Grad School Musical

"Where is my P.I." is my favorite...

Good vid

Can ya tell A____'s been busy? Ok, one last thing and then I'm off to bed. Thanks to Winterwheat for the link.


Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

Wedding album

I finished (I think) the wedding mix I'm making for my friend. Here's the playlist and cover art.
The Taco Bell Canon (artist unknown, CD lost)
Spam Song - Monty Python
Heart of Glass - The Bad Plus
Willimantic USA - (artist unknown, recorded before 1950 I think)
Connecticut's for Fucking - Jesus H Christ and the Four Hornsmen of the Apocalypse
My Generation rx - rx
Big Balls - Hayseed Dixie
Seasons in the Sun/Hustle - The Squirrels
Flower Girl - Joe Henry
Herbs, Good Hygiene and Socks - Lovage
Love You Madly - Cake
Gopher Mambo - Yma Sumac
A Hard Day's Night - Peggy Lee
You Oughta Know - Richard Cheese
Always on my Mind - Lewinski
St. Paul's Mix - me (sort of - I mixed it. The artists are Eddie Izzard, clips from Airplane, the Simpsons, the Marx Brothers, Pat Boone, and an anonymous MIDI composer who made a version of Mama Told Me (not to come)).











Now, I just need to hope I still have a date for the wedding Saturday. A____'s family stuff is looking grim.

weddings

Well only one I'm going to, so properly that should read "wedding", however it is wedding season and thus the plural. Maybe it should be a mass noun, like oatmeal or brick. I'm going to a wedding at the end of the month. Unlike many joyous unions I hear of, this is one I approve of. The participants, that is the blessed couple, are both fully self-aware adults for starters. Moreover, the bride (B___) and hubby (R____) to be have wonderful senses of humor which I'm sure will influence the ceremony. E.g., they have titled the wedding "The Motorcycle Marriage of the Martians" and sent B-movie themed invites. Excellent. They also requested no presents unless they are d.i.y. and out of sentiment, like a pair of knit socks - no seriously, this was in their invite. They're very cool people. So I made a special Letters to the Corinthians mix for them since B____ and I have a running joke about this being a necessary part of ANY wedding ceremony. As in "so how was the wedding?" "Oh you know, Letter from Paul, dyeable shoes, chicken polka, oh yeah and Pachelbel's Canon."

While the Letter from Paul mix (called "Love is Patient" and featuring Pat Boone, Eddie Izzard, Airplane quotes, and the Marx Brothers) is hand made, I have a prefab but still totally excellent version of Pachelbel called "the Taco Bell Canon". I have it somewhere. Somewhere in the boxes. I hope to unearth in it time to burn to the cd for B___ and R_____. Time's a ticking though, and speaking of, it's bed time for pfg, so I leave you with this google gem I found while leaning how to spell "pachelbel".

Thank you Ms. Silverman

Gah.
I just watched some Sarah Silverman Show episodes before returning to grading and now I have "Poop Song" in my head. Not totally irrelevant to grading these essays, but a song I'd rather not be humming for the next day or so. I think I'll have to get a Bonnie Tyler fix to bump it out. While I don't love Bonnie Tyler, few songs have the perseveration power of Total Eclipse of the Heart. We'll see if it can overcome the apparently quite catchy refrain "We pooped at the mall today!"

erin go...aarrrrrrrrrgh!

Oh boy, oh boy.

Tuesday Poetry

Folk Song, by bongwater (Ann Magnuson)

I met an anarchist in Tompkins Square Park
he was an angry man
spinning words so dark
he called for death to rich men
death to Yuppies too
death to art fags, bourgeois blacks
death to landlord Jews.
Kill the bankers
kill the cops
kill him her and me
kill them all for CBS, NBC, ABC, TBN, CNN, HBO, "Live At Five", MTV Spring Break
Party Weekend, Sally Jesse Raphael,
Geraldo,
Oprah,
Arsenio,
Regis
and Kathy Lee...

And I said,
Hey, I admire your get up and go,
your youthful brooding and sexually charged enthusiasm and all your
other utterly naïve and thoroughly endearing adolescent qualities
and I bet you can keep it up all night, can't you?

But I bet you don't even use a rubber no you don't even use a rubber,
no you don't, do you?
Because you
think you can live forever.
Or do you have this adorable and misguided notion
that death is something really radical and cool?
But I still can help being wildly attracted to your
fresh-faced uncompromised tattoo'd rebel stance
and goddamn
I'd like to help you sing your tune.
But I've been making friends with this here death
and it seems a might too soon.

And I said,
Hello death, goodbye Avenue A
I'm getting tired of waiting, tired of being afraid.
Joseph Campbell gave me hope
and now I have been saved.
So I say, Hello death, goodbye Avenue A.

Now I'm not trying to be flippant here,
or irreverent, or exploitive, or sarcastic, or ironic, or post-modern, and this is not
a parody.
Get it? Got it? Good.

I've been thinking what he told me,
that it's okay to cry
when we held the crystal Tina Child
spent 12 Grand to buy
homeopathic mantras
fresh-squeezed wheat grass juice
doctors up in Bellevue
Doctors Salk and Suess.

And it's time we'll all be going home
if you can find the way
Yes, everyone is going home
going home to stay.

And it's time we find a way to cope
a way to find some hope
for some it's the Bible
or Buddha
or Mohammed
or Krishna
or cheesecake
or bourbon
or the Butthole Surfers
or Giorgio Armani
or Romeo Gigli
and you really can't afford it
but it looks so fabulous on you so why don’t you take it on home
and speaking of home
isn't it about time
you move out of that
East Village hellhole
you know the one with the Honeymooners view
of the brick wall out the window
because you deserve something more life affirming
like a tree, or a flower, or a patch of grass,
or a singing little bluebird
or maybe you just want to take your boyfriend to Europe because he's never been
or quit the job you always hated
or learn how to play the guitar
it's easy
or get obscenely drunk in a piano bar
and sing show tunes
show tunes!
and don’t be embarrassed,
because at this point
I'd rather see "Brigadoon" than "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer"
or maybe you'd like to get politically active
so you disrupt a Presidential press conference by shoving a 5 pound week old stalk of broccoli between those thin lying lizard lips
that no one can read anyway
because half the country is illiterate and the other half is apathetic including the First Lady
who couldn't step just 500 feet out of the overdecorated White House to visit the goddamn Quilt or maybe you'd like to put a bullet into Jesse Helms pea brain
but you know when you start thinking like that
when you start thinking like they do
then it's time to let go of the material world,
so maybe you'd like to get yourself some religion

because Jesus is the Way
Jesus is the Way
Jesus is the Way
Jesus is the Way
Jesus is the Way.

Besides, it's a lot easier to accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior
when he looks like Willem DaFoe.

But maybe that stuff turns you off
so you rent "Power of Myth"
it made me feel really good (for about ten minutes),
or maybe you'd just rather do acid and listen to Led Zeppelin

Then again, the last time I took hallucinogenic drugs
was about five years ago
I took mushrooms in Joshua Tree
looking for that Carlos Castaneda kind of experience.
I got off, my boyfriend didn't
he fell asleep, left me alone with the television.
Turned it on, put on PBS,
you know what was on?
"Berlin Alexanderplatz"
So I started watching it,
and you know what?
I got really bummed out.

And that's when I said No to Drugs
No to Drugs
no no no no no
hell no to drugs,
and maybe you'd like to say no to drugs too
or maybe you want to join
Atheists of America
or the Madonna Fan Club
or watch Richard Gere follow the Dali Lama across the world
and then do those oh-so-Zen like movies with those oh-so-Zen like messages like
Hey! It's fun to be a prostitute!
I can't wait to spread my legs across Hollywood Boulevard
because then maybe some rich, handsome billionaire in a Jag
will come driving up and take me shopping on Rodeo Drive
and that's what a woman's all about anyway, right?
Sucking and shopping
Sucking and shopping
Sucking and shopping
Sucking and shopping
Sucking and shopping
Sucking and shopping
come on, it's a sing along
Sucking and shopping, sucking and shopping, sucking and shopping, sucking and shopping but hey Who am I to argue?
because this is the the feel good movie of the summer,
it's the feel good movie of the year
it's the feel good movie of the Nineties
it's the feel good movie of the Millennium
and you know what?
If it puts a smile on your face
and a song in your heart
and a spring in your step well
whatever makes you happy,
whatever makes you happy,
whatever makes you happy,
whatever makes you happy,
whatever makes you happy, whatever makes you happy, whatever makes you happy, whatever makes you happy
Whatever gives you hope.
Even if it's a truly tasteless joke.

So fax a manifesto.
Pencil in a date.
Let me know when something gives I hope it's not too late,
because I'm getting tired of waiting,
tired of being afraid.
Joseph Campbell gave me hope and now I have been saved.
So I sing, Hello death, goodbye Avenue A
Hello death, goodbye Avenue A
Hello death, goodbye Avenue A
Hello death, goodbye Avenue A."

(Super) Tuesday Poetry

Down to the Ark by The Mountain Goats

The candidates met up in North Dakota
And they donned their black robes there in the chapel hall
They said a brief invocation to their cloven-hoofed prince
And they signed their names in blood on the vestry wall

In Christ you know there's neither high nor low
And the void will claim all creatures small or bright
Seal up the borders or let everybody in
In the order of the serpent, there'll be neither left nor right

And we pull down our blindfolds
And we reach out for the lever in the dark
Get a sticker for our shirts as we head into the sun
Proudly bearing the mark
Headed down to the ark

The applicants went down to Oklahoma
And they hired an accent coach to teach them the western twang
And several post-born babies learned the hard way:
Vampires only kiss you if they've sharpened up their fangs

And as Minnesota fell, so went Missouri
We met at VFWs in the snow
And we voted down the tax codes, and we voted down the war
So many names to choose from, just one way to go.

galaxy

From Wikipedia:
A very remarkable planetary/galactic configuration occurs on December 23rd and 24th 2007. The configuration on December 23 — Mars, Earth, Sun, Mercury, Jupiter, Galactic Centre — is shown in the graphic simulation linked below (here); it becomes even more remarkable in that it will be accompanied by the Full Moon (conjunct Mars) at about 2 a.m. on December 24 when a simultaneous Venus square Neptune occurs. It is even more remarkable in that the Pluto/Sun conjunction appears exactly on the Winter Solstice, just past conjunction with the Galactic Centre.

art and cats

My cat's only dalliance with art (of any human sort) was the time he decorated himself with my green watercolor paint. When I paint, I like at least some of the paints to be quite viscous. This results in my often having somewhat heavy, sticky glops of paint on whatever is passing for a palette. Max found a slightly old palette and stepped into one such blob which had nearly dried through but retained a soft sticky center. He had tracked green paint around my office for a while, leaving little dark green partial toe prints here and there, before I realized what had happened.

Since he seemed fine with my attempts to wipe the paint off his paw, I got ambitious and dunked his paw in water to dilute the blob. That was decidedly not ok.

During the struggle that followed, Max ended up with green paint streaks all across his snowy white chest and neck. Then he took off out of the house and stayed out so late I went looking for him. As I scanned under cars and peeked into back yards around the neighborhood, I couldn't help imagining the "lost cat" flier I'd have to post if Max didn't come home that night: "Lost - Enormous Orange and White and Green Cat"

Thanks to A____ for the link below.

Tuesday Poetry

Why We Play Basketball by Sherman Alexie
(from the YouTube note: animated by the Native Lens youth in May 2005)


Cover of Bowie's God Knows I'm Good (lyrics here)

Tuesday poetry

Tom Waits sings Tom Waits and K.D. Lang sings Leonard Cohen

This is not my beautiful life

While my fella and I were waiting for the car salesman to bring around what I was assured would soon be my frosty green 2004 Civic, the Talking Heads was playing at a volume just under loud over the speaker. They pipe the music throughout the dealership, even out into the lot near the door to the salesroom. Through the many hours I was there last night going over variously unaffordable car replacement options, I realized that the dealership playlist was meant to target my age group, possibly a few years older. I smiled, because I found myself perversely thinking of the soundtrack of the aged come the year 2045. I was imagining how strange it will be to hear Frankie Goes to Hollywood playing softly in the background while my roommate is being suctioned for a sputum sample or having her bedpan changed. Most likely, the many intervening years of car dealership soundtracks and other audio indignities will ameliorate the jarring scene that would otherwise be.

On a happier note, I think I'm getting a car. I say "think" because there could still be a hold up with the financing. But if that clears, I pick up my pretty green Civic on Friday. I have my Ford for two more days. I can't get rid of it soon enough. On the way home from this afternoon's meeting with the Honda financing fellow, I sat at the red light with my hand stuck out the driver's side window to compensate for the Ford's intermittently fucked left rear blinker. The smell of cooking coolant wafted in from the engine while the fan whirred away in a mostly futile attempt to bring the engine temperature down from just a hair under well done and I was reminded of exactly why I am willingly about to go very deep into debt and to bleed my combined savings and semester's living expenses of a hefty $6000 this week.

I am so damned happy I have good credit and about a thousand left over from my divorce settlement. But the savings will be gone after Friday, and the debt load will be at a frightening all time high.

This unavoidable situation has helped to underscore that I've been feeling much closer to quitting my PhD program since at least May. I'll leave the precious pauper act for those who have the health, some level of unshaken belief that life always turns out ok, and the family financial backing to support such silliness. Lacking these luxuries, it's nothing short of terrifying to know that I am literally pouring time, energy, and a huge amount of money into completing this degree.

The faculty attitude which sees any slow downs for my health problems as a smoke screen for lollygagging my way through the PhD program are quite wrong and clearly deserving of a battle. It's the kind of fight I don't easily walk away from. But it is looking less like a battle I can win with anything better than a pyrrhic victory. And the degree itself is seeming less and less likely to support me in what are the most probable and desirable careers for me given my physical constraints, my shaken belief that life will always turn out ok, my apparent allergy to academic culture, and what I know about the academic labor market.

An unbelievably petulant and exceptionally passive aggressive email in my inbox from the new grad in my lab this morning helped push that growing sense of "This is not my beautiful life" a little further into the range where bailing seems the best way to cut my losses. So far, I've lost many things including my self respect on more than one occasion. I've found myself needing to sacrifice personal principles I hold extremely dear in order to even try to play nicely with the other children. I spent the last few years of good health I think I will ever have in my life first attending one crappy PhD program and now another, which, after a change in leadership is rapidly transitioning into high grade crap itself. My debt load is increasing each semester I waste here with little chance of a sure way to pay it off at the end (i.e. few tenure track jobs available and those that are involve hideous teaching loads). I know I have more I can lose before I am left with nothing but I doubt my ability to pull up out of nothing. If I were healthier, I might not be so sure of that, but as it is I don't think I can afford to take the hit to my sanity, any chance of current or future peace of mind, and all of my patience that another year of this program seems to require.

golden throats

Some years ago, a friend played William Shatner singing "Mr. Tambourine Man" for me. Amazing. The album also featured Shatner reprising his role as Captain Kirk on alien mind control except here he is not falling in love with his communications officer or scheming against his friends but shouting his way through "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" (if you haven't heard it you really should at least sample it at iTunes or somesuch place). Lastly, there was Spock - I mean Leonard Nimoy - singing "If I Had a Hammer".

I recently decided I must have some of these gems. My quest brought me to Actors Who Try to Sing, by Kevin Murphy (yes, that Kevin Murphy). A nice review of a selection of albums by celebrities who sort of sing.

ring my bell

My fella just upgraded his cell phone. With it came the ability to download your own ring tones. For the last day or so, he's been fascinated by this feature, searching out how to make your own tones. Since we have tons of recording and editing software, the capture part was not hard.

So I now have Monty Python and Mel Brooks clips on my phone. Excellent. I just need to get the "I am a pizza song" on my sister's phone and we'll be all set....

omg, "je suis une pizza"! I hadn't heard the full pizza song before - complete with French lyrics. Up to now, I thought it was unique to The Money Pit.

Connecticut's for...

fucking, it seems. At least so say Jesus H Christ and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (think sort of a musical Upright Citizen's Brigade).

You can hear a sample of "Connecticut's for Fucking" here.

reminisce

"What is 'reminisce'?" a coworker asked me once. We were working at the hippie import clothing store in Ann Arbor, folding indian and grateful dead print "tapestries". I thought for a moment. She had a habit of stumping me with these questions about English. It was a good question though. Not an easy concept to describe to a non-native speaker.

I got out something like "Reminiscing is like remember, but more conscious. It's what you do when you recall a time or experience, usually from a distance of time or period of life. Often it's used when you're sharing the memories with someone who was part of what you're remembering, who shared the experience with you. And sometimes there's a tinge to it, something not always 100% happy, a little dark in there too. So like if you and I run into each other many years from now, we might 'reminisce' about working here at the hippie import clothing store".

This seemed to satisfy her.

What made me think of reminiscing and my definition of it is what I found on the hard drive of one of the lab computers today. I had just put in a work order on the computer and decided if someone with master administrator privileges was going to be digging around in it, I should probably get some of my stuff off.

I don't make a habit of keeping personal files on the school computers, but until rather recently I didn't have a laptop and consequently I would sometimes transfer stuff to a lab computer. Usually meaning to promptly transfer it off. And sometimes I'd forget. I knew this. It's been kicking around my mind, but my account is password protected and no one in the lab knows how to navigate the admin privileges well enough to get in around it. But today it occurred to me I should probably go clean it up.

So I went in and looked through my folders to make sure there was nothing too personal on there. Not too bad. Some music files, a couple of pictures a friend sent me, and three recordings of the Christmas eve radio show I did in 2004.

This show was on the local campus radio station where my friend B___ and I had an every other week morning show on Fridays. It was mostly about labor and education, with a focus on academic labor. I think the tag line was "news and commentary on labor and social justice". Very leftist. Since neither of us wanted to talk for two hours straight, we mixed in music.

On the Christmas eve show, B____ was out of town. I loaded up the playlist and brought some company to the station so I wouldn't have to do all the work. My company was my ex, T____ and my current partner A____.

And I have recordings of this show.

I've heard some of the music I used to listen to then and it always recalls the feeling of getting up and going to the show that day, wondering if this was my last christmas with T____, and all sorts of other not pleasant remembered thoughts and feelings. We've all experienced this, right? The music which hits you with recollections of a time when you were feeling things very strong and not very good.

I'm playing it back now, trying to decide if I should keep it or delete it. We're at about half way through, a Christmas blues song is playing with a deep voiced woman singing about how much Christmas sucks. "Don't give me none of that 'Tis the season to be jolly'. No it ain't!"

These recordings provide not just the music but also the voices from that time. I was lead on the mic, with A___ and T___ reading news items, weather, and providing the back and forth you generally hear on a talk show. We had sleigh bells (we had stolen them from a faculty Christmas party), which you can hear now and then when we get laughing.

And even though we laugh a lot, I can hear the strain in my voice. I don't think it's obvious to the uninformed listener, or if it was any cause might have been attributed to my disliking Christmas (which I mentioned, quite a lot). But boy, that tone jumps right out at me.

I wrapped up mostly smoothly and we close on "Christmas in Heaven" from Monty Python Sings.

Say it in portuguese

A native english speaker acquaintance who was taking classes in Portuguese called it "the language of the damned". I did not know him or the language well enough to know if his humorous characterization even approached an accurate assesment of the complexity of the language or if it was more a reflection of his language learning skills.

In my limited contact with Portuguese speakers speaking Portuguese (Brazilian), the language has proven to be a bit odd to my ear. Odder than Italian and Spanish but not quite as odd as French or Japanese (the latter I simply cannot follow, not even a little). I'm not knocking the language - by "odd" I don't mean bad or ugly or negative. Odd means, here, something more like unpenetrable, inscrutable, veiled. Some languages you hear and you get this sense that although you don't understand them, you should understand them. Patterns pop out, you hear sound combination here and there repeated but maybe with a slight shift. They start to draw your attention and serve as windows into other aspects, like speaker variation versus lexical variation. You have no frikkin clue what it means but you do hear apprehendable elements of structure and you might even start to make some generalizations. German and Russian sound like this to me. But not Portuguese. I'll think structure is starting to come, and then it throws me a serious curve ball. I lose the thread, uncertain if the structure deforming moment was just a consequence of the conjunction of the particular speaker's personal style and my ignorance of the language or if it was something important, some step which one must learn but which I cannot possibly follow.

If you want to listen to some samples of Portuguese dialects, the wikipedia page has a few links.

All that above is in fact preamble for the issue of the word "saudade". I ran across saudade and was thinking about Portuguese because I was spending some time not making measurements, instead I was looking up music. I found a remix of some Cesaria Evora songs, which lead me to the word "sodade" and the European Portuguese equivalent, "saudade".

So what does it mean? According to whoever wrote the wikipedia article, "Saudade is generally considered one of the hardest words to translate." I find I usually enjoy words like this. There was one from Japanese a friend described to me a while ago. I think I posted about it. I'll go look. It was a great word.

But back to saudade. Here's a stab at a translation and context for the word, from A.F.G Bell, via Wikipedia and a shit load of other sketchy references (found a JStore book reference to Bell, his book, and the word, but I'm not logged in so I can't read the context of the Bell/saudade reference).

What you get online:
"The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness."

If this is accurate, I believe I have a translation to add to the pot. It is PhD student-osis. More specifically, it is "(what is felt by) a disenchanted PhD student as she approaches her sixth year"

Friendly's sold

Of all the things in the news today, the one which immediately drew my eye was the headline "Friendly Ice Cream Corp. Sold". It's a local story. Along with the story is a link for readers to share their "Friendly's memories". Personally, I find it hard to wax nostalgic about Friendly's. This is not to say I haven't got any Friendly's memories, just not any of the sort which I think I'd want to share in a pleasant trip down memory lane context. More evidence of my jaundiced views I guess.

I should back up. Friendly's is an ice cream/family restaurant chain. Of all the local chains of my childhood, Friendly's has never stood out as anything special. Compared to the occasional local dairy farm run ice cream stand/shop (of which there are usually a couple in any New England region), Friendly's is downright nasty.

It's not so much the ice cream which makes Friendly's nasty, and possibly in a town where there are many more choices for restaurant than Friendly's, Friendly's wouldn't seem so, well, wretched. But living in Buttfucknowhere CT for 9 years now has made me sort of loath Friendly's.

The only chain which outnumbers Friendly's are Dunkin Donuts. I do not feel a similar loathing for Dunkies because they are not a "restaurant". They don't try to be, even with all the silly shit they keep adding to the menu. You can still treat them like a coffee shop. Friendly's, on the other hand, is a restaurant. Because it is a restaurant, it occupies a dining niche which, were it not for Friendly's taking up that space, might be filled by something (or some several things) else. Something better.

In one of the three strip malls which border my university campus and which count as the commercial district of the "college town", there is a Friendly's. There used to be a nice little coffee and donut shop in this strip mall. According to the campus police (the ones I liked, yes, I'm the kind of tool who talks to police officers - the decent ones at least), this coffee shop had the best coffee. I used to go there. They had chess board table tops and games you could check out. It wasn't great, it wasn't bohemian. It was a regular working class local privately owned coffee shop and it went out of business a few years ago.

The space stood empty for some time. Two women I knew who ran the coffee truck on campus considered moving into the space the nice locally owned coffee shop used to lease, but they dropped their plans when they were told by the owner of the strip mall that they would have to limit their menu due to a deal with Friendly's. That is, Friendly's wouldn't allow any shop to move into their strip mall if that shop planned to offer menu items which might compete with the items Friendly's offered.

Talk about fucking collusion.

Needless to say, the space is still empty. It was occupied for a short while by a nice enough coffee shop - although the atmosphere left something to be desired ("ugh, who ever heard of painting a dining room BLUE?!" my brother yelled when we ate there once). But they went out of business about a year ago, leaving the empty space and yellowing "for rent" signs up in the windows.

Friendly's, however, remains - offering such delightful menu items as the "fishamajig".

I recall going to Friendly's with some school mates when I was in my former graduate department. It was me, another American (Kelly), and a young woman from Spain (Emma). Emma had only been in the country a few months. We looked over the menu and Emma asked "what is 'fish-a-ma-jig'?"

Kelly and I laughed and advised her NOT to order it. "See, it's like fish and whatever. Or whatever kind of fish," Kelly said.
Emma was confused.
"The suffix "ma-jig", in English, is added onto words to denote a sense of non-specificity," I explained.
"It's like 'fish or something, but we might not know what'," Kelly added.
"Oh," Emma said, staringt at the menu.
"So you probably shouldn't eat anything that has the morpheme 'ma-jig' or 'ma-bob', that's another one that means sort of the same thing."
"And don't eat something that has a 'whatsit' in it either. That would be ill advised also."

I wonder if Friendly's will change their menu now that they have been sold. I wonder especially if they will change their atmosphere. The one across from my campus has a chronically grease-slippery floor, an ordor of bleached french fries, and acid-like pictures of giant ice creams photoshopped into photographs of New England landmarks. The ice creams seem to be lurking, waiting for an unsuspecting tourist. Also, the local Friendly's plays just truly wretched music from the late 60s/early 70s. I mean BAD music. Muskrat Love, Neil Diamond, John Denver, all the worst of course, bad bad music.

gay day

"This is the gayest day ever!" exclaimed the young woman working the register at the supermarket check out. Her name was Annica and she was just finishing with the customer in front of me in line.

The customer in front of me was having problems reading the display on the card reader and had asked Annica which button to push for "debit". The reason the card reader wasn't displaying properly was that everything electronic was a bit fucked up that day. "There's no dairy, meat, or frozen goods but there is produce and other groceries" a boy standing at the front of the store had told me when I came in and stopped short at the surreal, underlit aisles. The lights were completely out in produce, but with some light trickling in from the front windows and a set of lights on the back wall of the store. In addition to these few peripheral lights, the registers, scanners, and card readers were working, more or less. The less part must have been giving Annica problems for some time, I assumed. After the customer's second request, Annica heaved herself up from the register well and peered over at the buttons on the less working contraption. She seemed genuinely put out at having to exert this energy. A typical late adolescent petulance was coming off her in waves. I could sense them in the combination of her posture, features, gestures, and quasi-verbal utterances up to that point. A series of huffs, puffs, thrusts, and squints conspired to give away the climaxing frustration that was that day, a warm, humid Memorial Day weekend Saturday which might have been full of presummer promise and thrills had Annica not been stuck working in a half lit, under airconditioned supermarket checkout line with moron customers who couldn't interact with a poorly working card reader.

"This is the gayest day ever!"
The customer in front of me paused. He glanced back at me. I had been humming absentmindedly to myself and hit a sour note, stopping abruptly when Annica erupted. The customer said "What?"
I said "Oh, 'gay' means anything negative to young people these days." The customer looked to be a bit older than me. He was attractive and well put together looking. I considered for a moment whether or not he was gay. He looked at my hello kitty t-shirt. Annica looked at my hello kitty t-shirt and then up to my white bandana. I wondered if I looked gay to either or both of them.

"If it were gay" the customer said to Annica and me "that would mean it was fun and open and exciting..." I nodded vigorously in agreement with him. I could feel my mouth twisting in a sarcastic half smile as I glanced over at Annica and saw that she seemed to have taken an extreme interest in the more or less functioning register keys.

The customer picked up his bags and left. Annica started ringing me out. "So...it's a gay day, huh?" I said to her. The sarcasm was in full swing now. I was hoping though that she would engage in a dialouge with me about this. Unfortunately, Annica didn't say anything. I had only one item, for which I am pretty certain she was thankful, so our official exchange was over quickly. "23.99" she told me. I handed her a five and a twenty, got my change and my bag, and then turned and looked her in the eye saying "Thanks. Thanks a whole big bunch Annica."

I started to leave, got about half way across the front of the store, then paused and looked back at Annica. She looked at me. She had a blankish look of crafted incomprehension. Not total misunderstanding or bewilderment. It was the kind of look I get from my students when I've asked them "Ok, so who didn't do the reading?" after I've been lecturing for 20 minutes and am starting to get the sense that this is all brand fucking new information. It was the look which says to me "You don't seriously expect me to answer that do you? Oh shit, you do. Um...If I just look at you like you're speaking another language, maybe you'll think my lack of response is an indication that I simply fail to understand what you are asking me rather than an admission that I haven't done the reading..."

I looked long enough for her and I to have a mutual recognition of this moment. The moment was broken when a hassled looking manager hustling up to the customer service desk passed near me, drawing first Annica's and then my attention.
"Excuse me, are you a manager?" I asked turning to the woman.

After explaning that Annica should be spoken to about how to either keep her mouth shut or how to do some rudimentary damage control for her mouth when it gets away from her, I left.

On my way home, I considered the remark again. "The gayest day". I fucking hate this. I remember asking a (different) young woman who had a tendency to overuse the word "gay" as a catch-all pejorative if perhaps she could imagine a big burly masculine looking leather daddy saying "WHAT?!" every time she found herself considering something "stupid" something "gay".

After yesterday's supermarket moment, I was thinking - what if whenever some kid says something like that, it in fact DID turn into a "gay day"? What if, that remark was like the "hey cool aid!" call in the 1970s kids' drink advertisements? What if speaking those words summoned up something of a less harmful gay stereotyped production which would evolve out of or descend upon the moment turning it into a broadway or hollywood musical dance sequence?

I imagined the store shifting from dim grey supermarket drabbery to a stage covered by flashing colored spotlights, laser-sliced fog, and speckled with twinkling flecks from a series of twirling disco balls which had descended from the ceiling as soon as the word "gay" had sprung so carelessly off the lips of some homo-aggro child.

Ranks of attractive dancers in coats and tails, top hats, and bikini briefs or denim short-shorts would spin, leap, and glide out of doorways. A moving chorus line of leg kicking fellows would emerge from seemingly out of nowhere, backlit by the eerie glow from the still functioning lights against the far wall, spotlights racing across them as they marched toward the registers, timed to seamlessly switch places with the flipping, cavorting, and leaping dancers all around. Streams of Lawrence Welk like bubbles would flow across the scene and a dusting of glitter would appear on the floor, where the tiles would pulse like the Saturday Night Fever dancefloor. The disco-thumping orchestral theme would swell as the dancers, some still kicking and leaping, others having taken partners from the crowd to pull into free form cha-cha, hustle, and the occasional tangos, converged on the registers, now brightly flashing in time with the music.

"Did somebody say it's the GAYEST DAY?!" a drag MC would yell into a megaphone while strolling down the checkout counter like it was a catwalk, pausing to flick her rainbow feather boa at Annica before launching off into the waiting arms of a dozen strapping young dancers who would wisk her away as the entire entourage shimmied and high kicked its way out the door to disappear into the parking lot and beyond, off to make another "gay day" come true.

or maybe something a little like this but with better lighting and wardrobe