Beer Flashback

Yes, we did this too. The highlight was always Norway, for the Grolsch on tap, which is the best beer ever. I don't drink at all anymore, alas, but once in a while I find that I do miss Grolsch, and of course Guiness. The not-drinking decision has stood since January of 2000. It hardly feels like it's been that long. Way too many many of my activies included, as an essential element, the drinking of way too much beer -- I'm not knocking the experience, but if it can't be done without going overboard continuously, which I did (go overboard cont., drinking way too much on nearly a daily basis, getting way too fat on it, not remembering the last third of most movies watched during that period), then it shouldn't be done.

(Via Dave Barry, not surprisingly.)

Karma Police

Running on a worrisome streak of good luck: Dad & Maria are here, at the computer lab, while I finish up my shift. Then it's off for Cuban food. Then Spirited Away.

The assistantship for Fall 2003 has been secured. I'll be teaching a composition course & I'll continue to work at the Writing Center. There are also intimations of some kind of tuition waiver for summer, which would be good, as otherwise I'll be far more broke than I already am. And I'm the award winning graduate student writer this year, the department has decided. There aren't that many of us, so odds were pretty good for anyone, and they had to pick someone. I get a free lunch out of it.

This is how I feel about these things: I don't believe in awards unless I win them, in which case I would probably say that they're no big deal, that they mean little, while what I'm really wanting to say is, Hey, I won! I won! Me! Yay! Hooray for Zoydberg!

But I'm always worried about getting too many good things at once (family, waiver, awards, food) -- because I've yet to experience any of these things in the past year w/o the universe correcting itself and making sure that some kind of cartoon piano falls on my head, so as to keep everything in balance. But the piano is still in the air, and I can't make out its shadow on the field, and so yes, I'm happy: I'm buzzing like a fridge.

Robot Parade

There is a real company called Mechanical Servants Incorporated, based off Melrose Park, IL. I have real news too, but am waiting on dad and the sister to drive in so don't have much time to relate. So instead, yes -- Mechanical Servants.

I attended an international student meeting a week and a half ago. The bad news: The US government pretty wants to know where I am most of the time. Since I am mostly taking naps, they should have no problem tracking me. The good news: We are now allowed a year of practical training per level, as opposed to one per lifetime. So after getting the MA (around summer of 2004, knock on wood), I'll be able to work for a full year. This is more than good news. The OPT visa is automatic and painless and pretty wonderful.

The plan had been to go straight from the MA to some MFA in creative writing somewhere -- anywhere that would take me. The new plan is to use the OPT to go somewhere, anywhere -- by which I think I mean New York. Work whatever. Do whatever. But I think the year off from school will be good. I'll miss Orlando. I like it here. There's good people. But I really need to be elsewhere, to remember what the color of blank paper is, in a different town, to paraphrase in the most ungrammatical way possible David Byrne's bit in True Stories.

All's well here. But "here" needs to be changed to "there." I hope all is well with you.

Moments vs. Chains

"But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on one memorable day." (Dickens' Great Expectations)

I like this passage for many reasons. It is, for one thing, a thoroughly Victorian moment - for a considerable driving force behind much Victorian fiction was the attempt to make sense of modern life precisely by tracing through it chains of causality and connection; and Dickens in particular was supremely good at excavating the submerged and sometimes fatal intimacies between people of different classes and clans. But there is also something here, I think, about the nature of fiction - for what is fiction but the following of imaginary lives along lines of possibility and hazard? - and, more importantly, a sort of enactment of the romance of storytelling itself.

I've come to distrust causality. It exists, and most of what's important in our lives does happen as a result of some decision -- ours or someone else's. Nevertheless, the link between cause and effect never interests me as much as the moment -- its glow, its afterglow, knowing that it is happening as it's happening and knowing that it will be limited in duration, that it'll pass. There are always reasons. But to mull over reasons is to recollect the wrong thing. I find that my favorite memories are divorced from what led to them or what followed, the moment itself firmly impressed with durable pigments. There may well be a case against this type of memory -- in removing context, one learns little from experience or one turns reality into something else, to which I can only say that both learning and reality are overrated. Dickens, however, is rated pretty accurately: he is a hell of a writer and one can never say enough good things about his novels.

(Quoted excerpt from Hands that Mold the Imagination, via Robot Wisdom.)