the wandering conference mind

Whenever I do student conferences, I tend to easily and readily fall into trances. I find myself repeating myself so often that a large portion of my consciousness tends to tune out; one year, I'm even convinced that I had an honest-to-goodness out-of-body experience, where I could watch myself giving the same bit of feedback for the 137th time.

However, my mind never completely shuts off (no matter how much I wish sometimes it would). Instead, my thoughts and observations just get very random and disjointed...more so than usual. How random? Why, I'm glad you asked:

• When I do student conferences, I develop a love/hate relationship with my mail. I hate getting mail--it's almost always either causing me more work or just making me throw away something else--but I check it incessantly nonetheless.
  
• At least two times a week, I go into the bathroom, and someone is in the stalls both taking care of business and text messaging. This is frankly a form of multitasking I can do without.
  
• I've had several students come in wearing hoodies that have their last name spelled out across the front...as if their family was a major university or something. Sadly, I managed to grow up without the DuBose name becoming a brand.
  
• My students are strangely resistant to any critiques of capitalism. From them, I have learned that fun should only be the dominion of those who have money. I have also learned that Marxism, Communism, and Socialism are the same thing. Also, Hegemony is a person.
  
• We, as teachers, are often led to believe that our students are of the computer saturation generation. This is far from the truth. In fact, I have been told several times in the last few days that interaction via computer is not real, because you never know the truth about people online. Apparently, no one ever lies or attempts to deceive in person. If I would've known this while single, it would've revolutionized my dating life.
  
• When I have conferences, I have the 2-3 minutes of dead space between students. Normally, I would turn to my RSS feeds or to Twitter for entertainment during these periods (as there is nowhere near enough time to do anything productive). However, stuff just doesn't happen quickly enough, and my need for distraction soon outpaces the inanity I regularly visit while online. So I do things I wouldn't ordinarily do, such as view photo sets of Insane Clown Posse fans. Yes, it does get that bad.
  
• Today in class, as I was shuffling through one of the articles, I realized that the scan was missing a page. While I was a little bit chagrined none of my students noticed this error, I was particularly upset that I had noticed it while reading. Yes, boys and girls, teachers can be idiots too!
  
• About half the time I leave my 12:30-1:45 class, a gaggle of my students were lined up at the vending machines. Yes, there is something about my teaching style that leads people to crave junk food.
  
• It never fails to raise at least one chuckle when, in my effort to demonstrate the effects of camera angle choice, I climb on top of my desk in class. It's almost worth the very real risk of ripping one's pants while climbing down.
  

you can talk and talk and talk...

When I became a writing teacher, there were a whole lot of adjustments I had to make...and most of them (as I've moaned about before) have to do with evaluation. Until someone finds out a way to grade student writing using scantron, us writing teachers end up with a whole lot of student essays to grade. Sitting in the room with a stack of papers in one hand and a red pen in the other does weird things to people--personally, it just used to make me bitter and revolutionary--so options are never a bad thing.

I went to student conferences instead of marking up essay drafts a long time ago. Generally, it's superior in every way. It does take up a little more time, but it also is dramatically easier on the soul. It's also more immediate. When students are unwittingly violating key rules, you can explain and demonstrate how things are supposed to work. When students are consciously not doing their work, you can get a glimpse on whether or not they're going to change their ways...and thus remain worthy of your time and attention.

The best part of conferences, though, happens when you can see the shining light of reason dawn in student eyes.

When I run my first batch of conferences, people are more panic-filled than anything else. I have (no exaggeration) had tears shed during week two of the semester. This is mostly because I believe in immersion-learning, meaning throwing the students in the deep end immediately...just so they completely understand how deep really is the water. Nothing I can say, for instance, about leaving yourself enough time to revise is quite as effective as only giving students one week to do their first assignment.

Now, however, is when the class starts to change in glorious ways. People know what they need to do with their papers before they come into my office. When I explain a concept, they nod their heads rather than stare at me like I've lost my mind.

Today, in one of my conferences, I was explaining how argument points should build on each other into a complex, unified thesis. The student was silent for a second before exclaiming "that's a really good note" and diving for something on which to write down my words o' wisdom.

I've been doing this silly job for years, so I should be able to occasionally "wow" them with my knowledge...but it's always nice to see visual proof that I am indeed not a fraud.

music and fate

Ages ago, I chronicled my experience trying to get into a band (which is, incidentally, better written and more accurately descriptive of my feelings than I recall). Since then, my lifelong relationship to music has more or less followed a predictable pattern: restring a guitar, mess around with it for a few days, get buried in an avalanche of work, forget about the guitar, sit on my couch grading, see guitar gathering dust, get all mopey and contemplative, repeat cycle. Throughout it all, the one constant was feeling that the "guitar player" part of my identity was slipping away, decaying through its half life, leading me inevitably and inexorably to a point where I become merely a guy who used to think of himself as a guitar player when he was younger. This, I believed, was fate.

Things inevitably happen, though. During my really good weekend recently, I found myself, during the course of one evening's drinking, going from "guy who sometimes likes to still think of himself as a guitar player occasionally" to "guy who is somehow in a band with another guitar player and a drummer." Then we somehow recruited a bass player before the weekend was out. Then we set a rehearsal date...and it seemed that for once, I was finally able to slap fate in the mouth.

Figuring more distortion could only help cover how out of shape my playing was, I went online and purchased a highly recommended distortion pedal from a well-reviewed music store. However, it never came, and when I finally contacted the store, they told me that their post office loses about a package a week...and it apparently was my turn...so I still don't have it. Sigh...score one for fate.

But I was hoping for improvement. When it finally came time to play together, I was pleased to find out that I was not as rusty as, by all rights, I should be. My fingers were actually cooperating. Moreover, my 1973 Les Paul Custom (which, in a fit of madness, I actually contemplated selling) sounded amazing when I was able to crank up the volume on the Marshall and put the spurs to it. And the day turned out fairly productive...we faked our way through some parts of songs, developed fragments of three original songs, and assembled a list of cover songs to learn.

Lest it seem that everything was going too smoothly or that I was coming out ahead, however, my amplifier started to make some weird noise when I first plugged in...we initially just put it down to schmutz in the system. Then I went to show our bass player a chord progression, touched her instrument, and received an electrical shock. Wondering if it was me or her, I touched the other guitar player's instrument and was shocked again. Near the end of the session, I was doing a stupid "never stop soloing" moment at the end of the song, and the other guitar player grabbed my instrument to stop me...and herself received a massive electrical blast.

Initially, we thought it must've been just the result of rental house wiring (where landlords regularly do not overly concern themselves with building codes or proper standards of maintenance). Yet when I went over to my guitar player's house this week to work out some parts, my amplifier refused to do anything other than an electronic gargle. So, having realized that my amp was on the verge of death, I took it to a recommended repair shop. Only two problems, though. First, I have to pay for the first hour in advance (which works out to be $70). Second, they'll get to the amp in 2-3 weeks. This wouldn't be a problem if I was still "occasional guitar player guy," but we have a practice session lined up for Friday.

Yes, it's not just my almost overwhelming workload that prevents me from being a musician...it's also some twisted combination of fate and whatever vindictive deities rule the world of electronic sound amplification.

But I won't let it get me down. This time, I'll just strum really loudly.

good times

A few weekends ago when I was sick, I laid on the couch, moaned a whole lot, and watched a lot of HGTV. This, in the end, was a mistake. I saw lots of programs with 22 year old couples either looking to buy or to spruce up their first house. I saw "What kind of house does $600,000 buy you" shows? I saw plenty of youngsters much better off than me. I wanted to punch them all in the left eye.

Normally, HGTV has a lot going for it...the general joy of watching a television network full of personality-driven shows but with hosts who have utterly no personality at all. The horrible production values. The sheer number of annoying idiots. All of it is generally hilarious. However, it does entirely too good of a job of stoking my class hatred and making me a bitter man.

It's funny how much good a weekend changes things. And indeed, it was a weekend in a number of ways:

1. Friday night started with sushi with my wonderful spousal unit. Mackerel might just be my new favorite.
   
2. Out to the best bar with good friends makes a Friday night just go right.
   
3. Discovering a very good local band also really helps.
   
4. Later that night, a friend asked if I wanted to get together and play some music. In an hour, another friend was recruited. I wasn't expecting to get into a band. However, it is awesome.
   
5. It's a good feeling to close out the bar...especially when you get to walk home with very funny-drunk friends and wake up with absolutely no hangover the next day.
   
6. Day two had a post-dissertation party at a friend's place with many more friends. Oh yeah, with homemade Bucyrus bratwursts. The weekend went from awesome to tremendous.
   
7. Out to another nightclub, which I also ended up closing down with more friends. Minus the karaoke, the sweet sixteen party wearing weird costumes, and a truly awful Belgian beer, it was still a blast.
   
8. Sunday? A day with my darling spousal unit, which is about as perfect as imaginable.
   

There are times when I start to feel left behind in life, stuck in a non-tenure job, stuck as a renter, living year 11 in a town I thought I'd only be in for 4. Then there are weekends like this one, where all I wanted was my friends to get full time jobs in the area so it would always be like this.

roid rage

Earlier, I moaned and whined about getting a cold at the end of summer (I know what you're thinking...Mike? Complaining? I know...it just doesn't sound like me). I started out on Aug. 13 just feeling slightly icky with a sore throat. Then I started to feel get all fevery and dizzy. It was quite depressing, mostly because I knew, deep down inside, that it really was not the result of too much partying or something.

I spent time laying on the couch. I watched more HGTV than any man should bear. I realized just how tougher than I is my darling spousal unit. Moreover, however, I spent a lot of time not doing the paper I had started...fever dreams and academics, I long ago learned, do not really go togethe all that well.

After about a week, the fevers and ickiness generally went away. However, the cough was refusing to budge. I seemed to notice that the more I talked, the worse it got, so I tried to avoid spouting off my opinions whenever I had an audience. However, the cough still didn't completely go away. The only real change is that my friends seemed happier to see a less talkative me.

I started teaching this week, and for me, that involves long periods of using The DuBose Teacher Voice, which can be, if I might say, an awesome entity. Yet my throat was suffering for it. I decided that, rather than adapting all the other Tom Waits mannerisms (which I couldn't really do anyway...I don't have a good hat), I would finally break down and go see the doctor.

He told me that I most likely had a viral thing (his words), but it had gone away. My throat and sinuses were still inflamed, however, so he gave me a stepped dose of a steroid/anti-inflammatory. When I mentioned this on my Twitter feed, I was bombarded by friends (?) pelting me with horror stories about steroid side effects. I half expected to turn into the Hulk (the Incredible or Hogan...either/or) by the end of the day. My only solace in this was that if I were to go all green, bloated, and rampaging, at least there was a good chance it would happen while I was teaching. If nothing else, that would cut down on disciplinary problems amongst the students.

There were no side effects that I noticed while at work. When the day of teaching had finally ended (around 9:45...yes, PM...damn class schedules), I drove home while blasting Green Day, and I noticed my throat was too sore from five hours of giving Exclusive Command Teaching Performances to sing along. It lessened the effect, for sure.

Then, a while after arriving in the arms of beautiful spousal unit, after giving time for my mind to supposedly calm down post-teaching, I went to bed. This is when things started to change. Now, I've had mild insomnia issues for some time. I've always had nights where my brain wouldn't shut off. Last night was definitely one of them, but with the added twist of thinking of random stuff at an extremely high speed. My brain was pulling all its normal tricks (getting caught into obscure song lyrics, trying to find new uses for bratwurst, composing a musical on the life of Asian Dawn leader Hans Gruber* but as if sung by chipmunks), but it was doing it at auctioneer rate, as if someone had tripped my mind's switch to 78. Of course, this made sleep nigh-near difficult.

So far, though, this could be traced to simple hangover from week one of teaching. Then everything subtly changed. As I lay there, trying to block out my brain while not disturbing my slumbering, wildebeest-snoring spousal unit, I realized that I could feel my head. I mean, I could really feel my head. I started being able to feel just my left ear (and its surrounding areas) in excruciating detail. Then I was also able to feel a bit of the back of my neck. There was one patch of hair in particular where I could feel the spikes at the end of the follicles. My head swayed and tingled. This might've been enjoyable if I at least had a Tommy Chong-esque "wow, man" attitude to go with it, but when you couple it with a brain which can't quit analyzing fictional animal musicals, it was less than enjoyable...somewhere on the road to annoying, if you wanna know the truth.

Eventually, the sensations in my head started to fade, and the conversations in my brain, while not really going away, at least had the decency to bore me into slumber (giving me the added benefit of knowing how my friends, when around me, generally feel. Waking up was relatively hard today, but so far, no lingering steroid side-effects.

At least I know know how professional athletes feel.

* ten points for the first person to get this reference.

classroom fail

Hi there. I'm a teacher. Currently, I teach writing. However, today certain events and locations began to conspire against me.

Now, I want to be perfectly clear. I like my job. Generally, I like my university. I love my department. Hell, I think my building is pretty damn skippy...even if they did have to replace the roof less than a year after the building opened.

I can even deal with my classroom having three glass walls and facing the building lobby. It's a bit weird, and I feel kind of fishbowl-esque. However, I'm tapping into the whole self-delusion angle and believing that it's because I'm so damn pretty. Maybe they're filming me for a reality show. Who knows?

The problem is with technology. I have a computer, projector, document camera, dvd player, and every bell/whistle you can ask for. What do I not have? Why, it's a board on which to write. No chalkboard. No white board. And, as it's a writing class, being able to write is kind of important.

I have developed a workaround. I turn on the document camera, put a piece of blank paper under that, and write on that. It's far from ideal, though. I burn through a lot of paper, especially since it's a 2 hour 10 minute class. And every time I write anything, the "intelligent" sensors in said document camera decide to refocus and readjust the white balance, which takes a focus. Also, I can swear it makes my already ugly handwriting look even worse.

Ultimately, though, I'm mostly unhappy because of the utter silliness of it all. They could afford an expensive document camera, an expensive projector, but could not fork over for a white board? I have to use hundreds of dollars of technology as a workaround for their failure to install a simple chalk board?

Once again, Kafka shows its relevance to the modern university.

damnation and groceries

I now no longer need to go to hell when I die.

This weekend is BGSU's "move-in" weekend. Freshmen are coming into town. The dorms are filling up. The roads are clogged with minivans hauling the little brats and their parental units. Meanwhile, the upper classmen are gathered on front lawns, sitting on outdoor couches or crammed at a rate of 3,857,336 per acre on front yards, drinking Natty Light and playing beer pong. It's much like being in Angangueo, Mexico...but with more public urination and less butterflies.

For those of us non-students, this arrival is more a sign of defeat than anything else. It signals that we have lost the city. There are now places we can't go without fearing for our sanity. We can no longer walk the streets at night without fear of stepping into student vomit or being shot with bb guns. Every night, instead of being sung to sleep by the birds, we'll now hear hour after hour of "woooooo!s" and bad classic rock.

I took a non-driving friend to the grocery store. Alas, move-in weekend was utterly the wrong time to do it. From the moment we stepped into the store, we were in trouble.

It wasn't too bad in the produce department...because none of them actually eat fruits or vegetables. However, none of them know how to pilot a shopping cart or observe rules of the road, so it quickly became difficult maneuvering. Every so often, there would be a knot of undergrads, accompanied by some bewildered parent, staring at the shelves in wonder.

These tie-up slots were predictably scattered throughout the store...in front of the instant soup, in front of the mac & cheese (store brand, of course), in front of the frozen food. Each of them had a deer-in-the-headlights/"which variety of ramen is perfect for me" glazed expression. Of course, I didn't need to fight them for such product (as I was searching for elements of food, not the "food-like products" favored by undergrads). However, I had to work my way around them,, which required a mixture of brute force and stealth...along with a NASCAR-esque willingness to trade paint. More than once, another shopper, after seeing my cart piloting, complemented me on my technique.

I probably only got half of what I need, but that's okay...I just needed to escape. Grocery shopping should not make you feel like you've earned a single-malt Scotch.

However, all such bets are off when you enter the special hell of a grocery store in move-in week.

on health, causality, and indulgence

Ever since I was a wee lil' tike, I've always confounded doctors and annoyed friends with my normal propensity to health. This started with my teeth.

Like everyone, I was given lots of instructions on proper tooth care. I saw the goofy films in elementary school. I had teachers and dentists alike demonstrate proper flossing technique on oversized demonstration dentures. One year, they even gave us these pills which, when we sucked on them after brushing, supposedly showed all the plaque we missed by making it purple. I was assured that proper dental hygiene would surely mark the difference between a life of friends, women, fame, and fortune, and a life lived in a cardboard box in a gutter of a ghetto, with only a rabid mouse for company.

In spite of all this cajoling and instruction, I took minimal care of my teeth while a troublesome youth. I brushed swiftly, without purpose. I found flossing vexing and tedious, so I abandoned it for months at a time. Yet I still didn't get cavities. While my siblings were getting their teeth drilled, I would laugh, having learned that the road to happiness and well being lay in total and absolute sloth.

Similarly, with my health, I never broke a bone. I would get colds, but I never had much worse. I never needed my tonsils removed. I never had chicken pox. And I never got rabies, tapeworms, or elephantiasis...of any region.

It was only after realizing I was getting old (thanks to a cute chick I met my first year in Ohio, who loved repeatedly reminding me of my ancientness) that I started to really think about taking care of myself. There were, however, problems. First, I was working for my Ph.D., so anything save reading and writing did not fit into my schedule. Then there was the related health care crisis (short version: it sucked, then I had none). When I finally got good insurance, I felt physically worn down. Additionally, thanks to the general inertia of the scholarly lifestyle (and breakfasts consisting of a whole slab of deep-fried bacon wrapped around a stick of butter), I had gained roughly 437 pounds. It was with a certain amount of trepidation and fear that I was able to schedule a physical to see exactly how far I had slipped.

I reserved time with a general practitioner, a dentist, and an opthamologist. I was poked, prodded, x-rayed, stabbed, and bled. They cut open my head to check on the state of its internal parts.

How did I fare? In spite of everything, there were no problems. Even though I had lived on a grad school diet for years, my cholesterol and all that were fine. My vision was no worse than ever. Even my teeth were relatively solid.

I've been thinking about all of this for a few reasons. First off has been my recent string of summertime injuries (2008's knee then foot, and 2009's toe) have left me shaken. They've also left me wondering if my body, much like my students, is now engaged in a full-blown effort to make me feel old.

That's not all, though. Last week, I was deep into the "friends are visiting, leaving, moving in" week-long drinking binge/spree/lifestyle. Every night for eight days, I found myself either at a bar, a porch, or a street corner, with adult beverages on the agenda. Now I enjoy drinking more than most, but this stretch of bar time, fueled by special occasions and guests, began to feel relentless. Every morning, my stomach felt mildly uncertain and my head felt like cotton. I was losing the ability to focus on anything other than "this is what touring musicians must feel like all the time...no wonder many second albums suck." I surprisingly never had a monstrous hangover the entire week (no splitting headache, no spinning rooms), yet in spite of this, I was getting sick of the daily feeling of uncertainty, both mentally and physically.

I was actually looking forward to my first night of sobriety, when no one would call, asking if I wanted beer, a cigar, or both. I was looking forward to going to bed sober, waking up sober, doing actual work. I was looking forward to reaping the benefits of clean, healthy living.

Of course, I immediately got a cold. And, wouldn't you know, it's not going away all that quickly. Ever since I quit my binge, I've had minor yet persistent mucus production, a sore throat, a transient feverish haze, and a general feeling of "woah" that's prevented me from doing much of anything.

I'm officially sick of it. I'm sick of feeling weird. I'm sick of sitting on the couch watching television. I've seen more HGTV than I can stand. I'm sick of not being able to do much of my own, very necessary, extremely time-sensitive work. I'm sick of the Oscar Wilde-esque fever dreams.

The worst part of all this, however, is that I can't even find a decent metaphor or meaning in all this. "Quit drinking and you will get sick" is not something I really want to believe. "The summer will always end in tears and misery" is too depressing, even for me. I can't shake the comment of a girl I knew in high school, who always told me that I didn't have a cold, it was my brain melting out of my head...but I'm really hoping that one's not right either.

Today's thought is that maybe the drinking then getting sick thing might be connected in some way. Maybe cause is starting to finally catch up with effect. Behavior finally starts yielding results. Baudrillard was wrong.

I certainly hope not. But even if the return of causality is the only lesson to be learned here, I just wish it wouldn't have manifested itself on my health. The end of summer is not, after all, the ideal time to dwell on one's lack of invincibility.

bend and cough

I've been thinking of health care for a little bit. No, not because of the national debate, but because for the second summer in a row, I've ended up with some virtually untreatable foot injury. But, of course, the personal inevitably leads up to the public. I am a scholar, after all.

Obviously, for many of the people, facts in the health care debate don't really matter. The US is far from the leader in health care, we spend more but get less, there are no plans for the government to round up Granny and dispatch her with an ice pick, and so forth. The truth is out there and fairly easy to find, but a lot of people don't care about data, statistics, facts.

Okay, then how about personal narratives?

• When I got kicked off my parental units's HMO, I was essentially without insurance for years. Thankfully nothing happened. However, I had great potential for disaster. To survive with no insurance, you either have to (a) be willing to kiss your credit goodbye for life if you end up going to a hospital, so most people (b) adopt the "eh, it will take care of itself" attitude which is especially stupid with serious injuries and illnesses.
  
  
• When I started doctoral school, I was required to get mandatory student health insurance. It was minimal and sucked. In fact, the only place without a co-pay was the student health center, about which horror films should be written. Every doctor in the place followed this exact procedure: they'd ask you what was wrong, pretend to listen while replaying last night's Survivor in their head, tell you to open wide, and then go to a 50 gallon drum of miscellaneous pills, grab a handful, and chuck them at your head...with whatever stuck in your mouth being the "prescribed dosage." Literally.
  
  Okay, not literally, but it wasn't far off. I went in one time, told them I had a cold with a cough that kept me up last night...they gave me Codeine. I had fun that night, but I still realize it wasn't exactly the smartest or most ethical course of treatment.
  
  
• During adjunct hell time, I was back into the no insurance/"it will take care of itself" mindset. Then I got a cyst on...um...a very uncomfortable place...let's just say "the base of the spine." Okay, damnit, I had an ass-cyst. It hurt like hell to sit, and since I had to drive 75 miles a day to get to various crappy (pun intended) jobs, "wait and see" wasn't an option. Neither, however was a real doctor.
  
  My solution? I went to an "Urgent Care" place to get diagnosed. After sitting with temp workers and virtually homeless people for two hours (and I really don't mean this as an insult...I've been a temp worker, and I was, during adjunct hell, pretty close to homeless myself), had a 15 minute diagnosis that cost $150. I then had to go to a surgeon to get the cyst drained. This also took 15 minutes, but it cost about $300, if I recall. Admittedly, the assisting nurse was cute, but I was married...and she had to stare at my ass-cyst, so I wouldn't have stood much of a chance even if I was single.
  

  
  (Incidentally, I should add the doctors in the Urgent Care place were generally pretty nice and would try to give free samples if a prescription was needed. They understood that their job was to help those left behind from the US health care "system"...as long as they were lucky enough to have a credit card with some space left on it.)

  
  
• However, not everyone is lucky enough to even be able to do Urgent Care. A few semesters ago, I had a student who had the same type of cyst I had. He also didn't have insurance...but unlike me, he didn't have the credit card to even go to a crappy Urgent Care place. His solution was to just tough it out.
  
  This guy must've been tough as hell, because he lasted over a month. I was in utter agony after only a week. However, his cyst got infected. I don't remember how he eventually got the cyst fixed, but financially, this must've killed him.
  
  
• Now I have health insurance as part of my job. Moreover, it's actually pretty good. The doctor freaked when I told him I was over 2 years between checkups, but luckily, I had stayed relatively healthy. And now my insurance allows me to regularly see a doctor. But is it perfect? Well, let me briefly regale you with the exciting tale of last year's foot/leg injury:
  
  Last summer, I decided to start walking every day in an effort to get slightly healthy. This went well for about a month, but then I screwed up a ligament in my knee. The doctor had me X-rayed (a few hundred even with good insurance), gave me some daily stretches, and made me wear a knee brace. However, the knee brace made me walk differently, and this aggravated my plantar fasciitis in the other leg's foot...so I had injuries in both legs. Brilliant! Now, by this point, I had sunk a decent amount of coin in co-pays, and I hesitate to think what it would've cost me out of pocket. But how did I cure this? Well, I rested (meaning I reverted to my lazy non-exercising self) and hoped it went away on its own...the exact thing I would've done if I didn't have insurance in the first place!
  

Go health care! This so obviously doesn't need fixing at all. In fact, bring back the leeches!

man versus dog

In the mornings, I like to have television on when I eat my breakfast, before I start to work. Since I need to avoid being sucked into any serial shows (my brief experience with The West Wing, which is awesome yet cost me many man hours working on papers taught me that), I put on the NFL network. I love football, but I can quite comfortably ignore and leave anything on that network. So it's good at being mindless television, which is what I need.

Today, however, they caused me to think. Damn them!

Former Atlanta quarterback Micheal Vick, of dog-fighting fame was the subject of discussion. How could he best rehabilitate himself? Had he been banned from the game long enough? Would anyone hire him? How could some team pick him up without becoming embroiled in a PR nightmare?

All legitimate questions, I guess. However, the thing that makes me wonder about sports, television, society, and people in general is the level of emphasis we're putting on this.

Undoubtedly, dog fighting is sick, cruel, inhumane, and needs to be stomped out. However, Vick was sentenced to 23 months in jail and was suspended by the NFL for over 2 years. Deservedly? Maybe so, but for a point of comparison, Donte Stallworth, another NFL player, ran over and killed someone while drunk. He served a whole whopping 24 days in jail.

The lesson? Obviously, the NFL values dogs more than humans. Food for thought, I guess.

on an overdue happening

I have seen the mountain. I have been to the mountain. Unlike Jimi Hendrix, I did not "chop it down with the edge of my hand." In this, Jimi was temporarily acting like a wimp. If he wanted to be tough, he should've done what I did...bite down that damn mountain with my bare teeth.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, hyper-intelligent cats and fuzzy reptiles from Alpha Centauri 8, I am here to tell you how it is. Remember my repeated moans about "The Paper That Would Not Die 2009 Edition?"

The Paper That Would Not Die is finally dead. Hallelujah.

A little after 1pm, I put the finishing touches on my draft. After many trials, after much avoidance, I have finally finished.

This is, for me, a momentous occasion. Some data to help you understand why:

• I started this back on May 19th with a simple blog post I couldn't quit thinking about the topic, though, so I wrote the paper.
  
• This means I have been writing this damn paper for 57 days, excluding my Florida trip. This is a long time for an article.
  
• During this time, I have done three outlines and six major paper reorganizations.
  
• My computer file for this essay has 93 files in it (drafts, notes, pdfs, & such), for a total size of 69 megabites.
  
• My Works Cited page is currently going onto the 6th page, with 45 entries. I still have to pare these down, but there will still be ahellofalotta sources.
  
• The draft itself works out to 26 pages, with 8,084 words. This will inevitably shrink during revision, but still, pretty damn long.
  

At this point, I plan to give it a once-over for stupid mistakes before checking all my sources (making sure everything that's used as a source in the paper is on the Works Cited & eliminating anything that I don't use). But then, this paper rests for a while. Three of my friends have offered to give the paper a look, so I'll send it off to them this afternoon. But, for at least a week, that's it.

As is, I'm pretty sure that a lot of this is fairly solid. I think it might just be notable and say things no one else has said. I do know the paper needs tightening, and I'm also pretty sure the conclusion will need a polish-bordering on rewrite. For now, though, I am going to take great pleasure in not thinking about this article for a little while.

Except, however, to ask one simple question: who da man? I suspect it might be me.

ain't no cure...

Each year in Bowling Green ends pretty much the same way. It gets moderately warm, with bouts of awful humidity. A large mass of students leave, and we briefly reclaim the town. There are cookouts, cigars on the back porch, walks through town, games of croquet or bocce...you know, the good stuff.

Then everything starts changing. Some people, realizing they have no definite plans for the next year, start to panic. Some people try to cram in as much work as possible since teaching will leave them no time to do what they love. Some people regress under deadlines, and you don't see them for stretches of time. And then, there's the worst part of the summer: people leave.

This is the thing I've never really gotten used to, even though I've been experiencing it all my life. As an Air Force brat, I regularly had to make new friends every year as families dispersed throughout the globe. When my father retired and we moved to Florida, I marveled at how some of my new friends had known each other for years, since they were little kids. For a while, there was stability...but then I moved up to Ohio, and I had to get used to grad school scattering us to the wind each year.

I've hauled more couches up more stairs than I care to remember. I've helped pack trucks, trailers, car trunks. I've strained muscles walking desks down narrow stairways. I've given the goodbye handshake/hand bump/hug/wave more times than I can recall. And it's been a long time since I realized how many residences in this town I know only because friends used to live in them.

Today, I got to help another friend move. I'm glad for him...he's going to a very good post-doc, which will do great things for his career. And I know that he'll be back...for dissertation defense, for a conference, maybe more. But this wasn't the main thing in my thoughts. Instead, as we were sweating, hauling, cleaning, I realized two things.

First off, I love all my friends dearly. However, you learn a lot about people when there's a mass packing operation. I learned that as wonderful people as my friends are, most of them would never last in factory or warehouse work.

More importantly, though, I was comparing this summer to last, and I realized that, overall, I am in much better shape than I was a year ago. Only one friend is moving away, while two are actually moving back. And beyond that, there are any number of people in this town who, one year ago, were just faces I would see every so often. I'd see this guy at parties, this guy at the coffee shop, this couple only every so often...and now we're friends.

It's good to know that I've connected with a whole circle of people I didn't really know last year. It gives me hope that this time next year, I will know several more people, strangers that have turned into friends. It almost takes the sting away from thinking of all those people who, long having departed this small Ohio town, I see so infrequently.

Such are the bittersweet thoughts of summer.

like a distorted G chord

I often like to think of myself as a cold, hard realist, but deep down inside, I know that in doing so, I'm really just fooling myself. There's a large part of me that's more a dreamer than anything else. Usually, I'm too cynical in authority, structures, and other such cultural movers to ever believe those dreams could, in operation, come true, but not always.

Example one? I still believe in the power of rock and roll. Even when there are experiences which discourage me, bands that let me down, overall I am still hopeful.

I believe, for instance, that the only thing in the whole wide world that sounds better than a distorted G chord played at a healthy volumemight just possibly be the distorted D chord...but only when you also add the open A string. There's just something about that rush of sound that makes all right in the universe at large. Equipment can die (and it has; I've had amps that cost over $200 to retube, and currently my effects unit has forgotten what an octave is). Bands can self-destruct (and, as someone who wants nothing more than to eventually play live music for an audience, I can testify that they have; I've had bands fall apart because of dissertation freakout, drummers jumping ship to old bands, and a thousand other methods of destruction...mostly concerning drummers, though). But when that chord hits, when the individual notes combine into something with greater range and power than anything else on earth, I still believe.

I also have faith in music performers. For every band of my teenage years that's abandoned its principles (Metallica), fell into choreography (Scorpions), forgot how to write a decent song (AC/DC), or just became a commercialized laughing stock/freak show (Ozzy), there are still bands that put it out there every time, that use their music for real purposes, that never, ever forget what's important about being not just an entertainer but a musician.

When the music really hits, it generally connects to something personal. When I first heard Green Day, for instance, it was when "Basket Case" hit local radio shortly after Dookie's release...but before they became an MTV staple (yes, this was back when videos still came on the channel). I was driving across town to my new university, after having my one semester post-community college break turn into several years, and I was undergoing the recurring academic self-doubt. My head was swimming with medieval literature and Soviet history, and "Basket Case" cut through the chatter. I remember thinking that someone had finally nailed the post-punk movement, and they did it by the simple act of learning how to write songs. I bought the album, and it had that same energy and songwriting throughout...and was remarkably consistent.

My college booked Green Day to play our arena right before MTV started playing "Longview," so it was a stupidly cheap concert...student tickets were only $3, so I went with a friend. By the time of the concert, though, MTV was playing them every three minutes, and the audience at the show was, as a result, decidedly "not college"...there were lots of kids there, and it was the first show I ever went to where I felt closer in age to the parent chaperons. It was an amazingly fun time, though...a nice high energy concert.

The good friend that I took to the show and I had a falling out--he quit calling me or even talking to me once his brother turned 21 and he had another designated driver to haul him around--but Green Day was always there.

Time went on. I moved to Ohio and found myself buried in the ungodly heavy workload of a Ph.D. student. Whenever I think of that bleak first year, walking through the student ghetto to campus, adjusting to the biting cold of a northwest Ohio winter, mulling over exactly why I thought I was good enough to be a professional scholar, and contemplating the latest in a line of dating failures/disasters, I remember listening to 1997's Nimrod on my Walkman. By that time, the band's songwriting had become deeper, more layered, and just slightly more adult...and it always helped pick me up and ease the doubts.

Green Day albums continued to be markers in my life. By the release of 2000's Warning, I was both in an amazing relationship while locked into dissertation hell, and the disk's higher level of nuance and adulthood provided a good counterpoint to some of the inanities and insanities of trying to get a reading list past a dissertation committee that sported only one supportive member. 2004's American Idiot's pointed rage and frustration at a world which insisted on not making sense played me through the final year of adjunct hell, and it nicely mirrored the frustration I was feeling at my own senseless, depressing work life. I still haven't absorbed their new one, but I'm sure in ten years, 20th Century Breakdown will also be more to me than just a collection of sounds.

I'm thinking of all this now because last night was the first time I had seen Green Day perform since that 1994 university show. Much has changed. Where I got $3 tickets before, they now cost me $25...plus about another $10 in fees, $15 in parking. I have changed; instead of being an angst and doubt-ridden college junior, I am now a full-fledged college teacher (although still angst and doubt-ridden). Green Day is no longer a scrappy band from the bay area, either...instead, they are dedicated, skilled arena rockers. But man, did they still bring the rock.

We got lotsa stuff off the latest two albums. We got hilarious false starts on Ozzy, Metallica, Kiss. We got explosions, pyro, and a neat set. We got songs from all albums. We got a Motown medley which sounded surprisingly nice. We got kids from the floor pulled up on stage, to be given the mic or (in one case) a guitar (and they were mostly pretty good). We got lifted, carried, and pummeled for almost 2 1/2 hours...and it was awesome throughout.

There is still a high kid ratio at a Green Day concert, but I've become okay with that...because I'm convinced that Green Day, as a band, will never let them down. Although they put on a much different show than they did in 1994, Green Day is still an amazing group of performers. They are also not just mindless rockers; instead, they are saying something, critiquing the media, politics, environment, and it's good to know that kids are exposed to the "question everything" mindset. And as someone who's seen hundreds of college papers on American Idiot, I know that it does prompt serious thought, and it does stick with them.

While that is definitely important, though, it wasn't even the most powerful thing I brought home with me last night. Just like that fabled distorted G chord, Green Day brought me a powerful sense of elation and fulfillment, and the idea that rock and roll can still do that is one of the most beautiful constants in life.

Post 500, by the way. Thanks for reading

yet another reason it sucks to be a renter

While the contractors are done by several days reconstructing my house, the house next door (run by the same landlord) required more significant work...namely, all the brick and block work on the front was demolished and is being rebuild. I hesitate to imagine the cost, but luckily, I don't really have to concern myself with this stuff...one of the few joys of having to pay to live in someone else's house.

However, the day before yesterday, I was vividly reminded that the workers were in fact still actively working. It was the sound of jackhammers that reminded me. I also noticed that the workers were using a few minor power tools...tied into a long extension cord that was plugged into an outlet outside of my house. The last few days, they have been taking water out of our outside tap to mix the mortar. Of course, we were never asked nor did we grant permission for either act.

Technically, I believe this is illegal. It is my name, after all, registered with the utilities company. When the bill comes, it is us who have to pay for the contractor's unrequested use of our power and water. And we are not experiencing any practical benefit from my neighbor's house's front being rebuilt...so I'm at a loss as to why I should help pay for it.

I also realize that the contractors aren't actually using very much of either the power or water, so practically, there won't be much difference in the bill. However, I can't help but feel a little used. I also can't help but wonder how these guys would feel if I parked in front of their house, plugged in a vacuum cleaner, and started cleaning out my White Castle-littered front seats. Contemplating all this, I have been filled with a raging desire to scream at my landlords for the egregious offense.

Only one problem, though. We live in a town with a whole lot of renters. The landlords here have some serious power and might...more so, I imagine, than National Guard officers. They have the ability to hold serious grudges, any of which might effect how quick maintenance answers work requests...or how much of my deposit I will eventually get back. And if they were seriously tee'd off, I wouldn't entirely put the burning bag o' dog poo past them.

Moreover, I am not exactly coming into a potential conflict from a position of power. People who are lucky enough to own their houses tend to look down upon renters as being less than adequate human beings; during my Florida trip, I even heard apartments as a general concept compared to Sodom and Gomorrah--responsible for crime, drugs, teenage pregnancy, and the swine flu. And what can I do if my comments to my landlord, no matter how legitimate they might be, lead to a battle of wills? I am not a lawyer--nor do I have access to one--so a lawsuit against a vindictive landlord is not really an option.

It's not a great feeling to know that you are right, that you have a legitimate complaint, that you are in fact being taken advantage of, yet that you can do absolutely nothing about it.

It's another example of the strange and terrible plight of the renter.

why culture scares me

In the course of doing other research, I ran across a listing of last week's cable TV ratings...and I am now officially scared.

Many things were not surprises. Wrestling still ranks high, as did the John & Kate "We're getting a divorce! Gee, why did having our entire lives filmed not work out great for us?" spectacle. Many original cable shows such as The Closer and the awesome Burn Notice also rank high.

However, there was one entry I've never heard of. The third most watched show of last week was some made for tv movie on Disney called (and I am not making this up) Princess Protection Program. The plot, according to its IMDB page, involves:

When a tiny country is invaded by a dictator, a young Princess (later known as Rosie) is taken into custody by the Princess Protection Program. She is whisked away to rural Wisconsin where she must learn the ins and outs of behaving like a normal American teenager. In the process of adapting to her new life, Rosie gives her new friend and roommate, Carter, a few lessons in how to act with royal aplomb...

Great. Because all we need as a culture are more Disney princesses. Also, the average American teenager is apparently a boy-obsessed cheese farmer or something...most certainly white, though. Heaven forbid a program speculate on the existence of urbanite ethnic others.

What's scarier than this, though, is that not only did this program crack the top 20, so did two separate replays. Yes, it was not just one but three of the most watched programs! Watched by over 17,378,000,000 viewers! And it says the average teenager is a white rural Wisconsinite!

Right now, I'm just glad I don't have kids who might try to make me watch this with them.

deconstruction and the academic

There are mixed joys inherent in being a renter rather than an owner. Chief among these is maintenance. Our house seems to need this more often than I would like (noted by things such as the great shower collapse of 2007), but on the plus side, at least I don't have to pay for it. However, this also means that I experience, over our humble abode, a complete lack of control. This, of course, has massive effects on my writing. Why wouldn't it?

The plan was, after 2 weeks off due to a faux reunion, an aborted evening of bocce ball (which, of course, morphed into a night at the sports bar), a day drinking beer out of plastic buckets while listening to polka and contemplating leiderhosen, and an afternoon traversing the grocery store mecca that is Ann Arbor, to get back to work on what I have started thinking of as The Paper Which Would Not Die, 2009 edition. I always end up writing papers that require I learn whole fields of knowledge of which I am unversed before dismissing them wholesale. This year's edition of this paper involves studying political economy--more specifically, trashing Marx, Frankfurt school Marxism, and British Culture Studies. It is not a task for the faint of heart. Moreover, it does require concentration.

So, Monday was spend doing errands (recycling, getting stamps, house cleaning, and shoveling wild yak carcasses out of the study). Yesterday, I was to refresh my theoretical chops by plowing through several Gramsci-related articles. Today was to be The Day of Drafting...or more accurately, the day of trying to remember what I was thinking when I abandoned drafting to go down to Florida.

So how well is this working so far? Well, to truly understand, you must understand the principle of deconstruction.

No, I don't mean Derrida-inspired deconstruction but that of the home repair genre. Since the spousal unit and I moved in, there has been problems with our brick facade on the front of our house...mainly, it has been cracking and falling down. I suspect they did not use weather-proof bricks. The landlords, in their infinite wisdom, decided this week was the time to repair our houses...but in stages. Friday, the contractors pulled out a few cinder blocks holding up our front porch but did not replace them. Monday, they finally replaced said blocks, but they also removed a row of bricks, thus exposing the structure to one house wall when there was a (thankfully unfulfilled) 75% chance of rain. These bricks only got replaced yesterday....when the contractors removed all the bricks off our neighbor's facade.

Come to think of it, this is actually exactly like Derrida deconstruction.

Anyway, just when I thought the worst was behind me, just when I thought I could get back to writing, just as I'm walking to the study with my coffee (which is, after all, a vital part of the writing process...right up there with Tetris and Solitare), the construction crews break out a jack hammer.

At this point, I don't want to know what they're up to. Did the repairs really need to be done this week? While I should feel thankful that our landlords finally want to start improving this place (and how about a good extraction fan for our bathroom?), I also gotta think that the house has stood like this for five years. Why now?

My latest theory is that the contractors are secretly agents from some communist country (is Albania still communist? Mongolia?) sent to undermine the American education system by creating distractions which stifle the academic advancement of some poor non-tenure faculty stuck in Bowling Green who desperately just wants to write scholarship that does nothing for his job but can't concentrate because of the damn jackhammering.

Hmmm. Now I'm feeling rampant paranoia. Luckily, that also is a vital ingredient in the writing process...so I'm hoping that these balance out in the end.

homes that are no more

When I first moved to Ohio from Florida, I was always astounded at the level of stereotypes some Northerners had about my old home, the South. They treated it like it was a different country, like it was a place of stupidity and ignorance, like it was a waste land in most senses. I chalked a lot of this up to an unwillingness on many of their parts to critically look at their own surroundings...they were quite comfortable deconstructing an "other," but to deconstruct themselves? Many simply could not do it. A prime example came in one of my classes, where a long-forgotten student, talking about his own trip to the South, said "they're racist down there...not like up here." This student then couldn't figure out why I and three students-of-color were all laughing.

There are, admittedly, key differences between the two regions, the most obvious of them being the openness of the South in revealing its idiosyncrasies. People who feel strongly about race, about politics, about anything at all are quite willing to tell you. In spite of (or perhaps because of) this, you are also more apt to see the difference at work. Yes, there is an open level of anti-African American racism in many quarters, but I also see more places where both blacks and whites mix socially. For that matter, I see more mixed race couples than I do up here. Chalk it up to what Patterson Hood calls "the duality of the Southern Thing."

These are some of the dominant things stuck in my mind when I think about my basic faux-reunion trip, because the trip has made me reconsider much about my past, and my relationship to my previous place I called home.

When I first met my friend T, the first words out of his mouth were "I feel so much a liberal, I'm thinking about joining the Communist party." I do know how he feels. Personally, I saw a previously smart person I know espousing views that put him within shouting distance of a Libertarian militia. I saw news broadcasts overrun with stories about police shootings. I heard the terms HUD, apartment complex, blacks, poor, and crime made synonymous.

Now don't get me wrong...much of this, I was expecting. Jacksonville has always been a right wing, conservative enclave. However, my personal distance from all this was thrown, during this trip, into sharp contrast.

And it was not the only time where I felt my differences.

Because of my differences with most of my classmates, I avoided the reunion. I realized that to spend a C note to get into a honkey tonk's VIP room one night and eat at a hotel buffet while listening to 80s music would, in addition to just plain costing too much, be dishonest both to who I was in high school and who I am now. And when I talked to my friends, the ones I did connect with and in fact wanted to see, I realized that they felt similar. One friend, D, upon hearing I would not be going at all, developed a deer-in-the-headlights "I gotta go through this alone?" look of terror.

Instead of the reunion, I decided to stay true to my high school character and went to a heavy metal show with some friends. Some of the bands, however, made me feel way too distanced from my heavy metal past. There was way too much cookie monster singing. Way too much stuff was in dropped-D tuning. Hardly anyone on stage looked like they were having a good time...certainly not the singer in a (no lie) clown mask. I did get to see an awesome band called Glorious Gunner that made me cackle with joy, but it was clear this is an identity I can no longer claim wholesale.

I felt very disconnected with the city. Distances became too long. The environment, littered with an increasing number of gambling parlors and strip clubs, seemed more scummy than anything. The heat was way too oppressive. And the "strip malls and subdivisions" layout of many areas just bored me.

What did I still enjoy? Well, there is the food. Day one, I had great fish. Midwesterners still don't get fish, but then again, they only see 2 week old garbage in the grocery stores. I also had great barbecue, and that alone marks the South as a truly cultured part of the country. And how can a place which has boiled peanuts be entirely bad?

Then there are the people...my family and friends, people with awesome talents, hidden depths, lives both heroic and tragic. I have not told half of whom I've seen or what I did, but if anything could draw me back, it would be them.

In the end, though, it was clearer to me than ever that Jacksonville is not my home, and nor will it ever be. And although I feel sadness for having to leave many people, they are the only thing there to which I'm really attached. We will all have to come to terms with me only, from now on, being a visitor to the place that used to be my home. It's a feeling that I've known for a while, but this trip made it clear. Moreover, I also feel fine knowing that this is how things are.

Although I would admittedly feel better about everything if I could just get good barbecue up here.

faux reunion post 4

Things I learned over the past few days:

• Although he's had some systematic changes in his life, my friend from CA is still a blast to hang with...and blindingly obscene.
  
• There's a music store in town that's owned by Mennonites that have an apocalyptic theology...and Apocalyptic Mennonite Cult would be a great band name.
  
• Reverend guitars are awesome, and I want one.
  
• Similarly, Orange amps are great.
  
• Remember how I wasn't able to make it for my friend's funeral? Well, he either was never buried, or I have no idea where he is. I really wanted to sing Motorhead at his grave.
  
• When a car has a weak air conditioner, Florida really becomes unbearable.
  
• Shopping malls are less cool in your late 30s than in your late teens.
  
• I am not the only one who gets bored with metal that uses cookie monster vocals and drop-D tuning repeatedly.
  
• I've been away from lovely spousal unit way too much, and the trip isn't over yet....sigh.
  

I'm sure there will be more blinding insights still to come.

faux reunion post 3

The last two days were supposed to be when I would be at the class reunion. Ultimately, however, I decided against going. Why?

• Most people I wanted to see either were not going, graduated before me, or graduated after me.
  
• I don't really remember much about high school--I was working 35+ hours a week--so most of the evening would've been spent pretending that I remembered who many people were and how I knew them.
  
• It cost $100...and I'm cheap. I mean, c'mon, that's a lot of PBR.
  
• There was a dress code...and I refuse to dress up more for recreation than I do for work.
  
• Day one party was at a honkey tonk. Enough said.
  
• Day two party included a dj playing eighties music...and I hated that stuff enough when it was current.
  

So, it was clearly time for alternate plans.

Friday night, I went to day one of a heavy metal festival of local bands at a San Marco bar/sweat box with my friends K and M (hey, by using just initials, I feel just like a 19th century Russian novelist!). First, it was great to hang with the K-M duo...I had a blast. I also learned many things...like M was actually in my 10th grade English class. Why didn't I know this? I blame my own stupidity, bad memory, and the fact that I was in one of the most ridiculous and long suffering unrequited infatuations of my life. Mostly, though, I was just stupid.

I don't remember any of the band names, but the evening went like this: first up was an "old school" metal group...old school meaning that the singer was in his late 39s at least. They were pretty good, but not without weirdness. The bass player was the son of the guitar player. The bass player had the "let's twirl the hair in time with the music" bit down pat. The singer was this huge guy who parked himself at the center of the stage. The guitar player was shaved head with the requisite pointed goatee. Later in the set, the guitar player's wife flashed her breasts at the band...which included her son. Just be thankful I'm not describing the phallic nature of the band's tee shirt design.

Band two was...not great. The singer alternated between low growls and high squeals. Their songs were similarly not great...they included the random insertions of jazz segments before going back to noodley over-playing, and the only way you could tell the song ended was the guitar player assuming the "Rio statue of Jesus" pose.

Band 3 was a pretty tight metal band from Gainesville with a singer who was only 2'4".

Band 4 was actually my favorite...the guys looked like they were having real fun, they sounded like a cross between Judas Priest and Ozzy Black Sabbath, and they even did a cover of "The Trooper." I wanted to see if they had cds, but they left after their set and never came back.

Band 5 was called Carnivorous Carnival. Yeah, I know. The band consisted of a drummer, no bass player, and two guitarists. As opposed to the other two guys, who dressed more or less like normal people, the singer wore a clown mask and talked about how "this next song is for everyone who feels like a freak"...well, maybe you. They drove 85% of the crowd out the door.

We sat through one more mediocre band before leaving. Overall, it was fun, but the 122 degree temperature (Kelvin) inside the club did distract from the evening. When I got back to my parents' place, all of my clothes were soaked through. The next day, there was a salt evaporation line on my shirt.

Reunion day two was also with K&M. Their nephew was playing in a battle of the bands competition for teenage musicians. His band was good, but the bit I will never get out of my head was the wanna-be 13 year old musicians playing Eric Clapton's "Cocaine." Went to European Street for lunch and ran into J and his lovely spouse (whose initial is escaping me). After hanging out at the awesome K/M casa (I love high ceilings) and scaring the hell out of their 6 cats, we went to see the Jacksonville Suns play because nothing says sanity like sitting outside in 95 degree weather...but at least it was cooler than the metal festival.

After getting something to eat (which should not be as involved as it was...why do so many restaurants close before 10?), we went to the former "Monty's" for some beers. As a pleasant surprise, there was an R&B band playing...wearing matching red shirts and playing Booker T & the MG-esque toons. All in all, a good way to end the night, and K&M made the weekend more fun than I would've ever had at the reunion.

And I am still not getting any work done, by the way.

faux reunion post 2

Last two days in Florida have been very quiet...hanging with family all day Wednesday, reading several Robert Parker novels, now onto Tom Clancy...who is a good read yet really, really annoys me for lotsa reasons. Last night, went to hang with several friends...talked, caught up, played micro bits of guitar. Low key, but very fun...so low key, can't write sentence with noun.

Anyway, tonight is supposed to be the first night of the class reunion. So what am I gonna do? A friend who graduated a year after me is coming to pick me up later. We are going to eat burritos. After that, we are going to a bar to see a heavy metal show. Really, this is much more in tune with what I want to remember about high school than the $100 "listen to 80s music (why? I hated it back then) and talk to people who never talked to you" reunion.

I had, of course, grandiose plans to do writing while I'm down here--Krom knows I need to do the work--but thus far, laziness has overtaken. I'm just being very sedentary while talking, reading, and missing my dear spousal unit.