what is wrong with me/oh life

Chelsea Clinton is coming to speak at my campus soon, but I've decided not to go because I had already slated that particular day for shopping. Yes, those are seriously my priorities, and I am not ashamed to say it (plus, I've already seen her father speak, and in any case, I'm more interested in the parents than the daughter).

In less pathetic news, my oral defense for my thesis is scheduled for next Thursday. This is good because I'll have a week to prepare for the hour-long grilling, but is terrifying because I am usually dead in the mornings. We'll see how it goes. I'll definitely write up a more detailed explanation of my thesis and how the defense goes next week.

To bring the ridiculousness level back up again, I'm participating in a crazy scavenger hunt/event known as "crunkfest" this weekend (I mean, it's 4/20! And it's my last year of college. I have to do it up!). Events in previous years have included: a circle jerk, piercing of genitalia, getting Chuck Norris to call the judges, streaking as many on-campus buildings as possible, and getting a rival school's student to shave their pubes. As you can tell, it's going to get really fucking crazy.

My team's name is the ga(y)ze because we all identify as queer, and I think we're pretty ready to go all out since we're all graduating. We just spent three hours tonight working on our team flag (which is actually a huge structure made with a ton of stolen campus goods...SHHHH!), and I'd previously put in four hours cutting a bunch of eyes out of magazines (I know, so clever).

In any case, the opening ceremony for the event is this Friday at 6pm, so I'll basically be MIA from then til Sunday night. Good times!

curioser and curioser

I found out today that I'll be honored with some other students at a dinner next month by the organization that brings together/umbrellas the campus groups for students of color, queer students, and low-income and first generation college students. This is completely shocking to me because I barely do anything on campus (most of my time has been spent doing academic work or being a research assistant, I've been woefully inadequate with my participation in these groups), so I'm wondering if they've made some kind of mistake (or if the clout of one of my favorite professors has somehow enabled me to get this award). Of course, there's always the (strong) possibility that I'll be getting the same award that a friend of mine got last year--which is solely reserved for students of color who don't really do campus groups but focus on academics. We shall see.

In other news, I saw Melissa Li and Kit Yan of the group Good Asian Drivers perform. They were funny and absolutely fabulous, and I would definitely urge you to check out their myspace (which is linked on the website) and to attend their show, if possible. Here's my favorite piece that they did:



As for the ex, the visit went pretty well all things considering, minus some awkwardness when we were at the rugby social. See, socials are basically an excuse to drink (read: get smashed) and socialize after the game, which is a problem when you don't drink and also don't know anyone there. In hindsight, it was probably not the best choice of an activity, but unfortunately, it was also the only thing that was going on at the time. Ah, the perils of attending a small school in the suburbs!

potential drama/awkwardness: hi(gh). so it goes.

The rash that I wrote about in the previous entry ended up making my entire face swell a la animated chipmunk. It was so sexy. I went to the doctor, she told me I have some virus (erythema infectiosum, what?) and there's nothing that she can do to make it better except give me lots of anti-histamines that make me sleepy. Fantastic.

Last night, I braved the world and went to a production of Othello with my Shakespeare and Critical Theory class. It wasn't bad...but I really didn't like how Othello was portrayed (the switch from being dismissive of Iago's points to being jealous and tortured was way too abrupt, and the actor also chose to play up the epileptic fits, which unfortunately ended up being more comical than anything else).

Today, my ex from sophomore year of high school who I've kind of sort of kept in touch with over the years is coming to visit me for the weekend. I'm not sure how this is going to go, seeing as the last time I saw him was sophomore year of college (for a quick dinner), but who knows, stranger things have been thrown my way and ended up okay.

I think the main plans today are to go to a student art opening on campus and just hang out. Tomorrow, we're headed into the city to check out a record store and fancy vegan restaurant, and then coming back for my friend's senior art show. Saturday I'm dragging him to a rugby game (whee! it's been a while for me too), and Saturday night he'll be headed on his bus back to Louisville.

We'll see how it goes. I have faith that things will be great. And if not, at least I'll have a somewhat amusing story to tell.

if it isn't one thing, it's another

So to celebrate finishing my thesis (well, the first draft anyways), my friend Evan and I went on an alcohol and cigarette run yesterday to a nearby state with no sales tax on the stuff. 8 bottles of Andre (I shit you not) and four packs of Nat Shermans later, I realized that I essentially paid less for that haul than I normally do for a single article of clothing. Go figure.

Went to the student café that my friend manages afterwards and did my old, drunk self proud, but without the belligerence that normally accompanies. Unfortunately, I woke up this morning with a horrible rash on my face (wtf?), so I’m thinking that I’m either allergic to cheap alcohol (say it ain’t so!) or I’ve really got to clean my room because something is really messing with my skin.

I’m skipping class out of sheer vanity and crossing my fingers that this stuff goes away by tomorrow. I’m headed over to the student health center soon, so hopefully they’ll let me know what happened and how I can make it better.

In other news, I’m starting to worry about the oral defense of my thesis, which should happen sometime in the next two weeks. I have no clue who my second reader is, and my adviser (being overbooked and just back from maternity leave) hasn’t read anything but my introduction and the postmodernism chapter (this is also my fault because of my procrastination…she didn’t email me to make meetings, and I was totally fine with this because I basically hadn’t done any work). In any case, we’ll see how everything pans out…worst comes to worst, I’ll bomb it and have to make more revisions than initially anticipated. Regardless, I’m safely into grad school, so all that matters is actually graduating.

a more substantive post will follow later, BUT

71 pages without the bells and whistles of a table of contents, acknowledgements, and bibliography, 11 hours of sleep in the last 3 days, way too much pizza, convenience store chicken fingers, and energy drinks, and now, at 9:03 on this lovely Monday morning, I am motherfucking done with my undergraduate thesis.

DONE!

ah to be young (and free)

One of the best things that can happen to you at 3:45 in the morning whilst in the process of cracked-outedly writing your thesis (due Monday!) and chainsmoking: A call from an old friend informing you that ze has just done a line of coke and the ensuing hilarity of that conversation.

One of the best quotes in a night full of gems from others in the same thesis-fucked boat: "I told them that I had to go home and masturbate and they told me to do it in the bathroom, but I was like: 'I'm already sleep deprived. I need to use my sex toys to conserve energy!'"

an hour and a half of my life that i'll never get back

So I just came back from a talk on modesty given by Wendy Shalit, and I'm not sure if I have anything more to say than:

1) It's reassuring to know that you can spin two entire books out of shaky statistics and a methodology that is weaker than the one in my (still unfinished, mind you) senior thesis

2) My opinion of Williams just dropped to the negatives for letting someone who can't even make a logical statement graduate (and I'm not saying this because I disagree with her points. She would literally say something incredibly disputable and trail off with "yeah" or start with "We all know (insert something that no, we don't all know/believe)" and then somehow forget to show the logical route that took her to this conclusion)

3) See title. I think that when I'm on my deathbed, I'm going to be really bitter about this lost time

I mean honestly, I might have appreciated the kernel of what she was saying (we should create a space for women who don't want to be empowered solely through sexuality) except that she took it to this extreme degree where value judgments were being tossed around (she called it "allowing women to have 'higher' standards. Yes, as if women who want to be sexual somehow have 'lower' standards), marriage was the be-all-end-all conclusion (we should save ourselves for the "right person" and a solid marriage is the indicator of a successful life), and feminism was represented as this malignant force that somehow pathologizes women for not wanting to be overtly sexual (I mean for godssakes, which feminists was she reading? The white, middle-class ones preaching sexual liberation in the fucking 60s? Thanks for reducing feminism to ONE PART of the fucking SECOND WAVE!).

It was seriously a shitshow, and I wish there was a nicer way to say it, but there isn't. While Shalit seemed like a friendly and personally engaging (though not on a group level) person, the reality is that her talk was ill-prepared and disorganized, there was nothing intellectually deep (or even intellectual period; I think the talk as it was is better geared towards a middle-school audience) about her points, and honestly, it wasn't even worth going to because there was nothing thought-provoking or stimulating about it. Just an hour and a half of poor logic, awkward analogies, bad statistics, and overblown and oftentimes offensive conclusions.