The Patient Etherized

The Patient Etherized
Q: Et tu, Jonathan? A: Read. Read some more. Buy Red Bull.

Wednesday, April 30, 2003

The Fight to be Male

Really exhausted now, but I wanted to give some vittles to my adoring minions (or more realistically, bitchy minion, and, no, I don't mean myself). Today felt a lot like sophomore spring during my Milton class when I would pore over my papers until they were really well written. I did the same for my four-pager that is due in fifteen minutes (don't bate your breath, I've already handed it in -- and, no, I will not do that for a dollar, not for any amount of money). I'm going to nappity nap in about twenty minutes I guess. Need to do laundry like a syphillitic 14th-century prostitute needs a good leeching.

Wrote about William Blake's "A Poison Tree" for my paper. Check out the last link -- the plates from the Songs of Innocence and of Experience are really, really beautifully illustrated. I really like being incredibly anal about some English papers. Not sure why, but I better be that way about my thesis when I finish my draft.

Rather worried about who will be my second reader and would prefer it be someone I like (obviously) and not someone whose class I slacked off in -- like most of the English classes I've taken recently.

Sick of Ayla after constant playing for three days. But don't feel like Bob Dylan either. Sometimes listening to too much of one artist just makes me sick of all music for a while. Either that or I seek out someone who has a really pure and beautiful voice -- someone like Natalie Merchant when she was with 10,000 Maniacs (MTV Unplugged album is great) or even an interesting band like Coldplay.

So my commenting system is about 12% functional. It's not as fucked as it was previously, but it's also got some weird bugs in it too, like it doesn't appear for the most recent entry. Will have to fix that eventually. Blogger is damn annoying because when you change your template the web page doesn't reflect those changes for a long time.

And I bitch like a professional geek. Oh wait...

Not sure why I titled the blog with the one I did, but it's the title of this weird movie I saw in high school biology about children born with micro penises and breasts (something happened on the way to the womb) who were then "turned" into women through some gross surgery that they showed us. And the children were (not surprisingly) messed up beyond repair and exhibited male tendencies even though they had been given to adoptive parents who didn't know that their new child had once been a male. So much for performative gender theory, mothafucking Judith Butler.

Ok, enough o' that.

posted by Jon | 4:58:00 PM

Three pages of crap down, one to go. Then a lot of editing.

Some people are still very annoying. I'll leave it at that, not that I'm really afraid of insulting people, but that I've done enough of that in the past six months for a while.

More Ayla to keep me awake. Still sore as hell but getting better.

posted by Jon | 3:18:00 AM

Tuesday, April 29, 2003

My back hurts like hell. I ache like there's no tomorrow.

I have just begun my four pager due tomorrow. Oh well, it'll be a long time in the meat grinder I guess.

Time to make some jokes about people's mommas. Nah, I'll wait til I'm more lucid and less dehydrated.

posted by Jon | 10:14:00 PM

Damn, did only about two pages on my thesis last night.

My second chapter is 75 bloody pages! It will probably be 80-90 by the time it's done. In TMQ's words, "Ye Gods."

posted by Jon | 1:09:00 PM

Monday, April 28, 2003

Inadequacy, the male affliction

I am so out of shape it's not funny. And now isn't really the right time to start working out, but I think I'll do it anyway. So I played basketball today for an hour. It was pretty intense -- full court four on four. The killer part was that we played against two kids who were on the heavyweight crew team. Both were about 6'3 and in ridiculously good shape -- the kind of body I only approached freshman year when I rowed, and the kind of body that made them never tire out, even if they weren't that great. I hit a couple of threes -- just beautiful shots with not much space between me and the defender. They just dropped through the net. However, I got so tired after we built a 13-6 lead that I just couldn't make it back to play good defense, and this skinny motherfucking Chinese kid starts droppings bombs whenever he got open. So eventually we lost 21-19, which was depressing.

But the good thing about the game is that I am not really motivated to play lots of sports, especially once my thesis is over with. I want to get in shape so I can "run with the big boys" or at least have some goddamn physical endurance for hiking and running.

I wrote ten pages last night which was pretty sweet. However, the best thing I did was download this sick album by Ayla (if you dun know Ayla, you are missing out -- a bit cheesy, perhaps ah beng-style techno, as Jackie or Ryan might say, but I like it anyway).

Greatest song ever -- "Celine," on the album, Nirwana. "Sunday" is pretty sweet too.

Really tired now; watching the Kings-Jazz game. As Ryan pointed out, I love dragging my laptop around and using the wireless network. It's that funny freedom of technology -- you are more mobile just as you are more reliant on the technology and paying less attention to the world around you. Oh well, I'm probably hiking Mt. Washington on Saturday, so I can have my reconnection with nature then. Oh wait, and then you see the damn cars driving up the auto road.

Not sure what hike to go on -- I kind of want to go to Mt Isolation, though the hike is a bit long so I don't know if Justin, Saad, Imran, and Faris can make it. I remember it as being easy, but I went alone and nastified the mountain back when I was in good shape. But it's a beautiful mountain top anyway, so we'll see.

I wonder if it would be cool to have sex on a mountain top. Sounds very idealistic and it's a hot idea, but a) I'd have to find a girlfriend who likes to hike (unlikely given my taste in women) and b) it is kind of dirty in an uh-oh repressed Catholic schoolgirls-will-shudder-at-the-utter-nakedness-of-being-unclothed-in-nature-rather-than-a-bedroom sort of way.

More things to think about.

Okay, to workity-work

posted by Jon | 11:55:00 PM

I am a monkey a monkey a monkey. Oh yes I am a monkey.Ooooeeeeahahaaaaah.

posted by Jon | 4:00:00 PM

Yay, new template to replace the shitty old one.

posted by Jon | 4:22:00 AM

New likes and dislikes in life

Saw Confidence at the Nugget just now. It wasn't very exciting, and was really stylized version of con movies like The Usual Suspects and Catch Me If You Can. Ed Burns was pretty good in the role and it featured one of the best "That Guys" in the film business -- Paul Giamatti, whose father, A. Bartlett Giamatti, was an English Professor at Yale, then President, then Commissioner of Baseball. Pretty cool guy who died an untimely death five months into his tenure as commish. But anyway, his son is one of those guys who plays a third tier part and you sort of recognize but can't really think of his name. Hence the phrase, "That Guy" (which isn't my phrase actually, but the Sports Guy's).

The movie was okay, but lacked plot and substance and it tried to top itself too much. At the end I knew what was going to happen pretty much because it taught you to suspend belief. I also find the movies kind of annoying that make us suspend our disbelief and believe that some guy can orchestrate all of life without anything unpredictable happening. I suppose in the chaotic world of L.A. that this is some kind of postmodern fantasy of being able to plan one's life completely, and we're just escaping from our urban worlds into this ordered version of chaos. Okay, enough of my bullshit.

I now back C+As completely as a late night food option. It is much cheaper than EBAs and also better. Their subs are good.

***Jon takes ten minutes break from writing***

Eh, people are generally annoying right now. I think I might cut one or two people out of my life because I feel like they consume my time and I don't get anything in return. It's like I talk and talk about their problems and what do I get? And my girls situation just further complicates this crap.

Did five pages of my thesis last night which was nice. However I still slept at 6:30 and got in a bad schedule again. I am going to try to write five more pages tonight. Have covered two out of four volumes of poetry for my second poet. Not bad. I woke up at 1:00 today to catch the Celtics game, which did not disappoint. A benefit to not having a girlfriend is that you can sit around in your bathrobe and watch a basketball game and really get into it. I mean, every time the Celtics get on a roll I feel the blood in my veins pulse to the cheers of the crowd. Haha, not that having a girlfriend really disturbed me from watching the C's last spring -- in fact I even got Jackie involved, though she was probably happier to see me excited than to actually watch the game, just like when she's happy that I like animals a lot and get exuberant and childish about them. But Paul Pierce scoring 21 in the third was unbelievable. I just hope to god the Nets lose so the Bucks can roll into town for a good series.

Growing up in Boston really ingrains sports into you. Money, politics and sports -- the only things that matter. That was a great quote and it is true.

So I've been perusing through lots of Singaporean blogs lately to find ones that are useful for my thesis. You know you're doing a weird thesis when you cite blogs and personal diaries. But just to record what I've found, here are a few interesting ones:

Alfian Sa'at's blog: alfian.diaryland.com
Alvin Pang's blog: www.verbosity.net
Cyril Wong's site: www.cyrilwong.com

And other blogs, one from a student that's coming to Dartmouth in fact:

orchardroad.diaryland.com Kind of random -- not sure whose site it is, though the person is fairly disillusioned with Singapore.
sidelined.blogspot.com blog of Grace Chua, apparently a future Dartmouth student. Wonder how often she googles herself :-) Well she's got one more hit for herself coming now.

Ok, must go back to work and expunge some more feces for my thesis.

posted by Jon | 12:09:00 AM

Saturday, April 26, 2003

Got back from Boston a couple of hours ago -- had a good time though I was so exhausted after dinner that I passed out in bed and didn't get to see a movie like I wanted to.

in that jingle-jangle morning, I'll come following you

Dinner with Jackie and my dad was pretty fun. I was out of it because I was grumpy about Jackie things, but felt better when I slept for about forty hours. Didn't sleep well until about 8am after I went to piss. Haha, I wonder if it was physiology or psychology that made me sleep better after that.

Got a haircut that apparently makes me look like a gay elf. Most elves look gay in my opinion, but that's Oh-K. I'm also too skinny according to Jackie, but I like to think of it as a base to build on when I go hiking and running and stuff. Or a base to continue to wither away and die. No, don't think so after eating so much crap from C+A's and EBAs lately.

Went to Chinatown today and made about a million SARS jokes. I think I have a particular talent for morbid sick jokes, or at least when I'm with the J (in Simon's words). Had pretty good dim sum, bought some food for Ryan which he seemed to enjoy a lot. Went to some supermarkets and saw lots of fish squirming around in the nastiest looking tanks filled with dirty water and other crap.

Ok, must pick Imran up. Will post full update later.

posted by Jon | 8:46:00 PM

Friday, April 25, 2003

If both the Lakers and Nets lose, I'll be extremely happy. Great Celtics game today, even if the final score didn't indicate it. Reminiscent of last year's blowout over Philly.

Shit, I haven't started my two page paper for Classics that's due tomorrow. It's amazing how authors in neoclassical and late 18th century England knew their ancient philosophy. Read a brief section of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, which I think references about all of philosophy before his time -- Aristotle, Locke, and Descartes being the only ones I recognized.

I wonder if I'm going to Boston tomorrow. Have to do much more work than I've been doing. Only wrote three or four pages last night and then goofed around. A weird anecdote from Novack at 5AM last night:

The last stragglers coming back from SAE came through at about this time -- a group of three or four guys, two of whom were staggering and sort of hugging each other. I didn't pay much attention. They yelled at the girl next to me, "You're hot" and then said something else I didn't catch. I went back to work until about twenty minutes later I saw a kid streak by outside the glass, followed in pursuit by a rather large S&S officer, who appeared to hold up, realizing he couldn't catch the person.

But then about ten minutes later three officers escorted the kid back into Novack. He must have been a freshman, since he looked to be about 12 years old. Apparently he had taken the "Caution: Floor Wet" sign and broken open the vending machine. The funny part is that he broke open the crappy machine that sells Campbell's soup and other things.

But the story gets funnier, because as they bring the kid to the machine, he bolts again, and that's the last we ever saw of him. One kid in Novack yelled out "Freeeedoommm" as he got away. It was pretty damn funny.

The other shit thing that happened today

So I had to present my thesis chapter for criticism at the honors seminar. I thought my chapter was pretty good, at least compared to some of the other people who had presented. I knew I had to do some work. However, what ended up happening was me listening to abuse for 20 minutes from my professors, who didn't give me any specific places for improvement and didn't really say much except "this is dense" and "maybe you need to start at a different place." I also felt a bit slighted since at least one of the profs hadn't read more than 10 out of 23 pages of my chapter.

Oh well, all it means is I'll just have to send it through the strainer again; and it just makes me have less faith in workshops than ever before. I never have much faith in other people reading the work because I never want to do it myself when I'm in the situation.

However, before I can revise that, I have to write the rest of my second chapter, which is a behemoth at 60 pages so far. It will end up being about 75 pages total, plus 40-45 more pages to write after that. Die, die, die, it's going to be a hard couple of weeks. Okay, enough bitching about my work; don't want to sound like you, Ryan. Haha, just kidding.

posted by Jon | 2:58:00 AM

Thursday, April 24, 2003

I'm not sure what this says about me, but every few months I get in this collecting mood. Usually that means I end up burning a lot of CDs and have some weird puritanical drive to "cleanse" my computer of anything on it (yeah, yeah, of my immense porn collection). That also means that I end up listening to a lot of Bob Dylan songs after that, because for some reason my collecting and cleaning drive is connected to my desire to collect every single performance of Bob Dylan from 1958 onwards (but mainly the period between 1963-1980). Maybe I actually do like history. Nah, I'm probably just weird...

Listening to: Bob Dylan, The Basement Tapes Volumes 1-5

posted by Jon | 3:33:00 AM

Wednesday, April 23, 2003

Can thank Jackie for this link: Thirsty baboons attack girl

At least they weren't hungry. Ha, the phrase "thirsty baboon" is pretty damn funny.

And just for fun, from the OED: Baboon: 2. A member of one of the great divisions of the Simiadæ or Monkeys, distinguished by a long dog-like snout, large canine teeth or tusks, capacious cheek-pouches, and naked callosities on the buttocks; they are inhabitants of Africa, Southern Asia, and the adjacent islands.

Naked callosities on the buttocks? I think I have mucho callosities on my ass too, but it generally comes from sitting on my ass in Novack doing my thesis. I'm not a baboon...yet.

Obsolete definition of monkey of the day number one: b. Freq. humorous. Typified as lecherous or libidinous (esp. in similes), or as a substitute partner to a woman with insatiable desires. Also in extended use: a lecherous person, esp. a lecherous woman. Obs.

Racist definition of monkey of the day number one: 9. orig. U.S. (offensive). A non-white or dark-skinned person.

Obsolete definition of monkey of the day NUMBER TWO: 34. slang. to put it where the monkey puts the nuts: expressing contemptuous rejection. Also where the monkey puts the nuts and variants: in the anus.

Umm, do I even need to open my mouth? No, I'll just put my words where the monkey puts his nuts... or how bout this: I'm speaking out of where the monkey puts his nuts.

Ah the amusements that one hairy, humanlike species can provide.

posted by Jon | 3:46:00 AM

It's late. I've written shit all day. Finished Romantic Poetry. Watched Milan talk to one out of every two people that passed by in Novack. Occasionally acted social, though kind of wish I had my own soundproof cube with no distractions (preferably clear glass so I could be monitored to keep from screwing around).

posted by Jon | 3:31:00 AM

Tuesday, April 22, 2003

Look folks! It's like The D, but faster! The links even work too! It's my own Op-Ed page; it's blogtastic. Okay, enough of that sarcastic, sensationalist bullshit. And if you don't like me, you can always check out this fat kid who makes videos of himself being annoying.

Twenty Pounds of Headlines

This is a typical example of one song that your, uh, English music newspapers would call a drug song … I go, I don’t, uh, I don’t write druuuggg songs …” (slurring words), “You know like I never have, I wouldn’t know how to go about it, but this is not a drug song [crowd claps]. I’m not saying it for any kind of defensive reason or anything like that. It’s just … not … a drug song. I don’t mean – it’s just [affects English accent] vulgar to think so.”

So spoke Bob Dylan in the middle of his famous Royal Albert Hall concert during his May 1966 tour in England. The comment, spoken in reference to “Visions of Johanna,” shows sides of Dylan that the reductive labels of the media cannot tame. Almost thirty-seven years later, we might also wonder what Bob Dylan is still doing performing, at least when other rocking dinosaurs such as the Rolling Stones and Aerosmith have long succumbed to the twin stakes and serpent’s smile of the dollar.

Dylan, on the other hand, is now reaching deep into no man’s land, back to the folk songs of Appalachia and the tales collected by Harry Smith during the 1920s in the Anthology of American Folk Music. What’s going on here? While Dylan and the public have long since diverged in taste (perhaps due in part to his early ’90s phase of singing through his sinus cavities and articulating words like a drunken student at a 7 a.m. language drill), he unabashedly beats on, occasionally making appearances before the media like at the Oscars two years ago.

While “Things Have Changed” since 1966, some things remain the same. And Dylan’s strange relationship with the media exposes reporters as inadequately prepared amateurs. And maybe we can learn a little something universal too, you and I, from this patient etherized upon our editorial table.

1) The media – it’s certainly painted as an enemy in the quote above, right? But this is only one layer of the Dylan canvas. He snidely dons the voice of the stoner and then the voice of the snooty English media that disparages his songs. The effect of these voices is to tease the media into believing its own claims, but to also suggest that it is inane to read the songs in one way. The crossword is part of your newspaper, chaps, not a way to interpret my songs, he seems to be saying. That my lyrics are abstract and defy realist conventions does not mean they lack sense. That I may or may not have taken a few drugs does not make them definitively about one thing.

And even today the media only holds Dylan up as the exemplary musician of the civil rights movement. For, of course, “Blowing in the Wind” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” were the anthems. It is ironic that Dylan, whose recent work in “Love and Theft” suggests he does not buy into the fragmented society created by multiculturalism (cf. “High Water”), has been subsumed by the political correctness wagon and made part of a reworked history.

Dylan, like many great artists, changed his image almost neurotically; when he was labelled the great folk savior, he went electric at the Newport Folk Festival; when he became even more popular, he retreated from society to make the “Basement Tapes;” he even converted to Christianity, secretly married an African-American gospel singer … the list goes on. This is not simply Madonna reinventing herself in a new and ever popular way. Dylan is the original trickster of the last half century.

2) The bastard and the media – and that’s really what Bob Dylan is in 1966, a smug 24-year-old singer with an inflated mop of hair and even more inflated ego. The quote above is representative of how he makes the audience (and even us, listening after the fact) feel young and hip as potential people in on a secret. He plays on the idea of the crowd by getting them to cheer at the very thing – drugs – that he says the song is not about. And we are never really sure what he is saying, except that all meanings are valid. But our cheers potentially make us the subject of Dylan’s sarcasm, and we are placed in the same ignorant boat as the unprepared reporters.

In D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary, “Don’t Look Back,” about the 1965 tour of England, numerous well-meaning or superficial journalists try to pin him down with boring questions such as “Are you folk?” and “Why are you so popular?” Dylan systematically evades giving answers by making his media answers a performance themselves, bringing props such as an oversized lightbulb to press conferences, and inventing stories about his childhood in traveling circuses, not a middle class Jewish background in Minnesota.

3) The central revelation I had watching such documentaries as “Don’t Look Back” and seeing this interaction is that reporting is ultimately a failure. There is no truth or “fact” as the New York Times thought of it in the ’50s – something the destructive prose journalism of Hunter Thompson, Norman Mailer, and Tom Wolfe made clear. But Dylan’s smugness tells us that these reporters are only doing their job, not asking the right questions. To ask about an a musician’s success only repeats the industry of buzz and does not inform the audience about anything substantial (that “buzzworthy-ness” is all that MTV cares about is only a sad reminder of the structure of music today). Dylan desires a journalist to ask him open-ended questions that yield flexible answers of interpretation, but the music critics either hail him as a hero of social issues (the opinion of the “high critics”) or as a cult phenomenon (think of the attention teenyboppers have historically gotten).

Yet journalism cannot hope to equal his desires, and Dylan knows this, because the journalist has a very limited time to learn his topic, and an even shorter time to write the actual story. Constant griping about the state of this paper (which, incidentally, is far more substantial than other comparable papers such as the Cornell Daily Sun) attests to this fact. Thus the same stories come out again and again – just as we see VH1’s “Behind the Music” rehash the same story of success, dramatic collapse, and rebirth – the reporter uses the themes of success and tragedy as guiding principles for his stories. And while these issues may change slightly over time, it is only a redistribution of relative powers. The song remains the same.

posted by Jon | 4:19:00 PM

Things I need to do by tomorrow: catch up with my reading for Classics and English; write about 6-8 pages of chapter 2 (why, for the love of God, can't I finish my damn chapter; it's like the longest piece of crap known to man).

Time to hole up in Novack for obscene amounts of time. After I take a short nappity nap.

Oh -- one more thing. Why is it that in English there's always that one really annoying kid (no, I'm not talking about myself for once) who spouts out some theoretical nonsense whenever someone makes the "error" of mentioning the "author" or "reader?" Haven't we gotten beyond thirty years ago where it was hip to point out that meanings are not definite and all that shit?

Less theoretically: my tummy hurts from too much milk. Poor Jon the puppy, watch him roll around on the floor and pick his fleas.

posted by Jon | 2:31:00 PM

Monday, April 21, 2003

A note on a screen name I picked in high school, around 10th grade or so. "Altumcorde" is actually a Latin phrase "altum corde" from Book I of Virgil's Aeneid:

Talia voce refert, curisque ingentibus aeger
spem voltu simulat, premit altum corde dolorem.

With such a voice he responded, and with huge cares his sickness
he represented in his wound and he pressed the suffering deep in his heart.

(Aeneid, 1.208-209)

I liked this phrase -- altum corde -- when I read it in high school because it means a few things, at least the way I read it, rightly or wrongly. Altus, -a, -um meaning "high," "lofty," or "deep" and cordis, -e (f.) meaning heart or chest. I liked the multiple possibilities for meaning that the phrase means -- combining bodily and emotional responses. It is high and deep, evoking the mind and the heart.

posted by Jon | 11:53:00 PM

When critics write their commentaries and analyses of literary works, what do they think is the ultimate point of such work? Is it an end in and of itself to understand a work better or should their critique say something about society at large and the way that people function?

I've been grappling with these questions as I write my thesis because I tend to drift toward the latter half of the second question, hence I drift toward cultural studies. Literary analysis and theory do tend to subsume other disciplines in their quest to be the top dee-ohh-double-gee.

In other news, I haven't been able to sleep very well lately. I've been sleeping in three or four hours chunks at most. I think it's all the crap I've been putting into my body -- Red Bull has probably caused more damage to my liver than alcohol to most drunken college students.

Need to write an op-ed in the next few hours but can't really get off my ass yet. At least I'm doing my thesis now. That's better than my usual 3 pm inactivity.

posted by Jon | 2:52:00 PM

Is there anything better than Bob Dylan's 1966 tour of England?

"Judas!"
"You're a liar!"

From Expecting Rain:
"I've been obsessed by this particular recording for 20 years," admits the broadcaster Andy Kershaw, the interviewer who has brought these veterans of that show's audience back to the Free Trade Hall to muse upon that night's events. "In my first year at Leeds University, a friend gave me a tape of the concert and I just thought it was the greatest rock'n'roll performance that I'd ever heard. I still do. I can't understand why anybody thought there was any point in making rock music after the Free Trade Hall concert."

And a line for right now:
"My weariness amazes me,/ I am branded on my feet,/ and I have no one to meet...

posted by Jon | 7:45:00 AM

Something I wanted to add to dartobserver but couldn't because the comments button was malfunctioning -- this is about the review of Orientalism, and is greatly shortened because my first attempt was deleted by accident:

I would have to agree with Brad's comment. Kimball has been known to make such bizarre claims as saying that "every student should read as much Tasso as possible," and he tends to extol classical knowledge and works like Tasso's La Gerusalemme Liberata as much to claim that they have been lost by the terrible plague present in the academy today, as to show any useful intellectual worth (at the same time as he effaces other histories that have made these works [undeservedly] marginal to our learning today).

I would just say, avoiding ad hominems, to try to be a little more flexible in your politics. I know that's like asking an oak to uproot itself, but you shouldn't shudder at the name of Foucault. While his theories may seem incomprehensible (what, just out of curiosity, of Foucault's have you read? since you seem to have always hated him ever since I've known you) ,if we can understand something from them that helps in our own understanding of how the world works, and literature, then haven't we gained something valuable?

To eschew provocative thinkers like Derrida in favor of your favorites (probably Allen Bloom and co.) is to fail to set up a rewarding dialogue with someone who might think in ways unlike you or I. And that would be the real closing of the American (and Singaporean) mind.

posted by Jon | 7:13:00 AM

Okay, I've finally decided on blogspot after futile attempts at keeping up blogs on xanga (terrible, terrible -- and curiously almost all Asian-American -- blog site) and Diaryland (never really got started). I am going to try to keep this blog toned down in terms of analysis, despite the image in my head of a blog as a forum for analysis much like pinning a butterfly down with a needle or etherizing a patient. Thus, I guess this blog will be a proliferation of thoughts both political and personal. I'm not arrogant enough to profess from my anus three times a day (well, I may actually be that arrogant, but I pretend not to be).

So this is an invitation to join with me during the thrice weekly all-nighters (generally Sundays, Mondays and Wednesdays) to look at my overflowing thoughts (not from powerful emotions, as this forum is as far from good old Wordsworth as we can possibly get) as I write my thesis and mope around in my personal life.

So the list of what this blog is all about:

1) First and foremost, of course: me. If you're interested in how many times I order Panda House during the week, then you're sure to like my blog. If you're more interested in what percentage of the way through Gran Turismo 3 (84.1 to be precise), then you're in the right place. If you want to know about Singaporean literature also, well, hot damn, you are one weird twisted fuck and I will marry you regardless of sex. But if you don't like those things then there's not room enough in this blog for the both of us, is there?

2) My politics: I grew up as a Republican and have drifted towards the center ever since then, and even the tremendous influx of doomsday crazy French theorists -- thank you very much, Mr. Baudrillard -- have not shaken my core beliefs in mediation and cooperation. Inflammatory or inflexible discourse angers me -- the squabblings of campus conservatives over semantics (and in the case of Dartmouth liberals -- Hemant-ics) anger me. A lot of things anger me. No, just kidding.

But that's not to say I'm going to go join a commune like in Easy Rider. There's some truth to the description of power relations described by realists in IR. But I put stock in irrational factors that economists and social scientists have a difficult time apprehending into their theories. The world is not such a cynical place as they would have it, and it isn't such a nice place either.

3) This is definitely about how the pile of books next to my window have obscured all light entering my room. I still apparently have a ways to reach the all-time record for books checked out from the Dartmouth Library -- about 700 apparently, by a student too -- but I'm content with my paltry 75 or 80.

What this blog is not about:

1) Building a fan base to make myself feel like I have more friends than I do. I'd like to stick to that contention for a while, at least until I'm on my fourth Red Bull for the night and the birds are chirping. Then it's good to have imaginary friends, like Bob the Jackrabbit here. Oh wait... perhaps I shouldn't tell anyone about those things ;-P

2) My sex life. If you're here for my sex life, you will be sorely (if I make a joke here I will shoot myself) mistaken. That is for me alone (and my high-paid NYC therapist) to know. For that kind of blog, you can visit everyone's happening Dubai swinger at massagemate.blogspot.com Is this guy for real?

posted by Jon | 6:56:00 AM

Will soon write a real entry. Here's the icebreaker though.

It's another long night at the thesis mill and these dark Satanic mills are almost about to stop churning. Haven't really done shit tonight unfortunately, but still have hope I'll write another five pages before bedtime.

posted by Jon | 6:21:00 AM