Texan-ness.

I watched an awful movie last night called Moon Over Miami, with Betty Grable and Don Ameche. I have to write a paper for my American Studies class on a film about Texas. This movie mostly takes place in Miami (duh), but it's about waitresses in a Texas drive-in who hatch a scheme to go to Miami and trick millionaires into marrying them. (Because there were no millionaires in Texas?)

I never knew much about Betty Grable except the famous WWII pinup poster, but I've seen her in two movies recently. What was that all about? Watching her tap dance is like watching an amateur dance recital. ("Well, isn't she cute?) She doesn't actually bite her lower lip, but you wish she would, just to complete the picture.

Redeeming the film is Don Ameche, only because he's so sexy as a bored millionaire. And Charlotte Greenwood and Jack Haley. They're very funny as you would expect. (Charlotte Greenwood played Aunt Eller in Oklahoma.) There must have been a taboo back then against showing any real heat between older people in movies. (I say older, but they're probably not even as old as I am now.) Their characters -- Haley is a waiter in a fancy hotel, and Greenwood is the truckstop waitresses' aunt posing as a maid -- are supposed to be in love, but in their romantic scenes they act like a cross between 8-year-olds and a couple of old ladies. They have one very funny number in which Greenwood gets to show off her signature high kick.

Oh, and there's a horrifying, hilarious (and huge) production number near the end called "Solitary Seminole." A loving tribute to the indigenous people of Florida. Tap-dancing, of course.

I can't be the first one to point out the resemblance between Don Ameche and Johnny Depp. Not just that they look similar, but watching Don Ameche in this movie it struck me that Depp's whole persona seems almost like a studied imitation. That combination of eagerness and boredom. And the mustache. It was eerie. I was going to do one of those "separated at birth" things but I can't find a picture of Johnny Depp where he resembles Don Ameche. It must be something that happens with movement.

Instead, I'm going to write my paper on a movie called Pigskin Parade. It's a low-budget Fox musical from 1936, also with Jack Haley and Betty Grable. (And Judy Garland in a small part -- she's 14, I think, and it's her first feature.) It's about an obscure Texas college football team that is mistakenly invited to play Yale. Yesterday I checked out a stack of books from the library about college football, which made me laugh, and blush.

For that same class, we've been reading Friday Night Lights, a non-fiction book about a town in Texas and their high school football team in 1988. It's a pretty great book but very depressing, really much more about racism than about football. Maybe I'm getting that impression because I'm skimming the parts where he narrates the games in sports announcer jargon that apparently people find thrilling but to me looks like technical writing. ("Carter dove forward for four yards and a first and ten at the Carter 28-yard line." Hm...)

Sprung.

I dreamed this morning that I was taking a Spanish exam and had only finished half of it but the time was up. I was furious, I wadded up the test and scowled at the teacher as I stormed out.

This semester is very different from last semester. Last fall, except for my Spanish teacher who was inexperienced and struggling, I had excellent professors who were organized and enthusiastic, great lecturers, tough but fair. There wasn't a lot of bovine memorization; their exams were more about understanding complex processes and being able to grapple with the subject matter. Also, I only had 15 class hours and an American government class in which I knew about 80% of the material going in.

This semester I have one really outstanding teacher (he's a grad student, I found out last week), one who is entertaining in lecture, but sometimes vague and scattered, one who is a walking encyclopedia of American and Texas history, and -- for someone who loves to listen to people who know history talk -- a mesmerizing lecturer, but whose exams are straight names and dates, and one who is an absolute dud whose class makes me want to scream it's such a disgrace. And I have two classes, geology and Texas government, packed with subject matter that was totally foreign to me, as well as two hard-core academic thinking and writing type American Studies courses. And Spanish.

The other big difference, the one I'm most concerned with right now, is that last fall everything didn't pile up at the end of the semester making the last couple of weeks hellish like I remember from my first college career. Finals were tough, but I didn't have a lot of big projects and papers due right at the end. This semester is more like old times. Hence, the dream.

I have a sinking feeling last fall was the anomaly.

The World Now.



I was watching this clip with my political hat on, as a supporter of Obama's campaign for president and as someone who has very little patience with anything anyone in the Bush administration has to say, especially about Iraq, especially someone like Rice, who was so instrumental in starting the whole fiasco, and suddenly it hit me that these two people are both black, roughly my age, one a woman, one of whom will likely be our next president and the other of whom serves our country in an office that wields great power and influence in the world. Regardless of how I feel about this particular debate, the fact that they are there having it moves me deeply.

I'm getting to the age where I'm beginning to have moments when I think, "the world has changed so much in my lifetime" -- a phenomenon I always associated with old people. I could never have imagined Condoleezza Rice and Barack Obama when I was 9 or 10 and my mother was organizing in our neighborhood in Indianapolis to stop banks from redlining and to fight discrimination by racist realtors, when my elementary school changed from almost all white to nearly all black within a few years because of "white flight."

I guess one would expect the world to change some in 40 years. Maybe I just never thought I'd last this long!

Third Ward TX.

(I sat down just now to write about a film I saw last year and loved, but I got sidetracked. Eventually I meandered back to the film, which is called Third Ward TX. I just want to say that, if you get bored with me pondering about my ego, scroll down and follow the links to find out about this great movie.)

I've been invited to participate in the American Studies (that's my major) honors program, because I'm one of the top 25 students in my class. The invitation has unexpectedly, but not surprisingly, stirred up a swirl of old feelings.

If I participate, I will write a 60-100 thesis, on a subject I choose, over the course of next year. On top of my regular course load. I may be able to make a film instead of a traditional written thesis. Either way, it'll be a shitload of work --actually the film would probably be quite a bit more work -- but it will be great preparation for grad school, and it will strengthen my application for the MFA program, especially if I make a film.

But I wonder if I love the honor part of it too much? The way it makes me feel: smart, special, etc. I feel like I'm in high school again, jumping at every little bit of recognition. (They told me that holding offices in clubs would enhance my chances for scholarships, so, in my senior year, I ran for and was elected president of art club, thespians, and the honor society. It's not like I had big ideas for what I could accomplish in these clubs, and I don't remember really doing much; I just wanted the titles.)

I can hardly imagine the amount of work the honors thesis would be -- not only do I need to take a full course load both semesters if I want to graduate any time soon, but I won't be able to get through another semester without some kind of job. Make a film on top of all that? Wasn't the idea to finish a B.A. as quickly and easily as possible so I could get on with grad school? And isn't my grad school application already pretty impressive. I've made a feature documentary, not to mention over 25 years of fairly interesting (and applicable) life and work experience. Still, it's hard to say no. I want the prestige.

I was discussing it with J the other night and he interrogated me a bit about "why?" Do I think there's intrinsic value in this type of academic recognition? Yes, but... Is this type of recognition a life-long dream of yours? Yes, but... Ever since I knew what they were I've wanted an Oscar, a Pulitzer, a Nobel Peace Prize, whatever. My attachment to recognition has loosened some -- most significantly around the time that I realized that these desires (more like neuroses) were at the root of a lot of my unhappiness -- but apparently there's still a bit of it lurking somewhere in my soul.

The focus of my life in the last 5 or 6 years has been to unravel this part of my personality. To relax about it. To enjoy being smart instead of needing desperately to be regarded as smart. I want to be honored, but because I've done good work, not because the honor makes me feel for a moment like I'm a good person.

I have a perfect thesis idea. If I decide to do it.

In my Intro to American Studies class, we just read a book called Dawn at My Back: A Memoir of a Black Texas Upbringing, by Carroll Parrott Blue. It's a very American Studies-type book: family stories, pop psychology, cultural history, photographs (the author is a photographer, filmmaker, and academic), letters and other ephemera, haphazard and beautifully connected at the same time. I loved it, and it inspired me.

For years, I've wanted to make something with the story of my grandfather. I wrote a song about him a long time ago, called My Family Tree, but I want to do something more in depth. Right after I came out to my family, when I was 20, my father (through my mother) told me about his father who he's certain was homosexual, partly because he disappeared several times when my father was growing up only to be found living with a man, the same man each time.

The story is compelling just on its face, but the background is fascinating too. What must it have been like to be homosexual (and possibly in love?) in the 20s and 30s in the Midwest? The other element of the story, for me, is the question of what gets passed on from father to son, genetically, socially, by example, and through family stories and mythology. (My mother joked to my dad that the homosexuality came from his side of the family, not hers. My father has a lesbian niece too.) Every one of my male friends has a difficult relationship with his father. Mine was painful as I was growing up but has over the years become a source of great pleasure.

But more on the Carroll Parrott Blue book. Though I love the book, the subtitle set me up for disappointment. The author grew up in Independence Heights in Houston, which was originally an incorporated town, a settlement built specifically for freed African Americans after the Civil War (I think) but much of the book takes place in Michigan and Detroit and other places. I wanted more Texas.

I saw a great documentary in SXSW last year, called Third Ward, TX, which is about a neighborhood in that area of Houston. I wrote about it very briefly at the time. I want to see it again. One of the reasons I'm so intrigued by these neighborhoods (urban, black, usually very poor) is that they are the neighborhoods I end up living in. I move in when they're being colonized by artists. Next come the homosexuals, and pretty soon I can't afford to live there once the yuppies arrive and drive up property values and rents. On the corner of my block a gay couple built two beautiful modern houses, one 2 stories high that they live in and another smaller one that they just sold for $650,000. Across the street there's a house under construction that is three stories tall and takes up almost every square inch of its small urban lot. It towers over the tiny houses on either side of it. I love our house, but it's falling apart and we feel like it's only a matter of time before our landlord sells it. The lot is worth a fortune. Meanwhile 3 blocks away, there's a brisk street business in cocaine and low rent prostitutes.

Anyway, Third Ward TX is a wonderful film. It shows that the arrival of artists in a poor downtown neighborhood doesn't have to mean the end is near, but could possibly be a whole new beginning.

Spring.

It was warm and muggy when I got up today, just like it had been for the last few days. It was raining on my walk to the bus. When I got out of my first class the temperature had dropped about 20 degrees. I went home to get a sweater, but I only wore it for about 20 minutes because a few minutes after I left the house the sun came out and it got warm again. Now it's dry and cool.

I finally got my garden in. We have two rows of sunflowers with green beans in a ring around them which I hope will grow up the sunflower stalks like beanpoles, 4 jalapeño plants, and a patch of cilantro and parsley. It's probably not the time of year to be planting parsley, but, what the hell, we'll see how it does. I also put in a row of red sunflowers along the front of the porch.

I was going to plant cucumbers since they did so well last year, but I changed my mind. We got tons of cucumbers from our farm last year and no green beans and not enough hot chiles. (Those are the two things that did the best in our garden last year with very little maintenance, and this year I'm all about low maintenance/high satisfaction.)

I had a run-in with an anthill, and now my fingers are fat and red like monster baby fingers. I don't know if they were fire ants, but they were tiny and red and they were mad at me.

Speaking of spring, maybe it's just the season but everyone I saw today looked good.

Check Out That Seersucker.

This is my grandmother and her brother, my great uncle. I think this photo was taken in 1910.

I was going through some random photos I have because I'm contemplating a short video piece using old photos and my high school journal, and I found a few very old ones that I ended up with after my grandmother died a few years ago. I love them. (Check out the dog. He has the same expression as my grandmother.)

I never noticed this before, but in pictures of me at that age I look very much like my great uncle. My grandma had lots of brothers, and she adored them.

I have only one sister, and I adore her. Below is a picture of her and me from 1973, which makes me 12. I'm doing her hair. (Whatever.)

They get bigger if you click on them.

I Need a Job.

We live near I-35, the Interstate that runs through Austin on its way from San Antonio to Dallas. At most of the intersections on the access roads along I-35 going through the central part of the city, there are one or two panhandlers working all day, asking for money. J found a dirty, wet piece of a cardboard sign on the street when we were walking home from somewhere a while back, and it's hanging on our kitchen wall now. Part of it was torn off and missing, so it reads:
Cold
Hung
Please
Help

That wasn't what I was going to write about -- it just came to mind. I was going to mention here that I'm looking for a summer job in New York. There's a little web site I can go to and look at a map that has dots on the cities where my readers are, so I know a few of you are in New York. Just puttin' it out there, as they say. I can cook, I can type, I'm pretty smart and easy to get along with. I'm willing to do anything ... I was going to say anything legal, but that's not true; I don't care if it's legal, as long as it's ethical.

Facebook.

I don't get Facebook. What are all those people doing? I hate to get left too far behind, so I joined, but maybe the social networking thing is not for me because I can't find much of interest there. And whenever I do find something interesting, I have to click through five screens of permission to give up my privacy, so I usually end up backing out.

My friend T is very anti-social networking because it obliterates privacy. Or, rather, it takes away your personal control over the parameters of individual relationships. It forces you to have the same relationship with your mother, your life-long best friend, the guy you just met at a party last weekend, and your boss.

Maybe that's where we're headed, but it makes me nervous. Do I want everybody I know, no matter how well they know me, to read a little note I write on an old friend's "wall" which makes reference to an old joke between us that, without the context of our long relationship, may be meaningless or hateful to someone else? One of the things I like most about conversation is that it's ephemeral. I was horrified a few years ago when I realized that every google chat I had ever had was stored in a Steven file somewhere in the big google sky. Somebody is making a list and checking it twice, separating the sheep from the goats. It smells too much like judgment day to me.

I can see you raising an eyebrow at all this apprehension about loss of privacy coming from someone who writes about his sex life on a blog for the world to read. You have no idea how carefully calibrated this writing has become. I might be telling you a lot, but I'm not telling you everything.

What I like about Facebook -- and this happened when I first joined Myspace, too -- is the flurry of contact with old friends. We're so peripatetic these days -- maybe some of the appeal of Facebook et al. is that it relieves some of the sadness and tension of having friends and family so far flung. Social networking brings us all together. I think I would just like to have a little more control over how together we are, and when, and with whom.

Fifties Day.

This morning I put on my favorite pair (my only pair) of 501s and a white t-shirt. Lately I've been putting lots of goo in my hair and slicking it back because I never know what to do with my hair and I don't like the way it looks if I don't do anything. But I realized just now when I looked in the mirror that I look like I'm dressed up as Fonzie for a Halloween party.

I also look quite a bit like my dad. I have a few pictures of him from the late fifties, from just before and just after he and my mom got married, in which he's wearing exactly what I have on right now and his hair is slicked back. It's not hard to see why my mom fell in love with him. So, though it's not not weird, it's not necessarily horrifying that I resemble him more and more. But, in those photos, he's in his early twenties. I'm pushing fifty. Tomorrow is my forty-seventh birthday.

New York.

I got back from New York at midnight last night. I feel like I was gone for months or years. What I'm doing here is so removed from what I was doing in New York, which is not quite the past and not quite the future, but somehow both.

I spent most of the week in T's apartment working, writing, recording. But we went to see Spring Awakening on Broadway on Wednesday and a show that my good friend K directed on Friday. Also on Friday, I went to the Met to see the Courbet show. So I was out and about a little. New York, as always, made me a little sad, but now I think I have a better idea of what that feeling is, so it doesn't hurt as much. I think of New York as my hometown. It's the first place I ever felt any strong attachment to.

I grew up in Indiana listening to my parents disparage where we lived. They're both from farther north: my dad grew up in Minnesota, my mom north of Chicago. They were married and I was born in Waukegan, Illinois, but we moved to Indianapolis when I was 3, and then to a small college town an hour west of there when I was 12. My parents complained about the hicks and the Christians constantly, and for the most part I agreed with them and couldn't wait to get out of there. I moved to New York when I was 20 and stayed for 17 years. I left in 1998.

Of course, the city is very different now. All things change. No place stays the same. There's the simple, nostalgic sadness of that. What is particularly sad though is that the changes to New York in the last ten years are not just the regular changes a city goes through, the gradual shifting and displacement of businesses on a block. Old buildings gone, new buildings in their places. It is the fact that the new businesses are so often international banks, Starbucks, chain restaurants. It's not just that New York is changing, it's that New York is changing into Dallas, or Orlando. Or Indianapolis.

I do miss New York. It's a city I know my way around. I never feel lost or stranded there, even now. Pedestrians rule there. And I realized on this visit that I still believe somewhere deep down what I believed before I had ever been there and what I confirmed when I was 18 and visited for the first time: that New York is special, better. I think I will always be a New Yorker who lives on Austin. I know I could not live there now, even if I wanted to. I could not afford to live there.

Rocks in the Head.

We had our second Geology exam on Monday. I studied like a motherfucker, memorized all the really arcane stuff that I figured would show up on the test -- most of it did -- and I got a 98. Not bad, and it makes up for the 88 I got on the last one. Still, I'm not satisfied. I missed one question. It was the last question on the test, and here's how it went: "Hydrothermal water is _____." Multiple choice, two options are obviously incorrect. The other two are: "B. groundwater heated by contact with a magma." and "D. any heated water (e.g., your water heater)."

Notwithstanding the shaky grammar, both of these are correct. I know this as soon as I read it. What's going through my head while I'm trying to decide which little bubble to fill in with my #2 pencil is: "Hydrothermal means hot water. That's what the word means. I don't know for a fact that this word is used in other contexts, but I know that hydro means water and thermal means heat. I also know that, in our class discussion of the hydrosphere, hydrothermal water was mentioned in the context of groundwater making contact with magma and producing steam. So I imagine, in the filed of geology, this is how the expression is used. Since they're both right, which answer does he want? Am I to consider the larger picture? Or should I narrow my thinking to only include the concerns of a geologist? I finally went with D because I couldn't get around the fact that it is the more correct answer, and I hate second-guessing. I should have known that he wanted B.

I'm not sure what to take from this. Even on the surface, it's annoying because it's a trick question -- I don't know how else to see it. But if you're going to write a trick question, the decoy answer should be in some way incorrect, shouldn't it? I even looked up hydrothermal when I got home, and the first definition is "Of or pertaining to hot water." The second definition is "Geology. Of or relating to hot magmatic emissions rich in water."

Isn't the point of a university education to broaden our minds, not narrow them? I feel like I'm being asked to act as if I know less than I know. Maybe that's the point. Don't assume anything.

J gave me some perspective when I was complaining about this to him. He said, "Well, if you were taking a Spanish exam and you came across a word that could also be Italian but mean something different from what it means in Spanish, you'd go with the Spanish meaning, right?" I guess I would.

Anyway, how can you be worried about a stupid Geology class when there's Spade Cooley?

The So-Called Koolaid.



I hear and read criticism of these pro-Obama music videos, some of it critical of the suggestion of celebrity worship (as in, "the beautiful people love Obama, you should too") or just the generally worshipful tone, the chants, etc. But most of the negative comments I've read have boiled down to something along the lines of "they're creepy."

These videos, as well as Obama's best speeches, have the whiff of the evangelical, and god knows we're scared -- and sick and tired -- of that. Obama has been called a "movement politician" as opposed to a party politician, and movements share characteristics with cults, one of the most obvious being that they attract the dissatisfied. And movements often, like cults, grow around charismatic leaders.

Is the president supposed to be a charismatic leader or a competent manager? Well, both -- but I think the charismatic leader is the more important function. (There's no way a president can really be the CEO of the federal government. The executive bureaucracy is too big and unwieldy, much of it is not accountable to the president, and the president doesn't have a lot of say in its organization. The president can't "make" the various offices and bureaus go along with his ideas. But they'll go along with him if they have a good feeling about him, if they like him. Not to mention the legislative branch of government, which is constitutionally outside of the president's authority but usually ready to help a popular president with his legislative agenda.)

Still, I think most of the negative reaction to these videos is no more interesting or complicated than a distrust of anything that provokes an emotional response. The head vs. heart debate. Music and images are very good at disarming us. When something makes us cry or feel sad or excited, we're out of control, at least for that moment in between our reaction and our response. It's hard to argue with tears.

These videos are so moving because they evoke that paradoxical American feeling which is a mix of deep sadness and shame (the feeling we feel when we learn about slavery, or the extermination of the Indians, or mountaintop removal, or Mexicans dying in the desert, or Iraq) with the optimism and pride we feel knowing that, in America -- though it's not always strictly true, and it's certainly not true equally for all people -- if you work hard you can succeed. And they remind us of how some problems that seem unmanageably huge, like racism, boil down to the simplest thing: changing how you feel. Music can do that, it does it easily and it does it all the time -- it changes how you feel.

In the end, all of the above is over-thinking it. The people making these videos are artists. They are famous, and their particular skill is emotional persuasion. Those are the two things they bring to the effort to promote Obama. They're doing what they do.

I Voted.

I voted early today, since I could do it on campus after class. The line was a block long, all students as far as I could tell. That's a good sign, huh? Next Tuesday, we caucus. We get two votes in Texas primaries. (Even the votes are bigger in Texas.)

Wednesday night I went to a review session for my geology exam (I have three exams next week -- I feel like all I'm doing this semester is taking exams, and I'm not loving it) and afterwards I strolled over to the south mall where I thought I might catch the end of a Hillary rally where Bill Clinton was speaking. It was 6:40 and the thing was supposed to start at 5:30, but he was being introduced as I walked up. The crowd was small, I think, at least much smaller than I would have expected for such an event. There was a core of screaming kids near the stage, but most of the crowd was hanging back with their arms folded, obviously not there to rally for Hillary but to see what old Bill had to say.

The president of the student Democrats gave him a very strange introduction: "We know him from MTV! We know him from playing the saxophone on Arsenio Hall! He's the first rock star president this country has ever had!" My guess is that most of the audience, the speaker included, was about 2 years old in 1991. I doubt they even know who Arsenio Hall is.

Anyway, his speech wasn't particularly interesting. ("I love my wife. But even if she wasn't my wife and she asked me to stand up here and endorse her, I would do it. Because she's more qualified to be president than anyone I've ever known." What an idiotic thing to say. If she weren't your wife, she wouldn't be running for president. If she weren't your wife, nobody would even know who she is. And she is your wife, so how do you know how you'd feel about her if she weren't?)

I stayed for about 20 minutes and then went home. One thing struck me. Not really a new thought, but a clear example of why I don't like Bill or Hillary Clinton. He was talking about how one of the points that is brought up to argue against Hillary as president is that, because of who she is, she would stir up the Clintons vs. the Republicans fighting of the 90s. And Bill said (I'm paraphrasing), "I don't know about you, but I thought the nineties were pretty good. I don't know what's wrong with fighting. I'd like to see someone in the White House who's willing to fight. Fight for jobs, fight for prosperity," etc. Now, everybody knows that's not exactly the fighting Hillary's detractors are referring to. Sure, there was a lot of squabbling over real issues, over legislation, but the fighting that we're talking about is the personal, partisan bickering that colored every issue. Whitewater, Monica Lewinsky. Instead of either ignoring or addressing the real objection, he distorts its meaning and then responds to that because it supports his stance. All with a wide-eyed innocent expression. I guess you'd call it passive-aggressive behavior. It's insulting.

Maybe she learned it from him, but it's their favorite rhetorical tactic. It's not exactly lying -- though they do plenty of that as well -- but it's false.

J and I went to a neighborhood block party for Obama tonight. Free pizza. Kids. White people and black people, together. It felt like the future.

La Tarea.

Here's a treat for my Spanish-speaking readers. La tarea de esta mañana:

El verano pasado, mi sobrino (el segundo hijo varón de mi hermana y su esposo) estuvo muy enfermo. Se contagió de E. coli. Primero, el tuvo un dolor de estómago. Por supuesto, con frecuencia los niños se enferman, así que mi hermana y mi cuñado no creían que era grave, pero un dia comenzó a sangrar. En ese momento, supieron que era grave. El pasó trés meses en el hospital. Sus padres pasaron todos los dias con él, y mis otros parientes lo visitaron frecuentemente. Yo no pude ir, pero mi hermano mayor (el otro tío de mi sobrino) podía visitar porque vive más cerca. Muchas veces, mi sobrino casi murió. Sin embargo, mi familia y yo nunca perdimos la esperanza. Finalmente recuperó y fue a casa.

(The assignment was to write 100 words about an important incident in my life. My friend Z, who, in addition to having vast knowledge of botany and horticulture and various other life sciences, speaks fluent Spanish, helped me with this.)

Double Life.

I arrived in New York for the reading in the nick of time. Actually I was a bit early -- my flight left on time, arrived early, there was no one in the taxi queue, and eerily no traffic on the BQE to Manhattan from Queens. We rehearsed for a little over 2 hours, which, even if you have nothing to compare it to, I'm sure it's fairly obvious isn't a lot of time, but all the actors were quick and focused and did a great job. It was rough, but we expected that. The reading itself was in a rehearsal space in Chelsea that I knew immediately I'd been in before, back in my rock and roll days, one of those big stinky band practice buildings divided up into dozens of little rooms that are never soundproof enough.

Afterwards T and I went to a bar nearby for drinks with the producers. We were happily all of one mind regarding what needs work: mainly two narrative holes, one in the first act and one in the second act. They're problems T and I knew were there, and we were waiting for the reading to see it from a wider angle. The producers are going to fly me to New York again in two weeks (my spring break) so that T and I can do some more writing together.

That evening and the next morning after the reading, feeling inspired, T and I hashed out some ideas. We're writing a new song for the second act, for the trial, which contains the climax of the story. I came home and -- instead of doing Spanish homework -- threw together a rough draft in GarageBand and sent it to T on Monday night.

Okay, now back to Spanish (and Geology and History...) for two weeks.

Whether Weather.

I woke up this morning to an email from JetBlue letting me know that my flight to New York had been canceled because of snow there, which was disorienting because it's been quite summery here. My first impulse was to check Amtrak, but the earliest I could get to New York by train would be Monday night, because I'd have to go all the way up to Chicago and then on to New York. Though I love the idea of a 4-day train ride, I have to be in New York by early tomorrow afternoon, so that wasn't going to help.

I talked to T on the phone, but there didn't seem to be much we could do, so I went to school and felt more and more resigned as the morning went by that I wouldn't be going to New York this weekend for the Lizzie Borden reading.

When I got home from classes, T had emailed suggesting I try to fly to Philly or Baltimore or DC tonight or tomorrow morning and take a train. First I called JetBlue to see if they had a flight in the morning. They didn't. But while T and I were looking for flights to other East Coast cities, a single seat opened up on a JetBlue flight tomorrow morning at 7:30, so the agent snagged it for me and I'm back on for New York, barring any further natural calamities.

Honeymoon's Over.

I don't know, I may have spoken too soon about how great all my teachers are this semester.

I had my first geology exam last Friday. It's a basic geology for non-majors class. The professor is a little odd, but I usually like odd people. The material right away seemed pretty advanced, but I felt confident after getting an A in Biology of AIDS last semester, which, if you don't remember, was very hard.

I have a heavy course load this semester, and I've been a little overwhelmed with the amount of reading, but I studied, I thought, adequately for the exam. There were a few questions that totally stumped me, but I thought I did well.

Except that there were three questions that I didn't like at all. One asked for information that we were specifically asked not to worry about memorizing. (We were to remember the Eons, Periods, and Ages, but not the Epochs. The answer to one of the questions was one of the Epochs. Fair?) Another asked for the age of the universe. The correct answer, on the test, was 13-14 byo. Our textbook says 15. Okay, maybe there's a little play in the age of the universe.

But this is the one I can't let slide. The question was, "The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter represents ______. (a) a disintegrated terrestrial planet, (b) a disintegrated gaseous planet, (c) remnants of a large comet that orbited the Sun, (d) fragments that never aggregated into a planet. The textbook for the class very clearly supports "d." The answer he wanted for the test was "a." I looked this up in several sources and all of them point to "d." Some of them say that the disintegrated planet theory used to be what scientists believed but that now the consensus is that the asteroids were never a planet. (I chose "d" on the test and got it wrong.) Here's a little math: I got an 86 on the test. There were 50 questions, so, without the three fucked-up questions, I would have gotten a 92. Which is an A. Which is better than a B.

I emailed the professor, because I thought it must be a mistake in the exam key or something and he would want to know. He emailed back and said that the asteroids contained mantle and crust material which proves they were melted at some point, so they must have been a planet. He also said, "You should chuck your source." I wrote back and said that my source was the textbook for the course (which I'd already told him, and quoted in my email) and that all the websites he'd referred us to for information on the solar system also contradicted his answer.

That was two days ago and he hasn't responded. I don't know what to do at this point. I'm not going to let it go. I don't want to be a dick, but I want to know what's up. Either the test is wrong and needs to be fixed, or I'm wrong. If I'm wrong, he's the teacher and he should explain it to me. I didn't let lazy teachers off the hook when I was 7 years old; I'm sure as hell not going to do it now.