See what happens when I blog before coffee?

I become an insufferable bonehead. The most important thing in my life is not, for the record, my comforter. I have freedom, intellect (not large, but functional), a healthy body (likewise not large, but functional), a wonderful girlfriend, good friends both globally and locally, and a family. Which puts my comforter fifth. Maybe even sixth.

And after two cups of coffee yesterday and a class where my students did group presentations on The Faerie Queene and actually said interesting things, I was upgraded from Grumpy to Downright Nonchalant. Even a long day with two flaccid composition classes and a department meeting didn't wreck it. Which leads me to believe that the main influences on my mood are not the ones that I had diagnosed yesterday. Fatigue, weather, drug withdrawal, stress, relative isolation (or solitude if you prefer), the daily news, these things which seem on the surface to be determining factors, are not really. All I need to feel okay is the sense that I've been productive recently. Even if it's as small as having done some situps, washed some dishes, and read an article, if I feel like I'm doing something good for me, I'm all right.

Drinking enough water, eating vegetables, and stretching might also have more to do with it than I think. I'm not a shrink, after all, and I'll never again be able to afford one, so I have to do my best.

Harriet Miers is withdrawn! Bush admitted a mistake! What the hell? Is the world ending? This must be a good thing, right? We don't have an incompetent Bush crony on the Supreme Court, for one thing, but also it indicates that some of the people who have some influence on the Jackass in Chief are not just religious kookballs.

Speaking of whom, it's amazing what you can learn about today's Christians from listening to the radio. I remember when that Old Time Religion included helping the poor, clothing the naked, loving your neighbor, suffering the little children, that sort of thing. But in just ten minutes of WRVM (Wisconsin Radio's Voice of the Master), I learned not only predictable and stupid things, but many downright pernicious ones. That dinosaur bones are only a few thousand years old and that "scientists" have NO IDEA what killed them is only ignorant dumbassery, but then we Christians got a "Washington Minute" that compared pollution controls to failing fad diets and pointed out that they are expensive and are just making European industries go to Asia. Therefore we must NOT try to control pollution at all. Then the ever-admirable Phyllis Schlafely came on to argue against Universal pre-school bills. Apparently the evil liberals in some states think pre-school is a good idea, even pre-school with trained teachers! This would cost money, said Phyllis, which would come from a tax on the "so-called super-rich".

"So-Called"? Really? Does she really think there aren't such people, like DeLay thinks no one is trying to feed a family on minimum wage?

Suffer the little children. Camel. Eye of a needle. I think maybe some Christians should break off again and form not just a new sect but a new religion. Cut and paste your favorite holy texts. Bits of the gospels can stay -- there's some great Jew-burning stuff in Matthew -- but I think we're mostly dealing with Genesis, Deuteronomy, Leviticus, and Revelations. Plus we'll have to add the Left Behind novels and The Purpose Driven Life.

What could we call this new religion? I'm open to suggestions.

The blahs (again)

The best thing in my life right now (or so it always seems before coffee) is my comforter. I don't know what it means that the shop people rated it "five," but apparently it means that this comforter creates an alternate universe entirely independent of climatic conditions on Earth.

So when I am summoned from it into the real, cold world of Nowhere, WI, I am not (comme dit ons en Angleterre) half pleased. When I am summoned from it not by my alarm, but by the inexplicably bleeping smoke detector, which may or may not need batteries, I am not half pleased but very confused. Shivering nakedly on a chair and myopically puzzling at the bleeping beastly thing is not as good as sleeping in my alternate universe. And when I got back to bed this morning I had re-snuggled for ten minutes when my actual alarm went off.

What am I so tired for? It's not as though I was particularly productive yesterday, or that life in Nowhere is such a whirlwind existence that I'm plum tuckered out. I think it may just be that October always does this to me. It may be having two, rather than one, freshman composition classes. It may be the cold snap. It may be five hours of student conferences yesterday. It may be my students that glare at me or fall asleep (or both) and then go online to ratemyprofessor.com and complain that I'm an asshole.

Maybe it's living in a world where we, having destroyed the planet, are getting destroyed right back, where our semi-elected leaders are baldfaced criminal bastards and not enough people care to change them. Maybe it's that Rosa Parks died.

Or maybe it's just that I'm a self-absorbed shit who really doesn't want to go to a faculty meeting today after teaching all day.

Thanks for your patience. I don't need sympathy (or outrage); I just needed to vent.

Fixing a hole where the rain gets in

I found myself expending my blogging energy not by blogging but by posting snarky comments on other people's blogs, most notably GASMETER, a notable effort from a fascinatingly enigmatic bloke I sometimes do things with, things like acquire advanced degrees and watch football. But all this metablogging was getting me down, so here's an actual bit of blog.

No matter what your politics and even if you don't like documentaries, have a look at Gunner Palace if you haven't already. We Netflixed it last week (yes, that is a verb), and it's a commendably spare look at a unit of American soldiers in Baghdad, living in an abandoned old Palace of Uday Hussein's. As surreal as the setting seems, it's the least striking thing about the film, which avoids Michael Moore-ism and sticks to telling the fairly horrific story of life in occupied Iraq, not seen through, but reflected in, the eyes of the occupiers.

Fall

The air got all crispified this week, finally allowing me to do some work in my airless office, which had been page-curlingly humid and 85 degrees. In October. End of the world and all. But now it's definitely autumn, and the Nowhere, WI Main Street Association has wrapped dried corn stalks around the streetlights. Starting next week the ground will be crunchy and brown underfoot as I trudge to campus, and everyone will have drippy noses and rosy cheeks. Fall is good stuff.

A couple friends that I haven't seen in years are rolling through Wisconsin this month. I'm getting really bad at keeping up with my friends, and if they don't call me back, I'm inclined to ring and e-mail them less frequently. I think the internet has the opposite effect on correspondence that we would've hoped. Knowing we can be instantly in touch with anyone we want has had the same democratizing effect on friendships that Google searches have had on information. I can just pull up Melanie or Ian or Jeff in a couple clicks, so why should I worry that they might be drifting into indifference. The machines make no distinction between nytimes.com and theonion.com and objectiveministries.com, so why should they make a distinction between my high school best friend and that interesting guy I met on a plane last year? We're codable, so we're discardable. Not to mention that keeping a blog (however sporadically) gives one's distant friends the illusion of being in touch without requiring them actually to be in touch.

Quality of life on the $8.15/hr Assistant Professorship varies from day to day, with a direct correspondence between my state of mind and the amount of grading I have in front of me. And it can truly be atrocious. One of my students wrote a paper the last word of which was "and." Another titled her essay "Gender as According Hemingway's." English is not these people's second language, they're just barely monolingual. And this is supposedly a selective Liberal Arts College. Oh, well. I will make them slightly better, and that'll be an accomplishment. In the meantime, I have this crap taking up my brainspace while trying also to revise and resubmit an article on Dickens, write a chapter of my book, and find a job at a somewhat better institution.

I'm finding it an interesting contrast, being on the job market again at this stage. For one thing, having any job at all is a huge bonus. The air is clearer and I'm less desperate. I don't have to apply to the U. of Mississippi at Plumpot, for example. Also, I seem to know someone at every school I'm applying to. One of my friends is on the search committee, in fact, at one of the big, well-libraried, well-endowed universities, and another friend is the dreaded internal candidate with whom I'll have to compete for that cushy Seven-Sisters job out east. Some of these departments have interviewed me before, and although now I can talk about a couple more years of teaching and a book contract, I don't quite know what I'll say differently.