Analogy Animal

Hanging out past my bedtime with a group of people that I mostly don't know to celebrate a friend's birthday. Half of us trying to describe someone who was with the group at the bar earlier. I'm sure I keep saying the wrong thing. A girl might be forming a crush on the guy, and we want to encourage that while preparing her for his extreme awkwardness.

I feel relieved when someone else comes up with an analogy. The guy is like a deer and the girl is a rabbit. Sudden movement will send the deer leaping away. Steady acclimation and they can end up being Bambi and Thumper. Not that the guy's Bambi. He's a stag. It's late, the bumbling babble continues.

That's how I was asked to come up with my analogy animal. Not a spirit animal. Simply one to stand in for me in analogies.

I settled on a penguin. The devotion to their mate appeals. As does the time when the women go off on their own. (Y'all know I need my independence in community.) Plus, they walk funny.

And their the unofficial second mascot for my college.

And everyone should like penguins.

Just like everyone should like me.

~~~
Anyone have other suggestions for my analogy animal? Picks for your own?

Working on the Nerd Cred

"I got some comic book collections at the library yesterday."

"Like Sunday comics?"

"No. Comic books."

"Like graphic novels?"

"No. Comic books. Like come in 22 page episodes. Collected in massive tomes? Loved the collection of Wonder Women by Jodi Picolt..."

"Woah! When did this start?"

~~~

National Read Comics in Public Day was a few weeks ago.

Or, like, a month ago. Whatever.

I found out about it from Monkey See, one of the few blogs that I refuse to put in my reader because I like going to the website. And know when to limit my visits so there is something new when I bop over.

This is the part that got me hooked.

Look; I read comics on the bus, on the subway and while waiting for chronically tardy friends at coffee shops, bars(!) and restaurants. In any of these places, I'll talk about comics loudly, forcefully and at considerable length to anyone who'll listen, and to many who won't. Compunction about comics, I got none.

Or so I thought.

Earlier this week, on my way to record the latest Pop Culture Happy Hour, I stuffed into my bag a handful of comics to read on the subway. Didn't think about it, just grabbed a bunch as I ran out the door.

When I took them out to read, I noticed something. Unconsciously, I had selected books of a certain type. A type that can best be called: I am a Special Smartypants*, Comics Edition.

They were, all five of them, dense, serious, black-and-white comics about war and art and history and social class and blah. Again: I did not deliberately leave behind the superhero comics, and the manga, and the fantasy books, and the classic comic strip reprints I regularly read.

But as I sat there, staring down at the faithfully and exquisitely rendered landscape of some war-torn country or another, I tried to remember the last time I had read any superhero book, with its bright, colorful, spandex-clad mesomorphs facing off against aliens, or super-apes, or robots, or Nazis or alien super-ape robo-Nazis, while on the subway or at a bar. And I couldn't come up with one.

Clearly, then, my subconscious is a rank poseur. Who still cares enough about what others might think about his reading material to unconsciously self-edit his public choices. My subconscious, bless him, also clings to the downright laughable idea that the kind of tiresome, ungenerous people who'd judge me for reading comics would distinguish between, say, Footnotes in Gaza and Fantastic Four.

Here's the thing, though: I love the Fantastic Four. Jonathan Hickman and Dale Eaglesham are doing some fun, trippy, literally fantastic stuff on that book. So why pretend I don't? To strangers on the friggin' SUBWAY?

So. I'll be seizing Read Comics in Public Day as a chance to overcome the last lingering shreds of my internalized geekophobia. It'll be me, the dog and a pile of shamelessly goofy, high-concept, boldy colored, alien super-ape robo-Nazi-smashin' adventure.

~~~

To be fair to the friend on the other half of the conversation excerpted at the beginning, I have half a shelf of Sunday comic collections. That he flips through on a regular basis. I don't own many graphic novels, and read them quickly enough he hasn't seen me with them.

And the comic books are a new thing. Because they looked like fun to try on for a day.

And, let's be honest, reading about heroes is AWESOME!

Not going in the proposal, no matter how many times I write it

This will be my first conference presentation and I have no idea what I'm doing. And I’m unreasonably nervous about it.

Definitely true. (At least in part. I guess I have some idea what I'm doing. Maybe?) Probably suspected. But, geez, you don't put that in the formal thing.

Still needed to get it out there somewhere though.

Ticking Along

23. Give yoga a second chance

It took me a week after going to yoga class to remember that it was on my list. Ooops. Write-up required.

At my school, the strength and aerobic classes are free, but you have to pay for yoga and pilates. At least normally. My usual Friday gym class was canceled because of some exhibition being held in the gym, so I got to go to yoga for free. Yippee!

I liked it! The instructor led us through the poses in whatever normal soothing way. The friend I went with (who actually has done yoga before) called him deceptively challenging. "What was that when were balanced on the one foot, and we lifted our heels off the floor and now we're supposed to lift our toes too? What am I standing on?"

Crazy sore for the next couple of days, but that's expected. I'd go again. Often even. I can see how people get hooked. But, umm.., you have to pay for that class and I've got another one for free. I'll wait until it's not the more expensive option.

Tell it like it is, girl

Love eavesdropping on early-high-school girls.

I'm just gonna go up to him and say we need to establish a relationship.

Bam. I should start doing that.

Bias

When scientists in my profession publish results of their investigations they try not to reference other studies more than twenty or thirty years old. Those works are considered outdated, superseded by later investigations presumed more worth because more recent. Like the echoing mantra of Eminent Domain, the science that guides us seems anxious to discard the old, bring in the new. This casting aside of history may partly explain why, the older I get, the more I’m fascinated by it.

An old book I have describes the invasion of the Great Plains by cattle. The book smells like the libraries I inhabited during my dispersal years and where I first discovered girls who like reading. Does that bias my appreciation for it?

~page 80, Grass: In Search of Human Habitat by Joe C. Truett