Mary Versus the Trumpeting Legions of Apathy

This is a very fat dog I walked today at Austin Pets Alive! It's so hot here that it's only in the early morning you can walk these dogs. This is probably one of the coolest things I do.

Pardon the awkward selfie from my last long bike ride, especially because it doesn't really match my rant. On this ride, I ran out of sidewalk, so I rode the grass, not the asphalt. Wanna know why? Bikes aren't cars. I know the hard core types, especially in South Austin like to ride in the middle of the street, back peddling to stay upright at red lights with their little bubble helmets (if any) but bikes just aren't cars. Here's my list of complaints about why it's not reasonable to suggest that bikes just act like any other motorized vehicle. 1- We can't accelerate as fast as cars, which means that at traffic lights it might take us a little while to get up to the speeds that the people behind us are itching for. 2- We get tired. Sometimes this getting tired will mean that we can't go as fast, or accelerate, up hills, on tricky terrain. That's bad, but it's also bad because when people get tired, they get a little stupid. Getting tire...

It's possible I'm an evil genius, but I'm a genius. Beach Blonde Popcorn 2 Gallons of popped popcorn, kernels removed (or more depending on how sweet you like it) half of the big container of white dipping chocolate 1/2 a bag of butterscotch chips 1/2 a bag of toffee chips You know what to do:  spread the popcorn out on waxed paper, melt the dipping chocolate then spread it over the popcorn, toss in the toffee bits and butterscotch chips and coat evenly. Then promise yourself that you won't eat it while it's still not cool. Break that promise. Love life. This is the popcorn I would have Cornecopia make if they hadn't changed their stupid rewards program. Now I only can earn IMAX tickets with my rewards. Lame. They're depriving the world of good popcorn.

So it's been rainy and I've been grumpy, but I do have a few things to be proud of this week: 1- I told the yoga teacher who had us listen to jarring music that while I normally like such music, I'd prefer something a little more mellow for the pm flow class instead of just passive aggressively holding it in. 2- When I stayed up WAY too late one night I used that time to clean out my drawers & filing cabinets. 3- I did go to bed on time one night this week. 4- I've gotten a little work done on my dissertation, even though it hasn't been always easy. 5- I graded all of my students' close readings in one day. 6- I went to happy hour with the admitted visiting students, even though it would have been easy to just go home. 7- I was able to say "no" to something I really wanted to do on Saturday because I knew I had prior commitments and I didn't want to over-schedule myself. 8-Had a really interesting, open and personable conversati...

We all agreed that Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer was racist. At first, we hated her, but then, after I taught a lesson citing Gramsci and Memmi on cultural hegemony’s persistence in determining individual attitudes, we only pitied her. Poor well-meaning, white, liberal racist. I opened up the class to include our discomforts in reading July’s People , a piece of speculative fiction written in 1980 about what the fall of Apartheid might look like. It’s a post-apocalyptic story where the apocalypse is Black Africans getting power. We read some sections where Gordimer describes the “descent” of her white protagonists as they adjust to life in a small, traditional Black village and shook our heads in appropriate discomfort. My French student said, “I’m not used to feeling white guilt, but this book, I definitely felt it while reading.” Maybe Gordimer was a white, liberal racist, but we could pity her.             I told my stud...

I have a very complicated relationship with Las Vegas, and by Las Vegas I don't mean the normal, real-people Las Vegas, I mean WOOO-HOOOOO, LAS VEGAS!! like girls in straw cowboy hats and little short shorts leaning out the window of a Hertz rental car at 2:00 am while stuck in traffic on the Strip. I like regular Las Vegas, the pretty landscaping of the temple, the good people I've met from there. But Woo-hoo, Las Vegas? I have a sympathy for it, even an affection. That being said, I wouldn't touch it. It's almost exactly the same way I feel about a stray dog in the third world. I spent this last week in Las Vegas at a convention for the College Composition and Communication group. English teachers. Here's our tattoo offer: And here's the sweet party up in the Stratosphere, a hotel best described as "scrappy." We did have a DJ and bright lights and lots of food.  Speaking of food, here is some of the many unhealthy foods of which I partook...

This last month, after spending sweat, tears and $14.00 in supplies to make a tiny jean picnic quilt, I realized that it's just not worth it. Which is a hard thing to realize when you consider that I've carefully saved, cut up, and moved my t-shirt squares to Texas on the hope that finally, finally I was going to make my sentimental college t-shirt quilt. This is the face of my BYU physics professor. Someone in class did the art and collected quotes for the t-shirt. Aw.....Divine Comedy t-shirt. The big pink one. Hell Run t-shirt Plant museum at the Bean museum Summer statistics camp at UT. They gave us models and cookies Run for Kiva--"teleraces" are terrible. Turns out sentimentality is a pain. So I took pictures of the squares I cared about and then {wince, grimmace} threw them away. My great aunt Dona would maybe be disappointed, but probably not. I have a good job, I can buy blankets, and I get frustrated when they don...