The Post-Apocalyptic Techno Poem

The news that the Grad Expo just (finally!) got approved for its funding request has come on the heels of the realization that we have over ONE HUNDRED submissions this year. My little bees are buzzing around like crazy to make sure that we have coverage for that many folks, and I've suddenly got a new lease on life.

After weeks of nagging doubts, I'm beginning to feel (once more) that this can--and will--be done.

Now, if I can just find a second paper topic for my adviser...

...I'm beginning think it might be best for me to take the tests with the rest of the peons and save myself the stress of an extra major research assignment.

Hrm.

I had the most fun ever working today. V. needed to shoot some images from a pile of tricky books, so we trucked up to the photo lab and began the process of getting the shots just right.

Getting the shots just right involved V. standing at the head of a ladder while I crouched under it, with my neck along the edge of the metal strut like an aristocrat in the guillotine, holding the pages down under a plank of glass. We added to the mayhem by taking frequent beverage breaks. (And beverage breaks can add plenty of mayhem, provided they involve the right kind of beverages... just sayin'.) We got some wonderful captures of images from Rinnoji and Nikko Toshogu, among others. We also got a great photo of me in the guillotine (ladder). We're going to sneak it onto the disc I give to my adviser; see if she has any comment. Heh.

I'm really going to miss working with V.

Yesterday the American people sent a decisive message to its government. We are done with your bullshit (for now, that is... until, you know, the democrats get the country back on a paying basis again and we all sink back into complacency and intolerance). Sorry about that last bit. Old habits die hard. [ahem]

For me, last night was the first time--in nearly eight years--that I felt that I might be able to be proud that I am an American. I haven't felt proud for so, so long. It is a beautiful and blessed feeling, and I do not take it for granted even as I bask in its glow. I truly believe that Barack Obama and his supporters triumphed over hate and fear, and that with a democrat-led senate and a democrat-led executive branch we may finally begin to climb back out of the abyss we allowed ourselves to be dragged into.

I realize that there are some people who worry about the loss of a number of moderate republicans in yesterday's election. A number of news sources I've read (chief among them the New York Times and the Washington Post) have noted that the republican base will now shift even further to the right. I cannot help but see that as a positive development, however. No longer will those bastards be able to hide behind a moderate fiscal conservative front. Everyone is going to see them for what they are: narrow-minded, hate-mongering, monsters. Yeah, I said monsters. And that's exactly what I meant.

Let we not forget that these are the people who refused halloween candy to the children of Obama supporters, who actually pinned their hopes for this election on racism and discrimination, who tried to disenfranchise mortgage-crisis victims at the voter polls among other things, and who sunk to the depths of insinuating that Obama = Osama = terrorist.

For the record, Obama is a city in Japan. So I guess Obama's really a Japanese man in disguise (which I guess just means that we finally know who exactly to blame for Pearl Harbor). Folks in Obama City are tremendously proud today. They held a city-wide celebration in honor of the election results.

For me, though, this Daily Show clip will always be the most nostalgic and delightful of the bunch. I was watching when Jon Stewart made the announcement that dropped almost decade of tension from my shoulders.

( Click here for the embed. )

And also, because I did declare a "two" for Tuesday. In a personal milestone that I am still excited over, my adviser, K., let me drive her car yesterday. It was dark, and she didn't know the way very well, and I took over from there--eliciting comments like, "oh, you drive fast, my dear!" and "okay, I'm not even going to look while you merge..." along the way.

So. Totally. Awesome.

The VRL supervisor is a real kick. And apparently, she thinks foxxydancr and I are a real kick, too. We're slowly piecing together what she expected us to be, based on conversations with other people in the department prior to our arrival in the VRL.

It seems that someone told her I was really quiet.

Yeah, no idea where that came from, but I'm tickled to death by the fact that you could describe me as either "really quiet" or "department rebel" depending on whom you talked with.

Part of my boisterous behavior in the slide library is of course due to the influence of my compatriot. Putting the two of us in a little white room together for hours on end really only has one possible outcome.

Tomorrow, we're going to try and figure out what the supervisor was told about foxxydancr. I suspect it will be as amusing as what we learned about me today.

Transcript of an exchange that took place between foxxydancr and myself earlier today:

fd: We're all crazy around here; it's just different kinds of crazy. You're Heinz crazy and we're all generic crazy.
Me: Heinz crazy?
fd: Yeah, like you're brand name crazy.
Me: I need a shirt that says that. Except it would have to say "I'm brand name crazy - comma - bitch - comma -what," as in, "I'm brand name crazy, bitch, what?!"
[laughter]
Me: You can tell the semester's gotten to me.

...

I have a major presentation in an hour and a half, but I can't go over it any more than I already have, I think. I've ate, drank, breathed, slept this material for the past five days. It's either good or its not, and there's nothing I can do about it at this point anyway. [sigh] And when I get done with the presentation I get to turn it into a twenty-page paper in the next three days, too!

Okay. Stressed.

But I'm Brand Name Crazy (tm), and that counts for a lot.

I officially accepted the position of 2009 Expo committee chair this evening. It was announced at the meeting and everything.

Yes, I am insane.

Let the good times roll.

Conversation between myself and a faculty member to whom I had sent a slightly-desperate sounding email requesting his help with a school Expo I'm helping to organize.

F: Hi Teva, I just sent you an email saying I would do it.
Me: Really? Awesome!
F: I only did it because you sounded desperate. It's kind of a pity thing.
Me: Well, I will gladly accept your pity, D.
F: How on earth did you get roped into this?
Me: I'm on the committee. Don't ask how it happened; I'm not sure myself.
F: Okay, I won't! Just email me some more details, okay?
Me: About what exactly?
F: About whatever it was I asked about in my email. I've already blocked it all out.

Stopped into the grad lounge this morning to chat with some peers before getting the day's work started. An anecdote by a friend of mine about a sorta-kinda-not-really period music ensemble lead to the topic of lutes, and I mentioned that I would pay good money to see a heavy metal lutist. The following conversation ensued (Note: GS = Grad Student; Fa = Faculty Member; Me = Me):

Fa: You mean, a lutenist?
Me: Is it "lutenist?"
GS1: Yes, it's "lutenist."
Me: Oh, well, a heavy metal lutenist, then.
GS1: I'd pay good money to see that as well.
Fa: Of course, it would depend on whether it was a lute, or an archlute, or a theorbo.
Me: Which would be most conducive to rock?
GS1: Theorbo, I think.
Fa: Yes.
GS1: It's larger.
GS2: "Theorbo" would make a great band name.
Me: Yeah, it would!
GS2: Of course, I already have a heavy metal band called "Panopticon." We don't ever play anything, though.
[laughter]
GS2: We're a conceptual band. We don't play; we just think about playing.
GS1: And your audience just thinks about going to your shows?
GS2: Exactly.
GS3: So when do you expect to get your conceptual tight pants and long hair.
GS2: Oh, we've already got those. You just have to conceptualize them. And I have a great beard going, too.
GS3: Do we have to pay you conceptual money, then?
GS2: Well, yeah, but it's conceptual. And we already have plenty of it so we don't care.
Me: You're in it for love of the conceptual music, not of the conceptual money, is that it?
GS2: Totally. It's like Star Trek - with the replicators. Like how they can concentrate on intellectual, scientific, and exploratory pursuits because money and food are all taken care of. Because our music and money are conceptual, and therefore freely available, we don't have to worry about anything.
GS1: I can get behind that.
Me: Fully.

Thursday saw another feisty Methodology seminar session. This one was particularly draining, however, as we were working on Sigfried Kracauer's "On Photography" and Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility" (often translated and referred to as "The Work of Age in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"). Both of these texts are difficult, and the cohort spent a good portion of the session furrowing its collective brow and saying, "Okay, wait... wait... so. This is saying this?!"

Good times.

At one point I broke the Kracauer argument down into the idea that the need to escape the narrow, bourgeois tendency of individual systems of discrimination (evinced by memory-images) would push society into a state of meaningless crisis (heralded by the photograph which does not discriminate at all, in Kracauer's view) that must be embraced to create the circumstances for a new individual system of discrimination to be laid. The professor contradicted me, pointing out that it would not be an individual system - because that was bourgeois. "Okay, then," I countered. "A new system of discrimination determined by me and my commie pinko posse."

With a snigger, the prof said that was roughly correct.

(And I now want a T-shirt that says, "Commie Pinko Posse." Because life's too short not to have one, ne?)

I got another laugh out of him when the topic of the nearby sandwich shop came under discussion during the break. The professor likes to order their "Greek Odyssey" sandwich, but he's continually irritated by the fact that they spell Odyssey incorrectly. My good friend, S., suggested that we start a guerrilla campaign of putting up stickers with the correct spelling over the glass cases and counters, until they get the message. I said that if we did that we had to make at least one that said, "Your mom knows how to spell 'odyssey,'" and the laughter began in earnest. I also got one of those classic, "what's is wrong with you" looks from him, though.

So it goes.