American Demigods: "life of quiet desperation"

It's a sad, well, pathetic thing, when you fail to rise to meet your ambitions, as I certainly have of late. As most of this website's 3 person readership was aware, I have for months been engaged in a long, bloody battle with a monstrous beast known as a correspondence course in Latin 104. I have been a vague shadow of my former self because of the absurd amount of work I've had to do. It has consumed virtually every free night I've had for well just about ever, and left me exhausted and bereft of vitality, congeniality and hope, but fortunately not my gift for hyperbole. Why am I doing this deeply irrational thing? So I can earn a bachelor's degree, eight years after entering college. I was always a bit slow. The ambitions I speak of are many but certainly maintaining a cool, regularly updated weblog is one of them. Finally however, the end is in sight, I've finished the bulk of the work I had to do and there's just a bit of mopping up to be done. I was supposed to translate a chunk of Vergil's Aeneid, which is you know, a good book, despite the fact that I don't understand the language it was written in. A lot of people know the story of Aeneas, the wandering hero of Troy who had a fleeting love affair with Queen Dido, and then was kind of a big jerk to her, ditching her because the gods told him to. Happens to the best of us. Anyway, Dido gets really upset about this and kills yourself. This would be a sad story if Dido's decision to kill herself, actual killing of herself, and subsequent journey to the underworld didn't take *pages* and *pages* and *pages* of a dead language that I had to plod through incompetently translating for hours and hours. Just off yourself Dido! It was getting to the point where I was going to offer to travel back in time four thousand years and give her the knife to do the job with. I can't really complain about Vergil writing long stories. Cause I do too. But I'm smart enough not to write them in Latin. Who does that?

One of the cool events I planned to write about here but never did was going to the Chicago Comicon and meeting one of my heroes, Buffy the Vampire Slayer creator Joss Whedon and getting to talk to him. Anyway, he's in the middle of directing a movie right now and someone asked him to do the "Dance of Joy" a reference to something he did on one of his TV shows. He answered that he would do the "Dance of Utter Exhaustion" instead, which he actually did, he danced around the stage and then fell down. Like the rest of his presentation it was utterly beautiful. I mention it because it is a dance I want to do right now. I asked him a question about whether he would ever write a full length musical (which he had done for Buffy) he said it was he did. And the question got play on all the nerd websites. Because I am a nerd, I am proud of this. Joss reminds me so much of myself. Is that an egomaniacal thing to say? Yes, but Joss is an egomaniac too, so that supports my point rather than detracts from it.

Speaking of the favorite writers of nerds, my friend/enemy Reina Hardy got published on Neil Gaiman's journal. Christ what have I ever done with my life? Not only does she write (marginally) better plays than my own, she gets on Neil Gaiman's freaking webpage! The woman must be stopped. But I will do my part to help her go instead. If you are a Chicago area 10 to 17 year old girl who likes to act (my key demographic) please sign up for the Viola Project. I've seen their work. They do good work. It's safe to say that were I a Chicago area 10 to 17 year old girl who likes to act (and that's not as much of a stretch as some things are) it's what I would want to be doing with my time I can say with some confidence.

I don't want to be at work right now. Oh God, it's only 12:40. I want to be asleep...Someone end this hell...

previous entry next entry

Replies: 3 comments

Yep, poppies. I think they're actually refined into heroin outside of Afghanistan. And most of Afghanistan's horse goes to other parts of Asia, not the Western Hemisphere. Still, Afghanistan can be proud that they're once again the world's #1 heroin source.

Remember in the summer of 2001, when George Bush was ready to give the Taliban $48 million in exchange for them saying they weren't part of America's drug problem? Was I hallucinating? Was he?

Anyway, moot point. Except -- hey, here's an idea. Why let that $48 mil gather dust? Be the first to claim it, by telling Bush that you're not part of America's drug problem.

Latin. I can see that hurting. I can only imagine the pain involved in finding the correct case for "to have been having", or whatever the infinitive transitive imperfect pluperfect plenipotentiaricative dative fricative case is.

Think about it. From its source in Rome, Latin gets shipped to processing centers in Europe. Here it's refined into the much more potent and hazardous French. From there, it's smuggled into our public schools, and then it's a straight mainline into the veins of our nation's youth. Our only hope is vouchers for private schools, especially schools run by the Catholic Church...

...the world's #1 source of Latin!

You see how the evildoers work?

Posted by Bela @ 09/20/2004 04:05 PM CST

I should note I wasn't complaining about office drudgery in general ('cause there are lots of other Bloggers on that particular case) but office drudgery + Latin. How many ya'll gotta face that huh? Afghan warlords eh? Hm, what exactly is their product though, heroin?

Posted by Rory @ 09/20/2004 02:52 PM CST

Re. quite desperation or the lack thereof:

William Burroughs writes: "The [morphine] addict is immune to boredom. He can look at his shoe for hours or simply stay in bed. He needs no sexual outlet, no social contacts, no work, no diversion, no exercise, nothing but morphine."

After a few years in the workaday world, this starts to seem like a reasonable goal. And if you have no spouse or children, it's not only reasonable but practical.

You might want to consider putting your talents to use, and writing PR pieces for an Afghan warlord or two. If you ask nicely, I'm sure they'd pay you in product. And if you hold enough of it back to sell, you could launder the proceeds by becoming a Bush Pioneer -- and help keep the status quo going indefinitely. You'd be set for life.

Posted by Bela Lugosi @ 09/19/2004 07:18 PM CST

All rights reserved by those who feel they have to reserve things and thereby deny those things to others who might want to reserve them. This is currently the recommended method by which to affirm your personhood, if you are in any doubt.