Putting On My Business Hat (Leaving My Business Pants Behind)

This week, I started my part-time, un-paid internship with Open Court Books, working two days a week as a "Marketing and Editorial Assistant." So I suppose that I'm no longer officially unemployed, but I wouldn't exactly call myself employed, either. It's more like I'm somewhere in between those two - schmemployment, perhaps. I am schmainfully schmemployed.

Not that I can really blame Open Court for not offering me a wage, either. As I've mentioned before, they actually interviewed me in October for a full-time paid assistant position that I initially applied for in August. Somewhere between then and now, however, the bottom completely fell out, and they sent me a sad little e-mail saying that they really, really would've liked to have to take me on, but, y'know, they're broke.

So I figured, what the hell. Right now, I'm not getting paid to loaf around my apartment in my underwear and play online solitaire. I might as well not get paid to do some filing and proofreading. So I wrote them back, and, after a minimum of haranguing, we agreed to start me off part-time, Tuesdays and Thursdays, and then, depending upon my job options and their financial situation, to go from there.

Tuesday was my first day. And I think that I can honestly say that, if I was getting paid, this would be an awesome job. Sure, the morning was spent sifting through a huge stack of papers in need of filing, but that wasn't so bad. And, in the afternoon, I got to start the proofreading of a book about religion and philosophy in pop culture. My bosses gave me a red pen and everything, and, by the time that I got to the chapter on Kant and Woody Allen, I had to resist the deep temptation to scribble all over the pages in bright red ink: "Grammatically correct, but conceptually WRONG WRONG WRONG!!!!"

I'm pretty sure that would get me fired, even from an internship.

WWNPHD?

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

Philosophy, Really, Is Just A Kind of Theory

It is 5 in the morning, and everyone is asleep but me. I am back in Hyde Park - I love Hyde Park - but I don't miss it. And my friend has the complete works of Wittgenstein in German on his shelf, and, because everyone else is asleep, I am left with only you to torture. So here we go.

§356 Man ist geneigt zu sagen >>Es regnet, oder es regnet nicht - wie ich das weiß, wie mich die Kunde davon erreicht hat, ist eine andere Sache.<<>> eine Kunde davon, daß es regnet?>> (Oder habe ich auch von dieser Kunde nur Kunde erhalten?) Und was kennzeichnet denn diese >Kunde<>>Mein Auge gibt mir Kunde davon, daß dort ein Sessel stehe<<

OK... I suck at translation. But here we go...

§356: One is tempted to say, "It rains, or it doesn't rain - this much I know, that my experience has amounted to a complete proposition. " But our experience makes us ask: What do I mean by, "my experience tells me that it rains?" (Or have I also from this experience had another experience?) And what then does the knowledge of this "experience" lead to this other kind of knowledge? Do we allow ourselves to ask questions of this type? It is not unlike the familiar metaphor of, "My eye gives me the experience of seeing."

I don't know if that's right at all. I'll let you know tomorrow, when I can find an English translation of that damn book.

Philosophy, Really, Is A Kind of Therapy

I'm sorry everyone, but it is late, and I have discovered that R.A. and I can more than handle a fifth on our own. And you are all asleep right now. So I have to do this.

§354: The fluctuation in grammar between criteria and symptoms makes it look as if there were nothing at all but symptoms. We say, for example: "Experience teaches that there is rain when the barometer falls, but it also teaches that there is rain when we have certain sensations of wet and cold, or such-and such visual impressions." In defence of this one says that these sense-impressions can deceive us. But here one fails to reflect that the fact that the false appearance is precisely one of rain is founded on a definition.

OK - the best that I can, at this moment provide, is that it is not the sense-impressions that deceive us but instead it is our not understanding how the word "experience" is used. It's a kind of a trick, a sleight of hand, that makes us think that the experience of watching the barometer drop is in someway comparable to watching wet, cold, droplets fall from the sky, insofar as both are (somehow) evidence of the fact that it is raining.

OK - the bottle of bourbon is starting to empty, and I think that I understand the difficulty in caring bout the difference between drops of water and barometers and vampires and vampire slayers. The existence of the latter proves the existence of the former. But, I continue to contend, the one cannot exist without the other.

The question is: In what sense does the barometer count as evidence for the fact that it rained last night, and in what sense does the fact that water fell from the sky count as evidence that it rained last night?

One night I was laying down. I heard mama and papa talking. I heard papa tell mama, "Let that boy boogie-woogie." And I felt so good. And I went on boogie-woogie just the same.

This Had Me Laughing For Hours

From Minnesota Public Radio:

Ballot #5: Lizard People

This Beltrami County voter cast their ballot for Al Franken, but also put "Lizard People" as a write-in candidate, not only in the U.S. Senate race, but for several others. The county auditor/treasurer ruled that the vote should not be counted because it's considered an overvote. Representatives for Franken challenged that decision. (MPR Photo/Tom Robertson)

Personally, I don't see what the big deal is. Obviously, the voter intended to vote for Franken for Senator, but for the Lizard People for President.

Thursday: What I Have Been Reading, Vampire Edition!

First off, reviews of the new movie "Twilight." The reviews are all pretty "so-so," mostly involving praise for the cast and the director, Catherine Hardwicke. Some of what I consider to be highlights are as follows:

The New York Times gets the tone of the critic perfectly when it opens its review with:

It’s love at first look instead of first bite in “Twilight,” a deeply sincere, outright goofy vampire romance for the hot-not-to-trot abstinence set. Based on the foundational book in Stephenie Meyer’s best-selling multivolume series, “The Twilight Saga” (four doorstops and counting), this carefully faithful adaptation traces the sighs and whispers, the shy glances and furious glares of two unlikely teenage lovers who fall into each other’s pale, pale arms amid swirling hormones, raging instincts, high school dramas and oh-so-confusing feelings, like, OMG he’s SO HOT!! Does he like ME?? Will he KILL me??? I don’t CARE!!! :)

LOL. But the Times also touches it with a needle when it concludes:

If Ms. Meyer has made the vampire story safe for her readers (and their parents) — the sole real menace comes from a half-baked subplot involving some swaggering vampires who like their steak saignant and human — it’s only because she suggests that there actually is something worse than death, especially for teenagers: sex. Faced with the partially clad Bella (who would bite if she could), Edward recoils from her like a distraught Victorian. Like Ms. Hardwicke, the poor boy has been defanged and almost entirely drained. He’s so lifeless, he might as well be dead — oops, he already is.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the aisle sits Time Magazine's Richard Corliss, who judges that, "So Twilight isn't a masterpiece — no matter. It rekindles the warmth of great Hollywood romances, where foreplay was the climax and a kiss was never just a kiss." Can you see my eyes rolling?

However, Mr. Corliss does manage to win the award for "Most Outrageous Statements Likely to Anger My Girlfriend" award, all of which I will reiterate here, because it will be funny:

a) "The Cullens are a fastidious family of vampires; in their tennis whites, with their regal airs, they resemble the aristocratic Flyte brood in Brideshead Revisited."

b) "Defiantly old-fashioned, the film wants viewers to believe not so much in vampires as in the existence of an anachronistic movie notion: a love that is convulsive and ennobling. Bella could be any Hollywood heroine in love with a good boy whom society callously misunderstands. She's Natalie Wood to Edward's James Dean (in Rebel Without a Cause) or Richard Beymer (in West Side Story). Cathy, meet Heathcliff. Juliet, Romeo."

and, of course:

c) "Hardwicke is faithful to the book's chaste eroticism. The couple must put off having sex because, well, it could kill Bella. (AIDS metaphors are unavoidable here.) Yet waiting has its own delicious tension."

LOL and weep.

However, there is at least one voice of sanity amidst this howling storm of nonsense, and it belongs, believe it or not, to Roger Ebert:

Come on now, what is "Twilight" really about? It's about a teenage boy trying to practice abstinence, and how, in the heat of the moment, it's really, really hard. And about a girl who wants to go all the way with him, and doesn't care what might happen. He's so beautiful she would do anything for him. She is the embodiment of the sentiment, "I'd die for you." She is, like many adolescents, a thanatophile.

Ebert gets bonus points for the use of "thanatophile," which, I believe, is not a neologism, but he is using it in an unusual sense. I think it is supposed to be synonymous with necrophile, but it obviously isn't. Ebert's use is way, way more awesome

It's all about Thanatos, darling. Thanatos.

Post-Script! Sub-Question! In what way or ways does Christianity itself, in particular the Church of Latter-Day Saints, of which Ms. Meyer is a member, embody the principle of Thanatos, and how is this reflected through the myth of the "good" vampire?

November 4th, 2008: Part Three

I think that I took my first breath of that evening after CNN called Ohio for Obama. It was pretty well known among the crowd at Grant Park that - as long as that projection remained valid - Obama was going to be elected. With one swift move, the drama that had surrounded the outcomes in Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, and Indiana had dissipated. They were now all completely and totally irrelevant. Maybe this ought to tell us something about the nature of the Electoral College. Either way, having lost both Pennsylvania and Ohio, McCain's path to the White House had now been blocked.

By this time, also, R.A. and I were starting to get quite cold. Our butts were wet from the grass, and our legs were starting to get cramped. Or at least mine were. Anyways, the point is that we decided that now was as good of a time as any to go for a walk. The crowd that we had been a part of had begun to disperse a bit, and so we wandered towards the south side of Grant Park, closer to where the ticket-holders had been roped off from the rest of non-ticket-holding proles.

As we neared the area where Obama would be giving what was becoming more and more likely his victory speech, the atmosphere became more and more festival-like. There were wall-sized portraits of the candidate along the walk-ways, vendors hocking Obama and "I Was There" t-shirts (Viva la Capitalisme!), and local youth hanging from the trees trying to get a fleeting glimpse of the still-distant stage. Eventually, we hit that point in the crowd/ potential gigantic mosh-pit where we could no longer push our way forward, and had to settle with standing on our tip-toes and peering over the shoulders of the people in front of us at the news-cameras and enormous video screens.

I remember that, at about this point, my cell phone rang. I picked up, but, at that same moment, CNN called Virginia for Obama. It was impossible to talk or to hear anything over that noise. As I was shouting in vain over the phone, the decibel level rose by several degrees. The polls on the West Coast had just closed: Obama was officially the winner.

I feel like I have spent my fair share of time in large crowds. I've been to protests, concerts, sports events. I even spent hours in a crowd of several tens of thousands of people in Rome waiting for the Pope to come out and bless us all so we could go home. (The last Pope, not the German one now; he gives me the willies.) But this experience was completely different. Hundreds of thousands of people- packed into a relatively small space - all erupting at once with joy and jubilation. People were crying and hugging and high-fiving and dancing. Some of the dancing was pretty hilarious. But it was a strange atmosphere, very calm and a little aphrodisiacal, made even more so, I think, by Obama's cool-headed and somber speech.

It felt a lot like a rock concert or festival, at least in terms of the magnitude of energy. But even those events have a kind of pent-up (youthful) agression to them, however upbeat and optimistic they might try to be. At Grant Park, there was a good deal of anxiety and trepidation, at least at first, along with a whole lot of silent, black helicopters, spy planes, mounted cops, and hidden snipers. But at the end, after Obama said good-night, loitered on the stage for a bit with his family and the Bidens, and then disappeared, there was just a feeling of relief and tired euphoria. Smileyness, maybe.

And then there was this moment of, "What next?" Everybody just kind of turned and walked home. It wasn't a "march," per se, but there was just such large amount of mass that, as we left the park, we occupied all of Michigan Avenue and State Street, halting traffic throughout most of downtown Chicago for a good long time - it felt like hours, but probably wasn't. There was some sporadic cheering and chanting and quite a bit of honking of horns and high-fiving car passengers. R.A. took some pictures, and then we went to a weird little bar/ diner on State Street for some drinks, and to wait for the crowds to thin out enough so that we could get on the Red Line and go home. Inside, there was that same feeling of exhausted glee.

When we got back to Roscoe Village, I immediately checked the results online, and was pleased to see that Obama had won Indiana.