The Film Noir Experience

My iPod and my new laptop don’t seem to want to play nice with each other. You really have to work to make them work together. I’ve needed, for a long time, to remove some digital junk from my life (much of which has, in one for or another, found its way onto my iPod) and I’ve taken this opportunity to go through some of this stuff and cull it from my iPod and my life.

Even if I still end up with the same metaphorical amount of baggage, in the end I will be short some of my literal baggage. As it turns out, I am in possession of a number of backup copies of stuff from my latest ex. (”Latest” is perhaps the wrong word to use here, since we and I have not been together now for almost two years.) As it turns out, if you just keep adding things to your disc-space enabled iPod without actually checking to see what is there, this sort of thing happens.

Anyway, I loaded a bunch of my music from my iPod to my computer and then told iTunes genius to make me a playlist based on ‘Joga’ from one of my favorite Björk albums Homogenic. So, it played ‘Joga’ for me. All of Homogenic is complex with techno beats and strings and eerie and excellent Brörk vocals and lyrics that resonated with me when it came out in 1997 and that recently have come to resonate with me again. For example, I’m going hunting/I’m the hunter/I’ll bring back the goods/but I don’t know when from ‘Hunter’ (which it played later down in the list). I’ve been working on my qualifying project (so that I can eventually progress to the dissertating stage of the PhD) these lyrics just seem to fit. I have this idea, this hypothesis. And, from here I have to go hunting. I have to figure out if anyone else has blazed this trail I’d like to be on. I have to collect data and see if it supports my hypothesis. I’m going hunting. I’m the hunter. I will get the goods. But, I don’t really know when.

So, iTunes plays me this song and it follows it immediately with Bill Frissell’s “I am not a farmer” from his album Disfarmer. With no techno beat. With no vocals. Just guitars and some eerie strings at the end. This combination made me smile. I would never have thought to put these two things together. Yet, here they are. Different, yet alike. But, while I would say “I’m a Hunter” of myself, I don’t think I’d ever say, “I’m not a farmer”. In a literal sense, I do grow herbs and orchids in my apartment. And, I’m considering (have been for awhile now) expanding my little venture to include window boxes. (I think I might get enough sun to grow swiss chard, which would be lovely.) It seemed to me, when I first saw this that two things, namely hunters and farmers, were different. But, perhaps not. Perhaps, you would have to specify that you are the kind of hunter that gathers all of the necessities via hunting. I am a hunter and I am not a farmer. The alternative would be to say that I am a hunter and also a farmer, so someone who does a little cultivating and a little hunting. I am now intrigued by this.

Album: Homogenic
Artist: Björk
Song: Hunter

Album: Disfarmer
Artist: Bill Frissell
Song: I Am Not a Farmer

Right. So, I’m the president of my department’s graduate student association. I have various duties in regards to this post, but the biggest of my duties is likely the organizing of the student run activities that go on in association with the Open House for Prospective Graduate Students. I’ve organized places for people to stay. I’ve planned fun “get to know Buffalo (and the other graduate students in the department)” activities. The weekend, I think, has gone pretty well. There have been seven extra people around checking things out (by things I mean the graduate program to which I currently belong) and keeping track of where these seven people are and how they’re getting where they need to go (in case their hosts don’t have cars or have some other time commitment) is tiring. Oh so very tiring.

But, the fun didn’t stop there. There are old and sketchy windows in my bedroom that are due to be replaced. And, my landlord informed me on Wednesday that they were on the schedule to be replaced. On Friday. Seriously. So, I figure, that’s okay. I won’t be home to let them in, but I can let them know they’ll have to let themselves in. I would lock my cats in the bathroom, which is sort of a big deal but it would need to be done.

The prospective students started arriving around 3 o’clock on Thursday afternoon. This was a good 3 hours earlier than I expected and threw a bit of a wrench into the works. Of course, no one would be home then to actually take care of letting the student in and what not. Now, I could have sent the kid to campus, that was an option, but that brought up further complications because people would be in class and someone would still have to be around to meet them (because I wasn’t going to make the department secretaries entertain him. I need them to continue liking me.) So, he came and sat on my couch and watched Harry Potter while I finished up some laundry.

A few hours later his hosts picked him up and I had a few hours of quiet before I had to go collect my own prospective student, a young man from Tennessee who was an excellent house guest.

The weekend went, more or less, without a hitch. On Friday we had a brief misunderstanding about how one of the prospective students was going to get to campus and the art museum/bar evening event we had scheduled and there was an incident involving slippage and the ice that caused us to end an afternoon of winter games early in favor of Buffalo wings and being indoors. The weekend was just looong… and, I’m still playing catch up. (Case in point…I started this post on Sunday and I’m just finishing it now.)

So, I feel like I had a little victory yesterday. I was walking from one part of campus to another with new of the students in the class I’m teaching on the history of English and we were chatting. In the first class we talked bout the history of three different words in English that are synonymous (or at least partially so): ersatz, faux and fake. We looked at the earliest cited usage and some collocates and their roots. They both said that they had never seen ersatz before I wrote it up on the board in class.

And, then one of them said that she was reading a book for fun and came across it. She was pleased that she knew what it meant. And, I am pleased that I’m a nerd who likes words and that I was able to share it with her. It is a little thing, I know, but sometimes little things make you smile.

When you first learn something, it is very exciting and even though you make a mistake you really don’t mind it because you are still learning.

Sadly, there reaches the point where you are still new to something but you’ve made so many mistakes that you feel like you should be beyond that by now. You aren’t. And, you end up doing the same silly things over and over again until you ask someone and they tell you, “Oh, its because it works this way.” You come to realize that your conceptualization of something is completely different from how the thing actually is (or works). You reframe your thinking and you set out to do things right.

But, you still make mistakes. And, its still so very frustrating.

The end is sight and that is super exciting for me. I am very much looking forward to spending some time picking my own readings. I can not believe how busy I have kept myself this semester. Seriously. I don’t want to say that I’ve bitten off more than I can chew because this is the end and I’m still alive and I haven’t punched anyone in the face (although, its certainly been discussed endlessly. We were, of course, talking about the argument structure of that VP. Of course.) And, (I think) I’ve done well in my classes.

I messed up this year, though, in my planning for the end this year. Usually, I have a house all set with stuff from netflix and a good mix of veg and junk food. I don’t know what happened this year, but I have popcorn and coffee and a workout dvd from netflix. I keep thinking I should run to the grocery store but it has not happened. I have gotten some stuff done. But, I’m not quite there yet on anything. Getting there, though. Getting there.