a reassessment

so i did the daemon sorter again, out of curiosity:

http://www.goldencompassmovie.com/?487296

i think i'm a bit more argumentative than i was just a few months ago. it's fun.

so should i move on-campus? it would be hard, and possibly unaffordable, but i wonder.

we can has band nao?

Whiskey Throwin' Crack-teeth Piedmont is recording its first single in our spare bedroom right now. working title: Steven's Goin' To Jail, Dudes.

we are going to be bigger than Thee Iran Contras. watch out, peter hynaman.

Irony-Impairment Theatre Presents

The Huckabee Presidential Campaign.

oh and gee, it gets better:

i messaged mr kolock through facebook. i was perhaps unnecessarily hostile. i received a response from him which was equally hostile. after receiving the response, i found i was able to look at his facebook account, including his photos. i think i recognise him.

i believe mr kolock, along with a friend of his, were the pair i saw dressed up for halloween this year, during the day. they had matching costumes: nearly-sheer black dance tights, black slippers, no shirts, and brightly-coloured fairy wings. they spent the whole day talking with exaggerated lisps, prancing about the quad with greatly exaggerated butt-wiggling, cocking their wrists, and basically aping every gay stereotype known to mankind.

mr kolock was also carrying a baseball bat.

i leave the interpretation of this as an exercise to the reader.

for nate

the following is an original work of Mr Steve Kolock, SF08. everything [sic].

"Sing to me, O muse, of the rage of the Womenfolk"

Somewhere between being picketed by angry women, shunned by angry women, and waiting for the bomb squad to arrive and defuse letter bombs sent to me by angry women, I had an epiphany: parts of my articles might somehow be making women angry. But why this was so I simply could not understand, however hard I tried; and I tried everything.

For weeks on end I stayed up late meditating on this anger whilst absorbed in hookers and booze -- yet to no avail. I reread my articles shod in women's lingerie trying to get into their minds through their pants -- and I was left even more confused than before.

No matter how revealing that teddy might be I simply couldn't see through to the body of this female anger. And I know it wasn't because the teddy didn't work on me. It looked sexy as hell against my ample bosom and supple skin, but there was just something essential lacking... it didn't quite bring out my eyes the way I'd expected.

After finally accepting (after much crying, weeping, sobbing, and questioning the existence of God in a world so cruel) that I would never find any lingerie that brought out my eyes properly, I decided I needed to take some 'me time' in order to recover. Usually this would have resulted in me watching a Gossip Girls marathon, but today was different. Today I was on a mission to discover the origin of this mysterious emotional response sent to me by women.

By the time I'd taken off the push up bra, wig, fishnet stockings, six inch heels, and crotchless panties (the sense of freedom you get in those is amazing), I'd begun to feel calmer and more in control of myself. I knew exactly what would help me understand this confounding isse of female anger; a nice walk in the plaza amidst the tourists I so dearly love.

As I neared the plaza, I could clearly see that the hustle and bustle of Santa Fe life before 5 pm was in full swing. Cars were driving poorly and threatening the safety of all; people were walking in the middle of the street oblivious to my car (aptly named Natural Selection) bearing down on them rapidly; and I was singing along to my favorite song: all was right in the world. "Don't cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me..." I bellowed to the scattering pedestrians in a bass voice that could only find its genesis in the depths of my soul. Already, in the midst of driving to my walk, I could feel insight pouring over me like that tender smell of chamisa on a sultry spring day.
Believing the drive to my walk to be exactly what I wished, I almost decided to turn around and go home to treat myself to a nice, hot bath surrounded by candles, enveloped in the harmony of Destiny's Child, and immersed in dark chocolate as God intended me. But alas, although this was a 'me day', it was a me day on a deeper level and I knew that deep inside my soul (in roughly the same area from which it sings bass) I needed to resolve this concern that plagued me so. So I told my shallow self, "I can't always cater to you," and soon sought a parking spot amidst the throngs of appalled witnesses to the process of evolution which Natural Selection and I had just affected.

Hearing the sirens swiftly weaving through traffic, I thought to start my walk with a brisk jog away from "the crime scene" (as the evening news that night so unfeelingly proclaimed it). Finally reaching the main plaza area I felt safe from the crazy drunk bastard we call Justice.

At this point all would have been exactly as I'd hoped had not intervention far from divine occurred. It was but a few minutes that I'd been walking along the plaza before I heard the familiar catcalls... cries of, "Hey cowboy, lookin' for a ride?" and "Is that a massive, Florida-shaped lump of steel in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?" filled the air around me. "Damn this cowboy hat, these cowboy jeans, and this sweet Polish ass!" I thought to myself, "Will I never be able to walk in public without feeling I need to hide my precisely hourglass shaped figure from the world?" Those women were looking at me like I was just some sexually gifted manwhore and I knew it. And sure, they were completely and absolutely right; of course my sweet Polish ass is irresistible; of course I have a come-hither stare that can cause seizures in those uninitiated into the Mysteries of Steve; and of course in bed I have perfectly combined the tenderness of a dove and the raw power of a full grown T-Rex on PCP, but damnit if I didn't for once just want a little peace instead of a little piece.

...As I walked back to my car I hung my head, tears streaming down my face. I wasn't sad. I was angry. Angry at those pedestrians for not getting out of my way in time and angry at those women for not viewing me in any other light than that which provided the best illumination of my award winning ass. "How could they be so hurtfully blind," I asked myself, "as to not even have thought about exploring my mind before my body, and to not even have looked in my eyes before undressing me with theirs?"
For just a moment I wondered if I'd come upon an answer to the question that drove me. Were the women who were threatening my life angry because they thought I'd been lacking the requisite respect for them? This realization hit me like Natural Selection.

Perhaps I'd been selling women short; perhaps I'd been treating them as a nameless, faceless people without a rational faculty or even a soul. But to those who would say this I ask; isn't imitation the sincerest form of flattery? And don't I look damn good in that teddy? I leave it to you to decide....

[there were three cheesecake shots of a mincing Kolock clad in the aforementioned teddy and a cowboy hat. i'm not scanning them.]

thank you, freshman math class, for destroying any hope i had for the basic decency of humanity. special thanks to the tutor, who explained that, actually, that senior columnist who ranted about how bitches is crazy actually is eloquent, brilliant and exceptionally talented, and told me i should talk with him sometime.

don't you hate those clever people at those clever-people-parties

i spoke with the dean. it was interesting. at least some of my frustration was eased by a long talk last night with greg, but the dean was able to give a name to the attitude of my class which i'm finding so problematic. i realised, too, that i was conflating lots and lots of issues with the school under one name, and doing so made the problem seem completely unmanageable. it's probably at least a little bit manageable.

i am relieved to know that freshman seminars aren't supposed to be ridiculously politicised, and that the administration has spoken to the tutor responsible for that; the climate of the seminar has improved since then, and their awareness of the situation is probably the reason that happened. i didn't speak to the administration about it, but i had voiced my frustration to the writing archon, and i have a feeling he passed my concerns along. i hadn't said anything, because i didn't know how and i didn't think it would help anyway. apparently, complaining about things can in fact improve a situation. this is a valuable lesson.

i am also relieved to learn that the administration is aware that a small group of freshmen are doing way the hell too many hard drugs way too often, and that they're trying to address the situation. offering treatment comes before kicking the kids out, but at least they know, and they're doing what they can. i think, to some extent, that the self-policing element of the community is broken, and though i don't live on-campus and i don't want to narc out people on the basis of rumour, i am going to go to the administration to complain about people who come to class high, or who constantly come to class hungover and unprepared and spend the whole tutorial whispering stories about how fucked up they were last night. because it's fucking tiresome. being made aware that i can do that, and be taken seriously, is also a valuable thing to know.

so i'll hang on til next semester and see if the behaviour of the freshman class is improved by don rags. the endless partying might be considerably reduced by a few threats, and if people actually buckle down and do their freaking readings, classes actually might not suck.

maybe.

once people start taking their studies seriously, they might start taking discussions seriously, as well. which might provide an opportunity to start having actual conversations with people, and to get them to gain even a glimmer of insight into themselves and the world in which they live. ms mora pointed out that these kids -- many of them, anyway -- grew up with that common and pernicious belief that racism and sexism and bigotry had all somehow been magically fixed, and didn't exist anymore, which meant that making racist and sexist jokes wasn't racist or sexist, but "edgy". that's a problem in the country as a whole, so of course it's going to be a problem here, too. if my classmates sober up enough, maybe we can talk about this. maybe by talking about it, we can work on it. when i was 18, i was perhaps not quite that naive, but it did take me a while to realise just how deeply society was still mired in hateful bullshit. i had to experience the bullshit firsthand to really figure it out. if the kids here don't get that experience -- and they might not -- they're probably not going to learn about it themselves. trying to help them notice the bullshit is better than being angry at them for not noticing the bullshit, and certainly more productive.

i'm going to write a response to some of the more egregious shit and submit it to The Moon. if i have enough time to work on The Moon and do the rest of my work, i think i might try. it's such a sorry-assed excuse for a student paper that i didn't even want to try getting involved with it, but despite being perpetually moribund, it's unlikely to die any time soon. as long as it's run by subliterate jackholes, it's going to be a wasteland of clever-kid cynicism and jokes about TEH OMG GHEY, so i might as well try to make it a bit less vile. it's better than seething with rage every time a new issue comes out.

i really don't know where to start, since we're already at a point where a privileged white kid attending a school for privileged white kids dresses up in blackface for halloween (as part of his Post-Assassination-MLK jr costume) and a bunch of other privileged white kids at same privileged-white-kid school write approvingly about it in their school paper, but all i can do is try. i can at least take down the sexist asshat who wasted a page-and-a-half of ink on an incomprehensible sexist rant, even if he is the senior editor.

i cannot believe the unmitigated racist, misogynistic, homophobic bullshit i am being asked to deal with at st. john's. i cannot believe the level of drug abuse that is tolerated at st. john's. i cannot believe any of it. i am going to the dean tomorrow, and i am going to talk to her, but i don't know how much good it's going to do. i don't know if i should even stay.

oh. that's what a Form is.

personal challenge: work the title of a Mountain Goats song into every title of every seminar essay.

so far, i am 1 for 1.