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.