Theory/Praxis

If you read this blog with any semblance of regularity, you've probably picked up on the fact that I'm into video games. I am by no means hard-core, and I'm also in grad school, so the occasions during which I immerse myself in marathon pixel-killing sessions are not as frequent as I'd like them to be. But. I like video games -- playing them, reading about them, and talking about them with people who play them a lot more than I do. And, for the most part, I have no moral quandaries when it comes to their crudity, violence, and general purposelessness. As I've written before, I think gaming nihilism is kind of a lovely thing. However, there is one video game that I love to play, but that I also have significant moral trepidations toward. That game is Rock Band.

Rock Band: A Theoretical Quagmire (or, how theory destroys everything you love)

The problem with talking about Rock Band is that every list of pros that can possibly be generated in favor of the game will also create a list of corresponding, corollary cons, depending on which social theory one holds dear.

Pro: Rock Band allows people who have no musical talent to feel intimately connected to the process of making music.

Con: You're not really making music when you play Rock Band. You're making what Baudrillard would call hyperreal music, exchanging any ounce of actual creativity you might have tapped during your time in front of the TV for an act of (expensive!) media consumption. Instead of the not-always-fun real act of musical creation -- with all its frustrations, disappointments, and knock-down-drag-outs with your bandmates -- you're being spoonfed the soft cream of rock star ego, skimmed of any real substance.

Pro: Rock Band exposes kids to different genres and music time-periods than what's represented on mainstream radio. In this way, it subverts the hegemony of bland pop by sneaking in classic anthems of alienation, sexuality, and violence.

Con: When the proverbial "everybody" started their own band after hearing The Velvet Underground play in the late 60s and early 70s, I'm not sure anyone could have predicted that this act of rock'n'roll bravado would lead more or less directly to six-year-olds belting out "Smells Like Teen Spirit" in the comfort of their suburban living rooms. But it did. The fact is, music has been co-opted and defanged for a long, long time, and it would be silly to pretend otherwise, or to try to go back to a mythical era when the sight of Elvis's gyrating hips was as dangerous as a Soviet missile. Be that as it may, it's still highly problematic that Nirvana songs, Black Flag songs, fucking Dead Kennedys songs¹ appear on Rock Band -- pruned, streamlines, and with lyrics altered to suit the game's family-friendly rating. No less problematic is the fact that, for any contemporary band, the new benchmark of being established is no longer going gold or platinum or selling out a bunch of shows. It's getting a song on the Rock Band soundtrack. When "alternative" (if that label has any meaning left whatsoever) and pop are collapsed into one homogeneous playing field, there can be no question of the former destabilizing or subverting the latter; rather, everything is subsumed under the rubric of "pop," and music becomes a reified commodity whose sole purpose is to shill Nike products and more copies of Rock Band².

Pro: Rock Band is not a monolithic entity. It's customizable, and, as per the "tactics" of Michel de Certeau, it can be modulated to serve the needs of its player. It lets you bond with your friends by creating alternate virtual personae, cooperating instead of competing, and cementing your friendship through catchy, accessible pop music.

Con: Since I just learned it, I guess I'll apply Bourdieu's concept of "habitus" here.³ When you play Rock Band, you're not just playing a more or less neutral game like cards or checkers -- you're internalizing an entire system of values and fun that can't exist without said game, and your social relations will be structured accordingly. Eventually, you will no longer be able to imagine a world where Rock Band isn't an integral part in your socializing. Habitus turns to doxa, and your subjective experience of the game will turn into the objective reality that Rock Band is "just the funnest, so leave me alone and let me play my fun game, stupid theory!" i.e., Desires socially-conditioned! Agency illusory! Story at 10.

I don't have any real solutions to all of these pressing paradoxes. I'll probably still play Rock Band at every chance I get. I can't do anything truly musical to save my life, and I guess I'm okay with false consciousness and bad faith if, for just one night, it makes me feel like a rock star. I'm only human.

¹ Remember that time when we actually cared that a Dead Kennedys song was going to be used in a Levis commercial? ... yeah, that was 20 years ago -- this is now.

² Frank, Thomas. "Alternative To What?" Conclusions slightly dated in today's high-tech world, but still far and away the best article on the alt-rock paradox of the 90s and beyond. See also: Frank, Thomas and Matt Weiland. Commodify Your Dissent.

³ Peer review welcome here. I'm still shaky on my Bourdieu.

Oh. My. God.

*

Photoshop is the new Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres!

Seriously, though. We've had artistically-deformed female anatomy since 16th century Mannerism. With all respects and propers to the ubiquitousness and veracity claims of today's 'shopped images, it's still kind of funny that people freak out like this is a New Thing.

* One of my favorite paintings of all time. Of all time!

Subcultures!

(Did I mention that I love them?)

On a hung-over Saturday, there is literally nothing better in the world than eating microwaved Totino's Pizza Rolls^tm and watching videos of South African crypto-rave-rap.

Your official introduction to the greatest thing on the Internet:

Taxijam presents Die Antwoord from taxijam on Vimeo.

The first time I stumbled upon the (unintentionally?) comedic rap stylings of Die Antwoord (warning: NSFW sound), I was mildly intrigued, but I couldn't force myself to slog through all five and a half minutes of that first video -- it seemed to teeter too precariously on the edge of painful ridiculousness. But after having read a few articles about them on Pitchfork (1,2), I'm starting to come around. The most amazing thing about this band is that its positioning in the liminal space between conceptual art and "third-world" rap (so hot right now) only underscores the tremendous mutability and potentiality of the gangsta aesthetic. The entire concept of hustling, with its insistence on impresario-like showmanship, carries with it a not-so-secret tinge of unabashed fraudulence. The subtext is straight out of P.T. Barnum's playbook: a sucker (favorite rap insult) is born every minute, and we're here to make money off of them. And yet, paradoxically, the lyrical content of rap is all about genuineness, of keeping it real and representing... something -- usually, a neighborhood, city, state, or coast. As I mentioned in my previous discussion of subcultures and nationalism, the link between turf and self is a seductively universal one.

In the hands of non-Americans, though, the bipartite structure of charlatanism and solemnity is taken to a whole new level ("next-level," to use Die Antwoord's parlance) as the inherent artifice of the rap persona is highlighted and the contradiction factor ratcheted up a few notches by the use of American-born rap to rep a "genuine [insert nation] style." And yet, as with Lil Wayne's consciously ridiculous take on "Fuck Tha Police," heightened self-awareness and promiscuous appropriation does not necessarily equal worse or degenerate art. I would argue that, on the contrary, by doing away with kitschy sentimental notions of earnestness and originality in the lyrical voice (I mean, seriously, nobody wants Ke$ha to think she is Keats), rap as a genre is more liberated, more thoroughly postmodern, and has much more potential to create bizarrely awesome new things. This has its ups and downs, of course (cough, Ke$ha), but in the end, I think we can all agree that the freaky carnival side-show that is Die Antwoord makes the world a better place. Totally zef.

The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction

Today, I helped edit footage for a documentary on cigarette smuggling in Eastern Europe. I'd already done quite a bit of transcription and translation prep work -- hours of tedious mp3-playing and agonizing over how to dejargonize the elliptical mishmash of Ukrainian/Russian/Sovietese of border guards and customs agents. But today, I actually met with the filmmaker and editor at their cozy home-base overlooking the Charles and got to see the tangible fruits of my labor -- a highlighted print-out script representing the admixture of a few ghostly audio files and the random rare language serendipitously embedded in my brain. And this fruit was ready to be peeled, pared, and made into near-finished-product salad.

My only previous experience with film editing was on a field trip to the Harvard Film Archive, where I got to fiddle with a strip of The Man With the Movie Camera on a real-life Steenbeck. Unfortunately, the Mac-alicious contemporary version of this technology is somewhat anticlimactic. After watching the editor cobble together some frames through the time-honored technique of drag and drop, I realized that, as with Photoshop or html, it was probably something I could teach myself if I ever had the inclination (more on this later) and a weekend to spare. Nonetheless, it was thrilling to witness an undifferentiated lump of footage go through a pixel thresher and emerge as a choppy but utterly coherent storyline -- so thrilling, in fact, that I may have gasped and grinned and otherwise broadcast my delight with such infantile eagerness that the editor was a bit taken aback. "It's just so... cool!" I kept gushing, to which she responded with a resolute, "... is it? I guess." This is what the Lumiere Brothers' first audience must have been like.

I'm beginning to suspect -- and my reaction to Film Editing 101 only serves to confirm the suspicion -- that the singular feature uniting most grad students in the humanities (and literature especially) is a combination of moderate to above-average intelligence and total fucking idiocy. Of course, I mean the latter (mostly) in the Dostoevskian sense: humanities people are the holy fools of the world, the simpleminded Alyoshas who delight in miracles and magic and other increasingly marginalized byproducts of good, sober Protestant-work-ethic capitalism. We don't like real science; we like "evolutionary biology." We don't like real psychology; we like Lacan. And we certainly don't like to realize that the very stuff we study (be it film, literature, or art) is made by human hands, out of earthly matter, and is in many respects the end result of a very un-magical labor process. We may pay lip service to this realization by appending "historical context" and "reception history" to the bulleted list of interests on our CV, but that's not why we get into what we get into. We're in it for the illogical, the irrational, the fantasy cults of Beauty and Genius. Which is why, behind even the nice young professional editor using a perfectly utilitarian software editing program, there lurks the secret hand of the divine.

Which brings me to the corollary of the above suspicion: this is also why most grad students in the humanities (and literature especially!) are totally incapable of creating art. It's not just the old "... those who can't, teach" chestnut. I think it's specifically that, in spite of our extensive knowledge of the craft behind our object of study, we (and admittedly, I'm abstracting from personal experience here) are so enthralled with magical thinking that creation, rather than interpretation or explication, feels unbearably... well, mundane. When reading about various authors' writing habits, for example, I've often found myself marveling: You mean I actually have to write out a draft of a story? And take notes? And then revise? Agony! Why can't the divine hand simply guide my pen through three hundred pages of unimpeachable perfection? Sing to me, O Muse! Et cetera. And sitting at the editing table (well, computer desk) today, I found myself simultaneously enamored with the product and trying to elide the realia of the process; i.e., that the narrative was being created not through some chimerical Kuleshovean theory of montage, but through the simple act of cutting and pasting.

This is where the aforementioned inclination part comes in. I could write a story, or even make a film. I have, I should hope, the intellectual capacity and the creativity to maybe, possibly make something good. What I don't have is any Protestant work ethic, and that, my friends, means one of three options for my kind: PhD, Pizza Hut, or public high school. There is no middle ground.

V-Day special

I've been reading a lot of Baroque poetry lately. In an article on the devices of the genre, specifically the conceit (something I may be appropriating extensively these days, ahem), I came across something I probably already knew intuitively but had never thought about in so many word. The author was arguing that the sonnet was the perfect Baroque poetic form because the profession of love carries with it the favorite Baroque antithesis: sensual, near-ecstatic earthly pleasure on the one hand, and, on the other, the realization that this pleasure is transient, brief, destined to wither and die.

This isn't just a Judeo-Christian concept, of course. Buddhism relies almost exclusively on this feature of mortality, but it seems to have found a much healthier coping mechanism in its mantra of cheerful self-abnegation. Christianity, though, is obsessed to the point of neurosis with desire, and, in fact, often tends to whip up the ecstatic frenzy factor while trying, very nominally, to curtail it. In that sense, my own relationship to desire is a very Christian one. In moments of pleasure, I find myself reacting with a weird ecstatic-melancholic hybrid, already lamenting the inevitable loss of happiness that the ravages of time will enact. And the impulse to write, in catalog form, the chronicle of my life is yet another manifestation of this antithesis -- trying desperately to fix a memory within a static frame, but at the same time mourning the imperfection of that fixture, the irretrievable loss of experience and visceral pleasure.

Thing is, seeing as how the melancholic factor is tied so intimately to my experience of happiness, pain becomes contaminated with pleasure. Not to put too sadomasochistic a point on it, but it's the awareness of transience that, paradoxically, brings significance (weight, as Kundera would say) to events. The hug, the kiss, the.... well. A desperately sweet kind of immobilization -- like trying to pin a live butterfly.

Ca$h money

In the past three years, I've owned five different Bank of America debit cards. Two were lost to identity theft. One was sacrificed in the name of matrimony. One suffered debilitating paralysis when I forgot its PIN number, and the last expired of natural causes. The long and short of it is, I'm no good with plastic. Every time I approach an ATM, I feign the blank, blasé stare of those ahead of me in line for the infernal machine, but secretly, what I'm always thinking is: Please, please, please work for me this time. As one can deduce from the above, the statistical level of success for this ATM rain-dance is approximately the same as a New England weather reporter's. I do not, in point of fact, make it rain.

I've noted earlier that my relationship to money is characterized by willful distrust and magical thinking. Yet, in spite of having no concept of "responsible spending," and in spite of earning a salary that would make a Starbucks barista laugh, I've somehow managed to be able to buy everything I've ever needed -- mostly to the tune of alcohol, food, and plane tickets to exotic foreign and domestic locales (in descending order of necessity). Whenever the routine ATM error message occurs and I can't get my hot, greasy mitts on the "hard-earned" cash trapped so pathetically behind the impersonal glass screen, I always think of how my father talked about not getting tenure: "You do your job, and at the end of the month there's a check in your box. Then, one day, there's no check." The pitiful way he said this -- curled around a full glass of whiskey, deep in the throes of the depression that would haunt him for years because of this one stupid professional snafu -- terrified me. I never wanted to feel like that, like somehow I'd slipped through the cracks of some nice consistent system and plunged into the bowels of Kafkaesque chaos.

But the older I get, and the more times I'm frozen out of my own stupid bank account for months on end, the more I realize that while I may have inherited many of my father's irrational fears, this one is something we feel fundamentally different about. Because when I do get that error message, I just laugh. (Well, curse profusely, and occasionally give the machine a light kick. Then comes the laughing part.) With all the truly terrible things that can happen to a person over the course of his/her life -- illness, fire, robbery, rape... -- what's the point of worrying so much about obviously temporary monetary glitches? I guess it helps that I don't have any Alpha-Immigrant hangups, and it helps that I do have a plucky American in-home support system (who knows a thing or two about Roth IRAs). But what's particularly useful to acknowledge, and what I'm probably going to end up teaching my parents the hard way one of these days, is that the fastest way to misery is thinking there's some teleological relationship between the goodness of your soul, the strength of your innate talents, and the presence or absence of that paycheck in your box. My father, with all his talk of the superiority of acetic monks over his lowly fallen self, has been circling around that realization in the form of mystical religiosity for a long time, but those pesky bourgeois values (order = virtue! check in box!) just keep sucking him back. I want him, and mom, too, to accompany me to an ATM one day. I want things, as usual, to go bad. I want to see my parents express the cringing horror they always do when something like this happens, and then I want to point to that error screen and say, "See? Look, it's all so stupid. It's a broken calculator, just a bunch of crossed wires and bad code. It's annoying and frustrating and will take a lot of shit work to fix, but guess what? Ultimately? It. Isn't. Real."

Of course, things might change once kids come into the picture and I am tempted by the trap of giving them "the best of everything," whatever that is -- but hopefully not too much. If there's one thing I want to retain of my twentysomething self, it's the ability to parse through bourgeois bullshit and come out none the worse for wear.

To the break of dawn

Three things you should know about Bad Lieutenant, Port of Call: New Orleans:

First, see it.

Second. The reptilian eye. To say that Werner Herzog has an abiding fascination with man's bestial nature is a bit of an understatement. However, I think Bad Lieutenant is one of his best cinematic treatments of not just the somewhat banal human/animal comparison, but the more eerie attempt to view reality through the cerebral mechanisms of other species. The menagerie of (mostly non-mammalian) creatures in the film is lingered over obsessively by the camera eye. We are shown extreme close-ups of a sinuous snake moving through water; the ethereal fins of a fish swimming in a shallow cup; the warty skin, hissing mouth, and blank double-lidded eye of iguanas; even the exploded guts of an alligator hit by a car. All of this animal fetishization creates strange parallels between the unhinged sociopath that is Nicholas Cage at his finest and the dimly predatory, amphibious reptiles swimming, slithering, and shuffling their way through the (Bad) Lieutenant's life. Interestingly, this heightens the film's already notable exercise in destabilization and detachment. At any given moment, nothing is as it seems. Not only have all the generic cues (is this a B-movie or an art-house gem?) gone out the window, but the very notion of being emotionally invested in the on-screen action begins to wear thin with each successive bizarre twist of the plot. And yet, there's another axis of the film -- the mammalian one, if you will -- that's all big-eyed dogs and cute babies, and that doesn't ever let you get too far from cheering, gasping, and otherwise suspending your superior pomo disbelief. A fine line, and Herzog nails it.

Third. I love that the entire film was shot on those days (either mid-August or, most likely, sometime in March, when the heat isn't so oppressive) when dark storm-clouds roll over half the New Orleans skyline and cast everything in a particularly gloomy slate-gray hue. This is hands-down my favorite New Orleans weather, the kind of days made specifically for leaning over a porch rail, smoking a cigarette, and contemplating the mysteries of the human experience. So many films shot in "The South" tend to go for the yellow filter -- either gently vaselined to denote the sentimental South, or loudly overexposed for that insistent tone of edgy social commentary. Bad Lieutenant doesn't play that game, and it also doesn't mess around with Katrina kitsch. Aside from one FEMA marking on a door, there is no obvious visual reference to Katrina, and even the neighborhoods they show, roughed up though they may be, are not even a tenth as post-apocalyptic as much of the real CBD and Midcity still is. I felt like I was watching the pre-Katrina city that I remembered from my first three years of school -- a city that didn't need a massively destructive hurricane to be moody and poignant.

Bonus! Xzibit!

Conceit

In high school, I couldn't stomach the packed lunchroom, with its overwhelming odor of ground taco meat and pungently flowering adolescent bodies. Instead, I'd go out into the ninety-degree Mississippi midday, sit on the edge of a picnic table crowded with loud impervious black kids, and apply a ballpoint pen to my left arm. Over the course of the forty-five minute lunch period, that arm would sprout delicate curlicues, arabesques, symmetrical patterns, or amorphous blobs, depending on my mood and level of dedication. Very often, I'd bleed my pen dry. After half a day of scan-trons, motivational posters, gum-caked radiators, and sad wilted ferns in the main office, I needed to reclaim some small part of myself, to stake it in the name of beauty and artifice. Paper wouldn't do; I needed to feel the ink on my skin, and to wear that ink as one part defiance, one part mystical apotropaic shield protecting me from the numbing force of reality. Lately, I've been getting that same urge to scribble on my flesh -- although this time, not pseudo-henna tattoos on my hands, but intricate art nouveau orchids on my cheek, blossoming from apple to temple. Instead, I apply tasteful eyeliner, shadow, mascara, and, as a last resort to quell my teeth-gritting frustration, the occasional splash of glitter. The numbness presses into me, and I can't seem to find a good way to press back.

I spend a lot of time worrying that I will never be able to transcend this level of ornamental artisanship, to transfer those lines to a less ephemeral medium. So much of my personality demands defiant postures going hand-in-hand with raw self-expression, but that's the stuff of high school. If I could only learn to stop loving that dumb white girl with the ink-smeared arms and cabaret makeup. If only she could learn to embellish anything but herself.

Synaesthetic kitchen glossary

Crave

v. to strongly desire a hard, crispy, heavily-salted snack -- including but not limited to: 1) crunchy cheese sticks, baked cheese crackers, or other assorted permutations of heat-hardened carbohydrate and lactose enzymes, 2) tortilla chips slathered with cheese, meat, guacamole, and/or salsa, 3) sea salt and vinegar potato chips

Moist

adj. of or relating to Duncan Hines cake commercial cakes; fork-tender; emitting a generous oozing of frosting and/or rich, sweet sauce upon contact with cutlery or teeth

Splurge

v. to drench in salad dressing, including but not limited to -- Italian, ranch, Catalina, warm bacon, raspberry vinaigrette; the squirting sound/motion of dressing being forcefully ejected from a plastic bottle

Succulent

adj. used only in reference to a particularly tasty crab leg

Platter

n. syn: hedonism

Transubstantiation, cont'd

Today was a quiet milestone in my time as amateur chef: it was the first time I ever made good old-fashioned New Orleans style roux.

Having eased my way into the world of temperamental flour-based sauces with a recent foray into homemade béchamel (which I suppose one could argue belongs within the roux family), I didn't feel too intimidated... though I do admit, at one point, to frantically, mid-stir, instant messaging a fellow New Orleans expat and pleading for him to tell me when it was supposed to be done. The final product looked like thick chocolate fondue and tasted like smoky heaven, so I believe I can say with some modicum of confidence: mission accomplished. Tomorrow, we'll see how the gumbo turns out.

Though I'm usually a spontaneous throw-shit-together kind of cook, I definitely feel that there is a time and place for fussy dish babysitting. I'm especially enamored with time-consuming stirring processes, which always put me in the meditative trance of a Shakespearean hag contemplating the future in her roiling cauldron. Conveniently, stirring also tends to be the catalyst for certain brands of alchemical magic -- hard grains of rice suddenly softening, plumping, drawing warm, rich moisture into their naked hulled bodies; mealy flour and shimmering oil fusing into one paste-thick composite, passing through various stages of darkness, from vanilla creme to caramel pudding to full-on Hershey's; stratified layers of liquids and solids succumbing to Brownian motion and condensing into a hearty stew.

When I was in 6th grade, I wrote a story about the accidental creation of the world by two ur-Beings experimenting with a soup recipe. Clearly, the magic of métissage, in the best sense, has never worn thin. What was once handfuls of discrete substances has become a gestalt of colors, textures, and flavors, with only a teasing hint of the elements it has absorbed. And although I might know some of the basic science behind it (about as much as Alton Brown has ever taught me) I still prefer to see that split second -- when rice turns to risotto, flour and oil to roux, chocolate and hot cream to ganache -- as a dash of otherworldly charm in our otherwise quite charmless universe.

(T)omb(r)es à paupières

So, I finally got myself a small notebook-style planner -- because it's one thing to muse abstractly on the virtues of organization, and another thing entirely to start a project as sprawling and unwieldy as a dissertation without the slightest fucking idea how to parcel it into digestible chunks.

*

If you're like me, you have a hard time shopping. If you're like me, you're also 25 years old and have not yet managed to accrue any credit because you are yet to own your first real big-person credit card, so if you are like me, I'm sorry. But, at any rate. If you're like me, shopping is an ambivalent endeavor, at once gratifying and horrible. Gratifying, because living in this country and stepping into a supermarket instantly makes you feel so incredibly wealthy. Just behold this subsidized bounty! A few measly dollars for age-defying greasepaint guaranteed to smooth, tone, enrich, and take years off your complexion! A handful of coin for a cellophane packet of brightly-colored undergarments! Mere pocket change for a variety of sugared waters, overflowing with sucralose, electrolytes, and B vitamins! What do I need B vitamins for? Who knows! The bottle assures me they're part of a "hydration trifecta," and in my sandpaper-lipped, feverish state -- which takes hold of me whenever I step foot in any kind of store and is only slightly aggravated by the mischievous rhinoviri currently replicating in my body -- I snatch up three 32 ounce bottles. Here, in this moment, pressing the molded plastic to my chest, I have at last shattered the fairy ring of direct deposits, credit transfers, and online bank statements. Here, as I clutch this screaming purple liquid, the ethereal wealth that has been floating in cipher form through some cosmically immaterial realm, anchored to me only through easily-forgotten passcodes and PINs, is materialized. Here is the glory of the transubstantiation.

And then I get to the makeup aisle.

Shopping for sustenance (sustenance? screaming purple energy drink in "grape and other natural flavors" is sustenance now?) is one thing. But shopping for any personal accoutrement, be it liquid, gas, or solid, is another beast entirely. Here I can stand for twenty minutes staring in despair at a collection of shimmery eye makeup, wondering with infinite seriousness which one of these miniature palettes best reflects my inner being, my soul, my eternally Platonic glassy essence. This is where the creeping horror comes in, slowly washing over my body in the layer of sweat that results from standing too long under fluorescent lighting in a heavy coat and assorted winter knittery. All of these diminutive plastic vials, tubes, hinged compacts, bottles, and jars cast their reflective glare at me, novice and amateur that I am, as I make my way timidly down the infinitely long beauty aisle. And that feeling of triumph, of satisfaction with the cornucopia of the world that just came from my impending purchase of sickness-dispelling energy drink, it's all seeped out of me. Because here is death staring me square in the face. She is smiling, radiant, illuminated through a complex triangulation of airbrush, floodlight, and Photoshop. Like the embittered middle-aged director in Synechdoche, New York, she is telling me that I am young now and only playing the part of someone who knows about the despair and decay of the flesh, but that the real irony is that I'm on my way to knowing that lesson all too well. No amount of B vitamins will save me. No amount of Visa Power Rewards Points^tm will save me. No amount of Revlon Perle 011 Lilac Shimmer^{NEW! NOUVEAU! NUEVO!} slathered on my rapidly aging corpse will save me. Like my short-lived rhinovirus companion, I am doomed to an inglorious end. After a brief stint of tormenting my biosphere, my energy will wither like a paralyzed spirochete's, and all that frenetic motion and dreaming of conquest will have been for naught.

*

Okay, "post to blog!!" checked off today's lengthy planner to-do list. Now, uh... on to reading the entirety of Les Mots et Les Choses? I don't think I've quite gotten the hang of this parceling thing.

Pastry items

A lot of my life feels, to overuse the empty cliche of my generation, random. This randomness operates at both the macro and micro levels -- my academic and avocational interests; the clothes and jewelry I acquire and wear; my inability to properly descend or ascend a staircase, because I'll suddenly, inexplicably, last-second decide to take two steps rather than one, inevitably losing my balance and looking like a flailing pinwheel-armed idiot.

That's why I'm so fascinated by people who seem immanently ordered, exuding a soothingly coherent stability and scientific repeatability in everything from folding a shirt to eating a meal. I like to observe these people as they undertake some mundane task and mentally record the steps and their sequence. Sometimes, I do this to steal the script and later, secretly, replicate these sequences in situations I find particularly perplexing (dealing with waitstaff/store clerks/bartenders springs instantly to mind). But I also just take childish, gleeful pleasure at the elegance of a particularly ordered performance, wherein every detail is invested with infinite precision and care. I'm sure the observed parties would be surprised by the joy these undoubtedly unconscious, mechanized actions bring to me, and it's possible that they would see their reliance on rigidity not so much therapeutic as neurotic. But like the crucial role that nymphs or angels play in the fantasy life of dreamy pre-teen girls, these mythical ordered beings, leading lives so completely alien to mine, are absolutely essential to my view of reality. It's nice to get the occasional visitor's pass into their world.