This Can Be Useful In Rocketry

When waiting until the night before to write your final paper, please don’t.

• That I might own a Chihuahua one day. I know I’m the type.
• That the internet will delete Wikipedia.
• My teeth falling out
• Canadians

Got this idea from Sarah Brown:

Busboy at the restaurant next to the coffee shop where I worked: There was something about his stringy long blonde hair, his black studded kilts, his strictly monochromatic punky outfits. He worked the afternoon shifts that started a half an hour after my shift at the coffee shop started, and I’d always make sure to be outside arranging the signs when his car would come screaming around the corner so we could wave hello. I always knew when to get outside because I could hear his screamo music a good fifteen seconds before he got to the parking lot. Massive hearing loss or not, this guy was sweet despite his damaged exterior, and I was always game to lend him a lighter or free water whenever he came in. Sometimes he’d get to work early and he’d come over to hang out before his shift started, and I’d always listen eagerly as he told he about his ADD issues or how he downed a fifth of Jack the night before, blacked out, and woke up in the hospital fighting the paramedics. Our love was totally punk rock and pure, that is until he got fired for being late to work too often. Then I never saw him again. Tale as old as time.

I’m really going to miss writing papers for my Postmodern Lit. class.

Yesterday I spent most of my time in office hours making fun of my TA’s hipster tendencies to his face. I sent an email this morning apologizing in case I stepped over a line, and he emailed me back “No hard feelings, no.”

There’s hard feelings.

I must learn to stop making fun of people I like.

- miso soup
- pizza
- onion bagel
- cereal combination of Chocolate Rice Crispies, Fruit Loops and Corn Pops

The Rifle Paper Co. and blog is my new summer house. Being an ardent hand written letter writer in this fast-paced digitized world, I have always been a sucker for hand drawn stationary and paper goods. It’s been forever since I’ve found such inspiration and cute overload as these.

Simply adorable.

I stumbled across this little jewel a few months ago. For someone like me who supposedly specializes in the field of English literature and language, it’s surprising how dreadful my pronunciation is. Among the words that are impossible for me to say are “patriarchal”, “matriarchal”, “brewery”, ” Smeagol” and “tour”, and I don’t know if it’s that I never learned how to say these words, or perhaps I’m just an idiot. Regardless, I think this website is pretty rad. Even if the videos are ridiculous.

(source unknown)

I’m going to get yelled at for using Blogger again. My sweet sister and brother in law spent a long long time fixing up my own domain and website from scratch, and here I am not using it. I hope this doesn’t screw up the new website – I never understood how linking websites works exactly. Maybe one day I’ll figure it out. Maybe one day.

So much has been going on lately. I want it to be summer already and yet I am nowhere near ready for the end of the quarter. I just finished reading Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut for the first time, and I must say that I am an ardent Vonnegut fan. He is just so thoughtful of his readers, nothing like Thomas Pynchon who forces your head under water and reads you words you’ve never heard of. Vonnegut is kind to you, makes his phrases short, his language simple, and his ideas almost misleadingly simple. I highlighted and circled this particular passage because I think it’s such an interesting way to deal with time and death in a totally un-human capacity:

“The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

When a Tralfamadorian sees a corpse, all he things is that the dead person is in bad condition in that particular moment, but that the same person is just fine in plenty of other moments. Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is ‘So it goes’.”

There is something so comforting about this, even in its impossibility. Human memory does not allow for this method to completely work, because our memories are flawed. Sure, we can remember what we did two weeks ago or five years ago, but we remember those events with hazy unclarity, and we never remember situations exactly how they were. For Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist of Slaughterhouse-Five, he has become “unstuck in time”, and visit moments in the past and future without any control – one moment he’ll be in his basement and then suddenly he’ll be a POW in WWII somewhere in 1941 Germany. His memories are so vivid that they are all encompassing and he must literally act in the memory as realistically as he would in the present. And so, to think that all of time, the past, present and future, have always happened and will always happen, is Billy’s reality. But Billy is of course a fictional exception, and that is not at all the world those of us holding the book live in. Nonetheless, how interesting.

This take on death and time certainly says something about destruction and tragedy and, I suppose, life. In one of my discussions, we talked about that refrain “So it goes”. There are so many ways to take that. The phrase has no inherent inflection, it’s framework for however you particularly want to read it. In fact, how you say “So it goes” says everything – “So it goes” while shrugging shows dismissal and no attempt to understand the subject at hand, sighing while nodding “So it goes” shows passive acceptance, and a sarcastic “So it goes” shows biting cynicism. It’s almost a totally empty phrase, and it doesn’t even mean anything if you think about it. “So it goes” is essentially “it is what it is”, which although is a visually pleasant and symmetrical sentiment, means absolutely nothing. When one considers that Vonnegut places “So it goes” after every single death in this book, over a hundred and fifty times, almost as a funeral ritual, some very interesting implications can be sought after. Is Vonnegut saying we shouldn’t care about the dead? “Eh, so it goes. Whatever.” Is Vonnegut making an anti-war statement? Is he making a pro-war statement? Or is he possibly noting, as his beloved Tralfamadorians would say, “There isn’t anything we can do about [wars], so we simply don’t look at them.”

Food for thought.