My toothbrush is badass. Really,
it's impossible to say enough about how badass my
toothbrush is. If you took all the dental products available and put
them in one of those free-for-all ultimate fighting matches, my
toothbrush would be the one who parachutes into the fray, clears the
ring in about 30 seconds, and then stands there flexing its pecs and talking
trash.
From the movie Repo Man,
which Jeff and I watched last night: a conversation among a small group
of disaffected-youths turned ostentatiously-rebellious, Suicidal-Tendencies-loving-outlaws
who embrace-the-value of fucking-shit-up: "Screw this," says one character,
mohawk bobbing jauntily. "Let's go do some crimes!" "Yeah!" says another.
"Let's have sushi and not pay!"
I think I am becoming a Paula Begoun
groupie. Not in a follow-her-band-in-my-van kind of way, but in a hold-up-my-lighter-during-her-power-ballad
kind of way. I tend to be seduced by ads for skincare products concocted
according to magical formulae that include whole troops of tiny, invisible
elves who dance across your face, erasing wrinkles with a little jig and
buffing out sun damage with the soles of their pointy-toed moccasins. The
names given to these elves—names like "GP4G Biopeptide," "Redox AntiOxidant
Complex," and "Ester-C Repair and Prevent CO Q10 Facial Complex"*—clearly
convey that they were produced by science, are endorsed by scientists,
and are so complex that you, the consumer, couldn't possibly understand
how they work, since you are not sufficiently skilled in droppin' science,
and science the way they do it is wizardry.
Troops of tiny, invisible elves don't come cheap, which is one of the many
reasons why it's so disappointing when they not only don't work, but create
all sorts of problems you didn't have to begin with. I bought one such product
last month, and when it became clear that the product and I weren't a good
match, I stopped using it. Still, the damage was going away very, very slowly.
I got some free samples of Paula's Choice stuff in the mail—the combination
I'm using is the stuff in Plan C on this
page—and in two days, it has fixed most of the mess caused by my evil
ex-cleanser and has been just generally good. I know I need to wait a few
weeks before I can truly judge how our relationship is working out, but
I've been so impressed by our introduction that I'll be crushed if she breaks
up with me. Besides, I like having a specific idea of what's in this stuff
and how it works.
I've also been looking through one of her great
big books with a zillion product reviews, and I'm finding it quite interesting,
because I like knowing when a lotion that costs $125 and is supposedly chock-full
of wondrous biopeptidey goodness has a formulation that's nearly identical
to a lotion I can buy at Sav-On for $8.95. And if you want to know what
she says about a product you're curious about, I will tell you**, because
she talks about damn near everything, and once I post this, I'll need something
to help me put off my filing.
* I am not making these up.
** I reserve the right to get sick of doing this and immerse myself in the
world of filing at any time.
You may or may not have guessed that I've channeled significant amounts
of time I should have spent working on my dissertation into reading up on
topics that have absolutely nothing to do with my dissertation. Or with
academia, for that matter. We really are talking about a huge number of
hours here; I feel a constant sort of low-level guilt about it. I'm beginning
to wonder if I'm exhibiting a pattern that's not uncommon among academics:
it's a pattern of pursuing what is initially a casual interest in a subject
with an level of diligence that might be impressive if applied to something
that mattered. This is not to say that the interest itself doesn't matter;
what I'm talking about has very little to do with whatever value I might
assign to knowledge of a certain topic. It has a whole lot to do with negotiating
a balance between the tangible and the emotional rewards of gaining knowledge.
The more pragmatic-minded among you might be tempted to point out that
I did, after all, decide to work towards a doctorate in the humanities,
and such a decision demonstrates a wanton disregard for things like tangible
rewards. Therefore, I shouldn't be surprised that it's difficult for me
to buoy myself with the practical when it was always the emotional rewards
that sustained me. Or maybe you wouldn't be tempted to say that at all,
but if you did, you might have a pretty good point. You might also
guess that maybe, just maybe, the problem isn't so much a dissipation of
intellectual energy as a struggle to draw on that energy—and to do so consistently,
over a long period, and in the absence of external structure—when doing
so no longer produces the emotional rewards I had come to expect. But I
have to do something, and it makes sense that I'd seek out something
interesting but non-academic, something that matters but isn't associated
with any real consequences—no competing consequences, anyway.
To put it more bluntly: I'm fucking spoiled, and I can't figure out how
to make myself do something I no longer like doing, so I'm doing something
else. Which is a conclusion I've reached before, but this time, I took a
different road to get there. How academic!
I said up there that I thought I might be describing a larger pattern.
Maybe I am, maybe not. I don't always have a very good idea of where I fall
on the spectrum between "insightful" and "full of shit." Addles your brain,
this business does. Evidently, it also makes you write sentences in Yoda-speak.
Next, because I find this transition amusing: I am being considered for
inclusion in Who's Who in America. This is very funny to me, but
I can't decide if I find it funny enough to bother filling out the little
bio sheet I'm supposed to fill out and send back—particularly because I
don't currently know the whereabouts of the letter they sent me, so I'd
need to hunt through mounds of stuff before I even got started. Don't they
know how urgent it is that I further investigate the comedogenic properties
of algin? I've no time for their bi-o-graphy, no time!
And finally... Lewis
Black from The
Daily Show, commenting on the beginning of Celine Dion's three-year
stint in Vegas: "It's the second-worst thing happening in the desert."
