Friday, April 08, 2005
Exhibitionism
Here's what I tried to post yesterday but couldn't because Blogger and my browser are big jerks who refuse to suck it up and get along:
I can't remember exactly what I had planned when I started this blog. I think I mainly wanted to update people who I had met on exchange but who now live in galaxies far far away about my life. But that didn't really happen, since hardly any of them have the address and I don't think the ones who have it are still reading.
At the time, I admired the blogs I read that were really gutsy and kind of explicit. Stuff like Belle De Jour, Geekslut, Gage, McEarsticks, and other assorted exhibitionistic material in which people post a lot of pictures of themselves and their various sexual exploits. Gage is kinda the odd one out on that list, because she's not really explicit most of the time. She just tends to say exactly what she thinks, appropriate or not, G-rated or not. McEarsticks is also pretty clean. She's just an odd but sweet kid with a really neat life.
With the exception of Gage's blog (and she's just irresistible, I guess), I don't really read those kinds of blogs anymore. And my blog has never even remotely resembled the ones I used to read.
I tend not to post naked pictures of myself or discuss my sex life in intricate detail. But I do sometimes wonder if that sort of thing would make more people read my blog.
It seems to have worked well for a lot of people.My most recent examples are Lindsey and, er, The JaG Spot. I don't know if this is really the content of their lives or if posting it just gives them tons of attention.
I also wonder if they ever eat pizza and watch bad TV. That's a delightfully unsexy activity.
I also can't help but wonder if posting that kind of material would alienate or attract the people who I know already read this.
I REALLY wonder why people do read this.
I think we've established that I have nothing new or particularly interesting to say about politics.
I'm not clinically insane and I don't spend all my time chasing down hallucinogenic bunnies (though I think that would make for great reading!).
I'm not much of an exhibitionist. I doubt very much that the Boy would appreciate me posting pictures of him in bed naked. In fact I think I'd be in very big trouble indeed. I don't post naked pictures of myself on here. And as far as I know, there are no naked pictures of me in cyberspace at all.
I'm not a psychologist and I don't have any wicked insights about the functioning of the human mind.
I am by no means well-versed in a variety of music.
I am a mere undergraduate with only a rudimentary knowledge of most works of literature. I could discuss Hemingway for a few hours but I doubt I could make a dent in The Grapes of Wrath, or War & Peace, for that matter.
I am a terrible excuse for a feminist and don't even like the label anymore.
I'm probably ridiculously easy to categorize by tons of people who scarcely know me.
I'm not much of a writer. I write the way I speak, plain-and-simple-boring-university-student. That should be a font. I know exactly what it would look like.
I am unemployed and have no expertise in any field.
I can't fix your car, write your book, be your lead singer, talk you down from the ledge, or even really tell you what books to read.
I was hoping to inspire.
I'm not sure I'm doing any such thing, or even anything close.
But this isn't really about value judgments. This is about what my film T.A. refers to as 'use value.' It's not: is this any good? It's more like: who is this good for?
I'm interested.
Of course, on some level it is just good for me. I don't know why or exactly how, but it helps.
Today I considered going to Africa to volunteer. Why? I dunno, frankly. My friend went there and got malaria. Malaria is for life. And I'm not sure I have enough altruism in me to even submit to the innoculations required to get there.
Today was the last day of classes of my undergraduate career. They sucked. The classes, I mean. Though I did get to write a killer line on the course evaluation of my "ten-minutes-late-deserves-a-5%-late-penalty" prof. It was: "On the whole, this course proved a tedious end to my undergraduate career." It felt so good to write it I thought I might just die right then and there. Death by History 425.
Oh, about that paper he was supposed to impose the penalty on. The wacko gave me 84%. I'm not complaining about that mark. It's one percent away from the best mark in the class. Weird.
It is 10:42 pm, four days before my exams begin. I haven't started studying, and I haven't helped my study group at all. I'm kind of unsure whether there's any point in continuing.
I just ordered my graduation gown. It cost $40 to rent the thing for two hours. I don't even get to take it home and hike it up a bit and take some sexy grad-escort photos. That at least would be mildly amusing.
My 87-year-old grandmother is coming in from Toronto to see the ceremony. As are my relatives from Calgary. But that's just what it is, really: a ceremony. It's like a baptism. Even if there are gangsters shooting each other outside, and the godfather is, well, a Mafia don, the ceremony goes on regardless. I could be an arrogant little shit who'd scraped my way through school by cheating and doing the bare minimum, and I would still get the ceremony. Ceremonies don't mean a damn thing. It's what happens afterwards that counts.
And I am going to wander the Earth. You mean you're going to be a bum?
Hmmm....yeah, sure. I know exactly what those pop cans are worth. Hand 'em over. Or else.
I tutored this kid today. My mom's best friend's little punk son. He smokes massive quantities of weed, steals people's cd players, and is getting 19% in English. I was summoned to rescue him. But how do you rescue someone who keeps sawing through the rope you've thrown them? How do you save someone who keeps popping holes in their life preserver? Damned if I know.All I know is that I got paid $20 for two hours when we had agreed on $20 PER hour after I read an entire book on my own time and tried to teach it to a kid who'd only seen the movie. Dyslexia? Maybe. Indifference? Definitely.
I did manage to save something significantly more ridiculous the other day. A band of punk kids stole my brother's New Driver sign, which he has to keep on the car at all times while he's driving. They were already a couple of blocks away, but I dropped my bag and ran after them. They were drunk as hell and it took me ten minutes to convince them to give it back to me. It was a worthless piece of plastic, replaceable for free at ICBC, but why the hell should my brother have to go get a new one because some assholes thought it would be funny to steal his? He shouldn't. They were a bunch of stupid cowards anyway.
I saw this really odd French movie last night called A Ma Soeur, which in English they stupidly translate to Fat Girl. I asked my T.A. about it today, just for kicks, because I figured it was the sort of fucked-up thing she rents all the time. I was right. She started talking about Lacan and how people mean exactly the opposite of what they say and I literally backed away slowly, Homer Simpson-style. I would have prefered to tutor Hapless Punk than to continue that discussion. My T.A. is a chubby, pasty woman in her early 20s with two-toned dreadlocks. She chain-smokes, says provocative things for no reason at all, and has a wicked smoker's cough. I often wonder if I would like her if I had met her under different circumstances. I had a dream about her last night in which she had a 9-year-old daughter called Sarah who she was incredibly devoted to. I think that was my way of reassuring myself that even crazy chimney smokers who study perverted sex films for a living have maternal instincts.
Or maybe it wasn't about reasurrance at all. Maybe her having maternal instincts is even more disturbing.
It rained all day, and I wanted to crawl into a little hole and never come out and never take my exams and convince all the doctors that I was autistic but just hadn't been properly diagnosed over the last 17 years.
"I really don't like people after all!" I would yell.
"They stink and they all smoke too much!"
While we're on this stream-of-consciousness, I thought I'd point out that I loathe when women who smoke try to cover the smell of it with a lot of perfume. It reminds me of those nasty little white mints they put in urinals. Disinfectant piss and Eau de Nicotine. I've heard it's very chic this season.
We were supposed to come up with possible exam questions in my children's lit class. I wrote:
Describe the characters of parents you disliked in two texts and discuss what this reveals about your relationship with your own parents.
I thought it was very Freud of me.
I'm releasing my first sex video next week. Just kidding!
This pithy nonsense will have to suffice.
I wish I'd gone to school with Henry Miller, but sadly, he is deceased.
Meh, gah, etc.
-N
