Hooray I'm done! (but I totally fucked up)...

So now, ladies and gentle-midgets I am formally finished with academic juggernauting for the year and am preparing to vamoose back into the reality of normal, laid-back, salt-of the-earth people who do things like pay baseball and repair water heaters rather than travel the world and hang with an overly cerebral elite. I feel like I need to get baptized in the cultural wellsprings of a fairground swap meet / clogging competition to wash my soul clean from the sometime-arrogance and elitism of the ivory tower that constitutes my work environment. People just ain't real half the time. Nobody I know chops firewood or grows tomatas anymore.

I still wanna build an electric car like the one in the picture below. I was actually lookin' fer a an ol' beetle when I found that 1965 Plymouth that is now rusting in my side yard. I need to sell that thang. I fired it up yesterday and drove it down my driveway a few dozen yards and the rear brakes were all stoved up. Damn old-ass drum brakes. They always git faulty wheel cylinders, 'specially when it rains a lot. That problem almost killed me once when I was 19 and the driver's side rear wheel locked up on my F150 as I was mergin' onto Columbia Parkway. I did a 180 into traffic and was left terrified with the engine stalled facing the wrong way in a 55 mph zone. That was some shit.

So now I am goin' campin' out on my dad's land for a week, after I drive to regular Virginia for to fetch my portly compadre Mr. Turner. I have nature deprivation something fierce and it is hurting my soul.

There's an interesting article about nature deprivation actually in the issue of Adbusters I just got in the mail, called The End of Childhood:

http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/78

When I was a kid I used to always tell my relatives that I was gonna go off an' live on a mountain someday. I been thinkin' 'bout that ol' fantasy a lot lately.

So I'm glad to done with the boredom, busywork, and highly spiritually disorienting culture at my school, but I am not leaving on a good note. Somehow my alarm didn't go off this morning and I overslept. I had a term paper I finished yesterday that was due at 9:00 AM. I woke up at 9:05, raced to school, and was too damn late. My prof was gone; left town for the weekend and won't be back until after grades are due to the university. This means I get a zero for the assignment, which is 30% of my grade. I had an A going until this morning, the very last day of exams at the end of the year. Now I have D if I'm lucky. I am royally fuckin' pissed! I have been on Dean's List for 4 years at UC, most of which involved me working 30+ hours per week and goin' to shool full time. Goddamit. Now I have to retake this class so I can get the grade replaced so it doesn't fuck up my GPA and my shot at a decent grad school.



I spent the rest of the morning poring through my ASA guide to grad programs and trying to figure out which ones are in cities I'd actually like. Unfortunately, there seem to be few Urban Sociology programs in the Rustbelt, virtually none in Appalachia, and few in the South. My future is thereby largely relegated to places like Chicago, New York City, and California. My Jewish hippie friend Mickey told me I would love living in California but I am not sure if I believe him. I think he likes it more than me, he just knows there's lots of political lefties, brown people, and eco-trendsters. I dig that part of California but its just a little too trendy and expensive. When I was in California all I saw was a slimy plastic coating of money all over everything, and then a bunch of homeless people living in the park right next to the premier shopping districts of San Francisco. I never saw such a diverse crowd of well-heeled shoppers, but again emphasis on well-heeled. And land costs a fortune there. I could never be a homeowner, even on a professors salary. And renting makes me feel like I'm getting screwed.

So right now I am looking at Chicago, Penn, Northwestern, Arizona (?), OSU, Brown, Cornell, possibly Emory, and possibly Howard. I would dearly love to be immersed in the glorious legacy of Black scholarship and research about urban inequality at Howard, not to mention gaining the perspective of African American colleagues, but the Soc grad program there is ranked something like 115th in the nation. That's 2 rankings below the program I am taking classes in, and half of my soc classes have been totally jacked up.

Besides all that, where can I move to where I can have a yard, a garage, collect junk on my porch, and have room for my dog to run around? How can pursue graduate education and have room to run an arc welder? I always really wanted to see Detroit and I was fantasizing yesterday about an urban homestead in inner city Cleveland, but there are no grad programs for me there. Maybe I can end up someplace like that. Besides enjoying living amidst postindustrial decay, the Rustbelt is attractive to me because of the urban Appalachians that live there. Sometimes they can be scarier than regular Appalachians, like when they adopt hardcore aggressive ghetto culture, but they're the closest thing I've got to my people and home right now. At least the older urban hillbillies are nice and laid back.

I keep wondering if I could get away with keeping a couple head of sheep so I wouldn't have to cut my grass. I always thought that was such a waste a time. I know Oxford ewes are pretty low-maintenance and I've read good things about the hair sheep from the Caribbean. I need some chickens too. I miss having fresh eggs every day.

Goddammit. I need to get the hell outta undergrad, get my Ph.D., and go teach someplace where I can have a chunk of land and live the good life. I feel claustrophobic living a conventional urban life, and I don't get to play farmer or build shit.

One more year a this bullshit. Lord give me strength.