my introduction

Honestly, not only would I never have started this (non)book if my grade hadn't required it, but I probably wouldn't have kept writing in (on?) it, either (though I will admit that the jury's still out on whether or not I'll keep updating from now on). But having put in the effort already, it's maybe more than a little cool to be able to go back and see some of the things I've been thinking over the past several (very long, very arduous, very frustrating) weeks. When I go back and look at my entries from the beginning, it's kind of fun to re-discover some of the ones I'd forgotten about--especially the instances where I linked to articles or videos or other outside sources so that I can see my entries both as out-of-context aphorisms and within their original setting. The best part of having put together this (non)book (or should I say, actually putting it together throughout the semester instead of as a rush job the week before it was due...that's a bit unusual for me), however, is that I can see the defining themes of my senior fall. Critical theory is viewing culture as literature, right? And here I am, able to see the past three months of my life as though it were literature, too.

As best I can tell with my highly-tuned analyzing-themes-in-literature English major spidey senses, there seem to have been three main motifs running through my life this semester. The first of these--and probably the one that stands out the most, thanks to the massive amount of bubbling, suppressed anger associated with it--is my ever-growing frustration with sexism. I grew up with a professor of Women's Studies and Gender Inequality in the Workplace for a father, I took a class on gender oppression my freshman year, I experienced that oppression firsthand a year and a half ago when I was living in Morocco (and, using the most liberal definition of the term, was technically sexually assaulted on no less than two separate occasions while doing so, which is a weird thought), but only now am I actually feeling the insurmountable challenges that stand in the way of a truly gender-equal society. I don't know if it's that I never cared before or just that I never bothered to pay attention, but now it feels like I wake up on a daily basis and want to scream with the frustration of knowing I'll only ever make $0.75 to ever dollar a man makes, of seeing my little sister define her entire sense of self-worth based on her relationship with her long-distance boyfriend, of watching episodes of TV shows and being unable to ignore the blatantly subliminal sexism (I swear that term makes sense to me) they tout but being unable to say anything without alienating myself from my less feminist-minded friends. If nothing else, I think my (non)book captures this frustration pretty perfectly.

The second theme--which, appropriately enough, runs through not just this semester, but most of my life, as well--is language. I've had language on my mind lately moreso than usual, what with my Watson proposal early in the semester and my now-fallen-to-the-wayside plans for linguistics grad school which followed (well, fallen to the wayside for now, not forever). Even if they may not always function well as aphorisms, it's hard for me to turn down just about anything related to language, so just about any fact I came across ended up here.

The third and final--and perhaps least significant--theme is that of humor. When I started this (non)book, I could hardly imagine what sort of quote might come under the heading of "significant" for me; the only types of quotes I've ever bothered to write down were funny things that people (usually professors) said. I've included a few of those, though considerably less than I would have expected (I suspect because the frustrations of this semester have made me rather blind to humor over the past few months). Even if they may not function well as aphorisms, I think they're important--perhaps precisely because of this semester's frustrations. If I'd just ranted for three months about the inequalities of gender and the plight of women, this would have been a pretty dismal blog (scratch that--(non)book) indeed. It's important to include the humorous quotes--it's important for me to notice the humorous quotes in my life--just to mitigate the effects of frustration.

And now, for a note on form: I'm not going to print this out. I know I was supposed to, but I'm not going to do it. Because unlike Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, my poor little commonplace (non)book could certainly not withstand a transposition to another form--and I would absolutely argue that digital and print are two very different forms. My (non)book would lose far too much if I were to print it out and put it in paper form. For one, it wouldn't be in color (no way am I springing to pay for color printing in Case), and I like the effect of my book background on my (non)book blog. Second, the entries that contain videos would, for the most part, no longer exist. Third, the links--which, as I discussed, enable my entries to be viewed in or out of context, essentially providing them with two different meanings--would no longer function, and, in fact, would not even be visible as links. Fourth, my commentary, which is placed as comments on the entries, would be awkwardly stapled to the page of the original entry instead of seamlessly incorporated into the structure of the blog. And fifth and finally, the feel of the (non)book itself would be irrevocably altered. In digital form, the (non)book is mine--only I can post to it, and I post whatever I want, whatever has meaning to me, just as anyone would in a paper commonplace book. But being as it is, out on the internet, my commonplace (non)book is commonplace in every sense of the word: it is common, just like any of the other millions of blogs in the world, but it is also commonplace in the sense of universal. The idea of a commonplace book is that whatever quotes that appeal to me could, and should, very well resonate with someone else, though potentially in a different way. In paper form, however, a commonplace book is the sole property of whoever keeps it; it seems unlikely that it would ever be shared. On the internet, however, my (non)book is universal to the extent that anyone--no, seriously, literally anyone in the whole world, barring whatever countries have decided to censor Blogspot--can read it (at least in theory; being that I've never publicized the address, it's far less likely in practice). I'm the only one who can post, but anyone with a Google account can comment. To print out the (non)book would be to cut it out from the web in which I deliberately initially placed and grew it. In some ways, removing it from the internet by turning it into a printed form would be almost the same as tearing a single page from someone else's commonplace book. Most of the entries would survive, yes; but they would be isolated and not at all in the context that I intended them (ie, to be viewed both in and out of context).

So I guess I'm done?

from someone's Facebook status

Wish that "burning the midnight oil" involved actual gasoline and a car, instead of spending the night in front of computer screens.

from Wikipedia

When asked by atheistic journalist Robert Sherman about the equal citizenship and patriotism of American atheists, Sherman reports that Bush answered, "No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."

from the (almost certainly underage) woman sitting next to me in class

I like the Palace because it's just like the Jug, but not crowded.

Sent from my iPhone

from YouTube

from Professor Davies

'Can you find the steeping stone cow?' Only if I'm stoned myself...

Sent from my iPhone

from Bien Laoshi

The Chinese enjoy passing diseases around.

Sent from my iPhone

from the article "How Palin Flunks Feminism" on The Daily Beast

In some ways, it’s a good thing that Sarah Palin calls herself a feminist. It means that, even among conservatives, women’s equality has become a normative position, the starting point for debate. It means that feminism has gone from something that the right wants to destroy to something it wants to appropriate. That’s progress, of a sort.

But reading Palin's new book, America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag, it’s clear that in order to claim feminism as her own, she’s had to radically distort its history. In a chapter on feminism that’s sure to be widely discussed, she mischaracterizes the views of nearly every historical feminist she mentions.

from a translation of "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"

Whether fate be foul or fair,
Why falter I or fear?
What should man do but dare?

from YouTube

from my dad and my little sister

Andrea: They're 60% off!
Dad: Sixty percent off what? You can still go broke saving money.

Sent from my iPhone

from MTV.com via TheFrisky.com

Movie Trailers - Movies Blog

from "Female Chauvinist Pigs" again

[Jimmy] Kimmel sucked an oyster out of its shell and then snickered.
"At TCA," the annual Television Critics Association conference in
Pasadena, "this woman asked, 'How does having a big-breasted woman in
the Juggy dance squad differ from having black women in the darkie
dance squad?' I said, 'First of all, that's the stupidest question
I've ever heard.'"

"Then Adam said, 'Let me put your mind at ease: If we ever decide to
put together a retarded dance squad, you'll be the first one in it,'"
said Kellison, and all three of them laughed.

Sent from my iPhone

from Ariel Levy's book "Female Chauvinist Pigs"

There's just one thing: Even if you are a woman who achieves the
ultimate and becomes "like a man," you will still always be like a
woman. And as long as womanhood is thought of as something to escape
from, something less than manhood, you will be thought less of, too.

Sent from my iPhone

from a conundrum in the Writing Center

Two stops later, a man got on, one of those guys who play(s) music for the passengers.

from my (apparently not very PC or grammatically correct) Chinese textbook

Lao Qian is a Chinese working in the same office as Xiao Xie, a local-
born Chinese married to a local.

Sent from my iPhone

from Robert Pinsky

I drowned in the fire of having you, I burned

In the river of not having you, we lived

Together for hours in a house of a thousand rooms

And we were parted for a thousand years.

Ten minutes ago we raised our children who cover

The earth and have forgotten that we existed.

It was not maya, it was not a ladder to perfection,

It was this cold sunlight falling on this warm earth.

When I turned you went to Hell. When your ship

Fled the battle I followed you and lost the world

Without regret but with stormy recriminations.

Someday far down the corridor of horror the future

Someone who buys this picture of you for the frame

At a stall in a dwindled city will study your face

And decide to harbor it for a little while longer

From the waters of anonymity, the acids of breath.

from Benjamin...seriously

The first tremors of awakening serve to deepen sleep.

Sent from my iPhone

from the title of a book I found in the PN section of Case 4th floor

Insults: A Practical Anthology of Scathing Remarks and Acid Portraits

Sent from my iPhone

from the Writing Center's "Book of Shame"

"BUT" is a coordinating conjunction--it joins 2 independent clauses and merely expresses the relationship (of contrast) between them
"HOWEVER" is a conjunctive adverb and "belongs" more to--or primarily modifies--the second independent clause.

The difference is so linguistically subtle, though, that it's easier to just memorize the rule that "however,"when used to join two independent clauses, needs to be preceded by a SEMICOLON and followed by a comma.

from the book "Scotland and Wales: Nations Again?"

In the past, one of the more famous insults to which the Welsh took offence was that contained in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, an entry which encapsulated all the patronising indifference shown by the Victorians towards the Welsh identity--"for Wales - see England."

from StumbleUpon

How to write a paper in college/university.

from my Cognitive Psychology textbook

The tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon is apparently universal. It is seen in speakers of many different languages. It is also seen in people with limited or no ability to read (Brennen, Vikan, & Dybdahl, 2007).

from John Donne

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
  And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
  "The breath goes now," and some say, "No,"

So let us melt, and make no noise,
  No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
'Twere profanation of our joys
  To tell the laity our love.

Moving of the earth brings harms and fears,
  Men reckon what it did and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
  Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
  (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
  Those things which elemented it.

But we, by a love so much refined
  That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
  Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
  Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion.
  Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
  As stiff twin compasses are two:
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
  To move, but doth, if the other do;

And though it in the center sit,
  Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
  And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
  Like the other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
  And makes me end where I begun.

from Alfred, Lord Tennyson

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

from F. Scott Fitzgerald

As once before, her eyes held his like hands.

from ILoveSleep.com

I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?

-Ernest Hemingway

from a list of amphibolies

Drunk gets nine months in violin case

Farmer bill dies in house

iraqi head seeks arms

prostitutes appeal to pope

British left waffles on falkland islands

Lung cancer in women mushrooms

Teacher strikes idle kids

Enraged cow injures farmer with axe

Miners refuse to work after death

Stolen painting found by tree

Two sisters reunited after 18 years in checkout counter

Never withhold herpes infection from loved one

Kids make nutritious snacks

Lansing residents can drop off trees

Local high school dropouts cut in half

Hospital sued by seven foot doctors

New vaccine may contain rabies

Include your children when baking cookies

from a drunken freshman

Have you seen my chapstick?

Sent from my iPhone

from the old Irish epic Táin Bó Cuailnge

If my husband was a timid man our union would be just as wrong because
I thrive, myself, on all kinds of trouble.

Sent from my iPhone

from the Huffington Post article 'Do Feminists Make for Better Girlfriends?'

You know what's a fun topic to bring up on a first date with a guy? Feminism. Once you get hard-lined religious and political beliefs out of the way (preferably first thing in the car, or during the appetizer if you must wait that long), toss out a couple of Betty Friedan or bell hooks quotes, and see if the gent picks up on it and responds with an appropriate Simone de Beauvoir reference. Or maybe just ask how much money he makes as a good segue into discourse on the gender pay gap or a nuanced debate on whether the "glass ceiling" still exists for today's young women. Awkward silences -- not gonna happen, guaranteed.

from StumbleUpon

There are at least 250,000 words in the English language. However, to think that English – or any language – could hold enough expression to convey the entirety of the human experience is as arrogant of an assumption as it is naive.

from a palindrome

Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era?

from StumbleUpon

from TheFrisky.com

Despite seeing the horrors of the fast food industry in “Food Inc” and “Fast Food Nation,” we must admit that once in a very great while, we say “F**k it,” and stuff our face with a Big Mac while forcing ourselves to think of happy images of unicorns and dancing polar bears—anything but processed meat and slaughterhouses. But after learning about the following, we think even the annual Micky D’s trip will have to come to an end. The above picture is what your raw chicken nuggets look like. And as if it wasn’t gross enough that the goo looks like strawberry ice cream, we then learned this:

• The substance is called MSC, or mechanically separated chicken
• It’s a sickening puree of the ENTIRE chicken including bones, eyes, feet, everything
• It’s then treated with ammonia to destroy bacteria, and then because it tastes so bad, is mixed with artificial flavoring
• And then dyed pink

from Malory's "The Tale of King Arthur"

So with thys there come a knyght rydyng all armed on a grete horse, and toke the lady away with forse wyth hym, and ever she cryed and made grete dole. So whan she was gone the kynge was gladde, for she made such a noyse.

from Cyanide & Happiness

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

from photographer Stefano Unterthiner

from my little sister's Facebook

I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours.

-Stephen F. Roberts

from Dylan Thomas

Somebody's boring me. I think it's me.

from Tucker Max (no, seriously, I'm shocked too)

Ladies, let me give you some advice. You can throw all your stupid fucking chick-lit, self-help, why-doesn’t-he-love-me books out, because this is all you need to know: Men will treat you the way you let them. There is no such thing as “deserving” respect; you get what you demand from people. Let a guy fuck you in the ass, come on your back, drink all your beer and then leave, and he’ll do it. But if you demand respect, he will either respect you or he won’t associate with you. It really is that simple.

from the NYTimes.com

That led to their reworking of Mr. Dodson’s rant as “The Bed Intruder Song,” which has now been seen more than 10 million times on YouTube and reached No. 3 on the iTunes R&B chart.

from a fortune cookie fortune I found on the floor of Lawrence terrace level

Our first and last love is...self-love.

Sent from my iPhone

from my DDD sister Symone Jackson, concerning original sin

Yeah but I don't have it cause I was...what's it called, cesarean
section.

Sent from my iPhone

from Robert Heinlein

Progress isn't made by early risers. It's made by lazy men trying to find easier ways to do something.

Sent from my iPhone

from my DDD sister Symone Jackson, concerning people who need to hurry up

Unless you're in the bathroom. Don't push too hard!

Sent from my iPhone

from yet another hateful, intolerant commenter on CNN.com

That's a threat! That's a threat in the usual Muslim way. They have no decency! If they did, they would move the center to another part of town. But no, we are now being threatened!

from the comment I want to leave on my last entry concerning the OUP blog, which is too long to post as a comment

I'm angry about gender inequality.

Actually I'm angry about all inequality, and for some reason I picked tonight to feel this anger so acutely. It all started, more or less, when I read an article this afternoon posted on one of my favorite blogs, which mostly focuses on what I like to call "non-news": celebrity gossip, relationship advice, fashion articles, and periodic real news updates on "women's issues" around the world. The blog has a definitive left lean and tends to cater towards an educated audience of working women and college students, and usually their rants against paycheck inequality or pro-lifers or objectification of women in advertisement provide me with some nourishing food for thought. Today, however, they posted an article entitled "20 Things Men Don't Know About Women," or something along those lines. I'm fairly certain the article was meant to be taken lightheartedly, but I found it so offensive and it made me so angry that hours later, I still haven't recovered from seeing red.

My issue with the article--other than the fact that the author was making gross generalizations about women, and the vast majority of items on the list did not even remotely apply to me (the first was about how much women enjoy peeing outside and in the shower. Um. No. Pretty sure I haven't done that since I was potty trained)--was that about half the things on the list involved the objectification of women in one way or another. For example, the author claims that one thing men don't know about women is that we all enjoy catcalls from construction workers, as long as they aren't too lewd. Another claim was that all women secretly want their guy friends to lust after them, so we deliberately dress up so that they'll want to sleep with us even though we don't want to sleep with them. Yet another was that all women hate waxing body hair, really, really, utterly hate it, but do it anyway so that guys will go down on them. Her bottom line, perhaps without intending it to be, was that women actually like to be objectified.

Catcalls aren't innocent, even when they aren't lewd--they're disrespectful, and designed to remind a woman of "her place." They aren't compliments, even if taken out of context they might sound like they are. A construction worker--even a female construction worker--would never whistle or yell at a man in the same way he would a woman, and for that and that alone, it's not okay. I put up with more catcalls than I can even count when I was in Morocco, and let me tell you, they were not flattering, they were not intended to flatter me, and I did not enjoy them in the least. They made me feel intimidated and nervous when I walked by a group of men, and I spent so much time wishing I were invisible so that strange men would leave me allow that I finally called it quits and left the country three weeks early...which was likely exactly the thing they wanted me to do. A catcall is intended to relegate a woman to the same position in a man's mind as a mostly-naked pin-up girl in a motorcycle calendar: an object to be drooled over and fantasized about, not a human being who would, at least in my case, be much more likely to confront a catcaller and give him a piece of my mind than to sleep with him.

As for the notion that all women want our guy friends to want to sleep with us even when we don't want to sleep with them, well, there's a very thin line between that and the fundamentalist notion that all women are hedonists who exist solely to tempt men into sin with our sexuality. The author of this article was implying that, yes, women do have a secret agenda and are trying to lure men into lust, that we're incapable of conducting a platonic relationship with a man without ulterior motives. Personally, I want my friends--male or female--to treat me as a human being, not a sex object; how on earth is dressing myself up and trying to subliminally hint that they should sleep with me working toward accomplishing that goal in any way? Not to mention the fact that the author is betraying a very low sense of self-esteem and self-respect on her part, and then imparting that same lack of confidence onto all women: it's not enough for a man to like you as a friend and enjoy your company and conversation; he should want to sleep with you, too.

And finally, the issue of the waxing. Having grown up in the Midwest with a prohibitionist prude for a mother, I'm somewhat uncomfortable discussing the details of genital grooming, so I'll treat this one in more general terms. The decisions you make about your body--hairstyles, clothing, even what you put into it--you should make for yourself, not for your friends, or your boyfriend, and certainly not because you want sex. I would never dream of changing my appearance by, say, getting a different haircut, because some guy wanted me to. Ultimately, the only one who has to be happy with my appearance is me, so why would I--as the author of the article claims--be willing to do something I really, truly hate, for the sake of someone else? To bring it back to precise terms, if a woman really hates getting Brazilians, then she should damn well stop getting Brazilians and instead just find a sexual partner who doesn't mind a bit of hair. Why on earth would you cost yourself time, money, and pain for something you don't even want to do? Because you're a woman, that's why--according to this author, anyway.

You know what makes me the most angry, though? Even more than ignorant articles like this that are posing as humor, even more than the fact that people think it's okay to write degrading and objectifying things in the name of humor, it's the fact that if I were to point out to someone how unprogressive and anti-feminist this article is, they'd berate me for being too PC and taking a humorous article too seriously. I'm angry about gender inequality, and articles like this--just as much as people like Sharron Angle--are upholding that very inequality, whether they intend to or not. But by expressing my anger, I suddenly am labeled a radical. It's okay to want equality, but when I express anger at the continued marginalization, objectification, and lack of equality that so many people face, or when--heaven forbid--I try to speak out and stop those things, somehow that makes me irrational. So yeah, I'm angry about gender inequality, but I'm even more angry at being told I have no reason to be.

from "The Gender-Neutral Pronoun: 150 Years Later, Still an Epic Fail" on the Oxford University Press blog

And in 1897 a Charleston, South Carolina, newspaper reports on a Massachusetts law that forbids certain kinds of feathers to be worn in hats, a law presumably aimed at women but which employs a masculine pronoun. This presents a problem for the Boston police commissioner, who insists that the masculine pronoun does not include the feminine: “I don’t believe I could arrest a woman on that law,” he said. “The masculine pronoun does not specifically include the women. The law including both usually says ‘person’ or ‘persons,’ but this one simply says ‘his.’”

from The Destruction of Da Derga's Hostel

I will inquire of wise men that I myself may be wise.

Sent from my iPhone

from "Voglia di Dance All Night" by Eiffel 65

Last night a DJ saved my life.

Sent from my iPhone

from "All the Above" by Maino

The new Benz is all white, call it John McCain.

Sent from my iPhone

from a street sign

WRONG WAY

Sent from my iPhone

from John F Kennedy via Time magazine

...Not what kind of church I believe in, for that should be important
only to me--but what kind of America I believe in...While this year it
may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in
other years it has been--and may someday be again--a Jew or a Quaker
or a Unitarian or a Baptist...Today I may be the victim, but tomorrow
it may be you--until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is
ripped.

Sent from my iPhone

from Stanley Fish on the NYT Opinionator blog, via Time magazine

If the bad act is committed by a member of a group you wish to
demonize, attribute it to a community or a religion and not to the
individual. But if the bad act is committed by someone whose profile,
interests and agenda are uncomfortably close to your own, detach the
malefactor from everything that is going on...and characterize him as
a one-off, nongeneralizable, sui generis phenomenon.

Sent from my iPhone

from my taxi driver

Marriage: it's a beautiful thing. Not for the squeamish.

Sent from my iPhone

from a comment left on CNN.com

I only seen four of five Afro-American there no more than five hundred in the country! there are three hundred million of us American. Sad but true.

from "Breakeven" by The Script

What am I supposed to do when the best part of me was always you?

from a true story

Emma Watson, who played Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter movies, goes to Brown. Recently she was in class and the professor asked a question; Miss Watson evidently gave an exceptionally good answer. A kid in the back of the class then raised his hand, and when the professor called on him, he declared, "TEN POINTS FOR GRYFFINDOR!"

from a fortune cookie

Your life will be happy and peaceful.