Obsessions y Compulsions

As I've said before, I am a ruminator. I think about the same things over and over and over again. In some instances this is really unhealthy and causes me to freak out and defeat myself with repetitive negative thought patterns. In less serious instances, my single-mindedness just leads me to become obsessed with things that entertain me. If I don't have at least one thing--the same thing--to think about constantly...I'm just not myself, and it's better for me if it's the entertaining kind of obsessive thinking rather than the self-defeating kind. I've written about past obsessions here, here, and here, and I thought it would be fun to write about some of my current obsessions and compulsions.

1. Nachos: For the past several weeks, I've been on what I refer to as Nacho Rampage 2009: I've eaten nachos at restaurants 7 times in 14 days. I've already posted some restaurant reviews at #15 here. I've always been pretty indifferent to nachos before, and I have no idea what's caused me to lust after them so (probably has something to do with cheese; also I think nacho is a funny word). I don't know if Nacho Rampage '09 is over or not, all I know is that some days when lunch rolls around I develop a fever, and the only cure is nachos. I suspect the nacho fever will rear it's greasy, gooey head again in the near future. That said, I realize the nacho thing is more of a compulsion than an obsession, because I don't really think about nachos much, I just feel compelled to cram them into my face on a regular basis. Though to be honest I spend a lot of time thinking about my next meal.

2. Twitter: You know how sometimes you get into a conversation via text messaging that is totally inane and hilarious? There's a website that pretty much gives you the chance to have inane conversations with people all day long and witness other inane conversations. I complained about Twitter before, but now I can't live without it. It's like a whole website of just Facebook status updates. Alot of people use it as a business networking tool, and I think it's really good for those who want to get their blogs read by more people. Here is an article that explains better than I can what Twitter is and why people like it.

I've had a Twitter account since last summer, but I'd never really payed much attention to the site until Inauguration Day (two whole weeks ago). I couldn't watch any of the live inauguration footage in my office because our internet filter blocks streaming media, so I watched Twitter instead for photos and updates of the proceedings. I've been hooked ever since. So hooked that I check it compulsively all day at work, after work, on weekends, etc. It keeps me from going to bed on time. I'm going to have to get a Blackberry just so I can be on the internet all the time.

I can't really explain what's so addictive about Twitter; you talk to people all day long and you may not even know them, but it's fun and everyone is very positive.

3. Firefly: Sometimes my obsessions begin with a dream. Like last Sunday morning, I woke from a dream where I was a character in Firefly. I watched that series about a month ago and fell completely under its spell. The show was so well-made and brilliant that it still has a huge following, even six years after it was on the air. To find proof of this, all one has to do is look up Firefly's Wikipedia pages (there are many more websites devoted to Firefly, but Wikipedia is about as geeky as I like to get). They're some of the most articulate and thoughtful Wikipedia entries I've ever seen. In a strange coincidence, after reading all about Firefly on Wikipedia the other day, I went to the breakroom and found my coworker reading a book full of scholarly-type articles about the show. Glad to know I'm not the nerdiest nerd in nerdville. And he told me that Joss Whedon has a new show called Dollhouse (I think this link contains spoilers) debuting Feb 13 on Fox. I hardly ever watch TV and I don't ever watch Fox, so I'm glad I found out about this, yay synchronicity!

And, typical to my obsessive nature, part of my fascination with Firefly comes in the form of a crush. Surprisingly, I haven't fixated on any of the more intellectual or sensitive characters. Nope, I like the big meathead guy with all the guns, Jayne Cobb.

He's tall. He's funny. He's a total badass. He also wears a hilarious hat with earflaps in one episode. I love earflap hats, partly because one of my other pet obsessions, the writer Mikhail Bulgakov, has written about "ridiculous hat[s] with earflaps" in several of his stories. (Boy is that hat popular. A Google image search for "Jayne Cobb" yields 10 times as many photos of the hat than of Adam Baldwin, the actor who played Jayne Cobb. You can buy hats like it or patterns to knit your own. There are songs about it. I love how crazy people are!).

Ok, now back to my quest to determine whether Joss Whedon has a Twitter account.

Ugh. I just went to lunch and saw a guy I totally hate wearing an earflap hat. He is definitely not worthy. >:[

Several things that end in a big, long rant

I woke up today and went to Bad Boy Burger to get myself a breakfast burrito (nice alliteration, eh?) and noticed that the inversion is here. Yucky doodle.

Synchronicity is an interesting phenomenon I encounter pretty often. You could argue whether the instances I observe are "meaningful" or not, (see the Wikipedia entry for synchronicity), but they are definitely interesting and worth thinking about. Last weekend was a stellar weekend for synchronous events. I already talked about the Star Trek occurrence. On Friday I got a Happy Halloween text message from someone that said something like, "I love you and your friendship means a lot to me, but if zombies were chasing us, I'd totally trip your ass." After I read it, I noticed that the song "Zombie" by the Cranberries (Preachberries) was playing on my coworker's radio.

The next day, I was talking to April about synchronicity, and she said she'd been discussing it recently with one of her coworkers in regard to band names (apparently there is a weird phenomena wherein bands will pop up all over the place with the same or similar band names, album names, and song names, though the bands are all too obscure to have heard of each other), leading she and her coworker to believe in Jung's theory of the collective unconscious. Right after she told me this, I told her that she looked like Anne Hathaway from certain angles. She said that was funny because she used to date a guy who went to high school with Anne Hathaway and dated her. Obviously, I said, that guy has a thing for girls with dark hair and big, dark eyes. "Obviously," April agreed. A few minutes later I noticed a postcard on her fridge with a photo of a bodybuilder dousing himself with beer. "Is this Arnold Schwarzenegger?" I asked her. "I don't think so. Hey! That guy we were just talking about gave that to me--the one who dated Anne Hathaway."

Later that day, I had a random conversation with someone about Transformers. The next day, as I was driving home from my Flying Pie Pizza date and wondered, hm, am I going to see any corresponding reference to Transformers soon? When I got home, I decided to record The Simpsons and Family Guy, and wouldn't you know, my DVR informed me that The Simpsons' Treehouse of Horror featured a spoof of Transformers (and The Great Pumpkin).

This morning, as I was waiting for my coffee to brew so I could take it with me to Bad Boy, I started thinking about why I don't watch the Headline News during breakfast any more; because as we all know, the news in America is nothing but bad news--if it's not violence, it's at least people being nasty or negative in some way (especially on CNN Headline News). I picked up the very excellent Heart of a Dog, by Mikhail Bulgakov (who is possibly my greatest love), and read a few pages whilst my coffee was spluttering out the final drops into the pot. Here is the conversation I read:

"And--heaven preserve!--don't read any Soviet newspapers before dinner."

"Hm...But there are no others."

"That's just it, don't read any. You know, I carried out thirty tests at my hospital. And what do you think? Patients who read no newspapers feel excellent. But those whom I deliberately compelled to read Pravda lost weight."

"Hm..."

"But that isn't all. They had lowered knee-tap reflex, rotten appetite, a depressed state of mind."

There is more going on here than just stating that the news causes people to become depressed; it's an expression of Bulgakov's anti-Soviet sentiments and more. What's interesting to me is the question of why throughout history the news has seemed to consist of negative and depressing information.

Headline News is either a good or a bad example; I use it because it represents what the average citizen watches--not the more educated individuals who seek out more intellectual and complete news coverage. In each half hour, Headline News devotes about five or six minutes total to the actual headlines, while the other 24 minutes are devoted to commercials, the weather, financial updates, salutes to the troops, entertainment, and special interest stories. The last two minutes of each half hour are given to local news channels to give local news updates.

If you turn on Headline News during the non-headline periods, the features are more often than not (I'd say at least two-thirds of the time) needlessly negative--as are the two-minute local updates, which here in Boise are done by Channel 2 (8 if you have cable) CBS News. The CNN non-headline stories almost always consist of "eyewitness" videos people filmed on their cell phones and uploaded to CNN's website, or that come from surveillance systems at businesses.

Here are some of the things I've seen on these features (conveniently organized into their own obnoxious 30-minute eyewitness show titled "News to Me"): explosions, violent COPS-style arrests, car wrecks, fist-fights, people stealing gas, plane crashes, child abuse, drug abuse, people giving drugs to toddlers, a grown man punching a teenage girl in the face for cutting in line at a McDonald's, teenage girls ganging up on and beating the shit out of another teenage girl for "talking shit" (actually, this one made headlines everywhere)... The local news updates on CNN are always two minutes of local murders, rapes, assaults, arrests, drug-busts, fires...and nothing else.

Why do the news producers think people need to see this shit? And it is shit. It's fucking bullshit. Everyone knows that what attracts viewers/ratings is sensational shit like this, or political or other public figures bad-mouthing each other, (remember that stupid Donald Trump/Rosie O'Donnell pissing contest and how much news coverage it got?), but what I'm interested in is why? Is this really what people want to see? Have they grown so accustomed to seeing terrible shit on tv that they can't get enough of it? (Yes! Hence the popularity of awful torture films like the Saw series).

When I worked at the call center, I couldn't take a breath without some middle-aged woman in a nearby cubie saying to someone, "did you hear about that (insert horrible local child abuse/murder story here)?" They were never interested in discussing anything else and would talk about this stuff all day, every day. When I started working at my current job, I had a coworker who would try to read all the horrible local child abuse/murder cases aloud to me, and she'd get really frustrated when I told her I didn't want to hear them. She was one of the most unhappy people I've ever encountered in my life.

I just want to know: are people so un self-aware that they don't know this stuff is bad for them? Does the media know it's assisting to keep people in a constant state of depression? Why do people like to see/read so much about people being terrible to each other?

Part Three of a Very Long Discourse

(Link to Part One of a Very Long Discourse and Part Two of a Very Long Discourse)

About the same time I became disillusioned with Holden Caulfield, I became enamored of Alex James, the bass player from Blur whose hair also resembled my sixth-grade boyfriend's:

I don't know if Alex started it, but every Britpop band had at least one member who had this hairdo. Pulp, Lush, and Suede all had members with the lopsided skater cut, (as did all of Elastica), and I can't say if this hairdo is the reason I became so obsessed with Britpop, but I think it was part of it. Also, Britpop music is good. According to this article from a very reputable source, Alex now makes cheese. He also has an extremely high IQ and is a prolific and creative swearer. Truly a man after my own heart.

Britpop led me to a short-lived but powerful obsession with the band Belle & Sebastian and their lead singer, Stuart Murdoch.

What I learned from this is the fact that the Glasgow dialect of the English language is the most beautiful spoken language my ears have ever heard, and that Glasgow has produced really kick ass bands like B&S, Sons and Daughters, Franz Ferdinand, and many others whom I haven't listened to. If I'd known about the Fulbright Scholarship program years ago, I would have gotten good grades and gotten through school and applied to go to Glasgow (yeah, right).

Let's omit an unproductive and boring number of years whence I was enamored of Orlando Bloom, tool extraordinaire, and fast forward to today. My ideal man is some sort of cross between Clive Owen, Jemaine Clement, and Mikhail Bulgakov. With a Glasgow accent.

(There must be something fantastic just to the left, as they're all looking over there).

On Graduating

Wednesday was my last class of college ever. I don't really feel like I've graduated from anything. I had predicted that I'd feel sad and start to cry as I walked from class, got in my car and drove away, but it wasn't as exciting as all that. I exchanged phone numbers with a girl I'd had several classes with throughout the year and made plans to go to coffee, then got in my car and drove away. I did not feel verklempt in any way.

I did have a bunch of homework to email to my professor by Thursday, so I did one assignment Wednesday night (in which I had to revise an academic article to make it sound cleaner and clearer. It was fun. I got to feel like I was really sticking it to this Cambridge professor whose style of writing includes too much metadiscourse such as "What we have here is" and "Very well, let us have another look at" that just makes me cringe). On Thursday I had to email one more essay to my professor and that was it. It was all pretty anticlimactic.

I did learn some things this year that weren't taught in class:

• Getting straight As at BSU is not difficult. There's really no reason I didn't have a better GPA for my college career than utter laziness.
• Course loads are supposedly easier and more manageable there than at more "difficult" schools. I think this is probably a crock, but seriously, three papers and a presentation is not too much for one class.
• Professors love me. Except for one I had several years ago; but I was very lazy in that class and she is notoriously difficult.
• If you can never hang out because you always have homework, some friends might lose interest in you.
• I saw this happen a few years ago to someone else, and I was one of the scoffers who couldn't understand the idea of having too much homework even to hang out on weekends. But it does happen, especially when you have to read 30 books in one semester. I apologize for any former scoffing I may have done to people about this.
  
• One night of socialness during Spring Break may be all the socialness you can manage in a semester. And at that point, you may just have a few drinks and talk everyone's ears off about the 20 or so books you've read so far in the semester. Especially The Master and Margarita.
  
• I also discovered I can't hang out on weeknights. Not when I have to go to work at 7am. No way. Not even when I have to go to work at 8am. It really sucks when all social events take place on weeknights.
• I don't like be out all weekend, and I can't stay awake past 11 when I do go out. I used to go out every weekend night when I was younger, and the idea of a night home made me ridiculously depressed. Now I only like to go out on Friday or Saturday, but not both, and I don't really like to do much on Sundays other than have breakfast with someone. My condo is pretty and I like to be here.
• I will probably never find another book that I love as much as The Master and Margarita.
• I think reading it was one of the things I had to accomplish before I die. I don't mean that everyone needs to specifically read The Master and Margarita before they die (though they should), but I do think everyone probably has at least one work of art that they need to come into contact with to make their life complete in some way. That's really vague, but I think I will save this for a later blog entry.
• M&M has introduced me to a whole new genre of literature and period of history to be obsessed with (writers oppressed by Stalin/Stalinist Russia).
• Don't publish things to your blog and then think nobody reads it. They do.

To celebrate my graduation, I invited some people to join me at the Modern Thursday night and the plan was to end up at the Neurolux later. I got to the Modern at 6 and met some friends and started drinking gin and sodas in the hot, hot sun. Gin and sodas in very large glasses. Round about 10:30, I felt sick and threw up in the trash can around the corner from the Modern's patio, right next to the ice machine. I had to call a cab and go home. My friends went on to the Neurolux where there were other people whom I wanted to see. I got home and started sending them embarrassing text messages about someone who was there with them and whom I have a crush on. In short, I behaved much more like a 20-year-old than a 30-year-old. Then I was sick all day Friday, which was my body reminding me that I am 30 and not 20.

I learned some things from this as well:

• It is not a good idea to drink a bottle-plus of gin in 4 hours. Especially when you hardly ever drink otherwise.
• Don't eat browned-butter and mizithra pasta before you go out drinking.
• Expensive drinks exist for a reason: to keep you from overdoing it by not allowing you to afford very many of them. In other words, drink expensive drinks.
• 9 pm is a much better time to start drinking than 6 pm.
  
• Foreign guys love me.
• If you celebrate something important to you like graduation and some of your friends are really enthusiastic for you while others can't be bothered to respond to your invitation, then you should probably focus on building friendships with the people who are happy for you.
• Mad Men is really good and makes for good hangover watching.
  

So, maybe I will feel more like I've graduated when I actually get my diploma in the mail. Or if I decide to walk in December. Anyway, woo-hoo graduation!

Walpurgisnacht und Andere Shenanigans

My, my, my, but a lot of things happened in this part of the novel! I think every time I’m annoyed by some sort of nagging doubt or repetitive, unproductive thoughts I'm going to imagine I'm Margarita, free and soaring over the world on a broom, laughing. I read something on the internet about how Bulgakov’s apartment, which is supposed to be apartment 50 in the book, became a favorite haunt of Satan worshippers. I’m not sure if it still is, because it is apparently a museum, but the Satan worshippers thing I thought was a little bit stupid. I don’t understand why anyone would think this book is Satanic. Just because the devil is a character in it, that doesn’t make it Satanic. I’m betting none of those so-called Satan worshippers ever read the book.

Satan is merely a device for pointing out the wrongdoings of humanity. I’ve noticed that all the characters in this book who get attacked, beaten, vampirized, etc., by Woland and his cronies are people who are shown to be cruel people with cruel and selfish motives and/or intentions. Such as Berlioz’s uncle, who cares more about Berlioz’s apartment than Berlioz’s death. The Variety barman, who at first seems to be treated cruelly by Woland, Inc., is shown to be a cheapskate and a hoarder. The doctor the barman visits is judgmental, arrogant, and mentally calls the barman a “madman.” Bulgakov makes sure to show each character’s judgmental, self-righteous, or selfish thoughts before Woland does something bad to them. It seems like the ones who are more innocent, like Ivan and the Master, just end up in the madhouse. And I love the verbal exchanges between Woland and the barman and Woland and Behemoth, such as when the barman says, “I beg your pardon,” and Woland says, “I cannot pardon you!” I love it when clever people call attention to trite phrases by turning them on their heads. It reminds me of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or Catch-22—I suppose it is a signifier of Menippean satire.

I think the Walpurgisnacht Ball is a theme that blends well with the excesses of the Jazz Age. I think I see some condemnation of American excess here. The scene where the rotting corpses enter the apartment through the fireplace is really funny, and I am now sure that JK Rowling has read this book, because several of Woland’s magical devices are very similar to things in Harry Potter books. (Of course she would have read it, because this book is a riot! I eon’t know why I always notice things that are found in Harry Potter. I can’t help it; they are very memorable and creative. I think JK Rowling herself may have sold her soul to Woland...) I’ve just been reading Mark Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” for my Lit of the American West class. My favorite line out of the whole thing is the following: “...the personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others.” I think of this scene in The Master and Margarita, rather than anything in Cooper, every time I think of this line.

I find it interesting that there’s no mention in the footnotes as to why the ladies are all naked. I’m sure this is simply a Walpurgisnacht tradition, but I am too lazy look it up right now—that’s what footnotes are for! I think Mr. Pevear is a bit remiss in not saying anything about it at all, especially after all the great detail he goes into about the claw-footed candelabrum, Satan’s dirty shirt (that would be a good name for a rock band!), and all the famous Italian poisoners of history. I will forgive him, however. Nothing can get in the way of my enjoying this book!