Hope you see this soon. I haven’t been avoiding your calls, I’ve been unable to take them. The microphone on my phone is completely dead now, and I’m getting the ol’ run-around in getting it replaced. Will speak, I hope, soon.

I don’t know if I’ve said this often enough, but I love Pandagon’s Amanda Marcotte to itty bitty pieces. She’s usually fairly- to pretty-damn astute, she’s always witty, and she typically has a good eye for topics of interest.

I’m pretty flummoxed, then, when almost every piece she writes about social interactions based on (sub)cultural membership instead of class or intrinsic-quality membership leaves me wanting to claw my eyes out.

There’s a long piece brewing in response to this piece, but it’s another of those that’s so twisty and convoluted that I’m sure I’ll never get around to writing it. I do want to call attention to something crucial, though.

The essay itself turns around defenses of some of the things that make Insufferable Music Snobs (IMSes) so damned insufferable. The whole damn thing is predicated on the idea that IMSes are often seen as annoying my non-snobs.

But then down in comment #64, she writes “You’d think the overload with the word ‘insufferable’ would be a tip-off that I’m trying to be cute about it.” So in the essay she writes an apologia for the insufferableness, yet in the comments she indicates the the “insufferable” tag is intended to be read with a wink and a nudge.

This was supposed to be just a quick note on an example on one of my obsessions, the way in which the acceptance of irony as an unremarkable mode of communication has eroded the ability to see anything as sincere. A quick re-read of the article and Marcotte’s ensuing comments, though, suggests a second possible, and much less generous, reading: By defending the insufferable behavior and then claiming that self-identification of insurable was meant to be read as clearly in jest, she could be saying that her aesthetic inferiors are either beneath her consideration or are not entitled to their own feelings of annoyance. Sadly, this second reading might fit in with some of the other blog posts of hers that have bugged me.

(There’s a third, or actually a two-and-a-halfth, possibility: Perhaps the social scene is so completely different in Austin than it is in the places of my experience that, within her own sphere of context, her attitude is not at all condescending.)

***********

Major update: OK, maybe I’m the one who’s lived his entire life in the Twilight Zone. The majority of posters in that comment threat, apparently along with the author, make an easy conflation of “person deeply knowledgeable about x” with “x snob”. In my experience, at least, those are two distinguishable attributes with considerable overlap.

The “person deeply knowledgeable about x” is so defined because sie (wait for it…) is deeply knowledgeable about x. The x snob, on the other hand, is so defined by hir tendency to unambiguously sneer at and condescend toward all persons who do not share hir rarefied tastes in x. The interesting thing is that while the two groups overlap, it is not at all unusual to find an x snob who proves not to know x particularly deeply or in detail, although sie will have soaked up a lot of the conventional wisdom and (other) misconceptions shared by hir x-snob peer group.

There is a thread running through the comments suggesting that deeply knowledgeable people are all the time being accused of being snobs despite their well-intentioned, totally non-condescending attempts to share their love of x. I have seen this, and when I was a lot less self-confident I feared it a lot myself, but in all honesty I’ve feared it more often than I’ve actually encountered it or seen it happen to others. Am I unusually charmed in this?

Currently sitting in a presentation by a sales rep from Elsevier, the Evil Empire of the library world. He’s got that slow-burn intensity, James Woods style, that comes off as even sleasier than the hyperactive hard-seller.

He’s a 40ish man wearing a yellow rubber bracelet.

He doesn’t blink.

It’s like he walked straight out of central casting.

Just out of curiosity, what was so awful about the Empire anyway? While I know they went to unconscionable extremes in their attempts to stamp out the Rebellion, I have no idea what intolerabilities made the Rebels rebel in the first place. Was this ever established in the films, or is it one of those things that’s taken as given?

Dunno why I’m noticing all this stuff today, especially since I’m finding this series surprisingly engaging and well-made. My nitpicker, normally the bane of my televiewing existence, is completely shut down.

Regardless: During a scene set on a subway car, it occurred to me that in movies and TV shows NYC subway rides always last much, much longer without making stops than they do in real life. In fact, I’m thinking that every subway ride in every TV show and movie ever made has been an express trip between the protagonist’s point of departure and hir destination.

I’m only about ten minutes in, but already it looks like it’s every bit as awesome as I’d been led to expect.

What jumped out at me, though, was the bit where the introduce the Las Vegas character, the woman who works as an Internet stripper and has a computer genius son and can’t pay her gas bill and what-not. She’s heavily set up as being Broke and Poor, but her house is HUGE. Her car, though, is even crappier than what you’d expect a Broke and Poor person to reasonably have. The house wasn’t a surprise, since Hollywood characters almost always live in digs way outside their means (even Roseanne, which came closest to matching income with mortgage payments, gave its characters a house a bit bigger than what would be reasonable).

Seeing the car, though, and realizing it wasn’t a surprise either, makes me wonder: Why is it standard entertainment-industry practice to make living space and wardrobe much more costly than what a character could be expected to have in reality but to give them reasonable or (when indicating poverty) worse-than-reasonable vehicles?

I’m really curious, and I don’t even have an inkling of a theory. To clarify and stave off the obvious: I understand why there’s a tendency to give characters nice stuff and nice houses, since expensive stuff is more pleasant to look at than cheap stuff and bigger houses/apartments are easier to shoot inside than shoeboxes, but why then make the exception for cars?

(And dess-grippu. Snrk.)

So when I met with one of the campus therapists on Tuesday, we of course talked a lot about my job and my thoughts on the larger professional culture. On librarianship and all that it entails, the doc (in one of those “I’m letting you know I can appreciate what you’re talking about” asides) mentioned the Dewey Decimal System.

This is telling because of the conjunction of two things:

1. One of the things that has proven frustrating for me is the fact that librarians in general seem to believe that the library is an essential, central element in higher education. There is the belief that no student can successfully navigate his or her way toward an advanced degree without learning the basics of library use.
2. This therapist, who is old enough to have a fairly impressive CV, earned degrees at three institutions. Each of these institutions almost certainly used Library of Congress classification, not Dewey.

So in a way it was nice to be justified in my suspicion that what my peers see as the essential characteristics of a successful student are really more the defining characteristics of a Lifestyle Librarian. Unfortunately, it was “nice” in the way that proves you’re right, but you’re right in a way that means 90% of your colleagues are vocally wrong.

So I realized in the bath that followed several hours of agitated sleep-and-not-sleep that I have hit rock bottom. This is weird, since I don’t do drugs or drink excessively, which are the usual rocks at the bottom. My rocks are more nachos, garlic bread, and boredom.

I should have prepared a written statement to carry into the therapist’s office yesterday; I’ll try to remember to do this when working with new therapists in the future. It would have gone something like this:

I don’t feel sexy any more. I’ve grown a big belly since moving here, and every morning I wake up saying “Today I start the diet again” and every evening I break down and buy more cookies and chips to scarf. Sometimes I’m filled with self-loathing while I’m doing it, sometimes I give myself a pass and promise I’ll get back on the path of righteousness tomorrow.

I don’t enjoy the things that used to give me pleasure. I’m too antsy to sit down and properly enjoy a movie, and if I’m not “properly” enjoying one I don’t get any pleasure out of a film at all. I get some value out of short cartoons and sitcoms and reruns of shows I love, but even that’s not as fulfilling as it used to be. Reading? Forget about it. First, there’s the agitation, and more, there’s the reduced pleasure thing.

I feel the need to do something creative, but my writing has grown increasingly ugly, clumsy, hateful to me. More graphic pursuits were always ugly and clumsy, and I don’t have the enthusiasm that gave those projects value.

[I’m redacting the work-related bits.]

I’ve found a few people here whose company I enjoy, but the social milieu they’re integrated into doesn’t appeal to me. I’ve gone out and tried to have fun, but it just doesn’t happen.

Topping everything off is a lack of energy and a sense of hopelessness. And that’s why I’m here for your help.

Jasmine has just been born (although she hasn’t been named yet). Again, I have to say that Gina Torres may just be the most beautiful human being ever to walk the earth.

Going through campus counseling services. Hope this works out.