VideoJug: How To Use Make-Up For Men
Here’s a British vid instructing men how to wear make-up without being obvious.
Don’t touch your face too much.
August, 2007
31
Aug 07
Perhaps Etiquette Should Be Taught In College
At one college where I teach, a certain professor has the knack for turning any bit of class participation, into a teaching moment. I’m not as gifted as he is, but I sometimes turn odd questions or comments into a pedagogical opportunity.
In my late afternoon class, when I was going over attitudes towards writing and what writing is, one student asked me about if they have to learn etiquette in English class. I have to admit I was thrown off by this. Would I have to walk my students a few blocks over to the University Club, show them how I eat holding a fork with my left hand and a knife with my right, and then arrange the silverware in the four o’clock position to let the waiter know I was finished? Or, should I teach them how to write Dear Sir or Dear Madame? Honestly, I was confounded, and I hate being confounded in front of a group of people.
So, within seconds (which seemed like an eternity), I responded that while etiquette is part of how we use language, we were not learning it in this course. I then shifted the subject to the issue of tone in righting. The odd question provided a nice segue for this, even though I didn’t plan to discuss it in this session. However, it was nice to see the students understood tone in writing and many of them even came up with various examples from life.
My student’s question brings up an interesting point. Perhaps etiquette should be taught in college. I’m not talking about which spoon to use (one scene in the Titanic provides that lesson in a throwaway moment), but students could use a lesson in civility. The Mindy Shatners of the world certainly could. These are the petty, spoiled, too smart for their own good brats who deserve a good kick in the pants, but my own decency prevents me from taking that action. And, of course, they’re always academic hacks and slummers.
While it may be tempting to knock some manners into Mindy’s noggin, she just has to learn not everyone is impressed with the likes of her.
If I could use an odd question from a student as a teaching moment, I can certainly transform the martini-inspiring moments of Mindy Shatner, her little sister, and her in-bred cousins.
30
Aug 07
What Knob Lobbers!
Craig and company, that is.
First Ted and then Chris post on the toe tapper.
It’s the third one this year. What’s up with the GOP and these closeted fraks? Allen, offender #2, tried to blame his cruising on a fear of black men:
In taped statements made by Allen to police following his arrest and released by the force Allen admits to soliciting the male officer but claims that it was the result of being nervous by the high number of black men in the park.
I’ve never heard that one before – using racism as an alibi when caught for cruising. I see he shows his true colors (would rather admit to being a bigot instead of the big, gross homo he is. He is both). What a knob lobber!
30
Aug 07
Mindy Shatner’s Little Sister
I think I have Mindy Shatner‘s sister in my class. Not literally, of course, but enough know the God, the Universe, or whatever, is trying to teach me a lesson that began with Mindy a few years back. I really don’t want to repeat this chapter this semester, so I’m ready to learn. Here’s how my day went.
I forgot to go over the essay rough draft requirements that are due next week (per my syllabus). One student asked me about what was needed, and I could have gotten myself out of this by pushing the date forward. I do say that the schedule is subject to change, and that language was added for anything that would push the schedule out of whack (as class schedules are bound to do). Then, this young woman rudely chimed in that the assignment was due and I hadn’t done anything to give them guidance. Perhaps her point was valid, but the way she pushed it forward was out of line.
So, I stuck to the schedule, gave them a general prompt for their narrative essay, and required them to bring five copies to class for the workshop. She interjected out of turn that she didn’t have enough printer paper for that. Well, excuse me. Go abuse the photocopier at your job. That’s what everyone else does.
Then some of the students had side conversations when a young man was trying to ask me a question (which would have benefited other people if they were listening). I asked them to quiet down a couple times before I raised my voice and said, “Excuse me!” I then calmed my voice and said, “Now that I have your attention,” and attempted to answer his question and close class.
Overall, I had a bad day. After taking some time to cool down, I went to the course’s coordinator and talked about the situation. I have until next week to get caught up. I also have this little Miss Shatner situation to deal with. Any sensible student who doesn’t like their teacher early on usually jumps to another class, but she may be here to stay because the class best fits her schedule or whatever.
If anyone truly gets out of line, I have the orange papers and the Student Affairs office number. I always hope I don’t use them.
Thanks for hearing me vent.
29
Aug 07
What Do Space Aliens Have To Do With Art History?
This one’s set in the fashion design school I went to right after graduating from high school.
Art history class was often one big slide show where the teacher managed to keep it interesting (in contrast to the color theory teacher whose droning voice often put me to sleep). She was intelligent and lively, and she highlighted what we needed to know about the artworks presented. Of course, that wasn’t enough for Frankie, a small little man. Apparently, not much was there at all, and he decided Art History was a course in the paranormal. When the teacher reviewed Stone Age, Neolithic, and Egyptian art, Frankie constantly interrupted her to ask if space aliens visited them and influenced with their works.
She, like most professional educators, displayed an incredible amount of patience.
If space aliens had anything to do with this, they most likely abducted Frankie some time ago before his admission to the school and vaporized most of his grey matter.
28
Aug 07
There Are No Such Things As Stupid Questions…
When I took course in European history as an undergrad some years ago, there were a few strange people on the class. One thirty something man would ask extremely convoluted questions that could be written out as complex sentences that said nothing at all, which would confound the professor, a man with a Classical education. He was often patient in trying to deal with this student, though I could see that these questions got on his nerves.
One day, the discussion was on Greece and Turkey, and another student asked, “Where does the name of Turkey come from, other than ‘gobble gobbble?’”
My classmates and I were all embarrassed for him, especially since there was a young woman from Turkey in the class. She graciously explained that the name came from Turkiye, the name for the Turkish people.
It’s a moment that’s a testimony to the unsurpassed wit and intelligence of Americans to our international student guests.
28
Aug 07
Shindo Can’t Do Code To Save His Life and Some Other Things
Earlier, this afternoon, I hinted in a discreet way to Chris that my former professor mentor Joseph K inflicted Taxi Xum Klo on his students in his Madness in Literature seminar. In an attempt to slyly reveal Professor K’s own perverse (and slender) body of work through links, I kept frakking up on the simple HTML code. I won’t do it here, as it’s been my policy to never directly point the finger at him on my own blog (though he has his own website, an entry in Wikipedia, and tons of generous “I publish you, you publish me” reviews). However, anyone who knows me from the MFA program at my alma mater knows who he is.
Here is an excerpt from my previous entry on Joe:
The literature students were no match for Joe. They appeared to be staid and conservative in comparison to him. The creative writers perceived this and ganged themselves against the MA’s. Joe often favored the MFA’s, showing preference for their ideas in the seminar’s discourse. Joe, or at least his persona, openly eschewed canonical authors. When an MA student proposed doing his final presentation on Virginia Wolff’s madness, Joe dismissively said that was old school. Since I had seen Joe’s personal library, I knew he did not completely subscribe to that view. However, he saw the graduate lit students as orthodox, unremarkable, unreceptive, inflexible, not even worthy of the A’s or B’s he gave them. Then again, was an A or a B even really worth anything in any graduate course?
Many of the literature students were more grounded in the canon, especially the specializations they were drawn to. They were not accustomed to thinking of the avant-garde feeding into literature, unless they were post-modernists. Their ways of talking about literature did not fit in with how he discussed it. They were confronted with the bizarre, the outré, the experimental, the independently published, even stuff that was downright bad. Some of the outsider writers weren’t that good at all, but their ideas were worth discussing. It may have been one thing to be required to read badly written stories, but seeing a sexually explicit German film, Taxi Xum Klo, was definitely much for some. Some scenes left little to the imagination; pornographic, though strong, would be accurate. Like most of work Joe presented, there was supposed to be something beyond the obvious. Or was there?
Beyond Joe’s choice of material, we were treated to Joe’s work. One story of his may have been included in the reader he prepared for the class. During one of the times we met at his home, he did a dramatic reading where he played Charles Manson. His stories were often like two character plays without dialogue tags or description of the characters. His subjects were often sexually unconventional people or murderers, sometimes even both. At this point, he was writing a body of creative work about serial killers, so his work qualified as madness in literature. None of the MA’s cared that Joe was a minor league literary star, a power broker in the avant-garde literary community. I’m sure a certain percentage of the MFA’s also shared similar sentiments. However, the MFA’s in his class treated him like a god. Their reverence was certainly rewarded.
I’m sure this stirs up a huge canister of worms, especially since I haven’t posted about Joe in about a year.
When I was a young college student who majored in French, the French literature professor showed us Fassbinder’s adaptation of Querelle, which some of my classmates had the same reactions as the graduate students who saw Taxi Xum Klo. While I am at a loss to remember the point behind Professor K presenting his German film, the French professor’s showing of Querelle was about Jean Genet, who is very germane to the subject of that course.
Needless to say, I’ll never make students watch a gay, semi-pornographic film. I don’t think it’ll ever happen. I don’t even inflict that stuff on my gay friends.
27
Aug 07
The Blogging Holiday is Over
Since I’ve been blogging regularly this year, this is the first time I’ve taken any kind of break from posting. Actually, it wasn’t a break, as I had faculty development obligations at the community college districts where I teach (with one starting class last week, and the other still in meetings). Of course I attended tons of meetings and documented them, as I didn’t want nasty bites out of my pay come December.
I had fun creating a syllabus for my Freshman Composition course (which was super long). I always wish I could have one outlining the class in two or three pages (as the schedule only takes about two pages), but I needed to cover myself with various policies. There is that lovely thing called plagiarism. When I was in the fourth grade and heard that word for the first time from my teacher (who was Belgian), I thought it was pronounced like “pleasurism.” However, she gave the correct definition for the word. Perhaps in the future, when going over the syllabus, I could use the anecdote of my European teacher when mentioning how the consequences of plagiarism aren’t so pleasurable, despite how the word sounds.
One freaky thing I noticed this week was when I went to the college police department of one of the colleges to pick up a parking permit. On the sheet where they have faculty sign for receiving their permits, the person before me had a signature almost identical to mine. Interestingly, his name was Gary, and the way he wrote his G and I wrote my S were the same. Like most signatures, we both followed the first letter with unintelligible wavy lines. I’ve heard the theory that everyone in the world had a double out there (which normally means one who shares the same physical characteristics), but this is the first time I’ve encountered an autograph doppleganger.
Chris obliquely mentioned how some creationist frak in “The Sick Man of Europe”* decided to get his government to impose a blanket ban on blogs. This doesn’t really help this potential member of the European Community, especially as it caves in more and more to fundamentalism and suppression of free speech. Then there was that film that damaged their reputation during the late 1970′s and early 1980′s, deserved or not.
First it was India, now this country. I wonder which nation will ban blogs next.
Changing the subject to something else, I went with my friend Scott to see Au Revior Simone at the Casbah last night. Their style is definitely comparable to the Postal Service, but with a more girly touch. With several analog synths, they managed to charm the crowd with their singing and some good old fashioned modulations (sans computers) along with some banter and interaction with the crowd. Their tourmates, Oh No! Oh My!, were definitely a band I could appreciate, though I don’t I’d get into. They hail from Austin TX, though I really don’t know anything of that city’s music scene beyond the better known Spoon. Then again, I don’t know much about the San Diego scene beyond Pinback and she who got discovered at Java Joe’s and became a superstar in the late 1990′s.
Signing out for now, stay tuned.
*when I took a European history course as an undergrad, the professor mentioned “The Sick Man of Europe” as a moniker for the state of that crumbling empire in the late 19th and early 20th century (which was then replaced with appropriately 20th century nation state). Its membership in the European Union is still pending.
17
Aug 07
Notes on a Fallout
It’s always interesting when you know someone with a pattern of close, but short term friendships. Yesterday, a fellow alum from my alma mater’s English program and I compared notes on Liza Radley*. He had his falling out with her a couple of years ago and I fell out with her last year. Without getting into too much detail, she picked fights with both of us when it came to expressing her disappointment. Regarding my colleague, Liza screamed at him on the phone until he hung up. I, on the other hand, got some very insulting e-mails. I then fell into the worst trap of all–responding. I recalled some event where she failed me and put it in the reply. That ended the friendship right there.
She also fell out with close friend and poetic collaborator Alexandra and then Shelly, her best friend from her undergrad years. Who knows why it happened, but the news about Liza dissolving her frienship with Alexandra spread quickly through the university’s MFA program, which was such a gossip mill.
A couple of years before my “break-up” with Liza, I was seeing a counselor who asked me in one session to rate the healthiness of my friendships on a scale of 1 to 10. I think I rated Liza 3 or 4. Not good at all.
*Pseudonym from “Liza Radley” by the Jam. Here are the lyrics.
