~equilibrio~

I am an exercise in balance. Also, apparently in blog resuscitation. Sitting here in the library, surrounded by books and papers, folders and sticky notes, and the looming black shape of my binder, I figure that it can't hurt to take this for a test rerun, and see if the revival can be part of the effort toward equilibrium.

Here's the heavy object I'm working on balancing out: SENIOR THESIS.

I'm currently reading (or should be) the novel Nubosidad variable (Variable cloudiness) by Spanish writer Carmen Martín Gaite, and my thesis will be an analytical take on the novel through the lens of feminist theory, specifically those branches which highlight the flaw of feminism itself in assuming that "women" can be unified as one category created by patriarchal oppression. Martín Gaite herself was apparently adamant that she did not consider herself or her works to be feminist, an odd claim considering the overwhelming number of women who protagonize her novels. Now I need to elaborate that in 700-1000 words and turn it in a week from tomorrow, but only after thesis advisor meeting #3, which happens tomorrow, so for today (and probably most of tomorrow) it's just read read read read read...

{Enter EQUILIBRIO} Yes, that's Spanish (but the translation isn't hard), which I thought appropriate, all things (but mostly the Spanish major) considered. Here's what Equilibrio does. He encourages conversations, mostly via phone, with people who are in no way stressed about school or thesis or academics of any kind. He encourages me to take a night off from the library at least once a week. He convinces me to take longer than half an hour for dinner and go out to celebrate a friend's success. In an hour taken to translate a pamphlet for a neighbor, he may have found me a side job. He tells me I should go to the improv comedy show tonight. He's looking forward to home soccer games this weekend. And he's brought me the two brightest spots in my week: three total hours volunteering in a preschool classroom at the local elementary school.

I didn't really consider how difficult it would be to be stressed about a college senior thesis in a preschool classroom. There are so many more pressing issues: like whether to stamp the smiley faced sun in green or pink ink, and that the make-believe hot cocoa in the red plastic shot-glass-sized cup is way too hot, or that the regular teacher (in the words of one kid) is sooooooo sick today, and the other teachers were joking about making the substitute do diaper duty. (Go ahead, laugh at the juvenile pun.) The point is, preschool makes me forget about college for three short hours a week, which was precisely Equilibrio's goal.

Hopefully, CPRing the blog will achieve E's goal in a slightly different way - by taking the time to stop and coherently recount (which is to say, think about) things that happen, I will be aware of the balance, and how he's doing. Because as long as he stays healthy, I stay healthy. (Creepy crazy personification of life balance aside.) That's the plan, anyway.

Zeta Oph

One of the bookmarks in the toolbar of my web browser is labelled APOD, and takes me to http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/, a site (obviously) run by NASA. APOD stands for Astronomy Picture Of the Day, and when I've already checked email, Facebook, and Blogger for interesting ways to waste my time on the internet, APOD often provides me with several seconds of wonder. That's really all I'm looking for - there was a video up the other day (occasionally they're AVODs instead of APODS) that lasted more than 9 minutes, and I opted out. Sometimes I read the details of the descriptions below the photographs, but more often then not I just skim enough to be able to put a name to what I'm looking at. Some days, the photos themselves are the cool part - the photographer has done something interesting with the exposure, or captured a curious light effect, etc; some days, the subject matter makes my jaw drop. Yes, that's an actual photograph of light that's lightyears away. Yes, that's a world being born, or dying.

But today, what caught my attention wasn't the photograph itself - though it's awesome as usual - but the heading, which describes the photograph's content as a "runaway star". I glanced at it, as usual, ready to ignore the finer print, scientific explanation of what I was looking at. More often than not, I lean toward the "oh, look at the pretty lights" kind of astronomy. But the phrase "runaway star" caught my interest, as a matter of language rather than science. The part of my head that still thinks like a children's picture book wanted to know: what does a star have to run away from?

Starbucks

Here's the thing. I don't usually go to Starbucks. I'm a snotty liberal Portland supporter of independent coffee shops - plus I just usually like the atmosphere better. But I had a gift card - somebody gave it to me for the holidays, so the Man had already been paid, so to speak, plus I'm far more likely to use it here in Walla Walla than back in Portland, where I go to specific coffee shops not only for the principles and the atmosphere, but for social reasons as well.

I haven't spent much time studying in coffee shops this semester, but last year I frequented Coffee Perk, the indie shop around the corner, and spent several days in a week there admiring the regularity of its customers. Coffee shops, more than almost any other business model, are designed to have regulars. Everybody needs their daily dose, right? and add in the perk of employees who can learn what your specific pleasure is, and the repeated and ever increasing odds of running into people you know - and the coffee shop regular is a phenomenon that makes perfect sense.

And like all things, this business model was just begging to be commodified. Enter: Starbucks. For a small, independent venture that started in Seattle not all that long ago, it's amazing to me just how quickly Starbucks has become the Man. There's something undeniably eerie about walking into identical Starbucks, one in Houston, Texas, the other in Walla Walla, Washington. Decor: identical. Menu: identical. Layout: not that different.

Starbucks, not unlike other (mostly West Coast) outfits, has begun the process of homogenizing what was once independent, individual, and quasi-countercultural. This is the irony of the "type" that belongs (not inaccurately) to Seattle, Portland, San Francisco.

So, courtesy of the blog Stuff White People Like, comes the anti-Starbucks man, who is, ironically, he from whom the concept of Starbucks initially sprang (sprung?). College students sit and study with laptops bearing cynical, sarcastically political stickers. A twenty-something yuppie couple sit and compare notes on their busily professional lives. He narrowly avoids suspicion by finally allowing her to check his datebook. Men and women, running the gamut from suits to sweatpants enter, order, and exit with an air of routine.

Coffee shops are a unique stop in people's lives - a space that is a strange mix of (expensive) fast food joint and living room. I will spend a relatively comfortable and productive afternoon here with my homework and my friends, but I will also have spent nearly $10 on coffee and pumpkin bread. So far, I've recognized at least three people from my time here yesterday afternoon. I wonder if they are regulars, or, like me, just short-term repeat players. Camped out at my table in the corner, I am both content and wondering why I can't just do this in my own kitchen. The coffee's cheaper.

How is this not personal?

I should be using these post-class, pre-dinner hours to get crackin' on my reading for tomorrow. But, as a large chunk of that reading is in a book entitled Roe v. Wade: The Abortion Rights Controversy in American History, I'm going to take a few minutes to ramble around that. . . theme, because I feel the need to release some thoughts that will otherwise be distracting.

Firstly, I have thoughts about The Abortion Rights Controversy in American History, but in their raw state in my head, they sound much less like "In a careful analysis of blahblah's argument . . ." and much more like "How dare they?!" Because (and bear with me as I work through this) I believe that NO ONE can tell me what I may and may not do with my body. They may not agree with my choices - they may make alternative suggestions - but at the end of the day, if I am going to do something to my body, whether that be as superficial a decision as getting a tattoo, or as horrible as shooting heroin, or as life-changing as getting an abortion: if I make my decision, I have the power to see it done. If I negatively affect others with my behavior - there are other considerations. If I break other kinds of laws in the course of my actions - there are other considerations. But on a very basic level, a doctor or medical professional should have no power to dictate what I may or may not do as regards my own health - it being, after all, my own. And by no means should those doctors have the power to shape legal limitations that affect me so much more profoundly than them. In one court case, an abortion ban was actually overturned because it infringed on the property rights of the doctor! The result seems favorable; the logic is astounding.

I think that some things, at the end of the day, truly are "women's business", not to the end of excluding men from the issue, but with the goal of giving women autonomy and control of something that is rightfully theirs: the use of their bodies. Can there be any right more "natural" (since you elitist old white men writing about legalities seem to like that concept) than control of one's body? What do you think, Thomas? George? James? John? Abe? Franklin? Lyndon . . . (never mind. I don't want to know what you thought about women's rights.)

Then there are just the sad inefficacies of legal prohibition as a means to an end. Prohibit alcohol, and more people go blind drinking whatever they've cooked up in their basements and barns. Declare "war on drugs" and black markets boom and cartels shoot innocent people in the streets. Maybe these aren't ideal examples, but this is the point: make abortion illegal, and women will resort to coathangers and knitting needles - mutilation either by self or by others. Sorry to burst your idealist bubbles, everybody, but making something illegal doesn't stop people from doing it. And while I know this sounds angry, and certain, and solid - please keep in mind (and this is directed at me as much as anyone) that I still have thinking and reading to do. Whether or not anything can shift my fundamental beliefs, there are countless nuances and variables and questions to which I don't have answers.

So I'll keep thinking about it. I got a book recommendation on the subject today - more reading that I might try to do over Thanksgiving week. We'll see.

brain-splosion.

A combination of Michel Foucault, Franz Kafka, and the Spanish language is going to make my head explode. Souls are born inside of jails, which are similarly disconnected neutral entities which exist solely in human beings? Or in apes? Or in apes who have trained themselves to make mockery of human beings...? Then there's the whole bit about Foucault proposing a translation of Bentham's Panopticon institution to a societal norm, wherein a mechanized and isolated order of humanity is as close as we can ever come to utopia.

Comprehensive argument, my ass.

Next up, after this message from your local stations...

So, it's the weekend... and that is more exciting than it perhaps should be even though it leads up into a week where (as a complete 180) I have NO ESSAYS DUE. And that's exciting.

My friends and I are starting a new blog. We're weirdos, so it's called "Hypothetical Happenings with Historical Figures." First up (probably), the asskicking of United States Senator Joe McCarthy. After that, likely some Cubans (shh, don't tell anybody), with the distinct possibility of some eminent figures of the American Civil War, after which somebody will talk shit about Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren. Marx will certainly make an appearance, and the axolotl forecast is looking pretty good. There will be pictures. There will hopefully be videos, although our limited technological knowledge may necessitate the enlistment of some talented compadres. There will always be geeking out. We see this as an excellent opportunity to actively engage ourselves in our studies. We are interacting with knowledge. Also, we want to dress up like historical figures and make dorky history jokes. Hah.

On a slightly related, yet much more serious note: knowledge is depressing. Between footage of people rioting as a little black girl climbs the steps to her first-grade classroom; to the metaphor of the penal system as a surgery that will not work with anasthesia; to 350 NLF peasant soldiers against 1400 opposing troops and three dead American helicopter pilots who shouldn't even have been there; to the Jacksonian democrat who said that all people should have an equal opportunity base - except for you, and you, and you, and you...

It's all just icky.

Brain. dead.

It's really interesting to be this tired. Running on the fumes of a few hours restless sleep, in combo with a sleep debt not fully repaid from last week... topped off with a severe case of academic ADD (AADD??), and I'm at the point where I can hear people talking, and I know they're talking to me, but for the life of me I can't string their words together with their appropriate connotations in my brain. Even writing... by the time I finish a sentence, I've all but forgotten where I started, grateful for the habits and instinct that seem to keep me reasonably coherent.

And don't get me started on reading. Rereading that essay through for the last time was painful. Word by slogging word I was able to guide my brain through the maze of historical facts. I felt like I was guiding a little kid through an I Can Read book. "And... then... to.. stay... safe... from... the... evil... Communists... ... the U.S.... kept... throwing... money... at... France."