Upon reading Moby Dick..again...kind of

I'm close to done with Moby Dick. I've been reading it for my American Novel class and it's been interesting. I read the condensed version of it when I was in middle school. It was one of a series of great books my parents had that were about a hundred pages each with half of those pages being pictures. I also started reading the book once for fun only to have school start again. These previous reading have made reading the book this time strangely familiar and foreign. It's odd though, the book begins much like a Dickens novel: long drawn out descriptions and next to no plot movement. About a hundred pages in the book shifts to a long series of essays on various whale related subjects mixed with a few whale hunts. This apparently switches back to a narrative for the last hundred pages.

The book is completely different in its structure than I expected. The odd thing is that in many ways it mirrors the structure of The Things They Carried. If you're unfamiliar with the book, it's a series of short stories about Vietnam, war, and human behavior. I highly recommend it. It is considered a ground-breaking choice of style that is absolutely necessary to in O'Brien's words "tell a true war story." It's fairly amazing to me that Melville did this long before O'Brien and yet Moby Dick is considered an awful book by so many people. In fairness, O'Brien has a much easier to read style.

All of this has lead me to wonder how popular any book really is and how we actually gauge that. I suppose the simplest way to do that would be sales, but that doesn't account for checkouts from the library and borrowing books from others. If my class is any indication, it seems like Moby Dick is a member of the literary cannon despite a strong dislike from the general populace.

Basically I think I like books that many people find unpalatable. I'm not sure whether that's because I want to like the "classics" so I can feel intellectual superior or because I genuinely like them when they're actually terrible books.

Mostly I'm just writing to try and get in the habit again.

Every semester has to have a worst class

I really don't like my grammar class. As a token of this, I wrote this haiku and poem during the class to keep me from gnawing my own arm off out of sheer boredom.

grueling tedium
gerunds, participles—sigh
grammar, a slow death

bow-tie speaks of corpses,
okay, so it was corpus but honestly
he's going to end up with more corpses than corpuses.
Starved to death on fun sized bites of the all too obvious,
surely zombies must come of this, and wreck sweet zombie vengeance.
Driven by a relentless march past the edge of interest and well-through intellect
where could they end up but madness.
A madness without method, but rather an aim: his silence.

That whole losing an organ thing

I just wanted to make a quick note (I'm on a break at work) to explain what I know about the transplant at this point. It's most likely going to happen beginning to mid September. I did a blood test this week and I'll have to do a couple more tests of some sort next week. So far, everything has been going well though the transplant coordinator has not been as fast at returning my calls as I would like. It's still quite a surreal feeling that it's actually happening this time. It's been over two years since the possibility was brought up. I had my freak out about it already. I missed a lot of work because I just couldn't focus on anything else. I'm feeling much better at this point, which is helpful considering Rachel and I just signed on a new apartment yesterday and we're poorer than usual as a result. I won't be able to drive for two weeks after the surgery and I'll have appointments up at the hospital that I'll have to get to, quite likely when Rachel's at work. I don't know exactly what help I'll need at this point, but I will need some. The plan at this point is that I'll be recuperating at our new apartment in Provo, but it's possible that could change. I'll keep you posted. And does anyone in Provo have a truck or a trailer? We start moving into our place on Monday and we need something to move our bed and some couches (once we buy them).

I blame my mother

Rachel and I were just sitting here talking about my childhood and how she's had an uncommonly thorough exposure to it. She knows many of my friends from elementary school and has heard a number of the attendant stories (yes, this includes a certain stabbing incident).

She asked me why I stabbed my then acquaintance, now friend in the arm with a pencil. The answer was that McSomethingkins wouldn't stop talking to me. I was inside during recess and the only way that happened was as a form of punishment. So I was bothered to begin with and then somebody wouldn't leave me alone. I ignored her and tried to keep working on whatever I had been assigned but that didn't work. At this point in the explanation, Rachel asked me if I asked McSomethingkins to leave me alone. I never asked McSomethingkins to leave me alone. I resorted to more drastic measures obviously.

Thinking through the story and why I hadn't asked McSomethingkins to stop talking I was reminded that I almost never end conversations. I'm just not very good at it. I feel awkward, as though saying "I should go" or "It was good talking to you" means "you suck" or "you're boring me." Rachel helpfully chimed in that I probably got this from my mother. My mother talks and talks and talks. On an average visit, it takes between twenty and thirty minutes to get out the door and into the car to drive off from my parents'. Her conversations don't end until they absolutely have to. For me, I don't end conversations because I feel like it's impolite. I'm guessing I picked this up from years of hearing her talk with a disproportionate amount of the conversations ending quickly, neatly, or when I wanted them to.

I'd like to take this moment to apologize for any awkwardness I've unintentionally inflicted over the years through my communicative defect. I was like a monkey with a hand grenade: I didn't know what I was doing.

Glitter is the herpes of craft supplies

The title for this post comes from a bit by Demetri Martin. Rachel introduced me to his comedy and I'm impressed. His "If I" videos on YouTube are really funny, but actually philosophical. It's just the sort of arrogant self-aggrandizement/self-deprecation that I'd like to think I'd indulge in if I ever became a comedian, which of course I won't.

He had his career planned out at elven. He was going to become a lawyer. He went to two years of law school and decided it wasn't the right thing for him. It made me think about my own job. I had brief thoughts about staying at Independent Study after graduation. I'd continue working on high school courses, but ideally I'd make more money (that is part of the idea behind college and all). But the more I think about it, the less sure I am. One of the biggest motivators for me is seeing the results of work I've done. I started at Independent Study just over a year ago and have yet to see the first course I worked on put into production. It's the sort of thing that makes me wonder if it ever will. The quality control process is the culprit as far as I know, which only makes me want to arrange a transfer to that department to see what the holdup is.

My first choice for a job used to be editing sci-fi books. However, this is the most sought after job in my industry so the chances of getting that range from unlikely to impossible. The sad thing is, I don't even know if I'd want that job right now, not that anyone's offering it to me.

I'm guessing a healthy dose of my general bleah feeling is that I've heard new news about the transplant. They've scheduled another evaluation for the 6th of August. I know it's terrible, but I'm sick of it. They need to take care of it already. I'm most likely not going to go to school fall semester. I have a hard enough time forcing myself to do homework when I haven't had a major organ removed so I'm not going to push my luck. This means graduation will be pushed back for me, again. I might be able to still be done by April, but I'd need to take classes via Independent Study and that hasn't worked out in the past.

This whole transplant deal has been the glitter or herpes of the last two years for me. It just keeps popping up out of nowhere attracting my attention and bothering me only to fade away again for another few months. I realize I'm being terribly selfish in my thinking about this. Obviously this whole process has been far worse for Angie, Joe and any number of other people, but regardless it still sucks. I think this might actually be the last time; it might actually happen. I hope it does soon because it's a crappy little storm cloud that keeps moving a little ahead of me, when I'd rather just get soaked and be done with it. Normally, I'd read back through this for errors, but I'd rather not mix business with pleasure.

Zombification

It's been some time now since my last post. Squitchy.org served me well until I forgot to take care of the financial obligations involved in having a clean domain name. Since being separated from my site, I've seen it bought by a Chinese based internet company and then resold to another company in the UK. The site that now owns the squitchy.org domanin name is sedo.co.uk. They rejected my offer of one dollar for my site as too low and informed me that premium domain names are often sold for three or four figures (told here perhaps implies more human contact than actually transpired; I entered my offer into a form). Despite their big talk of three and four figures, I found that I could buy my old domain from them for $60 even. I can only guess that this figure directly related to the four unique visitors the site has had in the last month. So McSomethingkins and three random strangers each cost me $15. Or rather they would have if I was going to buy back squitchy.org. Sad to say, I will not be buying it back.

Instead I am reviving this site: squitchy.blogspot.com. I figure since it's been dead a while and now brought back to life it counts as a sort of zombie, much the same way prunes and raisins are zombie plumbs and grapes. While I am no fan of prunes or raisins, I've learn from countless hours of video games that zombies can be fun. That is provided you have a shotgun or chainsaw at the ready.