EEEEEEEEEE!

My advisor has thrown up his hands in the grip of some indefinable emotion and told me I should defend as soon as I can. So there we are. Any further delays will be my fault, knock on wood. Talked it up at work and can - in fact have to - take my vacation days before March, so EEEEEEEEE! is all I have to say. One way or another this rubbish will be over soon, and I'll get to see some if not all of my Europeans. Planning on spending at least a week in Italy with FEB and family, splitting the rest between England and France. This will not be a sight-seeing trip. This will be a people trip. But then the people all live next to beautiful sights. FEB, for example, is in Padova, beautiful in itself and a stone's throw from Venice, that Disneyland of the grown-up world. And I do believe I'll get there for the tail end of Carnevale. Hope they got some good drugs! If not I'll just twirl, and twirl, and twirl!

Excited. Conscious the clean-up work will be work and ya'll won't be seeing much of me for the next week or so, a little anxious, but excited. I wonder if I can get three weeks instead of two. This short-tripping is not my cup of tea. That can be worked out at my office, I think. One of my colleagues in the department I'm leaving took eight months off to travel in East Asia.

So last night after doing clean-up work until I felt like puking, I watched some of the extra interviews from disc 2 of the Corporation, because - you guessed it - I needed visuals and hash. The spares with the commodities trader should have made the cut. Well, they probably would have made the cut of a better movie, but would have been out of place in this one. He talked about the difficulty of consumer activism in terms of the commodities market, which is super-interesting but would have required more depth to the film. The out-takes about advertising were something. Naomi Klein voiced aloud the pussy-rific conviction that consumers shouldn't 'feel bad' about being influenced by advertising, and then said something circular about how advertising comes from us . . . Thanks, Sherlock . . . but there was an interview at the end of that topic with a branding consultant about the Church as a brandworker that convinced me that he's the devil or at least doing the devil's work. They REALLY should have kept that in the movie; my emotional reaction against what he stands for remains quite extreme. Yes, I was stoned, but so are most of the people who'd rent that movie, I bet.

But then commies don't like the Church either. Ho-hum. The talking heads used the 'c' word a lot more in the cut-out interviews. Noam Chomsky was painstaking about drawing a distinction between Bolshevism and Communism, which was kind of gross. I'm sure 65 million dead Chinese thank him for it. Whatevs. I have to go participate in Capitalism now.