Exorcising the Stress Demon

Coping with work-related stress is like dealing with an over-sized Halloween Pumpkin. It's messy, it doesn't smell great, and often, working with it is just as hard as letting sit around. Only problem is, if you don't deal with it, it rots.

Another similarity is that stress can be made into pie. Delicious pie.

Forgive the extended metaphor, but I'm going to go ahead and blame my inability to describe stress on, well, the stress. I'm overloaded with more work than I know what to do with and I many of the graduate students I work with. There's something about fall semester, weeks 8-10, that just brings out the worst in all of us.

In the past week or so, I've been looking to add a simple, low maintenance hobby to my routine. Here were the nominees.

1. Hacky sack. I had one of these all last spring and used to love playing with it, even for five minutes, while I took a study break. My old sack was destroyed when my apartment flooded over the summer.

2. Darts. Although my friend Bridget assured me that playing darts is too hickish for me, I thought it might be fun to have a simple recreational implement like a dart board in my house.

3. Putting thingy. Ever seen those golf putter deals for people's living rooms where you can putt into a trap and then it shoots the ball out? I thought about getting one of those.

All three of these "hobbies" seem like easy ways to have a little physical activity in a space where I can run right back to my computer and work on a term paper or whatever once I get back my motivation. (Taking a long walk definitely kills stress, but you always think clearest when you're farthest from home.)

I'm curious what other people do when they're in my situation. I've heard half a dozen graduate students say their hobby used to be "reading" before they came to school. What do people do know to kill the stress demon? Stress ball? Alcohol? Play with dog? Pot?

Calling All Secular Humanists

W.H. Auden once said great poets have a weakness for bad puns. Similarly, self-indulgent ezine editors have a weakness for bad inside jokes.

This is the story of one of them.

Allow me to explain. I recently decided to integrate a handful of ad parodies onto Bosworth in the hopes that I could add a few guilt free laughs to every page. (Plus it gave me yet another excuse to take an overly aggressive shot at the dairy lobby.) I produced a few ads but wanted something making fun of the "Chickcn Soup for the Soul" series. I settled on "Chicken Soup for the Secular Humanist's Socially Constructed Notion of Post-Identity Selfhood." [View it here] This parody allowed me to make fun of the book series and contemporary identity politics.

I'm a nerd. And it gets worse.

I needed a background image for the ad, so I settled on an old photo of my friend Ben Quick (a University of Arizona Graduate student) relaxing in a hot spring in New Mexico.

Oh, he's also naked in the photo.

Thinking that a gratuitous "dudestick shot" might hurt my readership (or greatly enhance it for all the wrong reasons) I decided to cover up my friend's wang with a pull quote, like you often see in ads for books. But what should it say?

Indulging my geekness yet again, I settled on a quotation. "This book turns me on," says Ben Quick of the University of Arizona.

I want to make it clear that did not even attempt to contact Ben or ask his approval before making this advertisement parody. Some might think me cruel, but, in all honestly, I just didn't want to spoil the joke.

So far, Ben hasn't reacted to the image. Maybe he hasn't seen it yet. Maybe he doesn't care. Or maybe that picture just does turn him on. I hope he doesn't mind. If he files a complaint, I'll set him up with a free copy of "Chicken Soup for the Secular Humanist's Socially Constructed Notion of Post-Identity Selfhood."

600 copies of Annabel Lee

For those of you not in the know, I recently suffered a tragedy of epic proportions. Some philistine hacked into my printing account on campus (or I left myself logged on in the grad lounge) and printed off 600 copies of the poem "Annabel Lee" by Edgar Allan Poe. This capricious paper ejaculation would have cost me $30, but luckily the ink cartridge police rescinded the charges. Now, as I reflect on what occurred, I can't help but wonder who performed this evil deed and why.

Friends have recommended I commence an investigation. I have another idea.

Instead of using deductive reasoning and/or detection to find the perpetrator, I will employ my skills as a careful reader to assign motive, means, and opportunity. My contention is, in short, that the identity of my foe is embedded in the text of "Annabel Lee," which the offending party almost certainly selected based on a Freudian manifestation of vitriolic loathing.

Poe states, "It was many and many a year ago, / In a kingdom by the sea, / That a maiden there" ... printed 600 copies of this poem. Thus we can conclude, with some assurance, that the offending agent was in fact a woman who had a crush on me some years passed and printed off the text in question as a direct reference to that crush. I clearly knew her when I lived on the east coast, as "the kingdom by the sea" might seem to indicate.

Moving on in the poem, Poe indicates, "The angels, not half so happy in heaven, / Went envying her and me." These lines seem an indisputable reference to my churchgoing days, circa 1989. I attended Sunday school as a nine-year-old, and clearly some woman (possibly my Sunday school teacher) coveted a secret obsession for my waifish form.

Finally, Poe suggests, "the moon never beams without bringing me dreams" of the person who printed off 600 copies of "Annabel Lee" on my account. This line strikes me as classic Poe, shrouded in intrigue yet clearly constructed to make overt reference to a young woman I used to go to church with, whom I mooned one night in the early nineties. This woman, linked to me through clear romantic pretensions, apparently took my gesture as a refutation of her love. Then, for the next 17 years, she wove a plot so clever, so diabolical, that only a student of literature could unshroud it.

Also, I'm not sure how, but I think I may have accidentally proven that Edgar Allan Poe was gay...

Bistort Lives Here???

Typos suck. They just really suck.

Misspelled words in a website really make that site look unprofessional. That's what everyone says, and that's what I believe. But producing a website that's reasonable error free is a lot harder than you might think. Every month I put "Bosworth Magazine" together, I think I've done a little better job cleaning up the copy, but every month I find (or am told about) a slew of errors.

These errors also make google hate me. You see, google uses tiny super intelligent robots to crawl websites and punish anyone who misspells anything. (These same robots punish you for adult content.) So having a spell checked website matters.

About a month ago I started using a freeware application called "total validator." It checks links, makes sure your content is disability friendly, and points out any word that google would read as a spelling error. In order to use it, all you have to do is type your website URL into a search field and press the "validate" button. Good stuff, right?

Probably the funniest thing about total validator is that it think "Bosworth" is a typo. Every month I turn on this bastard, and it returns 72 misspelled words. By "Bosworth," it indicates, I must have meant "Bistort."

BISTORT??? What the screw is Bistort? And why doesn't total validator know "Bosworth" is a word?

A few days ago, I finally broke down and looked up Bistort. Turns out, it's an herb, "a hardy perennial with slender stems, growing up to 30 inches tall. Each stem is topped by a dense cylindrical cluster of tiny white or pinkish flowers (May-August). Lower down the stem grow long bluish-green leaves that are lance shaped; higher up, the leaves become smaller. The rhizome of bistort (underground stem) is dark brown to black, thick, knobby, and twisted into an S or double-S shape." (http://www.herbs2000.com/herbs/herbs_bistort.htm)

Bistort is also known as Adderwort, Dragonwort, Easter Giant, English Serpentary, Osterick, Passions, Patience Dock, Red Legs, and Sweet Dock.

My favorite is red legs.

So bistort is an herb, and just any herb. During the renaissance, its uses include treating polyps, diarrhea, and dysentery. It can also be applied to relieve sore throats and treat burns. Just like my magazine!

Another funny detail about bistort: it's name derives from the latin for "twice twisted," which I think really does describe Bosworth Magazine. The site's at least once-twisted, anyway. Maybe I should change the name of the thing to Bistort... at the very least I'm going to have to add something about this to my wall of slogans.

PS: Blogger's spell checker doesn't think Bistort is a word, either.