Tuesday, May 18, 2004
(12:14 PM) | Anonymous:
Buttered Toast in My Raging 13th-Street Brain
Hooray, I finally get to do a PowerPoint presentation for work! I know, I know, PowerPoint is the heinousness of the world. But at least this isn’t for a classroom—in fact, I think I was the last person in the whole world to slip through college without ever having to use PowerPoint—it’s to impress little rich old ladies into donating money. They never had to sit through “slick” PowerPoint lectures, see. Besides, it’s fun to be given creative reign here at The Office. What, with PowerPoint? Yes, and I’m with David Byrne on this.Sure, maybe my heretofore forays into PowerPoint—rather, my one foray (the only time I ever used PowerPoint was during the training course)—has been not-so-cutting-edge. But I had fun making up my Things I Have To Do (and these are mostly fun) presentation, including split-color stick figures on stage saying, “You have to get all this stuff done. (But it’ll be fun.)” with 3-D slanted heading “Yeah!” and photos of buttered toast and, for good measure, a whole slide titled “Pictures of Nature.”
Last night in Milwaukee it was hot. I got my birthday body massage* from my friend Sheila and then I bicycled around oiled and languorous, waiting for my 9:00 meeting with Douraid Souissi to plan my visit to Tunisia.
I’ve never bothered to buy proper lights for night biking, so I tried to find a “safe” way up to Marquette University from the southside. I covertly accessed the 13th Street Bridge by carrying my bike up the stairs. The bridge was surprisingly calm and traffic-free, and I was only a tiny bit disappointed when I was thwarted by a gaping hole the size of the frenetic freeway below it. I thought of Frogger.
My brain is changing. Do you believe me? I’m rediscovering the most efficient part of my brain (the Right Posterior Convexity), which is not the part that used to help me win arguments and write papers (Left Frontal Lobe). That part is sort of hard to access right now, so I won’t be posting anything scholarly for awhile. This is scary, because for a long time I’ve relied heavily on being “smart.”
Those blasted junk e-mailers are getting trickier! I was almost enticed to open this one I got just now with a subject line of “Re: postmortem stratosphere.”
Now I just got an email about Rumsfeld and I feel a new wave of rage. In my PowerPoint presentation I included a gratuitous slide called “Rich White Power Man.” It’s fun and all to boil down the fucking up of the whole world to the fault of a limited number of shortsighted, selfish, puny, soulless individuals.
But I have to acknowledge that it’s me. I am the same. I have a different vision and I will behave differently, but I am actually the same.
*Thanks to Stephanie & Bryan Keen for introduction to Fensler.
