Nonsense

I stared at dollar signs instead of working but then the reading was done and I had 5 hours until I had to be up for teaching people things about speaking.  A zombie TA with a unkempt mustache and dead eyes without their precious papers cause he ate them all up to stay awake.

Considering my lack of care for grammar at this moment, it might not be a good idea to start writing a paper. Then again, it might not be a good idea to wait until tomorrow either. Because at that very moment the cars starting whispering by his window with tired tired tires and saggy fenders.

And then they were silent.

PS - Cancer is everywhere and everything is synthetic.
PPS - There was some bad bad poetry tonight at the open mic. I wonder if people know what cliches are. Or if they care. I mean, maybe I'm using some here in this thing. But I'm not in front of a crowd pouring my heart out. A heart full of narratives from television shows movies books newspapers plays stories your parents friends enemies uncles aunts sisters brothers and everything everywhere on the internet drilled deep into the ventricles and pumped up through the brain until we regurgitated it to a room full of meaty meaning machines.  This one guy kept talking about his penis and elbows and it was terrible but sounded like it wasn't terrible but really, holy shit good god it was terrible. And a hippie got up and talked about walking around Washington DC and drivers and the environment but it was so ridiculously arrogant that all of the well meaning was washed away and I wanted to sneer instead of clap but I clapped cause I didn't want to be rude with my nose in a book I couldn't read because of all the terrible poetry.

The thing is, I could read all that above and call it poetry and people would clap and there would be a guy thinking, "Jesus what the fuck was that about. What an asshole" and someone else would think, "Whoa, that's so true" and someone else would be thinking about fucking that dude over at the other table who is writing in a notebook and looking up every few seconds, right through the ceiling and into the face of his muse and the words he writes are something along the lines of "To Do: Groceries (don't forget the almond milk!)" But really it would just be bad because I'm not even thinking about what I'm writing right now. I'm dumping piles of brainshit all over and you can read it or not and I can think about sleeping or writing in a more coherent fashion or continuing to do this because it feels a little more productive than the last however many hours.

Paragraph break!

I just reread up there and thought, "Saggy fenders? What the fuck are you talking about?"

This Colbert Restoring Truthiness business is some shit. Some good shit. They're funding teacher projects over at donorschoice.org and fucking kicking ass. Internets be good, tonight.

Braindrain complete.

Poetry night.

The thing about poetry readings is that it's really hard to tell if someone's poetry is good or not. It seems so arbitrary. Everyone gets the same applause, but you don't really know if that's politeness or actual appreciation. Certainly, there is appreciation of the courage to get on stage and read your personal thoughts. But that doesn't make it good.  I'm not claiming to be an authority, but part of me really wants a rubric for good poetry.  In the end, I suppose it doesn't matter. Just like pretty much everything else, and you like it or don't and it's all subjective.

I read last night. And it was awkward. Probably because I didn't read actual poetry but random shit I wrote including a screenplay (very short) and a short story (very short). And a one liner. And a rambling mess of ideas about truth.

Then someone gave me a jesus card.
I said, "Thank you."
We went our separate ways.

Racquetball Fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu!

I am actually too lazy to draw the comic in whatever paint program I have on this Mac, if any. It's also not that interesting. Had racquetball reserved for 4pm, got started at 4:15, left at 4:30.  Next time we're planning ahead. People in Boulder apparently really really enjoy racquetball. They're all soooo lame.  I mean...  You know... Not me and my friends... Just them...

The problem with forgetting to bring an extra pair of underwear to the gym is that you only have three options: 1) Wear gross, sweaty underwear. 2) Go straight home and revise your plans for the day. 3) Go commando.

I chose option 3 and while pulling up my shorts, the button popped off. Awesome! I mean, I've got the belt and all but it's still awkward just knowing the button is missing and feeling like it might affect the status of your shorts.  And riding a bike without underwear just feels wrong.  But it's not. There's no right answer when it comes to what you're wearing while riding your bike.

Academic or high?

"How do words relate to the world? How is it possible that when a speaker stands before a hearer and emits an acoustic blast such remarkable things occur as: the speaker means something; the sounds he emits mean something; the hearer understands what is meant; the speaker makes a statement, asks a question, or gives an order? How is it possible, for example, that when I say "Jones went home", which after all is in one way just a string of noises, what I mean is: Jones went home. What is the difference between saying something and meaning it and saying it without meaning it? And what is involved in meaning just one particular thing and not some other thing? For example, how does it happen that when people say, "Jones went home" they almost always mean Jones went home and not, say, Brown went to the party or Green got drunk. And what is the relation between what I mean when I say something and what it means whether anybody says it or not? How do words stand for things? What is the difference between a meaningful string of words and a meaningless one?"
-John Searle, Speech Acts


This is a serious academic problematizing human communication. 


But it also sounds like a conversation with someone who is high.


It's all starting to make sense now...

Premises can't be valid or invalid, asshole

It's becoming my ritual to write here in between procrastination on the interwebs and completing my reading or writing assignments.  It's my on/off switch. If I don't write here, I can't really do anything else or stop what I was doing a minute ago.  Makes sense, I think. I have to unload whatever it is in my brain that is preventing me from working before I can move on.

Also, NOFX is still my favorite writing music. Has been since the dorm room in college my first summer when it took me 10 hours to write a two page philosophy paper. Got the only A in the class for that paper. My premises were fucking SOLID.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a badass

Got pretty much his whole history in Readings in Rhetoric yesterday.  No one knew what the fuck our professor was talking about until the end of the story, but it was a great story nonetheless.  Clearly, we understood what he was saying, what the story was, and found it interesting but I don't think anyone really understood how it connected to the class until he told us that we would be reading a letter of his through the eyes of four major rhetoricians and writing papers analyzing that letter from the respective perspectives.  This revelation also made me way less nervous about the papers because just looking at the syllabus told me nothing.  Aristotle is gonna tear that shit apart, sonnnnn.

What?

In case you don't know, Bonhoeffer was part of the plot to assassinate Hitler and helped German Jews escape to Switzerland AND rebelled against the Lutheran church to start his own when they wouldn't oppose the Nazi government.  Badass.

Communicative Explanations for Steve Slater

We all got our panties and pantaloons in a bunch over that one.  I sometimes get the feeling that no one knows what they're talking about, including myself. Especially myself. I also sometimes get the feeling that everyone knows exactly what they're talking about and are absolutely right. Like absolute truth. Wait, Truth. Capital T. 

But really it seems to me that everyone really wants to know what they're talking about and the whole process of grad school and academia is striving towards that goal and no matter how far along you go, it's still a searching process.  I would really like to know how many people feel "I've made it. I now know what I've sought to know." I think I would not get along with those people.  THOSE people. I'd perhaps think of them as liars and frauds and egotists.  Ok maybe I wouldn't go that far but I'd be skeptical.

Also, in 45 minutes of racquetball I scored a total of two points.  Two points I was damn proud of.