Grim Huffing and Puffing

Eggers writes again.

Despite Miss Bates' attempts to move the date to Thursday (it now sounds like we're watching Pi on Halloween instead), we ended up going to The Ring last night, with one more person than we should've had. I could have been pulled over, in a more hypothetical Appleton.

Bill, Jonas, Andy, Mino and I did, in fact, find occasion to visit that hypothetical world, when Jonas' wanton disregard for the rules of Shotgun set us arguing about said rules.

Andy and Jonas, for some unfathomable reason, think that you can call Shotgun the moment you leave a building on your way to the car, or, worse, "whenever you're done with whatever you were doing". Bill and I, representing here the voice of reason, use the real rule, one we learned independently of each other: You have to be in sight of the car in order to call shotgun, regardless of whatever you were doing. In fact, Shotgun doesn't care what you were doing or when you finished. Go tell someone else.

That argument went too far and too long; we were taking The Deathtrap, so we ended up using the real rules anyways, and I think some of us just kept arguing for the sake of argument. This seems to be one of those things that I for one can't easily let drop.

But back to The Ring. I really liked the movie -it actually played off the audience's low expectations, especially in the first and last few scenes. Had we not understood the cheesy conventions of pop-horror, we wouldn't have been so affected by the abandonment of those conventions.

Or something equally pretentious… sorry, I've been writing papers lately and I still think I can get away with that kind of language: It was good.

Tonight I saw Lewis Black perform in the Lawrence Chapel. I've seen him do better on The Daily Show, but his bit was still pretty good. A little repetitive, and at times prone to Carlinesque sermonizing, but as entertaining as it was free.

My Milton midterm came back with a well-deserved bad grade. I hadn't studied and I paid for it: finally, I'm learning something.

Prof. Goldgar was a bit disappointed with the entire class, I think. He was confused and upset, in class, and afterwards… I saw him at The Grill and he was still thinking about our lack of preparation.

Prof. Fritzell was giving away free books outside his office (I just finished the overreaching "Roses, Rhododendron" by Alice Adams), and even with Lewis Black, I needed that mote's weight of good to keep my entire day from being ruined.

(Such snobbery, as Adams might say!).

Later.

Just Try To "Label Me" Again, Jerk

I'll to devote an entire blog to character assasination, if I talk to him again.

On Writing On Writing

I just got back from a really long and productive tutoring session with Krayola, a Chinese student. Thanks to me, her paper is better, and, better still, I helped her become a better writer by clarifying some of English's more obscure demands. I used my entire bag of tricks in that session- Old English, "an honorable", not-rather constructions, the subjunctive tense, all the grammatical minutiae I picked up in German and English classes over the years finally saw the light of day.

It was fun, actually, and afterwards Krayola offered to tutor me if I ever took classes in her language of choice. With our powers combined, we could be a multilingual fighting machine.

Jonas is working two nights a week now, and since he appears to be the only person I do anything with, of late, that means I'll get two really productive nights a week. Like now- look at all this productivity! What could be better than blogging?

I'm not always sure that I'm helping, in fact earlier today a typical Student A accepted everything I said a little too quickly, a sure tip-off (unless everything I say is just amazingly apt) that the tutee isn't listening.

That's an obvious one, but maybe this job will help me learn a little body language -my social consciousness isn't always what it should be. It'd be easier if I just had a social code, a collection of phrases with double meanings, for use in emergencies. In fact, someone get on that, stat.

I actually thought I was on the low end of the scale before I came to Lawrence, but lately I haven't been too impressed with the subtlety of my peers. I don't want us to turn into Jane Austen characters, but can't someone else allude to something in conversation, instead of mentioning it straight out?

Sure, the direct route is more efficient, but every now and then I want a graceful conversation, with something unspoken and nevertheless understood. Then again, maybe that's going on and it's just going over my head… I suppose I'd have no way to ever know.

I think I like The Flaming Lips. I'm listening to them for the first time right now, so we'll see. I know there's at least one Sophie B. Hawkins song that rocks the house, though.

I had to be pretty vague myself this morning, actually. The essay question on my Milton and the 17th Century Midterm covered a play I never read, for some idiotic reason. I've started to think that I don't get frustrated, but maybe I was frustrated this morning, taking that test and not knowing the subject matter. It seemed funny at the time though, even if it won't be when I get the midterm back.

Well, that's about all, folks. Tomorrow I may or may not see The Ring, which I've really been looking forward to; otherwise, that'll be part of our Halloween festivities. Ah, lame.

The Game of Anger and Frustration

It is my happiness!--it is my torture, none the less!

No, not Illuminati: Risk. I played Risk tonight with Jonas, Bill, Jonas's former roomate Andy, Andy's friend Marcus (of the Jim variety of Marcus), and Andy's little brother David.

I have the same problem with board games that I have with drinking. People can't seem to handle either, unwilling to acknowledge the unspoken purpose of both. A board game isn't the night's entertainment… and so on… and so forth…

So Risk was the night's entertainment. I'm not bad at Risk, after all the games I played in Brainerd, but Andy and Marcus play with weird rules. And they play to win, or not at all, it seems.

Since we formed a secret pact before the game, Bill, Jonas, and I worked together to destroy those two, refusing to attack each other until at least one of them was out of the game. They must of sensed the winds of change, because Andy and M. Marcus lamely consolodated their armies onto one territory to "try out a new strategy", making their inevitable loss seem intentional.

The game lasted for hours after the two who had really wanted to play were out (they weren't really out, of course: Marcus especially kept materializing about David's shoulder like a malicious Gazoo) and no one really made any significant advances, largely thanks to the wacky noncollective-trade-in-count rule. My biggest trade-in got me a mighty 15 units.

Still, I won, which made the game at least somewhat satisfying in a morning-after sort of way. I hadn't started in Australia, so I guess my beloved Australian Domino Effect approach wasn't the best strategy after all.

Jonas swore off Risk forever after that game. I really have no desire to play again, if all we're doing is playing Risk. So I guess I'm done too.

Incidently, I'm still awake now, for some reason. I think that we've ripped a hole in time itself. Or maybe I've found some kind of loophole, and I don't need to sleep ever again.

Trying This One More Time

So things are going pretty well.

Last night, I went with Jinx to Dog Day Afternoon, a low-key movie about a bank robbery in the seventies. It was good; I especially liked the distance the director (or writer, I suppose) put between the characters and the audience -you couldn't completely sympathize with any of the main characters, no one was 'right', as is the case in so many films today. And Al Pacino's wife… I didn't see that coming.

Then it was off to The Rocky Horror Picture Show, a Y.U.A.I presentation. Since I was a Rocky Horry virgin, The Hedonists forced me to imitate an orgasmic hamster. My team won second place, and I got to go sit down. With the exception of Jonas, there wasn't a single non-republican in my entire row. We danced the Time Warp of the Midwestern conservative.

I sat next to K. Elizabeth Bates, Lawrence's female Republican. She's in my "Milton and the 17th Century" English class (I'd forgotten how good Areopagitica is) and, since we also work together, we usually spend Friday afternoons talking about Milton and other English-related subjects.

Yesterday, she mentioned that she keeps a private journal, one with the rare distinction of actually being as private as a journal is supposed to be. Knowing that another English major is writing, in order to improve her writing, convinced me that I need to start, which is probably why I'm posting a new blog. It's the kind of passive competition that got me through high school -I can't wait for next term, when we have "Literary composition: Fiction" together.

This term is going well, though. I finished an East Asian Classics Midterm (some would say the East Asian Classics Midterm) a few minutes before it was due, cramming several ideas into one haphazard concluding paragraph. Likewise, I've done every Geology Lab during my pre-class lunchbreak, and I finished a 7-8 page paper on Marvell last week in near-record time. I'm not learning any lessons about procrastination, but I've certainly become a successful procrastinist.

My newest time-waster: Timesplitters 2, Jonas' new GameCube game. It reminds me of Goldeneye, and, best of all, it has features to unlock. I love playing a video game if I know that I'm unlocking cheats and characters and multiplayer levels, because then I know I'm working for the public good. I know when to stop playing, but I definitely don't know when not to start.

Last Tuesday Ann and Jonas and I went to a Dashboard Confessional concert (my third concert ever) at the Riverside Ballroom in Green Bay. It was fun, but I lost a lot of respect for Dashboard, a band I that I'd already packed away in a mental box labeled "last year's soundtrack: angst."

It was a critical blow, seeing the various types of emo fan (the idealistic emo couples, the angsty loners, the isolated groups of 9th-grade girls with The Strokes shirts), not to mention The Vain Man, that dastard who lived down the hall from me last year. Whenever I see people with him I want to grab them by the shoulders and just shake them until they understand what I could never articulate.

Worse than seeing my musical brethren was seeing how at odds the lyrics to early Dashboard songs are with the image Dashboard (at the insistence of the label, I'm sure) is cultivating. These aren't lonely teenagers; I doubt they ever had the kind of problems they sing about. I don't think I'll go to another Dashboard concert; I might as well watch them on MTV.

There. I think Jonas is waking up, so I'm going to get an early start on wasting my time. Maybe I'll put more thought and less summary into my next blog, but in any case, later.

I destroyed an update, accidently. Now I'm going to sleep, and putting off blogging for another day.

The Wild Ride

The Feminist Returneth.

I just ran into The Feminist, Lawrence's resident crazy feminist, down in Main Hall. Her coterie of anti-violence-against women goons (including Jinx, Sadie, and the ever-droll Meredith) invited me to attend their Tuesday meetings, which, according to Jinx, go something like this:

Feminist: We don't like violence against women.

Other Feminists: Yeah!

Anyways, I really have nothing against having something against violence against women, and I certainly have nothing against attending a pithy little meeting next Tuesday. My hope is that--eventually--I can be part of the Vagina Monologues.

The Feminist, of course, was characteristically humorless, receptive only to the code-words of her own genderlect. I asked for her opinion on intergender soccer teams, and she tried to inform me. That's actually a good approximation of The Feminist -rather than give her opinion, she told me stuff I already knew. Ladybugs and Ginger Snaps failed to trip her trigger.

That was a productive weekend. Not in the sense that I actually produced or finished anything, but in a general bustling sense of the word (or phrase) 'productive weekend.'

It began Friday, like many weekends.

A towheaded and idealistic boy stepped onto the Frisbee golf course, and eighteen holes later a thirty-over-par man left triumphant. Frolf is my kind of sport, even if I'm not good at it. The throwing, you see… I still can't figure out what hand to use.


So that was with Jonas and Bill and Bill's Japanese guy Mino and Shawn and Jeremy. Shawn and Jeremy are Jonas' friends from the noble city of Waupaca, the city of a single K-mart, and they've been over quite a bit.

Especially Jeremy, who lives about a block away from campus and is very religious is a quirky sort of way. Hark to the afternoon idealist; may he live forever.

After Frisbee, we played some Laser tag, which was pretty cool. Maybe that's my sport… the adrenaline rush is great.

Saturday I went to Milwaukee. Jinx and I took The Deathtrap to Rippon College, which apparently is Lawrence's big rival, where we met Jinx's sister and two refreshingly geeky guys. On the way down to Milwaulkee, Jinx's Sister and I ran through her lines for a Rippon production of 1940's Radio Show, which caused me to wax nostalgic for my own theater days, playing Elvis at the community theater.

In Milwaukee, we saw the two movies we'd come so far to see. The Last Kiss, an Italian film about commitment and such, was really good. Kind of like a more romantic version of Magnolia, but thankfully the film itself didn't commit to any specific relationship agenda, which was really refreshing.

A few witty comments later, we were in another theater watching Igby Goes Down, a much less impressive movie. Maybe I didn't understand, but the title character, a poorly realized Holden Caufield, only seemed to come together in the last fifteen minutes, which I can only assume were written before the rest of the movie made Igby into the type of Richardesque intellectual poser you just want to punch in the face.

Jinx's Sister wasn't as receptive to comments as Jinx (who sat a few seats over, in a comfortable end chair), so I wasn't able to talk during the movie. That's frustrating- to not like a movie and just sit there. But I still enjoyed it -I enjoyed the whole experience, in fact- and quite a few dollars later, I was back in Appleton.

And not too long after that, on Sunday, I was in Waupaca. We picked up a huge couch and squeezed it into the room. The couch just barely fit in the room, but after we'd put the door back on and covered the goldenrod monstrosity, Jonas pulled a J. Go and christened said couch "Fort Makeout". Ann cautions all young ladies to stay away.

To complete this transcendent weekend, Jeremy graciously offered to trade televisions. He doesn't watch his apparently, so we took his 27" and sent the 13" to his apartment. And with some extra cords, we were able to hook up the laptop. If only our posters would stay up, we'd have an awesome room.

That, I submit to you, was my weekend.

And so it goes. I just finished the last of my training, and at present I've actually tutored three Lawrence freshmen, two of them exceptional writers and fellow-would be English majors. I had trouble actually helping those two, as I was expecting worse writing from the incoming class. The Beautiful and Sublime will almost certainly become my new term for student writing, but, well, I tried.

My own writing needs cleaning; with each day I'm more of an English major and less of a writer, and that disturbs me. In that vague way I can immediately brush off, but nevertheless, for perhaps the first time in my life, laziness seems counterproductive.

This is ugly, ugly writing.

For now, I'm blogging. Well, later…