highlight of tonight was meeting J...mmm, J is a tall cool glass of handsome on a hot day :-D From the moment I saw those baby blues I knew I had to get to know him a little better..hehe..I couldn't help myself, those eyes are just hypnotic, and he's seems like a really sweet kind guy...anyway to cut my gushing short, we're going to temple on Sunday (Buddhist temple for those of you who ignore my tagline) and so I'll see how things go one on one...
*fingers crossed*
Okay, so I have been oh so gently reminded that I haven't posted about Sunday's event, you know.. the second date thing?
Hmmm..so..Is this what dating feels like? It just seems so anti-climactic, I mean you spend so much time thinking about it, and figuring out what to wear or what to say :) and then the day comes and the date ends so quickly that you're left wondering what exactly happened. I suppose there is an art to all this, a slow drift towards intimacy, helped along by occasional hand brushings and revelations about parental depression, but this feels so odd to me. I'm used to jumping straight to the sex bit and worrying about the rest of the baggage later. It's worked admirably for me in the past and quite frankly everyone gets something out of it..even if some parties may enjoy it more than others..haha
So what am I saying? Arrrgh I don't know what I'm trying to say! But I will say this, whatever the hell this is, I kinda like it :-)
I thought this might tickle your collective fancies; the TA staff for Comp Studies 270 this quarter is composed of: 1 gay man (me), 1 lesbian and 1 former middle school teacher, mother of two, and dutiful wife of a Marine officer.
You may now chuckle at will :)
It's the weekend! Yay!
I am happy that all the silly TA thingies are done with and that I've met the other people in the program and the faculty and they all seem to be nice, down to earth folks...
One thing that struck me very hard this week was, now that I'm in graduate school, I'm studying with a group of nerds just like myself :-p so I don't have to worry about coming off as a know-it-all or about referencing some obscure theorist or just some of my own strange ideas..it's a very strange feeling that I'm not quite used to just yet, but it's a pleasant feeling nontheless.
I'll be happy to start class and put my brain back into gear, I swore up and down that this summer I would do a lot of reading and writing and get my thesis into some kind of publishable form, but I just haven't had the motivation to do so..I mean even now, I should be thinking about cranking out a syllabus for my recitation section but I don't feel up to it. Well part of it is I'm not sure that I even want to make one up for the class because really my vision is for it to be a discussion session rather than a lecture/assignment kind of traditional class...Hahaha..when in doubt, call it subversive :-D
It's also second date time this weekend, yay! This time doing something really really gay, which I'll only post about post-factum..haha
Gah! Tired! Who knew TA conferences could suck so much
mana out of you?
Whatever happened to music that matters? Hahahaha..but no, really, tell me....
Oh yes, and Charles? My best friend from primary school from a coupla posts back? Turns out he's a foul mouthed, often soused, wanna-be film-maker :) Wonderful, just wonderful!
Mmmm....so tomorrow is the TA development conference, 3 days of sitting around listening to
anoraks telling you how to hold chalk in an academically impressive fashion. Now, ordinarily I would be dreading this event but this provides a lovely opportunity to press the flesh with cute grad students before the free-for-all that will be the GLBT grad mixer next week. See? There is indeed a cold and calculating mind hard at work here ! If only I didnt have to be there at 8.30 am... sigh
And here's a memo to all the people who didn't pick up the phone this weekend...SHAME!!! Why do you have cellphones if you don't pick up and let me regale you with tales of lurid and lush living in Cowtown? Hmmph!
La rue du couleur
So my friend K-dawg and I went down to High St and I-670 to check out this "Via Colori" mini-festival they were having down there; chalk drawings on the asphalt, greasy food and overpriced drinks ruled the day..and I thought to myself, why not give it a nice French name rather than an Italian one? Surely the Short North has pretensions to high culture? And then it struck me that the Italian version is much more difficult to mispronounce... :-p Midwesterners!
Yeah, and so finallly I've gone on a nice, normal date in Cowtown *applaud here*. It turns out there are warm, funny semi-sane people in Columbus who I would actually like to see a second time. Yay! There's no dirt to dish because there
is no dirt to dish you naughty naughty people, we shared a chaste goodnight kiss outside his place and that was that...besides it was too nice a moon and too nice a night to spoil it with unmentionables...so there...
And speaking of DJ talent, Tiesto is coming to town in October! I can hardly believe it...more Dutch talent than you can shake your magic stick at. LOVELY!!
Cooo..so someone
is reading this stuff after all....hello all, do have a seat..will that be tea or coffee?
Things a-plenty have been happening lately, even though I have little to do and a lot of time to do it with! So that Shawn business is total history though he calls me today and we spend a half hour chinwagging about online courses, the public defender system and the relative merits of contact lenses...huh? Is exactly right, I did not expect that this..whatever it is, would continue beyond the expiry date of relationship.. I guess we are friends now? Murf?
Did I mention
he was coming in November? I am of course suitably excited and preparing an appropriately scented and coloured item of underclothing to chuck in his face at a choice moment in the set..mmmm....hard dutch errr ummm trance :-p
Then today I get an email that just blew me away! It was from Charles by bestest friend in Primary who I hadn't heard from in 9 years....9 years! It was an absolute shock...we were inseparable until he left just before Std 8, and I was heartbroken when he did. I mean this was the kid with whom I spent every single moment I could, we talked about it all and I do mean all...Now that I think about it I probably had a mega-crush on him too but it's been so long that I'm not absolutely sure. I wonder if he's in the US or still in the UK...
Ha! I'm still reeling from the shock!
Just paid my rent early today, which means I have $1.40 to my name right now. Oh yeah...
Hmmmm...I'm feeling a bit better today, perhaps the
zazen and Arvo Part's
Te Deum are helping. I still don't know what to do about the boi, but I suppose that a decision will come to me when I have to make one...I just cannot rush it.
Go out and see Mars tonight! Or tomorrow night, or the night after..just go and see it! I wonder what my ancestors would have said 60,000 years ago as they looked up in the night sky and saw this brilliant light...
Heh, I wonder if they even had language...I hope they did, I certainly hope they did
Eh? Say wha? Me no speak the english so good....
Yeah, so this afternoon was spent sitting in a room full of new international students (not by choice, they put an ACADEMIC HOLD on us so we would HAVE to go..how stupid is that?) watching such informational videos as "Cold Water" (A lovely quote from which is, 'I felt alone, scared and very very isolated....sniff....') and a mindless Campus Safety video while a middle aged balding desk jockey cracked insulting jokes about Koreans, Indians, Pakistanis, Koreans, Indians, McDonalds and oh did I mention Koreans?
His favourite Korean anecdote apparently is to say that every Korean man he's ever known likes dogs as their favourite animal.
Retch.
I had to put up with this for 3 hours !!!! And then I find out that I HAVE to purchase a $325 a quarter health insurance policy from OSU simply because I am an international student regardless of whether I have insurance from another provider or not. That's just plain ridiculous, and to my mind...ILLEGAL!
$1300 a year for health insurance? I think not! Oh and there are penalties too if you don't buy the policy..oh such as not being registered for classes! Oh yes, perfectly reasonable.....quite perfectly reasonable... My kitchen and bathroom are awash in white powedery plaster...it's hotter than I can stand outside and today is supposed to be a nice happy day.
It's my 3 year anniversary! Yeah, I came out 3 years ago :-) and just a year later on the same day I landed in Kobenhavn, Danmark....sigh...what a glorious, shining, golden time that was....and those memories have to be tainted with this!
Oh and let's not forget who called the other day. You guessed it, the boi called me out of the blue from upstate to tell me why he'd disappeared for most of the summer. Boy is it a whopper of a tale with all the elements of classic drama; stalking, heated arguments, a vicious beatdown, a late night cross-country road trip with nothing but the clothes you wearing, near nervous breakdowns...I mean his story has it all! The problem is it's so easy to believe because I know he's unbalanced, slighly nutty and has a mean-as-fuck ex bf... part of me's suspicious as well...He didn't call for nearly 2 months or email or anything like that to let me know where he was, whether he was alive or out of jail or on the lam in Saskatchewan (do they have internet cafes in Saskatchewan? They sure as hell have telephones!) and so now that I know he's alive and back with his parents are things supposed to go back to lovey-dovey normal? I was sure I would never hear from him again..I was used to that fact and had begun to move on..and now this..just what am I supposed to do?
It's a matter of trust really, and I just don't know if I can trust him, and I hate myself for feeling that way, but surely I have reason....
Happy 3 years.
" Koba,
You have a lot to learn about MTW/VI. "
Ouch! Well that's what you get for having a slow-as-fuck school connection and playing SP campaigns all the time...a real human can kick your ass everytime...but I'm learning, oh yes I'm learning...
Mmm...so I've decided to rejoin my
clan but boy do I have a lot of catching up to do.. there are so many more units now, and counters, and larger maps and and and....At least I have been winning most of my matches online so I don't feel like a complete rookie.
Curious?
Numenorean
To which race of Middle Earth do you belong? brought to you by Quizilla
Yeah baby! For a moment I was afraid I would be an Elf..nothing against blondes, it's just, you know..i don't take that much care of my hair :-D
Now why doesn't the US have festivals like
this one ? I mean really... who wouldn't want to go crazy with 40,000 fellow dance nuts yelling your bollocks off coz the DJ just dropped the Tiesto remix of Southern Sun? Fess up people! It's time for the US to get its own Creamfields! Oh wait...we kinda already
do
Bah, now the silly thing has all my formatting out of whack
"You must remember this, a kiss is still a
kiss". Your romance is Casablanca. A
classic story of love in trying times, chock
full of both cynicism and hope. You obviously
believe in true love, but you're also
constantly aware of practicality and societal
expectations. That's not always fun, but at
least it's realistic. Try not to let the Nazis
get you down too much.
What Romance Movie Best Represents Your Love Life? brought to you by Quizilla
Casablanca my ass :-p
Billie Holliday does a mean interpretation of "As Time Goes By " though....
It occurred to me sometime last night before I dropped off to sleep that I'm not really over Christian....big surprise, and I know certain Bulgarians are laughing and clapping their hands as they read this :-) (I know woman, I know!) Sigh... that man has ruined me, he's raised the bar so high for anyone I could ever possibly date that I fear nobody will come even close....damn him.
Has anyone
seen the fucker? Where are you Christian? He's like some secret fag agent on a mission from luuuuurv or something. Agent Double-Oh Danish reporting for duty Sir!
It doesn't help that my lovely wonderful sleep was broken at 9 am by some weirdo pounding on my door...of course the moment I woke up and covered my nekkidness he was long gone. I suspect he was the building handyman come to fix my bathroom ceiling. Bet I have seen the last of him....dagnabbit.. My landlady does not believe in calling ahead to let me know these things..doesn't she know that's a tenant law no-no? Perhaps a gentle reminder is in order....Needless to say that colours my whole day piss-yellow...Thanks landlady...
Yes well, corn fed bounty is one thing...pity sex with a 40 year old is quite something else. It's a shame really, because he seemed to be such a nice guy, charming, not bad looking but of course he was well past a gay man's shelf life; past 30 all life ends. If you have not paired up with a regular screw by then, you are condemned to being that slightly creepy guy hanging around at the edge of dancefloors trying so hard to mask the thinning hair around his temples... Is that what I have to look forward to at 40? Yechhh..good thing it's at least ummm, 20 years away..hehe..
So I was sitting in the bus trying not to kill the screechy Greek teenager two rows back when the skyline of Columbus came into view and he said, "Wow, it's really a city!" And the first thing that popped into my head was, "Shut up you daft twit, of course it is!" I felt like a mother hen defending her chicks...does that mean I'm in love with my city? I think so kiddies, I think so...Which is a strange feeling given teh fact that I've spent most of my time this week, glued to my computer now that I have cable internet...arrrrgh!
Pirates off the left bow!!
Hooo boy, I'm surprised that I still remembered my login for Blogger...it's been so long!! Speaking of which, the last couple of months staying at my sister's place have been inexpressibly long and dull...my two young nephews notwithstanding, I could feel myself slowing morphing into a Southerner with each balmy afternoon...only without the mint juleps on the porch at sundown. What's the point if there is no alcohol?!?!
However, it was not without it's moments of progress, my sister and I are now tolerating each other a bit better; she doesn't try and drag me off to church and I don't yell at her for her weird relationship with her so-called boyfriend, she doesnt drag me off to church and I resist the temptation to subvert my young nephews. Family bliss. It was nice spending QT with my Mom, it also made me realise how different my relationship with her is from my other siblings; we're like sisters more than mother and son. Just watching my sister gape at some of the things I could say to my mother was worth the boredom and lack of liqour alone...Hehehehe.... Of course that kind of bonding doesn't come without some costly revelations, seeing the look of horror and disgust on my mother's face when she saw the news report that Canada was allowing gay marriage told me volumes about just how open I can be to my mom; not at all.
So rather rashly, I left Columbia, SC for Columbus, OH with very little money and a prayer that I could find a place to live and breather freely for a while before grad school starts, those hopes were dashed when I realised that I would be staying with the most hetero ex-frat boys I have had to spend time with in years. All I am hoping for now is that I get a place soon and start enjoying the bounty that Columbus has to offer. Uh huh, you heard me...corn-fed bounty :-)
Hello Kiddies... Did you miss Daddy? :-p
Well, graduation last week was a blast, and I already miss my friends so very much (I love you guys), but I have been doing so much since that it really hasn't had time to sink in yet. Once the 'rents and my brothers flew in I had no time to breathe whatsoever, I had to show them around, enertain them, make sure they were fed and also had to make sure that I was packing and had a place to keep my things aftr Sunday! What a stressful week that was, I don't think I slept more than 4 hours or so all that week, what with the drinking, the goodbyes, the deep conversations with the old folks..whew, I am glad that's all over with!
The Social Theory Conference in Tampa was a blast!! Sun, drinks and fun were just what the doctor ordered, and having a few of my fave profs there didnt hurt any..hehehe..Let's just say I go to see a side of them that a student would never see! Course I am sworn to secrecy so y'all will never hear about it..mauahaha.. but now I'm at my sister's place in SC and making the best of it, I don't know how long I will be here but sooner or later this dragging me off to church thing will have to stop, whether she likes it or not..wish me luck with that one.
I'll try and keep updating this baby as often as I can but I won't make any promises, regular service will resume once I am in school at Ohio State in September. Bear with me y'all.
Be good or be good at it! ;-)
Wheeee!! I got into Ohio State!!
I get to drive down to Syracuse today to pick up the 'rents, the fun part of my week has begun..hehehe..
"Calling all the children of the earth, are you ready for rebirth? Mil-len-ni-um is here, and there's nothing to fear..."
Perhaps I should be worried...
I woke up in my bed this afternoon and thought to myself, "How did I get here? I don't remember leaving the Guild last night?"
Mmmmmm yeah...that's what senior week is all about :-)
Woooo... Haven't been keeping up with this blog..do you feel neglected?
School's out, I'm done paying my dues to SLU and now the future lies gaping before me. What a scary thing that is...I really have no idea where I will be or what I will be doing 2 weeks from now. I have very little money, no work permit as yet, and no word from Ohio State.
If I really sat down and thought about the future, I would have a massive panic attack :-D Thank goodness for Senior Week and an endless supply of booze!!
You are Professor X!
You are a very effective teacher, and you are very
committed to those who learn from you. You put
your all into everything you do, to some extent
because you fear failure more than anything
else. You are always seeking self-improvement,
even in areas where there is nothing you can do
to improve.
Which X-Men character are you most like? brought to you by Quizilla
Meh.
I feel fat
I blame Senior Blues
Tra la laaa... 15 pager to write... tra la laaa....
Strange dreams last night; of begging in an anonymous subway station and chasing after a mysterious blond dreadlocked girl, who always seemed to disappear right before I caught up with her
Dreams of DJ'ing with
Carl Cox and the damn CD's keep skipping in the
turntable, of buying Carl a
sake bomb and of sitting with him afterwards sneering at a pack of yuppie lawyer types across the bar, dreams of coming out to strangers, dreams of coming home to a just vacated apartment that lingers with the scent of human presence...
Strange dreams
Oh and happy Labour Day :-D Workers of the world, unite!!
These past few days have just brought to mind how many unresolved issues I have with my brother, and perhaps with all my siblings. I suppose that this would naturally be the case considering that they are all much older than I am, and that they were rarely home when I was growing up. Sometimes I feel closer to my friends than I do to my own flesh and blood. That's an odd feeling for a Kenyan; I mean, your family should be closer and dearer to you than life itself, and yet I feel so distant from them. It does not help that my brother has to take the "I'm older than you so you better do what I tell you" attitude with me, because it just makes the gap between us seem all the larger. Does he really know so little about me that he thinks that kind of attitude will get me to listen to his advice? Right or wrong, I feel very patronised when he makes comments like that, when I confront him he tells me that he's just looking out for my best interests....Does that mean I have to put up with being treated like a 9 year old?
That's how old I was when he left for Canada back in 1990, he was a stranger then, and he is a stranger now. He calls me up in Buffalo, and over my protestations and attempts at explanations orders me to
demand of my fave professor that she find me a job/graduate school/manna from heaven, like it was her fault in the first place that I did not get funding from the graduate schools I applied to. By what logic does she now become responsible? What "duties" to me has she somehow shirked that I should chide her like a scullery maid who scratched the Bedford crystal? Sheeeshh..is this how he behaves with other people on a day-to-day basis? No wonder he's been single all this time! No sense of give and take with this man..it's all capitalist exchange value...gah! He just drives me nuts sometimes...
And then my poor parents are just stuck in the middle, they of course follow his advice because he's been in the US the longest of any of us, and I do love and respect them so much so when they take his side I'm torn about what to do. I want to give my brother the finger and say that I'm going to do what I think is best (and I've not been sitting with my thumbs up my arse while all this has been going on thankee very much), but on the other hand I still want to follow my parent's advice....it's like going through puberty all over again..
I've always suspected I have late onset pubertal rebellion against authority syndrome and here it is...I mean, Ihad no reason to really rebel back home because my parent always treated me like an adult: if I respected them they gave me respect back it was as simple as that, and I love them for it. So why rebel against that? My brother on the other hand represents everything that a person could rebel against: domineering authority, patronisation, lack of respect and plain old fuddyduddy-ness (someone tell me they've heard 'fuddyduddy' before).
Here comes my rebellion 7 years late. Whenever my brother begins to give me a laundry list of do this's and do that's, I have to fight the urge to yell "Screw you!!" into the phone and hang up. I think he really sees me a child and I cannot stand (!!!!!) that, it irks me to the core that he of all people should be treating me this way at this point in my life and boy I wish I could tell him this to his face...
We went through the same thing back in 2001 when he snooped around and outed me, somehow the conversation that was very difficult for me to initiate with him (for obvious reasons) got hijacked by this
in loco parentis persona that I can hear come over him over a phone line...it's bizarre how I can hear his persona literally change right before my ears (?)...
Why can't we all just get along? Aiyaiyai, all this drama...
Back, tired and writing what maybe one of the best papers I have ever penned (or is that typed?)
Oh yes, my brother still sucks...
Apparently my DJ name is DJ Pervert..
go figure
And for hoots and giggles, voila! A Personality Test! Thanks Derek.
1. When do you feel your best?
a) in the morning
b) during the afternoon & and early evening
c) late at night
2. You usually walk...
a) fairly fast, with long steps
b) fairly fast, with little steps
c) less fast head up, looking the world in the face
d) less fast, head down
e) very slowly
3. When talking to people you...
a) stand with your arms folded
b) have your hands clasped
c) have one or both your hands on your hips
d) touch or push the person to whom you are talking
e) play with your ear, touch your chin, or smooth your hair
4. When relaxing, you sit with...
a) your knees bent with your legs neatly side by side
b) your legs crossed
c) your legs stretched out or straight
d) one leg curled under you
5. When something really amuses you, you react with...
a) a big, appreciative laugh
b) a laugh, but not a loud one
c) a quiet chuckle
d) a sheepish smile
6. When you go to a party or social gathering you...
a) make a loud entrance so everyone notices you
b) make a quiet entrance, looking around for someone you know
c) make the quietest entrance, trying to stay unnoticed
7. You're working very hard, concentrating hard, and you're
interrupted, do you...
a) welcome the break
b) feel extremely irritated
c) vary between these two extremes
8. Which of the following colors do you like most?
a) Red or orange
b) black
c) yellow or light blue
d) green
e) dark blue or purple
f) white
g) brown or gray
9. When you are in bed at night, in those last few moments before
going to sleep, you lie...
a) stretched out on your back
b) stretched out face dow n on your stomach
c) on your side, slightly curled
d) with your head on one arm
e) with your head under the covers
10. You often dream that you are...
a) falling
b) fighting or struggling
c) searching for something or somebody
d) flying or floating
e) you usually have dreamless sleep
f) your dreams are always pleasant
POINTS:
1. (a) 2 (b) 4 (c) 6
2. (a) 6 (b) 4 (c) 7 (d) 2 (e) 1
3. (a) 4 (b) 2 (c) 5 (d) 7 (e) 6
4. (a) 4 (b) 6 (c) 2 (d) 1
5. (a) 6 (b) 4 (c) 3 (d) 5 (e) 2
6. (a) 6 (b) 4 (c) 2
7. (a) 6 (b) 2 (c) 4
8. (a) 6 (b) 7 (c) 5 (d) 4 (e) 3 (f) 2 (g) 1
9. (a) 7 (b) 6 (c) 4 (d) 2 (e) 1
10. (a) 4 (b) 2 (c) 3 (d) 5 (e) 6 (f) 1
Now add up your total number of points.
OVER 60 POINTS: Others see you as someone they should
"handle with care". You're seen as vain, self-centered, and who is
extremely dominant. Others may admire you, wishing they could be
more like you, but don't always trust you, hesitating to become too
deeply involved with you.
51 TO 60 POINTS: Others see you as an exciting, highly volatile,
rather impulsive personality; a natural leader, who's quick to make
decisions, though not always the right ones. They see you as bold
and adventuresome, someone who will try anything once; someone who
takes chances and enjoys an adventure. They enjoy being in your
company because of the excitement you radiate.
41 TO 50 POINTS: Others see you as fresh, lively, charming,
amusing, practical, and always interesting; someone who's constantly in the
center of attention, but sufficiently well-balanced not to let it go to their head.
They also see you as kind, considerate, and understanding; someone
who'll always cheer them up and help them out.
31 TO 40 POINTS: Others see you as sensible, cautious, careful &
practical. They see you as clever, gifted, or talented, but modest.
Not a person who makes friends too quickly or easily, but someone who's
extremely loyal to friends you do make and who expect the same
loyalty in return. Those who really get to know you realize it takes a lot
to shake your trust in your friends, but equally that it takes you a long
time to get over it if that trust is ever broken.
21 TO 30 POINTS! : Your friends see you as painstaking and fussy.
They see you as very cautious, extremely careful, a slow and steady
plodder. It would really surprise them if you ever did something impulsively or
on the spur of the moment, expecting you to examine everything carefully
from every angle and then, usually decide against it. They think this reaction
is caused partly by your careful nature.
UNDER 21 POINTS: People think you are shy, nervous, and indecisive,
someone who needs looking after, who always wants someone else to
make the decisions & who doesn't want to get involved with anyone or
anything. They see you as a worrier who always sees problems that
don't exist. Some people think you're boring. Only those who know you
well know that you aren't.
I scored a 36, surprise surprise...
Ressentiment will get me nowhere.
On to my spirited defense of Irigaray! Will she fall before a genealogy of power? Or does the divine woman instantiate a new discursive space for women? Stay tuned, I'm sure you are dying to find out.
Tomorrow I go to Buffalo for a Social Theory Conference with some of the other students from my class. What that means is I have to present for about 5 minutes on my slowly progressing term/conference paper that I will present in more depth in Tampa in May. Perhaps it would ease my anxieties ever so slightly if I typed up something close to a summary of remarks rather than trying to wing it on Friday morning. Of course, being the lazy bum that I am I will do nothing of the sort and will probably spend most of the 5 minutes humming and hawing trying to piece together a coherent thought, and make a fool of myself. Whoopeee.
At least I get to leave SLU for a coupla days! :-D
So madness has cooled now to simmering resentment..I can sense my eldest brother's hand in this, he's never been the most trusting of my relatives. I suppose that's what siblings are for in some sense, but he stubbornly believes, deep down, that nothing I do is good enough. There is always some way that I have messed up, or some route I have not explored, or some person I have not yelled at sufficiently. While all that is well and good when dealing with certain people at Res Life, it doesn't work so well when you are trying to figure out what to do with the rest of your life.
It's a simple series of choices really: work, school or deportation. I'd much rather grab the chance to go to school than work at some bullshit job or have to go home to cool my heels for a few months. So be it then, if he feels that I am not worth taking a chance on...
He always seems to be perfectly assured about what I need to do or say, I just wish he would go ahead and tell me rather than wait until I'm almost in
extremis gravis
Anyway.
I think the sunny weather yesterday was conducive to insightful thought.. my conference paper is going to be a doozy. Ever have those moments of insight when you can lay out an argument with crystal clarity and know that you have it dead to rights? Well, yesterday was one of those days..now all I have to do is write it out just as I saw it.
If I can stay focused....*mumblegrumblebrothermumble*
I'm so mad right now
I'm mad and I'm hurt
Your family is supposed to be there for you no matter what, they are supposed to help you realise your dreams, and be there for you when you need them the most. Well, thanks a lot guys, you really came through for me today.
Hmmmm..so now I'm fascinated by Foucault again, I'm reading a biography and I bought two new books of lectures, interviews and public talks, here's a fun excerpt;
"What, indeed, is the meaning of the death of God, if not a strange solidarity between the stunning realization of his nonexistence and the act that kills him? But what does it mean to kill God if he does not exist, to kill God
who has never existed?Perhaps it means to kill God both because he does not exist and to guarantee he will not exist - certainly a cause for laughter: to kill God to liberate life from this existence that limits it, but also to bring it back to those limits that are annulled by this limitless existence - as a sacrifice; to kill God to return him to this nothingness he is and to manifest his existence at the center of a light that blazes like a presence - for the ecstasy; to kill God in order to lose language in a deafening night and because this wound must make him bleed..." (Preface to Transgression)
Pretty, eh? Imagine what that would have sounded like in the original French. Whoops, did I just say a bad word? Here it is again, French!!! Idiotic politicos, I fart in your general direction! Now go away before I taunt you a second time!
On the homefront, I am no closer to determining my post graduation fate than I was last year. When everything is a possibility, nothing gets decided..multiplicity might be theoretically fun but in practice it is a biatch.....grrrrr...
Well, I'm back from my weekend trip to Boston, and I had a blast...I bought a cellphone (yikes!) and wondered why I hadn't done so sooner. I had one in Denmark and it quickly became an essential little toy..much like an extension of your hand or a psychic prop...I think of someone to call and viola! I dial the number and there they are at the end of the line, no matter where you are...pure niceness..
Wheee! The parental units are in the country safely, now all I have to do is ensure they actually have a graduation ceremony to go to...I just hope the weather holds out....
Ooh Oooh! Before I forget, last Thursday the Sociology dept held a Theory panel and afterwards a few students joined the panelists at the Glass O for drinks and light deconstruction (hehehe). Well I had fun and yacked about everything from sadomasochism to mob justice and then today just before class my prof says to me, "You know they were really impressed with you last Thursday" and I say, "What? Just me?" but it did feel nice I will admit, I've been feeling slightly vulnerable in that regard ever since the application debacle...so thank you Theory guy(s), you just made my day :-)
So where is the Butcher of Baghdad now? Probably lying under several tonnes of rubble...One dictator is gone now, but will anarchy and tribalism now hold sway? I am anxious to see what kind of government will be put in place, and I hope that Iraq will not be neglected as Afghanistan has been...when was the last time you heard news from Afghanistan that didn't involve US military action against "Al Qaeda elements" ?
Mmmmhmmm, exactly.
But seriously,
"[We must go] further than a sense of [our] own good fortune in the face of someone else's misfortune. [We need to] begin to recognise our own direct responsibility and involvement. It is our own value system that is contributing to the destruction of the sociocultural and economic foundations of the African nations." (Aoki Yayoi)
Substitute Africa for any "Third World" country you like: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Palestine and you begin to realise that the world capitalist economy really is a genocidal; both culturally and economically and the only recourse for those facing a juggernaut like that will be to lash out with violence...
Hehehehe...heard at dinner tonight, "You know the British Empire is in decline when they get kicked out of India by a guy who refuses to eat."
*Giggle*
Makes me mad enough to spit.
I watched a documentary on the Mau Mau uprising, and the same kind of racist, intolerant and self-serving rhetoric that the Israelis use against the Palestinians, the Americans use against the Iraqis and Saudis, the British against the Irish was used against the Kikuyu freedom fighters: 'savages', 'barbarians', 'destroyers of civilisation, culture and everything we hold sacred', 'unChristian'...
It just powerfully reminded me of the sacrifices that those brave men and women made to gain independence, and of the corrupting and perverse nature of political power.
What is the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter?
Great galloping Buddha, tonight was blathering idiot night at J-Board..a finer collection of verbose, unintelligible, moronic dimwits could only be found on Capitol Hill...aaargh!!!
Oh and here's another addiction I just picked up:
Chinese Chess (Xiangqi)
I got persuaded to go to Boston this weekend..which will be nice, I get to see A&A, eat some chowdah, and go shake some booty at the
Avalon!
Have I mentioned
this to y'all yet? Check it out!
Seen tonight in the chatroom:
"Don't talk to those guys, they have HIV"
I mean, seriously...what is this, 1986?
In other news I have finally found an author who agrees with me,
"Although feminists have identified gender as a social institution oppressive to women, the most radically deconstructionist feminists tend, ironically, to reinforce heteropolarity, since 'woman' - inevitably- constitutes a
privileged sign within feminist discourse, and since radical feminist constructions of gender tend to be organised around a definitional -albeit anathematised-
masculine norm." (Tamsin Wilton)(italics added)
You go, girl
Maybe I should mention SARS just so I can get some Google hits...SARS, SARS, SARS, but on a serious note, I wonder how many cases China actually has that they are not reporting? Why is it that SARS does not have the same pattern of infection in the US/Canada that it does in Southeast Asia..something does not compute here...
It makes no sense for an infectious (presumably viral) disease to have such divergent patterns of incubation and transmission, unless there are hidden factors or vectors we don't know about that make it much more successful in China than in the US. Strange.
And my readership grows...
I don't think I'll bore you all with my thoughts about the panel on the war in Iraq last night,(which I thought was excellent until the Conservatives started calling us all liberal mucky-mucks) or on the Diversity Coalition meeting that 'Che and I attended after that.
Why won't I bore you? Because I may fall asleep typing it myself! My God it was awful...
I think I will take a little time to weigh in on just one issue: what does it mean when you say "I support the troops, but I don't support the war"?
Well, to me there seems to be one obvious thing being overlooked; the troops that you are supporting are the ones doing the actual shooting and bomb-dropping and van spraying, much as we would like to divorce them from their actions (just following orders, have no choice) the fact of the matter is, when we begin to see soldiers as neutral and impeachable instruments of state policy, then we should be prepared to allow them to perform any kind of atrocity and shrug it off as following orders.
Wasn't this the same argument that the Wehrmacht leadership used at Nuremberg? Just following orders...
I think that support for the troops need not be conflated with sympathy or concern for their safety,or a strong wish for the soldiers to be home; barbecuing, drinking beer, bashing their gay/lesbian counterparts, riding around in Hummers...
You support the troops? Hold the government responsible for sending them to fight this foolish war in the first place! Regime change begins at home...
I've just had a thought about the amazing campus response to the hate letter sent to Margaret Bass recently. My thought is this: is all this outrage directed against the anti-black vitriol in that letter or does it spring from a sense of insult directed
inwardly?
Here's what I mean, the letter compares Dr Bass to " a fucking ape from Africa" and charges her with turning SLU into a "nigger loving college". Is all the rage being expressed by those rallying against this kind of hatred springing out of a realisation of the profound hurt and systematic wrong that this letter stands for, or is it a reaction stemming from taking that letter as if it referred to one's self?
Basically is it a reaction based on, (1) "Oh my God you just didn't call me an ape from Africa!" or on (2) "I just can't believe that this kind of stupidity still exists" ?
Why am i worried about this? Well simply the fact that if all this is in reaction to some form of (1) then sadly nothing has changed, in fact, it just serves to uncover what kind of ugly, nasty stereotypes are still held about Africa: my dear "dark continent"....if being compared to something from Africa is the ultimate insult then what does that reveal about our hidden prejudices about Africans? Or anyone else for that matter?
Nothing that I would want to see or hear about, that's for sure. I sincerely hope that I am reading too much into this, but I have a suspicion that I am not, and that makes me feel just awful :-/
Isn't this quote neat? It's from Sexes and Genealogies by Luce Irigaray, the chapter called "Divine Women"
"I have yet to unveil, unmask, or veil myself
for me - to veil myself so as to achieve self-contemplation, for example, to let my gaze travel over myself so as to limit my exposure to the other and repossess my own gestures and garments, thus nestling back into my vision and contemplation of myself." (65)
Pure niceness...
It's taking me forever to get the new Placebo album..what ever happened to our great and vaunted T1 LAN network? It's all those frat boys downloading porn 24/7 that's clogging it up...God forbid one should actually point the finger at our saintly IT department, oh no, they can do nothing wrong....those slags...
It never rains but it pours..I find myself in an interesting position, after months of no love life to speak of , I suddenly have 3 different guys interested and all this happening in the last 3 weeks or so..yikes!
I've already posted about one of them before, I could have sworn at the time that he wasn't interested..just turns out that he was a little bit shy and didn't screw up the courage to tell me until
after he realised that I was seeing Shawn...oh and mystery contestant number 3 just wants to fool around no strings attached..thank God or else I would have to have a chastity belt installed..
In the meantime, things with Shawn are taking a turn for the new, I think I'll post about that soon, but for the moment I can say this; "Why didn't I meet him earlier?"
The moment you stop looking for someone to being your life is the exact moment that it happens to you, regardless of whether it is convenient or not...
So to D I say; too bad, you had your chance and you didn't take it while I was still free..To Mr. Slap and Tickle, I say, dreams can come true...and to you dear reader I say, don't you wish I had a webcam installed? :-p
Yikes, havent posted anything substantial here in ages....not that anyone out there would notice. I think it's the sheer volume of things I could post about that I just can't handle. For instance, I'm not going to graduate school in the fall. Why? No self-respecting school would let my fool-ass into their Philosophy program. So that means, I'll be panhandling in downtown San Francisco until I can apply for the Spring..woohoo...
Boy oh boy there's so much to say about San Francisco, and so much I could write about how the choir is full of ignorant, self satisfied, bigots but I will refrain. The sunshine was a welcome change! So was the free wine at Blackstone winery, and shame on those froo froo alumni for not laying out a better spread for us at the University Club! Shame!
It just occured to me that I had one of those life changing revelations on tour, the kind of thing that makes a great bestseller or a blockbuster movie....that is, it would if I could remember what the hell it was!
Can you tell that I'm cranky? I dunno why, I saw Shawn just yesterday... *scratches head*
On the flipside, I'm back in the writer's groove, and my conference paper is looking pretty good right now but I can't help but wonder whether that'll be my last hurrah; the death rattle of my inner philosopher choking to death on a warm spam sandwich during a rushed lunch in a grey office cubicle. Hurrah for capitalism.
In other news, froo froo is my new fav adjective. So there.
Hmmm....so a war kinda broke out while I was on holiday...You know what I have to say to that? Only a pretzel can save us now
California bound folks....see you all on the flipside!
FLIPMODE BAYBEE !!!!
Speak the
God-word and disseminate me
So tired....
(Side note): Y'all are interesting..I post about electronics, everyone has an opinion..I post about lots of man sex, and not a peep...hmmmm.....
Okay but seriously, what is up with all these freshmen coming to Senior Blues? Eh? What? Freshmen at what is supposed to be a seniors only thing? Yes! Why the hell are these gawdamn children showing up at the Hoot to spoil my time bonding with my fellow seniors? ARGH! It's almost becoming the Tuesday night, fuck me coz I'm young night! That's what Saturday's at the Tock are for mofo's ..I better not see you out there after Spring Break coz I will just lose it !!!! ARGH!!!
Ahem
In more soothing and happy events, can I say that the last two dates with Shawn have been just marvellous...mmmm, I think he just proves my rule that older guys are so much more fun to be with, even though he's only a year and half older than I am...we talk (well he does most of it, but that's nice for a change), we laugh, we have a few drinks, we have great sex and then (here's the kicker) we cuddle all night ( cue the awww from the audience) could I ask for more? Pure unadulterated niceness....why can't he just move in to my room? Hehehehe...
I have a seminar presentation for Feminist Philosophy tomorrow....
.... I don't mind having to teach class for a while, because hey, that's what I want to do for the rest of my life, but for chrissakes let me do it on what I want to do it on? Don't tell me I can't talj about Foucault in my presentation simply because you don't want me to..this is my presentation, I know I can make the connections and gawddamit what right do you have to force the class to think your way or not at all? I'm beginning to think that my Philosophy prof (who I love to death) also loves being right all the time, aned can't stand the possibility that one of her heroines may perhaps be open to critique....doesn't matter, if I don't nail Irigaray this time I can do it point by point in my final paper....
I love the smell of toasted French feminist in the morning...smells like...
pie....
:-p
You know what else I have decided? I am switching to Linux 9.0! The new Mandrake build looks lovely and I can't wait to get rid of Windows! It's like getting a Mac without all the hassle and expense of buying one. Plus I get to keep all the nice functions that I have grown so used to on my dear old PC...mmmm, once i get back from San Fran I'm going to have this baby up and running! No more crashes, it supports Opera, partitioning, runs all the MS Office apps I use regularly and gosh darn it, costs a whole lot less than Windows XP!
Ah, guilt assuaged...one simple phone call and that takes care of that.
So now I'm consumed with post purchase guilt and I think I will cancel the purchase, because really....I can't afford to spend ~ $200 right before a trip to SF now can I? Not if I want to go to DC with 'Che in April!!
Buddha have mercy, I've gone and bought myself an Archos Jukebox...
Okay, you know if you are going to tell someone you'll call them at 3, you better damn well call on time..especially if you have to duck out of a gay film festival just to be there for it..men! Hmmph!
It's getting impossible to keep up with all my friends, it's a full time job! If I go to spend an afternoon with one group the other feels gipped and complains, if I decide to spend the rest of the weekend with the girls then the guild crew feels left out...The only way out is to get an android! :-D Hehehe, at least I
have friends to hang out with, I'll stop bitching now
Aaaaaaaaaaaahhh..my head hurts!
Here's why. If male homosexuality is simply imitative of entrenched phallogocentric discourse, then what space is there for "gayness" as differance? I mean, you read Irigaray and she has many a good point to make about the exclusion of woman from discourse and signification but then that is opposed to a singular system of white, male,heterosexist discourse...In effect, even gay men reify and perpetuate the very systems that produce them as deviant subjects. More problematic perhaps in Irigaray is the inkling that she leaves no space for subjectivity or embodiment in relations between men.
For example, she says that a girl's first love is homoerotic in that she loves her mother, but a boy's is heterosexual because his mother is a woman. Well and good if little Johnny grows up to marry Sarah from down the street, but what if he marries Pete from next door? Is the only relationship that men can have with women (gay or straight) dominated by patriarchal structures? Is there any room for an intersubjective relationship between two men that is mutual and
fleshed (I ain't talking 'bout just bump and grind here folks) that takes the form of subjectivity that Irigaray touts for women?
Another thing is if gay men are simply oriented within a phallic economy that invests the phallus/penis with the capital of desire and essentially become """women""" then isn't that analysis simply reinforcing rather than deconstructive? Doesn't male homosexuality undercut the heterosexist phallic paradigm at all? Or *horror* does it fail to do so entirely?
Where's the difference, woman !?!?
Yikes, bad thought!
You wanted more poems? Here you are! These are ones that I wrote in Denmark...happier days...
I
Clouds roll
across the sky like the smoke
from Thor's busy forge.
The brown, ample earth beneath
gently arches its wavy back
feeling the feathery touch of heaven upon its breast.
Here and there
as if sprung up from the black ooze
horses snicker and paw the muddy plains
their breath thick with the spume of Hades.
Everywhere,
a thousand colours
ripple and sway and mutter
in the speckled sunlight
rolling in the fat knowledge
of a thousand thousand mornings.
If you stand
and listen
the wind whispers softly
of ruby speckled shores,
cold iron in the hot grip of ecstatics
and the dim reflection
of fire
in slowly cooling pupils.
Vikings make for nasty neighbours...
II
The Germans built to last,
stone bone and iron teeth
grinning
above ice-blue water
black tongue unfurled
to spit fire and death
most horrible
Ants now crawl
in and out
of that gaping skull
and pose
smiling
for photos.
Heads are wagged
and vows are made to never forget
all the while unheard
over the whir and hum and silicon
the drums of war beat
Again and
Again.
I wrote this after visiting the German fortifications on the north coast of Denmark just 2 days after September 11th
This last one I wrote after coming upon a peace demonstration outside the Kobenhavn city hall quite unexpectedly...
III
On my way home
from other journeys,
I saw them.
Smelt them really,
incense and burning butter
guttering and glittering
midst a twilight Radhuspladsen.
Perhaps two hundred
brave lights
raising their feeble glow
to the darkened sky
on smoky arms of prayer
for
love
peace
understanding.
I watched
a patient handful
light and relight
those yellow diamonds
struggling so bravely
to set alight the chill wind
throwing itself relentlessly
at their glowing cores
Promethean butterflies
weaving and bobbing
a ceaseless dance.
Silently I cheered them on,
zipped up my jacket
and walked for the train.
How little things have changed in the 2 years since!
Well, how do y'all like the nifty redesign? I was getting tired of the old one... :-D
So does that mean I'm productive now? *Shiver*
On a related note, I have become obsessed with the idea of productivity recently: it's become the yardstick against which all my days are measured, how much have I accomplished, how many pages read, how many revolutions in the great cogworks of academia have I turned today? Is that what university is supposed to be like? This endless emphasis on visible products: papers, responses, BlackBoard postings? What ever happened to cogitation and pondering? To discussions and understanding as opposed to this weird system of exchange that just results in a crude barter system, "Me teach you so long, you give me so many pages of bullshit"
Argh..the lengths I will go to to justify myself these days..hehehehe....
Hmmm..i'm feeling very lethargic today, I cannot seem to focus on anything at all..my conference paper. my Foucault reading or even that horrid heap of research papers I need to annotate, and I'm getting paid to do it too! Ah, the horror...
On the other hand, did you know that "Hurrah" is originally a Danish/German/Swedish exclamation? You
betcha! "Huzza" is a sailor's expression and "Hooray" seems to have the same origins as "Hurrah" Interesting. So next time you use those words, remember that they are part of a masculine signifying economy that glorifies violence, bloodshed and rapine as viable economic modes of exchange and social interaction.
Yes indeed
Wipe that blood off your mouth
Of course, not that there's anything
wrong with that per se...
So it's been a month already? Wow, where does the time go? I don't feel like posting anything remotely resembling content so all you get is this semi-coherent rambling...Don't you just love the way I take care of y'all? Happy 1 month!
Whew! Tour's over, all my limbs are intact and I have a pile of work to do...hooray!
Soooooo....what shall I write about today? Hmmm, let's review the last coupla days shall we?
On Tuesday I get a letter from the University of Hawaii...it takes me an hour to open it because it takes me that long to screw up the courage to open the damn thing..even then my heart was beating like a noh drum! For good reason as it turned out that the Philosophy Department accepted me but didn't give me any money so they can't enroll me and in the end it's the same as being rejected or not even having applied in the first place. So sorry, please try again next year....
gomen gomen !
On Wednesday I get an email from the organisers of a Social Theory conference that I had dashed off a hasty abstract to...and yes, they accepted my paper..so if all goes well right after graduation I fly to Redington Beach to kick some theory butt! Pure niceness..
The mail giveth, and the mail taketh away
I almost forgot! I got my seriously bootlegged copy of
Snake in the Eagle's Shadow on Monday. Joy! Joy!
Still to come,
Drunken Master and
Snake in the Monkey's Shadow !
The Larry's are set to take a mini-tour of the bowels of New York state, I can hardly contain my enthusiasm....here's hoping I make it through the weekend..
Ugh, I think that knowing about Graduate schoool is worse than not knowing..hehehe...
Oh dear, Oh dear..please don't confuse what I have been writing recently with the babblings of self-pity..dear reader, anything but that!
"To have and not have one's emotions, one's for and against, at will, to condescend to have them for a few hours; to
seatoneself on them as horses, often as on asses-for one has to know how to employ their stupidity as well as their fire..." (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil).
Or maybe this will sound familiar to you:
"A philosopher: a man who constantly experiences, sees, hears, suspects, hopes. dreams extraordinary things; who is struck by his own thoughts as if from without, as if from above and below, as by
hiskind of events and thunderclaps...a fateful man around whom snarling, quarrelling, discord and uncanniness is always going on"
Or maybe not! Hehehe....
And by the way, it took me two days to get the comments working on this page so use 'em gawdammit!! Argh!!
You, no not you, you! You want so badly to know why I don't like you, why I can't stand the sight of you, why I dont want to be with you. You want to know that badly?
Well, here it is. All I see when I look at you is the reflection of my own bitter self-loathing, I see you and all I see is all that I hate about myself: my weakness, my loneliness, my wasted years and you ask me to embrace all that and smile, to wrap my arms around it and kiss it tenderly, to rest my head against its foul shoulder.
How dare you, how dare you make me face myself like this?
:EDIT: Well 'che...it seemed like a great post at the time!
So you want to know why I wrote those poems? I think more to the point you want to know who they were for...
Hmmm, you want me to name names? I don't know if I want to, or even think that it's necessary. The experience will remain the same: briefly heady and tingly and the bitterly disappointing but strengthening. I guess the reason that I posted was to remind myself of that time when the only outlet I had was to write poetry.
I haven't written anything new since I was in Denmark. Just for fun I tried to write again, to see whether I could recapture those moments when I felt that if I didn't write the poems down my head and heart would explode....
So in the end, who did I write those poems for? For myself...
Poetry today!
Now that
what we had has curdled
sour and lumpen
keeping us apart
I ask myself
time and again
gazing up into midnight skies
why
I broke my promise
never to do this
again.
You want more?
Music
is best appreciated in the dark
of a hushed theatre
and the squeaky
shiftings of uneasy arses
in plush seats
It is then
you notice
the curved line of your
lover's face
and their peculiar
br-ea-thi-ing
distracting you
from the enchantment
of bark and hoof but
there is another magic here
older and more lethal,
decadent!
And so you take the sorcerer's hand
and recline
ensorceled
and replete.
I'm seriously considering going to the
Ultra Music Festival, I wonder if brutha-man will put me up for the weekend....getting there is the tricky bit. Any ideas folks?
Oh I slept so well last night....who was that knocking on my door as I drifted away into la-la land?
My term paper topic was approved, that makes me feel better... What's driving me nuts is the waiting around to hear back from graduate schools..i'm going insane!
I'm afraid that I am going to disappoint you about last night...It's a shame but you looked so happy and curious, with your eyes shining in that wide-eyed-curious-happy-excited way you have about you. What's to tell? After you left the room, we sat and talked about all kinds of stuff. You know how he is when he lets his mind and imagination run free, but last night I was surprised, we talked about God and free will, the Antichrist, oranges, Armageddon, woolly mammoths and by the time he fell asleep on my shoulder it was 5 am. No time for any funny business. Maybe next time :-D
Of course that leaves me wondering, what to make of it all...I do that all the time, I'm sure you have noticed but I can't help myself! I like to know exactly what is going on, and what things mean, and how they relate and how (sadly) I can take control...So I'll leave it at that and try to take my own advice...hehehe...
Awwww...isn't it cute to find little poems written about you?
You looked at me
Soft, long
Kept your eyes on me
So strong
We connected intimately
I stared at you
No reply
I glanced at you
Declined
I filled you with my thoughts
Denied
You talked to me, showed me I could
Trust
In
You
I do trust you
I need you
I feel all that you are
Your sumptuous eyes
Give me butterflies
You incline me
To
Places I can't see
But only feel
Don't look away
Let our eyes be connected
Always.
Too bad I don't ever want to see him again.
And no, woman, this is not what you were harassing me about at dinner! :-p
Here's something that came up in class: why do insults in your mother tongue sting worse than insults in any other language? In Swahili saying "nyanyako" to someone is just asking for a fight, in english it would translate to "Yo mama" which doesn't strike me as quite so effective...I wonder why that is?
Something very interesting happened last night, but I am not quite sure what to make of it.(Yes, it does involve a boi, hehehe) More on this later...
Speaking of favours..get off your arse and buy me
this for graduation!
Speaking of favours..get off your arse and buy me
