Don't Worry About the Prozac

Years ago, the one cat I knew in high school who knew what he wanted to be when he grew up (a US senator) opined that prozac was a kind of vision of the norm: it makes people calmer, more thoughtful, it takes off the ragged edge of the neuroses from which most of us suffer, and he thought that it would be interesting if literally everyone was on it. Things would probably be a lot more peaceful. I was talking with another friend about it recently and that's what prompted item 7 on my last listy blog.

I don't have any orbit-breaking insights here, I just think it's funny and interesting how we all self-medicate. Prozac, sure, but so with alcohol and caffeine and nicotine and THC and sugar and exercise and stinky cheese, to say nothing of the insane chemical reactions prompted by and for sex. Heck, even sleep and solitude. It's just that tastes vary.

When I was younger I found the idea that our emotions were all just a very complex chemical stew to be appalling, but now I don't have a problem with it at all; it's like having a chemistry set in your head, and as long as you don't blow the whole thing up, it's not a problem trying out different combinations of reagents. Likewise, it doesn't make us any less human to accept the fact that there are biological bases for emotions; they're complicated enough to keep us all busy.

Monitoring the Internal Monologue

1. The trick with these kids is to convince them to try to focus on figuring out exactly what it was the famous intellectual was trying to argue before going off on how stupid or unrealistic or short-sighted his or her ideas were. As with Marx, so with Sartre, so with Foucault: you, undergraduate, are not actually smarter than they were.
2. Everyplace we've lived since we moved in together about eight years ago has been too hot in the summertime. Upstairs apartments and stifling weird old houses. The advantage of this one is that it actually has a screen door for the sliding door and a decent window screen in place, so we can air it out at night. I do wish I could cast 'silence, 15' radius' on my head to drown out the neighbor sounds, obviously.
3. I have this one kid in my class who reminds me of several of the too-smart-for-their-own-good punk and semi-punk kids I was friends with about ten years ago. At least he's not a complete jerk.
4. A just got back from Italy, where she had a lovely time gallivanting about. I would like to go to, say, Newfoundland, or maybe northern Alaska, instead. Or maybe a mobile camp on an iceberg, one of the ones that has broken off of Antarctica because of global warming.
   
5. It's very hard to keep finding fun stuff to watch. We tried one of the other HBO shows out, but we didn't like it. Why can't they release four seasons of True Blood all at once?!
6. Best True Blood characters: Lafayette and Eric. Oh, and Terra.
   
7. Maybe we should all be on prozac. Have you ever thought that? Just take that electric jolt of anxiety that comes with everything and be all "forsooth! Away with you!" I am seriously tempted, and I'm not kidding.
8. I realized today I need to stop eating a gigantic plate of pasta smothered in pesto and Parmesan every single day for lunch. I'm bummed about this, but seriously.
9. Happy Bastille Day, everybody. Consider storming something and seizing the ammunition.
   

Working Notes

1. Eight single-spaced pages of lecture is about right for two hours, supplemented by a meager PowerPoint, tangents, anecdotes, and Q+A with the kids. Writing those eight pages takes me a solid couple of hours, assuming I can keep myself from becoming completely distracted.
2. Apparently, I run a tight ship when I'm tired and hungover. We had the best overall discussion yesterday in class, of Freud and Weber of all things. The kids really seemed to get it with Id - Ego - Super-Ego by the end, and we had a pretty good time mapping out Freud's attitude about reason and civilization vs. aggression and madness.
3. BBQ tonight! Hot diggity.
4. Working on writing up my poststructuralism / postmodernism / Foucault lecture right now. Someone left a copy of Perry Anderson's short book on postmodernism lying around the bunker a week or two ago, and skimming it (which I did to avoid other work) gave me a lot to work with for this lecture. I'm convinced this is how 90% of productive academic work actually gets done (i.e. by accident or through procrastination.)
5. Shaved off the semi-beard after it got too itchy. This happened on Tuesday.
6. B and I booked a trip to Yosemite for October. We'll be out of town for Halloween, our second-least favorite holiday in SC, which is pure rad. We're staying at a fancy lodge in the park, whose off-season rates made it cheaper than a comparable weekend in Mendocino, which is weird.
7. Constant tension from worrying about lectures, dissertation, conference paper, l'avenir in general.
8. Weird conversation with this punk kid in my class yesterday, telling me about a show at a house somewhere in town, celebrating the violence and obnoxiousness of the local punk scene. Reminded me of why I stopped playing music in the first place: the human condition is wretched enough without arbitrary additions of violence and obnoxious behavior. Unless it's obnoxious behavior directed toward republicans, granted.
9. My relationship with sleep would be considered by therapists to be abusive.
   

Finding the Summer Groove

July 4 came and went and the inhabitants of the KFR household survived unscathed, although it should be noted that Pesto shares my loathing for fireworks. The marine layer* has been AWOL for the last few days, so summer is verily upon us, with temps hitting the high 70s.** Naturally, I am against this, but I've learned over the years to take these things in stride.

So here's the thing: I think by early August, I will have figured out summer 2009's tricks. I really like teaching, but my lectures are a little too short and it makes me feel guilty. I really like playing vampire and running my mouth (no disclaimer on this one.) Despite the fact that B's job is still potentially on the chopping block as the Californian budget train wreck goes into its sixth month, for now we are booking vacations in October anyway. I think I just need to hook up a little more BBQ and find a way to get a little more dissertation written, and I'll be all set for the season.

* The marine layer is the giant fog bank that rolls in from Monterey Bay most mornings from May through September, burning off in the early afternoon and keeping summer temps to about 70 - 75 degrees.
** By everyone else's standards, this is not summer weather. I am not concerned with those standards, however.

On the Dork Scale: Vampires Versus Dragons

Is this not dorkier than...

THIS?!?!

As just about everyone knows, I'm a shameless player of pencil + paper role-playing games. I've been rolling the twenty-sided die since I was in fifth grade. I have spells memorized. I can calculate skill checks on the fly. I've slayed some serious dragon.

For the last two years or so, I've been running a D+D game with some of my homies here in SC. I finally got tired of running it and turned over the scepter of control to J. In the process, we all democratically decided to switch from D+D to Vampire for a while.

Now: I heard from B that my homie K, wife of player L, thinks that it's waaaaaaaaay dorkier that we're playing Vampire instead of D+D. And the thing is, I understand. D+D is kind of the vintage, old-school dork-style, all pocket protectors and calculator watches. All things vampire have that veneer of pseudo-cool that is so not really cool (and which the brilliant HBO series about vampires, True Blood, does an outstanding job of making fun of.)

But this just makes me wonder more about nerdiness in the present conjuncture - at some point, my generation embraced their inner (or in my case, outer) nerd, with all of the nostalgia for 8-bit Nintendo and all of the movies about toys we grew up with and so on. Perhaps we're not ready to move forward. Perhaps we're not ready to get on board with current nerdiness. Perhaps the next generation will have to be the ones to be nostalgic about vampires, while in the meantime, a group of us gathers at K + L's and surreptitiously plays a game in which we pretend to BE them.

Time to Blow Up the Town Again

Here's a picture I took last year of the Fourth of July in SC.

Every year, the inhabitants of San Jose pack their cars full of explosives and come to SC, clogging up Highway 17 and Ocean St. completely. It's illegal to set off fireworks here, but the cops turn their backs on it for an hour to prevent complete carnage once the sun goes down. This semi-formal relaxation of municipal law doesn't stop throngs of idiots from continuing to set off fireworks until the wee hours of the morning, of course, but it probably does keep it from being as bad as it could be otherwise.

Tonight we pick up B's brother from SFO after his ten-week walkabout in Europe. We'll force his jet-lagged ass to hang out with us and drink delicious cocktails for a few days before he heads back to Oregon. I think it's an appropriate welcome back to the US of A to be subjected to explosions.

Battlestar Galactica: We Give Up

The human condition is a wretched thing. We're "thrown toward death" (Heidegger), we're a "useless passion" (Sartre), "the kids all suck" (The Problematics.) Walter Benajmin's "angel of history" is blown forward by the wind of progress but faces backwards, witnessing the ever-growing carnage trailing behind it. "The fully enlightened Earth radiates disaster" (Horkheimer and Adorno.)

SO WHY DO PEOPLE MAKE SUCH DEPRESSING TV SHOWS?!

I'm serious! Battlestar Galactica started out strong, with great characters, fun sci-fi technology, Edward James Olmos being badass all the time. But it just kept getting more depressing. It wasn't enough that the Cylons had destroyed all but a fragment of humankind; what was left of humankind spent all of its time bickering! It was worse than it is on Lost!* We finally tapped out last night after making it most of the way through the first two episodes of the third season, at which point humanity lives in a prison camp on a bleak little planet, controlled by their Cylon guards and human collaborators. I'm not disputing that some of it amounted to a nice allegory about patterns of human behavior, nor that much of it (occuption, suicide bombings, atrocities in the name of higher principles) was topical considering this all aired during the worst of the W years. I'm just saying that you, the viewer, never get a break. No comic relief, no selfless characters, not even any cool sci-fi space ships blasting the bad guys! It made me long for Luke Skywalker to come swooping in and destroy the Cylon ships with force-guided photon torpedoes! In a word, real life is depressing enough. This is not the kind of thing we want to watch on our free time.

So we gave up on that shit and watched Waiting for Guffman again.

* Ok, so we're stuck on this creepy island and we're probably all going to die. Let's complain and squabble and try to one-up each other rather than working together.

Cheer Up, Everyone

Lets make two life-sized cardboard cutouts of our bodies and then pose them into sensual positions.
Ill paint the wallpaper pattern onto your naked skin, stand against the wallpaper and get off like chameleons.
Ill flip some clips on my lips
Ill clips some chips to your hips
I nibble chips off your hips, and watch the moon eclipse

Ill go outside and get some leaves and pretend to be a tree.
You can be a squirrel, and store my nuts for me.

I told you I was freaky
'He told you he was freaky baby'
You didn't believe me
'Take that off'
I told you I was freaky
Girl, I do this shit weekly

Ill steal my roommates pillow feathers and make some homemade wings.
Gonna fly so high on make-shift pillow wings.
Girl can you believe we're flying,
on home-made pillow wings

Owww

Owww, owww, owww

I told you I was freaky, I told you I was freaky baby
I told you, I told you I was freaky baby