Monday morning wrap-up.

I'm just going to do one of those lazy list-posts because, well, I'm lazy and I feel like there's a lot of stuff to mention. (I love how I feel there are things I "have" to mention, as if someone out there is relying on me to fill them in on what I did this weekend. Well, whoever you are, this one is for you.)

1. On Friday night, Julia, Renee, and I went to the Pilsen East's Artist's Open House. Julia's boyfriend Eric had a friend from the MAPH program who was co-curating a gallery, so we went down there with her boyfriend and walked around, looking at art. Also, I got tipsy from drinking three cups of wine on an empty stomach, but it was fun. And I bought four posters from these people after I couldn’t buy the huge painting of owls flying into a gun (it was thirteen hundred dollars and I had forgotten my checkbook).

2. Critical Mass also took place on Friday. I didn't really have an opinion about it until I was stuck on the Halsted bus for fifteen minutes watching a few hundred bikers ride by. It'd be easier to take Critical Mass with a grain of salt if they were organized to raise money for a cause - like a real marathon. I don't think "Riding Bikes is Fun" is important enough.

3. I watched The Proposition, which was good, Don’t Come Knocking, which was very good, and Brick, which I didn’t like. Brick would have been wonderful if only it had not taken place at a high school. I tried very hard to accept that, but I just couldn’t. Also, I couldn’t take watching the kid from 3rd Rock from the Sun being serious or the kid from Witness being menacing.

4. I talked to my mom on Sunday, who was about to go see Cats at a dinner theater in Fredericksburg. When I told her that sounded like a miserable way to spend a Sunday, she said, “Well, they’ve got real actors in it. It’s, like, a step up from regular dinner theater.” But probably five steps down from a national tour.

5. A “Spirit of Halloween” store opened on Diversey, so now I’m getting stressed-out about Halloween, which is exactly what I need. What should I be: Pimp or Pimpin’ Priest? Christina had talked about going together as Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton. How much would it take to convince her that these costumes are The Shit?

6. My Southern fiction class is still dreadful. My favorite quote from last week’s class: “Property supersedes humanity. That’s the Southern way.” Sigh.

7. And finally, this week in MySpace friend requests:
and:

My brother is more of a man than I.

I don't really see a resemblance between me and my brother, unless you consider the cold, dead stare that we love to use when forced to have our pictures taken. Orrr the debilitating fear of haircuts.



(That gash would probably lose its effect if I told you that David got it while playing golf.)

Drev should work for Sassy Kutz.

Good news! Yesterday I broke down, faced my fear, and got a haircut.

I was sitting at my desk trying to figure out if I should just trim it myself again or spend the fifteen dollars at Hair Cuttery. I figured it wouldn't be too bad to just get out the old electric razor and thin it out myself in the shower (Nicole still hasn't hung up her mirror, so I could have used that to see the back of my head). After thinking about the possibility that I was just lucky to not fuck it up the first time I cut it, I decided that I should really just have a professional do it, even if that professional worked at the Hair Cuttery.

After practicing what I was going to say ("Um...I want it short in the back and on the sides, but leave some length in the front? I have a big forehead that needs to be covered up. Can you do that? Would that look weird? Can you just not make me look like a Flock of Seagulls fan? I'll promise at least a two-dollar tip."), I walked to the place up the street from my house. I had a good feeling about it since it was just a little south of Boystown, and everyone knows that gay men know good hair.

Then I walked in and realized, after looking at some of the employees, that I was in a Hair Cuttery and there was no way that this would have a positive outcome.

Luckily, however, I had Drev to take care of my hair. Drev just loved my hair and he knew exactly what to do with it. After the inevitable awkward exchange over my hair ("Who cut your hair last?!" "Heh heh... uh... I don't really remember, I mean it's been such a long time..." "Well, this is a weird haircut."), things were okay and normal. Drev was very chatty and asked me many questions. He also said "fuck" a lot ("You live by the Panera? I love that fucking Panera!" "Ohmygod, I fucking hate all that Cubs shit."), and told me that he was about to get into a fight with his manager. If there’s one thing in my life I can’t get enough of it would be positive sass.

Whine and cheese.

If I am going to discreetly not do work and write boring, long-winded pieces of generic prose, I should be writing about George Orwell's essay "Such, Such Were the Joys..." The truth is, however, I could care less that I have a two-page response paper due this evening at 5:45.

I've written about a third of the paper, which is just one very long paragraph. This does not bode well, since the one very long paragraph takes up most of the page, and it's likely that my short response paper will end up being four pages. But honestly, why am I writing short, stupid papers for a graduate class? I was under the expectation that grad school required more reading and more work, but so far I feel like I'm taking the boring, uninteresting general education undergrad courses.

I don't know what this means, exactly. I've been thinking about my situation (the whole hating my classes thing), and it's just sparked a new Life Crisis of the Month. Do I just hate these classes and these professors? Do I not like DePaul? Do I not like graduate school?

I think turning twenty-three fucked me up. This is why I hate my birthday, because it's another reminder that hey, here's another year where I am older but not so much wiser. And I still don't know what I'm doing. And, yeah, I KNOW I'm only twenty-three. But I want to figure things out. I don't feel pressure from anyone but myself.

So now I have a million questions to answer, including:

1. Should I stay at DePaul since the grad school is free, even if I hate it?
2. If I don't take advantage of the tuition benefits, should I continue working here?
3. Should I start looking at grad schools elsewhere? Ole Miss? Georgia?
4. Do I want to go to grad school? Do I want to stay in Chicago?
5. Is PeaPod cheaper than Jewel? If not, is it worth paying extra money for groceries if it means I don't have to walk eight blocks with a cart full of bags and avoid looking like a (well-dressed, let's be honest here) homeless person? (I realize this isn't really related but it's on my mind.)
6. Should I move to New York? (It's possible I have been reading Gawker too much.)
7. Should I just write shitty chick-lit novels and publish them under a pseudonym?
8. How does one get a job in publishing in this damn city?

In the meantime, I'll just suffer through "The Essay" and Southern lit. It'll give me some material to work with here.

This is just one cracker's opinion.

Here's an exchange that took place last night in my Southern fiction class, while my professor was explaining the genealogy of the main characters in Faulkner's Go Down, Moses:

Crazy Professor: And here we have Uncle Buck, not to be confused with the character from the film... John Candy? Right? John Candy was in that film? He's dead now, right? Just like Chris Farley...they were friends, weren't they?
Fellow Disgruntled Classmate: No.
Crazy Professor (ignoring FDC): Yes. John Candy and Chris Farley are one and the same.

Okay, I didn't want to blog about this guy. I kept myself from writing about the first class, when he made us watch a twelve-minute documentary clip featuring James Ellroy walking around LA talking about the Black Dahlia and his dead mother. Sure, it had nothing to do with anything relating to our actual course topic, but Crazy Professor was excited about film noir and the new Black Dahlia.

I didn't say anything when I came to the page in our course packet labeled, "Top 39 Things You'll Never Hear a Southerner Say." (My favorite: "Checkmate!") I can appreciate stupid humor, even if it's of the Jeff Foxworthy kind.

I was quiet when we had to watch two scenes from A Time to Kill, which my professor lauded as "the most accurate film depiction of racism in America." I thought, "Maybe he’s just a McConaughey fan?"

I was kind of taken aback, however, when Crazy Professor started using the terms "cracker" and "white trash" to describe Southern people. "Oookay..." I thought. "Maybe he's being ironic?"

And I'll be honest: I didn't read the handouts he gave us about Sonic restaurants.

Then he started calling William Faulkner a racist because someone once said that he opposed interracial dating. I thought, "Okay, LOOK, Crazy Professor. Not only was Faulkner the greatest novelist to come out of the twentieth century, but he also wrote incredibly moving and honest portrayals of African Americans in the South without a drop of racist commentary. Also, he grew up in Mississippi in the first quarter of the century, and if your sources are true - that he was 'disgusted' by the sight of interracial couples during his tenure at UVA - you should take into consideration where he was from, the way he was taught, and the fact that seeing something like that, even though he was extremely humanitarian and not prejudiced, would be shocking. Also, JOHN CANDY AND CHRIS FARLEY WERE NOT FRIENDS THEY WERE NOT EVEN OF THE SAME GENERATION YOU IDIOT."

I realize that, yes, some of the stereotypes of the South are based on some semblance of truth, just like all stereotypes. But when you group the entire South as a land full of racist, ignorant crackers, you’re not helping anything, especially when you’re teaching these opinions to a group of students who live in Chicago and do not have any knowledge of what the South is really like.

There are about four of us from the South, and I was lucky to make friends with one last night – a woman from Athens, Georgia. She had the same frustrations as I did, and she said that she wanted to address the class and tell our classmates to take all of this information with a grain of salt. She agreed with me that there is much more overt racism outside of the South (especially in Chicago, which our professor described as the most racially segregated city in America). By associating racism exclusively with the South, however, Crazy Professor is continuing the Red State / Blue State idea that American is split into two polarized sections. The truth is that racism is not a Southern thing. It isn’t even an American issue. Racism takes place everywhere, and I find it insulting that people are ignorant enough to dilute it to being a Southern thing. (There’s a line from the song “The Three Great Alabama Icons” by the Drive-By Truckers that says, “Thanks to George Wallace, it’s always a little more convenient to play it with a Southern accent.”)

This morning I wrote a long email to Jean Cash, my professor from JMU who taught the survey course in Southern Literature, as well as courses on Flannery O'Connor and Faulkner. Before I took Southern Lit with her my junior year of college, I had already decided that I hated the South and could never live in a place full of ignorance and hatred after college. After taking the class, however, and reading William Styron, Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Allen Tate, Larry Brown, Tim Gautreaux, and William Faulkner, among a long list of others, I realized that the South was not filled with the racism and stupidity the rest of the country applies to it. If I had taken this course with Mr. Crazy Professor from St. Louis who once went to grad school in Memphis, I would have still hated the South because he constantly feeds the same stereotypical images and ideas at us.

I wrote to Dr. Cash this morning for the first time in a few months, because I knew she’d be as upset as I am, and she responded with:

What you're telling me about the Southern Literature class fairly enrages me--people with that kind of patronizing attitude about the South have no business teaching Southern Literature (Memphis or no Memphis); tell him off every chance you get. You know how I hate the use of the "white trash" epithet.

So far we haven’t had a chance to speak up in class to give our own opinions or insight into what Dr. Crazy discusses, but I’m going to do my best to be assertive and give him a few of my own ideas.

This is why McDonald's makes me angry.

Exhibit A:


Exhibit B:

More reasons why I hated high school.

This morning I sat here at my desk deleting the majority of my MySpace blog archives. It's been that kind of day. BUT I did find these gems that I figured I'd post for you, kind reader, because you deserve it and I love you.


That's a page from my tenth-grade yearbook. Can you find me? [Sidenote: I hope Angela realizes that those bangs are totally back in. And I hope Adam changed his because they still gross me out.]

Also, there's this:

Again I will stress that back in '98 my classmates were almost procreating and I was still 5'4".

Doughnuts times two.

As you may remember, I was concerned about my birthday last Friday because it's the office tradition for my boss to buy doughnuts in honor of her employees' birthdays. I had not told my boss about my birthday, and then she left the country for three weeks, so I was freaking out about whether or not I should mention my birthday to my manager.

I had kind of forgotten about the situation on Friday, and around 8:30 I said to Fabiola that I was going to Dunkin Donuts and wanted to know if she wanted anything. She said, "Uh, just wait... wait a minute." I was like, "Uh, ok." Then I remembered it was my birthday and she was probably giving me hints that I would get doughnuts after all.

A little after 9:00, my boss's BFF, who was in charge while Real Boss was out, came around the corner of my cubicle with two boxes from Dunkin Donuts. She apologized for getting them from there but she said that she was planning to get them from a real bakery from home but forgot about it until she got on the train to work. She said she called Krispy Kreme, but they were too far away and she had to settle for Dunkin. That really didn't bother me because a. I was just happy that they actually knew about my birthday, and b. Boston Kreme doughnuts from Dunkin are THE SHIT.

Then yesterday, around 9:00, Pretend Boss walks in with two boxes of doughnuts from the real bakery. "I felt so bad about not getting the good ones!" she said.

About a half hour later one of my co-workers genuinely asked me, "Wasn't it just your birthday?"

Hey, what can you do?

Domestic disturbances.

A. Last night Nicole and I got into an argument over Garden State and why I didn't like it, which quickly evolved into an argument concerning anti-depressants.

B. Fifteen minutes later, Christina and I were fighting in my bedroom. She was hiding under my covers while I stood over her with a plunger, threatening to stick it on her face.

This kind of turn of events is rather common in the apartment and I'm not exactly sure how we always go from point A to point B. All I know is that now I have to wash my sheets because Christina wrapped them around the plunger.

Happy Birthday, Me!

In honor of turning twenty-three, I'm looking back on my life through the glorious finds of my family photo album.

Here I am as a baby, getting ready for my first moon launch. Ha, ha, ha, but seriously. Things were so great back then. I didn't have to make decisions or tie my shoes. Hell, I didn't have to walk anywhere. Screw the womb, I'd much rather go back to a time where I was pushed around in a stroller.

Here I am with my dad, who is wearing some bitchin' shoes. This is back when I was in my rugged outdoorsy stage, which coincided with my khaki shorts stage. Fun fact! I now have that shirt that my dad is wearing! Isn't growing up c r a z y ?

This picture is always a crowd-pleaser, so if you haven't seen it yet, do yourself a favor and click on the image to see the full-sized version. It's proof that awkwardness is hereditary in the C0ates family. It also blows my mind that my mother kept this in the photo album. This is the kind of image that gets posted online or sent to Jay Leno to embarass the famous adult version of the kid in the picture. I'm just beating everyone to the punch.

Ever since I was a kid, I loved dichotomies, so this shirt was perfect because it combined my love of surfing and chocolate sandwich cookies. Also, this was when I was a flag-wavin' Republican and drove my parents crazy by marching through the house chanting, "These colors don't run!" in between renditions of "Born in the USA."

Here I am dressed as a cowboy. This was just a normal Thursday evening at the C0ates house.

This picture was taken on my first day of eleventh grade. I'm about to turn sixteen. Sixteen years old. People in my class were already having sex, and I was still wearing t-shirts that are still too big for me. You might see this picture and think, "Oh, this was when Tyler was in his awkward stage." Unfortunately, my awkward stage would last another three years.

And, just so you all can see how I've matured and am all grown up, here I am last fall - passed out in a chip bowl:

I'm a big kid now.