[shadowy@pylduck.com]
AIM: kcudlyp
Go [Buffy]
[out-linx] / [R-KIVE]
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[LGBT UNC students respond to news of Durham murders.]

Oy. Another lonely weekend. Joe has gone home for a short visit again. At least we'll get to spend Thanksgiving together. Wonder what we're going to do. . .

Running a bunch of small errands today. Maybe picking up some more books from the bookstore. As if I needed more of those things to pile up around my apartment. I've long since run out of bookshelf-space.

obstreperous: adj. 1 turbulent, unruly; noisily resisting control. 2 noisy, vociferous.

I was reading a collection of Ultimate X-Men comics today and it's amazing how much the situation of the mutants, Professor Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, and Magneto's Brotherhood of Evil Mutants reflects America's current struggle against terrorism. The volume of comics begins with news reports of terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC. Condoleeza Rice, W Bush, and Tony Blaire make guest appearances. At the end, there is an all-out assault on the Savage Land, the headquarters of the Brotherhood and a responding attack on America as representatives of corrupt humanity. There are a lot more similarities, but I'm too stupid to recount them and draw the analogies.

Word-of-the-Day brought to you by yesterday's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (a question asked about the shape of a ziggurat -- how obscure is that? but now you know)

ziggurat: n. (in ancient Mesopotamia) a pyramidal stepped tower built in several stages which diminished in size towards the summit, on which there may have been a shrine. Possibly derived from earlier platform temples, ziggurats are first attested in the late 3rd millennium BC; the one at Babylon may have been the biblical Tower of Babel (Gen. 11:1-9).

I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. (James Baldwin, "Autobiographical Notes" in Notes of a Native Son)

I've decided I want a digital camera for my birthday this year.

Bought today: Tsai Ming-liang's The Hole on DVD. Annie Leibovitz's Women. Edward Gorey's The Doubtful Guest. Issue #4 of Joss Whedon's Fray.

Another one of those nights (Wed.). After dinner, I went to lie down for a bit and ended up sleeping until just about midnight. I had to come turn off my computer at least, but now it seems like I might as well just go to sleep instead of even bothering to pretend to do any work.

theodicy: n. 1 the vindication of divine providence in view of the existence of evil. 2 an insistence of this.

No no no! I'm the only [duck vamps]!

[Two murders in Durham] in the last few weeks. These murders have shown up on my radar from a gay students' listserv. Though not mentioned in the newspaper article, people on this list have speculated that the murders might be related to Internet chat room encounters. Perhaps there is a killer out there targeting gay men on-line. Very disturbing. No knowing how many people might be killed before the police find out anything substantial because of the difficulties of dealing with the amorphous on-line chat communities...

I went into the newly opened Borders mega-book-cd-dvd-vhs-cafe this morning. I almost bought [Tsai Ming-liang's] The Hole, but didn't. Now I'm thinking I'll get it tomorrow on my way to school. I need to see it again. I need to find again that connection to works of art that move me.

(After helping a friend study vocabulary words for a standardized test recently, I've had lots of words floating around in my head. I thought I'd start up a little "word of the day" thing here to help me work on maintaining and expanding my vocabulary.)

prurient: adj. 1 having an unhealthy obsession with sexual matters. 2 encouraging such an obsession.

I've been in an incredibly irritable, anti-social mood these past few days. I just can't stand being around people; yet, I don't necessarily want to be alone. I think I've confused and/or hurt my friend E, too, because I've been so sullen around her. She called me up for lunch yesterday, and I didn't want to refuse because I know how tenuous my social-ness is -- I don't want to seem like I'm always turning down invitations. But then I show up at lunch and I'm all moody. E asks me what's wrong, but I don't really know. I just know that I'm excessively unhappy with people and what I see as a total lack of consideration for others (especially me). It's always little, stupid things, too. At lunch, I was pissed off by the unorganized system of ordering food (where's the line? why does one cashier disappear for awhile?) and this guy behind me who was practically stepping on me as if he could hurry me up.

Grrrr.

I just want to surround myself with walls of sound, to drown out everything but loud music. There isn't any particular kind of music that I'm feeling now, though. I've put in Sarah McLachlan's Mirrorball, and I guess that's doing an okay job.

I'm thinking about working on a paper about emotions and violence. "Moved to Violence." Violence and the intent to harm.

E asked me this morning again what's wrong, and she thought I was just not wanting to talk about it, so she wanted me just to tell her what's up. But I don't know why I have this antipathy to people. I think it must be related to my periodic existential crises -- what am I doing in school? what is my goal? etc. etc. But how can I deal with these questions? Nothing ever seems to change.

Life is not about singular events. It's about repetition, a constant accumulation of sameness. Last night, [Buffy] went through a time-loop thing (like in the movie Groundhog Day) and I noted how much her situation was actually not extraordinary. Work, especially in a retail job, is the same every day. There is little to differentiate one day from the next, just the relentless onslaught of customers, questions, and problems to solve in keeping those customers happy. And I guess that's what's so confusing for me -- in studying literature and culture, I/we seem to look at singularity, even if we're looking at "representative" events. But how can we understand the utterly quotidian as informing our selves, our behaviors, our emotions?

It's night. My day-long headache is finally starting to ebb.

How frightening is all this anthrax? It makes me feel like the world is so much more vulnerable than ever. I guess that's how terrorism works -- takes away any sense of a safe, good-intentions-driven world. I only hope that we've seen the limits of biological terrorism now. How awful to see scientific technology used as an insidious weapon.

* * *

I love the developing relationship between Otoh-boto and Nurse Tyler in Shani Mootoo's Cereus Blooms at Night. I just love that book. It is so rich in depictions of novel possibilities of gendered and sexual relations. Where else do you get a moving story of a gay male nurse falling in love with a transgendered boy? There is a sense of humor in the book, but for once, this kind of relationship isn't simply a joke or a tragedy. I've been thinking about Cereus Blooms at Night again because of a flyer for a course being taught next semester. Apparently, there's an honors program at [UNC] that allows outstanding undergraduate seniors to teach a course of their own design. And someone is teaching a course on South Asian visuality in which one of the texts is Shani Mootoo's novel. Mmmm . . .

It's so hot in this apartment. I hate the yo-yo-ness of the weather here. It was cold a little while ago. Now we're back to 80-degree weather and high humidity. This is when I get lots of colds.

I'm feeling academically paralyzed gain (surprise). I look at all the stacks of book I have lying around that I should've been reading, but haven't. I try to sit down to write down my thoughts about a book, and I can't. I start reading articles that other people have written on these books, and I just feel small and insignificant. I think it's looking less and less likely that I'll be continuing with the PhD... But then that leaves a gaping hole where my future career used to be. What am I going to do?

Hmm. Very interesting: [7 Questions with Gorillaz]. I really like the idea of a cartoon band. I've always flirted with the idea of doing music, but it would never be the kind of music we consider as music -- you know, like singers and guitar players who you see perform and stuff. And I think this cartoon band does something with the idea of pop music, messes with how we view our favorite bands, the people, their stories, etc. Still, I can't quite make out what they're trying to do with all the stereotypes they play with . . .

A couple of days ago, I was considering again the cumulative effect of a daily, regular inundation of things. I was thinking about it in terms of living in the South. I never really have felt like the South is its stereotype of religious fundamentalism, overt racism, etc. (Of course, many people would say the Raleigh-Durham area is only a faint reflection of the "true" South, over-run as it is with people like me from the Northeast, the Midwest, California, and all over.) But as I was driving home Friday, I became despondent over the insistence of Religious Right messages on people's bumper stickers ("Children Are a Gift from God," "Choose Life," etc.), the sight of American flags everywhere (I know, this is a result of 9-11 more than an effect of Southern-ness itself), and as I pulled into the parking lot of my apartment complex, a sticker on a pick-up truck that said, "Defend Southern Values" (or something like that) next to a picture of the Confederate flag. I realized that though people are very nice here, there is also an aspect of people that is antithetical to me. I am the embodiment of so many things that people here hate and violently, at times, have tried to expel. I am for all intents and purposes a Northerner. I am not white. I am not straight. I am not religious. I am a feminist. I am queer. BUT, while it is easy to polarize, to think of oppositions and points of contention, I finally realized later that night that these things are ever-present wherever we are. And in some senses, my life will always have to be about negotiating other people's attempts to delineate my existence (just as everyone faces the same predicament, albeit with varying levels of tension). To run away, to extricate myself from a particular point of social existence, would never completely free me from these concerns. I would only have to enter another sphere of influences and expectations.

[Further Action on Anti-Terrorism Bill Needed]