Green Eggs and Hamlet

three things:

1. Since I desperately needed and wanted work, I posed as a Real Lighting Designer to get a lighting design job. I am not a Real Lighting Designer; I am a sound technician who has helped out on lighting hangs/focuses and stood near Real Lighting Designers sometimes. Now, understandably, the director is expecting me to produce a Real Lighting Design and do the hang and focus and program the board by opening on Friday. lawls?

2. Yesterday, cleaning my bookshelf, I found a picture of my late Democratic California Grandfather (n.b.: different from Republican North Carolina Grandfather) standing next to Richard Nixon. This picture was signed. By Richard Nixon. And utterly inexplicable. again, lawls?

3. I've been going to free skool classes/study sessions on Physics For People Who Don't Really Get Physics. (The class is actually called "Physics for Everyone.") Last night I went to a free skool shape note singing class. Overlap of attendance between Baby Physics class and shape note singing class? Nearly 100%. correlation? causation? you decide.

Life and other Plans
err um so
I graduated from college, moved out of 147, kicked it around massachusetts for a week, came back to oberlin for a week of summer thunderstorms, audio tech cramming, and hanging out with friends and faculty, and tomorrow depart for Atlanta, GA.

Here's the itinerary - if you're going to be any of these places, check out http://www.girlyman.com/showdates/ for full show information.

June 19th - Santa Monica, CA
Jun. 20th - San Diego, CA
Jun. 21st - Santa Barbara, CA, Live Oak Music Festival
Jun. 23rd - Tucson, AZ
Jun. 24th - Flagstaff, AZ
Jun. 27th - 28th - Laytonville, CA, Kate Wolf Memorial Music Festival

I will be: driving a big red van, glamorously loading and unloading equipment, mixing the shows, and learning more about sound tech more rapidly than ever in my life. I cannot wait.

You asked for it
I am back in Santa Cruz - 2.5 hour emergency fuel stop in Omaha, snowstorms in Utah, 8 hour surprise delay in Salt Lake City, and one suitcase full of drenched clothes and library books nonwithstanding. way to go, aviation industry.

In other news, you asked for it. This is a 10-page essay in its natural, double-spaced environment, so it's a big cut. responses, editorial comments, etc. are all welcome.

( Neoliberalism, Modernity, and Cherry Chapstick: The Sexual Politics of Katy Perry )

dispatches from the queer cultural worker frontlines
I am .5 conclusions away from finishing my paper. but then, I have to go to the art library to use the color printer to print our pictures of katy Perry wearing a football uniform and straddling a giant tube of cherry chapstick.

( A sample from my latest publication )
Let me know if you want to read the rest of it. You will probably want to bang your head against the keyboard, but you will probably laugh a lot too.

omigod you guys.

revelation: Katy Perry never wears pants.

It's true. I will personally mail cookies to anyone who can find a picture of Katy Perry wearing pants. the legs must be covered. must.

this lends a whole new twist to my research.

the sun rose at 8:04 am today. you know it's winter in the northern latitudes when.

shaping up to be a not-excruciating finals period. pros of life:

-finals that remain are a prospectus/bibliography for honors and a 10-15 pp. paper on Katy Perry
-guess whose midwestern liberal arts college campus Girlyman will be playing at on May 1st? That's right, MINE.
-A Very Fruity Holiday Party went down in our living room last night, featuring Swedish mulled wine and elf-shaped decorations
-knee-high argyle socks
-learning to spell argyle.
-Hannukah party featuring Oberlin's on B-52 cover band on the docket tonight

on the other hand, I do have 34 library and OhioLINK items to return to Mudd by Wednesday, and it's 29 degrees out. hmm.

finals project that i am stressed out and unhappy about:
huge paper & revision thereof on dramatic literature, the body, postcolonialism, memory, and how not to write papers the size of russia when lichtenstein will do.

finals projects i have no strong feelings about:
tarting up ESL lesson plans
prospectus and annotated bibliography for honors

finals project that are awesome:
silkscreening "Mister Hillary and hir Fabulous Fairchildren's Fruit-of-the-Month Calendar" featuring my fruitiest co-co-opers posing with grapefruits and bananas
research paper on Katy Perry's inadvertently queer agenda, written as diva camp performance. hopefully.

back to work, yo.

regarding (un)employment
the only job I can think of that I actually want is working for Daemon Records.

(they're not hiring.)

(this is a cop-out post. It's not like nothing's happened in the past three weeks, I've just been sort of taking an interwub-break, amplified by my computer's brief-but-grave-but-now-cured illness.)

have:
read the entirety of Terrorist Assemblages (sample quote: "Can we keep our sense open to emergent and unknown forms of belonging, connectivity, intimacy, the unintentional and indeterminate slippages and productivities of of domination, to signal a futurity of affective politics?")
thin crispy melty snow layer
bagels, far away in the co-op (courtesy of

flyinghambo )
readings, tea lights, and silk-screened posters for tonight's Transgender Day of Remembrance Vigil
5 books from the oberlin public library's book sale, for the grand total of $2.50. including Maya Angelou, bell hooks, and Annie Dillard. this feels somehow wrong. (capitalism is working? sort of?)
crampity cramps
thanksgiving plans that involve seeing the fam and meeting the newlywed cousin-in-law
library poetry
mango ceylon black tea

need:
more heat, more often
9 more pages in this english tutorial essay
a coherent response to Terrorist Assemblages and some basic steps towards actually doing my honors project
to make posters for the fancy contradance and t-shirts for my clandestine t-shirt business
life plans

barackin the vote
and that's about all i have to say about it.

the kitten thing has vastly improved my quality of life. she like to snuggle my sleeves while I read/type and mew plaintively if I do not cuddle her sufficiently.

I read Bone Black and The Queen of America Goes to Washington City, canvassed a lot and phone banked for Barack Obama, biked to and from Lake Erie, patched a flat on a street corner in Lorain, baked pumpkin and regular-wheat bread, listened to Kent State's NPR station, slept a bunch, socially-hermitted, watched "Kinsey", walked around in autumn, screened shirts and underwear, and cleaned things. that was basically my break. i feel good about it and also ready for it to be over.

goals: resume & life plans; turning my honors project from a flowchart to an outline/essay proposal, saying luminous things about the postcolonial body in contemporary american drama, playing some music sometime, first snow.

Current Music: sufjan stevens - illinoise

omg eleven !1!! I just met bell hooks, well sort of, and she's giving a talk on place and sustainability in Finney in one hour omg omg. for reals.

I'm definitely in Oberlin for fall break: I will be canvassing for Obama and silkscreening dorky queer t-shirts. If anyone wants a shirt that says "Save the Gay Whales" or "oh hai i'm in ur discourses dekonstructing ur gender binary" you are welcome to give me a shirt and I will do the rest.

coffee & kitten & crooked still & dykacademic day = as it turns out, I rather like this after all.

Current Music: did you sleep well? - crooked still

We live across the street from the middle school field, and every weekday afternoon they drill tiny little seventh-grade football players out there, lining them up and constructing masculinity all over that damn field. Sometime (such as now) they do an exercise where the coach calls out "are you ready!?" and then they all grunt in unison. I am not kidding.

I have a radio show! folky goodness with a trad-ish twist, mondays 10-11 am, WOBC 91.5 broadcasting from the charming third-floor student union station.

It's really quite difficult to bike in a prom dress and heels. i had not really encountered this problem all that much before.

Northern California and autumn in Ohio: I may be doing it wrong.
I only own one piece of rainproof clothing. It is a black leather motorcycle jacket.

also I broke a hanger the last time I tried to do the coat hanger trick. twice in a row. oops.

last first time
back! in oberlin! exclamations!

The sweet red house is sweet and red and gradually de-grungifying, and my room is green with blue floorboards and wooden panels and I made myself a bed-nest by a window where I can pretend I am on the second story of a boat floating in the sea of Ohio. The co-op is so so lovely to return to, and the housemates are all here now and we haven't all been in the same room since possibly ever. Yesterday was mostly about me making dinosaur noises and charging at/hugging people whom I had not seen in 4 or 8 or 13 months.

I'm actually quite excited to be back, which is a good way to start the year, even though I can already feel that free time concepts slipping away through my fingers. I also have cold feet about Honors and recently learned exciting new information about classes I didn't realize I had to take to graduate. Also I may have missed a couple important boats involving employment, etc. The "juice," however, did survive the airplane trip, and is in fact not juice but instead Argentinian liquor, which is a nice counterpoint.

Barack Obama. Such a ~~fox~~ good orator.

today, I went back and visited my high school teachers and one of them compared George Bush's intellectual capacity to that of a nearby geranium (unfavorably). I also got to field The Question several times. "Actually, I was thinking I'd just beg some sweet struggling grassroots non-profit to employ me, probably to fix the coffee machine! Which is good 'cause I have a lot of experience making coffee."

How does one transport a bottle or two of, um, juice via airplane, if one's checked baggage consists of a guitar case and a duffel bag?

On the cover of today's Santa Cruz Sentinel, my mother and I are in the picture of marchers at the Watsonville Pride Parade.

( on family. and creating change. )

I'm moving into a sweet red house on North Pleasant Street in less than a week. I have cold feet about my CAS honor project on the Real ID Act, but I did get into a philosophical discussion at a bus stop the other day over the Althusser I was reading as prep. I got serenaded by the members of a local improv troop on the occasion of recently-having-had-a-birthday, in which they made fun of the fact that I live in Ohio, my hairy legs, and my Engish degree, and then apologized for making fun of my English degree, and I explained that I'm totally insensitive to people making fun of my English degree. I biked for miles listening to trans and queer Jewish rockers against the occupation. I'm just about ready for my last school year for a while or ever, I think.

my first legal drink in the US was called a Pink Cowboy. yes, it was every bit as fruity as it sounds.

freegina's wedding was beautiful and scottish and involved many groomsmen in kilts and also a ceremonial slaying of the Spam Dragon. which is really the only was to do it.

Yesterday I read Valencia in Capitola and rescued a starfish and drank espresso and biked around and ended up on a beach watching the stoners at the next bonfire over smoke up and try and jump over the fire. oh, santa cruz.

buzzed hair. caused minor familial altercation. purchased dress. all better now, possibly.

please make me feel better about the fact that the majority of my productive hours* today have been spent painting modpodge onto a screen that says "Save the Gay Whales."

*the rest have been spent upon: reading Real Live Nude Girl, digging holes in the backyard.

it may actually be about time to go back to school.

Current Music: lindsay mac

Advertisement