the continual discovery of fresh types of nonsense

so far reading leviathan wakes (aloud, to gf, the only way i can read anything these days) is a mix of things i am relieved were changed for the show (the word ‘whore’ appears with truly outrageous frequency, for example, always as background decoration; a lot of anxious masculinity and casual grossness about women) and things i think the show eventually realizes it should have held onto from the start (holden’s sense of humor, merciful lack of arbitrarily fabricated interpersonal conflict), but above all it is an experience of looking up every few pages and shouting ‘this was nominated for a HUGO!!!!’ because the prose is so deeply, embarrassingly bad from the sentence level on up to like, did we really just spend a whole page on how these people got into this room and sat down, yes we did, okay. (the hugo nomination was not, i assume, for matters of style.) hugely reassuring frankly!!!

so among my least favorite internet social tendencies is setting up thirtysomethings as aged wizened elders, a thing both younger people and thirtysomethings themselves are constantly doing, but: if there is one thing that my thirties specifically have taught me it is that it people really do improve with age. i don’t think of most of you as being that much younger than i am but a lot of you are, by a good decade and more, and the only thing that i will set myself up as having more experience in order to tell you is what i would tell my own twentysomething self which is that people get so much better with age. kinder, smarter, easier, less self-absorbed, more careful. you will get better and people will get better and you will know better how to find better people. barring, you know, apocalypse, it will happen. i promise.

i have been having trouble getting a firm image in my head of the beverly crusher of 2399, partly because it is very hard to transpose the hair and the uniform, and partly because it’s hard to fit her into the existing structures in picard the show. but i just realized it’s also because i am struggling to imagine older gates mcfadden’s face without plastic surgery, and now i am supremely bummed out

the hair stylist i go to books out way in advance so i keep scheduling haircuts for evenings, because they don’t work weekends and i remain under the mistaken impression that i might get a job in the two months between booking and appointment, and like. what if i didn’t waste a whole lot of energy feeling humiliated because i, a continuously unemployed lump, now must go to get my hair cut at a very silly time for absolutely no reason. what if i didn’t make this into a whole ordeal about my general worthlessness. what if it’s just a haircut at a slightly nonroutine time of day for me. what would that be like. let’s try it. see how it goes. shall we. SHALL WE

a dude just popped up on my facebook and i had no earthly idea who he was until i remembered that he was a freshman in a class i TAd as an undergrad in like 2006. he was one of those impeccable but extremely boring students who does everything competently and promptly and has not one single original idea, but what i remember most clearly about him is running into him at an ani difranco concert in new york the next summer, and him asking me to buy him and his friends beer. i laughed really hard and said absolutely fucking not, and my dudes i have never in my life seen a privileged white boy look more crestfallen than this boy looked in that moment. anyway today he’s posting a stanza of ‘thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird’ because where he lives, it snowed.

then i got to trying to think of other men who write songs about women in which the women are people, and the only one i could come up with was j/hn d/rnielle, but it occurred to me that spr/ngst//n is an interesting edge case in which there is a kind of compelling flickering -- the example that came to me was the mary of thunder road, who as she stands in the doorway on her porch is not a person but a picture, but who in her ruined graduation dress is a human woman fully realized in just a very few words, all the more striking as the conclusion of a song which we have been led to believe is exclusively about a fantasy that belongs to the speaker alone and which he imposes on her

in a colossal failure of basic planning, every single possible feeling scheduled itself for about three hours of today

and i guess you also have to watch “skin of evil” but it makes me real fuckin mad to have to say that

most of the things that bother me about being “””single””” are social and about being “””single””” in a world full of couples and only couples  but outside of that category the thing that bothers me the most about not sleeping with anyone is that there is no one in my life who knows what i look like naked, i am the only person who sees my body.

*flops on your floor muttering incoherently about how so OFTEN quotable lines of renaissance poetry taken out of context erase the violence of their context like see for example the MTA quoting iago on reputation like what were they THINKING but the face-that-launched-a-thousand-ships line is especially striking because it RETAINS its victim-blaming violence but neglects to inform us that its source is a man who is more or less hallucinating so drunk is he on the ambition of immortality and so obsessed with his desire for knowledge that it easily becomes desire for the nearest apparently available female body in a substitutive logic that aligns him with the desiring patriarchal episteme that has put helen in precisely that position for thousands of years like does anyone really WANT to be on fucking faustus’s side even MARLOWE thinks we shouldn’t be on faustus’s side but you know i’ll lay good money he’s smirking in his grave because gotcha, suckers, what’s the point of being one of the greatest artists in the history of english rhetoric if you can’t punk the semiliterate for four hundred years, your move ben jonson*

Once you get this you have to say 5 nice things about yourself, publicly, then pass it on to 10 of your followers.

miss darling mostlyflowers tagged me to do this and i am exhausted and slightly drunk so: 

1. i am really attractive. like, i get that this isn’t a fashionable thing to say; we’re not supposed to care and we’re supposed to be too humble to say it, but fuck it, whatever. i keep getting better looking as i age and it is one of the only things that i almost always like about myself. 

2. i am very good at spontaneous eloquent speech, and agile at thinking on my feet. (i get away with a lot as a result.)

3. i am a very good listener and asker of questions and understander of things other people want to talk about. this is one of my best qualities as a friend. 

4. i am a kickass close-reader. this, like spontaneous eloquent speech, is about an even split between native talent and a shitton of training and practice.

5. i am a very fair teacher. there are times when my classroom pedagogy doesn’t make any sense and there are times when i’m disorganized or get behind on things or screw something up or whatever, but i have never once in my life as a teacher been unfair. ever. 

i tag: beifongdynasty, sapphoshands, cosmic-llin, carawj, silly-cleo, metatheatre, allamaraine, thiswildernessismyhome, fahrendengesellen, aubrys.

that was about thinking someone was attractive and then learning their age and being like, hrmmm, i guess, well, damn. 

anyway the point is today was twelve-or-thirteen-hour workday three of three and the best part is OH WAIT i get to do another one tomorrow :D :D :D :D

today's mood: 'i'm still here but all is lost' // 'help i'm alive'