Yeah, I still hate it here. More today than even my usual level of hatred, which falls somewhere between incendiary and global meltdown. Here's what happened half an hour ago…

I was driving home with the boys on the street that connects the main drag with my street. It's a narrow road, and full of potholes, yet that didn't stop some jerk-off from parking his black Bronco near the curb.

As I was preparing to go around the parked Bronco, imagine my surprise when it pulled out in front of me. All of its windows were tinted so I didn't even know someone was inside, and of course they didn't have on any lights or even use a turn indicator.

At this point in my story, you need to know that my New Year's Resolution was to take Monstro's advice and yell at the people who need yellin' at. I did the vehicular version: I laid on the horn, long and loud.

Imagine my surprise when 1) the Bronco slammed on its brakes and 2) the driver got out of his car and 3) it was a cop.

Effing A. This can't be good.

So the cop, an older model, walks up to my van and I roll down my window, reasonably certain that he's not going to kick the shit out of me, but not certain of that, because lots of people get beaten up by the cops in Western Massachusetts.

“You have no business passing me here,” he said in a loud, angry voice.

“Your windows are tinted, your lights weren't on, you didn't use your blinker,” I said in a voice that wasn't quite as loud but matched his for anger. “I didn't even know you were in the car until you pulled out in front of me.

“It's a 30 mph zone here,” he said.

“I know that!” I said.

“You shouldn't pass anyone,” he said.

“You didn't use your blinker!” I said.

“Stay behind me,” he commanded.

Then he got back in his car and started driving. I waited until he was about 30 feet ahead of me until I started to drive, but at that point, he had stopped. I wondered what the hell he was going to do now, but it turns out he was just going to turn into the copy shop. He turned on his blinker this time, but then realized he couldn't pull in to the driveway because a person with a cane was in the way, so he pulled ahead to the next driveway and pulled in there.

“That made me angry,” my four-year-old said from the backseat.

“Me too,” I said. “It makes me angry when the people who are supposed to enforce the laws can't be bothered to follow them.”

Adjunct status be damned, as of last night I consider myself to be a full-fledged professor. Why? Because even though I had no access to the internal network (where all of my class resources are located), and no access to a copy machine (to copy the resources I'd brought with me), and no dinner in my belly, and no agreement as to which classroom was actually hosting my class, I still managed to fill three hours of course time. Phenomenal. Of course, I probably seemed like a bit of a dingbat at times, and we'll see if everybody shows up again next week, but I'm considering it a win.

Note: I started writing this months and months ago, and it's not done yet, but I don't have anything else to share today, so here it is.

Three words and a phrase I've pondered of late are revolution, to come to pass, redact, and confound:

Revolution because it's a thing, plus the way you get to the thing (revolution itself only occurs from a revolution, or turning-around, of thought).

To come to pass because it's both to come and to come about.

Redact because it's both to put in writing and to obscure or remove text from a document prior to publication or release. (Has anyone referred to the past eight years as the Redactive Presidency? Dibs.)

And confound because it means everything from mixed up to damned, and its archaic def. is to bring to ruination.

Heavy stuff. What are these words called, anyway? They're not exactly oxymorons, are they? (rhetorical question)

I want to know their rhetorical classification, because it is this rhetorical classification as well as the examples' individual meanings that weave through my three favorite books, all of which I was lucky enough to read this year: The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, Infinite Jest, and Finnegans Wake by my boyfriend, James Joyce.

In all of these works, everything has happened, and yet everything has yet to happen. People must turn and be met by others who themselves are turning, before revolution can happen. Everything's written down, but often reads like soft-focus through a Vaseline-smeared lens (that sounds dirty but I don't mean it to). They're topsy-turvy ideas (and definitions behind the words that symbolize the ideas), and yet what makes better story than opposites attracting? Better drama than A and Z locked in a room?

To that dramatic end, each book's characters also share their occupation of intimate physical spaces: dorm rooms, hospital rooms, halfway-house common areas, all the way into the golden (?) lobes of one's own mind.

(Perhaps part of my frustration (ed note: frustration being yet another definition of confound) with Gravity's Rainbow was the vastness of the roaming involved. Too vast for Slothrop's own good. GR embodies the “to come to pass” ideal, though.)

Minimalization is something that, my three favorites all share, even the one that's more than a thousand pages, with 70+

pages of footnotes.

And yet it makes my heart swell to read, as I read in my new issue of American Theatre magazine, that Beckett's Waiting for Godot is being staged in the front yard of a house flooded out by Hurricane Katrina.

Now that the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that corporations have the same First Amendment rights as private citizens, I look forward to seeing Halliburton and Walmart in the pews of my local house of worship.

In other news, I'm convening a think tank. Subject: How can five of the nine of the smartest people in the world be so STUPID?

Maybe it's because I incorrectly entered the weight of my clothes the first time I used Wii Fit. Regardless, when I hopped aboard yesterday, it told me I had lost more than four pounds in two days.

“You've already reached your goal!” Wii told me. Then it expressed concern at my rapid weight loss. Does this mean I have to buy it a Valentine's Day card?

It speaks volumes about the GOP that I haven't been this depressed since Bill Clinton won his first presidential election.

Scott Brown will for now and always be “Senator Naked” on this blog.

If you voted for Brown, you voted against survivors of rape. This one says, “???????”

Those Massachusetts rural areas that Scott Brown carried to his GOP Senate-seat victory is where the people who DIDN'T go to college live. Thar she blows, America.

I just finished reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, one of my many on-target gifts received by Monstro this Christmas, and while I indeed read it to completion: not enough zombies. I was hoping for a big, Hamlet-like ending but didn't get it.

Ultimately, the zombie(s) arc pays off in additional reader satisfaction, because it and they deepen the existant charms/annoyances of the novel, depending on your side of the Jane-Austen fence. Zombies make the Bennetts' frittering worth something: I can't be with him because I'm a zombie-hunter Bride of Death.

Also, the spirit of the illustrations (yes! illustrations!) is willing but the talent is weak. Sorry dude.

Genius: I gave this to Monstro for Christmas and am the first to crack it. One-and-a-half authors in, plus all the preface material, and damned if it isn't positively titular. First I read about my boyfriend, and now I'm on to Master Shakespeare and Sir John Falstaff. Genius is arranged Kabbalahistically so there's quite a bit about that, too. I wonder if Harold Bloom (he's the author / compiler) has seen the movie “Pi: Faith in Chaos”?

Ulysses: Turns out, what you do after re-reading Infinite Jest is re-read Ulysses. But that's OK, because James Joyce and I have been boyfriend-girlfriend since grad school and good buddies since high school, and I would totally make out with him if he wanted to. It's cool. Joyce infuses his own super-dreaminess in Poldy (that's what I call him, too, Dr. Bloom!), which makes him the scene stealer / scenery chewer any time he's around. But, Poldy's such a pussy –alliteration + 5 letters each, ahem, plus, “Ulysses” has a double-s and four of the five letters of pussy, don't think that Mr. Master of Detail didn't think of that, so I'll use the word if I want to, though I don't typically utilize it in my writings, and don't consider myself a “dirty” blogger– that Leopold's wussiness truly renders him a cuckold. Plus, his lukewarm affiliation to Judaism –not via Talmud, doesn't attend synagogue, buys and eats a kidney in his first few scenes– is a turn-off. Also, it is hard to write about Joyce's work without double en-dashes.

Speaking of dirty writers, Monstro also gave me Russell Brand's memoir, My Booky Wook, in which Brand emits the talent and propensity to write pretty well about stuff you'd never otherwise want to read. It's pretty good, and particularly worth a look if you're interested in first-hand accounts of heroin addiction and hunky sex.

There, Fringes, now I've written about dreams and blogging in the past few days.

And yeah, I've been backloading. Meh.

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My 4-year-old is becoming increasingly smartmouthed with me. Today's example:

Me: …and you shouldn't do that because one, it's not good for the furniture, and two, you could hurt yourself.

Lex: (pause) What's three?