8:00 AM: Clyde the Orangutan

Yesterday was, all things considered, a pretty gay day. Or at least a queer one.

It's funny how things seem to align a lot in unrelated classes. In first year, the word synechdoche kept coming up. Last year I was able to transpose a lot of my film-based knowledge of WWII German and Russian propaganda into a fairly coherent European History paper. This year stuff crops up left and right particularly out of Film Theory. Sometimes the similarities, however, haven't got anything to do with each other.

Wednesday, we saw a scene from The Children's Hour in drama. The play is about two teachers accused of lesbianism in an all-girls reform school. According to the author, Lillian "More than Mayonnaise" Hellman, It's not so much about gay and straight as it is about the truth. And it was around this time that I realized that all of the plays in the second half of Drama were about more or less the same thing, how diabolical.

Later that night, in Literary Theory, we talked about Queer Theorists, those theorists who are eager to discuss the question of sexual identity in literature without politicking for one orientation/gender or the other. I liked the idea of gender as representation in particular; as some people may deduce from Half-Past, I've had some ideas about gender issues for a while (not my own, but as a social phenomenon.) I've half-written a lot of really awful stories over the years, Ranma shit. There's a whole subculture on the internet, and the people involved are all pretty disgusting; they've got some really backwards ideas about women's roles, really disturbing shit. If I had to generalize (or wanted to for sport.)

The prof explained the very enlightening concept of gender as performance -- not like acting, but like an action, every action we undertake builds one's gendered identity, using the example of why he didn't come to class wearing a dress. It gave me an idea for a play, in which a female character was played by male actor, dressed as a man and acting in no way feminine, but assuring the audience all the while that the character is female. I would probably never actually write the play, but it's an intriguing notion to think about in regards to gender.

But I think we can all agree blue means penises and pink means vaginae. Sidenote: Did you know that was the plural of vagina? Thanks Firefox!

Finals are fast approaching. I keep daydreaming about the play, but can't muster up the energy to do the re-writes I want to. Hurk. I also came up with a solid storyline for one of the numerous novels I have yet to write, and solved the question of how to juggle the pieces of Whatever It Takes, the ill-conceived lesbian play I attempted to write over the summer (it sucked then; the first draft of End of the Night wasn't much better but this new one ought to be.) Not to mention, just now, right on the spot, Eric and I came up with a half-decent premise for a Sewerman story. However, we are both kind of in agreement that I shouldn't write it -- not that I really don't want to, but it's a deadline/quality thing.

I may end up asking Martina, since she can draw and might somewhat get the material.

I think, generally speaking, my creative juices are flowing far too much lately. I need to settle down and finish one thing before starting three others.

Nothing much more of interest has been going on lately, though. So I'll end it there.

Keep on rockin'
-Scott