October 2008 Archives
We'll be trick-or-treating, dealing with The Boy's burgeoning social calendar, and Hublet and I will treat ourselves to a grown-up dinner to celebrate our anniversary--only one month late--this weekend. See you next week as we brace ourselves for non-stop election hoo-ha!
BTW, did you know Kay Hagan is "Godless?" I'm sorry, but I laughed my butt off at that. It's like an ad from 1674, if we'd had elections back then, and if women had suffrage...
I find lately that laughing my butt off is the only reasonable course of action when dealing with politics.
The Boy is now officially a sleepover-addicted fool. Didn't get home from his first one until 8 p.m. Saturday night, and has been invited to another one this Friday, post Trick-or-Treating.
Our last fall baseball game was last night, and I will miss those goofy boys. That was an awesome team.
If you aren't watching season 4 of Supernatural, a pox upon you. That is all.
Just when I think that I can no longer be appalled by how self-deluded and avaricious people can be, something like this comes along, smacks me in the head, and makes me despair for all of humanity. I mean, shouldn't someone be getting this woman Paxil instead of a book contract? Really?
Class wars, elitism, and the never-ending charges thereof are sucking the very marrow from my bones. Part of the reason Hublet and I stay firmly ensconced in the countryside is because I still live in fear of being stuck at another dinner party where a friend could pipe up, straight-faced, and declare that "We are the intellectual elites!" God help us all if that's the case. Yes, that really did happen, and yes, I was completely mortified. Said friend capped off the evening by calling her (then)-husband an ass in front of the assembled company. Yeah. Give me farmers, cows and guns any day.
Was perusing a tongue-in-cheek blog (UPDATE: blog has vanished into the ether. Have removed link as result.) by an out-of work academic looking for a job, when I came across a reference to a webpage for the Lehigh Humanities Center. The blogger had excerpted the center's description, and wow! It was bad. Bulwer-Lytton bad. So bad that I was skeptical such writing could exist anywhere outside of a pretentious 20-something's literary Livejournal, so I followed his link. Nope, he wasn't making it up. Look upon this webpage, ye literate, and despair:
The Humanities Center is a non-vocational, un-combed approach to education and university be-ing. Mingling in the margins, it is an un-disciplinary place, playing in the puddles created by the discovery of the oozing boundaries that characterize the Humanities. Jumping on the trampolinic tension between the intensities of concentration and the intensities of connection, we invite you to find these spaces between the disciplines, the space where the sparks of intellectual excitement fly, igniting the pleasures and passions of university life.
With this in brain, the Humanities Center is anti-'work hard, play hard' because of its division of work and play, choosing to focus on play of work and the work of play, perhaps re-inventing the very meaning of intellectual work. At this, we focus on movement, action, fluidity, disheveledment and the mingling of bodies, minds, and ideas. Developing a continual re-orientation toward exploratory uncoothness in action, the Humanities Center is faculty, students, and staff cultivating the empowerment that is verb-izing the planet through rumination on connection and community, splashing in the messiness of the intellectual foolery that is academia, the turbulence that is engaged intellectuality.
I mean, what? "With this in brain?" WHAT? "Verb-izing?" WHAT?!?! And also, it's spelled "couth," for crying out loud, and I would just like to take a moment to point out that never in my academic experience have I ONCE "splashed" in "intellectual foolery," unless you count that one philosophy session with the existential fart, but I really don't think that was or should be representative of my experience in the humanities as a whole.
Good grief. Could you do a better job of driving a stake into the tattered remains of the humanities' self-respect and viability as a collection of actual intellectual disciplines?
As usual, I blame the post-modernists. Mainly because it's easy, and as the above description illustrates, easy is apparently what the humanities are all about nowadays.
Apparently second grade is not too young for The Boy to suffer the first slings and arrows of rejection. Since he's a bit tactiturn by nature, I find that the easiest way to figure out what's going on with him is at night, when I just hang out with him in his room for a few minutes at bedtime.
This past Friday, he made one of the offhanded comments that usually lead to a longer saga about something that's bothering him, and after some prompting, I discovered that he had mentioned to a friend of his that he liked a girl in his class, the friend had gone and told said girl, and the girl had responded with, "But he's not cute or tan!" and the girl's best friend had then begun extolling the virtues of one of those interchangeably mono-browed (and tan, although probably fake-tan) Jonas creatures.
So then The Boy pretended that he had been kidding all along to save face, as we do in these situations when we're seven and mortified. It was heartbreaking to hear, and as a bonus double-whammy caused all those uncomfortable flashbacks to the un-fun parts of growing up that I had successfully managed to suppress. Arg.
I'm not good with this stuff, as a rule. I'm not touchy-feely, I'm impatient, and to top it all off my immediate reaction when someone is mean to a family member is to go set something on fire, that something preferably being the person who was mean to my family member. Bottom line: Edna Garrett I am not.
However, I have had enough training in modern social mores to refrain from arson, and so I did the only thing I could think of--after a big hug, and the usual bromides of "that sucks," except edited for a seven-year old audience, I said, "Well she's just a shallow, no freckle-having, scary-hairy Jonas-loving poopyface, so there!"
Amazingly, that seemed to work. I figure I have a few years to figure out how a mature adult can guide a middle-schooler or adolescent through the same trauma, or I can just use my time to come up with more age-appropriate versions of the above insult, just in case.
In other news, Friday will mark The Boy's first foray into a birthday party sleepover. His initial reaction was not enthusiastic, but a new sleeping bag and a promise to tuck puh-dog into his backpack (and a promise that he can call and we'll come get him if he gets scared) changed his mind. For now. I think.
Hair no longer has gray, PTA open house mandatory visit has been completed, and I have absolutely nowhere to be this evening except home. Life is good, and in keeping with that theme, I present:
My favorite:
Because no matter how bad a hair day you may be having, I can guarantee you'll never look that bad.
In the time-honored tradition of academe, professors surge to support one of their own via--what else?--a petition!
Maybe it's just me, but after the whole Duke Lacrosse fiasco and the vaunted "Gang of 88," my only response to gestures such as these is a ginormous eyeroll of "whatever, dude." But not everyone shares my apathy - read the comments section and enjoy!
Gah. Enough of this. In keeping with my recently taken vow of cruel frivolity (yes, I am ripping off Ann Althouse's "vow of cruel neutrality," only my version is way easier on the blood pressure), I am taking the afternoon off to get my hair done. And to read People magazine while I do it! Hah! I may even indulge in a mocha.
Take that, Harbingers Of Serious Business on the Internet!
Yeah. Because every time I turn on the news lately my eyes start to bleed and I can feel my brain running out of my ears--I've decided that frivolity is the way to go!
We went to Myrtle Beach this weekend to see the fam and get a little R&R. It was overcast and rainy, but we were still able to get in the ocean (actually, we were able to stand there, mouth agape, and watch The Boy frolic in the freezing surf with a bunch of equally cold-desensitized Canadians), ride some rides at Broadway at the Beach, swim in the HEATED indoor pool, and eat good seafood.
And I was finally able to use my birthday cash to procure the object of my capitalist lust:
Photo from here.
And let me tell you something - if an economist were to stick a toe inside the Coach outlet at Myrtle Beach, he or she would have NO IDEA that the economy was tanking. Seriously, it was a handbag-crazed free-for-alll in there. Women were snatching up $400 handbags willy-nilly and the salespeople were constantly running back and forth to restock.
Some of it certainly had to do with the sale that day - the bag I bought normally retails for upwards of $350. But it was marked down, then there was an additional 30% off of that, and then, if you gave a lady in a red apron $1, she would give you a coupon for an additional 25% off on top of the 30% on top of the already marked down price. So I didn't even spend all my birthday money, and had enough left over to go blow it at the Oshkosh outlet on clothes for The Boy. (I know. All my cash seems to end up on The Boy's back somehow, but since he refuses to stop growing, I'm not seeing that changing in the forseeable future.)
One of the perplexed Coach salesladies was heard to remark: "What meltdown? Either people are doing better than we thought, or they've all freaked out and decided 'to hell with it, I'm spending my money!''
My money's on the second half of that statement, but then, I'm a pessimist.
In slightly less frivolous news, I've been debating starting my own political party. I'm thinking of calling it the "What the Hell is WRONG with You People" party of populist rage, and am beginning to formulate the list of attributes I'd like my fellow party members to have. So far, I've only settled hard and fast on one thing:
If your political philosophy can be summed up in rhyme, YOU AREN'T WELCOME HERE.
There will be more to come.
So Sunday marked the twelfth year of wedded bliss that Hublet and I have enjoyed. Full disclosure - I always forget that the anniversary is upcoming unless Hublet mentions it in his roundabout way, like, "Sorry, didn't get you a card," and then I'm all, "Oh, no problem!" because I would have been totally screwed if he had remembered, since obviously I wouldn't have, and then he wouldn't have had a card, and then I would have to bake something to make it up to him, or whatever, and that would suck.
Sentimental sops, the both of us, I know.
Anyway, Hublet and I, sad lack of mushy Hallmark crap aside, usually do muster a grown-up meal at a nice restaurant to mark the occasion. But this year fall has been particularly hectic, and the anniversary kind of snuck up on us, so our anniversary celebration ended up being, in this order:
Dinner at the Golden Corral
A matinee of Beverly Hills Chihuahua.
Yeah. Then I capped off my fabulous weekend this morning with a flu shot.
Stop the fun, people, I just can't take much more of it.
Sorry I've been AWOL. Frankly, I'm entering my late election-cycle news/blogs avoidance mode a bit early this year, so I haven't been all that keen on reading or writing.
Plus, LEGO BATMAN remains awesome. And a huge time suck.
And I'm dugout mom - again - and Wednesday's game managed to take out two of our players, and nearly me. One kid hit another one on the head with a bat--IN THE DUGOUT. I KNOW.--and one of the twins, don't ask me which one because I can't tell them apart unless I look at their jersey numbers (did I mention they're FRATERNAL twins? Weird.), got smacked in the mouth with a ball. Blood ensued. Let's just say that my purchase of a first aid kit was prescient.
Overall, though, I am loving The Boy's baseball team this year. They boys are so cute! Well, when they aren't concussing one another with bats or bleeding all over the place, but you know what I mean. My favorites are A., the coach's son who informed me that mostly he's just in this for the snacks; W., who spent 10 minutes discoursing on the kinds of animals you can kill with different calibre weapons (his dad's a big deer hunter), and H.L., who's just a solid little dude, and practically a carbon copy of his dad. The Boy seems to be enjoying himself as well. We have another game tonight - hopefully we will survive with limbs intact, though there are no guarantees.
In other news, I took the satellite dish collar off of the cat. She was so happy she drooled and didn't even spit her pill at me. Dumb cat.
