The only complaint I've heard about the widely beloved Wall-E is that it works by an easy, lazy "fat=lazy" connection, relying on society's long standing prejudice against the over-fat (that is the PC term, right?)
I have one quote for you: "(guy to now-obese Homer) Let me guess, computer technician? Computer repairman? Computer programmer?...something with computers!...Hhhm, I wonder what it is, must be something to do with the non-stop sitting and snacking..."
Only fat internet losers who live on Livejournal and Secondlife would complain about Wall-E being anti-fat. The movie is anti-consumerism, anti-junkfood, anti-sitting in a chair beind mindlessly entertained by television, low-quality corn-based junk food and advertisements for the same.
The only problem I had with Wall-E is that is is a virtuosic CGI product mass-marketed to huge movie theaters that make all their money off of 2000% mark-up popcorn, candy and soda.

Naming Problems

Well, it's official. Sarah Palin names her kids Gutch, Fanbelt, Trambler and Snake-Eyes--Her kids name their kids Tripp Easton Mitchell Johnston (they would have thrown in 'IV', to make it sound more "classy", but at the last minute someone told them about the whole multiple generations deal, thus ruining their wacky zany baby-naming fun). If you give your kids weird ass hippie/GI Joe names (in short, the brand of stylized, misguided, CMTV sanctioned masculinity), they will flip out and return to a misguided notion of classicism that they've never, ever encountered before. It's so sad, the harder people try to seem like WASP's by turning their kids into advertisements (for their parents), the more it exposes them as (what WASP's label) hillbillies.

We saw the Revels today. The few times I've been asked to explain what "revels" are, I've always been hard pressed to answr, other than, it's what my parents take me to every year. It's a sort of Holiday, medieval, Christian/proto-Christian holiday pageant that's kind of the precursor to musicals, but with the dorkiness of Monty Python.
Even though, at least as my mother sees it, it's about pointing out the fact that a lot of Christmas traditions are "borrowed" from Pagan nature worship type junk, only white aging yuppie recumbent bicycle-riding Cambridge intelligentsia members ever go to it. Only WASPs with liberal guilt go to it. So even though it's ostensibly a paean to acknowledging our heathen past, it's got a sort of sanitized, safe feel to it, and this is in no small aprt due to the fact that every who goes to the revels looks exactly the same. The ladies are all short and squat in esigner glasses and jaunty scarves and brightly colored eco-friendly coats, and the men are all tall and gawky with balding shagg gray hair, dorky glasses, often beards, corduroy pants, sweaters and extremely practical Edie Bauer winter coats.

Weather

Weather is New England is always vague. It's sort of misty, cold, wet, but not really extreme in any o those diections. It's always between several etreme weather patterns. I never experiecned reall scorching heat, really freezing cold, or any weather pattern that lasted more than a short period before changing to somethign else. In other parts of the world,
the weather is more distinct; you'll see a huge white bank of clouds, and when it passes, the clouds are gone. In Boston you'd just be stuck inside a big wet gauzy field of humidity for days.
We don't have tall mountains, clear blue skies, bright blue water, or blazing hot sun. We have
short eroded hillocks, hazy skies, murky green water and mild sun gauzed in mist and clouds.

Teaching

I finally told my mom that I was thinking about becoming a teacher. I don't know why I hesitated. She and my brother spend so much time talking about autism and learning disabilities and teaching from the perspective of a learning disabilities specialist, I just felt like they would expect me to think about teaching in exactly the same way. They get on such tangents, and I just hae absolutely no interest in going that route. I think of children as students, not as test subjects. Or that is, when I become a teacher, that's how I'll look at students. I want to spend m time reaching people, finding out how they learn, how they think, and reaching them, rather than studying them as experimental subjects. I'm less interested in making a general statement about how such and such type of student learns than I am in finding an approach to reach particular students. I've always been a good one on one teacher, a tutor, and I can't think of anythign less interesting to me than studying education as a field. I'd hate to teach teachers; I want to teach students.
My mom was very supportive, fo course, and offered lots of good advice. She mentioned the iea of adult education, of writing as therapeutic exercise, and similar ideas. These were things I'd barely even considered before, but that suddenly struck me as being phenomenally interesting. This is sort of the way I've viewed every job I've ever had, as opportunities to see listen to people who've had harder lives than me talk about the ways they think, and the things they think about.

Unequal Partnerships

This morning Beanz wrapped the presents I had gotten for my mom and dad and wrote the cards on them. I got upset, because these were presents that I picked out for my family. They had nothing to do with her, she just took them over and decided how to deal with them. I often feel like she needs to be in charge of everything, and she asks me what I think only so she can play devil's advocate, to help her make up her mind. To me, this feels like she doesn't think I'm capable fo making even an arbitrary decision. I feel like her assistant sometimes, doing the menial tasks so she can make the important decisions. Whenever her decision had nothing to do with me, when it's a totally personal subjective thing that affects only her, she can't flip a coin without asking me what I think. What do I think? I don't. It doesn't even enter into my head. She gives me all kinds of superfluous information that I don't need and don't want to deal with. If something is not relevant to me, I choose not to let it enter my mind. BUT when the decision is large and affects us both, she charges ahead and does everything herself without even consulting me. I know she's just trying to help, to take care of certain things without bothering me, but it's like she's totally incapable of judging which decisions matter to me and which don't.

Text-ual Analysis (womp wah!)

I think these ads for a new texting device (is it a blackberry? I don't know what these things are or how they work) with a full keyboard, "So you can text it the way you'd say it!" To me, this is a total false dichotomy. Most of the people I know talk the way they text--they speak in such a stylizedly conversational ("casual") way, that listening to them I picture what they're saying as text.
Is this what people want? Something to help them transmit non-information to people who don't care what you're not-saying in a more detailed way? What's the fucking point?

Defining Shoveling Techniques

There's only one way to really shovel. You start as soon as you can bear it, as soon as the snow has started to settle. Shovel shovel shovel, getting as close to the cement as you can. Make a path from your front door to the sidewalk, and down as far as our building/house is. Then turn the shovel over and scrape the remaining slush until you get to bare pavement. You don't want to leave a smooth layer of hardpacked slush. Even if the snow hasn't stopped, you want to start early. It'll feel totally pointless, even impotent, because your work will get erased. The point is you want to clearly define the basic path, the borders of the fundamental channel that you'll be tying to get back to in the coming weeks, as more snow comes and your path gets covered again and again. It's always easier to get back to an almost perfect path than to dig through a general swath of slush and snow and define a path. You'll want a curved push shovel, preferably not too heavy, with a straight handle, and hopefully a straight bladed shovel for doing steps. Either way, you'll also want to have a stiff bristled, outdoor (or indoor/outdoor) broom. You can use the push shovel for the patio and sidewalk, and the brush for the stairs. If you're really ambitious, after you scrape the path, use the broom to really grind the snow and slush away. You'll feel really ridiculous at first, but in the next few days, if you start dealing with freezing rain, or even if it gets warm all of a sudden, the path where you got to the pavement will melt quickly, and the rest of if will gradually pack down harder and harder as you and other people walk on it. One year I scraped a tiny one foot's breadth path down my chronically heavy sidewalk, an the next day I found myself walking on a sidewalk covered with hard packed snow and a rivulet of solid ice running down the middle! Why, oh why did I work so hard? well, the next day the ice in the middle melted away completely and the rest of it stayed the same.

The One True Religion

I love this time of year, when people who go to church four times a year suddenly decide to get super self-righteous when anyone even begins to suggest that anyone might celebrate a holiday other than (OR in addition to!) Christmas.

Nip

The other night I left work and as I was trying to cross Boylston street a bus that was painted like the Partridge Family bus drove past me. There were strobing lights inside the darkened vehicle and people passed each other laughing and shouting, wearing party hats. The exterior of the bus said something about The 80's Station, or something close to that. I assumed it was an eighties radi station. A girl leaned out the window and shouted and unintelligible question, exhorting me to say something. I guessed and said Yes, Happy Holidays. She leaned back in, shouted something to the man next to her, then remembered to ask me if I was twenty-one. When I said I was twenty eight she tossed me a nip of Bacardi.
A few weeks ago I was standing in the Public Garden looking out at the pond, where the water slowly froze inward from the edge. I noticed a grayish blur in my peripheral vision. I assumed it was a small dog wandering over, but it was a squirrel. It hopped towards me in that weird, mechanical brush-like way they move, with their unblinking bulbous sidehead eyes goggling towards me. It snaked its way closer and closer to me. This happened once ebfore to me, on a coffee break at our summer job landscaping at Reed, where a squirrel just wouldn't leave me alone. It kept hopping towards me, and then, right when I started to think the whole thing was becoming funny...the squirrel leapt into the air and grabbed onto my calf. It's little claws were cold and prickly, and its body warm.

Food

I think all competitive eating shows should have a complimentary segment where a different host enjoys a reasonably sized and seasoned meal, a meal that is mean to be savored and enjoyed, rather than forced down to prove that someone could do something that no one else has done, to show the disparity of how much better in all ways it is to eat for satisfaction. I think it's appalling and offensive how fat white middle class Americans, who are so much richer and more privileged than the vast majority of people in the world, will make food, something that precious, into a chore, a lark, a gimmick, a notch.

One Note

Watching Kanye West perform live (on TV, at least) is indistinguishable from watching a music video, or an iPod commercial.

Dude. My landlord has been trying for weeks (months?) to get a carpenter to do some work on our apartmen, replacing the front and back doors and their locks, and putting a shelf into our closet and the pantry cabinet. After two weeks, he finally gets someone to arrive. Now, I didn't really think about how difficult or involving a job it would be to o all this. I assumed the doors would come fit to "door size", with pre-drilled holes, but I was wrong. The carpenter had to cut the doors to size, drill the hole and install the locks, and get everything in alignment so that everything would fit together properly. But dude has been here for ten hours and he's not quite finished. This also means my landlord has been coming in and out of my apartment. He's an interesting, nice guy, but he's very eccentric, mildly condescending and very nosy. He still thinks of our apartment as part of his house, like we're roomers in his home, rather than renters in one unit of the building that he owns. That's the double-edged cliché about landlord's who live in the building: he's always there (when you need him?)
Don't get me wrong, it's by far preferable to the opposite, the absentee landlord, which we had in Somerville. I just get tired of feeling like my landlord is my Aunt Dot, the relative that hovers over you, always with somthing midlly (but palpably) negative or bossy ("why are you doing it that way?") to say.

Blech

I've all but decided to become a teacher. I don't know what route I'll take to get there, but I think being an English teacher in an inner city school or a special ed teacher just about anywhere, would be more mentally stimulating, more personally fulfilling, more of a draw on my natural skills and more of a benefit to the city and the world than anything I can picture myself doing with the skills and resume I have now. I just started to wonder why it was I haven't tried harder to get ahead in publishign by schmoozing and so on, and I realiced that the people who work in publishign are fucking boring. They're just really generic office work jaggoffs who think about nothign other than vacation, having vendors pay for drinks at a party, getting a bigger lawn and retiring. How can you retire if you've never done anything? The people are so fucking ordinary, such a pile of generic, uninspiring morons, it's impossible to make myself imagine writing a resume that would appeal to such bland, one-note suburban retards. Middle-brow, pseudo-serious suburban materialists.

Viable

I'm beginning to really feel like I'm wasting my time with this pointless job. I used to feel like I wanted to have a good job that wouldn't interfere with my "other life", but I'm starting to feel so bored, so stultitfied by struggling to get ahead in a pintless field that has nothing to do with anything relevant. I feel like if I was a special-ed teacher, or taught English in a "troubled" neighborhood, like the one I live in, I would be exhausted, but inspired to the point where I wanted to actually sit down and write, as opposed to forcing myself to sit down and make myself write. Plus, the job market is so bad, and job security is starting to seem like such a joke, why should I hang onot such a retarded job? The people who work as editors and production specialists and so on are such unebelievably ordinary, generic dumbshits, it's almost offensive to me sometimes. They're sort of vaguely "artsy", but totally uninspiring. They're just run of the mill office drones who dream of nothing other than being higher level office drones.
Maybe my "other life" would only be improved by having a more consuming, exhausting, mentally challenging and stimulating job. I don't really want to work harder, having a more involving, consuming job if it means sitting around thinking about expense reports and the bullshit of making pointless textbooks for generic suburban white kids fiscally viable.

Hell is Other Cable Providers

Comcast is fucking satan! I hate those dick-lickers! Never before have I dealt with a company that builds more hidden fees, more astronomical prices, that abuses its almost total monopolization of a highly desired market, that changes prices more arbitrarily and refuses to accomodate the customers with the lower advertized price, that tries to dazzle you with numbers, acronyms and cutesy terms and then tells you, essentially, "Shut up and pay us. You think that sounds too expensive? Well you must be some kind of uneducated hillbilly. Pay me!"
Comcast is worse than Wholefoods. It's worse than Hitler.

Stet

I reappropriated a complimentary pen sent by a publishing company to someone who no longer works at my company. The company is called "Stet Publishing". A stet, I learned in my class, is a copy editor's mark that means literally 'Let it stand'; it cancels out the editor's mark in favor of the author's original word, phrase or punctuation mark. As if to say, "Maybe it would be better if you said '...' No, you're right, you're right. Leave it; never mind me!"
Naming your publishing company Stet is kind of like naming a driving school "Speed Through That Yellow Light!". It's a cute sounding name, but any editor would tell you the term implies over-eagerness, clumsiness, and lack of confidence. It's like a pornstar calling himself "The Premature Ejaculator."