Weblogs as Dissertation and Strawberry Shortcake

I posted this: OJR article: Scholars Discover Weblogs Pass Test as Mode of Communication up on the Sizurfed Blog as well but thought it was interesting enough that I'd bring it up on the "front page." You should go to the Sizurfed page though, cause there's more. Cousin Sean and I had been talking on the phone the other day about my plans for the upcoming year and my mental health and how I was feeling like I just wanted to crawl under a rock and die because EVERYONE kept asking me the same questions and I didn't have anything new to tell them and some of my friends were calling me asking me how I was but I am absolutely petrified to pick up the phone and talk to anyone -- ANYONE - who is going to ask me about how life is and what I am planning on doing. I have nothing new to tell anyone. We also talked about how interesting it would be to be in the school of sociology or any academic field and have a dissertation on weblogs, but this is about feelings of worthlessness:

Let me tell you a brief story that shows you how life moves in cycles. Right when I was first beginning this website, I had just gradumutated from college and was spending some R-n-R time at my brother's in Alaska. It just so happened that one of those days that I spent up there fell on his birthday. Further background investigations will tell you that both of us had just had our hearts ripped out and stomped on by members of the opposite sex. I had pretty much calloused mine over at this point -- not to be penetrated again (as yet holding to that, though I'm not really in a position to attract) while my brother was still fresh out in the dumps. Well, either out of pity or true love, some of his friends decided that it would be best if they had a boys night out. Not being one to shun the fun a mere two years ago, my brother and I acquiesced.

We were to meet Sir Chuck at the Goldrush Bar in downtown Anchorage. I can't remember now if it was called the Goldrush Bar or not, but I do know that when this locale first grew out of the frozen tundra of South Central Alaska it was in the form of a brothel for the entertainment of all those grizzled men who would amble in fresh from their diggin to, well, start diggin again. I remember mulling over these thoughts, my eyes wandering around the wooden interior, my gaze taking in the staircase on the left, following those stairs up to the second level that spanned over the full length bar, marveling at the frontierish feel and then noticing several rooms behind the bannister on the landing where in and out scurried several scantily clad entertainers. (It was like one of those frenetic scenes in Scooby Doo where Shaggy and Scoobs would be chased by the monster into one door only to emerge chasing the monster from another.) Hmmmm. Yes. I could see how this could have worked.

So there I was trying to take in this fine architecture, managing to take in several Captain and Cokes, and still maintaining an appreciation for the beauty of certain forms when my line of sight was hampered by the presence of another shape.

Listen. Even while harboring the most vitriolic sentiments towards the opposite sex after having my heart ripped out, I could still appreciate the beauty of the female form. I just was going through an unhealthy stretch of misogynistic behaviours. Unfortunately, this thing that had just wandered over was anything but beautiful. Well, maybe I'm being unreasonable. Perhaps she had some nice qualities that I wasn't seeing, it was rather dark in that strip bar... No. Nooo. No, I think I had it right the first time, except for maybe the moniker of "thing." This "woman" was definitely not beautiful. When I say "woman", I mean woman. Not girl, not young lady...woman. A true Alaskan rugged outdoorsy been through many many a cold winter and could kill a bear with my dagger eyes so don't think I'd have a problem gettin to you woman.

So there I am - man who hates woman staring back at my nemesis - in a slightly crude, slightly shoddy female form. Imagine a sculptor working with clay towards creating Venus when a sudden shift of the table knocks her from her perch and she lands with a sickening splat on the floor. The sculptor simply picks up the Venus, and out of sheer exasperation decides to abandon the project as is and start a new one, leaving the now deformed lumpish freak of Venus standing on the table nearest as testimony to the wonders of Nature. That was my nemesis. Only dressed in pithy amounts of leather rather than clay. And she had not been dropped, but rather in an act of volition had descended from her table to take her stand before me as woman who hates man.

"Hel-lo," She croaked. "What's your name?" Oh God did she croak. I knew she'd been heading for me. I had some sort of sixth sense about it, outta the corner of my eye I saw the shadows creeping across the floor - I felt an icicle between the hairs on my neck. I knew that just by leaving the safe seclusion of my brother's condo that night, still unable to face the world with a suitable level of comfort -- leaving rather than sitting idly by with the slug of intermittent shyness weighing on me, timid and aloof, comforting myself with the hypnotic notes that are emitted from the obsessive squeezing of air between the palms of my hands -- I knew that by leaving that security I was going to face something that was potentially a harvester of my insecurities. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your interpretation -- I had had what can now be described as an enlightening talk with my brother driving into Anchorage towards that very bar.

I had seen an episode of Seinfeld a few nights before and remarked how I found it rather disheartening to be able to draw a closer comparison between myself and George Costanza rather than anyone else on the show. In this particular episode George decided that he was going to tackle his problems with the opposite sex by employing a new approach. Honesty. And so it was that I would borrow George Costanza's line in an Anchorage Bar, and use it to the amusement of my fellow rabblerousers, and the bemusement of one dropped Venus.

"How about a lap dance sweety?"
"I'm 24. I don't have a job, and I live with my parents."

My brother laughed. He laughed so hard he cried. He laughed and struggled to utter out, "I can't believe you actually said that." But I had. Like someone just beginning to feel the onset of poison, the leather-skinned, leather-clad deformed Venetian woman slowly stopped shifting her weight around, er, dancing, and without taking her eyes off me began to back away.

Then I finished another drink. And then Strawberry Shortcake started dancing. Strawberry Shortcake!!!