One of our program requirements is attending a two-day, 18-hour “Negotiating Boundaries” workshop about sexual misconduct. Don’t touch people who trust you, etc.

I’m going this afternoon but fear that it’s all a ruse—what if it’s not a workshop but an intervention?

vindicatrix:

 ”I was reading Deuteronomy last night, and some of the notes by Rabbi Hertz, who is the late Chief Rabbi of the British Empire. Deuteronomy goes back to pre-literate days among the Jews; it actually was formulated before they had a written language. I thought, My God, the injunction in the Torah — in Deuteronomy — about caring for the needy, caring for the sick, caring for the poor, caring for the helpless, caring for the disadvantaged, are built into this thing which is maybe 3,000 years old, and has worked for 3,000 years. And now we’re hearing that kids don’t get hot-lunch programs, and the elderly don’t get social security, and everybody will have to get by on his own. We’re not seeing the clock turned back to 1912, before the graduated income tax was enacted; we’re seeing it turned back to Imperial Rome, where I think it was Seneca who said, “There’s no use giving food to the starving. It’ll just prolong their miserable lives.” Rabbi Hertz quotes him. The Roman attitude was that being hungry, poor, and sick, you deserved to die anyway. Aristotle, Plato, Virgil, Seneca and all of these people, don’t even include it as a virtue — they actually include it as a vice, that you would help the needy. We’re now seeing a return to the old imperial system of, “Let the disadvantaged sink to the bottom, let ‘em die.” This is so tragic and so inhumane.

        “But I can’t work up any animosity toward Reagan. I see him as caught up in historic trends that are so powerful, he was literally brought to power, the way Hitler was, which was legally and by a very large majority. And look what happened last week with Tip O’Neill’s fight against Reagen’s budget cuts. Did you see Tip O’Neill standing there at that microphone? The guy was ruined. His face was sagging, he was shaking. You didn’t even have to have the sound on.

…

        “There is one thing in Deuteronomy where he says, “You must always pay the hired man before sunset. For he is poor and has his heart set on it.” And in the notes Rabbi Hertz has for that, there is: “The workman is so poor that unless he is paid by sunet, he will not be able to buy food for his family.” I just lay there thinking about that, “For he is poor and has his heart set on it.” It is so incredible that we have fallen away from something that was so basic to our civilization, for maybe as many as 2,000 years.

        “We are in a time when there is a cruel spirit across the land, and it seems to be gathering momentum. I have some very close, personal friends who are showing symptoms of great cruelty…”

from Philip K. Dick’s last interview
http://www.philipkdick.com/media_twilightzone.html

- Sometimes I see someone at school and think, “His eyes look really sad,” or “She looks miserable, like she’s desperate to get back to her apartment,” and I’d like to ask them what’s up—mostly out of curiosity—but you can’t do that, not without having a gimmick or overstepping or being mistaken for an evangelist. I try to guess if their reasons are about school or something personal. This is an offshoot of the all-season game of intuiting peoples’ neuroses.

- Yesterday I remembered that my friend began his bar exam and texted him in support; this outreach made me feel like a good friend. Today I ran into a friend whose emails I have not returned in three months, which immediately spent my good-friend currency.

- I thought of two more people you wouldn’t want to date: an IT professional (graph the lines of Officious and Ineffectual, and “IT” will be the highest overlapping point; imagine asking them to run an errand for you) and a Unitarian (good luck being allowed to laugh at anything, ever).

- I abruptly realized that all along my 9th grade English teacher has been my archetypal “woman with whom I want to be in a relationship.” The realization felt queasily oedipal (I was never one for teacher fantasies or crushes on authority figures). Now she is 40 or 42 and not on Facebook, of course; she would roll her eyes at Facebook.

Rich people are often good looking,

and rich people often go to good schools,

but at the best schools, relatively few people are attractive.

One’s best bet for finding a mate, then, is to hang around a school that is good but not great.

“I think what she was getting at is—”

“What the writer meant by that is—”

Treasure trove of band names. The Hostile Voices, The Bulimia, etc.

Little Wings, “So What”

It is as dreary as England outside
A group project member was visibly disturbed by me/my colorful metaphor built around public vomiting
I have accidentally grown some kind of fuzzy, patchy afro, and it is awful
I have 10 pages to argue today
So what so what

so what a chapter, and so what a sentence,
so what of time, so what of distance?
camper shell calling, young leaves are falling
so what, do coastlines wait on us stalling?

This morning on NPR a listener called in and referenced our “corporate overlords.” That corporations control our government and our culture is a pretty mainstream idea now—mainstream enough that you can get elected to office on it. Even my mom and dad will acknowledge it, and they are far from skeptical/activist types.

If most people understand that it’s bad to have corporations controlling us, though, why doesn’t anybody do anything to change it? You have Adbusters and assorted liberal and hippie types, but they just talk to themselves. They are not talking to my mom and dad, and probably not your mom or dad, and probably not you, either. So although everyone has this low-level concern about corporate control of our government and the commercialization of our national culture, few people are having a conversation about it. What specific actions could begin pushing back against it?

Also this morning, I was talking to a professor about how, until the 70s, stores were closed on Sunday. The day off was timed to the Christian sabbath, but everybody got a break, Christian or not. When grocery stores in upstate NY began opening on Sunday, he organized against it because it was obvious that the poorest, lowest-wage-earning workers would be forced into working a sixth or seventh day of the week; either employers threatened to fire them if they didn’t work on Sunday, or they needed the money too desperately to say no. Either way, it is inhumane to make people work seven days a week (especially for so little money)—but we come not to bemoan.

The sabbath concept is that you do not work, and you do not induce others to work. Subtract the religious associations for a minute; imagine that you did not do any shopping this Sunday, and you did not even go out to eat. What would you do with that time? Your brunch date would come over to your house to eat. You would find a way to spend two hours other than strolling through stores. To go back to my family: I don’t know what yours is like, but when I am visiting home and we are bored, we go to Target. It’s a tantalizing idea to me—what if we dropped out of being consumers for one day each week? We would have to find different ways to spend our time, different ways to relate to each other. It would be great if some profound effects came from that weekly event, but just as importantly, it would give a lot of people a fucking break.

Another popular truism is that community is important; the scenario in that last paragraph looks to me like it does a lot to enable community formation. It also gives individuals a chance to catch their breath once a week and get practice at being people whose identities are not built up from being a consumer/user/connoisseur/collector/savvy shopper/etc. A weekly vacation from our corporate overlords. The challenge seems somewhat annoying or difficult now, but my guess is that after a month or six weeks, there wouldn’t be much challenge left in it. You find a different way to be.

Be clear that I am not advocating a legalistic sabbath practice—like I’m going to come to your house and slap the grocery bags out of your hand if I see you carrying them on a Sunday. I’m just thinking about what taking a day off could mean and what it might open up. As for myself, I am going to try not spending money on Sundays for a while. At worst, I will have cleared some corner of my life from the corporate overlords, at least until they come back over the next day.

ON AUTHORITY

Pictured above is a coin from the 4th century on which Constantine is holding the earth, which is round (not flat). Did you know that people in the Middle Ages, much later, didn’t actually believe that the earth was flat? The flat-earth belief was made up in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”

Now here is Ben Greenman talking about fiction, authority, and making stuff up:

What’s interesting is when I briefly taught in grad school—there’s this strange thing. You’d give kids a Calvino story and you ask, ”What is this story about?” They all have ideas: “This is about government”; “This is a parable about death.” Then if you put one line of italicized type on top of it saying the author wrote the story the year his mother died, that’s it; that’s all they thought it was about. So that one line leveraged the entire story. You could have beautiful 7,000-word piece of fiction that is about nothing and everything, and one little line will turn it. I thought that was so strange, but I’m susceptible to the same thing—how you can take that other authority—just italics, that’s the only authority and it’s at the top. That little tiny ant can carry that giant loaf of bread the whole distance. … Laurie Anderson, when she first taught—she taught history before she was a pop artist—she would tell her students lies, fake things about ancient Egypt. I never did that explicitly but I always really felt [that kind of impulse]. In graduate school I had to do a seminar paper, so I did it on flash photography at the moment of death. In Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading it happens, and in Borges, The Secret Miracle, it happens, and I thought, I just loved that idea of that—the person who is about to die seeing it being captured by some other idiot with a camera. I needed a third—you have to have three. So I just made it up. I made up this guy Grigory Satyrenko, who is a Russian writer who I said had studied with Sasha Sokolov. I wrote only one paragraph of this story because I needed to excerpt it, and then later I wrote the whole story.

Arthur Russell, “Nobody Wants a Lonely Heart”

[I wrote this last week, before my birthday, which is 9/18, AKA the one-week anniversary of 9/11.]

28 does not feel old to me, not since I began differentiating between capital-A Ages like 35 and 40, breaking them down into actual possible years rather than some floating gray mass over the horizon. It is true, however, that 28 feels old if I think back to 22 and take in how much opportunity was squandered. But I can forgive myself for it, because I didn’t know better, and it’s hard now to see a way that I could have done differently.

Recently I diagnosed myself with an addiction to wistfulness. (I don’t know how else to justify the constant stream of “Office” reruns playing in my apartment for the past 18 months. Or the Garrison Keillor stuff—I acknowledge that’s really weird.) Part of wistfulness is displacement, because you lament where you are compared to where you once were; you look tenderly at where you were and bittersweetly at where you are; part of you wishes that you were somewhere else and that part is, indeed, somewhere else.

I am comfortable with displacement to the point of seeking it. At school I have become skilled at avoiding associations, avoiding personal obligations, a ninja at slipping through cracks. Of course it is a lifelong practice, not something mastered overnight. Here is an Eddie fun fact: This one time, I labored under the notion of being in love with a girl who lived in another place, and I used that notional love to distance myself from actual girls whom I was actually dating. And this “one time” lasted for six years, ha-ha!

Events in the summer caused me to look squarely at this constant wistfulness and get some self-awareness about it. Suddenly I thought, Why would you want to be here but not here? Why would you want to let that have so much power over how you feel and how you treat people?

And so I began identifying instances of my tendency for wistfulness. The music I listen to is heartsick with it. The fiction I read fetishizes it. Certain relationships are constructed specifically to perpetuate it. Even the way I dress could be construed as an expression of it, because I am always wearing ties or jackets but in this sloppy way that says, “I probably care more about being somewhere else.”

Illustrative anecdote: My program at school has us go to one session with a voice coach. I went yesterday to a small office and read aloud a paper while a lady videotaped me. I did a crappy job. She asked what I had thought about while I read; I said that I thought about how I didn’t like the paper and so couldn’t “sell” it convincingly. Here is what she said. “Focus on the connection being made with the people who are listening. Don’t back away from what you’re reading; commit to it.” She did not realize that she would be supplying the moral lesson to my Livejournal entry. I read the paper again and got high marks.

First there is my glamorization of this wistfulness and heartsickness, and then there is my allowing it to forge a basic personality trait. Why would I want to be marked by heartsickness? I take as a sign of hope that my identifying it is coupled with a desire to (1) explain how it became so deeply rooted, (2) show compassion toward it, and (3) change it. For me that change looks like committing to experiences and people, standing with two feet on the ground instead of fidgeting from one foot to the other.

Broad strokes are made of small lines, and I am unsure about changing some habits. It might be beyond me, for instance, to love the horrible, fast Otis Redding songs in place of the good, slow, sad ones. Also I am actively trying to make a friend in New Haven who has cable TV so that I can see new episodes of “The Office.”

While I am just now hitting my stride as a graduate student, the good thing about finishing in May is that I will never again be invited to a lecture given by someone whose credentials are “Unitarian Universalist minister and sexologist.”

I have spent the day email-fighting with some awful asshole “Debbie” from my school’s student health department, which is trying to extort $450 from me for an eye exam.

Our 12 emails followed this sequence: sincerity, invocation of pity, indignant lawyerliness, accusation, crusade for justice, sarcasm, angry sarcasm, pathetic collapse from exhaustion (hers).

Because I won!! $0 balance!! I win!

As I recounted this story to my sister I felt as if I had earned a lot of money for my day’s work, when, actually, like the student health department I am just ending at $0.

Interdepartmental FriendFinder

I would like to meet more people at school but want friends who work in fields different than mine, so that (1) we can cross-pollinate topics of interest, and (2) not being knowledgeable in each other’s fields, we can blindly assume the other to be a top-flight expert and enjoy the glow that comes with befriending a winner.

But where at school does one meet these “others”? My department has its own cafeteria and library—we are cloistered.

Hence Interdepartmental FriendFinder, a combination of GoodReads and OKCupid, or LinkedIn and Nerve Dating, or Makeoutclub and JDate.

Asking Google what Paul said about the antichrist is a futile and creepy task.