Footnotes

[1]. The word "meme" was coined by Dawkins (1976). But it's now in common parlance, at least in some circles. So there's really no need for Quincy to give me that pained look.

[2]. Proceedings of the Modern Language Association. (Again: pained look.)

[3]. The allusion here is to T. S Eliot's poem The Waste Land which is so famously abstruse that Eliot himself added footnotes. There was a time (back when I was a parody of a 19-year old University student, so please prepare to roll your eyes) when I fetishized T. S. Eliot's opaque oeuvre. I can always elicit a particularly pained expression from Quincy simply by bringing up the fact that, in 1982, I attended a Halloween party dressed as the title character in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. "I'm so glad I didn't know you then," she says.

[4]. The phrase "a practically meaningless collection of phrases, learned allusions, quotations, slang, and scraps in general" is not just an apt description of this particular post. It's also the exact phrase that another writer (H. P. Lovecraft, of all people) used to describe The Waste Land. It's true. And, yes, Quincy is making that face at me again. Oh, but you should've seen the original title I'd put on this post before I changed it to that H. P. Lovecraft line. The actual title may be footnote-worthy, but the original title – of which I was embarrassingly proud – is the verbal equivalent of me going out in public dressed up as J. Alfred Prufrock. When I read it out loud to Quincy she ... well, you can just imagine the pain behind her eyelids. [i] To spare you, I've buried it in a footnote. Or more exactly, it's in a footnote to this footnote. I'm signifying footnotes-to-foonotes with little italicized i's in square brackets -- like what you saw after "eyelids" a couple of sentences ago. These foonotes-to-footnotes themselves appear in the post immediately below this one. (You suggest footnotes to me, you get footnotes. In fact, you don't just get footnotes; you get an over-the-top exercise in self-refential silliness. You're welcome)

[5]. Oh yes, I've been going on and on about Epic Beard Man recently, waving my laptop at Quincy and blathering madly about video mash-ups and Amber Lamps and the whole weird cultural power of camera-phones and the Internet. It's entirely the fault of Epic Beard Man and all those millions of YouTube enthusiasts that I've been using the word "meme" a lot recently, and causing Quincy so much pain. (You don't know about Epic Beard Man? Well, look it up. I recommend KnowYourMeme.com.)

[6] Yep, I actually created an entirely new blog simply so that that I could take this ludicrous exercise to whole new level of hackneyed self-referential post-modern pain.

[7] Nope, sorry; I told you I wasn't going to offer an explanatory footnote for this. Besides, if I did, it'd just be painful. [ii]