Nancy's Musings

One of my housemates and I had a conversation the other day. It's very refreshing, getting older. Roommate confrontations begin to look more like Companionship Inventory and less like sibling violence. Companionship Inventory, for the uninitiated, is a phrase from LDS mission life. When you serve a full-time LDS mission, you are asked to work constantly. Each hour should be accounted for in some productive capacity. Missionaries are also assigned a companion that must be with them all the time. When the companionship is struggling (often) or is new (every six weeks or so), the work suffers, so the missionary leaders created a solution: Companionship Inventory time, or time to spend as needed in repairing or strengthening the relationship between companions. A missionary is given one CI hour per week, if necessary. Some companionships don't ever take the time because they don't have any trouble getting along, but if there is discord for whatever reason, it's best to talk...

The publishing industry in the United States especially exhibits a trend especially alarming to me, an as-yet-unpublished writer. We read the same authors. Even if every book an author ever writes is so identical as to be indistinguishable from all her/his other works, we read them all to the exclusion of new writers. If a writer sells, no matter what trash he/she sells, the books are published, marketed, and consumed. [I'm looking at you, Clive Cussler]. Well, if it works once, right? So why didn't Stephanie Meyer write another Twilight-ish saga? Maybe because she valued her craft? Clearly the only direction to go from there was up, and slightly to the left. There's a security in reading books by a familiar author. We trust them. But even with a critical eye for lesser and greater books in the same saga, that attitude privileges the author over the text, a theoretical stance roundly troubled by critics in the later 20th century. When we bow to that authority, we diminish o...

Have I blogged about spam yet? Today, I blog about spam. I actually really like spam. You have to get turkey spam, though, otherwise you'll be dead inside three bites. Sodium, cholesterol, intestine: spam has it all, and probably several more frightening things besides. Turkey spam has less sodium and fewer calories than even light, or low-sodium spam. Spam tastes really great, thinly sliced on a grilled cheese sandwich, or inside a quesadilla. It can work cubed in a salad, or just fried with veg. There are two other reasons to buy it: it stores well, and it's relatively cheap, as meat goes. I am 2.45 months into a 3-month stretch without a paycheck. I am counting the days, and watching all the summer sales pass me by. I am eating food-storage. Last week, I drank milk I bought sometime last April. My oldest and very dear friend Jennifer just helped me out by donating a week's worth of freezer meals for a two-hour babysitting job (I shall have to tell the story of the cren...

School starts soon, and I've entered panic mode. Panic mode is just slightly more literal for me than most instances of use. I am subject to severe anxiety attacks after most social encounters, but in a state of heightened stress, they get worse. After three months without any income, a diet of canned food storage, and a fairly rocky social situation, I face not only the beginning of another semester of teaching (for which I have little natural affinity), but the progress of my graduate degree (for which I have less talent, but more interest). Teaching carries a kind of ill-balanced judgment from students whose opinion is only partially valid, but whose responses can destroy all future opportunities in academia. Students don't understand teaching, and yet their casual and emotional response means nearly everything in a market in which they, under great economic and social duress, provide nearly all the capital. They don't know what we're doing, and yet their evaluations...

I have never been friends with boys, teenage boys, or men. I have always been friends with girls or women who think it's easier to be friends with male-type people, but I've never been sympathetic to their now-cliche responses.* Last night, I tried to explain my own inability to some roommates, and I'm not sure I got it quite right, which is why, all Ancient Mariner-like, I'm doing it now. All relationships are defined by the substance between people. Typically, that substance is power, or information, or both (this is related to both Foucault, and Actor-Network Theory, neither of which is as prosaic as this blog post). The more of that substance is shared, the closer that relationship is. In very specific relationships, that substance is physical intimacy. Women are all sisters. My degree of friendship with other women is on a broad scale of closeness, but it's all just a degree of the same relationship, which is defined by how much we have mutually forgiven/tolera...

When I was a teenager, I would often listen to people. I'm not a genius listener: I can be pretty absent-minded in a conversation, and I can lecture when the other person in the conversation strikes a vein of geek-gold. But I listen a lot because I want to know things about people, about their lives and their opinions, and what they learned at school today. I want to hear them geek out and get excited, or articulate some personal philosophy they've just discovered. I like listening. When my mother found me a counselor when I was going through a hard time, I spent most of our sessions listening to him. That made me a little upset, but it was helpful in some ways to begin understanding myself. I learn a lot from listening. If you wait long enough, you will probably hear me repeat everything you've ever told me. My memory is Elephantine. When I was a teenager, I also invented an imaginary friend. It didn't happen naturally: I had never had an imaginary friend as a kid (Goo...

Life is an agonizing challenge when you're a horror-film lover who won't watch anything rated worse than PG-13. I have recently uncovered an excitement for supernatural horror. I used to hate it, to hate being scared. It's unpleasant; why would we seek it out? And truly, I don't know. I still don't enjoy being scared. I don't like the nausea of gore, or the scenes of bodily violence. I find the human body profoundly sacred, and destructive violence very profane. Plus most horror movies usually also have sex, which is its own kind of profane. I don't like brutishness, but horror with a sense of subtlety. . . that is extremely enticing. I think I am seduced by the uncanny: Freud's uncanny, to be precise. I enjoy things which create dissonance with simultaneous familiarity and unfamiliarity. I like being shaken up, and being introduced to something unexpected. At the same time, I seem to be quite careful what kinds of images I put in my brain. I want to go ...