Words

I was going to update Monday but some shit came up and then I had to go to bed because Tuesday I had to teach maybe the worst class I've had since I was student teaching--
but no matter because today is a new day.
And this is me coming off saying I'd stick to the schedule more--
look things have been crazy.
The schedule will be righted soon.

Me: *stares at thesis*

Thesis: *stares back*

Me: You know, this would go so much more easily if you'd just co-operate a little.

Thesis: *no response*

Me: I mean, I'm doing the best I can, here. I give you plenty of attention even when I feel utterly miserable. I spend most of my waking hours worrying about you. My life has come to revolve around your needs. I only want what's best for you.

Thesis: *silence*

Me: I just feel you should contribute a little more to this relationship, is all I'm saying. Don't you think that's only fair?

Thesis: *stares*

Thesis: *no response*

Me: ...Okay, then. I'm glad we had this talk.

BUT NOT AS CRAZY AS THIS WRITING HUE HUA HUE HUA HUE

Normally, I get distracted by books whose narrative arc ends in triumph. Pick up and read, carried along by prose and arc until the denouement returns me to myself and I realise how much time has passed: until the moment of triumph brings me back to all the work I should have done.

Delbo's tripartite memoir allows of no such literary catharsis.

All right I get it you go to college.
I know what all those words mean and that doesn't keep me from calling you a cunt.
I'm trying to decide the biggest offender here.
I'm sure most people reading this will argue "denouement" but that's a serious literary term with a (very) subtly different meaning from "reveal" so I'm going to cut that one some slack--
"catharsis" is like an emotional cleansing that comes after serious tragedy in a story where you just feel emotionally drained afterwards. Not a common term but again it fits with the serious literary terms so if you're reading literary-minded stuff then you'll run into it.
Probably the worst word is "tripartite" in my opinion.
You can probably guess the meaning which is always a kicker for big words. "Tri" meaning three so of course it just means "something in three parts".
Like you could just say that. "Delbo's three part memoir" and it would have exactly the same meaning but no, tripartite.

I bought Auschwitz and After once I had read Elizabeth Wein's novel Rose Under Fire, spurred by a half-remembered fragment of prose - and by the realisation that it had been years since I read an account of the enormity of suffering that is fast passing out of living memory. "Try to look," Delbo writes. "Just try and see."

A corpse. The left eye devoured by a rat. The other open with its fringe of lashes.

Try to look. Just try and see.

There is no bearing witness to horror that seems ghoulish now but was everyday reality for tens - hundreds - of thousands as they died. All that can be done to honour those dead is to hold the words of the survivors a while longer.

To try and see, and remember.

She keeps spelling shit the British way but I'm betting money she's American.

Not one of us will return is the title of the first part of Delbo's memoir. Stark. That's one word for it. Vignettes and poems. Snapshots and images, their bleak brutality transmuted by Delbo's pen into a lasting literary testament that nonetheless bears a searing kind of beauty.

Delbo finishes one such vignette with, "And now I am sitting in a café, writing this text."

One has the sense that no real return is possible.

I know one thing that'll return: this piece of shit book to where I got it from.
BUUUUUUURN.

I've never been a light person. It comes of being about 5'9 and 22-24 inches across at the shoulder. My lightest adult weight, before I left school, at my fittest, was 85kg. I didn't mind, as an undergraduate, weighing in at 95kg-98kg (that's 209-216 imperial lbs, approximately, American friends) while I was climbing and running: I'd never win any slenderness competitions, but I didn't feel uncomfortably bloated, except occasionally. 

Let's cover British hypocrisy for a moment. Things I've heard Britfags say (even if they're trolling):
Americans have a retard rollercoaster of a weight system! Who still uses pounds!?
>England's main form of weighing people is a fucking stone
Also our form of measurement is called Imperial standard.
>Not using imperial measurements
>being this plebeian

But the rest of my life is still made of emotional rollercoaster. I have a thesis to write. My grandmother's still dying. My mother is still on sickleave. The household finances are still not in the Happy Place. I have no local friends right now to see in person. I feel guilty about taking time away from work for hobbies - like climbing or martial arts, where I might see other people. My energy levels are nowhere near where they were even in my final year of undergrad. And when my thesis is finished, if I live so long, I have to contemplate What Happens Next.

I can't keep gaining weight. It makes me even more self-disgusted than I am already.

But changing or stopping the dosage of escitalopram is another giant worry. I don't like depressed mood and suicidal ideations, and for me they're less serious with escitalopram than without.



This, on top of everything else. I cannot handle my shit right now. I do not know what to do. And I am in a mood lately wherein I want to say hurtful things to everyone who was ever kind to me, and then crawl off in a corner and cry until the world explodes.

Mental illness is fucking annoying. The worst part? Right now, I can't even laugh at myself.

Imagine if you had real problems.
That usually grounds me.
Like the second I left the school yesterday my first thought was "holy shit" followed closely by "today could have been everything it was but I could have been square in the middle of North Korea."
I'm not even trying to pull a liberal social justice warrior move and try to say your suffering isn't significant because some tribe you've never heard of in Africa is starving, either. I'm just saying whatever problems you have could be a thousand times worse.
So just try not to whine too much because there might be a time where you look back and miss it.

11:00 Sun - Tivoli - Ageism in Genre

Its nearly always the plucky young hero.

>nearly always a plucky young hero
I don't know what genre but certainly not any genre that matters.
I mean the Odyssey stars Odysseus, who has a nearly fully grown son at the start.
Also Odysseus is a war veteran.
So plucky and young?
Dante starts his poem by saying he's halfway through life (he was 35 but let's face it by middle age standards [his standards] he was middle age) and is totally lost and has no fucking clue what he's doing with himself.
So plucky and young?
The Count of Monte Cristo is a case study in why being plucky and young is maybe the worst thing you can be.
So the three greatest books ever written provably do not feature plucky young heroes.
Hell, one of TV's most popular current TV shows, Breaking Bad, stars a 50 year old chemistry teacher who is so down on his luck I flash back to my own days as a student teacher square in the middle of one of the worst schools in NC.
I think fiction tends to feature characters that appeal to its target audience.
... Not sure why I felt the need to qualify that. Of course that's what writers do.
Only snowflake warriors disagree.

13:00 Sun - Tivoli - What Makes a Hero?
From the classics to modern fiction, how has the vision of heroism changed?

Well it has gotten worse. 
Before it was manliness, honor, cunning and skill that were venerated.
Now it's being a brooding, existential ladyboy.
Going back to my earlier Breaking Bad aside: people genuinely aren't sure if they should root for Walt, the main character.
Good or evil he has shown an incredible amount of skill, cunning and, yes, honor too so I think that's reason enough to root for him.
Sure he did a lot of evil shit but he's doing it all for his family's well being after he dies.
BUT OOOO HE KILLS PEOPLE AND MAKES METH.
That's what fucking happens.
You know if they paid teachers a decent salary none of this would have happened in the first place.
That's the major lesson I'm taking away from Breaking Bad.
The fact a guy with a college education in something really important who has given his life to teaching ungrateful assholes seriously considers methamphetamine production as a means to retire tells me there's something severely wrong with this country.
And you can't just say it's a TV show either because teachers in real life have gotten caught copying the show.
Oh right, blogs.

My gym session today included an interlude wherein I biled some milk from breakfast all over the weights I was using for chest fly. So that was pretty unpleasant.

...
So I started going to the gym recently--
Not an image I really wanted in my head, actually.

Books 2013: 59-61


59-60. Sandy Mitchell, Warhammer 40K: The Emperor's Finest and Warhammer 40K: The Last Ditch. Black Library, 2012 and 2013.

The Emperor's Finest is probably the weakest installment in Mitchell's Ciaphas Cain series, lacking the usual vibrancy and humour, and dogged by a very poor secondary character in the form of the lady aristocrat Mira. The Last Ditch makes up for this with rollicking battle action.

One of the things that strike me most about the Cain books is that, while never rising above the level of crunchy popcorn entertainment, Mitchell takes the (clichéd) darkness of the Warhammer 40K setting, acknowledges it, and then goes on to populate it with relatively well-adjusted, well-adapted people. With fully-developed senses of humour.

>Warhammer
>Cliche
AND ON THAT BOMBSHELL I AM GOING TO BED.
GOODBYE