An Alpha Wrath of God. Who knew?

We have returned from a week with my parents. No one was killed, hurt, or seriously injured during the visit.

Our return trip was largely uneventful save for a 45 minute jaunt to a "Winery & Eatery" for dinner. We kept following these brown signs down dark, winding roads further and further into a state we knew nothing about. We'd long since forgotten how to get back to the highway when we pulled into Ye Olde Winery, only to find that it closed at 6.00 . Our dash-clock cheerily blinked 6.37. So then it was a mad trek back to civilization that, through some twist of the space-time-continuum, put us on the highway precisely six miles south of where we'd left it. I still don't know how it worked.

And what the hell kind of back-water restaurant closes at 6.00 on a Saturday, anyway?

Aside from that, though, all was well. Our Christmas (and Hanukkah) celebrations went swimmingly, leaving me and the Girlfriend with substantially more in our car than when we first arrived at my parents' house - including my old Magic: The Gathering cards. I was all over that game in Junior High/High School, but I haven't played in almost ten years. The Girlfriend and I dug them out and spent about two days completely reorganizing them - ideally for sale- and I'd like to take this time to remark that dating a woman who catalogs information for a living is pretty sweet, especially when she gleefully started sorting and alphabetizing of her own accord.

So now we've got a week back at our place just to relax and take it easy together. Excellent.

And all of you poor schmucks at the APA, AHA, MLA, etc. - Best of luck to you. Try not to get too stressed out. I'll keep my fingers crossed that you'll all get jobs.

At home, no one can hear you scream.

My parents are, this very moment, parading a train of odd and sundry items in front of me and the Girlfriend. If we show no interest, it's off to GoodWill.

Among the more... eclectic objects are the:

Broken nightlight
Electronic Pedometer (sans battery)
Bag of assorted doorknobs
Neon orange T-shirt vacuum-packed into a disc the size of a large coaster
2 tape dispensers that no longer cut tape
FDA promotional, uncomfortably stiff picnic blanket with plastic underbelly (folds into handy purse-shaped bundle for easy transport!)
Plastic Eye-Coolers
2 sleeping masks (one gaudy pink)
Ergonomic mouse pad
DSL Router
Unidentifiable oriental fabric with flower print, still sealed in its original plastic bag (only Chinese characters can describe its beauty, or function)
Three foot tall air filter, never functioned properly - if at all
Bag of Christmas tree lights (dubious quality)
Promotional dream catcher key-ring (Help the Lakota children, send money)
Digital Camera (only takes blurry photos)
VHS VCR (no longer tracks most tapes)
2 one-size-fits-all, nylon, zip-up, cell phone belt holsters
Blender, cracked base

We have shown no interest. In fact, we have done our absolute best to contain both laughter and horror at what we have witnessed here.

God help us Goodwill.

Home again, home again, jiggety-jig.

I'm back in the house where I grew up.

We braved semis, freezing winds, flying sheets of ice and ravenous, ravenous bees that dogged our trail every moment of the twelve hour trek.*

Now the Girlfriend and I are on High Lounge, a special place filled with warm fireplaces, good books and a magical machine that makes espresso if you -literally- push a button button. Booze also makes frequent appearances - sometimes with the coffee if you're feeling decadent. So we are relishing our momentary respite from responsibilities. No papers to write, no job to worry about, no classes, no homework, no nothing.

Except for the huge god-damned English mastiff that just smeared drool all over my laptop screen.

Classy.



*The bees are a lie. Everything else is true.

On Shame and Cookies.

It's Christmas time again. Or Hanukkah. Or Solstice. Saturnalia. Whatever.

In celebration of something, my Girlfriend With A Real Job and I baked a veritable ton of cookies. Chocolate meringues, triple-chocolate delights, coconut macaroons, cardamom-oatmeal cookies, brown-sugar ginger cookies, regular ole' chocolate-chip cookies and some almond roca just to mix things up a bit. It was a bakestravaganza.

But you can't keep two-hundred odd cookies and a batch of frozen candies just laying around the house unless you have a burning desire to A) go into diabetic shock, B) get ridiculously fat ridiculously quickly or C) accomplish both at the same time. In the interest of our health and well-being - and some sense of "generosity" toward people we care about - the Girlfriend and I made up seven holiday packages of assorted baked love to send off in the post.

Of course we've waited until today, the Saturday before Christmas, to waddle into the local Post Office carrying a tottering stack of re-used Amazon.com boxes and whatever else we could get our hands on. The line is long, but manageable, especially since there are two employees working the counter.

Within a few minutes, we shuffle up to the front and slide our embarrassingly high stack of parcels into the small air-lock chamber designed for such things. (Our post office isn't in a great part of town, so any packages sent or received have to be put in a little chamber of 2inch bullet-proof glass. You have to open the door on your side, insert the package and shut the door. Only when after you've securely shut your door will the Postal worker open theirs. Great idea, except there's no locking mechanism on either door. There's not even a latch. It's a very strange endeavor.)

As luck would have it, as soon as we start discussing shipping options with the man who's helping us, his partner goes on break, leaving him as the only person behind the counter with seven boxes to deal with - one of which is going overseas to Iraq and needs to be insured (more than just cookies in that one). He is remarkably calm. Nonplussed. Completely fucking cool.

The line gets longer. People start grumbling. I am afraid to turn around to see just how bad it is, but my peripheral vision tells me that people are likely stretched all the way to the door. The Postman remains totally unfazed when he finds the package to Iraq. "You'll need to fill out this customs form," and passes the Girlfriend a horrifyingly extensive sheet.

Nervous and keenly aware of everyone else's annoyance, we suggest that we can step to the side and let him take care of the next person while the Girlfriend fills in the requisite information. "No, you might as well just stay where you are. I've already got the rest of your order in the machine, so I can't start anyone else just yet." Postman is wholly unconcerned.

She writes furiously as he casually prints out our stickers and does whatever he needs to with our packages. More people come in. More muttering. Finally the form is done. Insurance taken care of.

"Do you need anything else? Stamps? Envelopes?" Not a care in the world.
"Just a book of stamps, please. That's all." The Girlfriend is as ready to be out of here as I am. It's all she can do not to scream, "Just give me some fucking stamps! Any will do! I don't care!"

Postman rummages through a stack and holds up two options. "Which of these would you prefer?" The line's presence is palpable. Their annoyance inched surely into hatred somewhere around box four.

"The nutcrackers will be just fine."
"Here you are. Thank you and have a nice day." His smile is beneficent, like a saint's would be.

We leave quickly, trying not to make eye-contact with the twenty harried people waiting angrily behind us.

"Sorry!" the Girlfriend stage-whispers to the seething mob. I keep my head low until we're gone.

I don't know if we can ever go back there.

Shouldn't there be some triumphant music playing?

The paper is done.

I'm not entirely satisfied with it, but it's a got a good premise and - I think - has the potential to be worked into an article, given a lot more work. We'll see.

The truly unfortunate bit about the paper is its rather astounding lack of the "So what?" factor. My thesis is essentially, "Hey! These two authors are doing really, really similar things in ways that no one has really paid attention to before!"

And that's it. So at the end, you go, "Huh. I guess they are similar, aren't they?" I have no implications for this information, no alternate readings that these similarities might yield. Nada. If someone says, "So what?" all I can do is shrug.

Ah, well. This does mean that I'm officially on vacation, though.

The Girlfriend With A Real Job and I will be driving for a good twelve hours to visit my parents for the holidays. I'm not entirely sure what we're going to do for the week we're there, but I have the feeling it will involve a significant amount of time reading and sleeping in.

Also, I'm just going to say - for the record - that while I have written about incest a few times on here, I am both astounded and horrified by the amount of hits the blog receives from people searching for incest stories on Google. Holy shit, folks. It's not cool.

Did she really say that?

My mother sent me an email the other day about decorating the Christmas tree back home - not that I necessarily needed a progress report on the status of our holiday decorations, but hey, she's a mother and that's what mothers do.

"I'm going to put just a little bit of tinsel on it in a minute." She writes. "I threw away all of the awful "personal" ornaments, and kept only the good ones." Wait, what? She threw away all of our personal ornaments?!

Like any Good American Family, we have a veritable shit-ton of Christmas ornaments, most of which are fairly hideous but have been around for a couple decades at least. There's the fraying white doily, the ugly angel with a badly painted face, the green clay circular thing I made in second grade that's faded, chipped and otherwise painful to look at. These sorts of things.

Slightly concerned, I wrote my mother back and asked just what exactly she'd gotten rid of. Her reply was priceless, a perfect blend of her practicality and occasional blatant disregard for other people, "I only tossed the awful lace and baubles that were given to us by people we no longer remember, and a few of dad's relatives."

I can't decide what I'm more taken by. Is it the image of my mother holding up some gaudy holiday trinket, her nose wrinkled in disgust as she makes a halfhearted attempt to remember how it managed to get into her house? Is it the moment where she realizes she no longer knows, or cares, how it got there, only that she can now finally be rid of it? Or is it those times when she remembers exactly which member of the family gave the wretched thing to her and, in a flash, thinks "Screw it, I never liked it anyway."?

It's a mixed-up, mumbled-up, shook-up world.

Mary Beard, a Well Known Classics Scholar, keeps a blog. It's A Don's Life over at the TimesOnline.

Her most recent post is on the (possibly tenuous) relationship between modern Greece (and Greeks) and the Famous Ancient Greece Of Old, specifically in light of the riots in Greece last week and various politicians' claims of Greece's cultural heritage.

I'm not sure how I feel about the issue. I'm not sure if Mary's on the right track. But she's talking about it, and it's important. As of this writing there are 10 comments, several of which bring up good points. Some, of course, are kneejerk reactions to a sensitive issue. I'll be interested to see what comes of it, though.

Have a look.

Franny & Zooey

Just finished Franny & Zooey and I'll be goddamned if it shouldn't be required reading for every would-be academic out there.

Franny, on her thorough dissatisfaction with college:

"Sometimes I think that knowledge - when it's knowledge for knowledge's sake, anyway - is the worst of all. The least excusable, certainly. ... I don't think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while - just once in a while - there was some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn't, it's just a disgusting waste of time!"

I'll spare you any further introspection the book led me to, but it is most definitely worth a read. Very different than the typical 'modern' novel. Almost a play, but in full prose. Most of the book is conducted through dialogue with very, very little action. Any actions that do pop up read essentially as stage directions. Rooms are described in minute detail, almost as if by someone designing a set. I'll admit, I felt at times like I was watching a Wes Anderson movie. True, much slower and a bit less quirky than Anderson, but still. The resemblance is there.

It also helped that I kept picturing Zooey as Adrien Brody and Franny as a young Gwyeth Paltrow. Shut up. It's my brain and I'll do what I want.

There are only a handful of scenes in the whole book. And by "a handful" I mean four. Sure, there are two or three transitional bits, but the whole of the book is basically four scenes. Four really good scenes over the period of perhaps twenty-four hours. Great dialogue. Great characterization. Everybody smokes absolutely all the time.

Go read it already.

My brain hurts.

You may remember, some time back, that I took a side-job editing an upcoming card game. Four months after my work was ostensibly done, I'm still getting emails. Two months ago the woman called me up asking if I had any job leads for her at the university. She does not seem to realize that Graduate Teaching Associates, despite the rockin' job title, have very little pull in the department, let alone the university as a whole. Last month I randomly got a check in the mail from her. Not that I'm complaining, but it was unexpected and unannounced.

Which is all to say I'm still kind of surprised to be talking to this woman. Yet here were are. I received an email from her last night, time-stamped at 11.38pm. She had attached the final document for me to edit one last time before it went off to the printer with this (exact) message:

I need to see if you can go through this asap. We are schedule to send in Monday Am.

Don't get me wrong, her heart is in the right place with this game and I'm (sort of) glad to have been a part of it. But I have no idea what her effing problem is. In what world is it acceptable to send demands after 5pm for an overnight turnaround to someone who doesn't actually work for you? In what world is this even a good business practice?

And, not to be overly picky, but if you're sending emails about business-related material to people who you want to help your business venture, shouldn't you make an effort to use correct English at least once? It is your mother tongue, woman! I don't think I have received a single-goddamned-email from this woman that did not have at least one glaring error in it - which is pretty impressive for only sending one-to-two line emails!

Moreover, when you send something for a final pass, it should be damned near perfect. That thing I got this morning? That sad little thing trying to pass itself off as ready-to-meet-the-world? Not a chance. The first entry had three mistakes in it. Not five lines down, she misspelled "two." There were at least seven words in the document that are not English. They're not German. They're not Spanish. They're not Russian or Chinese. They're trying, (rather hard, in fact) to be English. But they are not.

Which is one helluva problem when your game is based on words.

If I could further explain the depths of incompetence to which this document sank, I would, but I cannot. Suffice it to say, I will not be purchasing this game. I will not recommend that anyone purchase this game. If it works correctly (which is a stretch), it will not be an enjoyable experience for anyone. Not even children or the mentally challenged.

Sage advice, evidently.

A little advice to start your morning off, courtesy of J.D. Salinger:

If it's Security you want, your M.A. will at least always qualify you to pass out logarithm tables at any dreary boys' prep school in the country, and most colleges. On the other hand, your beautiful Greek will do you almost no good at all on any good-size campus unless you have a Ph.D., living as we do in a brass-hat, brass-mortarboard world.

-Franny and Zooey, c. 1957

It's good to be reading again.

I signed up for an account at GoodReads.com earlier this week at the behest of Ailia. This led to the rather startling discovery that I have not read more than a handful of books cover-to-cover in the past several years.

Years! And it's not like I don't read, I'm in graduate school for chrissake! I read all the time! But for the past... three years? Four? I've been reading articles, primarily. Or translating. And if I read books, I'm usually only reading a couple chapters or so.

Do you know how depressing that is?

I was looking through my bookshelf to add to the "Books I've Read" when I realized that a significant portion of the books on my shelves I've either not read completely or have read so long ago that I no longer remember anything about them.

To wit:

The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi), Herman Hesse - Started in late High School, wasn't intellectually ready/able to get through it. Never finished.

The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco - Started in December of 2006, interrupted by class starting again. Never finished.

House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski - Started in December of 2007, interrupted by class starting again. Never finished.

The list goes on. So I'm forcing myself to read again for pleasure. It's too easy just to pop in a NetFlix DVD or flip though their 'Instant View' options. Too easy to watch an episode of the Daily Show whenever I want. Too easy to play a video game, or waste time doing any number of other things besides reading.

Then again, part of the problem is that my job is essentially reading, and I usually don't have ample free time to commit to a book for any continuous length of time. But goddamnit I'm going to try.

I finished The Time Machine last night. This morning I read "Franny" of Salinger's Franny & Zooey.

It's good to be reading again.

The water's cold, I swear.

Last year, I took a Pindar class with Morticia. There were only four people in the class and we were all good at Greek, so we flew through the work but since it was officially a "low-level" class, she felt bad about upping our reading load. Instead, our classes quickly turned into about half an hour of translation followed by a solid hour of gossip and storytelling.

One day she told us about some well renowned Pindar scholar from Oxbridge. I forget his name, and it's probably for the best.

Apparently this was "back in the day" when male professors could go skinny-dipping with their male students and no one would raise an eyebrow. So there they were, Pindar Professor and Students bathing naked in some stream or other when a few women from the college came walking by.

Caught in the water with nothing to preserve their modesty, the young men quickly clapped their hands over their genitals and waited for the women to pass on. Their professor, however, did nothing of the sort. He kept himself exposed but buried his head in his hands.

After the women had gone, his students had to ask why he hadn't bothered to conceal himself. He then replied, "I don't know about you gents, but around here I'm recognized by my face."

Horace really isn't that scary, guys.

Finals given. Finals graded. Three students had almost flawless translations of Ovid, Virgil, Horace and Caesar. I was very, very impressed, and more than a little thankful - good exams are a breeze to grade.

Two other students both opted not to translate the Horace passage, which would have been fine had I given them a choice. As it was, that poem was 25% of the exam. And the exam was 30% of their grade, which made that poem worth 7.5 percentage points that they both just fucking threw away. And they both finished early! Finished with over half an hour to spare! I am displeased.

Of course, one of these two was my Possible Plagiarist. Our discussion today was thoroughly inconclusive; I wavered between being sure P.P. hadn't written the thing to feeling guilty for my distrust. Then I'd go back to being sure again. Then more guilt. The neatness of the paper troubles me, especially since P.P. says it took about two hours two write and wasn't proofread or edited before it was turned in. I still don't know and likely never will.

It was a fairly useless as a paper for a Latin class and didn't even come near being a close reading. It reads like a synopsis from something... I don't know. The tone is something I'd expect to see in print, like for Cliff's Notes or BookRags or something. The flavor is decidedly off, I just don't know how.

I wound up telling P.P. that the paper was too short, didn't answer the prompt and didn't make a single reference to the Latin, so it needed to be re-written by Friday or it would keep the ridiculously low grade it earned. I don't know if I'll see a rewrite, but I want to. P.P. was a good student, one I've had for four quarters now. I was expecting much more than this.

As promised.

The in-class presentations I was so worried about went pretty well! Even Slacker McGee did a decent job, despite repeatedly muttering "God I suck," and "This is so bad." Had he kept his mouth shut about how poorly he was doing, he'd have been just fine.

All of them gave really thoughtful presentations and there were actual discussions involving all members of the class! There was debate! There was back-and-forth! They cared about what they were saying and what they'd read! I was amazed, at times. For the most part I didn't need to say a thing and was more than happy to sit back and let them talk about Catullus' grief or just what Horace meant by his "golden mean."

I claim success in this endeavor and am quite pleased with my students.

The papers, though... There may be an issue there. I'll not say anything more on the subject just yet, but one feels decidedly off. I can't put my finger on exactly what it is, but it is distinctly different from all the rest.

More on that later, I'm sure.

As of now, I'm basking in being done with my online class, having written the final for my Latin class and having a fairly good idea of what what I'll write for the Ovid paper.

And it feels very, very good to have all next week just to research and write. I never thought I'd say that, but it's true. I'm really looking foreward to working on this paper with no other distractions or interruptions.

What a fucking dork.

An important distinction.

Levi and I made a shocking discovery yesterday.

We were moving Red Sox into his new home (where he is staying in yet another professor's house) Red made an offhanded remark about someone really having it out for him.

"I don't know what his problem is, he's just got a hard-on for me."

Levi and I stared at him for a beat. "What did you just say?"

"A hard-on. Dude's got a real hard-on for me." He laughed as Levi and I looked at each other for a long moment, then back at him. "Look, I know it's an odd expression but I've heard people use it before, I've read it!"

Levi was incredulous. "That phrase does not mean that. Where on earth did you hear that? Who even says that?!"

"I swear, it's a legitimate expression! You know, if someone's out to get you, if they're really going out of their way to get you, you say they've got a hard-on for you."

"No. Not a chance, Red." I was shaking my head and chuckling, "You say that they're going hard on you, not that they've got a hard-on for you." Levi laughs as well, "Man, you haven't told any of your students that, have you? That'd be amazing. 'Hey, I don't mean to have a hard-on for you, but...' Wow. Just, wow, Red. That's incredible."

We of course had to bring this up at the White-Elephant party we went to later that evening. No one had ever used the phrase "having a hard-on for something" in the sense Red had. Sure, there's the ironic usage, "Oh man, he's got a fucking hard-on for post-modernism," but beyond that, we knew only of its traditional flavor.

Can any of you shed light on this? Has Red just misconstrued "going hard on" and "having a hard-on," or is there some crazy Bostonian usage that we're missing?

More incest.

Today's class with Lance - our last - was pure gold.

We spent most of our time on the story of Myrrha - the girl who falls in love with and ultimately bangs her father - and in the process were treated to Lance at his best.

Lance is a delightful little man of at least sixty years whose hair is dyed a pale red and whose full beard is dyed jet black. His eyes are in a perpetual squint, perhaps from years of intense work on manuscripts, and he has a marked penchant for black leather that manifests itself in the occasional pair of impressive knee-high boots or a button-down shirt that could double as a biker jacket.

As we went through class, Lance routinely referred to Myrrha's father, Cinyras, as "daddy." As in, "Did you catch the scene where he asks Myrrha what kind of husband she'd prefer, and she answers 'One just like you, daddy.' " Or "Remember when she's snuck into his bed and pretended to be a prostitute? Because of their age difference Cinyras calls her 'daughter' and she calls him 'daddy.' "

Any other professor and that would have been really, really creepy. With Lance... Okay, it was a little creepy. But more funny than creepy. Especially because he's got a coffee mug that has "DADDY'S BOY" emblazoned on the side.

At one point he stopped to reflect on a mythology class he'd taught a few years ago. Keep in mind, our myth classes are typically huge lecture courses of 500+ students.

"Yes, this was a while back, when they had me teaching myth for my sins... Back when they'd still let me teach myth... I had a class devoted to the incestuous stories in Ovid, just to keep myself entertained, you know, and I threw all sorts of things in there. I'm sure I called someone a 'naughty boy' on one slide, or had a list of all the "bad boys" in the series. Anything to keep myself from falling asleep up there. It was... oh, what's the polite term for these things... risque I believe. Anyhow, I'm looking at the audience and thinking to myself 'My, the freshmen get younger and younger every year...' and I don't find out until after lecture that that was the day the middle schoolers had come to observe a college classroom... I tell you, I was terrified some irate parent was going to call me up at any minute 'You taught what?! You perverted...!' "

He clapped his hand over his forehead, looking mock-embarrassed. That was, apparently, one of the last times he taught myth. The first two years I knew him he'd always joked that they "didn't let him teach myth anymore." I thought he was joking. Evidently not.

It's going to be a long night for somebody.

Dear Student-

You're giving an in-class presentation tomorrow. Yes, your paper isn't due until Friday, but you are still presenting in a little less than 15 hours.

5pm tonight is not the time to send me an anxious email from work asking for advice about a possible topic. You haven't even picked an author yet, let alone narrowed it down to a specific passage. What in the hell do you expect me to say?

"I think you're fucked."

Love and kisses,
Me

P.S. Cicero wrote letters to Caelius, not Celsius.