Notes follow.

• Still washed out from New Orleans. Had about seven interviews while there, had a phone interview yesterday afternoon, and think I have a decent shot at making it to the next round for two of those jobs.
• Conversation with some of my peers provided anecdotal confirmation for emerging research showing that the library job market is becoming increasingly tighter, allowing employers to be much more selective.
• Observation of who was getting or had recently been given job offers suggested–anecdotally!–that there is a strong positive correlation between youthful attractiveness and likelihood of being offered an entry-level position. This is not a surprise, as it falls in line with a couple decades’ research into hiring practices in other professional fields.
• The most recent Doctor Who was very good, but the preview for next week’s episode was astonishing. Somebody please tell me Billie Piper has already signed up for the next series of eps.
• A move-out date has been set for July 5, next Wednesday. Back to Huntsville for an undetermined amount of time, and back to waitering (or similar) for same. I am very bummed about this.
• Bartenders in French Quarter gay bars remember you after you’ve only been in once. This is a level of customer service that simply astounds.
• Speaking of, I got kicked out of a bar for the first time, and it was a bum rap. I’d been standing next to one of the platforms next to the dance floor, one not currently occupied and against which several people were leaning. I rested my beer on the ledge and someone walking across the platform kicked it over, which sent me into a stumblesome blunder of trying to figure out how to deal with the situation. The bouncer saw not the effect but the cause, assumed I was out of my skull, and gave me the tap.
• Every bar should have dancing underwear models who openly defy the traditional “no touching” policy.
• Walked into a casino on a lark, left after 15 minutes with $100 than I’d walked in with. Woot.
• ALA conventions are chock full of free pre-publication copies, mostly uncorrected proofs, of books. Yay!
• Uncorrected proofs contain more typos and blatant calls for line-editing than I ever would have guessed.
• I am simply unappealling to anyone under the age of 35. I’m having difficulty coming to terms with this.
• Packing may be the most onerous duty I’ve ever experienced. I am grateful that it’s the worst I’ve had to endure, but still it sucks.
• I was briefly excited about the new Superman movie, but now I’m not sure if I’ll even be arsed to see it. Still, Parker Posey.
• Am today only about 5 pounds above the upper limit of my BMI-determined appropriate weight range, but by gay-male standards remain grotesquely obese. Grr.

  A recent pic:

  
  

• It’s looking increasingly likely that I’m going to have to get a new(er) car once I get a job. Not at all sure howI’m going to swing that.

That’s enough for now, I think.

You know how sometime you can have–seriously!–just two or three drinks over the course of several hours, and have dinner alongside to boot, and think you’re just fine and not only not-buzzing but not even really mellow, but then you get involved in some activity and realize that, despite the gross-motor-skill and cognitive normalcy you are, indeed, noticably impaired?

That just happened to me. While returning a phone call to set up another interview in the morning.

I suspect I will be a tale of What Not To Do at a certain southeastern university for years to come.

Can’t believe I never mentioned it, but I’m at the American Library Association’s annual convention through Sunday. Not doing much conventioning this time around, though, as most of my time will be devoted to jobhunting and such.

To that end, I have five interviews set up over the next three days. I also have the opportunity, technically, to try setting up a couple more, but I’m thinking five is going to be pushing my boundaries as it is.

To better aid coordination of your sigil-charging and such (please!) I present my interview schedule:

Today at 3:30PM: Los Angeles Public Library system

Saturday 11AM: Chandron State University (Nebraska)

Saturday 4:30PM: University of Maryland

Sunday 11AM: Kings County (Washington) Public Libraries

Sunday 4PM: University of South Alabama

All times Central Standard. And, whew!

Something that’s been bugging me for a while, and some comments I just read over at Pandagon reminded me: How do charismatic-evangelical Christian thelogians deal with the fact that, to a reader who hasn’t already bought the whole kit and kaboodle, the Bible opens up with God pulling a hugetastic bait-and-switch con job on Adam and Eve?

Without knowledge of Good and Evil, after all, one cannot be expected to know the difference between good acts and evil acts. Like, duh. And what’s the one thing our protagonists are told explicitly not to do? Avail themselves of awareness of Good and Evil, that’s what.

But! Well, my point here takes care of itself, doesn’t it? Not knowing obedience is to be preferred to disobedience, indeed not knowing that things like morals and ethics exist or even could exist, why should they be expected to obey?

It’s like, according to the story, God created a self-directed creature, intentionally left out the component that would allow the creature the ability to evaluate alternatives, and then got pissed when the creature–unable to evaluate alternative or even to recognize the concept of evaluation–chose an alternative other than that which was to be preferred.

I honestly fail to see how any intellectually honest reader could read the Eden story and not come away furious at the fix having been in from the beginning. I’m sure, though, that there must be some apologetics on the subject, and I’d be curious to see what form they might take.

“In my Film Criticism class, we had to watch that movie, what’s it called? The really long movie everybody says is great but that really sucks. With the sled called Rosebud.”

I mean, of course it’s a valid opinion. And, given the context of the viewing and my general impression of the speaker, it couldn’t even be considered a poorly-informed or misbegotten opinion. But still.

One cannot without provocation “casually” mention that one attended of a (presumedly, relatively) prestigious prep-type school when, in fact, one attended for only six months before being kicked out for bad behavior.

One certainly cannot imply one is a legitimate alumnus of the school, nor can one refer to its sporting achievements etc. in first-person-plural, in the above situation. Simply not on.

I’d heard of Otherkin, folks who (for whatever reason) claim to sincerely believe they are elves or dragons or pixies or what-have-you trapped in human bodies. I had, naive boy that I am, assumed subculturality simply couldn’t get any nuttier.

Then I learn that there are people who call themselves Otakin: human beings who claim to believe they are fictional anime characters trapped in human bodies.

One would assume that this is about as mind-foggingly peculiar as humanity could get, but then it turns out that, per the link above, Otakin and Otherkin pit themselves against one another like Mods and Rockers.

One doesn’t know whether to weep or scowl.

I’m honestly not sure how well this has come across at (…), but people who’ve spent a lot of time around me in person probably know that Libertarianism, or at least the pop version to which many young folks seem to subscribe, is one of my biggest bugbears. I never have been able to quite get a handle on exactly what pop-libertrians are thinking, or why they want to think it. Then I ran across a post in a comments thread over at Pharyngula and things snapped into place.

The commenter, Brock Tice, had this to say:

I’m a registered Libertarian — I just don’t want the government in any more of my business than it needs to be.

While I was reaching for something to throw at the screen, I was overcome by a swell of compassion. The very thing that makes me mad about pop-libertarians like Mr. Tice is also that thing which, on reflection, makes them not merely worthy or deserving but needful of respectful compassion: They derive their position not from either an honest or wilfull misinterpretation of political realities but instead from a (most likely innocent) ignorance of what those realities are.

On reading Mr. Tice’s words, I reached for something firm but not-shattering to pound the screen with while shouting, “You dunce, everybody at every point on the American political spectrum wants to government to be in no more of anyone’s business than it needs to be. The disagreement comes over what those places it needs to be are, and how that need is to be addressed and effected. Dumbass.”

Unable to find something appropriately hurlable, though, I was brought up short and realized Mr. Tice was likely not speaking from wilfull ignorance but instead from the sort of ignorance fostered by mushy, muddled compassion intersecting with the media’s devotion to false equivalence masquerading as “balance” and supported by the tendency of pundits to willfully misrepresent people across the political fence.

In other words, people like Mr. Tice really believe that there exists a single and known goal-state for the resolution of every universally-held complaint and that partisan politicians ignore that goal-state in preference for their own self-serving goal-states. He just doesn’t understand that (what I’ll call) the universal goal-set tends to be a restatement of the problem (”we all want better schools” is the problem, “let’s make schools better” is the universal goal-set) while partisan goal-sets tend to be projects for implementing specific, presumed-by-the-partisan preferable solutions to the problem (”we all want better schools” is the problem, “implement private-school vouchers” and “equalize funding across public-school districts” are two incompatible partisan goal-sets).

I need to process this quite a bit before exploring further, but I really do think I’m onto something (not necessarily original, but definitely personally revelatory) here.

I’d heard that the first chapter of Ann Coulter’s new screed Godless was available for free perusal at Townhall.com, so I thought I’d conduct a wee experiment and see how long she could go without making a statement that grossly violated standards of intellectual honesty and decency. I was looking for things that were either outright lies, blatant logical fallacies or other argumentational errors, or nonsensical blanket statements.

I expected I wouldn’t have to read much before I found the first howler, but I honest-to-Bog didn’t expect a ringer in the very first bleeding sentence:

Liberals love to boast that they are not “religious,�

Stunning. Jimmy Carter, MLK, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Bill Clinton, every single fucking Democrat in the House and Senate for the last 50 years, Maya Angelou, a great big gob of Quakers and Lutherans and Episcopalians…well, Jebus, one needn’t go on, need one? And one need read no more after that, as clearly Ms. Coulter is not at all interested in dealing with little things like, say, facts or even honest rhetoric.

First sentence. Wow. It’s like showing up for an interview with your shirtfront coated in your own vomit.

It’s going on noon (CST, GMT-6) and I have yet to hear a single peep from the Antichrist. I thought for sure he’d at least drop an email.

Don’t I feel silly, having gotten myself all gussied up and even baking a cake. Men, I tell you; can’t live with them, can’t offer them your eternal soul in exchange for a cushy position in their hellish nightmare reign on Earth.