Today I'm trying to geolocate a fictional place from Karen Tei Yamashita's Through the Arc of the Rainforest for a paper/mapping project. This is understandably difficult, but careful reading and some fiddling revealed that it was supposed to be 1,500 miles from both Fortaleza and São Paulo, somewhere in the southern portion of the Amazon Basin. Taking Yamashita literally, I was able to drop it about there. If this seems like kind of a crazy way to spend one's time, you've probably got it about right. But they hand out degrees in it, so.

Pretty good formula evolving here for thanksgiving. It involves:

• (1) Stay in New York
• (2) (Try to) Protest in the morning, because civic duty
• (3) Start drinking (lightly) at noon
• (4) Make a number of relatively small, all-vegetable dishes; the cats get tuna
• (5) Marathon some nerdy TV or movie series. Last year LotR, this year Firefly.
• (6) Decorate, i.e. get a 1.5-foot Christmas tree and tie a bow on top of it

Year two of this and it seems like the way to go.

I always write these notes to self. I could probably write an entire draft of bracketed statements saying things like, "[say something about steinbeck's mustache, but don't make it obvious that yr talking about his mustache][like, an introduction of sorts should go here]" and so on. But now I have VIM and nifty color schemes, so my bullshit is purple.

Nothing to make light of on November 24th, 2014. This is a rare documentary post for Backseat Phillip, and in a way maybe the most useful thing it can do is say: this is what the internet looked like on November 24th, 2014.

This is what privilege looked like on November 24th, 2014, far from danger, watching as the black community was reminded that the law can kill them, but will not protect them.

Because Thanksgiving. I'll probably just give them tuna. I've come to terms with the fact that they actually do have to eat meat, but I'm not ready to, like, grind up chickens or whatever the serious cat ladies do---hence the hail-mary inquiry, because if I could just have made them a cat-food lasagna, everything would be solved.

I don't care how many papers I have to write or when exactly they're due again: I'm determined to make weekends and evenings a thing, at least sort of, preferably (but not definitely) through efficiency rather than laziness. What I don't know is whether I'm using sports as a way to do this (i.e. pencil in things I want to do) or whether I'm doing this so that I can watch sports.

Office hours are for: writing about obscure(ish) concepts in Marx ("species-being") while simultaneously also googling the passages in Lucretius's De Rerum Natura where he talks about warpigs in an attempt to win a Men in Blazers tie. Which takes me back to bonkers monk drawings in bestiaries---not of course from DRN, but somehow I got there anyway.