Toys vs. Tools

We watched (and bought*) Twisters 'tonight' - and it was totally, absolutely pretty good.  For context, Twister was a movie that came about in the heart of my youth and is a movie that I truly love, unironically, and unapologetically.  It came out when I was 18 years old and weeks away from graduating high school, and it imprinted on me.  Twister is earnest, a little schlocky (in all the best ways), and a fairly fun ride (literally, too, as Brooke and I did the Twister ride at Universal Studios Florida, although not actually literally as the ride wasn't that great - I just remember standing in a room with a fence, and then it was kind of windy, but not at you, just near you...).

Anyway, the point is - Twister is a pretty okay movie that comes to some relevant (if somewhat cliched) conclusions - "Making something of yourself" and "Don't be a total sellout" and "Love love (or no divorce allowed or something...)".  The science bits / meteorology / plot stuff is all very good.  There's a science bucket full of science puffins, and if they get the bucket in front of the twister and all the puffins fly up into it, they get science to speak tornado!

Twisters on the other hand starts with some children hobbyists who have a geo-engineering science fair project that ends in tragedy.  The tragedy of standing in front of a tornado and being killed by it - shocker.

The first mistake was to make the movie as a completely standalone sequel - like, it didn't need to integrate big parts of the earlier cast, but some cameos and nods to the earlier work would have been nice.  And grounding it in the 'science' of the earlier - a bit of "standing on the shoulders of giants" - I think might have grounded the plot in some semblance of the realistic, but of course those are not themes that we like in our current era, whether fictional or non-fictional.

The young will save us, and a profound disinterest in the ideas that came before... (generally before 2015 or so if you investigate the thinking very deeply).  The absolute importance of being liked - and if you aren't liked publicly (praised visibly), then you may as well not bother.

The central message of this far inferior sequel seems to be about "Ways to 'keep' getting ahead".  The happy ending isn't anything about doing good science for the world, or even like getting married or being happy or anything but frakking starting a company!

Congratulations!, You made it, please begin exploiting... 

{sigh}

* renting on Amazon Prime is a total scam - the cost of buying is generally just under double the cost of renting, and I feel like most movies - you will find another time in life when you are going to watch it or show it or reference it, so just own it forever (until Amazon collapses, which at this rate will likely be after the US government collapses!).

The eclipse, Hegel, and the American Road

I logged 2400 miles of American roads, 14 hours of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, 3 full Brewers game broadcasts (all the enemy radio feed on XM), and 1 total eclipse as seen from Glendo State Park in Wyoming.

I woke up on Sunday morning and decided to forgo my Midwestern eclipse experience plans because the weather looked uncertain for optimal viewing.  En route to Deadwood, SD, I listened through the Preface (very familiar!), the Introduction and the early parts of A. Consciousness. 

My copy of Phenomenology was safely at home on my bookshelf, sitting right next to Susan Buck-Morss' excellent Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (which I have read in its entirety!).  I bought a used copy (originally Elizabeth Trejack's it seems) at a book shop in Minnesota.  It was highlighted and underlined in a few very specific sections (it opens automatically to Lordship and Bondage), and otherwise appears largely untouched.

I first learned of the existence of a fellow called Hegel and his friend "Geist" on my first day of classes at the University of Chicago.  I read the greatest hits from Hegel's masterwork, and nodded knowingly when his influence on later theorists was discussed.  On arrival to UW-M, I heard less about Hegel (though there was quite a lot more mention of Foucault, who I only heard come up once at UChicago, and that was in a joke from a Zadie Smith reading about introducing someone at an academic party as "... she likes Michel Foucault and costume jewelry"), but dutifully put Phenomenology and Buck-Morss' book on my prelim reading list.

Naturally, like most good reading lists, I did not read most of most of the books on the list, but excel at the academic art of talking about books you have not read.  I have also not read that book, though I've held it in my hands, and skimmed through bits, and I know people who have read it.

During my long drives of the last several days, I've read through the first 513 paragraphs of Hegel's work, starting and stopping and occasionally paying more and less attention as one is wont to do when reading or listening or existing at all, I suppose.  I think this might be the best way to read Phenomenology, not as one's only or deep reading of the text, but as a way to have read through it all.  As I drove, I would make notes of paragraphs I wanted to return to (don't worry, the highways of South Dakota and Wyoming are sparsely populated, even when there's an eclipse on!).  When I was first reading Shakespeare (or first reading it in college, I can't remember which), someone (either Jerry Davis or Mary Hull Mohr) gave me the advice to "just keep going" when you're reading it and not sure you're absorbing.  It's reading as muscle memory, and the deep read of certain sections can come later (or earlier!). 

Hearing "of Lordship and Bondage" after reading through the entirety of Consciousness changes the focus of the passage.  It makes the easy reading of Hegel as writing the heroic history of Haiti less easy and fancy free.  I've come to trust Buck-Morss, and don't think her reading is at all off the mark.  That said, I think it is important to remain aware of our academic practice of the use of texts to suggest meaning and significance.

*.  *.  *

I first learned of the Great American Eclipse earlier this year, and almost in the same moment committed in my mind that I would be there to see it.  I took a few days vacation, but made few other plans, except to choose Beatrice, Nebraska as my viewing sight.  Tim & Jen & the kids live in Omaha, and actually lived in Beatrice shortly after they got married.  When the day got close, weather across the Midwest started looking dicey, and I headed west.

A total eclipse is an awe-inspiring sight, truly an opportunity to see the most awesome, magnificent vision available on earth.  An eclipse is also a random conflation of events - a new moon that aligns with the earth and sun; a sun for a planet that is about 400 times larger than the planet's moon, which is about 400 times closer than that same sun (so they take up about the same amount of sky space).  Also, we also happen to be in the small window of time, cosmically speaking, that allows this confluence.

I've been struggling to describe what I saw, or what the experience was like, or why it was worth the trip.  Finding significance in the random confluence of hunks of rock hurtling through the galaxy is what we do as humans.  Making meaning from bringing texts, histories, moments - that's what humanists do.  We live in a strange confluence of psychology, philosophy, astronomy, physics, history, sociology, geology, chronology and on and ology.

My thoughts of late have been turning back toward the super-modern, and the importance of the small.  I'm still working at making meaning from the experience of the eclipse, and from reading Hegel on the way to and from seeing the eclipse, and the observations and thoughts I had about Americans and Trump and Mt. Rushmore and history on the way to and from seeing the eclipse.  I expect that I will continue to try to build this meaning for quite some time.

What I learned or have built or have decided for now is that my phenomenology of totality has provided me some perspective on our present American experiment.  We are a strange and strained people, but I still think this is all just crazy enough to work. 

Walkabout (and sneeze-about)

Just in the midst of a rare sneeze-fest (8 or so in the last 90 seconds)…

Enjoying some sunshine in the backyard. Alongside an almost depleted rum and coke (Cruzan, because #AvenueLiquor wasn't stocking Barbancourt - I always prefer rhum to rum) 

So nice and warm today. And going to be hothot in Aruba in early May. 

A nice book and a friendly walk-y day. (Walked to McDonalds for hangover breakfast, and walked to Brig's to deliver Boots [aka Dog Terrorist] home). 

Not eating, but feeling peckish. 

Monuments of Future's Past

In the midst of Icepocalypse 2015: Midwest Edition - a lazy day and evening, featuring some bad-TV watching, some less-bad TV-watching, some reading, and a movie - some deep thinking about bad art has ensued.

There's evidently a movie called A Little Chaos - I think it's the 2nd in the Alan Rickman Rose Trilogy* (first was Blow Dry {dir. Paddy Breathnach}, unless I missed something).  On this new film (came out in 2015, who knew!?), Rickman takes the directorial reigns himself, and crowns himself king (Louis XIV).  My general rule regarding movies that pop up on premium cable, Netflix, or On-Demand, is that if you haven't heard of it, you can probably stay away.

In this case, I will say Chaos is worth an exception to my rule.  The premise of the movie centers on the construction of the Gardens at Versailles.  The silly premise has to do with a lady gardener (imagine that! in France, in the 15th Century!) who challenges the status quo at court.

I have not been to the Gardens (perhaps I will visit soon on my fancy new treadmill!), but the film had some anachronistic elements (and I apologize, i'm going from memory and sense here, not from rewatching) not in the plot but in the filming.  In the shots and composition. 

And those shots and that composition gets one thinking, not so much 500 or 600 years, but 500 or 600 years into the future, and legacy, namely, what we leave behind.  That is what A Little Chaos is really about.  Sometimes weather, and natural phenomenon give us a glimpse into this thinking.  Major events (hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunami) can give us immediate and obvious examples of what the future may well hold.  300 years of "time equivalences" pass by in a matter of minutes or seconds or hours of destructive power. 

So too, even a bit of odd or strong weather, can offer us smaller glimpses if we know how to look.  Take a walk outside after there's been a sizeable blizzard or during a rain storm, or walk around on an extremely cold day for your area.  Watch the corners of your perception and see things (for it's mostly things you'll see, few people) anew.  There's an abandoned, moved on quality to them.  What folks you do encounter (not in your own neighborhood, mind you) will be over-warm or over-cold.  Warm because they're lost, and feel desperate lucky to have found ye (for some reason, this blog post is coming through in my head in Calla-speak, say thankya); cold because they feel desperate, and fear (oddly) that you plan to take what's his.

These are moments - interstices - when time has grown thin, and we can glimpse what this space might be like in 200, 500, 1,000 years.  We, in the U.S.A. are 10 years away from living in a country that is a quarter millennium old.  To us, this seems a surprising development, and quite a very long amount of time, and it feels natural, to us, to assume that while the USA of 500 or 600 years from now, may look very different, and be very different, the USA will be, naturally. 

We always build, always create, as if we are permanent.  What Rickman's little film helps us see through to, is imagining what these spaces of ours will feel like when they are existing in another world.  His King Louis was building a grand garden for a history of perpetual royalty.  Half way between that construction and where we stand today is the Age of Revolution, and the world changed unexpectedly. 

Just imagine what will be halfway to that next era, looking back at us... Or mayhap, we are that halfway point.

* The Rose Trilogy is an as-yet-completed (and unacknowledged) trio of movies starring (or possibly involving, depending on what we decide the 3rd movie is) Alan Rickman, where the image of the rose is invoked.  The 1st (again, unless someone has one I missed, and we can be done with searching) was the hairdressing competition movie, Blow Dry, in which Rickman reveals a long-hidden tattoo of a rose on the bottom of his foot.  In A Little Chaos, King Louis is sneaking about out of disguise, and runs into his gardener (Kate Winslet) - they discuss roses, and Kate later uses the Four Seasons Rose as a tet-a-tet to put the king in his place.

* * *

In a strange oddity of coincidence, I started this post in late December - when was actually holed up in blizzard! - and since, sadly, dear Alan Rickman has died.

For someone my age and filmic disposition, I doubt Rickman was a favorite actor**... But he was for certain a known actor, and perhaps even a well loved (or well despised) one.  He was Hans Gruber, the first fun terrorist of the 80s.  And he played the Sheriff of Nottingham in a Bryan Adams video vehicle film (but truly a coming of age piece for us cuspers). 

Rickman was a wonderful villain actor - later embodying all that we loved to hate about Snape - but it was in his smaller, simpler roles that I think he really demonstrated why he was truly great at what he did (he was an actor...).  The doofus husband that he plays in Love Actually is a perfect example - he's not a bad guy... he's just a schlub.  And when a schlub is offered the chance to be a stud, inevitably, he takes it. 

Rickman is an actor who embodies the (possibly apocryphal, and possible entirely made up by me) story that Harrison Ford tells about his early days in the business.  A big-shot (director? producer?) allegedly told Ford that he would never be a movie star, because he didn't have that star quality.  The big shot tells Ford that when Cary Grant (this name is grabbed at random, but it stands in for some household name actor from days of yore) first walked onto screen, even though it was just a small role as a waiter, Big Shot says, "you saw him walk onto screen, and you knew! right there, that There!, there is a movie star".  For deadpan (in my memory of this telling), "I thought the point was that when he walks on to screen you're supposed to say, 'there is a waiter'".

It is a good story, and characterizes Rickman's acting perfectly I think.  He wasn't always likeable, nor always laughable, nor always anything.  He was what he was meant to be.  And it's a shame to have lost his craft.  I am sorry for it.

** Since the dawn of J, I have felt that the concept of "favorite" was fraught.  I have never really thought that I have what I would call a favorite actor.  Although, JP once told me that Paul Bettany was his favorite actor, which struck me as an odd choice at the time, but the more I learn about Paul Bettany, and the more I encounter  him, I find it to be an inspired choice. 

Environmental Theory

Of late there has been a ghastly pall of fog drifting over the spires of downtown Milwaukee (also, I've been reading some H.P. Lovecraft).

I hadn't given it much thought until

Brooke asked about it this morning, musing (sorry - HP) that the cause had something to do with the lake temperature, and theorizing that this perma-mist would last through the summer until the overall lake temp rose sufficiently to no longer need to release it's loamy essence. 

I said the theory sounds sound. But it certainly looks cool to me. And befitting my current reading. 

In a Sunburned Land

Hello faithful readers!

I am arrived in Miami, living in a condo near Florida International University where I am spending the next 6 weeks studying Haitian Creole.


*   *   *


February 2019
Wow, i seemed so positive and upbeat at the outset here.

On my first night in Miami, i broke the bed.  I was sub-renting an apartment off West Flagler Street near 97th, and staying inamongst the stuff of a Chinese professor who'd left for the summer.  It was minimally furnished, and the bed was a cheaper-than-IKEA structure.  When i first lay down on the bed uncarefully, it cracked, but didn't break.  The rest of the summer i slept sorta spread-eagle hoping to balance the weight so it wouldn't fully collapse.

That summer i saw every movie in theatres.  I ate Papa John's pizza so often that the crew knew me by name.  I ate at Denny's, because they had free wifi.  I had Netflix DVDs delivered to me in Miami nearly every day - because i was on a 3-Disc plan and i was finishing one or more almost every day.  I took the bus (and waited for the bus in the heat, my god, the heat) and got a used bike cheap, which i eventually abandoned for broken next to a gas station. 

But i didn't know all of this when i started this post.  I spent a summer learning Haitian Creole - and learned it well.  To this day i can read and write and understand and speak Haitian.  On my return to Milwaukee, i was asked to return to Mahler, almost magically, and things began, slowly, to turn around.

This was an important summer in my life i think - i still think.  I wrote my dissertation in my head over the course of this summer.  It's every bit as good as it was when i first came across it in the ether.

Post of (many) posts

While operating this blog, i've run into a lot of 'ideas' for entries that never came to fruition. Most of these idly floated away into nothingness, but a few got started as new entries... and i'd like to collect those here -


Wiki-Wiki-Wa-Wa
(20 April 2006)
I am a wiki-maniac.

*this was obviously a brilliant idea for a post... it was going to be all about how i was (momentarily) obsessed with posting on wikipedia... which didn't end up being totally true...



review of "The Walking Dead"
(6 June 2006)

The Walking Dead (Vol. #1-4)
Image Comics
Reviewed by : Seeger
Reviewer’s Grade : C-

When my set of all four volumes (thus far) of Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead first arrived from amazon.com I was positively giddy… I’d heard nothing but good things (from reviews that evidently were written by his mother) and was thinking I was coming into a world of Romero-level zombie thought in this exciting new series.

BUT, instead, what I found was a cliché-ridden work of zombie survivor fiction that’s been told too many times, and always in the same way. Kirkman does not help his cause in the introduction to Volume 1 when he writes:

“To me, the best zombie movies aren’t the splatter fests of gore and violence with goofy character and tongue in cheek antics. Good zombie movies show us how messed up we are, they make us question our station in society… and our society’s station in the world. They show us gore and violence and all that cool stuff too… but there’s always an undercurrent of social commentary and thoughtfulness.”[1]

Even casual fans of zombie films and literature see such societal critiques at work, but for Kirkman to explicitly make such a blatant statement in the introduction to his first volume bodes ill for the whole run and is a sign of what’s to come. Kirkman suffers from over-writing and an often painful lack of subtlety, a trait shared by artists Tony Moore (Vol 1.) and Charlie Adlard (Vols. 2-4).

The story traces police officer Rick Grimes who awakens from a coma in an empty hospital some days (28 perhaps?) after the zombie necropalypse has hit earth. We follow Grimes as he heads home, discovering his old neighborhood mostly abandoned and slowly discovering the new world order. Through contrived conversations with another survivor and a horse we learn about his wife and child (which we also found out about several panels earlier in the artwork), who he leaves town to try and find.

Kirkman shows disrespect to his readers by having to spell out every notion in words. He seems to not trust his artists, who in turn seem not to trust him (using the most extreme ‘surprised’, ‘angry’, ‘sad’ looks in any frame they want to express emotion). Some of his frames are so full of words there’s almost no room for characters to walk around in them. When his characters fight, their dialogue feels like an 8-year-old at play: “I’m going to blow your head off” says one survivor to another at one point, presumably before she is about to blow someone’s head off.

With all its negatives, though, the most frustrating thing about The Walking Dead is its amazing potential. The artwork, when it’s not painfully obvious, is quality black and white, which adds to the bleakness of the world the characters inhabit. The covers, all done by Tony Moore are beautiful, if a bit repetitive and the splash pages, few and far between are used very effectively. Walking Dead is at its best when Grimes is wandering alone and there are two or three wordless pages in a row, capturing the voiceless zombie threat more perfectly than any conversation can, but Kirkman again finds a way to spoil many of these with a speech bubble filled only with “…”.

Kirkman is asking very interesting questions about humans living in extreme circumstances, I just wish he could sometimes avoid asking them right out loud.

[1] Kirkman, Robert. The Walking Dead: Vol. 1: Days Gone Bye. Introduction. Berkeley: Image Comics, 2005.

*this post may actually have been posted... but it's listed as a draft. Regardless it first appeared on fourcolor.org, a now defunct awesome comic blog.



Michaels or Sorkin
(30 September 2006)

Sitting here this evening watching (what i think is) the season premiere of Saturday Night Live, i am quickly realizing that the fake SNL on Monday nights this season is a hell of a lot more entertaining than the actual SNL. It's all part of the recent TV phenomenon of to create shows about what folks wish their real work was like. To my knowledge, the tradition started with Ally McBeal & on with David E. Kelly's other shows, where he made shows about what we all wish our lives were like. Boston Public tried to show what teachers wished their lives were like. The Practice was a dreamy lawyer's life & shows like The West Wing and Gray's Anatomy follow the same model, where we watch every week and see people doing what we wish people in their positions were doing, were being. More real.

The first episode of Studio 60 had Judd Hirsh, essentially as Lorne Michaels apologizing for the past years of network cowardice and selling out the material for political correct-ness and sponsor friendliness. The question, though, is whether SNL (or any show) was ever any kind of idyllic challenging, comic programming that we like to imagine once existed (and has been since lost.) And i think the easy answer is no.

*i vaguely remember thinking of this tv commentary... Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, woo-hoo!



Line Up
(25 December 2006)

The American Spirit of Christmas is alive and well this year and i would like to take this opportunity to try and educate us all how we can make a slightly better world.

We Americans have an abysmal habit for forming a line. Everyone is so interested in winning the line lottery, sneaking into the new register that just opened up, beating a total stranger to the check-out & we all suffer for it. While i'm surely not the first person to point this deficiency out, i was so struck yesterday at the liquor store by how uncivilized we all are, that i feel it's my Christmas duty to try and fix this.

Step 1:
Everybody chill out. You are not that important & an extra 45 seconds out of your day is a small price to ask for universal harmony. Don't be so discontent with where you are in lif(n)e that you are constantly looking at other lines to see who's going faster or slower than you are. Line envy is just where the trouble starts.

Step 2:
(this is the hardest step) - we need to work toward a more civilized queue.

*oh yeah... here was when my blog was going to change the world, on Christmas Day, no less)


Turn my pants into shorts
(30 March 2007)

It's March in Omaha, which means the sun is shining (onto the sun porch), it's occasionally uncomfortably hot both here and outside, and despite the idyllic weather, none of the bars in town have their outdoor seating set up yet.

Early on in our tenure here in Omaha, brooke heard a statistic on the radio (almost certainly false, but nonetheless exceptionally compelling) that Omaha had as many sunny days per year as Fort Lauderdale (or Fort Knox, or perhaps Miami Beach... i can't remember any more). On first moving to Omaha this seemed like an apollionic blessing. Omaha seems to have a lot less of the heavy, bleak, gray season that i remember growing up in southern Wisconsin, and later in Iowa and Minneapolis. Almost every memory i have of Clinton is gray-colored

*this was before i lived in milwaukee again...


Total Sell-Out
(31 May 2007)




Due to the fact that i don't actually have any fans, or anyone really who pays that close of attention to what i do i am officially announcing that i am (or would be, rather) a total sellOut. If ever, any of my future work is of any value to any one with more money than me i will sell it...

But, moreso, over the last few weeks i've been desperately trying to whore out every bit of my life... With a looming move floating overhead, we've been trying to sell as much of our stuff as possible.

*think i covered this one



your time is almost up
(16 October 2007)

While i should be reading Gloria Anzaldua's i'm sure glorious essay "Entering into the Serpent", i find myself instead updating my facebook page. This isn't to say that facebook is to blame for the eventual failure of my students... Colbert's exciting announcement

* Here i was trying to get out of teaching... which i think i've done admirably since...


Bowl Prospector
(21 November 2007)

Evidently, i'm now a fine art collector.

*I was totally going to blog about this... a few weeks ago brooke & i went to a non-profit event called Feed Your Soul, put on by Brigette's company, America's Second Harvest... At this event there was a silent auction on pieces of art shaped like bowls... We won two. Evidently, the Milwaukee Art scene is full of cheap bastards...

Turn my pants into shorts

It's March in Omaha, which means the sun is shining (onto the sun porch), it's occasionally uncomfortably hot both here and outside, and despite the idyllic weather, none of the bars in town have their outdoor seating set up yet.

Early on in our tenure here in Omaha, brooke heard a statistic on the radio (almost certainly false, but nonetheless exceptionally compelling) that Omaha had as many sunny days per year as Fort Lauderdale (or Fort Knox, or perhaps Miami Beach... i can't remember any more). On first moving to Omaha this seemed like an apollionic blessing. Omaha seems to have a lot less of the heavy, bleak, gray season that i remember growing up in southern Wisconsin, and later in Iowa and Minneapolis. Almost every memory i have of Clinton is gray-colored...

Thunder...THunder...THUnder

THUNderSNOW! Whoaaaaaaaa....

Have any of you ever seen thundersnow? Last night on the news the weatherman was talking about it and i was sort of like, yeahsurewhatever, but this morning at 5:24 am Omaha was racked (wracked?) by thundersnow and it was truly a sight to be seen. Blizzard-like snow conditions alongside the booming and crackling of a thunderstorm.

Because Rex Grossman can only occasionally make it through the night these days without having to get up and pee i was up at 3:40 & 4:45 at which time there was literally no snow on the ground and minimal sleet. An hour later (after the thundersnow had started) there was at least a foot and a half of snow on my sidewalk and apocalyptic signs all around...

Seeing the thundersnow was like this world-altering sort of moment, where you sort of think you know how things work, but now rules are being broken and you just have to accept them. It was a big snow storm, but then occasionally, interruptively, the sky would boom & proclaim a thunderstorm... but the snow & wind would continue. It was a very strange thing. We're most of the way dug out, though tomorrow is another snow day for almost everybody... The sight was truly mesmerizing. Two natural phenomena that simply don't belong together working together to impress me... Man i'm a lucky guy...

Bad Umbrella Day

So, it's a swirly-winded, rainy day in Chicago. The walk home featured rain from all directions, and impassible puddles strategically placed to ensure soaked socks. All in all, it's a miserable day for walking home. To illustrate this (which i can't), two blocks south of my apartment i discovered the handle of an umbrella, with no actual umbrella attached (i imagine the cover section of an umbrella {a red one, i think} flying whimsimically through the treetops of Hyde Park, never again to deign to descend to earth...) and pictured the poor sot (sop?) holding just the handle as his umbrella top flies away. Sad rain stories all around.

My walk home featured several umbrella inversions, which, as it turns out isn't overly distressing for my newly purchased Walgreens umbrella. Evidently, my umbrella has an advanced technology that allows it to be inverted (converting it into a useful tool for water collection if stranded on a desert island), but easily changed back into an umbrella by closing and reopening it. Most umbrellas i've owned before this one seem to be permanently changed into a 'water collector' because the flimsy aluminum shafts are bent to hell by the wind.

Walking home also gave me an opportunity to show off my amazing leaping ability, from hopping over small puddles, to huge leaps off of curbs, to complex multiple jumps, kicking off of stoops & fences to avoid particularly long puddles. When i jump, i imagine myself floating gracefully over & landing eloquently (think Jackie Chan or Spiderman), but i'm sure the person behind me on the street sees Drunken Penguin or Club-Footed Gorilla... But i do enjoy it.

Random Momentary Elation (RME)

Once in a great while, a brief moment comes along in my life when suddenly everything seems alright... All my looming problems suddenly have solutions, the sun looks sunnier, my thesis has a thesis... Things seem great. Today this moment lasted from 4:36pm - 4:51, a longer period than such a feeling usually lasts for me, but i was biking home, waving at cursing motorists & smelling the fresh spring dumpsters of Hyde Park...

But now i'm home, and after delaying the Real for an hour with the first episode of Lost (thanks Eric & Bethany) i am rather back to feeling nervously content, happily trepidatious and not a little swoomy. But, this afternoon's RME is not utterly gone from my life, i still have the memory of it and the hope of another such moment soon... now, if i can just remember what the line after "Zombies are good to think with..." is.