Headed down the backstretch

The girls have been kicking ass. These two little voracious peanuts have answered the bell for every step and it looks like they should be coming home this week. As of now, they are sleeping together in a open crib without any tubes or cords other than the standard heart & O2 sensors they wear no matter what. It seemed like the Dr. wanted to stress test them today, taking them off their reflux medicine and upping their food intake by 25% (they had been working in 5cc increments, but dropped a 15cc jump on them today). Hillary responded by taking the bigger bottle in less time (5 minutes) than she was with the smaller one. These girls want to come home as much as all of us are, especially Maggie. My wrecked (new) car should be fixed tomorrow which is going to be nice too. On top of the twins being in the NICU, the bridge across the river has been closed, making the 15 minute trip to the hospital a 30 minute one. Add that to sharing a car with Jean, and the last two weeks haven't been strawberries & cream.

On another note, my other blog is underway: Atomic Neverland.There you will find directionless musings on punk rock. At the moment, you will find it infatuated with horrorpunk, my greatest, latest obsession. That's going to be my only apology. Along with that project, I've been half-heatedly working on writing a history on the subtype, ordering misc library books on early 1980s history to come up with an argument on why that music started then & persists so strongly now (yawn). I've also renewed my love for horror literature and realized how much I was subconsciously working in the arena of that old form in my thesis. That has had me exploring some new markets & I have sent out some revamped material to Cemetery Dance & the New Orleans Review (cross fingers again). The NOR doesn't advertise horror fiction, but it only takes reading through a few pubs to realize they definitely have some sensibilities. I've also picked up the guitar again so that is also soaking up my evenings. I got a new boss amp that is solid-state, a big nose-turner for the traditional player. It's the only way I can get the sound I want at low volumes in my garage. It will definitely come in handy with a house full of sleeping girls. One day, when I'm old & deaf, I'll hopefully get the Krankenstein I've always wanted. Did I mention that even my cats are girls?

Presenting Hillary & Mia

Born: 7.10.09 @ 1:26pm
Hillary Elizabeth Brasseaux

Born: 7.10.09 @ 1:38pm
Mia Helen Brasseaux



It's no camera trick. As of now, we have a blonde & brunette. Maggie was also a brunette at birth but now is ridiculously blonde.

The girls went straight to the NICU once Momma got to hold them for a few. Both are exceeding expectations. Both have no problems breathing. They are eating 2x/day from a bottle and should be moving from their sun-bathing huts into 1 crib tomorrow. The IVs have been removed and so should the heat lamps once they tan a little longer. We are expecting to bring them home in 7-10 days. Mom is doing great. She delivered both the old fashioned way.

Catch Up

It would like to write that I’ve joined some 12.21.12 armageddon cult camping around Kukulkan waiting for the Mayans to return from outerspace. Nothing of the sort. I have no viable reason for not blogging for the last few months. Or rarely returning emails. Or having conversations in general with anyone. I’ve been busy, but hell, who isn’t.

Maggie is closing in on three years (6.10.06). Here are some recent pics.











Jean is just about the same size with the twins as she was when she gave birth to Maggie. We are eating boiled crawfish tomorrow, so I’m sure the near illegal salt concentration will push her over the mark. The twins are growing well. One is 5oz smaller and has been the whole time. I wonder how that will play out over the next 50 years. I say this because they are both girls. Yes, that’s 3 for 3 for me. I’m going to buy a stud Brahma bull and put him in the backyard in hopes I can offset the wall of estrogen that will be flowing from this house in the future. We have decided on names: Mia Helen & Hillary Elizabeth. Hillary is going to be one pissed of kindergartner during name writing sessions (Hillary Elizabeth Brasseaux). At least she will have a stronger handle on the alphabet than most kids.
I’m dangerously coming close to growing up, and worse, being sucked up into the suburbia nightmare. I have a neighbor that likes to catch me in the driveway and talk about yardwork & home improvement as much as possible. The killer is that I sometimes find myself interested in these bourgeois chatters. The zippy 6-speed Jetta has been traded in for a Mazda CX-9 with 3rd row; Jean’s Mazda Tribute for a mini-van.

It’s getting hot so I’m missing South Florida more. Being miserable in Deerfield Beach was better than being miserable in Bossier City.

Work wise, things have been on a even keel save for I’m doing less & less technical writing and more graphic design for both web & print media. I dig the mix because both can reach their bores. I did just acquire the total Adobe CS4 master collection. At times, I feel like those monkeys bouncing & grunting along the monolith the aliens dropped on them in Kubrick’s 2001 Space Odyssey. The biggest thing to grasp is that Adobe wants you to work in a certain way as far as functionality & workflow. Universal hot keys aren’t so universal with them. Most annoying is they like to change the language on basic tasks. I’ve been learning XML on the fly and that hasn’t been as intimidating as I thought it would be. At the end of the day, XML or HTML is a language and is bound by its own inner logic and grammar. Much of it isn’t too far outside the boundaries of student writing I encountered.

That’s the catch up and hopefully I will post soon enough not to need any type of preamble. I have another blog I’ve been skinning and getting together that will be up soon. It’s going to be based solely on music. With the ability to listen to music all day, I’ve renewed an obsession that was dimming. But to build a solid music blog I needed to break out the Blogger templates to get some screen candy going. Once that is built, it should be up and updated much more regular than this boring one.

A Way to Close out the Year

Fast forward Thanksgiving to Xmas. Easily one of the better holidays with selling a 2 ½ old on all the nuances & mysteries surrounding Jolly Ol’ St. Nick. She was a tad disappointed, though, thinking Santa was supposed to hand deliver her doll house & tea sets in person. As usual, the rest went with a blur of food, drink, family & friends.

Then cometh the bonus gift of the year. A week or so before Christmas we found out we were pregnant with number two. Stemming back from the last pregnancy, we knew we always had potentially risky beginnings so we wouldn’t tell Maggie until we knew the ship was steady. The results from the first appointment were on the spot. The sack had formed, she was pregnant. Today we would go for the first big checkup, the check for fetus & heartbeat. It was there.

And so was another one. And then almost a third (an empty yoke sack).

So there it is. We are expecting fraternal twins. And if it is two more girls, may god have mercy on my soul.

What a year 2008 has turned out to be: a master’s degree, a 1,500 mile move, a change of profession, purchase of a brand new home & then we closed it out with a set of twins (and a near miss at triplets). What a year 2009 will be.

Palinesque Sentencing

Read an article today about the tension between the old GOP and the “new” movement. Of course the article rested on Mrs. Palin, and the polemic between some of the GOP wanting to euthanize the monster it created, and those who feel she is the face of the party—that she is the new and now of our culture. If anything, I thought the recent election represented, at least, that the culture was shifting, but the cynical side of me thinks perhaps those believing Palin is the face of the franchise may have a point.

So here are some notes from the under-intestine, and all replete with Palinesque logic systems:

From college Americans 20-24yo:

“In any type of collaborative knowledge project, some degree of government should be perhaps required”

“Certain things just wouldn’t function without a leader, like in a workplace. It couldn’t function without a manager figure like how a classroom wouldn’t function without an eraser at the chalkboard”

“It would not be economically efficient to spend so much money on a fake leg when a cadaver leg could be used for so much less, especially when we have so many homeless john does dying in New York. We can harvest in the cities.”

“In this world people should not be controlled by the government just like Fukuyama states with Biotechnology, but politics should be able to control peoples emotions because if they do people would all be the same and life would be more fun than being told what to do by governments.”

“Scientists believe that human beings just go to school to learn just in textbooks and take tests and become professionals without understanding that humans also go to church and enjoy other extracurricolor activities like hunting in the snow”


I refrained from any inter-commentary on this one. Too easy.

Change

With tonight's sweeping message of change, I hope some is set aside for the process of voting. I questioned all the rhetorical bombardment about how far we have came in the last few centuries as I stood in line (for the second time) while a 95yo lady hand wrote my name on a spiral notebook to log me into the "books." The old lady, who was apparently hard of hearing, was having my name dictated by another older lady who only stopped once for a piss break. There simply has to be a better way. This is only a step-up from a show of hands or getting a section of the bleachers to cheer at a pep rally. For an encore, the voting booth (1 of 2) was in a church near the pulpit. On the wall was a blue & purple tapestry with the misspelling: Redeemption.

So it goes...

New Hobby

Zimnizzle has been emailing me random quotes (possible blurbs?) from current students that sometimes make me poop a little when I read them. They also remind me of those moments during graduate school when the morning light of South Florida—pale, mocking, smiley—fell in bars over my desk, the tumultuous stacks of student papers. And then I would get that golden sentence, the one of utter, joyful incomprehensibility. Not a sentence of brilliance, but the sentence that provoked—How in the hell did this human being decide these words should be aligned together in a linear fashion? Or as one of Cory’s students suggested: “All the miseries of war are like moist toilets on the eyes” (I’m paraphrasing here, but not with the moist toilets on the eyes—a phrase I question should belong in any language).

I preface this because I truly miss those sentences, sentences I swore I would compile one day and publish as an English teacher potty book. Furthermore, since I rarely have anything of real biographical interest to blog about, I figured now would be a good time for me to dig through the sepulture of student writings I have saved on the HD for shits and giggles. I’m not quite sure if I forced my students properly to waive their intellectual property rights on their “writings,” but I’m quite sure (from their work) that they aren’t out on the internet or the real world reading for fun. My students would never read this even if I assigned it in class and tattooed the address on their privates. So like any aging Jackdaw, it’s time to spread out my worthless treasures in the nest and look at them.

To kick this off, I’ll start with some lines from an essay responding to some Foucault’ Fo’ Sho. Note: No edits have been made. No animals have been violated in the reproduction.

“After reding Michel Foucault’s essay, “Panopticism”, I understood that I may not or may be being really watched but it is the allusion of being watched, or I could very well have someone watching me. Panopticism is all around me.”

Eat your heart out Joe “the plumber” McCarthy. “Reding” I won’t touch. I was always stuck on the “allusion of being watched.” It has something poetically possible with its brain knotting logic. Being watched by something that isn’t really there? Or knowing you are not under watch, but an implication of being watched that nudges the possibility of being watched? Maybe that is the suffocating glory of panopticism, or more precisely, how panopticism is all around me.

“In school I would always notice that all the desks in the classroom are mostly the same, and all look alike. Panoptism is every where in school.”

Um…yeah. Had no idea the desk manufactures were in on it too.

“The teacher can see the whole classroom but the students cannot.”

That works on so many levels. Deep.

“Christian churches have a wordy panoptic affect on the Christians.”

Wordy came to mind many times when reading this essay. The string of Christian, wordy and affect is different.

Last one, I promise:

“Connected with the prisoners the Christians do not know if God is really watching but it is the suggestion of being watched, hence the panopticism and those who like religion”

No, this isn’t out of context. This was a self-standing conclusion. Those who have taught freshman English know that getting a robust conclusion is damn near impossible. The close as you come is a copy and pasted introduction. Other than that, I can’t unpack this last quote. I was sort of there with 'Christians connected to prisoners', but the last hurricane of logic left me feeling like the student who can’t see the classroom.