FAIL

For old geezers who don't know the modern meaning of "fail," there's a website with thousands of examples. You'll notice it's never used as part of a sentence: "fail" encapsulates a situation. Who needs verbs when one word can do that?

I always thought "fail" was kinda harsh. It's anti-sarcasm that shuts down communication. Walking down the road, you trip. "Smooth," your friend says, meaning the opposite. "Fail," he could've said, labelling you just as thoroughly.

But then I was playing Chinese checkers with my cousins, and now I understand:

Why I Need to Know Everything

I guess late Christmas Eve isn't the time I expected to resume blogging, but I wouldn't have expected the whole family to not have a single present wrapped yet, either. "We're a family of slackers," Melanie said. As it turns out, I didn't expect to be enjoying winter break so much, so I guess that makes for a whole round of unexpectation. Since I only had a few days to transition from studying in Beijing this summer to going to school, I haven't had a break longer than four days since June. Each day I wake up and am amazed that it's still vacation.

Vacation is always tough for me, though, because I never know how that relates to accomplishment. I usually define "rest" as anything that doesn't feel like work, but I have to watch out because the pleasure I get from doing personal projects is really similar to the pleasure I get finishing work. For example, I've been making a computer game intermittently over the last few years. It's almost finished. Andrew and I were playing it tonight. It's to the point, though, where the work the game needs is difficult and not that important. So it's mostly my perfectionistic streak that's making me continue. And I enjoy writing, but if I think of blogging as a duty then I feel overloaded. I was actually very conflicted about blogging tonight because I anticipate feeling a sense of accomplishment, and that worries me.

One thing I have been doing, though, is going to Barnes and Noble to read. I read Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers. It's a boring hypothesis (successful people have other things--parents, wealth, luck, culture--besides their own grit and intelligence going for them) but he cites so many interesting studies. In one page he happened to mention an IQ test for really smart people, and gave an example. "Teeth is to hen as nest is to ___"

I don't know the answer. And I think the problem is not because of my analogical skills, but because I don't know enough about teeth and hens. What's the relationship between teeth and hens? Hens are female, do teeth have something to do with that? Teeth have calcium, do hens have something to do with that? And once I did figure it out I'd have to be able to apply it to nests. I don't know anything about nests.

A few nights ago I was reading online about a study that concluded two things about octopuses: they prefer HDTV; and they have no personalities. If I only knew more, I found myself thinking, about the differences between regular television and HDTV, I'd be able to assess the researcher's results. One comment mentioned pixels and frame rate and went on to a complicated discussion about persistance of vision that I wish I had the background knowledge to follow.

That's all I'm asking for, really. The background knowledge for the world. Some people consider knowledge to be an end, but really it's only as good as you can apply it when wanted.

The point, of course, isn't to know about HDTV per se, it's to know that "hens' teeth" is a phrase as is "mare's nest." Neither of which I'd heard of before I googled the analogy, and so according to Hoeflin I might not be the smartest person ever. Wisdom is applied knowledge, so to become wise I have something to work on. But maybe I should wait until after Christmas break to do the real work on that.

That Giggly Phase

Blogging's fallen by the wayside in the days leading up to the LSAT. It didn't go as well as I hoped. I think I'm going to be disappointed with the score. My current schedule isn't much more conducive to blogging. I have two papers due by Wednesday and they are both in the beginning stages, shall we say.

I think I've reached my limit of fruitful output tonight. It's late and this is as far as I've gotten in my paper on Joyce.

look at my thesis!! this is my totally legitimate second (that is, thesis-ical) sentence, devoted entirely to hugh kenner and his dead faults, not to say that his deadness, that is, his death or dying or in the process being in a state of no longer declining through the abyss of human temporality, can be contained by what is now known to be the most extravagent expression of joyce's voices (so to speak) in his pocket at this time which is unavoidably long, however inextricably tasty the sentences might be. it is large and powerful and has voices. many voices.

Then the said creature began to laugh and laugh and laugh (indifferent voices). You are no good wife.

I wish myself well in the coming days. And a merry Christmas to all.

Katy Perry Hates Women or Gays

I'm warming up to writing my English papers. Let me practice by doing a "reading" of Katy Perry's song...

Before I start analyzing a pop song, I need to clarify that I know hits don't need to be deep for people to like them. I'm okay with "Grillz", appreciate the cohesion of "Hey Ya" even if the chorus has one and a half words, and love word play, self-centered or not, like Chamillionaire freestyling. But I do expect that a song doesn't contradict itself. In logic, there's a fundamental proposition of non-contradiction. Literary analysis has that too. People don't love nonsense, so if a work looks like nonsense, there must be an explanation for why. Let's examine what's strange about the lyrics of Hot N Cold before we propose an explanation.

The #1-charted hit in America's Top 40 this week is "Hot N Cold" by Katy Perry. It's a catchy song sung by a woman who seems to be empowering women to take control in relationships. Her significant other (in the music video, her fiance) won't commit and the singer is finally doing something about it.

At least, that's what the song is about. But if you look at the lyrics, Perry's words clash with this theme of gender equality. I'm pasting the lyrics in full; if you're going to be offended, pretend it's the word "blitch."

You change your mind

Like a girl changes clothes

Yeah you PMS

Like a bitch, I would know

And you overthink

Always speak cryptically

I should know

That you're no good for me

Chorus [

'Cause you're hot then you're cold

You're yes then you're no

You're in then you're out

You're up then you're down

You're wrong when it's right

It's black and it's white

We fight, we break up

We kiss, we make up

You!

You don't really want to stay, no

You!

But you don't really want to go-o

You're hot then you're cold

You're yes then you're no

You're in then you're out

You're up then you're down

]

We used to be

Just like twins, so in sync

The same energy

Now's a dead battery

Used to laugh 'bout nothing

Now you're plain boring

I should know that you're not gonna change

[Chorus]

Someone call the doctor

Got a case of a love bi-polar

Stuck on a roller coaster

Can't get off this ride

You change your mind

Like a girl changes clothes

[Chorus]

Frustration in a relationship is nothing new, and the song's metaphors are hardly poetic enough to sustain the theme. Instead, Perry speculates as to the underlying causes of her frustration. The song starts and ends with the declaration, "You change your mind / Like a girl changes clothes." It's feminine capriciousness that's the problem. A few weeks ago I had these lines in my head and posted my status on Facebook as "Will changes minds like a girl changes clothes." I received several comments accusing me of chauvanism.

How curious that a woman would pen them! In fact, the association between women and uncurable, undesirable character traits is stronger when we consider the next line. "Yeah you PMS / Like a bitch, I would know." Again, the problem is the masculine acting feminine. Behavior that is reproachably unnatural in a man is an unavoidable biological determinant of behavior in women. The singer cites personal experience as a testament both to her conclusion that he should change and to the accuracy of her comparison.

The message appears to be, "Don't act like a girl." Perry's identification of herself as acting bitchy, taken with her yet-confident tone, inclines us to believe that she doesn't consider women themselves to be bad. It's just that two women in a relationship is too many.

It's not good enough that one person act womanly (inconstant, sentimental, irrational) and one act manly (stabilizing, shepherding, reasoning). That's the relationship already! The singer is the man of the relationship: she's addressing the problem, she's not letting emotion get in the way of breaking up, she's not changing her mind, she's annoyed at indecision and opaque statements.

What's dissatisfactory about this situation isn't the singer's (masculine) character. We cheer on the singer. What's wrong is that the singer isn't free to be herself. A relationship with this unmanageable guy limits her self-expression, because if she acted feminine things would devolve even further.

She needs him to be opposite. At the beginning, the singer relished her "twin" who was "so in synch," but once the initial fun wore off, the pair is "a dead battery" because there are no more differences to convert from chemical energy to eletrical energy. Love is complementary.

Interestingly enough, Perry used to be on a Christian label. In the church there's a split between views of gender relations called "complementarianism" and "egalitarianism." The first is more traditional and sees men and women as two halves of a puzzle, each with respective roles and responsibilities. The second thinks of men and women as being faded pages which, when laid on top of each other, gives greater clarity than each individually. Thus, under complementarianism, women might take care of the kids, and under egalitarianism, women might be pastors. Apparently Katy Perry is a complementarian.

My only question is, after listening to the very liberal "I Kissed a Girl", it seems Katy Perry can't decide between being shocking and being conservative. Has she found true womanhood?

Summarizing Myself

Despite de-summer-izing myself recently, summarizing myself was long overdue. Facebook lets people casts themselves however they want to in an "About Me" section.

Some people say it simply. Andrew Schatz used to have, "I'm a licensed Platinum Member of the Republican Party. I even have a card, my member number is 559629888-S892." One of the best About Me's I've read.

Jessica's is pretty good, too, but a different style. "I love my people. I love. a lot. Im happy and bubbly and kind of really ridiculous.

I'm a ball of energy. I dance in my underwear and love to sing at the top of my lungs. I drive with all the windows down and the radio all the way up. Im a hopeless romantic. I curl up and just read for fun. I take pride in being a professional partier. I eat crackers in bed and dance till I drop. I like being myself, being stupid and honest and real."

Mine has been out of date, however. Check out my old About Me:

I wrote a first draft of this paragraph. I used to dislike eating fish. I have generally poor taste in girls, am often tempted to provoke people because society covers up who we are, am working on not sounding arrogant, do my best thinking in the shower, would analyze your socks off if you'd enjoy it, am an aspiring writer (if i will become one), am unsure how to judge the flexibility of my ambitions, am dazzled by wit, and spend hours a week learning Chinese without knowing why. I love God, enjoy summarizing myself because it is inexhaustible, and am romantic about the idea of being romantic.

I read that and barely recognize myself in it. I was so aggressively difficult. Wanna judge me? Bring it! I challenge you to say I'm doing life the wrong way. I can face me, why can't you? I can confess myself tenderly but honestly. Criticism? I already know it.

Now I look at my About Me and it feels foreign. I guess those things are true of me, but I would never summarize myself like that. Except I did. A year ago I considered my change in how much I like fish to be important, somehow, to who I was. I don't study Chinese any more. I'm still not sure why I did. And what was all that about my taste in girls for? I can't believe I needed to say that.

I know why people include random things. Partially, I think, it's a cultural incline toward post-modernism, which is incredulity toward grand narratives. People don't really think there is a theme to their life. But to the extent that they do, random facts juxtaposed with core values (did you notice how I slipped in the phrase about believing in God?) questions the reader's ability to distinguish important from insignificant. And if you think it's stupid that I like The Office and admirable that I donate 90% of my income to the poor, then you should be wary of weighting the first little and the second a lot. For all you know, watching The Office determines my value as much as donating all I own to the poor. Don't judge me, the About Me says.

Anyway, I had to compose a more up-to-date About Me. Wouldn't want the Internet falling behind in knowing me. But it's difficult to get the right tone. Too pedantic, too narrow, too effervescent, too depressed. My old one at least captured my life pretty well. But in the two or three days I thought about it, this is what I came up with.

I really like About Me-ing because for a writer a definition is a creation, and I am always being made new. I like neologisms (the awkwardly new), kids (the newly awkward), and applesauce in blue Gator Dining bowls. It's tasty. I lived in China for seven months but am still American. I hear I'm more mellow than I was in high school, which makes me nervous. I don't want to be a squash. Recently I've regressed some, I think, like a golf swing gets worse before it gets better. I look forward to heaven because then it's all better. I try. I try.

It's not very good. That's okay, though. People don't friend me for my About Me.

Eat Cats! with Litotes

In Turlington today a woman dressed as a chicken passed out vegetarianism propaganda.


We must infer that the "me" of her sign refers to the general population of chickens, not to the woman in the costume herself. Apparently the woman considers herself similar enough in nature to chickens to imply that eating one is linguistically equivalent to eating a person. Who's "me"? We're all "me"! Only this "me" knows how to read and write and stand in Turlington because the "me"s who walk by are the ones with power to change circumstances and the "me"s that go cluck cluck aren't capable of embracing any kind of ideology.

I haven't taken any literary theory courses, but I think that's deconstruction: using the "text" to show how the text undermines itself. The woman wears a costume for solidarity but in doing so necessarily shows disparity.

Well, the chicken let me take her picture, so I felt obligated to take the card she handed out. On the front, there was a cat's cute head facing a pig's cute head. In large letters, the postcard questioned, "Which do you pet? Which do you eat? Why?"

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--I took the one less traveled by. See, I think propaganda relies on politeness. Hear an entire argument before you respond, politeness requests, and then don't be nit-picky if you must criticize it. The problem is that propaganda tiptoes and politeness only tackles runaways. I pet cats and eat pigs because society has conditioned me that way? Because cats catch mice and pigs don't? Because pig fur is coarse? Because I don't like snorting or mud? Because there's more edible meat per pound on a pig than on a cat?

Politeness, if I had taken that road, would absorb the intended effect of the argument: we are inconsistent with which animals we decide to eat. We should be consistent.

But you have to go further than that to find the meaning. Consistency isn't inherently good! In between the flier's conclusion and the flier's logic is a gap. The implication is that we shouldn't eat pigs because we don't eat cats, but one could just as logically reply, "You're right. I should add cats to my diet."

In literature, there's a technique called litotes that has the same gap between what it says and what it means. "Litotes" (pronounced lye-toh-teez, with the emphasis on the first or second syllable) sounds like a kind of legume to me, to be served with lentils, cous-cous, and cats, but in fact it's a name for understatement. More specifically, "understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by the negative of the contrary." For example, you see Florida demolish the Citadel in football last Saturday 70-19, and you say, "Not bad." That's litotes.

In Anglo-Saxon poetry this rhetorical device was "not uncommon" (to quote from my translated copy of Beowulf--I hope the translator consciously used litotes to describe litotes). One king in Beowulf was found as a baby abandoned at sea, and when he died years later they set his body off to sea, loaded in a boat with all their tribe's treasures.

With no fewer gifts did they furnish him there,
the wealth of nations, than those did who
at his beginning first sent him forth
alone over the waves while still a small child.

Logically, this is a tautology. "His gifts were greater than or equal to the gifts he had at the beginning--that is, none." Duh! The use of litotes adds an element of irony, which is the knowing distance between what is meant and what is said.

What I find fascinating about the Eat Cats card and the Anglo-Saxon use of litotes is that in order to understand what is meant, you have to already know what is meant. In another situation, the statements could have the opposite meaning. In South China, for example, they eat cats and dogs, so if I got the flier from them, I'd think they were trying to win me over. The dead man's treasures are a harder example, but if I didn't understand the poet was doing it on purpose, I might think it was just a stupid line to fill up space.

What are we reading when we come across phrases like these? Devoid of content, these strategies, I think, give us a chance to practice the point of view of the author. We have to think like a vegetarian to read arguments about why we should think like a vegetarian. It's enticing. Next thing you know, I'll be out in Turlington dressed as a chicken myself.

Toward a More Perfect Score

The LSAT is two Saturdays from today; I'm in high gear preparing for it. I'm excited to take the LSAT for the same reason that I'm nervous: since it tests fairly inflexible skills (you can't learn to reason in a day), the LSAT will test my aptitude more than my achievement. If I score well, it'll be extremely gratifying; if not, I'm just not the person I thought I was. How's that for a reality check.

What's fun, though, is that even though I'm studying, I'm not really studying. It's like I've made a juggling routine, the tricks of which I can all do individually, and just need some practice before I can do the routine flawlessly, too. That's fun because I'm practicing the nuances as much as I am the big picture.

The LSAT testing conditions are very strict, you see. In fact, I think I need to fax them Monday to say the name on my government-issued ID is William I Penman instead of Will I Penman. They wouldn't let me in otherwise, I don't think. Taking the LSAT will be like going to camp, only in the winter and with one bathroom break. There's a checklist I received by email:

Test takers are allowed to bring into the test center only a clear plastic ziplock bag containing the following items: #2 or HB pencils, LSAT Admission Ticket stub, valid ID, wallet, keys, medical and hygiene products, highlighter, erasers, pencil sharpener, a beverage in plastic container or juice box, and a snack (for break only).

I can't wait to pack my clear plastic ziplock bag (maximum size, as the extended rules say, of one gallon/3.79 liter).

To get in the zone, I've scanned a sample answer sheet so I can get used to the layout of the scantron page. And, of course, I've been using pencils. I don't want to get to the day of the LSAT and be flustered by good ol' #2.

I hit a snag, actually, when it became apparent that America does not sell pencil sharpeners. I was halfway through my week, felt stressed out, and needed to just do some practice sections. My pencils, however, were all blunted beyond acceptable multiple-choice-ability. I searched our house--no pencil sharpener. I walked over to a bookstore--no pencil sharpener. I walked further, to another store--no pencil sharpeners. They had pencils, but no pencil sharpeners. Mechanical pencils, may I remind you, were out.

At this point I was wishing I was just taking the LSAT in China, because in China they know how to sell pencil sharpeners. For cheap, too. There was a store right down my street, and I could've bought ten of them, with ten different designs. And they all would've broken after one use, probably.

I eventually cut my losses and used (gasp) the pen I had in my pocket the whole time. My fight to study for the LSAT was not over, though. Confident that the overpriced UF bookstore in the student union had Gator-ified pencil sharpeners, I made it to the union a few days later (after asking all my friends if they had a pencil sharpener I could have and being told that no one in America ever needs a pencil sharpener) and bought one. For $4. They had an 89 cent version, but the expensive kind had a "high quality carbon steel blade." It's like Excalibur. I will vanquish the LSAT. And, it has a second hole in case I need to sharpen crayons. In case there's a surprise drawing section after the logic games.

To complete my LSAT paraphanelia, I dropped by Walmart today to buy an analog (non-digital) watch. I tested all the watches in the $9-12 range for ease of time adjustment. As long as it can go from 12:00-12:35, the watch can serve all my purposes. It's a good thing my standards are so low, because the watch I bought is pretty ghetto. I ripped off the band because I don't actually want to use it as a watch, and the metal came apart no problem. The watch itself aspires to telling the date but is unmoveable from the 16th and tells the days of the week in Spanish.

But now I have my watch and pencils. All I have left to do is be me. And not forget to bring my bilingual timepiece.