The Fabulous Salons of Lawrence

Decided in Shakespeare today that The Taming of the Shrew is a poorly constructed play. The characters in the "induction" are never returned to, and the tamed shrew is at odds with every other character in the play, because she's the only one who actually undergoes a permanent change.

Petruchio, by-the-by, goes waaaaay too far. His methods are a bit too extreme, and the result, the tamed Katharina, is waaaaay too meek to ever actually be enjoyable. But I guess Petruchio doesn't care about love, as long as she stays out of his way. "Wive it wealthily in Padua" indeed.

The whole class, amazingly enough, seems to agree with me about the poor construction. The Poet went so far as to say that she didn't like the play at all.

Tonight we watched a pretty boring episode of Survivor and, once the room had filled-up with U-Frisbee types, the always-entertaining movie Ghost World.

Thankfully, the post-movie conversation revolved around violence, mastrubation, and racism. I continue to marvel at Jubb, a Montanan U-Frisbee player who looks vaguely like a muscular Jack Black. His anecdotes are always incredibly colorful. It's like talking to my hetero-life-buddy Larson, who also seems to live in some more exciting version of my world.

The Cheerful Cynic, as black and easygoing as ever, demonstrated that he really was the whitest little black boy in town by taking a horribly elitist suburbanite attitude towards "hick towns" like Waupaca, Appleton (pop. 70,000+), and most of Montana.

I tried to crush his spirit by pointing out that urban elitism is no better, and really, no different, than the parochial attitude of the little towns The Cheerful Cynic was dismissing, but I couldn't pronounce "parochial" so, when I finally got my divine wisdom out, it sounded weird and out of place.

If you consider your city the epitome of western civilization, and never think beyond its borders, it doesn't matter to me how many people who live near: you're narrowminded. Take that, New York, you pompous city. Everyone doesn't love you.

Well, that's not true. I guess I'll end up living in a big city like New York someday, in an apartment overlooking a dirty alley. That's the dream, at least.

So then we questioned The Cheerful Cynic's horrible definition of "hicks" (people who live around "hicks" have a different conception of them than, say, people from the suburbs of Chicago). He said something about people who hunt being hicks, and Sockless Pete, the occasionally-incorrect but always-certain guy from my British Writers I class last year, added that guns make hickdom a bit more likely.

Well, I think we all agreed to that, but didn't want to dismiss outright the Republican Red parts of America, so we argued on for a while. We convinced Sockless Pete that many hicks had Confederate flags on their cars, but, like every thinking human being ever confronted with this fact, he could neither believe nor understand that midwestern hicks would identify with the Confederacy.

My theory is that our hicks are poser-hicks, trying to be from the South. Much like our goths are poser-goths, trying to be European, or something. I still haven't quite figured that bit out. But then again, maybe everyone is a poser. I hope we can find the last remaining original.

Yesterday almost the exact same group saw Spirited Away and enjoyed it. That was my first time seeing that movie on the big screen, and while it wasn't as magical as seeing the movie for the first time, seeing everything clearly (and not on some divx) was worth it.

Well, it's late and I'm just rambling. Also, my feet are cold. Later.