Oakland Athletics

...Well, I was supposed to use this 90 minutes between work and my night class to edit an essay, but I guess I can use it to blog twice in a row instead.

I squandered most of my time already because when I got home I had an email saying that it's almost time for TELEBEARS!

Telebears is the best thing ever. Well, no. Actually, it's just the online program that Berkeley students use to sign up for classes. But it has the best name ever. In my head, I think about telebears as being the Giant Ass Gummy Bears in Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Next semester I have to write a thesis, so I'm thinking of padding my schedule with some Physical Education classes. The problem is, unlike Jason Giambi of Oakland Athletic fame, I am not too good at sports. I've blogged about it in the past, but the point is, exercise usually makes me literally throw up.

I'm therefor limiting my choices to the courses labeled "Elementary". It looks like my options include Swimming, Basketball, 3 different kinds of Dance, 2 different kinds of Yoga, Aerobic Conditioning and Resistance.

Hmm. I was going to end this post with a request for recommendations. But Resistance seems pretty darn apropos, given my prior position on all things sporty. What is it? Can anybody tell me what it is?

Texas Rangers

I feel like the dynamic I've established on this blog is that I stop writing/reading other people's blogs when I get stressed out about school and then those people, whose lives are generally more complicated and stressful than mine (as evidenced by offspring, full-time careers, and other adulthood features represented on their blogs) have to say nice things to me.

I am pretty jealous that my little bro got to go to Texas!

Philadelphia Philles

Ya'll we just went on a crazy hike! I wish I were a horse, even one spelled incorrectly! Then I wouldn't be so tired, I think. Well, I hope the Hoosiers pull this game off!

Milwaukee Brewers

The Brewers have a name that represents a product you could buy in a grocery store. Anyway:

For Feminist Theory, we're reading Lauren Berlant's Cruel Optimism. Berlant doesn't like the way the America's problem with weight gain has been framed as an "obesity epidemic". One problem with "obesity epidemic" is that it frames obese people as infected individuals who made bad choices and have a personal responsibility to fix themselves. And posits that they can all do it, if they really try!

Berlant also says something about eating that I think is cool. She talks about the way that in our weird Neoliberal America, we're always involved in projects of self-improvement. Projects like "do well in school" or "improve my conversation skills" or "figure out how to have longer, better orgasms". She says that the act of eating something delicious- tasting, swallowing, ingesting- is a little break from these projects. This doesn't mean that when I eat Doritos in spite of my fear of being judged by the Bay Area Buddies I'm practicing some awesome form of resistance. It just means I'm taking a little rest from thinking about making myself better to eat chips. Maybe in Milwaukee.

San Francisco Giants

Yesterday I went to SF to eat lunch and see "The Lorax" with my friends in the city. Lucky for me, Janet, Paul and Alice invited me to stay for girl scout cookies, which turned into dinner, Clue, an episode of "Glee" and a sleepover. Did we see a Giant's game? No. It's just not time for that yet, folks.

Los Angeles Angels

If I'm being honest, I'm probably not going to watch "The Bachelor: The Womyn Tell All". I mean, maybe. But it doesn't seem like it's going to make my weekend too much better. Excited for the finale though- I've seen spoilers talking up both Lindzi and Courtney, so I might be the only person in America who still really doesn't know! So lucky.

Cleveland Indians

Ok so what do you think about this.

My paper is due in 12 hours. It's about Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook (not to be confused with Nicholas Sparks's The Notebook). It's the kind of paper you work on through the night, all week, in between studying for midterms. The problem is that when you don't sleep you go through the phase of thinking your paper is really good. Like, perhaps the best 4-to-6 page paper on Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook ever written by a 21 year-old Gender Studies undergrad.

Then you wake up without having actually been asleep and realize that your thesis is pretty much arguing that everything that happens in the novel isn't true.

I've found a lot of examples demonstrating that the events described in The Golden Notebook did not actually happen. But I'm not sure if this is an original-enough claim. So now I'm gonna spend whatever's necessary of the next 12 hours spinning it the argument into something more like "Representations can be violent". Which is obviously true, based on the logo of the Cleveland Indians.

Kansas City Royals

I don't know anything about them. Kansas City has kind of a cool music scene, as evidenced by the time I spent with this guy reading display boards in the Kansas City Airport. Two tests and a paper tomorrow, so not a lot of time to blog, but I'm feeling pretty proud right now.

Jacobs School of Music Class of 2016

Miami Marlins

I am afraid of Marlins. I think I've blogged about this before. What I have not blogged about before is my fear of magical things happening and me finding out about it.


There may be a more succinct way to describe this phobia. This I do not know. It's not exactly a fear of the supernatural. And it doesn't correspond to any other personal beliefs! I've been described by Metaswag as "the true atheist" for my general lack of interest in any sort of spiritual or other-worldly phenomena.

What it is, is, like, tonight, Jenna and I are in our room, making puns with the word "rat" starting with her ingenious band name, Rat Stevens. Then I start thinking, what if Jenna actually turned into a giant rat-woman? That would be so weird! How would I deal with that? Sometimes I also think, what if I found out I could time-travel? That would really gum up the works. A whole new dimension of things to be worried about. It's not so much the fear that magic might exist, but that I will have to deal with it in a totally annoying and confusing way. Yikes!

...Really these are not the most pressing things on my mind today. I almost cried in class about the state of reproductive justice in our nation, and I'm also really nervous about war with Iran. Still, I can't deny that Jenna turning into a rat would be a pretty stressful turn of events.

The Atlanta Braves!

Atlanta! Home of the pictured Chipper Jones, my Auntie Joy, the Coca-Cola museum, and Drake's least favorite concert ever. And the capital of Georgia, USA, famous for peaches, pecans and peanuts!

Hey, speaking of peanuts. When I'm back in the Heartland I don't eat them because the significant oth' has a pretty nasty allergy. When I complain about this, my Beloved Father usually says, "Rosie, come on. Eat what you want! YOU don't have a peanut allergy!" I appreciate this defense of my gustatory autonomy, but I don't appreciate having to make vague gesticulations indicating [kissing] in conversation with my dad.

Here in the Wild West, I can't get enough of the peanut stuff. Last night I made up a mess of peanut noodles to bring to work all week! I was too nervous to use red pepper, so they are of the Non-Spicy variety. Which is exactly what I thought I wanted, but it turns out that this makes them kind of taste like Non-Peanut noodles. Oh well. Hopefully my mild lunch will usher in more mild weather. I'm pretty sure that's how stuff works.

Go Braves!

Reasons to Participate in The Best Challenge Yet

I guess I'm going to do ProntoPup's latest challenge. I don't entirely understand some aspects of the challenge- I'm supposed to blog once for each Major League Baseball team, but could also get a point for blogging about made-up or defunct teams?- but there are a number of good reasons to follow through, and here they are:

1. ProntoPup recruited participants to this challenge using direct action. As a U.C. Berkeley Golden Bear, I believe in direct action. It really can bring about change. Especially if you are the change you wish to see. Shout out to Gandhi, Shout out to Mario Savio, Shout out to ProntoPup.

2. I actually really like baseball, as far as these things go. You could call it my favorite sport. I don't tend to "follow it", per se, but I do like going to games, which I have done about 11 times, and when I was a kid I had a really cute Nomar shirt. Where is that shirt? Where is it now?

3. That's about all I've got. I'm still in bed.

March Madness

I'm about to go to a talk called "The Male and Female Brain". I want to start blogging about more Gender and Women's Studies related stuff, so I thought I would start today, on the first day of March, right before I go to a talk called "The Male and Female Brain".

I hope the scientist-lecturer talks about evolution in this talk. When I'm watching the news, I love evolution! I think teaching evolution in schools is way better than not teaching evolution in schools. I'm politically evolutionary. Go Darwin!-- is all I'm tryna say.

...But the more social-scientific part of my Female Brain gets kinda queasy about the way people talk about evolution and gender. Like let's say you're a magazine, and you're tryna tell me that the reason I like making my boyfriend dinner is because back when my genes were inside of proto-humans, that's how proto-women got proto-men to protect them from proto-bear attacks. In that case, I might throw you in a recycling bin.

Or maybe that men like women with wide hips because their genetically predisposed to associate wide hips with having tons of babies that don't die. If you tell me that, I might say, what about men who don't like women with wide hips? Or guys who don't like women at all? I might say, You're making me feel totally weird right now.

As you can see, I am approaching this talk with a certain amount of skepticism. And also a certain amount of being late. So, I'll tell you how it goes.