Yesterday, after observing a friend of mine teach her 1030 class (not being creepy, it's a required thing for my "learning how to teach good" class and she was more than happy to help a brother out), I checked my email while eating lunch and saw something in my inbox from "Jeopardy," America's favorite way to "out" as many nerds as possible via a clever set-up in which they are asked to respond to answers in the form of questions. As you may recall, I have a long history of taking the online tests whenever they roll around every year, and a couple of years ago I even got the chance to audition at an event in New Orleans, which was awesome. I hadn't taken the test this past January, however, and I figured my life of "Jeopardy" was over.
So when they said they wanted to know if I could make it to an audition in Savannah, Georgia this upcoming April...I immediately thought "didn't Sony get hacked by the North Koreans last year?"
Because Sony owns "Jeopardy," and one can only imagine what the devious Kim Jong Un could do with my email address handy. I anticipate being asked to rate him in terms of "a great leader, or the greatest" soon.
But supposing this isn't a scam, and supposing I really do hope it isn't ( and I do), this means I'll have that to look forward to amidst a very busy semester that only promises to get busier. I got the responsibility of making sure the Lit Fest goes off without (too much of) a hitch, and while I'm not alone in that (an entire dedicated student group helping to organize the event and make sure no authors wander off too far into the native wilds of neighboring counties, thus avoiding any international incidents) I do feel a lot of responsibility towards the event. I also have two conferences that I'm planning on appearing at over the course of the next few months (one for a paper I've already written, one for a paper that I haven't). And my buddy Will is getting married, thankfully in the first weekend of May (i.e., after the end of my current semester), which means I can attend but which also means that I'm not sure I can perform the duties of groomsman that he offered to me and which I accepted late last year, before I realized that this was going to be my "busy" semester.
Thankfully, classes are going good, and I hope they continue to do so. Just so long as that bastard Foucault doesn't turn up in any of my readings...
Side note: Last week a kid brought in a short story set in a relic of another time, a video store (and he set it during the Eighties, when I was a kid whose mom worked briefly at one or two video stores). The nostalgia this evoked in me has led me to wonder if my memory of riding around the mom-and-pop video store my mom worked at in Westminster on a Big Wheel was accurate or just a misremembering brought about by my later viewing of Kubrick's The Shining. If it's a real memory, then I guess I could say I was Danny Torrance in my youth, minus the homicidal father and the psychic visions. But I do remember the old boxes that the videotapes came in, stuffed with cardboard or other material so it wouldn't fold down but still stand out on the shelves. I also remember looking through the horror section, daring myself to turn the box around and see what mayhem awaited the poor cast members of whatever half-forgotten fright flick had caught my eye. It occurs to me now that a lot of the time, the idea of the movies that I got from the images on the back of those boxes was probably scarier than the actual movie itself. Hooray for late Eighties imagination!
Also, it's Valentine's Day today, I don't have anyone to buy romantic crap for and that's okay because I've never been good at it anyway. I did ride around a bit and end up buying a Clyde Edgerton book that had once belonged to some guy named "Roland" (I know this because he wrote "Roland" in capital letters on the pages-side of the book, not the spine. Your book should be in good hands, Roland). I recently read a short story of his and thought it was funny. Clyde Edgerton, not "Roland."
Anyway, that's all I got for now, peeps.
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