links for 2006-10-22

22 October 2006 | del.icio.us | No Comments

Lap-Pop 3.0 is almost go

21 October 2006 | lap-pop, lappop3, locus arts, spoken word, weblogs | No Comments

Sort of live-blogging from Lap-Pop 3.0, waiting for the show to start. Heard something about somebody’s milkshake being awesome.

Stuff like this and the WYSIWYG Talent Show kind of bring weblogging full-circle for me. When I moved into Chicago from the burbs, I visited my poetry teacher from college and ended up showing her Running Tally, my original weblog, after she asked me if I was still writing poetry. (“Not so much, but I’m still writing, in a fashion, doing this thing on the web…”) She browsed through it and said, “What do you mean you’re not still writing poetry? What do you call this?” That same day, through her influence, I got booked to read at Grinder (now Homolatte) and started doing spoken word, writing stuff for the mic as well as the web. And now people are taking what they wrote for the web and are performing it as spoken word. Fantastic.

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links for 2006-10-21

21 October 2006 | del.icio.us | No Comments

links for 2006-10-18

18 October 2006 | del.icio.us | No Comments

links for 2006-10-17

16 October 2006 | del.icio.us | No Comments

I’ve been meaning to tell you about how my appendix burst

22 April 2006 | appendix, jaschu, personal health | No Comments

But it’s been just so nice doing nothing, not creating any useful output, and catching up on what I missed while in the hospital. More later, but to everyone who came and visited, called, emailed, sent flowers, ran errands for me, or dropped me an Odeo, thank you thank you.

More details later.

Fashion victim

2 April 2006 | delusion, fashion | No Comments

Tonight I was sitting in the Kintetsu Mall of Japantown, mostly just trying to practice no-mind (and failing; my inner state is never one of silence), and this kid walks by in a rush. He’s got a black murse with a Red Cross symbol on it. It stood out because it had more than a passing resemblance to my own murse—same kind of cover flap and buckles, same white circular background for the red cross itself… And after he walked by, I recalled another SF0 player telling me the day before that she had seen bags like mine at Urban Outfitters or some such, and like some victim of hipsterism I quickly asserted that I had found mine in a second-hand store… very knee-jerk of me, honestly.

The sum of these occurances, in some imaginative, solipsistic moment of fancy, made me wonder if this new fashion accessory appearing in stores was somehow my fault. I’ve had my bag for years, and I theorized that on one instance of being out and about, some designer-spy, prowling the streets of the city for items of unusual occurance, spotted my bag and decided to research it, replicate it, and push it out to market. Perhaps entire special forces of fashion informants roam the urban territories, filing reports on their findings during field reconnaisance.

Of course not, it’s ridiculous, at least the part where I’m somehow involved.

A list of items that might have been their own weblog posts had I been more inclined to stay focused enough to write over the last few weeks

28 March 2006 | adbusters, guitar hero, logo, music genone project | 2 Comments

Is this news? Is it the right news?

7 March 2006 | cnn, homecoming, hood college, lesbian, news, queer | 1 Comment

Rock on and congratulations to Jennifer Jones, the lesbian at Maryland’s Hood College that was voted in as Homecoming King. But I have to take note that CNN thought this was newsworthy. I mean, this isn’t the first case of a GLBT student running for Prom/Homecoming/whatever Court on a cross-gender ballot. She’s probably not the first GLBT person to win, either. It’s very cool, but… is it news?

At first, it seems like it is; if Hood is any indication, liberal arts students support GLBT efforts to stake out a place for themselves in the straight world. This projects into a future where we can imagine more and more people being a-ok for us queer folk. That’s cool. It’s a sociological indicator of where the nation is headed, yeah? Right?

…Sort of? What I found more interesting was the stats they gave: Jones won 64 out of 169 votes for Homecoming King. That’s not terribly overwhelming as a win. And from Hood’s website, there were 2,121 students enrolled at Hood in the fall of 2005. 169 total votes out of a student body of 2,121; that’s about 8% voter turnout for the King ballot. The real news here is that liberal arts students don’t give a fuck about Homecoming. And when you crunch a couple other numbers, it says 3% of students actively wanted a lesbian Homecoming King. That’s not much of a reason to celebrate.

If we want news to make us feel good about the future of GLBTs in this country, how about something more concrete? I want to see headlines like Gay man totally beats the shit out of his would-be gay-basher, or Rad lesbian does her thing in rural Alabama, or She’s brilliant, she’s post-op, she’s the Senator.

Jones deserves a better headline. She’s the homecoming king isn’t cool. A better one would be Young lesbian figures out early on how to game the system, is prepared for a richer life because of it.

(Cross-posted since it fit in both places.)

A request or two for that guy receiving a blowjob while driving on the highway

15 February 2006 | driving, sex | 8 Comments

Hi there. Wow, aren’t you the lucky bastard! Sorry to interrupt, but me and my friend are in the car behind you, and we’ve been watching what’s been going on. Now, far be it for me to put a damper on anyone’s pursuit of happiness, but just in case you forgot, we are on the 101 and it is the tail end of rush hour, and there are a lot more cars around you if you’d care to take a look, and we’re all screaming down the highway in the same direction. It’s a situation that can easily become perilous, you know? Do you want to be that guy that had an accident? Ever see The World According to Garp and that one scene when Robin Williams’ character comes home and wasn’t expecting the car in the driveway in which his wife is giving another guy a hummer? Remember how that ended? Plus there’s my life and my friend’s life to worry about. So! If you’re going to get a blowjob right at this moment, I have just a couple things to ask of you:

  1. Keep your car in your lane.
    This is what got me and my friend speculating on what was going on over there. I was optimistic and thinking you were just changing the radio. I’ve done that before, admittedly, reached over to change stations and started drifting. It’s easy. But you were… wiggling, for lack of a better word. Wiggling and drifting. And you did it twice. And then a third time. Now, for the record, my friend guessed “blowjob” from the get-go, but I didn’t believe it until we saw the head of your passenger lean over, go down, and not come back up. We wouldn’t be scrutinizing your vehicle so much had you not started steering like you were suddenly picking up alien transmissions that affected your motor-control. Also, people are trying to pass you and I don’t want to see you sideswipe them. Which brings me to:
  2. Please maintain your speed.
    You’re in the far left lane and you’re dropping below 50. That’s going to make a lot of people irritable and we’re going too fast for that shit. Or we’re trying to, but we’re stuck behind you. Pick it up, man.

Thank you. I know it’s a lot to juggle: velocity, steering, basic vehicular safety, living the fantasy, and millions of nerve endings in your pelvic region being coaxed into electrochemical bliss. I can dig that. However, perhaps it’d be better if you either pulled over to enjoy the blowjob, or stopped getting blown while you’re trying to drive. You don’t seem capable of doing it all, so why not just focus on one thing and do it well? Thataboy. Be safe out there.