I am being a very bad girl because I shouldn't be typing this while in Criminal Law class. I have a free night tonight because my mother and grandmother will not be in town when I get home. So I'm going out to dinner with friends, and after that I'm going home. Screw happy hours.
I'm only going to dinner because I like food.
Also, spite, anger, and frustration that words cannot express besides the succinct declaration that I am a boob.
And a failure.
To live as a proper lover of knowledge, I have to want to KNOW something, and I can't even get THAT right. I feel so worthless, and while staring at the wall, O wall, O sweet and lovely wall, I still haven't discovered the chink that will get me beyond the barrier of the wall.
"Do you like me?"
I asked the blue blazer.
No answer.
Silence bounced out of his books.
Silence fell off his tongue
and sat between us
and clogged my throat.
It slaughtered my trust.
It tore cigarettes out of my mouth.
We exchanged blind words,
and I did not cry,
and I did not beg,
blackness lunged in my heart,
and something that had been good,
a sort of kindly oxygen,
turned into a gas oven.
Do you like me?
How absurd!
What's a question like that?
What's a silence like that?
And what am I hanging around for,
riddled with what his silence said?
I do have a translation of that Shakira song; I like it much better in Spanish.
Apparently in English it's called "Something."
What's the last thing you usually do or think about before you fall asleep?
Whether Ryan has gone to sleep yet, and I usually decide I'm not going to X class tomorrow because I did no preparations for X. And I go. And I hate it.
What TV show(s) will you be watching this season? Why?
Submitted by ducnly.vox.com.
I wish I did have a TiVo or something. I'm not watching much of anything this season. My internet and my television do not like each other, so they stay in separate rooms. Of course, this also means I rarely see the light of day, but I make that sacrifice.
Teammates: Allen used "N-word" in college
Three members of Sen. George Allen's college football team remember a man with racist attitudes at ease using racial slurs.
By Michael Scherer
Sept. 24, 2006 | WASHINGTON -- Three former college football teammates of Sen. George Allen say that the Virginia Republican repeatedly used an inflammatory racial epithet and demonstrated racist attitudes toward blacks during the early 1970s.
"Allen said he came to Virginia because he wanted to play football in a place where 'blacks knew their place,'" said Dr. Ken Shelton, a white radiologist in North Carolina who played tight end for the University of Virginia football team when Allen was quarterback. "He used the N-word on a regular basis back then."
A second white teammate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retribution from the Allen campaign, separately claimed that Allen used the word "nigger" to describe blacks. "It was so common with George when he was among his white friends. This is the terminology he used," the teammate said.
A third white teammate contacted separately, who also spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of being attacked by the Virginia senator, said he too remembers Allen using the word "nigger," though he said he could not recall a specific conversation in which Allen used the term. "My impression of him was that he was a racist," the third teammate said.
Shelton also told Salon that the future senator gave him the nickname "Wizard," because he shared a last name with Robert Shelton, who served in the 1960s as the imperial wizard of the United Klans of America, a group affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan. The radiologist said he decided earlier this year that he would go public with his concerns about Allen if a reporter ever called. About four months ago, when he heard that Allen was a possible candidate for president in 2008, Shelton began to write down some of the negative memories of his former teammate. He provided Salon excerpts of those notes last week.On Sunday morning, Salon spoke with David Snepp, a spokesman for Allen's Senate office, to ask for a response to the recollections of the three former teammates. E-mail and phone messages were also left for Bill Bozin, a spokesman for the Allen campaign, and Dick Wadhams, the campaign manager. Though Snepp indicated that the campaign, and probably Wadhams, would respond, eight hours later no one in the Allen camp had replied to Salon. Chris LaCivita, a consultant to the Allen campaign, hung up when a Salon reporter reached him mid-afternoon Sunday. Additional attempts to contact the campaign were unsuccessful.
The racial attitudes of Allen, a once formidable presidential contender in 2008, have become an issue in his highly contested reelection campaign against Jim Webb, a former Marine and author. Last month, Allen was videotaped calling an Indian-American college student "macaca," an obscure word for monkey that is also used as a racial epithet in some parts of the world. Allen has since apologized to the student, saying that he made up the word, and did not know its other meanings.
Last week, Allen again created controversy by appearing offended when a reporter asked about the Jewish lineage in his mother's family, which he has since acknowledged. Allen has also faced questions about his affinity for the Confederate flag, which he wore as a pin in a high school yearbook photo and exhibited in his home in Virginia.
In public statements, Allen has said that he realized later in life that the Confederate flag was a symbol of violence for black Americans, and he has expressed some regret. "There are a lot of things that I wish I had learned earlier in life," Allen said in an appearance this month on NBC's "Meet the Press." But Allen has maintained that he never harbored any discriminatory attitudes toward blacks. "Even if your heart is pure, the things you say and do and the symbols you use matter because of how others may take them," he said in the prepared transcript for remarks to a luncheon with black educators on Sept. 13.
Over the past week, Salon has interviewed 19 former teammates and college friends of Allen from the University of Virginia. In addition to the three who said Allen used the word "nigger," two others who were contacted said they remember being bothered by Allen's displaying the Confederate flag in college, but said they do not remember him acting in an overtly racist manner. Seven others said they did not know Allen well outside the football team, but do not remember Allen demonstrating any racist feelings. A separate seven teammates and friends said they knew Allen well and did not believe he held racist views. "I don't believe he was insensitive," said Paul Ryczek, who played center in Allen's year before joining the Atlanta Falcons. "He had no prejudices, biases or anything else."
In the interviews, old teammates generally spoke of him highly, as a good friend, a bright and ambitious student, and a colorful character who embraced Southern culture, listened to country music, and attracted the nickname "Neck," as in redneck. "If a black guy dropped a pass, he would say something to him," said Gerard Mullins, who played defensive back in Allen's year. "If it was a white guy, same thing. It really didn't matter where you were from, who you were, or anything."
The three former teammates, however, painted a very different picture of Allen when he was around his white friends. Shelton said he feels a personal responsibility to tell what he knows about Allen's past, especially now that Allen has been mentioned as a possible presidential candidate. "I got to know Allen a little too well," Shelton said, adding that he does not believe Allen should hold elective office. "He had prejudices that were deep-seated."
Shelton said no political animosity has driven his decision to speak out. He has switched between Democratic and independent registration in recent elections, he said, and does not consider himself politically active. Four years ago, Shelton and his wife donated $1,000 to Sam Neill, the Democratic challenger to Rep. Charles Taylor, R-N.C., because Shelton said they knew Neill and were upset by the allegations of corruption against Taylor, who was reelected. In February, Shelton supported Rick Davis, a current Republican candidate for sheriff, and penned a letter to the editor in the Hendersonville Times-News backing Davis' campaign. Shelton says he does not know much about Allen's political ideology and says he hasn't spoken to him in about 30 years. "There are no personal grudges," Shelton said. "There was no falling out."
helton played football with Allen in the 1972 and 1973 seasons, according to the team media guides from those years. Shelton remembers Allen's attitudes about race surfacing early in their relationship. At one point, Shelton says, Allen nicknamed him "Wizard," after United Klans imperial wizard Robert Shelton. "He asked me if I was related at all," Shelton remembers. "I knew of that name, and I said absolutely not." Several former teammates confirmed that Shelton's team nickname was "Wizard," though no one contacted by Salon could confirm firsthand knowledge of the handle's origin. "Everyone called me 'Wizard' that knows me from those days," said Shelton. "My nickname stuck."
Shelton said he also remembers a disturbing deer hunting trip with Allen on land that was owned by the family of Billy Lanahan, a wide receiver on the team. After they had killed a deer, Shelton said he remembers Allen asking Lanahan where the local black residents lived. Shelton said Allen then drove the three of them to that neighborhood with the severed head of the deer. "He proceeded to take the doe's head and stuff it into a mailbox," Shelton said.
Lanahan, a former resident of Richmond, Va., died this year at the age of 53, said his aunt Martha Belle Chisholm of Richmond. In an interview on Thursday, Chisholm said that she remembered Lanahan speaking highly of Allen. "Bill was very complimentary of George Allen," she said. "He said he was just one of the boys." Chisholm also confirmed that the Lanahan family owned hunting land near Bumpass, Va., about 50 miles east of the University of Virginia campus.Allen, a college quarterback, arrived at Virginia in 1971 as a sophomore transfer from the University of California at Los Angeles, where he had a football scholarship after graduating from nearby Palos Verdes High School. He relocated to Virginia around the same time that his father, also named George Allen, took a job as the head coach of the Washington Redskins. At the time of his arrival, race relations at the University of Virginia were delicate. Allen's graduating class was the first to offer scholarships to black athletes, and included the first four black players on the football team and the first black starting quarterback, Harrison Davis, who did not return calls from Salon.
Accusations of racial insensitivity have long dogged Allen's political career. As a member of the Virginia Legislature, Allen opposed a state holiday honoring Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. As Virginia's governor, Allen issued a proclamation honoring Confederate History Month that contained no mention of slavery. In recent years, however, Allen has made a point to reach out to minority communities, sponsoring legislation to fund historically black colleges and a resolution to condemn the lynching of blacks in the South. In a New Republic article by Ryan Lizza earlier this year, Allen discussed a "civil rights pilgrimage" he had taken to Birmingham, Ala., in 2003. "I wish I had [gone] sooner," the magazine quotes Allen saying. "I was listening to the old civil-rights movement, the strategies, the foundations, the tactics."
Several of Allen's teammates remember him arriving at the University of Virginia in 1971 with long sandy blond hair and surfer stories of the Pacific Ocean. "He was a Californian," remembers Craig Critchley, a family doctor in Ohio who played linebacker in Allen's year, and did not remember the senator displaying racial views. "It was like, 'Wow, man, yeah.'"
Shelton last remembers speaking with Allen in the mid-1970s, in Charlottesville, when Allen, then in law school, played with Shelton, who was in medical school, in an inter-city football league. For Shelton, the memories of Allen's behavior during his football days raise clear questions about the senator's fitness for office. "I just think that someone who attains that level of higher office needs to have higher standards," Shelton said. "He has deep-seated core values that are hard to reverse despite what he says."
By contrast, Allen has pointed to a different lesson from his days of football playing in recent public statements. On "Meet the Press," he said his football career was an experience that taught him racial tolerance. "I grew up in a football family, as you well know, and my parents and those teams taught me a lot," Allen said on the program. "And one of the things that you learn in football is that you don't care about someone's race or ethnicity or religion."
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all around it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
What's your favorite foreign accent?
Can you tell the owners of this site are Amurrcan? lol
I don't know if I have one "favorite;" all accents to me sound damned interesting. European accents are pretty kickin', and African accents (especially from Morocco and Nigeria). Some Asian accents are fairly interesting (Korean, Nepalese, Indian, and my friend did a cool impression of a Hawaiian accent from when she briefly grew up there). I like Australian accents, and Canadian accents are cool even though they arguably don't sound very much different from American or French accents. Southeastern American accents surprise me because they sound like English accents that are exaggeratedly relaxed (and that seems wholly likely with American history).
I guess that's my list o' accents. I'll tag this later when I have the energy.
What's up?
I'm threatening my boyfriend with telling the internets he's horny. :-p
Aside from that, I'm doing nothing of importance. My mother's whining because she lost the lottery. I'm rockin' out to those striped whites. (Sounds like ruined laundry, but they're cool.)
It's very depressing when 90% of your most recent updates are questions of the freakin' day. And then you discover you missed a few days of questions. I am the negliblogger.
So now, I'm going to cheat. I'm going to post an excerpt from a rather long entry in my LiveJournal on how my life's been going. I'm not cheating terribly much because it encompasses how things have felt in my heart for the past couple of weeks.
While waiting for the 11 line to come down the street, I started thinking my usual embarrassed thoughts about standing on the bus stop across from the law school alone. My law books filled my bookbag today, and I felt the shakes because I had to leave my laptop at home. (Civil Procedure I is BRUTAL without some sort of distraction.) I felt listless and bored. My shoulder ached so horribly. I put my bag down, and I seriously just wanted to sit on the curb and cry. I feel like every car, every student, every federal hidden surveillance camera, every extraterrestrial lifeform was staring at me and smirking about the big poor black chick with the two bags on the bus stop alone. I knew it was not true (though people do stare at me from their cars; I have an old pedestrian habit of staring back). But I started thinking of ways to cheer myself up through this law school experience and these moods. The moods are growing more frequent than I care to admit.
I was listening to a live performance of "On and On" by Erykah Badu the night before, and I thought about how serene I felt then. Then my mind traveled to more Baduisms, and I thought about my heavy bag. Before I knew it, I was singing snippets of the song and piecing it all together.
Bag lady you gone hurt your back
Dragging all them bags like that
I guess nobody ever told you
All you must hold on to
Is you, is you, is you
One day all them bags gone get in your way
One day all them bags gone get in your way
I said one day all them bags gone get in your way
One Day all them bags gone get in your way
So pack light
Pack light
Pack light
Ooh ooh
Bag lady you gone miss your bus
You can't hurry up
Cause you got too much stuff
When they see you comin
Niggas take off runnin
>From you it's true oh yes they do
One day he gone say you crowdin my space
One day he gone say you crowdin my space
I said one day he gone say you crowdin my space
One day he gone say you crowdin my space
So pack light
Pack light
Pack light
Ooh ooh
Girl I know sometimes it's hard
And we can't let go
Oh when someone hurts you oh so bad inside
You can't deny it you can't stop crying
So oh, oh, oh
If you start breathin
Then you won't believe it
You'll feel so much better
(So much better baby)
And the more I sang the song, the more amused I felt at lugging all the books I carried. I didn't need half of them that day, though it's "mandatory" to take them. Being on the bus stop alone didn't bother me quite as horribly. I realized I wasn't up there to worry about putting on a show for all those eyes. I just have to start breathing and keep it up. And pack light.
I missed a social opportunity -- you know, an opportunity not lunch-oriented or library-oriented for once -- because my mom tricked me home for some fade cream for my blemishes, a few costume necklace/earring pieces, and some medicated pads for acne. I needed them, but she made it sound like I'd won another scholarship or something on the phone, and it was pertinent I returned home. Needless to say I was slightly peeved, but I liked the fact my mom bought it for me. She didn't have to do it, and I would have yelled at her if she asked me before she did it. I thanked her and calmed down somewhat.
The constant happy hours are bothering the hell out of me because I'd feel so removed from it all even if I could go. I'm not psyching up for my 21st birthday so I can get soused; I'm more egging it on so I can go out with my classmates and not feel like dead weight. I won't magically contribute to the best drink conversations or transform into a fairy princess, but I'll just feel less distanced from my classmates.
I'm also worried about participating in class and online. Whenever someone posts an inquiry on the class TWEN site (equivalent to Blackboard on the Westlaw network), everyone gets a notification. My Contracts professor has field days posting inquiries and probing willing students for answers. Everyone gets pissed. I heard them talking about a different kid who kept posting who'd earned their ire. I'd posted quite frequently answering and discussing cases, too. Plus I tend to ask clarification questions so I understand what's going on in the class. I've volunteered a few times and answered the wrong question; I've also piped up and brought things on track. But I still feel like I'm standing out too much, and I want to fade back into the scenery.
I've also embarked on this horrible, horrible trend of making law jokes. My social group laughs it off, but I feel like a dork after I do it. For example, my friend and I joked about suing my Contracts professor because of his haircut, claiming it was intentional infliction of emotional distress. Punitive damages are in order, we joked. When another friend and I made a wisecrack about giving my Criminal Law professor a high chair so he could play poker with us on Friday (if I go), a friend laughed and said she didn't hear it. I then told her she couldn't plead deliberate ignorance after laughing, because it has the same weight as actual knowledge. (It has a lot to do with proving the mental state of a criminal when committing an act or considering the commission of an act.)
Someone shoot me.
Lately, I've been on a Shakira appreciation kick. Her song "En Tus Pupilas" is beautiful.
