OF A GOLDEN AGE

Thanks to Netflix I finally watched Transformers, which was, yes, completely freaking awesome. Let’s observe the high points.

• Seamless, breathtaking CGI. Robotic characters move, interact, and throw their weight around convincingly.
• Shia LaBeouf. Yes.
• The gorgeous girl who plays his love interest. I rarely find actresses to be really beautiful.
• A lot of explosions.

Last night my supervisor held his birthday party at a bowling alley and bar in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood.

A nerdy colleague took his turn and put a lot of mustard on the ball, which curved almost into the gutter before it came back for a strike. He turned, made a braggy face, and said, “That’s how you get it done. The straight line.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “That wasn’t a straight line, more like — ”

Then we both said, “A parabola.”

“I feel pretty confident saying we’re the two biggest nerds in this company,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, “without a doubt.”

My literary hero and shortlisted celebrity dream friend, Anne Lamott, has this to say on the Palin/McCain ticket.

“Laughter is carbonated holiness. It is chemo. So do whatever it takes to keep your sense of humor. Rent Christopher Guest movies, read books by Roz Chast and Maira Kalman. Picture Stick Freedom in his Batman underpants, having one of his episodes of rage alone in one of his seven bedrooms. Or having one of his bathroomy little conversations with Froth Moonshine. (Bless their hearts.) Try to remember that even Karl Rove has accused him of being a lying suck.”

I’m trying, I’m trying.

As Martin posted much better than I would, Sarah Palin’s over the barrel for using her personal Yahoo! email account to conduct state business.

This situation speaks for itself in a way inimitable by any commentator or humorist.

Oh man. Surprisingly, the Akira movie lived up to all the expectations set by critics.

College remains a divisive economic issue that pits haves versus have-nots, so to speak, with an enormous cost gap between most state schools (especially the satellite or branch campuses, which usually cost less) and private schools. When I insist to some of my state-schooled peers that my private education ended up costing the same as theirs, they remain unconvinced. The thing is, private schools have a lot more freedom to give discretionary scholarships, and that’s the saving grace.

Anyway, that’s not the point of this post.

One of the high “extra” costs in education is the textbook, arguably the biggest racket in the biz. When I teetered on the fence about taking the full plunge into a math major, what finally tipped me was the preposterous $150 price tag on a real analysis book the size of my old copy of Ramona Quimby, Age 8. In the other sciences and hard-numbers fields the cost can be even higher, especially for heavy, dry, cumbersome books most students will not consult again after the class ends.

With these traditional textbooks, each new edition has just enough added material that professors usually require the newest (most expensive) release. This is one serious benefit to the study of literature, where besides issues with translation for Old English or international works, my shitty 50¢ copy of To the Lighthouse is just as good as the one at the bookstore. However, classes that use Norton anthologies have the same problem as other textbook-reliant disciplines.

My favorite way around this was a creative-writing teacher who put together her own photocopied reader for the first half of our course. She then let us each select excerpts or short works to use in the second-half reader, and these drew upon our eclectic taste and studies: traditional and contemporary poetry, segments of Nietzsche’s The Gay Science, nonfiction from multiple disciplines. No one had to wonder at the inclusion of any piece since the person who included it was there to explain. It had the most grounded, democratic rationale of any course I’ve taken.

A friend recently told me he’d chosen to illegally download an eBook of a text instead of purchasing an overpriced hard copy. It reminded me of a math class where I bought an Indian-produced second-rate paperback text off the internet and, much to my pleasant surprise, found it comparable and completely usable. These kinds of go-arounds are the subject of this New York Times article on the chokehold of the textbook industry, drawing an analogy between educational publishing and prescription drug companies. Zing! I love it, and the analogy will connect with anyone who’s ever been thrown over the barrel by these opportunistic bastards.

My dad has joked for years that my mom commits plausible deniability — when you don’t remember, you claim you didn’t do or say the thing in question. Children are particularly tenacious at this because they don’t realize you realize they’re full of shit. Did you brush your teeth before bed? Well, no, you didn’t, because I can smell you from here.

I suspected, and found in myself at least, that this tendency dwindled a lot by adulthood. As “grownups,” really, we either see that our lies are silly or stand up for them and make them better. There’s no remaining guise of trying to teach us how to be responsible people, or, to reuse my above example, tell us to brush our teeth.

Imagine my surprise to learn that our Republican vice-presidential candidate employs the same technique used by elementary-school children with poor dental hygiene nationwide.

The moral of this Aesop Palin’s* fable is: If you don’t remember saying something inflammatory, illogical, or ignorant, just claim you didn’t say it at all. Then the American people can know fair and square that Charlie Gibson will be a better vice president than you.

* Actually, this isn’t a bad name to fit alongside the other Palin children. Take a memo.

“MOST teenage girls love to talk to their friends. And talk. And talk.”

Somehow I lucked out and have female friends who don’t live on the phone, because I’m not sure I could take that kind of constant contact. At the same time, in late grade school and junior high I was one of these for sure, always on the phone gossiping or fretting about whatever, always having sleepovers. In no time since have I spent so much one-on-one time with any of my friends. (Thankful for that!)

This article connected with me, though, through the idea of co-rumination — the idea that talking uninterruptedly about everyone’s anxieties and neuroses only makes them all that much worse. I wish the concept stopped being relevant after high school, but as I learned talking to my best ladyfriend last night, this is not the case. We’ve even reached the point where sometimes, not participating in melodrama and gossip can cause more, which breaks my brain every time.

The bottom line is, I’d rather people know me for my straightforwardness than be timid or passive aggressive. It’s also sad that teenage girls are socialized to behave this way, but if you read the article you’ll see that when teenage boys engage in co-rumination it doesn’t make their anxieties worse — probably because it’s more measured and less frequent? Not sure.

“Here’s to a couple of confused grownups!”

(King Edgar in Final Fantasy VI)

The American identity today is more complex than ever before. Our populace becomes both more evangelically Christian and more liberal, creating a polarized national climate that is stressful to even casual participants.

I hate this.

It deeply saddens me that the first female Republican vice presidential candidate is serving as a token for her small-town folksiness and extreme social-conservative values. I’ve accepted that John McCain would say anything at this point, even though he was always the voice of Moderate reason to the Bush administration. I even choked down the smarmasaurus speeches of Mike Huckabee and Rudy Giuliani in an attempt to hear their side, though my interest waned when Huckabee harped on how Sarah Palin and McCain both believe life begins at conception.

There is a distinctly urban-versus-rural flavor to this election that makes me deeply uncomfortable. Small-town America is not a romantic notion any more than “the Big City” is. My experience, and those of most young people I know from small towns, was overwhelmingly negative and alienating. If a town’s size allows everyone to know and pursue everyone else’s business, this is never, ever a selling point, nor should it be for a classical conservative: small government, less interference, more privacy. On the other hand, cities don’t have any inherent advantages besides more revenue in one place and more carry-out restaurants. Having spent big portions of my life in many environs (suburbia, a town of 4,000, a city of 35,000, and now Chicago), I don’t like the idea of a potential President who spouts on God’s will and believes in abstinence-only education. Frankly, we’ve had enough of that.

Anyway, diatribes aside, this election is getting me pretty hot under the collar, and at least abstractly I appreciate that it’s doing the same to the rest of America. If everyone is fired up about politics, participating in the process, arguing about it on their smoke breaks, heck yes. This, underneath any specific situation, is the beautiful American system that I truly love.

Of course, that doesn’t mean Lee Greenwood’s song, this entry’s title, is any less embarrassing.