This lucky:  I had a mildly crappy day yesterday, and was feeling sorry for myself, and so R. bought a plane ticket to fly down to Atlanta and hang out with me for the weekend.

I’ve got the best boy ever.  That’s seriously lucky.

I’m a little more than a month behind the zeitgeist, apparently, but I just got a link to Sarah McLachlan’s World on Fire video, and want to point any of you who haven’t seen it yet toward it.  McLachlan redirected the $150,000 that would ordinarily have gone toward producing the video to various international charities; the actual video cost $15 to produce (the cost of one blank DV tape).

This story says, I think, both good and bad things about contemporary media culture:  bad, in that spending the $150,000 on a video would have been nothing out of the ordinary for our consumption-oriented culture; but good, in that digital technologies are making it possible for alternate cultural priorities to be brought to our attention.

I’ve arrived and checked into the Atlanta Hyatt Regency.  Forgive me for what follows; it’s a deeply unprofessional conference entry, but for whatever reason, it occurred to me as I was walking to my room, and I can’t shake the idea.

Now, I tend to be suspicious of tales of illicit conference hookups—they’re the kind of friend-of-a-friend story that has the ring of apocrypha to me.  (After all, we in the academy are too sexless and dull to be engaging in such activities, right?) But if, say, one were coming to the ASA with such intent, boy, it’d be hard to get away with in this hotel:

And just in case you forgot that you were in a hotel where your comings and goings are visible from every other point in the hotel, your room provides a lovely image of the atrium:

I love the academic community, really.  But I can’t help but feel, every time I read a David Lodge novel, or hear the stories of former relationships among academic rock stars, that I’m standing around in the dank early morning streets, having the scholarly version of that conversation at the end of Last Days of Disco:  it was a great party, and I just got here too damn late.

Back to professionalism tomorrow, I swear.

You know that feeling where you’re eating in a restaurant, and you bite into a piece of stir-fried chicken, and you can immediately tell that it’s been insufficiently stir-fried, and all you can think of is how you have to travel tomorrow, and you can’t have salmonella while you’re traveling?  And then when, several hours later, you start feeling distinctly queasy, you can’t tell if it’s just the power of suggestion or if you really actually are getting ill?  And how, given that uncertainty, you can’t decide whether the thing to do is just to try to go to sleep and see if it passes, or to, well, try to get the thing you think your body wants outside of you outside of you?  Not to mention how, having opted for sleep, when you wake up the next morning still feeling just as queasy, you know that you’ve sort of missed your window of opportunity, because if queasy were to resolve into active being-sick right now, your travel day would be completely screwed?

I hate it when that happens.

I’ve just completed a draft of the paper I’ll be giving at next weekend’s American Studies Association conference in Atlanta.  It’s on the relationship between simulation and empiricism in CSI [warning: that’s a pretty Flash-heavy link], and it’s been a good deal of fun in the writing.

But here’s something I need to gripe about:  I’m using a bunch of video clips in this paper, as one might expect.  And of course I own the episodes I’m using clips from on DVD.  And, granted, I’m showing six brief clips, from five different episodes, whch are resident on three different discs, so it wouldn’t make any sense to attempt to show them off the original DVDs anyhow.  So I’ve performed the annoyingly complex set of machinations that the film industry forces me to perform in order to use video I actually own in a fair-use context.

But say I only wanted to show one clip.  What’s with all the conferences I’m going to these days that only put TVs and VCRs in conference rooms?  My first thought would be that, oh, it’s only conferences like ASA and MLA, conferences where people don’t use much in the way of A/V, that haven’t managed to advance so far as to rent DVD players.  But last year at SCMS, there were no DVD players anywhere.  At the freaking Society for Cinema and Media Studies.  And no hookups for laptop projection.

I know we in the humanities go to conferences because we like to hear one another talk (*cough*), but wouldn’t it be a lovely thing if we could, say, move into the 1990s with our visual aids?

That is all.

Except to say that, if you live in Atlanta and have some spare time, come crash the party.

Seven years ago, I did something pretty astonishing, for me, something I never thought I’d be able to accomplish:  I ran the New York Marathon.  I finished a good bit slower than I wanted to, in no small part because I was having too much fun to go any faster.  This was November 1997:  I’d turned 30 a few months before, I was madly attempting to finish my dissertation, and I was in the thick of the job market.  A marathon seemed only fitting, a clear, if somewhat literal, way to celebrate the changes in process in my life, and a way to begin saying goodbye to the city that I so loved.

The marathon experience itself was amazing—seeing the neighborhoods of New York, many of which I’d never before set foot in, at ground level, watching the thousands of kids who’d turned out to hand out orange slices, feeling the complete overflow of emotion when, after finishing, I made my way to the meeting point only to find that all of my friends had showed up, with dry clothes and fresh socks.  The dry clothes were much needed:  it began raining at mile 13, and by mile 20, I was about the wettest I’ve ever been in my entire life.  But I didn’t care.  I just kept poking along, and when, at mile 23, the person I’d been running with finally fell by the wayside (he’d been suffering for ten miles, having gone out drinking the night before; feeling some kind of weird responsibility to him—weird because I didn’t know him from Adam, but had only met him at a tune-up race two weeks before—I stuck with him until nearly the end), I opened up my run, and finished running harder and stronger than I think I may ever have, before or since.

The marathon was an amazing experience.  Training for the marathon, on the other hand, nearly killed me.  In my early 20s, I had a weird health crisis—the virus of unknown origin was, annoyingly enough, just par for the course in my medical history.  Back then, however, the crisis was pretty serious:  my doctors were uncertain whether I had rheumatoid arthritis or the beginnings of lupus.  I’d gone from completely normal, as I’d been my whole life, to unable to climb a flight of stairs, unable to hold a pen, unable to wash my own hair, in about six weeks.  Every joint in my body was affected, and at the peak of my treatment, I was on two drugs for the arthritis, and three more to counteract the side-effects of the first two.  After about two years, though, the disease, whatever it was, went into full remission, and hasn’t been seen or heard from since.

It left behind a few reminders, though, most notably for the purposes of this story, bad knees.  I began running at age 26, for the first time in my life trying to get into some kind of decent physical shape, and always had trouble running more than three miles at a time, or running more frequently than every other day.  This made training for the marathon, four years later, more challenging than I might have liked it to be.  I spent the better part of six months achy and sore, and grew—and this is the worst part—to dread running.  Just the thought of putting on my running shoes was enough to depress me.

I stuck with it, though, and completed my training, and ran the marathon.  (And could easily have met my goal time, had I not saddled myself with a hung-over running partner.) And the marathon was great.  And afterward, I took some much-deserved time off from running.

But that time off stretched out way longer than it ought to have.  Things on the job market got nutty, and finishing the dissertation became a priority.  And then there was graduating, and moving, and settling into a new job.  Periodically, over the next several years, I’d try to start running again, and I’d manage a couple of weeks’ worth of runs, before the ache in my knees once again resulted in a resurgence of the old dread.  Running became a slow form of torture, and given that it was voluntary, I’d eventually just stop.

I’m telling you all this now because, in the last four months or so, something’s changed.  Part of it, I have to attribute to R.’s presence here:  he made me take my vitamins nearly every day, among which is included a glucosamine/chondroitin supplement that I think has made a phenomenal difference in the health of my knees.  Running doesn’t hurt like it used to.  And so I’ve been running more.

And I’m thinking seriously about giving the marathon another shot.

It’s probably crazy.  I’m busier than I’ve been in my life.  But there’s some part of me that needs a physical, attainable goal right now, something to drag me up out of the bad election-R. gone-work stress-no book-rejected grant application-doldrums that I’ve been languishing in.

Long story short:  I’m off to run.  If this goes well, you may be hearing more about the training process in the coming weeks.

Rory’s posted his take on all things U.S.-electoral, and it’s absolutely mesmerizing.  Almost dizzying.

There’s something about the graphic, too, that makes me wonder if the Republicans aren’t onto something with that whole states’ rights thing they’ve ostensibly been so hot after.  Like, overturn Roe v. Wade in the stripey part, sure, but we in the states of the starry part have the right to follow the dictates of our own courts.

Or, like, start a really problematic and really expensive war if you want to, but fund it with the taxes of the folks in the stripey part.  We in the starry part choose to use our taxes to fund education.

Okay, now I’m having fantasies of secession.  This can lead to No Good.  But it’s been nice to imagine, for a moment at least.

(Here’s Mena’s map.  This one’s not bad, either.  Her California sub-division far more accurately represents the state of things, so to speak.)

[UPDATE, 9.33 am:  Two more maps of actual voting patterns, one somewhat heartening and one much more dis-.  Even that second, though, has its revelations:  an interesting Kerry-corridor along the Mississippi, for instance, right through the heart of Red America (and including my former home parish).]

So, I’ve done a bit of reading, and a bit of thinking, and taken a nice shower, and cleared my head a bit.  And I’ve got two somewhat contradictory things to say now.

The first is that I now understand, viscerally, how my American Government professor, Wayne Parent, felt that morning in November 1984 when he walked back into the classroom and said, simply, “I don’t want to talk about it.” And then proceeded to go on with his originally scheduled lecture.

The other, though, is that—and I sincerely hope this isn’t just the desperately rationalizing part of my brain, trying to find ANY POSSIBLE GOOD THING that can be taken from all of this—I now have an even deeper sense of how much what I do (what so many of us do) matters.  Early glances at the exit polls (and yes, I do recognize the irony involved in basing any conclusions on the exit polls, today of all days) suggest that educated voters largely went for Kerry, and voters with lesser educational backgrounds largely went for Bush.  Add to this the data released over the course of the year about the relationship between educational background, FOX News viewership, and radical misunderstandings of issues on both the national and international levels, and you can begin to piece together a sense of the desperate need for decent education in this country—and especially for improved media literacy.

The results of this election—which now appears to be over, and much sooner than I expected it to be—don’t exactly give me hope, but they do give me purpose.

What I need to ponder is ways to pass that purpose on to my students, students who have been genuinely politically committed during this election, who cannot allow themselves to fall into despair over this result.  I need to pass on to them the commitment not simply to their own educations, but to educating others.  I need to impress upon them—and I begin to believe this, at a deep level—that the most important thing a media studies student can do is to pass their knowledge on, by teaching.

I’d love, as my knee-jerk response from this morning suggested, nothing more than just to escape the whole deal.  Pull up stakes and move to Canada.  Hell, Paris.

But the battle’s here.  And I’m not running away from this fight.

I hear Vancouver’s very nice, too.

By which invocation of the ethos of my former home, I do not mean to invite voter fraud.  Nothing of the sort.  Merely some good advice:  get to the polls early, when lines are shortest, and vote every time you have the opportunity.

As it turns out, I was the first person to cast a ballot at my polling place today.  There was a guy waiting ahead of me when I arrived, but I somewhat stupidly breezed past him and formed a line; the good news is that the manners of the poll workers were better than mine, and they asked him to go ahead of me.  However, he’d requested an absentee ballot that he hadn’t returned, and so had to be given a provisional ballot, and the poll workers could not find the provisional ballots.  After about five minutes of searching, as the line behind me grew, they finally waved me on around and gave me my ballot.  (While I was voting, they seemed to solve the provisional ballot crisis; it appears, though I cannot swear to this, that provisional voters are given regular ballots here, which are then placed in provisional envelopes instead of the usual grey ballot sleeves.  They were in the process of giving him his ballot as I left.)

We’re now using the InkaVote system here in L.A. County, a system which is mechanically identical to the old punch-card system we’d previously used, but, as you might guess, inks the bubbles on the ballot rather than punching them.  The system is pretty simple; if you’ve ever voted in L.A. County before, using the old system, there won’t be any surprises.  I’m curious about the accuracy of the counting machines that read these ballots—though they’re undoubtedly similar to the machines that read the Scantron sheets used for bajillions of college exams (not to mention all the other variants of educational testing), and it has never once occurred to me to question the accuracy of those machines.  So maybe we’re fine.  Maybe I’m just paranoid.  If ever there were a season for paranoia, however, this would be it.

So, I voted.  And the provisional ballot guy voted.  And the line of folks behind me voted.

I wish you luck with your own ballot-casting today—and wish us all luck, that we might have a speedy, and just, outcome.