What I've kept with me and what I've thrown away and where the hell I've ended up on this glary random day... Were the things I've really cared about just left along the way for being too pent up and proud?
- Ben Folds, "Evaporated"
"Reader Response Poll Results"
I received an overwhelming amount of personal e-mails about my last entry. It seems that a number of loyal readers were shocked and outraged that I entitled the section in which I made an assessment of last week's television programming "Sweeps Week," instead of using some variation of the idiomatic phrase "Idiot Box," as I've done for any television based entry on this blog since it began.
As one angered e-mailer wrote, I am "a colossal ass" who has insulted the intelligence of everyone who reads my "shitty little thoughts". Another upset former reader told me that I made them cry, and that there's a special place in hell for me. And then, strangely enough, there was one girl -- who will remain nameless -- who wrote "This is what happens when ugly negroes try to write smart" and that I should be sterilized.
I can only apologize to all of you earnestly and honestly, and promise that such a thing will never happen again.
I also received a somewhat smaller, though still massive outpouring of missives in full support of the idea of killing off Kate Jeffries in my blog. "The time for white girls from Texas is over!" was a line common to many of these e-mails. "There's too much curly hair around here, anyway!" was another. What was really surprising, however, is that everyone had a suggestion for how Kate should get faded. Stuff like "Grenades! Lots and lots of grenades!" or "Snatch her ass up in a bear trap. Leave her dangling for days!" and "Just have a safe fall on her. That'll teach her. That'll teach her good." One anonymous e-mail suggested that Kate should be taken over by the Carnage symbiote and start wreaking havoc all over campus, seriously injuring both Brent and Caleb, and that I should have to team up with Spider-Man and the X-Men to take her down in a twenty-four page fight scene that starts at the computer lab in Cornell Hall, and ends with the destruction of Jesse Hall. Needless to say, I'm currently working with famed fight choreographer Yuen Wo Ping, and the the death of Kate Jeffries -- as far as this blog is concerned -- will soon be immortalized in a narrative essay entitled "Fade Kate."
Sorry again about the "Sweeps Week" thing. I don' t know what I was thinking.
"Respect the Cocktail"
Last night I went to the cocktail party at Casa de Dang!
It was a formal affair, so I wore my blue daisy tie and said "Delightful!" an inordinate number of times.
I learned that I simply can't make it through a party comfortably without drinking.
I met a guy named Justin, and the first thing I said to him was "My best friend's name is Justin. We don't speak too often anymore."
I talked to a Poli Sci./Journalism student named Joe who doesn't really like to write too much but plans to be a political columnist who's going to be popular because he's just going to disagree with whatever popular opinion is at the time.
Joe's favorite movie is The Matrix, because it epitomizes everything he believes about the world. Quite frankly, this bullshit existence is just too much for Joe. He would far prefer it if he woke up in a vat of goo in a world where machines ruled and the environment had been laid to waste. Joe's waiting for Laurence Fishbourne to come and save him. Joe's a dingus.
We got into a spirited debate about Clark's chances at being the next President. He felt that Clark had some great ideas. I told him that I knew Clark well, that I don't think he's got the cognitive capacity to lead, that he doesn't seem particularly assertive, that I'm fairly sure he'd sell out the entire country for some comic books, and that America probably isn't ready for a black president.
Apparantly we were talking about two completely different Clarks.
What's great about a really crowded party is that it's easy to get away from people. All you have to do is turn about 15 degrees in any direction. As far as whomever you've been talking to's concerned, it's like you just vanished.
I am not Mr. Fun-Pants. I have got to stop leaving my apartment.
"All My Pasts Remembered, Forgotten, and Recalled Again"
To be honest, I kind of like my creative writing professor. I'm still horribly intimidated by him and I still dread going to his class every week, but I can't say that I hate him, though I get the feeling there are people in the class that do.
He's got this tendency to kind of go off on these long and rambling personal asides in the middle of discussion. We'll be talking about one of the stories we read for the week, and suddenly, he's off on a tangeant about an essay he's thinking about publishing, or some quasi-famous author he was talking to last week. For instance, when we were discussing this story by the guy who's writing style isn't really about "characters" or "plots," but about what kind of fucked-up-though-almost-insightful thoughts you can have when tripping on cough medicine and No-Doze, our professor closed the discussion by wistfully saying "The first story I ever published in a magazine was a drug story. It wasn't very good. I wasted a lot of good years trying to write drug stories." Then he kind of looked off in the distance for awhile.
How can I not love that? We babbling bastards have to stick together.
Anyhoozle, last week, during our discussion of Edith Wharton's "Roman Fever," he said one that thing that young people have trouble understanding is the past. That we don't really understand that there are things that happened in our lives that were great and wonderful and maybe kind of sad that are behind us now. We can't go back to them. They were great but they are gone. That sometimes, we may not be through with the past, but the past is through with us.
I've been thinking about that for the last couple of days, wondering if it's true for me. I'm still not sure. Mel once attacked me with a newspaper because I told her that once I left McDavid, she'd probably never see me again. (This was pre-MPFH.) To my mind, there comes a point in which you don't see some people anymore. Your friendship with them was just at a certain time and a certain place, and to try to keep it going is difficult because it's like trying to move against the current of the timestream. But at the same time, there's this part of me that's always expecting my erstwhile loved ones to return to me. There's this very foolish part of me humming a Rhett Miller song waiting for the people who went on without me to remember where they dropped me and come back.
And it's this uncertainty between holding on and moving forward that makes deciding the fate of The Unhappy Duckling so difficult these days.
"Crap Actually"
Something is definitely wrong. Love Actually looks horrible to me.
You don't understand. I am Lenar Clark: Charming Liar and Lover of Romantic Comedies. I should really want to see this film. By now, I should have vowed to take someone as my date, only to end up seeing it with Brent. I should be on the apple site watching the trailer over and over until I have it memorized. I should long for this movie with such passion and force that it makes me question my masculinity.
And yet, nothing.
Perhaps I finally am indeed dead inside.
NEXT:
Daisy.
- Ben Folds, "Evaporated"
"Reader Response Poll Results"
I received an overwhelming amount of personal e-mails about my last entry. It seems that a number of loyal readers were shocked and outraged that I entitled the section in which I made an assessment of last week's television programming "Sweeps Week," instead of using some variation of the idiomatic phrase "Idiot Box," as I've done for any television based entry on this blog since it began.
As one angered e-mailer wrote, I am "a colossal ass" who has insulted the intelligence of everyone who reads my "shitty little thoughts". Another upset former reader told me that I made them cry, and that there's a special place in hell for me. And then, strangely enough, there was one girl -- who will remain nameless -- who wrote "This is what happens when ugly negroes try to write smart" and that I should be sterilized.
I can only apologize to all of you earnestly and honestly, and promise that such a thing will never happen again.
I also received a somewhat smaller, though still massive outpouring of missives in full support of the idea of killing off Kate Jeffries in my blog. "The time for white girls from Texas is over!" was a line common to many of these e-mails. "There's too much curly hair around here, anyway!" was another. What was really surprising, however, is that everyone had a suggestion for how Kate should get faded. Stuff like "Grenades! Lots and lots of grenades!" or "Snatch her ass up in a bear trap. Leave her dangling for days!" and "Just have a safe fall on her. That'll teach her. That'll teach her good." One anonymous e-mail suggested that Kate should be taken over by the Carnage symbiote and start wreaking havoc all over campus, seriously injuring both Brent and Caleb, and that I should have to team up with Spider-Man and the X-Men to take her down in a twenty-four page fight scene that starts at the computer lab in Cornell Hall, and ends with the destruction of Jesse Hall. Needless to say, I'm currently working with famed fight choreographer Yuen Wo Ping, and the the death of Kate Jeffries -- as far as this blog is concerned -- will soon be immortalized in a narrative essay entitled "Fade Kate."
Sorry again about the "Sweeps Week" thing. I don' t know what I was thinking.
"Respect the Cocktail"
Last night I went to the cocktail party at Casa de Dang!
It was a formal affair, so I wore my blue daisy tie and said "Delightful!" an inordinate number of times.
I learned that I simply can't make it through a party comfortably without drinking.
I met a guy named Justin, and the first thing I said to him was "My best friend's name is Justin. We don't speak too often anymore."
I talked to a Poli Sci./Journalism student named Joe who doesn't really like to write too much but plans to be a political columnist who's going to be popular because he's just going to disagree with whatever popular opinion is at the time.
Joe's favorite movie is The Matrix, because it epitomizes everything he believes about the world. Quite frankly, this bullshit existence is just too much for Joe. He would far prefer it if he woke up in a vat of goo in a world where machines ruled and the environment had been laid to waste. Joe's waiting for Laurence Fishbourne to come and save him. Joe's a dingus.
We got into a spirited debate about Clark's chances at being the next President. He felt that Clark had some great ideas. I told him that I knew Clark well, that I don't think he's got the cognitive capacity to lead, that he doesn't seem particularly assertive, that I'm fairly sure he'd sell out the entire country for some comic books, and that America probably isn't ready for a black president.
Apparantly we were talking about two completely different Clarks.
What's great about a really crowded party is that it's easy to get away from people. All you have to do is turn about 15 degrees in any direction. As far as whomever you've been talking to's concerned, it's like you just vanished.
I am not Mr. Fun-Pants. I have got to stop leaving my apartment.
"All My Pasts Remembered, Forgotten, and Recalled Again"
To be honest, I kind of like my creative writing professor. I'm still horribly intimidated by him and I still dread going to his class every week, but I can't say that I hate him, though I get the feeling there are people in the class that do.
He's got this tendency to kind of go off on these long and rambling personal asides in the middle of discussion. We'll be talking about one of the stories we read for the week, and suddenly, he's off on a tangeant about an essay he's thinking about publishing, or some quasi-famous author he was talking to last week. For instance, when we were discussing this story by the guy who's writing style isn't really about "characters" or "plots," but about what kind of fucked-up-though-almost-insightful thoughts you can have when tripping on cough medicine and No-Doze, our professor closed the discussion by wistfully saying "The first story I ever published in a magazine was a drug story. It wasn't very good. I wasted a lot of good years trying to write drug stories." Then he kind of looked off in the distance for awhile.
How can I not love that? We babbling bastards have to stick together.
Anyhoozle, last week, during our discussion of Edith Wharton's "Roman Fever," he said one that thing that young people have trouble understanding is the past. That we don't really understand that there are things that happened in our lives that were great and wonderful and maybe kind of sad that are behind us now. We can't go back to them. They were great but they are gone. That sometimes, we may not be through with the past, but the past is through with us.
I've been thinking about that for the last couple of days, wondering if it's true for me. I'm still not sure. Mel once attacked me with a newspaper because I told her that once I left McDavid, she'd probably never see me again. (This was pre-MPFH.) To my mind, there comes a point in which you don't see some people anymore. Your friendship with them was just at a certain time and a certain place, and to try to keep it going is difficult because it's like trying to move against the current of the timestream. But at the same time, there's this part of me that's always expecting my erstwhile loved ones to return to me. There's this very foolish part of me humming a Rhett Miller song waiting for the people who went on without me to remember where they dropped me and come back.
And it's this uncertainty between holding on and moving forward that makes deciding the fate of The Unhappy Duckling so difficult these days.
"Crap Actually"
Something is definitely wrong. Love Actually looks horrible to me.
You don't understand. I am Lenar Clark: Charming Liar and Lover of Romantic Comedies. I should really want to see this film. By now, I should have vowed to take someone as my date, only to end up seeing it with Brent. I should be on the apple site watching the trailer over and over until I have it memorized. I should long for this movie with such passion and force that it makes me question my masculinity.
And yet, nothing.
Perhaps I finally am indeed dead inside.
NEXT:
Daisy.
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