Nineteen Minutes

Nineteen Minutes, by Jodi Picoult, is eight of your worst nightmares, in ascending order, by my personal scale:

1. You did your job badly as a judge, since you were not really objective but you were too subjective to understand the difference between subjective and objective (Alex).
   
2. You got caught between your professional and your personal obligations and each prevented you from doing your best job at each (Patrick).
3. You raised your children the best way you knew how, but it wasn't good enough to prevent the society that really raised your child from turning that child into a monster and then maiming and killing it (various parents of slain teenagers).
4. You tried your best to know the truth about what mattered to you, but somehow the truth slipped between the facts (Lewis).
5. You tried to be as humane as you could in every circumstance, from your relationships with your family to your relationships to your clients (women in labor), but somehow, they went their own way and left you behind (Lacey).
6. From the time you were a child, you were too good for this world and wanted to be left alone, but they provoked and provoked and wouldn't stop provoking. Finally, you did what they wanted you to do (Peter).
7. You were only as good as you had to be and then you were never good enough, but no one but you ever had to know this unless by some terrible accident, the truth came out. Then, the truth came out (Josie).
8. You were a casual mother, a phone it in mother, a hope it works out, but not giving it much thought mother. Then, when it looked like you had lost your child and it looked like she was never going to come back, never, you got a second chance. And you didn't have any idea what to do with it (Alex).
   

Stormy Weather

This isn't exactly a beautiful day by most people's standards but I think it's lovely. The sky is grey, like the Crayola crayon. My car is getting its air conditioning fixed finally and I have some great new ideas for reprising "Diary of a Stalker" especially now that I have a scanner in my office. I think I can do a flashback of the stalker when he was a wee lad and just beginning to get his chops as a stalkerboyo. Also, he's just gotten out of prison again and begun to realize that he's behind the times and all the other stalkers have laptops and can really do some serious spying, while he is living in a 50's world of Gig Young and Rock Hudson. Well, f--k it, he declares, I'm going to do what I do best! I'm going to stalk the good ol' fashioned way, thru the living room curtains! (For those of you who don't know who the stalker is, he's witty, he's urbane, he's the gentleman stalker! -- I'll be putting the scans on just as soon as I can grab some computer time here at the Rutherford Salt Mines.)

Gentlemen and Players

I'm almost done reading Gentlemen and Players, by Joanne Harris and I didn't realize that she was the author of Chocolat. G and P is a delicious revenge story, but so far I have no notion of what the specific act is that is being avenged. I do know that a lifetime of horrible injustice and misunderstanding is the subject of vendetta (cosmic justice) and for this, two characters are intertwined and become narrators, victims and perpetrators, all at once. The climax is yet to come. I can't wait.

I have also begun Jen Lancaster's Bitter is the New Black and I find myself strangely sympathetic to Jen, who is nothing like me, except in her compulsive aggressive perfectionism, judgmentalism, narcissism, antisocialism and neologism.

I've been trying to read Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, highly recommended by CG, whose recommends are always firstrate and challenging. This one is too, especially since it's about the lives of children and don't let it fool you and make you think it's about bioethics or apocalyptic endtimes or somesuch. It takes your lungs and squeezes them hard and you forget to breathe while you are reading just like you did when you read Cat's Eye and The Handmaid's Tale. "How were we to know we were happy?"

A Year of Nice May be Called For

This has been coming for a long time. It's time to be a nice person, or at least practice being one. It's not so much that I don't think I'm nice enough, but I think I could be nicer on a more consistent basis. The scary persona isn't working for me. I mean it is, but it's scaring me even. For example, I ordered my books from the campus bookstore on May 3 for a summer session course that begins on May 17. I have the written confirmation to prove it. Last Friday, I sent all my students an e-mail to say hi and welcome to the class and go buy the book and so on. So, on Monday, one of my future new students writes to me saying that the bookstore HAS NO BOOK ORDER ON FILE FOR MY COURSE!!!! Now I know this can't be right, so I give them a call and sure enough, they DON"T HAVE ANY RECORD OF A BOOK ORDER!!!! This would not be the first time this has happened, so when the bookstore personnelperson shifts into "I'll go check on this and give you a call" mode, I reply in my best ape-in-a-cage-on-extra-adrenaline mode: "YOU WILL NOT CALL ME BACK. YOU WILL NOT CHECK ON THIS. YOU WILL GET ME THE MOST UBIQUITOUS LOGIC BOOK IN AMERICA RIGHT NOW. YOU WILL HAVE SUFFICIENT COPIES FOR ALL MY STUDENTS BY THE FIRST DAY OF CLASSES THIS THURSDAY !!!!! And I hung up the phone. Then I called the regional sales rep and told her what happened and she gave me a lot of sympathy and five differient solutions just in case the bookstore didn't come through. By 4 pm, everyone connected with the bookstore had left me 90 second long voicemail messages assuring me that the problem had been taken care of and then the adrenalized ape need not tear their hearts out this time.

So that Sicilian thing I do really really works. But now I have an anger hangover. Which means I think I scared myself more than anyone. If I could do stuff like this and then feel terrific later and even better the next day, I would know that I am the sociopath I was raised to be. But I'm not, so what should I do about it? Be nice? Maybe.

Boredomophobia

Well, I am finally done with the horrendous task of grading for this semester. Here is small query: what universal thing is it about being somewhere around the age of 19 or 20 that makes an otherwise nicely raised American child obsess and get the absolute creepie crawlies when the thought of boredom comes up? And why does the terror of boredom seem to come up every, oh, say, .oooo2 nanoseconds at that age? Or, is it being American that produces the fear of boredom? Or, does everyone in the world except me fear boredom? Am I boring you?

I will tell you why I ask. I assigned as essay question, rather a choice of two essay questions re: Tananarive Due's My Soul to Keep. The first was

Explain how you might feel, finding yourself in the fifth century of
your immortal existence. Would you be discontented, like David
Wolde? What sort of life would you want to have or not have, if you were immortal? Would you be tempted to make another person or
persons immortal? Why or why not?

And the second was

Is Dawit a human being? Evaluate him using a specific set of criteria
and justify your criteria.

Can I tell you how whiny and misery sister the whole thing was? It doesn't matter which question anyone answered. David is sad. David is cursed. David is filled with loss. David has done everything, been everywhere. David can't die, though he has tried. David has loved and lost. David is bad. David is a deceiver. David needs love. David looks good outside, but is rotten inside. David is this. David is that. Bla bla bla David. On the first question, the BIG PROBLEM IS THAT DAVID IS A MISERABLE LYING MURDERING BASTARD WHOSE LIFE JUST GOES ON AND ON IN ONE LONG BORING STRETCH OF BORING INANITY and I wouldn't like that because it would be sad and boring for me after all those years none of my family or friends or lovers would be around and I would be lonely and bored with nothing to do and no one to do it with and I would be so bored and not have any fun any more even though it would have been fun at first and me so good looking and all. And I wouldn't make anyone else immortal because it's not fair because then they would be bored and lonely and not having any fun and bored just like me.

So, am I missing something here? In the "Points of Pride" webpage of our fine university, the braggarts (Deadly Sin # 7: Superbia) claim:

University XYZ students have a strong sense of civic
responsibility and volunteered more than 30,000 hours of their time to service
organizations during 2005-06.

Not MY students, or at least not in their immortal lives. They'd be too bored.

Would they give immortality to another? Only if the other was "fully informed and agreed to it." David is a monster since he did not ask permission. Asking permission makes everything okay. If I informed another that I wished to perform heinous acts upon their person and asked permission whether it was okay and they said it was, it would be okay, according to all. The nature of the heinous acts is irrelevant. The nature of the power differential between the informer/asker and the informed/asked is irrelevant. But wait, that never came up! It would be too boring to even think about it! Thinking, perhaps is the most boring thing of all!

As for David/Dawit being human, well, he "goes to the bathroom" some said. He "had a body" according to others. He "loves" and "is loved" (which comes close to something like an idea.)

At this point in the course, we have completely forgotten the criteria for humanity given by 8-10 major philosophers. We invent them now. We get them from Mademoiselle and Vogue and Esquire and the Wall Street Journal. "To be human is to push the envelope." "To be human is to wear nice clothes." "To be human is to take a pellet when the bell goes off."

I think I shall eat a peach.

New Face Plate

So, yes I did get a new Jesus on the cross face plate for my cell phone. Then, I answered my next call, "Hello, Jesus Hotline. Jesus speaking." It felt good. The person on the line was whining a little bit. He said that his team wasn't doing very well. I asked if he had prayed for help. He said he had, so I asked him how. He did say that he hadn't held his hands together, so I suggested he try that next time since it helps make the connection stronger. I asked him what he had said. It was the usual request for the win. That sounded okay, so I asked if he had promised something in return. He said he would be great all the time in return but admitted that he hadn't shared his candy. I suggested that lots of people didn't promise anything and got what they needed, but if you did promise, you should at least try to carry it out, for the first few times anyway. He said he would. I told him not to give up, but he started whining again about the team, the losing, the feeling bad about not being good. I told him to cut it out, and try to cheer up, since despair was worse than not keeping promises that you didn't mean. Try to keep a good attitude, I said. Keep those hands together when you pray because sunspots are a problem this time of year. Look, this conversation is eating into my minutes, so why don't you try later again. He said he would and rang off. Sheesh, this time of year is tough.

Object Fancy

Read this only if you have lots of time to waste or you are a serious semiotician:
I spied one of my students with a very nice Coach laptop bag in an indescribable ivory/taupe color. And here’s the relevant link to leather, olfactory experience, shopping and so on: http://members.aol.com/nonverbal2/object.htm) which will lead to another delightfully time consuming diversion, the Nonverbal Dictionary of gestures, signs and body language cues. Semioticians won’t be able to tear themselves away. See especially branch substitute and vehicular grille.