the mock-up.

Not to sound like a broken record, but it's been a rage-filled couple of days.

As an ancillary of my thesis (clear eyes full hearts can't lose!) I'm researching Texasness as a cultural concept. And, oh, for a good Boston liberal like myself, what a depressing cultural concept it is. I spent the weekend being treated to quotes like: "Hell, look at Africa. They've been here a lot longer than North America and they could be civilized and they're the same way they were three or four hundred years ago." Yep. This is our country.

I'm also in a film class this semester with online message boards. Class time is reserved for screening and lectures and all discussion is restricted to the online forum, which is proving to be a sad little case study for why academic message boards tend to be less effective when not accompanied by actual face-to-face conversation. The whole thing pretty much degenerated into open hostility this week, when one student posted a diatribe about how the class is overly critical (never mind that the class is called "Documentary Theory and Criticism") and, for good measure, threw in something about how female voices aren't suitable narration for serious documentaries. The posts resulted in angry responses, which resulted in even more angry responses, and now we're at the point of blatant sarcasm and mockery of each other. Not good natured mockery, either. Hard-core, you're-a-blithering-idiot mockery.

Anyway, this is what I was reading when my roommate had the good fortune to walk into the kitchen and subsequently have to listen to me yelling my head off about gender and Texas and race and bigotry and the general blinding stupidity of the human race.

But things are looking up. This, from Universal Hub, just made me chuckle. I think I've exhausted my capacity for outrage.