April 30, 2004
The sedge has withered by the lake
Professor Cleese is showing a steely determination to drill an appreciation for Keats into us. Up until now my only contact with Keats was in Hagar's class, when we were assigned to groups and forced to give oral presentations of his (Keats', not Hagar's) poetry. Kim and Michele (and Katie?) and I wound up with "La Belle Dame Sans Merci," and all through the oral report Kim kept muttering "it doesn't scan. 'And no birds sing' does not scan. This is bullshit."
So far I tend to agree with Kim; Keats is not my guy. Despite having the metaphors behind every word in every line in "Ode on a Grecian Urn" explained to me last night, I still cannot escape the feeling that I'm just reading a poem about a vase. The only Keats I really have warmed to so far is this, from "Ode to Melancholy":
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
As poetry it is swoony and ridiculous but as advice it's pretty good, and I herein offer it to the Lad as a how-to manual for weathering my emotional storms.
Posted by didofoot at 09:21 AM | Comments (4)
April 28, 2004
3:32
Nice Old Lady I Work With: Why do you always do that?
Me: Do what?
NOLIWW: Touch the wall when you walk.
Me: It's a prison thing.
Posted by didofoot at 03:33 PM | Comments (0)
Flamenco rodeo
My cowboy boss was predictably fascinated by my Thursday experience with my professor of Beer Studies. He kept trying to get more details out of me. "So, how did he talk you into this, exactly? And he bought all your beer? How much did that cost him, do you think? And did he hit on you? Where was he sitting? How close, exactly?"
"Ew, pardner," I said. "It was innocent. And in any case, I am NOT giving you tips on how to pick up girls in their twenties."
"I don't need tips," he said, "I've got moves." He danced the flamenco by himself for awhile while I edited some technical reports. "So when are you and me gonna go drinking?"
"I'm not drinking with you."
"Don't you want to meet John?" John is his alter-ego, the one who does bad things when drunk. I'm pretty sure that John is the reason why my cowboy boss no longer has a driver's license or a live-in girlfriend.
"No thank you," I said. "I've seen quite enough of John." He sighed, shrugged, wrote down a haiku about birds, and returned to his office.
Posted by didofoot at 12:18 PM | Comments (0)
April 25, 2004
The dog woke me up at 7:30. Gah.
You know the spot at the bottom center of the ribcage, right where CPR workers put their hands to jump-start you? That part is where I miss the Lad. Right there it feels empty and listless like an uncharged battery pack. First I thought this was a symbol of our beautiful, cinematic love, this physical ache for him, but this morning it occurs to me that I might just be in withdrawal from his magnificent hugs.
Many of you have known the hugs of the Lad on a regular basis in times of need, or in times of him hitting on you or, if you are lucky Sean and Jack, every time Mister Roper comes over, so that he'll keep believing you're all gay. Did you, too, find you missed these hugs when they disappeared?
Not that this will make our love any less cinematic. But I am curious.
Posted by didofoot at 08:36 AM | Comments (9)
April 23, 2004
Ham-fisted: my new favorite word
Not long ago, while waiting for my school train (which smells like a hundred ham-fisted schoolboy colognes), an enormous woman began showing me the pictures she carries around of her ex-boyfriend. She knows he dumped her because she doesn't look like Britney Spears (or maybe she does, in triplicate). She eyed my hips and I could tell that I was indistinguishable, at that moment on her platform, from Britney Spears. "Haven't seen your man," I nearly said, pulling up my sleeves and turning out my pockets as proof; "I swear to you I only inherited this metabolism, and already it's showing alarming signs of wear and tear." But I know what she means. Without girls like Britney around, she'd do all right.
Posted by didofoot at 08:40 PM | Comments (0)
It's practically champagne
I went to my history professor's office hours yesterday after class. He holds his Thursday office hours in the pub on campus, but I knew this (loss of faculties around faculty, never good) would not be an issue for me since I so recently vowed to only drink champagne and the pub is a beer joint.
However, he turned out to be the kind of drinker who does not want to drink alone. More importantly, he is the kind of drinker who wants to buy for the people he drinks with. Free beer, I thought. It's practically champagne. He headed to the bar to fill my order and I nervously asked the other student sitting with us, "Won't he get fired for this?" I imagined a department head, short and bald like George Jetson's boss, snorting up to the table at full steam, eyeing my miniskirt sideways, catching sight of the professor clutching a pint for me and 32oz for himself, and exploding in a rage bomb all over my backpack. But apparently he only gets fired if I press sexual harassment charges, and why would I complain about my new supply of free beer? Unless my new beer supply flashes me or something.
So we drank some more (pint for me, 32oz for him). Shoes, ships, sealing wax. The other student left. The professor bought another round (pint for me, 32oz for him). Cabbages and kings. Perhaps this happens all the time, this drinking and becoming fairly drunk with professors, and no one ever told me? Or perhaps you are thinking, "This sounds startlingly inappropriate." I, too, was thinking that; I mean, at first. Later on, my brain turned to a warm golden syrup and mostly I was thinking, "Mm. Beer."
Generally when a story begins with a student in a miniskirt and a professor buying her beer, it ends predictably, but in this case (after I managed to stay drunk in the pub while the rest of my 7:00-10:00 class was discussing Keats), we just drank a lot of water (pint for me, 32oz for him) and I decorously, slightly sloshing, drove him home.
Today I feel pretty good, except for the nausea and headache and nagging feeling that I have not behaved quite as one ought to behave with one's professor. It's clear to me that our relationship has progressed to a new friendshippy level, and to symbolize this I've begun addressing him by his first name. I snuck it in a few times last night but I'm not sure he was noticing much of anything at that point, so the first real test will come in class on Tuesday when I say, "Well, [insert first name here], when you were piss-drunk on Thursday you were saying that..." etc. I anticipate that this inappropriate familiarity, coming on the heels of my ridiculously short skirt and inability to hold my alcohol, will only add to his already immense respect for me.
Posted by didofoot at 08:59 AM | Comments (14)
April 20, 2004
Happy birthday, Danny!
My first strong memory of Dan is when he came out with some of the crew to a movie during our freshman year of high school. My mom picked him up and was as surprised as me that he was so startlingly articulate around a parent (a feat which only my girl scout troop and later the Lad were able to match). We started talking about the recent uproar over the possibility of gangs in school which had led to the banning of certain colors being worn together. "Gangs in Pleasant Hill?" Dan asked incredulously. "What would their symbol be? Wicker?"
Hey, I thought. This guy is funny. I spent the movie hoping that he would try to hold my hand, even though I was then involved in a serious relationship with a future convict. He never did make a move though. Hey, I thought. This guy is probably some strange breed of man who will eventually go off to become a monk on a mountaintop. Otherwise, wouldn't we be making out right now?
Happy birthday, D/T. You are by far the most interesting of all the ex-Falcons, and one of the very few who has never made out with either me or the Lad (I'm pretty sure). Have a wonderful day, and try not to get my boyfriend killed.
Posted by didofoot at 11:38 AM | Comments (3)
April 16, 2004
Two anecdotes about my professor-boss (not the cowboy)
"This is my wife, Jane," he said.
"Oh, hello," I said. "It's so nice to finally meet you!"
"Hello," she said. Then she turned to my prof-boss somewhat accusingly and said, "She's beautiful."
***********************
"Can you come to my office and fix my fax machine?" said my prof-boss.
"Sure," I said, went to his office, and reloaded the paper into the correct slot in the machine. "As a tenured faculty member in Electrical Engineering," I said, "you clearly are neither mechanically inept nor lazy, so I can only assume you call me in to fix your small technologies in an effort to be endearing. But in light of these four flights of stairs between you and me, I really think it's time you made that Ph.D. work for you."
Posted by didofoot at 01:37 PM | Comments (22)
April 15, 2004
Signs of the Times
Tuesday night in class a girl was talking about her little brother, and how he doesn't hang out with his friends or talk to them on the phone or even chat with them online. "They all have these online journal things," she said, baffled.
"Blogs," someone said wisely, pronouncing it to rhyme with "blow."
"Yeah," she said. "And he comes home and writes about his day and then goes around commenting on all his friends' sites while they comment on his. It's so weird."
Is this how people reacted to the invention of the telephone, too, I wonder?
Interesting side note: MT flags "blogs" as a misspelled word.
Posted by didofoot at 10:55 AM | Comments (0)
April 11, 2004
You thought he went to South America...
But in fact he was loved up and turned into a toad.
Happy birthday, Bunny!
Posted by didofoot at 04:41 PM | Comments (7)
April 09, 2004
Problem with MT and a blast from the past
Jacob and I found a potential problem with MT last night, and here is the amusing story to go along with it:
I was idly obsessively checking my stats when I noticed I was being linked to by a page I'd never heard of which was not spam or a search engine. Naturally, I went to check it out. Imagine my shock to find a girl from high school. She had Googled her own name (we've all done it) and found my site, where I impoliticly (but I don't think rudely) referenced her a couple of years ago. Apparently, this creeped her out.
Not wanting to be a creep, I deleted the entry. Here is where the problem lies: the entry can still be reached by following her link to it, or by Googling for it. I confirmed it with Jacob: I'm not inept, MT just has a weird issue. This means that any entry you have created and deleted might still be out there. Hopefully there will be a fix for this coming from the Lad when he gets home, but in the meantime, be warned.
Anyway, hopefully this will not turn into some war of meta-blogging. I just wanted to 1) warn people about the MT thing and 2) reassure this girl that the entry will be down as soon as I figure out how to do that.
Posted by didofoot at 04:31 PM | Comments (14)
Kim is queen
(Along with KTV.) Happy birthday, Kimmity Kim.
Posted by didofoot at 03:13 PM | Comments (3)
April 07, 2004
In which she faces the music and waltzes
I had a long, serious meeting with my cowboy boss this morning. I was scheduled to meet with my professor boss in the afternoon and tell him the whole horrible truth about his brand new shiny deficit of ($249,000).
"Will he be mad, do you think?" I wondered.
"Oh yeah," said the cowboy.
"Will he yell?" I asked.
"Hoo boy, yes. He's gonna hit the roof."
"What should I do? Should I just sit through it?"
"Yes, just wait him out. He'll rant and scream for awhile and then calm down eventually."
Heart in mouth crowding my foot, I crept up the stairs to my professor boss's office, clutching my backup paperwork like an 8"x11" rosary. I gingerly laid the debt on his desk in front of him and waited, eyes squeezed shut, to be fired.
"Oh, that's no problem," said this calm, kind gentleman who I suddenly remembered had been my boss all along, even as my other boss has always been a little psychotic and prone to fits of hyperbole and drinking in the office. "Here's how we can fix that," said my lamb of a professor boss, and fixed it beautifully, and with all the weight that has been lifted from me I think I will become a model.
Posted by didofoot at 09:34 PM | Comments (7)
April 02, 2004
Two unconnected paragraphs
They wanted to put our new techie, a friendly, ponytailed warhorse, into the cubicle next to me in the office I share with my four other female coworkers. My cowboy boss, resisting this attempt to pasture a foreign bull with his cows, decided instead to give his private office to the techie and move into the cramped space neighboring mine. As Nabokov would say, "Welcome, fellow, to this bordello." He has already warned me not to sit too close to him, though I'm not sure whether the implication is that I will jump him or he will jump me. But as long as he keeps co-writing my term papers I don't care.
If all the flights departed on time, the Lad should have landed in Cairo about a half hour ago I think. I am of course intending to be miserable without him. So far I've been able to replace him in my life with macaroni'n'cheese and "The Secret of Monkey Island," but I have my doubts about how long these pleasures can hold me. And while it is true that chocolate bars, when used correctly, can substitute for sex (I favor king-sized Mars Bars), what can I use to replace true love? Maybe Ben & Jerry's makes a flavor for this.
Posted by didofoot at 11:41 AM | Comments (9)
