Resolved: 20x10 New Year's resolution update

Here are the resolutions I made last year, and an update on how I did.

1. I will drink more chocolate Vitasoy this year than I did last year by remembering how awesome it is whenever I go to the Asian market.

Alas, I remembered how awesome chocolate Vitasoy is this year, but I'd have to drink about two gallons of it in the next twelve hours to keep this resolution.

2. I will take at least three "significant" trips.

Let's see: I went to Tennessee for friend Becca's wedding to friend Brad; went to RR'10 at friend Sharon's in Virginia; and visited friend Carl in NYC a few times. I also went with P.C. to a Matt & Kim concert in Rhode Island, my first time getting out of the car in that state. Perhaps that counts as three.

3. I will cultivate my prejudice against people who drive mini-vans through rehearsal and witty, biting commentary.

This was clearly the most successful of my resolutions, though my witty, biting commentary often devolved into simple mockery after awhile. Still, I uttered the words "stupid mini vans" more this year than any previous year in memory.

4. I will watch at least one episode of American Idol, since Ellen is on it as a judge this year.

I did not watch an entire episode of American Idol, though I did catch a few minutes of Ellen judging, and while waiting for a doctor's appointment in August I watched most of an episode of the Ellen Show. Mixed success, I'd say, in following the resolution -- though any year I fail to watch even one episode of American Idol seems like a win overall.

5. I will complete my M.A. in Cultural Production (December 2010).

Done. I need to make a few minor, sentence-level changes in my capstone paper and mail two paper copies to the CP office, but the paperwork is in, and my paper has been accepted toward the degree -- so basically done.

6. I will visit at least one museum.

A few weeks ago I took my girl to the Wilton Historical Society's "Great Trains" exhibit, which was of seven model trains in various gauges. I also visited the Tobacco Museum at Northwest Park in Windsor on a letterboxing expedition. Friend Carl took us to a museum at Yale, and P.C. and I wandered around a British museum down there. And since I took that museum education class, I also ended up at the Peabody-Essex and the DeCordova Sculpture Garden and Museum in MA, the Barker Character, Cartoon and Comic Museum, and probably a few others.

Still, despite the overwhelming success of following this resolution, since museums are less fun than disparaging mini-vans, I consider resolution 3 my best success.

7. I will make at least one new friend.

Done, and done -- though since I'm no longer living near said new friends in MA, I have to settle for Facebook-friending them.

8. I will invent at least two new kinds of purses.

Technically, I only invented one new kind of purse this year -- the book purse -- though because of the different binding methods, I've had to invent two different ways of rolling the paper to create the same effect. I also improved the look and stability of the final product by switching up the way the butcher's cotton twine was attached to the book cover, though this still may need some work to properly balance the purse.

You can decide whether this counts as one or two kinds of purse, though I'm inclined to count it as just one.

9. I will work the following quotes into conversation as often as possible: "Godzilla doesn't care what humans do"; "you can't just go around..."; "I'm not a real doctor but I am a real worm."

I forgot about this resolution, and so did not work these phrases into conversation as much as I now wish I had.

Perhaps I shot myself in the foot on this one by making two of the quotes related to weird animals (a giant lizard and a worm).

10. I will save the request for P.C. to do "the dog from New Jersey voice" for real emergencies.

P.C. was able to help me keep this resolution by refusing to do the "dog from New Jersey voice" on request.

Perhaps my next year's resolution will be to request the "dog from New Jersey" voice with profligate abandon, hoping to hear it as often as possible...

P.S. on "We're Democrats"

Quote from saveprospect.com: "It's about a right to property ownership without conditions and impositions."

Personally, I'm perfectly willing to allow people to own property "without conditions and impositions" if they're willing to haul their own water for sewage and other use, create electricity on their land, refrain from using public land, and agree to inflict no "conditions and impositions" on anyone else.

Otherwise, I'm afraid they're stuck living in a community instead of the nonexistent old West of John Wayne movies.

Local Trivia: We're Democrats first, then environmentalists. But mostly we just want the status quo to stay the same.

Driving through town last week, probably on the Big Lots shopping expedition that had me combing the state for additional seasons of Star Trek Voyager for $10 (they had season 3 at one Big Lots, making me hopeful for more -- alas, as in the series' episodes, my journey brought me to many other items along the way but did not achieve my original goal), I saw a sign that said, simply, "saveprospect.com."

Naturally, since it was past campaign season, I jotted down the web address to look up later. Such simple signs raise my curiosity and make me hope for a crackpot angelfire home page that would have been otherwise unGoogleable.

I didn't find a crackpot angelfire home page -- I'm pretty sure those have all been imploded anyway -- but I was surprised by the site I found. That is, I was surprised by the news that Prospect, CT is considering installing wind turbines (or a wind turbine). I was much, much less surprised that Connecticut residents had formed a committee to stop the turbines from being installed.

Read it for yourself, but the controversy is over the annoying sounds the turbines might make, the fall in property values, and -- most interestingly, I thought -- the wildlife and regulatory issues at stake in putting up a wind turbine in a state that so far has (they seem to claim, though I have no knowledge of this) insufficient regulation re: wind turbines.

Interesting argument on the regional level here, over an issue I thought was restricted to "Cape Wind" controversy (offshore "wind farms), and one that I think perfectly epitomizes how Connecticut and southern New England in general tends to look at things: it appeals at once to the property owner, the environmentalist, and the regulation-happy Democrat. That is a tough tightrope to walk...but it's the Connecticut way. (Note also that ultimately the hoped-for outcome is a conservative one, since it would leave things, at least in Prospect, pretty much the same.)

Unfortunately for all of us, Prospect is on a bunch of high hills and so gets a lot of wind, while Bridgeport, New Britain and Hartford, etc. are pretty much flat -- meaning we can't just move the annoying turbines to lower-class neighborhoods like we might do with other unsightly energy-producing machines or, on occasion, toxic waste.

Which means that probably, instead of wind turbines being installed, we'll end up doing what we tend to do -- being New Englanders -- and change nothing.

That's the true advantage of appealing to the disparate masses: everyone agrees with you, and nothing gets done.

PSA: HD-DVD is the new 8-Track.

I'm sure HD-DVD owners already know this, but I think it's funny to compare things to 8-tracks, especially when they're in the same hilarious situation.

Silly HD.

PSA: Mehhhhhhhhhhhrry Christmas!

That is all.

If as your Christmas gift you would like me to answer some particular superlative category for my New Year's prep post, please suggest such categories in the comments here, or via email. Examples include "your most frustrating class in the M.A. program" or "number of days you believe so-and-so would survive in a zombie apocalypse." You know, that kind of thing.

Hope your day is merry and bright.

PSA: Random books available to all readers

In deference to my recent desire to have a bedroom, rather than the library-where-I-sleep that I've had since I moved back to Local Town, CT, I've been culling the giant herd of books I'd accumulated for communal use.

If any of you would like a carefully selected, but still semi-random packet of books for Christmas, or for any other purpose, email me your address and I will send you three, or fewer, or more if you request it.

I always loved walking into the D.C. public library, whose shelving systems I could never understand, and pulling a few random books off the shelf, checking them out and then seeing what I had. This would be that, for you, but with the bonus of also getting a package in the mail around the holidays.

Let me know if there are any themes you would like your random selection of books to explore, or if you'd like them to be utterly randomized, or chosen for some other feature, such as how impressive they will look on your shelf.

Local Trivia: First I quit my job...

Hey, all.

You may have noticed over the last year or so of your religious reading of this blog (har har) that my posts on "my girl" quotes have been missing. This is mainly because I've only been working with the girl at the Pizza Hut, or had been until she was let go by a new manager who cleaned shop and then was subsequently cleaned out of the shop himself.

And things aren't really funny at the Pizza Hut. In fact, things haven't been really funny anywhere with my girl for awhile.

So I've done what I had intended to do when I began my M.A. at Brandeis, which is to quit working with her. Or at least I've indicated that I will not be working with her starting in 2011.

This is exciting for me, as I've been ready to quit for awhile. I'll still be working at my other direct care job, and probably still working with the other girl I work with. But it will definitely be a relief to have a break.

Plus now I can spend all my time reading again, like I used to. Perhaps 2011 will show a revival of the "book a week" goal. Or maybe I'll watch all those TV show seasons I didn't get to while I was busy the last year and a half critiquing all the TV show seasons I've already seen.

Or perhaps I'll actually start writing stuff on my blog again.

PSA: TV reality check

Alright, New York Times article. I actually agree with your general premise that we should look very carefully at a merger between NBC and COMCAST, in terms of the monopoly it might create. But you're marshaling some silly points to your cause.

First, yes, if NBC and Comcast are allowed to merge, it will mean that one company will own both distribution and programming capabilities.

On the other hand, that's happened before, like when TV first started and RCA owned this little broadcasting company called (what was it again? Oh yeah--) NBC. In fact, RCA created NBC in order to sell more televisions. Now, given, the production of programming and the distribution network of, well, networks (local affiliate stations) weren't taking place in exactly the same company. But affiliate stations and the network had a give-and-take (mostly take-and-take on the network side) relationship that can't be easily distinguished from what NBC and Comcast propose.

Second, if you're looking back to the old halcyon days of when cable companies had nothing to do with television production, cable networks and distributors (though not Comcast) have also been able to produce and control programming for years.

Third, there's no such thing as "online TV." TV is on TV, and online is on computers. If you mean "television programming distributed via the internet," then that's still not "online TV."

A television set is an item, and it is not a computer.

It's possible that in the future we'll still refer to short, episodic, scripted or edited shows as "TV shows," even if they've been produced and distributed with no reference to the television sets that we use increasingly even now for viewing stuff from our computers, from "online," or from various digital media players (or VCRs, if we're the lucky owners of a copy of Isaac Asimov's Robots VCR Mystery Game). It's true that those lines are blurring. But "TV" right now still means those devices that receive a broadcast signal, and cable.

Fourth, cable companies have ALWAYS fooled with pricing to make money off of distribution. This is mainly because they are companies designed to make money off of distribution.

Cable companies stand in contrast to the public good of broadcast stations, which were allotted distribution networks in the form of bandwidth when TV "came online" (haha) in the 1950s. The federal government regulated that distribution of distribution because the airwaves were a public asset. Cable companies are private, and therefore have always been after profits rather than public good. They own the cables; they get to say what they're charging to use them.

It's too late after the fact to make a private enterprise into a government-regulated one. This is partly why I was against the switch to whatever this digital system of distribution is. (That, and the fact that I can't get a freaking signal anymore. And also that poor people got screwed with those converter-box dealies.)

Those cats are out of the bag, and it's unhelpful to stand around wringing your hands and worrying about them as they run around peeing on things.

If "online TV," should it ever exist, actually wants to do anything, it's going to have to do what TV did originally, and innovate. There's no reason that new forms of distribution -- internet-based ones -- can't get as much traffic as TV has had, eventually. We're in the middle of transition, here, from a TV-based distribution model (in which actual TV shows are simply made available also online), to a web-based model.

It makes sense to me, given this transition, that behemoths of the old age, like NBC and Comcast, would begin banding together to fight the coming tide. They won't win, ultimately. The reason they're all starting to look the same is that we've already left them behind us, and from a distance, everything starts to blur.

PSA: For those who are afraid of goats (you know who you are)

There is finally help for victims of petting-zoo-related trauma -- at least for the human victims.

I'm not sure what the goats can do about petting-zoo-related trauma. ("Okay, show us on the doll where he touched you, Billie...")

"We've been poisoned by these fairy tales"

Now that my capstone paper's "final" draft is turned in, I have a little room to breathe -- or, no, wait. I still have 45 hours of internship work to do by Monday.

Okay, but I'm taking some breathing room anyway simply to register my intense irritation -- an irritation that's been building over the process of writing my paper on Criminal Minds, a paper that interrogates the fictions of the heteronormative patriarchal protector and how those are predicated on black-and-white categorizations of people who are actually, essentially, uncategorizable -- with the idea of the (pure, facist) war hero.

My objections have been stated better than I'm stating them here in Chris Hedges War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (2002), and in The Hurt Locker, a movie that I thought successfully portrayed the ambivalence of war in our post-9/11 world in a compelling personal narrative.

In the context of my hating the Grand Narrative of the war hero (which doesn't mean hating soldiers, so don't send me any comments saying "WHY DO YOU HATE THE TROOPS??" [Actually, that would be pretty funny. Go ahead and send 'em.]), I've had a renewed interest in Don Henley's "End of the Innocence" of late. In my evangelical fervor to attain a holiness that amounted to 100% purity, I probably would have found this song scandalous as a kid and teenager. In my loosening, "maybe I'm not the boss of everyone," post-college liberalism, I probably didn't think much about it at all.

In my current state of mind, after so many months of reading about detective narratives and watching detective television shows, and seeing the connections between these (interpretive) narratives and the (heroic) war narratives we've heard -- in both their "conquering hero" and "ambivalent adrenaline-addict" iterations -- I've gone back to believing in its scandal.

In my reading of "End of the Innocence," Don Henley is proposing a personal stand against the narrative of purity that activates the "war myth" Chris Hedges refers to...in the form of loss of virginity.

Well, Don. Hold on there, buddy. I mean, how do we (women) know you don't just want to "do it," and that you're making up these political excuses for a base drive?

Except that I think women (or this one woman -- OR MAYBE IT'S NOT A WOMAN AT ALL -- who's in the song) have agency in this song. And I think that partly because the lyrics I'm focused on are contradictory, in a way that fails to fit the narrative of the virgin/whore. Henley says "let your hair fall all around me.../Offer up your best defense/But this is the end/The end of the innocence." It sounds like he might be giving an order. But it mostly sounds like he might be proposing a response to things that have already occurred, an acknowledgment that "the innocence" has already been taken. His proposed response is a political act, and one that really only women can make.

(Why can only women make this response? Basically, because theirs is the only virginity anyone cares about.)

To me, the message of this song as a whole is that there are ways to creatively and productively "opt out" of the Grand Narratives we're given, and that option necessarily involves both taking action and the renegotiation of identity in terms other than pure/impure.

In the first chorus, he's saying this in response, apparently, to a divorce. Heteronormative formations of family have failed, and his response is to propose that they (he and the person he's singing to) go back to a more natural setting (where "we'll sit and watch the clouds go by / and the tall grass wave in the wind"), a place removed from the constructs of the "normal family." The "naturalness" of this pastoral imagery is also suspect (again, is Don just trying to "get some" by going all Romantic on us?), but in combination with his statement that "we've been poisoned by these fairy tales," the relatively unscripted space of the "natural" setting allows for an alternative to the (fairy tale) heteronormative ideal.

In the second chorus (the one that makes me connect this directly to the war hero myth), he's responding to America "beating plowshares into swords" -- dystopic as that is -- and ends with "when daddy had to lie," which I think relates directly to the lie of "happily ever after" and the lie of the war myth.

[And then I took a break for several hours and when I came back I was no longer in what is obviously paper-writing mode.]

Anyway, I like that song. And you should probably like it, too.