Morpheus beckons... still & looking at a gift horse in the mouth

Argh... I was supposed to wake up at 7:30 AM (after going to sleep at 4:30 AM), but for the umpteenth time, I hit the snooze in my sleep and woke up at 9 AM, with barely any time to prepare for the 9:55 AM class. This blog is getting addictive. Must control. Must...

Aww heck! Here we go again! *grin*

So I had an interesting ICQ conversation with the very attractive gf of my childhood buddy/mountain biking buddy (what a mouthful!) this morning, and some of the contents of the conversation went into her recent blog. Our ICQ conversation had its impetus in my comments on her blog, delivered via ICQ through her bf. Ah, round and round we go: Joyce would be proud of us.

It was refreshing to look at my good ol'friend (but really young looking) through another lens. How time flies. He's an uncle and here am I still reminiscing about vodka, bongs, UC Santa Cruz, angry bulls charging in the moonlight, and screaming "stoned immaculate" humanities majors (Jim Morrison).

So this lonely little blog is now conversing with another blog out there. How weird is that? Intertexuality of blogs as a dissertation topic, anyone?

Anyways, I hardly think I am being grandiloquent with my prose. It just comes so naturally. It is like, well, asking a track driver to drive with less finesse on the road. On the other hand, this could be a symptom of reading writers and critics who are verbose. I love Faulkner and Nabokov, to give you an idea. And in terms of theory, I wish I could write like Gayatri Spivak. So I guess these loves and wishes must somehow percolate into my subconscious and cause me to "use big words." Did I mention that I love Samuel Johnson and periodic sentences as well? I should post a long sentence from V. S. Naipaul one of these days. It is a work of art; a testament of prosaic artistry. [Here is ONE sentence]:


One day, late in the summer, walking past the old farm buildings and what had been Jack's cottage and garden--the junk and ruins which had formed no part of Jack's vision of a world ever renewed, ruins to which now, across the droveway, was added a burning pit in the chalk for industrial-looking rubbish, the fire of which occasionally singed the silver birches planted years before to screen the old patch of waste ground--one day, walking past the farm and its spreading litter and on up to where the Swiss rolls of hay had been stacked and were already going black and brilliant green with new shoots of grass, I heard the sound of a great fire behind the young wood--and that wood was no longer young. (V. S. Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival, pp. 80)


Next point (gosh, I hope this isn't turning into one of those essays!): why did I lie next to "Ellie" all night and did nothing? Well, charges of heterosexual (and then some...) homo sapien males being rutting canines by nature aside, thinking back, I just didn't feel it between us. I mean, she was attractive and cute, and certainly not overweight. Bottomline is: I have no idea. I would like to believe that I treasured the friendship too much to ruin it, but that's probably romanticized nostalgia. Till this day, I have no idea, no explanation.

Now we get to the issue of the "slim fanatic." I like to reiterate my stance that "attractiveness is relative," because "attractiveness" can have many forms. Someone may be physically attractive but ethically/morally repulsive. Ted Bundy certainly fits the bill. Is he attractive? Physically, maybe. Similarly, someone may be unattractive physically, but gorgeous intellectually. Of course, the opposite is also true. The following is a true anecdote:


PROFESSOR: Michelle, would you give us your impressions of Margaret Atwood's _A Handmaid's Tale_?

MICHELLE: Oh, [flashes her dazzling, perfectly aligned, whitened teeth] it's good. [Bats mascara-ed eyelashes]

PROFESSOR: Um... O...K... Perhaps you will like to elaborate on that a little more?

MICHELLE: Oh, [wrinkles forehead a little in concentration] it was VERY good! [Sits prettily, triumphant]


I think you get the idea.

Back to the "slim fanatic" issue. I think firstly, we need to distinguish between "friends" we associate with, and "potential partners." (And no, no, no, I'm not proposing "the Ladder Theory" here.) In the former category, I think a blanket discrimination seems unjustifiable and borders on bigotry. Some of my closest friends are plus-sized people. However, in the latter category, neither defence nor justification is necessary. I could point to examples like this MRI scan of two women : one in the normal range of the BMI index, and the other, um.. well... let's just leave it at that--BUT I won't. I will instead refer to an ancient proverb: De gustibus non est disputandum, or "There's no accounting for tastes." We are all different and unique. It would be a sad, sad world if all of us are only attracted to one type of people. Of course, the IBM drones must love that: a world of beige/gray boxes; how quaint. Even the prophylactics are probably gray... Oww... what a wet dream for Big Blue. (Hey, what can you expect from a company that has its own anthem? Can you say Kim Jung Il redux?)

Chicks who are tomboyish are the hottest, IMHO. The "Save Me! Save Me!" damsels in distress types get tiring after a while. There is very little that is sexier than a lady who can take care of herself, and hold her own. One of the professors I admire completed her Bachelors, Masters and PhD in unprecedented record time, but she also holds degrees in Akido and can whoop your ass. How sexy is that? A very special friend who lived beside me when I resided in this quaint Victorian house in Palo Alto is one of the sexiest women I know. She taught Mechanical Engineering (Plastics) part-time at Stanford, is an expert welder, loves book discussions, doesn't mind getting her hands greasy, her clothes grass-stained under her car with me, and was the inventor of the concept of BYPO (Bring Your Pillow Over), where the gang of us (the house consists of 2 studios, 3 one-bedroom apartments) would just cram into one room up and watch movies. And, oh yes, there will be food too! Nachos, chips, salsa, falafel, pop-corn, etc. Now that definitely was cozy and fun!

Thought of this when I was making coffee this morning:

Diamonds are forever, but marriage ain't?
Heck, many marriages don't even last until death (do us part).
Now, don't get me wrong, the last thing I desire is a situation where a wife is unwillingly trapped in a marriage. I would imagine being set on fire in the dead of the night, in bed, by an angry wife, would result in some significant damage to the libido, other injuries not withstanding, but if two people enter a marriage with the attitude that it IS only until death that they part, I believe that more marriages will stand a higher chance of working out. Standard disclaimers apply: i.e. I am not advocating the legalization of spousal homicide; I plea the 5th with regards to the question of whether I hold stock interests in the "medical practice" of Dr. Kevorkian.

Seriously, that is one of my biggest beef with the entire marriage industry: it makes a mockery of the vows when you swear before the public official (if you are secular) or the priest, and yet, possess the option to annul the union within a year, or divorce later. Why have the vows at all then? Why not just cohabit or have a common-law marriage?

6:23 PM: Interesting afternoon today: an unpleasant ending to a great start. I got my head bitten off for asking what I thought was a legitimate question in class: MLA or APA? And what the hell does it have to do with the type of computer and operating system I am using? One can employ MLA or APA on a typewriter or in longhand. Bah, PeeCee users and their sheep mentality (it is the most common platform, therefore, it must be good--read: lowest common denominator): bahhhhhhhhh! P.S. enjoy your spyware, malware, viruses, etc. While you are trying to get your WindBlows PeeCee to work, I'm doing work on my Macintosh.

I suspect the underlying cause is showing the professor up with regards to security chains for bicycles (he scoffed at the suggestion of getting "a chain that cannot be cut," and I proved not only that they exist, but that I use one everyday). In all fairness, I wasn't the one who showed up bitching and whining to the class about having his bike ripped off (again). Oh well, I guess I will be hearing the complaints of his 3rd bike stolen on campus sometime this quarter... Like I said in my previous post, I am giving up this personal quest of helping bicyclists on campus safeguard their bikes. The acceptance rate is like 1 in 15. Yep, so I am disillusioned. Why should I care? It is like casting pearls before swine. Let be. I've got better things to do with my time.

So... "Enjoy shopping for your replacement bike! Just know that every time another bike theft complaint appears under "Incidents Report" in the campus papers, there is someone out there with a heavy titanium-boron-steel-alloy security chain (which costs more than your entire Wally-World, Walmart bike) enjoying a bout of schadenfreude with his paper and latte..."

Salute!