2:23 AM:

Friday Five:

1. If you had the chance to meet someone you've never met, from the past or present, who would it be?
   Let's go with Beverly Cleary.
2. If you had to live in a different century, past or future, which would it be?
   The 20th Century. I don't much like change.
3. If you had to move anywhere else on Earth, where would it be?
   Back to New York? Although I'd rather wait a couple years for that...
4. If you had to be a fictional character, who would it be?
   Pippi Longstocking, of course! (Is there a person alive who wouldn't want to be her?)
5. If you had to live with having someone else's face as your own for the rest of your life, whose would it be?
   Claude Garamond. (You do mean typeface, right?)

Y'know, if you go off sugar-laden sodas for awhile, and then you go to the movies and get the super-duper-sized cup of non-Diet Coke? And then get a refill?

They call it "sugar shock." It's been a couple of hours, and I still have the jitters.

In other news, have seen Two Weeks Notice and Maid in Manhattan. After all, why see just one romantic comedy set in New York (in which a philandering upper-class male lead is paired with a hard-working female lead with a heart of gold) with Norah Jones on the soundtrack when you can have two?

Two Weeks Notice had the better soundtrack (I particularly liked the use of the Counting Crows cover of "Big Yellow Taxi"), but that was about the only area it excelled in. It wasn't terrible, but it wasn't really satisfying, either.

Conversely, while Maid in Manhattan wasn't a great film, it was certainly the better of the two in every other respect. The New York therein bore at least some resemblance to the one I know and love, and it had a more satisfying resolution. I'd go as far as to recommend this one for rental.

1:11 PM:

Oh, and Columbine has a really good entry here.

Unsurprisingly, Sarah Lawrence has decided not to accept me into their MFA program in Writing. That just leaves Emerson... after they turn me down, I can figure out what to do next.

(What, me, pessimistic?)

Because I can't resist following my sister's lead, here are a couple of poems read by Yours Truly:

• "The Purist," by Ogden Nash (430 K)
• "Jabberwocky," by Lewis Carroll (1 MB)
• "Jabberwocky" at warp speed (412 K)

11:21 PM:

Now, see, it's not that I'm not keeping up with the outside world. I think it's important to be involved in the important issues of the times. Which is why I'm proud to report that for the past two weeks, I've done my civic duty and voted for Clay on American Idol.

Of course, I'm aware that there are bigger issues out there than a cute boy with an amazing voice winning a talent show. Issues like Vanessa calling Ryan a "trained monkey," followed (after the commercials) by Ryan's not-entirely-convincing explanation that the whole thing had been scripted, which might explain why she didn't get enough votes to stay in the running last week, despite having turned in the second strongest performance of the bunch. (Ruben had the third, as he did this week, behind Kimberley-with-an-"e".)

Seriously, I know there's life outside of American Idol. The President gave a speech on Monday night, for example, and I was glad, because it meant that when I returned from hearing the megillah being read at the local Hillel, I was able to see the final half hour of Boston Public. If it hadn't been delayed, I would have caught only the last few minutes. See? Already, there's a positive result from all this war stuff.

And the new episode of South Park tonight was brilliant. I don't know how Parker and Stone are keeping the show funny after all these years, but they're dong it, and I'm glad.

And, okay, yes, my main source of news these days is The Daily Show. I probably ought to cancel my subscription to the New York Times, 'cause it pretty much goes straight to recycling anyway. It's a testament to how much I like Peter Jennings that when I switched to ABC after Boston Public finished on Monday night, I actually lasted through about thirty minutes of news coverage before I had to change the channel.

"When Diplomacy Fails," said the giant graphic on ABC.

Not "When We Fail At Diplomacy." Not even "It's Clobbering Time," which would at least have had some honesty to it.

"When Diplomacy Fails."

Yes, I haven't been following the news all that closely. I haven't had the heart to, and it seems futile.

But one pet peeve: will you idiots on the Left stop yammering on about Bush having lost the election? It seems that every time I try to read an article from somebody on "my side" I run up against this canard. He won. The "popular vote" is not -- and should not be -- the issue; what matters is the electoral vote, and he won that, and everybody with a fourth-grade education knew the rules before the election started. Yes, it was close, especially in Florida. We have a system in which winning by a razor-thin margin is as good as winning by a landslide, which ought to remind us all that every vote counts, but hardly changes the fact that he won. The Supreme Court didn't "steal" the election. Get. the fuck. over it. All you're doing is keeping people from taking you seriously, even people like myself who'd be predisposed to be on your side in the first place. But if you can't understand basic election law, there's not much reason to buy anything else you have to say.

I will grant, once again, that I was wrong, way back when, in claiming that there was only so much damage Bush could do in this term as president; he's been doing an astoundingly effective job of dismantling everything our nation has had going for it. But if you're going to try to combat that, try to stay focused on the present, okay? It's more effective than falling back on whining about Gore's loss. Who knows, if you manage to come up with a reasonable outlook, you might even get the rest of us willing to follow the news again, with some sense of purpose.

Okay, that's a bit of a stretch under the circumstances, what with the President out to win a Pyrrhic short-term victory that's hardly likely to add to our nation's long-term safety or stability, but every little bit helps.

In the meantime, however, I'm voting for Clay.

Whoo-hoo!

Okay, this is going to require a bit of background... it's just possible that some of you have been wondering how, exactly, I've continued to keep a roof over my head despite being out of school, and, therefore, being out of financial aid. Until the end of last semester, I was getting paid for my services as a grad student instructor... but having been dropped from the program, I've also been unemployed. And my long-term readers know that I wasn't exactly rolling in dough before I started grad school; far from it.

The answer? That American classic: litigation. I was in this serious auto accident back in the summer of 1999, see, and, for some reason, my family had a lawsuit against the company whose no-fault insurance was covering the car, and we settled out of court about a year ago. I ended up getting a rather large check, enough to have paid for the past couple months of downtime, and a couple more to come, if necessary.

The catch, as I understood it, was that whereas, pre-settlement, the insurance company had been responsible for all medical care directly resulting from the accident, such care was now my own problem. And I still need some plastic surgery on my eyelid, for non-cosmetic reasons. (I have a few eyelashes growing in the wrong way, y'see, which are perpetually irritating my eye, which is not a Good Thing.) So while I've been draining away my savings lately, it's been with the uncomfortable knowledge that this might leave me with a serious problem once it came time for the surgery.

It turns out -- now that I've spoken to both the insurance examiner and the lawyer -- that I understood it wrong. It seems that the insurance company is still paying for any medical care I need directly resulting from the accident, and that the settlement was simply in exchange for my agreeing not to sue them for anything more than that. I'm frankly a bit mystified as to just how that worked, but I'm not about to argue.

The question of whether I'd be able to afford the surgery has been looming in my mind ever since the settlement, to be honest. This is... this just rocks.

10:31 PM:

I've been completely reworking my public home page, the one that, until now, hasn't been significantly updated since around 1997. I'm switching domain names, and all but starting from scratch; even those bits held over from the last incarnation of the thing are being fairly thoroughly overhauled.

Today's been spent putting together most of the skeleton; there's still more work to be done fleshing it all out. At the moment, I've debating just how far forward I'm gonna move the line of self-revelation therein. Further than 1997 levels, definitely, and not as far as the one used for this journal, but beyond that I'm not entirely sure.

(For now, it's just on my hard drive, but I'm hoping to go live with the new version by the end of the week.)

I've been meaning to link to this for the past couple of weeks: Satan is Not A Literary Character: Teaching Early Modern Literature to Religiously Committed Students.

Students are already empowered to read from their subject positions of race, gender, sexual orientation and class, rather than aspiring to achieve an objectivity they have been taught to consider illusory, or fraught with its own ideological and methodological biases. Why, then, is religion necessarily the category that cannot be spoken of in the classroom, or included within a student’s scholarly work?

Anyway, part of why I love -- and have missed -- the Queens College English Department can be seen herein, both in the diversity of the student body, and in that it has professors who actually respect and make use of the various perspectives those students bring to the table.