Help Wanted: Decadent Slug

I've decided that I'm in the wrong line of work, and I need to pursue my true calling-Roman Emperor.

Now being a Roman Emperor isn't all watching people be eaten by lions for your entertainment. Roman Emperors do have to wage wars and deal with foreign policy. They have to plot assasinations ( again I consider that something of a perk.) And with all of that, there is very little time to ravish the slaves, senators, gladiators, soldiers, citizens, and diplomats. But you know, it's really all about creative problem solving. I was a big fan of Caligula's Imperial Whore House idea, make the wives of the senate be required to be prostitutes. Makes money for the state, and you don't have to hear all that preachy blather about family values. Of course, R.E. don't have very long life expectancies. On the other hand, after a week like this one, that's just another perk.

So if you hear any openings "Caligula Wanted" or "Opening in Sadistic Megalomaniacal Arsonist with a Fondness for Violins" let me know.
Because there is nothing to fear except Brooke Shields re-enacting Jabberwocky with the Muppets

Smitten has a lovely post about fears. I posted mine to her comments, but I thought I would take this moment to share some of the stranger phobias from my past. Apparently as a child my theory was since I was going to be irrational anyway why not be really creative about being irrational.

My odd acute phobias from childhood/adolescence in order of longest duration of fear to shortest:

alien abduction
demonic possession
spontaneous human combustion
the crypt keeper
the show "Tales from the Darkside"
the Brook Shields' episode of "The Muppet Show"
the doorway to my bedroom
the film "Tron"
Mr. Yuck ads

In grad school because of the Brook Shields' episode, I became convinced that everyone from my generation has one Muppet Show that totally scarred them mentally. ( I actually confirmed that theory one night over several Coronas-there is a doctoral thesis in there somewhere I know it.)

I then developed the theory that everyone has odd little acute phobias. I confirmed this theory using my very first creative writing class. What were some of their bizarre fears?

turtleneck sweaters
bridges ( because of the film "Annie")
butterflies
winter clothes
chocolate

Anyone care to share their favorite odd phobia?
Woman: What's your dog's name?
Man: Herpes....if she's good, she'll heel.
excerpted from Priscilla Queen of the Desert

Bad mood, tired, on my period, stressed, and lonely-yep the boyfriend has got a promotion and so he is working long hours and I'm not sure how things stand-Freud once theorized that depression is cause by reality interrupting fantasy. Is there any way I can hit a reality snooze button? Just two more weeks of being happy? After two years of unmitigated depression is that so much to ask?

Of course happiness is not garaunteed. There is no earning or desiring it. For some people it happens and others it doesn't.

My nervousness about Israel does seem to be somewhat justified at the moment. Then again as my more colorful relatives would say when it comes to relationships I'm more nervous than a long tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

Please leave some sort of supportive note.

I guess as the bunny says I really do suck and that's sad.
And I Thought I Was the Big Bad

courtesy of Paul

you are the "you suck, and that's sad"
happy bunny. your truthful, but can be a bit
brutal.


which happy bunny are you?
brought to you by Quizilla


Ever wonder who are the people who come up with these quizzes? Don't they have day jobs?
See Jane Blog

Today I discovered, via the computer lab, that most of my students blog. They also use xanga for their sites so I'm not in any immediately danger as I guess using blogger is "old school". Now, I was looking over some of their sites as they were intently writing. ( It's interesting that none of them have ever noticed that most of the time when I am in the lab I am blogging or reading the blogs of others.) Their blogs tend to be either highly theme oriented (ie one student had a Cowboy BeBop blog and all of his friends had anime specific blogs ie Vampire Princess Miyu, Gundam Wing, Inuyasha) or detail oriented ( one student was typing in her entire spring schedule-she then added another post which detailed what her evening schedule was going to be so people would know when to catch her on her AIM).

I have in the past considering using blogging as a teaching tool, coming up with some class blog, or requiring students to keep a reading blog, so that I can periodically check on the reading ( although keeping track of 35 different blogs on a weekly basis seems like a daunting task when you consider everything else I have to do for the class). I am still considering how to use it. If they are already using the technology on their own, why not use it to my advantage?

What do you think? Any ideas? or as my old camp counselor would say at the close of every meeting "Questions? Comments? Anybody want to make a speech?"
I Feel...um..Pretty?

So, I just got some pics (What am I? 13?) from Halloween, and I look fabulous. Really, the costume looked better than I thought, the make up was fab, the whole thing just really spot on. ( I got third place at a costume comp, but if you saw who came in first and second you would understand why coming in third is such an honor-I know one thing in this life and that is you can not CAN NOT beat a drag queen in a costume competition-period, end of story-unless you are, of course, a fellow drag queen, in which case you have a shot) But what shocked me is how great I looked. Not just the costume and the make up and the hair, but really I was all smiley and cute and spritely and I thought "Do I really look like that? Do I really look that happy most of the time?" The pictures brought home to me how much disparity there is between my external appearance and my internal experience. It also emphasized how much hard I am on myself in terms of appearance. I look kick ass. I was worried about looking old and uncool, but no, I am one slick little bitch damn it. And I still put together a mean little costume.

Honestly I wish I could post pictures, but that would be dangerous. Most of my students blog, and I am suprised that none of them have stumbled this way, but I suppose none of them are all that enterprising. Hell, it's difficult enough to get them read a three page essay, never mind go off in search of a blog they don't even know exists.
Word of the Day:Inferiorialize

Yep, just read a paper with that word in it. I will not reproduce the specific sentence, but to give you a sense of how the word is used, I will present you with the following example:

When a child watches its father inferiorialize its mother,...


Well, maybe the mother will eunichize the man for not accepting her feministical thinking. Of course, in this age of political correctness there is a lot of confusement about appropriate gender roles.

(* all bold words have been included in previous blog entries about my students.)


I Think iCan, I Think iCan

courtesy of metafilter

To combat the feeling that "many people are still very disillusioned and cynical about politics" the BBC has developed iCan a service designed to make politics, and specifically investigating issues and political figures, accessible to the general public.

The features are nice. There is a topic of the week, to which viewers can add comments. You can join a campaign. There is even a "hottest" topics section.

But look a little closer. The campaign listed on the fron page is to ban chewing gum. The hottest topics are rubbish and recycling and influencing policy. As for the topic of the week? Speed bumps.

Seriously people, chewing gum bans and speed bumps.

I agree with Bill Hicks when he said "The British don't have crime like we have crime."

Still I think it would be interesting to set up a system like iCan and see what the American public would do with it. I'm fairly sure it would totally degenerate into ad hominem attacks and emotional appeal. Most Americans would like to blame the media but the truth is the majority of Americans have had their critical thinking process pretty much shaped by the evening news and other "news programs". I suppose when I get some free time in the year 2025 I can try setting up some sort of American equivalent.


Welcome and Bein Venu

So it seems that the Eros Blog posting I mentioned has resulted in an increase in visitors, so a big hello and thank you to all have deigned to join the mauvais lapin ( bad bunni). I have added a number of links, and another thanks to all of you who have linked to me.

Please file under: irony

A comment that I made on a Smitten post ( about men who are alledgedly good in bed) has been posted on Eros Blog. Of course the timing couldn't be worse. They link to me when my sex life is about as exciting as Jane Austen's Emma . I mean, yeah there's lots of drama, but at the moment my blog is less racy than Lady Chatterly's Lover.

The old gypsy curse: may you get what you want

previous line excerpted from the film Thirteen Conversations about One Thing

According to Susan Scarf, the author of Intimate Partners ( Oh you know you can link to amazon and do your own damn book search, you lazy bums) what an individual first finds attractive about his or her mate is exactly what will become the most problematic trait. (She links this theory to the concept of projective identification-in other words we seek out others who express feelings, drives, and behaviors that we wish to express, but are too conflicted about to do so-initially our mates fulfill our desire by expressing these desires for us, but of course most of the time the conflict comes from the fact we were raised to believe such behavior is "unloveable"-ie a boy being taught that crying is not "manly" and will result in the suspension of fatherly love-and eventually we will find the very behavior which we sought out to be "unloveable"-the boy will find an "emotional" woman who will express his depression and upset for him-initially he will find her sensitivity touching, but eventually he will find it annoying and disgraceful-he will begin to wonder why she can't act "more like a man"-all of this info courtesy of the "psychology of marriage" course I took in undergrad)

Have you ever wanted something so badly it possessed your body and your soul through the night and through the day?
excerpted from the song "True Happiness This Way Lies" off the album Dusk by The The (An album my very first boyfriend turned me onto.)

According the character of Gene English in Thirteen Conversations About One Thing the greatest curse is actually getting what you want. Of course, in the film the premise of the curse is that what a person thinks he or she wants is very different from what he or she actually wants. Of course no one actually realizes that until he or she gets the theoretical desire and has the revelation "Wait, I wanted something ELSE.". Case and point, me.

You all have long been witness to my diatribes against men who just want to use me for my body. Often I have longed for the relationship I had in high school where my boyfriend and I could lie in my bed for hours and just kiss. I wondered why I couldn't go back to that, find some guy who just wants to kiss me.

And then said guy walked into my life. If I customed ordered a man, I probably couldn't find a better man. Although I have issues with his working hours at the moment ( he worked through the entire weekend-although he still hung out with me on friday and is going to have coffee with me tomorrow night) I know this is not a serious issue...yet ( my old therapist used to call this living three weeks in the future-I told her I was closer to living ten years in the future). He is a non practicing Jew. He is slender, attractive, smart, funny, charming. He knows how to treat a woman without being all macho and ridiculous. He calls me two to three times a day. He calls me princess and sweetie and baby, but doesn't condescend to me. In fact, he puts a far higher premium on my intellegence than I do. He takes me to dinner and puts up with my ridiculousness.

And all he wants to do is kiss me.

And this is exactly what is driving me crazy. Because it seems that I totally don't know what to do with a man who doesn't want to rush me to bed. There is an element of suspicion-a feeling of he doesn't want me. Of course the counter argument is that he respects me. ( what are the odds?)

There are, of course, other options. One is that he understands how I work and he knows that by resisting my seductive impulses that he has hooked me even more ( when I own a guy in under fifteen minutes ie Luke Duke you can say good bye to the respect). There is always the suspicion that he wants to use me for something else, something that I am not seeing ( not for a lack of looking).

My friends are no doubt feeding my fear. Although they initially were very encouraging of his restraint, now their attitude is closer to "What the hell is wrong with this guy?" I'm not sure if there is anything wrong with him ( I mean in the big huge, skins of young children drying in the attic or dressing up as mother before stabbing the resident of cabin one to death sense of the word). It seems that perhaps I have bought into the new york way of thinking-that not rushing into someone's bed the first month of dating is indicative of some major psychological illness. Trust me I am a big believer in premarital sex (you test drive a car before you buy it right? you check out an apartment before you rent it? Well, why not test a guy's sexual ability before marrying him-I'm not saying it's a make or break proposition, I'm just saying that I want to make an informed decision), but that doesn't mean that it has to be an upfront thing.

Still, it makes a girl ponder.
Metablog

Smitten wrote a blog ( I admit it, I'm too damn lazy to find the link at the moment, I'll do it tomorrow) where she wrote that blogs tend to be like high school cliques. This idea intrigues me as I have myself been pondering the world of blogs. This is an undeveloped idea that I discussing with smitten this evening, and she encouraged me to post it. As I write it seems even less developed than I anticipated, but I put my faith in her.

Smitten's concept of the high school clique does seem apt, although not quite fully in the way she pointed out. For example, I find that I am strangely attracted to blogs written by bloggers on the Upper East Side. This revelation is not particularly shocking. The psychological concept of like attracts like has long been establish, but it does put a rather large hole in that the internet unifies the globe theory or that it allows for cross pollenation of diverse ideas and customs. It seems that most of the cross pollenation I get is from other single disgusted upper east siders.

It seems that the initial blog impulse could be tied ( and now I'm going to get really pompous so forgive me) to the salons in Paris where you have bunch of witty people driving each other to highest pinnacles of linguistic dexterity ( although not necessarily the deepest content). There was both community and competition, and often members used each other both to build off of one another as well as to punish and chastise each other in the salons. Of course with the huge number of blogs being posted the concept of an intellectual elite is destroyed. The beauty of blogging is that it isn't elite at its most base level, although certainly members may drive each other to excel and the "higher order" of blogs is extremely elite.

As I was talking to smitten, I realized one of the best comparisons would be to old vaudeville. There has been a lot of discussion about file sharing and copyright infringement these days, but it seems like for the most part the world of bloggers doesn't mind sharing inspiration, content, or format. For example, regularly lists and formats (like the five questions) circulate blogs. I have quoted other blogs here, and used the posts of others as inspiration for my own posts. Although generally I link to the original post ( or at the very least, the blog from which the post originated), it seems in the world of blogging, to "borrow" from another post to innovate or build on an idea is not considered stealing "intellectual property" but rather paying homage to those who have inspired you. Imitation is often accepted as the sincerest form of flattery. Marlowe and Shakespeare although "rivals" often used material from each other. In vaudeville, comedians often lifted skits or characters from each other, making innovations and changes.

So although in the blogging world like may attract like, it still leads to innovation and development and not stagnation because bloggers encourage others to quote and use material from posts.

What do you think?