Stumblin’
Posted 4 years, 6 months ago in Blogging
Stumblelog is a tumblelog.
Stumblelog is a tumblelog.
…must come to an end. Or at least an indefinite hiatus.
I started this over 5 years ago.
I was a different person then.
I leave you, for now, with a poem by June Jordan. May you too be nobody’s fool, not now, not ever again.
Resolution #1003
I will love who loves me
I will love as much as I am loved
I will hate who hates me
I will feel nothing for everyone oblivious to me
I will stay indifferent to indifference
I will live hostile to hostility
I will make myself a passionate and eager lover
in response to passionate and eager love
I will be nobody’s fool
Tuesday, June 20th, Texas Crowd Kills Man,from the Associated Press:
“An angry crowd beat a man to death,” “2,000 to 3,000 people were in the area for…Juneteenth,” “beaten to death by as many as 20 men,” “thousands of people had been in the area,” etc etc
Friday, June 22nd, 3 or 4 People Fatally Beat Man:
“About three or four people…beat a man to death,” “fewer than two dozen people…were witnesses,” “almost all the celebrants were blocks away,” “Morales reached a hospital about 35 minutes after a 911 call was received, timing that became more difficult to understand given the news that there had been no large crowd in the area.”
So basically every aspect of the story changed within 2 days. And it seems the original distortions were there so people could cover their asses on how long it took paramedics to get the man to the hospital. And racism is so NOT alive in this country, nope, not at all.
So Newsweek came out with this year’s rankings of the top 1200 schools this past week, and sitting on the top are two Dallas schools with the somewhat scary names “Talented and Gifted” and “Science/Engineering Magnet.” I’m always fascinated by schools are ranked, what the standards are, and so on. This year, according to Newsweek, the “index” they used was to “take the total number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or Cambridge tests given at a school…, and divide by the number of seniors graduating.”
This is an immensely flawed (and actually, in some sense, hilariously stupid) mechanism for ranking. Simply put, to raise your rankings, all you must do is graduate fewer seniors.
That’s right. If you have 60 people taking AP/IB tests and say 1 person graduating, your ranking would be 60.0 and you’d be on top of the list.
Fitting that a list ranking high schools fails at, well, basic high school math.
Given how I got smashed by taxes, I just couldn’t justify paying so much money for cable TV. So I canceled it, today. I never watched TV when I was growing up (besides the one hour dream combination of GI Joe and Transformers, but I think more and more lately I’d become, well, addicted to the damn thing.“What’s done is done.”
Brother Mouzune, The Wire
No more.
And I’m saving a veritable shitload of money.
It isn’t so much that there’s nothing good to watch on TV; the fact is, there’s a few good shows and much more solid wastage of time. If I want to watch to good shows, I’ll be able to do so, thanks to the the wonderful world of the Internet. It comes down to this: paying all that money for the ability to sit and wast my life away, well, I just couldn’t do it anymore.
On the flip side, being able to unwind, relax, and turn your brain off is essential sometimes.
I’m just hoping I can do that without TV, and that this will actually make me a better person.
And coming soon: an update on my first Organic Express shipment.
In October, when Lancet released their findings that >600,000 Iraqis had been killed as a direct result of the US invasion of Iraq, they were pooh-poohed by both the US and British (i.e. the 51st state) governments as “flawed.” The Iraq Body Count at the time of the Lancet report had less than 50,000 deaths.
For me, the difference between those two numbers was basically a question of reporting. Since IBC uses “reported” names/numbers, they have an undercount, while Lancet attempted to use statistical methods to get a more accurate count. The real number was probably closer to the Lancet number, but the debate is somewhat academic, to me: if at least 50,000 people have died as a result of the US invasion, well, that is not good.
Nevertheless, today the British finally admitted the Lancet study was not flawed. So with some nontrivial certainty, we can say this unnecessary, illegal, and despicable war has killed 600,000 of the people it claims to liberate.
So for my next “project,” I want to eat for a month as responsibly and as healthy as I can. I just bought The Omnivore’s Dilemma and although I haven’t gotten far reading it, the principles I’ve read so far and those I’ve heard secondhand espoused in the book are important. And also, I find myself eating digustingly (especially since I’m travelling right now— hotel conference food is foul). And lastly, because I want to cook, want to support locally-grown fruits and vegetables.
So for all that, I’m going to try a service my sister-in-law pointed me to, Organic Express. They apparently deliver a box of fruits and vegetables every other week, and I’m going to try and force myself to cook with those vegetables and eat all that fruit every couple weeks. I think it’ll be a good way to expand my horizons food-wise while simultaneously forcing me to think more about where my food comes from and how it is prepared. Since I’m the one doing the preparing.
Expect updates. I’ll write after my first box arrives in a week and a half. I’m going to try it for a month and see how it goes.
If anyone ever needs proof of how much this country needs an anti-racist, feminist, movement, this movie is it.
The worst movie I have ever seen. Like watching “Birth of a Nation,” except most of the theater cheering.
At least some people walked out.
There is honestly not one redeeming thing about this movie. Worst than Gigli. I’m still annoyed and angry. Every single stereotype from the Orientalist canon, all brought to life for two disgusting hours.
Update: See comments for more specifics.
One word: wow.
Watch it.
I’m still thinking about it, but it was most excellent.
Wong Kar-Wai is a genius, no doubt. This movie just… works. Especially the soundtrack. Makes the movie.
I never believed in writer’s block. I just felt that if you really worked at it, stayed attuned to the world and present in every moment, a poem, a story, a line, something would come to you, and you could take off from there, and write. I’d read stories about notoriously-long writer’s block, writers who wrote prolifically until some absolute cutoff point that hit them, and then never wrote again. Or never wrote anything good again.
I haven’t written a poem in five months.
And there’s been plenty to write about.
I don’t know if that means I have some kind of writer’s block. Putting together an application for a writing workshop this summer, I realized that I hadn’t written anything in so long. To be honest, it makes me a little scared— I’d feared becoming a busy-as-hell grad student would snip off some creative part of myself, make me into the very automaton-like CS person I fear becoming.
I used to write constantly. Every moment was a line, a metaphor for something else streaming through my mind. I don’t do that anymore. Instead I work work work and then plop myself on the couch to stare into space or lose myself in some mindless TV vortex.
I hadn’t read much either, but then my plane got delayed and I read all of A Place So Foreign because I happened to have it in my bag. And I know this is all related, my schizophrenic half-CS half-arteest personality, not reading, not writing, turning my mind off, I know it is all related somehow, that I’m avoiding confronting some huge aspect of my life I need to change— but I don’t know what it is, not yet at least.
I don’t know.