Personify

-JC

Tequila Taco Night - Epic Meal Time

420 means a lot of things, but what does it mean to me? It means I'm hungry. I dunno about you guys, but this is how I felt about yesterday.
-Gabe

Questions and galleries!

Has anyone seen Black Swan yet? What are your thoughts on it? I was going to attend the previous with a favored snap from the film but google searching it has only given me the jeebies...frightening good stuff.

________________________________

Again, another snippet of my life:

I need to work. She walks away downcast, playfully. The game fills me with joy. I know this, and what to do, and what should have been done. It shouldn’t have been said in the first place. I knew this, but most importantly: she knows this. Yet I fill lungs and bate my breath as I chase her the three bounds to the left that she’s achieved, right over left then left in place before sliding my right leg beside her so that I can lasso her with my arms and hold down on her shoulders. At that moment a group of teenagers let out late at the local school feign interest, “Awww.” The cooing member was the girl alone and ahead of the pack, who kept quiet and made me think of an ambush. But I have to admit, I then saw the best of her in there her eyelashes curled, her opal eyes fountaining resplendent over her cheeky mounds, before she turned it sidewards.

            “Hmph.” arms crossed.

            “Luuu!” in the highest mock pitch.

            “Fine and I dressed up for this.” I knew it.

            It usually just takes a few pecks to get her chiseling chimpy cheek back around, just like this time. It’s a wonderful breeze that’s caught up to us this time, like a lot of many other things are. I am thinking of a real modest proposal, the travel paying for itself with each recovered millimeter of smile joining mine in return. It does, it does, it does, I think outside Chin Hua under the awning. I have her back, my baby, that I throw into the air, really breathing now.

            “Ok let’s go. You can go to your house to study and I’ll go to mine and lay in my bed and cry because baby isn’t with me because baby doesn’t want to be with baby because he’d rather stu-dy,” moving off the sidewalk. I took the plunge, too, my hand massaging her elbow entirely, behind her. She turns around. “Ok bye.”

            “Where is you going?”

            “You know where.”

            I grab her keys. I open her driver’s door.

            “I’ll go around—”

            “Please.” I proffer her keys back and with my left arm sweep kindly into imaginary view the door. “I can’t leave my car here there are too many hoodlums coming out from school.”

            “Luuuu! Just go home.”

            “Okay, let’s go. I’ll follow you.” But before she can retake her natural ground I turn and head to my own door and get in. I buckle down then put the key in the ignition. I look over, and can’t see her face. She’s texting, I know it. I’m going to wait and good thing I just checked out the first volume Norton anthology of English literature. I’ve been studying the French Revolution and the Reformation and Marx, impressed with the Penguin Communist Manifesto’s 200 page introduction, and taking cognition pills to better take in books for potential review such as Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, the contents of which I’m finding to be already occidental, and of which I’m expecting a post-structural twist later in. But what I’m really studying is Marxism to better understand capitalism, to accurately diagnose our times, to have something to write about, anything important. She doesn’t look up once. I press on the honk, and still watching her, I see a wave of response move up her body and out from the top of her head like a bunny turning to prospect any threat to her comfort zone.

            I point at what’s behind her, to the road. She doesn’t get it and even tilts her head, like bunnies are wont to. So I give her the thumbs up. She lifts up her phone to view and spins it along its X-axis to identify the proper object of her attentions now. I jut my bottom jaw out, lips pursed, and with eyebrows Stoogely raised with enlarged eyeballs. She just looks down. At these junctures, it’s best to give time.

            So I continue down the contents and I see—Samuel Butler! As I’m turning to the appropriate page I notice something outside—she’s walking towards me! I unlock the door manually on her side since I’m not sure if any unlock button will actually unlock the whole car. And of course when she opens the door the alarm takes off and, used to the embarrassment, I calmly try each button on the controller, ‘lock,’ ‘unlock,’ ‘alarm,’ and finding them useless I remove the key from the ignition and then work ‘unlock’ how I know it will now, while taking care not to repeat aloud the page number (2155).

            Supporting herself on her angled right leg, which is excruciating to think of, and using the car ceiling as a preventive to a balancing act, she removes everything from shotgun: two beanies, a dvd, her UCSC zip-up, all those tossed kindly to the back, and a clipboard with a single blank piece of paper to the ground, before sitting down. We don’t look at each other for about a long while as we hug.

______________________________________

Also, is this not the dumbest reply you've ever read? Consequently I did not receive any response, to the loss of my wallet and reputation.

"Hi -----,

I actually chose to name my ad's subject "learning aid," and not just "tutor," to not restrict myself to just tutoring for school, since tutoring is usually known as something done "for school" only! With that said, yes I wouldn't mind being a personal tutor for your husband. In fact, I think acting as a conversation partner for language acquisition would be more enjoyable than exclusive school-related essay structuring. Judging by your last name, was I wrong in having already begun brushing up on my Spanish? Do you have any language skills or subjects in mind that I can begin preparing learning material for?

Also, what is your husband's availability? I work part-time at my local library in Fairfield so I'll cross-check his hours against mine. As to the upcoming two weeks, for which I already have my work schedule given by my supervisor, I am completely available Saturday (23rd), Sunday (24th), Monday (25th), and Thursday (28th). I work the mornings of Thursday and Friday, but I'd like some time to prepare so as to deliver an effective tutoring session.

As to the fee per hour, I'm sorry but I would only consider a long-term package type deal if I was local or even lived in Davis. But being from Fairfield, the gas is too much and I honestly need the money. I apologize.

Sincerely,
Arian"

Bastard, and right outside my employee entrance where I take my break . . .

The IRS has finally recognized how many families . . . kidnap children?!

My new office.

Thanks you, James.

Where is everybody?

Here is a snippet of my taunting life . . .

I cannot open my mouth in objection even with the radio turned down for my response. I was not surprised at my ineffability, nor was I surprised by the way things turned out, or how things are discovered. Or how things are forced into place. We were on our way to a steakhouse in the city over so there was time enough to talk and reevaluate the family’s financial house, which is only possible from a distance. Before any reassessment, and this may be the cause for such a reassessment, there was also the silence not of the road, but of the travel. From an economic point of view there was good foundation, but from the managed’s perspective an iron hand was just shaking the beams to reinforce the contractor’s own good work. It was kind to have given me a shake, but it was pointless; he had already his own judgment, that it was sound.

            But my house is a honeymoon suite of myself, sweeter becoming the closer my father gets. Lately he has been kinder to me, and I’ve appreciated the effort, but there was an underlying cause different from what I had hoped, and he had brought it up himself.

            “Is it because you want more time to yourself?”

            “Yeah. I’m afraid I won’t have time to write.” Kafka would have nodded at my own blunt force. But fathers are rarely Kafka’s.

            “If I had known that was why you haven’t been doing anything . . .” In my mind anything I follow this with would have been negatively correct, because my mind was six feet beneath me scuttling for the sea. In the wake of his sentence I reconsidered the proposition, which was: apply for the job, “it was meant for [me],” “that’s a lot of money.” I didn’t even know his SUV had a calculator built-in it—“that’s $160 a day . . . $3200 a month—,” and my mom even joining: “Ooh that’s more than what you made Papa!” I couldn’t thank them enough.

____________________________________________________

Also, does anyone know of any job openings? I need to make money in legitimate daylit ways.

Ad posted

http://sacramento.craigslist.org/lss/2327982310.html

Does anyone know how to ad pictures in craigslist? I thought it'd be a good idea to have any picture, be it of just piled books, so that those filtering for photos only would still cull my ad.

25 writers on overlooked treasures

Hmm I just found out about the "Compose" mode of blogging so now my spaces will actually be spaces?

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2009/12/best-forgotten-reads.html

"What follows are lost treasures from 25 writers, as they looked back in 1999.

André Aciman: "Count d'Orgel's Ball" by Raymond Radiguet

Margaret Atwood: "Doctor Glas" by Hjalmar Söderberg

Anthony Bailey: two by Marc Bloch - "Strange Defeat" and "Souvenirs de Guerre 1914-15"

John Banville: "By Love Possessed" by James Gould Cozzens

Jacques Barzun: "Practical Agitation" by John Jay Chapman

Alain de Botton: "The Unquiet Grave" by Cyril Connolly

Thomas Flanagan: "Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the Civil War" by Edmund Wilson

Carlos Fuentes: "Paradiso" by Jose Lezama Lima; "Grande Sertão, Veredas" by João Guimarães Rosa and "The Flowering of New England" by Van Wyck Brooks

Robert Giroux: "The Enormous Room" by E.E. Cummings

Nadine Gordimer: "Turbott Wolfe" by William Plomer

Juan Goytisolo: "Petersburg" by Andrei Bely

Thom Gunn: two by Arnold Bennett - "The Old Wives' Tale" and "Riceyman Steps"

Dave Hickey: "The Man Who Loved Children" by Christina Stead

Pico Iyer: "The Road to Xanadu" by John Livingston Lowes

Milan Kundera: "The Man Without Qualities" by Robert Musil

John Le Carré: "The Good Soldier" by Ford Madox Ford and "Rogue Male" by Geoffrey Household

Elmore Leonard: two by Richard Bissell - "High Water" and "A Stretch on the River"

John Luckas: two by Jean Dutourd - "The Horrors of Love" and "Best Butter"

Frederic Morton: "Lieutnant Gustl" [also published as "None but the Brave"] by Arthur Schnitzler

Paul Muldoon: "Irish Journal" by Heinrich Boll

Cynthia Ozick: seven by Rudyard Kipling - "The Wish House", "Dayspring Mishandled," "Mary Postgate," "The Gardener," "The Eye of Allah," "Baa Baa Black Sheep" and "Mrs. Bathurst"

Noel Perrin: "Far Rainbow" by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky and "The Walls Came Tumbling Down" by Henriette Roosenburg

Gregory Rabassa: "Internal War" by Volodia Teitelboim, "My World Is Not of This Kingdom" by João de Melo and "The Return of the Caravels" by Antonio Lobo Antunes

Susan Sontag: "And Then" by Natsume Soseki, "Jennie Gerhardt" by Theodore Dreiser, "Fateless" by Imre Kertész

Marina Warner: "Anthologie des mythes, legendes, et conles populaires d'Amerique" ("Anthology of Myths, Legends, and Popular Tales of America") by Benjamin Peret

-- Carolyn Kellogg

Photo: Rare books from the Huntington Library's collection. Credit: Lawrence K. Ho / Los Angeles Times"

craigstlist ad . . . help please!

So here is an ad I want to post up on craigslist.org offering my tutoring services in English. It's the first draft and I just completed it. Any suggestions?

ENGLISH TUTOR

To many English is like learning another language, and not just for foreign speakers. Many native English speakers, too, have a difficult time writing, and even reading, English, to the point that the national level of competence of basic English skills expected to be mastered by high school’s, or even college’s, end is often only eulogized in contemporary reports on its status. With many different style formats (MLA, APA, Chicago, AP, etc.) to navigate, each with its own unique grammar and punctuation rules, it is not unexpected that so many students are finding themselves surprisingly frustrated midway through English 1, having thought that they’ve mastered the language after thirteen years of K-12 schooling or preliminary English 350 and 250. And worse, some are even so discouraged to continue past the “drop date,” and it isn’t even entirely their fault!
Four out of five times I tutor I will be working with someone who is willing to make it on time everytime, fully awake and ready to go. Many students do ask for help from their peers and their teachers, but also many times the relationship between them gets in the way. The peer will be too relaxed, or condescending, or is just basically not qualified to guide the troubled student towards the right direction. And the teacher, well he/she is often preoccupied either with other students, her own work, or—let’s be realistic—her own life. There are also environmental concerns, such as distracting noises, absence of references tools, and uncomfortable workspaces. There is also the common plight of uninterestedness . . .
Hi, my name is Arian Cato and I want to help, whether it’s your son or daughter, sibling, friend, or you! I am a graduate of the San Francisco State University Bachelor’s English program as well as an experienced tutor with three semesters’ worth of in-building and private tutoring experience. I have worked with

 English as a Second Language (e.g., a native Spanish speaker from Peru)
 beginning learners in “English Fundamentals”
 beginning students in “Basic Reading and Writing Skills”
 students “majoring” in English taking courses such as
• English: Critical Thinking and Writing About Literature
• English: Critical Thinking and Composition: Language in Context
• English Literature 1 and 2
• American Literature 1 and 2
• Modern Fiction
 a graduate student needing supervision with editing her Master’s Thesis

Of course I am more than eager to expand my horizons and grow intellectually beside you through discussion over whatever piece of literature you have in mind, whether for class or not. I am acquainted with the entire scope of Western literature across all ages and can even discourse over philosophy, criticism, or theory of any sort. I am also knowledgeable about MLA format and advanced grammar and punctuation rules. I am also ready to prepare anybody for the SAT, CBEST, or GRE English or Essay Writing components.

Just $15 per hour. Willing to meet at any house or public service facility, such as a library, within Solano County (Fairfield, Vacaville, Suisun, Vallejo, Cordelia), American Canyon, Napa, Dixon, Davis, or West Sacramento.

Please, if interested, contact me at (707)344-2230 or ariancato@sbcglobal.net