Joan Baez - "Here's to You"
My idea of eternity spent in Heaven is a bottomless bottle of Peach Snapple, a package of Toastchee Peanut Butter Crackers (you know, the orange ones?) that reproduces itself every 6 crackers, a trashy Stephen King book that never ends (this one is plausible), and Vince Guaraldi Trio or Abbey Road playing endlessly on the stereo. (John may recognize that my idea of heaven sounds a good deal like a summer spent at Queen's College Charlotte).
My idea of eternity spent in Hell is to be stuck driving a car west at sunset, so that the sun is always in your eyes, like that horrible 30-60 minutes of the day when the sun is neither above the flip-down shade-thing nor below the dashboard. Also, every radio station I play would never return from commercial.
On Memorial Day I went to the Fundamentals Picnic at Prof. Cohler's wonderfully retro home. "Fundamentals: Issues & Texts" is a program I recently picked up as my second major, which involves
1. A "fundamental" question formulated by the student like "Is there a just war?" or "What is marriage?" which will dictate the classes taken in the program, and will be "answered" in a paper written junior year.
2. An exam given by the Fundamentals faculty 4th year which drills each student on six "fundamental" texts they have chosen to study closely. Most of the time these texts are what are traditionally defined as "Great Books" or the Canon or whatever.
The program also tends to accept the most exquisitely awkward people in the university. So the picnic was, well, no picnic. Lots of people standing around a table with catered Italian food trying to discuss Nietzsche and Star Wars. Not that there's anything wrong with doing that. But that sort of social situation should not be forced among people who are too intelligent to make conversation look easy. As for me, I spent a lot of time taking minute bites of the piece of bread I was clutching like a stress ball and staring at Prof. Cohler's mantle of tchotchkes and the Tigger greeting card he had from one of his children which read, "Happy Birthday from your OFFSPRING!"
Speaking of STAR WARS, no matter how good or bad the new movie ultimately was, this is the first time in 7, 8 years I have spent class time drawing pictures of Tie-Fighters and the Millenium Falcon in the margins of my notes in the wake of "Revenge of the Sith."
Since this post has already passed the Point of No Return on the nerd factor, I might as well mention that last Thursday I took part in Sarah and Emily's play they wrote for the class, Tolkien: Medieval & Modern. This involved me and Alex dressing up as hobbits (no large effort, really) and performing a script rich in Tolkien backstory and lore much too obscure for any healthy person to be knowledgeable about. The premise was that we were all descendants of Sam performing a historical play for a hobbit wedding, so consider: not only were we playing Middle-Earth deities, we were also playing "actual" hobbits (with recorded lineages) playing Middle-Earth deities. It was more meta than Last Action Hero.
My bicycle, who I named Sir Walter Raleigh, is now in storage for the summer, but last weekend I spent an entire morning changing the tires from a mountain-bike tread to a smoother street bicycle tire. Until now, Walter and I have had a fun, but fairly distant relationship. And I'll be honest, for a while I was starting to consider trading it in for a vintage street bicycle which would make for a smoother ride around Hyde Park, and truly would just look more hipster. But now that I got my hands dirty and spent a few hours on the ground just taking Walter apart and putting him back together, really getting to know the parts, I feel like we've stepped our relationship up a level. Me and Walter are in it for the long haul, I think.
So I'm "finally" back in Alpharetta; "finally" being a relative term, because to people in Chicago I'm "already" back home, since finals week goes through this Friday. My job starts tomorrow, even though I have heard nothing from my supervisor as to where or when I'm supposed to show up (and more importantly, whether I can wear Birkenstock sandals). Until then, it's starting to feel like the typical Alpharetta summer: profound boredom, lots of sitting in traffic, guilty feelings about how I should be spending time curing cancer like Kristen instead of diligently downloading the "Revenge of the Sith" soundtrack song-by-song off the internet.
And by the way, I hope everyone caught the scathing article on Alpharetta in the New York Times last week. I enjoyed how the "happy ending" that the writer gives to the article is that the family he followed moves out of Alpharetta.
My idea of eternity spent in Heaven is a bottomless bottle of Peach Snapple, a package of Toastchee Peanut Butter Crackers (you know, the orange ones?) that reproduces itself every 6 crackers, a trashy Stephen King book that never ends (this one is plausible), and Vince Guaraldi Trio or Abbey Road playing endlessly on the stereo. (John may recognize that my idea of heaven sounds a good deal like a summer spent at Queen's College Charlotte).
My idea of eternity spent in Hell is to be stuck driving a car west at sunset, so that the sun is always in your eyes, like that horrible 30-60 minutes of the day when the sun is neither above the flip-down shade-thing nor below the dashboard. Also, every radio station I play would never return from commercial.
On Memorial Day I went to the Fundamentals Picnic at Prof. Cohler's wonderfully retro home. "Fundamentals: Issues & Texts" is a program I recently picked up as my second major, which involves
1. A "fundamental" question formulated by the student like "Is there a just war?" or "What is marriage?" which will dictate the classes taken in the program, and will be "answered" in a paper written junior year.
2. An exam given by the Fundamentals faculty 4th year which drills each student on six "fundamental" texts they have chosen to study closely. Most of the time these texts are what are traditionally defined as "Great Books" or the Canon or whatever.
The program also tends to accept the most exquisitely awkward people in the university. So the picnic was, well, no picnic. Lots of people standing around a table with catered Italian food trying to discuss Nietzsche and Star Wars. Not that there's anything wrong with doing that. But that sort of social situation should not be forced among people who are too intelligent to make conversation look easy. As for me, I spent a lot of time taking minute bites of the piece of bread I was clutching like a stress ball and staring at Prof. Cohler's mantle of tchotchkes and the Tigger greeting card he had from one of his children which read, "Happy Birthday from your OFFSPRING!"
Speaking of STAR WARS, no matter how good or bad the new movie ultimately was, this is the first time in 7, 8 years I have spent class time drawing pictures of Tie-Fighters and the Millenium Falcon in the margins of my notes in the wake of "Revenge of the Sith."
Since this post has already passed the Point of No Return on the nerd factor, I might as well mention that last Thursday I took part in Sarah and Emily's play they wrote for the class, Tolkien: Medieval & Modern. This involved me and Alex dressing up as hobbits (no large effort, really) and performing a script rich in Tolkien backstory and lore much too obscure for any healthy person to be knowledgeable about. The premise was that we were all descendants of Sam performing a historical play for a hobbit wedding, so consider: not only were we playing Middle-Earth deities, we were also playing "actual" hobbits (with recorded lineages) playing Middle-Earth deities. It was more meta than Last Action Hero.
My bicycle, who I named Sir Walter Raleigh, is now in storage for the summer, but last weekend I spent an entire morning changing the tires from a mountain-bike tread to a smoother street bicycle tire. Until now, Walter and I have had a fun, but fairly distant relationship. And I'll be honest, for a while I was starting to consider trading it in for a vintage street bicycle which would make for a smoother ride around Hyde Park, and truly would just look more hipster. But now that I got my hands dirty and spent a few hours on the ground just taking Walter apart and putting him back together, really getting to know the parts, I feel like we've stepped our relationship up a level. Me and Walter are in it for the long haul, I think.
So I'm "finally" back in Alpharetta; "finally" being a relative term, because to people in Chicago I'm "already" back home, since finals week goes through this Friday. My job starts tomorrow, even though I have heard nothing from my supervisor as to where or when I'm supposed to show up (and more importantly, whether I can wear Birkenstock sandals). Until then, it's starting to feel like the typical Alpharetta summer: profound boredom, lots of sitting in traffic, guilty feelings about how I should be spending time curing cancer like Kristen instead of diligently downloading the "Revenge of the Sith" soundtrack song-by-song off the internet.
And by the way, I hope everyone caught the scathing article on Alpharetta in the New York Times last week. I enjoyed how the "happy ending" that the writer gives to the article is that the family he followed moves out of Alpharetta.
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