Follow these directions:

1. Call Governor Schwartzenegger: 916-445-2841 (they’re apparently accepting calls from anywhere).

2. Push: 2 (voice your opinion on legislation).

3. Push: 1 (gender-neutral marriage bill - Senate Bill 849).

4. And push: 1 to support marriage equality.

Of course, the conspiracy theorist in my brain has me convinced that all the 1 calls are being dumped, while the 2s are being carefully tallied.  But we’ll see…

Collin took the notion of “practice” that I raised on Sunday and ran with it, thinking both about the ways that academics are “disciplined” as binge writers and the ways that blogs, contrary to any Tribble-esque anxieties about their marginal utility and maximal dangers, might help scholars develop a new kind of writing practice.

More below the fold.

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Somebody somewhere apparently crossed the streams earlier today, and everything around here went kerflooey.  Not in Claremont, at least not as far as I know; I’ve been at school all day, where the energy crisis of some years ago resulted in our being outfitted with mondo generators that we move seamlessly to in time of blackout.  But my otherwise fabulous and enormously reliable hosting provider went down sometime in the 1.15 pm vicinity, and the site only just came up moments ago.

Sigh.  And I was having such a good blog day.

before
Originally uploaded by KF.

My stepfather just forwarded me a couple of photos sent to him by his junior partner in his real estate firm.  The junior partner received these from a fraternity brother of his, who took the pictures before and after Katrina, from roughly the same spot in his Bay St. Louis yard.

after
Originally uploaded by KF.

That’s before.  This is after.

I am frequently plagued by earworms.  You know earworms, right—the songs that get stuck in your head?  They seem inevitably to be the most annoying songs possible, and though their origins are often mysterious, for me at least, they can usually be traced back to some specific point of infection (muzak in the drugstore, commercial on the television, passing car stereo).  And some percentage of the time, at least, recurring earworms are found to be connected to odd phrases of thoughts that trigger connections that link to lyrics that just won’t go away.

For instance, a couple of years ago I was plagued with an infestation of the theme song from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.  This, amazingly, I was able to trace back to the prescription for a certain pain medication, the thought of whose name inevitably tripped me into “chillin’ out, maxin’, relaxin’ all cool and all” for weeks on end.

Some, however, remain mysterious.  Such is the current status of my most recent earworm.  I find myself at the oddest moments—staring into the refrigerator trying to figure out what’s for dinner is a prime example—with Dope’s “You Spin Me Round” on repeat in my brain.  And I’m clueless as to why.  I inevitably come in right on the downbeat of the chorus—you spin me right round, baby, right round, like a record, baby, right round round round—as nothing in my thoughts seems to lead me there.  And I’m at least not conscious of having heard the song of late, even in sampled or otherwise doctored form.

All I can hope is that going public with the infection will result in its rapid retreat.

Folks out there in Bloglandia seem really often to run up against the same kinds of concerns at the same moments, without necessarily knowing about one another, as though there’s something in the zeitgeist that suddenly makes its way to consciousness in multiple locales at once.  Witness Shauna’s thoughts on the cumulative effects of her recent blog silence and Mel’s musings on the downside of binge writing.  Both intersect with something I’ve been pondering for the last couple of months—that when I write every day, whether here at Planned Obsolescence or elsewhere, on other projects, writing gets easier and easier.  Not just in terms of the production of sentences, though that of course comes more smoothly, but also in the production of thoughts, of things worth writing about.

The posting-binge of the last few weeks, before I had to call a mental-health-serving hiatus on Katrina-blogging, really highlighted that for me:  the more I wrote, the more I found worth writing about.  When I discipline myself to post something every day, or as close to it as I can, I find myself watching the world around me slightly differently, and treating my thoughts slightly differently, as though any occurrence or any idea might be capable of blossoming and bearing fruit.  When I’m not posting, nothing seems worth writing about, just a bunch of dried-up seeds that’ll eventually blow away or be eaten by the birds.

The same is of course true of whatever other project I’m working on:  when I don’t touch it for weeks at a time, it takes hours just to remember what it was I was thinking last time I wrote, and any brilliant thoughts that I may have failed to get on paper then are long since gone.

Why does it take until the age of 38, until the eighth year of an academic career, to realize that writing is in many ways like playing the piano?  No one attempting to be a pianist, whether professionally or for personal enjoyment, would assume that practicing once a month, fourteen hours a day, for three days in a row, would be better than practicing an hour a day, every day, rain or shine.  Why is it that so many of us think of writing that way, as something that must be put off until there are huge blocks of time available?

I’m working on this, quite seriously:  every day, for small chunks of time, I’ll sit down at the keyboard and practice.

When you completely fail to show up for dinner at the dean’s house, because you’ve written it on the wrong day on your calendar.

I’ve given to the Red Cross, and to Catholic Charities USA.

I’ve given minor (mostly moral) support to a student here who has organized fundraising here on campus.

I’ve made an open offer of help to our administration, as they admit and enroll students from affected colleges and universities for the fall semester.

I’ve made several proposals to my department for things we might do, ranging from bringing a displaced writer to the college for a several-week residency to organizing next year’s literary series around New Orleans writers.

I’ve thought, and I’ve written, and I’ve tried to consider what else I can do.

But it’s hard not to feel like it’s such a drop in the bucket, so to speak, and that it can never be enough.

If you haven’t seen it, go watch.

I woke up appallingly early this morning, considering how late I’d gotten to sleep last night, and lay there thinking about those dreams I’ve been having the last several days.

It occurred to me that the worst of the dreams—worse than the search and rescue dreams, worse than the drowning dreams—are the too much information dreams, the dreams where I’m subjected to a non-stop barrage of information about death and destruction that I’ve somehow got to absorb and process and do something about.

Sounds like life, lately.