virulent.nu

The problem with not having any more Internet is having no way to spur of the moment write out to it. So I guess I will be working on this.

In the mean time, a list.

1. Once again I have started off the summer with a break-up. This is disturbing, but I am not sure if this is surprising. On the other hand, with much more additional time on my hands, I finally tried out recently legalized sports betting in New York.
2. Most calories come from beer.
3. 1&2 are related because really, who eats when this happens?
4. Have been contemplating the inherent passive-aggressiveness of interactions and paper.
5. Purchased rat toys.
6. They love so hard.
7. Will be preparing another paper for Impressive Science Publication status. By prepare I mean write and by write I mean fear. I will also be teaching sixth graders the wonders of non-traditional poetry in a month and a half.
8. Some calories come from cheese.
9. I should probably start getting into more underground graphic novel type things because made me cry at least seven times.
10. I am spending my weekend at a lake in upstate NY.

The internet connection I’ve been stealing since I’ve moved in was finally secured. I am trying to give myself weekly assignments to break the cycle of food, mom’s cable, work, drinking with gen-Xers. Hypothetically, this includes writing but I haven’t thought much beyond such and such a poem about fish.

Someone else, give me an assignment. It will be most successful if I get to be funny.

I could mention that on Saturday night I found myself at a bar called Stinky’s, which is full of young and middle aged yinzers. They sang journey in unison, and it was as if you knew the same young kids will be living in the same neighborhood and going to the same bar in twenty years.

I kept trying to secretly take pictures of the absurd shit men were wearing, but they looked like the type to threaten physical harm to a camera phone and/or a misplaced, bespectacled indie rocker. I was the only girl in the bar wearing glasses. However, I did see the only guy in the bar wearing GIGANTIC JESUS BLING. This was a diamond-encrusted 4″ gold cross slung low on his chest. He also wore plaid almost-pants, the length of which I had falsely believed to be out-dated.

I hesitate to call these kinds of people white trash, because they aren’t. This barely explains a yinzer, but here is a good break down of their linguistic habbits. I admit it was only recently that I consciously fixed a grave yinzer halmark, the omission of “to be.” My “car needs washed” has become the much less embarrassing my “car needs to be washed.”

Because I have sold books for over five years, you would assume that a) I know a whole lot about books and b) I come across awesome things.

I’m not entirely sure if there is a lot to know about books when you are not an actual book dealer beyond some terminology, pricing, how to gently break it to people that their 1956 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica is not worth anything, how to inform customers that even though the book in question was priced as $4.95 in 1968, we are selling it for $6 and you may not argue with me, asshat.

One may also assume that I am an avid reader. Since so much of my brain power is devoted to insipid memorization, I am more interested in shiny, ridiculous things.

This book basically made my Saturday amazing. Unfortunately, Shaq is not featured on every page, but the illustrations are quite lovely. I believe this book was published a few years after the release of Mr. O’Neal’s studio albums — Shaq Fu: Da Return and Shaq Diesel.

I am always pleased to find things I would use to indoctrinate my unborn children, if I should ever un-unborn them.

Folks, it’s about a GAY DUCK. This book is AMAZING. There is room for criticizing its stereotypical implications (not all gay boys/ducks prefer watercolors to baseball), but it deconstructs heteronormative masculinity, which leads me to:

Some things women invented include Kevlar, windshield wipers, flat-bottomed grocery bags, the computer program that translates between binary and English, and chocolate chip cookies. A lot of these products were conceived within highly male-dominated fields (chemistry, astrophysics, computing) with patent restrictions for women.

My friend (and coworker) Claire and I are setting out to a) start a band called “There is No Inventory” as a homage to the bookstore and b) a feminist zine as a homage to the bookstore. Fruits of these labors will be available, by God, on myspace.

I had this whole entry about lists, the problems I see with lists, comparing numbered lists to comma-lists such as this, and some narrow summary of what’s new. Internet ate it, but beyond that, it is interesting how meaningless that kind of loss is. So I’m somewhere in the midst of getting a waitressing job, somehow inadvertently stopped eating meat and have continued to do so, and somewhere a bird is sleeping better than I ever do.

I look at mess and think that my glasses are always crooked and the worst thing at this moment is to keep on thinking that they will always be crooked.

Maybe I’ve been drinking

and

maybe I’ve been poetry.

So what’s the deal, really, with ambivalence?

I will probably hate every part time summer job I’ve applied for but understand this as a better alternative to lab research.

I am doing this well-publicized-for-a-local-poetry-thing even on Thursday with all sorts of grown-up poets. I’m on a flyer for the first time since sophomore year!

I am super important.

I am also probably running a fever but have no thermometer by which to confirm this.

I like to throw things away. Materia makes me kind of queasy because I think, hey, better things could go there, like air!

About his mother, my dad says something like: Well, there were times when you couldn’t get anything. You couldn’t afford to go down the street and buy a pencil.

Which is why when I open a drawer in one of my grandmother’s desks and find a pile of shot gun shells, a young child’s paint set, fifteen Avon catalogues from the 1970s, and a bunch of beverage coasters, I have to wonder if a pencil or two here would have made and difference.

Because of proximity, my grandmother has almost exclusively suggested that I take things. This includes linens as old as my father, endless furniture from Value City, and the odd sport coat.

I have to conclude, then, that there are two reasons why she uses to justify saving everything, in multiple houses, for decades.
1. pawn off to grand children
2. it will be worth something someday

I saw no less than a dozen still-in-the-package barbie doll knock offs, more firearms, piles of ceramic knick-knacks, and stacks of phone numbers and notes from the past fifty years.

This morning I woke up to my dad burning garbage on the hillside.

This grandmother, like my maternal grandmother, has to sell her house. Except that this grandmother is only going to assisted living and is not yet dangerously forgetful. She will be living in a lush apartment complex outside of Philly. It costs quite a bit but thankfully, her children have been finding piles of cash hidden throughout the house. The running total is about $12,000.

As I drove her enormous Lincoln an hour back to Pittsburgh, I kept playing that memory association game. I guess that’s not a proper descriptor, but you piece together whatever childhood scenerios still stick like, jumping from the second floor balcony onto the couch below, and matching it to another moment, the shag carpet in my maternal grandmother’s bedroom. The specificity of memory is alarming.

Grandmother houses are the most defining because you can play with nearly anything and not get yelled at, and I feel sad and strange thinking about both of them gutted and sold so few months apart.

I was there by myself with each parent in each house on the first major stuff-hauling day.

And In my pocket is a match book from I don’t even know when adverising a 900 number for sports gambling.

Semester finished.

I don’t want to be congratulated on graduating, mostly because I haven’t yet. I am impressed that I finally know how to spell congratulate. The word argument took me YEARS to render properly.

Because I decided to get two degrees (asshole), I still have another semester.

I kind of don’t know what to do with myself.

Some suggest I do “feminst readings” of “important things” and “social commentary” within Internet-related phenomena. This could get me some high profile job someday. PROFIT.

HOWEVER

Rat: EXCUSE me do you has an eyeball flavor?

Cat: Dude I am hanging out in a fucking windowsill. It’s dirty and my owners are slobs. I have also been drinking.

Rat: OH NOES. I will give you beautiful words to improve your life.

Cat: Mmmffrrrfppphhhhhh

Rat: I’M IN YR CAT, FOLDING MY HANDS LIKE I AM SLIGHTLY UNCOMFORTABLE.

(photos jacked from facebook group “im in yo fridge!!”)

My fear, however, is that writing scouts view non-sequitor as a bit of a cop out. I am sorry if postmodern hell leaves me with few options to be funny. I also enjoy animals.

It is the end of the semester. I has:

1. draft #4 of manuscript. Anyone wanna read it?
2. memorization of all enzymes and mechanisms of glycolysis, Kreb’s cycle, oxidative phosphorylation, gluconeogenesis, and apparently photosynthesis. Stupid.
3. some other crap.

Which is why I am taking a break to weight in on media matters, which I seldom do, but sometimes the fucking Internet makes me.

I will probably regret writing this, but whatever. I realize that not everything is as cut and dry as I see it, but I am also tired.

My dad called this evening before work to make some dumb ass jokes about the VA Tech shootings. I hung up. My father has the unfortunate disease of Nearly Crotchety Old Man Humor which manifests as Every Racist Joke Ever & Cackling. Sometimes I worry that he deeply agrees with the crap that comes out of his mouth, but he is a reasonable person in principle.

He calls back to make the valid point that the ONLY PERSON AT FAULT HERE IS THE GUY WHO DID THE SHOOTING.

Looking for someone else to blame is not going to work. Let’s examine the vitriol garbage I should have stopped myself from reading hours ago.

Campus Security
The police responded to a “domestic” incident in the dorm rooms and acted accordingly. There was absolutely no way they could have instantly known that a SWAT team should have been mobilized.

Furthermore, how do you cancel classes at a huge University within an extremely narrow time frame? Again, you probably need a campus-wide mobilization. Maybe this will provoke better campus-wide security contacts — emergency sirens, etc.

The bottom line is that a shit ton of people are going to be fired for something so tragic and inhuman that there is no way to prepare for this.

Gun Control
Again, not the point. While the statistics comparing the U.S. and the rest of Europe in terms of gun-related deaths and gun ownership are compelling and important, we have screwed ourselves so hard from the very beginning that gun control or not, people are still going to get guns.

Furthermore, the answer is not that “OMG VA Tech shouldn’t have BANNED GUNS on campus or else a professor or student could have shot him!” Wrong. While this taps into our great Second Amendment Hero Saves the Day narrative, having guns at any other point on a college campus is a BAD IDEA. Arming campus police makes sense, but we have become so warped with the idea of protecting ourselves that no one backs down. We got guns because they got guns and vice versa.

An excuse to weigh-in inappropriately about the Holocaust
As seen on Pittsburgh’s Craigslist Rants ‘n Raves. People have used one of the victim’s backgrounds (a professor who survived the Holocaust) as an excuse to bitch and moan about how the media is just “so obsessed” with the Holocaust when there are so many other awful things that happen in the world.

NEWSFLASH ASSHOLES
Never in the history of the world has there been a SYSTEMATIC genocide that has killed so many people. The key word here, is SYSTEMATIC in case my CAPS were not clear enough. You may want to remember that this happened up until the mid 40s. If I do the math correctly, this means not that long ago.

*This is more of an example of WTF is wrong with the Internet (see end of post) that especially relevant to the story at hand.

the Patriarchy
Now this, to a greater or lesser extent, I agree with. Feminist underpinnings remind me to point out the fact that in the past 24 school shootings, 23 of the perpetrators have been male. Again, I stress that this is not the point where this specific incident should be examined. You can argue (as radical feminists do) that the patriarchy is the point from which all detrimental power dynamics originate, that we rear violent men, or that society is “pussified” because of coddling mothers and fathers (a trait which is OF COURSE attributed to the “dying” world of masculinity — but this disjointed series of rants is not about this either).

So what I am getting at there?

This is about a kid that fell under the goddamn radar, a point which is so hard to investigate because you run the risk of profiling. AOL has put up a couple of plays the kid wrote for a class.

Before reading them, my boyfriend pointed out that he’s read plenty of vile, disgusting literature and has had plenty of friends ‘targeted’ for being weird. I understand and agree completely, except for one point: the writing therein is not just disjointed shit fueled by some postmodern hyper violence; it speaks to some serious psychopathic tendencies. Of course I am just pretending to be an armchair psychologist, and I may be wrong, but I cannot help but make the connection.

According to the Hare Psychopathy Checklist-Revised, there are twenty of them. Someone is rated from a scale of 0-2 (2 being very much shows the trait)

1. glib and superficial charm
2. grandiose examination of self
3. need for stimulation (drugs or otherwise)
4. pathological lying
5. cunning and manipulativeness
6. lack of remorse or guilt
7. shallow affect
8. callousness and lack of empathy
9. parasitic lifestyle
10. poor behavioral controls
11. sexual promiscuity
12. early behavior problems
13. lack of realistic long-term goals
14. impulsively
15. irresponsibility
16. failure to accept responsibility for one’s actions
17. many short-term marital relationships
18. juvenile delinquency
19. revocation of conditional release
20. criminal versatility

Non-criminals clock in around 5, criminals around 22, and psychopaths > 30.

Psychopathy according to this list occurs in 3% of the male population and 1% of the female population. It should be noted that this does not mean that all psychopaths thus defined conduct mass murders.

(source: A lecture, ironically, on the very Monday when the shootings occurred)

Reading “Mr. Brownstone” in light of this is bizarre. You could argue evidence of most of these symptoms in the play itself.

The blog attached to the play links mentions that he was referred to the school counseling system. Beyond this, what magic check list can you conjure up to determine if someone is going to hack up people and store them in their freezer or not? There are plenty of people who fit the profile of a serial killer that do not become serial killers.

What happened in Virginia was awful, and it rocked me to the core, as always people are capable of such evil. So please, please do not use this as an excuse to write dumb shit all over the Internet.

I once wrote paper for a class trying to understand why people think it’s okay to troll and write inflammatory stuff everywhere. I compared the idea of flame baiting to the Milgram Experiment whereby “if someone else says it’s okay, then it must be okay.” ZAP.

Looking back I think that analysis is incomplete. Where does the feeling of empowerment or entitlement for being a dick-head come from? Are people really this stupid?

The more I read, the more I suspect that I am wasting this Internet space on completely frivolous, self-aggrandizing material. Myself, basically. To which I consider the alternative, some kind of feminist/writing/science blog, of which there are so many with so much good to say and to which I say “oh well” because that is not what America wants right now.

They want answers. Constipation answers. I keep up on my site visits since so many come from google image searches. The highly sought after images of a dwarf hamster seen here is the culprit. Never mind that it is SEVERAL PAGES into the search.

I clearly have no meaningful impact beyond rodents which would be okay if not for my crippling existential-angst.

Theoretically I have spent twenty-two and a half years building a sense of meaning, a personal narrative involving my childhood, stumbled-upon values, and very pointy chin. Observing everyone’s stream-lined post graduation plans has been enlightening because it has helped me realize exactly what I do not want to do. With one more semester left, this has been extremely easy to evaluate.

I don’t want to take (as an budding academic/med-student/whatever, you are ultimately a resource drainer)

I don’t want to hibernate (shitty job)

I do not want to stay in Pittsburgh (because this will be my only motive for buying a Univ. of Pittsburgh window sticker. represent.)

// move, teach, have world rattled.

I am so willing to give up my comfort zone because I believe that it is starting to do me harm. I second guess myself to the point of immobility. I have formed the disparaging exhausted-unfulfilled complex which feels like driving a spike into my brain, over and over again.

I will also except an all expenses paid vacation. I will enter any and all necessary limbo contests for participation, minus roller skates.

My apartment is heavy one cat and one line cook (he does other things, too).

A couple of days ago a landslide ate my boyfriend’s house. By “ate his house” I mean the hill send projectile tree things, blew out the power, and provide enough hill-clogging for the photo in the article. I’ve been drunk on those steps!

At some point, the City of Pittsburgh declared it passable to below a giant hill of shale and mud. With all of the trees ripped out, the whole thing is likely to fall down. Thankfully no one was hurt, things will work out according to the lease, and there is someone else here for the time being I can yell at to do dishes. The cat, of course.

An extremely accurate artist’s rendering may be seen below.

Some may be quick to point out that the hill feasting occurred after dark, but I say that is exactly why the sun is sad, assholes.

wanted: portable bathroom TO CRY INTO

or, if not available: personal assistant TO CRY INTO

or: box of cookies TO CRY INTO

asldfkasjd9f08u4roijfuckyouallaopsidjfasdfjas93r

Thank God the Internet is full of pictures captioned cat pictures.

Boyfriend’s shrimp met a flush’d, watery death. This is most tragic because I, the best namer of all things animal related (see impressive science paper wherein I named a fly mutant), named shrimp Lil Uno. The significance of this name is boring, involves a vanity license plate by the same name, but it is synonymous with Doing Really Stupid Shit.

Lil Uno lived in a tank with Otto, the Betta (not this one), four tetras (dot com, dot net, dot gov, and dot edu, my idea) and Speed Racer (snail, not my idea). He was happy like this:

Then, tragedy:

But wait! Not quite! Instead:

When not watching Boyfriend flush fish I have these ladies running around my room, climbing into my bookshelves, chewing, peeing on each other, and eating noodles.

Strategy for living: frozen meals

Here are two poems I just wrote. I don’t like them yet. I am putting them here so I remember to go back and re-read them. The manuscript is pushing fifty poems, and after a draft-round in class, I realize that it’s actually quite good. The mission now is to reconcile competing voices, that is the confident, nearly obsessive nature of study and how the more you know the less you know. I mean, that’s how it works.

anthropography          1

theoretically, I
have put myself
in the kitchen
with a knife and
a potato.

I did not anticipate
the two pounds
of pressure needed
to cut it -

it sprouts.

anthropography          2

evolutionarily, my father is a gadfly

because I have not yet left the city where I was born, he pulls from his Judaica shelves. I am instructed to think without becoming irritated, so

the extraordinary old sage and curious youth go at it, S & Y, and the sage (in many words) says science is its own religion

if you pretend that men come from pond slime you have already discredited the slime and the man because their linkage is mathematically impossible

S. you trust too much

Y. it is impossible to mathematically reconcile the exchanges between particles and planets

S. you discredit yourself

Y. there so many moments where I have wanted more books.

Now I have cause to obsessively write about houses. They have been demystified into 16 penny galvanized nails and the stubbornness of hammering cross-wood.

Central VA may the least depressing place I’ve ever visited for this reason: community work actually works. As a caveat, we were probably just shown the impressive stuff. However:

1. This particular chapter of Habitat has built 260 homes since 1988
2. For several years they had the highest per-capital record of builds
3. Sometimes they crank out two or three homes in an entire weekend
4. They once finished a house in sixteen hours
5. Entire housing communities have been built including a rec/tutoring/vocational center
6. Successful integration of both white and minority communities
7. The homes, which are sturdy as hell, are provided to the families with a no-interest mortgage which enables them to build equity.
8. Who can argue with a family?
9. Retired manufacturing men are the best teachers.

We met the to-be owners, a single black mother and her two year old son. She was on site a couple of the days and had a definite energy about her. I think the whole pile of wood did, because that’s what houses do. On the forth day a group of high school kids came to the site for a school project: determine from a handful of organizations which deserves a grant. The choice should depend on how children are helped. Habitat had been in the running for years, but never chosen, and I’d like to think we (Pitt and UPenn) really convinced them. Yes, you house one or two children in the family, but the monthly payments to Habitat (not a bank!) cover expenses for the building of MORE homes.

I am impressed. The tendency of these kinds of organizations to be non-secular is a bit of a bummer. We had group prayer on the worksite, and as someone who does nothing of the sort, I was more weirded out than offended. Maybe it’s the South, but you really do have to pull people tooth and nail to volunteer. Especially college students, especially MALE college students. Our trip was all female.

Admittedly, I have very little weekly free-time for stuff, but I like these kinds of trips is that the result is immediate. Altriusm is an entirely self-serving emotion, but that’s why it’s awesome.

I’ll probably write about the south later, why part of me wants to move there, why the food scares me, why I am so unrelentingly cranky, why the computer lab always smells like canned ass.

I’m tired and lazy, but here is some photographic evidence.

We started with this (a foundation)

and ended up with this after five days of building

I am heading South to dig holes and sleep on the floor. Back in a week with documentation.

I about a week I will be leaving for Lyncburg, VA for a week of habitat for humanity work. I’m ignoring the fact that I have to do this, not because I don’t want to, but because it is not real unless I have purchased K-mart underpants for the occasion. I am also very busy.

Not too busy, however, to remember all of the awful movies I have seen over the years with my father. I think there was some point during the custody battle where I was not yet permitted to stay at my father’s. This meant that every Friday was movie night. I’m fairly certain we saw the following:

And this classic, which I have seen no less than ELEVEN TIMES on VHS:

I remember seeing the crayon box Costner is stowing away and thinking HOLY SHIT CRAYONS.

This also makes me realize that I need to see Kindergarten Cop immediately and that sometimes I feel bad for Danny Glover.

STOP WHINING. STOP IT NOW.

Accomplishment! A first draft of manuscript exists in some form, a little over 40 pages, and very much still being written into. Any takers?