mass absence

"...as for the silence of the masses in relation to the media...I propose that this silence was a power, that it was a reply, that the silence was a massive reply through withdrawal, that the silence was a strategy. It is not just a passivity. It is precisely a means of putting an end to meaning, of putting an end to the grand systems of manipulation, political and informational. And at the moment, the masses, perhaps instead of being manipulated by the media, actually utilize the media in order to disappear...It is a strategy of disappearance through media...For the masses it is a way of neutralizing the fields that one would like to impose on them...They nulify meaning. And this is truly a power. On one side there is the political class, the cultural class,etc. who produce meaning...And on the other side there are the masses of people who refuse this meaning which comes from above, or who block it all because there is too much meaning, too much information..."
(Baudrillard, 1993)

so guess what's better than flying to LA last minute in the middle of the night on a Saturday with no luggage but a box of grant applications having no idea where to go, then waiting for 4 hours outside of a museum before you finally go home only to discover that you were bumped from your flight home and had to stay an extra day with, again, no luggage (even underwear) and no transportation unless an expensive cab or rented car--cause its LA and public transit is more like an idea than a reality...still guessing?....

that's right...what's worse is finding out two months later than not only did this great, wonderful, magnanimous foundation you applied to not give you the amount of money you and your university applied for but they didn't give you ANY money and they shredded a grand worth of fancy, color printed, bound grant applications rather than returning them to your office for your records or so that you could figure out what the hell went wrong or circulate them to anyone else for their records...

"some days you eat the bar and some days, well, the bar...it eats you"

quotes are fun as are run-on sentences...