Soda-Pop, minus Pony-Boy

Of all adolescent eating habits, I enjoy having a soda for breakfast most. On Saturday morning I popped open a Hansen's soda slightly before ten and settled with my laptop on the couch. My main squeeze, upon entering the living room, gave me a look to communicate his disapproval.

I held up my soda in defence and announced obtusely "Soda for breakfast."

My main squeeze, always more agile with the rejoiners in the morning than I, replied, "And diabetes for dinner."

And yet I still maintain that there is something awfully refreshing about drinking something cold, carbonated and distinctly sugary from an aluminum can before you are fully awake. But then I think a can of spray cheese and a Edwardian novel is the perfect evening.

Probably a dog calendar

My parents are coming to visit this weekend, and thus I have devoted no small amount of time to tidying my house. It's not like I have a spectacularly messy house (and I have lived in some spectacularly messy apartments, so I know the difference) but the house does seem to accumulate clutter very easily.

When I was younger I used to adore clutter, and would spend hours arranging my various clutter items on shelves. However, somewhere between here and there I got a bit more OCD about things, but because my clutter-gathering habits haven't changed, I now find myself with an alarming amount of crap stacked on every flat surface and an insatiable urge to tidy.

I will make this brief, because the vacuum is rebelling and I feel a little guilty pawing away at my computer while my indentured co-cleaner attempts

to fathom the mechanical innards, but I had a few random thoughts of note during the process.

Firstly I would like to voice my concern over buying furniture. Our house is filled with a variety of second hand and loaner items, the crown jewel of which is my rickety plaid loveseat. When I look around at the menagerie I wonder how a person could undertake the creative and fiscal responsibility of buying a set of furniture. I may be a lady, but charge me not with choosing a motif for my house.

My second point is in regards to photos on display. As any internet savvy procrastinator does, I rarely manage to print photos out physically. As a result of this coupled with an alarming lack of photogenic tendencies, our house is devoid of any pictures of the occupants together. And though I do think that pictures add to a certain quaintness, I think this might be nice. I don't want to look at me. Yetch. And I feel silly buying a frame to put myself in for my own looking enjoyment. So back to framing pictures ripped off of calendars.

Series of mildly related thoughts.

While plodding away at work this morning I succumbed to a fit of procrastination and took the opportunity to examine my water bottle from all sides. I always give my water bottle labels a thorough peeling, so it's not often that I get to gaze on the exciting line-drawings of mountains and streams name-plates. I was thus occupied when I realized something disturbing: water is a total show-off.

To preface, I love tap water. People are always gabbing on and on about how the water in Davis is distasteful (too liberal?) and whenever I’m not too busy guzzling water straight from the hose I take the time to disagree with this. It tastes perfectly acceptable to me.

My boyfriend and I are in the formative stages of a plan that requires drinking several dozen bottles full of sparkling lemonade, with the intent of filling them with marvelous tap water and stockpiling them in the fridge, thereby enabling us to constantly be lumbering about swigging from a chilled bottle held by the neck. [To be clear, that last sentence is both the longest in my blog thus far and a blatant digression.] Obviously, I am no anti-water freak with an ugly rock lawn.

And yet, the unbridled liquid ego of bottled water rankles me. There is no need for a Nutrition Facts panel when the answer for every value is 0 percent (based on a 2000-calorie daily diet). If you need to include it, you might as well mention things like 0 % water snake particulate matter, or 0 % crawdads disease, both of which concern me more than the fact that water lacks carbs. So you have no sodium, no calories and no sugar. Stop showing off. You also have no color. And I think that Sierra Mist, semi-transparent N-64 game systems and albinos can attest that having no color is bad news.

So, while reflecting on water I was reminded of the Willa Cather documentary that I watched last night (because I’m that kind of crazy party kid). In addition to revealing Willa Cather’s suspect sex life and history of the risky hair decisions, the documentary featured several melodramatic voice-over excerpts from her novels against a visual of casually wind-swept prairie.

This is exactly the sort of thing that I like about documentaries, the low-budget reenactment feeling. I’m quite fond of long dramatic shots featuring someone’s hand writing with a feather quill while a lilting voice reads the Gettysburg address or the personal correspondence of some hella religious corn farmer. I’m also keen on panning shots of cannons and flags with the noise of bullets whizzing and swords clanging. I even like a repetitive circling of a gallows accompanied by a noisy courtroom soundtrack, complete with audience shuffling and pounding gavel.

Anyway, in this Willa Cather documentary featured one such reenactment. A man and his packhorse were picture from the knee-down roaming listlessly in the desert in search of water. The narrator was reading from the novel Death Comes for the Archbishop and explained that the priest was following his pack animal, hoping that the mule might sense water. There's some nonsense about a cactus casting the shadow of a cross, and maybe some metaphor about needing God almost (but not quite) as much as you need water. Eventually the super-star mule leads the priest to water.

It occurs to me that a water company might do much better to detail this story on the side of the bottle instead of including a Nutrition Facts panel.

PS, I'm reading The Way of All Flesh by S. Butler, which is very slow going, but offers important insights about the valuing your offspring. Por exemplo:

“His money was never naughty; his money never made noise or litter, and it did not spill things on the tablecloth at mealtimes or leave the door open when it went out. His dividends did not quarrel amongst themselves, nor was he under any uneasiness lest his mortgages become extravagant upon reaching manhood and run him up debts which sooner or later he would have to pay.”

Just when I discovered a good away message for being in class...

Today I attended my last lecture. I also picked up my graduation outfit, but as the sentimental realizations there were limited to the chagrin of knowing that I was paying 40 buckeros to rent a gown that has shoulder pads and smells like hot-dog wienies in BBQ sauce, I'll skip the weepy descriptors.

I spent my last lecture drawing a robot man with square eyes on the desk and after giving him (the robot) six legs and adorning each foot with a hiking boot I wrote very melodramatically "Last Lecture" above him. I am well aware that I should have been listening to the Professor discuss "The Deserted Village" by so-and-so Goldsmith, and as eighteenth century poetry goes it's really not bad (the best couplet: "His best companions, innocence and health/ And his best riches, ignorance of wealth"). However, I was fairly distracted and felt that the last lecture of my career was hardly the best time to begin acting studiously.

Okay, that last bit was sort of a lie. I am largely very studious. I even re-read "The Deserted Village" before going to class, despite the fact that I abhor haughty English poetry and I vaguely recalled having read it some time ago in some Masterpieces class. When is comes to being a geek, I summon all other geeks to proclaim me as their overlord and pay me a yearly tribute in Buffy comic books. Geek though I may be, I just feel that there is no real reason to behave in such a fashion during lecture.

Chronological Development of my Lecture Behavior Patterns:

1)Falling asleep in class, in bold defiance of twitching motion that implies the weird falling sensation that characterizes these sort of naps. Oddly this has not happened to me since Freshman year.

2)Forming back-row coalitions of sarcasm. It's difficult to find the right mix of disaffected youth and slacker in the back-row, because there's no fun in forming a coalition of suffering with someone who never shows up. In fact, the only thing that is worse is forming a coalition with someone who always shows up but never wants to shoot the shit. A good unit of measurement is to try to locate someone who always looks around incredulously whenever that kook in the front-row who looks like Uncle Joey from Full House opens his mouth to bring up 24 again. Disdain for active participators is a serious plus.

3)Doodling. I started with boxes, moved on to cubes and finally settled on drawing circles and shading them to look like Easter eggs. For awhile I was daily re-drawing a reindeer with wings on this particular desk in my totally bitchin' Manifest Destiny class, because on the desk in front of me the words "Beer Run" had smeared to look like "Deer Run." I had high hopes that someone in another class who sat in my seat might respond to the weirdness of the Deer Run phenomenon, but the only thing that ever happened was some jerkwad inked in a joint for the deer to smoke, adding some tacky subtext to my flying friend.

4) Struggling to conquer the crossword. This very well might be the ideal lecture leisure activity. Firstly, it is deceptive, because your look of confusion and your furious scribbling suggests that you are zealously taking notes. Secondly it embodies the perfect level of lecture socializing. It doesn't require chatting and the exchanging of phone numbers to set up study groups, but there is an unspoken solidarity between crossworders. You know that if you are working on the crossword beside a fellow crossworder that there will be some healthy peaking going on, and perhaps even some collaboration. Nothing brings people together more solidly than the realization that "A Flower from Holland" is a tulip.

Because I should be writing a paper...

Last week in my sociology class (how I abhor you, G.E. left until my last quarter, full of freshman sporting their ID cards in lanyard pouches about their necks) we watched this documentary called Merchants of Cool. The documentary wasn't really shocking, it simply detailed that the entertainment industry is ruled by giant conglomerates who are busy You-Got-Mailing their way into our brain-cases. It also described how these empires employ special baby-faced professionals (Andy Milonakis?!) who seek out "cool" kids and infiltrate their sub-cultures with the intent of popularizing it for evil capitalist gains. Now, I know I'm being trite, but I thought that the concept of cool deserved a little meditation.


My interest in the documentary was focused almost entirely on the choice of wording. The phrase "cool" seems to have become vaguely immortal. It transcends the harsh realities that ground up trends like "savage" and "sweet" (yes, sweet is over). Parental types utter it all the time when figuring out how to play BeJeweled on their Blackberry. Although my personal tastes tend more toward "bitchin," I am not immune to saying cool when confronted with say, someone doing a kickflip on their skateboard in a halfpipe built of boxes behind the Safeway. I looked it up on Urban Dictionary [Long aside: Not a usual reference point for me, but some guy I know IM-ed me yesterday and said that he was "sprung" and then followed up with a link to the word on Urban Dictionary. After clicking around for awhile I learned that the meaning of the phrase "drink champagne on a beer bottle budget" and advice on how to leave your girl if she is acting "klingy"]. Anyway, the entry on Urban Dictionary for "cool" implies that it is relaxed and never goes out of style and (most importantly) no one will ever laugh at you for saying it. Apparently cool is the safest verbal road away from embarrassment.


So, in the spirit of the immortality of the phrase, and because my boyfriend said that my blog needed more lists, what follows is a list of the things that come to my head immediately as being cool.

1) Melodramatic and poorly edited literary magazines full of melodramatic poetry and thinly concealed politics.

2) Professors who write their lecture outlines on the board.

3) Soothing prose about early America. [I never eat pancakes without thinking: "Then sit down he did, as they urged him, and lifting the blanket cake on the untouched pile, he slipped from under it a section of the stack of hot, syrupy pancakes. Royal forked a brown slice of ham from the frying pan...and Alamanzo filled up his coffee cup."]*

4) Zealous internet fan communities.

5) Hour-long teen dramas from the late-nineties.

6) High school newspapers.

7)Boring BBC adaptations of boring British novels.

8)Unpopular eateries.

9) N. Baker's The Mezzanine. [I'm going through a revival phase. After gifting it to someone last week I re-read it, and am re-enamored. People are lucky that I don't block-quote the hell out of that thing all over the interweb.]


*That's The Long Winter; I don't want the internet police knocking on my cyber-door with their virtual mag-lites.

In which I do the unthinkable and quote a poem

I wish that I could manage to write with music on. It seems like it would be so nice to write while listening to some thematically relevant jams, but whenever I try the words from the music get mixed up with the words that I'm thinking and everything gets all lyrical and muddled. I sometimes can't even think too well with music on, to the point that I have to turn my radio (perpetually set to a loud and jangly classic rock station) while driving my car if I am having serious thoughts. I suppose that it's a dramatic exaggeration to say that I can't write with any music on; as long as the music has no words, or in the case that those words aren't in English or very slow phonetically pronounced Spanish, I'm fine. The trouble is finding thematically relevant jams that meet that standard of inscrutability.

I meant to post yesterday because I was feeling very nervous about certain maladies, and I felt that a good ramble would be a suitable remedy but because I got busy at work I had to postpone this venture. I was planning on talking about people that are totally mega-spazzy on the medieval times, because I had been reading this blog by a medievalist, and it suddenly occurred to me that I have read many (perhaps at least two) blogs by medievalist in my time scamming about on the interweb.

This realization combined with several factors. Firstly, I'm a retired scifi enthusiast, and I have a keen knowledge of "Ren Faire" culture. Secondly I had read several--admittedly early modern--Swift poems that morning and was considering 18th century cleanliness ("When he beheld and smelt the towels/ Begummed, bemattered, and beslimed/ With dirt, and sweat, and earwax grimed"). This sort of vivid imagery clashes with the general corset-heavy medieval conception and created for me a general state of unrest. People: the medieval times were not romantic, they were pretty damn icky.

I know what you think, I saw the Paul Walker classic Timeline too. We'd all like to think that if we were charming archaeologists sucked backward in time that we'd fall in love with a French heiress/revoluntioneer and be awesome at sword fighting and use our "magic" boom boxes to subdue the friendly (if misguided) natives. You, me, and a giant turkey leg in 1344.

However, on further contemplation, I have decided that it might not be quite so pleasant as all that. (And not just because I visited France over the summer and saw a dead homeless guy, though that is a factor). The medieval times were rife with plagues, various household molds, and plenty of people pissing on tapestries. I'm none too sanitary a person myself (currently I'm sporting jeans besmeared with Flaming Hot Cheeto dust and a rip in the crotchal region for the second day in a row), but even I'm baffled by the medieval concept of toiletries, which I assume is a crucifix and a few leeches.

Oh-- consider this my first aborted blog. I've got to go off and eat, so my rant is arrested here.