Elijah

I have been reading a lot of Yehuda Amichai lately.

( Grief )

-Fenway High
-My students
-"Why you gotta ride the Stallion?"
-Om 10
-"1984"
-Having a daily routine
-Being proud of myself
-Teacher talk in the teacher's room
-The other English Ed majors in my program
-Coolidge Corner
-Google
-Google calendar
-Google search history
-My body
-Testosterone
-Queer theory
-The Sisters of Notre Dame
-"How I Met Your Mother"
-"Pushing Daisies"
-"Dr Who"
-"The World According to Garp", John Irving
-Dinner Dash
-Wii
-Being naked
-Living alone
-Badger Balm
-Rocking the boat
-Being kind
-The Chicken Bone
-Sushi
-BANG!
-Wordpress
-Kurt Vonnegut, the New Kids on the Block, and reading, all over again

Gram: Listen, tomorrow is my last day of being crazy. After the new year, I am going to start acting like a real, old, grandma.

Eli: See, Gram, this website has a program that will let you play crossword puzzles on your computer.
Gram: Too fast! Too fast! I'm not ready to die yet! I don't want to die! There's too much!

Gram: Now, how long do you put [the popcorn] on for?
Sarah: Well, actually, there is a popcorn button and you just press it...
Gram: I want to go home.

Awesome things I found in my Google search history

( Read more... )

Fair warning: If you use the spelling "kree8yve" to mock using creative spellings of names, I will kill you.

That is all.

At work the other day, I was thinking about how to spell someone's e-mail address. Here's my verbatim thought:

"'S' as in 'Steve', 'T' as in 'tain--' 'tachycardia'..."

Who goes from "Steve" to "taint" to "tachycardia"?!

People sometimes ask me just what it is that keeps me up all damn night. Here's an insight:

Setting: 04:12am, lying in bed looking at my ceiling.

Utterly unprompted, aloud: "What's 'Elsinor'? Is that Hamlet's... town?"

And then I get up, run a Google search on it, and fist-pumpingly congratulate myself aloud.

Also, it turns out that not everyone needs to know the answers to every question that pops into their head. And that most people don't randomly find twicequater-mentioned 16th-century play settings bursting into their heads in the early hours of the morning.

*FYI: Yes, I did (immediately) need to go find a searchable full-text version of "Hamlet", count the number of times "Elsinor" appears, then look up the proper way to say "four times". This may also be why writing papers takes so long. And why I know a little about a lot.

Eli: Deconstruction is tricky. It's like trying to nail Jello to a wall, without nails. Or, possibly, Jello.
Gina: It's like nails and Jello don't even exist.
Eli: Exactly.

I just called the guy at Fenway who handles pre-pracs. It was chaos. I heard helicopters baring down, there were gunshots, and I'm fairly sure I heard a baby crying. The first time I called, he had to have me call back. Second time it was pretty much the same state, but we got to talk for a minute about me coming in.

He sounded enthusiastic. He sounded alert. He sounded happy and excited. There were police sirens in the background and he was so pumped.

I am excited. You really have to appreciate a school that has teachers who can stand in th middle of stuff like that and still be excited. I think this bodes well.

My little sister just got an e-mail address for Christmas, and my older sister and I arehaving a fantastic time reading her e-mails aloud to one another:

"'I (lowercase) have a new poetry project for school. I'm studying a poet, and guess who I (lowercase) am doing exclamation point, exclamation point. Robert Frost, all caps, exclamation point exclamation point exclamation point. Daddy says you [signed "u"] guys could halp me with it exclamation point exclamation point. See [signed "c"] you [signed "u"] later [signed "l", signed "8"] exclamation point exclamation point.
"'Sarah exclamation point exclamation point smiley face.'
"I love her."

My living situation is awesome as long as I try to think of it as some sort of sociological experiment during its more surreal moments.

It's that point in the semester when I need to start planning being ill. It goes like this:

"Well, I'm out of lungs to cough up; my lack-of-lungs is sore; I have some sort of sinus event developing and my snot is an impressive shade of green; when I lie down, I can't stop with the pathetic, whimpering coughs, but I'm too sore to roll over, let alone sit up; I have BV and need to take showers every half hour on the half hour or everyone will die; my shot didn't go right the other day and I'd probably feel better about the huge arc of blood that came out with the needle if someone agreed that, since I didn't actually die, I'm fine; my roommate has strep and I've had a few days when my throat has been so sore I couldn't swallow; I'm tired and could use a day devoted just sleeping but I have so much work to do that I CAN'T EVEN CONTINUE THIS RUN-ON."

(I'm really doing well these days, and I'm happy and not overwhelmed. I'm whelmed.)

I have a rolling file cabinet with file folders stuffed with articles in it.

One of these file folders is headed "Sodomy/Buggery/Et Cetera".

Once again, being an English major is awesome.

(Also awesome: telling a professor that sodomy is obviously part of your orientation because you didn't remember the word "analytic" when you reached that point in the sentence. Even better: not being embarrassed by it when you correct yourself. So he probably thinks that that is what you meant to say.)

After running searches in at least a dozen databases, I gotta say: what the fuck? I have found nothing about Rochester as a literary figure that also talks about the syph. Most reviews of the Depp movie mention syphilis, but nothing on Rochester talks about a hugely important poet and debaucheur's mind rotting out and penis falling off. It's just weird.

Also weird: A search for "Rochester and syphilis" turned up an article called "Oral Sex: Vampiric Transgression and the Writing of Angela Carter". Wow. I'm willing to bet that little gem is the result of a Ph.D thesis.

(PS: I'm writing a short paper/outline right now, which I think is eventually going to be a section in my distinction paper. So far, I've mentioned PIV, premature ejaculation, oral sex, and dildos. Also, thanks to some related research, I've learnt that the medical term for blue balls is "vasocongestion".)

I had a meeting with Dr. Palumbo the other day. It freaks me out that even when I feel like I have nothing to say (which I moaned about for a full week before this meeting), I ended up saying some pretty insightful things. Even as I was saying them, I was like "I didn't know that I had an opinion on this ten minutes ago. But that was pithy." Something else that freaks me out: the amount of faith he has in me. He was talking about how hard he's working on getting a paper published and how it's pretty important that he is published within the this academic year. Juliet, who was in Major British Drama and Special Topics with me, joked that he might end up using meas an excuse for not being published, to which I responded that I am quite influential like that. He replied that he's really banking on me doing something important or interesting in a way that implied that he thinks that I will do it.

Bart: I was so bored I cut off the ponytail of the guy in front of us. "Look at me I'm a grad student. I'm thirty years old and I made six hundred dollars last year".
Marge: Bart, don't make fun of grad students: they just made a terrible, terrible life choice.

I have a meeting with a professor next week. Am reading "The Body in Pain". Terrible life choices a-go-go.

"The Tootsie Roll Pop is like G-d's lettuce. It's so versitle." --The Roommate

Also, she told me an involved story about a rather scientific approach that she took to counting the number of licks it takes to get to the Tootsie roll center of a Tootsie pop. She did a bag of pops at a straight-to-the-centre lick, with an approach that used only one side. Another was a slightly more liberal approach. The experiment took her more than a month.

ELI: So, how many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll centre of a Tootsie Pop?
JESSEY: I don't remember, I was smoking a lot of weed the whole time.

"It's important to eat them all when you're doing an experiment. Maybe all the green ones are smaller. I don't know. ...They come in green when you're high."

I hate when my therapist is right.