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Apparently, I'd be worth a lot more more if I were an albino midget. Find out how much you'd be worth if you donated your body to science!

-- Virgil

Here's A Tip: Throw Out The Cup!

Picking up a sandwich at Subway for my Dearly Beloved the other day brought me face to face with what I'm told is a growing trend across the industry. As I went to pay for my food at Subway, there was a highly decorated paper cup by the cash register that said *TiPs*!

Tips?!

Apparently Subway isn't the only semi-fast food place that has the beggar's cup. But where is the value-added service that deserves a tip? You came to work to make sandwiches, for which you are paid--probably not as much as you'd like to be, but you are paid. You're not a waiter. You don't fetch various things throughout the meal, remove plates, box my food, check on my general experience and/or chat with me. Why should I give these people tips for doing what they were hired to do? Waiters are paid chicken feed ($2.14/hour) because they are expected to make up the rest in tips based on their skill level. Waiters can do everything from mix drinks to recommend wine pairings with food. They get that extra oomph because they add value to the experience.

How does a surly high schooler working a summer job who clearly would rather be picking his nose and surfing YouTube, for whom even the basic instructions of making a sub sandwich prove to be cause for irritation, deserve a freakin' tip?

-- Virgil

Eat My Town

Per Meg's request, I am responding to her meme about great places to eat in this town. Meg, if you give me some notice as to when you're driving through, I'll even take you there! The only thing I'm not following through with is tagging other people--as I honestly can't think of who I'd tag for this particular meme.

List top 5 favorite local restaurants:

1) My absolute favorite: Puglioni's, known to the locals as "Pug's." This is an Italian restaurant that makes their own pasta; everything is soooo good, and pretty reasonable, too. They have a great pine nut vinaigrette for the salad, and though I've tried other things I always end up getting their sea scallop pasta dish. It's made with a garlic/butter sauce, homemade linguini and sauted spinach. Yummy!

2) Voyager's: think Lebanese/Mediteranean food, also reasonable prices. It's in the airport, as the owner got harassed pretty badly right after 9/11 happened, so he moved the restaurant to the safest place he could think of. All kinds of shishkebabs, curries, etc., a great tahini salad, and great bhaklava. Tasty.

3) Yama's: authentic family-run Japanese food served in a little hole in the wall for shockingly cheap prices. I always have the katsu bowl, which is some pork & egg thing with onion over rice. It's awesome. There is a big screen TV behind the counter blaring Japanese TV from the satellite--always weird stuff. A giant bookcase of manga sits beside the door, and you have to use chopsticks--they don't have silverware there (except for spoons). Beats the heck out of a habachi grill anyday. They close by 8 p.m., though.

4) The Regatta Grill: located in the Waterfront Hotel (where one of the richest men in this state lives in the penthouse--he looks like a greasy mobster), this is a good lunch deal but a pricey dinner meal. The food is excellent, though. No particular style, just the kind of stuff you come to expect in a fairly expensive restaurant. As a bonus, the Rat Pack lounge (fancy-pants, but not that pricey unless you're big on special drinks) is on the other side of the hotel lobby, and it's got fantastic atmosphere (the slinky, dark room, velvety chair kind of atmosphere). Lots of this towns power brokers come there to have a cocktail (or five). It's great to start there and work your way into the Regatta. When Fight Night comes to this town (whoo-hoo!!), a trip into the Rat Pack is required! But then the whole thing just becomes very Ernest Hemingway, so there you go, I guess.

5) Shah's: I think that's its name, anyway. It's only steps away from Pug's, and it serves Middle Eastern food, mostly with a Lebanese flair. It's really a little M.E. grocery store, but you can get food from the counter from the menu. You can't eat in the restaurant, but you can sit outside at a picnic table and eat. A fantastic buy. I see lots of out of the country doctors stopping in around dinner time from the hospital to take something home to their families.

I would recommend all of these places without reservations. All but the Regatta are locally owned and the owner is also usually the cook, or supervises it closely. They require you to drive a little bit away from the interstate exit, but honestly, not that much. Five minutes, maybe.

Do you ever go to Deep Creek Lake, MD? If you do, I completely recommend the Cornish Manor. It wasn't nearly as expensive as I thought it would be, and I think I'm going back there for my birthday next month. Whoo-hoo!

Buona fortuna -- Virgil

Too Much Fun!

While blog surfing, I discovered the The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form--where you can search by topic over 41,000 entries of words used in a limerick! Be warned--it's addictive. One of my favorite limericks from the site topic about Buddhism on the word "bodhisattva":

A Buddhist of type Mahayana
Knows of one who won't enter Nirvana.
Bodhisattva's the name,
Saving others, his claim,
'Stead of saving himself like I'd wanna.

-- Virgil

Chemistry Gets All The Good Ones

I found this at one of my favorite blogs, Doc's Sunrise Rants. She got it in her inbox. You'd think teaching composition would bring out the cleverness in people--but apparently all the really bright ones go to fields like Chemistry!

HELL EXPLAINED BY CHEMISTRY STUDENT

The following is an actual question given on a University of Washington chemistry mid term.

The answer by one student was so “profound” that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet, which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle’s Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant.

One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving. As for how many souls are entering Hell, let’s look at the different religions that exist in the world today.

Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle’s Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that, “It will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you,” and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number two must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over. The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct...... leaving only Heaven, thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting “Oh my God.”


-- Virgil

More Anti-Poetry

More anti-poetry. These things are going to end up meriting me a dozen or more "reflections". You know how in the Bad Old Days teachers made you write "I will not do (whatever I did)" across the board a hundred or more times? Well, the grad student version of that is a "reflection". How did that make you feel? What will you do differently next time? Do you give two shits? Too bad I'm not "re-enlisting" and would have to care.

Check out the cool use of both graphics and space-poetry in the anti-poetry here, from Batmite!. Alternatively, the Undesirable Element has a fantastic anti-poem in the traditional rhyme scheme about English majors and poverty, in which he rhymes buck and fuck. No small accomplishment, that.

I have chosen to present a limerick, inspired by Keats' famous friggin' comma.


I Met A Famous Comma

I met a very famous comma--
A comma which sparked so much drama
Does the urn say the words?
This shit's for the birds
"Criticism" drinks the piss of a llama

*OK, so it's not your traditional 9/9/5/5/9 scheme. This is ANTI-poetry. Screw the rules!

-- Virgil

What Will Be, Will Be--A Long and Gassy Rant

During the weekend that we went to pick up Dante, my mother yet again brought up the stupid gas contract she's been begging me to sign (for a refresher on that can of crap, click here.) Recently she's been barraging me with discussion of it, to the exclusion of everything else. Now, I know from experience that the best way to insure your kid won't do the thing you want him to is to make sure you nag him about it at every possible opportunity. What has thrown Mom into high Land Rapist gear is the fact that a new company is out there drilling all over our neighbors' properties. We are, I found out, literally ringed in by gas wells around our property. "They could be siphoning off our gas!" She shrilled at me. I don't care. But I did make one mistake this weekend. I tried to use logic, which for Mom is like throwing eggs at a brick wall hoping they'll knock it down. Posing a logical question gave my mother an opportunity to go into conman mode, something she's been resorting to as she gets older. She saw a door being opened; so if she can just demonstrate that she can meet that need I'm showing, I'll sign over.

I had originally asked her why she was so adamant that we sign now. After all, we get contacted every few years by people who want to drill (or log or mine or whatever). We've always said "No." Why say yes now? She had two reasons: 1) They were there. And 2) they could be siphoning off our gas. Everyone else had a well--so should we. (This is the same woman that gave me unholy hell over peer pressure. As a JW, you aren't even really supposed to have "worldly" friends, hence everything that isn't strict doctrine is subject to peer pressure.) I told her I didn't find either of those reasons compelling; they both seemed like a version of "If your friends were jumping off a bridge, would you do it, too??"

I changed tactics then, which turned out to be a mistake, her way to try to con me into signing. I thought that if I just tried to force her to lay things out in the open, she would be shamed into leaving things alone. So I asked her: Do you need extra money for some reason? Are you in financial trouble?

The way her eyes lit up immediately, I knew I'd asked the wrong thing. I happen to know for a fact that she's not in financial trouble. But everything after that question became an uncomfortable rebuttal of her "needs."

She said she'd like to retire. I asked her if she was going to have difficulty making ends meet when she retired. She started to say yes, but then realized she'd have to come clean with just how much she was short by--she's not short by anything. Because of my father's death, she also gets his social security and his retirement pension from work when she chooses to retire. She gets two retirement incomes. She's fine. She won't be able to retire in Hawaii, but she's perfectly capable of retiring in Kentucky, and she had no plans of doing otherwise anyway.

Turns out what that really means is she wants to retire two years earlier.

This pissed me off. It doesn't piss me off that she wants to retire early. It pisses me off that she'd sell out the land through the lifetime of my son and his children so that she can get two fucking extra years.

Her two other reasons were health insurance and a new car. There will be a gap for her when she retires (early) where she'll have to pay for her entire insurance bill. That's legitimate. She also wants a new car, and even though her old one is still drivable now, it is a foreseeable need. I asked her how much she anticipated those things to cost. She had no idea. I told her I would help her pay for all of those things, that's what children are there for (not that she's been such a fantastic mother). "You can't meet my needs," she announced quickly. I asked for a dollar figure on her needs, which she couldn't supply.

I tried to explain two things to her, neither really successfully. First, I told her, if she wanted to make a needs based argument, she was going to have to know what her needs actually were. She just knows she needs "money." Don't we all. If we can meet her needs collectively as a family, there is no need to lock up the land for 80-100 years (more on how I know that figure later). Second, there is no guarantee that the gas well will meet any portion of her "needs." They can't guarantee that she'll make anything off of the well, much less to the size that she thinks she's going to get. If it were a stock, I wouldn't buy it. It's too risky. It's especially too risky to bet your "retirement" on it.

In the day and a half I was there, besides talking my head off about it every time we were around each other in daylight, I got a phone thrust at me with the new gas company owner on the other end of it. I happened to be watching both my son and his friend in the backyard, and while they're good, they're wild as bats, so I wasn't very keen on talking to him and taking my eye off of them. "He insists!" Mom declared. I told her that neither she nor he were going to get what they wanted by forcing it upon people. So, in a particularly brusque business mood, I talked to this man for probably 25 minutes (which she eavesdropped on, and then later denied; when I confronted her with the fact that I was sitting outside and heard the boys rumbling through the house through the phone, she owned up to it). He's not a bad man. He's just not selling something I want to buy. From him, I found out that because he's drilling down to the shale, he's near guaranteed to hit gas, because gas is a byproduct of the pressure the shale is under at that depth. He also said that the average life of a shale gas well is 80-100 years, and that he would not be able to change the terms of the duration of the contract to mean anything besides "the life of the well." We're nearly guaranteed to be locked in for 80 years. And, during that time, he can come in and drill another one, and the contract would then extend to the life of that well.

Later that night, my mother and I really got into it over the principle of the thing, mainly because she just wouldn't leave it the hell alone. I told her I thought it was wrong of her to try and ram this down our throats, which she would've done, had that other deed not popped up at the last minute. I told her that I felt like I had an obligation to future generations, and that I just couldn't make a decision that my son (or any other kids I may have) and likely his children would have no choice but to accept, or what's more likely, would have to clean up legally and literally behind me long after I was gone. I declared that I wasn't signing, period. My "conscience" wouldn't let me. (The look alone on that one was worth it; apparently, JWs have the lock down on possessing a "conscience.")

Then she shocked me with, "You know, I don't have to get your signature on Grandma's part of the property. She only did the mineral rights deed for the place you grew up in. I can't imagine, though, why she did that." Gee, I wonder. The reason she did that is so that all family members involved would have to come to a consensus about something of that magnitude happening to the land. Her people have always filed deeds like that. It's their little way of being democratic, I guess.

I told Mom that if she wanted to sign that part over, that was her choice. But she was doing it knowing that her children were dead set against it. If her "conscience" (again, the beauty of that rhetoric!) allowed her to do that, then there wasn't anything I could do to stand in the way of it. But I wouldn't participate in it, help her legally with it, or take any of the profits (provided there were any) from it. I responded with that right away. But I grieved over it longer quietly.

It just seems so incredibly selfish to me. Just for two years earlier for your retirement, you do this thing that everyone else is so much against.

The next day, before we left to come back to West Virginia, she told me "I've just grieved me heart out over this gas contract. I've tried to think about what it means to be reasonable or unreasonable, and I just...I'm just so upset over it." I explained that grieving was for people, not for business ventures. And that reason existed apart from her own ability to identify it. Reason isn't subjective, and it doesn't require her to validate a thing as reasonable. I told her I couldn't understand why she didn't see how she was tying our future generations' hands. Then it occurred to me. She doesn't believe there will be any future generations, because the "New System" is coming right around the corner. It doesn't matter if the gas company tears the land to hell, Jehovah will be coming, probably next week, and he'll make it all better. So she gets her money and her land, if only in her own mythology. I can't believe I never thought of that before. She told me to think about it some more. I replied that I'm done with thinking about it, that I had thought about it, laid out my reasons for being against it, and that was that. No free clear conscience passes from me.

On the long seven hour drive home, I tried to be zen about the whole thing. I can't control others, only my reactions to them. I was calm the whole time I wanted to rage about the house. I no longer have the desire to burn things to the ground (well, maybe just a little bit, but it's under control). If I get a check in the mail, I'm going to return it with a snarky little note about how since she needs this so *desperately* for her early retirement, my conscience (again, lovely!) won't let me cash it. If she gets in legal crap, I'm not helping with it. She comes to me every time she needs something salvaged. I've made a shaky peace with the fact that this is now out of my control. Whatever happens, happens; but at least I feel like I did my level best.

-- Virgil

Dumb. Dumb, Dumb, Dumb, Dumb, Dumb.

I have seen enough already of the advertisements for this upcoming stupid reality TV show called Age of Love. Mark Philippoussis, a tennis star, will be doing the "Bachelor" show, basically. Only, the "twist" will be he gets two sets of women: "kittens" in their 20s and "cougars" in their 40s. Does age really matter? Let's grab the popcorn and find out!

I despise this set up on so many levels. For starters, it was only until recently that I had even heard of the term "cougar". Has it been around long, or is this the tail end of the baby boomer generation creating a term to describe the fact that they're still sexually active? I hate "kitten" just as much. "Kitten" implies cute and naive. "Cougar" implies predator--and what else would a woman in her 40s-50s prey on except men? Like we have nothing better to hunt down.

Second, why do we need to continue to pit women against each other? Don't women who participate in these things realize this is what's happening? Is their self esteem so low they have to duke it out with each other over one man? I don't like these Bachelor/Bachelorette type shows in the first place, unless, of course, it's The Flavor of Love, where the comedic value is just priceless.

But what really galls my soul, a personal pet peeve of mine, has to do with these photo links. I wish I could upload the picture so you don't have to click, but they haven't hit google image yet, and I'm not talented enough to import the picture otherwise:

Here's Maria. This woman is supposed to be 42 years old.
This one, Jen, is supposedly 48.
Jodie is 46.

Is that what "cougars" look like? Where the hell are the real women? This show should be renamed Love: Pre and Post Plastic Surgery! I'm not "hating" because these women look "better" than your average mid-40s woman. I think they look incredibly fake. Fake boobs, botox, obvious eye work in some cases. This is not what women look like! I'm sure the whole point of this show is to "debunk" the myth that you can't find love with an older woman. But that flushing sound you hear is all the self-esteem and hard work that women have done so that other women don't have to feel like looks are their only asset. All this show does is demonstrate that women believe they have to keep trying to look like they're in their mid-twenties, although all they seem to look like is that they're a being pinched.

Why fool people about your age? Who the devil cares? I know a lot of women care, but why do they care? I realize that I'm in the position of saying this at 29-going-on-30 years old. Having had to go through my mothers "ultra-secret" plastic surgery events, I can say with certainty that if what you don't like about yourself is really an "inside" problem, no amount of tinkering with the outside is going to change how you feel. It makes me sick to think that "cougar" is what is offered to young women as a model of what adult women should look like/be. Where the hell are the courageous and graceful older women?

I want to be courageous, not a cougar.

-- Virgil

Anti-Poetry

At a post-class conference (read, having beers at the pub down the street after class), I got the brilliant idea of creating anti-poetry to deal with all the poets, poetical nonsense and poems we have to talk about during this summer class. I bravely volunteered to start. I envision this as a way to both mock class and the humanities. Although, I hope that it's not to inside-jokey for those who have the pleasure of not being in the MA program with me. MFA, by the way (see, already rhyming!) stands for Master of Fine Arts. Based on the behavior of some of them, though, I'd say it stands for Mother Fucking Assholes.

This little gem is based on my Navy Buddy's one night stand with an MFA. Never again, eh? Apparently she talked the whole time about, among other things, her work, of course. Like Dickenson, I've chosen to not title it, but rather to let the beginning line serve as the title. You'll note I've even used a dash.

I would not lay an MFA
Nay
In fact, why anyone would--
I could not say
Perhaps you were having
A very bad day
For if you do, you'll pay
In a big way
So if your boat should choose
To dock in that quay
I urge you
Don't Stay!
Else you may
End up the victim
Of their "forte"
And find yourself mentioned
In an angry way
Via a poem or a story that's really
Quite gay*

*not in an anti-homosexual way, of course.

Maryland

For our second anniversary, Husband took me to Swallow Falls in Maryland. I don't normally like state parks, because I grew up and played in a family band for ten years, and the state park was the scene of most of our venues. So going to state parks feels very much like going to work for me. But I do like waterfalls, so it was OK. We spent the weekend at a b&b, went to an outdoor bar, ate good food, generally had a good time.


This is one of the falls. You could hop the rocks and get pretty close to it. It was neat to sit there and contemplate it.

Like having good seats at a nature concert.


Scenes like this make any journey interesting.

More Kitty Pictures...Just Because They're Cute

Kitty on top of the neat bookcase Sister bought me when I first got married. You can stack books in all four sides of it. She likes to sun herself under that lamp (Kitty, not Sister). I didn't realize my "complete" Douglas Adams book was so frickin' huge.


Kitty on top of another bookcase. She likes this vantage point, because she can stalk the room from it. All of my Vogues are on the third shelf. :)



Kitty getting ready to read the latest copy of Edith Wharton's biography by Hermione Lee. Right after she wakes up from her nap...


-- Virgil

So What the Hell Do You Do?

On the way back from a work related event, Director/Buddy & I popped into a store that was going out of business to see if there was anything that caught our eye. After checking things out for a few minutes we decided there wasn't, and so started to leave. As we're making our way out to exit the store, I notice a man paying for his things and his little boy--probably 7 years old--sitting down waiting on him. The boy looked sort of sad and dejected. Once you've been around kids with hard home lives, you sort of come to recognize that look. He also had the markings of a bruise that was healing around his left eye.

Now, he could've fallen off of his bicycle.

He could've run into the door, and blacked his eye. I did that once when I was 13 (it was a slumber party, we were running around after the lights were out).

He could've gotten into a fight at school before it let out with some bully.

Or his dad could've popped him in the face.

Call it the social worker gene, but something about that scene just did not feel right to me. It was a combination of the old bruise and the little boy's posture and the look on his face. But even if that were true, what the hell do you do about it? This has plagued me all afternoon. I'm not a fan of butting my nose in other people's business--unless I see/hear a woman or kid getting beat on by someone. I don't know his name. I don't know where he lives. I guess I'm just supposed to ignore it and go on, mainly for sheer lack of evidence. But if it really, honestly looked like something bad was going on, what are you supposed to do?

Another example: I have neighbors right across the street who don't deserve to have kids. Especially this one broad. She has a little girl, probably 5 years old, and a little boy who can't be older than two. I don't think she lives at the house, I think she just comes to visit a lot and sometimes leave her kids there. This woman doesn't talk to her kids; she screams at them at the absolute top of her voice. She never watches them or she abandons them to the people who live there, and mostly, I'm sure, because of her own attitude, her little girl in particular screams and cries at the top of her lungs. Just a few days ago, the little girl was playing with a water gun, and wanted it refilled or something, mom says "I'm fucking tired of this bullshit" at top volume; the little girl, of course, screams and cries louder, so the mother grabs the water gun and throws it down and stomps on it. It's broken. "Now!" she yelled. "Is that any better?" No, dumbass, it clearly isn't. Little girl hits new octaves with her screaming. "I'll buy you a new one, OK? Just shut up and get in the damn car!" And off they go.

This isn't anything unique. This is the kind of interaction they have whenever they come around. She calls her daughter a bitch. I haven't seen her hit the kids yet, but she may as well. They're so screwed around right now, that the only way they can get anything for themselves seems to be to keep up a campaign of screaming until she caves in. But the mother yells way before they start screaming. That can't be good for them. The woman is damn near psychotic. So what do I do about it? Nothing? Foster care isn't always the best solution. Sometimes the devil you don't know is more traumatic than the devil you do know.

But these situations disturb me. I'd like to come to some kind of resolution.

-- Virgil

Virgil 1, World 0

Virgil launches war: May 28, 2007

Virgil wins war: June 6, 2007



My son called today and left me a message saying he had "important news". After a very long and involved (and I must say I was on my best diplomatic behavior) phone conversation with his dad last week, apparently his dad has let go of his position; Dante comes home this fall. As usual, he didn't bother to tell me. But that's OK.

Dante's coming home. And that's all that matters.

-- Virgil

Emily Dickenson's Very Important Fucking Dashes

Here follows a very cynical view of what's going on in the humanities right now.

An interesting thought occured to me whilst wasting my time in the summer class I have. The Gypsy was talking about how Emily Dickenson may have had really bad eyesight, and that's why she may have run her words all the way to the end of the page. This may not seem like anything monumental, but it at least got me to daydreaming about it instead of being bored to tears by whatever was happening in class that day.

See, Emily Dickenson is a weird and understudied (although you wouldn't know it in this class!) member of the American Renaissance. She was supposedly very deliberate in her work: all of her poems were sewn up in little packets in a specific order that was immediately violated by the person who first got hold of them, so we'll never know what order, etc. her poems were supposed to be in. Supposedly she even incorporated the kind of paper she was using into the poem. So if she writes the word "abscond" or something in blue ink on a brown toothy weaved piece of scrap paper, that means things that are really complex. So the story goes. She also used a lot of strange punctuation, and people like to work themselves up over why she put a dash here or a comma there, and how you're supposed to read her poems out loud. She even has an "upward" dash versus a "regular" dash. Does that mean you're supposed to read that phrase with a certain upward lilt? Do you hang silently while you're reading for a second or two over a dash? Treat them as separate thought clusters? Get a beer and have a chuckle? Who knows. She's certainly a lot more interesting than a lot of the other poets at the time.

But what if all of these upward dashes, words falling off the edge of a piece of paper, and words wrapped around symbols embossed on the paper were just the result of her crappy eyesight? What if scholars have been basing decades of "scholarly" work on myopia? It would certainly be a "score one" for students who claim we "read too much into things." Sometimes, even though it's a fun exercise, I wonder why we strain to make sense, for instance, of Arthur Rimbaud's The Drunken Boat when the man was clearly rotting through from the effects of Absynthe (which I tried once--tastes like alcoholic mouthwash). If that drunken ramble is poetry, then so is Ozzy's Crazy Train.

Sometimes we strain very hard to make meaning from things--probably to make us feel better about the value of our jobs. We don't build bridges or discover vaccines to treat diseases or create manufacturing jobs for people to feed their families or broker political agreements. We fight over the meaning of Emily Dickenson's Fucking Dashes. Clearly, the pinnacle of higher thought.

-- Virgil

Class sucks.

I've decided that I'm terminating at a Master's, because I can do what I want on that degree without having to go through four or five more years of departmental bullshit. In fact, I really narrow my options down if I go on to a PhD, because then I'm considered too specialized. I do much better outside of a rigid structure anyway, and if I chose to continue teaching at the university--which I could certainly do on the education I'd have by then--I can more or less do whatever the hell I wanted to. Sign me up!

I took a good, hard look at everything from my personality to what I really enjoy doing, and I just don't have the passion for the scholarship part of it. I like English as an intellectual exercise sometimes. Let's talk about subversive power structures in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, whoo-hoo! Or how about Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost--was he really trying to say he was an atheist? Or how about the underlying rhetoric of cosmetic ads? Talk to me baby! But I like that best accompanied by a cold beer and some good buddies.

I'm simply not interested in burying myself in Emily Dickenson and discussing the meaning of Her Fucking Dashes (the bizarre punctuation she uses in her poems) for the rest of my life--or the equivalent. I want to read the newspaper again. Or a book for fun. I want to read Foucault and think to myself, now how does this work in the *real* world, not how can I apply this to Tom Sawyer. And yes, I'm geeky enough to actually still read Foucault without being in school. How can you pass up something entitled Discipline & Punish?

I've been coming to this decision for a while, but something in the class I'm currently taking really punctuated it for me. This has been a class filled with some of the most bizzare people sitting in the same room together. Check out The Undesirable Element's latest post (see the sidebar) for some more of that class' nonsense. But some of them are *really* into what they do. One girl has been scrapbooking about Emily Dickenson (or somesuch) since she was in highschool--she's in the PhD program now. For her project she is writing about a manuscript of E.D.'s poems by writing her own manuscript about how she is reading the manuscript...or...ehrm...I can't really figure it out. It made my head spin. But another chick in that class, the Gypsy, as we refer to her, said something the other day about "Keats' famous comma."

And that's when I realized that I didn't give a shit about English graduate school.

Keats' famous comma is in the line before last of Ode on a Grecian Urn. This particular poem does not have the best history with me personally (not that it cares), as I always saw it as the perfect poem for White Male Domination. Keats is waxing on about this cold and unchangable pot, about how it remains long after men have died, how it's, like, the Holy Grail of Greek influence, and how some kind of eternal truth (as defined by Dead White Males) is to be found on that pot, if she would but only reveal it to us! He totally sexualizes the pot. Being a young undergraduate, that stupid poem came to represent everything that was so wrong with the world in a way that only English majors can understand. When he starts the poem with "THOU still unravish'd bride of quietness," you know you're in for some patriarchal goodness. All I wanted to do by the end of the poem was to smash the urn into a bazillion pieces. Which, I suppose, is some sort of metaphor for militant feminism. Whatever. Pressing forward. The "famous" comma is in the next to last line:

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

The "controversy" is in the comma after the word "beauty." People have been fighting about it for over 100 years. Is the urn talking to Keats? To the reader? Is Keats translating the urn for the reader? Does the urn stop talking after the word "beauty" and does Keats say the rest, or does the urn say the whole last two lines? Does anybody give a flying fuck?

I'm not saying that it isn't an interesting thing or a philosophically important thing (is it??). It's just not something I can devote a lifetime to. I'm not programmed that way. People are starving, kids are being abused, people can't read, governments are screwing things up, and I need to do things that make me think and feel like I'm addressing those problems in some way. I know what that means for me, and it has nothing to do with Emily's Fucking Dashes.

Such things make interesting cocktail conversation, but I don't think I'd want to build a life around it. The Gypsy, however, seemed really into it, as she seems to be with most things English. I'm not that into it. I'm just casually dating it, I'm not ready to settle down with it and have kids. I still want to read the newspaper and have a life of my own.

-- Virgil