Parting Words

In case I die in a car accident tomorrow, with the screams of two innocent Stillwaterian passengers in my ears, I'd like to reflect, now.

Brainerd is… Brainerd. It's frustratingly boring, but most of my strong emotions are here.

Appleton doesn't have my old friends from grade school or my well-meaning but often annoying parents or all the old stories or my super-intelligent Golden Retriever or the backroad I take into town. I spent years trying to get out of here, but since this town is so very responsible for who I am, everything makes a lot more sense in Brainerd.

It goes without saying that I know a lot of people here, and I've found a half-dozen people whose personality flaws I can accept, even enjoy. I could say the same about Lawrence, I suppose, maybe. But not really.

As I once tried to explain to Ann, friendship, like many things, seems far more valuable when it has a sense of history to it. It barely seems like friendship at all, when it's so new. This is the only place where I have that sense of history. This is my Yoknapatawpha county.

God help us all, especially those of us who think they feel a "sense of history" in their central-Minnesotan hometown.

Spring Break wasn't exciting, but it was nice. It was comfortable, familiar, and while I wish that I'd gone mountain-climbing or toured the American Southwest… well, whatever. I did some stuff that I won't someday regret. We had some good times.

I've got a long drive tomorrow. Later.

Let's All Go To The Movies

So Thursday night we saw Final Flight of Osiris, the third Animatrix short film. Jonas and I saw it opening day in Appleton, but I really liked it, so I made Jenna and Manney and Graham pretend that we were planning to watch Dreamcatcher so that they could see and appreciate as well.

Graham saw the short a day before I did, which, as Manney pointed out, makes him more of a man than I.

But Manney and Jenna hadn't, and now they have. It was almost worth getting caught sneaking over to Old School and being kicked out of the theater by both managers.

Our free enjoyment of movies thwarted, we rented Roger Dodger on a strong recommendation. It was a pretty good movie, but really dark, in the sense that I couldn't ever tell what was going on.

Our other option that night was Igby Goes Down, which both Jenna and I had seen.

Anyways, Jenna liked Igby and I didn't, and between that, my boosting of the "incredibly phallic" Final Flight of Osiris, and my stated wish to watch Wednesday's episode of Survivor (which I missed, forgetting that it wasn't on Thursday), Jenna found reason to say that I had universally bad taste.

Blind Date isn't any better than Survivor, for the record.

Anyways, she apologized yesterday, which was perceptive, because for some reason I'd fixated on that comment. I think a lot of people wear their taste as a badge of honor; the uppity types (including an earlier version of Our Bold Hero) who push a few good, relatively unknown movies on people in order to somehow prove their own worth are the best example. I used to tell everyone I met about Pi; before someone on a similar ego-mission did the same to me.

Jenna regalled me with fascinating drunk-talk on the way home. Tonight was a little more exciting than the last few nights.

Well, not really. But the location was different. We hung out at Graham's older friend's apartment and spent most of the evening watching a Tremors: The Series marathon.

It's normally a bit weird, with that group. But tonight wasn't awkward at all, for anybody, because hearing J Loss throw up bad scallops in the next room brought us all together. That and a disgusting hour of Howard Stern. Ugh.

Graham and I officially called off this summer's European Tour.

It sounds like it's going to be a quiet summer. Unless I find a decent internship—and it's a little late for that—I'll be here in Brainerd with whoever else is sticking around.

Things to do in St. Cloud

Well, there's only one reason we ever go to St. Cloud: Consumerism. Consumerism is the new Capitalism!

I bought a Kula Shaker CD from CD Warehouse, but otherwise nothing. Thrifting was disappointing; nothing fit.

I'm watching From Hell. Heather Graham isn't a very convincing streetwalker. And J. Depp's true love or not, she's probably crawling with venereal disease. Still it's an interesting movie… what the…?

Also, the assistant Godfrey, who's obviously read a schmidge too much Shakespeare, is a nice touch.

Man… London… even with the murders, it looks great.

Yeah, besides shopping, today wasn't too exciting. We toured Royalton, played a few rounds of "Sword and Shotgun", and, once we got back to Brainerd, I got to abuse my Vice City priviledges again. Yesterday's epic questing was far more memorable.

Yeah, Manney and I agreed that we need a more geek-friendly world. Either Tolkienesque fantasy world or cyberpunk Stephensonian dystopia would do. Anywhere where I can slay things all cool-like.

O.k., that movie is over, and Josie and the Pussycats is starting. I'm going to pass, this time. Later.

Things to do in Brainerd

Back in Brainerd.

So far, I've played some Vice City and hung around. Jenna and Manney are here. Adam was.

Brainerd is everything I remember. Right now I'm experiencing a weird mix of nostalgia and boredom, because there still isn't really anything to do in this town. But it is nice to be back.

So we watched Chicago Saturday night, and the Academy Awards Sunday night. I thought Chicago was good, but it was a little like a warmed over, less ambitious version of Moulin Rouge. Meaning: it couldn't have been the best movie, right?

And Michael Moore? I suppose I should've expected that kind of righteous grandstanding. It was perfectly in character. But I'm not sure yet if I consider his actions rude or merely fiesty.

Later.

Warning: Dense Writing About My Future Plans

I turned in my essay, a long piece about Gertrude Stein's destruction of absolute denotation that I called "Incredible Prose." I stood in the hallway for a few moments after I'd handed the essay to Prof Fritzell, trying to think of something profound to say. Prof Fritzell half-suppressed a laugh at a joke no one else had heard. I told him that my essay had run a little long (it's half again as long as it should be) and he said he didn't care about stuff like that. I'll never have a class with him again.

I picked up Essence of Story from Prof Dintenfass, and had a 45-minute talk about my future. He said that my story was the best high school story he'd read in years, and that I'd shown a lot of improvement in writing it. The praise, as he predicted, went to my head, but I know by now that I'm neither the most skilled nor the most talented writer at Lawrence, so his comments didn't inflate my ego as much as they once would've.

My rather cynical adviser said that he'd decided not to dissuade me from attending graduate school, though he spent a while telling me how graduate school English departments really work: I'll be reading a lot of mediocre, politically correct fiction. I'll be encouraged to embrace a jargon-filled critical theory and write jargon-filled essays.

The future is still pretty fuzzy, but it's a ways off. I don't even know when I'm going to London.

Prof Dintenfass did convince me that getting a second major in Linguistics, just to secure my economic future, isn't the best idea. Intro to Linguistics was interesting, and The Philosophy of Language sounds good, but I don't have the enthusiam to slog through classes like "Syntax" and "Phonology."

So instead of some Linguistics course like Topic in Logic, next term I'm signed up for Shakespeare, Satire, and Contemporary German Culture & Politics. It'll be a fun term, and hopefully an easy one. The Master Plan requires a light workload.

And with that, I'm done with this term. Tomorrow I leave for home.

Essence of Novel

I just finished my 18-page, single-spaced, I-want-to-get-a-B story, tentatively called Essence of Story. I have to say that, after writing so much, and developing my characters and liking them quite a bit, I want to keep writing. I want to give them a better story.

Not now, mind: I just wrote a huge amount of pages, albeit fiction. But later.

Oh, and I almost wrote in a sex scene, but I chickened out. But I could have done it.

Writer's Block, Early Sunday Morning

There are only a few people that can make me angry just by showing up, who annoy me every time they open their accursed mouths. Or maybe there's just one. In any case, he shouldn't stop by when I'm trying to write and failing.

Note to self: Don't try to write this much in this little time, ever again. I have ten pages left to write for Monday, and I keep hitting my head against that wall Prof Dintenfass was warning us about all term.

(And I keep complaining about hitting my head against that wall Prof Dintenfass was warning us about all term. I apologize in advance.)

I've met the wall before, the wall and I are good friends, but the wall has never decided to try and muck up my grades. It's just not like the wall, to be this callous.

But my characters can walk and talk, this time! They can sing and dance and climb and I may just make two of them have sex, because now my characters are capable of action, pardon the horrible pun! I can write something besides setting and blogish exposition, and that's progress!

So I've grown as a writer, and it will all be worth it, etc. I just need to finish. And that, as they say, is the tricky part. Between the wall and the many tempting forms of media only two clicks away from my story, I haven't been ever-so-productive.

Yesterday night I watched Winter Sleepers, which was good and German. I've watched hours of The Simpsons already this weekend; I'll be glad when I can burn all those episodes onto CDs because they're destroying my productivity and I think I might be addicted to watching them.

And this, and so much more?

Only one Fiction Writing class left, and I don't think I'm taking Advanced Fiction Writing next term. With seventeen pages left to write, I've become obsessed with Grand, a major character in Camus' The Plague.

Grand, like myself and others, finds himself writing slower and slower as he thinks about the precise implications of his words.

In Camus' novel, Grand has a fifty page manuscript dedicated to a single sentence, roughly: "One fine morning in the month of May an elegant young horsewoman might have been seen riding a handsome sorrell mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne."

He wonders if "flowery" is better than "flower-strewn." He wants to tell a story, but he can't get anywhere because he's too self-conscious to get anywhere.

In real life, Gray spent seven years writing a 128-line Elegy; Plato left us at least seven versions of the first sentence in The Republic. So apparently this problem is well-precedented. May the almighty gods of English Literature help people like Prof Fritzell and Wittgenstein and Eliot, people who think/realize that signifier and signified will rarely, if ever, be the same thing.

Some writers have synesthesia, and give each letter a color and try to make the colors pretty. Some writers, like Tolkein, think about the sound of words independent of their meaning—Tolkein was the one who famously said that "cellar door" was English's most beautiful phrase, and he designed Elvish, first and foremost, to be melodious. Those people, with even more to consider, completely baffle me.

If I had stuff like that in my head whenever I tried to write a paper, I'd get nothing done.

(Prof Fritzell actually has this problem, but solves it by rephrasing/repeating/reiterating everything. He can't say exactly what he means, so he says everything he could mean. It gets repetitive, but the modernist in him will allow no less. Anyone who gets bored in his class isn't noticing Fritzell's bemused frustration with his own lectures.)

Come to think of it, I don't get anything done. I spent two hours writing tonight and finished about a page. I did, like Grand, obsess over individual words and sentences. That's why I don't bother with drafts, that's why I usually force myself to write the night before. I couldn't finish if I had the time to muse. Too many choices, too many connotations.

So I think I'll be in the library again tomorrow night, trying to write my characters out of wherever I trap them next.

I will take Satire. Writing, except for the effortless and time-consuming act of blogging, isn't as much fun as it should be. Next term will be fun, it won't take as much work, and maybe I'll enjoy writing an essay or two on Orwell and Heller and the like.

Spread The Hype

Last night we spent almost two hours watching previews for the new Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. I'm a little sick of little video previews, now, but I have to say that I'm really excited. Jonas' enthusiasm is infectious; plus, it helps that Wind Waker is beautiful.

Z-Day? March 24th.

But then again, I'll be in Brainerd, and I don't own a Gamecube, so I'll just have to wait until I get back to school. Vice City, anyone?

I'm third on the waiting list for London. Hoping against all odds seems to be my thing, of late, but even so I'm not optimistic. That had better be a merit-based waiting list.

My parents, still worried that I'll be attacked by anti-American Londoners, don't seem that enthusiastic about the trip. Especially if I go Winter Term.

Walking through the cold to get to class this morning, I was reminded how much winters here suck. Missing Lawrence's worst term wouldn't be so bad. I just wish the Winter Term classes in London were better.

As far as Lawrence's best term, Spring Term, goes, I'm unsure exactly what I'm going to take. The Master Plan is to take a lighter load, so as to enjoy the weather and Wind Waker and the company of the people who I won't be seeing for a while. All hail The Master Plan!

So far, the only class I'm sure I'm taking is Shakespeare with Prof Bloom. I could take Modern British Fiction, which would put me one class away from completing the major, but then again I'll have plenty of time to take English classes. Satire with Prof Goldgar sounds really tempting, but doesn't help me in any way.

And won't taking too many English classes interfere with The Master Plan? Won't anything except Wind Waker interfere with The Master Plan? Why can't it be warm outside all the time?

I spent almost two hours tonight tutoring one student.

As for a second major… well, I'll find one eventually. The classes in our German Department are pretty depressing… Linguistics takes too much time… Philosophy doesn't have any requirements posted… I'm running out of time for this kind of big decision, but I'll figure it out. I've got five/six terms.

Rock Show Girl and I have formulated a crude plan for Spring Break, so that we don't cry when Jonas and the U-Frisbee types return with tales of drinking and non-Mario-related sunshine.

The plan involves doing something over break, possibly in Chicago, and I think that there was something about Rock Show Girl's crazy uncle trying to kill us, but that may have been a dream. The plan is a bit fuzzy, at the moment, admittedly. If the weather were nicer we could all just go to Canada and buy cheap prescription medicine, or whatever it is that people do in Canada.

And, I suppose, as long as I'm on the festivities-mentioning bent, I should mention the festivities of last night, pre-Zelda. While I'm all for productivity, in theory, I took a break from Mariokart 64 (I got the Rainbow Road shortcut three times in a row) and went downstairs to steal free rootbeer and cake and icecream (two of which I combined, though the third did get in my glass, accidentally somehow) from the Super Happy Fun Party, or whatever it was they called it.

This weekend, when it wasn't spent in passive appreciation of a videogame or playing a videogame, was pretty good. I have a growing respect for a few Ormsby-ites, actually, and that's pretty scary.

Sometimes, the other people in this building can be quite entertaining. And, usually, they substitute originality and creativity with quotes from The Simpsons. But I didn't begrudge them that, because given the chance I'm just as bad. I'm just a better person because I don't invariably take that chance. And I have 5 GB of Simpsons episodes right now, which could very well make me their king.

Gnashing My Teeth

So. Well, for starters, Infinity didn't get the reaction I'd been hoping for. I liked the story, I thought it was satire and it didn't take itself too seriously and I enjoyed writing it.

There were a few people, humorists and populists and Miss Bates, who agreed, but the artists and poseurs of the class, the Literati, were pretty unenthuased. No one seemed to want to talk about the story; Dintenfass had to prod them. They seemed to think it was… average.

As Dintenfass pointed out (though not in so many words), I have yet to write a character who can walk. None of my stories have any action; they're all sketches.

And I don't think I'll raise the bar with my next project, which looks like it'll be an epic work of semi-autobiographical angst. It had better be epic, if I'm going to reach my page-total goal.

I studied the wrong chapter for a Linguistics quiz today. I was, in fact, two chapters off: it was on Syntax, which we covered more than a week and a half ago. That was a painful quiz. I was the last person to finish.

Also disheartening is the latest news on London. I heard today that I've been approved for winter term of next year, which was my second choice. I was really looking forward to going fall term… The Politician and Rock Show Girl will be there then, whereas, winter term, Jonas might be there.

I thought that my qualifications (read: seniority) and application would be enough to get me the Term of my choice, but I guess I was wrong. And now I'm going to spend the rest of the term grousing about this and wondering if I did something wrong with my application.

And wondering what classes I signed up for Winter Term.
And wondering how cold London is in the winter.

And wondering what I'm going to do next year for housing.
I always worry too much about housing.

My complaints are pretty petty, I know. "They didn't like my story." "I'm going abroad during my second-choice term." "I did bad on the quiz."

It's a true tragedy. No one suffers like I do.

On the plus side, I don't have to worry about where to stay during September. I can go on a European Tour with the Brainerdites and then just go home. This in no way changes my plans for August. It puts me in a foul mood, is all.

Also, I've decided that most of the human race is pretty annoying. I think I'm going to have to stop being picky, if I'm going to be around people a normal percentage of the time.

I know I sound like Jenna, with all this vaguely antisocial self-discovery, but between my tendency to find fault and the human tendency to disappoint, few people can please me. There are, at most, about ten people in the world who don't annoy me on a fairly consistent basis, and most of those people aren't in Wisconsin at the moment.

Actually that's not fair. I ran the numbers again. It's more like a dozen. The rest don't meet my arbitrary standards. When did I become a misanthrope?

Along the same lines: When did I become an extrovert? That's what's making this frustrating, after all.

One-Less Day

Today is One-Less Day, basically a crappy nondenominational version of Lent.

Forty days (not counting Sundays) is hard, but one day… I can manage one day.

Lent may have been yet another pointless tradition with little or no theological foundation, but it was, for many people, an important period of self-denial. Going weeks without chocolate was annoying, but it did teach me—as many times as I needed to learn this lesson—that I could go without meaningless luxuries.

Which, I take it, is the whole point of this irreligious rip-off. It's an excellent idea.

Some people celebrate Lent for religious reasons, of course, but it would be cool if Lent, with its longer period of self-denial, could become a nondemoninational holiday. A One-Less month or something. It'd be hard to commercialize a holiday like that, and it'd be a nice experience for the year or two before Madison Avenue figured out how.

Protest Lemmings

There are a lot of idiots on this campus and in this country.

The same kind of people who thought that the predictable countercultures of their high school years were somehow "rebellious" just because they didn't embody the most popular mainstream trends- many of these same people are protesting the war at Lawrence University.

Their arguments are certainly convincing. "No War on Iraq!" screams one sign; "Wrong War!" shouts another. All the signs offering viable counterplans to a U.S. invasion must be pretty good, if the protesters have been saving them for this long.

The red armbands certain make me reconsider my stance on the upcoming war. Hmm… red means "stop", so maybe we should stop our aggressive interference in the region… or perhaps the red means "blood", and I'm meant to the think of the blood, American and Iraqi, bound to be shed in any armed conflict.

It's certainly a puzzler!

Personally, all I can think about is the red armbands worn by the Hitler Youth. Is that meant to equate American aggression with Hitler's empire-building schemes? Or is it merely an unfortunate lack of historical insight on someone's part, assuredly mine?

The problem with the anti-war movement is that, as far as I can tell, it's more of a fashion trend than anything else. Red armbands are in, war is out. The unspoken pressure is to conform, to get your own red armband before everyone on your block has one.

How is this knee-jerk pacifism any better than the knee-jerk patriotism I also despise? I can't see much of a difference; there are conformists on both sides of the proverbial fence here.

Opposing the war doesn't necessary make you more correct, or more intelligent. It makes you more popular, probably, but little else. Give me a reason, a reason that someone else didn't feed you, the reason you had for opposing the war before any protests started and before anyone was wearing those stylish Hitler Youth armbands and once more co-opting poor innocent meaningless red for their own ends.

If you're in this for a reason, a good and well-thought-out reason, then carry on. My mistake. If you have a plan for helping the citizens of Iraq, without war, then you get some bonus points for understanding the situation our country is in.

But if the most coherent argument you can come up with is "Bush WORKED for the Oil Companies!" or, worse, an emphatic "Bush Is An Idiot!"… if, honestly, you would be protesting the war no matter what the circumstances, if you don't understand that sometimes stupid—even evil—people can stumble into the right decisions, if you're the kind of person who protests animal cruelty in leather shoes, well, then just go home and save us the trouble of listening to you until we decide what you're to believe. Idiot.

Well, I don't necessarily agree with all that jingoism. My apologies, I just got a little riled up, is all. I'm fine with people being anti-war; there are good reasons. It's just that not everyone seems to have them. And, for my part, I'm a bit disgusted with myself for siding so vehemently with this administration. Darn it, it's just not wishy-washy enough…

Later.

And Everything Relates Back To Germany

Rock Show Girl and I just finished the longest conversation I've had in… well, months, probably.

Jonas was intermittently present; he contributed his most interesting quip mere moments ago, in his sleep. If only we spoke his complex and beautiful language…

This Whole World Does Not Need An Anthem

I continue my heroic recovery alone.

Today I'm not so much inescapably sick as I am coincidentally sick. I've passed that stage where my head feels sick, and I can observe my symptoms with scientific detachment. It doesn't even hurt to cough. It's just loud.

Jonas made it out all right, for the concerned. He left Friday, and he's playing U-Frisbee in Knox, right about now.

Friday night I watched Election with Ann and The Politician.

Personally, I prefer Matthew Broderick-as-teacher to Matthew Broderick-as-gadget-sporting-inspector anyday, and I'm pretty sure that The Politician was likewise impressed with the film. I had my doubts as to how Ann would react to the sexual content, even after being warned by Jinx and myself.

Yesterday I read short stories when I should have been writing them.

Anthem, which The Politician lent me on Trivia Weekend, was simplistic and annoying. I agree with The Objectivists (yes, Lawrence has an active Objectivism club) on some issues, usually because the person attacking them is making bad points (like the shrill protest of the One Minute Left that "the Objectivists would have us ignore race and gender!"). But this world without "I" seemed pretty comic.

Also, why mention a 1946 "Council of Eugenics" and then have your two protagonists be remarkably attractive? And how would a house survive for hundreds of years in the woods without so much as a broken window? The woods protected it? What about the hundreds of years of leaves and branches? And the idea that there could be a law against being alone? How do you do to the bathroom? What if someone walks out of the room without you? And where does trade come into Objectivism? It's not "production for use" vs "production for profit" unless you don't understand capitalism. Buyers and sellers aren't enemies…

I'm sure that Ayn Rand's views are better expressed in one of her longer works, but another thing that bothers me about Objectivism is all its dilettante followers. I find it hard to believe that they've exposed themselves to much non-Objectivist philosophy before throwing in with Rand. Why is Objectivism the only philosophical movement that gets a club? Is it because it lacks flaws?

I also read The Old Man and The Sea and reread Hills Like White Elephants, just because we're studying Hemingway in class right now. That was enough productivity, meaningless though it was. I should really get to work on something, but since we have Monday off (Dean's Day) I've got plenty of time before anything is due.

Later.

Still Sick

So Jonas was well enough to go to his U-Frisbee tournament, which of course makes me feel a lot less guilty.

I continue my heroic recovery alone.

Tonight, Ann and The Politician and I watched Election.

I'm not sure that Ann approved of all the sex in the movie, and part of me hopes she didn't notice the Sexual Metaphors On Parade. But I think I can vouch for everyone as far as the satire part is concerned. Nicely done.

My only question is this: Why does Flick, the overachieving monster, seem so familiar?

I don't know whether Flick reminds me of Sex & Poverty, our class Valevictorian and obligatory Carleton student- or of Natalie, the nonevil equavalent of Sex & Poverty.

Natalie, a friend of Meghan Rahn's, couldn't have been that bad, right? Sex & Poverty was manipulative and sneaky, whereas Natalie just got what she asked for. No… Flick was Sex & Poverty.

I'd forgotten about that particular longstanding and largely meaningless grudge. Curse that Sex & Poverty.