The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

As we all know (because I’m just addressing my past and future selves… okay, addressing you too, dear reader, but you probably also know. Also, you’re dear. You’re a dear. Also maybe a deer. I mean, I have furry friends. You could be.) I am knee deep in the theory shit. It comes with the English grad student territory. As I work and try to make sense of the incredible quagmire of bullshit that theory entails, I find myself coming back, time and again, to one thing: Dom/sub, power play sexual relationships, BDSM or no.

The question I have to ask myself is why.

For some reason, it makes it quite easy for me to grok a lot of these theories when I go “but how does this apply to a D/s situation?” I quickly lay out these ideas and I am instantly fine. Well, okay, not instantly, but they do make a whole lot more sense to me. I mean, it is something I know, but at the same time, it’s not something I KNOW. I dabble, but I can’t say I’m really in such a relationship. The closest thing I have to that is my relationship with Ecks, but even that is just an incredibly awesome friendship wrapped up in that kind of clothing simply because it’s fun. I’ve done a lot of thinking about it, and it’s something I know about, but it’s not my life. It doesn’t seem like it would be something I’m constantly drawing on.

Yet it is.

If I had to venture a guess as to why things work out that way, it would be because a sliding scale of social power is a metaphor I use to easily and, as far as I’m aware, effectively deal with social situations that come my way. I use it to plan my actions and feel out how people are reacting to me and what I’m doing. I use it to judge when people are not being honest, because if they’re playing outside of their projected power space, they’re up to something, or they’d be projecting that level of power. Similarly, I tend to look at how the world works as social relationships and social systems. Even my potentially bad habit of putting a ton of personification on objects that don’t really fit that mold (the writer of all the post-humanist rhetoric I’ve read would be disappointed in me) is all done in order to make the world work in the social interactive metaphor I’ve put forth.

Once I’ve force everything into that view, I suppose that a D/s sexual relationship is one of the purest, and least hidden forms of such a relationship, making it easy to choose as a non-confusing example to apply it to.

In the end, I have a pretty good grasp on this stuff, and that’s what’s important, education and future-wise. But I’m endlessly interested in my own thought processes and why I do things the weird way I do them. I spin it around in my head again and again. I write blog posts to put my thought processes out there in a more concrete way, to better understand them. I do these things.

The way I do them is kind of like a D/s sexual relationship…
*rimshot*

I prepared a poetry presentation today, and it struck me how different this presentation is going to be than how I normally look at literature.
OR IS IT?
Well, it kind of is.

In general, as a reader, I am a big picture and character person. This is especially true reading short stories and novels. I come up with an overall impression based on gut instinct and reader-response concepts. Sure, when prompted I can point back at the text and find proof, or at least what I’m referring to when I bring stuff like that up. In general, though, it’s all about big sweeps. General character concepts: who they are, why they’re doing what they’re doing, and so on. It’s looking inside the character’s head and seeing how the reader relates to that.

In poetry, though, I tend to get way more detail-oriented. When I really try to read a poem, I look at silly things like the effect of titles, use of line breaks, and punctuation. I see how words line up on the page, and ask why. I look at the little details of construction of the poem and focus on that almost exclusively. I mean, I still form that overall picture of what it’s about, but that’s not what I obsess over, like I do with prose.

At the same time, I guess that’s not really all that different from what I do with prose, because what I’m doing is attempting to figure out the motivations of the poet or speaker. Why would they put a line break there? Why would they use that awkward slant rhyme? I attempt to figure out what the poet is trying to do and figure out what the reader’s reaction to that is. I am treating the poet like a character in a short story; it’s just that the poet’s motivations and so on are manifest in these little decisions, just like a character’s motivations and such are manifest in the little things they do throughout a story. In most situations, I think this really works, as speaker and poet are pretty clearly linked. One always claims that you need to treat the speaker and the poet separately, but most rarely do, and in many situations, it isn’t important to anyway.

It tends to look pretty different from the outside, but I guess it is still me. I’m not totally a New Critic when I look at poetry! Whew. I was worried for a second there.

I bet I’m late to the party on this, but…

Oh. My. Fucking. God. Sprung may be the most amazing game of all time.

Every page of this LP of Sprung, I am laughing my ass off. It’s well made, but it’s not just that. The entire game is so mind-blowingly, hilariously bad. I’ve only read through Brett’s story, but I’m working through Becky’s too. It’s what I’ve been doing instead of writing this blog post.

You owe it to yourself to check it out. You really do. You will be amazed this game exists, and you will laugh.

Oh yes. You will laugh.

Last night, after having listened to even more of Tweet Me Harder‘s amazing fanfiction that they’re doing, as well as having recently read Wide Sargasso Sea for class, I got to thinking: There’s a lot of critically acclaimed fanfiction out there. One could think of countless Bible fanfictions, for example, many of them important works of literature, like Paradise Lost. There is plenty of stuff in the canon that, when you think about it, is just fanfiction.

That’s so weird.

I mean, there’s no doubt that there is a bit of a difference between, say, a fanfic where two characters in your favorite anime fuck because that would be nice and a book like Wide Sargasso Sea. I’m not comparing these works of literature to that. But, well…

Way back, when I was much younger, I read most of a huge, I’m talking Novel-length here, fanfiction crossover between Ranma 1/2 and Sailor Moon. Much like Wide Sargasso Sea, the author was attempting to reconcile the various canons of these works into this story, which explained things that she thought were important. It wasn’t written in a tongue-in-cheek way. It was very serious. It was treating the base subject matter with respect, and really trying to create something entertaining and significant.

I look back on that now, and my first response is to shake my head. “I really read that stuff?” At the same time, as I think about it, I almost certainly enjoyed that fanfic more than Wide Sargasso Sea, because I am more of a fan of those two properties than I am of Jane Eyre. I mean, I certainly know more about them. Most of my Jane Eyre knowledge comes from my reading of The Eyre Affair, which isn’t exactly a perfect picture of the novel.

Maybe that’s it. Because they’re based on “respected” properties, the sorts that the people picking the canon would know about and have an appreciation for, stuff like Wide Sargasso Sea gets a free pass, even if it is just playing off someone else’s brilliance. Is that fair? I don’t know. Sailor Moon is not going to have the cultural significance of Jane Eyre in the future. Or is it?

I forget where I heard or read about this, but when the Scott Pilgrim movie came out, there was a lot of discussion about how it used video game references in the books and movie. There was talk of video games being at the point where they can be used as cultural touchstones, where you can work recognizable elements into another work, much like you could references to famous literature and key movies, without actually making the work be about video games. Now, I don’t think that’s totally true for Scott Pilgrim, but there certainly is a measure of it. Overall, too, things that I’m sure people of the time never would have dreamed would gain the cultural significance it did are super important. I’m sure those in charge of the canon who saw Star Wars for the first time probably wouldn’t understand how timeless it was going to become.

I guess what I’m trying to say is: write on, fanfiction writers. I mean, if nothing else, working those writing muscles is going to help you to create something completely original down the road, to be sure. At the same time, fanfiction is just one incredibly intense literary allusion. In this copyright-happy world, we maybe have lost sight of how wonderful people can make things when they build off of the ideas of others. At some point, I remember someone putting forth the idea of a world where anyone can write about Spiderman, because he’s no longer under copyright. Wouldn’t that be awesome, they said? I agree. It kind of would be. There’d be plenty of shit, sure, but soon, someone would hit upon something fantastic. That’d be cool.

I had a soundtrack to the past few days! And it’s this song.

Seriously, I tend to go through through phases when I find an album that I just listen to constantly. It’s this kind of obsession that caused me to listen to so much Presidents of the United States of America that I wrote a whole, whole book of poetry about it. Ok Go’s second album, Oh No, has recently fallen into that rotation for me. I’ve been listening to it constantly, letting it flow through me.

It’s damn good.

Like, seriously! There’s a lot of songs on their first album I don’t particularly care for. Get Over It is good. Otherwise, I dunno. But man, I really like most of Oh No. The first four songs are solid gold, and there is plenty other good songs on the album.

I’ve focused on Invincible and A Good Idea At The Time in the past, but now at the moment the main focus of my love is It’s A Disaster. It’s upbeat, exciting, but it also has pretty solid lyrics. The chorus just rings true. Bad shit is happening, but in the end, that bad shit is all we have, so we might as well enjoy it. We might as well sing a happy song about it and just have fun, you know? As things fall to shit around me, I could stand to remember that.

Anyway: Ok Go is pretty neat. I don’t really like the single with the Rube Goldberg machine, but I should still check it out at some point. Yep.

I kind of wanted to not write about more doom and gloom. I’m too much that recently. But fuck. I had no time to write a blog today, so this is what you get. Sorry! But hey, you could always watch this video Val shared with me of a dog dancing if you want something more positive to do with your time. Go dog go!

Anyway.
Today sucked!

I was booked the entire way through. On top of that, I hadn’t really slept. I felt sick for most of the night before, and didn’t really rest, and as the last blog post says, I was already really tired. So I was working on no sleep and no energy, and I was feeling really depressed. I sent my mom a pointless depressed text that I instantly regretted, but I was making it through.

Then my phone broke.

Nothing gets me more angry than technology that doesn’t work. I was out having lunch with Cara, but I was angry. I was feeling disconnected, and I didn’t really have the money to buy a new phone I really wanted. Things were bad. I went to the AT&T store, and they were useless, as expected. I got on the phone for two hours talking with people. To their credit, they were very polite, but I ended up having to escalate the call. See, maybe this is selfish of me, but I didn’t want another Blackberry Bold 9000, because it would be my 6th one or so? The construction quality on them sucks. Since I was out of warranty, I didn’t want another one that was just going to break. Eventually, I got them to send me the new model Bold instead, the 9700. That’s something, at least. One problem solved.

However, due to the tiredness, I had expected to use those two hours on the phone doing my homework for class. I then had to rush to get that done. I finished literally a minute before class, thankfully. But it was sub-optimal.

Also, during the break at class, Cole borrowed a dollar and we both went to buy a soda. We went to the only machine not marked “Use Exact Change” and he got a soda… and I said “You know, with my luck today, that was probably the last bit of change in the machine.” And I was right. It was. Yay.

Now I’m home and writing a depressing blog post. I hope something goes my way soon. That would be super nice!

I’ll try to write something more fun tomorrow. Wish me luck.

I keep falling asleep.

It normally happens when I sit down at my desk. I’ll turn on a youtube video or a let’s play or something, and then I’ll just dose off. I’ll keep snapping back awake, because I’m not supposed to be sleeping, but I can’t seem to help it. Eventually, this leads to be, angrily, going to bed. I then sleep, and wake up the next day. But I’m still tired.

I guess I haven’t been getting enough sleep? But I feel like I’ve been sleeping about as much as I normally do. Maybe it’s just the emotional exhaustion. I really have been running a million miles an hour, emotionally and physically. I’ve been doing so much. I’m ridiculous like that.

I felt like it really all came to a head the other day. I was playing Magic with everyone, and I was bringing by Blue/Green deck. This deck has counterspells, including my beloved Mystic Snake. I literally couldn’t focus on the game enough to be able to counter anything. I couldn’t follow it. I kept drifting off. It kind of embarrassed me.

I need a break, but I don’t think I’m going to get one. The best I can do is try to keep knocking things out, and keep making progress. At the end of the tunnel, I might be able to relax.

Also, napping. I need to nap more aggressively.
Eh, I’ll figure something out, right? Probably? I mean, sleep is just another thing to schedule, right? I can do that, can’t I?
Sure I can.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Time Management.

Mostly in the context of adding way, way more to do to my schedule, and if I can pull it off.

Honestly, I think I’m pretty good with time management. I can normally fairly safely estimate the amount of time a task will take me to complete, and slot it in in a time where I know I will get it done. I understand how I work, and when I will be reluctant to work, and I can fit things in.

However, the one thing I can’t stand organizing and scheduling is my free time.

I hate having to parcel off my free time. I hate going “Here is the hour in which I will do a vidjeo gam.” I really dislike that. It turns the very act of relaxing into work, and it frustrates me. I know it sometimes frustrates Brer when I hate him constantly asking me when we can schedule viewings of shows we’re trying to watch together. It just makes watching it seem like more work.

All this potential stuff that I could add to my plate… all of it would start to require such strict scheduling of my time, in order to get my schoolwork done, that I feel like all my free time, not just some of it, would start to fall under scheduling concerns. Frankly, it scares me, because it makes me feel like I’ll never have time to unwind. I’m a creature of habit, but when I sit down to relax, I don’t want to feel forced into doing one thing or another. I want to be able to let my whims roam free for the first time that day. That’s what relaxes me. Just letting me do what I want, without worrying about deadlines or scheduling. At least for awhile.

I work best when I can set a cutoff time, where all the rest of my time that day is mine. That’s when I work best. I’ll have so much less opportunity to do that if I take this up. But it’s also a good opportunity. Arg.

I guess this is growing up. If you want to have cake AND eat cake, you have to get everything in gear to make it happen. I know I can make it happen. The question is more… will I be happy making it happen? That’s what I’m wondering. I don’t know the answer.

But I’ll try, and we’ll see.

On Friday, we just picked up and went to Lambert’s. Just, you know, for the hell of it. But that’s not all. We also played some Race for the Galaxy. Upon flipping randomly through the rulebook, I stumbled upon a “Draft” variant I hadn’t heard of. It sounded fantastic, so we tried it. It really ended up changing the game in an interesting way.

Basically, we dealt out starting worlds, as per usual, then separated the rest of the deck into 9 card “draft packs.” We passed them around, drafting them like Magic cards. Once we’ve drafted the whole deck, we all had small, individual decks with which to draw all our cards from. Then we played the game.

It worked really well.

Basically, it removed a large chunk of the randomness from actually playing the game. For example, I had drafted mostly rebel cards, so I knew I was attempting to set up a victory via Rebel military, and thus evaluated the cards I drew differently. Jonathan, on the other had, had gone for Galactic Federation all out, and was trying to make developing work for him. It was much more like a game of Magic, where you had picked your strategy beforehand and was just trying to pull it off, as opposed to doing the best with what you draw. It kept the game the same, but changed it a lot.

Of course, one of the benefits of Race is that it’s a fairly fast game to play, once you figure it out. The drafting added a long, long time onto the gameplay. I had first surmised that you might negate that by playing multiple games with the same deck, but I kind of went back on that after our second game. If you hadn’t done well drafting, you just had no chance. Even if the person who one the first game got a bad draw, someone else probably would get a better one who wouldn’t be you. It didn’t seem worth it with so many people at the table. But eh, maybe everyone else disagreed with me.

I don’t think this will undo normal Race play for our group, but it is a really, really neat way to switch it up, especially if the goal of the night is a night of Race, as opposed to one quick game before bed, which it often is in our case. If you own the game and a few expansions, give it a try.

You can tell I’m stressed because I’m standing up for myself.

Or at least being very clear about it.

Allow me to offer some examples.

A student who has shown up about 35 minutes late for class every time so far e-mails me asking me about assignments he’d know about if he’d actually show up. Instead of just ignoring this, as I normally would, I said, though in a polite way, that if he’s show up to class he’d already know this.

Similarly, once at Kohl’s, I left a passive-aggressive note telling people to actually pay attention and put toppers away in the right spot so I don’t have to sort them, as well as standing up for how ridiculous some of the accusations against my team are. Anger was the basis for this.

I’m just tired of being pushed around. I’m still a professional. I’m not going to break down. But shit, something in my life has to give somewhere. Even if it is just little things like scolding these little transgressions. Something needs to go my fucking way.
I mean, things are. I continue to have the BEST FUCKING FRIENDS AND SIGNIFICANT OTHERS I could ever ask for. You all help me get through the day, and you’re all completely, without restraint, awesome. Still, I feel bad for leaning on you constantly. I’ve had to. I shouldn’t. Something has to give so I can stand on my own.

Maybe this is the prelude to bigger things. Maybe once actually being proactive and working to make myself happy works, I’ll finally finish off all the stupid bullshit standing in the way of my happiness. Eh, even if it doesn’t work, I’ll go that way. Of course I will.

Of course I will.

Until then, though, don’t like… throw cans in the trash can. They don’t go there. Little things. You know?