Mystery Hole, Inc.

Oh, great.

Thu, 02 Oct 2008 19:21:01 GMT

There are anti-abortion fundies holding a protest outside my building. (Why my building per se is beyond me. Maybe English majors are more likely to be godless heathens and thus likely to perform drive-by abortions on unwilling mothers. I know I am!)

What's more distasteful is that they're using the "shock value" posters with pictures of bloody embryos, arrayed so that you pretty much have to try not to see them.

So, what I'm thinking of doing is going out to find out what church they're from. Then, I ought to have full-color flyers printed up showing a cancerous tumor and hand them out on Sunday in front of their sanctuary. My spiel:

PROTECT CANCER FROM EVIL DOCTORS

Cancer has human DNA - it's a person!
Cancer is a living thing - more living than the tissue around it, in fact!
God clearly put it there - what right do you have to remove it?

I think it will go well.

Zina Saunders For the Win.

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 17:47:15 GMT

I think I just found a favorite new political illustrator.

This one made me think, fasterthanlight</lj> would love that. So would misfitina</lj> , and tragical_mirth</lj> , and....

Then some fellow miniatures gamers pointed out this one to me as well. The facial expressions she creates are priceless -- both creepy and realistic.

So just go to zinasaunders.com already!

Edit: Oh. Wow. There's an even more striking piece that's not on her website, but I just found it here.

And the comments indicate that she has struck a nerve something fierce.

"I heard a voice cry out/'we want something good'"

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 21:24:48 GMT

Okay, enough out of me today. Music for grooving instead.

And now, the serious stuff.

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 20:01:45 GMT

Think about the following statement:

"A local man burst into the classroom at school today and began randomly teaching students. He managed to enlighten two children and inform several others before authorities apprehended him."

I have an idea. It's kinda crazy, perhaps, but I want to put the idea out because if it's worth doing, people should do it.

We need guerrilla education. Students are being taught lies - not maliciously, in most cases, but things that are nonetheless untrue. Kids in elementary schools in coal country (WV and PA, for example) get so much subsidiziation from big coal that they subsequently never learn what the industry is doing to their own immediate environment. The same with kids in oil towns in Texas and Alaska. Inner-city students are never told why it's so hard for them to succeed, why there's no money for their education compared to students across town. And how many students anywhere in the country can name the first ten amendments?

In my wildest imagination, the concept will spread and culminate in a day of spontaneous school invasions, in which concerned citizens take classrooms away for just a little while and talk to students about what they really need to know, that trustees/boards of governors/state assessment panels/etc. don't want to talk about.

I put this forward to discuss, to refine, to perhaps implement. You see, one of the big problems is fear. Teachers are afraid of coming under reprimand for disobeying the power structure of the school system. (The phrase "organized education" just sprang into my mind, with all the intonation and connotation of "organized religion". Take that as you will.) Students are afraid, even, to learn certain things - as Marc Bousquet and others point out, the point of getting an education has been systemically linked to getting a job and nothing more; if you're not going to use it at your presumed future job, many kids (and their parents) think, then don't learn it. What the fuck kind of attitude is that?

Yes, I realize I'm being idealistic. I also realize that idealism is the nerve impulse that makes your foot take a step when you would otherwise stand still. Get brave or get gone.

One shall stand, and one shall fall.

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 19:22:20 GMT

Jesse Dangerously wins the battle, on account of his being cool enough to show up in my LiveJournal. MC Frontsjustalittleless loses by forfeit.

And because Mr. Dangerously, Esq. was Cool enough to make a personal appearance, I've rewarded his Being Cool by buying his CDs at CDBaby. (Not all of them, much as I might like. I am magnanimous, of course, but I'm also a grad student living on loans.)

Nerdcore battle!

Mon, 22 Sep 2008 17:30:06 GMT

In the red corner: Jesse Dangerously

In the blue corner: MC Frontalot

FIGHT!

Well, you can't be a pimp and a prostitute too.

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 22:58:31 GMT

What can I say? I loves me some White Stripes.

I was going to say something about Meg White, too, but it was totally facetious. [big grin]

So, is this what it means to be "manic"?

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 18:03:10 GMT

I'm finding it incredibly hard to concentrate on anything. My mind is full of completely overblown ideas for things I can do to get involved in various aspects of the academic community here, which are somewhat unfeasible as well as a little absurd. And I haven't even had much caffeine today; I think it's in my brain.

Since I've never had a manic episode to my knowledge, or at least not one that I've had the self-awareness to step back and observe as such, it's hard to say. I did always imagine it being a bit more Joker-giggly-scary than this: I just feel as though I have a tornado of energy inside that completely refuses to go any direction I might like. The thought of actually initiating any of my cockamamie ideas seems ridiculous, for example, because I know that as soon as I open one particular porthole, the current will shift to something else completely.

Will continue to observe and moderate. For now, rock out.

What goes around...

Fri, 12 Sep 2008 17:16:39 GMT

...comes around. Everyone gets what's coming to them eventually.

I have plans this weekend. Don't wait up.

Public Service Announcements

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 17:22:27 GMT

1) I am juggling four different professional obligations right now, two significant personal ones at the moment and a rotating half-dozen other minor personal tasks. If I don't get to you immediately, I will soon. If you think it sucks for you, imagine how it makes me feel.

2) It's only two months until the election. If you haven't registered to vote, DO SO IMMEDIATELY. If I have to put up with even a day, much less four years and possibly more, of the same shit we are just about to put down like a rabid dog, because people who know better can't be arsed to actually take part, I will come kill you with a hammer forged out of solid hate, then I will go to Canada.

3) Apparently, I overdosed on caffeine last night. That would be the second time ever. Um... yay me?

4) Another zombie-movie dream last night, and very interesting. As I suspected, I am totally the person you want to be around when the zombie apocalypse comes. Except if you're going to do the stupid things that always get people killed, like being sentimental or wishy-washy or taking stupid risks, because then I'm going to kill you as a liability.

5) Just a reminder that every so often, people need to take ten minutes out of their day for some Pure Awesome:

This time, I'm in charge of my life, and not the other way around.

Mon, 08 Sep 2008 18:22:51 GMT

Me and Smokes McQueen are tight, yo.

The GA contract finally came in, was signed, and now I'm officially a worker in the great lit/crit hivemind. I'm ahead of the game in my classes thus far. This weekend was wonderful beyond imagining. And there is caffeine like rain falling down. :D

Today is a day for energy. Power to be put to the use of good, because I feel good. So MORE ROKK!

Nobody fully understands the effects lightning has on its victims.

Fri, 05 Sep 2008 16:59:11 GMT

I'm caffeinated, tending to quotidian business, and have sent Cynical Me on a vacation.

The barista who gave me my drink was right - it does look like a wonderful Friday.

A screaming comes across the sky.

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 04:19:39 GMT

The sound of my flaming engines, turning air into pure platonic propulsion, jetting me closer to my destination with no regard as to my state when I get there.

The presentation I just assembled for tomorrow's class was the equivalent of the midterm project I did for Bibliographic Methods and Methodologies way back in the day for the M.A. In other words, I learned how to do it in a month and a half, and after ten years off, decide to make myself do it again in a week.

The good reason, that I say out loud, is that it'll make things easier for me later in the term and it will get me in the good graces of the instructor. Whether or not I admit out loud any of the bad reasons (that this is my form of self-flagellation, that I'm pushing myself to breaking out of spite and comeuppance towards someone who's not even paying attention, that this is an attempt to stave off the derision and dismissal that some paranoid part of me thinks my cohort have in store for me for not being good enough...) remains to be seen.

But, hey, spending a late night at the library has its advantages. For one, I can sleep in a little longer tomorrow morning. Since I'm already caffeinated, when I get home, I'm going to listen to Hum and get a crack at Godel, Escher, Bach, which I checked out of the library in some mad moment when I had inexplicably told myself I would have spare time to read it.

Wants, and needs.

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:28:04 GMT

There are things that everybody wants, and there are things that everyone needs. We need oxygen, for instance. Wants tend to be lower priority, or auxiliary to needs; a hungry person needs to eat, but there may not be things they want to eat.

It occurs to me that it's quite common, psychologically and even neurologically, to move things from their proper place in one category or another. Drug addiction - the brain rewires itself to need a substance that it previously simply wanted (not simply a feeling of needs: MRI scans of long-time addicts demonstrate that the actual functioning of the brain is reconfigured, neurons actually move, to accomodate the new paradigm, which is why withdrawal is difficult and painful).

And I am also thinking about something that is needed but not wanted, for whatever reason. Why people refuse medical treatment. Why suicidal ideation exists. The mind is capable of latching onto an idea, or creating such a strong aversion to an idea, that a hard barrier comes down between the want and the need. We do not cease to need oxygen, but in some people, it's possible to no longer want oxygen. This can lead to self-destructive behaviors, both great and small.

There are therapies to reconcile the two sides when they become imbalanced. Because conditioning is typically involved in the dysfunction, however, it's not easy or quick. Conditioning cannot simply be "broken", despite popular notions. For example, I have several conditioned responses of which I am aware. They were acquired over many, many years, and whenever I'm confronted by the stimulus, I instinctively panic and become despondent. I know this to be the case, but my neurons have had a path ground into them over the years, and I have to talk myself out of the state once it has occurred -- not going into the state is simply not an option. The way conditioning works is devious, too, because you can't simply be removed from the trigger stimulus for a long period of time and expect it to 'wear off'. Psychologists training dogs have found that conditioning actually becomes more ingrained if the stimulus-reflex connection is sporadic or infrequent. To truly destroy previous conditioning, a new counter-stimulus and response have to be established to drown out the old reflex.

This is an objective run-down of the problem I am currently faced with. The situation is both metaphor and literal: I have yet to find a proper counter-stimulus, administered for a long enough period, to overcome the conditioning already prevalent. As a result, the conditioning itself interferes with finding a stimulus, creates self-sustaining feedback, and consequently becomes just a little further enmeshed.

And, no, I'm not going to hand out the substitution cypher for the cryptogram.

Title update.

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 19:56:26 GMT

(Not for the journal, for me.)

As part of my graduate assistantship, I have been appointed editorial assistant for the journal Studies in the Humanities.

As much as I would love to celebrate that right now, I have a stack of pages to proofread first. :D

I think I know how to win now.

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 17:29:12 GMT

Perseverence is the key. I may not be able to kill the gremlin, but I can be stronger and faster than it is, and hold on tighter to what I want.

It seems to be working, too. And I'm going to say it out loud just to spite that little motherfucker, because if he shows his face and tries to mess this up again, I'll cave his head in with metaphorical fists of great justice.

The grinding of teeth.

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 15:25:35 GMT

When I get my hands on the fucking gremlin, I will torture him until he disintegrates.

Not only have I had to suddenly scramble to keep the very good thing that was happening from spinning away in a sudden fit of chaos, I didn't sleep last night - tossing and turning all night, I managed barely to get two hours of sleep, and that fitful, fraught with really anxious dreams about deathtraps and ex-love interests. And, to top it all, apparently there is still mold in some of my bedding, and I woke up with an allergic skin reaction over a good portion of my body, and since I couldn't identify exactly where it was located, I had to drag the whole kit and caboodle down to the laundromat.

I was just starting to accept that things might be good for once, too.

Luck be a lady?

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 18:01:17 GMT

Um, no. If you have real luck, then she is nothing like a lady. ;)

But, yeah, things tend to be going well here so far. [shoos away little gremlin over shoulder who tends to run and fuck things up as soon as I get positive] I am sitting on a 4.0 for the first half of my doctoral studies, and yesterday the admins came through with a half-time GA, which is split towards both tuition and stipend (meaning I work 10 hours a week, in exchange for half my tuition paid, and half the supplemental pay of a regular assistant). I'm scrambling to get my residency requirements taken care of in the time I have remaining (the deadline is the 30th), but it's gone well up 'til now.

And there's something else, which is important enough that I still can't mention it outright. [glares at gremlin]

There's always a part of me waiting for the shoe to drop: I fully expect some terrible thing to happen any minute now to ruin all the good that has started to accumulate. The longer I wait, the more anxious I get, which must be tempered by constant reminders to live in the good moments while they're here. About six months ago, I changed the greeting message on my phone's screen to "THINK POSITIVE!", and since then, I'm sure, the subliminal programming of seeing that day after day, even after I stopped being conscious of it, has to factor in somehow. I'm by no means a ball of sunshine [hissss] but it's admittedly a little easier to be confident in front of people who have no reason to know that I'm not actually confident.

Return of the returning.

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 19:30:58 GMT

Plan: return to Huntington on Wednesday. I'm thinking I'll stay into the weekend (perhaps Saturday). I have need of reclaiming belongings that are in storage, now that I have my permanent Pennsylvania domicile. (Or as permanent as these things get.)

If things change, or come into clearer focus, I'll update here ASAP.

The lesson for today is:

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 19:29:57 GMT

Apparently, I'm not worth sticking around for. And really, I never was.

I don't have any right to feel as eviscerated as I do, but I still feel it.

Already, the confidence I had been building up this summer about myself is brutally crushed into half its size.

A strange day has risen.

Fri, 01 Aug 2008 16:30:53 GMT

Perhaps. Perhaps not.

One of my classmates was telling me just the other day, "It'll happen when you least expect it." However, this sort of sudden confluence has happened to me in the past on rare occasions, and I don't recall any of them amounting to anything, so I'm not going to expect anything this time either.

It's really hard to say what I feel, or what I ought to feel.

Note:

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 22:57:10 GMT

the Consolers of the Lonely review has finally gone up. The Slip review is in the queue, but I've got lots of writing for class yet to complete.

Titles, and what they mean.

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 20:24:41 GMT

No, not titles to journal posts. Though that is delightfully recursive. :D

So, now that I'm pretty well on my way towards a Ph.D., it comes time to start seriously thinking about the apellation "doctor". Some of the people who know me (especially online) have begun appending "doctor" to my handle, to the point that I have actually started to use "doctorparadox" in some places rather than the traditional "paradoxboy". (Criminy, I just realized I've been using that handle for nigh on THIRTEEN years. The internet is old. [wink])

But it is in names that we form identities. So, before long, I will be "Dr. Neal Stidham." (It was brought to my attention Sunday that, upon finishing comprehensives and hitting ABD, you can legitimately adopt the title.) If that's the case, then I need to start thinking about what it means to be "Dr. Neal Stidham" and not just "Neal Stidham". What kind of person is he? How do people see him? What does he do?

And try as I might, I can't really think of my life being that greatly different after completing the degree. I will be the same person - it won't fundamentally change who I am. Some of my cohort think of me already as "the theory guru" and expect I will publish some groundbreaking criticism and perhaps be the next Derrida standing at Johns Hopkins with the next "Structure, Sign and Play" (an idea I take with a healthy lump of salt). I joke lately that I'm going to have to invest in a tweed jacket and get used to lecterns. While these are just nods to the awareness that my academic career obviously will change - that's why I'm working on the doctorate, after all - I can't see myself being a different person. I'll still go home and listen to the same music. I'll still read webcomics. I'll still be extraordinarily patient with people I care about and horribly impatient otherwise. I'll still noodle badly on the guitar. I'll still love to sit down with friends around a good board game. I'll still have a temper, still be a hopeless romantic, and prefer small, quiet rooms with people I know to any public place or crowd.

In other words, the title is meaningless to the essence of who I am. It's something to be done, an accomplishment or benchmark, nothing more. I've already proven I can, also; if I haven't washed out after this summer, the program can't throw anything at me that I can't defeat. And in realizing that, there's a little Zen that creeps in: it seems a little more silly to worry so much about what I'm doing, and more worthwhile to just perform the act without thinking too hard about it.

Oh, and in two more days, I'll be shuttling stuff to the new apartment. Which makes me think that there are only six class days left in the summer, and reminds me to not get too Zen yet - there are papers to write. So enough outta me for now.

Trent sends me ghosts of the future.

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 19:15:09 GMT

After procrastinating for various reasons, I downloaded NIN's The Slip and the first volume of Ghosts. After study-lunch today, will give a listen tonight; a review is probably forthcoming. (I actually have my review of The Raconteurs' Consolers of the Lonely written and saved on my hard drive; I just told myself I was going to edit a bit more before posting it, and it's been eternally deferred. Maybe I'll get to that tonight too.)

We'll have Skip Lackley with weather, right after these headlines.

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 15:34:36 GMT

* This session proves more difficult than the previous one. The problem seems more logistic than material: while the coursework for these two classes combined ~~to form Voltron~~ are not significantly greater than last term's -- mostly it's the amount of reading, not the production of work -- I went into this term with my fuel cells depleted. The amount of energy I was able to (and did) marshal towards term 1 was prodigious, but it's not a level I have been able to maintain. The fear is that I won't be able to live up to the bar that was set previously, of course: I'm harder on myself than pretty much anyone else could be.

* Despite insomnia, both forced (caffeine) and involuntary (psychological), the amount of time my body tries to sleep continues to increase, seemingly unable to grasp that it won't stay asleep when it gets there. This, and the knotting of my muscles over the past week or so, convinces me that my stress is finally beginning to enter feedback stage. How this will affect me, given I seem to have pretty much no outlet for said stress, remains to be seen. I doubt it will make me rich and handsome.

* Speaking of which: there's no progress to speak of in terms of prospects for attractive company. Those tentative hopes I had have been swallowed by school. One of my cohort-mates, an older woman with whom I've had three of my four classes and who is part of the study/discussion group I started for the summer, has taken it upon herself in her own (misguided) fashion to spruce me up. The offer was made to take me for a haircut this weekend. This, folks, is an object lesson in What Not To Do When Trying To Help Neal. See, I couldn't care less about my hair, or much else appearance-related. I am who I am, and I think I do a better job of being who I am than most people do. (Either at being themselves, or at being me. It's a qualification issue.) My polite explanation of why I would be declining her offer went along the lines of, "Anyone who wouldn't pay attention to me the way I look now, but would pay attention to me with some sort of makeover, isn't someone I'd want to have around anyway." And it's not as though I look bad. Really: for all the self-esteem issues I have ever had, that's actually not much of a problem at this time. I look the way I look because I want to, and because I really don't give a toss. My classmate offered, by way of introduction, that as far as she's concerned, my personality and other ephemeral qualities are "perfect", and she thinks I just need to be more presentable or something. And I understand why she says that - it's the way the world is. There are plenty of people out there who succumb to shallow or superficial when they ought to pay closer attention to the person and not the package. But it's all academic (ha ha) anyway, since anyone around here who's caught my eye already will be gone by next month. Timing has apparently become my nemesis over the past couple of years.

* Once classes are over (after the first week of August), I'll be back in Ashland/Huntington to pack up belongings still in storage and schlep them up here to my new apartment. The address is forthcoming - while I now know exactly where I'll be, that information isn't particularly relevant for another couple of weeks, so I'll hold onto it.

* I've discovered a new, unexplored territory within my depression. If I go far enough into it and poke around, there's this one little corner where I just don't want anything at all. I believe the clinical term is anhedonia; while it hasn't been much of a symptom of previous episodes (other than the general dulling of sensation that occurs with cyclo/dysthymia; I typically crave sensation and seek more), this intrigues the purely analytical portion of my brain. It seems to be telling me that the ability to shut off desire for physical sensation could be useful. And I can't argue with it, except to say that since I don't quite know how it works, I would like to know if I could turn it back on again afterwards, since I probably would want to do so (as troublesome as it tends to be).

* "Two more weeks" is the constant mantra around here. I prefer to think, "I only have two more weeks to do everything?"

* The comprehensive exam workshop yesterday was a disaster par excellence. The outgoing and incoming directors of the program were both gone, as was the secretary, so the largely unqualified faculty member in charge of the information session didn't have enough copies of the handout for everyone (nor could he make more - I had to run to the library and make several more on my own dime for people I knew who didn't get it), especially given that we were promised free food (the sure-fire way to get graduate students to do anything) which showed up forty-five minutes late. After the session, while everyone went to chow down, I did my boy scout routine and made the extra handouts; when I returned, most of the food was already gone and people had sectioned off into their own little cliques. There weren't even any chairs left to sit in. I just handed out the papers without saying much and then walked back to my room to have a sandwich. I'm too damn nice for my own good, really. Not to mention the session was an hour-long jazz improvisation on the phrase "everyone's exams are different". Brilliant. I could have stayed home altogether if I'd known how uninformative this information session would be.