Random Closeups of Mundane Things

I didn't get much sleep Wednesday night, so Thursday seemed like a great day to haul my camera around with me and document my day. Especially since I can usually be relied on to have an embarassing or klutzy incident (in this case, two!). My roommate at NYU was a photography major and used to do stuff like this, only infinitely better (and more interesting, because let's face it, New York). Like sands through the hourglass...


I start off with a cup of yerba mate and almond milk and finish my slave trade syllabus movie-screening with the rest of Quilombo, about the Palmares maroon community in Brazil. It was OK, but the production quality wasn't as good as La Ultima Cena, still my favorite.


Paola decides that if I'm not going to fold my laundry, she's just going to snuggle up in it and be cute.


Waiting for my bus. The gray sky will remain until approximately June. At least the torrents slowed down in the last few days.


I love my green wool plaid coat.


Passing by the Red Barn in the lively downtown area. This is shortly before I spilled water all. over. my. lap.


The glorious hallway leading to my glorious office for glorious office hours. No students come for the first hour. I'm OK with that.


Reading for my subaltern seminar tomorrow. This is the founding statement of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group -- this paragraph talks about "uncovering the social semiotics of the strategies and cultural practices of peasant insurgencies" and that the subaltern while "not registrable as a historical subject capable of hegemonic action...is nevertheless present in unexpected structural dichotomies." Really, it's one of the clearer documents and I like it. But then I like theory generally, while simultaneously having a deep distrust of my liking for it. I'll never leave my trailer park anti-intellectualism behind. Nor should I, probably.


I go to lecture for my grading class and come back. My office is the same. Tiny. No elves have come to finish my reading for me. We discussed Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz and the Virgin of Guadalupe in lecture, and I have stories about both, for another time. Three students come see me, nervous and seeking grade changes. Mostly, they just need to be talked out of it. I feel mean.


I grab some devil juice to help stay awake during the lecture at the library on memory and forgetting in Pinochet's Chile. Fittingly in line with Esperanza Rossi's kick-ass post on history and memory yesterday. It's a great lecture, but unfortunately the caffeine doesn't fully kick in, so I'm kind of in and out. Until he played the 80s Chilean pop group "Los Prisonieros." Wild to think that the 80s were a decade of revolutionary movements and protest generations in other countries. Not so much here.


The grad students all showed up for the free food at the end anyway. This is why they pay us so little, to ensure we come to all the lectures.


The fancy bar/restaurant/hotel I walk past every time I go to my teaching gig. I've never gone in, so I have this whole Little Match Girl, nose-pressed-to-the-glass obsession with going there someday. It'll probably be a total disappointment.


Post-formal logic equations for 3 1/2 hours. My hands are covered in those damn markers, like my middle school algebra teacher. My students are sleepy and whiny. I take my use of the Socratic method to new heights, which is fairly hyprocritical of me.


The heel of my boots snapped right off in the middle of LSAT class. I didn't fall on my face or anything, but I did have to maintain my authority while balancing on one foot and holding on to the podium for the last hour. Yeah, that's what I get for trying to be taller than I already am (or so my friend Courtney would probably say). They were my favorites too! I demand a refund.


I come home (finally! it's 9:30!) to have my boots pulled off by one person (I can't do it myself!) and a plate of freshly made pad thai put in my hands by another. E., who has stopped by to borrow something, calls me "pampered." It's true. I love living in a community that takes care of each other. Then we watch that Deal or No Deal show and marvel at how the entire thing relies on powerless people not being able to calculate their own interests when they are in a perceived position of power for the first time in their lives. Under any kind of cost-benefit analysis, that lady should not have kept saying "no deal." Whatever.

That was it -- incredibly prosaic, as are most days. Next time I'll take the camera along with me to the WinCo, which is a good time.