Sunday, August 3, 2008

And Now For Something Completely Different!

Today I will be in grading, rather than dissertation, jail.

Note how I managed to be in my chair and writing by 9 for all the dissertating days, whereas today I have been snuggled under a blanket with a cat until almost 11.

Off for some misery now. And coffee.

UPDATE: Well obviously I am in celebrity grading jail because after a mere half hour of trucking away at those essays I left the coffee shop and went shopping. Like LiLo or Paris Hilton being repeatedly arrested and then almost immediately released or given special treatment or moved to a special "treatment ward" because they felt upset and threatened by being placed in the regular holding rooms. Unfortunately, I don't have their celebrity bankrolls (more luckily, I don't have their celebrity cocaine habits either), so the fact that I went and spent money is Very Bad. And I ate out later and felt quite ill from stuffing myself so I had to go home and lie down for a while --- this coming directly after trying on lots of clothing and discovering that I, ahem, am at the very top of my usual weight fluctuations and possibly have gone up a size, but, this cog, she does not learn from her experiences very well. Still, I bought things. Yeee!

I looked at lots of trendy clothes places and peeked in the window of crazy-jewelry-store-that -doesn't-even-have-prices-listed-and-I-wasn't-wearing-enough-rocks-to-even-darken-the -doorway-but-that's-ok-as-I-don't-actually-like-jewelry, and drooled over and molested all the yuppie trendy furniture at places like Pottery Barn and Williams-Sonoma (yeesh, I gotta get out of this place! It is insidiously affecting me ---- I am being ever more hailed by their professional-managerial-class siren songs and I want an antiqued, distressed wine hutch in an apartment with cathedral ceilings. Don't tell anyone!). And I sniffed all the soaps at a place even more fancy than Lush but I'm not so into scented soaps at the moment. And I bought a few things at Ann Taylor. Cough. Um, don't tell. 'Cause I'm unemployed as of now (and so don't need teaching clothes at the moment, even) and who knows where the money for that is coming from and I realize that this was a Very Unwise Thing To Do.

I'm not telling you what I did buy, but I didn't buy this (though I thought long about it):


Cute, eh? The shoes were especially tempting, although I never wear such a high heel due to extreme laziness. What put me off (besides, oh, you know, the insane price) was how thick and stiff the skirt material was --- it looked very uncomfortable when I just held it. But I do love geometrics, and those colors! I'm not such a flowers-and-rainbows kinda girl. My bedroom was black and red and white back in high school and I've been thinking I should return to that scheme. But on the other hand my mother, who's much older (I'm the youngest by a lot), dressed in the worst excesses of barfy 60s-mod prints all the way up until the 80s, when the whole "now sailor motifs and chains are popular" thing came in and she switched over to that. So right now the stuff in the stores feels overly familiar in both a comforting and a terrifying, I-need-to-rebel-against-mom-by-running-in-the-opposite-direction way. Maybe I will return to the retro fashion cycles and how they confuse me so in a future post.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Snuggle time with cat is a crucial component of work-life balance. Glad to see it's happening.

I really hate grading jail. May you serve your sentence in a timely fashion.

undine said...

Sometimes a complete sensory break (shopping! smelling soaps! thinking about styles!) really helps when you do get back to the original work. It really does.

Sisyphus said...

Well, I did manage to finish grading, so perhaps the "sensory break" helped with that. Still, sigh.

Thanks for the comments though! Have some shoes on your way out.