The Antisocial Socialist

homewardangel asked about my relationship with caffeine.

Sometimes, when a woman and a chemical compound love each other very, very much…

Okay, let’s be clear–I’ve been addicted to coffee since I was 13 or so, I have no desire to quit, and I tend not to entirely trust people who don’t drink coffee until they’ve proven conclusively that they’re not lizard aliens. Coffee’s great. I’m a bear until I’ve had my first cup. I searched long and hard for a coffee mug that was of an acceptable size so that I could fill it with a sufficient amount of coffee and not have to keep refilling it, and I’ve finally found the perfect mug. It’s a House Baratheon mead mug. That’s how much coffee I drink before I leave the house every morning.

I am super-picky about coffee as a result of spending a lot of time in Seattle. Fortunately, there’s a really good coffee shop around the block from me that sells fair trade, organic, locally roasted beans. I get their dark roast. I like my coffee strong but not acidic; here on the eastern part of the continent, most roasters seem to misunderstand what dark roast is supposed to take it and burn the shit out of it, Starbucks being the worst but not the only offender.

Weirdly, when I’m desperate and need to go to a chain coffee place, I go for Tim Horton’s over the other ones. Mostly because light roast has more caffeine, and if I’m going to a chain coffee place, it’s because I’m going to pass out if I don’t get coffee now.

I take coffee with milk and sugar.

If I’m working, I tend to not drink coffee after about noon or so, because it does mess with my sleep. Of course, this year I’ve had worse fatigue problems and a stupider schedule, and I discovered the one kind of energy drink that is not gross (Monster’s mocha flavour) and this was a Problem for awhile. At the moment, I’m only using them in dire emergencies because I’m worried about becoming addicted and dying of a heart attack before I’m 40.

I’m not much of a tea drinker, and when I do drink tea, it’s usually herbal. Black tea is growing on me, though. I still can’t convince my body that it has caffeine in it.

I should also add that I constantly struggle with coffeemakers, and haven’t had a coffeemaker I liked in years. I can’t manage things like a French press—it always comes out wrong—and that cold coffee brewing thing just sounds like too much work and why would I want my coffee to be cold? So it’s really got to be drip, and for some reason they don’t make drips like they used to. My current one makes reasonable coffee for one, but try making it for two and it explodes about 75% of the time. But I don’t want to get a new one, because I literally go through three coffeemakers every time I replace an old one.

springheel_jack asked about my favourite childhood toy.

As suggested by my previous post, I don’t actually remember my childhood all that clearly, and much of what I do remember involves other people retelling anecdotes about it. I don’t, for example, remember playing with toys for very long, though it’s entirely possible that I did, and I definitely had quite a lot of them because when I finally moved out of the house, there was a lot to get rid of. I know I wasn’t keen on dolls, and that I was keen on LEGO (back when LEGO was about creativity and building stuff and not Star Wars and gender essentialism).

The one childhood toy I do remember being very attached to was a ratty stuffed elephant that I named, oh-so-creatively, Dumbo. I used it to reenact the scenes where Dumbo was separated, then reunited, with his mother. Interpret away.

This one was suggested by ironed_orchid and seconded by princealberic, and, I have to admit, is the one thus far I’m most excited to write about. I kind of feel like I have blogged about Phil Ochs before, but maybe not enough. Also I have new readers.

So, I don’t always agree with Christopher Hitchens (in fact I devoted a fairly large number of posts to trash-talking him over the years), but I love what he has to say in this interview, which is part of the excellent Phil Ochs documentary “There But For Fortune.” (Which you should all totally watch, by the way.)

“There was a difference between people who liked Bob Dylan—anyone could like Bob Dylan, everybody did—and those who even knew about Phil Ochs.”

That’s the most hipster diss ever, but it’s true. Both Dylan and Ochs were played extensively in my house when I was growing up, but for some reason it was Dylan who remained in the cultural zeitgeist, whereas I went years without remembering who Ochs was until I was collecting songs for a mixed CD about the Spanish Civil War and found, appropriately enough, the chilling and gorgeous Spanish Civil War Song. While I knew that the singers on all of the other songs were dead, this one sounded fairly modern, so I figured I’d contact him to see if it was okay to use it on the CD. To the internet! Wherein I discovered that, no, he was also dead, at a tragically young age no less, and also he was the same guy who wrote that Draft Dodger Rag song that my mum used to play when I was a kid.

Hence, at age 20 or so, I re-discovered the awesomeness that is Phil Ochs.

( This is long. )

I'm going out of order here, because the next Blogcember prompt was about pizza preferences (which I do want to write about!), and it felt a bit weird to have a serious post about Nelson Mandela that's getting linked to all over the place, followed by a post about pizza.

Anyway, maeve66 asked: "What you're going to do in Morocco! Also, what is a VLPA or some gathering of similar initials?"

So! The background to this is that I've wanted to go to Morocco since I was a little kid. This is as a result of knowing someone who went and came back with photos of the architecture, and also reading way too much William S. Burroughs at far too early an age. MY CHILDHOOD TRAVEL DREAM AND I'M DOING IT, you guys.

I'm going on a tour, because that's the only reasonable way to see all the places I want to see in a short period of time and my command of French leaves much to be desired. (My command of Arabic is non-existent.) I'll be in North Morocco: Casablanca, Rabat, Fez, Chefchaouen, and Marrakech. What I'm doing? Seeing stuff. As much stuff as possible. Particularly architecture.

VLAP is the thing that makes the whole thing possible. See, when you're a teacher, you get crazy amounts of vacation (and need it). But it's only at Christmas Break (when it's expensive to fly and most people have some sort of obligation), March Break (a week long), and summer. You can't take vacation any other time. I'm not complaining, and I'm totally willing to pay more because the perks of my job are awesome, but the thing with Morocco is that the temperatures average around 90-100°F in summer. I am actually willing to endure that for the sake of my childhood dream, but the friend I'm going with is much more sensible than I am.

Now! Rewind back to the shitty contract we got enforced on us last year. As shitty as it was, like most neoliberal economic ideas, it was short-sighted and actually didn't save anyone that much money. (When we had 20 bankable sick days a year, the average teacher took 7—and I took way less than that until I got Maggie. Now we get 11 non-bankable sick days, and there is zero motivation to not take all 11, since we lose them otherwise. A supply teacher costs $250 a day. Your homework, boys, girls, and genderqueers, is to do the math.)

In another effort to save money, the Board started offering a Voluntary Leave of Absence Program (VLAP), where you can take up to five days of unpaid leave. That amounts to a substantial pay cut, but I saw that and went, "fuck it, I can attach it to my March Break and go to Morocco! Hells yeah!"

And that's what I'm doing. Because childhood dream.

Thanks everyone for your post suggestions. There are still more days of the month than prompts, so if you'd like to request something, head on over here. Also if you'd like to suggest a better title than "Blogcember," I'm all ears.

metawidget asked about painting of the arty sort. I'm not sure I have anything really profound to say about painting. What I like about painting is that it's not very profound for me. As some of you know, I utterly agonize over most of the things I do—writing, teaching, freelance work, attempts to pick up playing piano again—painting is pretty much the one thing that I've been reasonably good at for a long period of time that I can do competently without thinking about it too hard. I put on music, I work sloppily, and I completely turn off the part of my brain that is a constant anxiety-ridden monologue for a few hours at a time.

I paint in acrylic, though lately I've been tempted to take up watercolour again, which I haven't done since I was a kid. I like acrylic because it's immediate. I went through a phase where I used palette knives and fingers rather than brushes, but now I'm back to brushes. I prefer to work on large works over small works, though when I was off work and in tons of pain, small works were the only sort I could do.

There's not a lot of deep meaning to any of my work. It's usually just stuff that I think looks cool. The painting I'm currently working on is a woman I saw at Black Creek Pioneer village; I thought she looked like she stepped out of a painting, so I snapped a picture on my cell and I'm working from that.

Unlike writing, where I really do need to be in a certain frame of mind (and I'm hardly ever in that frame of mind), I actually can force myself to paint. The fact that I don't do it more often has to do with time and hassle rather than inspiration.

Once I'm finished with a painting, I seldom want to look at it. There are three exceptions, two of which are hanging in my house:

1) A still life I did in undergrad. It's a gas mask, an old army boot, and a bottle of wine. It's about being prepared for whatever comes your way, a.k.a. the zombie apocalypse, and I have it hanging in my bedroom because it matches the colour scheme.
( In Advance )

2) A portrait I did of the first male non-relative I saw completely naked. Which is to say one of our life drawing models in high school. (I was an innocent teenager.) He's clothed in this painting, though. It's very stiff and Victorian and it looks exactly like him. By the way, he was a really cool guy and often hung out at the coffee shop with us after sessions, and he was into the Church of the Subgenius. That one's in my living room, and I actually chose the colour of the living room to match the painting.
( The Gambler )

3) This street scene I did, one of my palette-knife-only paintings. It was based on a photograph that I took before there were digital cameras; essentially I shot the feet of the two people I was with, and it was blurry, and for some reason I decided to paint it. I was going through a very angry phase, and the process was violent; the sense I get from looking at it is that it's the feet of people mid-riot. I'd have hung it in my house but it really doesn't match the decor.
( Things Got Out of Hand )

So that's painting. I do a lot more illustration these days; less clean-up and I get paid for it.