I Rant Because I Care: Oh Lindsay

Well, to be honest, I don't care that much. I just need a moment here to rant. Lindsay Lohan is neither probable nor awkward. She just sort of ... is. She wreaks havoc on my daily life, because feeds from my Google Reader seem to revel in reporting about the minutiae of her existence, which as far as I can tell involves wearing either unfortunate, loose-fitting tops or equally unfortunate but differently ill-fitting bikinis, and in both instances carrying everything she would put in a purse in her hand while also carrying said purse (which I have to assume is thus either empty or full of whatever it is she supposedly isn't snorting -- but man, have you seen those purses? You could fit small children in there, which maybe she's doing since she's carrying a redbull, blackberry, keys, and a wallet all in her hands, as if to prove what? That she's a hydrated, moneyed, cellularly-connected person who hasn't locked her keys in her car?). Inbetween my morning bagel and reworking any number of memos about [redacted], Lindsay Lohan finds her way into my pre-noon Google Readering, and now that she's up and gotten herself arrested (again), there's really no end in sight. Is her level of intoxication directly proportional to her overexposure? Unlike Britney Spears, who has become the trainwreck that we're all starting to watch with weird empathetic horror, hoping that somehow her ongoing derailment will magically put her back on the path to tight abs and common sense, Ms Lohan is somehow always-already an object lesson in crashing and burning. Paris Hilton will just keep chugging along until she just ends up looking like her mother, which I think will happen a great deal sooner than later -- but it doesn't matter, because as much as I despise her, I have to admit that Paris is one savvy lady. But Lindsay -- I mean, I'm having a hard time imagining her seeing 25. And she just turned 21, what, a week ago? Maybe she'll pull a Drew Barrymore and get her shit together (and hopefully not have to marry Tom Green, however briefly) and then eventually date (and dump) a Stroke, and then maybe be seen around town smooching Spike Jonze. Maybe. But I really think she just needs to buy a ranch in, say, Alberta, Canada, and just hide from the public eye for a good 10 years or so. I don't know what it says about me, or her, or the media, that I can imagine taking her more seriously as a cattle rancher than as a 21 year old bikini-clad, peace-signing rehabber with an alcohol-monitoring ankle bracelet (sigh. oh dear me). That's all. I feel much better now. Thanks, everyone.

I Rant Because I Care: Rental Car Companies

This weekend, MD and I will be attending the wedding of our friend MJP, who will be marrying DB, her fella of many years. Besides being a pretty great guy, DB also happens to have been one of my students the first time I was a graduate teaching assistant, and the only student I've ever failed. (Oh how we laugh about it now!) Anyhow, MD and I need a way to get down to western Howard County, Maryland. Both of us are loathe to drive in or out of New York City, and are looking to keep the transportation costs low. So we thought we'd take the bus down to Baltimore on Saturday, and from there rent a car and drive the 30 miles or so to the farm where the wedding will be held. Sounded easy enough. So today when I finally got around to telephoning rental car places to secure a vehicle, I hit a stumbling block of sorts. HT: I'd like to rent a car for Saturday. I need to return it Sunday. Rental Car Man (RCM): We're not open on Sundays. HT: I can't drop it off? RCM: Nope. You'll have to drop it off on Monday. HT: I sort of need to ... um ... i can't drop it off on Monday. I need to leave Baltimore on Sunday. Um... RCM: Well maybe we can help you. Do you have a major credit card and full auto insurance coverage? HT: Excuse me? RCM: Credit card and full auto insurance coverage? HT: I have a credit card. And ... uh ... if I had full auto insurance coverage, I'd probably also have a car, no? I don't understand. RCM: Well then we can't help you. First of all, I don't understand how you can be a rental car agency and close on Sundays. Apparently this is standard practice for rental car agencies (or their branches) that aren't located at airports. How the hell do you return a car if you need to leave on a Sunday? Is this some sort of national law? No car drop offs on the Lord's day? Secondly, .... yeah. I can't even rant properly. I can't believe Enterprise Rent-a- Car has rendered me speechless. Because it's insanely expensive to rent a car in the New York metro area (which includes Newark), MD and I are resorting to this cockamamie plan: we're taking the bus down to Philly, and renting a car from there. No joke. At least we'll be able to hit a Sonic on the way down now. Gotta get me some Frito Pie Burrito!

I Rant Because I Care: Swiping You Through

I'd like to think that I'm a decent human being; to be sure, I don't volunteer at food banks, give a whole lot of money to organizations I care about, or actively rally my fellow human beings around a cause. I'm not fundamentally lazy as I am fundamentally in a constant state of distraction. But I try, any given moment of any given day, to be nice to others. When I started my present job, in an office building located next to Port Authority, I found myself getting out with some regularity in the morning at the subway entrance/exit on the northwest corner of 42nd and 8th Avenue. These exits have those crazy/creepy cage-like turnstile things, not the old-school turnstiles but the ones that look like they could easily trap you late at night, when no one's around. (Here's a good piece on turnstile design, for the lazily curious.) This particular area is also bereft of an MTA clerk or any Metrocard machine; you're pretty much on your own here if you're trying to get into the subway. Because this entrance/exit is at 42nd and 8th avenue, right near Times Square, I tend to see a good number of folks trying -- and failing -- to swipe their way in. And many times, for whatever reason, they can't. Sometimes it's because they don't understand how to enter through the turnstile; they sometimes advance the turnstile half a turn, not realizing that this uses up their swipe -- and, if they have an unlimited card, they can't use the card again for a bit. Or sometimes it'll be a regular workaday person whose card is being fussy, leading to the aggravating Please Swipe Card Again at this Turnstile message. Or sometimes they're without a card, and just want in. And, if I'm not late for work, and (this is probably a more significant factor) if I'm not feeling antisocial and haven't started my day by glazing my eyes over humanity, as I walk through the turnstile, I'll usually help out one of these souls by swiping them in with my card; it's no skin off my back, since I won't be needing to use my card for another 8 or 9 hours anyway. I can't bear to see faulty MTA technology reduce people to tears, especially not at 9:30 in the morning. That's no way to start your day. My rant? Well, see, sometimes there are people who are clearly frustrated by the card's sudden unreadability. And those people will ask nicely if I might be able to help out. And generally, I will. I'll even sometimes help out folks who aren't asking for help, but who clearly look like they're on the verge of a turnstile-induced nervous breakdown. But then there are people who either don't have a card, or I don't know what, who will say, as I walk past, hey swipe me through! Then, when I do, they walk through the turnstile and -- this has happened more than once -- they not only fail to say thanks, but they give me a look. It's a very particular look I think, specific to this kind of exchange, that has entitlement written all over it. I'm not looking for a thank you, but at 9:30 in the morning, it seems like a much nicer thing to say to someone than, say, Bitch, that took you long enough. (This has actually happened to me.) Because you know what? That's just not nice. I might be going to hell for my myriad indiscretions, but you, my friend, are on the express track. How's that for swiping you through?

I Rant Because I Care: On Academic Writing

Does this make any sense to you?

In this dissertation I argue for an expansion and transformation of post-structuralist and Frankfurt School critiques of history and progress through a rigorous integration of images and visual materials into the critical methods themselves. I suggest that etchings of a ruinous ancient Rome by 18th century Italian architect Giovanni-Battista Piranesi are emblematic of a critical and visual rethinking of emerging, Enlightenment-era-related conceptions of time – conceptions which continue to give order to our experiences today. Using these etchings as a visual framework for my project, I explore and critique the disciplinary parameters guiding the construction of historical narratives; from there I offer a reworked understanding of emerging notions of subjectivity and their relationship to a linear conception of historical time. This image-oriented critique of history as a continuous, seamless narrative culminates in a discussion of the dialectic between monuments and ruins, where I argue that in perpetuating a nostalgic longing for the past, romanticized writings on ruins also render invisible a productive reading of urban space as the necessarily discontinuous co-existence of past and present.

Yeah, didn't think so. Me neither. And I wrote it. No, I'm being completely serious. It's my dissertation abstract, featured prominently on the first page of my curriculum vitae. Academic writing is wordcraft writ very, very odd. I've come to believe that 10 years of graduate school didn't make me any smarter; they just made me much more skilled at constructing sentences that an increasingly smaller percentage of the population is able to parse. Don't get me wrong; I'm not suggesting that those ten years were all for naught -- I went into grad school because I had a couple of ideas that I wanted to see to fruition, and I accomplished that. I just managed to do it in a language that now, 18 months since filing my dissertation, I only kind of remember, much less understand. I'm not suggesting that academics ought to dumb down their language; that would imply that academic language is of a higher order or something. And it's not. Rather, it's just on a different plane, and that's kind of sad. You've got a country full of un- or mis-employed phDs who were never taught how to forge necessary bridges between ideas and real articulation. (C'mon -- we all know that a seminar paper is fundamentally the reconfiguration of the same 500-odd words into different sentence constructions. That's not articulation; that, again, is just wordcraft. Well, wordcraft and smoke and mirrors. I mean: render invisible a productive reading of urban space? Why couldn't I have just said make it hard for us to talk about cities?) I mean, this is partly why I took an extended hiatus from academia, and why I now blog: I needed to find a way back to language that felt more grounded in how I might actually speak. (Read my dissertation abstract out loud. It sounds ridiculous.) I don't deny that there's a place for formal academic language, but at the same time, I worry that that formality has just become a way to hide behind a fundamental inability to truly share one's ideas. And what's an idea if you don't know how to talk about it? addendum: NG just pointed out that the phrase 'increasingly smaller' is rather laughable. No, wait. Very laughable. [apologies -- don't know why the formatting is wonky with this post.]

I Rant Because I Care: On Walking.

We didn't set out to have a blog where all we did was rant. I'd like to think that MD and I are astute, witty, charming individuals who observe life's absurdities, and who have a thing or two to say about them. Sometimes such observations will come out in fairly dulcet tones. I think it's entirely possible to be a profound, lyrical critic of everyday life. I try, as much as HT-ly possible, to not veer toward the indignant. It's just not very ladylike. That said, why the fuck are people walking around the city like idiots? Don't get me wrong. I love a good stroll as much as the next person. I also love to window-shop, and to stare up at buildings as I'm walking, and to just, you know, amble. The theorist in me (she has a cute name, but you don't get to know it) would point out how I am, theory-speaking, always-already a proponent of the life of the flaneur -- you know, the Baudelaire- and Benjamin-related fella (or lady!) who walks around and observes and in thinking/watching, is slightly removed from the world around him but in walking is nonetheless right in the thick of it. Yeah, I'm all about flaneurie. Let's all lace up our chucks (or espadrilles, for the fashion-forward) and perambulate. But if you're gonna be a walker, have some common sense. And also: I'm all for you looking at things, but really, there is nothing in that copy shop that needs to grab your attention, such that you, the guy walking in front of me, need to slow down to a crawl. You might get away with it if you're a tourist. Oh look! A copy shop that isn't kinkos! Isn't that precious?! But c'mon. I know when you're a local. And if you're a local, you need to walk a little faster. Stop veering aimlessly and irrationally towards the store and then suddenly away from it. Don't stop suddenly and turn around and walk right at me. In fact, don't just ... stop. Right there. And not realize that you're going to cause a five-pedestrian pile up. Everyone makes such a big deal about personal space -- you're getting too close, do you not see the invisible forcefield around me, etc. That's all fine and good. But nobody seems to remember that there's also such a thing as collective space. And the sidewalk definitely constitutes collective space. You do not own the sidewalk, my friend. I'll be aware of your personal space as long as you remember that the minute you step on that sidewalk you are a part of a collective. A collective has rules. I suggest you take a minute to learn them (please step off the sidewalk as you do this). Otherwise the collective will run you over. And don't get me started on how poorly you cross the street.