OK, so I’m not going to post a desperately intellectual, academic, original piece today, despite the fact that Fossil and other members of The Algebraically Confident group did indeed explain to me why and how the stupid Chocolate Age Calculator works. The fact that they did it while smacking me on the head for my own mathematical inadequacy is not even the reason for my reluctance to venture into Brainstorm’s erudite arena.
I just don’t feel like it.
(I’m tempted to make that the end of the post. I’m sitting here with Karen and Sarah in my basement office, while the cold rain comes down in nasty, vicious sheets, making it look like a summer day in England. Sarah and Karen are both graduate students. They’re not happy today either. We’re not sure why. Maybe it’s because it’s almost the end of the semester and we all have a lot of grading to do; maybe it’s because of the various annoying disappointments, rejections, frustrations, and indignities that are all part of the intricate tapestry of academic life; maybe it’s because the vending machine is out of Diet Coke, and nobody likes Coke Zero — Karen just added to the general air of bitterness by muttering, “What the hell is up with Vitamin Coke? I don’t need to multitask that much. I mean, let me have my soda and take my vitamin D supplements separately. I may not have a lot of time, but I have enough time to do that.”)
The whole week has been a little messy. Sarah’s in the grad seminar I’ve been teaching on Freud and the Freudians, and she was the only one, apart from me, who liked Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child. The other students, a usually insightful and lively bunch, wanted to put Alice Miller in the middle of the town square and throw rocks at her head. OK, maybe their reaction wasn’t quite that bad. They were genuinely ticked off that Alice Miller changed the title of her book — or at least the subtitle of the book — about a 123 times since it was published, and that the new afterword seemed to be more an ad for her Web site than an actual commentary on her work. Me, I still really like what Miller has to say. And it turns out I’m not the only one who wasn’t loved as an infant. Sarah sent me an email while she was reading it, complaining that she had already run out of “lotiony tissues” by chapter two. “My roommate was reading about genocide,” Sarah says, “and she wasn’t half as sad as I was. Sure, whole civilizations are wiped out, but I was not properly mirrored during breastfeeding.”
(Karen complains under her breath as she reads another book, “I want to go back to the ‘lotiony tissues’ line. More multitasking. See? Why do you have to moisturize and cry your eyes out at the same time?” Karen is not to be appeased today.)
So Tuesday morning wasn’t so hot. And then last night, after admittedly a really nice dinner with a friend, my husband and I watched Cloverfield because my undergraduates told me I should.
I wanted to put them in the middle of the town square and throw rocks at their heads. But only after giving a map to the monsters from outer space, showing where all the filmmakers and their characters lived. What a bunch of morons. What a bunch of narcissistic, self-indulgent, useless morons. Not that I’m bitter. But why should these people not have been eaten by what looked like a cross between Godzilla, Lucifer, a really big spider, and one of my old boyfriends?
Right before I went to bed, I read all the responses to the chocolate post, most of which seemed to indicate that I should not have been allowed to graduate from public high school in a timely fashion. Alice Miller, where are you when I need you?
Today I realized that my new book, It’s Not That I’m Bitter, which will be published in May by St. Martin’s, might have to be hand-sold out of my trunk. This makes me think that I should change the title of my new book because the title just may no longer be true.
I’m worried about the future of the scholarly journal I’ve been editing for 20 years, LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory. My co-editor, Margaret Mitchell of the University of West Georgia, and I, however, had a great conversation earlier today about the fabulous special issues we’re going to do for next year.
It sort of turned the day around.
So did the fact that Sam Buzzelli just showed up and put Nick Lowe’s “I Knew the Bride When She Used to Rock and Roll” up on YouTube.
In fact, writing this whole thing has made me feel better.
Intellect tomorrow, comedy tonight.
