New Moon Makes Girls Swoon, Unattractive

Call it Karma or simply the machinations of a thoroughly vengeful Old Testament God, we reap what we sow in this life, and all the trite agrarian metaphors in the world won't change that. While I cannot recall precisely what grave sin I committed in the past that merited the punishment, it must have been dire; indeed, there may very well be the body of some innocent girl scout bricked up in the wall of my home, her boxes of thin mints and carmel delights moldering alongside her. Without a tell-tale heart or black cat to alert the authorities, I might have escaped scott-free, and so the universe has taken a more subtle hand, for I can see no other reason how I could deserve the harrowing ordeal I was given. Perhaps this is a generational concern, a reckoning visited upon the son for the father's crimes. After all, during his minority in Ireland, my father was known to drown kittens for money. Maybe I pay for that deed, like my friend who must forever bear the curse of horrible foot odor because his own father once spit on a gypsy. I cannot know for certain. But whatever the reason, I was made to watch New Moon.

Needless to say, death is sweet release compared to the 130 minutes of agony that is this movie, but like the "vampires" that populate the local high school, I must apparently suffer in perpetuity. I put the word in quotes, of course, because they're nothing of the sort. When a vampire is exposed to direct sunlight, they burn to ash. They don't fucking sparkle. Honestly, if I hadn't already seen Twilight (which I'm pretty sure was punishment for a joke I made in 1996 about a special needs individual), I would have burst out into laughter at the sight, as I actually did when I first saw that ridiculousness on DVD. While it's true I now understand the literal meaning of the "I love boys who sparkle" t-shirts I've seen around, the connotative meaning remains the same: "I will die alone, unmourned by even my dozens of cats, which will probably feast on my remains after an indecorously short period of time." Funny how five little words can say so much, huh?

I won't go into how much I hate that movie, for drudging up any specifics sears my very soul. What I can tell you is that every second in that theater corroded my already delicate masculinity, leaving a ruin that will take years of deliberate effort to reconstitute. Thankfully a friend passed along this picture, which is constituted by such raw virility that I no longer entirely despair for my own plight. If you, too, have been subjected to moody stares of Robert Pattinson, the "my acting repertoire consists of four alternating facial expressions" performance of Kristen Stewart, the inexplicable reasoning behind werewolves never wearing shirts but always wearing knee length jean shorts and running shoes, or God help you, a sparkling vampire, behold and be saved:

Col. Gentleman Turns Corner in Life, Bangs Knee

I've been away for months now, but it has been a productive number of months. I'm now officially Col. Gentleman, Ph.D, or Doctor Colonel Gentleman, whichever you prefer. I've also enjoyed being jerked around by my gainful employer, which itself is a victim of California's budgetary woes and, if I'm to believe my union's rhetoric, the inhuman greed and ignorance of university administration. Rhetoric aside, if I have finally tasted the uncertainty common to most working Americans, unsure if I will keep my job or for how long, the fact remains that I am still teaching and thus have it a lot better than most. For this, as for so many other things, I remain thankful.

I also went through this year's round of applications for tenure track jobs in academia, which is apparently the thing you do after you graduate, this despite the fact that only a modest percentage of graduates ever land tenure track jobs even after years of trying. I won't go into details, but the process is the equivalent of asking every single girl in your high school to prom and being turned down by every single one. You don't expect the captain of the cheer squad or the junior beauty queen to give you the time of day, and there are plenty of others you've never heard of, only seen in the halls passing silently by with their biology textbooks clutched protectively to their sweatered chests, so again, no loss there. But when the girl with the strange skin affliction and a lazy eye, the one who weeps openly as she rereads the Twilight saga and gorges herself on baked meats, when that girl turns you down too...it stings a little. Thankfully, the process doesn't start again for another nine months, so I have time to nurse by bruised ego.

Things move forward on other, lighter fronts. I and the regular cast of villains have convened through the dark arts of the Internet to begin a regular Dungeons and Dragons campaign again, which provides a far more ready satiation of the urges that, had they no other outlet, would eventually compel me to don a purple bathrobe and pointy hat to stalk the freezer isle of my local supermarket and throw balls of tinfoil at passersby and shrilly cry, "Lightning Bolt!" Instead I may safely purge these emotions in the privacy of my own home, admittedly wearing a headset and brutalizing my peers with a poor imitation of Sean Connery. Still, it has produced other, glossier fruit:


In short, life moves on, and if not always in expected ways, it is not entirely unpleasant. And, without having to constantly devote my spare time to the dissertation (well, spare time not already devoted to video games and alcohol abuse - though in my defense, that bottle of whiskey had it coming) I may once again resume my duties as your humble blogger. It may very well take a few posts to get back to my usual form, so please bear with me. But for better or worse, I'm back, bitches.