What have I been doing?

This past weekend I once again journeyed to SUNY Stonybrook for I-CON, where Lefty and I worked long and difficult hours selling things to people, many of whom were teenagers dressed as characters from anime (mostly Naruto, Full Metal Alchemist, and Inu Yasha).  It was a laborious and stressful weekend, but I soldiered along and the store made good money.  Highlights: Millari let me use her car, so the actual driving was fun, and I got to blast Fatboy Slim on the CD player.  Claudia Christian was there signing, and I got to banter with her for a minute during Sunday set up.  She's charming.  On Saturday I got to check out Neil Gaiman's new short story collection Fragile Things, and I really liked the two stories that I read, "Study In Emerald" (which mixed Sherlock Holmes with Cthulhu) and "Monarch of the Glen", which was a sequel to American Gods. 

This coming weekend there's the much smaller but still fun Conbust at Smith College.  Together, these two events plus doing a favor for another MM employee mean that I will be working five weeks straight with one day off.  Which explains why I am feeling so very, very tired today.  That, and M and I having trouble going to bed before 2 am.

I haven't gotten much done on the life goals front for awhile, and it's been striking me how time is passing.  My friends, MAMEd and Crafty, have given birth (Crafty doing the actual labor) to a daughter while I was in New York.  Millari has already been to see them.  I don't know when I will have the time/energy to see them, but I feel like a shitheel for saying that to the parents of a newborn, since I'm sure that they are even more stressed than I.  Several friends have called and left messages, and I haven't called any of them back, again because I'm just so tired.  I must do better.

Heck, I have been meaning to write to V, a classmate from Kenyon who, I have recently learned, has had the double hit of being diagnosed with breast cancer and having her husband of two years die of testicular cancer.  I'm sure that a letter from me will mean little, but damn, I feel that I should write and express condolences.

Ah, the drama of undergraduate life

This past weekend, I was at the State University of New York's Stony Brook campus on Long Island.  I actually quite like the Stony Brook campus and the surrounding area (the Curry Club is a really good restaurant, worth a detour), and in some alternate universe I got over my ADD problems with math and went there to pursue a science career.  So when, this past weekend, I saw a student newspaper lying around, I checked it out, and discovered a contretemps in student government.

The article is here but to sum up, apparently the SGA president has been practicing race-baiting election fraud.  I find the story strangely fascinating.  Part of it is the tempest in a teapot-ness of it, something that seems to underlie the SGA president's obvious contempt for the whole affair.  Part of it is the small-town amateurishness of the writing (I don't mean the errors in grammar or editing*, I mean the way the reporter includes mockery from the audience, but doesn't really explain the background to the story for new readers.)  Part of it is the seriousness of the student senators, and the superlatives they use to describe something as transitory as student government, when four years from now none of the officials or voters will be the same. In the end, however, what really strikes me about this story is the open corruption and bigotry the president and his cronies (reportedly) display.  The article could be a tissue of lies, of course, though the awkwardness of it make it somehow more believable to me than a more skillfully written piece, but it doesn't entirely matter for my point.  What strikes me is the open disdain of the SGA president for the senate's attempts to reign him in.  I suspect that similar passions, similar behaviors, and similar prejudices exist in the halls of power in state and federal government--just better hidden.  It's interesting to see budding politicos behaving badly before they learn the code words to cloak their evil in fair colors, as well as journalists who haven't yet learned what not to say about our leaders if they want to maintain their "access."



* Yes, I am aware that I am saying this in a sentence fragment.  I just don't care.