failure.

it's very strange. since i've been out of university, i've been plagued with creative impulses. however, i can't finish any of them, with the exception of those with a culinary bent. you'd think someone for whom NaNoWriMo was shockingly effortless would be able to follow up a creative impulse now and then, but my nano is languishing at about 57,000 words, nearly the same place it was december 1.

i get fits and starts, a character, a setting, the inkling of a plot and then...nothing. it withers, or tails off, or i get frustrated and depressed and become convinced i'm writing nothing but adolescent trash. it's almost as though i need a deadline to be able to write. i know my best papers were written in that delicious state of panic where you know you've got less than 12 hours left before class (10pm-4am was about ideal). when i was under the "50,000 words in 30 days" deadline, the words flowed. after that passed, there has been nothing. setting deadlines for myself doesn't work either; i wanted to have the novel done by the new year. ha. fat lot of good that did me. even promising it to people didn't help (and if you're reading this, i am sorry >_< it's just as frustrating to me).

and then, you know, i end up hanging out in the sf/f section of barnes&noble and i look at the crap on the shelves and i think, "fuck. if they can get published, i should be a shoo-in." you know, assuming i ever do actually finish anything. i don't think publishers take manuscripts with big chunks of the story missing. every now and then i want to give up and say, well, if i never finish anything, it's probably not worth attempting in the first place. but the ideas still come. how? why? someone get me a psychiatrist, seriously. this is getting ridiculous.

i have motivation insofar as i have frustration. but i've lost inspiration. banging your head on your desk only gets you so far. it's not so much angst as it is just straight anger. i don't really do angst. but i do get angry. and there are very few things that make me as angry as when i look at something i've failed.

oh, the horror.

i lost my office, so i can't blog from work anymore. i'm not sure what this is going to do to my update schedule, as i tend to have less energy when i come home from work.

stay tuned, faithful readers.

corporations.

grrr. so i get a thingy in the mail yesterday titled "Important Changes to Your Credit Card Account." already i'm apprehensive. the changes are:

1) the interest rate is going from 9.99% to 24.99%. this wouldn't normally affect me as i pay off my balances in full with each payment. but it gets better.

2) the due date is going to be changing. it may now be only 20 days after your closing date. which means even less days between when the statement is actually delivered and when your money is due.

so first the up the default rate, and then they make it easier to, oh shit, NOT GET YOUR PAYMENT IN ON TIME. the best part?

We made these non-APR changes to your account primarily due to a change in our business practices.

oh, i see. so you're not actually making enouch money by ripping people off to begin with, you have to make it harder to avoid interest and finance charges. granted, it says "non-APR" because you can write them and reject the change to your APR, but then of course, they might decide to close your account.

i understand credit cards are a necessity of life nowadays. it's not practical to carry all the money i need as cash on me all the time. but, seriously. is it in your best interests to fuck your customers? oh, of course it is. you'll make more money that way. except...we have a discover card, and not only do they give us cash back, but they credit the payment by the postmark, instead of whenever they get off their lazy asses and decide to notice our cheque cleared.

well, fuck you, MBNA. anyone know a better visa/mastercard issuer?

i was right.

it was a busy weekend. oy.

happy passover.

the calm before the storm.

literally. we're supposed to get rain all weekend.

also figuratively. it's a boring friday at work. we're now on the sixth revision of a spec that has never even been close to working. which essentially translates to continued inaction. and even my meeting was cancelled. but i've got 15 million things to do this weekend to make up for it. argh. i wish i could just go home now and not sit here for another two hours. maybe i'll give in and have another half of a cinnamon bun.

media frenzy.

i've come to the conclusion, recently, that the media frenzy surrounding the recent developments in the roman catholic church has two basic causes:

one, people just get a kick out of saying "pope." for example, see goats.com "Congratulations, Pope!". or how a friend of mine insisted, "The new pope will be made entirely of poponium." it ought to be a drinking game. every time the newscaster says "pope", take a drink. if s/he says "popemobile" just go ahead and pass out ;)

two, the funeral and election process are full of these elaborate medieval-esque trappings which we don't understand, but are intrigued by because they're so elaborate. the pomp and colour and solemnity of the whole process is fascinating because it's so alien. they keep saying there are 1 billion catholics in the world, but that means there's another 5 billion who have very little idea of what's going on. i don't think i've spent more time at the catholic encyclopedia than i have recently. although that's possibly not the best source, because the text online is (c) 1917, and therefore pre-WWII, pre-VaticanII, and it ignores all protestantism except for the C of E, the Lutherans, and the Presbyterians. but since i don't have a catholic theologian handy, it's the best i can do.

seeing as the newly-selected benedict XVI is 78, maybe there won't be such a frenzy next time around because we'll all still remember it.

good intentions.

what a gorgeous spring morning, i thought to myself, just before a gnat flew into my mouth.

volunteer.

i am now a volunteer adoption-type person for Stray Cat Blues. we got our cat from a shelter, and really, you can't help feeling sorry for the animals that end up at these places. and i don't have to worry about getting attached to one and taking it home, because our cat doesn't like other cats! ;) so it'll be just me and a cat in a pet store for four hours one saturday afternoon a month. when you sit down to think about, four hours a month is hardly going to have a major effect on any schedule, and i like cats, and they just opened a new adoption center in a pet store about 10 minutes from my house, so it was hard justifying not volunteering.

however, i forsee a jump in my activity at the local library.

slowly...slowly...

ever so freaking slowly, the discipline known as "classics" is moving away from its crippling attachment to the 19th century. the discovery of a way to read previously unreadable papyri found in egypt is exciting, not only for the content they contain, but also because it will introduce a whole new series of texts for which there is no 19th century baggage.

this may be a pet peeve of mine. one thing that so infuriated me as a classics student was its desperate insistence on retaining the narrow-minded attitudes of the victorian scholars. while it is true that we do owe quite a lot to them, to their studies and archaeology and translation, they have also crippled the discipline by essentially being too influential. where in literature and art, for instance, critical techniques have progressed and idealogies such as feminism, post-modernism, and post-colonialism have been allowed to add their own level of interpretation, the concept of a "feminist classics scholar" (for instance) would still strike many in the field as an oxymoron (women in 19th c england weren't even allowed to learn greek). many classics scholars still have problems with the idea of "context," for example, and venerate the unfortunate gentleman whose life work was a book on greek particles, which are one-syllable words that are not even translated.

the chance to get new translations of new texts, as opposed to a new translation of oedipus rex/oidapos tyrannos is extremely exciting to me as a somewhat lapsed 21st century classics scholar. the classics offer so much knowledge on where we came from as the western civilization that their decline in popularity is nothing short of tragic. we need to shed the idealogical restrictions surrounding the discipline and make it accessable to everyone. the classics informed who knows how much of western art that followed. why study shakespeare when you can't understand the allusions he's making? no wonder people have no desire to learn these things anymore; they're seen as remote, confusing, and utterly irrelevent to modern life. the misconception of these artists as "dead white men" has more to do with the narrow-minded men who are attmepting to preserve their dominance over the art and knowledge than it actually does to the original sources themselves. classics are not all the high-minded (and boring) sentiments of aeschylus; they are the obscene poems of ovid, the fart jokes of aristophanes, the anger and passion of euripides. oedipus rex is all the fault of a 19th c theoretician named sigmund freud. euripides' bacchae is not only more interesting, with more complex characters, but it also offers us today an amazing parallel in the chorus's desperate fear of "unbridled female sexuality." in this amazing period of cultural self-discovery, it depresses me to see people turn their back on the very things that can help them see where they came from.

postscript: as an aside, it is absolutely amazing to see what egypt, of all places, has done for the study of the classical world. something like 90% of our extant sappho library is the result of papyri that had been ripped into strips and used to line a sarcophagus. these papyri came from a trash dump. when the library at alexandria burned, countless manuscripts were lost. personal idealogical considerations aside, it's exciting merely as a scholar and an academic to see these lost works come to light again.

taking down the pose.

one thing that everyone noticed howard dean for was his lack of political posturing. uniquely, he said what he meant, and he meant what he said. whether you admired him for it or felt that he just had no idea how to conduct himself is something else entirely :)

i'm relieved to see that he's doing it again. he's cutting through the rhetoric and the pose, and he's quite frankly saying what needs to be said.

"We need to be a national party, we need a national message, and we need to understand why people in dire economic straits — people who certainly aren't being helped by Republican policies — why they vote for George Bush," he said. "We need to respect voters in red states who want to vote for us, but we make it hard for them by not listening to what they have to say."

yes. thank you. when the map of the country has the coasts blue and the rest of the place red, you've got something wrong with your message. john kerry avoided states where he supposedly had no chance of winning. so why would people vote for him anyway? howard dean is going to those states, giving them money, saying, "we want to work with you." he's not going to roll over and cry when he hears the word "values."

shit. maybe there is a chance after all ;)

always the way.

the spring after i move, a whale shows up in the delaware river. he's been spotted, among other places, right near the apartment complex where we used to live. hmf.

mmm. logic.

southeastern PA is under a "Red Flag Warning" today for a high risk of fire. so i've been poking around the web doing a little research.

in the process, i discovered this map. for some reason, it is extremely amusing to me to read the key and see the order they put fire risk in.

Low
Moderate
High
Very High
Extreme
Water

yes, that says water. perhaps they were thinking of this bit of history?

i have to admit...

i'm liking this whole "sunlight" thing. the warmth isn't bad either.

i could do without the allergies, though.

background information.

i was having a conversation with a co-worker this morning who shoots competitively in marksman contests. we were talking about video games and first person shooters, specifically. he said, well, he didn't really think people should play those kinds of games because, you know, all the school shootings. he has 3 sons, the eldest of which is in his second year in university.

i said, look. your sons know how to shoot a gun. they know how to hold it, how to aim it, how to handle it. they've seen you set an example by shooting a rifle for sport.

all i know how to do is click a mouse.

whether or not video games encourage violent behavior is something i'm going to leave up to the psychiatrists. anyone who's played a game knows it certainly has psychologic and physical effects, including adrenaline rushes, rapid heartrate and breathing, and so forth. but for any kid who has picked up a gun and shot someone, there was someone else who had a gun, who taught that kid how to use it, and who introduced the kid to that culture.

i'm not against gun ownership. i believe they knew what they were doing when they wrote the second ammendment because history has shown that one of the best ways to control a population is to criminalize weapons ownership. but we need to sit up and ask what's going on that high school kids take a gun and go shoot up a school, or that people want to own assault weapons that frankly have no other purpose than to kill a fair amount of people in a short amount of time. no one's going to take an AK-47 deer hunting. you're not going to need it for self defense, either. but don't blame videogames when you've got a loaded gun in an unlocked cabinet, and you've taught your kid how to use it.

oh my.

headline of the day: CNN.com - Secret Service protects expectant duck - Apr 8, 2005

i don't know whether to be enthralled with the cuteness of the whole thing, or to be appalled at what my tax dollars are paying for.

i guess i ought to just be grateful for the bush administration engaging in environmental protection for once ;)

what do we pay these people for?

comcast was down for 6 hours yesterday. blerg.

and yet they're still better than verizon. anyone's better than verizon.

progress.

it amuses me that the second most important headline this week is the postponement of prince charles's second wedding. it's worse than celebrities. there have been opinion polls about whether he ought to marry her or not. it's a delicious story/scandal everywhere.

why? is it just because he's a prince? nah. it's because we're watching, played out in the exquisite manners of upper class england, the oldest of revenge dramas: competition at its most raw, most base level. diana, the publicly scorned, jealous, beautiful wife who died in a sordid car crash in paris. camilla, who met charles first, whose husband gave up the field to the prince. and in the end, she won. literally.

this columnist said it very succnintly:

Camilla has got the last laugh. She's got her man. She's nabbed the future King of England. She may yet be Queen.

the reason i think we're so fascinated is because this is the couple we all want to be. they both defeated, not their social rivals, but their sexual rivals. theirs will not be a romantic, fairy tale wedding, as his first was. it will be more subdued, a mere recogniction of a fait accompli. their wedding on saturday is not going to be a celebration of love, but a celebration of victory.

omg!!!

the sky is blue!! and there's a big freaky yellow glowy thing in it! run away!