I finally know what “strain” of author I was meant to be.  You know, how some are existentialists, etc etc?

I will be an infernokrusher.

A brief update on the state of things as relate to my life, because sometimes it helps me to write things out. All my classes are going swimmingly, which of course isn’t hard because we’ve only had two weeks of classes, which means in some of my classes I’ve not even had to do any real work.  An exception to this is my feminism class, which is fascinating and interesting and also incredibly hard.  It’s hard not to read, say, MacKinnon’s Sexuality as an attack on my sex (gender?), though I’ve no doubt the idea is to inform rather than inspire guilt and anger.  Needless to say that I find it almost impossible to reconcile my own experiences with MacKinnon’s assertions, especially the assertion that male sexuality is violence.  This flies in the face of everything I’ve ever experienced in a relationship.

But at the same time, it begs the question: do I disagree because I really think she’s wrong, or just because I don’t want her to be right?

I don’t know.  It’s distressing to think about it, so I try not to, and instead I while my hours away reading the Old Testament and playing Europa Universalis 3 and Warhammer: Age of Reckoning. (I wonder if I could get away with witing an essay about the objectification of the female form in the context of MMORPGS using WAR as my source?)

and indeed it has.  The truth of the matter is that despite my efforts otherwise, it’s hard for me to find enough interesting in my life to blog about, let alone blog about regularly.  The things that are important to me right now are things that I feel should be kept private, for the most part.

That doesn’t mean I don’t have stupid ideas to throw out there.

For example: why do many women (I’ve noticed this online in a lot of places, as well as heard it in casual conversation around campus) refer to their male partner simply as their Man?  I mean, it wouldn’t be appropriate for me to walk around talking about guys and their Women, right?  I certainly would never refer to my significant other as my woman, since she a) doesn’t belong to me and b) deserves at least the same amount of respect as I would give anyone else, male or female.

Which technically means if I’m ever going to refer to her as anything I’m going to call her my Dogg, as in “hello my Dogg, how you rollin’?”

You know that feeling you get when you look up the requirements of a paper, and discover, to your horror, that the paper is supposed to be a full two pages longer than you expected it to be?

Yeah, it’s not an altogether pleasant sensation.

If any of you are interested in seeing the fruits of my labor for my final project in my early modern drama class, feel free to head on over to this web page to embark on a choose-your-own-something based on the play The Duchess of Malfi, by John Webster.

I’m pretty proud of it, but I also am notably biased. Go me!

I’ve got a draft done, though I haven’t touched my other paper (seriously, I have no friggen idea what I’m going to do), and now I’m on the flip-side of the work, heading into the easy stuff.  Well, easy being a relative term.  I think I’m going to finish my essay ASAP, maybe run it by my professor one more time, and then move on to working on my report for archaeology coupled with my last essay for Early Modern Drama.

It looks like I’ll be able to take Braun’s class next semester, which is a) very yay! and b) awesome because he’s going to give me the textbook list early and I am going to go to school on those suckers, figuratively speaking, over the break.

I know what you’re thinking, it’s something along the lines of “But it’s break!  You’re not supposed to do school work!” and I know what you’re saying, but in this case, once Katherine leaves for UW two weeks before my own break is over, I’m going to go stir-crazy… especially since my mom is now without a job, so I’m probably going to be stuck in the house with her.

Sigh.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again (though neither of these things happened / will happen on this blog, necessarily), I am a very lucky guy with a totally wonderful lady friend, and at least that part of my life is going swimmingly in nearly every way.

For the spielberg thing, see this interview.

For the update, I have finished the presentation and I’m putting the finishing touches on my 10-page essay.  It’s actually not going to be the bare minimum length, which I think is pretty cool.  I’ve still got to write a draft of another paper for tomorrow, but after that I’ve got a lower-stress period that extends all the way until the end of next week.

I have finished:

• 1 presentation and 1 1-2 page paper describing the thought processes behind the project I undertook for this presentation.  The actual presentation will be given later today, and I am confident in its success.  For those of you curious about what it is I am talking about, it’s a choose your own adventure-style story built using a wiki, and based on John Webster’s play The Duchess of Malfi, which has the distinction of being probably my favorite early modern play of all time.

I still need to write:

• 1 10-12 page paper on the kingdom of Navarre, due on Wednesday, of which I have 0 – count ‘em, zero – pages done.  This is the project I will be furiously working non-stop on for the next two days.  I should be fine, I’ve got plenty of research done.
• 1 6-8 page paper on some topic related to early modern drama, due at the end of next week.
• 1 6-8 page paper on some topic related to the novel Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, probably dealing with postcolonialism in some way, shape, or form. The first draft is due Thursday, and the paper itself is due a week after that.
• a report about my virtual dig project for Syro-Palestinian Archaeology.

Yeah, this is going to be a fun time.

I have ten days to write fifteen pages.

That’s really not so bad.

I also have ten days to prepare two presentations, one of which is based on said paper, and one of which is based on a creative project.  My creative project will be a “choose your own adventure” type thing.  I’m hoping I get to make it big and complicated enough that I get a passing grade.  We shall see!

Then I have a couple other essays.  I think the page total comes out to around 31-35 pages.

Big Suck.

In other news, I had rice pasta macaroni and cheese last night!  the pasta was a little strangely textured but it didn’t taste so bad and the cheese sauce was okay, for Annie’s.

Reading my lit theory for tomorrow, I’m finding myself facing two things.  One, I am feeling rather alienated by the texts we’re reading.  The first one, in particular, labeled “Borderlands / La Frontera”, begins with a three paragraph extract in Spanish.  This has the immediate effect of distancing me from the writing, of informing me that I do not have the ability to understand this text, on a very objective level.  The actual content of the text is similar.  There is Spanish littered throughout, some of which I can puzzle out, and some of which I can’t.  Nowhere is a translation provided.  I have no doubt this is a deliberate move, it’s just one I don’t like.

Two, as a white, 3rd generation immigrant (on one side) and significantly more distant-generation immigrant on another, am I allowed to have an ethnic identity?  Am I – can I be anything but “American”?  what seperates me from a Sansei other than the country of origin for me?  Can I refer to myself as a “Canadian-American,” or perhaps a “French-Canadian-American”?

Obviously, Whites who are Irish in descent can be Irish-Americans.  But in a sense, this is because they, too, were “othered,” given a sort of metaphorical blackness.  The Irish were savages in the eyes of the english, little better than the Africans they enslaved and transported to their colonies.  when the Irish came to America, this perception stayed much the same (the iconic “no Irish or Dogs” sign, or perhaps the “no irish need apply” classified ads, springs to mind).  They were less than White, barely human.

Is the racial adjective something availible only to those marginalized, dehumanized, and transformed into the metaphorical Other that seems to be the driving preoccupation of literary theory?  Is it a symbol of this marginalization?  Or is it possible for someone on the other side to become more than just an American?

I’m not saying I want to, and I really don’t.  Being “just” American is something I have always been comfortable with.

But If I wanted to, could I?