Frogs and Ravens

Real Life Calls Shotgun

The apartment is as clean as it is going to get, and it's time to head up to the airport to get D.!

Translation: blogging will be light this weekend while offline life takes the stage. Have fun out there until I get back!

Raining Ranas

Dorothea posts that she's received an email from a real-life Rana. Cool!

As she suspected, however, my "Rana-ness" is indeed a pseudonym, and it does mean frog (in Spanish as well as Latin). I began using it back when TableTalk at Salon was free (alas, no more...) and it has since spread into a variety of venues. I like it because it's short, I like frogs (among many other small quirky creatures), and it has certain affinities with my real-life name. (I thought about Raven at one time, but it doesn't work as well, somehow. Don't know why.)

As for email... I hate spam and I move a lot, so it's hard to maintain a public email address that I don't mind getting mined by spam spiders. You can send things to me at my "dump" email -- c h e r a l @ l y c o s . com -- but only if you're willing to wait (on the order of weeks) and don't mind the possibility of Lycos purging it before I get there. Posting a comment to me here is much faster and more reliable. :)

(And yes, "c h e r a l" is a pseud, too. Paranoid little thing, aren't I?)

Eee-Ya-Ha-Ha!

Grades are IN. Finals are GONE. Yeeeesss!

And, more to the point, D comes to visit tomorrow!



Now, this does raise the question. Why am I sitting here in my office on campus instead of at home, cleaning up?!

To give you all a full sense of the issue, remember that (1) I have been grading, (2) I am a packrat, (3) I am a strewer, (4) I have been working on a sewing project, so scraps, threads, tools, etc. are currently everywhere, (5) I'm short on quarters, so no laundry... AAAAGH!

More Bytes Wasted on the Matrix Reloaded

No, I haven't seen it. I don't know if I will; I mean, it would take a month's worth of tax cuts to buy a ticket! One thing that I am pleased to see, however, is that the sequel is getting slammed for being shallow, gratuitously flamboyant with the special effects, etc. (I'm not opposed to these things in a movie per se, mind you. Sometimes you just want the mindless eye candy.)

The reason why this pleases me is that the heart of the criticism lies in the reviewers' sense of betrayal that the film is not as "deep" as the first one. This amuses me greatly. Deep? Oh, please. Original? Hah. It's not like science-fiction novelists haven't been writing about virtual worlds, robot take overs, etc. for decades, even before the web was invented, is it? Drop in a few literary allusions, it seems, and you have produced something "deep" and maybe even "scholarly."

But, to get to the point, it does suggest that viewers, even of sci-fi (so commonly believed to be the zone of cool effects and stupid plots -- remember "Zardoz," anyone?) want something more taxing than eye candy, and this is promising.

Postscript: For those of you who want to see a true "scholar's movie," I recommend The Mummy. Yeah, it's cheesy and features silly special effects and has an ancient, revived mummy wandering around sucking people dry. But it also features a scene in which two of the characters, as the heroes are trying to fight off an army of the undead, argue about how to pronounce hiroglyphic writing on an ancient scroll. Scholars, indeed!

Post-postscript: If you want a good laugh, go to Lilek's review of the Matrix Reloaded. Very funny!

Stimulating the Economy -- Whose?

I learned this morning that"almost immediately" the tax withholdings on my paychecks will be reduced. By how much?

Well, for someone earning $480/week (the lowest they give -- what is up with that? I wish I made that much. And have you ever noticed that the usual "bottom" yearly income is about $40,000? Well, I make less than half that, currently...) the savings per week is...

Wait for it...

$1.31.

Well. Time for that big shopping spree, ain't it?

On a Lighter Note...

All is not doom and gloom. I am enjoying the book I am reviewing, I successfully realigned a bent bicycle tire today, and the corset is almost done!

The Sorrows of Young Rana?

It worries me sometimes to look over my past postings. I had not intended, when I began, to produce such an unhappy, bitter, angry blog. I had vague ideas about this blog being an outlet for the odd observations I make on a day-to-day basis, and to serve as an arena for hashing over things that I've already rendered into little bits with my friends but can't quite let go. I suppose that it is successfully serving the function as a space to vent, but I hadn't fully realized what a nasty collection of negative emotions I' ve been bottling up until now. (No wonder my eye is acting up!)

I suspect, therefore, that it will be a long time before this becomes much of anything besides an ego-blog. I keep thinking that I can perhaps wrest some lessons out of my experiences and that others may profit thereby, but it's still too raw. Each time I try, I can't sustain the role of analyst; it's like trying to look objectively at oneself in a mirror.

Still, I think it is good for me to continue, even if only for my own selfish benefit. It may be that there are some of you out there reading this who are comforted by knowing that you are not alone, or some may find reading my travails to be interesting in a train wreck sort of way. Of course, you may just find this all terribly boring (that's okay) or nauseatingly self-pitying. (I hope not this too much; I'd hate to for this to be the blog equivalent of The Sorrows of Werther. Ick.)

In any case, I think just having a record of this experience will be a good thing (and there's the historian speaking!). It may be (I hope) that I can look back at this and laugh, or at least with a sense of pity tempered with the knowledge that I-now was/is missing the big picture that was/will be revealed later.

Summah-tiime...

It is now officially summer. The grading is over, I ate cotton candy yesterday, and I woke up with my first mosquito bite. Time to shift gears...

I'm working on a book review, I have two chapters to revise, and I need to get the strewn papers and finals out of my apartment and into my office because D will be making a visit this weekend. (Yay!)

So far the book is pretty good; it's a well-written biography with a handsome young 1920s lawyer on the cover. He's wearing a hat and suit and has that clear-eyed look you don't see much these days, but which seemed so common in that era. It's hard to describe -- it's a sort of calm competence that says "I can change the world, if I only put my mind to it."

I need to get me some of that.

The Paths Go Up

Life flares up, like a forest fire,
Flames of aggravation licking the treetops,
All vision obscured by a flame of red.

Then the cool dank mist descends,
Streaming around the tall redwoods,
Milky, bitter tasting, like tears and rot.

Is that a thin ray of light I see?
It weaves its way through the shadowed heights
Blessing the ground like an absence of pain.

The world spins around on its axis
Sometimes in light, sometimes in shadow
Some days we are ravens, other days, frogs.

* * *







I may take tomorrow off from blogging, if I can manage to tear myself away. It's hard on the eye to stare at a screen this much, and I do have other things that need doing. It's also not like I haven't been writing enough online, both here and on various comment lists.

Sucky Timing

I should note, as an addendum to the preceding entry, that I am not intrinsically opposed to learning a new set of professional skills, whether through experience or by going back to school. It is just that the timing is wretched for that sort of thing.

First, most obviously, I will need a job in a few months. Little time for learning a new career, there! So it is pretty obvious that on that front, at least, most of this talk of skill sets is moot. My probable employers in the short term will be more interested in knowing if I can type and file alphabetically and have used a computer than if I can do original research, discuss and assess complex environmental theory, and can distill this into a form that undergraduates can digest.

In the long run, re-credentialing may well prove necessary. But here's the second rub -- I would like to have "adult" things like a family and a home I don't have to move out of in one or two years. I would like to live in the same city as my boyfriend. But currently I am too "unstable" to even manage having a cat or even a low maintenance pet like a fish. The thought of deferring having a "real" life for more years while I gain enough experience and credentials to be employed in a stable and rewarding field is daunting, to say the least.

I've always been a late bloomer, but I've never felt the pain of it quite so much as now. One should go through all of this in your twenties when you're young enough that people expect you to be inexperienced and forgive you for it, so that when you have learned enough for stable employment, it is not too late for things like houses, spouses and families and pets. I fear that taking more time to establish myself in a second career will come at the expense of time needed to develop a stable personal life, but if I focus on my personal life instead, how will I be able to afford the time and poverty that will come with trying to recreate myself from scratch?

I put life off in order to get through graduate school, and now, it seems, I'm screwed no matter what I do.

Sigh.