Highlights from this week:
1) I've learned to love reading again. I actually started reading one of the books that was on my comps list and that I therefore barely "read" (Wilderness and the American Mind, by Roderick Nash). I had some vague ideas of the books' points before, based on the hard-earned comps skill of skimming, summing up and book reviewing. But then this week some other demanding person requested it, and as I brought it to campus to return, I opened it and rediscovered that I actually do enjoy reading the written word for sheer enjoyment. Wow! Ideas, words, thoughts for their own sake. I feel like I'm back from a long, weird trip.
2) Good people were in town! Kungfuramone and Beetlegirl swung through for some food, some catching up and some Hell's Kitchen. I still need to know how that ended.
3) I am currently addicted to the Gilmore Girls. It's all cute and snarky. I enjoy.
4) I compiled a coursepack for my class that begins next week. It's long. My students are almost all white male poli-sci majors (cough-pre-law-cough). Did I mention the coursepack is long? Why didn't I teach a class on pop culture and TV-watching? Or wine-tasting 101?
Now it's off to P-town for some family stuff, a Patty Griffin concert at the zoo, and the Columbia County fair, where I hope and expect to run into any number of my high school classmates, most likely with their three to six children in tow. Woo-hoo!
19 July 2007
12 July 2007
Priceless
One year's worth of library fines for 450 assorted monographs on US history and theory: $300. No joke.
Coffee. More coffee. Even more coffee. Frankly, I don't want to think about how much I spend in a year on this. Let's just call it a bajillion dollars.
Replacement pens during the last two months in which I frequently drained the ink from a pen a day on my notes: $30.
Passing my oral comps and never EVER having to go through that rite of passage again: You know what it is.
Yay! Took the comps, passed the comps, even felt good about my answers on the comps. It was actually, dare I say it, verging on fun (minus the nausea) to get to talk about things I find interesting with thoughtful, intelligent colleagues for a few hours. I got to talk about Foucault and Judith Butler as well as the US as a simultaneously postcolonial and colonial nation and, of course, race and class and gender. No one tried to nail me in any way, and the one professor I was afraid of seemed to like my answers the most and was the biggest pussycat of them all. It still hasn't completely sunk in that I'm done with this hurdle, but I'm getting there. I'm just glad I didn't, you know, freak out unnecessarily or anything. Ahem.
I cannot thank everyone enough for the love, support, understanding (especially those who had to deal with me at my most neurotic or talk me off ledges a time or two or twenty), coffee cards, singing cards, gifts, flowers, emails, phone calls, and for those in town yesterday, drinks and food and more drinks and more food. (At last! A chocolate butterscotch martini at the Excelsior for the Little Match Girl!) Pretty much, when I felt like throwing up for the 24 hours prior to the exam, I just thought about my awesome friends and felt better. I really don't think I've been this relaxed in about a year, so I'm going to enjoy it for a while longer before thinking about things like...what do you call them? Ah, yes, dissertations. Thanks again for the support! And for those who still have something like this to look forward to in their future: all will be well.
Here is the dazed, goofy smile that was plastered onto my face for about two hours straight after the exam:
Coffee. More coffee. Even more coffee. Frankly, I don't want to think about how much I spend in a year on this. Let's just call it a bajillion dollars.
Replacement pens during the last two months in which I frequently drained the ink from a pen a day on my notes: $30.
Passing my oral comps and never EVER having to go through that rite of passage again: You know what it is.
Yay! Took the comps, passed the comps, even felt good about my answers on the comps. It was actually, dare I say it, verging on fun (minus the nausea) to get to talk about things I find interesting with thoughtful, intelligent colleagues for a few hours. I got to talk about Foucault and Judith Butler as well as the US as a simultaneously postcolonial and colonial nation and, of course, race and class and gender. No one tried to nail me in any way, and the one professor I was afraid of seemed to like my answers the most and was the biggest pussycat of them all. It still hasn't completely sunk in that I'm done with this hurdle, but I'm getting there. I'm just glad I didn't, you know, freak out unnecessarily or anything. Ahem.
I cannot thank everyone enough for the love, support, understanding (especially those who had to deal with me at my most neurotic or talk me off ledges a time or two or twenty), coffee cards, singing cards, gifts, flowers, emails, phone calls, and for those in town yesterday, drinks and food and more drinks and more food. (At last! A chocolate butterscotch martini at the Excelsior for the Little Match Girl!) Pretty much, when I felt like throwing up for the 24 hours prior to the exam, I just thought about my awesome friends and felt better. I really don't think I've been this relaxed in about a year, so I'm going to enjoy it for a while longer before thinking about things like...what do you call them? Ah, yes, dissertations. Thanks again for the support! And for those who still have something like this to look forward to in their future: all will be well.
Here is the dazed, goofy smile that was plastered onto my face for about two hours straight after the exam:
03 July 2007
State of the Field
1. Practice session yesterday with adviser went well. Despite the fact that she didn't ask me a single question from the subjects she was assigned and instead asked all kinds of outside things, I still managed to answer it all to both of our satisfaction. After forty minutes, she said "well, this is an interesting conversation, but I can't drag this out for you any longer -- you're ready." I have not had a single vision of my potentially-homeless self with the monograph-and-propaganda-lined shopping cart since. So, basically, I'm a much much much less crazy person today than I was three days ago. But of course it's all relative.
2. Ratatouille is an exxxcellent movie. Sneak in a wedge of artisanal cheese and a hunk of crusty bread if you can, because popcorn does not really cut it. If you like good food, you will like this movie.
3. Vote for Oregon. Do it. This state made Matt Groening what he was, it was our broken-down nuclear power plants (cough-Trojan-cough), our bumbling public officials, our crappy schools and depressed economy that led to the genius that is the Simpsons. We don't have all the fancy-pants "population levels" of say, a state like Illinois, but I'm hopeful we can get some West Coast solidarity and snag the California vote. So basically, Y. & S., we're relying on you. I don't count my former Oregon cronies now in California as people I need to recruit because once you've lived here, you're loyal FOREVER.
4. I'm not hiding completely as per KFR's suggestion for the Fourth, but there will be some white-trash junk food consumption, some unmitigated bitching about this country's leadership, and attendance at "Sicko" during the hottest part of the day. I feel that being difficult and ornery and non-patriotic (and also kind of trashy) is kind of the most patriotic thing one can do. For those in hiding, may the neighbor kids not torture you too much with loud bangs. For those at barbecues, check how long that macaroni salad has been sitting out. I'm just sayin'.
2. Ratatouille is an exxxcellent movie. Sneak in a wedge of artisanal cheese and a hunk of crusty bread if you can, because popcorn does not really cut it. If you like good food, you will like this movie.
3. Vote for Oregon. Do it. This state made Matt Groening what he was, it was our broken-down nuclear power plants (cough-Trojan-cough), our bumbling public officials, our crappy schools and depressed economy that led to the genius that is the Simpsons. We don't have all the fancy-pants "population levels" of say, a state like Illinois, but I'm hopeful we can get some West Coast solidarity and snag the California vote. So basically, Y. & S., we're relying on you. I don't count my former Oregon cronies now in California as people I need to recruit because once you've lived here, you're loyal FOREVER.
4. I'm not hiding completely as per KFR's suggestion for the Fourth, but there will be some white-trash junk food consumption, some unmitigated bitching about this country's leadership, and attendance at "Sicko" during the hottest part of the day. I feel that being difficult and ornery and non-patriotic (and also kind of trashy) is kind of the most patriotic thing one can do. For those in hiding, may the neighbor kids not torture you too much with loud bangs. For those at barbecues, check how long that macaroni salad has been sitting out. I'm just sayin'.
28 June 2007
Calculus of Comps
Here's an average day right now:
7 am: Coffee, coffee, coffee. BBC.
7:30: Run along river, normally just a walk but currently too much excess nervous energy to burn. I enjoy the new Mandy Moore song. Shut. Up.
9:00: Read notes. Reread notes. Wonder why my brain cannot hold the same quantity of information as say, a competitive eating champion's stomach can hold in hot dogs. Spend some time overthinking the metaphor. Search in vain for distractions from work. Pay bills! Do laundry! Blog! Email! Done. Back to notes.
11:30: Coffee, coffee. Fifteen minutes of staring into space and lamenting choice of academic career. Second wind in which I immediately feel that I will not only take and pass the comps this summer but write the entire dissertation as well as teach a class, open a cupcake bakery, start the revolution and publish groundbreaking articles. This lasts 30 seconds, at which point stark fear takes over again aaaaaand it's back to rereading notes.
12:00: Lunch break. Fail to fix dishwasher. Recruit Jake. Ignore gender implications as brain is too full right now. Consider letting Paola take my comps, as she's spending all her time studying with me currently. She's quite snuggly these days, apparently she has a renewed sense of her own mortality since recent events. Become irate over Supremes' decision today to basically resegregate public schools, which relies on the precedent of Brown. Shameful moment of feeling a tiny bit vindicated that it proves my thesis accurate. Spend fifteen minutes or so hating white people who claim to be victims of "racism" because they couldn't get their brat into their first-choice kindergarten. Return to work renewed by some good old-fashioned righteous indignation.
12:30: Read journal articles. This is probably the most valuable comps-related thing to do, and now I wish I'd been doing it all along, but hey. Reading books -- psshhh, useless! I sincerely doubt anyone would care to know my article recommendations, but for those few of you who are in my field (who've undoubtedly already read it, since you are in my field) -- I just reread Steigerwald's article on consumer history for the third time and now feel like I didn't get it at all the first two times because it suddenly makes lots more sense than ever before. This horrifies me in light of the fact that I will not in any way have time to read other articles (or books or whatever) three times in order to finally clue in. Crap.
3:00: Pop tylenol. Initiate midday moratorium on coffee. Torture self with the thought, borrowed from Saru, that somewhere, some pasty guy at Yale who wears a bow-tie and suspenders at the age of 25 (hey, they were in my medieval legal history class at the big H -- I'm not making these critters up!) is also about to take his comps and is mainly concerned that he may not get that tenure-track job at Princeton. Whereas I only seem able to worry about the eternally-realistic-seeming possibility of winding up homeless in Washington Square Park, muttering something about Pennoyer v. Neff and lining my shopping cart with socialist propaganda. Place limit on neurotic breakdowns to fifteen minutes at a time in order to increase productivity.
5:30: Look over notes on answers to potential questions. Momentary concern that many of my subfields have suspiciously similar answers. Look, I didn't invent agency/structure or consumerism or race/class/gender or cultural history or transnationalism, OK? Fine, I'll be more specific. Longer moment of concern over the mention by Trust in Steel's adviser at a dinner last weekend, when I told him my committee membership, that I should "watch out for Professor X, he can be unpredictable." If you know my committee, I doubt you need further clarification. Crap. Console self that it could be worse. Right? I could think of a few other members of the faculty that I would not want to have on my committee. Reflect for the 571st time that I wish this was a written exam and not an oral evisceration. Back to answers.
7:00: Erin makes dinner. Pierogis, etc. Then I sit and "think" for a while (read: space out), then some berry picking. We get three or four cups of raspberries off our bushes every day right now. It's absurd. Not to mention the strawberry patch. I could always be a berry farmer. Return to notes refreshed by berry sojourn. Erin vows to make jam tomorrow. Appreciate the roommates and friends who have tolerated my neurotic ways for the last...let's call it months.
9:30: Freak out for the ten thousandth time that I don't know who was governor of New York colony in mid-1700s. This is like my warm blanky of freak out topics this week, since I stolidly refuse to look it up, because then what would I freak out about? It's comforting! OK, it was George Clinton. I now officially need a new blanky. Look, I'm not a colonialist, OK? Moment of fear that I will lapse into Valley-girl speak in the middle of exam? Consider that I might, you know, punctuate all my answers with question marks? Contemplate that actually, um, my life is not that hard? Like, I could have to scrub toilets or mine diamonds so maybe I should stop complaining? And I should stop this post, because now I'm just using it to get out of work.
Rinse, repeat, for two more weeks. The sick thing is, at times I'm even enjoying the -- you know, what they call it? -- learning. Thinking. Clarifying thoughts and ideas. It's the examining process that feels like just flat-out meanness. But ultimately, as I remembered last week and forgot in the intervening period, thus far I have defied what most sociological models would predict I would do with my life (in a good way), so even if I screw up now and for the next sixty years straight, it's all just gravy. Yeah, that was more comforting last week.
7 am: Coffee, coffee, coffee. BBC.
7:30: Run along river, normally just a walk but currently too much excess nervous energy to burn. I enjoy the new Mandy Moore song. Shut. Up.
9:00: Read notes. Reread notes. Wonder why my brain cannot hold the same quantity of information as say, a competitive eating champion's stomach can hold in hot dogs. Spend some time overthinking the metaphor. Search in vain for distractions from work. Pay bills! Do laundry! Blog! Email! Done. Back to notes.
11:30: Coffee, coffee. Fifteen minutes of staring into space and lamenting choice of academic career. Second wind in which I immediately feel that I will not only take and pass the comps this summer but write the entire dissertation as well as teach a class, open a cupcake bakery, start the revolution and publish groundbreaking articles. This lasts 30 seconds, at which point stark fear takes over again aaaaaand it's back to rereading notes.
12:00: Lunch break. Fail to fix dishwasher. Recruit Jake. Ignore gender implications as brain is too full right now. Consider letting Paola take my comps, as she's spending all her time studying with me currently. She's quite snuggly these days, apparently she has a renewed sense of her own mortality since recent events. Become irate over Supremes' decision today to basically resegregate public schools, which relies on the precedent of Brown. Shameful moment of feeling a tiny bit vindicated that it proves my thesis accurate. Spend fifteen minutes or so hating white people who claim to be victims of "racism" because they couldn't get their brat into their first-choice kindergarten. Return to work renewed by some good old-fashioned righteous indignation.
12:30: Read journal articles. This is probably the most valuable comps-related thing to do, and now I wish I'd been doing it all along, but hey. Reading books -- psshhh, useless! I sincerely doubt anyone would care to know my article recommendations, but for those few of you who are in my field (who've undoubtedly already read it, since you are in my field) -- I just reread Steigerwald's article on consumer history for the third time and now feel like I didn't get it at all the first two times because it suddenly makes lots more sense than ever before. This horrifies me in light of the fact that I will not in any way have time to read other articles (or books or whatever) three times in order to finally clue in. Crap.
3:00: Pop tylenol. Initiate midday moratorium on coffee. Torture self with the thought, borrowed from Saru, that somewhere, some pasty guy at Yale who wears a bow-tie and suspenders at the age of 25 (hey, they were in my medieval legal history class at the big H -- I'm not making these critters up!) is also about to take his comps and is mainly concerned that he may not get that tenure-track job at Princeton. Whereas I only seem able to worry about the eternally-realistic-seeming possibility of winding up homeless in Washington Square Park, muttering something about Pennoyer v. Neff and lining my shopping cart with socialist propaganda. Place limit on neurotic breakdowns to fifteen minutes at a time in order to increase productivity.
5:30: Look over notes on answers to potential questions. Momentary concern that many of my subfields have suspiciously similar answers. Look, I didn't invent agency/structure or consumerism or race/class/gender or cultural history or transnationalism, OK? Fine, I'll be more specific. Longer moment of concern over the mention by Trust in Steel's adviser at a dinner last weekend, when I told him my committee membership, that I should "watch out for Professor X, he can be unpredictable." If you know my committee, I doubt you need further clarification. Crap. Console self that it could be worse. Right? I could think of a few other members of the faculty that I would not want to have on my committee. Reflect for the 571st time that I wish this was a written exam and not an oral evisceration. Back to answers.
7:00: Erin makes dinner. Pierogis, etc. Then I sit and "think" for a while (read: space out), then some berry picking. We get three or four cups of raspberries off our bushes every day right now. It's absurd. Not to mention the strawberry patch. I could always be a berry farmer. Return to notes refreshed by berry sojourn. Erin vows to make jam tomorrow. Appreciate the roommates and friends who have tolerated my neurotic ways for the last...let's call it months.
9:30: Freak out for the ten thousandth time that I don't know who was governor of New York colony in mid-1700s. This is like my warm blanky of freak out topics this week, since I stolidly refuse to look it up, because then what would I freak out about? It's comforting! OK, it was George Clinton. I now officially need a new blanky. Look, I'm not a colonialist, OK? Moment of fear that I will lapse into Valley-girl speak in the middle of exam? Consider that I might, you know, punctuate all my answers with question marks? Contemplate that actually, um, my life is not that hard? Like, I could have to scrub toilets or mine diamonds so maybe I should stop complaining? And I should stop this post, because now I'm just using it to get out of work.
Rinse, repeat, for two more weeks. The sick thing is, at times I'm even enjoying the -- you know, what they call it? -- learning. Thinking. Clarifying thoughts and ideas. It's the examining process that feels like just flat-out meanness. But ultimately, as I remembered last week and forgot in the intervening period, thus far I have defied what most sociological models would predict I would do with my life (in a good way), so even if I screw up now and for the next sixty years straight, it's all just gravy. Yeah, that was more comforting last week.
22 June 2007
Fun With Flickr, Fun Without
Somehow I can't type the word Flickr without thinking of Flicka the horse. Um, anyway. I finally remembered that I have an account and even managed to conjure up the password, so there are now many pics of Thursday's goodness on my little badge thingey, specifically Trust in Steel's farewell to certain local hotspots before his move next week. My favorite sequence may be the finger portraits of E., J., and I, just because they are so reflective of our personalities. He is clearly primed to destroy all governments with his finger of doom, while I am playing double-finger-pointing cheerleader at some sort of quiz team semifinal competition and E. is metaphysically questioning the deeper meaning of the finger. And then there was dancing, which was most necessary.
In other news of fun over the last few weeks:
--The Fabulous Miss Saru turned 30 in a beach weekend extravaganza two weeks ago. There was drinking at 3:00 in the afternoon, a huge house full of lawyers and academics and other supercool people and gossip magazines and girly movies. This house was so close to the water we saw multiple whales multiple times -- the photo above shows the view from our hot tub/deck. There was also some "Proud Mary" karaoke (including the dance, Tina Turner version of course) by three of us at the diviest dive in Lincoln City. So basically, just a bar in Lincoln City with karaoke. The only thing missing from the weekend, actually, was my camera, so those of you who weren't there will have to live without pictures of the giant tissue paper pom-pom flowers we suspended from the ceiling and the molten chocolate cakes and the deadly serious game of Apples to Apples that was played over mojitos. Board games with a team of attorneys is Serious Business. It was amazing to see all these ladies -- definitely one of those reunions where you just slip right back in like it's been three days instead of three years. Can't wait for the 2008 birthday reunions!
--We got to see Rachel briefly yesterday before her intrepid travelling takes her to Singapore in a few days. She has promised to keep us updated on all things Singapore while there. I think that level of whirlwind world touring is best done in ones' twenties. I am simply too sleepy now that I'm in my thirties, I'd probably curl up for a nap and miss the train. (Or, as Saru would say, I'd be in the Piazza of the Dead Babies missing the train.) Good luck and safe travels Rachel!
--Numerous awesome people graduated last weekend: Erin, Jeff, Austin, Nina, Kimi...graduates all. For many, they are now official Masters of Stuff. There was elaborate barbecuing at the gorgeous rose garden in town (sans alcohol, sadly), leaving such a large amount of food we still have some in our refrigerator. Our superstar friend Jessica did a bang-up job keeping all of us sane throughout the weekend, especially as she was the one we abandoned at the train station while we killed our cat -- with her help we still managed to get through the many barbecues and ceremonies of the weekend intact. And I was the only one that tripped, despite not even being one of the graduates, a hit I am willing to take to maintain the grace of the rest of the team. Here is one of Elizabeth's finest portraits:
18 June 2007
Goodbye Pan
I've been dreading this post, so I have to get it done. On Friday we had to put our new kitty, Pan, to sleep. He got very sick on Tuesday, we hospitalized him for three days with acute kidney failure (apparently very common in boy cats, and they often can bounce back, but his was pretty advanced) and went in to the vet to visit him on Friday afternoon thinking he was getting better. Then they put us in a windowless little room, at which point we began to suspect the worst. Basically, his kidneys never resumed functioning, his bladder had also ceased to work, and he would have had to be in an emergency hospital for the two or three months he could have continued to live, in pain and catheterized. It was a horrible, horrible decision to have to make, and when they brought him in to us it was even worse, because he just purred the whole time and snuggled us until the very end. He actually stopped purring when the first injection went in to sedate him, and then started purring again when the final injection of barbituates went in. Thanks to E. & J. & K. & I. for helping us bury him when we got home and for providing music and catmint and catnip plants for his grave and making sure we all ate something eventually and generally looking after us that night. A lot has happened in the last week and a half, much of it wonderful, but I will have to do catch up posts later in the week on that because I really just can't do it right now.
Goodbye Pan, Pancake, Panini, Pantalaimon, Pancetta, Panettone. You were the sweetest boycat I ever met and you were in our family, you were in the BCC, even if it was only for a brief time. We'll miss you kittybaby.
08 June 2007
Faux-Toes
Thanks to Elizabeth's infinite knowledge of how to plug things in and select an item from a menu, I am finally able to download my photos, so I can at last show off our new guy, Pan. Here he is in what we have come to call his stoner mode (which is 95% of the time).
Here is his cute Pan-face (he doesn't actually have the cool two-different-colored eyes, that is solely a reflection on my "skill" with a camera):
Here is E. hard at work in our kitchen, as per usual. Action shot!
Finally, with a freshly cleared out camera and a passel of goodies, we embark today on a coastal adventure in honor of a dear friend's 30th birthday. To the celebration-mobile! Seven lawyers in a house, and their three innocent bystander victims. There will be many tort-related jokes. And much chortling at Scalia.
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