A night out: Text exchange.

So a few weeks ago I met a friend for a drink after finishing up some administrative stuff downtown, then hit up a couple bars after that.

The last bar of the night was a recently opened wine bar with a non-traditional menu, including pork tots.

So, though, I usually don't get food, I got the pork tots, and texted my one modern Czech literature professor friend:

Im eating pork tots.

I know she likes the unexpected, and I know that just the way those words appeared on her iPhone, that she'd get a kick out of them.

When she got that text, she texted back:

That is the most awesome text I've ever gotten aside from anything my daughter sends me.

. . .

Ayn Rand tidbits!

The other week I taught about Ayn Rand's thought, and then how it related to how she liked to get f*ck*d.

First, I made the kid's read "John Galt's Speech" from Atlas Shrugged and had a major assignment crafted around; it's a really important text in today's world, but it's kind of long if you're not totally into it, so I made sure they *had* to read it for class.

Second, after discussing that and then comparing it to the modern self-esteem movement, I passed out a timeline of how Ayn Rand got into some twisted sexual shit, and then had them read excerpts from a memoir of her one disciple who f*ck*d her and the infamous rape scene from the Fountainhead.

Then, we talked.

Highlights:

1) In our discussion of the speech, one student said she got the feeling that Ayn Rand must have written that speech while having very little contact with anyone else, or at least anyone who thought differently from her.

"Wow," I was like, "That's absolutely right!  That's crazy, you aesthetically intuited history just from the prose style of a philosophical speech...  At one point, she didn't leave her New York City apartment for 33 days in a row."

Then, I added, "She also took a lot of methamphetamines."

2) It was pretty obvious to all the kids that the situation Ayn Rand really doesn't talk about is people who are economically oppressed and really can't get ahead since things are stacked against them.

3) In discussing the rape scene, one pointed out that the man initiates sex - and Ayn Rand had complained to a young disciple that her husband never initiated sex with her (and wasn't rough enough with her, as well).

Someone also added, "It's not really a rape, it's a fantasy of a rape" - to which someone added, "A lot of people do have rape fantasies."

4) One's student research question is to see how much government aid Rand got when she first arrived in the U.S., and at the end of her life.

. . .

Fundamentalist field trip!

Highlights from my class's fieldtrip to a local fundamentalist church:

1) A tourist from Tennessee, this blonde woman with tons of make-up and on crutches because of a withered foot, told me at the post-service guest reception that Ashley Judd was "radical" and had "lost touch with her roots" and really wasn't a "fiscal conservative".

She also asked if I was a Christian, and I said that I used to go to Catholic school but never really practiced.  She didn't reply.

2) I was really really struck by evangelicalism is defined by "narrative thinking" - the relation of anecdotes to make the gospel new, but also part of a wider phenomenon (e.g. explaining global warming by saying that more and more asphalt is affecting thermometers, understanding Obama's economic policies through Joe the Plumber)...

At the post-services tour, the tour guide was relating some different stories (e.g. how the church founder got bread and water after prayer, when he was ministering to dying soldiers; how a guy on the Titanic yelled out, "Women, children, and the unsaved first"; how the church founder said the distance to heaven was "one step - will you take it?").

I later related those to my students who weren't there, and they found them corny - and I had to tell them that the people there nodded their heads at them, and they found them deeply meaningful.

3) After the post-services tour ended, I was leaving the choir section, and the tour guide sidled up the woman from Tennessee and was like, "You know, my brother is an atheist, he says religion is a crutch..."

Great convo: Bar near the train station.

So a few Mondays ago I had a meeting with a graduating senior to inform him that he could no longer receive credit for the class; I had extended help on multiple occasions and thought he was finally working, but he didn't follow advice on 2 major writing assignments and cut corners on things that I had explicitly flagged he should do, resulting in me being blindsided with the fact that suddenly 2 out of 3 major writing assignments were unacceptable, in addition to the huge ongoing problems with the weekly cumulative assignment (and we were then entering the 7th of 14 sessions).

I had consulted with multiple profs I know about how to handle a situation like this, and I re-examined his assignments, the reminders/advice that I had given him, and realized I had done everything right and I had in good faith extended more than enough opportunities for him to improve, and it really was the student who had let things snowball.

So, like my faculty mentor at the institution recommended, I sent the kid an email informing him that he could no longer receive credit for my course.

The kid requested a meeting, and so I said that if he wanted, I'd be able to meet with him to explain why it was no longer possible for him to receive credit.

In preparation, I made copies of his 2 corrected writing assignments and printed out our email correspondence (it took me like 30-40 minutes on an already busy day), and that last part was helpful for me, since I realized that even with the weekly cumulative assignments, he hadn't taken some of my advice seriously, even after we had met and he said he was serious about improving.

In any case, I went through all of that with him (I had marked "Reminder #1" through "Reminder #6" and "Explicit Request #1" through "Explicit Request #3" in the margins, as well as a few "?"s next to the emails where he claimed that emails had been lost), then he kept asking for another chance, I had to tell him straight up "No", he cried, I had to email his advisor to make sure someone reached out to him, and it made my day pretty shitty, esp. since our meeting went over and I was 6 minutes late to class.

So, after class and doing administrative stuff, I went barhopping downtown.

At the pizza place by the train station, I sidled up to the bar, where a (middle-aged) (black) woman was sitting there with a glass of water and a pint glass of some mixed cocktail that was a bright hot pink.

Me and her started chatting (she thought I gave the kid enough chances), and it turns out that she was an Amtrak worker on layover from another state, and her daughter was a graduating senior from a state school there who was doing really well and had gotten some good scholarships to a local middle-tier law school (tuition was reduced to just $10,000 a year).

She just kept gushing about her daughter's achievements, and how as a little kid her daughter even used to ride the trains with her.

"She toddled on those trains, she grew up on those trains, she damn near did everything on those trains but get conceived on one, and sometimes," she was like - and at that, she leaned back slack in her barstool with her eyes rolled up in a position like she was getting fucked, and she jerked her body and esp. her pelvis up in a one-two beat like she was going over train tracks  - "Sometimes," she was like, "I'm not even so sure about that."

"What a cool kid," I was like, and I raised my beer bottle to toast about her daughter, and the woman picked up the hot pink drink.

"Is that alcoholic?", I was like.  "It's bad luck to toast with a non-alcoholic drink."

"That," she said, pointing to her water, "Is the only non-alcoholic thing I drink."

My students are so smart! - Evangelicalism.

In my evangelicalism unit, I was drawing my students' attention to how there's a huge range of loosely-associated institutions (churches, publishing houses, universities, radio stations, etc.), and I was going to make the point that since they're all independent, people have to know by word-of-mouth which ones are 'kosher' or not.

So, I told a story from the field trip that past Sunday to a local fundamentalist church, about how a visitor asked if the seminary associated with the church founder was still "solid", and the tour guide said that it was sadly not, and that not only was the theology not good, but that when he visited, students there couldn't even tell him where the church founder's house was, even though they were 50 feet away from it.

"Now what was that about?", I was like.  "I'm being serious here, it's a really important point."

My one redheaded student raised her hand, and I called on her.

"Money," she was like.

That kind of threw me, so I asked her to expand on her thoughts.

"If people give money, they won't give it there, but to the places where the guy approves of."

"Exactly," I was like, and then expounded my original point about how evangelical gossip plays the same role as the CDF cracking down on the liberal nun ethicist, because they don't have direct control with which to "dick around" someone (my words; I love being able to swear in class).

Bugs redux (2 of 2): Bug dream.

(I don't have trash bags for my sink; rather, I save plastic wrappers [e.g. ramen noodle wrappers, bags from prepackaged carrots] and use those for veggie scraps and coffee grounds, and then after keeping it in my kitchen sink, chuck them that day or the next.)

The other night I had a dream -

I picked up the ramen noodle bag of vegetable scraps, and water and coffee grounds were pooled around the bottom on the sink where it had sat, and as I picked the bag up, water poured off of it, and I noticed it was torn and there were potatoes or onions inside - and masses of fruit flies were being roused and flying out of the bag and up around my hand and into the air above the sink, and everywhere I looked on the potato skins fruit flies were stirring, and I felt queasy.

Bugs redux (1 of 2): Wall bug.

Like last week I woke up around 10am (slept in a bit b/c I had had some hellacious late days for 2 days before that) and I saw a black dot crawling around far up on the wall between some windows.

Somehow, I knew it was one of those small black bugs that had invaded my rice.

I got up and stood on my 1950s dark green loveseat, and sure enough, it was one of those small black bugs.

I crushed it with the thumb of my right hand.