Abstraction and Self-Bludgeoning

In case the title hasn't already tipped you off, abstract thinking makes me want to bash my own brains in. That's really the short version of this post, so if you don't care much more beyond that, read no further. (See, this is what I've been telling my students about audience: hook them at the start, make sure you appeal to them, state your thesis up-front, and if they don't care, fuck 'em. I do, in fact, practice what I preach sometimes.)

Being an English major is great for two big reasons: 1) so many people think of reading as entertainment or diversion, so the prospect of receiving monetary compensation by participating in such an activity is both mind-blowing and wonderful; and 2) the field encompasses so many different areas that you're bound to find an area of great interest and be able to make exciting new headway in that direction.

As one might expect, though, with this freedom and expansiveness comes the need for some self-limitation. I consider my professional specialty to be 19th-Century British literature, but I frequently read things outside my field both for critical purposes and for pleasure. (See my running commentary of recent reads for indisputable proof.) Granted, some of this is the result of class requirements, which is in all academic disciplines the nature of the beast. But even if I were a rabid fan of science fiction, American Modernism, Romantic poetry, Renaissance drama, and post-structuralism, the truth remains that pursuing them all in a professional career will leave one hopelessly behind all those fields and an expert at none of them. Thus, specificity.

The hardest part of the task of specificity is narrowing down one's likes to the far smaller set of one's loves -- and, in the ultimate test of professional commitment, narrowing the set of one's loves to the (usually single-membered) set of critical and publication-worthy interests. The easy part, by consequence, is figuring out what it is you don't particularly like -- or, even easier, what you don't want to do for the rest of your life. For instance, I like Chaucer but I'm not especially fond of the rest of Medieval lit: that's out. I'm a grammar freak, but I don't really want to teach or write on grammatical properness (or even impropriety) until I'm settled into a pine box: that, too, is out. Even one's loves -- contemporary fiction, for instance -- can be quickly discarded when one considers that the skills he brings to Modern, Post-Modern, and other such "weird" texts may not be sufficient to allow for eventual expertise.

For me, though, I've decided that the single easiest thing to knock off the list of potential specialties is theory. Why? Because it's a complete enigma to me, one that is wrapped in so many layers of further mystery and riddle that its messages, conclusions, and even purpose cannot in any way be elucidated by my feeble, insufficient mind. It sails way over my head, like a fly ball you think you'll be able to catch but ends up buried in the cheap seats of the upper deck. I swat feebly trying to grasp it, but it just never seems to work.

It must take a special kind to truly appreciate theoretical work, which only confirms my belief that I'm not special at all. Consider my adventures, this week, with a single theorist, Jacques Derrida, in my Introduction to Graduate Study class. In no other class have I yet experienced reading that is so dense and practically unintelligible that I can read 10 pages, put the book down, and confidently say aloud, even in an empty room, "Okay, seriously, what the fuck did he just say?"

My frustration with theory is two-fold. Firstly, it's such an inextricable part of what we as English majors do -- because, really, how can you deconstruct a text if you're not familiar with the tenets of deconstruction, and how can you possibly hope to enter the modern critical conversation if you don't know precisely what the critics are doing to a particular text? The ends justify the means by necessity, but they don't make any kind of sense on their own because theory is like reading your reading of a text, which takes things to (in my opinion) an excessively meta-level.

This is not to say that a solid knowledge of the history of theoretical discourse is not a useful, practical part of a solid liberal arts education; I'm just saying I can bring a lot to the text without reflecting that it's coming from, say, the school of New Criticism. What I bring to the text reflects my own feelings and assumptions, my own doubts and expectations, and a critical eye that is deep, wary, and always, always skeptical. Reading like this works for me, and I have no idea into which school of theory that falls. And frankly, I feel it works better for me. It's useful to know what trends in theoretical discourse inspired the approaches of the teachers that have in turn inspired the frame of mind I bring to texts, but I don't feel it's a necessity to successfully read a text in a critical sense.

The other frustrating part about theory is that it's so goddamn abstract. Theory, by definition, is theoretical; it involves seeing beyond the structure to see the underlying structure of the structure itself. For instance, not just why Rousseau said what he said, but why the language of Rousseau is constructed in such a manner as to render his argument contradictory. That's just way too much for my feeble brain to handle.

I read. I like reading. It's fun. I enjoy reading critical essays as much as I enjoy reading primary texts because it's like a peek behind the curtain while a magician is performing: for once, the master lets you in on the trick, or the observer is able to see the smoke and mirrors and explain how it's done. That, to me, is truly fascinating, particularly since I fancy myself to wear the always-dangerous double-brimmed hat of a writer and a critic. Seeing how, for instance, A.S. Byatt established the metaphor structure of the two novellas in her Angels & Insects helps me see my own writing in a new light, helps me plan better for getting past those first few sparks of inspiration (something I'm still struggling with) and actually creating a complete, dense, complex, and engaging work of art.

What doesn't help me do that is having to grapple with looking at the structure of the structure, of seeing why the magician used a particularly kind of cross-beam in his props and how that beam helps us to understand the box as a whole. It's a kind of literary carpentry that, frankly, doesn't interest. I don't give a shit how the box was built, but I'm intensely fascinated with how it works and how that working reflects on the magician as an artist and performer. Surely, the design of the box says something about what the magician planned, but is it really all that important to know why he chose balsa wood instead of mahogany? Not really, I don't think.

Theory, to me, concerns itself with so many intricate details that it takes much of the fun out of reading. Derrida's critique of Rousseau, from Of Grammatology, highlights this perfectly for me. Why concern ourselves so much with the intricacies of things that are not so obvious when there's a whole world waiting there in the words themselves. Granted, some will say that it gives new light and meaning to a reading, but too often theory concentrates on what's not there instead of what's staring you down on the page itself. That's both frustrating and, to me, counterintuitive to my task. I'm trained to see words for their meanings, and to see what is and isn't implied by a choice of diction: that's a more-than-fair expectation for a critic. But why consider the "knowledge that is not knowledge at all" when the page presents us with so much to know and work with. And what the fuck does that mean anyway?

Theory will always remain a paradox to me, I fear, and perhaps then it's appropriate that I should finish by criticizing the paradoxes that appear too frequently in theoretical discourse. It's a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't kind of game to me: I must be conscious of it, I must learn to use it, but I must reject it because it confounds things that otherwise have great clarity to me. But I don't have to like it, and I'll go on record as saying I don't. Theory, I'm sure can be useful, and will be throughout my professional career, but as far as I'm concerned, I need theory like I need a cudgel to the cranium.

Confidential to the Bitch

Dear Aforementioned Bitch,

You know exactly who you are. And now, we know exactly who you are. I was really hoping that it wouldn't have to come to me airing out my dirty laundry in an open forum that no one reads anyway, but apparently common decency continues to elude you and I am forced, reluctantly though it may seem, to air said grievances.

Let's start with the most obvious gripe: the noise. I understand that you have quite the affinity for music. I understand this because, from the moment you moved in, we've heard your music. Loudly. And by "loudly," I really mean "at a ridiculously unreasonable volume." Part of me wants to say that I wouldn't mind so much if the music was good -- and in fact, last night, while Danielle and I were having a quiet romantic dinner in our living room, one of the tunes you played (its specific name escapes me at this time) was rather nice and appropriate for the setting. But when Toby Keith's "I Love This Bar" took its place, that was simply too much to tolerate.

It was at this point, after a month of teeth-gritting toleration, that Danielle finally went upstairs to have a chat with you. From what she told me, you were less than receptive: after requiring approximately ten knocks for you to actually hear Danielle over your incessant auditory attack, you answered the door with notable frustration, then shrugged offer her request with a curt "okay" and a quick slam of the door. (Be fortunate you hadn't dealt with me at the door, because I can assure you I would not have simply walked away from a door slammed in my face.) Now, in fairness, you did turn the music down at that point; it was, in fact, at a reasonable volume again. But this morning, yet again, I'm painfully aware of how much you love this bar.

This week, it's Toby Keith. Two weeks ago, it was some bastardized combination of hip-hop/R&B (I couldn't tell, really; all I could hear was the THUMP THUMP THUMP through the ceiling). And last week, it was insanely heavy hard rock -- which, again, in fairness, I can usually deal with pretty well. The problem, though, is two-fold. I don't mind hearing Papa Roach's "Forever," as long as you don't play it three times in a row or once every hour. Ditto with Drowning Pool's "Bodies" and Disturbed's "Voices." What's the other problem, you may ask? Well, if I can identify the title and artist of every song you're playing, that means I can hear it clearly. From one floor down. Hell, over the weekend, with the weather brisk and cool and all our windows open, I felt the bass thump through the ceiling and heard the vocals and guitars, almost in stereo, coming through my window. It was immersive in a most unpleasant way -- again, by "immersive," I mean "oh God I'm trapped get it the fuck away now now now now NOW."

I mean, as I type, Justin Timberlake is explaining about how he's just bringing sexy back. Fuck sexy. I want you to bring quiet back.

Actually, let me rephrase that. It's not just quiet. Granted, you're not quiet at all, and that problem goes way beyond the music issue. You have no sense of quiet as you traipse across your apartment in shoes that clearly has steel not only on the toes but on the soles as well. If the THUMP THUMP THUMP isn't coming from Justin or Diddy or God only knows who else, it comes from your feet. You do realize that you can walk, heel to toe, and not stomp around like there's an elephant stampede in your living room, right?

And while we're on the topic of things you should and shouldn't know, let's review:

• Holding parties on Friday or Saturday nights in a college town is probably to be expected, but a raucous party till 4:00am on the night of Labor Day (which, in case you forgot, is a Monday)? That's outlandish.
  
• Moving furniture around not by carrying it but by scraping it loudly across the floor? Not only is that going to wreak havoc on your gorgeous hardwood floors, it travels directly through those floors and into my ear canal.
  
• You've apparently got some nails that are begging to be a-hammered. And that's fine. Hammering them repeatedly at 1:00am, though, on any night of the week, is just plain irritating. Do it in the middle of the day or the evening or -- brainstorm! -- at a time when other people might actually be awake and not potentially sleeping!
  
• And yes, I know I went through the music thing already, but since we're on the topic of appropriate times to be loud, here's a couple of hints: playing your music loudly enough for me to hear at 6:45am? No. Playing the same music as loudly at 2:00am? Same no.
  

I know it may seem like these things should (and that's the key word here) have been covered years and years ago, when your parents taught you about common courtesy. But apparently those lessons never stuck, so I need to cover them again here. Why the need to be so pedantic, you ask? Because what you're doing is not just annoying, it's rude. Rude because what you're doing isn't strictly independent of your own room: your walls are shared with at least one other apartment, your floor has three other sets of residents on it, and (biggest surprise of all!) your floors are my ceilings. This isn't like home, where a sound that reverberates through the whole building affects only the people you live with; in an apartment building like this, you share the building with eleven other groups of tenants, many of whom don't want to hear your shitty music, pathetic attempts at home repair, or emergency interior design remodels. We have lives too, and some of us (like yours truly) have work to do that is better done in an environment of peace and quiet, one in which we don't want to jab sharpened pencils into our ears or gouge out our eyes with melon ballers.

This whole thing could have been easily averted -- and the path of our relationship could be easily improved -- if you realize that what you do impacts other people, and that your actions have consequences outside of your own four walls. That means keep the noise down. That means don't act like a bitch when someone comes to your door to respectfully ask you to keep it down. And yes, that also means don't smoke in your bathroom -- why? Because your vent is connected to my vent. And nothing smells worse than waking up in the morning and walking into a bathroom that you expect to smell like a Glade lavender-scented air freshener but instead reeks of cigarette smoke. There's a window or -- surprise! -- an outside world you can utilize to get your nicotine fix, so stop stanking up my bathroom.

And while your at it, since common decency at this point has been long ago defenestrated, turn your goddamn music down, step lightly, lift up your damn furniture when you move it, and, above all, realize that the apartment complex has quiet hours. That start at 10:00pm. So after 10:00pm, turn your shit down. No one wants to hear it but you (at any time of the day, frankly), but after 10:00pm, it's a whole new ballgame.

After 10:00pm, we all have the right to peace and quiet. And if you can't provide that, there are avenues to be taken. They're rather clearly elucidated in your move-in packet. The key thing is that disputes between tenants aren't handled by the complex, they're handled by the disputants. That would be you and me. Or you and Danielle.

Last night, we tried to be civil. You wanted to be a bitch. More than fair. All I'm going to say is, we tried. Pretty hard, I think. But you still insist on being unreasonable.

So when the police show up at your door and slap you with a $300 fine for violating the township's noise ordinance, remember your polite, friendly New Jerseyans downstairs who tried, as civilly as possible, to set you on the right path. And don't bitch to us when your wallet feels lighter for your discourteousness and ignorance.

So seriously. Shut the fuck up already.

Sincerely,
Your Ingracious Downstairs Neighbors

The Incompatibility of Appreciation

It's not often that I slip into complete bitching mode, but I feel like I have to today. It's not that I had a particularly bad weekend, because I didn't; in fact, it was quite relaxing and soothing. However, like most everything else in life, moderation has a way of rearing its ugly head and forcing itself upon the proceedings -- even if happiness and satisfaction is what needs moderating.

I spent a vast majority of the drive home reading excerpts from The Descent of Man, the other famous text by the ubiquitous Charles Darwin. Mr. Darwin and his theory of evolution and natural selection played a critical role in the novella I finished this weekend -- A.S. Byatt's "Morpho Eugenia," from the collection Angels & Insects. What struck me most about reading Darwin was the lack of expected boredom. This is not to say that it was the most thrilling, enlightening, just-can't-put-it-down text I've ever picked up (far from it, I'll confess), but there was a lucidity and, dare I say it, poetry to Darwin's writing that I was not expecting. The fact that such a scientific text could be so evocative was a very pleasant surprise.

That, coupled with the insightful seminar discussion/analysis that predated my reading of the majority of "Morpho Eugenia," reminded me of the beauty of my major: faced with very seemingly-simple things -- books, at their core, are no more than words on a page, after all -- we are tasked to look beyond the obvious to find the deeper meaning, to see the depth of the genius that put those words on that page in that arrangement. It may be, to some, over-thinking, but in reality it's a form of historical psychoanalysis, and opens up so many more pathways that one may initially expect.

Granted, not everyone sees things that way. That variety, after all, is what makes the world go 'round. But there's something to be said for taking the time out of our busy, often predetermined lives, to take a slow, careful, close look at things and try to appreciate them. We spend so much time trying to see a forest that we miss the trees, which seems in opposition to conventional wisdom but is really so critical.

So, you may be asking, what's your point? Why are you bitching? I'm glad you asked.

Back in April, a film came out that was radically different from what I would normally want to see, but which looked so unbelievably cool that I simply couldn't resist. It was Grindhouse, the Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino double feature that was highly anticipated, critically lauded, and (ultimately) fiscally devastating. In its entire run, it made barely half of what it cost to make it. Some wondered if it was the nearly 3-and-a-half-hour running time that did it in; others claimed it was the timing of its release (Easter weekend); still others claimed it suffered the same fate as Snakes on a Plane, a combination of two facts: that internet hype need not necessarily equate to actual hype, and that horror-comedies tend to be problematic because they're too funny to be scary and/or too scary to be funny.

Whatever the reason, the fact that was obscured throughout the process is that this labor of love (and no, I don't believe I'm too frivolously tossing around that turn of phrase) was not seen by many people, but those who did loved it. Myself included. I'm an unabashedly outspoken advocate of both Grindhouse and Snakes on a Plane not because they're great films, but because they do what they aim to do exceptionally well. They're both incredibly cheesy, hackneyed to the point of amusement, and so self-aware of their schtick that you can't fault them for being either. They're fabulously well-done in the B-movie style, which is certainly not for everyone, but they both take a certain depth of appreciation to enjoy. In fact, a huge part of the Grindhouse and Snakes experience is about where you see them and with whom. I viewed both films on the night of their premieres (Snakes, in fact, I saw at 10:00pm on the Thursday before its official release) and found that the films delivered more in a setting in which the audience interacted with what was on the screen. After almost 4 hours in my seat at Grindhouse, when the end credits finally rolled, the adrenaline was pumping so much I was ready for another viewing. It was a unique, visceral experience.

And I do believe that last word -- experience -- is the key. All great works of art, whether visual, motion pictures, music, or any other, are far beyond just the piece itself. And to truly get the experience, you have to have a sense of appreciation. And that appreciation (to bring myself at last to the title of this rant) is frequently incompatible with the business end of the arts. That lack of compatibility, as much as it sounds like I'm just a whining little hippie, is a huge problem because it reduces things to the lowest common denominator and disrupts the fundamental experience for the sake of making a few extra points.

I am spurred to this because I discovered last night that Grindhouse is not being released as a single DVD, with the fake trailers intact and all the grainy effects still in place, but will be released as two separate features (Death Proof, in an unrated, extended version, comes out tomorrow; Planet Terror, I've heard, will be released sometime in October). Even worse, the faux trailers, with the exception of the initial trailer for Machete, will not see the light of release, at least not at this juncture.

There's a part of me that's being jaded about this. I've seen my share of DVD releases, and I know that many films end up with souped-up special-edition releases several months or years after their initial releases. The problem is that one would expect that Grindhouse would offer, at the very least, both alternatives: buy the films separately, or buy the original, untainted theatrical release. Now, I'm not naïve about why this will be: it's all about the money, and separate releases offer the promise of more money to recoup more of the money lost on the original release. It makes fiscal sense, I suppose.

Except for the fundamental bit of logic that was missed here: have you heard raves about the separate releases of Death Proof and Planet Terror (admittedly, more of the former than the latter)? Yeah, me neither. The two have done okay, I suppose, but not superb. And the reason is quite simple: they were honestly never meant to stand alone on their own. Take Death Proof: it's being released in an unrated, extended version, as I've already said. But what's the point? Frankly, the lengthy dialogue and lack of action in the 75-minute version of that film was borderline-intolerable already; I can only imagine how slow the extended feature must be. The thing is, it was effective in the context of the larger Grindhouse film because Planet Terror was so outlandishly over-the-top, in terms of scares, gore, and laughs, that the slow pacing of Death Proof was a deliberately anticipatory move. You waited and waited and waited for something as outlandish to happen, and just when you thought it wouldn't...BAM! The single most incredible car chase I've ever seen on film, and one that runs easily 20 minutes in length. It's relentless, thrilling, and incredibly satisfying. But without that larger context, it's just a really slow, shitty movie with a rockin' car chase at the end that probably feels incredibly out-of-place.

Grindhouse worked because the audience understood the appreciation involved in getting all that. And what The Weinstein Company is blowing here is that the people most likely to buy the movie on DVD are the same people most likely to understand that experience. Why? Because they saw the movie in the fucking theatres while everyone else stayed home. The fans got it. Rodriguez and Tarantino got it. Separating the films is not only an insult to the wallets of the fans of this film, but an insult to their sensibilities and appreciation as well. I don't give a fuck about the extended edition of Death Proof or the super-special cooking school features that will end up with Planet Terror. I care about buying a DVD that will bring me back into that theatre on that Friday night in April, when everyone around me was cringing and screaming and laughing and yelling for four uproarious hours.

Call me idealistic if you will, and I'll probably deserve it, but I can't be the only one who actually appreciates shit like this and wishes more people noticed the trees, or noticed the subtlety involved in making a film that's both horrifying and hilarious. I'm seeing more and more a world in which there's no room for subtlety and incisiveness, and it's that -- far more than Grindhouse or Snakes on a Plane -- that scares the shit out of me.

My Days Are Rarely This Noteworthy...

It's not often that a day gestures so very obviously to both one's past and one's future, but today appears to have done so. Granted, as I've said time and time again, I'm an English major: my job is to overanalyze things, and I consider myself pretty good at that. But I'll let you be the judge.

Any day where I have to wake up at 6:30am is never a good one. Especially considering that, as much as I'm truly enjoying the experience of teaching my students, I would be having a much better time if I was able to get my students to actually, um, talk. This morning, sadly, was no better than usual; I've come to the conclusion that I guess I'm just going to have to let them sink or swim on their own. Sometimes that's the only way to motivate people, though I'd hate to think that's what's getting in the way here. I mean, half my class on Monday was listening to two rock songs and analyzing them. It's not like I'm not trying.

After a relatively uneventful but kinda amusing seminar, I spoke with fellow grad student Emily, who seems to have been having the same problem. She's taken the more "motherly" (her word)--

brief digression: in the interest of full disclosure, I totally typed "motherfuckerly" the first time I tried writing that

--approach with her class, but having told her about my more hands-off approach, she feels a lot more confident and will try to stick to it. The bottom line is that, like I was when I was a new undergrad, these folks probably think they know everything. I've tried warning them that many of them will be quite unhappy with their first grades, the thing I would think would be the ultimate warning, but I'm not 100% confident it's settled in yet. I guess they'll just have to learn the hard way.

I couldn't chat too long with Emily, though, because I had to get back to my car across campus and make my way to Mt. Nittany Medical Center for my Holter monitor appointment. I'm not sure what I was expecting from the process, but it was a much briefer initial ordeal and a much bigger pain in the ass than I had anticipated.

Imagine this: you've got about 8 sticky things, similar to the leads on an EKG, stuck around your chest. Attached to each is the actual wire, all 8 wires attaching to a big bulky black box (which looks a lot like a really old, circa 1990, Sony Walkman) which hangs by a surgical mask-like sling wrapped around your neck like a miniature messenger bag. Surgical tape holds the leads down more securely, and the wires are all bundled together, wrapped in gauze, and taped to the center of your chest between your pecs. Finally, an ACE Bandage wrapped twice around your chest attempts to hold everything down.

This is bothersome for a whole bunch of reasons. Firstly, and most obviously, it's really fucking uncomfortable. The monitor itself throws my balance off so much, forcing me to keep myself tilted a bit to the right to keep myself up straight. Plus, I'm so paranoid that the leads or tape or bandage is gonna come undone and throw the whole thing off. I also can't take a shower until it comes off (tomorrow around 1:00pm), and it's so hard to hide under clothes, even baggy ones. As I made my way back to campus to fulfill my office hours duties, I felt like a suicide bomber, with all these wires and shit strapped to my body. It was unbelievably awkward.

The other major inconvenience of this thing is that I have to stay far away from two items I tend to be pretty close to all the time: cell phones and microwaves. The avoidance of microwaves isn't too difficult -- I mean, I heated my lunch up in one today, but just walked far away from it after I started it -- but, seriously now. Cell phones? Especially on a college campus, with 45,000 undergrads, all with parents just dying to hear from their babies everyday and friends that are constantly trying to get ahold of them, I knew this would be a challenge.

I was doing quite well until the ride back. Trying to get off campus at 4:00pm is quite the challenge, and the Blue Loop was, unsurprisingly, packed to the gills. As I got on the bus, though, I got sandwiched between a small girl and a guy who came on already yakking on his cell. I tried turning my body to move the monitor as far from this dude as possible, but no sooner did I turn than did the girl get on her phone as well. Now, I can't possibly be so rude as to ask them to hang up -- a) it's just not polite, even if the conversations happening were downright asinine and featured the word "like" more often than any other word combined; b) I wasn't about to explain/show them why it was so critical that they quit gabbing -- but I spent the whole time waiting to move in the hopes that the signals wouldn't fuck up the magnetic tape.

In my efforts to avoid the cellular interference, I turned and stared right into the eyes of another one of the guys on the bus. I stared for a few seconds, partially because I wasn't sure what to do in terms of moving, and partially because the guy was vaguely recognizable. I turned away and didn't say anything because I was too flustered to put all the pieces together, but after reaching my car, the pieces finally fit: I went to high school and played in the band with him! A quick trip home and a search on Facebook confirmed that the gentleman in question -- one David Ortiz, no relation to the ball player (thank God) -- was, in fact, a Penn State student ('08). Success! We've since shared a few messages, and I personally hope we start chatting it up again regularly, as it always helps to know people in new places. And who knows? Maybe he'll need a ride back home at some point. Always good to know I can be of service.

So here I sit now, with this stupid (but useful) contraption hanging off me, no immediate work due for tomorrow, and me counting the minutes until tomorrow afternoon when this whole thing is said and done. The only consolation I have right now is that, as per my suspicions, I did have a slight flutter before, which prompted me to hit the event button and make a log in my diary. Which means that, if nothing else, the monitor should have picked up at least one instance of what's been happening the past few weeks.

For better or worse, that's what I was hoping for. I'd rather know what the problem is and be able to address it, knowledgeably and head-on, than have nothing come up and me still be in the dark. Obviously, I don't want this to be anything serious, but with me still in relatively strong health and a positive reading on the monitor, it seems like I really have done all I could. It doesn't really feel all that good to know that there could be some kind of bad news on the horizon, but again: better to know than not. And better to catch it earlier than later.

Granted, it's probably just a lucky stroke of kismet that I should run into someone today that hearkens me back to my past. But that, as well as this whole little health scare, has had me focused on the future, and I've got my fingers crossed that a bright and healthy one is ahead of me.

A Modicum of Miscellania

I think I've finally realized why it's better if I blog on an almost-daily basis: sometimes, it doesn't seem like anything exciting ever happens, and just when I feel I settled into such a groove, I am cursed with an overabundance of events worth relating here. Such a problem has emerged in the last few days: after my little heart scare, I became so overwhelmed with things happening that I never settled down to blog, and now I fear I have no direction or organizational tack save for chronological description. Which Faulkner always thought was boring as hell. (Granted, I'm not Faulkner's biggest fan, but the dude wrote much better than I ever will.)

But since chronological seems to be the most effective coverage technique, I might as well go for it. (That, and the blaring of What Not to Wear on the TV at my back is pretty disorienting and not conducive to truly creative discourse [granted, further, I'm not doing much to help my own cause, as the arrival of four new CDs from Amazon has put me on an iTunes-ripping binge {I've gotten through Tool's 10,000 Days and, as I've been wont to do with alarming frequency lately, I can't stop listening to "The Pot"}]).*

Firstly, let's go back to the health stuff. Since telling of my alarming attack last week -- coupled with the fact that, though I didn't tell all that many people, I've been receiving a huge number of messages and notes asking how I've been -- I should alleviate all concerns by saying that I've been feeling much better as of late. After my little freak-out Wednesday, the little flutter I'd spoken of vaguely has only returned once, and not nearly with the intensity which it had displayed previously. I will be having a 24-hour Holter monitor placed on me on Wednesday, and while I obviously don't want to see anything happen anymore, part of me hopes to at least get some kind of flutter on Wednesday so that this can be effectively diagnosed and treated. Fingers crossed.

By the way, thanks so much for all the well-wishes, particularly from those anonymous folks who read but don't comment on these posts. I know you are actually out there, and I appreciate your concern.

After muscling my way through the rest of the week -- which was relatively easy, considering I needed to get through only my teaching classes and a fabulous seminar, "Reinventing the 19th Century," taught by a brilliant professor who just happens to be a fellow Princetonian -- my weekend was built around relaxation. It wasn't as easy as I'd hoped, but a few well-mixed martinis on Friday night sure did the trick.

That wasn't the only event of note on Friday, though. Danielle, in her infinite wisdom, had selected a birthday gift for me that, in her estimation, would be far more useful if received on Friday instead of Sunday. I was able to deduce that this would clearly be something that would occupy a weekend's worth of leisure time -- i.e. a new Wii game -- and when I removed the aluminum foil she'd used to wrap it (so ingenious, and so very cute), my gift revealed itself to be Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. As one of the two games I'd been secretly hoping for (the other being Madden '08), I was thrilled and set right to it.

I will admit, though, that the promise of a Metroid gaming experience sent my ever-nostalgic mind flittering back to the early '90s: the old days, the formative days of my video gaming life. I never owned the original Metroid (though a neighbor did) and my desire to fill in that gap saw my Wiimote beckoning for the Virtual Console, where I discovered the original NES game available for download. I quickly snatched it and set to work on reliving the glory days of my not-so-glorious youth.

What a rush of ripe élan! Though I'd only played the game maybe an hour or so in my life prior to this, the experience was refreshing, reminding me of why I had been such an avid gamer as a kid. This wasn't about graphics or plot development or cinematic cut-scenes (or, at times, about play control...) but about the challenge, which made the whole thing so much fun. There's no help, no guides, no clues or directions: just an open game world and an invitation to explore. It got so disorienting I needed to actually make myself a map as I went along -- how deliciously old-school!

Friday and Saturday were wrapped up greatly in my Metroidian endeavors, at least until my brother and mother arrived for their expected weekend stay. There was little eventfulness to speak of: we ran some errands and got some needed stuffs on a dime that wasn't mine or Danielle's, ate dinner at Applebee's, made some purchases of an alcoholic variety, and brought said beverages back to the apartment for an evening of watching college football. The Penn State/Notre Dame game ended much to my delight. The Virginia Tech/LSU game... Well, let's just say it devolved into my brother playing The Legend of Zelda on the Virtual Console and a rather unhappy Danielle in the morning.

I was pretty unhappy on Sunday morning too, but not for the same reasons. The booze had had an unexpected and undesired effect (as it was the first time I'd actually gotten drunk in quite some time) and waking up on 8:00am on a Sunday is never a good thing. I received cheerful birthday wishes, after which we headed out in search of a delicious breakfast. Turns out, though, that many of the approximately 110,000 people who had descended upon State College for the game also decided to grab breakfast before hitting the road: all three Waffle Shop -- not, ever, on God's green Earth, to be confused with Waffle House -- locations were packed to the gills, and we settled for a brief wait at The Diner on College Ave.

The family left shortly after breakfast, which left Danielle and I to ourselves for the remaining 14 hours of my birthday. They were uneventful, to say the least, and I liked it that way. I didn't do a goddamn thing, and loved every minute of it. We sat around, listened to some music, and read, and I sat stifling comments as Danielle engaged in her first attempt at a quest on Twilight Princess. (Thus far, she's proven herself to be a decently competent swordswoman, though her expeditiousness leaves a lot to be desired. At the rate she's going, I'd estimate her game will take her at least 100 hours to complete.) We completed the evening with a delicious (and excessively filling) dinner at The Olive Garden, then returned to the apartment for a brief marathon of Clean House before deciding to bring my restful day of nothing to an end.

As for the present day, I quickly completed my teaching and returned home, where I've been tackling my own actual modicum of marginalia, using the early part of the afternoon to take care of some of the silly little chores I'd been meaning to do but have been putting off.

Like cleaning up the kitchen table and living room.

And ripping my CDs into iTunes.

And writing a blog entry.

Done, done. On to the next one.

------------------------

* By the way, in the interest of full disclosure, I've been trying to emphasize substance over style with my students this week. And while a sentence with three sets of nested brackets may seem to be nothing more than an acute case of stylistic narcissism, I say thusly in my defense: fuck it. It seemed cool at the time, still does.

Panic, or Knowing Fear

I'll be the first person to admit that, as babyish and occasionally hypochondriac as I may be, I tend to try and tough things out rather than make a big deal out of them. Most of the time, it's because past history has proven such issues to be of little import or consequence; after a few false alarms, you tend to think twice about crying wolf.

I should have cried wolf so many times in the past few days that I must look like the world's biggest idiot. Of course, at each point along the line -- each time I felt a little intake of breath that was a bit too sharp, every walk that ended with a touch of what I perceived to be lightheadedness, each time I swore I felt a tiny little flutter in my chest -- it never turned into anything and simply went away. I figured it wasn't worth making such a big deal about.

Let me be the first to admit it, then. I was fucking dumb. Because until you sense something really drastic about to happen to your well-being, you really can't know the true meaning of fear.

So imagine, if you will...

You, with a very short history of events akin to those detailed above, are sitting alone in your office, finishing your lunch and waiting for 1:30pm and your scheduled office hours to start. Imagine that the office is perhaps a bit warmer than comfortable room temperature, but nothing out of the ordinary. You've just finished a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich and a granola bar, and you're reading a random Wikipedia article. Then, all of a sudden, you have that brief little flutter again.

It surprises you, but you decide you're probably alright and that the episode, like all the others, will pass. So you stand up, take a deep breath, and sit down, taking a sip from your almost-full bottle of water. You continue reading your article, but notice that the episode is not subsiding. Even with more water, it doesn't quite feel right, and you can't put your finger on what's going wrong.

Before long, you stand up, believing that perhaps a walk around will settle yourself. But the moment you stand up, you don't feel better. You feel incredibly lightheaded, your balance feels frighteningly compromised, and before you can even register what might be wrong, you become conscious of the beating of your heart. Alarmingly conscious. You grip the wall of your cubicle and put your fingers to your neck. You feel your pulse almost jumping out of your skin. Without even looking at your watch, you can tell that it's beating at almost two beats per second, and your breathing becomes instinctively heavy as you panic.

You walk in and out of your office, trying to shake the feeling, trying to decide whether you should tell someone just how close you are to passing out on the floor. After the longest minute of your life, you begin to feel strong enough to head downstairs to the graduate office, where you tell the secretary that this doesn't feel anywhere close to right, and you have to figure out exactly how to tell your girlfriend to get to campus as soon as possible to take you to the health center, but that she shouldn't freak out.

You get to the health center and, though your pulse has dropped again, it's still probably over 90 bpm, and you can feel it. You sit nervously as you wait to plead your case to the receptionist; then as you wait to sit in with the triage nurse, peering nervously onto the computer screen as she enters your vital signs; then as you wait again to see the doctor, forced to listen uncomfortably to a conversation between two Asian girls in their native tongues when all you want to hear is silence.

Then, when the doctor does take you in, you sit and answer questions about your condition, spilling out the whole truth in a way that feels both cathartic and deceptive, since you've keep seemingly little things to yourself for so long and you can't help but regret that now, wondering why you ever thought that was a good idea in the first place. You give details about your family history that alarm you further, subject yourself to a perfunctory cardiac exam and, afterwards, to an EKG that will turn up depressingly normal. You accept a prescription for lab work and the promise that they will set up an appointment with the hospital to have you fitted for a 24-hour Holter monitor, in the hopes that one or more of these episodes might be caught. So that someone may be able to tell you just what the fuck happened to you in the past three hours.

And then you have to go home and figure out how to tell your parents without scaring the shit out of them.

You imagine all that?

I wish I could just imagine it, just like I wish I'd just been imagining all the "stupid little things" that were happening to me over the past couple days. I wish I was imagining it all right now, but I'm not. It's real. It's all part of a painful, upsetting reality that has so many potential consequences that I wish I wouldn't have had to think about. My goddamn birthday is coming up in four days, and all I can think about is that I hope to hell that what happened today doesn't happen again between now and then.

This all just got way too real. And way too fucking scary. And I can't ignore it anymore. And I can't make it go away.

That wasn't imagination. That was my day.

So, how was your day?

This Is My Blog on Holiday

I still refuse to believe that Labor Day is an actual, legitimate holiday. Its pretense, for one, is completely backwards (and thereby perfectly American): in order to celebrate our hard-working laborers, let's recognize them by giving them...one day off. Only one. Conveniently, right around the time students start to head back to school and you could use that day to run around, get their shit together, prepare them to transition back into the school year, et cetera. You know, all that labor you don't have time to do because you're laboring at work, remember?

I can't complain all that much, though, because Labor Day for me = no need to wake up at the ass-crack of dawn and drag myself to campus for the 50-minute class I teach on Mondays. This day is like a godsend because instead of totally derailing the nice long break between my Friday seminar (which ends at 3:20pm) and my next class (Tuesday at 6:30pm), the class just doesn't happen. So it actually feels like the quasi-four-day weekend I'd imagined it would kinda sorta be.

Not that the extra time has gone towards any particularly productive use. Sure, I've been catching up on my work and my reading, especially, but there's always more to do that I haven't yet done, so no self-congratulations are in order. I also haven't written any more of the story that was begging to pour out of my soul just days ago -- that well hath run a bit dry, and I'm waiting for the appropriate inspiration to renew my creative passions once more.

However, what I did accomplish this weekend was a bit of a personal realization, one that I feel will help me with my writing from both a creative and a technical standpoint. The road to this realization, naturally, was unpaved, unmarked, and unintentionally trodden upon, but it also consists of two additional elements that inevitably crop up as important themes in my writing and thinking: an adventure, and a nostalgic self-reflective trip into the past.

It happened Saturday, as Danielle and I were attempting to find ways to fill our day after we finished watching a monumental afternoon of college football. The Hokies had, despite several suggestions to the contrary, kept it together and taken a relatively unimpressive but emotionally triumphant 17-7 victory over a tenacious East Carolina team; the Nittany Lions had, despite the suggestions that there was a game being played, instead treated the arrival of Florida International as an occasion for devastation, leveling them without prejudice by the punishing score of 59-0; and the Michigan Wolverines had, despite the assumption that the #5 team in the nation didn't need to take their home opener against an FCS/I-AA team all that seriously in order to win by a healthy margin, went down faster than a Thai hooker and saw their hopes, dreams, and AP ranking plummet as quickly as the last-second field goal that Corey Lynch blocked, sealing Appalachian State's shocking 34-32 upset -- an upset, as it were, for the ages.

What to do after such a draining, historical sports day? Why, go roller skating, of course!

There is, off in yonder distance, a roller skating rink that holds public skating sessions on Saturdays from 4:30pm until 7:00pm, and then again from 7:00pm until 10:30pm. "Yonder distance" being the operative phrase here, though at 4:00pm, when we had yet to complete our necessary run to Target and Wegman's--

note to self: sometime in the near future, you must write a glowing acclamation of the Wegman's, preferably adopting the style of Jen Lancaster, if not in its cynicism and humor then definitely in its bordering-on-religious praise

--we could not have predicted that the drive there would have resembled something out of a Texas Chain Saw Massacre rip-off.

By the time we returned to the apartment after Wegmaning, it was well after 5:00pm, and we presumed that we wouldn't make it to the rink before 6:00pm, making the first session less than worth it. We'd wait until after 7:00pm and then head out, it was decided, although we didn't leave until after 8:30pm, on account of reasons that are clearly not important enough for either of us to remember right now. (Did we go somewhere? Sit around the apartment watching Clean House...again? Were we waiting on th--fuck, that's it! We were waiting on the laundry to finish! Success!)

It didn't take long for a tinge of regret to set in. I had looked at a trusty Mapquest map which told me that, in order to get to the roller rink, you needed to make a left onto Fox Hollow Road right across from Beaver Stadium, then follow the signs to the University Park Airport, at which point you make a left onto High Tech Road and the rink should make itself clear within seconds. All of this was true (except, perhaps, for that last part) but the descent of twilight on the land made this a much more challenging and creepy venture. There was no one to help guide us if we suspected we were lost: the people were like spirits, going about their lives unaware of their state of bei--oops, sorry, got a little carried away there.

Once we turned and drove away from Beaver Stadium, the whole scene became more and more unnerving. This was a backwoods Pennsylvania road, with no lighting and piss-poor signage, and all I had to go on were tiny green signs with a plane and an arrow. By the time we saw the airport, a little confidence had been restored, but the undulating hills of rural PA and the lack of natural or artificial light play a cruel trick of perspective: it always seems so close, but falls so quickly away that it's like a horrible tease. And when you're on a very small, two-lane road with a 55 mph speed limit and very little sense of what falls outside the range of your headlights, you want that airport right fucking there as soon as possible.

We eventually reached the airport, and made the turn onto High Tech, but found ourselves not in the Penn Skates parking lot, but a long, unadorned road filled with nondescript warehouse-type buildings on either side and no inviting street lights in the distance. I was trying to be the tough, manly man, but I was definitely afraid some creepo was gonna launch himself at the car at that point. Eventually, through some miracle of vision that evaded me, Danielle noted a small, hanging-from-one-screw sign for Penn Skates next to -- you guessed it -- a nondescript warehouse-type building.

Did somebody say sketchy?

The drive there was, but once we entered the building, it was like a blast from the past, and by the past, I mean middle school. A huge cartoon mural spread along the wall on the long end of the rink, covering the history of cartoons from Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner to the cast of Futurama. The man who took our money -- and gave us a discount because there was only about an hour left of skating; what a deal! -- didn't even flinch when I dropped a very Jersey but decidedly not rural PA bit of vulgarity into our discussion, and suddenly the place felt a little more like home.

One stroll around was enough to take me back to the old days of Skater's World, before it became just another big box office store. It was lit far more brightly than Skater's World ever was, but it had the assortment of old school video games (I mean, seriously, the place had a working arcade machine, circa 1980s, that let you choose between Pac-Man, Galaga, and Donkey Kong); the orange bench-style seats screwed into the floor on either side of a flat formica-top table; short seats that were covered in carpeting of the same pattern as that on the ground, making them seem like pimples emerging from the floor; an old-school skate rental desk with both standard and inline skates; and enough pastel colors to make the place feel like a time warped holdover from the early '90s.

We skated around to crappy pop tunes for a while -- I on appropriately orange and black rollerblades, Danielle in canvas-colored standard skates -- when I lamented aloud the lack of consistently good music. It was in saying this that I realized that much of the appeal of the old Skater's World was not necessarily the skating: it was the atmosphere. It was the crazy neon lights and the soundtrack (which, at the time, was pumping pop tunes as well, but pop in my day was good alternative, and not crap), the groups of people you went with. For Danielle, it was the punk shows. For me, it was my first experience, at the tender age of nine, with heartbreak. There was so much I associated with Skater's World -- and now associated with this place, since the environs conjured up so many memories -- that were hallmarks of my childhood.

And with each new experience we discussed, I began to realize, like Billy Joel did 24 years previous, that the good old days weren't always good. Granted, nothing I experienced in Skater's World or in 17 years of growing up in Wayne ever really damaged me too badly, but I started suspecting it should have. And it was here that the conversation became much more introspective. I began doing what I, as an English major, am supposed to do: overanalyze everything. It started bothering Danielle to the point where she asked me why I was doing it.

But then it hit me. Of course it has to do with English, and with reading, and with writing. Of course I need to overanalyze all these things: it's what I do. It's how I come up with all the creative ideas I develop and then let smolder in the corner while I figure out how to finish them. Most of them languish because I feel I don't have enough complexity (in my opinion) to see them through to a lengthy completion. I want to prove to myself that I can do things like that, so I need to keep on digging deeper. Not because I'll ever really figure them out, but because, in identifying myself as a writer, I've ascribed myself to the task of joining the pantheon of writers before me. And English has taught me that the pantheon exists as a window not only into the author's soul, but into the souls of a generation, of a time and a place, and, sometimes, if you're really lucky, for all time. That's why we still read the classics, and why we search constantly for the next great author: not only because it's a lucrative business, but because that next voice could be the spokesperson for a time, a generation, an experience, the experience.

What I ultimately learned from skating on Saturday night is that my whole purpose for writing, and essentially for being, is to have those conversations and try to be an active part of that experience. I'm savvy enough to know that I will never completely understand the kinds of topics that I address when I talk or write, but being part of that conversation clarifies things just a little bit more. It keeps things interesting, keeps things moving, and keeps me and everyone around me (so sorry to you all) on our respective toes. It's the same reason I litter my work with obscure references to Snakes on a Plane and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess (please, please, please tell me you caught them...): partly because it brings more of our cultural experience into the conversation, but also because it's fun to see who gets it. If there's nothing to be gleaned as a lesson from this post, let it be that every part of our individual experiences become an inextricable fiber in the fabric of our lives, and that in appreciating them, and only in appreciating them, do we too become fibers in the grand quilt of the human experience.

That, and Applebee's new Ultimate Trios are fucking tasty. Yum yum yum.