Gobble, Gobble

This past weekend Sarah and I had a bunch of people over to our house for a "Thanksgiving Preview" party. In a couple of weeks we're going to have both sets of inlaws at our house for Thanksgiving, and, because of my love of all things cooked over an open flame, I said I wanted to cook the turkey on the grill. I cook lots of things on the grill, and figured that a turkey wouldn't be all that different from a pork shoulder. They're roughly the same size, and, if anything, the pork shoulder would be harder to cook because it's denser. Anyway, Sarah said okay one condition--a smart condition, I might add: that we cook a turkey before "the day" so if I royally screwed it up, it wouldn't be on Thanksgiving and thereby ruining her favorite holiday--a situation that would undoubtedly involve much weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Well, I cooked the turkey on the grill and have some news to report.














Score.

I cooked the hell out of that turkey. It's safe to say that Mr. Floppy-Neck had no idea what happened to him once I got ahold of him, but ne'er has a turkey been so divine (if I do say so myself). I brined that sombeech for 18 hours in a mixture of water, salt, brown sugar, apple juice, peppercorn, allspice, and clove, and then cooked him for somewhere on the order of 3 1/2 hours, to an internal temperature of 175. At some point I tented him in foil because he was all golden-brown and I didn't want his tasty self to burn. I let it rest for 39 minutes before disassembling him into tasty goodness, and let the Americocentric feast begin.

Ahh, America, and your infatuation with unnaturally big breasts. The turkey, you heathens. Go read some Kingsolver. Geez.

Done, pt. 1

I missed last Monday night's forced blog post. I'm sure all of you people who read this blog (all none of you) missed it. Well, here's one to make you happy.

I finished my dissertation. It's done (except for 2 small things I have to add to the works cited page, which I'll do in the morning). I'm turning it in to my committee tomorrow, and will defend it on December 10. Now I'm going to cook French food.

I like to cook (as opposed to my wife, who loves to bake). Maybe I'll post stuff about cooking like she does about baking. Maybe I'll even put some pictures in. The writing won't be as good as hers is, but maybe it'll be interesting. There will probably be more cussing. And more references to post-punk and gothic Americana. Maybe I'll do it. Maybe I won't. I'm so punk.

The first thing I'm going to do is make some good veal stock and demiglase (if I can find veal bones in Oxford. I'm not optimistic. Rhea's Market might be able to get them.) But then I'm going to grill a turkey this weekend, so maybe I'll do that.

The thing is, I write all day (or at least all morning--like 4 hours) so I don't want to write on a blog at night. It's not relaxing. I want to read. I want to cook (but we don't have money or ingredients enough to do what I want). I want to play awesome-looking Playstation 3 games (again with the money thing). I'll do the first two. At least until I can figure out some way to buy myself a video game console. I need to hurry with that one because I'm rapidly leaving the prime video game demographic. I've only got a few years left. Getting old blows.

Well, well, well

It's Monday night, and that means I'm sitting here watching football, playing poker, and posting to my blog. But I'm tired, so I'm not going to say much. I type for a living, I don't want to type now.

Maybe I'll do more tomorrow to make up.

Joke

So I heard a new one tonight.

What's red and smells like blue paint?

Red paint.


You can laugh now.

Monday Night Sports

So here's my Monday Night Football post (last week my "I'm making myself post something" post was during Monday Night Football). The problem is that football is over, so this is a Monday Night National League Championship Series post. It would be a Monday Night Football post, but I played CentPoker all through football.

CentPoker is awesome (I'm not going to tell you about it, go see for yourself you lazy bastard), but there's starting to be too many people on it. For a while people played like they wanted to play. Now people just do stuipd stuff and it's not as fun anymore. Only it is. It's crazy fun. Which is why I played all through football.

It's fun to write like this where it doesn't matter becuase all the writing I do now is revising, which is not as much fun becuase you only write a few words or sentences or MAYBE a paragraph at a time. It's mainly moving around and cleaning up, so your fingers don't get to move quickly across the keyboard for very long, which is the fun part about writing on a computer.

I like writing in pen, but after a while my finger starts to hurt. I miss those little rubber things you could put on your pencil (that sentence sounds dirty). I also miss the brown erasers. They were fun to tear up

Truthiness

This is where I rant about something that doesn't matter at all.

I hate that prices don't include tax and companies that advertise their pre-tax price like that's what you actually pay. Currently this ire is aimed at Taco Bell. Taco Bell currently has a commercial campaign for an 89 cent chicken soft taco or burrito. In the commercial, a guy walks around town taking pennies from various "give a penny, take a penny" jars (communism at its finest!). He goes into Taco Bell and orders one of these new 89 cent burritos and gives the woman 88 cents. She says, "Hey, this is only 88 cents!" To which the guy responds by grabbing a penny from the Taco Bell take-a-penny jar (which does not exist in any Taco Bell I've been in) and gives it to her with a very smug "eighty-nine" and walks out with his burrito.

I call bullshit.

In the real world, that burrito does NOT cost 89 cents--it's probably more on the order of a dollar. If I walk into a Taco Bell and order one of these cheap-ass burritos and give the cashier 89 cents before trying to walk out with my burrito (especially if I give them 89 pennies) some high schooler who is pissed off that he's working in Taco Bell is going to jump over the counter and beat me to a cheesy-chewy-crunch pulp. Just figure tax into the damn price.

And for all you places that don't have sales tax on food, suck it. You'll just have to pay 7 cents more per dollar than you used to. Get over it.

I'm better. Just don't get me started on gas prices. $3.749 a gallon is $3.75! It's not $3.74! Why are we so dumb that we think a tenth of a penny means something? It doesn't. Idiots. Gah!

Forced post

So I haven't posted anything in a long time, and I haven't been very good about keeping a regular posting schedule, so I've probably lost whatever regular readers I had. If I had any. So here's a post saying sorry. Sorry.

It's hard for me to write these things because I get ideas in the middle of the day, but I'm working in the middle of the day and I don't want to take the time to do this. But then when I get home and have a chance to post a blog, I don't want to or I can't remember what I wanted to write about. Maybe I'm not dedicated enough, but I think I'd rather be dedicated to getting a job, which I'm trying to be.

So maybe I'll start jotting down ideas. But I won't.

Such is the life of an itinerant blogger. I just wanted to say that word.

So here's what I'll do. When I can't think of a post or don't want to put one up, I'll just post a dumb joke. This is one of my favorites.

What kind of coffee did they serve on the Titanic?

Sanka.

I laughed my ass off the first time I heard that. What's that say about me?

MMM...Donuts.

In case you didn't know, I'm from North Carolina, a state that has a pretty serious donut pedigree. Krispy Kreme, the standard for all mass-produced donuts, was started in Winston-Salem. (Don't come to me with your weak-ass Dunkin' Donuts. They may have good coffee, but their donuts are crap).


But in Carolina Beach, about 25 minutes from Wilmington, lives the best donut in the world. It beats Krispy Kreme with a stick and then humps it through it's hole (did I have to go there? Yeah.). Anyway, this bad-ass donut is a Britt's Donut, and if you've ever had one, you know the truth of which I speak.

Britt's is down on the boardwalk in Carolina Beach, surrounded by some pretty questionable looking stuff. I've got love for CB, but it's still pretty red. Sorry, but it is. Britt's is worth the trip though. We usually make one trip down there when we stay at the Seaside Club, and whenever people find out we're going, they place orders. Everyone loves Britt's. The thing about Britt's is that they make donuts right, by hand. They roll them themselves, right there in front of you, and fry them in these big cauldrons of oil that look like something I want to own. They flip them with big sticks and get them out of the oil with those same sticks, making a big stack of donuts that reminds me of the little ring toy that little kids have (you remember what I'm talking about)?

These donuts are the best straight out of the oil--best eaten right there on the boardwalk either with a styrofoam cup of milk or a Pepsi (no coke) with crushed ice. Soooo good. But if you take them home, they won't be as good. As Mrs. Britt told my mom this year, "Our donuts don't keep 'cause we don't put no crap in them." How true.



Britt's is only open during the summer, so you've missed it if you haven't been yet. But if you find yourself in southeastern NC or northeastern SC next summer, make a trip. It's worth it.

Debate

So next Friday the first presidential debate is going to be held in my town. I'm not going to go on a rant about who I think should be the next president because god knows there are enough people doing that already, and 99% of them shouldn't be talking (I take that back--even if they're saying stupid stuff or saying things for the wrong reason or saying things that don't even really matter, I think I would rather have them talking than not. Being involved, even if it's for the wrong reasons, is better than apathy, right? Right? Hmm.).

Anywho, the debate is coming to Oxford, and the whole town has gone to hell. You think Wilmington went nuts when 3 inches of snow fell? You ain't seen nothin until you've seen a small Southern town that can barely deal with the increase in population that students cause when they return in August deal with the circus that's about to descend with the debate. It's nuts. For the past few months they've been paving and re-paving every parking lot they can find (and maybe it's saying something about how long I've been here that I didn't think it was strange to have a bunch of gravel lots on and around campus), putting up a whole mess of new poles from which to hang banners proclaiming the debate (as if you could NOT know) and all the red-white-and-blue paraphernalia from each of the surrounding counties' 4th of July celebration, and erecting miles upon miles of chain-link fence. Seriously. They've completely surrounded the debate site, and some of the roads that lead to it, in 8-foot tall chain link fence. It looks classy. Very antebellum. Today I saw some people putting a covering on it, like that green mesh stuff they put around tennis courts.

So they've done all that, they're blocking off the main entrance to campus and about 1/2 a mile of the road leading into campus, they sent an email out today essentially begging people not to drive to campus next week. If you pledge not to bring your car all week starting Monday, the school will give you a $10 food credit for any on-campus eatery. They're doing this for the first 2,000 people to sign up. That's $20,000 worth of income they're giving up.

Trust me, there's a lot more I could talk about (don't even get me started on the fact that my house is within a mile radius of the debate site and I'll probably be locked down by the Secret Service--or at least scoped out, or the snipers that will be posted on campus rooftops, or the fact that the KKK has announced that they'll be at the debate, you just won't be able to pick them out. No robes, no hoods, but they'll be here. That's much creepier. I know it's not 1960, but still). The thing is, this debate isn't going to do any lasting good here. Sure it's a feather in the cap of the administration that the University of Mississippi (I really hate the "Ole Miss" name by now), but it's not like we're the only place. Top professors, researchers, or students aren't going to say, "hey, that school hosted a debate. I really wanted to go to Harvard or Yale, but I think I'll go to the University of Mississippi instead." Having the debate isn't going to make this school suddenly jump up in the rankings. It's not going to create a surge in funding for academic resources or faculty lines. It's not going to give Oxford a Target. Or a decent beer selection.

What it is going to give us is a big hangover. 'Cause I'm gonna get DRUNK.

Be Vewy Vewy Kwiet...

I'm hunting jobs. Hopefully I'll have more success than Elmer.

The job list for English Departments came out on Friday, and by now I've gone through the first postings and printed off the jobs I think I'll apply for. I'm putting the bar pretty high--there are just over 40 jobs right now that I'll send applications to. It's a daunting thing--there are some jobs in places I'm not sure I'd really want to live, but then again I can pretty much be happy anywhere, as long as I've got my wife and my dog with me. And I'm somewhere where I can do things outside. Ideally, if we're not on a coastline, I'd like to be somewhere that has a nice University golf course that I can join and start playing golf again. That would be an acceptable alternative to the coast, especially since there aren't many jobs on the East Coast. There are a few in Taxachussettes and a couple in Conneticut, but not much beyond that. There weren't many at all in Virginia, NC, or SC, which made me kinda sad. But there was also one in Atlanta, which would be pretty cool. We have lots of friends in Atlanta, and it's a pretty fun town.

Anyway, deadlines aren't until early November (except for one job I saw that had an Oct 15 deadline), so there's some time until I hear anything at all. But it's starting.

We're going to need a bigger boat.

I don't know why I said that, but it sounds ominous. Scary. Ohhhhh.

Long time no...post

So I realized it's been over a month since my last post, but I have a good reason. For over three weeks, from July 24 to Aug 13, Sarah and I were traveling. It was awesome, if a bit long. I've realized as I've gotten older and set up a home of my own that, even if I'm tired of being in Mississippi, I'm much more comfortable and much happier in my own home. I love Wilmington and everything that comes with it, but after two weeks of living in my parents guestroom, I'm ready to come back to my own space. I just wish this space was closer to Wilmington. Someday...

Anyway, our trip was a whirlwind of visiting and seeing. We left Oxford on a Thursday to drive up to Murray and stay with Sarah's parents for a few days. They did us the HUGE favor of watching our dog, Mercer, while we were gone. They love that dog--Sarah used to joke before we got married that they approved of me primarily to have access to my dog. It might not have been a joke. Anyway, we spent a great weekend with them--golf, lake, relaxation. The Wurglers' house is great for relaxation--there's not a whole lot to do in Murray, so it's a lot of sitting around and reading, and you don't even feel guilty about it because there's honestly nothing else to do. Probably the highlight of the trip was Sunday lunch after church. Not too long ago Murray got this Thai place called Jasmine which, though it holds no candle to Indochine, serves a pretty tasty noodle dish. Every time we went to Murray we would go to this place after church, but then they made the terible decision of being closed on Sunday afternoons. Thankfully they have seen the error of their ways and reopened, so we got to eat there for the first time in a while. It was pretty good.

(This is where I realize I'm not going to be able to summarize the entire trip like this, so here's the faster version).

Left Sarah's parents' house on Monday morning. Get to my grandparents' house just east of Asheville 7 hours later. Spend night. Leave next morning, detour to Fayetteville to have lunch with Fatty, finally get to Wilmington Tuesday evening. Spend the rest of that week eating (INDOCHINE), sitting on the beach, and, on Friday, taking Sarah shopping (you're welcome). Saturday we moved into the Seaside Club for a week full of HEAVY food, too much sun, too much alcohol, and utter happiness. This is my favorite picture from that week:
That's my gorgeous wife, looking happy and being completely oblivious to my sister flipping her off. Classic. And classy.

So we move out of the Club the following Saturday, spend a couple of days recovering, and leave for Atlanta on Monday. We stay with some of our best friends, Brandon Wicks and Katie Rawson, in Atlanta until Friday, and while we're there I get to visit my other good friend in Atlanta, Wes, and see his new house and awesome home-brew tap setup. (PS, if Wes ever invites you over for one of HIS beers, take him up on it. You won't be disappointed). We leave Atlanta Friday morning to get home 2 hours before the in-laws return with our dog, who I miss terribly.

So just about every sentence in the above two paragraphs contain at least one blog post of their own (many of them could spawn multiple) but I can't sit here and do this all day. Revisions and job searching calls. But at least it's Friday. Maybe I'll post another tomorrow. I'd like to get back into a more consistent habit with this blogging thing, so we'll see how it goes. Until then...

FINISHED!!

Sort of. I've just finished a full draft of my dissertation (so now I'm on a high). Go me.

The only thing is, I know I still have a lot of work to do on it (I kinda left the Poe chapter hanging and I'm going to have to substantially change my intro because what I wanted to do over the course of the diss changed, which I knew it would), so I can't be unreservedly excited. Now I'm nervous that I'll have to change A LOT - that all the work that I've done isn't good enough. I'll probably feel like that until I let someone read the whole thing and not just certain chapters. I know some chapters are good--I've already gotten feedback on them--but it's different when you have to think about the whole thing as one big unit.

Anyway, regardless, I can work with what I've got. If it's not ALL brilliant, a lot of it is.

As Fatty would say, I'm awesome.

All-Stars

I'm sitting here at a quarter to twelve watching the All-Star Game go into the 13th inning. This is a helluva game, and if you like baseball but didn't watch it, you missed out.

I do feel bad for Dan Uggla though. He's had some tough extra innings, that one.

Come on NL!

Girl Talk

I was listening to NPR's rundown of the "Best Albums of the Year So Far," and one particularly caught my ear-- "Feed the Animals" by Girl Talk. Girl Talk doesn't sound like somthing I'd listen to, but it's not what you think at all.

"Girl Talk" is one guy, Gregg Gillis, who samples all sorts of music (most of it from the 90s on) and mashes it back together in amazing ways. Now I've heard other sample mash-ups, but nothing like this. What this guy does is absolutely amazing. He takes songs from all kinds of genres and puts them together damn near seamlessly. Most of the vocals he takes from rap, but the background music comes from nearly everything--Prince, Fergie, Metallica, Gwen Stephanie, Tone-Loc, Temple of the Dog (Yep), all sorts of other stuff I recognize but can't think of now, but literally, everything. I'm not well-versed enough in music technicality to be able to talk intelligently about what he's doing or why it works, but it seems like he's got a knack for finding extremely divergent musical forms that share basic beat and tonal forms--the music just plain out works. I think this is why most of the vocals are rap-based, the cadence and beat of rap is most easily superimposable over other musical styles.

Seriously, go listen to this yourself. It's incredible, and fun as hell. You can listen to the whole album on his Myspace page for free: http://www.myspace.com/girltalk. The album works either as separate tracks or as a single long mash (I think I'm using that word right, but I might not be).

Also, you can buy the ablum for whatever you want--seriously. It's for sale online and you just name your own price. Anything at all allows you to download the album, at least 5 bucks gets you the ablum and some bonus stuff, and at least $10 gets you all that plus an actual CD. I think that's a cool way to do it. It's here:

http://74.124.198.47/illegal-art.net/__girl__talk___feed__the__anima.ls___/

Ahab

Even if you've never read Moby-Dick, if you don't know much about Ishmael, if you don't know your beloved Starbucks coffee is named after a the Pequod's first mate, you probably know something about Ahab. Perhaps more than anything else from the novel, Ahab has entered our collective culutal consciousness as the embodiment of mindless pursuit. Whenever someone is searching fanatically for something, expecially if others see it as a pointless or dangerous pursuit, they are compared to Ahab, and the object of their quest the white whale.

In his unflinching pursiut in the "War on Terror," President Bush has often been compared to Ahab, though his white whale has changed forms--something even Ahab may have derided. In an interesting essay, "Moby-Dick and the War on Terror," Carolyn Karcher lists instance after instance where Bush and his inner circle were compared to Ahab and his special force of mysterious harpooners (though I don't think anyone made this connection, I especially like either Dick Cheney or Karl Rove as Fedallah). Bush's white whale was once Osama bin Laden, then Saddam Hussein, and now has become the distrubingly amorphous "the terrorists."

While these may be attractive comparisons to make, I don't think they do Ahab justice. Although Ahab, to us, is obviously on a doomed quest, its hard to argue with some of his logic. He's not unthinkingly going after Moby-Dick. He knows his quest seems ridiculous, he doesn't really argue with Starbuck's point that "Vengence on a dumb brute [...] seems blasphemous." For Ahab, it's not the white whale itself that Ahab is after. The quest is not a tit for tat "you took my leg, I take your life" retribution. Ahab rebels against the uncontrollable, he rebels aginst the futility of human existence, he rebels against the feeling we all have when faced with problems we did not bring on ourselves. We all have Ahab inside us. That common prayer, "Lord, grant me the serentiy to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; and the wisdom to know the difference" is designed to keep our own Ahab at bay. As we all know, this can be a hard thing to do.

This is especially hard to do when you can express the desire to fight the unwinable fight as eloquently as Ahab can. For Ahab, fate acts through the whale, and since that's the case, a strike against the whale is a strike against fate. Listen to him say it: "'But in each event--in the living act, the undoubted deed--there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! [...]. That unscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principle, I will wreak that hate upon him.'"

Meditate on that comment, and see if you can still condemn Ahab. He may be flawed, but who is not? Who doesn't want to strike out against that inscrutable thing, to strike down the mask if we can't strike down the thing itself? Don't mourn for Ahab, but don't damn him either. Understand him, and learn. That's why I love Moby-Dick.

Ishmael

Melville's Ishmael is one of my top three favorite literary characters. (The other two, by the way, are Hemingway's Jake Barnes from The Sun Also Rises and Milton's Satan from Paradise Lost.) There's something about Ishmael that sits right with me, and I've never really been sure what it is. From the first time I read this book in college, I was in love with it. I remember sitting in an Honors British Romantics seminar at UNC and listening to this girl in there complaining about Moby-Dick and how she had to force herself to read 50 pages a day--that was her plan for getting through it. I was a new English major then and not confident enough to call her on it, but I marvelled at how someone else who was obviously smart couldn't appreciate it. I have come to learn, however, that this unnamed undergrad is in the literary majority. For shame.

I was hooked on this book by the first chapter. Sure, everyone knows the "Call me Ishmael" opening, but what else? Do you know why Ishmael set foot on that doomed ship, the Pequod? It was because Ishmael, like so many of us, could no longer stand society as it existed on shore. He saw himself in a rut, and knew that the vast expanse of the sea could help him. And who among us cannot be helped by vast expanses? Have you ever felt sad or depressed and stared at a clear starry sky, only to feel better afterward? I love this explanation: "Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses. and bringing up the read of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off--then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship." I love the simplicity of that last statement. For all the grandiosness of Moby-Dick, for all of Ishmael's cetological diversions and exaggerated nineteenth-century language, there are a trove of simply-worded statements that blow me away. This is one.

It's much more difficult to explain why I love this book, or even why I love Ishmael, than I thought it would be. I find myself not wanting to type things because there seems too much. Why talk about one thing when I could talk about another? Should I talk about Ishmael and Queequeg, which deserves to be spoken of. But to do that, do I need to tell you about the history of tattooing in the South Pacific and the fear white sailors had of being tattooed? But Dan, you say, I thought tattoos were part and parcel of sailors. And you'd be right, but not at first. The first generations of sailors who went to the South Pacific were terrified they would be tattooed against their will and so marked, literally and metaphorically, when they returned to "civilization." But as Ishmael says about Queequeg when trying to psyche himself up for sharing a bed with him, "A man can be honest in any sort of skin." Add to this the fact that Ishmael eventually tattoos onto his right arm the dimensions of a Sperm Whale skeleton. What does that say about Ishmael, about whales, and about tattoos? Read chapter 2 and chapter 102, and you tell me.

So this is what I'll end with. When talking to a few other people about Moby-Dick, all of them professors, and I say something about Ishmael telling this story back on shore, they all say, "that's assuming he does get back to shore." This angers me. These people are referring to the end of the novel, which I won't ruin for you (though you probably know pretty much what happens), but suffice it to say that Ishmael doesn't say "and I returned to New England." But he talks all throughout the novel about other whaling voyages he goes on, and he does plainly say that his voyage on the Pequod, while not his first time as a sailor, was his first time as a whaler. So then, obviously, Ishmael sets out against the sperm whale even after his encounter with Moby-Dick. What does that say about him? Does his drive to go whaling (he doesn't have to ship out on whaleships) echo Ahab's monomaniacal quest? Is Ishmael more successful than Ahab because he lives to tell his story? Why do whales have this pull?

I'll leave this question for my discussion of Ahab. If you can read along, I'm going to be talking about Ahab mainly from chapter 36, "The Quarter-Deck." Until, smooth sailing to all.

Moby Dick

So I realized that the last thing I've put up here was me saying that I was about to start re-reading Moby-Dick, and I got to thinking that I would really be dropping the ball if I didn't talk about it at all. I mean, it's my favorite book, perhaps the greatest thing written in the English language, and most people are scared of it. When you ask someone about Moby-Dick, they usually roll their eyes or come back with some comment about how long it is, or they complain about the chapter where Ishmael classifies whales. But these people miss the point, and it's sad.

I said in a comment the other day that the best way to approach reading Moby-Dick is to read it like you would read the Bible. The Bible is not a beach read. That doesn't mean it's a bad read. There are long sections of the Bible that are boring. That doesn't make IT boring. If you read the Bible, really read it, there are parts that can change your life. Moby-Dick is the same way.

There is a lot I could pull from to explain that last nearly blasphemous remark, but I'm not going to do that. What I want to do is, over the course of a few posts, try to convince you to read Moby-Dick if you've never read it before, or read it again if you had the cursory college reading experience.

I'll try to keep them short and to the point, and I'm not going to throw in a bunch of theory or analysis. I just want to point out certian things that I love about this wonderfully demanding book. But I won't start tonight: I'll save the first discussion for next time. I'll start with the beginning--the first chapter, and Ishmael.

POE

So I've got a draft of the Poe chapter. It's not a great one, but it's done. We're getting there. One more chapter to go.

Now I get to re-read Moby Dick. I love that book. This is the fun part.

Why I Might Never Finish My Dissertation

To begin, I'm going to finish my dissertation. I'm like 75% finished now. I'm one chapter away from having a complete draft (minus the conclusion, but that won't be written until all the other chapters are edited). I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and it doesn't look like a train.

So here's the thing. I'm having a hard time dealing with this flurry of activity followed by a crash. The problem is that if I can't finish the chapter in a flurry, then I'm in trouble. That's what's happening now with this Poe chapter. I've got a full 25 pages, which I got pretty much all last week, but I'm not finished with the chapter yet. I haven't even really talked about The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym at all (and I guess that sentence only makes sense if you've both read Pym and know the gist of what I'm doing). But the way the chapter has shaped up so far, I think I need to reorganize almost everything I've written so far in order to best incorporate Pym into the discussion because it's such a problematic text. I can't really talk about Pym straight through because so much of it doesn't really deal with the coast. But there's definitely material there for me, so I have to really craft how I present it.

Anyway, today I was in my office working and was motivated to get some work done, and thought I had some good ideas. So I stopped thinking and turned to my computer to write. And automatically checked my email. Then I checked the news. Then I looked at Facebook. By the time I got around to my chapter, I had lost all motivation. So effing frustrating.

The worst part is that this seems like a willpower question. It's easy to say, "just don't do that distracting stuff." But at this point, that's a hard thing to do. Argh. It doesn't help that this was at like 1:30, and I'm definitely a morning person. And in all fairness, this morning I did get the overview of how the coast is a good location for American Gothic, so that was good. But by lunchtime, I was done.

But see, now I'm looking forward to getting to work tomorrow morning. So here's to the morning and the sweet, sweet coffee that comes with it.

Pandora

A while ago a friend of mine told me about this music website called Pandora. If you haven't seen it yet, and you like music, you should check it out. It's free, and it plays music that you like.

All you do is type in a song or artist that you really like and the site searches through something called the "Genome Music Project" to play other songs by other artists that are similar to the one you picked. All the songs are linked by certain musical aspects (and the site tells you what they are), but there's enough variation that you won't get bored. It is probably the single best way to find out about music you didn't know about but would probably like.

As the song plays, you can easily get information about the group, the song, or the album the song comes from, and it gives you links to iTunes and Amazon so you can buy it if you want.

You can set up many different "stations," so you can always have different things to listen to. Right now I'm listening to a "Jurassic 5" station -- right now it's playing Blackalicious, and the last song was by the Beastie Boys. I also have a "Flogging Molly" station for Irish-punk/rock music, and (my current favorite) a "The Clash" station for awesome 70s-80s punk and post-punk.

If you go to this site, you really may never listen to anything else on your computer again.

Biking

Biking is hard. Very hard. You wouldn't think so--well, maybe you would. I didn't. I figured I knew how to ride a bike and that was all I needed. I'd be able to ride my old rusted mountain bike, whose gears don't all work and whose tires don't spin easily, for 18 miles and then get off an run. Wrong.

Luckily a friend of mine loaned me a road bike. I rode it out to Taylor today (12 miles round-trip) for the first time. I almost puked twice.

Starting to re-think a June 14th triathlon...

Swimming

I love swimming. More to the point, I love water. Even more to the point, I love the feeling that you get after you've been swimming in water. It's the most wonderful combination of tired, relaxed, and just all-over loose. It's as if all your joints work more smoothly, like the water itself has infused your body and replaced your bones. I get the same feeling after swimming a mile in the pool that I used to get after surfing for 2 hours, and maybe that's why I like it so much. And it's a good thing I like this feeling, because swimming laps is almost the epitome of boring exercise--just a short bit behind running on the treadmill and riding a stationary bike (or doing the elliptical machine, for that matter). Since you don't get this wonderful wet-spaghetti feeling after those machines, the only thing that makes them even bearable is that you can watch TV or listen to music while you do it. I don't use my iPod when running outside anymore, but I don't think I could bear using a gym machine with no music or tv sound. If I'm going to be stuck exercising inside, I better have something to distract me.

But I'm getting off track--this post was supposed to be about the glorious post-swim feel. But I guess I already said it was good. Well, it is.

Killer Kudzu

This past Friday, a couple of friends and I ran in a 5k in Holly Springs: the Killer Kudzu 5k. It was the first one I have ever done and I thought it would be a pretty good experience to have if I want to do this Triathlon in June. It was a lot of fun--Holly Springs is a little Mississippi town, and the course took us through some nice areas of town. At one point I ran by this well-dressed 40- or 50-something woman sitting on the steps at the front of her yard drinking a glass of wine as we ran by. For some reason I liked that; it was nice to know that while I was running in this race there were people having a nice, relaxing time. Though the next 15 minutes or so (by that point) would suck for me and probably go by very slowly, I'd likely be finished by the time the woman needed a refill. Strange thing to think about while you're running, but I did.

There were two things that really sucked, though. At some point on the course we had to run around a cone and come back down the hill we just ran up. At the bottom of this hill, there was a woman giving out water and also (supposedly) marking the turn-off where the course ran through a cemetery (which was cool, though there was a really steep hill in that cemetery). For some reason, this woman wasn't telling people they needed to turn, and as I ran by her and got some water I kept on going past the turn for a good 50 yards or so. I finally realized it when I got BACK to the 2 mile marker. Man was I pissed. There were probably 8 people behind me (I was leading my pack!) who did the same thing, and they probably weren't happy either. When we turned, all those people were now in front of me, which was also a kick in the pants. I ended up passing most of them again before the finish, but that's the other thing.

At the end of this race you were supposed to run to the end of this column of cones where a woman would give you a card with a number on it. This number matched a number assigned to your time--I'm guessing it was your place. Well, since this was my first race and they didn't tell us we were supposed to do this, I didn't make it to the woman fast enough (she was standing a good 10 yards past the finish line--at that point, I wasn't thinking about needing to go any farther) and some other guy grabbed my card. The woman got all flustered and wouldn't get it back from the guy, so my time time got all screwed up. So I'm not sure if the race organizers will get me down or what--some guy who seemed to be in charge gave me another card and told me he'd take care of it.

So anyway, with the missing the turn crap, I ran my first 5k in 22:46 (I think that was the time I saw when I ran past the line. I know it was under 23 minutes), which I think it respectable for a first race. Hopefully they'll get it worked out and figure out my "official" time.

Despite the screw ups I really had fun, and am looking forward to doing another one. And the best part is, if I actually run the course as it's supposed to be run, I should have no problem beating this time!

Another Gem from Fox News

So the other day Fox News had this Liz Trotter person on to talk about Hillary's dumb comment about staying. She was talking about people interpreting Clinton's reference to RFK being killed in June as a veiled implication that Obama could be assassinated (which is an asinine interpretation). When talking about it, she, yet again, mispronounced Obama's name "Osama" (which is another issue in an of itself. I know they sound the same, but you're on TV for crissakes. Shouldn't you be more able to speak more good?). Correcting herself, she went on to say that it would be good if someone killed Barack Obama. This is an exact transcript of what she said:

Trotter: ...[talking about how bad Clinton is]... and now we have what, um, some are reading as a suggestion that somebody knock off Os...O,O, Osama...uh, um, Obama. Wuh, well both, if we could." (smarmy grin and chuckle)

I'm serious about the smarmy grin and chuckle. Check it out--the comment about Obama is from 1:21 to 1:33.

I'm angry about this for a couple of reasons. One is the sheer evilness of telling a national TV audience that it would be good if someone killed one of our presidential candidates. You have no idea who is watching that show, harboring those same ideas, and waiting for something he/she can use as justification for doing it. It sounds extreme, but tell you you'd be surprised to hear someone use that as a reason behind something like an assissnation. Far stranger things happen every day.

The other problem I have is the lack of outrage. Sure this is blowing up the blogosphere, but when that woman made that boneheaded comment about golfers only having a chance of beating Tiger if they lynched him in a back ally, it was all over the place. Maybe it's just the incendiary term "lynch" directed at an African-American-Asian man, but it's still joking about murdering someone. Shouldn't we expect and demand better than that? If we're going to pay people to be on TV and tell us things, shouldn't we presume they would have the intelligence to NOT say evil, dangerous things like this?

Or is that what we want people on TV to do--shock us? Is it okay to joke about assassinating a potential (maybe presumable) presidential candidate? Is that American? Is it patriotic? No. Decidedly no. But in this world where patriotism means less about understanding and upholding the principles of what your country was founded on and more about unquestioningly supporting the president (which was NEVER supposed to happen--read your history), this woman undoubtedly considers herself a patriot. What a sad state, and a sad State.

I want to ride my...bicycle

I figured when I thought about doing a triathlon that the bike part would be one of the easiest. It's a bike. You learn to ride it when you're little, and even if you don't ride it for a long time, you still know how. Like they say, "it's just like riding a bike" -- which signifies something you can pick up again really quickly. So even though I haven't ridden my bike in a long time, I figured it would be no big deal.

Boy was I wrong. I rode about 7.5 miles yesterday, and it was not easy. Granted, I wasn't riding a road bike on smooth pavement, I was on my old rusty mountain bike on a gravel trail, but it was still more difficult (and tiring) that I thought it would be. If there's something that would prevent me from getting through this triathlon, it's going to be the bike part.

The most frustrating thing about it is that I know my bike is a piece of crap, but I can afford to shell out $500 for a road bike to do this thing. Maybe one day, but not now. And I don't really want to show up at the even with my old crappy mountain bike, especially if I'm the only one who's riding one. People say for your first triathlon as long as the bike has two wheels and moves you're okay, but I don't buy it. We'll see how training goes. It's right at 7 miles from my house to Taylor on the road, so I'll bike that some time next week on my crappy bike and see how it is. That might be the deciding factor of if I do the race in June.

Tri Again

So I'm officially putting this out into cyberspace -- I'm training for a triathlon. The one I'm going for is June 14 at Sardis lake; it's a .5 mile swim, 18 mile bike, and 4 mile run. I can do each of these independently, but we'll see about putting them together. I'm a little nervous about it--I tried to do this once before and the training got interrupted by an emergency appendectomy. That kinda put a kink in my regimen, and I never got back on. So now, three years later, I've decided to try again.

As of now, this is what I can do. I ran 4 miles in just about 30 minutes on Sunday (about 7:30 / mile). I swam a half-mile in the pool in just under 20 minutes. I logged 9 miles on a stationary bike today in 28 minutes--that's pretty crappy, but in my defense I haven't ridden a bike in a long time.

I'm pretty happy with my run time, I think I can get the swim time down a few minutes, and I'm not sure about the bike. For one, all I have is a 10 year-old mountain bike that's pretty much spent its entire existence outside. Needless to say, it's not going to be the most efficient machine on the road.

The June 14 triathlon is going to be my baseline. All I want to do in that is finish in something other than last place. Hopefully I'll do more after this and can work on improving my time, but for now the focus is on finishing this one in June without embarrassing myself.

I'm in pretty good shape, but not the best shape I've ever been in, and I've got 4 weeks from this past weekend (when I decided to do it). I told my wife that if I'm not super confident that I can do it by June 14, I won't do it. She doesn't want me to take any chance that I'll push myself too hard during the race and collapse. I don't want that either. So while I am definitely committed to doing this, I have an out to protect myself from doing something stupid.

I'm most worried about the bike; the swim and the run I'm pretty confident about. So that's what I'm going to try to focus on. I'll post my progress on here--hopefully that will keep me motivated.

One Year

I realized this this blog was in danger of becoming my personal rant space -- most of my posts dealt with the "lows" of writing a dissertation instead of the "highs." I think that's because I'm the time of person who really hates complaining, and I try not to do it out loud. But I've always liked writing things down as a way of getting them of my chest, and I think I was starting to do that here. That's why I wasn't writing often, and when I did it was a way to vent. I realized this when one of our good friends who lives in another state asked my wife if I was doing okay after my last post. I don't want to be that negative guy, so I'm going to start making the effort to temper my frustrations with more good things.

First up: yesterday was my wife and my one-year anniversary! It's been a wonderful year -- everything the first year of marriage should be. It had its ups and downs, so wonderful times together and some knock-down-drag-out fights. But that's all great. We had a great anniversary weekend. Friday night we went to go see IRON MAN -- it's pretty damn fun. Saturday night we went to eat at this new restaurant on the Square called PRIME (check it out here). I went and got a florist to recreate a small version of my wife's bouquet for the table, and had flowers put over a piece of cake to make it look like our wedding cake since our frozen top piece is 6 hours away. It was a wonderful dinner -- it's pricey (I think it's more expensive than City Grocery) but if you want a steak, it's spot on.

Sunday we had a nice easy day, and yesterday my wife made me a wonderful breakfast (orangey breakfast crab cakes she found in this cookbook, A Real American Breakfast). Then she made me a great dinner -- grilled jerk chicken sandwiches with hot pepper relish (like we had in Jamaica), grilled corn, tomato salad, and homemade key-lime pie. It was fantastic.

Just like my wife.

Trying to Break

I've discovered this annoying thing about myself -- I can't take breaks. I've just finished a period of wonderful productivity. I wrote and presented a conference paper, wrote a chapter of my dissertation, and completely re-wrote another chapter all in a month and a half. That's pretty good, I think. The problem is that when I sat down to begin the next chapter, I couldn't think. I was spent, and I need to recharge the batteries. The problem is, here in Oxford there's not much to do to take a break from working except get drunk. And while I have no problem with getting drunk, it's probably not so good for my health, my marriage, the completion of my dissertation, getting a job, making money...you see where this goes. So I'm stuck in this limbo of feeling like I need to take a break from working but then feeling guilty for not working because there's nothing in this town that can completely occupy my mind and make me forget work for a few days. And the thing that really sucks is that if there was, if I could really take a good two or three days of doing things other than working that completely occupy my attention, then I could get back to work after those two or three days and feel completely refreshed. As it is now, I'm trying to occupy myself with other things but can't, so I never really feel like I'm taking a break OR getting work done, and in reality am doing neither.

This is the first May in my entire life when I have not been at the beach at all, which may be playing a part in my malaise. Anyway, I tried to find a different book to read, since that's a good way of occupying the mind, but my reading habits are so screwed of from dissertating that I have no idea what to read for fun. I had the same problem this time last year when I was trying to find reading material before my honeymoon.

Maybe I need to build something -- that would help me stay occupied doing something else. If the weather cleared up I could play golf. That would help too. I just need to relax. Writing a dissertation is stressful -- don't let anyone ever tell you otherwise. Especially if they've never written one before.

Pomp and Circumstance

Today is graduation day at the University of Mississippi. It's the first time I've been in town for it (I usually leave for the beach right after grades are turned in in May), and it's got me thinking about the whole thing. Technically, my wife is graduating today, making her MA official. She decided not to walk, and I don't blame her. MAs are strange degrees. I understand why they would be useful for someone like a public school teacher--an advanced degree in the area of your specialization would be useful for your own information, not to mention the pay bump most public school teachers get when they have an MA. And they're also useful for disciplines that don't have a PhD, like Creative Writing. But other than that, why even have it?

I think the answer to that question is that it gets you ready for the PhD. Honestly, there's no way I could have done this PhD thing straight out of undergrad. I went to a great college, majored in a field that the university has a top-notch graduate program for, and I would have been completely lost in a PhD program if I started it straight from a BA. I needed the MA to learn how to think like a literary scholar, and I think that's the usefulness of an MA. At a liberal-arts university, you learn a lot of different things. Your major is supposed to give you a specialization, but it really doesn't. If you don't think so, consider how many people who major in biology or poli-sci and still don't get through the first year of med school or law school. It's because it's a completely different world (in my field's jargon, a different discourse). So the MA gets you ready for that. Getting the degree is a way of saying, "OK, you've got your feet wet. You should be cool with the next level." Now whether you WANT to go on to that level is up to you, and I think that's another service the MA provides. It gives you two years to decide if you want to spend four more, even more intense years, doing the same thing. If you get the MA and decide you don't want to subject yourself to the mind-numbing insanity that is academia, well, you got lucky. But if you can't imagine doing anything other than reading books, writing about books, talking about books, and dealing with students who you sometimes think couldn't read a third-grade level book, let alone MOBY-DICK, then welcome to the PhD, my friend. Enjoy the ride.

Sweet, sweet irony

So I imagine everyone has heard about that cyclone that devastated Myanmar (Burma) over the weekend. I heard on the news this morning that there were something like 15,000 dead or missing. Wow. I heard on NPR yesterday that the Myanmar government wasn't doing much to help out their people, and because they are so wary of outsiders they were not immediately willing to accept outside aid. Now that's pretty bad--every government has a responsibility to take care of its citizens. That's sort of the point of government. But the capper for me was seeing Laura Bush hold a press conference and chastise the Myanmar government for letting its people down in the wake of the storm. Apparently the Bush Administration doesn't think the Myanmar government is acting fast enough or giving enough back to the poor people whose lives were destroyed in this storm. Sound familiar?

I'm all for learning from mistakes, and if the Bush administration came out and said, "Learn from us, don't do what we did. You have to help these people out, even if they ARE poor," then I'd be a little more okay with it. But I don't think that's going to happen. I think the Bush administration wants to again act like the world's parent (all the while advocating small government) and pull the old "do as I say, not as I do" line, which is crap. I get really frustrated when I see people complaining about or getting mad at something someone else does when the person getting mad does the same thing. Its like an inversion of the Golden Rule: instead of "do unto others as you would have them do unto you," its "don't get pissed about other people doing thing you do too." Let some other country call them out. Ask some other country to call them out. Then you can agree with them. But don't do it yourself. At the very least, get someone other than a Bush to do it.

Get Low...

So today's a low. Today is one of those days when it's hard to write a dissertation. I think I know what I want to say next, but I'm just not feeling it. I can't make myself write, and that's really frustrating. I'm not sure if you can understand this unless you're a writer, because the rational response to my problem is "if you know what you want to say, just say it." The rational side of my head yells at me all the time, and makes me feel guilty for not getting a lot of work done today. And I know I COULD -- I could just sit down and force myself to write 5 pages today, and I might feel good about it, but odds are I'd know it was crap and I'd just throw it all away. I think this is why dissertations are so stressful--you have days and weeks when you get all sorts of work done, you hit a stride and you pump out 30 pages in a week. I've had those weeks, and they feel great. But then you have weeks when you struggle to get 5 pages out. And that's this week for me. I think I've written maybe 7 pages this week, and I think most of those will have to be rewritten. So on the surface, empirically, it seems like this was a wasted week.

But the thing is, and the thing you have to keep telling yourself when you write a dissertation, is that it wasn't a wasted week. Monday I sent an article out to a journal called Early American Literature, which is a good thing. I think I came up with a good way to restructure the paper I read at SSSL to turn it from 11 pages into about 30, which is a good thing. I think I wrote 2 good pages to begin that chapter, which is a good thing. I re-read all of John Smith's Generall Historie of Virginia to make sure I didn't miss anything major that I could put in the chapter now that I've figured out a better angle to discuss it, which is a good thing. But when I'm trying to write a dissertation, which is measured in pages and chapters, and I don't have many written pages to show for this week, it feels like a failure. It's hard to accept intangible progress as tangible progress.

And I think that's why I understand why people look at University professors and think we lead kushy lives. They don't see the intangibles. In the "real" world, I haven't done much this week that I could show you to justify a salary. I don't have a physical product -- no cured patient, no filed motions, not even a changed oil. Most everything I've done this week has been in my head, and the world doesn't really like to pay people for that. But they should, because without this week, I wouldn't be able to get lots of work done next week, which is probably what will happen. By this time next week (if the pattern holds) I'll probably have written 25-30 more pages, and I'll feel like I'm right on track to finish this dissertation and find a job.

So here's to next week, may the wind be at my back.

Apologia Vegetarianum

Pig is a beautiful thing. Notice that I'm not saying that A pig is a beautiful thing, but pig, pork, the food that a pig makes, is a beautiful thing. I know people from Texas will sing the praises of cow and people in the Mediterranean world will fawn over lamb, but the pig is probably the single most impressive edible animal. Now, it's hard to argue for something like this because taste is subjective -- I don't particularly like mushrooms, for example. But you know what, when I'm honest with myself, I don't dislike all mushrooms. I can handle someone saying they don't like a part of a pig -- maybe you don't like ribs. Maybe you don't like ham. Maybe you don't even like bacon. But you can't not like all pig. The flavors, textures, smells are all different. You can't not like ALL of them. It's like saying you don't like music -- you may not like some kinds of music, but you can't dislike MUSIC. Pork is like that. And me, I love it all.

Take this for example. This is a pig's shoulder after one hour on the grill.


This is the same pig's shoulder after six hours on the grill.



Even if you do claim to hate pig, even if you have religious issues with pork and so have never tasted it, you have to admit that the shoulder of a pig that's been sitting in a 250-degree grill and periodically immersed in hickory smoke is a beautiful thing. Look at the color, the glisten -- you can hate meat but you can't hate aesthetics. And if you don't hate aesthetics, and you don't believe that if you eat pork you'll be unclean, taste pig. And please, don't ruin it with a tomato-based sauce. That'd be evil.

Chicago vs. MLA

I just spent the entire afternoon converting an essay I've written from MLA (which is my default citation style) into Chicago style because some journal I want to submit it to uses that style. It was serious pain in the ass. Now look, I understand that different people like different things, but if the Modern Language Association is essentially the governing body for English departments and all things literary and they have their own approved citation method, a journal that publishes scholarship on literature would abide by it. But noooo, they want Chicago, so I have to take all my parenthetical notations and turn them into endnotes. Trust me, it's much more of a hassel than it sounds.

Chicago style, though it does look elegant when all's said and done, just feels pretentious when you're trying to abide by it. MLA seems so old and comfortable in comparison. It's like the difference between straight whiskey and a manhattan -- the whiskey gets the job done and can be pretty nice by itself, and the manhattan has this pretention of refinement and probably looks down on the stright whiskey. But in the end, a manhattan tastes pretty damn good.

I need a drink.

Thoughts on America

Recently I rented a car and got a bonus. When I made the reservation online, it gave me a 1-class upgrade, which meant I wouldn’t be forced to get the “economy” car—something probably akin to a Powerwheel. But, like most things, the upgrade was based on “availability,” so there was a chance I wouldn’t get it. When I got to the counter and asked about it, the guy told me one was available, which was great. Then he leaned in a little and asked if I wanted a Mustang. I’ve never driven a Mustang, never driven anything that could be considered a “muscle car.” (I’m sure there are plenty of people out there that wouldn’t consider a 2007 Mustang a muscle car—to those people, I don’t care. It’s American, it’s got a big hood, and it looks mean. ) So I, naturally, said yes. It was more than an 1-class upgrade, but the guy gave it to me anyway. Thanks, white dude from Hawaii who works for Hertz in Newport News, VA.

Now, I don’t really care if my 2007 automatic Mustang is not a Shelby GT stick and I don’t care if it drank gas like ‘97 Wes drank Coronitas. I don’t care if it had a back seat that only a midget could fit in and if the seats had odd stains on them. I don’t care if it had a a dent by the back tire that I swear I didn’t do, and I don’t care if it was speeding-ticket-magnet red (which should be a color description for cars). I don’t care if our hotel was 3 blocks from the conference hotel and I’m the only person who drove those three blocks on a regular basis instead of walking them. I had a Mustang, dammit, and I was going to use it.

And God was happy about it. I know this because one day my wife and I drove to Jamestown and the Lord smiled on me. The road to Jamestown is called Colonial Parkway, and it is a glorious driving road. It’s very wide, but has no lane lines. There are no buildings between Williamsburg and Jamestown—its 15 miles of asphalt and woods, with very little traffic. As soon as I pulled my Mustang onto Colonial Parkway, with the Sirius radio tuned to some station called “Classic Vinyl,” what song was beamed to my little American-made muscle car from the heavens?

Freebird.

Oh yeah…Freebird. How can you not love America when flying down a wide two-laned road in a Mustang, windows down, beautiful woman beside you, with Freebird blasting around you, and heading to the place where America started? You can’t.

SSSL and Williamsburg

I'm sitting in the Charlotte airport with my wife waiting over three hours for our flight to Memphis so we can drive another hour back home. Travelling home is never as poetic as it seems like it should be, especially when you want to move away from that home.

But the conference...it was great. We both presented wonderful papers, and my wife created a good bit of buzz for herself with the paper she gave. It was great, and I was very proud of her. Mine went well (not like hers, though), but it probably could have gotten a better reception if it had a better title. A paper titled "John Smith and the Liminal Coastline" isn't going to bring in the crowds anywhere. But if I had called it "Cannibalism CAN be Funny: John Smith, Sailors, and the Genesis of Southern Humor," I'd have had a line of people trying to get in. But oh well.

Williamsburg itself was great--especially the time we got to spend drinking eighteenth-century style with our friends. And if the ale at Chowning's was any indication, our American forefathers drank well (I recommend the Tavern Ale), and if the food at King's Arms was accurate, they ate pretty damn well too. Just remember, don't be like that couple we sat beside and walk out without paying. That was crappy -- I don't understand how people could do that. I mean, I DO understand that people steal every day and it's really no different, but there's something odd about stealing restaurant food. Because what you're really stealing is trust, and that's worse than stealing goods. You have this waiter or waitress (the gender-neutral form of this word is "waitron," but I can't use it--I just can't) who is concerned only with making sure you have a good meal, and they trust that if they treat you well you'll tip them in return. I guess, really, leaving without tipping is just as bad as leaving without paying at all, only noone knows you did that except you and your waiter. Anyway, I don't want to go off on a rant about this, but you people who ate at King's Arms on Friday night, April 18, 2008, you suck.

Jamestown was awesome, especially because the old guy who was working out at the site was asking ME questions. It was the first time in my life that I felt like a legitimate scholar outside of academia. Here was this guy, probably a retiree, who worked out at the Historic Jamestown site and had his little notebook of answers he could use to make sure people knew what they were looking at out there, and he was listening to me. It was pretty cool. I think I was also in a good mood because I sweet-talked the woman working at the information desk into letting us in for free. Five of us. Who knew that knowing that John Smith had his balls blown off in Virginia would save 5 literature instructors $50 one day. Thanks, John. I'm trying to bring your rep back, buddy.

One last note on Williamsburg. We had gorgeous weather during the conference. I mean gorgeous. We stayed 2 days extra to make sure we got to do all the things here we wanted to. The minute, and I'm not exaggerating, the minute the conference ended, it started raining. And it didn't stop the rest of the time we were there. Then, fittingly, as we boarded the plane in Newport News, the sun came out. Nice.