take THAT...

...SUV drivers. Americans for Fuel Efficient Cars is whipping up some ads of their own in response to the ones run during the Super Bowl last year linking drug-buyers in America to terrorism. If you want to donate money to their cause or just read the scripts for two of the commercials, check out their site. I've heard that the people making and acting in them are working for free.

You might say "It's not really all that bad, yo," but it's easy to KNOW that and yet still be unable to do anything except lay on the floor and think about all the other great things you thought you would've done with your life by this point.

And so I'm checking e-mail accounts I'd almost forgotten about (spam) and blogging instead of organizing papers from the last 19 weeks and rearranging my furniture.

The ant guy came and sprayed behind things and in the scary closet, and for about 3 days there were ants staggering around the kitchen, obviously out-of-sorts. But then there were no more ants. I haven't seen one for a while now. Where did they all go? Did they retreat to die in private? Are there piles of dead ants behind the dishwasher? Did the dogs eat them?

So the word "liberty" has always kind of rubbed me the wrong way, and I finally figured out that this is because it sounds so much like "puberty," which might be the ugliest word ever to be included in a human language.

"Um, if you see you see someone making off with my stuff, could you point your finger at them and say, 'Hey! Stop that!' ? Thanks, I'd appreciate it."

You remember the show 'The Tick'? Not the cartoon on Comedy Central, although that one is worth remembering, too. No, I'm talking about the one with the guy who played Putty on Seinfeld dressed up in a blue tick suit. Wasn't it cool how his antennae moved around depending on his emotions? Wouldn't it be cool if *people* had antennae that did that? Yeah, that would be rad.

It's like living in the future -- today! When I'm too rich to see straight, I'm gonna get me one of these sweet-ass hydrogen cars. Me making my millions and getting the cars actually on the market should take about the same amount of time...

every once in a while, i will post a single sentence that i find amusing (and that is more likely than not true), such as this one:

today i burned the living shit out of a bagel, and it set off the fire alarm and stank up the house.

Since becoming a writing instructor, and hence, someone who is in a position to judge pieces of writing, I have noticed a significant decline in my ability to read more than one or two entries of a blog that is new to me and that I don't find especially interesting. I have also since come into contact with lots of language that is not exactly perfect English... words used in inexact ways, bungled sentence structures, misspellings almost certainly attributable to spell-checkers... And I think this is starting to drive me a little nuts.

Being a writing instructor has also put me into contact with vast amounts of staunch apathy. As someone who used to be apathetic, but has finally come into strong political opinions and the habits that follow, I have a drive to show my students things that could lead them to their own strong political opinions. At the same time, however, I know that especially in a writing class, it is not good to show students your political opinions, for one reason so they do not feel those opinions are being foisted on them, and for another so that when they turn in shitty papers, they will not attribute their shitty grades to my prejudice against their (unrelated) political opinions (or lack thereof).

So it's odd to have a public forum and be allowed to voice my strong political opinions when I'm so used to censoring them.

So with that in mind, I will work to let my political leanings come out in whatever form they choose here. Click on the links at the right, please, and recycle as much as you possibly can, even if people think you're insane for pulling plastic bottles out of the trash and taking them home.