In Shameless Adoration of Quadrennial Occurrences

CAVEAT: There is no substance to this post.

Well, almost none. I had planned to write about a particular topic I overheard on the bus ride back to the car after class, but the discussion got me so riled up that I needed to listen to gloriously loud music to beat it out of my aching brain. Consequently, I don't remember exactly the salient points of my argument, so it will remain to be told another day when, perhaps, it causes me less agony.

But then I realized that my intended rant gave me an excuse to post something into my blog today -- that's today...you know, February 29th -- and it was not a great or unreasonable intuitive leap for me to realize that I was far more interested in the heading of the post reading "February 29, 2008" than I was in writing something that any of my two or three readers might actually give a fuck about.

Of course, I do have a cousin born on February 29th. One of those second cousins, twice- or thrice-removed or some shit. I'm not entirely sure about my relation to him, but I know for sure that you only need one major vein to get from my capillary to his, no matter how distant, so I can further justify this post by wishing Josh a happy birthday. And there it is.

Now I really am out of useful things to say. But then, to be perfectly honest, that really happened yesterday, around 8:30am, when I put the finishing touches on the brain drain of a paper that, you will recall, I bitched about several days ago. One down, one to go, and much more time available for me to complete it.

Given that time frame, and the general mushy consistency of my grey matter, I've been able to get away with spending this day in quiet solitude, doing nothing of importance except beginning to post books to my LibraryThing profile. Since I dig it so much, and often find that the Books application in my Facebook profile is my sole motivation for going on Facebook at all (even though it's gotten really buggy and crappy lately), I've decided to modify the template of this here blog a little and make a nice bibliophilistic display on the right side under the Ego heading.

You can use those fancy little widgets to search, see 12 random books of mine, or click the "Bibliophilistic" link to go directly to my catalog see all the books in My Library (which I hope I will be able to complete over spring break, so keeping looking for additions over the next two weeks). It's kind of on the narcissistic side, I know, but I love hearing from people who read good books and are willing to share them with me, so I hope this will help spur on the same kind of cooperation. And, of course, if you've got any good reads you think I should work on adding, feel free to comment and let me know, either here or on my LibraryThing profile.

Oh yes, and since I'm a whore for attention, friend me on LibraryThing if you're so inclined. As long as your library doesn't suck. Just kidding. (Kinda.)

Annnnnnnd, now I'm really done. Happy Leap Day!

Feeling Down About Keeping Up

The Internet is an incredible thing. I mean, here I am, with lots of better things that I could be doing with my time, and instead of being responsible and productive, I'm bullshitting in a blog that no one reads because it gives me a sense of pride in putting my writing out there and, to a certain extent, perpetuates my deluded notion that I'm providing a way for people to keep up with me. This kind of thing just wasn't possible before some smart (and currently, very rich) folks realized the cyberpotential and put it to productive use.

Things like blogs and Facebook and e-mail and instant message have made it so easy for people to stay in touch and communicate, but at the same time I feel like it's having this strange impact on the kinds of relationships I'm able to maintain, and it actually depresses, rather than uplifts, me to think about all the people on my IM list and how few of them I actually maintain contact with.

I'm sure you've all been there, or are there right now. Go on, take a look. Whether it's AIM, Adium, Pidgin, iChat, or some other program, there's probably anywhere between 100-200 names over there. And of those, maybe upwards of 50-75 are actually online or posting an away message right now. But how many of them have you actually held real conversations with in the past, oh, six months? My count is depressingly low -- I'm currently trying my damnedest to sneak it up into double-figures.

I've always been the kind of person who's counted more on small quantities of really close friends than large groups of friendly acquaintances. Some people like to roll the other way, and I respect that decision. For me, it's been about having a few people that you know always have your back, being able to turn to them and know that they'll be there to support you. Otherwise, really, what are friends for? I would expect to be held to that kind of standard as a friend, too, and I'd be more than willing to stick my neck out for anyone close to me who might need it.

Because of this, I've reflected a lot over the past few years about how going to college changes the relationships game. All of a sudden, people that you were extremely close to become devastatingly distant: questions your parents ask you about how they're doing are suddenly a challenge to accurately answer. And all the while you sit and wonder to yourself, Well, shit, when did that happen?

And you would think that the Internet would solve this problem, that you'd be so much more inclined to keep up with people if you saw their names on your buddy list every day. But instead, we (or perhaps just the royal we, what do I know?) look at away messages as judges of mindset. We follow what our buddies are up to by what they say they're doing, where they are, what movie quotes and song lyrics appear in their profiles. We have at our disposal the potential for incredible lines of communication but, just like we do when people become too distant in location, time, and memory to call them, we let them fall by the wayside.

I always thought, personally, it had to do with the phone. I don't like the phone. Something about it has always made me feel terribly vulnerable, but only when calling. I love receiving phone calls but I always feel horribly awkward making them, as if I'm intruding on someone's day by ringing them up. I panic about how they'll perceive the call, and try to predict how stupid I'll feel if the call doesn't go well, if we don't speak to each other again for weeks, months, or years, if my telephonic olive branch falls to the ground and toasts in the sun. It's probably a very silly thing, but I'm super-conscious of how I'm perceived when I put myself out there, and I always have.

But now, IMs and e-mails have taken over the same sort of category. I've got a list of a few people -- some friends, some professors, etc. -- that I've been meaning to keep in touch with, whose e-mail addresses and screen names (if applicable) I've kept around just so that I could reestablish contact with them if I suddenly craved hearing from them. And yet, like that dreaded phone call, I'm terribly worried about what happens after I click "Send." What if they don't write back? What if they get it but think I'm a loser/nut/stalker/worse because I've got nothing better to do than try to catch up with them? What if they're pissed because it's been so long and they wonder why the fuck I chose now of all times to reopen the lines of communication?

I seriously think it's a sickness, but I can't be the only one who thinks these things, can I?

I mean, if it really were that easy, we wouldn't fall out of touch in the first place. And sure, people's lives change and they move on and grow in different directions and sometimes the truly magical things that brought you together in the first place end up being insignificant trifles that fell by the wayside long ago but you were too lost in the moment to notice they were gone until now. I totally appreciate and understand that. But I still wonder why it's so hard, in the self-proclaimed Age of Communication, to, well, communicate.

I've got half a mind to send out a few e-mails now and see what people are up to, just because. Sure, I'll sit and wait and wonder what they think of me, and I'll probably freak out every second that goes by without a reply. But at the end of the day, I can sit back and enjoy the delusion that maybe they've read this post and understood that it applies to them and that they get that I'm actually interested in knowing how they've been doing.

But since I understand the nature of that delusion, perhaps it's better to just say it in the e-mail itself. Not only would it be more direct, and have a more guaranteed effect, but it might just be the beginning of breaking down these barriers between our desires to know how the people we care about are doing and our fears of what they may think of us now. Who knows? Maybe they'll be just as excited to hear from you as you'll be when(/if?) they send a reply. Now that would be communication at work.

Nobody's Fault But Mine

It's frustrating when you can't seem to get things done in a timely manner. It's even more frustrating when you realize you've got nothing to blame but your own lazy ass. Which puts me in my current predicament: I'm supposed to be working on a paper, but I've been sidetracked, and now I'm writing a blog entry that no one will read purportedly as a catharsis for my lack of creativity and motivation.

I've had these things hanging over my head for some time now, I know. And while I tend to operate pretty well under pressure, it seems that these papers just aren't going nearly as smoothly as one might expect, particularly given my previous track record. ("Fastest Thesis in the West," anyone? Thank you, Jeff Bagdis, for my favorite recent moniker.) I haven't quite determined if it's a self-consciousness issue, or a moment of self-doubt, or a silly case of not feeling like what I do is going to live up to standards I'm not even sure of yet. Whatever it is, it's totally fucking up my mojo and threatening to turn the next two weeks in a muddled morass of monotony and misery.

I knew from the start that the end of February was going to be problematic, and it has been, but again, it's all my own fault. If I'd been more diligent in the reading of this one particular text, I would have realized that the work would have solved a great many of the problems I've had in conceiving my issue and that it would make the writing of this paper much easier than I had anticipated. Of course, I've also had my doubts that the topic I planned to discuss would actually fill at least 20 pages, but it sure seems like that's a more reasonable expectation now -- it helps, too, that when you realize you can break a paper down into smaller segments, and that those segments can easily fit a 5-6 page requirement, you're good as gold.

I know too that part of it is the sense of transformation I'm attempting to instill in my English 015 students: not only does high school writing not really cut it as college writing, neither does undergraduate writing really cut it as graduate writing (or, as it should more appropriately be called, pre-professional writing, with the prefix pre- interpreted in the very loosest sense). And I can't help but feel that, at least in the case of the paper on The Dress Lodger, I'm doing nothing more than writing a glorified undergraduate paper. And sure, I remember not learning all the ins and outs of college writing in my first semester at Princeton -- Professor Kim received a great number of indirect diatribes, none of which I ever told to her face, of course -- but there's a whole lot of pressure to professionalize pretty quickly and it doesn't help when your first work reeks inexcusably of what you "used to do," not what you're "supposed to do."

Granted, Paul and Lisa are about as cool as one could expect from professor types, particularly those with whom you're fraternizing in your first semester. I know they both know I work hard, that I'm capable of good things, and that I'm just a lowly first year -- and that all of this will be taken into account when the dreaded grading happens. But I also feel like I owe them something better than they're expecting, something that will really wow them and convince them that I'm not just another first year. And I guess it's fair to say that my primary fear at this point is that that's all I'll end up being.

Which, I stupidly realize, predicts that I won't gain anything from this whole experience, which is a total fallacy. I know I'm supposed to learn and improve and that I'm not going to be the best right now and that nobody has the kinds of expectations for my work that I have and...well...

Yeah, it sounds pretty fucking stupid, doesn't it?

Which leaves me with little left to blog about and a substantial amount of other writing to do. And as counterproductive as it may end up being, I have to admit that, by this point, I've resigned myself to the fact that I've got a fairly 50/50 odds in terms of grades, and that it's just a matter of sitting down and getting it done, which is something I've been able to do with fair success before.

So enough dissecting my mindset. Time to go work on that paper about dissection, and hope that I fare better than the corpses of which I write.

The Folderol of Flawlessness

I'm starting to get really tired of sports. And that's not only because I generally despise this time of year, which is, in my opinion, a wasteland: football is gone, baseball hasn't started up yet, hockey is grinding along but is not quite center stage, and the focus is on the NBA and college basketball (neither of which can save basketball from the sad truth that it's a dull, boring sport).

It's bad enough that golf highlights are the pinnacle of my SportsCenter experience on February mornings -- the bastards and their warm weather... -- but for two consecutive seasons, we have been immersed in two radically diametric threads of discussion, and it's possible that I may be the first one to put the two together and draw them out to their logical conclusion.

Unless you've lived under a rock for the past six months or detest the NFL so much that you can ignore it through its omnipresent season, you may have remembered a little team called the New England Patriots, and how from very early in the season (I want to say it started around Week 5), talk amongst sports aficionados -- or at least those they'll allow on television -- was that this could be the first perfect season since the 1972 Miami Dolphins went 17-0 and won Super Bowl VII.

Notwithstanding the fact that, at that point, it was Week 5. Or that there were still two other teams with 5-0 records. The Patriots were adorned with the title of potential perfection -- aww hell, fuck "potential." As the season wore on, there was the occasional grumbling about when they'd trip up, but few if any genuinely believed they would. (As a point of reference, look up how many articles declared the Patriots Super Bowl Champions after the end of the AFC Championship game; there are more than you think there are.) Even when the two remaining undefeateds met, New England at Indianapolis in Week 9, the fact that it was the Colts whose bid at perfection was ended did not surprise too many people. (And who actually gave a crap that the Cowboys too suffered their first loss that day?)

The truth that New England was showing great weakness and beatability around the halfway point of the regular season? Brushed under the table. The magnitude of "Spygate" and its related allegations? Water under the bridge. It wasn't even about football anymore, it was about destiny, as if somehow, the anointed Patriots deserved, from Week 5, to win it all more than anyone else because they had the potential to be flawless.

But as we know, in the end, they were not perfect. They only lost one game. The one game that mattered. The Super Bowl. And as much as I may despise the New England Patriots, and as much as I may love that my Giants are Super Bowl Champions, you have to give them just a little bit of credit, because 18-1 is a pretty damn impressive mark to reach.

It's that 1 that's ruined everyone. The 1 that got away. The 1 that, according to many, would have justified it all. And this is where I begin to take issue. Sure, anyone in professional sports who tells you that winning isn't everything is feeding you a years-old pile of horseshit, and most of us know that. But think of how the expectations for the Patriots have changed: a Super Bowl will no longer be enough. It will have to be perfect.

We as a culture obsess so much about perfection, and the sports writers across this fine land fed into that obsession in the worst way over the NFL season. It was all about being perfect and winning and nothing else. Consider what happened during the college football season, a season in which near-perfection is the only way to reach the National Championship -- a truth that should, on its own, show the inadequacy of the BCS system as a college football playoff. The only team that went to its bowl game undefeated was Hawaii -- #10 Hawaii. Ranked at #10 because a computer didn't think their perfection was impressive enough, that they didn't play hard enough teams, that they didn't really earn it.

And now we are just hours away from college basketball's game of the year, #1 Memphis vs. #2 Tennessee, with Memphis sitting at 25-0, looking to defend perfection while all around them the media dares to believe and expect that they will see it happen. The players even filmed a montage before a feature on SportsCenter this morning in which they must have said "perfect" at least ten times. Do you honestly mean to tell me that if they don't win, if perfection becomes tainted, these kids will feel nearly as tall as they do now, unscatched, unblemished, untainted? (If you need a hint, start searching for articles on the Patriots written after February 4, 2008. The answer will become quickly obvious.)

The obsession over perfection on its own wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that the other top sports story is the Senate hearings on baseball's steroids scandal. A bunch of highly-paid men, earning their paychecks by playing a game, forced to either own up to having cheated or perjure themselves in front of Congress in defense of their good names. It's an absolute travesty, for sure, but is anybody seeing the connection that I'm seeing here?

On one hand, players are doping themselves stupid to give themselves the utmost competitive edge. On the other hand, the possibility of perfection in sports is cause for compulsive celebration in the hands of the media.

Umm...duh?

Does anybody not see that perhaps athletes dope because we expect perfection from them? That cheating, whether through performance enhancers or illegal videotaping, is done so that some one or some team may be able to reach the pinnacle of perfection and receive the endless accolades of an adoring legion of fans back home? And if this is all so obvious, why isn't it equally obvious that kids in college and even in high school do the same kinds of things, adopt the same dubious standards of good sportsmanship, because the expectation isn't just to win, it's to win all the time, every time?

We're blind to that kind of impact, and I can't for the life of me figure out why. There's painfully little differentiation between the crazed Little League parent's rant that my-little-Johnny-is-the-best-and-should-play-all-six innings-of-every-game-and-what-do-you-know-you-stupid-ignorant-coach and the staggering expectations of New England's pursuit of perfection.

We all agree that steroids and cheating aren't right, but perpetuate their presence because we believe it's the sport or the rules that need to change, and not our perceptions.

And in that regard, our perceptions couldn't be any farther from perfect.

No Country for Inconsistent Authors

Let's not mince words with some flashy introduction this time around -- mostly because I want to get back to reading the book I'm going to bitch about in this post. I'll be a good little student-writer and put my thesis right up front: I'd like to rant briefly on the inconsistency of talented authors to be able to write good books.

My case study is Cormac McCarthy. I have no doubt that Cormac McCarthy is a talented author, and anyone who does need only consider his winning of the National Book Award for All the Pretty Horses (before you ask, yes, the same one they recently made into a movie; that issue will come up again shortly, so don't say I didn't warn you) or even the virtually unanimous praise he's received for his well-known Blood Meridian, or The Evening Redness in the West (which Wikipedia tells me is among the greatest novels written in the 20th Century -- and if it's on the Internet, it has to be true!).

McCarthy fans, however, will notice I've made one glaring omission in the list of his honors, and the reason I haven't mentioned it yet is that it is the crux of my argument. I know Cormac McCarthy is a talented author, and because of this I've been tempted on many occasions to read his books. So it's not surprising that I recently found myself staring at a shelf full of Cormac McCarthy novels wondering which one I should start with.

And after great consideration, I decided to go with what seemed like a slam-dunk choice: his most recent novel, The Road, which was not only an Oprah's Book Club selection but was also the recipient of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. My English-dork brain was all a-flutter looking at the pretty foil-stamped medal on the trade paperback cover. Ooh, I've read Pulitzer winners before! To Kill a Mockingbird ... American Pastoral ... Middlesex ... they were all so good! And that doesn't even include Beloved or The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, both of which I own and am just itching to read! How can I go wrong?

Here's how: in plain English, The Road sucks.

With all due respect to Mr. McCarthy, and to the legions of readers who have bestowed heaps of praise upon this book -- and trust me, there are plenty: it's practically impossible to find even a partly-negative review that wasn't posted to Amazon by some 12-year-old who could manage anything more insightful than "dis shit iz teh SUX0RS frrlz" -- I simply couldn't wait to finish this book so that I would never have to pick it up again.

The language, while beautiful in spurts, is somewhat repetitive, and only gets worse as the novel progresses. The two main characters are almost totally flat and not particularly interesting because they don't develop meaningfully (in fact, when something interesting does happen, at the end, it is almost devoid of emotional impact because it too is portrayed flatly). The dialogue, by and large, is even more repetitive, often consisting of back-and-forth exchanges of the exact same lines which end up feeling emotionless, stilted, and unnatural to the point of feeling almost scripted.

Oh, and one more thing: NOTHING HAPPENS. The plot meanders on for 287 chapterless pages, with painfully little rising action save for a few interesting and/or grotesque scenes and some confusing, unexplained flashbacks that are never resolved. Not even the final few paragraphs, which should be profound but end up feeling too detached and ethereal, don't save anything. Like I said before, by that point, I was just glad to put the book down.

I don't give up on books, especially not ones I've bought. And it pretty much took everything I had to not give up on The Road.

So I was pretty bummed about this. Especially given all the really incredible stuff I'd read about his writing, much of which came around the same time that a great deal of admiration was being lavished upon the Coen brothers for their film adaptation of the novel he wrote before The Road, a little book called No Country for Old Men. I was feeling betrayed and hurt, not ready to dive back into McCarthy's fray.

But sure enough, after a few days at home itching for some new fiction to read -- and having plowed through Mark Haddon's excellent novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time -- I couldn't resist the lure of that shiny red cover. I gave in and bought it. Then put off opening the book for a couple of days. But alas, I could hold off no longer. I put Cormac McCarthy on notice: you've got one last shot to wow me, sir. Don't make me regret it.

Boy, did I eat my words.

From page 5, No Country for Old Men leaped off the page, grabbed me by the throat, and hauled me in. I didn't think the action of the first chapter could possibly be matched, but the body count kept climbing. And just when the killing spree started slowing down, I realized that the suspense being built by the novel was overwhelming and intense, masterful even. And it sure doesn't hurt that Anton Chigurh may just be the most realistically horrifying villain ever committed to the printed page. Seriously. I'm glad it's fiction, because the man is evil fucking incarnate.

I'm now within a hundred pages of the end. The suspense is killing me, and I have to finish typing this so I can get back to the story and find out what happens in the last few chapters. It's that good. In fact, it's as good (if not better) than I was expecting a Cormac McCarthy novel to be.

So why is it that authors can't be that good all the time? Why does topical, self-indulgent crap like The Road end up being universally (and, in my opinion, undeservedly) praised when great works like No Country for Old Men show the same author at the height of his talents and skills, a writer in the motherfucking zone? Why couldn't Oprah command all the housewives in America to read a novel with a body count rivaling that of a John Woo film, instead of dull postapocalyptic drivel?

And why didn't someone (like an editor, perhaps?) insist to Mr. McCarthy to keep writing books in the fast-paced, edgy style that embodies No Country for Old Men? Because I'll go on record here: I may have hated The Road, but on the awesomeness of No Country for Old Men, I'll be making it a point to read all of Cormac McCarthy's previous works in the near future. And if he writes more novels in the same vein as this blood-soaked drama, I'll be sure to be first in line at the bookstore to pick it up and power my way through the prose.

That is, of course, after I actually finish this one.

Which reminds me.

Dispatching the Lead Balloon

I say that because it appears that last post went over like one. (At least based on the lack of commentage -- I don't use counters or anything like that because I don't care enough about this to care about how many people actually look the blog, and yet, paradoxically, I do care how many people have something meaningful to say about what I write. Hmm...)

I'm kind of at a loss for where to go with this post because my last one was a hastily-assembled mélange of disparate ideas. Ultimately, this one will likely be organized no better. Which is fine by me because -- here I go reaching for a metaphor again -- the current state of my life is a huge mess of things that should, in my view, have some meaningful connection but don't.

For one thing, I'm going home this weekend and hoping to find more success at my productivity than I've been finding lately. To say that so bluntly isn't terribly fair to me, but I refuse to give myself the benefit of the doubt about this (though, I've been thinking, perhaps that's my problem). In terms of reading and the work associated with my classes this semester, I'm right about where I'd like to be: caught up in two classes, ahead in one, and ever so slightly behind on the last. On average, I'm up to date. But I'm still behind on the stuff I was finishing up last semester, and for the life of me I can't seem to stir up the goddamn motivation to sit down and just pound those fuckers out. I tell myself that I care so much about them, and maybe it's that I care too much about them that's keeping me from sealing the deal.

One might argue, at this point, that I'm stressing myself out too much and need to take a break. To that I say: one day ahead of you. Yesterday, for no good reason other than the fact that a working clock was not within my line of sight, I sat down on the futon and, instead of reading my Chaucer like a good boy, I picked up the old Classic Controller, turned on the Wii, and started playing The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. I'd successfully completed both the original Legend of Zelda -- in two hours and nineteen minutes (and amassing 100% items), a time I will use as my benchmark for future completeness runs -- and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, the oft-maligned but underrated NES sequel (which is, I should add, significantly more challenging), and felt that moving on to the SNES game was the right move.

So I started playing. And stopped almost ten hours later. (Somewhere in South Bend, I fear that Charles, for several years at Princeton my patron saint of productivity, is having a coronary event right now.)

And no, I'm not going to apologize for that, even though I'm still slightly behind on my Chaucer reading (and class is in 35 minutes). Because it was fun. For one day, I didn't give a fuck about deadlines and requirements and what-not because I didn't have to, and it felt wonderful.

Except that, like excessive intoxication, the hangover's always a bitch. I've spent lots of today simply regretting it, for no perceptible reason other than my slavish mental devotion to the ideal that one must do something productive every day save Saturday and Sunday -- which I'm beginning more and more to think is bullshit, by the by. Maybe I also feel a bit guilty that I can be that obsessively devoted to a video game, or to the many pleasure books I've read so far this semester, but can't find it in myself to devote a similar level of energy to some of my work.

Or maybe it's that I'm struggling to find some kind, any kind, of common ground between the two. Frankly, I'm getting really sick of the belief that I have to be two separate people: the responsible, hard-working graduate student by day; the laid-back, hanging-out, fun-loving guy by night. Why am I stuck in that rut where I think I should be more one than the other, where I feel like I'm not being serious enough and that that's a bad thing?

Don't get me wrong. I pissed away my Sunday playing poker and then watching the G-men totally bend Tom Brady, Bill Belichick, and the rest of the Patriots over and fuck the "perfect season" right up their collective asses and didn't regret it at all. Especially not when the Giants won. And, you know, ruined perfection. Like I knew they would weeks ago. Because the Patriots have been beatable since the Ravens debacle. And they got beaten. Badly. And left Tom Brady's pretty face subject to shit like this:



But I digress. No regrets. None at all.

I didn't even regret taking an hour and a quarter of my life and devote it to listening to the new Mars Volta disc The Bedlam in Goliath last week, like I promised myself I would. I regretted it even less when I discovered it was a funky, heavy, ass-kicking album that delivers the goods every which way but sideways and leaves you beginning for more. (Did I mention I really, really like this album?)

So why all of a sudden do I regret not taking care of other things when I was doing these things, which I very much enjoy? And will it all start going away once I, for better or worse, get my shit together and actually finish the things I've been meaning to? Because the last thing I want to end up doing is perpetuating a pattern of regret and obligation where I'm miserable working on a project and satisfied only when it's been completed. Isn't the joy supposed to be more in the journey than the destination? If so, why is that not working out for me?

So perhaps this initially random rant has congealed around an actual core problem, something that will involve more soul-searching and self-examination to unearth. The only problem with that is: with so much still on my plate, when will I have the time to do that thinking without the threat of impending remorse?

Oh, the movie never ends; it goes on and on and on and on...