Syllabus #152

Pardon my absence last weekend, and my tardiness today.  I hope you invoked the 15-minute rule and bounced when you realized I was a no-show.  

I only ever had one opportunity to ditch class because the instructor was more than 15 minutes late.  Freshman year at UArts, our spring semester 3-D design teacher was kind of a mess.  He was a disorganized schlub but he meant well.  One day we all got to the studio and he was nowhere to be found, so we waited out the clock and at the stroke of 9:15 we all walked out, and as we filed down the hall to the elevator, the doors parted and out stepped the instructor, his arms laden with hot fresh boxes of Krispy Kreme donuts for all of us.  Nobody went back to class.  I still feel like an asshole for that.

We went to Chattanooga last weekend.  I'm a fan.  It's like Nashville's much more chill younger sibling.  Lots of outposts of Nashville-based restaurants, breweries, and coffee shops without the aggressive Woo culture and in-your-face bro-country jingoism.  

What else? It's been a busy time.  School's almost out for the summer (school).  I'm a glutton for punishment and will have two summer jobs again, but with less responsibility and fewer hours than the regular school year, andplusalso I like money, so it's cool, I guess?

 

Did you hear the one about Dolly Parton starring in a Taco Bell musical about Mexican Pizza?  I have questions.  

If a fart falls in an office, and nobody smells it, was it ever really a fart?

This cultural deep dive into the mullet posits that, these days, you'd be hard pressed to fashion a haircut that would cause someone to cross the street to get away from you.  I disagree.  If I shaved a stripe down the middle of my head and then braided my remaining hair into Pippi Longstocking braids on either side so I looked like a demented human Cynthia doll, I feel like the nice white moms pushing toddlers in their expensive jogging strollers would probably elect to give me wide berth.  

Analog Reading:

Finished Lost in the Valley of Death by Harley Rustad.  It was kind of underwhelming.  It wasn't as compelling as, say, Krakauer's Into the Wild, and the missing person at the center of it seemed like kind of a chode, honestly.

Read The End of October by Lawrence Wright.  Hoo boy.  I guess this book was considered remarkable and prescient when it was published in April 2020, because of how meticulously detailed and eerily similar the pandemic plot mirrored covid, given that it was obviously written many months, if not years, before our current pandemic began.  It finally felt safe enough to read it now, and honestly I'm glad I didn't read it, (or Station Eleven or The Stand) any earlier than I did.  It was quite a thrill ride and the pacing was brisk.  If I had read a book like this prior to 2020, it would have seemed completely implausible and I would have considered the plot to have gone off the rails at about 30 pages in, but as things stand, I kept reading and nodding and thinking, "Yea, that checks out."  How times change.  

Up next, I'm going to crack open The Matchmaker:  A Spy in Berlin by Paul Vidich.  Lately, I've been trying out some genres I don't normally dig on, like thrillers and spy novels, and it's been fun to change it up. We'll see how this one goes.