The Reader is dead, long live the Reader!

Remember, back when I quit the teaching job on the grounds that I didn't want to teach the required reader? Well, it was more of a thing than I really indicated back then. Other and I had gone to the Dept. Chair to protest the reader becoming mandatory, as we had created our own new (and highly successful, based on four sections of the course) curriculum. He'd said, well, you can still request to be excused from the rule - write a letter to the Composition Chair and explain why you don't want to use it. She'll be reasonable.

So I did, and she turned down my request on the basis that three (out of thirty or so) of the articles that I planned to use in my class were also in the reader, so I could build my course around those. She also said, seizing on my mention of my use of group work in my classes that there was an article about group work in the reader that I could also use.

I wanted to talk about the beauty and power of language to express complex ideas and emotions, and she wanted me to talk about how neat group work is.

Another important piece of information here is that I had used an earlier version of the reader my first year of teaching composition, and it was fucking horrible.

So, I quit. E-mailed the guy who does scheduling, copied the Dept. Chair and quit.

Then earlier this month I graduated and everything, and I've been looking for a full-time job for the last couple weeks. And yesterday, the guy who does scheduling phones me up and offers me a job teaching a literature survey. The same one other (a third-year PhD student) is teaching. Classes started last Tuesday, but this professor up and left, leaving several classes needing to be filled immediately.

Whee! I took it, and am now looking for part-time work to supplement the meager pay that teaching a single class will bring in. Yesterday was crazy, getting back into the university's system, twisting arms for a parking pass, reworking the syllabus which had originally called for the students to read 8 novels (some of them quite long), three plays, and a variety of poems in 15 weeks. Luckily the first novel they read was Invisible Man, which I am all over. I had my first class this morning, and it went well.

In my dream, the snake-tossing contest ended badly.

From an AP story today:

During a speech-editing session on Friday, Hughes said, Bush told his speechwriters to accentuate the "transformational power of liberty."

Heh. I'll bet he did.

When allergies attack!

Here is why I love literature:

"In the help-wanteds there were thousands of boring jobs and no interesting jobs. Until you opened the help-wanteds it was possible to forget that the essence of the average person's job, which was: you perform this soul-killing "data entry" or "telemarketing" or "word-processing" function and we will reluctantly give ou money.

"The help-wanteds were even sadder than the personals. "Very attractive benefits package," some promised. (STUNNING BLUE-EYED SWF, fortyish but looks 25, seeks . . . ) Was there anyone in the world who was independent, highly motivated, creative, and possessed of a minimum five yrs exp w/T-1s, SDLC, HDLC and 3270 BISYNC? And if such a dream candidate did exist, would it not be suspicious in the extreme if he or she were looking for a job? Ads like these seemed to have been placed as bitter ceremonial reminders, lest anybody think that corporations did not, like everyone else, have needs and desires that could not be satisfied.

"At the other end of the scale were the laconic one-liners seeking watchmen or receptionists and mentioning no benefits or wages; ads like ugly prostitutes who, on the plus side, didn't ask much.

"Running a business was clearly nothing but unpleasant trouble. Companies wanted good employees and did not want bad emplyees. But the bad employees were eager to stay and take the companies' money, while the good employees were eager to leave and work for competitors. To Louis all the thousands of jobs listed in the paper seemed like noxious effluents that the companies were trying to pay people to take off their hands. How they hated to have to pay so much and offer such juicy "benefits" to be rid of these noxious duties! How they wished it weren't so! He could feel their anger at the expense of disposing of all this garbage. The top executives dumped the problem on the personnel department, and the people in personnel wore plastic suits easily mistaken for faces and personalities. Their job was to handle the poisonous but inevitable employment by-products without letting them come in contact with their skin. Their cordiality was guaranteed non-stick. It was 100 percent impermeable."

--Jonathan Franzen, Strong Motion, p. 145-146

Plus, I didn't want to be the guy who knows all about S&M.

Update!: Don Pablo's Debacle.

Remember how, awhile back, I ran into Plagiarism Girl at DP's while avoiding Nice Student at a different DP's? Well, today we avoided the Plagiarism Girl Don Pablo's, choosing instead to eat at Nice Student Don Pablo's, and we didn't see Nice Student there. Yay. No uncomfortable eye contact and small talk.

SO. Tonight we go to the grocery store. Nice Student is there, with whom I presume was Nice Student's Very Sexy Girlfriend. (Go Nice Student.) Nod, say hello, walk quickly past. So we get to the checkout, which has 20 different people mobbing the self-checkout with no other lanes open (a brilliant move, considering that with school starting back up, our town's population has approximately doubled in the last couple days). We get behind N.S. & N.S.'sVSG. Pretending like we don't know each other.

Someone gets the bright idea to open another checkout lane. Because we want to write a check, we want to go to this checkout lane, and thus follow N.S. & N.S.'sVSG over there. Still pretending like we don't know each other.

Phew. They're done checking out and they leave.

Get out to the parking lot. Turns out my car is parked nose to nose to N.S.'s car. We all load the groceries as if we're being shot at, ducking and heaving stuff into the backseat. Peel out.

Maybe I'll never see him again. It's either that or plastic surgery. At least I haven't run into Plagiarism Girl, but at least she has the decency to pretend not to recognize me.

I'll take "Reasons to Live" for 200, Alex.

Because I don't have cable TV, and my parents do and virtually never turn it off, coming home is like rolling around in a cultural minefield. In the last two weeks, I've seen "Wicked Games," by Chris Issac, "One of These Things Is Not Like the Other" (Sesame Street - how could you do that to me?!), "You Can't Always Get What You Want," by the Stones (big surprise, but Jesus, low-carb Diet Coke - that's low), and "Bohemian Like You," by the Dandy Warhols used to hock pieces of crap. (Heinekin, (I don't even care how that's spelled), Subway, l-c DC, and a car. And they completely cut the lyrics that explained the singer's derision about the car.)

This is why I cannot watch TV. If a musician sells out and you never see the commercial, does it still break your heart?

mad about saffron

Drop off old electronics of any brand (monitors, computers, computer accessories, cell phones, TVs) at Office Depot and they'll recycle them for free.

Bound copies for everyone!

Dirt on the ex is likely to show up whenever it feels like it. Such as when your mom runs into the ex's best friend's mom at the grocery store and they chat in the meat department for what must have been half an hour. Strangely, in the last several months I've inadvertently caught up on what a lot of people I used to know are doing. It seems like they are all doing well, and, looking back, if you'd have told my 17-year-old self all the eventual answers, I would not have been surprised. Is this comforting?

I'm in possibly the most serious period of transition I've ever faced -- for the first time in 19 years, I will not be starting school again in the fall, and while this offers a great sense of freedom, the idea of getting a 40-hour/week job seems like a prison sentence to me now. And that's pretty much what I have to do. High school was miserable, but at least there was a community of people there who could be counted on to offer company in suffering, which made it not really suffering. The struggles we had then were not so obvious, because it seemed like once we left, they'd be irrelevant. That comfortable world is gone, but the struggles and questions have just morphed.

Batman is a scientist.

Well, I am a Master. I passed. One of my readers said, "Congratulations, you are a Master," and I was happy but I was wondering about this usage of "Master." The world of possibilities! I can make people call me Master. Or grand Master flash. Or Master Rogers. It sounds kind of slave-owner-y, which might take some of the fun out of it.

I would actually rather be a Master than a Doctor, because Doctors usually have to touch people.

Also, I joined a quilting club tonight. They operate with Robert's Rules of Order, which struck me as hilarious. But it probably isn't.

i drink til i'm drunk, and i smoke til i'm senseless

My thesis defense is tomorrow, which has left me absentminded, which has manifested itself in the following behaviors:

• I'm surfing around on other people's blogs, and I think to myself, "why doesn't anyone ever leave comments on my blog? That's so uncool!" Then I remember that I do not have the option for people to comment on here.
• After enjoying a nice meal of queso and warm tortillas at the old Don Pablo's, I realize that after paying bills this morning, I have neglected to return the wallet to the bag. In my pocket is 78 cents, and in my car is a single penny. This will not cover the bill. My wallet is about 20 miles away at this point. I've always wondered what someone would do in this situation. I can't just walk out because, for one thing, it would be really obvious because Don Pablo's is basically a Mexican-themed warehouse and I'm on the opposite end of the warehouse from the door, and for another, I go there a lot and would like to continue going there because I need the crack that they melt into the queso. Ultimately, I tell the waitress (who was not happy about any of it, and I don't blame her) that I know my credit card number (and the expiration date, which I sort of estimated a little) by heart, and that they might just be able to type it in. They do, and it works, and I am free to leave.
• I forgot to eat dinner.

By 5 pm tomorrow I will be on to worrying about other things, such as, come to think of it, my complete lack of gainful employment and the prospect of having to work really hard to find a job I'll likely as not not want to do. GAH.

make a little birdhouse in your soul

I've been getting so sleepy late at night recently that I've been hallucinating. "Hallucinating" might not be the most accurate word, because I always know on some level that what I'm seeing isn't acutally there -- I don't swerve the car to avoid the animal I'm hallucinating or anything. I just imagine things.

So last night when I got out of the shower, it was pretty late and I'd been imagining things as I rinsed my hair. Toweling off, I thought I imagined something on the towel, and when I pulled it within 2 inches of my nose to inspect -- because I'm so so nearsighted -- I realized that the spider 2 inches from my nose was indeed real. I squeaked and flung the towel down, then got my shit together enough to maneuver the spider into the toilet and flush. I was very proud of the fact that I didn't have to bother Other with this matter.

After flushing the spider, I still didn't want to use the toilet in which it had so recently died, so I went downstairs to the half bath and was confronted there with the second biggest motherfucking spider I've ever seen loose and running around. It was black and had distinct joints and was moving toward me, about the size of those plastic spider rings everyone wears at the end of October. GAH.

Irony.

the fundamental irony here is that you don't even care what the fundamental irony here is.

It would be completely hands-down insane to put my shoes on and leave the house to obtain a Milky Way bar, right? Because who in God's name needs a Milky Way bar when they've been up for 18 hours and have to be up at least one more hour and then have to be back up in less than 7 hours? Right?

I'm up because I'm revising this thesis yet again. I'm confident that it's getting better but I'm also rather tired. And eventually the getting-better factor will sink to the point that it meets the rising tiredness factor in the curved shape of the front of a fish. Which equals me getting no more productive work done AND probably no Milky Way bar for me.

Milky Fish. Fishy Way. Heh.

Gah! Must finish!

And that's when I realized that cops need air freshener, too.

Yesterday I headed on down to Bloomington to see Modest Mouse. The club where they played was small - not tiny, but still pretty small - and about 7 million degrees fahrenheit, and very dark and smoky. I want to say that it was a good concert, but in all honesty it sounded like every band member was playing in a different key, with 200 people singing along in 200 more keys (how many keys are there?). I'm not positive that this actually was the case, but it was so ridiculously loud that to my ears, it could not possibly have been in the same key. You know how in clubs you can usually feel the vibration of the music up through your rib cage? Well, last night I was feeling each note of the base guitar in my arm-hair follicles. That was weird.

The songs were highly recognizable, though, and the part that made it a good experience was that 200 people were joyfully singing along, at the tops of their lungs, with all of it. And dancing, and pumping their fists in triumph. It's not too often that I can be in such a crowd and feel that this is a good thing, that the object of the fist-pumping is worthwhile. (I'm picturing here the idiotic crowds gathered around the TRL building, or, like, outside where they shoot Good Morning America.) Often such aroused crowds are cheering the words of some fascist dictator, ready to trounce the rest of the planet into submission. But these people were just earnestly enjoying their band. This one guy in particular kept just shaking his hand and thrusting his fist into the air, mouthing the words and swaying. I watched him for awhile, and it was really good to see someone enjoying something wholeheartedly and unironically. He wasn't making fun of people who like Modest Mouse - he was just liking Modest Mouse.