Arriving at this essay in May of 2012 with a desire to re-engage with the field of composition studies after having earned a master’s degree in English with an emphasis in Composition & Rhetoric in 1999, I found myself surprised by three key issues raised in the course of the chronology.  Firstly, the use of cultural studies in the composition classroom has been mainstream since at least 2001 when the Guide was published.  Secondly, writing teachers who focused on cultural critique as a way to 1) arm students against media influence, 2) examine the ethics of cultural production, and 3) teach students the art of analytical, ethical and effective content production were themselves being criticized over a decade ago for indoctrinating students with elitist, leftist ideologies.  And thirdly, more than ten years ago, composition lecturers in the United States were suffering from an internal split as they struggled to not only produce “scholarly commodities,” as George and Trimbur state, but (my addition) to become scholarly commodities on the intellectual market simultaneously with their efforts to critique the dynamics of cultural production and market-based life.

On the first issue: while I’m satisfied that cultural studies has become solidly mainstream in the composition classroom, my own aim to use consumer cultural critique to teach writing will not, by itself, make me stand out amongst the many highly competitive candidates out there seeking coveted positions as composition lecturers in my local college and university market.  That which makes me distinct might then be my professional experience in consumer products marketing research, web communications and visual design.  This brings me to the second issue.

I find myself suspicious of those who would critique the presence of cultural studies in university-level composition courses, more so as an elitist leftist indoctrination process.  If such critics knew what I have learned in my professional life, initially, as a marketing research writer in consumer products marketing (electronics usability, packaging, print ad design, brand development and positioning, and more) they would agree that young people do need to be armed against the powerful and devilishly detailed manipulations that large businesses cook up in populous, moneyed, competitive teams of well-dressed MBAs who have flown business-class sipping mimosas into your hometown to mine the minds and spirits of wide-eyed, brand-cowed locals for the purposes of mediating their every thought and decision.  They don’t get paid so well because their machinations don’t work.  (My student loans, for example, are paid in full.)

Later, I pulled out of the marketing research industry and became a research writer, project planner and graphic designer for web design and development focusing on underserved non-profit organizations—using my powers for good.  As I look now to return to my roots in English composition, I’m fascinated by the internal contradiction that George and Trimbur cite in their essay: that of creating oneself as a scholarly commodity by producing theories and techniques for analyzing and criticizing cultural production.  In my venture of redirecting myself toward an academic profession, I am, due to my professional background, hyper-aware of myself as a commodity and of my embodying a potentially inherent contradiction.  I am designing myself as a scholarly commodity and planning to deliver intellectual commodities in the form of techniques for critical thought and academic writing by way of consumer cultural analysis.

Yet there is a misunderstanding in this sense of “contradiction” that seems to occur when composition scholars emphasizing cultural studies work too closely within their own cultural context.  They may risk consenting to believe they have used their incisive knowledge of power dynamics to make themselves into corrupt wielders of influence.  Inside the classroom, it becomes possible for composition lecturers to buy into the idea that, in spite of their good intentions, they have become hypocritical intellectual commodities.  They might consider that if they are to be true to themselves and their professions, they need to step back from the heights of this intoxicating precipice of depraved, elitist, leftist commercial power before they find themselves wearing Cuban military berets and T-shirts depicting Che wearing a Che T-shirt whilst seeding young people’s unsuspecting minds with the tools they’ll need to form an Apple-branded, internet-streamed World Revolution^TM.

Composition lecturers, in truth, hold a modest and duly placed kind of power when using cultural studies to teach young people how to think critically and produce well-reasoned, ethical content during their university studies and beyond in their lives as working citizens.  Wielding this limited but substantial power through the creation of scholarly commodities or even by becoming a scholarly commodity is not hypocritical or even contradictory.  It is, instead, a demonstration of the creation of ethical cultural products, products that enable students to understand more completely the breadth and complexity of the intensely mediated world they live in and will need to work in.  It is a laudable vocational model that wisely integrates our inescapably market-based lives with principled, reality-based, professional work.

To close, this is not to say that there isn’t something discomfiting and misplaced in the American model of scholarship where each academic creates oneself as an individual commodity in competition with others in one’s field.  It may seem to create a sense of suspicion within the profession, a grasping for closed intellectual ownership that stagnates creativity, shrinks one’s breadth of knowledge and breeds anxiety.  As models for vocations that integrate American market-based life with ethical productivity, composition studies scholars might try to very consciously relate to one another not as commodities in competition for scarce resources, but as people who belong to a knowledgeable, insightful, intellectually opulent and generous community.  My sense is that this trend already exists and that, as I reach out to update my knowledge base, potential colleagues in the field may help me to become a new, open and contributing member of their community.

Romney—who made 21.6 million dollars in 2010, over half of which sum was from capital gains, and none of which was earned wages—can’t possible grasp working class reality himself.   He might do well to hire someone who does (and this is clearly not Eric Fehrnstrom) because it’s possible that he believes he’s a Detroit guy.  He was born there, his father worked for American Motors Corporation from 1954-1962 (as chief executive, that is) and his father also served as governor of Michigan from 1963-1969.  Plus, Romney owns an excessive amount of American-made cars.  In his own cultural context as a multi-millionaire with deep roots in the Detroit-based ruling class, he’s as close to a “Detroit guy” as you can get.  But to most of the autoworkers there, who understood the title of Romney’s NY Times op-ed piece, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt,” as what former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm recently referred to as getting “knifed in the back,” Romney can’t possibly be a Detroit guy who can take credit for the rebounding auto-industry, even if it was achieved both by bailouts as well as the kind of managed bankruptcy he had called for in his editorial.

When he did try to take credit for Detroit’s coming back from the edge this Monday, he and his advisors failed to see, yet again, the distinction between his own cultural context as a multimillionaire (who was taxed at a meagre 14% on his 21.6 million dollar income) and the cultural context of the rest of us to whom he is directly addressing when he speaks in public.  This likely Republican presidential nominee and his communications advisors continue to mistakenly believe that their target audience consists of wealthy big business managers—Romney’s colleagues—rather than the majority of American voters.

Visiting my parents’ southern Californian home in Porter Ranch for Macy’s Day, I pull into a nearby shopping center after my two-hour drive north from mellow North County San Diego.  There’s always tension here.  It’s not just the holiday.  Sharply featured women wearing red-lipped grimaces threaten me with their waxed, black, battle-ready humvees.  They compete for the rare open spot in the vast parking lot that sprawls before Ralph’s, Best Buy, and Walmart.  I park sheepishly half a football field away from my target, Starbucks.  There, I grab a double latte and quickly make it back to my car before anyone checks me with a shopping cart.

I drive up the hill, sipping my coffee, passing the large California-style homes with their white stucco walls and red-tiled roofs.  Parking in front of my parents’ house, I deftly avoid a black SUV whizzing by, only a red-lipped grimace visible beyond the sheen of the windshield.  Finally, I step safely through the front door where my parents, my sister and her children wait warmly for me, relieved that I didn’t get hit by the holiday “crazies” on the way.  In the living room, we sit as a family below a 42” television set, which my parents complain is too small.  We watch the parade.

The name “Macy’s Day” parade, as most call it, is clearly a misnomer, as it celebrates much more than Macy’s alone.  The annual parade began in 1924 as what it is now, a marketing stunt to draw publicity to the department store.  That year, it drew a quarter of a million New York consumers. Today a staggering 3.5 million gather to watch it live on the streets of Manhattan.  A stupefying 50 million watch from home.

The parade makes its way through New York City from Central Park to Macy’s Herald Square, where pop singers lip sync a few seconds of a hit, sparkling cheerleaders shout “Macy’s!” and militant marching bands salute the entrance to the store with blaring brass horns.  Aside from the TV commercials, the real attractions are the giant, helium filled balloons representing some of our most powerful corporations.  Adults cheer with fervor, children point wide-eyed, our heads tip toward the sky as these beloved characters loom over us, our powerful pantheon of Consumer Gods.

There’s the Nestlé Quik Bunny!  And Ronald McDonald!  How BIG!  Oh, the Honey Nut Cheerios Bee is coming up behind him!  Look!  It’s the M&Ms!  How cute!  The Pillsbury Doughboy!  Adorable!  And here comes the Energizer Bunny.  Don’t you love him?

Later that evening, after my family and I had stuffed ourselves silly and after we’d watched Miracle on 34^th Street (such a heart-warming feature-length advertisement for Macy’s), we caught the eleven-o-clock news.  That’s when we learned about the woman who—in order to get her hands on a brand new, discounted Xbox at the Porter Ranch Walmart down the hill from us—pepper-sprayed her way through the shoppers ahead of her.

“Shocking,” we said.

And with Macy’s Day at a close and Black Friday dawning early this year, we went to bed, listening to the high hum of a police helicopter hovering over the house, over the neighborhood, watching over us there in Porter Ranch during the days of the Walmart Wars.

Photo credit: AFP

In 2012, Martine Aubry may become the first présidente (female president) of France.  In 2000, Aubry pushed through the 35-hour workweek along with universal health care for France.  She’s been mayor of Lille since 2001 and the leader of the French Socialist party (the first woman in the role) since 2008.  She is currently a candidate in her party’s primary (which will be held October 9, 2011) for the upcoming 2012 French presidential election.  On July 26 of this year, she revealed a key facet of her proposed presidency.  Publishing an article in Le Monde,“Un nouveau printemps pour la culture,” or, “A new cultural spring,“ she detailed that under her leadership, the state would support young artists and those called to culturally-oriented vocations by nourishing their education and careers with a 30% to 50% increase to France’s cultural budget.  The proposal might be perceived as impractical in these times of world economic crisis and, as such, Aubry’s push for it seems, on the surface, strategically cryptic, even reckless.

So, why encourage young people to pursue a creative vocation at the state’s expense in the midst of the worst economic crisis to hit the world since 1929?   In Aubry’s late July proposal, she writes, “Creation and culture are not a luxury in times of crisis.  Instead, they offer the keys for our exit from it.”  What Aubry sees—that other world leaders seem blind to during periods of turmoil and economic contraction—is that artists are the foundation of cultural innovation and renewal….

CLICK HERE to read the rest of this article at Ruelle Electrique . . .

I went to see it with a friend for his birthday.  Normally, I’d have pretended not to hear him asking. He’d read the Robert E. Howard books and loved the first two films.  Several years ago, when he tried to introduce me to the original movie, he couldn’t believe I’d fallen asleep in the middle of it. So, on the way to the theatre this Friday, he was trying to convince me that there was more to Conan than the muscles. The books were existential, he explained.  Conan was a scholar who knew several languages.  Listen, I’m not trying to be facetious when I say I believed him.  There was obviously something to this American hypermasculine hero for him to have endured for so long.

However, when the movie was over and we had wiped the 3D blood from our faces and had checked that our arms and heads were still attached, I asked my friend what he thought.  He glowered and said it wasn’t worth a critique.

There was, in fact, little to critique.  There was no disguise to the sexism, to the formula, to the empty cliché.  I argued with myself that the story was hackneyed and predictable because Robert E. Howard had invented this genre of sword and sorcery, which we’ve seen so many derivatives of.  Further, he had invented it with outmoded 1930s mores, which were difficult to update for 2011 without losing a good measure of authenticity.  The thought appeased me temporarily, after which I went back to shrugging and reminding myself that it was Conan after all.  Topless slave girls and the command, “Woman, come here!” is what I’d expected.  And that was just it.  The film was exactly what I’d expected, with just one amendment: I had expected to be offended, even outraged.

But it was my friend, the Conan fan, who was outraged.  While I was driving us away from the theatre he said to me, “It was like they asked you,” who he knew as a perennial mocker of silliness and sexism in film, “what you thought a Conan movie would be like, and they made that movie.”  I tried to reason with him, to salvage the birthday treat.  I said, “At least the woman wasn’t technically a virgin when they had a go at sacrificing her.”  She was chosen to die for being of “pure blood,” as in the last of a sacred blood lineage, and not for her carnal purity, although, as a female monk, the latter was implied and probable—until, of course, she got an eyeful of our very pretty Conan.

I’m going to skip to the end, but don’t worry, I won’t ruin it for you.  I’ll give you only these three pieces: villain, virgin sacrifice, Conan. I know.  Now you’re wondering fiercely: what, dear god, what will happen? I refuse to say. Nevertheless, after the tied-up virgin did a whole lot of impressive screaming as she hovered above a pit of lava inside a giant skull cave, the villain emerges for the final battle with our stunning hero. The villain is armored in chintzy gold and is wearing what amounts to a starfish on his head.  He crouches a bit and gives us a man-growl, showing his teeth. It was so pitiable, it might as well have been Justin Bieber threatening to fell the barbarian. It made me wonder if the filmmakers even knew what hypermasculinity was, or if we, as a culture, had finally lost touch with the concept.

As I walked out of the theatre with my sulking friend, I passed a movie poster for Killer Elite (Jason Statham, Robert Deniro and Clive Owen).  I was regaled with cocked guns, large military sunglasses on the faces of grimacing white men, one retro-seventies mustache and the tagline: “May the Best Man Live.” Shew, I thought, relieved that we were still in touch with what it meant have too much testosterone in a film. I was pleased that there were still movies for men to watch, and that boozed-up, laughing feminists weren’t secretly producing all of the dick-flicks out there as parodies of our lost (sniff) patriarchal past.

The American artist Shepard Fairey was beaten in Copenhagen last Saturday after finishing a commissioned mural with which some locals took issue.  According to the Guardian, he was commissioned by an art gallery to commemorate the controversial demolition of a youth house that had been used as a base for the left-wing community there. The Danish media reported, in error, that the mural had been commissioned by the city council.  His attackers, apparently a part of the left-wing community who had lost their HQ, therefore, thought he was a government-backed propagandist, and after arguing with him outside a nightclub, they bruised one of his ribs and gave him a black eye. Locals also wrote, “No peace,” and “Go home, Yankee hipster” on Fairey’s mural, which features an image of a dove and the word ‘Peace.’

In spite of the media misprint that Fairey was a government-backed propagandist, a Copenhagen local, according to the Guardian, said the mural was still an attempt to smooth over the conflict between the leftist-community and the government.  That is, Fairey was a privately-backed propagandist and there remains a resonance of justice in the attack.  In fact, the beating seems to offer a more general sense of moral fairness in calling Shepard Fairey out as fraudulent in his posture as ‘rebel street artist’ and friend to the oppressed.

The position he’s trying hold as a paid, professional street or graffiti artist comprises two socially, culturally, economically and politically opposed identities.  The first of Fairey’s identities is the graffiti or street artist who performs work illegally in order to lash out at a system of government that leaves his voice out of the national conversation—in fact, the work is done in order to force the street artist’s voice into the public, political sphere.  At least, this is the reason the original writers in New York and Philadelphia tagged up trains in the seventies and eighties.  Fairey never actually held this role authentically, as, by the time he was defacing public property in 1989 in Rhode Island with his Andre the Giant posters, graffiti had become a trend that skater punks from middle and upper class families took on in order to be cool and rebellious, not to have a political voice (which they and their class already possessed in spades).  In fact, Fairey’s wiki entry details that the Andre poster was created while Fairey was attending the Rhode Island School of Design.  Before that, the young Fairey attended a boarding school for the arts.  That’s right, a boarding school for the arts.  His father is a doctor.  His mother is a realtor.  As a well-off kid who went to fancy art schools, Fairey’s street art was never a legitimate antiestablishment statement.

Shepard Fairey was always training to be his second identity, the one that perfectly opposes the powerless, poverty-stricken graffiti artist hankering for a political voice.  That identity is Shepard Fairey, the successful commercial artist and fine art gallery artist, whose work, “has a place in The Smithsonian, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London,” according to the Independent Mail out of South Carolina, whose 2009 article features just how proud his grandmother is of him.  He was also recently prominently featured at a show in LA at the Museum of Contemporary Art alongside Banksy and Basquiat.  In this role, Fairey even has an LA fashion line, Obey Clothing.  He recognizes his success and uses it with good ol’ upper-middle class business savvy.  As his class ideology dictates, Fairey capitalizes on the power that the inner-city bombers—poor, powerless minorities—of the seventies and eighties created in order make their presence known.  In the role of affluent commercial and fine art gallery artist, Fairey is much truer to who he is, to his roots in the middle and upper classes, to his art school education, which legitimize him as a professional.

Yesterday, Fairey commented on his blog, that he didn’t want to press charges against his Danish assailants because he didn’t get a good look at them, nor was he “a huge fan of the cops generally anyway.”  The latter statement calls attention to Fairey’s being in a kind of state of denial.  It’s this doltish refusal to see the truth that makes him such an interesting oxymoron.  It’s not his work that’s fascinating, but Fairey himself as a representative of the confused nature of current strains of American free-market ideology wherein controlled revolt is accepted and encouraged as a catalyst and capitalist model for economic growth.  Shepard Fairey is a financial success as a capitalist, and he is an upstanding American citizen who is represented as an artist in several of our most prestigious institutions of high art; yet, still he poses as a revolutionary underdog who has been jacked by the system, who is out to save the downtrodden, with whom he claims to have so much in common.  Here is the truth: the police are not now and never were after Shepard Fairey.  He poses in public as one engaged in revolt against the establishment, but he is the establishment, and always was.

Sources:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/aug/12/shepard-fairey-beaten-danish-mural

http://www.independentmail.com/news/2009/jan/17/local-womans-grandson-behind-obama-hope-poster/?partner=RSS

http://www.bombit-themovie.com/

http://obeygiant.com/headlines/obey-copenhagen-post-2-bad

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_Fairey

Men are often victims of violent rape (by other men) in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), particularly in the eastern Kivu region, where the Kivu Conflict has been raging since 2004, writes Maryline Dumas in an article from Rue89 (August 2, 2011).

http://www.rue89.com/2011/08/02/viols-au-congo-le-jour-ou-ils-ont-fait-de-moi-une-femme-216257

Congolese men, traditionally perceived as protectors, are sometimes abandoned by their families after having been victimized, emasculated, or “feminized” in the pejorative, says Lara Stemple, Director of the Health and Human Rights Law Project at UCLA.  As a result of this severe stigmatization, a code of silence exists surrounding men who have been raped or who are victims of sexual violence, and not just in the DRC.

According to Stemple’s article, “Male Rape and Human Rights” (Hastings Law Journal, p.605, 2009), sexual abuse of men during conflict has been cited in Chile, Greece, Croatia, Sri Lanka, Iran, Kuwait, the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia.  In El Salvador 76% of male political prisoners interviewed during the 80s said they’d been victims of sexual torture (612-13).  80% of men in concentration camps in Sarajevo reported male rape, and sexual humiliation marked the scandal in Iraq at Abu Ghraib prison (614).

http://uchastings.edu/hlj/archive/vol60/Stemple_60-HLJ-605.pdf

Stemple’s article points out that female-centric definitions of rape, created historically by the women’s rights movement that rallied around calls for illumination of and protection from male assailants, create the notion of “a perpetrating class of men” that make men “implausible victims” (634) and frame women as perpetual victims.  The ideological focus on women and girls as victims, the implausibility of men as victims, and a strong code of silence protecting male victims’ role as protectors in conflict-torn regions like Kivu in the DRC, have all perhaps contributed to the United Nation’s lack of preparedness to provide aid to male victims of rape and sexual violence.  Aid for female victims of the same is comparatively ample.

In Rue89, Dumas describes the story of a 28 year old Congolese man who, although already stark naked before his captors, only realized what was about to happen when several of them grabbed his arms, another his waist, and forced him to bend over.  He had not imagined that this could possibly happen to him.  Three men had a turn, after which he finally collapsed from pain and exhaustion.  Immediately, the next of their victims was brought in.  He eventually escaped and fled into Uganda with his brother and sister.  He bled for weeks from his anus, suffering from pain and fatigue from blood loss.  His brother and sister eventually abandoned him, as the smell of the blood was sickening and they were afraid he would give them diseases.  This young man finally found asylum with The Refugee Law Project, which “seeks to ensure fundamental human rights for all asylum seekers, refugees, and internally displaced persons within Uganda.”

http://www.refugeelawproject.org/

Will Storr of The Observer broke this story for a worldwide audience on July 17.  Here, he quotes Stemple on the availability of UN aid for men like the above described Congolese rape victim:

International human rights law leaves out men in nearly all instruments designed to address sexual violence….  The UN Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2000 treats wartime sexual violence as something that only impacts on women and girls…. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently announced $44m to implement this resolution. Because of its entirely exclusive focus on female victims, it seems unlikely that any of these new funds will reach the thousands of men and boys who suffer from this kind of abuse. Ignoring male rape not only neglects men, it also harms women by reinforcing a viewpoint that equates ‘female’ with ‘victim’, thus hampering our ability to see women as strong and empowered. In the same way, silence about male victims reinforces unhealthy expectations about men and their supposed invulnerability.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/jul/17/the-rape-of-men

In late July, Al Jazeera aired a feature on the subject (English):

I was at a café near my apartment this morning, which is in a beach town in southern California, but not one of the very ritzy ones.  This is, rather, one of the coastal towns where working class folks from inland or central California come for their vacations because they can’t afford a hotel in Maui or Malibu or even San Diego.  The people who live here are relatively simple, and, usually, they’re only interested in current affairs that involve a scandal with a movie star or famous athlete.  Like most Americans, the people here are often interested in making enough money to consume products they’ve been convinced they desire and to consume them with a reasonable amount of abandon, at least enough abandon to appear wealthier than some of their peers, but also to feel and look like savvy American shoppers.

And so, while I was sitting in the café this morning, a father and his two young daughters (they might have been eight and fourteen) hovered over my table, which happened to be just below a seriously gigantic map of the world.  “I wanted to see where Yemen was in relation to Africa,” the father said.  “Why?” the eight-year-old asked.  “Because there’s a similar thing happening there as in North Africa.”  “What’s happening?”  “In Yemen?  They’re trying to have a revolution.”  “Like in Libya?” said the fourteen-year-old.  I took notice when she said this, because I realized this wasn’t a new conversation for them, the father hadn’t only just learned of the Arab Spring, and it meant they weren’t likely from around here.  “It’s something like what’s going on in Libya,” her father said.  “How’s it going in Libya?” the fourteen-year-old asked.  “Oh,” her father’s shoulders lifted and fell, “Gadhafi is still holding out, but we’re helping the French and the British with a military intervention.” “Why?” said the eight-year-old.  “Well, they’ll tell you it’s because Gadhafi was shooting the rebels, but there are a lot of people being killed by tyrannical regimes in this thing, like in Yemen and Syria, so really, it’s more likely that we’re there to protect our oil interests.”  “We don’t have oil interests in Yemen and Syria?”  “It’s different there.”  “Why?”  “It’s complicated.”

I imagined he faltered because he didn’t know or he didn’t want to tell his daughters that the US is actually supporting the tyranny in Yemen.  We’re not on the side of the protesters, like we are in Libya, because the protesters in Yemen are anti-West and mixed in with Al Qaeda.  US forces are actually doing covert air-strikes on the people there.  They’re aiming at Al Qaeda, but they’re killing a lot of innocent Yemeni people.  Of course, if Ali Abdullah Saleh’s regime fell in Yemen, it’s likely that Al Qaeda would pretty much control the country.  Bad news all around.  And as for Syria, the protesters there don’t want us to intervene.  Western military intervention to topple Assad’s regime would be perceived as being in the interest of the West and Israel, not in the interest of the Syrian people.  They would be right.  Although, likely, intervention would turn into another Iraq, and so, the US and Europe, as in Yemen, don’t want the Syrian regime to fall.  They want Syria to hold on, even if Assad’s regime is shooting and torturing the people there.  In Libya, however, Gadhafi is both hostile toward the West, hostile toward Al Qaeda, has oil, and is shooting his people.  Initially, it looked like an easier fight to support openly.

Nevertheless, I just loved this rare American family conversation about the Arab spring on a Saturday morning. Just before this shining threesome walked off, the fourteen-year-old said, “Daddy, why don’t we hear about this in the news so much?”  Her father said, “Because we’ve been on vacation at the beach.”  I watched them recede toward the café doors and into the sunlight of my coastal Californian vacation town and I thought about how most of us Americans have kind of been at the beach, vacationing from the rest of the world, reading ad-banners for beer brands flapping from the asses of Cessnas as we loll on the hot sand. But my thoughts didn’t go much deeper than that because when I went to check the latest headlines at CNN to see whether or not, indeed, there was some new coverage of the Arab Spring, I read that Amy Winehouse had died.  She was 27.  Actual tears came to my eyes before I closed my ipad2 and drove home to see what time my companion and I were leaving for our day hike along the cliffs overlooking the Pacific.  After that we’ll go to our favorite Indian food place where they have an all-you-can-eat buffet Saturday nights for just ten dollars a plate.