4/22: What I Accomplished Today

1. We won Puzzle Day today! Any family can get together for Sunday brunch; we made a contest out of it. (I suggested to my co-vivant that we have T-shirts made that say, "We're not just a family; we're a crossword puzzle league!") This week, all three teams tied on the main New York Times crossword puzzle (this week, we were all perfect! Yahoo!) and we tied with the Fellas on the second puzzle, so it went to the third puzzle, and we'd finished it, and they hadn't. so we won. The losing team puts in $3, and the team that comes in second puts in $2, and every now and then, we have enough money to have a nice meal in a restaurant for all eight or nine of us.

2. Finished two Pogo badges, which got me the Spring Superbadge.

3. Watched ER. Is there a more depressing show on television? I don't even know why we still watch this, except we worry about Abby. Maybe Sam and Neela sometimes. Everyone else is a jerk. Morris is a jerk. Luka is a misogynist jerk; I don't know what Abby sees in him, and I didn't know what Sam saw in him. Stupid, stupid Abby to have a baby with a jerk. Pratt is a jerk; his name is appropriate. Gates is a huge jerk. Ray is a mild jerk; he's the best of this lot, and he'd be okay, I think, with Neela, but right now, he's still a jerk. Frank is a jerk, challenged daughter or no. Kerry was a jerk, but at least she was a jerk we knew. Occasionally someone tries to rehabilitate him- or herself, but it never takes or lasts for very long, and before you know it, the person is a jerk again. In retrospect, I see that most of the jerks I have listed are men; I thought Lewis ended up being a jerk, too.

Has anything positive on this show happened since...jeeze, I can't think of the last one. Joe was born, but he was very sick. Ella was born, but her father was dead in fewer than six months, so it was hard to be too excited about that. Green was in remission at his wedding, but we still suspected the cancer was coming back. I can't think of the last happy thing that happened on this joyless show. We've tried to stop watching it because we've agreed it's just one abysmally depressing thing after another, but then something happens and we end up watching just one or two more episodes.

We also watched this week's Best Week Ever. This is just the right amount of information on pop culture. Heaven forbid we actually watch American Idol or Survivor or a ballroom dancing show or any show featuring that odd man with the large clock on his chest, but I suppose we should know the names briefly.

For Earth Day, we Tivo'd the entire run of The Planet Earth; Ellen showed some clips on her show, and it looked interesting and beautifully photographed. However, we won't be able to get them all watched in a timely fashion, so we also spent part of the evening moving these to DVD-R so we can watch them as we have time.

4. Finished the current issue of The Week, and read more in the Oppenheimer biography. We're at Los Alamos finally, but instead of focusing on either the research or the people, which I would find interesting, the whole thing I read today focused on the continuing investigation of Oppie's left-wing connections, including the suicide of his former fiancee Jean Tatlock. When the book talks about people or research, I find it really good, but as I've mentioned, the focus of the research is on his CP connections, and that horse is being beaten into the ground. This isn't a biography I'd have chosen to read for myself, and I probably won't finish it, but I'll get as far as I can before the luncheon on Wednesday.

5. Made a sketchy mock-up of my business website for my meeting tomorrow.

6. Got my Draenei warrior to level 24.

7. Played a few minutes of today's/yesterday's BigFishGames new game, Ice Cream Tycoon. I usually really enjoy business sims, but this was just a guessing game; there are ten types of ice cream, and you have to guess with no clues what ice cream will be most popular in what neighborhood. Oh, my gosh. I couldn't finish Day Two because it was just too boring.

Today's new game, Crazy Eggs, looks like a pretty run-of-the-mill three-matchy; not even gonna bother downloading it.


Tomorrow begins the last two weeks of the term before finals; intense, unpleasant weeks, but I suppose if I only find my job unpleasant four or five weeks out of the year, that isn't so bad. I think I have four or five meetings this week and two or three meetings next week. This is also the second most unpleasant grading week because this is the last week I can guarantee students rewrites. Blech. Mebbe I shoulda been a plumber.

Something happened at one of last week's meetings that's been on my mind. We were talking about having a seminar in Convocation Week about the way our program meshes with another program at our institution, but the other program is rather antiquated and has refused to work with us when we have offered to meet with them about helping their program articulate with ours (most of their students will eventually need to take our classes). Somebody suggested that the workshop be called "Bridging the Gap from Nowhere," which was very funny and clever and we had the laugh, but then people were talking as though we were actually going to call it that. I said, "Now wait; what are we calling 'nothing'? In we insult them in front of the whole institution in a program name, why are they going to want to work with us?" And someone else said begrudgingly, "Oh, you're right; we have to go with the P.C. version and call it something else."

Now I'm as irritated by P.C. as anyone; I don't think "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder" (or, heaven forfend, PTSD) is a better name than the starkly evocative "shell shock," and I don't think "African-American" is better than "Black." (I had a friend tell me once, "You know, we've both been to Africa the same number of times, which is zero, so let's just stick with what I am, which is darker than you are." I'm also bothered by modifying people's Americanism. I don't think amount of melanin makes people a different type of American, and if everyone who isn't Caucasian has a modifier, the implication is that Caucasians are the 'standard' Americans.) However, I don't think this seminar name was about P.C.; this was audience awareness, simple common sense in acknowledging the rhetorical situation. We teach English, for pity's sake; if we give a workshop a name that alienates the people at the receiving end, how we can do a good job teaching audience awareness to our students?

I also get irritated when people confuse P.C. with Courtesy. There were times 10 or 15 years ago when there was a good chance, when I left my home, that somebody was going to snarl, "Fat dyke" at me over the course of the day. This chance is considerably lower now. I do not think people are thinking to themselves, "I would normally call that substantial masculine-looking lady a Fat Dyke, but that wouldn't be P.C." I think that people have become more aware over the intervening years that isn't kind to call someone a Fat Dyke, and most people were (or at least claim to have been) raised by our mammas not to be rude once we understand that something is rude.

So yes, I'm impatient with P.C.--but I'm more impatient when it's confused with common sense or courtesy.


I reread last night's post this afternoon, and I left out several words. I always tell my students to read their paragraphs out loud so they don't do that, and I had, in fact, read some of the paragraphs out loud, but not all of them, and it came back to bite me. I've read this one out loud, so I hope it's better.