Bullet-Point Friday

• Ah, the last of the Bullet-Point Fridays!
• I started this segment when I returned from Germany and began the fall semester just to ensure that throughout the long and difficult term I would sit down at least once a week and post something on my blog. And now it’s almost over.
• Well, not quite: I still have to submit another essay Monday. My research on the Redon painting has been fairly interesting, but—ohmygod!—I have no energy to just sit down and pound it out. I wrote about half of it Thanksgiving Day. While most of my compatriots were stuffing turkey down their throats, I was fasting and writing—what I tend to do best on that holiday. And I spent more than three hours at the museum Wednesday, so I have plenty of information to write about. Just tired.
• I exhausted myself with the first essay due before Thanksgiving. And thankfully that proved to be worth the effort. My professor wrote that I was “gifted.” (And I’ve hence decided to start a “Gifted & Talented” program for my Ph.D. curriculum! Too bad few of my colleagues will meet the requirements….) Of course, I started the research and reading on the flight to Germany last July, so it’s fairly accurate to say that I’ve done some serious thinking about my topic over the past 4½ months.
• Perhaps I will start my Bullet-Point Fridays again come January. But I think I’ll change the name: no good ever came from bullets. And “bullet points” imply a reduction and a leveling that I hope to never be guilty of.
• I submitted my translation portfolio for the term this morning. I feel like after the first draft I was no longer doing translation but merely leveling, making the text palatable to the pack of illiterate philistines who were in the class with me. After several classmates complained that one particular sentence was “hard to understand,” I declared, “Perhaps I should just translate it back into Polish, and then we’ll see how well you understand it!” If nature abhors a vacuum, then I’m certain she would indeed hate my classmates as much as I do.
• So, it’s time to go to bed. I still have so much more work to do over the next couple of weeks: exams to write and grade, essays to grade, grades to submit. And my winter break is quickly filling up with things wanting to be done and read. (And I’ll try to write so much more consistently throughout the week that Bullet-Point Fridays will be unnecessary.)

Bullet-Point Friday

• The first definition of "bullet" listed in the OED is "a small round ball." I think first of a child's ball: small, probably red, and rolling across a street in front of an oncoming car.
• When I was living in Shimonoseki, I often traveled by Shinkansen, Japan's bullet-train. Speeding down to Fukuoka (sometimes purposely mispronounced "Fuck you, okay.") for a day of gaijin (that word still grates on my sensibilities) shopping was a luxury I grew accustomed to, especially during my last semester in Japan: time was running out; time was of the essence. And I could turn a 90-minute one-way trip into a 20-minute breeze just by paying more than three-times the cost of regular trainfare.
• I made up for the cost and convenience by factoring in Shinkansen tickets when traveling home to the US or back to Japan to serve out my two-year contract: if I could get cheaper airfare from out of Kansai--even with the Shinkansen fare--I would go that route. Direct flights from Osaka were always more acceptable than stopovers on that half-assed Korean peninsula. Plus a trip to Osaka probably meant a trip to nearby Kyoto as well. If time wasn't an issue but money was, then I could take advantage of several other transportation alternatives: the overnight ferry or the long-distance bus service.
• My preference was the overnight ferry: not only was the cost bizarrely low compared to just about everything else in Japan--$5.00 for a can of Coke!--but the ferry also included an onsen, or traditional Japanese public bath.
• The time I've spent wet and naked in the company of foreign nationals cannot be measured. (I'm just saying....)
  
• Over the 1998 Christmas vacation, I spent probably no less than four hours a day at the onsen where I was staying in balmy Okinawa.
• Perhaps it's been a way of recovering from the years of Texas summers and droughts I've suffered through. Perhaps I'm more fish than human. Perhaps I didn't have a clue what else to write on a Bullet-Point Friday.
  

Bullet-Point Friday

• It’s like, you know, flamenco piano: when you hear the first measures of just such a beast you recognize the form (flamenco) but don’t recognize the medium (piano) because your ears are not trained to interpret that form through that medium. After a few moments, a new synapse fires, and you are better prepared to hear flamenco piano again: a new possibility has been created in your world.
• It’s like, you know, when human beings rely too heavily on infrastructure designed to keep them safe (i.e., guardrails, stop signs, traffic lights) that they behave irresponsibly because someone else is policing their reckless behavior; they have a false sense of security because they’ve relinquished responsibility for their own actions. (It’s also like, you know, when parents expect legislation to supplement their demonstrably poor parenting skills: they want society to be policed instead of being responsible for the raising of their own children. I mean, think of the children!) Remove the guardrails and pedestrian accidents fall 60% because pedestrian and driver behave more responsibly when they must think for themselves. If I choose to jaywalk, then I’ll be sure to look both ways—twice, even—before jumping out in traffic.
• It’s like, you know, trying to get through a lecture on Berkeley’s immaterialist idealism when your students would much rather hypothesize about “crazy people” or “people on LSD” or “the blind”: if someone falls in the woods and no one is around to perceive it, did the person really exist in the first place? (Thankfully, for Berkeley, God is omniscient and omnipresent: He’s always watching/perceiving! And even if you don’t believe in God, He still believes in you.) I sometimes wish my students would stop invading my sensory world so their drug-induced craziness would simply stop existing, even if only for me.
• It’s like, you know, hotdog!
• It’s like, you know, accepting the alternate relationship with truth that wanders to supplement one’s acceptance of truth that remains coordinated on a grid. To start walking with the right foot (techne, the logos of techne, the word: “technology”) is quite alright as long as the next step is with the left foot (organic, systemic (uncoordinatable) episteme, the organicity of the epistemic); otherwise, you spin around in circles going nowhere. And no guardrail is going to protect you from doing that!
  
• It’s like, you know, attempting to speak language as such without using any of the words from the language of humankind. Or perhaps like, you know, speaking a word to(ward) an other all the while speaking a word as (an)other. This too shall not pass.
• It’s like, you know, Liberace’s famous question: “Would you rather have roses on your piano or tulips on your organ?” Vote now!

Bullet-Point Friday

• Well, I kept my cell phone on buzz from late September until today hoping that I'd get that call either from the MacArthur Foundation or Sweden. No such luck. I guess I can switch it off (and hold my breath) for another year.
• Since besides keeping a fairly sophisticated monthly budget I don't dabble in economics, and since rarely do I delve into cutting edge scientific research, I thought I'd surely be shortlisted for either the prize in literature or maybe (as a last resort) the peace prize. I guess I need to write more than term papers and angry blog posts. And perhaps do more than save the world everyday from my utter disgust.
• Congratulations to Doris Lessing, whoever she is. I browsed through the table of contents of the Norton Anthology of British Literature last night and couldn't find anything by her. If Norton doesn't bother with her writings, why should anyone else? Perhaps she's just trans-canonical.
• Congratulations to Al Gore, whose name was in the news just a couple of days ago when a British court determined that nine statements in his film on global warming were in error. Thankfully he wasn't up for the Nobel scientific prize. Polar bears drowning, indeed! (Although I have to admit I chuckled out loud during that part of the movie when the computer-animated polar bear went kerplunk into the Arctic waters! Ah, good times. Of course, if you were in the audience and couldn't tell that that scene/scenario was designed purely for an emotional response, then perhaps you deserve a Nobel for naiveté and gullibility.)
• No Nobel. No Genius. At least I'm in good company.
  

Burnt Out

Cameron Diaz using her eco-friendly (and edible) hair gel.

Nothing makes Skajlab wish the whole world would burn to smithereens than the incessant and insipid Cameron Diaz talking about the environment. Yes, I bought those damned expensive light bulbs several months ago. Yes, I gradually grew accustomed to the bizarre glow that emanates from them. (Even my neighbors commented on the strange light coming from my windows!) And one of them has already burned out! So much for saving me money in the long run. So much for saving the world one light bulb at a time. So much for eco-spokesperson Cameron making a real difference: I’m sure now in the post-Live Earth fantasy she’ll refuse to be a part of any production that is not entirely green and utterly significant. I wonder just how many of those st00perstars are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for the world and give up their careers and celebrity lifestyles. My light bulbs are not going to make the least little impact if Al Gore himself is still jetting around the globe presenting his fancy slideshow. Jets don’t run on rainbows. PA systems don’t run on love. Stop preaching (and “raising awareness”) and actually conserve energy (and my patience) by sitting your sorry ass at home in the ethereal glow of an enviro-friendly light bulb that’s about to burn out long before the world. And I’ll gladly keep my TV turned off for good measure.

Vegetal Carnage

One of the most exciting things about living in Tornado Alley, USA, is every spring when the tornado/severe weather sirens begin wailing, and you have to rush into the hallway, grabbing the shortwave radio (and making sure that fresh batteries are nearby), the cats (and their food ... and hopefully a litter box), your cell phone, a flashlight or two, and some blankets (in case of flying glass) on the way. Usually you have about a five-minute warning before the storm is right on top of you. I never much worried about such quick preparations before Hurricane Katrina, but now the thought of losing everything--absolutely everything--seems much more like a possibility. (Thank you, George Bush, for all that you do!) In the past three weeks, the sirens have sounded twice. The last time warned of wind gusts of up to 100 mph. Listening to the news the next morning, you'd have thought that we had survived a major storm. All the Dallas news reports were broadcasting the damage all throughout north Oak Cliff. Apparently the small square where I live was the least damaged. Funny, but throughout the entire night we kept hearing screeching breaks; when we got out the next day we learned why: several trees and power lines were lying in the road right outside of the gate blocking traffic. The road remained closed for a couple of days. Walking and driving around the neighborhood, signs of devastation were everywhere. The main casualty: the lovely trees that make this section of Dallas the most beautiful and tolerable. Here are some photos of some of that (vegetal) carnage.