December Sunshine

Oh, I went to a luncheon party today and ate outside in the sunshine. I love going outside to eat and just chat. Maybe I should try drinking hot chocolate outside in the snow when I get back...but I don't think it would be the same.

I watched Star Wars: A New Hope again, but with new eyes. Every time I watch that movie Luke becomes more a more of a kid to me. See part 10, around 8 minutes - hilarious.
Han: "Do you think a guy like me-"
Luke: "No."
I like how Han just smiles.

We have an actual Christmas tree! With presents! And we're making Christmas cookies next week!

BYU looking for Jazz voices

Dear all 47 of my subscribers:

Jazz voices is having auditions for new members. My friend Andrew is in it, and he is a cool guy. You should also check out his car blog.

In other news: I have a boyfriend (Acius)? I probably already mentioned this to you. It is fun times.

in which I do not develop my thoughts

If I had snow pants, I would be so much better at making snowmen.

Is cannibalism okay if it's post-mortem?

I like traditions. But some traditions are impractical, or sexist. Sexism is just a part of life, I think. Those boys in Sweden will just have to settle for not being St. Lucia tomorrow.

nothing in particular I just feel like talking to the Internet again

Impromptu hang-out of three guys here this afternoon. One revealed he'd never had a girlfriend, worried about it somewhat, but decided to leave it in God's hands. A roommate suggested we get together. Protesting: "I hate being the starter girlfriend!" Maybe it's because I think "starter" girlfriends have an obligation to make dating fun and unserious.

There are only two more weeks of classes! Frig! I don't understand why I have procrastinated my papers this long. If I procrastinate it, does it mean I hate it?

ahh so I gave my blog URL to a high school friend and doing that self-reflexive "what do people think of me from reading my blog?" And I'm so serious and BORING and WHINEY all the time. I was reading back on some of my entries, and at least they were funny! Why am I not funny anymore, that's what I want to know. Probably because I've started to worry about whether I'm funny or not. Maybe I should stop worrying about it! At least I don't write bad poetry anymore!

Thanksgiving at the grandparents'

I was inside all afternoon and evening yesterday, so I didn't see the package that came, my Kershisnik art book. I noticed it when I opened all the blinds to let in the sun. I spent the morning reading it and gazing through it. I brought it to my grandparents'. I thought I could show my family what real Mormon art could be like.

My grandpa looked through half the book. "He can be artistic without being particularly beautiful." His hands are shaking and he has trouble turning the pages. I hope it is not Parkinson's. He accidentally gets some chocolate pie on one page and tries to wipe it off. When I get home I clean the glossy pages with a microfiber cloth that I got from a flute dealer. That's the risk of sharing, I guess.

I also brought along a Foxtrot comic book. My cousin Devin read it and said it reminded him of when my little brother would always bring his Garfield books with him when he visited. Devin's brother just left for a mission yesterday, and Devin looks a little sad, but he laughs when he reads the book. I think that a good book can be therapeutic. Especially good comic books. We watch Meet the Robinsons and I wonder what my future family will be like.

no country for shooting each other

I think the difference between a game and life is that in life the consequences matter, which makes it more exciting, but also more stressful.

One of the problems of sharing links online is that my conversations become redundant (oh, did you hear about how shellac is bug poo? Yes, Whistler, you shared it in Google reader).

I read No Country for Old Men and I didn't like it that much. I thought the philosophy was too overt and the violence a little self-gratifying. But I think my dislike is deeper. I consider a book well-written if it teaches me new words and describes things in ways I hadn't thought of before. I also like it if there are hidden connections and obscure tangents. Okay, I still don't know why I didn't think it was fantastic. I really hope it wasn't just because it was a bunch of guys shooting each other, because I think that has potential.

you know, like Zeno's paradox

In one of my classes I compared the problem of linguistic indeterminism to Zeno's paradox, in that it seems like it shouldn't work and that we shouldn't be able to communicate to each other because so much of semiotics is like subjective and dependent on individual experience, but in the end, we communicate basic things to each other (we buy food, create friendships, etc.). I hope I wasn't just name-dropping old Zeno there. I should just stop creating connections from disparate fields!

rejection can hurt your ability to perform on IQ tests

Remember that time I took the GRE after getting dumped? Well it turns out that rejection can reduce IQ, so maybe I should re-take it sometime. Sometime when I have less AGGRESSION. It's quite remarkable that I didn't do worse, actually.

Different Strokes

Okay, so, The Strokes have been my secret favorite band for the last 3 months. I listen to this playlist (which is basically 3 of their albums) all the time and never get tired of it. I really like "What Ever Happened?" (lyrics; youtube), but I haven't really figured out why. Wanting to be forgotten feels new in this culture that I perceive as valuing fame/infamy in any form. Their lyrics are refreshing in their bitterness?

That reminds me. I played Kid A for my students while they were writing, and about halfway through "The National Anthem" I was like "oh, this might not be the best concentration music for everyone." Embarrassing! But I don't feel too bad, because one of my teachers this morning played Satie's Gnossienne No. 1, which was fraught with memories of when I saw The Painted Veil last and then when I saw it first, and then when I learned the piece on the piano. All memories that aren't inherent in the piece itself but dependent on its context in my life. I think that type of personalization it something people like about music. So, everyone can listen to the same piece of music, and if they've heard it before, they could all have personal memories about it. Okay, this bulletin from captain obvious is over!

Casual swearing?

Okay. I don't mind a little swearing, and I even think it can be funny in the right situation, but I don't understand casually using the f-word (especially among other LDSs). I've been puzzling over why this is. Why is it that "damn straight" and "smart-ass" are funny, but the f-word is profane to me? It might be because the f-word makes sex profane - profane as in vulgar, commonplace, or explicit. And, maybe this sounds weird coming from a virgin, but I think we should talk about sex in better, more respectful ways than the f-word.

But doesn't "damn" do the same thing? It makes the serious situation of eternal judgment into a commonplace. I would feel pretty uncomfortable saying "exalted straight!" Anyway, Ian Duncan was visiting and talking about the relationship between the sacred and the profane, and I've been trying to figure out what it means.

(that said...I think showing the absurdity of jr. high cussing is kind of funny. cf. "A Serious Man.")

Guys, what makes you swoon?

So, I'm answering a Board question about how to be a good girlfriend (which I covered pretty well last year, I think), but more specifically, on what things make a guy "swoon" in a relationship. So if you're a guy, what makes you swoon, and if you're a girl, what have you done in relationships that made your significant other swoon (I'm assuming heterosexuality here, I hope you can deal with that)?

So, um, no one entered the chestnut cartoon contest. Well... so much for reader interaction. Maybe facebook would have been a better venue, or in maybe it's too hard to draw stuff.

Well, here is a joke for you: What do you call a bunch of chess champions acting boastful in a fancy hotel?

A: Chess nerds boasting in an open foyer.

I think I'd like a quiverful of children, myself

Psalms 127:4-5
As arrows are in the hand of a might man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.

Contest with prize!

Dear readers,

I purchased Sufjan Steven's new DVD The BQE recently, and it came with 3 downloads of the film (iphone-sized). My last download will go to the winner of this contest (I will e-mail him/her the access code).

Here is the contest: Make a one-panel comic including chestnuts. It can be in the dialog, in the background, as a character, a prop - whatever. E-mail submissions to me by midnight on the 30th, and I'll decide the winner on Halloween (and post the submissions, unless I get weird ones). Scanners are available in the HBLL (the copier ones are easier to use than ever - you can even have them e-mail it to you). Most of you know my address; if you don't know me, just use my Board address: whistler@theboard.byu.edu.

Okay, have fun! Even if you're not crazy about Sufjan I would encourage you to participate, because, it will be kind of hilarious.

-Whistler

another epistle

Dear cute guy at RMMLA,

I was too shy to talk to you, and I thought you were a professor, but now that I've used my creepy data mining skills it looks like you are a fellow graduate student in North Carolina. I am loving the plaid sport coat, but Faulkner? Seriously? Don't we have enough Faulkloreists in the world?

your snobby once-proximal,

Whistler

Amazon stat

Have you seen the new Amazon.com feature where you can look at the readability stats of the book? This book by my aesthetics teacher is harder to read than 97% of other books, while Infinite Jest is only harder to read than 35% of other books (though it's longer than 99% of the books on Amazon). McCarthy's Border trilogy is amazingly easy to read in comparison, with a Flesch-Kincaid level of 4.4 (meaning a 4th grader could read it). And, of course, Proust has longer sentences than 99% of other books (36.8). Unfortunately this feature is only available to the books for which the publisher has consented to have the "look inside!" feature available, which isn't all of them... but fun times! I wonder if the stats include children's books.

the postmodern self

In a weird Wikipedia chain (Baudrillard-Zizek-Lacan) I found myself looking into Self-Relations in the Psychotherapy Process, a book my former semi-retired boss wanted to get rid of. It has a chapter on "Understanding and Treating the Postmodern Self." At first I'm skeptical, but oddly enough, I found myself identifying with their case study:

One wants to join the cynic, who seems so smart and invulnerable. Then the earnest and innocent self is left behind, ridiculed and humiliated. The innocent self becomes a kind of "hot potato" to be passed back and forth, no one wishing to be the final receptacle of such vulnerability. [...] One might say that Henry [the case study] lacks just such a capacity for transitional experiencing, a place between the fixedness of self as "really this" or "really that." What Henry has not fully appreciated is that no one is "really" a banker in some transcendent sense, nor is anyone really not a banker; if one looks closely enough, one finds that there is really no such thing as a banker in a Platonic or essentialist sense.

I find myself also feeling that cynicism is a safe place for me - where I can blame other institutions for my failures, or at least something I can't change. I also often complain that I can't really be a graduate student, or that I'm "becoming one of them." But there isn't going to be some day where I wake up and I'm "really" an academic intellectual or I'm "really" someone who knows what she wants to do with her life. Anyway, I wish I could scan the whole chapter and send it to you. Well, I guess I can, if you're interested. Let me know.

Top five most useful presents I have ever received or given myself

Okay, I was thinking about gifts lately, and which ones I have found the most useful and have lasted the longest. Thus a small list:

1. REI Backpack
My freshman year of high school, my parents bought me this backpack for my birthday. I whined because it was pretty much my only present that year, but nine years later I am still using it five days a week. My sister still uses hers, too.

2. IBM Thinkpad Laptop
My dad gave me his old laptop when I graduated from high school. It lasted me three years, and he bought it used. I used it almost every day, and when the motherboard finally fried I was able to live without it for the summer, but I really missed it?

3. Sony Portable Cassette Player
I think my parents bought me this tape player when I was around 9 years old for Christmas. I used it to listen to my tapes all the time up through high school, and I think my mom still uses it to take to church and play music for her lessons sometimes.

4. Grado SR60 headphones
I bought these for myself about two years ago when all the cords of other cheap earbuds kept getting crushed when I put my mp3 player in my pocket. I use them all the time, with my laptop especially, and it's a better listening experience than just using my laptop's speakers. Every once in a while when I'm trying to watch a movie with someone I wish I had another pair and one of those dual-headphone output plugs.

5. Seagate 150 GB External Hard Drive
Another Christmas present from... about four years ago. I use it a few times every week to store huge files and listen to music. It's the old-school style, which looks like that droid tank from Star Wars V, but I think that it's a stable design, which is really what I go for in external drive design.

Honorable Mentions: My Land's End rain jacket (used every winter since around '04), my American Heritage Dictionary, my typewriter (more useful than you might initially suspect!), my 1 GB mp3 player, the portfolio thing I bought from the BYU bookstore to hold all my papers, and the green sport coat I bought at Thriftown for $7.

Looking back on this post, I'm like "wow maybe I am a materialist," but this is stuff that has really made a difference in the quality of my life, I think.

I reflect briefly on 2 things

Two things:

1. Sometimes I catch myself taking it personally if a student doesn't try or do well on an assignment. Like, I think they think they're being a punk or something, when actually some of them just don't care enough to try that hard. The hard part is when a student has really tried but still doesn't quite get it right. Then I think that I'm not a very good teacher.

2. It's kind of fun bonding to talk to friends about my romance life (or lack thereof?), but sometimes I'm afraid that it just intensifies my emotions, or creates artificial expectations. But, it's something to talk about that isn't grad school or the class I'm teaching.

it's just stress

This week I've had some of those moments where I just feel upset about everything. I had one of those days where I would just cry about anything, like if someone glared at me. And at first I attributed it to my breakup, but I realized that sometimes I just feel really inadequate in my grad program. And not just inadequate - like I don't even like it enough for it to be causing me this much stress. So I'm considering that maybe the PhD route isn't for me. I enjoy reading and thinking smart things about literature, but I don't know if I like the whole politics of academia. The stupid thing is that anywhere I work there will be politics I'll have to think about. And you know, maybe I'll like it better once I get more comfortable with the lingo and find a professor who thinks I have a chance to CHANGE THE WORLD through literary analysis. Wooo literary superheroes!