Okay, So Maybe Technology is … Okay … Sometimes

Free on-demand movies that I just stumbled over include:

Such Cult favorites as…

“Surf Nazis Must Die!”

“Sweet Sweetback’s Badass Song”

And classics as …

“Spy Hard”

“Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid”

“Parenthood”

And so on. The cult ones blew me away the most. So maybe I could get used to this “free on-demand” thing…

Quickie: The 99%

Just for funsies, I asked the freshmen in my 8am General Studies class what they thought about the Occupy movement. Most of them stirred in their self-satisfied slumber just long enough to convey, via blandly appalled stares and the occasional shaken head, that they had absolutely no idea what I was talking about. (a good number of students in my other two sections were equally, which is to say, completely, unprepared to discuss the topic)

After one student offered up his awareness of “something about 99% vs. 1%” (a noble effort), I patiently explained the basic concepts behind the movement, brought the class ‘up to speed’ on recent events, more or less, and looked around the room, encouraging any kind of response.

One girl eyed me suspiciously before blooming ever so slightly with inspiration and then mumbling quietly.

“Sorry, what was that?” I asked. “Go ahead,” I smiled.

She blinked.

“You mean like ‘Goodfellas’?”

I blinked back.

“You mean, the mafia?”

She nodded. Solemnly.

“Well, no,” I responded respectfully, “I mean, it’s actually more about legal possession of wealth than illegal gains, but…”

I glanced around at the enlivened students as they huddled telepathically behind their fearless prophet. I cleared my throat.

“But you bring up a good point.”

The Bitchiest Insult I Can Think Of (And Am Poised to Sling)

“Profoundly in-eloquent.”

One Silly Thing

Here is my attempt at a literary “mash-up” (as inspired by an enjoyable and challenging poetry-driven email exchange with Robin, my sister and best reader):

This Is Just to Howl

that I hate the jobs that are on craigslist.
that I should have been a pair of fucking claws
settled miserably on a gold-rimmed plate
garnished by grapes of wrath
because at least then I’d have monetary value.

Are you there, God? It’s me, Janet.
I pray for work and for fullness of life.
I’ve seen the best-ish minds of my generation
Reduced to retail jobs, or worse.

Forgive me, I hate the internet, because it pays so little,
And is so cold.
It is the telecommuter’s fate I face:
to the last I grapple with thee
from hell’s heart I stab at thee
for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee,
for, academically and professionally speaking,
I am fortune’s fool.

O Brave new world, that has so many writers in it.
O, Internet, thou hast robbed me of my industry!
The rest is silence.

He Made a Fair Point

Me: “You know who Al Gore is, right?”
Him: “Yeah — the guy who wrote Avatar.”
Me: “… No.”
Him: “Well, he might as well have.”

Facebook: Still Not Perfect.

According to today’s ads, 117,972 people “like” Mr. Clean, who is a “Man of Mystery”, and I should click “like” on a banner for “Inclusion” if I believe that all persons deserve dignity and respect. As much as I might want to publicly and electronically craft my identity by “liking” things that my friends do, I don’t want my values to be the bait on a hook for my personal information, and I really don’t want to suggest that cleaning products and human dignity are in the same sphere of importance.

Two Things

1. Having never seen the show, I kind of like that the apparent premise of “MacGyver” is that he’s always under-prepared.

2. Are there female butlers? If so, what are they called? Not maids, because in really big households, the butler is head of the servants, meaning he supervises various kinds of maids (scullery, parlor, minute, etc). So there’s that.

Running Head: Sex.

Sometimes, while I’m waiting for the shower to heat up, I like to play American Apparel Ad in front of the mirror.

That is, I like to strike inanely un-concealing poses while casting lazily harassed glances at myself.

Naked.

Ways to Find Me

It used to be all Sean Connery stuff, but the most recent browser searches mis-leading to my blog are:

“big bird, big bird sesame street, what do lions do in the day, male lions, sean connery long hair”

(Or so says the Stats dohickey on my blog’s dashboard, 2011)

Exercise Prompt: “Bending Time”

On My Side

Sometimes, when I’m stoned, everything looks bigger. Like when I’m walking away from my car where I’ve just parked it, already across the street and uphill a few yards, and I realize that my car looks bigger than I expected it to, and the buildings look bigger – not taller, but just bigger, which doesn’t make a lot of sense, because for something to be bigger or smaller than it was, there has to be something to compare it to, something that stayed the same.

I think that what is probably happening is that I’m feeling bigger and taller, having that less-depressing realization of “I’m not so tiny and ineffective after all”, so that my car, which is more of an extension of me than anything else I own, also gets bigger. This happens with my room, too: we both get bigger, grow more spacious together, and it feels pretty good. Even if everything actually stays the same, the important thing is that I’m there to see it, to bear witness to something, or maybe just nothing, but something, anyway. I was there.

In 2017, I will become the first woman to ever naturally inseminate another woman, and I’m never going to tell anyone how I did it. In 2035, some Finnish guy, born last week, is going to harness time well enough that he’ll travel through it, backwards and forwards, losing only a small amount of body hair during each trip. Despite pleas and threats from other leading nations, he will refuse to share his discovery outside of a small group of European academics, who will reassure China and the United States and everybody else, time and time again, that, should anybody try to steal the device, specially trained interns will launch missions into several key time periods and really fuck everything up.

This genius Fin will, however, allow numerous historians to travel back in time to investigate various scientific mysteries, of which I am one. A team of such historians has been hovering outside my window for the past month, gathering information and trying to quiet down the raucous lesbian protest groups who have been camped out on my lawn since they heard the news. The researches want to figure out how I might have done it without interfering in my day-to-day life which will lead up to this “miracle”, as someone called it. They think it has something to do with makeup, because people wear a lot of makeup in the future. So I stay inside a lot, watching the minutes drip by and getting as fucked up as I usually would, which is to say, as fucked up as I can.

If life is a water slide, getting fucked up is the friction of your bathing-suited ass dragging along the damp plastic tubing: it slows you down, lets you acknowledge every passing molecule before the ride is over, lets you pause to look down and up at the annoyed faces of generations past and generations lined up for a turn.

The only problem with being stoned all the time is that I’m unnerved by the lack of a “control” object in my reality, like that cozy space between the little lines on a carpenter’s level, both a physical state and a spot to which every bubble longs to return after its daredevil adventures with gravity; something that captures and offers up all those details affecting a state of normalcy, like the Christian Reading Room on Polk St. with all its pale stacks of gathered information, that dull, people-sized glass cabinet silently and anonymously locked and unlocked day after day, patiently referential. You’d think the historians could have brought something with them, some future invention, to give me that anchored feeling, but they didn’t. They say they don’t want to interfere.

Watching a lot of TV is pretty good way of linking arms with time as it jogs along. The alarm clock always seems to tell the time that I wanted it to, or that I guiltily knew it should be, but TV progresses at a consistent rate and doesn’t jump around. If they’re having conversations with witnesses that last more than thirty seconds, you’re about fifteen minutes in. If they just got back the groundbreaking results on a piece of thread dipped in semen, you have seven more minutes to pack your coat pockets and start walking to your car in order to be exactly five minutes late to work. By the time I’ve finished watching every episode of every crime show ever made, I’ll be thirty and I’ll have just impregnated someone, supposedly with twins.

As we paddle faithfully through seasons of CSI: New York in reverse order, my boyfriend will observe the exceptionally dated costume styles of its criminally-investigative crew and pseudo-urbanite guest stars. He’ll say, “Mac (Taylor) is so nineties.” I might surface from my waking slumber for a moment to argue, “Different ways of acting and dressing come into style and go out again, but meanwhile, as the cycle keeps going, there’s still someone, or, like, ten percent of people that have always been wearing it and still wear it.”

The point is that eyeglass frames and newspaper headlines are surprisingly useless as tools for determining your place in time. He’s right about Mac, though. As the bruised, brilliant and likeable male lead, he is carefully designed to be unaffected by time. Based on the gorgeous women he dates and how fit he is, he should be in his forties, but he looks and acts like he’s in his fifties, and Gary Sinise, the actor who plays him, is pushing sixty. I think they use a lot of makeup on that show.