Desperate attempts to make one's intelligence not a liability in the eyes of the opposite sex

Ok, here's me in college:
"Hey! Hey, if you go out with me, I'll do your homework for you! Oh... Oh -- okay. I'll just...do your homework anyway, then. If that's ok."

Which, hey, it's college -- if there's ever a time that you're allowed to be a total mark for stupid boys with pretty eyes, it's then. But the thing is? I'm 22 now, and I still do this. It's like nothing's changed at all.

Well, ok, it's not totally the same. Different boys, different subjects, different continents. Nobody's in college anymore, at least undergrad, and no one's in danger of getting bounced because Descartes' locus prop has No Mercy. And really, a lot of things are different: I'm...well, I'm something approaching happy and secure, which is a far fucking cry from the college days.

But even now. These boys. They come to me with their articles they've written for scholarly journals, and their presentations that they have to give in English, the whole thing, and they're panicked, and their big brown eyes are pleading...I'm not made of stone, how can I say no to that?

"Try this thing called 'growing a spine'," one might suggest, and one might in fact have a point there. Nonetheless, the fact remains that no matter how many times you discover that half a loaf is in many cases totally not better than none...no matter how many times and in how many ways you're forced to confront that truth....you...you just...but...they're...but...brown eyes...


Exactly.


Oh well. At least I have more clarity about it now. And they're pretty good about buying me beer afterwards, which is probably more than I'd get if I were getting actual romantic attention from them.


Plus...I like doing this shit. I read their articles and presentations and whatnot, and I whip them into shape, y'all. It's amazing to me that these guys can reach Ph.D. candidate status without figuring out that when you write something, or give a speech, or whatever, it's a good idea for it to maybe have a point. I don't know, maybe they had easy teachers all along. Or maybe they just got smart chicks to do their homework for them. It's a mystery.

And the universe is shaped exactly like the earthIf you go straight long enough, you'll end up where you were

--Modest Mouse, "3rd Planet"

So like a month and a half ago, someone asked me what I missed most about America. And...I couldn't think of anything. I mean, ok, I miss my friends, but I won't really be much closer to most of them when I'm stateside. And I guess ready access to cheap sushi would be nice, but...really? There wasn't a single thing I could point to that I missed about living there, or that I'm looking forward to now that I'm going back in ten days. Which is bleak as hell, and kind of made me sad, since it's not like I loathe the U.S.

But I was listening to this song, 3rd Planet, and all of a sudden I came up with what I do miss about the States...and it sounds almost bleaker than missing nothing. What I miss about America is: the atheists. That seems strange, given that atheism is pretty much the norm in Europe, especially in the Czech Republic. Pretty much everyone I've met here is a mild and unexamined atheist; when they find out that I'm Catholic, on more than a purely ethno-cultural level, they react not with hostility, but with mild amazement. It's like I've just announced that I've made it my life's work to collect antique paperweights; they're not judging at all, they're just kind of mystified as to why I would remotely care about that stuff. God is just not...something that occurs to them even to wonder about, it seems like.

Whereas almost everyone in the U.S. is a mild and unexamined "believer in a Spirit that moves through all of us" or some such shit. It's at least somewhat rare to find an American who flat-out doesn't believe in God, at all. And...this doesn't seem to me to be much closer to the truth than the European attitude. Plus it's more annoying. Shut up with the fucking angels, America. People talk about angels like they're little cute God-substitutes, with the fun powers but minus the scary judging thing.

But. The point is. The corollary to this American attitude is that those who do take that stand, that God doesn't exist, take the position more seriously. At least for some of them, it seems like the fact of having to consciously choose that belief makes them more aware of what a tragic discovery it is. They're not comfortably at peace with it, they're full of resentment and grief. Like people who've realized they're being cheated. And not because they thought there was a god and there isn't. It's because your soul needs God, or something, like a drowning man needs air, and you can sense that, even if you never articulate it to yourself on a rational level. And so what kind of a bullshit world is it where you ache for something you can't name, that doesn't even exist? If there is no God, then we're children abandoned by parents we never even saw.

Which is why I started thinking about this just now. Because I'm listening to Modest Mouse, who embody this attitude more than anyone else I can think of. Their songs are like all of Flannery O'Connor's characters rolled into one: the tragic bitter atheist, who doesn't believe, and faces up to the full bleak reality of what that unbelief means. There is no God, and it's a fucking tragedy. There is no God, and why is there anything at all? There is no God, and we'll never forgive him for not being.

And now for something even shallower, albeit somewhat cryptic:

Written while drinking Svijany 11°, shortly after grading 67 individual three-page Phonology exams.

Such a beautiful short tough word. Starts with a fricative, voiceless of course. Voiced consonants are pussy -- it would be /v/ if it was voiced, and how would that sound? Exactly: gay. And it's a fricative, for maximum catharsis: a fricative is like the perfect combination of the force of a consonant and the flowing air of a vowel. Your upper teeth dig into your bottom lip as you hiss your way into the word. Then to the vowel itself, a grunt almost, the back of your tongue lifted to within a fraction of the soft palate. Your whole tongue's close to the roof of your mouth, so it's an effortless move from the initial consonant: all you have to do is widen your lips and you're there. And then the finish, the final consonant: hard and gutteral and voiceless, yes, and where's it articulated? The soft palate of course, just a millimeter away from that unobtrusive little vowel sound! A brilliant finish: whether left unaspirated or given that extra push of breath at the end, its plosive force cuts off the air and then releases it, like the sound you make when you get punched in the stomach. It ends the word like a full-body hit in a mosh pit, that leaves you gasping for breath, and slamming back for more.

Yeah, I'm...not sure where that came from. It's in the same format as one of the answers I was looking for on the Phonology exam: take a word and dissect it, discuss the articulation of each phoneme in order. Despite the fact that the word above is, needless to say, not one of the ones I asked them to analyze, I would have been absolutely thrilled if someone had turned in the above paragraph. Because, mark you, it gives all the relevant information for each phoneme, and! It uses complete sentences! You wouldn't think it'd be that hard! But the little twits cannot get it straight.

I'm...gonna go lie down now.

A posting drought this long can only be broken by something deeply deeply shallow

A conversation from at least three years ago, with my girl C.B.:

R: I like some ass on a guy.
C: Ok, now, do you mean "I like some ass on a guy," or do you mean "I like some ass on a guy"?

And I must admit that it was the latter. Still is, in fact. I can't help it; some boys can seriously rock a ghetto booty.

Beautiful beautiful crazy talk

This was part of an anonymous comment on this blog. It was prompted by a reference to the practice of waxing one's pubic hair.

Creating pedaphilic minded spouses is not a goal in life - Heaven is!

I mean, damn. I don't even know how to explain what's so mindbendingly funny about that comment -- the term "cognitive disconnect" comes to mind, as does the term "spit-take," and possibly also "Bitch crazy." But other than that...I'm kind of speechless here. Speechless, but grateful. It's moments like these that give me true appreciation for the Interweb and the joys that it brings.

My new favorite phrase

It's kind of too much, you know? It would be like if the Queen woke you up every morning. Too Special.

--Raymond Smuckles

Sometimes I have a hell of a lot of work to do for my job. (Jedno's rolling her eyes and heaping calumny on my head right now. Um, sorry.)

Then again, other days I get paid to sit in my office and read Achewood all the live-long day. So good.

Since I'm in the process of grading EIGHT GAZILLION phonology exams, I thought this was appropriate. I got to it from Donzilla.

Your Linguistic Profile:

55% General American English

40% Dixie

5% Upper Midwestern

0% Midwestern

0% Yankee

What Kind of American English Do You Speak?

It's pretty accurate...I don't have a very strong Southern accent, being from Atlanta, the motherlode of Whiny Expat Yankees. But my accent's definitely there somewhere...at some point we were all in the car, and my parents called my cell phone. So I shoot the shit with them for a while, and when when I get off the phone, the other people are all like, "Damn, girl! You just started talking like Dolly Parton!"

And I was all, "Hell naw, she from Tennessee. Georgia accent's way different." And it is.

Good luck abstracting the universal from this one

Being a teacher has been bloody enlightening in a number of ways, especially since I spent so many years being taught. For one thing, I now understand the hostility that teachers tend to direct at smart(ass) kids: because the little bastards are fucking with your lesson plan. You do not want to fuck with the lesson plan, shorty. The lesson plan is all that stands between the teacher and a classroom full of bored 18-year-olds with 40 minutes to go in the lesson and there's just been a memo about not letting them out early and there's nothing up your sleeve sweet heaven what are you going to do? This is the kind of existential crisis that leads my lamer colleagues to play Hangman for upwards of forty minutes, when by rights Hangman should not be "played" by anyone who's mastered the multiplication table.*

But that's not what I do. I'm far more sophisticated: I write the word "Sexcapades" on the board, and say, "In groups. Discuss." Because come on, that's all they want to talk about anyway, that and beercapades. Come to think of it, that's pretty much all I want to talk about, and I'm, hey, almost four years older than some of them.

This has all been a long tangent on the way to revealing: I am a really unfair grader. Well, I'm not, according to my lights...it's just that the test formats I've painstakingly come up with turn out to be kind of subjective when I actually get around to grading said tests. This can be blamed to some extent on the fact that I do the absolute minimum required to meet each successive deadline as it comes upon me...my motto is, fuck the stitch in time, let's have a beer and we'll just do nine tomorrow at the last minute! And then I curse my lazy ways the next day, but whatever, I had a good time the night before.

Speaking of procrastinating...I haven't posted anything, or answered emails, or anything for the past few days because I'm so damn busy. But this current flood of eloquence? Is because there are literally fifty phonology exams on my desk, that I should really grade before tomorrow. And it's 9pm now. Whoo.

But so anyways. I'm realizing, as I grade the fairly subjective sections of the phonology exams, that the grade I give the kid is largely dependent on how much I like the kid. This isn't as unfair as it sounds; I like a lot of the kids, but especially the ones who speak English well and participate in class actively. And, um, laugh at my jokes. Hey, it shows comprehension! And knowing what side their bread is buttered on!

And this makes me realize that probably most teachers do this. Not on, like, strictly math exams, I guess. But exams like the ones we took at the college? Totally...I don't even think you can help it, to some extent.

I'm not sure what point I was making with this. I'm just going to hit Publish now. And then I'm going to grade those bleeding Phonology exams. Yeah.

*except for the time we were driving back from Berkeley in toque's tiny little no-AC VW, all the way down the 5 in July, and I was in the backseat next to clara, and we seriously thought the skin on our legs was going to meld to the seats it was that fucking hot, and so after we got bored of trying to get bauble to flirt with girls in other cars,** we played hangman on the back of an envelope. the first word was "buttcheeks", and it was downhill from there. and then when it finally got cooler, we tried to roll up the windows some, and then we discovered exactly how much we'd all been sweating, and we rolled them right the hell back down again....good memories.

**and it worked! he smiled at them! and several of them smiled back so hard they almost ran off the road!