Class is over

Time to write about non-environmental things:



The other day Amy had Pure Prairie League's "Amy" stuck in her head ("Amy what you wanna do?/I think I could stay with you/ For a while, maybe longer if I do" . . . that song they sang on SNL), and we got to talking about songs with our names in them. I mentioned that the only song I could think of with my name was Michael Jackson's "Ben" - a song I always found a little creepy, since the titular Ben was a rat. On a whim, I decided to google "Ben lyrics" to see if there were any more complimentary Ben songs, and found a disturbing trend. Ordered by popularity:


Result 1: Michael Jackson's rat song

Result 2: The Rapture - "No Sex For Ben"

sample lyric: "no sex for Ben Rama/ Fat trucker, cheap sucker/ No sex, no sex for Ben Rama now/Cheap faker,/Cheap Cheap Faker"

Result 3: "Dear Ben"

sample lyric: I love you, you're perfect,/ A manifestation of my dreams"

Well that's better! . . . Oh wait, it's by Jennifer Lopez, and the "Ben" is Ben Affleck. For the love of Gigli

Result 4: John J. Francis - "Simple Ben"

sample lyric: "I asked if he had seen the great jets fly across the sky/ He said he'd seen the smallest bird learnin' how to fly"

If you're keeping track, I've now been a rat, a fat fake trucker with no game, Ben Affleck, and a mentally retarded old farmer . . .

Result 5: An entire page of lyrics for a band named Anti-Ben
sample song titles: "Ben Forever Excreted (Forever Defeated)," "I, Killer Of Bens!," and "Emo Is For Bens" from the 2003 album "Bloodthirsty Benslayers"

I swear to christ I am not making this shit up. What did I ever do to you, every musician ever?

Getting the hell out of Dodge

"As God is my witness, I'll never be hungry again!"

Replace that "hungry" with "cold," Scarlett, and I hear ya.  My glasses have no windshield wipers, so I'm blind in the sleet walking from my North Campus cocoon to that damn South Campus barn for play rehearsal.  I can't hear the wind whipping my ear Coca-Cola red, too consumed ohming my mantra: "One more year, one fucking year, one more year, one fucking year, onemoreyear."

My fiance and I haven't decided where we're moving in a year, just that we are done with the abuse of Chicago winters.  We're done covering our frostbitten extremities with mittens and hats like a high school girl in a turtleneck the day after a too-rough date.  We're leaving Chicago's I-hit-you-cuz-i-love-you wind kisses for the warm embrace of Arizona or New Mexico or the lush anonymity of Oregon forests.

My inner mantra fades out, eaten up by an insidious earwarm: "Let it Snow"

GAH

In the past two weeks, my band released an EP, I got engaged, I had extensive rehearsals for two plays, I continued to work two jobs, I tried to keep up on all the final projects that have been due in all my classes all at once - and I haven't found a spare second to write a blog. So, since I'm putting off a paper, and since we were encouraged at the beginning of class to write about things we did on days we didn't write blogs (like, say, because we took a trip to the Smoky Mountains), I'm going to do just that.

Alright, first off, a short piece about announcing the engagement to her extended family on Thanksgiving:

She tells me not to hold her hand, but it's too late - the diamond's already imprinted onto my palm. Forced sympathy pains - I hide my left hand under the table just as her right lives in her pocket, like a third moat to guard the jewel (moat 1: wrong hand, moat 2: stone turned in). We might need a curtain wall too . . . her mom keeps bravely swallowing, pushing back word vomit, eyes darting like a squirrel with a nut looking for a hole in a tree. I see her earlier this week, locked in the bathroom, crouched under the shower-head, curtain drawn, phone clutched, begging us to tell Amy's dad because she couldn't trust herself to the leave the bathroom without spilling.

Wunderkammer

I found the wunderkammer concept (german "cabinet of curiosities") intriguing, so I did a little googling on the subject which led me to MoMa's lovely website created for their 2008 Wunderkammer exhibition.  I really love the interactive aspect of the site, and as is appropriate for a website for an art museum, the design is simply wonderful:

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/wunderkammer/flashsite/index.html

Ichneumon

As I mentioned in class, the story of the ichneumon in Dillard's Fecundity hit me in the gut.  The idea of a child eating a mother from the inside out . . . not the sort of image you can easily escape.  So, out of a sick fascination and also as a means of de-anthropomorphizing the ichneumon, I did a little poking around on Wikipedia.  Besides learning that the word ichneumon also refers to a medieval mongoose-like monster that was known for killing dragons (oh the wonders of hypertext), I also found out that the ichneumon wasp (which Dillard was referring to) can grow to be five inches long.  

In other words, the ichneumon wasp is a gigantic bug so mean it will eat its own mother given the chance.  My fears continued to not be assuaged.  Wikipedia went on to try a different tack.  It told me that while the wasp has an "extremely long ovipositor . . . the ovipositor does not deliver a sting like many wasps or bees."

 . . . No, the ovipositor is only used to lay a shitload of eggs that grow into wasps that "will eat any body in which they find themselves," as Dillard warns.  I am now half-planning a horror franchise based on gigantic ichneumons.  I figure it can't be worse than Eight Legged Freaks.

XKCD on Organ Donation

In light of our discussion in class about how the lack of separation between self and body can make people hesitant to become organ donors, I figured I'd post this comic from XKCD that views the body in fairly clinical terms: our body is just an "arrangement" of bones, organs, viscera, etc.  The self may imbue this arrangement with something more, but once the arrangement is taken apart, we should allow ourselves to be repurposed, our organs saving lives, our bones supports for spaceships.

Ocean

In the spirit of Styrofoam, I google image searched "ocean of garbage" and this came up.  Seeing the garbage so close to the shore, I assumed this was a shot taken in the third world.  I guessed East Asia, Amy guessed Colombia.  The caption once we followed the picture to its website proved us both wrong:

ALTERED OCEANS: Tons of garbage that swept down the Los Angeles River after a storm is corralled by a boom in Long Beach, Ca. Most plastic trash makes its way to the ocean and can be found washed up on beaches around the world. “Every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is still out there somewhere,” Anthony L. Andrady, a polymer chemist at the Research Triangle Institute said. “Because there is no effective mechanism to break it down.”

It's coming.