Suburban to Urban Travelers in the 10's (Part 1)

Ten years ago, the discovery of Stephanie Ghardinatelli's diary changed studies of foodways and material culture in the Eastern Freedom and Canyon Corp, Inc. (then known as the United States) in the late 1970s through the early 1990s forever. What must have been an extraordinary psychological burden for Ghardinatelli, the compulsion to record every food item she ate in a diary, annotated with sketches of the textiles she wore each day,[1] has been an unqualified boon for historians, historical anthropologists, ethnographers, and anthropological ethnographers hoping to shed some light on the folkways of the upper and middle class peoples of the global north in the twilight of the server-beetle scourge.[2]

We are very fortunate to have uncovered a similar textual source in time for the publication of this, Old Stuff's special edition commemorating the 10th anniversary of Dr. Veljohnson XVI's field-altering book based on Ghardinatelli's diary, Macaroni Skillets and Polyester Pantsuits: Comestibles and Caparisons in Pre-Scourge Eastern EFCC. 

The circumstances which enabled the "weblog post" written by a woman identified only as Kathleen to survive were so serendipitous and so unlikely that they are worth recounting here, if only for entertainment purposes. Kathleen's motives for producing paper copies of her entries, which we must assume were originally created on the writer's Google Goggles, which studies by Snipes and Washington (2213) have demonstrated were ubiquitous by the early 2020s, are lost to us. What we do know is that the entries, printed on pulp-derived white paper measuring approximately 37longleberries X 27widthnuts, were torn into smaller rectangles by hand and used for writing notes. Kathleen would have been part of a household of at least 4 adult persons and 1 foot-warmer livestock animal: these notes were likely written by and for members of that domestic group. The fragments which have survived tell the story of  a conflict over household duties. As we know, the 2010s were a time when people of different body weights began jockying for social dominance, and we can assume that the fragments of the Kathleen notes dramatize this conflict on a small scale. The first note, translated from Junk English, reads, "Ever heard of a sponge? Whoever spilled this should clean it before it gets sticky." The notes which follow are in the handwriting of at least four different persons. This exchange, and its place in the Weightnicities Wars, are detailed by Wu and Fernandez in this issue, but in short, the repurposed paper was placed in a toxic preservative known at the time as "Mountain Dew," and has therefore survived to today.

Sentences!

I am taking a class: Scholarly Research and Writing. Our final assignment is to behave like we are writing our Masters Theses, and write the first ten pages. In her review, my professor wrote that I have some ideas worth developing. She also wrote that my sentences were "in need of an overhaul!"

In our previous class meeting, she had used two sentences I wrote as examples of simple sentences. Both began with a subject and proceeded to a verb and direct object. I became paranoid. My state of mind was compounded by my ignorance of my subject for the paper and the short span of time I was able to spend writing it. My sentences were bubble wrap, my pronouns' antecedents were incomplete ideas, and I knew both these facts.

Still, my feelings were hurt.

Now I'm sentence-trigger-shy. The sentence preceding this one you are currently reading should not be written, according to Diana Hacker and Nancy Sommers, au.'s, The Bedford Handbook. It has my own neologism in it: bad! I am also afraid of imprecise pronouns currently.

"I'll warm up my writing muscles by responding to something," I thought. The Library of America sends me emails with links to their story of the week. To read this week's story and write something about it was my plan. This week's story was by Henry James.

Strictly speaking, as a person with a not-insubstantial amount of education, I do not consider myself to be superstitious, which of course is what most people say before they make some kind of outrageous occultist claim, but I quickly came to regard the fact that this week's featured writer was Mr. James as a portent: of what exactly, however, I could not say with a satisfactory degree of certainty.

By the way, I looked for a Hemingway story, and the one I found wasn't much better. Plus, he wrote things like, "the tree," as if that was all you needed to know about it.

I bought a book about procrastination

I decided that this was necessary to do after another day spent almost beginning to work, succeeded by an entire night spent awake working.

Not sleeping at all has bizarre effects on a person's body and brain. I remember reading a pro-weed article once--which might have been anti-weed--in which the author(s) claimed that smoking before a test is comparable to some amount of nights not sleeping, which I absolutely think is probable. I've had more instances of not being able to access the word I want to use since I've been not-sleeping than I am able to chuckle about.

Anyway, for a person who never tried any drugs because she was so afraid of the effect they might have on her precious, precious brain, I’m really doing a number on old squishy.

What I want to do instead is not that. More specifically, I’d like to start my work at 2pm on Saturday and have Sunday free rather than starting at 10pm on Sunday, being nervous about my work all weekend, and then never finishing and never having any time I could describe as “free.”

Still Procrastinating? The no-regrets guide to getting it done was written by Joseph R. Ferrari, Ph.D. I chose this book because the writer is a Phd—and apparently a big deal in the field of procrastination research. Lately I’ve been feeling like my procrastination (which is a word in need of a shorter, less dead-horse-beaten synonym) has a compulsive quality. I want to start working, I know waiting will only make me miserable, I hate that I’m not doing the work, I know if I just did a little it would be better than doing nothing, I know that the things I’m doing instead of work are absolutely useless, nonsense time-wasters, I feel as though I’m wasting my life doing this to myself, I have a list of things to do which occasionally describes these tasks in more manageable chunks. But I’m still not doing the work until the last minute or later.

I didn’t want a self-help book, but if I was going to buy a self-help book, I at least wanted the writer to be a person who understood that I might be too crazy to help myself.

"Fun" Facts about Saint Fulgentius

(Related to my previous post.)

Once, this one time, Saint Fulgentius was hanging out with the King of the Goths and some Romans. And the Romans looked super fancy, and Saint Fulgentius was all, "Oh, if Rome is so flippin sweet, heaven must really be, like, wow."

See the really excellent source here.

I was hoping for some kind of miracle where his head got cut off and his disembodied head continued to read picture books to children in his local library for 12 days and 12 nights, but the fact that he said something about heaven once is pretty fun too!

Mother's Day Fiction, part 1

Sister Mary Fulgentius* gasped and wiped her chin with the edge of her habit. Yesterday, the garden path was carpeted with soft cherry blossom petals, like pink sprinkles adorning His Great Sundae, and today, the pristine petals were swamped in human blood.

Poor Jimmy Plechtani, the unskilled groundskeeper at Our Lady of Frequent Unlikely Occurrences, lay with his neck bent back in an acute angle, his forehead leaning on the leg of a granite bench donated by the parish's best patron, Tony Sciaglioli, the sharp edge of his trowel buried in the side of his fleshy stomach. Sister Mary crossed herself and whispered a quick Réquiem Ætérnam.

Father Michael waited for her to finish. As soon as she unfolded her hands, he whispered, "Oh, Sister Mahry. Cahn't we jost move the lad's head into a more rehstfol posetion? It hourts me hart to see 'im so."

In spite of herself, Sister Mary chuckled. "Now, Father Michael," she said, "you know I'd never have a word to say against you when it comes to parish policy or church doctrine, but you've got a thing or two to learn when it comes to solving murders."

As usual, her glasses hung folded by the arm over the rope Sister Mary wore around her waist. The lenses were hopelessly smudged. Mary was always forgetting her rosary beads, so she would touch her glasses instead: Hail Mary right, Hail Mary left, Hail Mary right, Hail Mary left--five times in a row. "It works just fine for prayer," she'd joke, "but it doesn't make finding cotton fibers on a corpse any easier!"

She rubbed her glasses on her vestments and pushed the arms over her ears, poked the bridge with her right finger to make sure they were securely on her nose, and knelt down next to Jimmy's body.

"You cahnnot mean thaht thes es mourder Sister Mahry! Who would wahnt to hourt poohr Jehmmy?"

Mary answered with her nose inches from the ground, scanning the path around Jimmy's body for anything out of the ordinary. "Well, at the moment only He knows for certain, Father, but if I had to make up my mind all at once, I would say that this most certainly is a murder, and the killer is--"

"--Ma'am, please step away from that man immediately! This is a crime scene and we need, oh! Sister Mary Fulgentius!" Detective O'Malley's face began to fade from an angry beet to it's typical borscht color. He had been delayed on the way by construction on Calvary Street, and was naturally concerned for the integrity of the scene before he knew that Sister Mary was there.

Detective O'Malley had worked with Sister Mary when the senator had been murdered last Christmas and the FBI came to aid the investigation, and around Halloween when the ambassador was pushed out a window and the CIA assisted, and on Memorial Day when the general was found floating in the river and the investigator from the Army came out. "For a small-town gumshoe, I worked with a lot a big shot government guys," O'Malley liked to tell the new recruits over a few Killian's, "I'd take just one nun over the whole bunch of em every time."

"What do you got, Sister, and who are we lookin for? I guess a big guy from the way this poor sap's neck is snapped." He held out a hand to help Sister Mary up.

"Thank you, Charles. Well, that's a good guess from your vantage point, but you didn't see the marks on poor Jimmy's right cheek, or see that glazed straw fiber under his fingernails, or smell the vegetable material in his hair and around his collar."

"Sister, you can see more through those schmutzy glasses of yours than a whole gaggle of FBI agents can see through a microscope. Noonan, Brecchialli, let's see what they're teaching you at the academy." O'Malley waved the two young officers towards the body. They nervously nodded at Sister Mary and knelt on either side of Jimmy.

Noonan photographed the marks on his cheek and sighed. He looked up. "Well sir, if I wasn't afraid to look like a fool in front of Sister Mary here, I might say these look like scratches from an animal."

Brecchialli used tweezers to pick up the straw fiber and then a few leaves and stems and place them in separate tiny zip-lock bags. "And I don't know what I'm looking at, either. Maybe a bit of a straw hat, and the plant I guess is some kind of herb." Brecchialli's eyes moved sheepishly back and forth between the detective and Sister Mary; Noonan was still snapping pictures.

"Nice work, gentlemen! Charles, there is simply no competing with your excellent department." The young officers exchanged happily surprised looks over Jimmy's head. "The marks are from claws, the fiber is straw, most likely fallen out of a weave pattern, and the plant bits are Nepeta Cataria."

Father Michael's eyes had grown wider with every exchange, and his head was oscillating between Mary and O'Malley. "Sister Mahry! You cahnnot be mehning--"

"Are saying what I think you're saying, Sister?" O'Malley narrowed his eyes.

"Yes, exactly. You are looking for a killer who could ride to hell in a handbasket!"

Zombie Villanelle (for Richard)

I’m finding my being beyond pain:

My skin is a spreading, snapping mesh.

The only cohesion is my hunger for brain.

Blinking, breathing seem mundane.

There’s no signal from my rotting flesh:

I’m finding my being beyond pain.

I stagger on the old, familiar lane

I’ve forgotten the color of your dress.

The only cohesion is my hunger for brain.

That’s my locket you have on your chain.

It complements your eyes’ distress.

I’m finding my being beyond pain.

Screams become a familiar refrain,

Though I’m disoriented in the gutsy mess.

The only cohesion is my hunger for brain.

I’m wearing my face like a lion’s mane;

Your eyes are as beautiful as ever, but no longer fresh.

I’m finding my being beyond pain.

The only cohesion is my hunger for brain.

A Sample Question from the Content Specialty Exam for Future Teachers of English

The passage is followed by questions. Please note that the sentences in the passage have been numbered. This is one of our many concessions to fairness on this test. You are welcome.

1. Sedimentary rocks are rocks made of other rocks. 2. Other rocks break, or crumble. 3. Then, by various processes, they are reformed into rocks, except that they are now sedimentary. 4.Sedimentary rocks can be found in places where other rocks are. 5.A riverbed is one example.

48. The writer was best able to communicate the main idea of the passage by which of the following methods:
A. The writer's repetition of the words 'rock' or 'rocks' wears on the reader like the processes that create sedimentary rocks.
B. The passage used causal organization that allows the reader to use context clues to determine the meaning of the word 'crumble' in sentence 2.
C. The writer takes alternate interpretations into account, which helps the reader evaluate the literary merits of sedimentary rocks.
D. Onomatopoeia.

49. If this passage were to be accompanied by a chart, which would be the most appropriate?
A. A flow chart demonstrating the quantitative number of sediments in a riverbed.
B. A pie chart showing the proportion of rocks to other types of rocks in one sedimentary rock.
C. A bar chart showing the number of readers who had nodded off while reading each sentence.
D. I'm sorry, did I miss the chapter on charts in the Aeneid? Because I want to be an English teacher.