On Being Awesome

I am fighting a migraine for the second day straight and homework is unthinkable.  A short blog entry, however, is not.

"Why," I thought as I ran like a freak from the mailbox to my house after making the nasty discovery that Wind Makes the Outside Cold, "did I manage to get myself a regular subscription to Forbes?"

I've decided to attribute it to a need to be Awesome.  That is a much better explanation than me compulsively clicking my way through freebie sites.  Really, it is.  See, I watch a lot of How I Met Your Mother, especially when I'm feeling down.  And I love Barney.  Not just because Neil Patrick Harris is an Albuquerque boy who made it big, but because it's good for someone as neurotic as I am to occasionally look at that sort of bravado and go "I could do that."

A while back I already promised myself, based on that bravado, that any time I was tempted to make one of those vague angsty Facebook posts, I should just be awesome instead.  It's the self-aggrandizing version of mind over matter. Like right now, it's not a migraine, it's an electrical storm caused by the excess awesome in my brain.  See?

So I must have gotten Forbes so that I can pretend that I'm somewhere in the midst of that lavish lifestyle, sitting in an office wearing a suit and shopping for watches that cost... Oh holy crap, guys, I just looked at what those watches cost.  That is many digits.  I could not imagine having a watch like that.  I'd have to count how many educations for underprivileged children a watch like that could buy.  I'm not that evil.

I think I'll just start bringing the magazines to my office, slowly building a collection of Forbes just to confuse everyone.

A Familial Spotlight

See my grandparents?  They're cool.

My grandparents rock.  I mean it.  My grandparents could totally beat up other people's grandparents, but they wouldn't because they're classy like that.  They are action-adventure grandparents.  They pretty much kick all the ass.

Last weekend, I went to their pad.  One of the nice things about being here is that it's only about two and a half hours away from their mountain abode.  Grandma invited me up so that I could do school work in a new location and be fed good food, and other nice things.  Their house has a picturesque view of the mountains, and stepping inside, you might be fooled into thinking they were average grandparents, what with Grandma's crafts, and Grandpa's trains downstairs, and the homey bric-a-brac on the shelves.  You would of course, be dead wrong.  I was serious when I said they were action-adventure grandparents.

Grandma has been playing Tetris pretty much since it was invented.  That, in and of itself, is not an amazing detail.  However, she also bought a working Super Nintendo at a yard sale some years back, and consequently bought every Tetris-styled game for it she could.  Most people, upon sitting down to play games with their grandmother, might expect to win pretty hard.  After suffering a number of crushing defeats at her hands, I had to admit that Grandma was the superior player.  Sure, it's not Halo.  But how many people have ever been schooled at any video game at all by their grandmother?

It doesn't end there.  They are world travelers, and have only stepped up their game.  Oh sure, everyone goes to Europe.  There's recognizable toilets and nobody has to buy leech-proof socks to go there.  So they did that, ages back.  Russia.  China.  Turkey.  Like people on a scavenger hunt for continents, they started branching out.  Grandma, in search of the best shopping in the world and pretty things, Grandpa in search of birds.  They go to Costa Rica on a regular basis, because a little town of rain forest paradise just happens to be their sister city.  Apparently finding habitable regions too tame, they took a cruise to Antarctica to see the penguins.  They went to India with my mom and stepdad, and they don't even like Indian food, that's how hardcore they are.  They've showed me their pictures of the Sydney opera house, and movie-picturesque New Zealand.  Fairly recently, Grandpa took a trip to Borneo, which is where the leech socks came in.  They have traveled in conditions that make me cringe, and I am pretty travel-hardy.

The upshot of all this is that I admire these two immensely, and am in constant awe of their atypical grandparent behavior.  (Not to mention that Grandpa still remembers songs from when he performed in H.M.S. Pinafore in high school.  I remember, like, one line from performing in high school.)

To the rest of my family -- You guys also rock, but these two deserved a shout-out for hosting me over the weekend.

A Post to Show I'm Alive

 I have had sort of a stupid couple of weeks for a variety of reasons, and since I have no desire to blog about things that just make me sad, I've been quiet.  But I realize that people are probably wondering if I have been eaten by roving packs of philosophy majors or something, so here I am, writing a few words to prove that I am still somewhere in existence.

Folks, I admit it.  I have an addiction.  I really, really can't help myself.  Free samples in the mail.  As many as I can get.  Stuff I don't even know if I want.  If I can get it sent to me simply by virtue of an address and email, I'm there.  And I get pathetically excited about it too.  I open the mailbox and thrill to see some tiny colorful package that means someone has heard my plea for free crap.  I have a few standards, though.  I did not sign up for a year of Maxim magazine for free (though I think I might have blithely clicked through if it wasn't a two-step sign up process.  What?  Beside the point, people, I didn't and that's what counts) and I don't click on the free diaper sample links.  So I'm not totally crazy.

So despite my own dramas, I am slowly amassing a collection of free samples that I think I'll put in my office for times when I need two post-it file labels or a single dose of vitamins.

So there will be a real entry of some sort soon.  But that's what I've got for now.

PS-- I don't want to make a habit out of saying bad things about my students online as a matter of public record, but let me just say that if you have a young person in your life, please, please, please make sure they understand a few basic concepts like using commas to make a list and what the word "or" means.

In Which I Imagine I Attend a Wizarding School

First, a blog PSA: I've learned that some of you who are reading my exploits have been unfairly silenced by the default blog setting that privileges those with specific online identities.  In seeking a more liberating environment for us all, I've turned on Name/URL and anonymous commenting.  Thanks for reading, now you can say stuff too!

The wizarding school idea keeps floating around in my head.  Partially, because blog commenter Jona poked fun at me for distinguishing the grad students here as "first years" and "second years" just like in a certain British series about wizards, and partially because so much of what we do and say in English seems to require a certain amount of magical thinking.

Consider words.  We can break them down and discuss phonemes and morphemes and usages, we can consult the OED for history, and we can pretend that it makes sense that through simple arrangement, words take on vastly different meanings.  But it isn't a science.  People write dissertations on why a particular writer's choice of arranging and choosing words makes their work last for centuries, and yet there's no formula to it, otherwise we would utilize the formula and all of us would be brilliant writers.  But you ask any editor, and that arranging of words is more than just art, too, because if one does not follow certain established forms, you have a hot literary mess at the end.

So I like to pretend that it's magic.  Then, if I just choose the right combination of words, something wonderful will happen, suddenly and with seeming spontaneity, because I have cast my spell effectively.

In fact, I think that the link may be one that's ripe for fiction, because we've all seen stories about wizarding schools, but I'm not sure we've seen a story about the equivalent of wizarding grad students teaching wizardy freshmen.  And if it's anything like our experience with freshmen so far, the resulting rains of frogs and accidental transmutation of textbooks by people who couldn't bother to show up for all their lessons would make simply grading papers seem tame.

Yes, I have an overactive imagination.  I have to do something to amuse myself during office hours.

In other news, it's fall here.  It crept up on me, because I'm used to our section of about a week and a half of real autumn that separates summer and winter, and the season happens much more gently here.  But now there's grey sky, changing leaves, and chill wind, so I think it's safe to say we're well into the season.  Which is nice, because I love fall.

I'm sorry there are no adventure tales right now.  I really need to have some more adventures.  I'm open to suggestions!