At least I got a battery of mindless things done

I’m in a fog today, so I decided to do mindless things for a day. Would you believe I got the syllabi done for Spring term classes all done? I was in the right state of mind to work through a calendar and update my schedule. I even submitted it all to the division secretary! I hope she survives the shock, she usually has to nag me to get it done.

I also got my schedule all mapped out. I’m going to have Fridays free of all classes, and you know what that means: Friday will be SpiderDay!

Monday and Wednesday won’t be bad, either. Although, realistically, a lot of that blank space will get chewed up with committees and other work.

I have things to do!

I do! Lots! Yesterday I was working on a paper, writing up a script for a video, and fussing over spiders, and I still have a couple of term papers to finish grading. I started to fade in the mid-afternoon, though, and was feeling exhausted, because I haven’t been sleeping well, waking up way too early. So last night I programmed our lights to dim at 9:30, went to bed promptly at 10, and went right to sleep. I had also programmed the lights to come up gradually at 6:30, and wake me gently by 7. I was determined to get a good night’s sleep and break this cycle.

Unfortunately, I had not planned on the behavior of the two large mammalian organisms I share the house with, one of whom started eating crackers crunchily in bed and checking their phone at sometime around 5am, and the other started snuggling up to my neck and purring at about the same time. I won’t say which was which, to protect the guilty.

So no, I didn’t get my good night’s sleep.

I’m so tired right now I might just go stretch out on the sofa and spend the day in a lazy haze of stupid television. Or maybe go the other way and take a long walk in the cold, although there’s no place to go on a Sunday (everything is closed) in Morris. Oh, I know! I’ll sit dazed and stupidly incapable of making up my mind all day long!

Have you ever had one of those days where you’re relieved to only have to work with things?

I have only a few term papers to read, and I don’t have to deal with students at all for a while. I like students and am happy to work with them most of the time, but right now I am so looking forward to retreating into my lab and dealing nothing but things. No committee meetings, no office hours, no engagement with human beings at all, just microscopes, cameras, and most importantly, spiders. Yesterday I only had a little lab time, and it was so soothing to see all the long-legged beasties hanging upside down in their sprawling webs, waiting for food. Today I give it to them, and they will be so appreciative. And undemanding.

It’s a good life, being a spider, all solitary and patient.

You can’t go back again in Star Wars

I have really good memories of the first Star Wars, back in 1977, and the latest installment made me rethink them. What genuinely thrilled me in the first movie was that it was like nothing else out there — it was strange, it was original, it was an odd mashup of a fantasy novel and a space opera, it was…creative. It was also epic and heroic and all those good things.

But here’s the problem with that: you can’t get that enthralling sense of newness and surprise if you keep going back to the same material again and again. At the same time, the corporations running the game don’t want to gamble, they want to milk the same cow ten thousand times. You can walk into this new Star Wars movie and enjoy yourself because it is comfortable and familiar and rehashes the old tropes yet again, and that’s fine — it’s just like that new Scorsese movie, The Irishman, because it is like every other gangster movie that’s been released in the last 40 years. Great, if that’s what you want.

If what drew you to Star Wars in the first place was the novelty and creativity, though, it’s not here. This movie has the Hero-Discovers-They-Had-Royal-Blood-All-Along. It has the Villain-Who-Is-Redeemed. It has the Overwhelming-Evil-Force-With-One-Itty-Bitty-Weak-Spot. It has the Battle-In-The-Throne-Room, while Space-Battle-Seems-To-Be-Doomed going on at the same time. It has Porgs…and Ewoks! It is McDonalds and KFC and Burger King, the old reliables that produce the same thing everywhere and everytime, but will never ever astonish you. It’s been commoditized.

I was actually getting pissed off and disappointed during this movie, because it totally lacks any creativity or unexpected shocks. It’s as if JJ Abrams went through all the old entries in the Star Wars universe, picked out all the memorable themes, dumped them into a blender, and poured the resultant slurry out on a tray and served it up to the audience confident that they’d recognize the scraps of the old flavor and love it. And he’s right. People will eat it up and make the corporation lots of money. I shouldn’t be disappointed, because this movie wasn’t made for me. Sometimes people want formulaic nostalgia, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Except…there is reason to be worried. The dominant forces in science fiction entertainment are Star Wars, Star Trek, and Marvel Superhero movies, pure comfort food that provide little intellectual stimulation. We have to hope the flood of money pouring in for the predictable and familiar encourages them to take an occasional gamble on some weird one-off like Annihilation or Arrival or Watchmen.

We also have to hope the good ones don’t get coopted into long-running mega-franchises, because all that can happen with that is that they’ll be run into the ground and turn into deep furrows that limit originality. In art, death is good, opening the doors of change and inspiring new ideas, so let these series die. I fear, though, that now that the Evil Empire of Disney has seized control, Zombie Star Wars is going to be revived and walk the earth forevermore.

Warning! Pure Farmland Plant-Based Burger Patties!

As a vegetarian, we’re always on the lookout for new alternatives for the menu. We’ve been mostly happy with an occasional “Beyond Meat” burger — except for the expense and the excessive packaging — so when our local grocery store started stocking this other meat alternative, we thought we’d give it a try. Slightly cheaper, 4 patties to a package, so slightly less packaging, it seemed like a good deal. It’s called Pure Farmland Plant-Based Burger Patties.

I have learned to appreciate the hard work that had to go into producing “Beyond Meat” burgers, because everything about these was off. Right away, as I was cooking them on a medium low heat, they were oozing this brownish oil that sizzled and smelled nasty. I had my doubts right away. I cooked them thoroughly and served ’em up, and noticed another phenomenon…they were orange. They didn’t taste as bad as they smelled, but still, there was a peculiar after-taste.

It looks like someone rushed a product to market after noticing the popularity of the genre, and didn’t quite put the work in to master flavor, texture, and color. It probably won’t kill me, but I probably won’t buy them ever again, either.

In case you’re interested in trying them, not recommended unless you really like the flavor of burning petroleum by-products.

Cell biology…done!

All finals graded, and the final grades submitted to the registrar. It feels good.

One of the easy questions I asked on the final is for them to tell me what they learned in class that they expected to forget immediately after the exam. The most common answers were photosynthetic pathways (might be an animal bias emerging there) and the lac operon (eep! Gene regulation is my favorite unit of the course!).

Then, weirdly, I had a bank of essay questions that they allowed them to, at their discretion, skip one. They included questions about photosynthesis, the lac operon, and cell motility. Guess which one almost everyone skipped? Cell motility! I guess they studied the subjects they hated the hardest, which may be why they wanted to forget them as quickly as they could.

Unfortunately, I am not entirely done. I’ve got one other class, biological communications, in which the students have to work with me on writing a 10-15 page paper. I gave one student an extension, so the last of those will be turned in tomorrow, and then I finish grading that by the weekend. Then I’m free!

I’ll still be trying to catch a Star War tonight.

Adam Driver and I have something in common

Besides our facility with the Force, that is. He doesn’t like to listen to or watch himself, and walked out of an interview when they threatened to play a clip. He has a history of doing that.

…in a New Yorker profile in October 2019, interlocutor Michael Schulman described Driver’s reluctance to watch himself as a “phobia.” The actor himself recalled feeling nauseous during a première of Star Wars: The Force Awakens; and hiding out in a greenroom during a screening of BlacKkKlansmen.

There are videos others have made of me floating around on the internet. I never watch them. Never. I feel a cringe crawling right up my guts when I encounter them. It’s peculiar because I don’t mind public speaking at all, it’s just seeing it again that makes me want to cry. When I started making youtube videos of my own, the hardest part was editing — I have to pretend that’s some dull old stranger in the recording so I can chop out the really bad bits, and then I don’t watch them ever again once they’re online.

It’s nice to see that even famous movie stars share this problem. See? I’m normal! Are you normal?