kommishonerjenny

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not for the first time, and certainly not the last, a cranky white guy in a tie thinks i went to a crappy school (and graduated from a crappy department -what what! throw it up, women's studies!). this particular cranky white guy has the hyperbolic gift of a book deal for ferretting out crappy schools, and picked mine as the crappiest. namely, the Worst! School! In Americaaaaaa! all this while managing to plug one of my mentors, bettina aptheker, *and* her newly-released autobiography. kisses all 'round.



note: the cranky white guy in a tie gets basically hosed at the end when it is discovered that none of these classes he so hates are actually mandatory, throwing his whole "they're indoctrinating our children against their will because our children are too stupid to think for themselves!" argument right to the dogs. i mean seriously, does he really think that the reading of a book written by a black panther is going to magically rob us of the ability to argue with the black panther viewpoint? and what of the fact that the class he mentions (on the US prison system, taught by angela davis) is *really hard* to get into? you practically have to mow angela davis' lawn for a week just to get on the waitlist. four hundred or so undergraduates can't be that misled, can they?

i got to meet alison bechdel today at a reading at the sf public library. she is totally nerdyamazing, and very nice. i brought both Fun Home and a copy of the original Dykes To Watch Out For Comic. when i asked her to sign it, she said "how old were you when this came out?" and i said i was seven. so she signed it, "to denise, who was seven." for some reason, i find this inscription really moving.

another author at the reading was lenelle moise, who performed a piece called "the fuck you now manifesto," which (and this paraphrasing will hardly do it justice) is about maintaining the right to scream expletives at people when they're fucking with you for being you, and how sometimes the pressure to provide pithy and eloquent responses to assholery is nothing more than elitism, couched in the insidious belief that passive-aggression is more productive than revolution. while i think that there are lots of survival tactics that one keeps in one's arsenal, it's sometimes important to remember that we have a right to be really, really angry. even if you do nothing more with that anger than put the "fuck you now manifesto" on your ipod and walk around glaring mightily at people.

today i found a pair of keys that i lost six months ago. in a pocket that has a tendency to hang onto stuff in this one corner. that i checked a hundred times. and this morning i just pulled it out of the pocket, looking for my real set of keys. wtf. six months.

and if you ever want to know the emotional razoredge a hot night in baltimore brings on, watch this one episode of homicide called "night of the dead living." i forgot what it was like to completely freak out because the ac isn't working. it's perfectly done. i mean, it's no televisual masterpiece or anything, but it does that one thing perfectly.

oh, and my Big Exciting Paper is going to be published. infamy, here i come!

well, first there were finals, and client wrangling.
and then...
(clicky for pictures/links, cut so as not to be an a-hole)

( i was here )

( then here )

( and then i was here )

i am so in hate with law school right now.

wah.

i think it's incredibly sweet that joanna newsome wrote "emily" for her sister emily, who is an astrophysicist. writ:

"anyhow i sat by your side by the water
you taught me the names of the stars overhead
that i wrote down in my ledger
though all i knew of the rogue universe
were those pleiades loosed in december
i promised you i'd set them to verse so i'd always remember
that the meteorite is the source of the light
and the meteor's just what we see
and the meteoroid is the stone that's devoid
of the fire that propelled it to thee
and the meteorite's just what causes the light
and the meteor's how it's perceived
and the meteoroid's a bone from the void
that lies quiet an offering to thee."

the life duet is in our room right now listening to the healing meditation cd he got from the hospital after his surgery. the very calm lady on it just said "i can see the powerful healing energy, washing through my body head to toe." he's been listening to it every day. it's really sweet. he says it helps. or, he would say that if he could talk. instead he writes it in a little notebook that the fabulous sarah and i got for him in the gift shop (which clockwatcher remembers for its creepy pro-life kids books). he's also gotten very good at gesturing. it's a good thing i can talk, because the only sign language i know is what i learned teaching special-ed preschoolers and the oddities i gleaned from my old housemate- i know the sign for "potty", "cookie dough", "do you want to eat?", "sit down!", "done", "good!", and "pumpkin vagina". guess which one i didn't learn from an autistic four-year-old!
the life duet also has a whistle he uses to summon me, which he is using right now (and particularly pathetically, i might add. his throat must be hurting again).

i have a confession to make: i've been an lj lurker for a really long time. i don't really understand what's so compelling about it to me; i guess i'm nosy. so i'm setting this up so that i can have online friends and keep up with them and be able to read more than boring public posts (because we all know the real action happens behind the friends lock, right?) and be part of dramatic lj communities with verbally abusive comments threads and whatnot.

however, i already have a blog. and unlike my other relationships, my relationship with my blog is pretty monogamous. we've talked it out, my blog and i, and come up with this compromise: i'm not really going to post on lj, unless the techno deities can help me figure out some sort of simultaneity where my posts from my primary blog are auto-posted here. lj experts tell me i'm pissing in the wind if i expect lj-ers to do any clicky-clicking over to my primary blog, and so i'm not actually going to have any friends and no one will know i'm here (with the exception of those who already read my primary blog and have for a while. i love you guys. you're fabulous, and really my loyal wish to reciprocate for you is what has brought me here. you know who you are.). but i'm okay with no one knowing i'm here. after all, nobody knew i was here before, right? right.

so here goes the relatively futile endeavor:

www.kommishonerjenny.blogspot.com

recent entries have been lacking, because school is kicking my ass but good. read the archives, though. i'm told they're funny.