random stuff

Thanks, everybody (about the utterly clueless student). All through the teaching assistant training that I did years ago, I got the phrase pounded into my head "People who become professors were atypical students" and so it makes me wonder sometimes if my expectations are just too high.

Except: I have as many as 100 students per semester and I learn all their names, and I remember their names at the end of the semester. (It takes me a couple of weeks but I learn them). Students have maybe five different professors. I don't think it's too much too ask.

(I've also been 'described' by students who don't remember my name, to the secretary: usually as "the one with long hair and glasses" because I'm the only person in the department who currently fits that description).

I suppose I'm extra-sensitive to the not-remembering-name thing because I go through periods of feeling kind of like I'm invisible.

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Shirley Chisholm, yes, I remember that name.

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I happened to wind up listening to a few minutes of the Morning Show again today, and I once again find myself wondering: what part of your brain do you have removed so you can utterly seamlessly segue between horrifying and sad stories (some suicide bomber blows up a bunch of Iraqis whose only apparent "crime" is that they're looking for work) and dumb celebrity news (I kid you not: the lady-host said something dangerously close to "George Clooney, rrrrrroooooowwwwwwr...[or however you render that "gee I'd like to have sex with HIM" purr in written English.]). I'd make a bad host for the very reason that I'd be kind of unable to do that. I'd be like, Yeah, yeah, Clooney made another movie. Now can we talk about how to try to solve the REAL problems in the world?

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Ate dinner at someone's house last night and I think I must have got something made with aspartame; my head is killing me this morning. (I cannot consume any artificial sweeteners; aspartame gives me migraines and Splenda gives me stomach cramps.) I am too nice to be an Insane Lifestyle Mentioner about it, so I just try to avoid things that look suspect, but seriously? You don't expect that whippy gelatin salad with the marshmallows and cream cheese and pineapple chunks to be made with sugar-free Jell-O. I mean, that's kind of like ordering a Double Big Mac and a Supersize Fries and then getting a diet coke.

I popped an Excedrin migraine; hopefully it will kick in soon. God bless the man (I'm assuming it's a man as most pharmaceutical researchers still are) who invented that stuff. It has saved me a lot of pain on many occasions.

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I'm contemplating another Fragment for later this week.

I pulled out a recording of Christmas music I listen to every year (and have, for more than 10 years now I think). One particular piece on it I had worked up kind of a little mental movie about. I was listening to it again yesterday and was amazed at the vividness of my imagination - the story has almost become like a memory of something *I* did rather than a story I made up - I can feel the chill in the air, and see the people on the street, and even feel the velvet that one of the characters is buying in a cloth shop.

I suppose that's how some people manage to be fabulists. They imagine something and they keep coming back and polishing up that imagining, but they lack the little stop-cock, the little safety valve, that reminds them "this is just something you made up" and so they go on acting as if it were REAL.

I find myself stopping from time to time - either while reading a novel or when I'm making up one of my fragmentary stories - and going all meta, and thinking, "man, where did that come from?" or "I can't believe how vividly I'm picturing this."

It sounds dumb, down on the electronic-version of paper, but it's one of those amazing moments.

I remember reading one of the biographies of Truman Capote (it was the one that was all in bits and pieces from people who knew him. I think it was the one George Plimpton did) and being amazed at how Capote could just make stuff up - about his life, about what was going on around him - and pass it off totally bald-faced, as if it were really real, and not seem too bugged about it when people caught him in a lie.

I often think - usually as I'm setting off on a trip somewhere - how much fun it could be to make up just this alternate life, where I have a different career, or I'm a different person, or something, and then "present" it to whoever is sitting with me at dinner on the train.

But I'm always afraid - afraid that someone I wind up sitting with or near will be a relation to someone I know or will somehow distantly know me, or that if I tell everyone I'm a book editor or a zookeeper or something, that no matter how exotic I make the job, karma will have put me next to a person who really, truly, actually has that job, and I will be caught in my lie and look like an idiot.

And yeah, it IS lying. That's a big part of it.

But like I said, it amazed me that Capote could apparently do it so gleefully and so without concern for getting caught.

I think part of my idea to fabulize (if that is an acceptable word) is that I fear, deep down, that most people find my career terribly boring. And by extension, find me boring.

I do not know why, but that is one of my deepest fears: that people find me boring. I'd almost rather be thought of as someone who "makes up stuff" and cannot be trusted than be someone who is boring. (But in a lot of ways, I kind of am: my hobbies and interests are what a lot of people find boring. I don't tend to seek out drama or excitement. I keep my promises and live up to my responsibilities. I don't wait until the last minute to do things. I have a tremendous amount of arcane knowledge about subjects that relatively few people care about.)