Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

There are days when I feel like I have told the same story to numerous people multiple times because I cannot stop dwelling on it. I have always struggled with letting things go. People tell me that I am too sensitive and that I just need to let things go. I battle with trying to forget the small injustices from twenty years ago, blaming others for being mean to me when they barely remember doing it. I think I tell stories to try to reorder my life and take control of situations that I cannot control. Of course, my inability to stop dwelling does not account for how I start forgetting minor details and adding others after years of telling stories. We all do this because memory is fallible and people like to entertain. The process of understanding what has happened to us throughout the years is hard to comprehend and understand, especially for those of us who have difficulty not dwelling on every detail. We blame others for the minor bumps in the road and we blame ourselves for im...

" One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the  'impossible,' come true.”  -F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up , 1945 I should be working on many different things, including applications, revisions, and grading student papers. Yet I find myself at a cross roads, torn between doing the things I love and trying to keep food on the table. I struggle at being an academic, a teacher, a citizen of this mess of a country, while working sixteen hour days. I feel disappointed and broken if I take time to watch a movie or listen to a record. The mounting stress and anxiety bleeds into my work, etching my writing and my scholarship indelibly until the two become inseparable, a misshapen hulk of a thing, trending between monster, art, and commerce. I know that this will someday end at the inquisition or the tenur...

In my darkest days I tend to sleep a lot. Nap after nap comes in quick succession when turning off the world is as easy as clicking the light switch and settling into a light snooze. I have become reckless in my pursuit of sleep, searching for one long forgotten dream. Perhaps, I long for anything that will shut out the light. When I was a kid, I had a recurring dream filled with creepy witches and small children, rendered in cartoon detail. This brain animation came weekly for a period, then just stopped. I've never had it again. Could this be the dreamworld I seek? Or, perhaps, there is another world buried deep in my psyche, asking to be explored? I've never had another dream that beat on the doors so often as this one. Most dreams come once and never return. Dreams are always peopled with the strangest or most unexpected characters, random places from the past, and enough chicanery to make election year look like a triumph. Random classmates from grade school appear alo...