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.

Moving to Surburbia

The longer the spans between blogs, the longer it seems to find a starting place. So here goes the thirty-day tour-de-force.

The Gulf hackle raisers, Gustav and Ike, the Storms That Will End All Storms, came and went with little fuss. The new job is moving along well and I’ve been doing a great deal of graphic design with some expensive software I know little about. My role is starting to crystallize: everything document related is me—product reviews, sales pitches, savings presentations, business letters, logo creation, tutorials, etcetera. It’s one of the first times in my life I drive to work not really knowing what I will be doing or trying to do that day. That’s not a complaint.

Other news is the purchase of a new house. Here are a couple pics.

Jean and I have historically moved fast on things like this. From first thinking to buying was about a week. We will close on Oct 24^th but want to move that up to the 17^th.

Between the storms and buying the house, Centenary hosted their annual Book Bizarre, arguably one the main reasons I moved back here. I picked up a collection of Carver, Cheever and three Beckett novels. I grabbed some Faulkner (Light in August, The Unvanquished, Requiem for a Nun, The Wild Palms) to complete my collection. Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills, Dubus’ Dancing After Hours, and Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time were some cheap snags on authors I had been on the fence about. Also found an original copy of Eliot’s Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats, a new staple edition to the toilet library. There were a dozen more I can’t name offhand. All of it came to about $8. One criticism of the Bizarre, though. The sale was at a large gymnasium, chock-full of tables with the bleachers retreated. Around 100 tables and +15,000 books (they estimated)—all of this—and not 1 book of poetry. The books are all donated. This explains the biting sarcasm and overriding anger I notice in every poet I’ve known.

Yukon Ho!

For once, I don’t have to spend a few minutes pondering an excuse for not blogging. I have a job, and a real one this time. I actually wake up early, go somewhere for most of the day, and then come home. I got on as a tech writer for a really American company. We sell drugs and guns. We also make the technology for people to buy those guns and drugs, which is where I come in. I work with a team of programmers—code ninjas—as they are often nicknamed. In short, they build software and I build web authoring (the stuff that flies open when you hit the Help button), or at least that’s what I’m attempting to do.

I’ve always thought of myself as pretty techno-geeky, but I’m clanking through the Nordic Bronze Age compared to the know-how of some of these guys. I enjoy it, though. My love for minimalism may very well pay off.

Some shots from the hip.

Jean was in Canada the last few days (and as good timing works, Maggie gets bit on the eyelid by a mosquito in the night, and wakes with it swollen shut. Got some nice looks from the folks in town when I was out and about with her). I then got a voicemail from Jean mentioning that she had called her mother about “the storm,” and they had made plans to leave New Orleans, if need be. My reaction: What storm? I pulled up the radar and found Gustav, the loose tropical depression, at best, hanging over Cuba. For a second I thought maybe it was a message that was lost in the air some years ago before Katrina. This couldn’t have been the storm I was looking at on the radar. I called Jean back and she confirmed that she was speaking of Gustav. To her credit, she was in the boondocks of Canada and the only information that made it that way was some micowaved media mush. Hours later I was at the drive through buying chicken fingers at Cane’s. It was taking forever and the drive-up window person apologizes, claiming that the system was running slow because of the “storm.”

I said, “It stopped raining hours ago. It’s crystal clear out here.”

She said, “No, the big storm, Gustav.”

I said, “That’s still way, way down there.”

“I know. Our computers run off our main office down in Baton Rouge,” she said. (I won’t even go into how many other things are wrong about that answer besides basic physics.)

Maybe there is another Baton Rouge in the Haiti, I think to myself. There was a pretty strong French influence there at one time.

I mutter something to Maggie about the human race, and whip on home only to find a flier taped to my door from the apartment manager. It’s an evacuation plan. A fucking evacuation plan for us living in Shreveport roughly 300 miles from the coast.

What kind of culture of fear have we become? I read a headline on Google: New Orleans Plans Mass Evacuation, Braces for Catastrophic Hurricane. Jeeez, maybe this is serious I think. Then on about the 4^th line of the “news” article it reads that experts say the storm could hit from the inner panhandle of Florida to southern Texas, and could be anywhere from a Cat 2-5 hurricane. WTF? So they are saying that the storm (that’s already in the gulf) will hit somewhere else in the gulf? And then the storm could be just about any size or shape that hurricanes can be? This is news? I feel so embarrassed when I read things like this.

It’s bad enough hearing them speak with an air of disappointment when a storm misses someone, but this is a new low by ramping up weather possibilities in the same sensationalists manners of all other journalisms. What’s next? Pollen levels? Maybe plain old oxygen, since it is the chemical that causes cell aging and destruction. We’ll soon be on oxygen alerts and conservation. Breath shallow and less often, Timmy, we are Code Blue right now. Lots of air out there today.

I remember my beginner courses in journalism and propaganda in grade school. Some of the first things taught were tools of bad journalism, bad tactics, and using them was merely the benthic feeding ways of tabloid magazines. I’m not naïve enough to believe that our respected sources of information haven’t drawn upon those tactics in the past, but we seem to be in a Golden Age of them now. What was once unethical and unprofessional has become the preferred and only viable tactics. Red herrings and false analogies are probably still taught in those beginning courses, but aren’t taught as cheap, discrediting devices to be avoided.

Then I stumbled over another great article to end my night. I know, I know, I shouldn’t be reading TIME news to start with, but today I came across a gem. It seems the FBI nabbed their bionutcase for the anthrax incident, an incident that had fallen from my radar. I couldn’t make it through the first paragraph when the writer exposed what she thought was the overwhelming evidence in the case:

“there were electronic records documenting Ivins' late-night sojourns in the lab, e-mails revealing a mind wracked by paranoia and an inventory of a November 2007 FBI search of his home, which turned up a paperback copy of Albert Camus's novel The Plague.”

The Plague. Our new Catcher in the Rye, I guess. I have both books on my shelf so Bradbury’s library police should come busting through any minute now. This is one of the lamest attempts at taking a kidney punch at literature readers and the constant American paranoia towards the intellectual. The irony of this jab. The Plague is essentially about pervading the preoccupation with dread, suffering, anxieties, about the need to act instead of wallowing in rat feces and hopelessness—unless I totally misread the thing—the old cliché of living on your feet instead of dying on your knees. In fact, I felt the book may have been a little too optimistic at times, a little heavy handed for my taste. And it wouldn’t be that far of a stretch to transplant the plague with something like terrorism if a modern reader chooses to do so. It’s a sort of call-to-arms, but in the opposite direction this reporter, Laura Fitzpatrick, clumsily tried to insinuate. In short, we have a work of literature that maps ideas on how a culture can surmount, or should at least try to surmount, mass hysteria and paranoia, but, in turn, Fitzpatrick name-tosses it out there as linked to the support of terrorism. Thus, adding more lubrication for the fear machine, propagating more paranoia, and spreading more media plague. Abracadabra, Presto!

Around 9pm, Jean finally gets in from Canada (apparently there was no delay from the storm). I can’t help but think maybe Maggie and I should have just met her up there. Yukon Ho!

Transition complete

Officially now moved to Shreveport. Even the final boxes have been unpacked, those last-packed boxes that are ridiculously eclectic—a toothbrush, a couch pillow, DVDs, silverware, power cords for unknown gadgets. The steamy sweat-sock air of South Florida wasn’t escaped. On the move-in-day it was 106 degrees in S-port, 99 at about 930 one night. Maggie was a trooper through it all, probably more relaxed than any of us. She does ask about her old friends, her school, some places we use to visit.

The new apartment is surprisingly much nicer than ours in Deerfield, and also unbelievably cheaper. I thought I had a haunt in my new office. Every few minutes late at night I’d here this deep breathing sound from something large and sleeping. Jean came in to confirm the sound. Jean then dispelled it when she noticed the sprinkler sweeping the side of the apartment. So there goes my ghost.

I’m slowly getting back into the swing of things. Reading, writing, thinking. I have an interview tomorrow for an entry level position as a tech writer at a pharmaceutical company. Hopefully that goes well and I can be a productive citizen again. Even though it is still suffocating hot, you can sense fall closing in and the prospect of winter. It’s been four years since I’ve had to don on a coat and gloves. My writing is not one of color, sun, and puffy white clouds, making it difficult for me to write in South Florida. I can’t wait until the first run of overcast days of damp and unmoving air.