it's warm outside today

i had a paper due yesterday morning, yes, a paper due on saturday. the night before had been an eventful one, to put it one way, but i somehow got myself out of bed and to the CIT to finish the paper up. after sending it in it seemed like a good idea to go to the ATM and buy some powerade. on the way from the atm to the store, i had a violent series of yawns. painful yawns. yawns so large i wasn't able to close my mouth for far too long and my jaw muscles couldn't stand much more. meanwhile my eyes started tearing up because it was pretty bright outside. i can only imagine what i must have looked like to the people i was passing: mouth violently wide open, tears falling from my eyes and headed toward the shadiest convenience store on the east side.

chris sent us an e-mail yesterday morning saying that we wouldn't see him for the next few days because he's going on a hunger strike in front of city hall. that's right, a hunger strike.

it's been an odd weekend.

"The whole spot is redolent of typography."

Well, we all know I'm not man enough to drink a bottle of Ipecac. [problematic! –ed.]

Lately, when I haven't been battling the bike snobs at The Hub, complaining about collages, or inventing animal dance games, I've been writing. Quite a lot, in fact. In the past three weeks, I've written six papers, none of them particularly good (and all of them relying on compound complex sentences to provide the illusion of sophistication). This isn't necessarily a complaint--particularly because it pales in comparison to things like the ProJo getting 17 facts about one's mugging wrong in a two-paragraph blurb--but more an observation that I have finally reached a limit. There is, it seems, a limit to the amount of text that I'm interested in consuming and producing per day.

This, in turn, has fed my mild anxieties about employment. Having realized that becoming an editorial assistant at a university press might not be the best thing for me after all, everything I see and read seems imbued with career ideas. Many of these have been fueled by my "Contraband Capitalism" class--migrant smuggler, FBI agent, DEA agent, political economist, money launderer, etc.--but I've also gotten even crazier ideas, like, "I know, maybe I'll go to grad school for English and study Anthony Trollope for a living. After all, we both love endless qualification, and we're both pleasantly boring."

So really, this whole post was an excuse for me to quote a line from The Warden.

Trife Proliferation

I discovered over the past weekend that our readership is much further reaching than Unit 26 expatriates, 17 Thayer residents, and Indy hipsters. Given the growing sphere of influence that our blog has attained, I feel that we should move from the less important issues of race and poverty, gender and sexuality, and talking skeletons to the critical issue of bringing trife to the world.

What is trife you may ask? It is a difficult concept to explain so I figured a Google search might help. It turns out the first image match and the site www.trife.com, lead to "Page Not Found" sites. Suprising, I know.

Even the urbandictionary.com definition is horribly off:
Closely related to "trippin".
1. Someone who makes much ado about nothing.
2. Something that is so wack that it's not worth your time.
3. Over-concerned with petty things.
4. Some that is dissatisfying. Not to the standards of your approval.

As it is such a hard concept to pin down, I will provide an opportunity for trife open to anyone who wishes to experiment with it.

Several months ago, this clip was shown on Family Guy:
The clip is of Peter and the family drinking a substance called Ipecac that induces vomiting. It is sold in drug stores and supposed to be used when people injest poisions. It's pretty fucking funny, the picture does it no justice.

This is a real-life version of the same stunt. Depending on your personality, you'll ever find it sad and shocking or just downright hilarious. For me, it was one of the funniest things I'd ever seen.

So here's where you come in. Me and Mike have agreed to do our own Ipecac challenge and vomit up lots of multi-colored foods. If you want in, you're trife. You also have my respect.

there is another post below this

i'm about to pull an all-nighter (though i'll probably cut out early and finish tomorrow) for a paper concerning the show with the guy pictured here.

to see why brandon should be a gender studies concentrator, read the post below

Fucking Faggots

"The relationship between adolescent masculinity and sexuality is embedded in the specter of the faggot. Faggots represent a penetrated masculinity in which ‘to be penetrated is to abdicate power’ (Bersani, 1987: 212). Penetrated men symbolize a masculinity devoid of power, which, in its contradiction, threatens both psychic and social chaos. It is precisely this specter of penetrated masculinity that functions as a regulatory mechanism of gender for contemporary American adolescent boys."
- ‘Dude, You’re a Fag’:
Adolescent Masculinity and the Fag Discourse

After my last post on the "guy friendship rules," a commenter who would not identify him or herself left the comment "heterosexuality is so taxing." That comment struck me as amazingly problematic and struck a chord with an issue that I've been trying to explore recently.

Girls (y'all are some God damn girls)
Why do you act this way? (why do you act this way, huh?)
Why do y'all act like fucking sissies
- Eminem, "Girls"

My question is basically the same as Eminem's. Why do gay people act like that? Or in this case, why do gay people not act in accordance with the "guy friendship rules"? Why do they act like "fucking sissies"?

[DISCLAIMER: For the purposes of this post I am only referring to gay guys - also if you haven't figured it out yet, I'm using the language that I'm using to call into question the very meaning of these words - no I don't believe that God hates fags or anything.]

By that I mean why is one's performance of gender related to sexual desire? What does wanting to fuck women have to do with letting your friends know:

"When you are scared -- I will rag on you about it every chance I get."

What does fucking men have to do with a really loud Lisp, making your wrists as limp as humanly possible and portraying a gender performance generally marked as effeminite?

The very idea of 'gaydar' rests on the fact that gays act differently than straights in clearly discernible ways. Shouldn't the only way you can tell the difference be when you see a guy fucking a man or a woman in the middle of the street?

If we are to believe that gender, sexual desire, etc. are purely social constructs, then why do gays CHOOSE that particular performance. Or can they choose? Is it that they always cried easily, were less athletic, and disliked the roughhousing that other boys enjoy?

Why should gays be exempt from the general rules of gender performance that the rest of us are used to?

"becoming a fag has as much to do with failing at the masculine tasks of competence, heterosexual prowess and strength or an anyway revealing weakness or femininity, as it does with a sexual identity. This fluidity of the fag identity is what makes the specter of the fag such a powerful disciplinary mechanism. It is fluid enough that boys police most of their behaviors out of fear of having the fag identity permanently adhere and definitive enough so that boys recognize a fag behavior and strive to avoid it.

According to this group of boys, gay is a legitimate, if marginalized, social identity. If a man is gay, there may be a chance he could be considered masculine by other men (Connell, 1995). David, a handsome white senior dressed smartly in khaki pants and a white button-down shirt
said, ‘Being gay is just a lifestyle. It’s someone you choose to sleep with. You can still throw around a football and be gay.’ In other words there is a possibility, however slight, that a boy can be gay and masculine.

By invoking it so often, boys remind themselves and each other that at any point they
can become fags if they are not sufficiently masculine."
- ‘Dude, You’re a Fag’:
Adolescent Masculinity and the Fag Discourse

So why do gays act like fags?

The most accepted explanations are:
a) the essentialist argument - they're born gay and part of that genetic makeup is a propensity to act like a fag

b) the constructionist argument - as children gays feel ostracized because of their different sexual desire than the other boys; to accommodate this alternative desire, they perform an alternative gender performance.

I don't buy either of these arguments. I'm an MCM major so I don't believe in essentialist arguments and the constructionist argument relies on the belief that sexual desire is SUCH A LARGE INFLUENCE on them as kids that they are forced to completely change their gender performance. I don't know about y'all but I was much more interested in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles than sexual desire as a kid. Not to say that kids don't experience sexual desire in their own way as kids but I don't think it dominates their life enough to mark such a drastic change in their behavior.

All I see is sissies in magazines smiling
Whatever happened to whylin out and bein violent?
Whatever happened to catchin a good-ol' fashioned
passionate ass-whoopin and gettin your shoes coat and your hat tooken?
New Kids on the Block, sucked a lot of dick
Boy/girl groups make me sick
And I can't wait 'til I catch all you faggots in public
I'ma love it.. (hahaha)
- Eminem, "Marshall Mathers"

Here's my theory: there's massive conflation going on. I think gay actually means four different things:
a) a sexual desire for the same-sex
b) sexual behavior with the same-sex
c) part of the gay community
d) social behavior that can be picked up by gaydar as "acting gay"

I think each one of these things can happen without any of the other three. I don't feel like writing down all the combinations so stop reading right now and consider all the different combinations.

OK, I think that these four VERY different definitions become conflated into an all-encompassing gay identity. Gays act like fags because they a) have a sexual desire for the same-sex and b) want sexual behavior with the same sex so they c) become a part of the gay community by d) acting gay. Why gays chose acting like a fag to be their specific performance is a whole 'nother question. It probably has to do with valorizing the identity that seems most pitiful to normative masculinity as both a resistance and subjection to normative masculinity, itself.

So that's all well and good and it seems I've figured this out. Unfortunately, there's one piece I haven't accounted for. Why do gays act like fags when they are children and haven't gone through the process I described above? Why do gay people often exhibit d) gay behavior before c) becoming part of they gay community? Is it just innnate like the essentialists believe? If you can give me the answer, I promise to credit you in my thesis.

"Looking at ‘fag’ as a discourse rather than a static identity reveals that the term can be invested with different meanings in different social spaces. ‘Fag’ may be used as a weapon with which to temporarily assert one’s masculinity by denying it to others. Thus ‘fag’ becomes a symbol around which contests of masculinity take place.

The fag epithet, when hurled at other boys, may or may not have explicit sexual meanings, but it always has gendered meanings. When a boy calls another boy a fag, it means he is not a man, not necessarily that he is a homosexual. The boys in this study know that they are not supposed to call homosexual boys ‘fags’ because that is mean. This, then has been the limited success of the mainstream gay rights movement. The message absorbed by some of these teenage boys is that ‘gay men can be masculine, just like you.’ Instead of challenging gender inequality, this particular discourse of gay rights has reinscribed it. Thus we need to begin to think about how gay men may be in a unique position to challenge gendered as well as sexual norms."
- ‘Dude, You’re a Fag’:
Adolescent Masculinity and the Fag Discourse

And is it their responsibility?

That's What Friends Are For

I saw this online and thought, "that's about right."

The Guy Friendship Promise:

1. When you are sad -- I will help get you drunk and plot revenge against the sorry bastard who made you sad.

2. When you are blue -- I will try to dislodge whatever is choking you.

3. When you smile -- I will know you finally got laid.

4. When you are scared -- I will rag on you about it every chance I get.

5. When you are worried -- I will tell you horrible stories about how much worse it could be and tell you to quit whining.

6. When you are confused -- I will use little words.

7. When you are sick -- Stay the hell away from me until you are well again. I don't want whatever you have.

8. When you fall -- I will point and laugh at your clumsy ass.

To those I would add the following:
9. When you pass out drunk -- I will Sharpie hella dicks on your face and take pictures of me bare-assed farting on you.

10. When you get in a fight -- I'll have your back... and then kick your ass later for getting both of our asses beat down.

11. When you try to gross me out -- I will come back with something bigger and badder.

and

12. When you piss me off -- you'll know.

well look who it is

nathan's movie-star update

1. i appear 3.5 minutes into the lucero documentary. i have only had time to watch the first 9 minutes.

2. brandon suggested i get myself on imdb. this is a good idea.

3. he also mentioned that, when squinting, unshaven and without glasses, i look like clint eastwood. this is also a good idea.

4. my film-related ego is at an all time high.

5. my other types of ego have declined or remained in place.

One of Those Weeks

Last week was one of the top five craziest weeks of my life. And y'all know that means shit was CRA-ZY. For various reasons, I'm not gonna get into all of it here but let me just say I'm looking forward to the turkey and peace that lies approxminately 50 days away.

So instead of stressing yall out with my stresses, I will attempt to offer an enjoyable study break.

• This guy is my new hero and a role model for college students everywhere.
  
• These two guys decided to have a shitty mixtape contest where the loser had to walk around the city with a huge boombox blasting the awful music: the video is pretty damn funny.
  
• Japanese game shows are soooooo amazing! In this one, for every question he gets wrong, he gets closer and closer to a face-to-jaw conforntation with a crocodile.
  
• To Brian Lee and all the other yellow wristband wearers...
  
• And finally, on a much more uplifting note, this is the Brown '05 MVP of the year. This article came up 157 places on Google, played on CNN (the link to the video is in the green box on the right). Damn. Biko, you do us all proud.

From ABCNews.com:

When Biko Eisen-Martin spotted a woman giving birth to the first of triplets in the middle of downtown Berkeley, he didn’t hesitate to give her the shirt off his back.

Eisen-Martin, a 23-year-old poet and first-year history teacher at Berkeley High School, said he left campus for a walk and some fresh air around 1:45 p.m. Monday and saw Lanitta Lewis of Oakland standing five steps down the stairwell to the BART station at Center Street and Shattuck Avenue, hunched over the banister, alone and bleeding.

“I asked if she was OK and she told me to get her some napkins,” he said. “I came down to give them to her and I see the head coming out.”

Eisen-Martin used his cell phone to call for an ambulance. Seconds later, with the baby almost completely out, he ripped off his shirt and handed it to Lewis, who wrapped the newborn in it.

“You’re my hero,” Lewis told Eisen-Martin when he visited her and her three newborn girls Wednesday at Alta Bates’ Newborn Intensive Care Center. “No one else took notice of me. I would have been all alone at BART with a baby in my hands.”

i am a movie star

i am in this movie.

that's right. i just got confirmation that my interview with lucero made the final cut.

i am such a big-shot.

global hegemony is, at best, problematic.

complications abound of late.
mostly having nothing to do with global power struggles.

Well, this looks like a bit of coincidence, as I can imagine what Adam's post will be about. But I wanted to revert to the basest of blog-habits and link to a London Review of Books article, written by the Scottish novelist Andrew O'Hagan, on the subject of his journey to New Orleans and Mississippi with a couple of guys from North Carolina who decided to drive down and volunteer. I found it worth reading not just because its tone and approach are so different from everything else I've read in the media over the past month or so (such a lengthy, narrative approach to the hurricane's wake--and one which declines to focus on a 'message' or scapegoat, or even much on the victims themselves--would be unthinkable in other publications), but because O'Hagan reminds me of Adam. I went into the LRB archive to find some of his previous articles and, funnily enough, one of his most recent reviews was of Saint Morrissey and The Smiths: Songs That Changed Your Life.

Edit:
Before I forget, here are a couple articles from the new and exciting Brown Review:
- Adam on Pynchon
- Myself on Hemingway

And to settle the raging controversy: When I can't think of a title, as often happens, I just don't type one in.

huh

i was going to complain about 16-hour days, lurking piles of work, disheartening baseball news and a pesky sneeze, but when i signed in to blogger i saw adam is working on a post. i took a look at it.
brought me into a bit of perspective.
i imagine he'll be posting it next chance he gets.

Dis-curse-ive

A week ago I posted on a blog I found at deporttraitors.blogspot.com. This post had caught my attention:

The (A) Anti- (C) Christ (L) Loves (U) Us -NOT

A US federal court in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, opened Monday to hear whether the so-called "intelligent design" doctrine should be taught in basic schools to challenge Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

The Prince of Darkness ally, the ACLU, is leading the fight against "intelligent design" in this case.

Kenneth Miller, a Brown University professor. If nearly all original species are extinct, then the "intelligent design" creator was not very intelligent.

Kenneth Miller, repent or die in your sins for calling God The Almighty "not very intelligent".

I happen to disagree. I felt that I should voice my differences of opinion with this blogger on his comments page and wrote the following:

He Hate Me said...

I am a Clevelander and a Brown student and a liberal so you probably are not a big fan of mine. However, I must take exception to your post "The (A) Anti- (C) Christ (L) Loves (U) Us -NOT."

First, I don't think that the ACLU is an ally of the prince of darkness. I think they are well-meaning citizens who have dedicated themselves to preserving the ideals of American democracy. It is completely understandable to disagree with their beliefs or judgment but I feel that it is unneccessarily harsh to relate them with the prince of darkness.

Secondly, I don't believe that Professor Miller was saying that the Almighty was "not very intelligent." In fact, the point he is making is the very opposite. He is saying that a belief in intelligent design could be seen as blasphemous becuase it would mean that the Almighty created creatures that were not capable of sustainability or survival.

This, of course, is beside the point. The reason that the ACLU and its allies wish to teach Darwinistic evolution theory and leave out intelligent design (a codeword for creationism) is because they believe that science should be taught in schools and religion should be taught in church. Evolution is a theory backed by facts. It may, in fact, be incorrect but given the test of the scientific method, it stands up to scrutiny. Creative design, on the other hand, is based in faith rather than science. The ACLU and its allies are not against faith or religion. They simply believe that it should be taught in church rather than the publicly-funded schools.

Thank you for your attention.

Today, I checked back on the site and the following response was posted by the author of the site:

America Is Great! said...

You are right when you said "I don't think"

3:47 PM

Wow.

In classic passive-agressive Hu style, I wrote the following response to the response:

He Hate Me said...

Dear Sir,

Frankly, I am hurt and disappointed by your refusal to take my comment seriously and engage in an intellectual debate of ideas. I was hoping to have an informed, lively debate with a fellow Clevelander on the very serious moral and political dilemmas of our times. Instead, I feel like your response was dismissive and purposely offensive. It is my belief that America works best when everyone can bring their ideas to the public square in a climate of civility to discuss the topics of the day. I do not think that name-calling and put-downs are constructive in the building of consensus or community. Honestly, I feel unwanted and unwelcomed at your blog and feel that I should find an online community more conducive to my ideals of democracy rooted in mutual respect.

Thank you for your attention.

5:28 PM

Lest you think maybe I just caught this guy on a bad day, here's some excerpts from his posts:

Powerless Liberals Toasting Mr. Delay Short Lived

"...Eggs on their faces again for liberals. Justice again will slip away. Why? I believe it boils down to a lesser of two evils. Democrats are not the lesser evil. Their tactics are well known. The majority of liberals are godless creatures that think they are better than others. The liberal ego is soo big, truth is whatever you decide is in your best interest.

The facts are very vague and Delay is very cunning. Delay knows the law and whether he hugs that line is not in question here. The question is did he cross that line."

I like the slavery reference in this post:

Republicans Need Another African American Supreme Court Justice

"The democrats will continue to look more and more like bigots for not supporting an African American justice. They whipped Clarence Thomas at his hearings, could they do it again and get away with it? Nope.

Making the democrats look bad is just icing on the cake. Having a republican controlled Supreme Court is the whole cake. We can have our cake with icing and eat it too! Nominate an African American to be our next Supreme Court Justice."

And in this post, he just tells us the bottom line...

Before You Side With Democrats Consider This

Al Gore attended a money funneling event/fundraiser for the DNC at a buddhist temple then claimed he never knew about it being a fundraiser. Buddhist monks were used in a money funneling scam to the DNC...

So while they bask in the "We're soo much better than Republicans" think again. They are definetely worse, worse at politics, worse at corruption, worse at trampling the laws of this great land. Beware of the smoke and mirrors, the Democrats are the craftiest liars known to America.They have single handedly criminalized politics for their own interests. If you can't beat them at the polls, give them a lawsuit instead. Shame on Democrats, never again should they be allowed to gain power. Consider this, Democrats take malicious pleasure at the misfortune of others, thats just pure evil. Do to other what you want done to yourselves. He without sin cast the first stone. Democrats are evil creatures. (emphasis mine)

Comments are welcome.