Digital Alterity

So, I’ve spent most of the afternoon drinking Diet Coke. This is hardly unusual for me, and it’s really not the crux of my post but rather the subtle event that leads toward rising narrative action and an eventual literary climax. In any event, because biology works, all this beverage necessitated a trip to the restroom. Again, hardly newsworthy stuff here.

Upon arriving in the second floor bathroom, I discovered a scene of pure Lovecraftian horror. Someone, in an apparent fear of pestilence, had unleashed some sort of unholy bathroom ritual involving yards of toilet paper draped across the toilet set in a roughly circular fashion and a conspicuously unflushed toilet. I’m pretty sure they were trying to summon dark elder gods or some such. The horror took ten years off my life.

I’ve never understood people who live in this terrible, debilitating fear of catching diseases. This admission is not a request for attempted explanations for such behavior because, frankly, I’ve already thrown all those who worry about such things squarely into the “summarily worthless” bin. Nonetheless, I can’t help but ponder the strange dementia that leads to such behavior. I mean, if you’re that concerned about the horrible germs on the toilet seat, maybe using a public toilet just isn’t for you. If you’re too terrified to actually sit down on a toilet sit and then pull the lever to flush when you’re finished, either go home to poo or go buy some adult diapers.

The truly sad thing is that someone is going to have to clean up the results of this mental malfunction.

me: is it sexist that i’m tempted to re-roll my orc shaman as a male?
when there’s no difference whatsoever between the sexes?
Allyson: are you sure you don’t want to rick-roll her?
that might be sexist.
no boobies
me: i can’t rickroll her because there’s a very real chance that i will “run around and desert [her]” for another toon.
Allyson: Hah

While sitting in my office just now, I heard Allyson start whistling in the shower. Now this isn’t really an uncommon occurrence. Allyson whistles or otherwise makes noise when things get too quiet. What is somewhat funny is the song she started whistling.

She started whistling “Take ‘Em All”, an oi song by Cock Sparrer.

Take ‘em all…Take ‘em all…
Put ‘em up against the wall and shoot ‘em.
Short and tall, watch ‘em fall.
C’mon, boys, take ‘em all.

How did I end up in a life this perfect?

Several years ago, Allyson and I lived in a nice but inexpensive apartment very close to campus. This sort of environment happens to be the native habitat for the university graduate student, a population skewed heavily toward international students. Where many apartment complexes had random undergraduate soirees and bass machines, we had lots of nice people with rich brown and yellow skin hues, people who spoke kindly with unusual accents. We became good friends with some of our neighbors, never failing to offer up a hearty hello as we passed by each other.

I will say at the outset that I am profoundly impressed with the English-speaking ability of most international students. After three years of Spanish, a year of university French, and an aborted crash course in Japanese, I have mostly obtained the ability to spout rather convincing language-like gibberish. In contrast, the international students I’ve met here in Gainesville are often better able to converse than their native American peers. It’s quite easy to forget that you’re interacting with someone for whom English is only a recently acquired linguistic skill. Only unfamiliar accents and peculiar word choices remind you as you otherwise effortlessly chat about rental costs, banquets with free food, and American cigarettes.

One such odd word choice remains humorously seared into my memory. Allyson and I were returning late at night from our second shift jobs, and our favorite neighbor, an engineering student from India, happened to be peacefully smoking a full-flavor Camel cigarette on his front porch. After the exchange of customary pleasantries, our friend recited the most uncomfortably funny sentence in the history of interpersonal interaction.

“I saw your pussy in the window the other day.”

After a second or so of repressed laughter paired deliciously with a slight tinge of paranoia, it became apparent that he was referring not to my wife’s nether regions but rather to our feline companion Tux’s tendency to sit and wait for us in the kitchen window. We talked a bit about how he jumped up there when he knew we were supposed to be heading home and how he liked gazing at the outside world.

But we were always careful about keeping the blinds closed after that. You know, just in case.

You know that kid in your class that raised his hand to answer every question, the kid who waved his head to answer the question as though the fate of the universe itself rested on his success in wresting away the teacher’s attention? Yeah, that was me. At least that was me until I realized that I could just worke ahead in my workbook and piss off the teacher by finishing the year in the first month of any given subject. I was a bright kid who knew I was intelligent, and I had a real obsession with knowing The Truth about everything. I also never did anything without taking things about five steps beyond normal.

As you can imagine, the Santa Claus myth quickly became a point of obsession. I gathered over time that my parents were filling the role of the jolly old elf, but I hedged my bets in case they would suddenly stop buying me as many Christmas presents. However, I also needed desperately to prove that I was intelligent enough to see through their ruse. What I needed was to trick my parents into revealing the lie themselves, allowing me to prove my ability to find the truth amidst their lies while still maintaining enough righteous indignance to justify an annual offering of presents. My initial plan was to rig up a walkie-talkie under the living room table while quietly sitting in my room listening in to my parents. The implementation of this grand investigation, however, was found to be lacking since my mom discovered my covert operation when I was using masking tape to secure the walkie-talkie under the table.

Recriminations about how children who did these kind of things didn’t get presents abounded.

I decided that my ruse was up, but I still needed to play my righteous fury card to ensure a steady stream of presents. Consequently, I sat down and wrote (with pen and paper) a treatise on the folly of the Santa Claus lie and how it undermined all attempts by parents to stress the importance of telling the truth. I was ready. I dug my heels in, and I was ready for an argument.

When I presented my thesis to my mother, she did the worst thing possible. She laughed at me. Not being taken seriously was the single worst thing an adult could do to me. I took great pains to speak like an adult and think like an adult, and I therefore fully expected people to treat me like an adult at all times. I got so mad and ashamed that I just started crying, which immediately switched Mom over to consoling me rather than laughing at me.

Once I had calmed down, Mom asked me why I couldn’t have just told them that I knew. This question confounded me.

This story tells you several very important things about me.

One of my tasks at my secretarial position is dealing with the Department of Homeland Security for the various faculty and graduate assistants who come here to the Fruited Plain to further their research. All of the processes by which people are granted permission to live and work in the US can only be described as “byzantine” (or perhaps simply “effing ridiculous” if you weren’t the sort of child that played with a thesaurus). Here at UF, we have an entire office devoted to sorting out residency status, visas, and other such forms involving numbers, letters, and judicious use of the word “homeland”.

I have been trying since March to renew a professor’s visa status and also try to earn permanent residency for the same professor. Keep in mind here that the fellow in question is a teacher and a researcher at arguably the most important research institution in our state. He has a PhD. He presents important papers in a scientific discipline at conferences. In short, he’s the sort of guy that any country would love to have around. Nonetheless, I didn’t get his visa renewal back until a week ago. Then today, we finally got back his I-797 approval notice for his permanent residency application. The letter accompanying this notice had a tangled mess of forms the professor could choose to fill out with absolutely no recommendation about which forms he should fill out. This isn’t unusual. Every step of the permanent residency process has been like this. The whole process resembles nothing so much as a giant real-life Choose Your Own Adventure novel.

Turn to page 43 if you want to fill out form I-485.
Turn to page 57 if you want to fill out form I-765.
Turn to page 13 if you want to fill out both forms.

You have been eaten by a wolf.

This whole thing is some bureaucratic version of Hell. I’m convinced of it.

Technorati Tags: residency, green card, Department of Homeland Security, visa, bureaucracy, humor

Recently, I checked out Superman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told from my local public library. I did this in part because I’m a sucker for free comics, but by far the biggest factor in my decision to read this book was some marginalia added to the cover:

Someone had inexplicably added “NOT for children” to the upper-left corner of the book. Having read through the book, I must admit that I’m still amusedly perplexed. The stories in question are almost all from the goofy Silver Age days when Superman fought giant robot dogs and such. The only modern tale is basically a morality play about why Superman’s oath to avoid killing even evil men is a good thing. There’s no sex to be had anywhere in the book. There isn’t even any sex implied anywhere in the book. The only drug use is tobacco.

Was this brief sharpie verdict the product of some kind of ultra-fundamentalist that even I with my years of Southern Baptist lifestyle can’t understand? Or was it the scrawling of a rabid Superman fanboy, desperately needing affirmation that his Superman comics were far too meaningful to be shelved in the young adults section of the library.

Technorati Tags: Superman, Comics, Humor

I am almost completely in love with really old Wonder Woman comics. They fill my ironic little feminist heart with a bizarre sort of glee. They make me smirk.

I have the good fortune to be reading through Wonder Woman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told courtesy of my local public library. The really old Wonder Woman comics by Charles Moulton are the most innocently kinky things I have ever read. By innocently kinky, I mean that you could conceivably read them without seeing some bizarre sexual kink writ large—but not by someone like me. In those early issues, everyone is getting bound up and compelled to do things. It really is like some kind of BDSM fantasy.

Take, for example, how the Amazons deal with their prisoners:

I especially love the feminist subtext played with by having the conduit of submissive bondage being a girdle. That is about as effing perfect as you can get. Especially when paired with this panel later on in the same storyline:

Remember, kids: When women get too uppity, they get bound into loving submission by a strong master! And they don’t just like it…They love it.

Technorati Tags: Feminism, Comics, Wonder Woman, DC, Comic Books, Submission, BDSM, Humor

I often sing random nonsensical songs while walking around the house. These songs usually either involve some ribald combination of my penis, a Mexican guy named Gomez, Jesus, and whores. Basically, there are only one or two different tunes to these songs, but the lyrics change on an hourly basis and never make sense. Sometimes the songs are even en español.

For the past two days, I have the phrase “We play fast, effective  ping pong,” to a chanting tune that often shows up in the songs.

I unfortunately have not been able to work this into a song yet.

Really, my desires in life aren’t hard to quantify. Is it so wrong to want…?

• A fellow comic book geek to enjoy Comic Book Wednesday with. Allyson is always my co-conspirator, and she’s starting to dig a lot of the indie comics that don’t have super heroes in them. But sometimes I just want to gush about how much I love/hate/worship/detest Bendis/Ellis/Quesada/Cho/Dini because of the clear reference to Amazing Spider-Man #331/the sheer humor of killing Hawkeye twice/the fact that his penis is clearly larger than mine/the latest line-up of a random book I don’t even read.
• A place that serves vegan donuts. There are no vegan donuts in Gainesville. I hear that Seattle has vegan donuts. Tim Horton’s has vegan pastries that I could eat while smelling vegan donuts. Gainesville? Just the broken memories of how donuts used to taste.
• A drafting table that magically increases my ability to render images with pencil and ink. I have this wonderful fantasy about a little studio nook in my apartment that is so well-lit and ergonomic that illustrations just flow right from my pencil/pen/brush right onto bristol board with an artistic beauty that makes steak-eating rawhide cowboys cry like a scene out of Brokeback Mountain.
• A reason to use the line “Cilantro tastes like Tijuana whore.” If I had to vote right now, this would be the best sentence I have ever written. It has been faithfully sitting in my writing ideas text file for years. It’s hard to work a line that brilliant into much of anything. Other than a bitchy ChangeLog post apparently.
• My own personal Starbucks with a barrista named Jarvis. Sometimes I want a cup of delicious freshly-ground-and-brewed cup of coffee with soy milk and some sweetener. Now I’ve got a coffee pot in my house that allows this, but if Allyson doesn’t want to partake of the aromatic beans of caffeinated life, then a full pot is too much. Now you reasonable people are probably thinking that I could just make the pot and not drink it all. This is a lie. If I am not contained to my usual half-liter of coffee, then I will just drink and drink until it’s all gone. And the last time I drank a whole liter of my coffee, my hand shook so badly that I could hardly draw. I am not coffee responsible. Jarvis would take care of me.
• Weekly conference calls to Joe Quesada, Editor-in-Chief at Marvel. Basically, I want to be the Ted Haggard to his President Bush. Without all the crank and gay hookers.
• Streaming, per-episode HD television. I want to watch every episode of Good Eats and some Premiership/Champions League/Championship football. I don’t want to pay the cable company for all the ridiculous channels I never want to watch. Furthermore, I don’t want to watch any of it in standard definition. I want it all in 1080p, and I want someone to give me a new ridiculously large 1080p television to view it all on. Because, you know, my TV is 1080i/720p.
• My own personal tailor. I don’t like dressing myself. Given my short stature, pants are never the right length for me unless I either cut them off or suddenly find myself in a magical world where pants spontaneously hem themselves. I want clothes designed from the ground up to fit me. Furthermore, like everyone who shops at Hot Topic, I want to be unique with clothes that make a statement about me as a person. Can clothes be geeky, verbose, and anti-social?
• Vegan colorway yarn. I love Noro Kureyon. I love it. I totally want to have a three way with Allyson and that yarn. Would you believe that I can’t find any similar colorway yarns in cotton or bamboo? Because I’m still having trouble accepting that belief.

Technorati Tags: Humor, Art, Knitting, Lists, Writing, Coffee, Vegan, Comics