John Lithgow and Annette Bening star in King Lear in this summer’s Shakespeare in the Park. Currently I am sitting in line waiting for my tickets. 9:05: We arrived at 6:40. I planned to get here around 6:30, but we got turned around in the park so we were later than intended. The line is surprisingly short given that people often camp out at 3 a.m. for popular shows. This morning’s news reports said the line for last night’s show was long. We came woefully under-prepared with only the hotel blanket, a sweatshirt for a pillow, two bottles of water, and a handful of BlowpopsRead More →

This morning I read off a litany of complaints to anyone who would listen. I realized it is time to list some gratitudes instead. 1. Lebanese Iced Tea, a lovely concoction served in middle eastern restaurants in Louisiana. I read that it was invented in NOLA. It is mostly lemonade and rosewater. Quite delicious. 2. The new red chef hats worn by the employees at the middle eastern restaurant where I drank Lebanese Iced Tea for lunch today. Bright and happy. 3. All the videos on the intertubez of Fiat 500c’s driving around in the snow. I’m now confident I could drive my car throughRead More →

gas receipt

At the first oil change for the Fiat Pop 500c, I noticed that the sticker the shop put on the windshield listed the mileage incorrectly. I snapped a quick pic of the instrument dial since I didn’t want to lose track of the next oil change. I have a swiss-cheese memory, I couldn’t find a pen, and I was late for school. I was already tracking gas consumption with pics anyway, because I wanted to see what my true mileage was (it’s about 30 mpg). I do it by taking a pic of both the instrument panel and the receipt. The receipt shows how muchRead More →

Dear Fiat Poop Mobile Manufacturers: Thank you for making me a fun car to drive. Please enroll in a technical communication class. Your manual sucks. The Fiat Pop glared a warning light, a yellow triangle with an exclamation point and no clear indication of what it meant. The manual said GENERIC WARNING LIGHT, to which I replied with a generic WTF? On an entirely separate page in the manual is a list of problems about which I had been generically warned. On the list was something about a broken oil pressure sensor. Skary!!!!1! Not a good thing for a new car under 4k miles. OrRead More →

Over the years, my therapists have asked me how I feel. They tell me my answers express my inner thoughts, not my feelings. My vocabulary of feelings is remarkably thin. This is unsurprising given that I am an academic; thinking to the exclusion of feeling is, presumably, my occupational psychosis. Ironically, the academy has taken the turn to affect. It’s an interesting twist given the centuries-long atrophy of feeling in the sacred grove. Now that post-human, post-gendered, post-raced but always material bodies can play in the exclusive grove, we can talk academically about how it all feels. Unintentionally. What gives? I have noticed a popular turnRead More →

Bring Back Our Girls As the tragic spectacle of 276 kidnapped Nigerian girls receives international attention, I can’t help but feel sick to my stomach thinking about Nigerian Scams, and the context in which they arise, in the deepest Hunger Games kind of way. As celebrities stride red carpets in stunning pink, carrying bold posters for the cause, I want to root for “our girls” much the way I cheered for Katniss to save Rue in a mediated extravaganza, a spectacle the state designed to distract me from world poverty, hunger, slave labor, and mass slaughter. Hollywood is filled with the scandalous objectification of littleRead More →