What’s the relationship between the Kantian sublime and Freudian sublimation?  Is the apparent relationship merely a coincidence of translation?  Or is there some deeper connection that I’d never noticed before?  It sounds as though sublimation ought to be the process of making sublime, which makes me wonder whether Freud understood the sublime not as an amalgamation of beauty and terror but rather the containment of terror by beauty, the transformation of the chthonic into the aesthetic.  Is there anything in this?

This post brought to you by the skin brightening face scrub in my shower that describes itself in French as “soin lissant sublimateur,” which got me wondering whether I really wanted my face to be sublime, or whether I was just channeling my libido into better skin care.

Strange and interesting things that I have learned from the NCAA website in the course of an extended email exchange with a colleague about college sports:

1.  LSU has won the 6th highest number of national championships in Division I sports.

2.  Numbers 1, 2, and 3 are UCLA (97 national championships), Stanford (91), and USC (84).

3.  The drop-off between the California schools and the rest of the pack is precipitous.* Oklahoma State comes in #4 with 46 championships, and Arkansas is not far behind with 42.  (LSU has 40.)

4.  Of the top 6 championship-winning Division I schools, LSU is the only one that has won more national championships in women’s sports (24) than in men’s (16).  Neither Oklahoma State nor Arkansas has won a single national championship in a women’s sport.

5.  LSU is ranked 3rd in the number of national championships in women’s sports, behind Stanford (34) and UCLA (28).

6.  All 24 of LSU’s women’s national championships are in track and field, 11 indoor and 13 outdoor.

7.  Somewhere down the line, LSU won one national championship in men’s boxing.

8.  Football is not included among the sports that the NCAA counts in these championship figures, as “the NCAA does not conduct a championship for Division I-A football.” On a linked page of past Division I-A national championships in football, however, one can see that over the past 136 years, there have only been 27 seasons in which the championship title has been considered undisputed.  Of those 27, 13 date from 1892 and earlier.  Of those 13, 7 went to Yale, 5 to Princeton, and 1 to Harvard.

Make of that what you will.

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*I remain very curious about this concentration of championships on the west coast.  Some of it is attributable, I suspect, to the inclusion of certain sports in west-coast athletic programs that simply don’t exist in the midwest or east; I’m thinking here in particular of water polo.  Some of it may well be climate-related; California’s mighty conducive to sports in general, with its mild temperatures and low humidity.  And some of it, no doubt, is a legacy factor, in which the championship-rich get championship-richer, through more easily obtainable funding and greater ease in recruiting.  But I’m just not convinced that those three factors are enough to explain the nearly 50% dropoff between USC and Oklahoma State.  Theories?

So I just got what is probably the best—and without question the cheapest—french manicure I’ve ever gotten.  Weigh that on the one side.

On the other, I’m a teency bit skeeved by a couple of things.  First, granted, it was 2.30 in the afternoon, but I was the only customer in the joint.

Second, the guy (yes, guy) who did my manicure itched.  Non-stop.  And paused to scratch something about every 45 seconds.

So:  super-cheap and really good manicure?  Or does everybody in town know something I don’t?

Surely there should be a Germanic compound word for this—not the shameful joy one takes in someone else’s suffering, but the feeling best captured by that Gore Vidal line, “Whenever a friend of mine succeeds, a little something in me dies.” The Times gets it, though their coinage—Erfolgtraurigkeit, or success-sadness—leaves much to be desired.  As the headline has it, though, the happiness of those around you can’t help but shine a klieg light on all of the depressing aspects of your own life.  Or maybe it’s not true for you.  Maybe it’s just me.  Maybe that, right there, is one of those awful bits of my life thrown into high relief by the success of my pals, for whom I insist that I really am ecstatically happy, even as I bear a flame in the gut that’s either excruciating jealousy or really bad heartburn.  Maybe it’s just evidence that I am, in fact, a bad person, one who doesn’t deserve those kinds of happiness.  And that’s where the little something in me dies, where the Vidal-factor comes in:  not in being jealous of my successful friends, but in the spiral produced by the conviction that I’m a jerk for being jealous.  Surely there’s a good solid eight-syllable word for the soul-killing mixture of happiness, jealousy, and shame produced by someone else’s good fortune?

Is the plural of “roof” roofs or rooves?  Is one U.S. usage and the other a Britishism?  Which is which?

The end of the year comes in a great rush of late—the leap from Thanksgiving to the end of classes; the sprint from the end of classes to finish grading; the mad dash from the end of grading to Christmas.  Most years, that sense of speed is exacerbated by tearing out of my parents’ house on Christmas day (or at latest, the day after) on my way to the MLA, which is followed more or less immediately by New Year’s.  For years, I’ve found myself utterly unable to experience the holiday season as anything other than a blur.  Any sense of anticipation that I used to have—excitement about seeing my relatives at Thanksgiving; looking forward to my family opening the gifts I was selecting for them; counting the days until Christmas, or again until New Year’s—has gotten utterly trampled by the rush.

This year, things are a little different.  The blur from Thanksgiving through Christmas remained—I’m not at all sure where those weeks went, and was never really conscious of any moment of it being the holiday season—but since Christmas day, time has moved much more slowly, more deliberately.  In no small part this is due to having opted out of the MLA portion of the marathon, of course, but another significant chunk of this sense comes from the bewilderment of finding myself, the day after Christmas, seven time zones away.  Jet lag has, it seems, the effect of firmly situating you in the here and now, if for no other reason than that you have so little idea of where “here” is, and when “now” could possibly be, that any relative determination of movement or speed becomes pointless.  There is no anticipation or anxiety to speed up the clock, and so the passage of time slows, and instead becomes a matter of incidents—a meal, a museum, a pub—rather than hours.

This morning we got up, after the first full night’s sleep either of us has managed since arriving here, and when R. asked me what day it was, I found myself completely unable to answer.  The only reason it mattered is that our hotel breakfast voucher is only good for Monday through Friday, and while we were pretty sure we’d be able to get fed this morning, we weren’t positive.  After concluding, with some difficulty, that it is indeed Friday today, came the realization that tomorrow, being Saturday, is also New Year’s Eve.  And though the days since Christmas are a bit hazy, they’ve at least been there, each of them, lingering and slow.

My greatest hope for the coming year is that I experience as much of it as possible—that I genuinely have a full eight months before the return to classes in the fall.  Eight months is far too easily broken up into two-weeks-until-this, and ten-days-until-that, until it simply isn’t eight months any longer.  I want, as much as I can in the coming year, to avoid the kinds of anticipation of the near future that usually yank me out of the present, leaving me looking back on a past that went by without my noticing.

I ordered some jeans online last week, and just attempted to track the package, in order to figure out when they’ll be here, and hence, when the single pair of jeans that I currently own that I like—and thus the single pair of jeans that I wear, and thus the single pair of jeans that is developing holes at the corners of the rear pockets that are this far away from becoming obscene—can be relegated to grunge status, and proper non-gluteal-exposure threatening jeans can be rotated in in their place.

The package was sent “USPS Parcel Direct,” which is a new one on me, in no small part because the parceldirect.com link in my notification email finally resolved to a fedex.com URL, but with a USPS logo up top.  So I’m perplexed already.

But nowhere near as perplexed as I was at discovering that my jeans have spent the last four days in two different “sortation” centers.  Why sortation?  The gerund wasn’t good enough?  Too focused on the action of sorting rather than the result of that process?  There’s something troubling to me in this, not least because previous packages have moved very quickly through various sorting centers, but sortation is apparently a days-long process, and I need my jeans yesterday.

The last couple of nights, I’ve dreamed about running, a little way for my unconscious to attempt to guilt-trip me into getting back into my running shoes.  It’s been one thing after another for the last week:  a strained something in my left knee and hip that had me walking funny for a couple of days; a big pile of meetings that required me to be showered and dressed earlier than I usually can if I run first; the muscle spasm; sheer inertia.  The dreams only kicked in once I hit the sheer inertia phase of the cycle, signaling that it’s time to get going again.

My dreams are often like that, embarrassingly obvious little nudges from below telling me that something’s going on that needs attending to.  Like the night not long ago when I went to bed after having drunk a fair bit more than I should have:  I dreamed of drinking glass after glass of water, the best-tasting water I’ve ever had.  Of course I woke up dying of thirst, completely dehydrated.

And let’s not even get into the recurring dream about my inability to find a working bathroom at the MLA.

What I can’t quite tell, though, is if the dreams are intended to wake me up—“Hey, stupid:  you’re thirsty!”; “Come on, lazy slug; don’t you remember how good it feels to run?”—or if, rather, they’re intended to keep me asleep, simulating the satisfaction of whatever need my body has such that my mind can keep dreaming.

It never works with the MLA dream, though; I never can find a toilet that isn’t either occupied, broken, or so repulsive as to be unusable.

At some point, of course, all those bodily demands have to be answered.  I’ll be back on the treadmill tomorrow morning, in more ways than one.

The other day, I was unloading a 12-pack of diet Coke cans into my refrigerator, and about halfway through the package pulled out one that felt… wrong.  I couldn’t have told you why at first; something about it just wasn’t right.  I froze, can in hand, hand halfway to the refrigerator shelf, trying to figure it out.  Was the can mushy?  No.  Bulging?  No.  Dented?  No.

It was light.

Lighter than the rest, by about a third.  And if you turned it over, it made more of a sloshing noise than any other the other cans.  I assume that what’s happened is just that the can-filler failed to fully fill the can, but there’s nonetheless, if you’ll forgive the pun, something uncanny about it.  I put the light can on my countertop, and keep picking it up every time I pass by, checking to make sure that I wasn’t just mistaken, that the can is really less than full.

I’m not sure why this has me so unnerved.  It has something to do with the failure of the machinery involved, which isn’t supposed to fail.  But beyond that, there’s a nagging sense that if the machinery can fail to fill the can, it could also fail to prevent something else from getting into the can, something that shouldn’t be in the can at all.  And right behind that is the thought that perhaps my can isn’t two-thirds full, but fully full, just with Something Else.

So part of me is wondering if I’ll ever work up the nerve to open the can and find out.  And part of me just doesn’t want to know, thanks.

A few days ago, I came within a couple of inches of hitting a pedestrian.

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