Le maudit Mo D.

vermont!

I got an e-mail from VSC and, like, wept with joy. This kitchen remodel has me missing eating at home. Our kitchen still has usable appliances, but its in disarray and is a huge mess, so F that. I then remembered that my VSC scholarship requires me to work in the kitchen 10 hours a week. I'm really happy about that. I think manual labor complements writing very well and love cooking in big, industrial kitchens.

Seattle is on, even though it means missing key events like Dr. Dre's going away party and Roy's BoS show. Poopers on that front, but I haven't gotten to hang with the Swilkes and the D-Moe since my wedding and that didn't count, which means we haven't REALLY hung out together at once since 2001. Too long. EDIT: My memory serves me badly. We hung out in April '07 in DC. DUH.

A can of pineapple rings exploded in my pantry at some point over the last year or so, causing its innards to rot. I didn't realize the can was open, so when I went to pull it out of its dark corner, stank, rotten pineapple juice splashed all over the floor and my legs and the other cans I was removing from the pantry in preparation for the kitchen remodel. The smell was nauseating and I was already keyed up and tired from hauling shit out to the storage container, so that made me even more angry.

I am sorry for the people of South Texas but I'm really excited about the rain Austin is going to get. Does that make me a bad person?

space boat

I had a dream that Bob rented a Space Boat. The Space Boat was shaped like a spaceship and sailed out to the middle of the ocean, where it's dark, so you could pretend like you're in space. Admission to the Space Boat cost $160 and water bottles were $10 and ice cream cones were $12. I suppose the day will come in my life when water bottles and ice cream cones will cost just that. Everyone's shoes got stolen on the boat. And I didn't want to pay $160 but I did anyway since everyone else was super-enthusiastic about the Space Boat.

Just in time to rescue me from a ho-hum, craptacular summer in which all the self-esteem building that was done in my childhood is being undone on the daily, a trip to the Pacific Northwest w/Swilkes and Dyna is now on the horizon! I've been lamenting the low number of close ladyfriends in my life, esp. how I've floated away from a lot of my college-era ladypals. Forch, Swilkes and Dyna and I still rock the same page lo these many years hence. Some of the most fun moments of my life have been with Swilkes in her hometown of Seattle. AND BONUS: Average temperatures of 60 degrees.

I am of the opinion that if one complains loudly and consistently enough about one thing, then if they don't change it in their lives, they are asinine. I complain loudly and consistently about the weather and yet I don't endeavor to summer elsewhere so much (all my travel monies are spent on Vermont from here on out). However, next summer I am making like a tree and leaving. No more hot hot heat in my life. Hopefully my scheme will work...

do me, dolly!

I want that Tropical Storm to fucking rain the shit out of this dry, hot town. I want T-storms, I want a saturated driveway, I want the temperature to drop and all the little plants to get soaked.

In other words, I want to be in Seattle. Or anywhere but here, really.

les garçons d'été

Tonight is the 2nd installment of Boys of Summer III and the first one that I'll be in.
Tonight's boy is someone I've never played with and have only spoken to maybe twice. But he's cool! He wrote the Venus Zine article about us.

Someone "heard a rumor" that we're now "letting boys into the troupe." I can't remember who told me that.

Also, another male improviser told me "if we want a man, not a boy," he's available. Noted.

BOS 3.2
featuring Erik Adams of Skipfield
TONIGHT!
8pm
The Hideout
617 Congress
Next door to PITA PIT.
Snarf microwaved falafel and then come see us.

open your heart to my liberal art

This morning, I was in the shower, scrubbing myself clean. I've had to concede that natural deodorant does not provide the odor-fighting protection I need during a hot, humid Austin summer, and that I smell like a plate of Armenian cured meats if I don't use the toxic stuff. Although I had the water running and was focused on stripping my body of funky smells, I could still hear Bob in the other room laughing his ass off.

"You've got to read this online comic!" he exclaimed. His enthusiasm indicated that staggering brilliance awaited me at xkcd dot com, and that my life would be irrevocably altered by the myriad blessings I would receive via this masterful work of comic art that Bob had unearthed and deigned to share with me.

So I wrapped myself in a towel and sat down at my computer, first checking nytimes.com to see if any interesting celebrities had died in the last hour.

"Have you looked at it yet?" Bob prodded. I was placing unnecessary minutes between me and this unparalleled genius! I clicked over to xkcd.

I did not laugh. I guess if you were a science major in college and still enjoy feeling smug and superior to those of us who chose liberal arts degrees, this comic is pants-shittingly hilarious. But if you, like me, were and are forever a liberal arts person, its just tired and played. Clearly, the joke is on me, paying all that money for a degree that doesn't parlay itself nicely to a 9-5 job. While I'm the first to admit that writing novels all day is not as beneficial to humanity as, say, nursing or police work, and is indeed selfishly motivated and provides negative financial remuneration for my trouble, I do not concede that doing what makes me happy is so completely worthless as to deserve mockery.

If Bob had taken more literature and history courses during his college days, he would know that American colleges were not intended to provide job training for middle-class workers. It was intended to educate clergy and the sons (and later daughters, thank you Mary L./Sophia S./Matthew V./Henry F.D.) of elite families who would go on to work in professions such as law, academia, medicine, government, and yes, the sciences. A hundred years ago, you didn't get into Harvard based on merit. You got in because your father went there, or your father's boss wrote you a recommendation, or or because your family could pay full freight and could make generous donations to its capital fund. This still happens to a certain extent (just take a look at the POTUS). Certainly I am not advocating that higher education remain available only to the upper classes; however, when I was told that the type of college education I had chosen was not designed to put my butt in a specific professional seat, I accepted that and knew that with the Ladycollege's unparalleled bad-ass alumnae network, I would never be completely unemployable.

I thought about putting an ad up on Craigslist to find fellow liberal artistes who want to sit around drinking coffee having wanky conversations about literary criticism, particularly about Infinite Jest, since that IJ reading group never really got off the ground and I feel that in order to earn my stripes as a modern literature wankster, I need to complete this tome tout de suite. However, my motivations for doing such a thing felt like cheating, for some reason, if seeking what you lack in your marriage outside the marriage is indeed cheating, even if no sex is involved.

Also, I must say that I will never join TX Exes or give the school one thin dime based on UT's culturally-motivated avoidance of the word alumni. Latin is too fancy for these people? Okay, fine, I'm keeping my fancy money for myself then, thanks.

new people to hate

So today is the anniversary of my dad's death. Sixteenth. Half my life has been spent without this man, and the way I carry on, you'd think it happened yesterday. I must have had some extreme psychic bond with this man who sired me at age 65, died in his armchair at age 81, and left behind a teenage daughter who had spent every waking moment of her childhood scared to death that each day would be THE DAY, the day that daddy, an old man, would inevitably die.

That day was July 17, 1992.

I wasn't going to write anything about this, because I've already said all that needs to be said about it. I'm even getting tired of the whole dead father trope of my life. But in yesterday's Statesman, a story about a 59-year-old woman in our area who gave birth last month predictably stuck in my craw.

First of all, fuck the Statesman for failing to report that this woman had to have taken every fertility treatment known to man to get pregnant. Fifty-nine year old women don't get oops preggers ever, unless they have been chosen by God to birth the Messiah. This "oh, well, this little miracle just snuck up on us!" tone of the first paragraph is total bullshit, and the fact that they had lost a child made it even more apparent to me that someone was doing a little in vitro behind their grown children's backs.

The big bullshit is, of course, the last part of the article, the part where they concede that at their age, they may not be around to see their baby through to adulthood. Such light is made of this. Hey, their grown kids will undoubtedly step up and finish raising the kid! No sweat there! Forget the trauma that a child with old parents goes through every day! I promise you that kid is going to be clinging to his mother's leg crying hysterically when the time comes for him to go to school. At age 65.

Some shithead kid is going to get up in his face and tell him that his parents are going to die soon and that's going to be it for him.

I fucking hate these misguided, selfish people.

special welcome

Um, "a special welcome for admitted students of color"? What? It reads like they just this year updated the letter, last year it said "a separate colored mixer". Come on! 1994? Yikes.

To answer LaSuprema's comment (LaSuprema is one of those cool lifelong Austinites who was here when all the cool shit was happening before Californians like me came and fucked everything up), the special welcome for students of color was actually a very early '90s thing. The Ladycollege, like other private liberal arts schools, was very much at the forefront of the PC movement (if you could call it a movement). African-American students of the day reported they didn't feel very integrated, and there had been a few racial incidents on campus (I think on the level of "dumbass bitch wrote the N word on a black student's dry-erase board," not all-out riots). The LC is a very white place in the middle of a very white community, so the college has to do what it can to make urban-raised ladies-of-color want to spend four years at Barbara Bush's alma mater. So as a way to recruit students of color, they'd have recruitment weekends specifically tailored for them. I never went to one, so I don't know if they were patronizing bullshit or what. In 1995, the Ladycollege inaugurated its first President-of-Color, so I'm guessing it was not patronizing. But I can't say.

So although it sounds like they're segregating, they're actually trying, in their adorable little early-nineties way, to integrate.

They also forced incoming students of all colors (esp. white ones) to sit through six hours of "diversity training," which amounted to having to listen to a couple of overbearing, self-righteous upperclasswomen tell all the white straight students that we were racist and homophobic and then have the non-white and/or queer students get up and tell a story about how they were oppressed in high school and, with any luck, start crying. I got the feeling that the facilitators weren't happy unless they got at least one person to turn on the water works. I wasn't cool enough to skip it or, in the style of the great M. A. Brooks, get up and completely fuck with the facilitators. I'm cool enough now, but at eighteen I was still in obedience mode.

I can tell you that diversity training was not responsible for preventing me from committing a hate crime during those four years. I don't know why I never did, but something inside me just didn't want to hate a bitch for the color of her skin or the rainbow rings around her neck. I accredit that to common sense, a decent upbringing, C-Juana High, and not being a douchebag.

So that's the long answer to that.

october regret

I knew when I signed on for four weeks in beeeeyootiful Vermont this fall that some amazing thing would get scheduled here in Austin that month and that I'd have to miss out. So it came as no surprise that the Magnetic Fields are playing here in October and not any other month that I might be around. I am sad about this, but am still going to Vermont, damnit. Maple syrup and foliage trump Stephin M. any day.

Swilkes should note that they are playing at her institution of higher education on 10/26. Very convenient.

more fun from the maudit archives

College acceptance letters! I don't even know if colleges mail these via post anymore. I got my grad school acceptance via e-mail, and that was in 2000.

Can you believe how dated that font looks? And note they have their Telex number printed on the letterhead. Go MoHo!

Ah yes, the one that actually did welcome me in the fall! Smith's acceptance came in a deceptively thin envelope. I had gotten Mount Holyoke's thick one the day before and had set my mind to going there when I saw the thin envelope in the mailbox. But no! I've really never given any thought to what my life would have been like had I chose MoHo over Smith. I suppose I would have had an uglier dorm room and more sugar in my diet and that's about it.

All I know is, I question every day how much that "heightened expectation of success" has really served me in the long run.

Humboldt was my safety. I had a very nice phone chat with an English professor from Humboldt who tried to reel me into his department. I had no intention of going there, but for tuition purposes, my California residency would have saved me quite a bit of money.