Eagerly Unanticipated

Thursday, December 21, 2006

karma

Nature has decided to repudiate my snow demand of earlier this week by giving Denver a full-scale blizzard today through whenever it all gets cleared off. I awoke to probably 4-5", it's still snowing real hard, and we still have a second front to pick up where the first storm leaves off.

Positives: as they said on the news last night, we get a guarenteed White Christmas. Everybody's offices are shutting down for today and tomorrow at the least, so families get to be together around the holiday. It's not as cold when it's cloudy/snowy, especially at night. I'll have plenty of leisure time to cook some good dinners this week, since I got no place to go.

Negatives: I have a baaaaaaaad feeling they're cancelling the Nuggets game tonight (to which I had those Christmas-present tickets), and it will in all likelihood be rescheduled to a time when we aren't on break any longer. So I'm missing the game, which was supposed to be ALLEN IVERSON'S DEBUT with the team (which I'm still excited about). Also, a friend from Denver was planning on going out to celebrate her birthday with a bar crawl of some kind, and there's no way that's still happening.

Regardless of why we're getting dumped on, snow, particularly of the blizzard variety, is something I don't get to see nearly often enough. And, with Denver's winter weather being what it is, today's accumulation should stick around at least until early next week.

Tuesday, December 19, 2006

anticlimax

Well, the snow didn't pan out. Denver didn't get more than the lightest see-it-swirl-in-the-headlights flurries last night. At least it's staying cold--I see it almost as a necessary condition for Christmas. My winter break goals of 1. regularizing sleep schedule 2. seeing friends 3. writing math thesis 4. cooking have not been achieved yet. In fact, my sleep has been stunningly irregular (woke up at 1pm on saturday, 7:45 sunday, 6am today), I haven't seen anyone, math grading has taken up my time since I got back and is far from complete (making thesis less palatable), and I have a week's dinner menu to plan by the time I go shopping this afternoon. Lovely. Any suggestions for meals for 4?

Monday, December 18, 2006

it finally feels like winter

ohmygod, it's snowing! Just a little bit, but it's been smelling like it'll snow all day today. I really hope we get enough to get that amazing quality of light at night, with the moon and the clouds and the snow all glowing faintly and softly and making me want to run around in it, but wishing I could do so without leaving any tracks or sign... all those little bits of wonderment from childhood that aren't the first things I usually remember but just when the time is right...

on flying

Over Thanksgiving break, I flew for the first time since coming home from study abroad the previous December. In the interim, I've driven a ton of miles on a car that feels and sounds like it's coming apart, but I'd managed to avoid the ushering in of the era of Having To Check Your Luggage Because You Brought Shampoo on Your Trip for nearly a year. Following my flight home, I was prepared to write a rant of probably 1000 - 1200 words about how much I hated flying. After I got sick over the holiday and flew home with probably the worst sinus/pressure headache I've ever had at 5:55am, I was prepared to write probably 40 words about how awful air travel was, about half of which would have been profanity.

But flying home for winter break changed that a little bit. As a (sometimes) rational person, using domestic airlines as a mode of transportation is pretty awful. In fact, really awful--they didn't even give me a full can of ginger ale this time. My flight to Denver on Friday was full, I had a middle seat cause I booked it late, the tv-monitor programming was EXACTLY THE SAME as what I'd seen over Thanksgiving (which is a different calendar month, United), and they even took a step down from pretzels to give us this assorted snack mixture of bad pretzels (since good pretzels can only be produced by a company that specializes in their production alone), these weird orange things (according the the label, they were somehow made from corn, and flavored with some kind of flavorless powder that discolors your fingers), and the absolute worst soy nuts I have ever seen--lacking texture, flavor, or substance, they seemed to be part of a conspiracy to keep Americans convinced that soy products are for evil hippies and Asian people and thus inedible by the average McDonalds/frozen pizza consumer. I love soy, I enjoy tofu (it's 1/3 the cost of meat per pound, if I've never mentioned it before in this space), and I think it's crazy that it's somehow been relegated to a "specialty food" designation. But that's neither here nor there.

I kept trying to doze off on the flight, but kept waking up because I had leaned almost into the seat-space of the person next to me, and since I really hate when other people do that, I tried to stay awake or at least sleep sitting upright. The airport was crowded and we got dropped off at the farthest end of the longest concourse at the airport (if you've been to DIA, you know what the layout's like). The bags from our flight arrived in two waves spaced 15 minutes apart (my two were split, one in each). And so on.

But, somehow, there's a part of me that still enjoyed it. And it's not just the going home part, although that's still nice. It's not that I got to meet some other students from the colleges, who I may see next semester randomly and have that little moment of semi-recognition with, although that was nice, too. I realized why I enjoy taking trips by plane because of that moment right at the beginning of everything. I pulled out a book to read as soon as I got to my seat, ignored the safety briefing, and was prepared to keep on going through til we landed, but as the plane finished taxiing, I couldn't help but set it down, and look out the window, the way I realized I look out the window every time I get on a plane, even though I normally try to get an aisle seat. With the last colors of the sunset out our window, the plane did it's thing--extending flaps, revving the engines, accelerating down the runway... and just as the nose tilted upward and I felt us lose contact with the ground, I felt a kind like all the negative energy I'd been carrying at the base of my skull, in my shoulders drained down out of me. It was a great feeling, and the moment that makes the rest of the flying experience bearable: the feeling that anything, *anything* is possible.

Sunday, December 17, 2006

the nuggets-knicks brawl: first impressions

Wow, so this story has kind of blown up, as far as NBA storylines are concerned. And, although the game may not have gotten good tv ratings (i.e. wasn't seen in many households), everyone's going to offer opinions about what happened based on poorly-shot and endlessly-replayed video clips online. I just wanted to say: being home in Denver for the holiday, the game was available via our local cable-tv affiliate. Furthermore, even though it had turned into a 20-point blowout by the 4th quarter, I have math grading to catch up on, so I was still watching the game to have something to do. So, no matter what else you may read online about the whole incident, I was, in some petty professional sports sense, a Witness to things in a way most writers can only falsely imply that they are. It feels kinda cool.

I have a couple thoughts on this I just wanted to share (despite the flack from friends I've taken for writing rambling entries about sports); I also have some other thoughts about going home, etc, that I'll hopefully get around to writing about tomorrow. First of all, as someone who reveled in his favorite (hometown) NBA team's emotional immaturity and swagger, it is clear that this is exactly what got us in trouble. Stupid, dangerous (headlock-and-throwing-into-basket-support), flagrant foul aside, it's hard not to see all of the angles by which to amateur psychologize the Nuggets at a time like this. The whole Carmelo-JR Smith relationship dynamic has appeared since the summer to be, oddly enough, a big brother-little brother thing--JR wear's Melo's signature court shoe, talks about all the great advice he's received, and Melo positively beams with pride after JR has a good game. So after Isiah threatens Melo in the closing minutes of the game to "stay out of the paint" (according to a source affiliated with the team), and then his surrogate brother gets assaulted, essentially, in a dirty play on a breakaway, the polish comes off the 22-year-old league-leading scorer, and he steps up to back his teammate up. Although there will be suspensions, and while acknowleging my subject position as being fairly partisan, I can't attack the team for what they did, which was to refuse to be scared off or backed down by some hard-fouling and shoving bullshit by Isiah Thomas (for whom I have lost all respect, following a viewing of his post-game comments) and Nate Robinson (who I already had no respect for following his unbelievably lame dunk-contest victory and unwillingness to expand his game to help a team that already has way too many short, shoot-first guards who don't play good defense). And again, I will defend this view as someone who 1. watches the nuggets regularly (and understands our tendency to blow leads, thus somewhat justifying our decision to leave our starters in late in the game) and 2. watched the whole 48 minutes of the knicks game, which in the grand historical emplotment of sports (which drives much of American culture), was revenge for a fluke loss early in the season, and a personal strike by Nuggets coach George Karl (who is completely crazy) against a coach (Isiah Thomas) who had a playing career featuring numerous violent incidents and personal vendettas, like the time he broke his hand punching Bill Cartwright in 1989. Basically, I feel like the Nuggets, a talented but emotionally immature team, fell victim to the baiting of the Knicks, a talented but awful, underachieving, and emotionally immature team, and so we lost by winning (both the game and, arguably, the fight).

As far as my own experience, I asked for good seats to a Nuggets game for Christmas from the fam, and I'm planning on going to the Suns game on wednesday. Unfortunately, the brawl means that, while the Suns normally just kick the crap out of us, we'll also be playing them without at least one (and probably several) of our starters, thereby making the game that much less enjoyable. A big thanks to one of the worst teams in the NBA (the Knicks) for screwing up my Christmas.

Monday, December 11, 2006

I guess a little speculation about the future

Actually, it may even be anxiety about the future. Um, I'd sorta had this germ of an idea as I was doing some for-school writing last week, but a combination of a lot of words submitted for credit and a lot of other stuff going on has left me without enough sort of standing-in-the-shower thinking time (my most productive 12-15 minutes of the day) to really close the ideas out and get them ready for writing in this space about. As you may have notice, I had some really random stuff kind of spill out over the past couple weeks, some of which I'm kind of afraid to re-read because I don't want to know whether it makes sense or not. Thus, I feel sorta late, and I still don't feel like I have my shit together enough to write for the pleasure of it, but I may as well clear the docket and deal with some of the cooler stuff that's coming up (i.e. coming home for break, holidays, the end of the term, hopefully some cooking). So.

I wrote this paper last week for a US-Latin American relations course that was about contemporary political responses of indigenous people in Bolivia to the state ideology of mestizaje (like 'mixing' or 'hybridity'). It was actually kind of personally interesting, because US history doesn't exactly deal with multiracial people (at least 2/3 of us are under the age of 18, as I recall), but different constructions of multiraciality have been explored in Latin America for a couple hundred years. In fact, the historic Great States of Mesoamerica (Incan, Maya, Aztec) were not ethnically homogeneous, as a result of conquest, tributary relationships, centralization of authority, and so forth. Efforts were made in the 1950s and 60s--when many countries were finally emerging from colonial social structures that had endured past independence--to construct a 'raza cosmica,' a pan-American (minus US and Canada) identity that relied on a shared heritage of racial mixing and ambiguity. The next couple decades demonstrated that the white ruling class managed to manipulate this rhetoric into a perpetuation of the same oppressions, and a second wave of activism began in the 70s and 80s in Bolivia, Ecuador, and other places like Chiapas to assert indigenous difference, to deconstruct the assimilative framework of mestizaje and assert their own culture(s). In doing so, however, political expediency caused the Andean Aymara nationalists in Bolivia to construct their own version of what it meant to be a member of their ethnic group which oversimplified the cultural diversity/hybridity/mixing that had historically occurred there. Two thoughts I had while writing the paper:

While the (mixed-race) romantic in me wishes the solution were somehow to 'fix' the mestizaje ideal of a globalized multiethnic heritage as the national character, it's not clear where to go from here. At any rate, reading about how other states had approached the issue of lacking a clear racial plurality (even though power was far from equitably shared) gave me some hope that the US will be addressing exactly these kinds of issues in the future.

I used, at various points in the paper, 'person', 'persons', 'people', and 'peoples'. The language which decided that this was a good idea, grammatically, was not centrally planned. Whereas you hear about how France has a language board that attempts to replace cognates of foreign words with "French-sounding" analogues, and how some Micronesian linguistic communities have had panels of experts trying to decide the appropriate names for new technologies, English is defined in a bottom-up sort of way. The OED, which the little elitist in me considers the most authoritative dictionary, has defined its mission as the recording of English usage, not as a prescription for how it ought to be used (I would link the NY Times article, but it's too old and is now locked with TimesSelect, but if you have a subscription, the title is "Cyber-Neologoliferation
"). That's cool, I guess, knowing that, for example, by writing this thing and calling it a 'blog', when the term appears in OED, this source was part of the impetus for the addition. On the other hand, the person/people thing got confusing. On probably the third different form, I decided that trying to explain the semantic difference between "person" and "people" as compared with "people" versus "peoples" would be a real pain. And then I realized that if I got that teaching English in Korea job I've applied for, this is exactly the sort of thing I would be expected to do. And that simultaneously, I would be expected to keep a classroom full of middle-schoolers disciplined and attentive. I have several friends who are really excited about going into teaching as early as next year; while I've thought about it before (on numerous occasions), it scares me. It's a lot of responsibility, and I definitely would not be able to cope with students not respecting me, even as I remember all the teachers I've had and didn't really respect. Ick. That's the speculation about the future, I guess... the same sort of linguistic oddity that amused us to no end when I was abroad (see archives from Sept/Oct/Nov 2005, which make me happy and nostalgic all at once) now looms over me with excruciating certainty--it may soon be my job to elucidate the very things we found so charmingly hard to describe.

Monday, December 04, 2006

a referral, another sports-related rant

To a slimmed-down and stylized (and logically coherent) post that parallels what I'm trying to say/do about basketball with this space. Basically, I got love and admiration for the writers over at FreeDarko. While I would love to speak with that same level of authority, they have the NBA League Pass cable package, whereas I am 1. busy 2. sick and 3. the tvs at college are all in public use, so usually you have to fight off a pack of people trying to watch Gray's Anatomy if you want to see anything at all.

In other news, Michigan goes to the first Classic Rose Bowl (Big 10 v Pac 10, even though the Big 10 champion is technically playing elsewhere) since 2003. This will be their third Rose in the four years I've been in college, a span over which they are 0-2. On the plus side, it reminds me of the days when college football was the best sport in the country, precisely because they didn't even pretend that the scientific method played a factor in their crowning of each year's National Champion(s). The bitter arguments employed by fans, even years after the fact, about the hypothetical matchup between, say, 1997 Michigan and 1997 Nebraska really make my day. Fact is, team sports cannot possibly say with absolute authority that the year's best team has separated itself from the pack, and thus deserves its title (with the possible exception of the 95-96 Bulls): NFL schedules differ markedly between good and bad teams, series like last year's NBA finals test the credibility of the process, the mandate given by winning the "World Series" trophy is called into question when a team made up almost (though not quite) entirely of Japan-league baseball players beats everyone else in the World Baseball Classic, and even the NCAA basketball tournament is a flawed beast riddled with unfair seedings, tilted brackets, and tangible home-court advantages. Bias happens, unfairness happens, but only in pre-BCS college football was there the acknowledgement of subjectivity, even, in some years, of blatant favoritism. And that's what made it so great. The possibility of a workable system that did not force college football players to schedule into the depths of December but still produced an uncontested champion occasionally arose, but was dismissed as ridiculous. Since the BCS, controversies have emerged, but blaming the process takes the place of those hypothetical matchup arguments. By claiming to fulfill a standard that is essentially infeasible for 117 teams playing only twelve or thirteen games a year, the BCS has stripped the system of its charm, its opacity. Expecting a bunch of sportswriters, retired players, and computers to fairly determine the best two teams via polling is hopeless, and the BCS's assertion of legitimacy attempts to "compensate" for human faults by encoding them in formulae, burying the system's structural problems. Hopefully, the sport can reestablish a balance between the objectivity (and thus credibility) with which its governors seem to be obsessed and the subjectivity and imperfections that make it enjoyable, human, worth discussing.

Friday, December 01, 2006

breaking news:

Due to time constraints, there's no way in hell I'm going to be able to successfully apply for JET this year. I was jolted out of near-sleep last night in appilcation-related panic, and after reviewing what I still needed to do (lots), I realized that I still needed to get an Enrollment Verification Form QR-96 from the registrar's office. By tomorrow. Now, normally, this wouldn't be a problem; everyone in that office is really nice and understanding, and they've all seen my puppy-dog eyes enough that I have every confidence that they wouldn't mind speeding up the timetable on form requisition for me. Only problem is that this week is spring pre-registration, so there's constantly a line of like twenty people in what is a very small space. It seems kinda like kicking someone when they're down to expect them to even produce any paperwork this week, let alone give them only a day's notice, so I found myself last night deciding that there was no way I could in good conscience attempt to throw an application together and get it overnight-mailed by Friday morning. I still have a number of other options for next year, including an increasing peace made with getting a job next year that will have no bearing on a career, just living a little bit. And, anyway, I'm still waiting on what happens with that Fulbright. Oh, and pushing out an application would also require asking faculty for recommendations on a day's notice and making up a personal statement ("Why do you want to go to Japan?" for which my best answer was "Cause it's not here?)... and I have the flu. It's just... not... happening. So I was able to go back to sleep last night (after doing a couple pages of somnolent academic article-reading), accepting the decision.

Well, wouldn't you know it, this morning, I felt pretty good. Not sickness/health-wise or anything, that's about the same. And I still have just as much that I'm grotesquely behind deadlines in. But I got a couple things done, I got some writing back that was encouraging, and I had a sort of shot-in-the-arm meeting with a Prof. I started getting upbeat about the dwindling amount of school in my life, about the LSAT I'm underprepared to take (sick) on Saturday, about the future, even. And on the crest of this wave of good feeling, I started thinking about the JET application. What I could maybe write that personal statement about. Who I should ask for a rec, even. Dammit, is all I have to say to that. Basically, I go from being overstretched and panic-attacky last night to dropping an obligation. Then I feel momentarily relieved, so what do I do? I try to ADD MORE SHIT TO DO. That's wrong in oh so many ways. I don't want to call it "ambition," because I don't feel like it has a lot of direction, but I feel like I can't be content with having a set of things to do and then doing them. I'm still a month behind where I said I'd be on one of my grading work-study jobs (the course has "recommended" homework deadlines for students, so it's a sort of two-way street). I'm still vaguely depressed by emotional co-dependence. I called in sick to work twice this week, because my body feels just awful, and I definitely had to take a bunch of excedrin yesterday so I could keep working... it's not fucking fair that my subconscious isn't content with getting through what I can, always pushing. Sure, it was fun as a kid, always wanting to learn more about how stuff worked, how a task is performed, what it means to ____, but this is ridiculous. As an adult (sorta), I feel like childlike drive to learn has left me with little more than a short attention span and a deep affection for Win Ben Stein's Money.