It's My TV….It's My Peanut Butter

The above is one of my favorite quotes from Farscape. For the life of me, I don’t know why I like it so much. There’s nothing super memorable or moving about the scene. In it, Crichton tries to explain away his willingness to work with his mortal enemy based on the fact that his species looks fairly human. Therefore talking to Crais is the closest he’s going to get to “guy time” with another human male: “I look at you, and I get homesick.”

But I think it is an apt description of the way familiarity, no matter how vague, can evoke the feelings of home. I found this with one of my coworkers who we will call, for purposes of this blog, M. M is from South Georgia. She has a heavy southern drawl and tales about her father’s backyard wine making operation and her grandmother taking gin soaked raisins for her arthritis. I’m not from anywhere near South Georgia. I’m not even from the Deep South. But I was raised by a Texan and a woman from South Louisiana. My mother also recommends gin soaked raisins for arthritis—and she’s a nurse! From a family standpoint I tend to think I’m as Southern as they come. Not Tennessee Williams Southern and not Jeff Foxworthy Southern, but something else entirely that you don’t see on television. And sometimes, I talk to M, and I get homesick.

Because now I live in the Midwest. And there are wonderful things about the Midwest, but it’s different. Compared to what I’m used to people here seem standoffish. No one ever smiles if they pass you on the street. The food is bland (and racism is at a level I’ve never witnessed before, but that’s another matter). My program seems to be full of people from the Midwest and the Northern Midwest, which is another region entirely, but just as foreign. I love most of my colleagues, but sometimes I feel like we speak a different language. We also have very different experiences (except for my one friend from Detroit who is the only other person I’ve ever met who was taught to kick out a tail light in elementary school. That’s another story too.)

M and I started grad school at the same time, so our first year here we had a lot of classes together. And since we both took the bus to campus we tended to get to class early, and we had a lot of time to talk. Later we were assigned to teach the same class, wound up with overlapping office hours, and had a lot more time to talk. M is an amazing person to begin with and I like to think we’d have been friends without the shared experience of being southerners, but it’s certainly helped. It’s like when I lived in Peru—I speak Spanish just fine. I would and could go entire days without speaking a single word of English. But sometimes I would be sitting in a restaurant or an airplane and hear someone next to me speak English, and it was so nice to be able to speak English for just a few minutes. That’s how it is talking to someone “from home” when you’re in a foreign land. That’s why it’s always been so refreshing talking with M when one of us says something about our family and then adds, “Well you know…” Because I do know. It’s nice to know when M says, “Well you know what the expectations are, being a Southern daughter,” that I know and she knows and someone gets where I’m coming from. All the good and bad that goes along with it.

M has just received an amazing job opportunity. One that fits perfectly with her experience and expectations and will allow her to get paid while doing her dissertation research. Unfortunately this means she’s moving this Summer. I’m thrilled for her. And on some level I’m a little sad for me. As it so happens, a lot of my friends are moving this Summer and next year will be different for me in a lot of ways. But somehow that little self absorbed part of me is extra sad about M leaving, because from now on I know when I get homesick I’ll be homesick alone.

You would think that with my having suffered the horrors of dwelling in North Dallas for 3 years, the ABC series GCB, which lampoons that very same microcosm would be right up my alley.

Oddly, I think it’s the familiarity that makes it difficult for me to watch.

On the one hand there are things that they get oh-so-very right.  The plethoras of money, the mock version of Highland Park United Methodist Church (where you go to rub shoulders with the wealthy more than for any real religious reason–though the service shown seems way too casual to be like the HPUMC main service…and not casual enough to be like the contemporary service), women with bizarre names like Bookie and Cricket, mentions of places like Turtle Creek, proper homage to the roll of Nieman Marcus in the shopping pantheon….

But then you have things like people offering over hand-gun laden purses to their daughters.  I’m not saying a hand-gun laden Gucci bag is abnormal in North Dallas, I’m just saying that every woman there would be damn good and well aware of the concealed carry rules (having gone through the process herself…except for the ones married to slightly more fringe husbands who cling to the belief that the concealed carry law will only give the government a list of names to collect from when the Second Amendment is destroyed–but that’s a whole ‘nother kettle of fish) and know better than to arm her recently imported from California daughter.

And the pet peeve that actually arises in every show which tries to set itself in Texas (or, honestly, much of anywhere in the U.S.):  putting a definite article before a numerical freeway designation.  I-20 is just that “I-20″ or “20″ not “THE I-20.”  The minute I hear that I’m reminded that this whole thing is clearly being shot in L.A. (first ep WAS in Dallas at least as far as the exteriors were concerned–I’ve driven past more than one of the places shown).

The emphasis on ranches and cowboys is also losing me.  You see way less of that in Dallas than in other Texas cities like San Antonio or Ft. Worth.  Oh, sure, you see it in Dallas, probably more now than in the past few decades, but it’s mostly a costume put on to distinguish themselves from wealthy folks in, say, Atlanta.  It’s not because anyone’s spent any time on the family ranch.  After all, Dallas is all about “bidness” not farming and ranching.  Men in Dallas are more likely to be in Armani than Wrangler and I honestly can’t say I have EVER seen a woman from North Dallas over the age of 23 in a cowboy hat or boots.

Now that we’re on week two, I have to question the whole pork thing.  Really?  REALLY?  Pulled pork?  Oh, hell no.  This is Texas.  It’s all about the beef.  Even John Ford got that much in Rio Grande (“Ain’t no one told Uncle Sam we grow beef in these parts?”).  Also, if you drive 80 miles from Dallas, you won’t get to anything looking like the landscape shown around the local of the pork incident.

The thing of it is, the fodder is there in reality.  North Dallas and the Park Cities (Highland Park, University Park) are twisted little worlds.  Saint Molly of Ivins captured some of that in her article “Hello from Boosterville” (included in her book Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?).  While I was in law school there was still a gas station down in Snyder plaza where you could get full service.  No joke.  And I saw many a Grande Dame ol’ gal with that particular style of North Dallas Helmet-Hair sitting primly behind her wheel while a guy in coveralls filled the tank of her Mercedes and cleaned her windshield.  I’ve seen a fleet of Mercs, Jags, Audis, etc. parked in the firelane outside of my dorm because if you’re late to HPUMC on Sunday, you wind  up having to park over in one of the garages and that’s just not acceptable.  It’s worth it to pay the ticket left on your windshield after one a disgruntled law student in one of the dorms calls campus police…..

I may give it another week, but I just don’t think I’m going to be able to overcome what I know of the real comedy of North Dallas enough to enjoy this fake version.

During a call to Kristy, I was venting on the failure of a particular manager o’ mine to grasp the basics of proper sentence structure.  No, this particular moron is not ESL.  English is his mother tongue.  Were it otherwise, I might be less apt to judge.

This led us to a discussion of the fact that both of us seem to harbor a kind of hierarchy of  grammar failures.  Some things are totally acceptable in my world.  For example, placement of commas is a subject that I’ve heard well-respected English teachers debate to a point where I was expecting violence.  I tend to rank those errors lower on the scale of offense since reasonable minds could differ.  Some errors I care less about in certain contexts.  For example, I tend to overlook one-off there/their/they’re errors in an e-mail partially because I am totally guilty of slamming out a message and, for reasons I’m still trying to understand, using the wrong “there” even though I know good and well the proper choice.

But Kristy and I both agreed that subject-verb agreement errors are something that ranks as highly unacceptable once you’re above a certain age (approximately 6 in my world).  I’ll forgive a verbal mix up that’s clearly born from one’s tongue going faster than one’s brain.  Even a written subject-verb agreement error may be understandable in those cases where the writing is informal and the sentence is one of those complex beasts with mixes of plurals and singulars (none of those, however, excuses the particular moron about whom I was venting).

I also have a slightly greater than average aversion to people who don’t know how to use “myself.”  I’ve noticed that this error is VERY common in cases where the speaker is both arrogant and ignorant (a dangerous cocktail).  Somewhere along the way these people were yelled at for using “me” instead of “I” and they internalized this to mean that “me” is bad.  To make sure they sound suitably educated, they now refuse to use “me” and wind up substituting “myself” as if it means the same thing.  It doesn’t! (Side note:  usually, these people will also make the I/me error).  To the scores of people who don’t care much about grammar, maybe this sounds fantastic.  To me?  Fingernails on a chalk board.  I can’t help thinking less of people who do this.

So, ‘fess up, folks:  What grammar errors drive you batty?  Anything in particular that makes you want to strangle people (and feel free to point out the shit one which I consistently error out around here).

Thursday I will face one of my greatest fears. Well… one of my greatest fears that isn’t alligators or crocodiles. (Don’t judge. Those things are relics of an earlier world. Much like Balrogs. And just as evil.) No, Thursday, for the first time, I will substitute teach.

I have a lot of teaching experience. I’ve taught high school. Middle school. I’ve taught middle school curriculum to overachieving eight year olds. I’ve adjuncted at the community college level and I’ve been a graduate teaching assistant. But I have never been a substitute. There are reasons for that.

Mostly because I remember how awful kids are to substitute teachers. Okay, at the end of the day, kids are awful to all teachers. But whereas with full time teachers they’re constantly testing the limits with subs they tend to assume there are none. I’d like to believe that it won’t be so bad since these will be college students, but I’m not holding my breath. Teaching any classroom full of undergraduates who aren’t majoring in the subject at hand is always hard. But with my own students I learn to read them. Thursday will be like the first day of class again, only without the benefit of ever moving beyond it.

Add to all the student bullshit the lingering feeling I’m going to screw up what I’m supposed to teach and ruin the curriculum for the rest of the semester. After all, I’m not going to be the one grading them. I won’t be there when they all get the same thing wrong to sit there and say, “Oh, you know what? That’s because I said XYZ.”

And the real reason I’ve never subbed before is this: you don’t even get paid well for it. At the secondary level subs tend to get paid about minimum wage. I’ll be getting paid in nothing but good karma and fudge.

Though to be fair… fudge is fudge. And I’m a broke grad student, contractually obligated to do most anything for free food. And I’m going to need the karma in a couple weeks. So heigh ho, heigh ho, it’s off to someone else’s work I will go.

It’s an Olympic year. It’s a Summer Olympic year which means that it’s that one year in four when some of you might actually watch gymnastics. As your resident somewhat more than casual gymnastics fan I feel like it’s therefore my duty to keep you informed so that when the Olympics do roll around you can act all knowledgeable when you’re watching with your friends who aren’t informed because they don’t read this blog.

One of the first major competitions of the year took place yesterday: The American Cup. While the commentators always go on and on about what a prestigious competition it is, it only rates as anything at all prestigious if you’re American. If you’re not American it’s sort of a joke. There’s a reason the fan communities on the interwebs refer to it as the “Scamerican Cup” or just “Scam Cup.” Americans are always over scored. For years only C list international competitors were invited; now they invite higher ranked gymnasts, they just don’t come.

Regardless, it does give us our first glimpse at many gymnasts for the season. And perhaps most importantly it gives the online gymnastics communities something to talk about. Because for months they’ve been making conversation about which gymnasts follow each other on Twitter and it’s gotten a little stalkerish.

As for what we learned:

American men tend towards some head case-ish-ness. (Don’t worry, one of them still won after magically coming from behind.)

The American women’s contingent is deep. The top three scorers in the women’s competition were all American. This is especially interesting since each country is only allowed to send two gymnasts.

Aly Raisman and Gabby Douglas can both do Amanar vaults (round off on, two and a half twists off). Since conventional wisdom stated that Raisman could not make the team without one, this is big news for her. Also, she does insane tumbling.

Jordyn Weiber is not someone I would like to meet it a dark alley—seriously, girl is ripped. Even for a gymnast.

We need better uneven bars coaches in the US.

The Romanian women are making strides towards erasing the disaster they had at last year’s world championships, but they aren’t there yet.

And yeah… we don’t know much more than we knew last week. As far as who will make the Olympic teams, it’s way too early to tell. At least half the contenders will be injured by then. But message boards will be filled with daily posts of people analyzing the issue, saying who they’d put on their team, etc, etc. Fortunately they won’t have to obsess over this meet for too long as Pacific Rims are in two weeks and it will have much more to obsess over. (Don’t worry, you’ll probably get another blog post around then.)

I’m sure most of you, gentle readers, have probably been having the same kind of completely out-of-regular-character weather episodes we’ve had around here.  If Kristy hadn’t already assured me that the Mayans say the world is going to end in earthquakes, I’d assume the whole 2012 apocalypse was getting a jump start.

Thursday night, I went for a walk to burn some of the quantities of pissed-off tension I’ve been carrying around.  I had on a sleeveless shirt and a think 3/4 sleeve cotton cardigan that I put on less for warmth than to hide my fat arms.  I didn’t need a jacked at all.

Thursday evening walk, no jacket necessary.

I was out for an hour and it was mostly dark when I returned….and I still wasn’t cold.  It was nice.  I snapped a few pictures and came back relatively not pissed off.

Friday, I was home, doing laundry and trying to recover the state of the house before the TV crew from Hoarders showed up.  I came out of the laundry room and happened to glance out the window and see, well, this:

Um, where did this come from?

Really?  REALLY?  From no jacket to a good 35 minutes of steady, heavy snowfall?!?!?

Admittedly, I had the idea for this post yesterday, when it was 66 degrees. It’s now somewhere in the 30s here, so this seems less timely than it did yesterday.

My friends from Minnesota and Michigan have been complaining that we haven’t had enough of hard core winter. I’m just rejoicing that whatever winter we have seems to be on the way out. This means my life will improve in a lot of ways, but, perhaps most importantly, it marks the start of ice cream season. While I will generally eat ice cream any time of year if the mood strikes, even I eat more when I don’t have to bundle up in blankets to do so.

Last weekend I made my first sorbet of the season and it was a brand new, self created recipe that I think deserves to be shared.

Lavender Lime Sorbet

Zest and juice of four limes (this recipe also gave me an excuse to use the citrus press my sister got me for my birthday)

1 cup lime juice (you can use all fresh lime juice and I’m sure it would be better, but I’m broke and lazy, so I went half and half on the good stuff)

2 cups water

1 cup sugar (approximately. Some limes are tarter than others, so start a little under and add until it tastes a little sweeter than you want your end product to taste. Remember it will lose some sweetness in the freezing process.)

1 shot vodka

2-4 drops lavender oil

Mix all ingredients together and chill. When totally cold pour into ice cream machine and follow directions. Put in the freezer for about two hours to set. Enjoy.

I haven’t been sleeping much lately. Mostly this is from stress. I decided I need to do something to de-stress. My usual go-tos of alcohol and exercise weren’t helping, so I decided to try a strategy recently recommended to me by a colleague. I decided to try reading fiction. And since the piece of crap book I’m trying to slog my way through wasn’t helping either, I decided to pick up some new fiction.

I was at Target to buy a new flashdrive, and I had to walk by the books to get to electronics. I saw The Hunger Games on a display, and since the same colleague had also recommended this book, I decided to pick it up.

When I couldn’t sleep again Friday night I decided to start reading it.

Bad mistake.

At 4am I finally got to sleep.

The good news is I read it in two nights (I skipped Saturday). The bad news is that’s because I stayed up till 5:45am on Monday to finish the damn thing. Keep in mind I’m a sleep deprived narcoleptic who tends to fall asleep after five pages.

The question is: why?

Admittedly, the writing style has some minor issues. Most notably a tendency to break the “show me, don’t tell me” rule. And yet, I’m totally addicted. And unlike with Twilight I’m not even ashamed of being addicted. I’d blame this on social pressure, but you all know how eagerly I admitted my soap opera addiction, so that seems doubtful.

I could give you the answers everyone else seems to give regarding this book: the social commentary inherent in the dark future and the strong female character. Those are both true. I like that Katniss is not just a strong female character, she’s a well rounded one. Let’s face it—emotionally the girl’s a train wreck.  Understandably so.

But I think the truth is that the book actually does a remarkable job of blending plot and character. A lot of popular fiction these days is all about plot. Which bores me. A lot of other writers (myself included) get so distracted by character they forget they need a story. This book balances both forces perfectly. Enough that it can break my heart and keep my heart pounding for five hours.

Needless to say I can’t wait to read the other two books. But I’m not letting myself stop them till Spring Break. When not sleeping won’t be such a problem.

The other night I made a late run to the grocery store after work.  It was about 9:45 when I was coming home, pitch black out with a few snowflakes starting to fall.

So I was more than a little shocked as I turned into the neighborhood when my headlights cast across two boys around the age of 13 or 14 clambering all over the big sign displaying the name of the subdivision.  A name that includes the word “Stone.”  I’m sure I need not trifle with your intelligence by listing the kinds of spray-paint additions that the idiot children of this predominantly upper middle class community like to make to that sign.

It being snowy, dark, and a school night, about the only reason I could see for two young teen boys to be on and around that sign and not home on their X-Boxes hijacking virtual police cars and taking out enemy foxholes with pixelated grenades was to entertain residents of this subdivision with their wit and potential Scrabble acumen.

I very nearly pulled the car over to roll down the window and start questioning what the hell they thought they were doing out there, but it really wasn’t a good place to stop.  While it was later in the evening, there was still a fair amount of traffic about (did I mention that these were idiot children?), and while I do relish the stress relief of verbally berating others, I didn’t want to negate that by getting my damned car rear-ended by someone else turning in.

So, I reluctantly continued home, wondering if they would have added their marker to the sign by the time I got in my garage.  I supposed I would know the next day on my way to work.  The obnoxious little shits….

And that’s when the part of me that is destined to become the mean old hag at the end of the cul-de-sac with the 15 cats who sits out on the front porch shaking her fist and yelling at those “damn kids” decided that she was not satisfied.  If I wasn’t going to yell at them personally, I was still going to teach ‘em.

I called the cops.

Sure, it’s a small step.  It lacks the satisfaction of personally hollering and asking those kids why they can’t find anything better to do than deface others’ property, but there’s a certain amount of twisted “feel good” I get while imagining the local PD rolling up on the little miscreants and handing down a level of intimidation I’m not currently capable of…..

In my imagined version?  They cry and repent.

So for part II of my changing the channel adventure, I decided to check out Days of our Lives. I didn’t really have much of a concrete reason for choosing this one other than the online buzz for the show at this point seems fairly decent.

I didn’t have any trouble figuring out what was going on. For the most part (more on this later). Just like in stereotypes they do a good enough job of working exposition into scenes that it’s easy enough to catch up. Even though there’s major plotline that seems to be referencing some deep history.

Over all, I’m digging the show a bit more than B&B (which annoys me since it’s twice as long). There are things I definitely like about it. I like that they’ve spent a lot of time dealing with the friendship dynamics between Abigail and Melanie. Abigail kind of grates on my nerves, but the big issue is that television usually gets so swept up in couple swapping that they forget to include non-sexual friendships. And friendships can be just as compelling dramatically. I loved watching Melanie listen to Abbey’s whole story about sleeping with her married professor boss. You could see Melanie thinking that her friend was crazy and stupid and yet trying to still be a good friend. A lot of us have been there. It was a nice touch of reality.

Other things I like: EJ is a wonderful villain. Smarmy and smug. Devious. But he’s also multifaceted—seems to actually have some sort of a heart and feelings etc. I was blindsided by the revelation that EJ and Sami had slept together (this is a big deal because they’re both married to other people) because ordinarily on soaps when people have secrets they talk about them constantly, loudly, in public locations. I’m amazed that the show enabled me to be surprised. Nicely done. On the other hand, I wasn’t entertained by Sami’s husband Rafe making out with her sister Carrie because they kept building and building to it, yet I don’t really see any chemistry between the two. I’m also incredibly sick of listening to Sami yell at people about it. I hate when television shows do this thing where they have characters have the same conversation over and over again and it goes nowhere. Oops, this was supposed to be the things I liked. I like Will. By which I mean Will is an obnoxious little punk, but that’s an accurate portrayal of a young man in his late teens/early 20s. Particularly one simultaneously struggling with being in the closet and knowing his mother cheated on the step-father he really likes with the ex-step-father he hates. I liked the corporate espionage storyline with Sami and Madison, particularly in the way it made it clear that people around the two women would not have been so upset out of similar behavior by men. Nice. I like that the professor sleeping with the student subplot didn’t go with the standard seductive teacher but when with the kinda psycho undergrad. (By the way, since you may not be watching, they didn’t actually sleep together, she’s just convinced him they did. He was actually too drunk to stay conscious that long).

Things I dislike: Stefano is simultaneously too much of a cartoon villain and not enough of a cartoon villain. It’s hard to do a fleshed out caricature, and they aren’t pulling it off. I’m not entertained by this whole subplot where Hope (who thinks she’s married to Bo) is actually married to John (who thinks he’s married to Marlena). I don’t care. I don’t get why they care so much. I just want it over. I don’t like the whole election storyline because I’m clearly supposed to be rooting for Abe, but I can’t get past is unethical behavior (he let someone give him the debate questions ahead of time while slipping his opponent fake debate questions). His whole logic that his opponent (the aforementioned EJ) was dirty and so he had to sink down to fight him at that level didn’t convince me. Nor did his desperation that EJ would do horrible things as mayor. Seriously, he’d just be mayor. Too my knowledge that doesn’t come with missile codes or anything. How badly could he screw things up in one term? I was relieved when Abe’s wife finally pointed that out to him, but not relieved enough to like this storyline.

So over all, I’m definitely liking it more that Bold and the Beautiful. But I’m not loving it. I’m not invested in it. When my DVR crashed and erased an episode I wasn’t that upset. I didn’t even go watch it online. Maybe investment takes time. I had half a lifetime invested in OLTL and I don’t expect to feel that for any other show any time soon. But I’m still trying to support scripted drama where I can. And I’ll admit I’ve been thrilled to see ratings for all the non-ABC soaps increasing while the ratings for ABC’s new reality show nosedive into the toilet.