1. No one hates me enough to say anything bad on my RateMyProfessor.com entry, and just yesterday, I received the following comment: “If you suck at writing, take this professor and he’ll help you!” That feels good. Sadly, my name is still listed as Gideons (missing e) in there, and that’s really annoying.
2. mtvU, the off-shoot of MTV especially for college students (which now owns RateMyProfessor.com), has started a site called Pos or Not. It’s sorta like Hot or Not except that you have to guess if someone is HIV+. At first, I was utterly freaked out by it — I mean: Dude! — but then I realized it was simply a particularly wacky method of getting kids to learn about HIV and AIDS.

I’ve been meaning to update the five or six people who still read my blog on how my studies are going, since, well, the whole reason I’m here in Blandiego is the studying. But, actually, no, I haven’t been studying. And no, I haven’t been doing meth. I’ve been doing all sorts of other things, like teaching and obsessing over gay marriage and untangling myself from the absurd red tape caused by an ill-fated attempt to take a class cross-registered at UC-Irvine. (Irvine use punched cards in the registrar’s office. Still. Really. When I dropped the class I was cc-ed — for realz — on five emails from various admins at two campuses, because no one has figured out how to use the Interweb to connect the two schools.) I’ve also been collecting all sorts of fun stuff about crystal meth, because that’s what I’ve switched my focus to. Yeah — I came here to study assimilation and sexuality on the US-Mexican border and now I will be studying the gay meth “epidemic” in California.

This is what happened: I went to check in with one of my committee members. I had planned on working on a study on HIV-prevention among MSMs in Tijuana. I had spent two and half years studying Spanish and US-Mexican border issues (and theory), and I wrote my Master’s thesis on “Hybridity as Cultural Capital on the US/Mexican Border.” (Wanna read it? I’ll email it to you. And then I will list you in my Outlook contacts in the “masochist” category. Not that I have a category with that name. Really.) So, I was ready, more or less, to do a big ethnographic project of the such. But my committee member told me that the project that I was going to join and study (I was going to study the study, as it were) didn’t exist yet, for a host of reasons. But before I got to freak out, I was offered a number of other projects that I could hook up with, and I jumped on a large study of HIV+ gay men who use crystal meth.

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Li Yang wants to create a chain of Crazy English Tongue Muscle Training Houses in China that will be like Starbucks, but for studying English. Whee!

I read Evan Osnos’s awesome New Yorker article about Li, who is “China’s Elvis of English,” while on the elliptical trainer at the gym. Here are my favorite two paragraphs:

“One-sixth of the world’s population speaks Chinese. Why are we studying English?” he asked. He turned and gestured to a row of foreign teachers seated behind him and said, “Because we pity them for not being able to speak Chinese!” The crowd roared.

Li professes little love for the West. His populist image benefits from the fact that he didn’t learn his skills as a rich student overseas; this makes him a more plausible model for ordinary citizens. In his writings and his speeches, Li often invokes the West as a cautionary tale of a superpower gone awry. “America, England, Japan—they don’t want China to be big and powerful!” a passage on the Crazy English home page declares. “What they want most is for China’s youth to have long hair, wear bizarre clothes, drink soda, listen to Western music, have no fighting spirit, love pleasure and comfort! The more China’s youth degenerates, the happier they are!” Recently, he used a language lesson on his blog to describe American eating habits and highlighted a new vocabulary term: “morbid obesity.”

Just FYI, while reading the article and working out, I was listening to Britney Spears’ “Blackout” on my iPod.

In solidarity, that’s all I’ll say.

But you can read all about the Day of Silence here. Also, check out GLSEN. And Rob’s talk from Monday, which addresses anti-LGBT bullying, is here.

Via, duh, CuteOverload.