The Storm Within

(My Neck)

Well, here we are. It is Wednesday; time for me to bare all about the Bard. Only problem this week is, I am practically immobile. That's right folks; Mayday, mayday, Blogger down! If I was a soldier I'd be wounded; a racehorse I'd be coming up lame; a ballplayer I'd be on the DL; a Victorian aristocrat I'd be in need of a rest cure; a politician I'd be suffering a setback, bowed but unbroken. Being none of these things, my neck is just plain killing me, and the pain is shooting into my shoulders like a gatling gun on Valentine's Day. It is very difficult for me to read, and writing on paper is hell. Using the computer can be accomplished with moderate ease, about 15 minutes at a time. Yeah, I know, we've all got problems. But I've got a weblog to pour mine into, and you don't. So be sympathetic or get your own damn blog.

The Spouse, in an outburst of productive concern, consulted with some public domain online medical diagnostic program and decided I have "Wry Neck." Insert your own predictable joke here. You can get Wry Neck by sleeping funny, or being in a big cold wind. Since my cat enjoys surreptitiously taking over my pillow every night, AND no Mom, of course I never go out without a scarf, I'm going with 'sleeping funny' as the cause of my agony. One seems to cure Wry Neck through judicious application of heat, and gentle moving of the neck "within the boundaries of pain."

The advantages of Wry Neck appear to be limited, at least in my case. Being forced to lie in bed all day with a heating pad sounds nice, to the uninitiated, but begins to lose its appeal when:

a) The Cat, aka the Wry Neck Causal Agent, manages to co-opt my heating pad, as well as my pillow. You probably think I'm being too nice to the cat by permitting him to move in on my heating pad, but let me assure you, with this cat, resistance is futile. He would have been worth his weight in Vichy Government bonds to Laval, Petain and company during World War II.

Seriously. I finally had to invest in a second heating pad.

b) We are looking forward to company on Friday. Hopefully the company will be looking forward to meeting our new house in its present state - which could most kindly be described as au natural; less kindly as a study in dust and dirty dishes.

c) You've about had it with The Spouse leaving you cranky comments on your blog about missing your Wednesday deadlines. The Spouse has witnessed my four-thirty am crash courses in html code to prevent the blog from formatting like a kaleidoscope on acid, the late nights with my trusty Shakespeare tome after company has left. How about a little empathy here? Hath not a Blogger eyes? Hath not a Blogger hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same wry neck, subject to the same diseases (let's just see how you fare with Wry Neck, Old Spouse of Mine), healed by the same heating pad (only now we have two, so if the Cat permits, we won't have to share anymore), warmed and cooled by the same scary, dangerously old oil boiler, as The Spouse is? If you prick us, do we not get blood all over the clean laundry we just folded? If you tickle us, do we not laugh until we accidentally punch you in the jaw? If you poison us, do we not puke on your shoes, and remind you we said eating at that shady Chinese place was a bad idea? And if you wrong us in The Comments section, shall we not seek revenge by sneaking into the bathroom during your shower and dumping a glass of ice-cold water on you?

That's right, toots. Beware of chilly liquids when you least expect them. There is much wisdom in Shakespeare.

So, basically, I'm not having any fun here, and you won't be learning much about Shakespeare from me this week. My plan was to discuss the language of The Tempest this Wednesday. Only it was going to be fun, and super interesting. Really. I have some of the lines picked out, but it hurts too much to really do the full job of it. So it will have to wait.

This week's entry, which exists, as I think I've made clear, so no one can claim I didn't give fair warning to The Spouse about the icy future that awaits, will just have to be full of aimless rambling on stuff I don't need to look up, read, or otherwise lend any substance to in any way, which I think I've also made clear. This brings me, naturally, to my newest pet peeve. Pet peeves are super material for someone in my condition, I think, because a 'peeve' is a beef about which you are obsessed but no one else gives a rat's fanny. Having looked into the whole amateur blog scene a bit since I began this enterprise, I feel confident in saying that obsessions of interest to no one other that the author are the essence of most blogs. Plus, the use of the term 'pet' makes clear that what you are about to complain obsessively about is a purely subjective matter, needing - and holding out - no prospect of rational justification, substantive analysis, or coherence. When you have almost no ability to do any research, your resources are all - literally - out of reach, and half your mind is occupied with staying the cat's attempts to commandeer heating pad number two, pet peeves are just what the public domain online medical diagnostic program ordered.


Having thus set, I hope, your expectations lower than below deck on the Titanic, I should hasten to add that I think my newest pet peeve is actually a Serious Issue. You see, I was wondering if anybody out there in the world of Real Scholarship shared my poor opinion of the action in The Tempest. So I did a quick online search and lo and behold! I found several sites just filled to the Gigabytes with essays on different aspects of The Tempest. At first when I saw the list of essay titles I was a bit disheartened. They all sounded so positive and complimentary and otherwise enraptured with The Tempest's amazingness that it did not look like any real experts agreed with me in the least. And then I noticed that while I could read some of the essays gratis, most of them would cost me something for a peak. At least $29.95 a pop. And THEN I noticed that each essay was color-coded by quality. The quality ratings were: Free (red), A Good Essay (aqua), A Very Good Essay (green), An Excellent Essay (blue), Outstanding (purple). On the sidebar of the website were testimonials, all of which pretty much said the same thing, 'My grade went up, like, 5000 percent or something once I started copying stuff -whoops, I mean learning from your site. Since I managed to steal my Dad's credit card one night when he was passed out in a pile of tortilla chips and gin, your pay-to-plagarize (did I spell that right ;) ?) offerings have meant honor roll for me! I only wish you you could do my math, too!'

On the one hand, I was relieved. This explained the sycophantic tenor of the essays. Did you ever try to really tear apart something you had to read in high school? Well, I did and let me tell you, criticism was not well received. The teachers picked the books they shoved down your throat for a reason, and that reason did not seem to be because they thought the books sucked. Oh how vividly I can recall the paper I wrote for high school Sophomore English, which could have been titled, "The Same Damn Ridiculous Thing Happens in Every Freaking Charles Dickens Story You Make Us Read, and I For One Am Sick of Pretending I Think it is Good." Sub-titled, "'The Absurd, Well-Intentioned Mishap on Page Two that Causes Everyone Tremendous Confusion and Heart-Ache Until it is Happily Resolved by the Family Solicitor in the Last Chapter' Plot Devise is Wearing a Little Thin". The teacher was not happy. He kept me after class and explained to me that I was an arrogant nobody, and that Dombey and Son was a thing of pure genius. Later I found out that Dickens didn't think Dombey and Son was all that hot, either, but hey, the family had to eat. I have grown in my affection for Dickens, but not for the English teacher, poor mutt.

But this clouds the central issue. Which is: you can buy school essays online, and you can get crappy ones for free. I don't know which one bothers me more; the general access, or the economic discrimination. The poor, underprivileged kids are stuck with the red essays, which, having read several, I must agree are priced correctly. I suppose a ludicrous few would say this is a way to teach kids the meaning of hard work. If you kill yourself on your paper route, you can shell out the $49.95 for a purple essay and impress the parents. The Spouse, who has a PhD and the puffy hat to prove it, was a student more recently than innocent me, and was not shocked. 'Oh yes,' The Spouse nodded knowingly, 'graduate students can supplement their stipends nicely writing those. They pretend it's no worse than writing for Cliffs Notes, but obviously...' The Spouse's head wagged sadly.

It is a whole different universe than Cliff's Notes, let me assure you. Here are some essay titles I found while visiting a single website:
~Essay on Duality Between Nature and Society in The Tempest
~Magic in Shakespeare's Tempest
~Importance of Dialogue in The Tempest
~The Theatre Metaphor in The Tempest
~Essay on the Exploration of Values in Robinson Crusoe, Odyssey, Tempest and Gulliver's Travels
~Relevance of The Tempest Today
~Opposition between Art and Reality in The Tempest
~Four Sides of The Tempest
~Discrimination Exposed in The Tempest
~Essay on Social Hierarchy in The Tempest
~Essay on Vengeance and Forgiveness in The Tempest
~Art and Nature in The Tempest

And that is just a handful from page one. This single site offers 138 essays about The Tempest. Is there an essay topic a teacher could potentially assign that is not covered here? Not for long, I'm guessing. Does this encourage original thought? Intellectual exploration? ANY EFFORT IN THE LEAST?!?!? The essays come complete with helpful copy and paste instructions for the 3 high school or college students who haven't mastered this procedure yet. They also carefully explain that paying for the essay gives the buyer the right to copy it. Now, if you are a college student, you (or your parents) are probably paying for your education, so if you want to cheat yourself by plagiarizing a $49.95 purple color-coded paper on your way out the door to class because you couldn't tear yourself away from that frat party last night, hey, that's your business. Maybe it was a really good party. But high school students? We were all high school students once, and as high school students you may recall how we were basically hormonally-programmed to be morons. Most days, there was just nothing to be done about it. Judgment was out; swaggering about how wasted you got in your friend's parents' basement last weekend was in. Do we really need to give obnoxious upper-middle class teens another way to be stupid? (Obnoxious upper-middle class teens who accidentally find themselves reading this entry (no doubt misled in their search for an online Tempest essay to "study"): This is a rhetorical question.)

Will the beleaguered teachers be reduced to giving up actual teaching time in order in watch their students actually write their own essays in class? Between that and preparing students for dumb standardized tests that will somehow determine everyone's future, there can't be very much actual teaching time left. Why not just use chimps as teachers, and release this valuable asset of real teachers back out into the private sector where they can directly contribute to GDP growth like good Americans?

I know, worse things exist to be outraged at than the future capacity of our youth to sustain a compelling argument, or independently analyze intelligent work. But hey, the outrage is real, and it's mine, dammit.

And I have Wry Neck. So leave me alone.