"april full moon" | monday | april 2, 2007 | 4:15 pm

ONIGHT IS A FULL MOON. It's also the beginning of Passover. Easter is only a week away. Spring is definitely in the air like all of the cherry blossom petals everywhere. I am struck sometimes by the poetry of my life -- how much this Washington is so much like or reminiscent of the Washington I left -- particularly in details like cherry blossoms at springtime.

I'm one week into the new quarter. Things are all right. My schedule is definitely different since I only have to be on campus three days out of the week. But I still haven't yet figured out my reading routine, my study routine. I suppose that will come in time (or default once the deadline nears). I got a new draft of my lists and rationales off to my committee chair. Hopefully, I can get that finalized soon. I'm supposed to be meeting with him this week to talk about it and to talk about who I'm going to select to be my third and final committee member.

This past week has been pretty busy, actually. First week of class. Getting settled into my new group of students, who are pretty talkative, a good sign. My Spanish reading class is getting harder by the minute, and I really should devote more time to it than I do. Last week, I went to the first grad pub of the quarter, met a really neat prospective student, and drank too much. Spent much of Friday doing work and not going out, though I did do a trip to Costco and to dinner. Saturday was more work and then my friend Andrew's (now) yearly grad English kegger. I provided the snack food. There was much drinking and revelry. It was pretty fun (even a little embarrassing), and I didn't get home till after 3 AM. Of course that meant Sunday was hungover and very, very slow. I did get up at a normal time. Then my friend Jason and I ran errands and drove around Lake Washington. I was pretty much a zombie, but it was good to fight the hangover. Then I went to bed early.

More soon.

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"beatrix evelyn" | tuesday | april 10, 2007 | 11:01 am

VERY HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO BEATRIX EVELYN. She was born yesterday to my friends Cate and Andrew. Congratulations to the whole family. Now I have to send all sorts of stuffed animal bees to their house! Best to everyone.

"woebegone" | thursday | april 12, 2007 | 9:58 am

EFORE I FORGET, I HAVE TO WRITE IT ALL DOWN. The past week has been really full. Both in terms of things I had to do and things that have been on my mind. Crazy, actually. Some good, some bad, some ambivalent.

Last weekend was a marathon, which of course starts Thursday night at grad pub. I wasn't supposed to stay very long at the pub, but of course I did. I drank more than I should have given the fact that I was due to leave for a conference really early the next morning. I got home from the pub around eleven, which is early in my defense. But I needed to pack. And then for some bizarre reason (read: drunk), Jane and I wanted to listen to Rent, so we went online and watched random people singing songs on YouTube particularly the selections from Derek & Diego. Ha! So I didn't get to bed till well after midnight.

Friday morning, early, I got up at four, cleaned up, finished packing, and then waited for my friend Megan to pick me up to take me to the airport. Megan was supposed to get me at 4:45 AM so we could try to find coffee before heading to Seatac. Alas, she was late (the fault of her phone, which for some reason doesn't believe in Daylight Savings Time). For a city that loves coffee, there certainly isn't really anywhere to go at five in the morning to find some. Megan drove me down to the airport. I got there in plenty of time. There was a bit of a crowd, but security wasn't a problem.

The flight wasn't too bad, only two and a half hours to Riverside, CA. I flew into Ontario Airport, which is close to University of California-Riverside. It was my first visit to Southern California, which is basically still a desert no matter what the people living there might think. I was attending a two-day graduate humanities conference called (dis)junctions): Malappropriation Nation. I got to Riverside, checked into the lovely Comfort Inn on University Avenue, changed, and walked to campus. I got there in time to see my friend Lauren, who is also at UW, give her paper. Then there was lunch. Then more panels. I gave my paper "Looking for Ophera Windfury: Imagining Race (and Sexuality) in World of Warcraft" on WoW that afternoon. I was part of a panel on "Race and Video Games." It went very well. Though I didn't know the other presenters and hadn't read their papers, we all meshed well and there were useful resonances in all three of our presentations.

After the keynote and dinner, I went around trying to find people to go out. I didn't know anyone really at the conference (Lauren headed out early). So, it was up to me to make plans. By the end of the first day, people were coming up to me to ask me about where everyone was going out. We ended up at a place called Frank's, a local watering whole con seafood grill con karaoke bar. It was fun, though a little slow. I met some cool, sassy people. Drinks were had. And then I really wanted to go out to the Menagerie, one of the two gay bars in Riverside. (I found out later that it is currently the oldest existant gay bar in Southern California.) Only two other people were willing to trundle down to the "bad part of town" (I'm always finding myself in such environs) to do a little more drinking, a little dancing, and maybe get into some trouble.

The Menagerie was fun, small, and kitschy. They played really cheesy videos, but people were friendly. I had a good time. I was a little shameless in hitting on one of the conference guys that came with me (but he kept buying me drinks and then saying he had a long term boyfriend). The night was fun, and I'm totally glad that I made it out to the gay bar. Late, late, late in the evening, we put our third in a cab back to the hotel, and the guy and I decided to stay out. We met up with a couple, a man and woman, at the bar. They were totally wasted but hysterical and fabulous. They asked us if we were going to make it into Los Angeles. We said no since we really didn't have time. They said that wasn't acceptable and we all piled into their car and they said they'd show us all the hot, gay places in LA. So, I got into a car with complete strangers and drove an hour to LA. Drunk, no less. But wait. We didn't quite make it. When we were minutes away from the city, the guy's wife totally passed out and he said that he should take her home. So we turned around, stopped at a random Denny's so I could pee, and went all the way back to Riverside. We got dropped off at our respective hotels, and the night ended safe and sound. It was still fun, though. Crazy.

Saturday, I woke up late. But I did get up before noon. Headed back to the conference. Took in a couple more panels. Then decided that I really just wanted to go home. It was too bad because Saturday night was the "going out" night since the conference would be over and people would want to cut loose. I decided to head to the airport early, just in case I could catch an earlier flight back to Seattle. Turns out that there were no such flights, and I sat in the airport for four hours (though it wasn't too bad because it was totally empty and I snoozed). My flight back to Seattle left at 9:30 PM. We got on the plane, everything fine, and then were delayed for almost two hours by a little fuel spill. And I mean little. They had to check this and that. Then they decided that they would empty the fuel tank and refill it. Everything was fine (and it's good that they check these things), but I was annoyed at being stuck on a plane. Eventually, I got back home. It was really nice of my friend Jason to pick me up at 2 AM.

Sunday was a slow day. I just wanted to recover and rest. I spent most of the day lounging around and playing an obsessive-compulsive web game Desktop Tower Defense.

The past week itself has just been busy with school, teaching, and trying to figure out what the hell I'm doing with my life. Even though I am not in classes per se, my time still gets eaten up. I had to grade papers. My Spanish class is kicking my ass, since we just learned like six new verb tenses. I just don't feel like I have the time to do anything really, really thoroughly. It also doesn't help that in general I feel lost, sad, frustrated, and lonely most of the time. The whole PhD exam process is getting me down. I know a lot of my friends and peers that are in the same boat are going through similar ups and downs. Right now, though, I'm mostly in the down mode. I saw my advisor last week. He wanted to make some significant changes. He made some great suggestions. But now I look at my lists and just wonder if I will ever get it done (as in finish the lists themselves and actually read everything and know it for a three-day written and oral exam). I don't have the structure, the deadlines to force me to be disciplined. I have to learn how to do that for myself still. I feel like I never see anybody. And, mostly, I feel like this whole process is eating away at what's left of my life outside of school. All school and no play makes Ed a dull boy.

Ah well. Ups and downs. Downs and ups. I will figure it out, hopefully sooner rather than later.

All I can say right now is that thank goodness is pub night.

More soon.

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"let's go, hokies" | tuesday | april 17, 2007 | 7:15 pm

THINK I'M DONE. (That statement means so much at this very moment, layers upon layers of meaning.) What I mean is I think I'm done trying to follow the news about the Virginia Tech shootings. Any time -- any time -- there's an incident that involves schools, young people, and violence, I am immediately apprehensive, edgy, sad, and angry. And like my reaction to the Columbine shootings, I feel these things in response to the gall and the predation of the news, the media. I'm shocked, of course. This comes just weeks after a shooting at UW. And the media frenzy, the speculation, the buzz, the culture of fear, the rumormongering flew then as it does now. Only hours after the shooting, the national media with nothing really concrete to say spends hours upon hours in recapping, in rehashing, and in playing "what if"? After the shock wears off, my next reaction is to wonder how they are going to construct, to rhetorically and metaphorically paint, and imagine the killer. What tropes are they going to use? What analogies? What histories are they going to rip willy-nilly from the past to lash to the present?

Of course, now, the identity of the shooter (interesting whether they call him a "shooter" or a "killer" or a "murderer") has been released and the headline from The Washington Post is "Shooter Described as Eccentric Loner by Students, Teachers." Tropes of "strange" and "quiet" and "loner" and "keeps to himself" and "disturbed" abound. Clearly, evidence was uncovered that the shooter was troubled. I wonder if they'll pursue whether that "trouble" had been adquately addressed by the institution and culture he lived in as much as they'll pursue how that "trouble" clearly marked him as a (potential) killer. I wonder if other usual suspiscions will get played like cards: did he play video games? did he listen to heavy metal? did he do drugs? did he play Dungeons and Dragons? did he get picked on at school? did he have a "life"? did he have a "soul"?

I have to say that I find it repulsive and frankly disingenuously sensationalizing when a news reporter asks of an acquaintance (again, does this person have the credibility and authority to speak about a person they have never bothered to know) whether they thought he was the "type" to go on a violent rampage or whether they were "surprised" to find out it was him. The answer "He didn't seem like the type" only further entrenches the culture of fear that "anyone" could be a killer (well, of course, no shit Sherlock); and the answer "He totally fit the profile" only further reveals how much we want to map our fears and perhaps insecurities on to another body and to find a way to divert attention away from the fact then why didn't you do anything about it if he totally fit the profile? Too much to say, but not enough to say.

I cannot even go into the field day that some people are going to have with the fact that the shooter is racialized, Asian (finally evidence that it isn't just fucked up middle-class white boys that go on shooting sprees), and is not a citizen of the US. This of course is carefully framed and set against the "bucolic" and "small town" and "once safe" setting of Blacksburg, Virginia and the university campus. Such a rhetorical move only further distances the shooter from us, from the dorms, from the classrooms, from the town, from the culture that till hours ago thought nothing of him, thought him part of the community (he has no record, was legally given entrance into the country, was seeking naturalization), or failed to see him as a threat, as in trouble, or more importantly, as a friend.

As with Columbine, I make no excuse for the choices, the desperation, or the psychoses that drove the shooter to kill thirty-three people and injure dozens of others. And I cannot minimize the pain, shock, suffering, stress, disillusionment, and honest fear that people are feeling right now. But I want to know what the next steps will bring and I am afraid that they will fall short of any kind of critical and informed and useful reactions, responses, and reparation that address more than just surface, more than just skin deep, more than just the hype.

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"blah" | tuesday | april 24, 2007 | 1:45 pm

HE ONLY THING DIFFERENT ABOUT THIS WEEK IS THAT IT'S THIS WEEK. I seem to be in a bit of a rut. I don't have any motivation to do anything. All I want to do is stuff that has nothing to do with what I should be doing. The usual things that keep me busy or make me happy are lackluster. What's that called again? Oh, yeah, right, depression. I think I'm in some mid-mid-life crisis.

I keep expecting the next day, the next morning to be when it all turns around. I guess that's at least a good sign, a ray of hope. But so far all I can do is sit, wallow, gnash, and sigh. Oh, and cough, too. I seem to have developed some sort of upper respiratory thing again -- must be the tree pollen busting out all over right now -- and what started off as a scratchy throat turned into losing my voice (the full day of student conferences did not help), which then was exacerbated by drinking and me pretending to be Kathleen Turner hawking Sleepnumber beds instead of Lindsay Wagner, which then turned into a hacking, phlegmmy cough that won't go away.

I would say that I need a vacation, but I think that's just indicative of my desire to simply cut my losses and run away. I don't think that it would solve anything. I don't even think it would make me feel better. I just need to muddle through (or maybe machete through) it all. What makes it is worse is that I cannot articulate it very well since it's a mishmash and Jacob's ladder of things. And I my attempts to talk about it with people seems to just frustrate me more. Perhaps that is a sign that words aren't the solution.

Anybody say, "Action!?"

End of line.

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