Bill Watterson Would Be Proud
-or-
Death Is The Mother Of Beauty


Scary-Go-Round was an excellent comic. I ranted about it to friends, family—anyone who would listen—and I read it faithfully ever since I found it, sometime during my sophomore year. Now it's over. John Allison had the guts—not the mention the class—to end his beloved comic, and his blog post on the subject indicates that it probably wasn't an easy task.

Kudos, Mr. Allison. A lot of hacks and talented writers/artists alike get trapped in stagnation and sameness. Your fans will never forget what you created, and will treasure the stories that you wove. May your future endeavors show similar success. Godspeed.

A Belated Call To Arms

(I'd actually forgotten I'd written this until someone said something to me yesterday regarding my problems with grad school. This was an essay I wrote in September of 2008, which shows how far back my resentment and dissatisfaction go. I was originally going to print out a hundred copies and tape them all over the Virginia Tech campus, but I ended up not having the guts. So much for my career as an iconoclast.)


Imagine a system where it was impossible to get fired. Nothing that a person did could ever lead to the termination of their employment; the worst they could expect would be “lateral promotion,” or a transfer between two posts of similar rank. There are two systems in the United States where this misguided principle is applied: the Federal Government, and Academia. Both bodies are plagued by the same problems: a lack of accountability at fundamental levels of operation, acceptance (some would argue encouragement) of incompetence and ineptitude, and a predilection for excoriating and ostracizing any of its members who dare to shy from what is deemed “acceptable speech”—i.e., party line.

Unfortunately for us as American citizens, our will has become so far removed from the machinations of our governmental morass that it is nearly impossible for anything barring a coup to influence policy. However, the situation is not the same in Academia. We’ve been led to believe that the situation is analogous, and a lot of professorial smoke-and-mirrors and baiting-and-switching has done the trick on most students, undergraduate and graduate alike. Yet we as students have more power than we imagine. We as students have more power than our professors imagine. Without students, they would have no function. They would be reduced to earning their keep on the lecture circuit, and no doubt many of the ones who had nothing original to say—and we can safely assume that there are a few within the academic circles of America who fit that bill—would find themselves in need of a reality check, as well as a real job.

Why, then, do we persist in our acceptance of the status quo aeterne? Part of it no doubt lies in the stereotypical abusive parent-child dynamic. “As long as we can get our licks in when we get our Ph.D.’s, all of this will be worth it,” students say to themselves. Or maybe it’s just become one of those things that is seen as just another hurdle. Classes, thesis, professorial abuse—it’s all part of the wonderful package that is a collegiate education.

Undergraduates, to some extent, have more rights than graduate students. They are paying to be here. Their money pays the professors’ wages. It pays for new stadia, new buildings, new programs, anything that a university administrator can dream up. Therefore, a few angry parents can command at least some attention, especially in today’s increasingly litigious society.

What of the grad students, though? They are paid employees of…well, whom? Of the university? Of their respective departments? The details are often hazy, and it is easy to see why they are kept that way. Without knowing who writes their checks and to whom they are ultimately responsible, grad students have no recourse to anyone in a position of objective authority. As employees, their loyalty is expected. Contracts are drawn up, specifications laid out, and who among the newly arrived masters’ and doctoral students would dare raise an issue with the entrenched laws of a pre-existing and overarching academic behemoth?

No one’s that brave. The person who is writing this isn’t brave enough to sign his name to this declaration. The person who is writing this declaration isn’t yet free from the fear that academia instills: the fear that voicing opinions that don’t fall into line with the (supposedly) objective but actually repressive professorial dogma might revoke that precious piece of paper, one of the few remaining things of value that our institutions of higher learning have to offer. These words are being written in the hope that one day students won’t have to face that fear.

To those who are reading this: it is time we got rid of tenure. It is time we gave pink slips to the dead weight that, by the grace of an archaic and outmoded policy, has dragged our colleges and universities into an educational sinkhole. It is time we dismantled the tenure track and demanded from our professoriate the same things our professoriate demands from us: creativity, drive, intellectual and academic excellence, and a fervent rejection of the stagnation of any of these rational ideals. If you are a student who feels they have no recourse in the face of professorial abuse of power, then this is for you. It’s time we gave ourselves a voice.

One Mountain Outpost
-or-
Why Would I Want To Leave Serenity?

"You old sorcerer!" the boy shouted up at the sky. "You knew the whole story. You even left a bit of gold at the monastery so I could get back to this church. The monk laughed when he saw me in tatters. Couldn't you have saved me from that?"

"No," he heard a voice on the wind say. "If I had told you, you wouldn't have seen the Pyramids. They're beautiful, aren't they?"

(from The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho)


Well, I did it. I quit grad school. I suppose some people will consider it amazing and scary that I quit grad school, but honestly, I don't understand why I didn't quit sooner. Why? Well, for starters, the economy has made things so utterly terrible that a lot of departments can't afford to pay their grad students. I ended up having to take out a lot of student loans, even though I was TA'ing last semester.

Yes, wrap your mind around that. I paid to be a TA, one of the most unrewarding jobs ever invented.

I also quit working for my advisor and began working under another professor. This second professor ended up leaving Virginia Tech, giving a month's notice, and leaving me and two other grad students effectively without any way to finish their degrees. This meant that I would have to start over for a third time. As Yahtzee would say, "Bother that nonsense," except he didn't say "bother." Or "nonsense."

As sudden as it might seem, this happened over the course of...well, over the course of most of the time I was in grad school, anyway. I used to say, only half-jokingly (and now, not jokingly at all) that the best parts of grad school had nothing to do with grad school itself. There were really three main reasons why I stayed in this town after quitting. In no particular order, they are my choir, my swing dance group (and between those two, most of my friends here), and my girlfriend.

It's rather a belated and sophomoric realization, but I think I finally understand why someone ends up settling in one place. It's because the idea of staying in that one place NOW, when they find it (or notice it), seems much better than wandering more and possibly losing this one precious moment in time when things seem to click. This isn't the same way I loved Williamsburg; I loved Williamsburg because I went to college there, and I have no such filial relation here. No, I love Blacksburg in spite of everything that has happened, because there are times I've felt so alive it's almost frightening. And so, in a sense, Blacksburg itself was the fourth reason I stayed.

It hit me, one evening back in August, when I was exploring some of the side streets in Blacksburg. I drove up a hill to a golf course so I could turn around, and it just so happened that pretty much every direction looked out over the mountains and valleys in the summer twilight. I remember thinking, "I don't see how anyone could get jaded in this town," and drove down the hill to my church for choir practice. About thirty minutes after choir practice started, I had one of those 16-ton-weight moments where I realized I had been jaded, so incredibly jaded and depressed, squeezed dry. And now I wasn't. It had taken a cataclysmic event to do it, but it had woken me out of my stupor. Woodsmoke came drifting through the open window of the choir practice room and I realized that there was no other place I wanted to be, right now. In spite of the fear, the anxiety, the anger, and the uncertainty leading up to everything that is my life right now, I had come to love a place that I had only chosen after I started to live here.

I call it Serenity Syndrome:

Inara: I wasn't gonna stay [on Persephone], you know.
Mal: Yeah? Why's that?
Inara: Someone needs to keep Kaylee out of trouble. And all my things are here. Besides, why would I want to leave Serenity?
Mal: Can't think of a reason.


Me either.


"One prairie outpost, you are how I feel
Alone in a flatland between the dream and the real
The irony? Ask me, 'Where have you been?'
I don't know, I don't know
Because I don't know where to begin."





(I'm still flying.)




(P.S. There's some stuff from the end of last semester that I've been wanting to backpost. However, because it might get lost in the shuffle, I'm just going to post it, either this month or in early October. It's not gone, just late.)

A new Will to honor all God's creation

New flag on the mast
Without any secrets, without any past
All things are new again, within and without
Sooner or later the ending begins
Just then it can be said that all things are new again

While the days leading up to Easter were, as Mal Reynolds might say, "not my best Holy Week ever," Easter itself was quite lovely. I've been singing in the Christ Episcopal Church choir since the late fall, and we do special musical events around the important holy days of the year. This year we did a Maundy Thursday evensong of sorts, accompanying the stripping of the altar with a choral arrangement of Psalm 22. There was also a Good Friday service, but it was a capella and it was at noon on a day I had work to do, so I was sadly unable to attend.

Easter, as would be expected, was very busy. There was an Easter Vigil which I did not attend because I was up far too late the night before celebrating the fact that my friends Matt and John passed their doctoral engineering qualifying exams. However, I did sing in both the 8:30 and 10:30 services, the latter of which featured a Tudor anthem entitled "Haec Dies" (I forget the author) during Communion. One of the things I've come to love about singing at Christ Church is the focus on using Tudor anthems and hymns during the special services and evensongs. They're hard to sing, but they sound so hauntingly beautiful that it's enough to make you see why some purists believe music reached its peak in England during that time period.

On a more hedonic note: after the 8:30 service, the choir was granted a brief reprieve and had brunch with the congregation. I managed to get my hands on two mimosas, which made me very happy. It's a sure bet that they played a large part in my sunny outlook on the 10:30 service.

Earlier in the month, my friend Kara had invited me to have brunch with her family at a hotel restaurant here in town, so as soon as the recessional was done I got changed and headed over before the inevitable post-church traffic started. Kara's father is an engineering professor here at Tech and has a flattering amount of faith in my enological prowess, so towards the end of the meal he managed to steer the conversation around to wine, particularly Virginia wine. In the past couple of months, I've affected a strange mixture of overconfidence and diffidence on matters where I feel as though I have a passing familiarity but am somewhat out of my depth. It's this sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that once I venture past profound-sounding banalities, someone is going to come over and prove me wrong on every single semi-controversial point I may have espoused. On the other hand, stepping out on a limb has a strange attraction for me, so I gave my usual speech wholesale. (Virginia's wine laws are crippling its image, ABC and big distribution companies are out to get the small wineries, a lot of the small wineries are somewhat apathetic about marketing anyway, and no, we're never going to beat California and France at their own game, we have to rewrite the rules. Et cetera. I really need to make that into a wineblog post.)

The silence around the table when the monologue-with-slight-discussion was over kind of unnerved me. I told people that they could feel free to shush me at any moment, that I was pretty much used to it. It was a bit of a surprise to find that they were silent more because they'd actually been impressed by what I was saying. I suppose that because I didn't think I'd said much of import, I was expecting a lackluster response, and it never fails to take me by surprise when people feel as though my pontifications are anything more than out-loud brainstorming sessions with myself.

This post may have appeared to have veered from the "The Lord is risen indeed, alleluia" into "Woo hoo look how great I am", and maybe it has, but I suppose the whole point of this is that this year has been my Eastertide of sorts. I have come out of a long, hard period in my life into a sunny, hopeful, Other Side that, while it's not exactly where I wanted to be, is new. It's uncharted territory. The things that I was put through last semester and part of this semester have left me confident that even if things go to Hell, I will know how to deal with it, or at least be able to make a clean break without going into the fetal position. For some people, like my brother or my father, maybe this wouldn't be new ground, but for me it feels like the first step towards actually being the kind of man I want(ed) to be. On this Easter, I gave thanks for a host of things.


The ability to discern and either avoid or weather the bad situations that crop up inevitably, and often;

The good sense to appreciate and nurture the small miracles that make life a journey worth taking;

A group of friends with whom I can run the race and find something better.


Here's to the birth of another new age. Here's to making the most of it while it lasts. And here's to seeking, striving, and never yielding, and looking back only in fondness and wisdom.



(I'm still flying.)

Who Watches “The Watchmen”? Why Watch “The Watchmen”?

This weekend, I had the misfortune to watch the film adaptation of the famous graphic novel The Watchmen. It was a movie I had every intention of enjoying — the trailers looked fantastic and everything pointed to it being a thrilling, if gruesome, ride through yet another untapped franchise. Sadly, it proved to be nothing more than a pretentiously dark and high-mindedly nihilistic piece that would be more forgettable if its images weren’t so pervasively disturbing.

This abominably empty film is set in an alternate 1985 during which Richard Nixon is serving his fifth term as president. How exactly he got Congress to repeal the 22nd Amendment is never explained, but don’t let’s fret our pretty little heads about that. American scientists and military leaders have put together a Doomsday Clock which counts down towards inevitable nuclear war with the Soviet Union. (The method by which the clock is turned towards Midnight — Mutually Assured Destruction — is another plot device left maddeningly unexplained.) Former superheroes, hamstrung by a bill (the Keane Act) which prohibits anonymous vigilantism, have turned reclusive, like the terminally nice Nite Owl/Daniel Dreiberg, or gone rogue, like the raspy, violent Rorschach/Walter Kovacs. All in all, it is — was — a nice set-up for a grimy crusade through a Gothamesque New York, with the idea of superheroes made obsolete providing the bittersweet leitmotif.

However, it all goes downhill pretty damned fast as we find out more about superheroes past and present:

The aging Comedian, thrown out of his apartment window in the first scene of the movie, is revealed to be a sexually and physically abusive, murderous scumbag who began working for right-wing nationalist third-world governments (the worst kind) after the Keane Act restricted his ability to beat up on hippie scum with impunity.

Rorschach was designed by his writers (both film and print) to be a “realistic” interpretation of what a Batman-type character might have turned out like — sociopathic, merciless, scornful of the very people he allegedly protects.

The Silk Spectre is an aging, promiscuous lush living in a retirement home, and her daughter, the Silk Spectre II, has basically no other purpose than to be The Girl Superhero. Jokes are made about her latex costume, but they would ring truer if said outfit were less ridiculously revealing in the most stereotypical way imaginable.

Dr. Manhattan has been stripped of his humanity by a scientific accident that left him gigantic, blue, and imbued with godlike powers; however, his bald pate and robotically tormented demeanor evoke images of a fretfully indecisive Charlie Brown.

Dan Dreiberg, as the Nite Owl, comes close to being a sympathetic character. Like the rest of the movie, however, he tries too hard and ultimately fails, often sounding less like a retired superhero struggling to find his way in a world that doesn’t want him and more like a parody of Jughead saying “Aw, jeepers!”

That’s the rub of this entire movie — the world doesn’t want its superheroes. And who would want this motley crew, anyway? All of them are fascistic embodiments of the ultimate abusive parents — brutalizing and beating the people who supposedly look to them for protection, and then bitterly lamenting the fact that they aren’t loved and idolized. The graphic portrayals of violence reach several ham-fisted climaxes throughout the movie. One scene in an alleyway that results in Nite Owl and the Silk Spectre II maiming or killing an entire Asian street gang was probably intended to be balletic and artistic, but instead comes across as embarrassingly pornographic, and raises the question of whether violence is just another form of foreplay for these purported superheroes.

I could go on for hours about the ways in which this movie displays an apparent contempt for humanity. Out of all of them, however, I was the most disgusted by the lack of any characters with whom we can empathize. One of the “heroes” is murdered, quite violently and graphically (and in the least subtly ironic way possible), towards the close of the movie, and I found myself thinking that I cared as little about his death as I would about the death of pretty much any of the rest of the main cast. My sympathies, such as they were, lay with the Unnamed Public, on whom the unasked-for “protection” of these “heroes” was foisted the way similar “protection” was foisted on Chicago shopkeepers by the mob.

Attempts to make the surviving main characters more likeable and human are much too little and far too late, and come across as implausible and forced. The Silk Spectre, justifying her rape and impregnation by the misogynistically violent Comedian, says to her daughter and successor, “I can’t hate him for what he did because he gave me you.” In a movie as devoid of the milk of human kindness as this one, one can only assume that some hack assistant writer got his scripts mixed up. It’s less insulting to our intelligence as viewers than assuming the directors and producers thought we’d buy such a mawkish line after having pure, distilled nihilism shoved down our throats for almost three hours.

It is necessary to pause here and answer the unheard-yet-foreseen voices, crying out in indignation that while everything I’ve said is true, my arguments are rendered moot by the fact that the writers of both the graphic novel and the movie set out to do just what has been described. It’s just like every other apocalyptic story: create a terrifying future by turning an established norm (in this case, the superhero as a projected ideal of human virtue) on its head (the superhero as a fascist enforcer of Order at any cost). To which I would reply: if you set out to make a salad out of broken glass, garbage, and the tears of infants, you still have a depressing meal that no one wants to eat. Even if it’s the BEST salad made out of refuse and lachrymation, and moreover made in an ironic way.

Somewhere in the interminable middle of this movie, the Keane Act-flouting Rorschach is framed for murder and put in prison. He ends up foiling an attempt on his life by savagely beating and dumping hot grease all over an inmate who tries to stab him. As the guards drag him away, he yells “You all don’t understand! I’m not locked up in here with you! You’re locked up in here with me!”

Indeed.

And later on, when he is freed, the entire world is locked up with him. We are left to ponder the question: with heroes like these, who needs villains?

An Interlude: The Girl and Her Horse

Ellen O'Mara, 1905. (source)


There is a story on my mother's side of the family that my great-grandfather, James Sullivan, attended a horse show with a friend of his not long after being appointed to a diplomatic position by the U.S. government. While at the show, he noticed one Ellen "Nell" O'Mara, the daughter of the mayor of Limerick, riding by. Upon seeing her, he turned to his friend and said, "That's the woman I'm going to marry." He was proven right; Nell O’Mara Sullivan later became the mother of my grandfather Stephen.

I wonder, sometimes, how many other men have spoken with such surety and conviction. I wonder whether their stories ended similarly. I wonder if James Sullivan would have spoken with such certainty about anything else in his life, had his attention been elsewhere when that pretty Irish girl went by on her horse.





(I'm still flying.)

I got back to Blacksburg a bit before Break ended to help out with the Enology/Grape Chemistry Group's "Short Course" for winemakers. It's basically an introduction to laboratory analytical techniques that are useful (and sometimes necessary) for determining wine quality and characteristics. Some of the equipment is beyond the range of a small-scale winery's budget, but I suppose it's a good thing that winemakers and their staffs are being exposed and made aware of such things. With the Enology Service Lab able to run large amounts of samples, it's not really necessary to have an on-site cash still for measuring volatile acidity at your winery anyway. Unless you REALLY REALLY want to, maybe.

Anyway, so classes have started, as they are wont at the beginning of every semester. One of the interesting things about grad school is that your schedule can end up to be quite a bit weirder than it did in college:


Monday
Food Microbiology: 9:05 AM - 9:55 AM
Graduate Seminar: 11:15 AM - 12:05 PM
Biometry II: 4:00 PM - 5:15 PM

Tuesday/Thursday
No classes, but I T.A. the "Wines and Vines" class, which involves variable amounts of prep work.

Wednesday
Food Microbiology: 9:05 AM - 9:55 AM
Flavor Chem: 10:15 AM - 12:15 PM
Biometry II: 4:00 PM - 5:15 PM

Friday
Food Microbiology: 9:05 AM - 9:55 AM


It's a bit odd, being a T.A. You're barely any older than your students, and you don't always really have the sense that you know exactly what you're doing or indeed what the hell is going on, and yet they're coming to you with questions. They're not coming to you with big questions, but it's easy to remember what it felt like to be an undergrad. TA's seem more human because they have a first name instead of a "Dr.", and they're less frightening to email. I'm confused. I don't understand. I didn't turn something in--can I turn it in late? Will I get in trouble? I didn't understand this. I'm confused.

And so I cast in my lot with the host of T.A.'s who have gone before me, caring enough to get stuff done but doing my best not to care so much that I get bogged down in the details. It's easy to get snared in the trap of perfectionism but in a class of one hundred forty-two students, there's just no way that's going to happen. I perform triage, sort out what I can, hope the rest sorts itself out, and move on. Not exactly the most original view, but it's what works, or at least gives me some measure of distance and sanity.

I'll probably have more to say as the semester unfolds. Posting on here isn't what it was in college, nor is it what it was when I was living at home. It's not for lack of excitement--swing dancing and the semi-monthly Wine Nights that I hold at my apartment provide that--nor is it because of laziness, although you could argue that I slack off more than I really should, sometimes, as a Master's Student. It's just because, well--I want to disturb the universe a little, I suppose. Based on the fact that blogging about grad school would read like a travelogue of Purgatory, it doesn't seem likely that any novel or profound thoughts would emerge from such an endeavor.

This may not be a novel or profound reflection, but the other night I was getting a CD out of the cases I keep in my car and noticed a set that a girl sent me back in 2004. She was a senior I had a brief fling with when I was finishing up my freshman year. (It ended painfully, although after the things I've been through since then the hurt feelings seem somewhat silly in retrospect.) It made me remember that a year or so later I found a picture of this girl at the Fall 2003 Phi Mu Alpha semi-formal. Among those pictures was also, oddly enough, a picture of Maria--whom I was dating at the time--with some of her NKE/PMA friends.

At the time I just chalked it up to odd coincidence. Now, though, I'm starting to think about it a little more. It led me to the somewhat sophomoric conclusion that my future is all around me all the time, and I'm just as unaware of it now as I was in October of 2003. It makes me think about the people who are on the periphery of my life right now that will enter it in ways that I could not, or would not, imagine.

I guess it's a Malcolm Gladwell train of thought. When you calculate the odds of me dating two girls who were at the same dance on the same night out of the entire female population of William & Mary, yeah, it seems like a statistically significant event. However, thinking about it more closely--those two girls were moving in almost exactly the same circles I was in, making some of the same friends, or friends of friends, their orbits and mine becoming more and more aligned. Therefore, the odds of me meeting, becoming attracted to, and even dating them became more likely when considering the parallel nature of our social interactions.

So I wonder now about the people I am moving towards. It seems like a tangential thought process in grad school, when you're more focussed on the what--the degree--than the whom. Still, they've been telling us in our graduate seminar that professionalism requires a great deal of thought about the initial impressions you make on people, including the friends who will later become your colleagues, your peers in the working world.

I'm not teleologically minded. I don't believe that I am being inexorably drawn towards someone, or something. It's interesting to note, though, that when looking back at our past and the friends we make, the interactions we have, we're more likely to chalk it up to "random" (as if such a thing existed) happenstance. We'd like to think that what happens to us is the result of situations, as though we didn't create our own microenvironments through our actions and words and behaviors. In other words, we look at our own pasts as though they weren't, at one point in our life, an uncertain future. We don't give ourselves enough credit for the often unseen effect that the depths our innate character--our Soul--can have on causing the events we refer to as "lucky" or "chance." We have more power than we realize, or perhaps want to admit.

So here's to, in the words of David Roth, "the miracles that cause us to believe." May we realize that there are those miracles which come from inside the Self, and may they bring us from a lesser perfection to a greater perfection.



(I'm still flying.)