a smattering

 

soooooo..... this is is short list of some ideas I had been working on from the last post (in March 2025) until around late May 2025.

It is now just the end of June 2025, and I KNOW that I will not be coming back to this post and "gettin' UR done" as it were, so i think i'll just let it fly as is.  (as a bonus, for regular readers, if you'd like me to actually expand on any of the ideas here, I'll accept as poll voting any comments to this post and let me know what you want to hear about, and I'll do a full post about it in July 2025!)
also - keep an eye out for ANOTHER BIGGER POLL!!! coming to Roman Numeral J in July, upon which may hang the fate of the very universe itself...

abundance - the need for government to seed progress in areas that are inherently non-capitalist / anti-capitalist at a certain moment in time (Moon Shot / Operation Warp Speed / penicillin)

grit v. 80/20 - smart & hardworking vs. smart & lazy... 

Bill Maher's White House visit - radical grace (plus acknowledgement of performative politics)

how d'you like them apples...

It occurred to me today as i was leaving work and polishing an apple on my shoulder that i look pretty damn good eating an apple. I came up with a theory when i was living in Münster that if nothing else, i look good eating apples, so i ate apples all the time. There's something to the way i bite with a bit of reckless abandon, but without the Roman-esque excesses of juices dripping down my chin...

When i'm not biting, i hold the apple well, slightly daintily at the ends of the core, but without seeming overly concerned with getting my hands a bit sticky... My arms swing freely, if a bit away from my body (think Brody Peed walking down the halls of Clinton High School, but without the muscles). I've gotten pretty good at walking while eating an apple, i can usually time finishing the apple pretty well with my arrival at a garbage can...

I can even, truly, finish an apple... not in the Teutonic sense, perhaps, where you eat ALL of the apple, stem, core & seeds, but all the way around, then to the top & bottom, getting almost of meat off of it...

So what i really want to know is, what is it that you look really good doing? Dancing in the club ( deine Bewegungen gefählen mir), doing shots, or smoking (i look a lot like John McClane when i smoke, taking entire cigarettes in in just a couple inhalations)... So tell me, in an effort of supporting and promoting self-confidence & positive self image (not in the blow smoke up their ass sense, but for real, quality things that don't generally get noticed).

therein

All of my PhD applications are fully in and submitted and i now just have to wait until i start hearing the laughter start to burble out of the vaunted institutions to which i've applied. To celebrate my great turn-in, i've started reading Foucault's The Birth of the Clinic, which will be the first Foucault i've really sat down and read. That guy seems to be kind of full of shit.

I mean, he's taken the first 19 pages to say, essentially, that doctors study disease & the patients are something of a distraction to that study. His point is that the only reason doctors need to learn about human physiology (anatomy? biology? erg, it's so frustrating now that i've been kicked off of UChicago's OED subscription, i don't know what anything means anymore) is so they know what to subtract when studying disease. That is, what it is that may be causes & effects that have nothing to do with the disease, but are naturally occuring in the body.

Ok, so why am i reading Foucault, you may be wondering. Well, when i gave my presentation on Body Worlds, i was pointed toward this book as another way of approaching the ideas i was dealing with. I didn't get around to it until now, and last week, when the great green god granted me an extra 10% off my employee discount, i bought it. Well, thus far it's miserables (that's a french joke), but i do hope it helps me along as i am wanting to rewrite that paper and submit it for publication (so i can send along "amended CV's to all my schools). Oh, speaking of which... this is insane. I'm a film editor now... i didn't even know i was applying and was told by my brother that he'd given somebody my name... suddenly, i'm it. So, if you would like to write a film review about a German film, send it along my way & you, too, can be published (i'll "edit" it). Ok, so this post has lost its trail, but i must prepare to teach the young minds tomorrow, so i'll sign off.

Veeder strikes back

When i started grad school last fall, i briefly turned over a new leaf, namely, that i would be a better and more contientious (i cannot for the life of me spell this word) student. I thought that i had been exceedingly lucky in duping UChicago into the idea that i was a real and valid student and that the only way not to let the secret out was to actually act as if i were a totally for real student.

Alas, at the end of the first quarter at Chicago, Professor Veeder hit me with the words, "if you won't have the final paper done by the due date you can drop it off at my home." This disastrous line opened the door for the habit i'd gotten into late in my undergrad... that of 'testing limits'. Seeing just how late "late" actually was. At first it was just minutes or an hour that i messed with... A professor'd say "due @ 5pm", i'd walk in at 5:15 and drop it off... but soon it became days and weeks that i was messing with. Fortunately when Veeder said this during that first quarter, i somewhat ignored it and handed in my Gothic paper almost on time, but with other classes i was not so careful. My zombie paper for Cults of Personality became an "idea for a paper" that, true enough, eventually became a thesis, but i did not hand it in that winter...

And now, as i implied earlier, Veeder has struck again... He's kindly agreed to write me a letter, and in an email requesting more information (read reminder) on who i actually was, he told me that PhD application due dates are actually bluffs. Which i read, again, not as a simple statement, but as some sort of challenge. Let's see when i absolutely cannot get into Cadwallada, and when i might have... (anyone know what Cadwallada is? not sure of the spelling... but it strikes me as a fictional university i know from somewhere)

I used to be so into due dates. I remember when the Nottingham program chose not to take me along, part of what so pissed me off was the fact that Perkins had handed his application in late, but was still chosen over me. In the end, i think, all worked out as it needed to, but at the time that was a real problem for me.

But somewhere along the way, i found deadlines to be more schedules to keep someone else in line and not for me. Yet on Monday, i will find myself in front of a class of college kids, taking a class on 'paper-writing' and i will be expected to teach them how to write a paper in a timely manner. Me, who still has application essays to write, with the due dates fast approaching... I will tell them to hand stuff in on time.... or else? Or else what, they may ask... Or else they'll turn out to be a real burn out like me, i suppose...