I’m limping across the finish line of this week, so a few thoughts that aren’t really full postings unto themselves:
Just for a hoot, try this: transfer the audio CD of Sarah Vowell’s Assassination Vacation to your mp3 player. Then, set it on ‘random.’
I did that, without knowing I had set it on random. Despite switching tracks about every three minutes, a half hour went by before I realized anything was amiss. And I’ve read the book!
I just didn’t remember it being quite that…experimental.
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Is anyone else completely creeped out by that Burger King guy in the unmoving mask?
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This week a student told me he had to cut back to part-time school so he could keep his
full-time job to pay for his methadone. As excuses go, that ain’t bad.
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It’s a measure of how degraded our political culture has become that we devote more coverage to Katie Couric and Meredith Vieira than to the revelation that Bush actually ordered the leak of a CIA agent’s name to punish a political opponent.
I predict the usual conservative trolls will work their usual echo-chamber magic, and within a few days we’ll be heaping scorn on anybody who suggests that Bush doesn’t have the right, nay, the duty, to blow agents’ cover to protect his own approval ratings.
Nothing against Meredith Vieira, but I was rooting for Natalie Morales. Sigh.
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It’s a good thing we have Homeland Security protecting us from the likes of the deputy of Homeland Security who just got busted for soliciting a 14 year old girl.
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I saw a poet speak on campus yesterday, which was a terrible idea. She was able to switch voices, narrative speeds, whenever it suited her purposes. That has never been one of my skills. It made me insanely jealous. There are topics I’d love to address, if I had the writerly chops to do them justice, but nooo. This must be how the guy who made “Logan’s Run” felt after seeing “Star Wars” for the first time. “Humbling” doesn’t quite capture it. Sometimes being completely outclassed is more incapacitating than inspiring.
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The rubber-chicken circuit is starting again. For the next few weeks, it’s all end-of-year functions, all the time. Better stock up on coffee and Diet Coke while I still can…
