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
