Cockroach War 2010: The Cockroach Heard ‘Round My Room

They always wait until you’re most vulnerable. That makes the most sense, strategically. Clearly, if you want to plan an attack that will do the most damage, you are best off waiting until your enemy is heeding the call of nature.

It’s what I would do to these little bastards if I could ever find where they sleep.

There I am, getting ready for bed doing getting ready for bed things, when I hear what sounds like someone slithering into my room. Little did I know it wasn’t someone, but something. Turning from the window I see on my wall a GIANORMOUS cockroach. Just hanging out. Saying “hi.”

Taunting me.

Tempting me.

Thwarting me.

Stealthily I go into my closet for my greatest weapon--Shocaliber; its name translated from the Old Language means “Bane of all Things that Creep and Crawl into my Bedroom Uninvited.“ So armed I prepared myself for the attack. This was a big boy--he was going to crunch a lot. There was a high splatter factor.

I reared back and swung, but as Shocaliber came down the monster leapt off the wall--I was unsure for a moment if he had hid his wings from me under camouflage, such a tactical mistake could cost me my life--when gravity over took it and he disappeared into the dark of bags, papers, and a small plastic container that lay below his former position.

He was under deep cover now--I was going to have to flush him out. But I was up to the task, if for no other reason than the impossibility of my sleeping until he was dead and flushed. I pulled out the first bag and he popped out onto the carpet, but quickly scrambled along the woodwork before I could strike at him.

Next I pulled out the plastic container providing haven; I would offer no quarter, no compromise. He knew that when he twitched at me with his mocking antennae from my wall. There he was, trying to blend into my eggshell carpet and eggshell walls with his pulsating brown and black body. I swung and missed! He shoved himself between the carpet and the woodwork and I could see the gap he was scurrying for. If he reached that gap he would escape me! He would return to this colony of evil and speak of his triumph over ale and women.

All the time mocking me with his existence.

Alas, I was not quick enough. I have sealed his entry way into my room with duct tape and black magic, but I know it won’t be enough. It’s never enough. They always find a way in--I will never be safe. I will never be secure. I must sleep with one eye open, my weapon at the ready. When my students ask why I’ve grown haggard and sallow I won’t be able to make them understand. You can never understand the horrors of battle unless you’ve lived them.

The buds of spring and the warmth of summer herald no happiness for me. As Mother Gaia travels on her elliptic the change of seasons brings only sneezes to my nose and shadows to my eyes. While the rest of life is rejoicing and rejuvenated by the return of crops and the blessings of wild flowers I am fighting for my very soul against those creatures that would invade my bedroom and my bathroom--the inner most sacred sanctums of my existence.

He escaped me this eve, but I will not forget his twitchy appendages and bulbous body. I will have my revenge.

I WILL WIN THIS WAR!

Dissertation Episode 5: Mucking Myth Mucker Mythy Myth-Myth
Or
Aaaaahhhhh!!!! I Broke My Brain

I don’t actually have anything to say--no axe to grind, no soapbox from which I will preach. Indeed my normally bounteous supply of rage lies cold and still like a dead volcano. Rather, I thought I would muddle through all the stuff on myth I have been reading and try to make some sense out of it.

That’s a great opening eh? I know THAT is precisely the sort of introduction that makes a person want to keep reading. (Lack of rage does not denote lack of sarcasm.)

In all honesty, though, I feel like I broke myself. I fear I am literally, actually, and truthfully (do you like how I used 3 words that mean the same thing?) not smart enough to do what I want to do. It’s kind of hard to tell because I’ve never actually applied myself wholly to something and seen just what my limits are--hell of a time to start, huh?

Even in music, certainly the only activity I devoted any serious amount of concentration to prior to grad school, I was only ever interested in being good enough. My naturally competitive nature (did you know I was stubborn and like to win? Apparently everyone has known but me) meant that I worked to be the “best” amongst the people around me, but being all I could be (thank you Army) was a non-issue. Who cared how good I could be? All that mattered was that I knew I was good.

This is, by the by, precisely the sort of thinking that led to a copious amount of B’s and not a few C’s on my report cards over the years. I’ve just never been interested in investing a lot of worry in a job that could be accomplished satisfactorily with little fuss.

But now, of course, I’m engaged in this process of active self-realization, education, and improvement. In other words, I am consciously trying to be the best thinker, et. al. that I can be. It’s incredibly over-rated and I highly recommend you pursue other venues of excitement. But active self-realization, especially this whole dissertation process, means that if I accept “good enough” then I will never know what I am capable of. I will never feel like I found the boundaries of my abilities.

At some point if you want to do something that matters you have to suck it up and try, regardless of the almost assured result of failure.

And so, having no shortage of ego, I embarked on my dissertation with lofty hopes and high goals of “saying something that mattered.” It’s really a good thing I was as concrete as possible in my goal-setting by the way. I have revised this goal, in no small part thanks to my awesome (AWESOME) advisor to “saying something that matters to me” and that small revision has allowed me to move forward whereas before I had the momentum of a beached whale.

But…(why is there always a but?) saying something that matters to me means figuring out what matters to me. Furthermore, due to my need to be right (oh shut up) I want everyone else to agree that what matters to me matters to them. And finally (isn’t it impressive I can lay out my neurosis like this in shopping list form?) because I am, at heart, a performer I want them to like agreeing with me; I want them to be entertained.

Why am I not humble, shy, and retiring? WHY?! In answer to that I’m going to go with the current obesity epidemic--it’s hard to fade into the background when you’re the size of a small dump truck. There’s one for the insurance companies: obesity made me egotistical.

But I digress. All of this rambling is to the larger point that I have been reading books of myths, books on the history of myth, books on the nature of myth, books on archetypes, and books on books about things that might possibly have contributed to the possible construction of social matrixes which in turn reproduce the myths of pre-history all the while claiming to be removing myth resulting in the myth of mythlessness…

You see why my brain is broken?

I have been reading these things and highlighting and note taking and composing and idea garnering and I can’t help but think to myself: Self, you’re no dummy. You can see the connections. You can see how things are interrelated. But are you really smart enough to make the argument yourself? Do you really have what it takes to put all of this into conversation with itself and make a larger overarching point that is valid and interesting?

And my self replies: I want a cookie.

This is my life people. By the power of Grayskull someone please find me a wealthy husband to support me and a vanilla cake with chocolate frosting.

Not necessarily in that order.

Dissertation Episode 4: I Put My Collective Fist Into the Face of the Collective Unconscious or Psychoanalyze THIS!

I hate psychoanalysis. I hate it; I hate it; I hate it. I think it’s dumb; I think it’s sexist. I think I’ve read way to much psychoanalysis and stuff about psychoanalysis in the last week.

But honestly, let’s just look at this logically for a moment. The Oedipus complex (based on Oedipus) rests on the belief that Oedipus who killed his father and slept with his mother secretly wanted to both kill his father and sleep with his mother. The problems with this analysis are twofold: 1) there is no textual evidence that Oedipus wanted and/or knew that Jocasta and Laius were his parents; 2) Oedipus is not a real person; he’s a textual character. Therefore, to base an entire theory on what he “secretly wanted” assumes that he has a psyche to secretly want something.

I like to believe that the Batman secretly wants me in his bed, but probably if I based an entire psychology on that belief I would not be allowed to live an unsupervised life around sharp objects and children.

But hey, Freud gave us the unconscious and dreams and all sorts of good stuff and I will admit that. His writings on civilization in particular are interesting. That being said I read a little Jung yesterday and I thought, “I like myth. I like mythy stuff. I should like Jung.” Yeah. As is said in the land I hale from: “whoopsie-doo.”

Jung’s collective unconscious, kind of a neat idea if your twelve playing D&D, is based on the universalist idea of humanity. Well, what’s wrong with this universal idea you ask? The universal human is male, white, educated, heterosexual, and reasonably wealthy. Cause that is SO universal. I know that deep inside me, the place from which all my morals, courage, and independence arises, lives a wealthy, educated, heterosexual, white man. (Really, doesn’t that explain so much of my behavior?)

So here I am, reading Jung, screaming (SCREAMING) out loud and then crying deep inside because there was no one to understand my rage and pain. Apparently when you read Jung, no one can hear you scream. Not only is this collective unconscious formulated from a purely male perspective, but one of the archetypes, the anima, is that damned female influence that exists particularly to test, uplift, defeat, and perplex men.

And I should digress for just a minute: I’m at a place here where I’m not sure that I believe there is an inherent male or female perspective--I think I’m moving into a realm where we all just have “perspectives” that have been shaped by our lives and environments and, because society is gendered, we learn to gender those perspectives. Probably well over half of the ten people reading this are cursing at me now, but for the two or three that might take issue with my use of “male perspective” I wanted to throw that in. When I say male perspective what I mean is a perspective coming from a person that is classically close-minded and unaware of their biases in favor of stereotypical masculine traits over stereotypical feminine traits.

No doubt someone will still hate me for that definition but whatever. I’m a feminist. My rage is infinite.

Back to psychoanalysis, however…

I think myth is really interesting and I think the same stories appearing in cultures all over the world in all different time periods is equally interesting. I love this tactile proof we have that societies, despite some fairly major differences, all evolve in similar ways or at least with similar mythic constructions. However, once you start making claims about a “universal humanism” (a term that is fairly, if not certainly, indefinable) then lines get drawn between what is natural and unnatural, human and inhuman, etc. etc. This is how witches get burned, crusades and jihads undertaken, and citizens denied equal rights due to their sexuality, race, and gender.

When we say “universal humanism” what we mean is “how I imagine a utopist version of the human to be” and what we imagine the perfect human to be is incredibly subjective dependent not a little on our religious, social, and economic backgrounds.

I think psychoanalysis has some incredibly interesting things to say--certainly notions of repression and suppression have informed my knowledge of family dynamics my whole life--and we would never be able to explore so many “whys;” I.e. why we like horror, gothic, or grotesque. Furthermore I would agree that we are unaware of our reasons for behaving as we do sometimes--certainly all of us have ample proof of that.

But here’s my sticking point: I have yet to see someone say (in a scholarly article I’ve read anyway) that they are borrowing from Freud or Jung, or Freud and Jung, in “this” particular way but want everyone to know that, in general, Freud and Jung are sexists, ego maniacs. I just feel like that disclaimer should be at the start of any psychoanalytic text so I, the reader, can know that the author understands and acknowledges the ridiculous aspects of the theories being worked with.

Too harsh? Must be my penis envy.

Dissertation Episode 3: I’ll Have A Large Iced Tea, No Lemon Or Sweetner

I feel better about today then I did five hours ago. Since feeling like a failure at research I’ve watched a JCVD with Kate and it feels right to be working on the JCVD project once again (jcvdproject.blogspot.com for those of you who are late to the game).

But JCVD is not my dissertation (though wouldn’t that be awesome?) and what has actually prompted this latest episode in the galaxy of Dissertationia is the incontrovertible proof that I am, in fact, my mother. In order to explain what brought me to this realization I must first share a story:

When I was little, too young to be left at home alone, but too old to be easily entertained by shiny things, my mother brilliantly navigated the problem of needing to grade and me needing to be watched by taking me to school with her. In retrospect I’m amazed that I was never bored. Sure, there were days I was particularly petulant (come on, I was a little kid) but I don’t recall ever being bored. I was scared (have you been in a high school when all the lights are off? I saw parts of Nightmare on Elm Street at some sleepover and it was all over after that. Creeping shadows are never the same for a seven year old) and I (possibly) had adventures in the “faculty bathroom” but I was never bored.

Mostly, my entertainment was due to my mother’s brilliant use of movies. Mom would load me up in the van with pillows, blankets, and my bean bag chair (it was my very favoritist thing there for awhile) and we would go first to the video store where I got to pick any (almost) two-three movies I wanted to watch, and then drive thru for some lunch and then over to the school where we would push four desks together. On those desks we would make a little nest for me out of my bean bag chair, blankets and pillows and Mom would roll in a tv/vcr cart from the AV department. If it was really special we popped popcorn in the Home-Ec room. I was blissfully happy for the length of movie, usually two, and Mom got her grading done.

Looking back on it I have to say my mom was pretty brilliant.

Along with wracking up a lot of good memories, a habit was also formed that I hadn’t consciously thought about until today. No, not the movies (though we all know that’s a habit) but the ritual of getting a large iced tea before undertaking any hard work.

When we would drive thru, you understand, even if we didn’t get food Mom always got a large iced tea with no lemon or sweetner. In fact, the necessity of this iced tea has shaped our drive thru habits at times (McDonalds has the best iced tea and is therefore the favored restaurant while Wendy’s is rarely visited due to their subpar beverage service). When I was home over the summer and studying for my comps like a madwoman, my mom would come into my room and say, “I’m going to go get an iced tea, would you like one?” And I would say “yes please.” And just that one little act, the act of her bringing me an iced tea made me feel so darned taken care of that I didn’t lose my mind until September when I was back in Las Vegas with no iced tea in sight.

What I didn’t realize, even as lately as this past summer, was that the iced tea was not simply a drink, but triggered in my mind all the feelings and emotions of being blissfully relaxed and refreshed--either after working on the house, track practice, or whatever. In a sort of Pavlovian response my mind/body recognizes that anything is doable--so long as one can take a break to drink some iced tea every now and then.

Today I headed into school because I needed to research Joan of Arc. I knew it was going to be painful (and indeed, today’s experience was remarkably unfulfilling so it will continue to be painful) but as I drove up Maryland Parkway I thought, I should get something to drink. Carl’s Jr. is right across from my building so I just popped over. A crackly voice said “would you like to try *crackle* bac-*crackle* gian-*crackle* pie?” and I responded “No thank you. Could I just have a medium iced tea?” “Was that Hi-C or Iced tea?”

“Iced tea please. No lemon or sweetner.”

As I walked into school on my Saturday to work I looked down at my iced tea and thought, wow--I really am my mom. But I’m pretty okay with that. She doesn’t believe me, but she’s a pretty cool lady to be.

(And McDonald’s really is the best iced tea. As this horrifying experience known as dissertation writing continues I will be imbibing only McDonald’s beverages not Carl’s Jr. It’s important to have good tea!)

Clash of the Titanically Bad Ideas

I imagine it started with someone’s 6th grade mythology project in 1981. Fresh from the thrill (and I use the word loosely to be sure) of Harry Hamlin’s Clash of the Titans, some intrepid twelve year old took it upon himself to rewrite Greek Mythology and make it “cool.” Unfortunately, due to bad teaching or indulgent parents, this same child never learned that he had grossly misunderstood the myths that so entranced him and that to remythologize, rewrite myths, you need to be smarter (and a better writer) than the average teenage twitter.

This is how a catastrophe is born.

It’s no surprise really; the writers seemed to be lacking experience and one of the two credited for the screenplay is responsible for Aeon Flux--could no one really see this coming? I mean, I don’t have much faith in Louis Leterrier the director either, but he made the most recent Incredible Hulk; you would think after that experience he would have learned the importance of remakes being…you know…good.

Instead this movie is the cinematic equivalent of pyrite: shiny, pretty, and totally useless. The cinematography is quite something; the music is great. But the script, and Sam Worthington for that matter, were the sort of bad that makes babies cry. Is it that hard to buy a copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology? It’s like five bucks at your local Barnes & Noble.

Some of the flaws weren’t the movie’s fault, or at least, the first Clash made the same mistake. I’m thinking here specifically of Medusa’s lair which someone, somewhere decided should be in the Underworld. It’s hard to die in the Underworld since you’re supposed to be dead when you get there. Sticking Medusa in the Underworld serves no purpose at all; people don’t just wander in. But hey, it gives everyone a chance to see Charon and talk about “bribing the ferryman” so okay, whatever.

But then (and this might be my favorite part) the Kraken is a creation of Hades? And it was the Kraken that destroyed the Titans? And it was the Kraken that was the mightiest weapon on Olympus? And Hades pretends to love Zeus? And goddesses that have no part whatsoever in all of the story? And (I take back my earlier assertion--this is definitely my favorite part) King Acrisius attempts TO LAY SIEGE TO OLYMPUS.

He attempts to lay siege to Olympus. I don’t…I can’t…I mean who thought that was a good idea. What writer in what room said, “hey, I know--let’s have Acrisius lay siege to Olympus and then Zeus can pull an Uther Pendragon and sleep with his wife while disguised.” You don’t lay siege to Olympus. It’s like trying to run from God (see my Legion rant).

But this whole mess of a grade school script was clearly uninterested in mythology, rules of myth, or even basic fantasy. In fact, what this movie actually proves is that Neo-Platonists are alive and working in Hollywood. Allow me to explain.

Long about 1,000 years ago Christianity was doing real well, and all the borrowing from Greek and Roman writings meant that philosophers needed to explain why we were borrowing from Plato and Aristotle, etc. Since the word of God was the word of wisdom, we couldn’t be building civilization based on the words of pagans who worshiped multiple deities. So began the subsuming of the Greek Myths into Christianity. There was absolutely nothing wrong with this; it’s a time honored tradition and Milton shows off this melding of Greek and Christian mythology to perfection in Paradise Lost.

The problem is that now, four hundred (almost) years after Milton we have the latest Clash of the Titans that felt like Zeus and Hades are boring as the Gods of Sky and Underworld and that this story would be vastly improved if rewritten into some Bible battle over humanity. This means that Zeus goes on and on (and on) about his “love for mankind” and his disappointment in their turning away from him while Hades counteracts with his having learned to live off our fear and hate. Perseus then becomes the savior of man who must teach us how to save ourselves and protect our souls from the corruption of Hades. Yeah, read Genesis and the story of Christ and you can see why they released this movie on Easter Weekend.

Zeus doesn’t have love for mankind. Zeus has love for pretty women as evidenced by his plethora of rape/seductions and demi-god children. Speaking of which, there’s a whole lot in there about how there is “only one” demi-god child (Perseus) and how only he has the power to save the people who have turned away from the Gods. Because apparently Theseus, Achillies, Jason, and Hercules don’t count.

And Io is cursed with agelessness? Because her being a cow was just too trite? It’s like thousands of years of mythology didn’t even exist for these people.

And maybe maybe all of this bad blending of myths could have worked (though I seriously doubt it) except that while we are clearly supposed to be put off by the insulting of the Gods, we are also supposed to believe in the power of man (more rhetoric that gets beat into the ground) and how man has strength without the Gods.

It’s just a mess. Just a horrible, horrible, horrible mess. Horrible mess.

And why do filmmakers keep letting Sam Worthington make speeches? The man is not rhetorically gifted (a bit of a problem considering his career choice) and they really need to keep his lines to a minimum.

Oh, and apparently if you’re a demi-god you know sword Kung Fu after one lesson? But you’re going to turn down the gifts of the gods because you want to do this “as a man?” What does it even mean to do something “as a man?” We’re not talking about a Faustian deal here; we’re talking about using the super sword that will kill the monster you’re supposed to kill without getting everyone else around you killed.

It was just so bad. I’m almost too heartbroken to be that upset.

I feel a little bit like the preview told me I was pretty and promised to love me forever and after I said yes and gave this movie two underwhelming hours of my life it never called me back. And gave me the pox in the process.

I’m just saying; this is the sort of abuse one doesn’t recover from quickly.

Stay away from this movie--if you look at it too long you’ll probably turn to stone.