Sitting here in Huntsville International, waiting for my flight to O’Hare, where I will then commence waiting for my flight to St. Louis. Then a two-hour drive to Rolla, MO, check-in at the hotel, and a long and arduous wait until my day-long interview with the University of Missouri-Rolla tomorrow. Ugh.

Then Friday morning I repeat the journey in reverse, fill the weekend somehow, then head back for Tuscaloosa to begin my (hopefully very) temporary job back in Gorgas.

Ugh. I’m a bit stressed.

Oh, and the big board says my flight out is still on time, even though we’re supposed to depart in 20 minutes and the plane still hasn’t even made it to the gate. Grr.

Know what I’ve had stuck in my head for, no joke, the last ten days now? Only the most outrageously misogynistic song ever recorded, that’s what.

For over a week, my mental jukebox has been stuck on an endless loop of “Automobile”, the track everyone of my generation will recall from N.W.A.’s efil4zaggin.

I can’t explain it, and I’m certainly not proud, but no matter what I try I just can’t wash out the anthem for the patriarchy. It’s so, god help me, catchy!

Zombies, as popularly conceived since Night of the Living Dead, are of course not zombies at all. Zombies, up until George Romero came along, were understood to be reanimated corpses permanently enslaved to the houngoun who did the resurrecting. There was no brain-munching involved, and their mindless behavior was definitely not self-directed.

That’s not the epiphany, by the way, just a general run-down.

After Romero, zombies became something completely, wholly, and utterly different. About the only similarity between a pre-NotLD zombie and a post- was the involvement of an inanimate corpse. Hell, even voodoo had been disposed with, when previously it had been an element as essential as the moldering stiff itself.

So what happened, where did the new type of zombie spring from, and how did they take such a strong hold in popular consciousness that the more traditional zombie has pretty much been consigned to the cultural dustbin? That had been bugging me for a while, whenver it crossed my mind, and then the big E came.

Zombies after Night of the Living Dead are vampires before Dracula. Before Stoker’s work came along and humanized the critters of the night, beginning a process that saw vamps becoming increasingly more urbane and less corpse-like, vampires were mindless, flesh-eating, contagious revenants who emerged willy-nilly from the grave and spread their rotting-fleshed terror hither, thither, and yon. I don’t have the citations for it, but I think it possible that Dracula set in motion cultural gears that, working increasingly away from the legendary source material, saw the creation of a (very successful) brand-new archetype in the 20th-century vampire. I’m not sure that anything like it had existed before, and it managed to wholly displace the prior conception of the creatures.

But, of course, in doing so there was left a vampire-shaped hole in the cultural consciousness. A generation[1] passed without undead fiends driven by primal savagery, unbound by any trace of humanity, when George Romero came along and (consciously or not) resurrected the traditional vampire under the guise of the new-fangled zombie.

So, a generation later, one might wonder whether the traditional zombie will rise again. Me, I doubt it; they were (as I understand it) useful as story elements only in their figuring as villainous native opposition to white colonials, and we don’t like telling stories where the oppressors are overtly heroes any more. Anyway, traditional zombies were really more interesting as window dressing than as active players, as there’s not a whole lot you can do with a shambling corpse that spends most of its time plowing the field or picking beans.

[1] I’m counting the time between NotLD and the Browning/Lugosi film of Dracula, not the publication of Stoker’s novel. While the novel was the impetus for the change in public conception, the first film adaptation of the work, Nosferatu, suggests that the figure-of-unholy-terror conception of vampires was not completely undone by the book alone. It took Bela Lugosi’s swankification of the character to really push the public mind over to the new way of thinking.

You know that major suckiness that follows immediately on a group decision to order a pizza, the bit where you stand around and argue and haggle and bargain and plead and sulk and gnash over what kind of pizza it is you’re going to order? Fret no more! Thanks to the miracles of technology, you can let The Pizza Arbiter do the heavy lifting for you.

As a service to your friends and family, go now and set up a profile. The only catch is that you have to have a LiveJournal account, but those are free to set up. Enter your account name for use as a unique identifier, then just check off all the toppings you’d be willing to eat on a pizza. When the moment of decision arrives, and it eventually will, all you’ll need to do is log on to the Arbiter, enter the user IDs of all parties involved, and allow the magical computer genies to work out what kind of pizza is allowable. Whee!

Grumble.

The head of libraries told me they hoped to be making their decision and contacting candidates (or at least the chosen candidate) by today.

This is a very long day, full of bitten nails and twisted stomach.

I think I was doing pretty OK during the multiple rounds of interviews, and the luncheon went well enough I guess, but then it came time for my presentation. I loaded up my PowerPoint, stood at the lectern, and my brain decided to go all Evil Zen.

Next thing I knew I was flopping around on the ground, spinning my fingers in the air, and singing “I’m a fish, I’m a fish, I’m a fish made of tin!”

And then there were two more rounds of interviews, and I have to have dinner tonight with a search committee member who wasn’t able to make it today.

La Quinta is practically swanky compared to the Seattle fleapit I stayed in.

The giant statue of Sam Houston, or the statue of Giant Sam Houston, just outside of town looks eerily like Martin van Buren. I shall not mention this during my interview at all.

It took me nearly 1.5 hours to get here from Houston. Just over a third of that was spent travelling five miles on the Houston outskirts.

There does not appear to be an NPR station in Houston. There is, however, a World Radio thingie that plays full-length news broadcasts from (at least) Ireland and Romania. At one point between Houston and Huntsville the only stations I was getting were a Jebus channel and an 80s schlock-pop station. I left the radio off after that.

Around 2, I decide I should eat something. Chinese sounds good, and there’s a little joint I haven’t tried at a shopping center just up the road, so I head there.

Once I hit the main road, I’m followed for the next mile by a cop. This makes me very nervous; I guess I have a guilty conscience, I dunno, but I always tense up and expect to be pulled over at any moment when I’m around the police. Unpleasant, and it’s a relief when I arrive at the strip mall.

I go in and find that the Chinese place doesn’t take debit cards. As I have no cash on me, this is major suckage. I go back to my car, planning either to eat elsewhere or hit an ATM, and find that my key slides all the way through the ignition without actually igniting anything. It’s not the starter, as there’s no sign of anything even trying to turn over, but a breakdown in the ignition switch itself. This has happened to me once before, and I know it’ll be a pain in the ass to get fixed but at least not a major expense.

Now, as I was just heading down the road for a bite I had left my phone at home. This meant I couldn’t call my brother for a lift, as I have no idea what his cell’s number is and, anyway, pay phones are few and far between these days. I figure at least I’ll be able to eat at the Subway in the strip mall, as they do take plastic.

Unfortunately, I got greedy at Subway and ordered the twelve-inch veggie sub instead of the more reasonable six-inch. This would insure about six hours of nausea afterward.

Finished with lunch and wanting to crawl into a hole and hide from my bloated stomach, I embark on the mile-and-a-half walk home. About a quarter-mile in, it starts to rain. About a block later it starts to rain hard. A couple blocks after that and it’s a deluge, complete with disturbingly close lightning cracks. No joke, I had to keep my head hunched down just so I could breathe easily.

So I get home, finally, drenched and squishing around in my now-ruined clogs. I figure I might as well pick up the mail on the way in, and I find that the only item is a rejection letter from Penn State. Whee.

And then, once inside, I find that the power’s out. It would remain so for the next four hours.

So, yeah. Ugh. At least there were no snakes.

Finally got some forwarded mail, wherein I found a letter from the Los Angeles Public Library System informing me that I have an interview scheduled with them on Tuesday.

Hmph.

Of course I’ll be calling Monday to see about rescheduling, but it’s not necessarily a tragedy or disaster even if I’ve missed my chance. I don’t know if the LA system reimburses travel expenses for interviewees, and the Seattle trip drained me enough that I couldn’t possibly travel to LA without compensation. Still, grr.