Big stick diplomacy

In history this morning, half-listening to my professor's lecture on Teddy Roosevelt, I decided to name my future hypothetical publishing house Carry a Big Stick.

The only things I know about tomorrow are:

• I have to get up at an obscenely early hour.
  
• Bill and I are in fact going to the robotics scrimmage. How we're going to make it up two and a half hours' worth of interstate and back is yet to be determined.
• We're not recognizing Valentine's Day. My choice. I hate Valentine's Day. For the first eighteen and a half years of my life, I thought it was because I was bitter and lonely. Nope. Last year with a recklessly romantic boyfriend and bright yellow daisies and a red stuffed dog named Roscoe (currently sprawled across my pillow), I still hated Valentine's Day.

I went into CVS--okay, so I went in there with the intentions of getting Bill something small and cute and useless or maybe edible, but tomorrow's also our 14th month together. Anyway, moseying around the obnoxious pink and red Valentine's aisle were a couple middle-aged guys looking lost and sort of droopy around the edges.
Poor dudes. I'm not even going to get into the commercialization aspect, because if you haven't heard it before wait ten seconds and you will, but the pressure we put on relationships because of a stupid holiday that originally celebrated a saint getting beheaded is ridiculous. If our relationships hinge on remembering a day that practically forces love down our throats, then we're all doomed to never discover real love.


Current Project:
Reading my way through Dan Barker's Godless. I think the first part, about his personal journey from evangelical to athiest, would make a more interesting novel or written in the style of fictional prose. It'd be much more powerful if he showed a few important detailed scenes than the general overview he actually draws.
That might be a slight bias of mine, though. I'm chained to show don't tell.
Every book I read is research on how to write.

I'm so incredibly tired.

What would atheists think?

I couldn't get into the Darwin Day debate in the RuHo ballroom. No surprise there, really. Coming back from journalism, I saw a couple church buses unloading on Greene Street. So I'm live streaming it from justin.tv/darwindaydebate. Click it, my theologically curious friend, and see if it's still up there.
Must say, Mr. Baker is kicking Mr. Butts's ass (no pun intended until I typed this, I swear) by using logic that Mr. Butts can't answer and does not answer except to indirectly call Mr. Baker a Nazi and a baby killer. To be fair, though, Mr. Baker just called Mr. Butts a baby killer, too, in his rebuttal where he talks about the wrath of the old Testament god.
Also, Mr. Butts seems not to understand sarcasm. Of course the human hand wasn't created to fit into gloves! Mr. Barker was JOKING to make a POINT. Holy crap. I hate people who don't understand humor. And people with thick ass Southern accents. Two strikes, sir. Two.
Watching this chat room feed is making my head spin. So...much...bad...grammar...so...many...typos...so...little...actual...facts...*bshhht* My brain just exploded from the circularity of it all. Fuck, I could've used that for next week's computer test.
"He truly does not understand heaven and hell."
Well, duh. Because he doesn't believe in either. What's there to understand if nothing is there?
Of course you're not degrading Dan at all, Kyle. Of course not. It's all God.

The only thing I believe in is that we each make our own meanings in life.

Current project:
Have been a lazy ass about writing fiction this week. Last full week of robotics, so I figured I'll wait until all that shit dies down to a dull roar and I'm bored as hell by 7pm most evenings again.
I have been reading some great short stories, though, in a book collection called The Torturer's Apprentice by John Biguenet. They're little thumbnail sketches about creepy slices of life written with the same elegant, dark urgency running through all of them.

I wolfed a waffle cone full of Nutter Butter ice cream on the way to my astronomy lab.

Tuesday I went and squirmed on the chair across the desk from Dr. R, the psychiatric nurse I've been seeing ever since Lisa steered me in the direction of medication for my depression. (I was diagnosed in September and on meds within a couple weeks.) This time I managed to keep a straight face when she asked me if I've developed any super powers since we upped my dose.
I hate it. I hate going to the Student Mental Health Center place. The decorations try so hard to be calm and non-confrontational (I do like the big bright green iguana painting in Lisa's office, though.), nobody looks each other in the eye, the copies of People are shamefully outdated.
Most of all, though, I hate the scrutiny. I hate talking about the painful shit in my life--of course I do. Nobody likes talking about the painful shit. But that's what I have to do. Last time I talked about the daddy issues every red-blooded post-Freudian person has.
All of this seems really far away from the episodes when I get dragged down into a funk, staring at a giant lump of bad gunky and feeling it weigh down my shoulders until I'm too tired to do anything else.
And then other days this whole depression shtick feels like self-pitying masturbation.

This is your shitty future.

Today's lovely optimistic title comes courtesy of the Bronx (a pop-rock band that's finally more rock than pop, not the NYC borough. Although maybe they came from there.), from their self-titled album I cribbed during my WUSC run Saturday.
Rest of the good stuff I legally stole:

• Postmarks, "7-11," from their cover album By the Numbers. Everything else is way too twee for my taste, but the cute bouncy innocence works well on this Ramones tune. Try to listen to it and NOT chant, "We were young and in love..." for the rest of the day. It's not possible.
• Alice Russell's cover of Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy." She took out the relentless bass line, my second favorite part of the original, but put gospel buildup behind her soaring voice (which replaced my first favorite part of the originals, the vocals that sound like they know everything and take malicious glee in using that knowledge for random cruel pranks) and made a creepy pop song into a soul lament. The rest of the album (Pot of Gold) is hit or miss but mostly hit, especially with her voice, and on the second half the instrumentation gets funkier and therefore awesome-er. Yeah.
• Mother Mother, O My Heart. Experimental instrumental stuff usually gets on my last fucking nerve, but Mother Mother manages to keep it interesting without over-cluttering by layering it under tortured lyrics. "Body" starts out with random string instrument noodling but solidifies into a jumpy song about body issues, tying together with this chorus: "I've/ grown tired/ of this body/ a cumbersome heavy body..."
• Wussy, Left for Dead. Sharp guitar riffs equally inter-spaced with thoughtful acoustic wanderings.
  
• Buffalo Killers, self-titled. Classic rock that was recorded about five years ago. It fills your quotient of "I wish I'd been a baby boomer" yearning and shuts up the part of you that whines "But nobody makes real rock any more!"
• The Amazing Crowes, Royal. Bouncy rockabilly with edgier guitar riffs. And a stand-up bass! All of this goes about ten million miles an hour, so don't use it as lullabies.
  
• Delicious Vinyl All-Stars, RMXology. Dirty robot sex remixes of vinyl classics.
  

Yesterday I realized that lying naked in bed with my Boy--not after sex, not trying to start anything, just laying there and watching the morning through the window--is amazingly peaceful.
I'm ridiculously grateful that Natalie likes sleeping on her futon better than her bunk and let me push the two school-issued beds together to form one (relatively) giant oasis of mattress. Bill not being a tiny guy + me not being a still sleeper = one hell of a weekend's sleep squished together in one extra-long twin bed. Now we can get as close as we want or as far as we need to be.

Walking up three flights of stairs sometimes makes me feel like a small bird, with hollow bones and a fast fluttering heart, and sometimes makes me feel like a heavy stomping elephant.

I've come up with a better system of labels for my posts. The writing ones'll stay like they are, because I talk about all aspects of my writing process, but since by now it's pretty much a given that each post has random shit about my life in it, I'm going to do away with "life--random" and start adding ones that specify the randomness.
That'll go into tomorrow's headlines.

Current Project:
This morning between kicking ass on a history test and re-learning how to add in computers, I mailed five copies of my story "Bluebird's Comb" (For some reason my brain insists on referring to it as "BlueBEARD's Comb.") to five random university literary magazines. Another ten bucks invested in my dream.
It'll be, at the very least, a couple months before I hear from anybody.

Cool websites:

Go Fug Yourself. Perfected snark directed at bad clothes.
AV Club
xkcd web comic. I don't get all the math jokes. Maybe you will.
Inside the Box comic. Bunny and Ravy and all their (mis)adventures.

I'm not selling anything, I promise. Unless you are the Blue Mesa Review, in which case I'll only sell part of my soul to get printed. Alligator Juniper already got most of it.