the problem with jumping is that then you want to fly

went and spoke to brooke this afternoon. she's brooke, so she's positive, but she's done this whole applying to mfa business and she has the inside, rejected-by-all scoop. it was a kick in the complacency, sure, and I'm moving along now. still, I think I have the skills to beat them all. that's strange, because I'm usually trying to measure myself up and make like I could be the best. here, I feel like the best. I can't explain it, and I can't get rid of it either, but I'm ready to win. I know it'll be a long term in terms of working for it, but I have it. I can't shake that feeling.

I want to kill alex. if I do, someone please bail me out. fo sho: this kid has yet to change, except for the semi-annual "I'm too mainstream and now I need to be jewish/mexican/filipino/transgendered." I told melyssa over the summer that if I never saw alex again, I wouldn't necessarily regret that. I'm smarter than I give myself credit for.

I swear this term will be made up of more than bitching about alex and working on the novel / grad stuff.

I wonder where the anderson is, and if she'd write me a letter of recommendation. brooke says I need the best titles I can get, and she pretty much runs the poetry classes at nau, so I could do worse. she seemed to have some faith in me, anyway. I'd have to have backups, though, 'cause I'm not sure I'd ever hear from her again.

it's amusing: when I get writing and spinning (re-spinning) scenes, I feel like I've done a lot. "hey, yeah, I went to the hospital and broke up with my boyfriend today. no, wait...."

one more bitch-at-alex: he accused me this afternoon of not doing anything, ever, of just sitting in the room and ... whatever. I don't know. jerking off. fuck if I couldn't have punched his chubby fucktarded face. I try to let few things get to me, but the implication that I'm not doing anything when I'm writing gets to me. I mean, the root of the problem is that I know it's true - it's oscar wilde who said that, deep down, no one needs writing or books or any of it. but I chose this, I'm good at it, and if you want to fight me over it, put your fucking fists up if you're going to say I don't do anything.

my heart's been fast. I feel like I'm closed to something. proofs:

negative libido. now that I can, I don't want to. derivation, I believe, of "boyfriend DNE label." if I'm opining that gay is reprehensible as a label, who am I to want a significant (or unsignificant, as preceding cases suggest) just because?

I hate nau. it's safe. two years is the longest commitment I've made to anyone or anything, ever, except for my writing, and that hasn't reached the point where I'm able to separate it from me and send it out on its own. I'll have to. that'll be hard a day. two years, huh? it's time to move on. maybe I like being seen as cavalier. maybe I knew that once I could choose, I'd fly.

how much of me is intellectual snobbery? I dropped a literature class because I didn't agree with the way he taught or presented it. how much of my problem was him, and how much was the education system? do I just want to be a teacher to ride cowboy over the fuck-ups and the non-cares? do I just want to yell at them because, really, no one else cares.

aly and I spoke of the brodawgs and the sorostitutes yesterday, and I couldn't verbalize my point. I have it now: there's nothing wrong with a perception if its the world. these idiots have never been anywhere but here. the vapids in the lit class never got raked by isabella winkler. how many would choose what I've chosen? who even remembers the power to say that things are bad and that they should be better?

driving to the house last night, I thought of a hundred of me and wondered, if all 100 had shipped off to uni ari in august 2005, where we'd all be now, three years later. uni ari? antioch? prescott? here? somewhere else? the scariest thought is that this was the only course, and we all ended up here. I don't regret the choices (isn't that a refrain). what scares me is that I'm afraid that inside me somewhere, if we'd all ended up here, it would mean that the foresight ability and future-planning is too far buried, and that doesn't say much for this grad school plan.

the graduations circumstances of kyle and sunny-kristin frighten me.

I found the four of diamonds on an empty shelf four days ago. sometimes I wish the world were a dream and I could figure things out with books and portents.

I'm scared a lot of the time. but, more than that, I'm angry.

You don't change the course of history by turning the faces of portraits to the wall.
Jawaharlal Nehru

one of the all-around girls is doing her floor routine to the theme from "pirates of the caribbean."

I think it may be one of the chinese girls?

I can be as cynical and trendily deconstructionist as I want, but hearing the national anthem at the olympics still gives me the shivers.

the liberal studies program has no spirit.

I made this choice not because I wanted the easy way out or wanted to take fewer classes. I truly believe that these classes fulfill the ideal goal of whatever blah blah blah, and if they are to be discounted simply because they don't match the departmental prefixes and numbering system, I submit this as reprehensible. the liberal studies program is designed to round students, to prepare them for the "outside world," and yet it refuses to accept courses that do not fit exactly into NAU's system block? now, why? because it is easier. because it is easier to create a system with a stated goal of improving students' minds and lives, and then forgetting that goal in the bureaucracy. more than once, I've been asked if I believe I'm "special," if I deserve "special attention." yes! of course I am! aren't you? isn't every student? when did the liberal studies banner become nothing more than a cover sheet for a Fordesque assembly line? if the position of the liberal studies program and board is that any class that doesn't come from NAU and doesn't fit into its system is flawed, lesser, or not worth bothering with, then I contend that it is the program itself which is failing, and whose worth should be seriously reconsidered.
what bothers me most about this whole fiasco is the implication that I've made some kind of mistake. that, by not coming to NAU as a freshman, and by trying to transfer credits in from different schools, I'm somehow doing the wrong thing. I'm being difficult in trying to question the program, difficult in trying to petition my classes for acceptance. why can't I just take NAU's classes? I'll say it again: the goal of the liberal studies program, as laid out by the program itself, is to prepare students to be rounded, creative, and several other lofty adjectives that never happen. yet, when a student comes along who takes the time to read those guidelines, to look at the forgotten spirit and think that, just maybe, it's not a bad idea and his classes fill those requirements, that's the one who's punished.
now, if you disagree with me, why don't you ask yourself, what truly prepares a student for outer worldlyness - taking classes merely to fill slots in a required schedule, or attending other institutions to take classes and have experiences completely outside the province of programmed imagination?



who's being helped here? that's my question. by forcing me to drop cross-departmental classes, by forcing me to take something other than indigenous astronomy and medical sociology - two classes that are both higher division and very, very different than my concentration of creative writing - I now have to take classes designed to fill a slot. is that all that the liberal arts program has becoming, slot-filling? what is its goal? where has it been lost?
perhaps I'm biased. the school I had to leave didn't have such a program; classes were taken at the students' leisure, since the adminstation and staff knew that if (1) their instructors were good (2) the classes were quality and (3) the students were interested, horizons would be expanded. maybe that wouldn't work everywhere. maybe the fault of the whole thing is the structured educational system, which decries THIS CLASS, THIS CLASS! here and nothing else.
but I contend that when a student is genuinely trying to expand his or her boundaries with classes far outside his or her area of study; when that student has already experienced classes on every topic imaginable, in every discipline offered; when that student has classes from other institutions that couldn't even be duplicated at the current university; and when all of that is ignored simply to make things easier, to make an existing class fit an existing class for an existing student, it isn't only the student that suffers. the class itself suffers, because it could be filled with students who genuinely want the knowledge. the instructor suffers, because he or she is forced to teach a class to students who aren't genuinely interested in the subject. the school itself suffers, because when slot-filling becomes the norm rather than inquiry and exploration, then learning has stopped and mass-feeding has begun. the portents are here, and the scenarios are falling already. I implore you, don't ignore the benefits of true aesthetic and humanistic inquiry in order to fill a slot with the spiritless title stamped on its box.



let's compare syllabi!
hum 101, semester total:
The course grade is determined on the basis of a mirrored set of interpretive questions taken at the beginning and end of the semester (10 points total), five short-answer discussion questions (10 points total), two online, small-group threaded discussions (10 points total), two response papers based on assigned texts (10 points each), a 1600 word term paper (long session only) counting 25 points, and a final examination (25 points). The course grade is based on a standard curve, 100 total points. There is one and only one make-up assignment (5 points).

so, that's a total of two short papers and one longer one for the ENTIRE SEMESTER. two discussions, for the ENTIRE SEMESTER.





let's look at two weeks' worth of work in dance.

read excerpts from african rhythm, african sensibility by john chernoff (p 34-37, 50 &51, 144-151) and chapter one in "gimme the kneebone bent: music and dance in africa" from stepping on the blues by jacqui malone. select five quotes from readings and respond to them. view the video black dance in america in class and discuss. (one week)

read about any three choreographers in african american genius in modern dance and prepare a paper discussing them and why you chose them. view the videos rainbow round my shoulders and new worlds, new forms in class and discuss. (one week)

two field trips - one, to see the dayton contemporary dance company, and two, to see akram kahn at ohio state. respond to each experience in two-three pages, discussing the intent of the choreographer - communications of the dance, integration of costume, music, and lighting with the vision. also discuss the kind of movement used and your response to each dance. (mid-week)


in two weeks and one unit (african dance), the load of both work and critical thought has surpassed the semester total of work for the NAU class.