Master mind
Friday morning I finished my defense, with success. I have one more degree under my belt. I also don’t know where my belt is. I think I already packed it.
I’m supposed to know what to say to people, but I seem to screw it up. They accepted my thesis, but that doesn’t mean I’ll ever feel adequate. Let me give you some examples:
“Have you seen Mamma Mia? It’s a great film.”
“Mmmm, no, but I wanna be in an ABBA cover band!”
“Guess what I just did?”
“Shoplifted! Broke into your own home!”
“Well, congratulations on this milestone. Many good things lie ahead, no doubt.”
“Yeah, I’m working on having a pig farm and writing about digital colonialism!”
I get a lot of blank stares. At least I don’t give them, right?
A car alarm keeps going off in my building’s parking lot, every few hours. I wonder if anyone ever uses that as a makeshift alarm clock.
Bees are not my servants.
Also, speaking of what we eat, DDR could easily cure childhood obesity if they’d subsidize that action. $1/dance at the arcade, winning no tickets to boot, makes that shit otherwise pricey. Anyone remember when phys ed was mandatory and you had to climb the rope? Is dancing the same torture for the uncoordinated? I’m hoping it’s fun instead.
I would be the bartender if it meant going back to playing music I love and want to share. I went to see !!! for the ?th time and determined that Nic Offer is having more fun than anyone else on the planet.
Other goodness I love: Progressives Against Obama, the 2008 Midwest Flood Pig Rescue, and two blogs about friends who are abroad that I won’t link. But I will say this: personal travel writing can be fascinating with the right minds behind it. I never knew until now.
About this entry
The tortoise and the superhero
As I jog down the home stretch of thesis research and editing this month, I’ve been taking breaks to read things like Jen Angel’s Becoming the Media: A Critical History of Clamor Magazine. Despite the importance to be learned in its pages, the pamphlet made me sad, filled with stories of endings. I’m also working my way through Making A Killing: The Political Economy of Animal Rights, The Future of the Internet–And How To Stop It, and The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. When I can’t sleep at night, I suspect it’s because I don’t remember to consume anything “fun.”
The thing is, I can sleep all day. It’s the nights when I’m awake, staring at the clouds, suspecting that what I’ve learned from my people will propel me forward. My grandfather has gone off the map this week. He’s 82, believes my institutionalized grandmother may divorce him, and he needs some reprieve from the blame that he hasn’t done his best over the past eight decades. He has, in fact, done an admirable job of staying true to a union people often disregard as too difficult or complicated. You can’t save someone who has been abused if they can’t save themselves, but he tried. I saved myself, and now I get to try my hand at this lifelong business of staying true. When the world makes it hard to sleep, my personal life makes it easier.
When I’m not reading & writing, I’ve been spending my month with animal friends, working on a way to one day house some of our own, sanctuary-style. I’m not a poster child, just a woman with empathy and a dream.
Here are ten lumiere videos that I’ve neglected to post this month. As always, they contain no audio, so you can sing your own song, leave your own music playing, or enjoy the silence.
click for lightless train (in a new window)
click for jim did it (in a new window)
click for turkey (in a new window)
click for llama (in a new window)
click for ‘08 4th (in a new window)
click for beer/wine/liquor (in a new window)
