Cyprus Nights

So, yeah, I couldn't resist sneaking into an internet cafe and posting from the birthplace of Aphrodite. Not that I have too much to say other than that I'm here, and that there are many many cats in this city. (Nicosia--or Lefkovia, depending on whether you're giving the Latinate or the Greek version of the name--people seem to use them interchangably, which was plenty confusing at first.) Yes, I've eaten lamb sliced off a skewer, and yogurt that I can only describe as a reason to emigrate here. Seriously, it was that good. The flavor of the city is very Western Europe, on the whole--though I've not ventured beyond the mid-city border into Turkish territory--why, I know you're wondering, on Earth not? Dunno--something about signs posting UN warnings and informing me that cameras are going to get me into serious trouble that just...puts me off.

I arrived here semi-zombified, and haven't quite recovered--ah, jet-lag, you're twice as sweet to those of us with a proclivity for biochemical depression. Though there's been little to be depressed about--the place is quite lovely--as I say, Western Europe shows here--the Venetian roots and the British occupation are in evidence, and it's not as if the Ottomans didn't know how to run a city. Oh, and there's a wee bit of Greek culture, too. Just a little. Alas, the fucking museums are all closed on Mondays, because, of course, they knew that that was the only day I'd be available. Bastards. Plus they drive on the left side of the street. Damn you, Britain, and your wrong-headed automotive imperialism! (Though I suppose until we in the U.S. shape up and go metric, we've no right to complain. Still.)

Arrived in time to drive by about eighty press conference--there was a national election, and they've got a new...head...guy. (Seriously, I don't know--President? PM? Anyone? Anyone? The TV stations are mostly in Greek, and all I know is the stuff waiters in restaurants shout when they break dishes!) Apparently, according to the BBC--OK, so I'm grateful for a little cultural imperialism there--he's a genuine Communist, but that his election is generally quite popular here and abroad, as he's made it his first order of business to reunite the country--kind of the flip-side of Raul Castro's 'election,' after which he promised There Would Be No Changes--the Cypriot's much more the Obama voice of audacious hope. So, here's hoping.

There are, to reiterate, many many cats here. All feral, presumably, but clean, sun-drunk, and quite happy-looking. (A healthy pigeon population probably keeps them well-fed.) I've been meowed at and stared at from parks, atop walls, from balustrades, and roof-tops. Cute little things.

No public transportation; you either walk, or drive. Alas for environmentalists, it seems that people here choose the latter. Which leads to parking jobs that can best be called hilarious--there are no sidewalks in Nicosia--only places where people walk around over-the-curb parked cars. This has to be illegal, yet no one cares.

My interview is tomorrow morning; I'm still a little spacey, and worried that I'll be so then, which is not good.

I left for Cyprus thinking that if I didn't love it, I wouldn't consider staying. I'm considering staying. Which means, fate being what it is (see "hell-bitch with an ugly sense of humor"), they won't offer me the job.

Off To The Far Side Of The World

Starting tomorrow ca. noonish, when the van picks me up and whisks me off to the nearest super-major airport, I'll be in transit for the better part of a day, winding up on a Mediterranean island for one day of recovery from jet-lag and then a job interview. I am, as to be expected, nervous. Yet also, not. This job, I want. It would mean challenges and difficulties and lots of displacedness-induced angst, and yet...yeah, I want this job. So wish me luck. Should be back on Wednesday next, but travel in an uncertain universe being what it is, who can say?

(Low Menacing Growl)

Heard from one of my potential hirees this morning; it seems that at the point at which they were about to make a decision, the university administration informed them that the funding for the position was no longer available. Which means that there suddenly was no job for me to get or lose. Poof--all gone! The committee fell over themselves apologizing--and it truly isn't their fault--they wanted to hire somebody. But someone among the higher-ups made a last-minute call that reduced the past few months to a waste of time and (amusingly enough) money--searches are expensive. Alas for me and for the kind folks at the department.

The problem with profanity--needless to say, I've been cursing under my breath quite a bit today--is that the best sounding words are the most offensive. Take "c*cks*cker." The sound of it is just perfect--that Teutonic bite to it is a magnificent means of expressing a bitten-off chunk of anger. But you just insulted a large number of gay men by suggesting that a perfectly harmless practice of theirs is vile. Similarly, "c*nt"--well, we won't go there--it's a good sound, but a terrible word. "F*ck" is OK, but it's more of a bark than a curse. "Sh*t" sounds petulant. And one can't go with "D*mn" without sounding like a 19th-century English gentleman who's just lost the fox's trail mid-hunt. Profanity is difficult. Which, at a time like this, it shouldn't be. Consarnit.

Mission Unaccomplished

Back today from an-occasionally-literally-disorienting trip to New Orleans for a campus visit. (That's a 'final job interview,' for those of you not hip to the academic lingo.) Flew in Monday night, ran a gauntlet of meetings and interviews with various solemn worthies, taught a 'sample class' on Othello (that was genuinely fun, I admit), and flew out late afternoon on Tuesday--so I really didn't have much time for anything else. I cannot tell you what the French Quarter is really like, though I will bet you that one leaves it with a true appreciation for the nuances of the varieties of beer vomit.

But I did notice something that I take home with me. (Apart from that awesome 'drunken Cajun salt-and-pepper shaker' I picked up in the gift shop--that is so going with my good china!) And that was this: People there talk about Katrina. A lot. Only natural that they would, to me--they're introducing me to a city I might very well move to, and they want me to know the Real Deal--but they never call it "the Hurricane." They call it "the flood." Because, as more than one person pointed out, "the storm didn't do this to us--the levees did." They are painfully, angrily aware of two things: One, this didn't have to happen--that enough people had been saying for long enough that these levees would not hold, and Two, in the wake of its failure, the government has been cruelly negligent. New Orleans is an angry city--and it's a good, clean anger that's actually brought them together, in the same way that hating an enemy in a time of war will unite a nation. And coming back, I was a little angry, too--it's infectious, and I'm prone to that disease, as you all know.

It wasn't the storm, it was the flood. It wasn't a natural disaster--it was a man-made one. They know this--and they know that people outside have forgotten.

And they're clear-eyed and angry about it.

Good.

Perversely Hypnotic

Johnathon Swift once stated that "satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own." Truer words, and all that, as Bertie Wooster would say.

I thought of that aphorism when I stumbled across this site: http://jezebel.com/gossip/crap-email-from-a-dude/.

It's probably relatively work-safe, but wait 'til you get home, because you're going to want to spend a few hours there--especially if you're a straight guy with even the smallest capacity for self-reflection. Oh, it won't be a pleasant experience--quite the contrary. Enlightenment is rarely gratifying; it usually takes the form of being confronted with what a total ass you've been. And this site is a doozy of an enlightener.

In all the times that women have told me--and men around me--that "we just don't get it," I've been inclined, I admit it, to think of that as a cop-out. That rather that explaining what it is we don't get, they simply throw up their hands and bail, as if they were faced with the task of teaching particle physics to special needs kids. But most of the men I've known have been, most of the time, capable of high-level-cognitive processing; we're not dumb, ladies--that's just something you tell yourselves so that the fact that we don't care about the same things that you do becomes our problem rather than yours.

But--

That said--

I began to read these letters, and realized that Oh My Sweet Lord They Might Have A Point After All. Because the letters here aren't written by knuckle-draggers. (Their high-level of grammatical errors notwithstanding.) They're actually the product of effort and thought and an attempt at verbal nuance/precision. Which makes them all the scarier. To return to the analogy of the special needs kids--hey, it's not like I'm afraid of pissing them off, as I'm pretty sure I can outrun them, and they always fall for the "It Was My Evil Twin" excuse--when said kid attempts to produce a 'pretty picture' and instead produces a godawful smear of random colors blending into muck brown, you still admire the effort and the creative impulse. The kid in question shouldn't know better, and is judged accordingly. But when a grown man who holds down a job and ties his own shoes and manages a stock portfolio does the same thing--well, then it's equal parts creepy and sad.

And what I realize in reading these letters is that when guys try to talk about their feelings or explain their behavior--this is how we sound. Self-important, condescending, and so completely un-self-aware that you just...curdle. And it's not just some of us--it's all of us. We all sound like this. Because...I think...we just can't get it. Maybe it's the limitations of English, maybe it's the way we're taught to use it, maybe it's our egos, maybe it's our insecurities--and yes, "All Of The Above" is probably the right answer--but when a man tries to explain himself, he invariably ends up trying to justify himself. Which makes him defensive and controlling. Which makes him, well--these guys.

And the only thing that consoles me is the fact that the only thing worse that being such an awful creature, is being forced to spend your life with one. Sorry, ladies--we really didn't know. And sorry, too, that our knowing will not fix the problem.

Murder

There are really only two responses to what happened yesterday--grief and rage. Because I'm a WASP male with a geneology dominated by Irish, Polish, and German, I don't do grief, so rage is all I've got. Because I teach students the same age--because I teach the same people that this murderous, hell-bound thing killed, I take it a little more personally than I perhaps have a right to. I'm not saying that I get it in ways that others don't--I'm removed enough from the place and the event that I can't claim any such thing. But here I am in southern Wisconsin, which is uncomfortably close to Northern Illinois. People on this campus knew people on that campus. And so how can I not look at my own kids this day and not see them as potential victims?

I'm supposed, according to Good Solid Judeo-Christian principles, to forgive. I don't. I can't. (Again, I don't say this with some kind of macho swagger that shows how much I really really care. Just a fact, nothing more.) Young people, for all their foolishness, and shallowness, and stupidity, are really quite wonderful. They--there's no other word for it, so sorry about this--they glow. They hum. There's all this energy and hope and frustration and the excited impatience of knowing that their lives are waiting for them, and they still think of those lives the way kids think about unopened presents on Christmas morning. They live in ways and in degrees that I watch and envy--they have, all of them, so much to give and to do, and no, most of them don't--most of them slack, and party, and fall asleep in class, and wait 'til the night before the paper is due to get started. But that's part of their charm--they're finally free to live according to their own body clocks, their own impulses, their own values. And sure, some of those values are a bit laughable, in retrospect--but only in retrospect. In many ways, this is the most free they've been since before kindergarden--and the most free they'll ever be. I love them; I truly do. Even the ones who drive me mad, even the ones who ignore me--I love them all.

And I hate him. To take away that life, that joy--can there be anything so selfishly, stupidly hateful? There isn't even the comfort of yesterday's butchery being 'senseless'--it isn't. Someone was in pain, and decided to hurt others--not so his pain would end--a simple suicide would have solved that, and earned my sympathy and sober attention--but so that they would hurt, too. As if their pain and horror and loss would somehow make his justified or tolerable or right. That's the face of evil, folks. That's Iago. That's Satan. It's cheap, and small, and contemptible. And I hate him for it.

I've rambled. So be it. Somehow coherence and polish seem inapt in the face of such viciousness.

February 14th

Henry Ford once said "Exercise is bunk. If you are healthy, you do not need it. If you are sick, you should not take it." Then he probably added something about how it was Jewish conspiracy, but never mind that.

I think the same thing about Valentine's Day. If you're in a couple, you don't need it. If you're not, it's only food for morbidity. Look, in the same way that "every day is Children's Day," every day that a happy couple is together is Their Day. And if it isn't--if they need a day to remind them of how lucky they are, well, that's what anniversaries are for, right? For the rest of us, Valentine's Day is a day of gloom, rash declarations of insincere affection, and a whole lotta drinking as a result of both. It's a poorly conceived holiday because it celebrates that which those who have cause to be celebratory, are already celebrating. And those who don't, can't. So f*** it, and those who perpetrate it--it's not 'phony,' or 'commercial,' or even 'cruel'--it's just a bad idea, ill-conceived from the get-go. Can we please let it go the way of Flag and/or Columbus Day? Please?

(OK, enough from me--go eat your chocolate, all you happy snugglebunnies out there. And yes, feel a little bit smug about the rest of us on the outside looking in. It's only human nature.)

Strike's Over!

And not a moment too soon. Another week without Grey's Anatomy and I'd've been climbing bell-towers with my trusty Red Rider. But seriously, folks--what's remarkable is how little I've missed what these guys had to offer--one realizes that television, for instance, is a habit rather than a pleasure. I mean, did any of us actually miss all those lost episodes of SNL? I think not--lame, one-notion sketches about, oh, I don't know, Obama and Hillary trying to be awkwardly polite to each other and failing. Haha! That was mildly, if obviously funny for, like 18.7 seconds! What're you going to do with the remaining five minutes? Oh, I see--recycle the joke. Lovely. And while I'm picking on poor SNL a bit, let me suggest that there's a larger concept at play: all shows are like SNL sketches. There's a reason why so many first seasons (Heroes, Lost, Alias, etc.) rock, only to have subsequent seasons suck, and suck hard--the precipitous decline can be blamed essentially on a fundamental frustration on our part with what we realize is a poorly conceived recycling of the same shit.

Look, 'twas ever thus--I'm not saying anything new, here. We all knew that Rod Serling is going to twist things around in the last five minutes of The Twilight Zone. We all knew that Perry Mason was going to get his client off, and that Columbo was going to nail the B-list celebrity bad guy. We definitely knew that the castaways were never going to leave that damn island. (Incidentally, has anyone pointed out that M. Night Shyamalan is a very very very poor man's Rod Serling, minus, you know, the remarkable social commentary and progressive politics? Seriously--go rewatch that show--Serling was the man when it came to civil rights, the environment, post-war paranoia and conformity--just a buttoned-down version of Lenny Bruce with a talent for the fantastic. Anyway--)

So, strike's off. And while it means that Daily Show and Colbert can depend less on interviews--though they've had some remarkably good ones in the interim--both men come to the table well prepared and have shown a truly remarkable willingness to let the other guy talk without giving an inch--seriously, Colbert and Stewart would each of them be able to segue rather seamlessly into 'real' news if they wanted to. But why would they want to?--and I'm glad about that return to a scripted format--am I really all that happy beyond this? No. I just haven't missed the writers.

Mind you, I'm truly unimportant in this respect. ("And in every other," you say, and fuck you, too, pal.) That is, I'm not, never have been, and never will be the intended audience of the workers of the WGA. Businesspeople themselves, they're looking to market their goods to the widest possible audience, and--oh, the wackiness of Adam Smith--that means that they actually have to exclude some consumers in order to get the largest possible number. So we on each side of the bell curve--look, I've got a freakin' Ph.D. from a top-twenty program, I'm one of the smarties, 'mkay?--get to go chase our amusements elsewhere. And writers, aiming solidly for the middle, produce...well, have you ever tried to watch a sitcom on ABC? Try it sometime--but remember, it's like the first time you drop acid--have a friend nearby who stays clean and can help you through the rough spots.

So I'm glad they're back--I'm glad that they got something for their efforts. And yeah, I'll still tune in to catch the occasional episode of House and 30 Rock. But in the long run: meh.

Post-Game

I'm off to one of my campus visits tonight, and am appropriately paralytic with fear, dread, and yes, just a soupcon of nausea. In order to distract myself, I will go ahead and jump on the bandwagon in pointing out that Oh My Dear Sweet Lord In Heaven were those Superbowl ads racist. You know the ones I'm talking about. The Charlie-Chan panda bears. And the Subcontinental salesman, with the--but of course--seven kids. SalesGenie--know the name so that you may avoid it. I just...it...words failed me. Oddly, I wasn't deeply, deeply hurt or offended (my lily-whiteness probably had something to do with it) because there's just a certain point at which racism becomes funny to me--so absurdly disconnected from reality that I just have to lean back and laugh. And then ignore the source forever. Which I plan to do. Interestingly enough--and this fact has been getting a lot of play as well--is that the ads were written by the company's CEO, who's India. Which, if you think about it, kind of explains the anti-Chinese racism. And perhaps he's self-loathingly Indian? Who knows. All I know is, I've got a number of close friends who are Chinese, and I wonder if that sound I heard from a great distance was that of their heads exploding. Mine would have...

Largely Half-Hearted Post

More of an assurance to concerned readers (both of them) that no, I'm not dead. Just in Wisconsin--ba-dum-bump-tish! But seriously, all the leaves are brown (all the leaves are brown) and the sky is grey (and the sky is grey.) It's staggeringly bleak here, relieved only by the occasional dumping of another 3-inches. I took my second major seasonal spill on an ice-laden sidewalk yesterday, and am feeling the effects still, a reminder that, no, I'm no longer in my bounce-back-after-a-gut-shot twenties. Now I'm more in my takes-the-elevator-to-go-up-one-flight late 30s. Joy. Anyway--

This month initiates my trial by fire, as I travel to not one, not two, but three campus visits. (I also have upcoming phone interviews for two other schools, one domestic, the other staggeringly not.) Georgia, Louisiana, and a certain Mediterranean island--yes, you heard that last part right--will be visited by yours truly, where I will attempt to convince skeptics that I'm not a total mongoloid. (Wish me luck on that!) Since I hate travel immensely, I will probably enjoy very little of this, and don't bother trying to tell me to think positively and approach these as mini-vacations, because it's not going to work. Jet-lag, missed connections, and lost passports are what this means, and we both know it.

Mind, such travel also means that I've got another several shots at getting a Real Live Job, so I'm not going to bitch too terribly much. Still, between one thing and another, I'm more than lightly frazzled.

Oh, and my social isolation has become so complete that I'm actually in the early stages of taking an art class. Because, you know, that's where all the women go to meet heterosexual men. Yep. That's where we flock in droves. Sigh...