Roasted turkey in pumpkin sauce

Well, things are not really as dramatic as the previous post may imply. But its essential message is still valid and accurate. I just wish I had “balls” and was “man” enough to do something active about it (Apologies for using those deplorably masculinist cliches).

In other news, thank goodness for Daylight Savings Time! I don’t have to regularly wake up before the sun rises again (hopefully). Also, all this academic writing is making my literary well run dry. I need to recharge!

And Halloween was fun! Food!

47F

I understand what I am still too proud to mention
To you

-Fiona Apple, Never is a Promise

On one hand, it is your fault, so you should do something about this. On the other hand, it is also my fault so I should also do something about it. Either way, it should be done soon, preferably before the arrival of finals week (because I do not want to pause long and collapse my shoulders often between academic tasks).

Cold weather is screwing me up. This will go on and on and on but it shouldn’t. Something radical has to happen! Like, actually talking.

Para usted*

Let’s try this.

To address this heavily asymmetrical set-up of you knowing most of what I’m thinking (which is my fault, but still…), I pose the suggestion: Why don’t you tell me what you think. Drop a hint, send a clue, whatever. Let me know and I’d appreciate it.

 

*courtesy of Google Translate

Critique of common sense, or screw the Summers of the world!

The best way to get over a woman is to turn her into literature

-a character quoting Henry Miller in (500) Days of Summer

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(500) Days of Summer, despite its sometimes annoying preciousness, is actually a good film. Until that fucked-up, cop-out ending. (SPOILERS!) Why should he get over Summer? Why couldn’t he be miserable all his life and be angry at her forever? Why should he move on?

Common sense is not only uncommon, non-universal and context-specific, it is also a product of a dominant rhetoric that remains unchallenged and that gets reproduced by our uncritical acceptance of it. Subversion #7: Resist!

Subversion #6

Make it easy
Make this easy
It’s not as heavy as it seems

-Tori Amos, Bouncing Off Clouds

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Everything is so blurry now for the first time in more than two months! I feel good!

And yeah, it shouldn’t be too difficult. Everything is easy. So easy! You know what I mean.

Post-kebsism

Subversion #4: I am just not ready yet to completely abandon the theory of kebsism. With deeper introspection, I realized that kebsism can be an effective tool of passive resistance (modified from Gandhi). However, we must remember that kebsism is good only for certain situations (such as resisting neocolonial relations in the production of knowledge by ignoring their rules and silently rejecting the ideals they work for so dearly) and should not supplant active forms of struggle against oppressive, unjust and uncaring structures.

Now back to studying (or subverting?) a ’science’ that hides behind a curtain of supposed objectivity (remote sensing).

Subversion #5: Resist the de-humorification of leopoldbloom.wordpress.com! I should put in a video of Chen lip-synching or something.

Barfie

Absence diminishes mediocre passions and increases great ones, as the wind extinguishes candles and fans fires.
-Francois de La Rochefoucauld

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Subversion #3: Yeah, I won’t even pretend that quote is not about you. Barfilicious.

College Station is starting to feel a bit suffocating for me. Quiet, suburbanish, small city life in Texas is fine. Except when I get to think that I could have been living in Austin, two hours away and infinitely cooler and weirder. A&M is too normal. 95% of people are the same; I believe them to be replicas of a few, transposable prototypes. I’m crossing fingers too that there would be hidden pockets of radical social science in here somewhere. Otherwise, I’m screwed. But it’s only the second month. I’ll start worrying when I still feel like this after the 20th.

And I’m off to DC and NYC late November and maybe SFO and Seattle on December. Wanderlust will be busy!

In the mood for like

This is for a friend who is in like. Go lang, I support you!

ETA: Turns out this is one of the favorite movie of friend’s object of desire. Lovely coincidence. And this is my favorite too for other reasons.

Brrr

You don’t show much these days
It gets so fucking cold

-Tori Amos, Northern Lad

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The cold winds from the Arctic are blowing over Texas this weekend, which is fatefully coinciding with my first encounter with an ego-boost deficiency syndrome. Somebody reassure me that I’m smart (or irresistibly good-looking!) or something. Never had this trouble with writing a short paragraph in my whole life.

In other news, the subversion continues. Subversion #1: Resist blind adherence to the hegemonic constructed narratives of masculinity. Subversion #2: Prudence is overrated, so just go.

Counterhegemony

There is a pressing need to subvert the hegemonic ideals of bourgeois complacency, dangerously disguised as ‘conventional wisdom’. And while we’re at it, on a personal scale, that of stiff masculine indifference too.