Friday, November 19, 2004
Tigers fans and Royals fans taking shots at each other's offseason prospects from the safety of their own boards.
Sometimes you just have to lean back, close your eyes, and cackle like a loon. Wow. Every time I get upset at the thought of possibly losing Varitek or Pedro or Cabby or whomever, I should just head over to the Tigers board and scroll through it. It's time to admit it, Red Sox fans-- our problems are nothing compared to these poor guys. Sometimes I forget that teams like the Royals even exist, but blimey, the thought of their plight sure does make me feel secure and happy.
*wipes tears of unexpected joy from eyes*
Yes, Pedro talked to the Yankees. But he also spoke with the Sox. And we supposedly had a chat with Pavano, although no news yet on how/if that went off. Tigers picked up closer Troy Percival, which I suppose means that they'll be looking to unload Urbina, he of the kidnapped mother.
In other news, I am hideously, murderously sick. The Cold of Death, seemingly. Blinding headaches, nasal passages that seem to have solidified, throat in a constant state of fiery agony, mysterious pain in the back of my neck. O joy. For the record I dragged my miserable carcass to all three of my classes today. And for those of you in weeny programs who only have one hour classes, those three classes translate into 6 glorious hours (one 3-hour studio and two one-and-a-half-hour lectures). Toss in two hours of transit, and you have a happy fun jolly good day to be sick. I guess I can say 'thank god it wasn't Tuesday', since that's my 9am-9:30pm day. But I'm still not happy about it.
We have to read a book called Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson, for art lecture. Everything we've read in there so far has been pretty much what one would expect-- architecture books, utter wank written by overpaid Harvard professors who don't even know how to cite their sources, a treatise on the sociological importance of pink plastic flamingos. So I was a bit shocked when I picked up Snow Crash and started digging into it.
It's a sci-fi novel. It reads like someone combined the general storylines and atmospheres of Tron and Bladerunner, and had the thing drafted by Philip K. Dick in full A Scanner Darkly mode. I don't really know what to say. I blew through the entire 468-page behemoth in two nights, because it was so morbidly fascinating. It gets sort of preachy and dull in the middle when it goes into a huge religio-techno spin that is, now that I think about it, very much a Philip K. Dick kind of thing. Maybe even an Orson Scott Card kind of thing, though the book does read more like Dick... i.e. you finish it and feel like you just took a blow to the base of your skull. It's relatively well-written. After a while you even get over the fact that the main character is named (no kidding) Hiro Protagonist.
But. What does any of this have to do with my art lecture class? I am completely, utterly at a loss here. It's a very nice sci-fi book, with some pseudo-science facts thrown in, some religion thrown in, some social commentary thrown in, and some humor thrown in. But it does not seem to intersect with the (admittedly vague) subject areas covered by our class or, indeed, by anything at all in the art school.
Then again, the entire class firmly believes that the professor comes in to all the lectures drunk (hair mussed, staggering slightly, slurred speech) while he claims to have some kind of chronic ear infection, so who knows. It's the art school. Anything makes sense.
Lastly: it was in the 60s outside today. Didn't even need a jacket. This was possibly the only thing that made me able to go to classes in my morass of illness.
1:58 AM
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