Mastery of Language for the win!

The comic below, gleaned from Wednesday's post on Penny Arcade, is so very far up my alley that sunlight no longer penetrates its shadowy narrows. Were one to wander this far themselves, they would undoubtedly be accosted by nare-do-wells, and at knife point, would be forced to participate in tom-foolery, shenanigans, and if truly unlucky, ballyhoo. Enjoy.

Def Whyte Man's Burden

Guitar Hero III will be hitting stores tomorrow, or at least that's what the fine purveyors of electronic entertainment tell me; I remain rather skeptical, mainly because video games tend to be released on Tuesdays, not unlike DVDs and many CDs. Isn't it amazing what one's youth in customer service will learn' ya? Anyway, what spurs me on to write this post, apart from the simple fact that it's been over a week since my last one, is rather the harsh self-realizations that playing the GH III demo on Xbox Live has made brutally apparent: I have horrible taste in music.

Anyone who knows me even a little soon realizes that my musical tastes cull from the most stagnant and vile corners of the barrel. The most acceptable layers are those that fifteen year old girls swoon over (read: Fall Out Boy) on Total Request Live (or TRL, if you're into abbreviations, and who isn't?), and while I whole-heartedly cling to that tired, cliche answer that their last album before their 'discovery' is my favorite and that I'm less of a fan of the mainstream stuff, I won't go so far as to call anyone a 'sell-out.' I believe that phrase is one among many that I, as a white, middle-class male, am not allowed to use, unless ironically. Same thing goes for any complaints about me being oppressed or not being paid as much as someone else for the same job.

I would be a far happier man if a guilty affection for the "Sugar We're Going Down" guys was all I had in my musical closet. Instead, we're talking the kind of shit that keeps you from getting elected Senator or ever holding a job where you're around kids. For instance, out of the five songs put forth on the GH III demo, the one that really sent shivers up my spine was "Rock You Like a Hurricane." Yes, the one by the Scorpions. First of all, any person should be wary of liking a band with an animal in the name or band logo; if the word "white" is added into the mix as an adjective (Whitesnake, White Lion) or any part of the name is deliberately misspelled, then you might just need to go put a pistol in your mouth and rock yourself like a bullet to the brain pan. The only possible exception to the animal rule is Modest Mouse, and that's because they got the name from a Virginia Woolf quote.

Believe it or not, though, the 80's aren't my true weakness. Sure, I may have a fondness for singing "I Just Died in your Arms Tonight" while playing Halo 3 online, mainly to annoy/amuse my friends, and Patrick Swayze's "She's Like the Wind" may have somehow found a way onto my iPod, but my real kryptonite is 90's music. Oh yes. I'm talking songs so bad that hearing them has a scientifically documented chance, however slight, of inducing coma, as a sort of bodily defense mechanism, not unlike how a computer crashes. Dare I confess my affection for the Gin Blossoms, or even worse, the fact that I have yet to erase Deep Blue Something's "Breakfast at Tiffany's" from my iPod, and because of that delinquency, now refuse to take it off out of sheer stubborn obstinacy? No. This horrid truth would rend the very fabric of the mind, and with what tattered shreds remain, my friends would one by one bid me a hasty adieu.

Of course, they don't seem like they're that bad to me. However, I must confess I am not completely oblivious to how the outside world might see me. Like the portly bachelor in his fifties who has an extensive porcelain doll collection with which he enacts his favorite scenes from Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters' collected works, I realize others would look at me askance, and thus indulge my aberrant whims in the secrecy of long drives home and stolen moments of solitude in my study/lair/Batcave. Still, there is a pull to these songs that I cannot ignore, and if that makes me a pariah, then I suppose the sweet siren song of Eddie Murphy's "My Girl Likes to Party all the Time" will rock me into a fitful sleep, one that, I pray, is without dream.

My Soul May Carry Rabies

While I would hesitate to call myself an online quiz aficionado, I do take them from time to time. I typically steer away from the IQ rating ones and have long since given up on the purity tests, mainly because the results for both are so dismally low that they suggest I spent my first twenty or so years of life caged in the basement of some dilapidated Victorian home, fed fish-heads from a slop bucket twice a day but denied even the barest education or social contact for fear that my mongoloid form would diminish whatever cultural capital the family had up to that point managed to accrue. Should the comparison have crossed your mind, I would readily grant that Boo Radley metaphors are also appropriate.

So anyway (the lingual calling card, I might observe, of the serial meanderer and long-story-teller), the other day I took the "Meet Your Daemon" quiz on the spiffily interactive website for New Line Cinema's forthcoming The Golden Compass. Why was I there in the first place, you ask? Perhaps it was my affection for fantasy literature and Hollywood's oft unrealized potential to visually bring off that literature spectacularly. Perhaps because when you glance at only the final eleven letters of the URL, one finds themselves staring into the face of "assmovie.com." Most likely, it's because I had already seen the new international movie trailer. I mean, for God's sake, there's fucking armor-clad polar bears fighting in this thing! These "gentle giants" have once and for all cast aside their Coke bottles and Christmas cheer and returned once more to what the Creator intended them to be: hulking bastions of savage ass-kickery.

The idea behind the Daemon in general, at least within the book/movie's mythology (as far as I can tell), is that every person's soul is manifested in an animal companion of the opposite gender, and while children's (because of their open potential) Daemons may often change shape during these early, formative years, as people progress toward adulthood this avatar gradually settles into a fixed shape. Thus the type of animal companion you have is a representative of your personal characteristics. This handy quiz allows you, after answering a mere twenty questions, to find out what your Daemon would be.

Diligently, I completed the quiz and waited with bated breath to see what totem my soul would greet me as. I am not an entirely arrogant man, and thus felt no compulsion to see a great lion, a majestic eagle, or even a damn marmoset saunter across my screen. But what did I get? A mouse named Aurora. Yes, the very core of my being can best be summed up as a tiny rodent that lives behind your appliances and, centuries past, may have helped spread plague throughout Europe. Indeed, mine is an animal almost universally put forth as a sign of helplessness and timidity, and should sufficient numbers of my soul congregate in one locale, words like "infestation" are bandied about. This, dear reader, is the type of man whose blog you read. Furthermore, if I did have the utter misfortune of residing in this fantastic universe, what the hell use would I get out of dear little Aurora? Send her out to scare housewives, or harvest me modest amounts of expired cheese? Perhaps I could throw her at the eyes of an attacker, hoping those disturbing little pink paws of hers might find purchase on a retina. I, of course, would never know, as I would be frantically sprinting the other way. Hurumph. Mouse indeed.

My wife's daemon simply puzzles me. Hers is a honey bee named Borealis. Now, I of course appreciate the synchronicity of our two daemons obviously suiting each other so well (if you don't get why they are suited yet, then congratulations on failing fifth grade science), but apart from that, what traits does one associate with the honey bee? Hard working, I suppose, though the word "drone" can too easily be bandied about. Colorful? Okay, if yellow and black are your thing. There is, of course, the vast array of material associated with "honey," but even I will only go so far, dear reader, to sate your boredom; allow me to politely decline.

So should you find yourself bored anytime in the near future, pop over to the website mentioned above and see what your Daemon might be. As is ever the case in these things, it's best to answer truthfully and not in the hopes of getting a specific beastie, since the character traits these deranged people associate with certain animals can, at times, boggle the mind. For instance, when I retook the test (I was still hoping for something a little higher up the mammalia food chain), I got a snow leopard named Elpis (the majestic symbol of, I shit you not, the Girl Scout Association of Kyrgyzstan). First on the list of descriptors was "spontaneous." How exactly is a snow leopard spontaneous? Does he suddenly decide, mid attack, that rather than biting the throat of his prey as usual, he'll instead try mauling its genitals just for the hell of it? Is it merely a ploy used by this cunning feline on its Match.com application? Needless to say, I'm not all that spontaneous, and disturbingly, the snow leopard's diet tends to subsist off of rodents. Poor Aurora has her work cut out for her, it seems.

Not fat, but "Prosperous"

To be honest, I've been worried lately that I was already experiencing a drought of sorts. Apart from the olfactory incidents in my junior college classroom, I didn't have a whole lot I felt compelled to write about. Sure, I could force it, but like so many other things in life, forcing it results in a poor product, or in other contexts, jail time--where a whole lot more "forcing it" tends to take place, I hear.

Then I checked my email on Wednesday, and to my delight, found one of my dearest friends had been kind enough to send me a link to photos taken at my recent, 10 year high school reunion. New worlds of possibility suddenly laid themselves bare before my eyes. I felt like a cheetah on the Serengeti who had accidentally stumbled upon the wounded, retarded, and elderly section of the gazelle herd; yes, my friends, there was bounty to be had here. So much, in fact, that my frail mortal mind could not adequately process the brutal stimuli strewn before me as I clicked through picture after picture of this delightful little get-together. Indeed, I slipped into a comatose state, and only now, days later, have I regained enough consciousness to share my thoughts.

First impression? Overwhelming relief that I did not go. Now I know how passengers who missed a flight must feel when, driving home from the airport in irritation, they hear that their plane detonated over the Pacific; or how the promiscuous Lothario feels when learning that a former conquest has gonorrhea but he, despite his utter and persistent disregard for protection, escaped with his junk (Mr. Peeps) untarnished. Such was the feeling of serene calm that swept over me, so much so that I immediately slaughtered a fatted calf and burned fragrant herbs in praise of my merciful God.

Interestingly, the other sensation that most forcibly warred with my relief as I perused these crime-scene snapshots was a deep-seated, almost bewildering confusion. The title on the web page claimed that this was my high school and my graduating class, and every six to ten pictures did contain someone I vaguely remembered, but the vast majority of these pictures were inhabited by souls I, as far as I could tell, had never seen before in my entire life. For many of you, this may seem unremarkable, but bear in mind that my graduating class clocked in at somewhere around 200 people. At one time, I knew the names of every single one of these kids, but whatever the years had done to them, it had erased the once rigid contours of their profile to leave a fleshy, dead-eyed caricature in its place. Let me pause a moment to emphasize that first adjective a bit: indeed, were there a machine bolted to the gymnasium floor that night that could pare away the excess pounds that had accumulated over the past decade, they could have molded themselves at least another fifteen people to enjoy the festivities.

I could go on for quite some time, so I'll cut this short. Despite what my previous paragraphs might suggest, I hold no persistent distaste for my high school or my former peers; indeed, there were a number of people I saw in the pictures who I really did wish I was still in contact with, and another few who are still close to me. I don't mean to malign these people, or the rest of the gang in attendance. I suppose it's just that I don't have a whole lot to say to them, nor they to me, I imagine. Come on--I don't even remember their names. Showing up that night would be tantamount to saying, "I never cared enough to remember you after graduation, but I do care enough now to squint at your name tag and feign enthusiasm about your life for as short a period of time as possible." I respect them enough to save them the implied condescension. Though, I suppose, not enough to simply not condescend in the first place. God, I'm a prick. Maybe I did them a favor not showing up.

Update: Still Silent, Still Deadly

So it's been a week since my students approached me after class complaining about the anonymous flatulence of their peer, and the only good news to report is that they haven't approached me a second time, despite the lack of any impotently vague announcement in-class on my part. This silent killer continues to bombard the innocents around him/her with such unflinching persistence that WWII artillery metaphors spring unbidden to mind. The original plaintiffs who brought the matter to my attention have taken one of two courses: some suffer stoically, their jaw muscles taut as their breath hisses in and out between clenched teeth; others simply persevere until their all-too human willpower inevitably crumbles, and at this point, rise abruptly mid-lecture to re-seat themselves in a marginally better--and certainly further removed--location.

Charmingly enough, as of Wednesday another student has taken a slightly different approach. Stopping me as I was passing out their latest batch of quizzes, he opined that there must be something wrong with the ventilation system above the room, because an unfamiliar stench had been seeping down onto him from above. My first impression? That be it for reasons of delayed guilt or (if this young person is truly the virtuoso of biological warfare that I suspect he is) for reasons of barely restrained pride, the culprit himself had broached the subject with me, thereby elevating the game of cat, mouse, and expired brie to the next level. He was giving me a way out, an avenue to discuss the subject in class without attaching the onus (don't transplant vowels now, dear reader) to any particular individual. The fact that this may very well have been provided by the guilty party only underscores the point that he has no intention of stopping. The ritual has merely evolved, to a point now where the prodigy demands public acknowledgement, albeit obliquely so.

The only gesture to be made on my part, at least for the moment, will remain a passive one. By incrementally increasing the complexity (and thus the difficulty) of the grammar lessons, one by one my students should become so fixated on the gibberish on the board--and more importantly, on their woeful inability to adequately master those grammatical skills--that their concern over their course grade will snap them into an attention rapt enough, I would hope, to block out the more visceral stimuli surrounding them--namely the fact that they are forced, twice a week, to attend class in a Dutch oven.

The sinster limits of good pedagogy

I've been teaching at the college level for about five years now. Let me clarify that a little by explaining I've been teaching at junior colleges and universities for that long, and not giving a college-level lecture to a kindergarten finger-painting class. And while I'll be the first one to admit that this isn't an overly substantial period of time, and that therefore I have not seen everything in "the book" (whatever that malevolent volume might actually be), I like to think I've at least experienced the basics of the profession, along with the more common curve balls that are thrown--inevitably at the skull--of whoever happens to stand before a classroom and speak 2-3 days a week.

So when three of my students waited to speak to me after class the other day, I assumed they had a question about the lecture, or perhaps were unclear about some procedural issue from the syllabus. I am delighted (read: appalled) to reveal that this was, indeed, not the case. Rather, these students felt obliged to inform me that another member of the class, seemingly without scruple, had been mercilessly and quite continuously farting during lecture--enough so that the heady aroma of this person's gastrointestinal tract had become distracting to these unfortunate neighbors/victims. They corralled me after class to complain and beg me to "do something about it."

I was so taken aback by the situation, that I rattled off a placating sentence or two and sent them on their way, unwisely promising I'd try to remedy the situation. But what, I ask, can I do? My purview as instructor reaches no further than teaching the subject matter to my students, evaluating their performance in class, and maintaining some semblance of decorum during our time together so that the majority of students who want (and choose) to learn can. Personal hygiene is not something I should have to deal with, nor can I imagine broaching the subject with the suspect to be anything other than leaving yourself wide open for complaints to the administration, or at the very least, an extremely embarrassing conversation for everyone involved.

So what am I going to do? Pretend to forget about it on Monday, and should the issue come back, explain to these students that they may need to take the bull by the horns themselves and find a moment to talk to this kid. Or simply move seats. I, for one, will continue to pray that the ventilation in that classroom will continue to keep my nostrils free of that most oppressive aroma, or that should it not, I will have one of my dry-erase markers handy to shove up my nose. The minor brain damage should be well worth the trouble.

Drawring Is the Funzorz!

I used to draw quite a lot, but regrettably, I simply don't have the time anymore. I have the time to dabble every now and then, but the thing about drawing (at least for me) is that if you don't keep your skills up through constant practice, you won't get results you're entirely thrilled with. So if and when I do "dabble," I get crap, which only frustrates me and thus I put the pencil and pad aside for another month or so. Thank God I have a good metabolism, because I fear I would rather easily fall prey to a shame spiral that would eventually involve me eating my weight in roast beef covered in chocolate sauce. For those of you playing along at home, the roast beef would be the thing covered in chocolate sauce, not me. That would be just weird, and the kind of mental image I would only wish upon sworn blood enemies.

Nevertheless, there are times when things just click, regardless of how long away I've been from the medium. Case in point: the picture heading this post. I drew it last year sometime, but despite how rusty I was, everything came out crisply and fell right into place. I imagine this is what athletes mean when they talk about being "in the zone," though for someone of my meager athletic ability to attempt approximating even an understanding of that trope may smack of hubris. Still, I think it gets the point across.

Anyway, I'm only writing this post because I want that picture to be in my profile, but apparently, the system demands the arcane sacrifice of the pic included in a genuine blog post, from which the profile can then steal away. It makes no sense to me whatsoever, but then again, I can't understand how an entire electronic language can be composed solely of 1's and 0's, and of course, my persistent belief that the world is indeed flat and that ships routinely sail off the edge of the sea into the great abyss. Call me old-fashioned, I guess.

Then again, I have been thinking I need more grist for my diseased mind to mill over (wow...I fit both "grist" and "mill" into the same sentence without literally talking about an actual mill) in these blog posts, so perhaps I'll start including brief (at the mere mention of that word, I can hear my loyal reader--yes, singular--breathe a heartfelt sigh of relief) posts with any promising sketches that happen to have bled from my pencil that week. Of course, that would entail me drawing every week. Still, should anything worth sharing come up, I'll let you know.