I Once Had Parted Hair

Moe: It’s po-mo.

(blank stare)

Moe: Post-modern.

(blank stare)

Moe: Weird for the sake of being weird.

All: Ohhhhhhhh.

In keeping with the rest of my personality I find post-modernism annoying and unnecessary. When describing the post-modern approach to archeology my adorable nerdy witty hot professor struggled to sustain a diplomatic tone toward something he clearly despises. (It was so cute.) Then the Rubbery Neapolitan predictably butted in to say, “But post-modernism has offered the chance for traditionally under-represented groups like women and other minorities to get in on the action and the research. So post-modernism is a good thing!” I certainly approve of clearing some space for traditionally under-represented groups to get in on it all, but not why enable them to worm their way into the existing traditional school of thought rather than creating an entirely new, laughable school? I don’t get the point of it.

A lot of big socio-political ideas have been blossoming inside my head recently and I’m reeling under the weight of all their . . . foliage. I like to revel in the immensity of my own intellect. And yet I’m afraid of baristas. And I’m struggling to be a college student. And I suck at using scissors. I want something new, a new balance. Like my shoes.

1. He wears a tie every day
2. He is irrepressibly happy all the time
3. He approaches his job at the Krusty Krab with a strong work ethic
4. He sucks at driving but he never gives up on trying to pass the boating exam
5. He owns his own home

"Imagination!"

because our adorable nerdy witty professor was out of town. These are some things she said:

• “I’m going to be shoving a lot of details into your little brains.”
• “You guys can watch it at your leisure.” [Pronounced 'leisure' as if it rhymed with 'pleasure.']
• “One of my pet peeves is when people mix up monkeys and apes. Apes do not have tails. The next time you’re at the zoo looking at the chimps and a little boy says to his father, ‘Daddy, why don’t those chimps have tails?’ and his dad says, “Because they’re monkeys,’ you can inform him that, ‘Actually, monkeys have tails and apes do not. Chimpanzees are apes.’” [Yeah okay, I'll keep that in mind next time I go to the zoo with the explicit intention of terrorizing strangers with cunty correctives.]

She also quoted Hamlet when describing a photo of an archeologist holding the skull of H. floresiensis and she felt the need to quote Romeo and Juliet when hypothesizing about the language abilities of early H. sapiens.

And, okay, this part is a little snotty of me but . . . She also mispronounced these Chinese names:

• Zhoukoudian [Pronounced it 'Chu ko jin,' wtf? It's more like 'Joh ko dee-en.']
• Hexian [Pronounced it 'Hecks Ian,' wtf? It's more like "Huh sshee-ehn.']
• Nihewan [Pronounced it 'Nee Hee Wan,' which is not bad, actually, but not good.]

And, most egregiously, she mispronounced the Indonesian name ‘Ngandong,’ calling it ‘Nuh ganne dong.’ This is unacceptable because she claims to be taking third-year Indonesian. (I’m in second-year.)

One time my dad told me that’s it really obvious when I hate someone who is standing near me. I just seem to . . . radiate hatred. With that in mind I made an effort during the class yesterday to interrupt the radiation of my hate by forcing out some laughs when she made little jokes, by asking follow-up questions, and by paying attention and appearing interested. But she kept saying ”Chu ko jin,” reader, over and over, “Chu ko jin,” “Chu ko jin,” “Chu ko jin this,” “Cho ku jin that,” and it took everything I had to restrain myself from blurting out, “I have BEEN to Zhoukoudian in China. YOU ARE SAYING IT WRONGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGihateyourhair!”

And that ankh tattoo. Give me a break. One day I’ll meet someone who will have enough smartz to call me out. That will not be a good day.

1. Fascist Anti-Defamation League
2. Society for Those Whose Arrogance Is Justified
3. Nixonites
4. Association for the Reactionary Advancement of Ante-Post-Modernism
5. fuckbook.com
6. facefuck.com
7. U.S. Into Everywhere!
8. P.E.T.A.
9. Roving Vigilante Adventure Squad of Greater King County
10. White Inferioritists

It’s my fault (see #5) that  everyone in Indonesian class had to write 20 sentences about Facebook as  our homework for the weekend.

The rubbery teaching assistant with Neapolitan hair assigned us a group project and explained it by saying, “We thought it would be fun for you take control of your own learning.” It shocked me to realize that she thinks this because it’s completely wrong. Group projects are torturous, not fun. They remind me of grade school when we were forever being asked to make POSTERS of everything. Posters were less time-consuming for teachers to grade and ostensibly they were funner for students than writing essays or whatever. Every project had to be a POSTER. Always a POSTER. The only way we could demonstrate that we had learned anything in school was by producing a POSTER about it. And then we had to go to the front of the class and explain our poster and point to the boxes of text and the pixellated photos we had printed on our crude 1990s printers. And then the posters sat in the classroom in a pile or even worse the teacher put them on the walls and we had to look at them every day for the rest of the year: garish, sloppy, peeling posters. UGH.

One guy keeps sending me e-mails about this group project in which he refers to the “ruff draft.” He always writes “ruff” and it’s pissing me off.

1. chess
2. telling stories out loud
3. cooking
4. using scissors
5. college

I observed three fobbie girls this morning giggling tritely at a bus stop. One of them tried to walk but she was wobbly because of her impractical trendy boots. So much disgust oozed from me as I watched them that some flowers near my feet wilted. Later I was in a coffee shop and a fakeblond girl with orange skin walked in and just sort of stood there, blinking. Her greasy makeup gleamed in the lamplight. What a useless person, I thought. Then I saw three identical jock boys in identical baseball hats and identical billowy basketball shorts swaggering in unison down the Ave discussing something poon-related, probably, and I thought, Why do they live? One of the things I really want is to prove to someone that they don’t deserve to exist. I want them to agree. I want to hear them say, “You’re right. I’m an automaton.” And then they fall over dead.

But I guess I don’t really want to cause people to die because then their families would be sad and stuff. And I suspect that automatonry is in most cases not a conscious choice. Does a person really decide “I want to be like everyone else; I want to buy Crocs because other people wear Crocs; being like everyone else is a good goal and needs no further examining”? Can you blame the poor zombie for having been bitten? Far better, I think, to discover the roots of automatonry and eliminate them. But not in a . . . oh, sigh, reader, not in a We’ll-change-the-world-one-person-at-a-time kind of way. Not in a little-acts-of-quirkiness-will-show-the-masses-there-is-a-different-way-to-live kind of way. I deplore people power.

I’m looking for a top-down solution. A top-down solution with me at the top. Obviously.

The teaching assistant for my new class on archeological problems in Southeast Asia is total trash. She reminds me of a rubbery piece of jerky. She’s too tan and has a gaudy ankh tattoo on her arm, and the front third (THE FRONT THIRD) of her hair is fake blond while the other two thirds are brown.  On the first day of the class for no reason in particular she announced, “I’m a fourth-year PhD student. This is my twelfth year of higher education. Ha-ha!” Ha, ha. I guess education does not necessarily increase one’s class. She likes to answer our questions by demonstrating the vastness of her well of knowledge of archeology. She even tells us how to ask questions. “If you’re going to ask a question, it’s better if it’s not too vague. Instead of saying, for example, ‘I don’t understand this article,’ you could say, ‘This article argues that Homo erectus must have made use of boats because there are rocks on these islands which could only have been brought there by boat. I don’t see why that necessarily means that Homo erectus made use of boats. Could you explain?’ Yeah, so ask a question like that.” That was her making up a hypothetical question from a student. No one is going to ask that question. It has nothing to do with this class. But notice how nicely that question would set her up to loosen the valve and blow some hot air for twelve minutes. So much knowledge! So much knowledge. All this insecurity and pedantry is difficult to endure when it’s coming from such a piece of trash. She also does this thing where her lips kind of flatten out and she wiggles her head just like a piece of jerky would do if it had lips and a head.

You might recall the middle-aged lesbian I described in my other class. This week she spoke at length and it was just as bad as the first week. I could feel myself dying while she talked. Do you know what that’s like? To feel yourself dying? I could feel myself dying. I can’t believe I’m paying tuition to listen to other students give their worthless opinions. What made it even worse was that for a moment the light shifted or something and I noticed how frail and human this creature was and suddenly it was hard to hate her. I hate THAT. I hate how I hate to hate frail things. If she were one of those non-sentient tank lesbians, the kind who rumble through life with bristling lopsided hair and no apologies, she would be easier to hate. I felt the same ambivalence toward the Improbable Old Man last year. He was so frail! And yet I was paying tuition to listen to him say things that made no sense! For hours!

I knew I would despise this woman, this frail lesbian, from the first moments of the first day of the class. The professor asked us each to introduce ourselves by telling the class about the last book we read for pleasure. When her turn came, the frail lesbian said the last book she read was something called A World Without Men. Great. As a man I feel vaguely threatened by that title.