Letter to the Editor

The Birmingham News printed my letter about Larry Langford's most recent publicity stunt. If you are unfamiliar with the day of prayer, burlap sack fiasco, I direct you to this article from The Birmingham Weekly: "Leapin' Larry's Prayer Proclamation".

My letter is in today's paper and online here.

I also encourage everyone to write Mr. Langford to complain. You can reach him at larry.langford@birminghamal.gov.

Accident & Emergency

I'm not sure if I've written about this here yet, but I've been taking a class this term for fun. As a staff member, I'm able to take one class a semester for free. So I decided to take Postmodernism in Philosophy, and we've been studying Habermas, Lyotard, and Rorty. It's been a fascinating class, and I've thoroughly enjoyed diving deeper into some of the philosophers that I only briefly studied in college, but I'm a bit nervous because I have a paper proposal due on Wednesday for the first paper I've written in almost three years. The process is a bit daunting to say the least. I have a general idea of what I'm wanting to write the paper on, postmodern aesthetics (more or less), but I'm having a hard time writing my proposal. I think I just need to find my way back into that process. The problem is that I've already fallen into the habits of college in which I start some sort of large scale reorganization/restructuring/cleaning as a procrastination attempt. I've already reorganized my bookshelves and DVDs (according to subject and author for the books and genre and quality for the DVDs). It's pathetic.

On a completely unrelated note, I've been thoroughly enjoying the new Goldfrapp album, Seventh Tree which I was a bit disappointed with at first. It's a lot more subdued than the previous albums, but it's grown on me the more I've listened to it. It didn't hurt that it fit the somewhat morose/resigned mood I found myself in most of last week. My favorite tracks at the moment are 'Eat Yourself' and the first single 'A&E.' I've included the video for the latter below.



Something I found interesting: 'A&E' stands for accident and emergency. Patrick Wolf had a song on his last album, The Magic Position, entitled "Accident & Emergency," which I also am quite fond of. Here's the video for it:



Edit: It has been brought to my attention that the "Accident & Emergency" department is the British name for the Emergency room. Good to know.

I kind of suck at this.

Blogging, I mean. I'm glad that I wrote that post about the topical posts that I'm 'writing' on April Fool's Day because they may never happen. I haven't spent another second on either post. The atheism post will happen eventually in some form, but I'm going to reduce my post on Tiny Toons to the following statement: I think a large subset of our generation's sense of humor is derived from Tiny Toons and Animaniacs. I will offer no evidence to support this statement at this time, but if you watched those shows with the same fervor I did, I have a feeling you'd agree.

I've been kind of up and down lately. I had a date recently, which I think went really well, but having been on a date at all brought up all of these issues and concerns with which I haven't had to deal lately because I haven't been dating. It's so rare that I find someone that I'm actually legitimately interested in that I think I may get too excited. I also find the whole practice of dating somewhat foreign since I don't find myself doing it often. I'm of the mind that if you like someone, you're up front and say so and move on from there. This hasn't always worked well for me in the past as I think that sometimes people aren't used to that sort of directness. Of course, other times, I behave in the exact opposite manner, and I don't tell someone that I'm interested and then they end up dating someone else. I find this whole process incredibly interesting, and I see how people behave in this arena, and I'm confused, and then I see how I behave in this arena, and I'm even more confused, but it's an ever-evolving process that I just have to dive into and figure out as I go. A good friend who is older recently told me that you feel the same way when you're forty-five and navigating these waters as you do when you're twenty-four, so she said not to worry and just go for it. The not worrying thing I will probably have a problem with as I can get pretty anxious about things sometimes, but I'm certainly willing to try it out. I like this guy, but we've only been on one date. I hope to go on more. If it works out, that's wonderful. If not, then at least we had one kick-ass date, from which, like all life experiences, I can learn.

So as I was saying before I went off on a tangent, I've been kind of up and down recently. Part of this is because I'm nervous about my decision to explore the dating world again, but the biggest catalyst for my vacillating disposition is that I sent in my deferral form to the New School on the fifteenth, which finalized my decision to stay here another year. When I sent them the fax with my credit card information to pay the deferral deposit, my heart sank a bit, because even though I am thoroughly enjoying my time here in Birmingham, and I love my friends deeply, I'm still feeling a little stuck. I'm hoping some projects I'm about to start working on will help me feel differently, but I am feeling it now nonetheless. I keep asking myself, "Is it becoming stagnant, or is it just a brief pause?" 'It' has several referents.

In other news, I'm still fumbling my way through my attempts at learning Reason, which I'm hoping will help me in my songwriting and recording. I'm going to have to get through this learning curve first though.

Also, Friday night was the third Kids Got the Disco, and it was tons of fun. We had right around 200 people come again, and everyone was dancing and looked like they were having a great time. This event is becoming a highlight of my month, so if you haven't been, I highly recommend that you come to the next one on May 16th.

A pre-bed 'this and that'

I'm working on what's turning into an essay on a theory that I have that an increasingly dominant subset of my generation's sense of humor is at least in part derived from the influence of Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs (and to a lesser extent Freakazoid). Whether anyone ends up agreeing with it or not, I'm having fun writing it. I hope to have it posted at some point this week. I've also written a bit of the second part of my (hypothetical at this point) series on atheism, which of course is as irregular as anything I try to do on this blog has been (and, lets be honest, probably will be).

Life's going well at the moment. I was accepted to The New School for Social Research, though I am going to have to defer a year, as I am financially incapable of moving to New York at the moment. I'm hoping to save this coming year, reapply for financial aid next spring (and hopefully get more than I did this time around), and then go in Fall '09. I'm also planning on applying to a few other places in the interim, which is what I intended from the onset of this process. The New School's due date was significantly later than the due dates of the other schools to which I'm applying, and I wasn't ready to apply anywhere when the other applications were due. I'm certainly ready now, though I think I'll take the GRE again and actually allow myself time to properly study this time.

Anyway, I'm off to bed. Other entries to come, but the editor in me won't let go of these topical entries, so I just keep hitting 'save now' and rewriting, never clicking 'publish post.'

And now I'm escaping as I'm teetering over the edge of making this a metablog (if it isn't already), and god knows we don't need one of those.