Academic Cog

Priorities, People!

2012-01-29T12:03:00.000-08:00

And by "people" I am of course yelling at myself.

I have not been able to get on top of stuff yet this semester. There might be something to *not* having so many classes and immediate deadlines that is ~~preventing me~~ allowing me to make excuses and sit around on my ass not working. I'm not super behind --- if you just count my stuff. But if you look at what I *really* need to be working on --- figuring out the job search and/or finishing up with Floyd the article --- you would see that I am sadly out of whack in my priorities, finishing up the low-level (or even useless!) tasks at the expense of the important stuff.

Sigh. And having only small amounts of homework so far is also messing up my usual motivation. I have two homework batches to grade today, and then one more class to prep for tomorrow, and what I *should* do is knock those out right away so that I can work on job apps or my article. But instead, grading these response papers, one by one, has been like sloooooowly pulling off a band-aid, each one followed by plenty of internet procrastination. Grrr.

I need to do something to re-set my work habits or hire someone to be my whip-holder or something. I also need to start those oh-so-annoying community college job apps. Or plan a plan for nonacademic jobs. I still haven't made any sort of decision about that.

Hmph. How am I going to stave off a nap while grading homework papers?

If you like it then you should put a ring on it

2012-01-21T09:14:00.000-08:00

I need to do more job applications and get set for all the crap that is posted for the post-MLA job search. Sigh. I went out with people and had more beer than usual (ie none on weeknights) so I am tired and have been just sitting here looking at cute pictures of kittens instead.

Oh, and I had an MLA interview. I have now been rejected for said MLA interview and will not be doing a campus visit. Meh. This rejection, for a variety of reasons, was not nearly so devastating as the post-campus visit rejection from a couple years ago. Which is good, since all that unhappiness came out in ulcers and panic attacks and a bunch of physical symptoms that then inspired more terror and anxiety than the actual rejection did. I guess I have gotten inured to both rejections and my panic attack symptoms and can talk my way down from both. I should be thankful I have coping skills? Eh.

When the chair of the dept. heard that I had been out for an MLA interview she got very flustered, and hastened to point out that they are going to need to replace a lot of the postdocs this year (she wasn't able to fill all the spots last year --- to cover all these freshman comp classes they could easily add 7 more positions, she says) and that she had talked to the dean about extending all of us for a third year. Which is nice, although I'm officially not believing it until you hand me another year contract and ask me to sign it.

On the other hand, I'm not all that keen on staying. I mean, I like the locale and the people and (most) of the courses. But I would exist here very differently if this were a renewable lectureship and I was trying to put down some roots. Adding a year on to a postdoc only extends the temporary-ness, and I am feeling very tired out by the constant job applications. I feel like I have been done with the PhD for so long and I should be somewhere building some sort of career at this point, whether that is academic or not.

Right after the rejection I was sad and totally beating myself up --- not that I had done anything wrong in the interview, because I believe them when they say it was lovely but they have different ideas of fit --- but at the sheer waste of time and energy of all those years of writing up applications and doing job searches and angsting about jobs. All of those hours and pages could add up to a book. Or a huge volunteer or political campaign. Or a huge chunk of a job. It seems like this whole process is a massive waste of smart people's time and resources; think of all those people who do this year after year for months, and then think about the world's problems that could have been solved (or at least alleviated) or beautiful things produced instead. It's sad.

So I went on monster and idealist and the fed gov jobs site and a bunch of other places and thought about getting a nonacademic job. But. Everything I see that I am qualified for (so no stats or quant or finance experience), I don't want to do. It bores me. It looks like crap. I printed off about 5 or so jobs and when I contemplate the possibility of working at these jobs for a year or two, I shrug and go "meh." I am ready to settle down and stay put and have a decent salary, in other words, but am not ready to do just any old crap job to do it.

I was talking with one of the other postdocs and mentioned this --- she had passed along an organizing job, knowing that I like all that social-justice stuff --- and I mentioned the problems I was having that I just mentioned. She said she thought that would be the biggest transition, moving from living for your work to working to live, and I think that's right.

The problem is, I really really love academic work. I just had a great day of teaching where all of my classes went well and I was totally energized and high off it. On my non-teaching day I alternately faffed about and relaxed and edited my article and felt really happy about even the frustrating parts of that process and did teaching prep that accidentally got distracted as I just went off on a bunch of cool tangents and learned cool things while preparing an introduction to research activity for comp. Unlike my office mate who is feeling dispirited here and "exhausted" by the experience of teaching, I love it and totally thrive on it --- even here where there is a heavy load and unprepared, often unappreciative students. (And my style in the classroom is so totally manic and silly and happy and the office mate teaches in such a flat, low-key, dead style that this person just exudes the aura of not wanting to be there ---- which in turn changes how the students interact and causes more behavior problems for this person). I'm not like the people who write on alt-ac or who leave the tenure track jobs because they hate the profession or the research side of it (I complain about it, but I love to complain, if you get my drift). I just can't land a job that will allow me to stay there and do my job.

I guess I have decided to continue with applying for the academic jobs all this semester ... even though I am increasingly frustrated with the time that is being sucked away from my life. Seriously, does anyone look back on their life and say, I'm so glad I wasted about 5 years with continual job searching? Ugh. And then for afterwards ...? I am still torn. The options, I guess, are to agree to stay another year in the postdoc and do this all over again. Or pack up and move back to California and stay in my parents' basement (metaphorically) while looking for nonacademic jobs. Because I refuse to do some random job I don't like in a location I don't like.

So, in short, nothing's changed. Except that I know I need to make some decisions. Well, even that's not new. Why do I even work at all? I should just become a professional slacker and sponge off my parents for the rest of my life.

A quick update to announce that I have nothing to announce. Now with article writing update!

2012-01-16T14:23:00.000-08:00

So, how are you doing? I have plenty of things to do and no urge to do them. It's been a slow weekend here in Postdoc City. I did a little bit of teaching prep (but there is more on my list) and some yoga. I spent a lot of time knitting and lazing about (but I messed up the knitting to the point where I think I need to start over yet again so I won't even be able to show progress on that) and did a little cooking. Oh, and Kill Bill vol. 1 and 2 were on the other night.

I really really should be working on my article. It is done, so I should clean it up and send it out. I'm afraid to look up in my planner when I first started working on this ... but it may be near the one-year mark; we might be approaching Floyd's birthday. Yeah, definitely time to kick him out of the nest. Unfortunately (or actually fortunately but I'm a big dork), I asked a friend to look it over and she said yes. In the email returning the marked-up version, she says it has lovely writing and good ideas (my strengths) but that the different topics are so awkwardly put together she _almost_ thinks it should be broken into two articles (my big weakness). But that she thinks if I could have a clear reason for why the different ideas are stuck together, and if I really clearly demonstrate that in my intro, it could be a complex, interesting, good article.

This also sounds likely; I agree with her assessment. And yet, who really wants their fears about their writing to be confirmed? I was kinda hoping she would say it was brilliant and I shouldn't change a thing and just send it off. So now I need to open the file and look at her line-by-line comments, and fix the articulations, and rewrite the intro, and snazz up the big claims of the conclusion. Yeah. I just gotta do that. Just gotta look at it. Just look at it. Just look.

Why can't I move?

On the one hand, I might not be as prepared as I'd like. On the other, I have goat cheese.

2012-01-10T20:47:00.000-08:00

I am back in Postdoc City --- damn I hate red-eye flights! and waiting super long times in the airport too keyed up to actually do anything productive while waiting for those flights! and not being able to sleep on said flights because they are up high in the air and are scary! and I was in the middle seat of the middle section! --- and have now recovered enough that can do useful things. For example:

- scrubbed (really scrubbed!) down my kitchen completely
- cleaned the living room/eating area
- cleaned the downstairs bathroom
- gone on a massive grocery run and got the cat food/litter etc.
- continued to work on a syllabus
- ate goat cheese

Actually, I am still doing that last one. It is nice. I spent a crapload at the grocery store but one of the things I did at the end of the last semester was eat all my "emergency pantry" food, so that I could replace it. And even inside the foil pouches, year-old granola bars taste pretty stale. But now I have a nice full pantry and am ready in case this freezing rain and snow actually hits this week --- or indeed, pretty much ever. (Oh, I still have a bunch of veggies to prep. Remind me to get to those.)

So over break I had this most marvelous fancy meal, and was introduced to pan-seared brussles sprouts with bacon. Wow, that was good! So now I have bacon and brussels sprouts in my fridge ready for me to experiment with. The goat cheese was more of a whim --- although I had a lovely watercress and endive salad with goat cheese crumbles and pomegranate seeds which probably inspired the longing glances toward the specialty cheese section at the back of the store. And that reminds me of my favorite Trader Joe's salad and now I am sad and miss Trader Joes. Sigh.

One drawback of not being here for a month but having the cats here is that the place really really needs cleaning afterwards. I found several dried piles of cat barf that I had to deal with, to say nothing of the general hair and mustiness everywhere. I still have to get to the whole upstairs and I want to do a deep cleaning before school starts again in case I don't really have time to do more than touch-ups during all the teaching madness. And of course I have a lot of work on my syllabi still --- haven't even touched the comp. The Fruit Studies class which was supposedly good and just had to get switched from a T/TH to M/W/F is taking a lot more time than I expected. Which means, of course, that I have probably completely underestimated how long it will take me to work up that damn comp research syllabus.

And to make me even more annoyed, I stopped by campus to deposit some checks and ask some questions about my paycheck, and the student center was closed!!! Presumably with the credit union closed inside it too. Grr. I will have to wait, because I need to talk to a live person.

So I still need to:

- proof/print/copy Fruit Studies syllabus
- update half the Fruit assignments and rewrite the damn Study Questions (thank you, three days a week instead of two! argh.)
- scan and upload the rest of the fruity reading goodness
- drop off stuff at library/pick up other stuff/check ILLs/go to the bank
- figure out the second half of my comp syllabus (??? Eh. I'm at a loss.)
- finish comp syllabus and all homework/ assignment instructions
- update (as in check page #s and edit) Stripy syllabus (and proof and copy etc)
- update comp and stripey websites
- make first day stuff for comp and stripey
- clean the upstairs bathroom (and catbox) my bedroom, and study
- wash massive laundry pile
- pester Dr Does Everything about Floyd
- collapse in exhaustion

Dang. I tired myself out writing that.

I had funny and interesting things to tell you earlier and wanted to say some more about my winter break, but I held off until I couldn't do any more syllabus work and now I'm too tired to think of what I was thinking. It just may continue like this for a while, sorry.

Feh.

2012-01-04T12:00:00.000-08:00

I feel sick today. I've been feeling "off" for a couple days now and having trouble sleeping besides. I have been at my parents' house _way_ too long without any time/freedom to go elsewhere and not be around them.

Monday I hung out at my brother's house, which was quite nice --- I watched him play one of his new PS3 games while I curled up on the couch with my nieces and nephews, and I faffed about with my syllabus. It was really nice, being able to do work and spend some time with the kids and lump around on the couch and make fart jokes when my brother's character blew his war horn on the screen, all at once. At least I thought it was a wonderful day, but at dinner my niece said she felt feverish and sick and nauseated. So now I am worried that I have been made sick. It's hard to tell what's sickness and what's anxiety, though.

Also, I'm a little shocked by how much work I still have left for my classes, considering I have done several days of faffing about on them already. The Fruit Studies class got a new edition of a textbook, and I was smart enough to photocopy just the table of contents for both rather than bring the books, but that means I have a lot of checking to make sure that the stuff is in the order I want it. And I have two of the assignments I want to re-write based on my last semester's experience, but the notes for them are back at Postdoc City.

Yesterday and today I have been working on the comp syllabus and it is still a mess --- it took a long time to go backwards from what the portfolio and end result should be to all the different steps of the process to then slotting in readings I thought would work. And I don't like putting something on a day unless I know what I am going to be doing on that day and how it fits into the overall whole, so that means I am planning out a lot of the day-to-day stuff before getting it into the syllabus. Somebody else wrote about wanting to do it this way, I think it might have been Anastasia. Anyway, there's nothing I hate more than to come into class than thinking "why the hell did I assign this reading? And what connection does it have to what we did yesterday?" And I need to write homework questions and work up my library assignment ideas into a more polished form.

So, in sum, I am feeling too anxious/sick to my stomach to work and still have many many things to do. And I appear to have used up all the internet procrastination. Dangit. I wish my brother hadn't had to go back to work; I could have sat on the couch and watched him hack up orcs or whatever while my niece and nephew tried to put their feet on each other's heads. That sounds relaxing.

Ibid ibid

2011-12-29T15:18:00.000-08:00

Have I mentioned that I hate Chicago Style? I mean, lately?

I did some article fixing this morning ---- only an hour and a half before I got too tired, but better than nothing --- and now I am going back through and fixing more footnotes. Of course I have no books with me, which makes the process even more frustrating. Ibid, ibid, ibid --- is it capitalized or not? italicized or not? and do I care about this at all?

In honor of stupid citation tricks, here's an ugly toad I found on the internet. Ibid, ibid, ibid.

End of the year Posts roundup

2011-12-21T21:23:00.000-08:00

Hello! It is December! 2011 is almost over! And nobody is posting blog updates to distract me while I am angsting about angsty things, so I have been amusing myself by reading my own archives!

(You think that's dull, go ahead out in the living room where you can watch Very Loud TV commercials being flipped through just fast enough for you to not follow anything. If you go out there, though, my dad is going to tell you to take out the garbage.)

Anyway, in case you missed what I have been up to at my postdoc, here are the highlights: I taught the same freakin' classes and was totally overwhelmed by grading in spring, I decided to write a new article not from the dissertation at all, I taught a summer class (on line and from my parents' home in California) came back and did a lot of hiking because we had a dry fall, taught the same freakin' classes and was even more overwhelmed by grading (though Fruit Studies went very well and students told me they liked me), and we finished up the semester with a death in the department which made everybody depressed and upset and I ended up taking a fifth (!!!!!!!) class as an overload because I am stupid and nice and ohmygod you should have seen the end of this semester's grading. To say nothing of the fact that a family member thought the gradebook was part of the prof's financial papers (???) and took them home to the parental household and we thought there was no record anymore of all the tests and papers the students had done. Luckily, it all worked out in the end. Whew!

All of this means that this was not my most prolific or interesting year of blog posts. Sorry. I went through them to find what funny stuff I had put up and was a bit disappointed in myself:

My Crazy Film Reviews:

Baby Doll
The Unknown

Humor:

D-90X Dissertating Challenge
Prose Polisher ad

In happier news, I wrote an article this year! I am quite proud of myself, considering the amount of teaching I had to deal with. I named my article Floyd, if you remember. Now, he's not really ready to fly yet --- though really, if you're flying, does it matter if you're missing a leg? --- but I reread the article today and it is looking pretty good! And approaching finished! I promise to be done with it soon!!! I will push him off a cliff to see him fly if it kills me!

Baby Pics of Floyd, the article:

A New Idea
Growing Up Into a Big, Bouncing Draft
Floyd and the Boneless Chicken Problem
Discovering the Perils of Interdisciplinary Research
Floyd Can Fly But Not Steer
I Contemplate Epigraphs for Floyd
Someone Else Already Wrote Floyd! (Luckily, I finally read the article and discovered it was on Froyd, not Floyd. Whew!)
I Join Another Damned Notorious Writing Group

As you can see, Floyd consumed the bulk of my non-complaining, non-procrastinatory blogging. Sure, it would look less impressive if I stacked up all the lookit-the-pretty! windowshopping posts I did and compared them to Floyd Work, but I'm not gonna do that, hah. You can go look back through my archives on your own.

Contemplating Pedagogy posts:
I want a framework for longer comp essays
I approve of the book Writing Analytically
I find a brainstorming exercise (from WA)

At some point soon I will amuse myself by making various lists and perhaps some new year's resolutions, but for now, all I can deal with is grooming up Floyd and obsessively refreshing the wiki.

Ahhhh. I am graded.

2011-12-18T21:47:00.000-08:00

Or maybe that is grated. I certainly feel pretty grated right now, like my brain has been run through the cheese shredder.

Or maybe I am not graded, but degraded: I no longer have grades because I gave them to the students, and now I feel horrible about that. Nope; that doesn't work! I feel fiiiiine!

Of course, this all just means I have a new pile of things to tackle. Since coming home I have been dad-sitting (he's such an ornery cuss) and dad has been "putting me to work" which involves him insisting I am doing something wrong and he has to demonstrate how to do it correctly --- which is how I managed to make my brother come out early and hang the Christmas lights. I could not handle my dad insisting on climbing up the ladder to fix my efforts. Then dad made my brother unpack the artificial tree, so I got out and set up all the holiday decorations and prevented dad from getting down any heavy boxes, and then my sister came over and my brother put us both to work "fluffing" the tree as he put it together. And then we put the lights on the tree with much complaining and grumbling. My sister points out that this is our family tradition, which made me feel a little better. Good, I said, that means you can't put on the stupid Christmas carol music because that would drown out the sounds of our ~~bitching and moaning~~ family togetherness.

Today's task (apart from all the grading) was a) humoring dad and b) not letting him get in the car. My aunt and uncle will be coming in for Christmas and my dad has remembered a certain item at a certain store in the middle of a nearby downtown place that my uncle loves. I don't want him to drive into all that craziness. Frankly, I don't want him to drive to his usual haunts around town, but really I don't want him dealing with crazy traffic and complex one-way streets. Dad keeps remembering that my uncle really loves going to that shop, so he wants to drive out there and get my uncle a gift. I got the idea that we call the shop and order a gift certificate and have it on hold, since my uncle always wants to go see the shop. That way my uncle can take a trip in and see all the geeky goodness and then pick out his own Christmas gift as well as buy himself whatever treats he already had in mind. (and my dad is not driving around crazy downtown.)

Every ten minutes or so, then, my dad would remember his Task, and either tell me to find the address of this place or announce that he was going to drive off and see where it was. And every ten minutes or so I would have to convince him that really he should call and ask for a gift certificate to be put on hold and just put it on his credit card and not drive there. Sheesh. He's not forgetful as in not understanding what's going on or where he is, he just has such a drive for getting stuff on to his to-do list and then off his to-do list that he is kinda insufferable. It's kinda fascinating, thinking about what the "go-go-go Type A business personality" mutates into with age; it's also really depressing, thinking about getting old.

Which brings me around to: my to do list! Tada! I need to make up for getting completely buried in grading --- I took an Incomplete in my Another Dammed Notorious Writing Group and need to finish my article over break. I sure hope I brought everything I need.

However! I still haven't gotten Christmas gifts, for the most part. And my sister in law had been saying she was going to take a day off work and take us all shopping in The City (not the one with the specialty shop) and I believe she has planned that day to be Monday. This makes checking in for the Winter Writing Workshop difficult. Hmm.

Anyway, a partial list:

- yoga! (I did some today! back to the habit! yay!)
- shopping in The City
- reread my article
- make to-do list for revising article
- buy and wrap all Christmas presents
- give myself a manicure/pedicure as I have gotten all dried out and disgusting what with winter and grading
- apply for some late job postings

other break to-dos include cleaning out my reading magazine/book pile, updating classes for spring, hopefully some last-minute interview prep but more likely completely reimagining a future career trajectory, and probably being forced to make the Christmas cookies. And dadsitting. I'm sure there will be a lot of that.

Edited to add this from the Writing Group page: Ok, I plan to put 2 hours a day this week towards my article! Today I read and took notes on an article I might want to include, and I still have to reread my latest draft and make a full-on to do list. And I still have a bunch of other things that have been added to my list! Oy.

Inching through the grading

2011-12-13T08:46:00.000-08:00

Ok, fine. I am making up for all the posts I didn't have time for in the past month or two, all this week. It's not really procrastination --- it's more that these papers are bad enough I need to have *something* different to do as a reward every few papers. Think small! Baby steps! Keep going!!! Argh!

I need to grade these 3 essays on topic 4
Then I need to grade 5 essays on topic 5
Then I need to go back through the whole pile and norm and assign grades.

Then I can move on to the pre-final stuff I accumulated for Fruit Studies, hooray!

And tomorrow I have two finals and Thursday two more, so there will be more grading. Oh joy.

Back in a few, I'm sure.

Ok, search committees, let's get this show on the road!

2011-12-12T16:35:00.000-08:00

You have my phone # and email address, and I'm all ready for some action. Go ahead and contact me! I see from the wiki that most places haven't scheduled their stuff yet. Well, I haven't packed my suitcase for winter break, either. But it's finals week and now is the time!

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.

.

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Right? Hello?

Awright, time to put on loud music and compile some grades

2011-12-11T14:57:00.001-08:00

I had coffee, but coming back home always has the possibility of distracting me.

I got through my essays --- I'm missing several and lots of peer reviews from people who just didn't show up Fri, which is good except it makes grading their peer reviewers tougher --- and now I have to tally up all the homework and attendance and whatnot.

Sheesh. I'm "caught up" in terms of today's quota and yet still so far behind. Tomorrow I need to grade my entire Stripey class's pile of big essays (35 OMG!) and administer a comp final. Then Tues I need to go through one of the two big assignments from Fruit Studies and administer another comp final. Then there's the added class too. Yeeek!

I guess all this work is distracting me from wiki-watching, but if any search committees want to interrupt me tomorrow and ask me to the MLA, I won't complain.

Also I've only barely started my Christmasgift shopping. Aiiiigh! What should I get my dad, people? He's old and doesn't want anything and isn't really doing hobbies any more. I need to brainstorm. Eh, I need to do a lotta things.

UPDATE: I have compiled two of the classes, and I went and did all my bills instead of another class --- numbers, so it counts, right? I might go back and do the attendance for Stripey class, or I might go to bed early cause it's cold.

And in other news, I suddenly had the urge to check the Penn CFP list. Should I do a conference next year? I hadn't been planning on it. I did one last spring/summer and it cost me a lot of money I didn't have. If I didn't mess things up I might be able to get a little money from the dept. this year (forgot and missed the deadlines last year), but that still probably wouldn't cover much. Hmm.

I mean, I might be running around crazily accepting a job and moving and all that ... or I might be sitting around going WTH? What sort of career am I going to switch to now? while planning on moving back west to my parents' basement. In fact, I'll be moving *somewhere* either way, so maybe a conference just isn't a good idea. Hmm. Can't weigh the options too long, as deadlines for stuff are probably pretty soon. I hate this whole up-in-the-air job search bullshit. Meh.

I must need chocolate after all those depressing thoughts. Off to munch on things!

Grading Marathon

2011-12-10T16:41:00.001-08:00

All the shit I have been putting off and picking away at bit by bit just got real, yo.

I got a good chunk of grading done this morning, got a haircut, and then had a long nap and bout of internet procrastination. Oops. But just now I have gotten another five essays done, but I want to do the last ten so that I finish off one comp section today and do the other one tomorrow. Their in-class finals are next week.

Siiiiiigh.

I also want to grade their peer reviews and finalize all their attendance/participation grades tonight too. A loooong haul. And this is only for two out of the *five* classes. I have plenty of backlog on the others. The good news is we finally found the gradebook for the deceased professor's classes, so I know what they did on their midterms and such.

Ok, I will grade and then procrastinate from grading by grading other things! Whoo-hoo. I will come back here for an update and possibly to watch silly cat videos as a break, so leave encouraging comments and interesting links.

Cute shoe pick me up

2011-12-06T18:38:00.001-08:00

I am officially too exhausted to deal with reading drafts or prepping my classes tomorrow. It is what it is. I am not in any position to care. We are almost done, however, so it does not matter as long as I can make it through this last week or so.

Maybe I will be able to miraculously plow through everything early tomorrow morning. Of course, dealing with that this morning is why I am so tired I am taking a nap at 7 pm.

I have been fairly good at restricting my clothes/home purchases this semester in an effort to fix my finances (an effort rendered totally null and void by various car repair bills that have come up) but yesterday I finally caved because these shoes at modcloth were so cute:

Are they not tres adorable? I do not actually own t-straps, which is surprising given how much I like that retro look. I got some thick tights that I hope will go well and highlight the little cutouts.

And today I saw these, also at modcloth:

These are so cute! I love the bright cheerful colors! (though it seems odd to be bringing them out in winter.) If I had not just bought shoes ---- and also I am unable to choose which color I like more ---- I would totally be getting them right now. Of course, since I love stripes, I actually can't see how they would go into my already stripe-filled wardrobe. Would I just pair them with clashing stripes? Hmm. Maybe I could buy one shoe from each pair and not bother figuring out how to work with the colors! Ok that is just my crazy talk coming out. Good night.

It just gets worse

2011-12-04T18:32:00.001-08:00

Now I just heard that my friend's cat has just died. That cat was no older than my cats, and wasn't sick at all or giving them any clues he was about to keel over in the middle of the night. *whimper.*

Ok, I know a cat is not to be compared with the sudden death of one of your colleagues, but it is just one more thing to add to a very depressing and overwhelmed semester already. And I won't even get into how exhausted I feel or how, even though I just had thanksgiving break, I feel completely unmotivated and unable to grade any of these huge piles ---- my friend here has been pretty close, and we have both been too busy to even meet up and drink and bitch about things. The last thing she mentioned to me was that she had been a bit too depressed to deal with people this semester, and now she has lost her cat too. Sigh. I think the other postdocs got together on Friday and now I feel bad I did not wake up and go visit them --- but I got home from class, mapped til 9, then went back to bed at 11, and still couldn't get the energy to clean anything or get up or grade anything yesterday. Today I at least got some stuff done, but not without a lot of procrastination and just sitting there.

I also have to start christmas shopping soon. And think about what I am going to pack for break --- including thinking about MLA or not and packing for that but not knowing if I'm gonna go --- and thinking about spring class prep and about a million other things. And deal with my car which has been acting up. And write all my finals instead of procrastinating by updating the dates on some of the spring syllabuses. Sigh. There are still a bunch of late December job apps I printed out too. I remember missing a lot of the deadlines last fall by this time (roughly) last semester but so far this time I only missed one. That's something anyway.

I think I need to go reread Barthelme's "The School." It's about time for the new gerbil to walk into my life.

Bitchin' Camero Bitchin Camero

2011-11-30T15:33:00.001-08:00

I gave back essays today and one student was stamping her feet in frustration --- "oohg, erg, argh, I got a better grade last time! I hate this class! I got a C+!"

Immediately another student called out "I love this class!" They were peer review group members, so she goes over and asked what he did to fix the end of his essay. "What did you get?" she asked.

"A C+."

It was pretty hilarious. At least I have them engaged and involved, right?

And going through the piles of peer reviews, I found one girl had written on her partner's paper, after increasingly enthusiastic comments at the beginning, "This essay is bitchin'!" Seriously? We're bringing that back?

Ok!

In Memoriam

2011-11-17T10:12:00.001-08:00

That professor I mentioned as being in and out of the hospital earlier has just died. Please keep her in your thoughts.

I agreed to take over one of her classes. Everything over here is horrible. Everything.

Now, do I start working on the pile of job apps coming due or the piles of overdue essays? Gah.

Not what you thought

2011-11-07T13:56:00.000-08:00

I had a student come to my office hours today because he had an idea about the reading (!!!) but was confused about how to organize that into a paper and relate it to another reading. I promised I would bring in instructions for our next class period. I have some stuff on my flash drive, but it might not be as useful as I had thought. I still am looking for how to teach structure without being too formulaic!

Anyway. I photocopied a bunch of stuff out of Writing Analytically and returned it today (I can't order a desk copy since the postdocs are not allowed to request different textbooks for classes; we are all on a dept. wide text for the comp and all the GE surveys.

I am going to do a variation on one of their exercises, "Seems to be About X But Could Also be (or is Really) About Y" --- which I have renamed in my title for brevity and rhyming goodness.

As the authors of Writing Analytically explain, "The person who is doing the interpreting too often stops with the first answer that springs to mind as he or she moves from observation to implication, usually landing upon a cliche. If this first response becomes the X, then he or she is prompted by the formula to come up with other, probably less commonplace interpretations as the Y."*

As an example, they mention a Nike Freestyle tv ad that contains basketball players dribbling and passing and maneuvering to the accompaniment of hip-hop music. The authors suggest that the ad seems to be about basketball (or shoes) but is really about...

Here they tell you to create a rapid-fire brainstorm list, such as:

Seems to be about basketball but is really about dance.
Seems to be about selling shoes but is really about artistry.
Seems to be about artistry but is really about selling shoes.
Seems to be about basketball but is really about race.
Seems to be about basketball but is really about the greater acceptance of black culture in American media and society.
Seems to be about the greater acceptance of black culture in America but is really about representing black basketball players as performing seals or freaks.
Seems to be about individual expertise but is really about working as a group.

I'm going to put up a bunch of Mad-Lib style sentences around the themes of this unit and ask them to complete them, then to do a rapid-fire list around one that really interests them, and then connect their lists to our various readings.

For example:
America seems to be ______ but it is really ________.

Then I will have them do the reverse: This reading seems to be about theme X, but really it is about _____. I hope this really inspires creative thinking and analysis that goes in a little more depth than the obvious. Did I mention that in addition to defining and exploring what is analysis is, the authors define what is an idea and what makes a good idea?

This doesn't get me to them having thesis statements or outlines, but I have the rest of the week to concoct something that works.

See why I liked this book and told you to go look at it? I always love ideas for class exercises. Got any more? then pass them along!

*Oh dammit! I have cut off the page numbers on my photocopies! My bad.

Writing Analytically: a Quick Review

2011-11-04T19:19:00.000-07:00

Remember how I was complaining about how to teach larger essay structures and not use the 5-p essay format? Someone suggested the textbook, Writing Analytically, by David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen. I ILL'd it and need to give it back soon, so I'm doing a quick go-through, and hence, a very rough preliminary review for you all. In sum: I like it. It has a lot of useful ideas.

The drawback to a quick go-through, of course, is that I am seeing all sorts of useful ways of approaching analysis, and interesting ideas for restructuring assignments, but not really anything to throw in to the middle of a semester ---- it would be worthwhile to take the time of sitting down and reading it slowly and in depth while recreating a syllabus, or even for ordering and using in a course. I would get my own copy but I'm tight on money right now, but I'm writing up this post as much as a reminder for me as a recommendation.

So why is it useful? As people have pointed out in the comments of previous posts, college students don't really write classical rhetorical essays in their classes, and they will write essays in a lot of different disciplines besides English literature. I was mostly trained up in writing-across-the-disciplines myself, and sorta taught myself bits of rhetorical analysis and Toulmin, so the WAD argument (hehe, WAD! snicker) makes sense to me. (Side note: is this a West-Coast/East-Coast thing? A push away from classical or rhetorical and more of an emphasis on science/social science writing?)

The first chapter explains what analysis is and isn't, and claims that analysis can be broken down into 5 steps: 1) suspend judgment, 2) define significant parts and how they are related, 3) make the implicit explicit, 4) look for patterns, and 5) keep reformulating questions and explanations. Sound confusing? It is all explained simply and clearly, and gives little examples and activities for practice. It might be worth it to just photocopy it for your students and work that at the beginning of a semester, but chapter 2 is all about the "habits of mind" that prevent students from actually developing analysis in any depth. It is also useful --- though I don't know if assigning this to my students would actually produce good results. Hmm.

There are some really useful exercises in chapter 3: the toolkit of analytical methods. ---- Remember my little "pick the most important word in this poem" exercise? Well it helps somewhat, but only on certain assignments. This chapter has some more ideas for getting students to look closely at language: a paraphrase activity, a "notice and focus" and something called "10 observations on 1" --- I need to reread that to really grasp what they are getting at, but, remember, I am hurrying through the book. There is also an activity they call "The Method" (it sounds cool --- I need to do it while wearing Men in Black shades and an earpiece, no?) where you look at patterns, exceptions to patterns, and binaries.

Now, the authors claim that these toolkits and activities can be used in all disciplines, not just literary ones, and they have lots of great art history examples and a few history ones, but the book is very humanities-focused. I think these activities would go great in a literature course and I am assuming that learning the importance of close observation and understanding of patterns would help in more social science or science type courses, but I don't know that for sure.

The book also covers the basics of rhetoric and argument (warrants and claims) but as a single chapter or partial chapters that are examples of how to do analysis rather than the be-all and end-all of analysis. The second half of the book sets up a "process-oriented" approach to recursively inventing and refining a thesis and having the analysis shape the organization of a paper. It has interesting sections on moving between induction and deduction (defining these) and a nice explanation of the 5-p essay and why it is limited (and they call it Procrustean! I feel vindicated!). The discussion of paragraph structure and word choice is similarly focused around how these elements shape the analysis and the analysis shapes the form. Again, I don't know how well this kind of sophisticated and unstructured structure would work for my students here. I'm willing to try, though!

Part 3 is about using sources analytically in developing the research paper, which I haven't had to teach here yet. The ending has some grammar and style sections, so I guess you could get the version of the book with readings and use it as your main textbook.

Before I return the book I'm going to copy a few pages and see if I can throw some of the activities in my Stripey class, if not my comp class, if I can figure out how. I like the philosophy of this book and it has some inspiring ideas. Go check it out --- it might give you good suggestions for your intro to lit courses or regular lit classes in addition to freshman composition!

Procrastinatory Shoe Post

2011-10-30T12:05:00.000-07:00

I have cleaned the catbox. I have done four job applications. I have requested a crapload of dossiers from Interfolio which is always tedious and tiring, filling out all those addresses individually over and over. While I still need to grade a zillion essays, prep Monday's classes and get groceries, I am tired and in that fuzzy-headed afternoon slump. Hence, I will post about shoes instead.

I've been feeling an inclination toward metallics these days, particularly bronze.

Fig. 1

Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Fig. 4


Fig 5. I'm also really drawn toward wedges lately.

Fig 6. These might be a bit high. I still like them.

Fig. 7 And these are awesome and amazing! I might need a lot of new clothing to make them fit into my wardrobe, though.

Fig. 8 There were cute sparkly flats at Target, that did not fit. I kinda want something tacky and covered with glitter. This is close, but not really what I want. And I bet the glitter shoes track/leave sparklies everywhere and then look like crap after you've had them a month.

Fig 9. Yeah, see --- sequins just aren't cutting it. I want tacky sparkly. Huge glowing sparkly that makes everyone alternate between staring at my feet and shielding their eyes.

Fig 10. Dear Uggs: Congratulations. You have made these damn things even uglier than they were originally. You should have to pay me an eyeball-burning fee every time I encounter a student with these on.

Fig. 11. I love these strong graphic shoes. Of course, I love black and white anything so actually I cannot have them in my wardrobe ---- unless I could mix them with a stripey black and white blouse and a black and white polka-dot skirt. If I'm not careful, I will end up with a closet completely devoid of color.

Fig 12. The next few shoes are my candidates for "somewhat boring yet would fit nicely into my current teaching wardrobe." The problem with snazzy shoes in crazy colors is that then it is difficult to work them into outfits that also have something bright and interesting and/or crazy. I need some browns/blacks that go with dress pants but aren't completely boring.

Fig. 13

Fig. 14

Fig 15

Fig. 16. Ok, these are both awesome and crazy. I have plenty of boots and would never wear something _this_ level of crazy anyway, but I still love to look at them. Maybe I can convince one of you real fashion mavens to go for this look.

I must say I've been doing pretty good lately --- I bought a pair of flip flops over the summer when my old ones snapped, and nothing since. Now, of course, I am sighing over various job openings and telling myself that everything I can hold off on buying now is one less thing to pack and move next year. Doesn't stop me from looking at all the pretties online.

Vote for your favorite, make snarky comments and/or suggestions in the comment box below!

Chicago Freakin' Style!?!?!?!?!?!?!

2011-10-29T15:05:00.000-07:00

Argh.

It is week 8 (seriously? already?) of Another Damned Notorious Writing Group and I have been tootling around my article instead of working on job apps or grading essays. It's really getting there, if you look at it from one direction; if you look at it from another direction, there's a long long way still to go. This is what I hate about writing ---- how do you know when you are done? When can you cross off a writing task from your day's to-do list?

Anyway, I need to get this article movin' along. I need faster progress than I have been doing. But I'm not going to be able to do the tough parts of revising late at night when I am so tired I can't see straight, so I am making a big list of stupid little fixes I need to make and I will work on those in the evenings.

I have a journal all picked out that I really really want to get published in even though I find them snooty and I hate them. Oh, and they have rejected my articles before. And were obnoxious. And yet their articles are delicious tasty mental snacks and I want to be listed alongside those big name snooty-mac-snoots. So one of my little mindless tasks is to find their submission guidelines and suggested article length and make a list of biblio stuff to finish.

I had forgotten these idiots use Chicago Style. Oh fuck me.

Do you know how many freakin' parenthetical citations are in this damn thing??? This is gonna be a mess.

Brrr!

2011-10-29T05:52:00.000-07:00

Today I do not have to teach or go anywhere (yay!) so I had the wonderful and crazy plan of sleeping in until it got light and warm. But it's still cold! Damn! I might just not get out of bed all weekend, if you believe the weather report.

Please bring me a hot chocolate and some breakfast in bed. And feed the damn cats again so I don't have to climb out of these warm comfy covers.

Self Portrait

2011-10-27T14:30:00.000-07:00

The ... 8 paragraph essay?

2011-10-25T13:26:00.000-07:00

After doing conferences and getting final drafts for their second essay, I am surprised by how well my comp students are doing. I think the majority of them* are now to the point where they can take a strong basic side in an argument and write a nice clear 5-paragraph style essay. If you are horrified by the fact that we are halfway through the semester to get to this point or that I consider this adequate to pass comp 101, then so be it. In spring I had students who were on round one million of 101 and still couldn't figure out how to capitalize anything or to write complete sentences. I think I lucked out and got a good batch this time of students who have some basic smarts or training** and can grasp a new writing style with some models.

Ok ... so what next? One nice thing about switching to a new comp reader and handbook (besides sample essays for them to look at) is that the handbook came with an instructor's guide, mainly of instructions for how to build a syllabus, but also with some suggested assignments, which were helpful. But one thing that irked me when I reread it today was how so many of the instructions told you to not teach the "formulaic" 5-P essay or that topic sentences didn't have to be at the beginning of a paragraph (making me feel crappy for beating structure into their heads) and then the sample paragraph or bit of writing they had for us to bring in to class was a perfectly formulaic paragraph. Humph.

It made me think about why we teach the 5-paragraph essay at all. First of all, I think it is necessary at a particular developmental stage. When I worked at that for-profit k-12 tutoring center in their writing program, I mainly ~~fought with~~ worked with middle-school boys who hated writing and may or may not have had ADD. Their inability to understand essay structure totally meshed with the developmental stuff the center trained us on: they were just incapable of thinking very abstractly or structurally (the kids a bit younger than them were totally unable to really understand "people" in the abstract, that there were groups of people out there in the world who the kids didn't know and who didn't think or act anything like the kids) and you needed a strong framework that you could beat into their writing. You also needed a strong checklist because the boys hated writing and sitting still and making them write was a constant battle of: "Write a sentence. No, 'I ran' is too short. Write three paragraphs of five sentences each and each sentence has to be at least 10 words. Sit down. Sit down. I will count every word! Focus back on your paper." When you get students tell you a sentence has to be this long or a paragraph has to be this many sentences, you are probably seeing the result of beating a bare minimum amount of effort into them, effort that they have then incorrectly understood the point of. (Quality, or grades, don't motivate at this age --- not if their parents eventually felt they needed to bring their kids to the tutoring center.)

And man, that was my spring class! Two sentences is the minimum! You need more than that in your paragraphs! Stop hyperventilating; yes, you can write a whole four pages! Just try!

But I think the other reason we over-rely on the 5-P essay is because it can be taught. And it can be assessed. I used to fret and worry about whether you could actually teach writing for the longest time, that whole "writing can't be taught/you just pick it up on your own," debate, not seeing any improvement in my classes, until I got good at teaching the 5-P essay. Now I can take students from unorganized crap to clearly organized simplistic thinking. But this comes at the expense of the actual content and development of their ideas, which get a little cramped and lopped-off when squished into the 5-P mold. And it is easy to grade on a checklist because you are looking for clear parts in a clear order and everything must be in a specific place for it to count. Makes grading faster, too. No wonder the SAT writing section and all sorts of essay testing services grade to that format, to say nothing of the poor overworked high school teachers. It takes a lot longer to think about whether this point that might be the thesis here in paragraph two is actually a worthwhile stylistic choice to build up slowly to the thesis --- and often takes reading the essay twice before making a single mark on it --- than to look at the end of the first paragraph and then the first sentence of each following paragraph and check it off.

And my students seem to like it (with one exception) because writing is hard and it's reassuring and fairly pleasant to follow a formula instead of the trackless desert of blank paper. After reading several models and doing a workshop on a three-point thesis and peer reviewing two separate student groups, they pretty well have a grasp on what a three-point thesis should look like. The exception, of course, is that I want four-page essays from them and the 5-P essay doesn't stretch quite that far, so they often get stuck on what they should do to add a paragraph to the structure.

So now that they have been familiarized with this structure (I'm not going to say "mastered" yet), I am stumped. How do you teach students to go beyond the 5-P essay? How do you tell them "here's a rigid and constraining formula you have to use" and then go to complete structureless freedom? How do you go from a simplistic one-size-fits-all --- ooh, Procrustean works even better there --- to, "you should let the content and purpose of your various writings determine their form." Once again I am back to "can you even teach students to write?" Sigh.

I mentioned to my officemate that I was getting really strange penultimate paragraphs --- sometimes completely off topic, sometimes two separate conclusions, sometimes "background" that was so obvious it was clearly padding, and my officemate mentioned the point that the 5-P essay is too short to follow blindly. "I wish I had some other sort of essay structure to teach them that was, like, one level up in difficulty from the 5-P," I said. "Like what, the ... 8 paragraph essay?" she snorted. "Yes, totally! That's it!" There's a huge jump from simple structure to complete freedom in writing, and so much variety in my anthology's text they hardly work as "models." What I want is some sort of semi-flexible form my students could both copy and tweak, so that we don't have to regress to complete structurelessness when I push them to complicate their analysis and extend their papers.

Can somebody please invent this?

* I have quite a few that didn't bring drafts to peer review or have had "troubles" getting in the final draft and who are never paying attention during class. If they're not mentally there I'm not counting them as part of my class.

** I have a couple who took honors English but haven't been asked to write an essay for two years. And another who said he went to a bad school: "man, I cut class almost every day and still I got Bs. I didn't even show up!" But I have a lot who were very familiar with the whole concept map-outline-draft-revision thing.

A Tylenol PM post

2011-10-22T13:37:00.000-07:00

Urgh. I don't know what's up. Last night I had two beers and stayed up late to watch a movie. That shouldn't really have any effect on me. But this morning I was tired, and I had a haircut appointment, and when I got back I just felt miserable. Huge stabbing headache and (still, from earlier this week) cramps.

I drank water (maybe it's a dehydration headache?) and ate lunch and tried to work on job apps for a little while, and then gave up and went for the medicine. All I had was the drowsy nighttime stuff, so I took it. I just woke up from a couple hour nap and the headache is now gone. The cramps mostly are too. But they appear to have taken my brain with them, and I am sooo groggy. Rested enough I don't think I can nap any longer, but man.

I may print out a warning to myself and post it on the wall: Do Not Touch Your Job Applications. You Are Totally Mentally Incompetent. I keep getting pulled back to them and wanting to get work done today, but I also got up to go to the bathroom and forgot where I was going along the way. Job apps are not the things I want to screw up while suffering medicine head. Or really, screw up at all.

Got any suggestions for shiny mindless things I could look at on the internet?

Nope, this just isn't working...

2011-10-19T18:01:00.000-07:00

Awww, it's beautiful; it will go so nicely with my red dress.

I love playing Angry Birds and annotating all my PDFs with this new purchase.

It's so exciting to unwrap a new package full of shiny things!!!!!

I've always wanted a complete set of these.

Sure, I'll have to eat ramen for the next three months, but the photos and memories from this experience will make it totally worth it.

Sigh. Nope. No, this just is not as fun to budget for and recover from. This is even worse than shopping for replacement underwear or such. Seriously.

At least everything else went well on the checkup and the mechanic says we can wait another month or two to update the tires. Sigh. I kinda need more groceries, too, to balance out my leftovers. At least those are marginally fun to shop for.

No good deed goes unpunished

2011-10-18T15:07:00.000-07:00

So, being a nice person, when the email went out that Professor Overwhelmed had become so overwhelmed that she had run herself down into a serious illness and was in the hospital, I immediately agreed to take over two of her class sessions for one course (I'm still waiting to hear back if they need me again for this week). One session was on an author who I had taught before but hadn't read the specific stuff I would be teaching, the other was an author I had had in an undergrad course and who naturally had been on one of my reading lists, although I don't think I was ever asked a question about that text. So clearly this threw more prep and a little more stress into an already jam-packed week.

Now, I don't want to imply that my level of stress was anywhere near this professor's --- I don't know much about the nitty-gritty details of shepherding a program through the reaccreditation process but it seems to provoke physical and/or mental breakdown in the program administrators if what I have witnessed at two different universities is to be believed. Whoah. And although we ("we" meaning Postdoc U, although obviously I am not really part of this "we," being temporary) recently got permission from the higher-ups to advertise and fund a new full-time lecturer, who is here starting this fall, that doesn't really take away any work from the position of the faculty member running the program. In fact, it probably increases it: she had to chair the search, get approval for the search, train and mentor the lecturer, and still deal with all the logistical stuff of running the now-expanded program, and then do all the reaccredidation stuff to show that this bigger faster better program is meeting whatever benchmarks it is supposed to meet. (I told you I didn't know anything about this stuff.)

In fact, to continue this digression, hiring a full-time lecturer only helped with the course coverage of this program ---- sure, Fruit Studies now has a line devoted entirely to the program, but everyone who can sit on or chair a meeting or do anything with faculty governance is an "affiliated faculty" who is in another department, so there is still a tremendous amount of work to be parceled out amongst these already overworked faculty. So while full-time lectureships with benefits are good, I demand the creation and hiring of more tenure-track lines!!!! More power to the Fruits.

Ok, anyway. Can I go back to petty griping after making some trenchant institutional analysis? I'm going to anyway. Like I said, although I am not under so much stress that I am getting hospitalized, it did take away a few hours from my week for the class period, and I had to read the class material and plan something for it, and then I had sleepless nights because I didn't want to prep to the usual level of control and preparedness I do for my own classes but I tend to not sleep or have bad anxiety dreams when I am going to be teaching something for which I am not prepared, and then I had tons of homework grading to catch up on, which I still have not completed. But I am getting there. Anyway, that is my life at the moment. Not quite so sure I want the whole tenure-track job thing if it means a workload so stressful I'll be on antibiotics and an iv for two weeks, but there's the hope that the more work would also be more interesting work.

Of course, I would also just accept bags full of money instead. Inquire within for a mailing address.

You can lead a student to water, you can show the students the water, you can even splash the water on the students but...

2011-10-17T07:43:00.000-07:00

Yes, it is midterm grading time once again! The one bright spot is that I have gotten much faster at pushing through them. Oh wait, that could be because they left so much blank this time compared to the last two times I taught this class. Dude.

I don't know what to do about these students, except maybe shoot them. Since I have worked out a decent syllabus and lectures, this time around I am working on making the class more interactive for them --- quizzes every week, more discussion questions, more practice writing in the beginning of class where I ask them what is the most important word in this poem/passage. All the stuff I couldn't quite get to when I was reading the material and trying to figure out what was important about it the first time or two around.

And I have been "connecting the dots" for them in excruciatingly painful ways. "Guys, why aren't you doing the reading? This is a literature class. I notice that there are a lot of zeros on this quiz I am handing back; that is a good sign that you are not doing the reading and will fail the midterm. You will need to identify passages we have read and connect them to our lectures, you know, and you won't be able to catch up on an entire class worth of reading the night before!"

And you know what? They totally bombed the midterm. Like I have said before, I don't give any credit for blank answers, and there just isn't any point to curving or grading these up. This is all on them. I went back to my files and they even did worse this time than the last two times. For example, here is last fall:

1 A
6 B range
9 C
2 D
7 F (three of those being in the 10 % range)

Compare to this time around:

1 A
8 B range
5 C
4 D
12 Fs (2 of those are in the 20% out of 100 range)

Yeah I have no sympathy; clearly students can do fine on my midterms. I asked the students what was important in class so far and they generated a big list of terms and names of movements on the board and I took straight from that for the definitions section; if you get 3 out of 40 points on that section I can tell you didn't even copy down the list of terms from the midterm review.

What are these people thinking? Do they hate literature so much in general (or this class topic specifically) that they are dead set (perhaps unconsciously) against passing the class? Are they so invested in magical thinking they think that they can pass this class without doing any of the reading? Do they secretly want to fail? They have to take a literature course from this list of requirements to graduate from college, but they don't have to take this course. And yet (something I did not know last fall), students failing my course have tried to pass it 2 or 3 times in a row now. Any time you teach one of these required surveys you have a fair percentage of repeaters. Why do they come back to the same course they didn't bother to do the reading on last time and expect it to be better this time around? Arggh!

We have been doing group work/discussions where I have them pull passages as evidence for or against an interpretation of the text and then come back and discuss it. I think I am up to about 7 or 8 different people actually talking in class and saying good things. Maybe 3 or 4 of them are actually fun and saying interesting things that count as literary analysis. I would looove it if all my Fs would drop and just let me teach students who talk and seem semi-willing to be there and work with me, instead of folding their arms huffily and glaring at me from under a baseball cap. The class would be just so much more pleasant in its vibe and more like teaching if I only had to work with the students who were attempting to learn in good faith.

Sigh. But I know that none of the Fs will drop; most of them won't even miss a day since there is an attendance requirement in our department, and I bet I will get nasty horrible emails once again as soon as I hand back the midterms and have to have another series of meetings with my chair and my students about how I "disrespected" them by making them fail an assignment. Jeezus Fucking Kerist on a Cracker.

Window Shopping

2011-10-09T20:09:00.000-07:00

It's that time of year again where I am too tired to work until all hours and there is nothing on tv! You know what that means ... I am trawling the internet shopping sites and going ooh and ahh.

Let me note that I have been pretty good about not buying things this fall, and I hope to continue. Hence the "window shopping" of online browsing.

Boden sends me catalogs, since I bought some stuff last fall, and when I first flipped through it, I was not impressed. However, it must have grown on me, since now I want many many things from them:

I stocked up on brightly colored and brightly patterned dresses over the spring and summer, and now I do not stare at them droolingly (for the most part) on websites. I seem to have moved on to funky patterned skirts.

Or colored skirts. I have quite a collection of black and brown skirts in many shapes and styles, and now it seems I want craziness covering my ass instead of blah neutrals. Though I don't know that I can do the long straight pencil skirts like these --- they tend to be very stiff and not working well with my various curves and bumps.

And while these are so cute (look at the swirly hem patterns especially!) I wonder if I would have to ruin or re-make them when hemming them to a length that didn't swallow up my short little legs.

Also, I bought a bunch of "interesting" tops and/or cardigans with patterns and adding patterned skirts as well would make matching up outfits just that more complex. I am not brave enough to venture into pattern mixing.

Hmm, I liked these when I pulled them and now I am not loving them. Good thing I am just "buying" them by putting them on my blog and not actually going real shopping.

There were also some nifty looking coats, if you are looking for coats. I am not, because I just bought those two coats in December and don't want to spark some hitherto-unknown Coat Addiction. In fact, maybe I should just close up my browser now.

What a difference in cynicism a year makes...

2011-10-09T06:36:00.000-07:00

You might remember that last year I was annoyed that this Historic Anniversary/Homecoming school thing ran in the middle of my classes and I was supposed to cancel some of my classes for the rally.

This year it came around (at least it was noted in the master schedule this time) and I'm all like, thank god I get a day off! Finally! A day of not dealing with my comp students and one less class to prep!

Heh heh.

I should go off and do all sorts of job search stuff or write an article or whatever, but I think I'm going to go off wandering in the woods, if I can get the other postdocs on board. Whee!

Random Teaching Updates

2011-10-06T17:57:00.000-07:00

Hmm, what am I up to these says? I dunno. I should be grading madly --- I handed essays back but have other things I need to catch up on --- but I feel like I want to rest and relax instead. Wait, when is that not true?

I got the word about spring classes and they are the exact same ones as this semester. Eh. There is a chance, though, I might be able to trade my Stripey Class for a Nosepicking Survey class, my specialty, which would be great. If they let me do it. And I would then have to prepare a new course from scratch, which is extra work, but I think it would be worth it for the fun of reading and teaching stuff I know something about and love. Who knows if I'll be running amuck on flybacks or retooling for a different career. I'm bound to have something crazy on my plate, so I might as well trade classes with this adjunct who doesn't like Nosepicking. (How can you not like nosepicking?)

And of course, after switching the comp book on me for fall, Fruit Studies is switching to a later edition book in spring. Figures.

My comp classes have been going pretty well. One class can go from "excitable and willing to talk" to "entirely too loud and shouting at each other." The other day was weird; I had lots of shouting at them to settle down. I may have to rethink class management in that class (which is always weird when you have two back-to-back classes turning out totally differently). Other than that it seems to be coming along. Right now should be the end of the "honeymoon period" since I have handed back the first essay and totally crushed their little egos (welcome to college!), but it doesn't seem too bad right now. Except for the students going nuts and shouting in our "what is the value of the liberal arts" discussion. Weird.

Now the Stripey Class ---- sigh. Jeez. You can totally drag a horse to water but not make it drink, you know? I have been giving quizzes regularly, handing back quizzes while pointing out that getting a zero on the quiz is a good sign that they might not pass the midterm, explicitly pointing out how they should be marking important passages we close read and that they should take notes, and still I had to yell at them on Tuesday, because it seemed like they were even less engaged than usual. A bunch still haven't bought their book. And to top it all off, I revamped what we were supposed to do today, and instead of giving them two quizzes in one week I made up a handout where they had to find quotes about each of the main characters while in small groups. And then they were pissed cause they had done the reading and were expecting a quiz! Crazyness. You will hear more from me once I give the midterm, I am sure.

I spent 20 minutes on my article though! Let's see if I can devote some more sustained time to it again on Friday. I was surprised --- or maybe disappointed --- to find how much time rereading the subsection and pulling my books and then turning two bolded things into cited endnotes took to finish. Grumble. I have so much more to do on those sections! Ok, Sisyphus: baby steps, baby steps. Just keep on plugging away at it.

Actually, I guess I should wrap this up and go back to plugging away at my pile of quizzes and homeworks to grade. Or figure out what I'll be doing in my classes tomorrow. A cog's work is never done!

The Looming Uncertainty Returns

2011-10-03T20:36:00.000-07:00

(side note: finished my essays at the last possible minute and handed them back today. Yay! Still completely buried in other grading and need to get back on that damn article and job app stuff. Need, need, need, need --- I am so sick of what I need to do.)

I just booked a flight to see the fam for thanksgiving (waited too late and it is pricey), and was inspired to grab a flight for winter break too. (Still pricey but way less and probably the best I can manage given I am flying way the hell over there.)

Of course, my fam doesn't live in Seattle, so if I get an MLA interview I would need to go there. I didn't include the trip in my original ticket, which means I will either a) break down and buy another ticket in the next few days, b) get an interview and buy a last-minute-expensive-freakout ticket around December 10, or most likely c) not get any interview and also not have a plane ticket to Seattle. Quel domage. Seattle's a nice city to visit. If you have the reason to go, the time and the money, that is.

My officemate has been annoying me by discussing this issue at length while I am grading. Should I sign up for the grad student or the full time convention rate? We don't make enough to really count as fulltimers even though we are full time. I need to find someone to split a convention hotel room with. Are you going? Are you booking the hotel and registering now? Should I look for other people? I think this officemate has a paper to give and therefore a reason to go regardless. Me, I never get on top of it in time to hit those very early calls for papers for MLA. After far too many years of going, I won't be going to this MLA unless I have an interview.

(And if the luck-givers of the universe want to punish me by granting me an interview and making me pay through the nose for everything, then please, have at it!)

I hope that people have become accustomed to Skype enough to want to do Skype interviews with me instead of me flying out there, 'cause damn, that is a huge expense you are putting on us impoverished jobseekers year after year. If I do get an interview I'll camp out on someone else's floor and borrow a nametag to get me up the elevators. I don't have the money, yo. And my advisors' advice that these expenses are a worthwhile investment in return for a job wears thin after so many years of investing and not getting any job in return. However, I am a pessimist and think that more likely I will be sitting around my parents' house being depressed and interviewless and not spending any money on travel, which is fine if my niece takes me out to this dive bar she has found that she likes (OMG I am old; she is old) but then that raises the question of what I will be doing if I don't get a job this year once my postdoc, which cannot be extended, ends.

What the hell am I going to do?

Eh, I can't focus on that. I am lucky I have managed to get my tgiving and break plane tickets before the prices went through the roof. I have so much stuff to do and so much immediate stuff to worry about I can't be bothered with planning Plans B through Q and a possible Escape from Academia where the Kurt Russel role is played by your humble blogger.

Nope, I'm too busy to think about all that. But that doesn't stop it from looming over me like a dark cloud, like one of many dark clouds creeping up over my horizon. You can't do anything about uncertainty but it weighs on you. You'd think a cloud couldn't weigh anything but it does.

Anonymous, the movie

2011-09-29T20:50:00.000-07:00

First of all I want to point out that the movie trailers for that new version of the Three Musketeers makes the baby Jesus cry. Seriously, why are you remaking the book ---- no, more accurately. why are you making an explosion-action movie with boobs and tacking the title of the Three Musketeers on to it? It certainly doesn't get the point of the book nor really seem to bother with any of the plot details. Or even really the costuming of the period, which was more than just decolletage. There's a funky mark somewhere on that word, isn't there? Eh, I'm not gonna look it up.

But now on to the big point, which is someone has made a movie about the Oxford conspiracy. You know, the whole "Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare's stuff, so it must have been a nobleman of your choice depending on what week it is." Seriously, is that interesting? Do people really care who wrote Shakespeare? Wasn't the point of Theory and Foucault's What is an Author that the whole concept of "author" is socially constructed anyway? I didn't think even Shakespeareans cared, since it's not like we know a whole lot about his biography. You still have the plays. Doing criticism through straight-up biographical criticism is about as interesting as whether you find a character "relatable."

But you know I wanted to ask all my Shakespeare peeps about the film and see what they thought and if there was anything exciting they could weigh in on.

I was thinking it would be more of an interesting movie if they did a thing where the author of "Shakespeare's plays" wore the Anonymous mask from V for Vendetta. Ooh, and also tried to blow up Parliament. And ran Wikileaks. While tweeting from inside the Iranian revolution. Because that would be a story, at least. And really they should just go with this new and interesting story and jettison the stupid attempts at referencing history altogether. Then they could work on imagining new ideas and representing our lives back to us in original ways rather than rely on the crutch of a pre-made story everyone already sorta knows to allow them more time to work on getting all those expensive explosions perfect. Oh. Well that explains a lot.

Well what does our buddy Michel have to say about this?

We are accustomed, as we have seen earlier, to saying that the author is the genial creator of a work in which he deposits, with infinite wealth and generosity, an inexhaustible world of significations. ... The truth is quite the contrary: the author is not an indefinite source of significations that fill a work; the author does not precede the works; he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition, and recomposition of fiction. In fact, if we are accustomed to presenting the author as a genius, as a perpetual surging of invention, it is because, in reality, we make him function in exactly the opposite fashion. One can say that the author is an ideological product, since we represent him as the opposite of his historically real function. When a historically given function is represented in a figure that inverts it, one has an ideological production. The author is therefore the ideological figure by which one marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.

In other words, to hash it up a bit, We don't care if Joe Brown did or did not write a laundry list or even a particular play. And we only care that Shakespeare did or did not write some plays or even about those plays at all because an immense amount of cultural work erected an apparatus of meaning and value around them, from festivals to English departments to RSC videos to required reading lists and mandatory high school assignments --- to say nothing of the many parodies, citations, or homages of those plays and the very notion of "Shakespeareness" you see constantly in popular culture.

This, I think, is why I have lately become very depressed about the latest rollouts in social media promising to "seamlessly integrate" every single search and button clicked on the web with your "real life" identity --- and now with a "timeline" function that will chart out your every awkward attempt to reinvent yourself in the past. No more moving to the big city and starting a new life, or hiding your photos from a bad fashion moment or bad relationship ---- you get to carry your baggage with you and share it with anyone who clicks "friend." And that's to say nothing of the skeletons you may have in your closet, whether mental illness or money problems, you might want to conceal in order to start over with new people and a clean slate. Or even the ability to be whimsical and random and inconsistent and changeable in mood ---- can you "seamlessly integrate" all the disparate identities we usually paper over with the term "subject" and roll them out on a single timeline?

It really does seem like "we fear the proliferation of meaning" and want to make sure that, once and for all, all identities get securely pinned down to one name, one body, with full authenticity and no masks, role-playing or contradictions. No pretending to be someone else, no imagining what it could be like as someone else. Ironically, to lock down the proliferation of meaning and fasten it securely to a single unified identity, we all must endlessly proliferate data to be mined for corporate commerce as playlists and shopping preferences, and upload representations of ourselves that we sign away all rights to.

He goes on to say that, although he recognizes that doing away with the author-function is utopian, or "pure romanticism," conceivably, as the culture changes from bourgeois individualism and private property into something else, the author-function might be replaced by something else entirely, "and in such a manner that fiction and its polysemous texts will once again function according to another mode, but still with a system of constraint-one that will no longer be the author but will have to be determined or, perhaps, experienced." In this new social configuration, "there would be other questions, like these: What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject functions? And behind all these questions, we would hear hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference: What difference does it make who is speaking?"

What difference does it make who is speaking, indeed, Mike. Except for that earlier bit you said about authorship being born out of torture. When it comes to torture, as long as it's still a risk, a lot rests on who is speaking.

You need some cats.

2011-09-26T19:25:00.000-07:00

So here you go:

You also need a big pile of grading to do, I can feel it. I'll trade you the privilege of kitty head-scritches for essay grading. You can see Loquito there hiding behind the pitcher meowing for more food and willing to chew up papers to get my attention. He'll handle some, but you'll need to pick up the leftovers. Plenty to go around. Scritch, scritch.

The Nitty Gritty

2011-09-25T20:09:00.000-07:00

I hate it when I have a weekend that didn't get much done on the to-list, and yet didn't feel very relaxing either. Plus, I am in the weird state of being both done and not done with everything this evening.

Today at least I got the catbox cleaned. And the kitchen floor was gritty; you know that means I have to deal with it. So I did. And a lot of cooking so I have leftovers to bring in all week. Yesterday I only did half of a job application and then pissed the rest of the day away on class prep for my Fruit Studies course. I have been doing pretty well at not allowing myself to prep the Fruit or Stripey classes at all, only going off of last semester, and that really helps free up time for grading. Although it doesn't really make my life feel any better, since then I'm grading all the time. But prepping a lecture or a powerpoint show can really eat up the time, and feels productive and fun.

I got comp papers on Friday and you know I should have graded like a fiend on them all weekend. Instead I haven't started them. That's what I mean about this evening: I have done a lot of little stuff on the to-do list but there's no way I'm going to start tackling a pile of essays at 10pm. Which means I tidied everything and picked out clothes for tomorrow and packed a lunch just like I am sending a sex year old off to school instead of myself --- no, wait, that's not all that different really --- and now I am taking a moment to blog.

The nice thing about the week before an essay is due, if you are like me, is that you have students doing peer review days and revision days and you have handouts and slides that you think work really well and only require updating the due dates and making copies. You don't get any paper that week and can spend the in class time catching up on other classes' quizzes and the out-of-class time on other class assignments. Then you suddenly realize that on Monday, you're going to have to start teaching again, and you look at your syllabus and are confused by the motley readings. WTH do these have to do with each other? you think to yourself. What am I going to do in class on those days? And how the hell will I get this into a new essay sequence?

So instead of grading I have been writing a prompt for essay 2 and planning out all the stuff we will work on in class, moving backwards from what the prompt says and backwards across the calendar. I don't know if that's the best way to do it, but I like planning backwards this way. Today I waffled back and forth on the types of in-class writing I would have them do and whether or not I would collect it ---- holy cats am I going to be collecting a lot of homework paragraphs and in class paragraphs from them! Argh.

On the other hand, I think I have all of next week for comp planned out. Now I just have to really discipline myself to grade grade grade those essays and peer reviews all week to make up for the slacking this weekend. Except it wasn't slacking so much as trying to make sure the next essay is doable and will not cause me to commit hara-kiri. Which really is a possibility when I go into the class and try to wing it or write an essay prompt at the last minute and then discover that it inspired extra sucky papers.

Oh, and I entered grades from the latest batch of Stripey quizzes ---- lots and lots of zeros and 1s out of five questions. Some ok ones that clearly read. I will be taking a moment to remind them of the existence of the midterm and to nag them about keeping up on the reading. I don't know if it is resistance to the topic or not enough quizzes smacking them across the ass but the Stripey students are not in the game yet compared to my comp students. They are also very sullen and bored looking. let the nagging begin, I guess. At least blank and obviously-wrong quizzes don't take long to grade.

Ok, I guess now it is time to sleep.

Another Damned Notorious Writing Group Week 2: Haha!

2011-09-23T15:23:00.000-07:00

I am going to declare my week's goal met ---- fix all the bolded parts of sections 1 and 2 ---- even though I am still missing a subhead title for the section. Titles don't really come to me when I think about them but appear on their own time instead, so I don't want to hold things up while waiting. I have a list of nouns; maybe I could thumbtack them up over my bed and the perfect witty phrase will drift into my mind while I am sleeping.

So last week I was complaining about time to write, and just the overall exhaustion of teaching four classes when you are making them do piddly homework and quiz crap every day. And I just got essays, oh god! Wait, don't let me distract myself. Anyway, I tried putting in a short writing period immediately after my yoga practices and it sorta works but it is a far from ideal situation. Monday I skipped yoga but got in 30 minutes of revising; Wed I did a short yoga and did 30 min of revising; and today I skipped yoga and spent all day except for when I was actually collecting my essays revising. Hmm. And yes, this blog really is going to get this boring for the next few weeks. Maybe if you are lucky I will take pictures of my cats and pretend they are in yoga poses. That's as exciting as it's gonna get.

Part of the problem there is I slipped and fell and banged up my knee, which still has a massive scab like I am five. It made doing any sort of yoga that involved kneeling impossible. And then I went straight into cramps for my period and that just adds to the amount of self-discipline I need to make me get up at 6 am and actually do exercise. Dammit. I don't want to fall off the exercise habit, not when I spent so long building it up this summer! I will do a make-up session tomorrow morning and see if that helps get be back on track.

Writing between exercising and teaching isn't the best spot either, since I want to do it undisturbed at home yet feel very worried and antsy until I actually make it on campus and know that nothing is going to prevent me from getting there ---- I know, I'm such a worrier, what the hell can I do about it? ---- but at least I kept my mind semi-involved in the article and on track and polished up a few bits. I would never be able to do this at the writing stage, so I am soooo glad I got it pretty much drafted before school hit. No, wait, I am pissed that I only got it mostly drafted! I wanted to send that completely polished fucker out and not have to deal with it during the school year! Ah well. Make the best of whatever stupid situation you find yourself in, I guess.

Ok, now I know I promised to say how I found stuff and finally read the "scoop" article which is not actually on my argument or even particularly interesting, and I will, some day, but those will go in my "lit review" section and other than that the lit review is pretty much done. So it is not next on my to-do list. Nope, the center subsection is next and it is a mess --- there are two pages that basically need writing (as in they are a bulleted to-do list) and the rest are very rough and drafty. I must get this section polished next. So that is my goal for next week for the ADNWG! Actually, I think, given the roughness of the section, that I will need two weeks on it, so: I will have it half done on Fri, Sept 30, and completely polished up on Fri, Oct 7. If I then take two weeks on the final section and one week on the intro/lit review stuff, I could be done with it by the end of Oct and then just go proofy-proofy and fix up the bibliography. I do think that schedule will slide a bit though as I hit even more grading and do some damn job apps. Argh. In fact, I want to work on this all day tomorrow, but think I will have to do job app stuff instead. Double argh.

Anyway, if I wasn't always tired and overwhelmed and trying to get out from under one pile of something or another, I'd be able to tell you something interesting. Stay tuned. But don't hold your breath, because these days, when it comes down to a choice between blogging and taking a nap, blogging is coming in a distant second.

Audience Exercise Whaa?

2011-09-18T17:40:00.000-07:00

First order of business: I worked on my article for about an hour this morning, returned for a couple snatches in the afternoon, and currently have all my piles neatly organized on the kitchen table with newly-made to-do-lists and notes on each one. :) And I plan to try revising first thing after I exercise tomorrow morning! Even if it's only 30 min, I can work out a topic sentence or a couple transition passages.
Go go super Sisyphus!

Second, I tried assigning homework questions from the new comp book for almost every day (to force them to read, and hopefully read carefully enough to understand these little articles), and my students have out-stupided me, the cheeky little weasels. We had a day with horrible discussion last week, and getting to their homework, it is clear that most of them tried to answer the comprehension questions I assigned without actually reading the article!!! Geeez! I didn't like question 1 so I assigned 2, 3, and 4, and many students couldn't even tell me who the author of the article was ... the author being identified in the first question and referred to as "the author" in most of the remaining questions.

Also, if I see another paragraph burbling about "flow" I am going to smack someone. Seriously, I got sooo many homework paragraphs that read "The author organizes the information in this article from general to specific because that gives it a nice flow and makes his arguments more persuasive. I found the essay to be very well organized and persuasive. The way the tone changes between the fifth and seventh paragraphs was also important because it helped with the flow." Basically, a restatement of all the questions (without the answer to "and why?") and not a single specific noun much less an example from the article. I am giving out a lot of zero-credits and will hand them back with a stern lecture on Monday before peer review. I am hoping that they will learn and I will have less actual marking to do on the pages. Actually they are going pretty fast, I just have to take breaks like this to avoid bursting into flames from the repressed rage.

And finally, the title of my post: who bothers to do audience exercises in their comp class? I ask because one colleague had no luck last semester getting students to understand writing differently to different specific audiences, and so this colleague is doing nothing but audience exercises this first four-five weeks and that is all they are discussing in their first essay. I fail to see the point. I mean, I am only teaching them to do one thing: write academic essays. I do discuss the conventions of different disciplines and how they do research a bit, but really the only emphasis I put on audience is that they need to think of audience for their essays as if they are a scholar in that discipline and writing to other scholars and that this is a fairly formal structure. I don't spend any time having them rewrite an essay for a general newspaper audience, or to compare how they would describe a car accident to the cops vs their mom vs their best friend, or whatever. I have things way higher on my priority list --- like for example the fact that my students see nothing wrong with a thesis that reads "computers are bad, but on the other hand they are good." Argh. On the other hand, by Friday I had gotten them to be able to explain why "There are many problems with computers" and "The thesis of my paper is the many problems with computers" are examples of bad thesis statements, so perhaps there is hope. Maybe once they start reading the essays they will be able to find examples of actual quality thesis statements! A girl can dream.

Another Damned Notorious Writing Group Week 1: It could have been worse

2011-09-16T20:23:00.000-07:00

At least, I think it could have been worse. Part of the problem is that this is not week 1 at school for me, but week 4, and I have gotten stacks of essays from all four of my classes already. Yeah, I know, I am the one scheduling and so on, but really, if you need the comp students to do 4 essays in a semester, you don't really have that much leeway for scheduling since stuff is going to be constantly coming in. Plus I have stacks and stacks of quizzes and homeworks I need to at least check off that they did them (these are the other classes) which is also kinda weighing on me right now.

On the happier side, my Fruit Studies class is doing all the reading, brings their books and loves to talk, so that class is such a joy compared to the last time I taught it. And the stripey class just got an average of zero on their first quiz and I pointed out that getting a zero on the midterm would probably be A Bad Thing, so I'm hoping that this lesson has now been learned.

Anyway, Floyd the article. I worked on Floyd last weekend and Monday, and then was buried by grading all week. I always feel so harried and behind on it and have anxious students wondering how soon they will get material back. But! They are only part of my job. And i need to make sure I make time for my article writing and my job search applying. (Applicating? whatever.) So my goal is, even more importantly than cleaning up the middle sections, to look at my schedule and my semester assignment schedule and give some priority time to revising. As part of that, I promise to write first thing tomorrow morning, as soon as my coffee has kicked in, and then do my planning.

(I am most willing to do unpleasant or stressful stuff first thing in the morning --- my "sweet spot" for energy and alertness. But so far this semester I have missed only one 6 am MWF yoga dvd session, and I really don't want to give that up. But there's not really time afterwards to do anything besides shower and go to teach, and I won't do anything so unpleasant as exercise at any other time of the day. Get it over with and off the plate, you know. Will have to ponder this.)

I looked on the MLA Job List and it was like lancing a boil: painful but great afterwards. I haven't had the urge to look at it again or do any applicating since. I mean, I printed out anything that looked remotely possible and put it in my big binder organized by due date, so I know when the apps are going to start coming due. It's just strange to me how I had to *know,* like I was worried there would not be any jobs at all on the JIL and once I reassured myself I could stop compulsively checking to see if it was up. I'm weird, I know.

I am so tired. Later I will tell you about The Scooped Article That Totally Was Not, and the Potential Exciting Crazy Thing I accidentally discovered about my author. Now, though, I'm going to bed. ZZZZZZ.

Missoni for MLA

2011-09-13T15:35:00.000-07:00

The JIL website has gone live, a few days early, as it often does.

Target released their Missoni line of stuff today --- stores have already sold out of Missoni merchandise in certain major cities --- and their website is crashing under the huge numbers of people.

Guess which site I'm more interested in.

I made you a Another Damned Notiorious Writing Group Sticker, but I eated it.

2011-09-12T18:36:00.000-07:00

Since I joined the writing group hosted by Notorious, PhD and Another Damned Medievalist, and since I was doing fine with revising while eating dinner until I decided to drink the last of the wine I used on the lentil sauce, I made you a sticker.

If you are doing the writing group this fall, you can put it on your blog! Or you can design a better one, as I don't vouch for my visual-design skills. (I made it in Word and it wouldn't let me play with the leading, for one thing.)

Now I don't know what to do, as I really can't concentrate on revising or grading after a glass of wine. And boy, do I have lots of grading! There's nothing like a pile of in-class essays to make revising your article seem really enticing. I'm buried already and it is only, what, week 3? Fun fun.

I feel like I should incorporate LOLcats into my ANDWG sticker. I think I have exhausted my store of patience for fiddling about with image and font programs for the day, though.

True, true! Though really, if I had the energy, I'd re-do this pic to read WRITING R HARD. Because it so is. Even with wine.

New new or same old? Or, do search committees care about breadth of courses taught?

2011-09-12T13:59:00.000-07:00

Hello! I got an email asking about spring courses already. The emailer asked if I wanted to teach the same Introduction to Fruit Studies course in spring, or if I wanted the chance to try out a specific different GE course for Fruit Studies. I have a few days to think about it.

This basically comes down to ease of prep time vs adding to my repertoire of courses to look good on the job market. Of course, I won't have taught the new course by the time MLA rolls around, but I could always mention it in my letter or cv and hopefully impress people with my application. On the other hand, I could be looking at nada on the job market and be moving in to the spring "alternate" job market for ccs or even nonacademic jobs and the possibility, yet again, of moving into my parents' basement, which would mean prepping up a new course while feeling sad and anxious and completely revamping my life. (But is teaching already-prepped and practiced courses while feeling sad and completely revamping one's life better? Hmm.)

I kinda think that any time I have taught a new course it has been a lot of work and kinda sucked, and then the second time things go much more smoothly. Plus I know me and I might be tempted to blow off article writing and current class grading to prep the shiny potential of the future class instead this semester, but I bet I can work to keep that to a minimum.

The email said I haven't been put into the schedule for the regular comp/English classes yet, so there might be a chance I get offered a different comp class or something other than the Stripey class in spring (hmm, a Plaid class? Checks? Polka dots?), so depending on the whims of the department, I could have lots of new classes to prep instead of just this one. Not sure yet if that would be a good thing or bad. Probably bad. OTOH, I have taught almost the same thing for three semesters now (except when the fuckers changed comp anthologies on me this fall, rrrr) and maybe I will explode from sheer frustration if I teach them for a fourth semester.

Do you think search committees care about the variety and breadth of courses taught? Is there a point at which the payoff is negligible? Because I TA'd a shitload of lit classes on different topics (to say nothing of the years I worked in other departments) and then got to run some of my own and adjunct teach some topics classes before I even got here to teach the whole sequence of gen ed classes. Would it matter to anyone that I had taught the same stuff vs. lots of different classes here?

And would your answer be any different if the Stripey Class was world lit and this new course was Fruits Around the World? Or alternately, what if they're not?

Missoni for Target

2011-09-11T13:35:00.000-07:00

You might remember the last time I blogged about Liberty Fabric at Target, but was sad when I looked at the actual stuff and found it not as nice as I was hoping. Also, I don't do well in head-to-toe loud clashing floral patterns.

However, I have high hopes for the Missoni collection coming to Target later this week! I like geometric stuff better than flowers. Bring on the wild-colored chevrons!

Now, I will probably look about as good in loud, head-to-toe horizontal chevrons as I do in clashing florals, but I am not really so stoked about the outfits as much as I am interested in livening up my solids with some interesting accessories. Like the scarves or shoes:

Why, oh why, did I buy some plain black serviceable wellies last year when clearly I need crazy chevron ones??????? Sigh.

I might have to try on the clothes and see if there is anything I can work into my wardrobe without being silly --- but the shoes are a must-have. They are awesome. Also, I want to wear men's ties, just so that I can steal the ones from this collection.

What I am really stoked on, though, are the housewares. I found a "lookbook" previewing all their products (Target doesn't have any of them online yet; must wait for the 13th...) and I am worried. There was a tv commercial that had crazy towels. I would really like a loud and cheerful set of bath towels! I can't find them previewed anywhere and I am worried that they don't really exist. That makes me sad. I do not need a set of zany black-and-white melamine dinnerware; I need crazy towels!

Also, I feel like Flavia needs these snazzy bar accessories, mainly because on the internet she's an Art Deco head. (Side note: does that mean I should be wearing lots of furs and animal prints? I actually do wear lots of black-and-white, just like my photo of me hiding behind poststructuralist theory over there.)

Long live the chevron! I hope that all this snazzy stuff lives up to my expectations.

Hilarious and Wrong

2011-09-08T12:15:00.000-07:00

Funny day yesterday.

First of all, the squeaking was still there when I went back to school, although not so loud that you could hear it when the classroom doors were closed. I guess the water was off for most of the day after I left, but they had it back on yesterday morning.

So I had my two comp classes yesterday, back to back, and of course we do exactly the same thing in both of them, because I'm no dummy who needs to over-prep things. Yesterday I had a PP slide up when the students came into the class that read "You will need the article I put on the course management software and assigned for today!" or words close to it.

First section, everything went fine. I had them write paragraphs in little groups analyzing how this article included evidence. And we had a lovely discussion about the reading afterwards. Then I cleaned up my piles of stuff and marked the attendance sheet while the next class filed in --- I even have the same classroom for both classes. So, I sit around and do my stuff the whole "passing period" while students file in and get all ready.

I happen to be going to get something --- a marker? I forget --- when one girl stops me in the doorway, right as class should be starting. I don't have the article, she tells me, but I read it. I can just deal with it from memory, right?

No, I tell her. We are doing an assignment that will mean you have to use quotes from the essay and talk about the statistics. Try printing it out from the computer lab downstairs, but sometimes there is a class in there and you aren't allowed in. Maybe the library?

There is this noise like a damn breaking and I turn around only to be swept out of the classroom by a tide of students. Wha??? Where is everyone going? Almost the entire class files sheepishly past me. Four students are left out of twenty-eight. I stare at them for a minute and begin laughing.

"Gee, if I had known nobody had it at the beginning of passing period I would have improvised some other sort of assignment." I comment to the near-empty room.

"So, how about that weather, huh?" I joke. "How bout those 49ers?" To my horror, one of the students actually wants to talk about how the weather impacted the local games this weekend. I bluff for a minute or two then take roll, and have the students break into two pairs and begin the assignment.

About halfway through the class, students start trickling back in with their copies, in ones and twos, and I can't help laughing again. I give them the assignment and tell them they need to haul ass in order to finish because they need to turn it in at the end of the class period. I realize I should probably not be saying "haul ass" but think it's even worse to start censoring myself on the 8th or 9th time. We don't have time to discuss the reading at the end of class but I collect the paragraphs of varying lengths.

So I think my freshmen have learned something, in a far more valuable way than my lecturing could ever do. Heh. Long live the object lesson! Ahhh, freshmen.

When this water fountain's arockin', don't come aknockin'

2011-09-06T13:02:00.000-07:00

Today has to rank pretty highly on the list of Highly Annoying Things That Distract My Classroom, although not as high as the time a very cute and photogenic puppy wandered into view and plomped himself down on the grass outside the classroom window and distracted even the most cynical of my students with his gleeful cavorting. But it was Highly Annoying nonetheless.

Evidently a water main broke sometime right between my first and my second class. This meant that the water fountains on every floor ---- and all the bathroom plumbing, I later found out ---- started making interesting and horrible noises. At first, it consisted of various knockings and banging and pops, with varied tempos and accents that had me poking my head in next door to ask if they were playing music or practicing a drum circle. They protested their innocence and pointed to the rattling, shaking water fountain that appeared to be having a seizure right outside our doorways. Someone ran the water for a second and said, "maybe if we relieve the pressure," and a lot of the noise subsided. Of course, we did not know that the pipe had burst and not yet been located or the water turned off, so no, the problem was not solved.

Instead the banging and rattling subsided down to a steady, rhythmic squeak, about ten minutes into the class. It sounded for all the world like someone having vigorous sex in a very squeaky bed, and I mentioned that to my class. What can I say? The whole thing was distracting me too. From the looks of flat disapproval on most of my students' faces, they did not want me to talk of Such Things. I forgot that I am basically a high school teacher here and it is not ok to acknowledge that they know anything about sex. It probably wasn't helped by me adding, "Jeeez, could they change it up a little? I'd get pretty damn bored of the lack of variety even if it's squeaky-bed sex, much less pipes breaking." Someone made a weak joke about staying power and I retorted that's way less impressive from the perspective of the other person involved.

"So, ok class (cree-Eek), when we look at this (cree-Eek) line of the poem, what's (cree-Eek) going on here? (cree-Eek ... cree-Eek ... cree-Eek) What are the two things being compared in (cree-Eek) the metaphor here in this line? (cree-Eek) Anyone able to tell me (cree-Eek) arrrgh god make it stop! Nooooooooooo!"

Except I didn't actually start screaming and cursing out loud. I don't think. I guess it wasn't too bad --- I already have to pace and repeat my sentences around all the coughing and throat-clearing going on in that class. This was just fighting distraction outside of the room instead of within it.

The only problem is that the rhythm has now been burned on my brain. I was joking with a couple postdocs afterwards that if I knew how to beatbox, I could rap along with it. It is about twenty times louder on the floor where my office is, and ended up driving me away instead of me staying in the office to get my class prep done. And even now, I still have it echoing in my ears as if I were still hearing it. I sure hope they fix that damn pipe before (cree-Eek) tomorrow.

A venture off into the unknown

2011-09-04T09:57:00.000-07:00

Hmm. They appear to have changed the Blogger dashboard. Do I like it? I don't know.

Anyway, I'd like you to meet my nephew:

(Blue-crowned Mot Mot, from wikipedia)

I am very proud of him. He just came back (fairly recently, now he's back in school) from a month-long trip to Nicaragua, with some sort of high school student-exchange-do-charity group. I got to hear all about it on the phone last night.

My nephew's the one with all sorts of learning disabilities and lots of trouble reading, and very shy and not really self-sufficient. My dad had taken a look at his grades and his LD reports and thought he would never make it through high school. And now he is finishing up this year and looking into colleges! The bad news is that his GPA is truly terrible and he wants to do engineering, and he might not be able to do that in college, since it is competitive. But he has really grown up and learned how to manage studying and his various learning problems in a good way.

For this summer exchange program, he got nominated by a teacher, but then had to do an essay and a big old application to compete to get in. And he did it all by himself and was very proactive about getting his app looked at by that teacher and doing drafts of the essay and bringing them by his English teacher, so I feel like even that process was great for teaching him some maturity and self-sufficiency.

And then he got picked and went to a foreign country, which is awesome and very eye-opening! My nephew is very nice, but very sheltered by his parents. And, though I love my brother, my bro is an engineer and they can tend to range from libertarian-don't-believe-in-taxes-and-social-programs to totally self-centered dicks. My brother is definitely on the mild side of it, but he thinks that because he went to (from a solidly middle-class secure background) a nice middle-class life and plenty of money through a secure job, everybody can and anyone who is poor is simply lazy and worthless. So my nephew got a strong dose of what it is like in other countries and just what poverty might mean. And he helped people weed their crops and dig a well and all sorts of stuff that just might make him really think about the relationship between his wealthy first-world lifestyle and other parts of the world. I think I'm going to point him towards Engineers Without Borders and try to get him involved on his campus (if and when he goes to college.)

Anyway, I hadn't gone to another country by the time I hit high school or really thought about global poverty by that point, so I am thrilled that he is gaining an awareness of it ---- they had the students do an exercise where they lived off a dollar a day, roughly, and went without electricity and hauled their own water. My nephew said they ate only rice and beans those days, but those tasted so amazing, they were so hungry; the best food of the trip. --- And I think being away from his parents and on his own and trading off leadership duties with the other students was a great exercise in him coming out of his shell a bit and being more mature and self-sufficient. It just sounds like an overall awesome experience and I am glad he had the chance to do it.

He also told me about rainforests and humidity with afternoon thunderstorms and monkeys and lots of birds and bus trips around in the mountains and all sorts of stuff. It really made me want to go traveling; there are so many places I have not been! Next time I am back in CA I get to see all his pictures, too. Good stuff.

Nothing so exciting is happening over at my place, though. I had a couple really bad nights' sleep and also thought that I ate something I was allergic to --- but more likely was me having a panic attack about something. Sigh. Now I have to figure that out. Why does my body have to have a stress reaction that makes it infinitely more stressed? After all that not sleeping I might need to take a nap. Forget being able to get myself back on a super-early-morning sleep schedule, that's for sure.

Auuugh Scooped!

2011-08-31T13:19:00.000-07:00

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Nooo!

This is terrible! I've been scooped! How the hell did I not see this article before??? It came out in April 2011; I started my article in April 2011. It's like it oozed into me via osmosis or transfer through the ether before the citation began to show in the MLA biblio. To repeat: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I'm not even going to look at it right now. I can't. I can't deal with this.

Happy New Academic Year!

2011-08-28T17:55:00.000-07:00

I should make new (school) year's resolutions! Except I can't think of any at the moment.

I am reasonably ready for the first day of school. I packed my lunch and put all my bags together and laid out clothes like I am still a seven year old, but I really find that doing that kind of prep helps, even if it feels silly.

As part of this silliness I have to leave postit notes in various places reminding me that there is a lunch packed in the fridge, or else I always forget it. Yes, I leave them up all year, only taking them down sometimes when that in fact is not true and there is no food in the house.

Another nice thing about doing all that silly prep the night before is that my brain melts into a puddle of goo at some point in the evening, making actual work impossible, and this way I still get some stuff done. That's why I said "reasonably" ready. I have the syllabus copied and stuff together and the start of a class to do list --- lesson plan? well, it's nowhere near as fleshed out as a lesson plan. whatevs. --- but my brain rebelled when I was planning out the details of the first assignments after "read the syllabus together and yell at them for various stupid stuff they are bound to do anyway." And I'll need to get together more stuff for Tuesday's classes too. Luckily I have time tomorrow morning and will do a whole bunch of prep then while I am fresh and alert.

I feel like I should make resolutions. What sort of resolutions should I make? Am I so perfect I can't find anything to improve about myself, or maybe so damn egotistical I can't see all sorts of obvious things I need to change? Hmm. I have been quite good about keeping my "exercise regularly" and "go have fun with friends more" resolutions. The two cancel each other out at the weight-loss level, though.

If not resolutions, maybe I should be planning my Fall Goals? Hmm. I need to a) finish the article and send it out, b) do all my job market work, and c) do just enough teaching and grading that my classes hold together without giving them more priority than a and b. (Sorry, school --- if you wanted it you should have put a ring on it, or at least extended the postdoc.) I shall have to make a to do list for those items soon, but I can't think straight tonight.

What about everybody else? Does anybody else have any good new resolutions, goals, or funky new things to try? I would love to start a new hobby or some sort of new creative endeavor, but I just won't be able to manage it this semester.

Epigraphically

2011-08-24T20:23:00.000-07:00

Like the swish of the conductor's baton right before the downbeat, or the rumble of bass filling the movie theater just before you are thrown into cinematic battle --- or is it the chewy little amuse-bouche before the meal that makes you say: what the hell is this? I think I might like it? Is it intriguing? Will it go well with the rest of the meal ... or will the meal at least wipe this taste from my mouth?

I am talking, of course, about epigraphs and their function.

Still working on my introduction, and having come up with, if not a title, at least some semi-related keywords that I can plop down at the front of my essay and hope it would come up in a search engine, I turned my attention to the space where the first line needs to go ---- you know, the one that needs to be gripping and brilliant and completely captivate the readers with delight and suspense ---- and I thought to myself, maybe I need an epigraph here first. At least if I take the time to choose someone else's words and arrange them here I would be able to postpone coming up with my own. Or perhaps they set the scene, like the rows of trumpeters who play fanfares and announce the approach of the Douglas Fairbanks-esque hero in all those old-timey movies. With my luck, however, the more apt description is the beginning of Duck Soup when they have all that fancy fanfaring and Groucho Marx comes out and farts on them. On the other hand, I would kinda love an article that did that.

But I digress.

I have looked around here and there and haven't really seen anything in my theory or scholarship or my primary text that jumps out at me and goes yes! This would be a great epigraph! Some of my grad school papers and one article have epigraphs, so maybe it's just that some articles need epigraphs and others don't want them, kinda like how some outfits really need a hat and others just don't.

But then I thought, well, what are epigraphs for, anyway? Maybe I have some sort of function that an epigraph would fulfill for me that I am not aware of!

So I went and googled the point of the epigraph, because clearly I need to digress!

I found this interesting little piece in the New York Times about the current trend of obsessive epigraph-using (epigraphocity?) in contemporary poetry --- yes, it is an old article and I am sorry I am so behind the times on my procrastination and sharing of random interesting things --- and I found all the rationales the author mentions for using lots of epigraphs to be plausible. But then, none of them seem really apt for an academic article. Unless you think we're all trying to show how we've read Marx and Wittgenstein and want to be TS Eliot? (I can't really see Eliot coming out into the ballroom and singing Oh Freedonia and farting and grabbing some lady's bum ---- oh wait, I have successfully created that mental image. That made my day.)

And the real reason I wanted to link to the article was this cool little graphic:

Look, a zipper made of citations! Yes, I think quotes from other people are about all that's holding my essay together right now! Probably not as cute as this little picture though, aww.

So: epigraphs! What functions do they (or should they) serve in scholarly articles? What is the best metaphor you can think of for what an epigraph does? And is it just me, or is "anarchic comedy film" the best description ever for what is happening with all my arguments in this article and why I can't finish it? I think right now it feels more like a performance of "Who's on First" with a few "nyuk"s and an eyeball poke thrown in.

Call Me Ishmael. Call Me Floyd?

2011-08-21T10:57:00.001-07:00

I spent a good chunk of yesterday trying to figure out the opening sentence of my article. Openers are tough, because you want to be attention-grabbing and also clear and informative. Today I wrote up part of an intro and I am going back and forth on whether my opening sentence is grabbing in the right way or not. And then, suddenly, I decided it was time to stop writing. I hope that means I am "stopping on the downhill slope" as Boice or one of those other writing coaching books advises, and not simply stopping because it is hard. I do have a couple pages of writing, though. Oh, that's handwritten, so don't be too impressed --- it will shrink down to a paragraph, maybe, once it is typed up.

So now I am trying to figure out what to do. I kinda want to either go out somewhere or take a nap. But probably I should work on my assignments and finish off the syllabi instead. Eh. Any advice for getting me to do all my work? I want to have everything for school prepped by the end of this week (unless you count Sunday as the previous week, in which case it is "next week") and I also want to rewrite the entire first section of my article by the end of this (next?) week. Clearly a nap is not in my options here, although I had lots of trouble sleeping last night. And that just means that I need to not nap in order to reset my internal clock.

Did I mention that I not only have, but requested, 8 am classes? That'll be a fun one to adjust to. But this way I will have my classes back to back instead of a mid-morning class and a nighttime class, which sounded extra hellish. I'd rather get the teaching over with and then collapse, with the possibility of a nap, than fumble my way through the afternoon in a fog and have to re-energize for an evening appearance. I know from experience that I end up waiting out the clock instead of getting a lot of work done when I am sitting there waiting for the next class to start.

Hmm. Since I'm feeling a bit stir-crazy, I just might drive out to the *$ in the next town and get coffee and work on my class stuff. That would cover a lot of requirements at once.

Am I the most boring blogger in the world? Well, I hope I am the best at something, so I will take what I can get. Remind me to take some more cute cat pictures, at least, and I will have something to post.

Back to the grind

2011-08-20T07:01:00.000-07:00

Hmm. I have coffee, and I am sitting here on the couch, and I do not feel motivated to tackle anything yet. Perhaps that is partly because I got a new yoga dvd, and tried it yesterday. My reaction at first was "wow, I did the whole hour workout! Hmm, it doesn't feel so bad and I do not feel too overwhelmed. Clearly that means it was too easy!" No. Noooooooo no no no. Let me tell you, I am feeling it today. There are aching muscles in my legs in places I didn't know muscles existed.

I have done my comp classes syllabi, and done the Fruit Studies class, and my Stripy syllabus is mostly done except for finalizing some readings and getting accurate page numbers in. All this is good, and it means I can go back to my article Floyd ---- which, I admit, I have been actively procrastinating from. Sigh. I need to finish this and send it out and be able to update my cv! And there is so much work left to do on it! And there will be no time at all once I get going on the semester! No wonder I feel like prepping my assignments and uploading additional readings instead of tackling the Floydster.

Maybe I will read this ILL I ordered as a way of easing myself back into the project gradually. This person wrote the biography on my author and the title suggests that there is a reading of my text in there, but I'm not sure. Don't wanna be scooped or leave holes that the Author scholar type people would instantly notice. (As a side note, this scholar has published 17 things! Nine full-length books! I don't know how old she is, but I am totally impressed and overwhelmed. And it goes to show you that people do not lose their productivity after tenure, but increase it!)

Ugh. My cat Loquito has just hwarked up some foam on my pile of scrap recycle paper. At least it wasn't a pile of teaching materials, I guess. I suppose I need to deal with that next. Ew.

You know what makes everything better?

2011-08-15T14:18:00.000-07:00

This:

Those first few still images have no sound, so do not adjust your set.

The sound quality/singing-in-tune-ness isn't so strong at the beginning, but, it is a great show in terms of energy and silliness. Go watch.

Arrrrgh Party Foul!

2011-08-14T02:06:00.000-07:00

I just got back from a party --- yes, it's 5 in the morning --- and am still seething over a stupid argument I had with a postdoc, one I haven't mentioned much yet. I now officially don't like him: he's confrontational in ways I am not, his deadpan humor does not mesh well with mine, so we are constantly offending each other or having to explain that we are kidding, and he is, as one of the other postdocs says, a bit of a "shit-stirrer." I think I shall call him the Agent Provocateur. I would totally post my question to facebook if it didn't mean I had to block it from the people who are here in Postdoc City.

In the middle of a looping, random discussion of vaguely Marxist leanings, Provocateur said that, when you look at history, fundamental change has never happened and never would. I jumped in immediately and said, "of course things have changed, in lots of fundamental ways. Look at slavery; the US had slavery and now it doesn't." He totally took me to task for this: you can't say that anything fundamental has changed and blacks are any better off now; look at poverty, look at racism, look at all the economic fundamentals.

Well, yes, but --- things did change. We have the 14th Amendment; it was once legal to own another person and now it is not legal. They gained civil rights, they didn't have the right to own anything, to marry, to name themselves or move freely about the countryside. These are huge; they are on the books, they are there in law if not always followed scrupulously on the ground in this country, and they used to not exist.

-You really think black people can live where they want, move where they want, have the money to do anything? Have you seen the south? By now several people are involved in this argument and it has gotten heated and I am the only person on my side.

(And then Provocateur asked about incarceration, and yeah, he has a really good point there if we consider the numbers of black men locked up, but then he also mentioned the spring African American diversity festival, at which there were not white attendees, and I was like, really? You are going to declare segregated --- unofficially segregated --- attendance at a state fair type thing to being forced to work in the cotton fields for 14 hours a day?)

I was also trying to explain how wage slavery --- even in the shitty, dirty, repetitive jobs we have today, like floor-mopping and chicken-gutting --- is just not the same as slave labor, but this change is almost more about advances in technology than social activism and everything was getting muddled.

And despite my repeated shoutings that this was not a light-switch situation where the only options are everything is great vs. nothing has changed, we got to the point where I got called a racist and an apologist for slaveowners ---- and it is interesting that this is the point where the actual southerner was joining in ---- and also I'm not sure how this person went from racism is terrible and endemic to the south today to that means it is worse than under slavery to that means I am apologizing for slavery.

Instead of having an interesting conversation about whether you count change by the top, middle, or bottom members of a social group (meaning: do you measure progress by the lucky and wealthy few, like the fact that we have Obama as president or I have some friends in my grad program who are going off to become professors, the plight of a (still, barely) emerging black middle class, or the most exploited and weak of people from the ghetto or the prison system), it devolved into a shouting match where I was being challenged on my stats for how many black people were lynched during Reconstruction.

And I kept thinking about my grad school friends who are black --- true, it's not a large number! --- and thinking, you have got to be kidding; surely they would not let you claim that black life today is fundamentally no different from that under slavery. And then I thought of my sociology friend: what would he do? Would he punch him in the face? Because I really want to punch him in the face. And finally someone --- a friend of the host, so someone I don't even know --- managed to intervene on my side forcefully enough that the conversation ended, if not really ever resolved. We also went down to crazytown through the whole "comparative oppression" thing where women's progress and gay liberation progress get compared to black progress and since other groups have come so far, so fast in comparison to black rights that this shows there really hasn't been enough movement past slavery, and I wanted to point out how making this argument slides the terms of the debate as well as directly contradicts our first sticking point but also got sidetracked by my point that "women" and "gay" can very well overlap with the category "black" so how well can you compare these experiences really?

Arrrrgh. Also this guy kept weaseling on what he had said and hadn't and even what we were arguing about, which he has done before on less volatile subjects, and this pissed me off.

Okay. Exhaustion has set in. You can weigh in down in the comments. Or simply vote on the face-punching.

Damn, I wish I lived closer to New York!

2011-08-13T15:05:00.000-07:00

The Alexander McQueen exhibit at the Met is closing tomorrow. And I think the collection is being scattered rather than going on tour. Sigh. I often think I don't like high fashion, because it is too weird, and then I see his stuff ---- and a few other select designers ---- and I realize that most runway fashion is not weird enough. He pushed beyond couture into real art.

PS his assistant has replaced him as chief designer and her stuff is good too, as you can see from the fall collection:

The trick of fashion is to follow the old rules and yet say something new and original, to make a connection to all that's been said in the past and still speak to our time. And to say something more than just the-rich-are-always-with-us-and-have-shitloads-of-money. In that way, McQueen reminds me of avant-garde poetry.

Floyd the article and the dilemma of the forest or the trees

2011-08-09T13:38:00.000-07:00

I am so freakin' frustrated right now I am going to procrastinate by ranting here on the blog. Argh! Aroough! Grarrg!

Anyway, to back up a bit, I watched at National Geographic show all about Big Sur last night (which I probably shouldn't do while I am homesick for California, but oh well...) and was struck, once again, by how appropriate my metaphor of Floyd the article really is:

I mean, look at it. It's big, ungainly, and slow ---- slow to grow up, slow to reproduce, and have I mentioned kinda stupid? --- but also kinda awesome and amazing in its own ugly way. And endangered, because it keeps flying into power lines and crash landing when learning to fly. (As do the red-tailed hawks we heard about on the program, but they lay more eggs and lay them more often.) And currently the released condors fly right by naturally-existing carrion because they still rely so heavily on caretaking from human scientists. I mean, if that's not a great metaphor for me and my writing, what is?

Check that out. Don't you just want Floyd to finally be able to spread his wings and fly? That's so cool. And he has tags and a GPS! Because that is just how we roll in a state so up on our technology, even the birds have techno-bling. Either that or I need to make a crack about navigating all the damn freeways.

But, ok. I have a very long draft. I also just read over my main section and it's just --- a bunch of paragraphs. I think I have been so busy writing paragraphs --- or actually, motivating myself to get past stuck spots in the article by allowing myself to have tunnel vision and just focus on fixing one sentence or integrating one critic --- that I haven't been able to create a coherent throughline or direction from one end of the section to another. It's a mess and I don't know what to do with it. There are paragraphs that I no longer know why they are here, paragraphs with the topic sentence buried in the middle (ok, easily fixable), paragraphs that I have this vague dissatisfied feeling of "that doesn't belong there" but I don't know where it does go, and one of my main argument terms drops out halfway through the section because a lot of the examples I use don't really technically consist of the main term I am arguing about.

That is to say nothing of the paragraphs that go on and on at length explicating every single instance of my pattern (like the repetition of the color green, for example) because the language is just so pretty. Sigh. I know I need to be ruthless about that, but it kills me.

There is just so much wrong with this section --- and I'm not even looking at the whole article at the moment --- that I don't really know what to do. I'm overwhelmed. Where do I start? I think I need to go back through it and ask, after every sentence and paragraph, the dreaded teacher question, "so what?"

I went through and reverse outlined it, then I went through and wrote out keywords next to each paragraph, and I still don't really know what to do. I still can't even really articulate what is going wrong in some places, much less how to fix it. It's just a bunch of discrete paragraphs instead of an arrow shooting through the heart of an argument and dragging the reader after. Hmh.

I'm so tempted to just procrastinate more and go fix some word choice and citation problems, since I know how to fix those things, but that's just going back to fixing individual trees when the problem is there's no path through the forest. Have I used up my entire allotment of metaphors yet? This blog might explode from an overload of metaphors. Anyway.

You know, I hope the academy has room for people like me in its ecosystem --- that it hasn't become so competitive only one type of scholar, the fast-writing quick-thinking least-publishable -unit scholar, can get a job and tenure. Because I think there is value in a diversity of approaches, of methodologies, of writing styles, in the academy, even though I can't really justify why at the moment. Just like when people ask, why do we need even condors when turkey buzzards fill the same niche? I dunno. We just do. Something is impoverished when we're all the same. Even if some of us have an unfortunate tendency to eat tractor parts and fly into power lines.

Checking out the new comp reader, of course, makes me question everything about my comp knowledge

2011-08-05T12:30:00.000-07:00

The new reader has a lot going for it that the old reader did not ---- most importantly, two intro chapters that lay out the writing process and the argument process. The readings themselves, are, of course, a mixed bag.

But first --- have any of you read Edward T Hall, "The Arab World"? I am suspicious. It is an interesting comparison of how "Arabs" and "Westerners" think of their bodies and use public space, but ... something about how it is written makes me think that my students would all read it and go, oh, how weird the Arabs are and we are totally justified in killing them.

Actually, quite a lot of the articles in the last reader reinforced my students' worst assumptions rather than making them question them, and I hate having to really push against that myself. This is why I like having a range of arguments on a very focused topic. The last reader, for example, had a lone article about why unions suck and libertarianism is good without any hey-unions-are-good counterargument articles. This one annoys me because it has a short piece about teen mothers that argues how useless it is to try to educate impulsive young people about contraceptives and no article about why contraceptives and sex ed are good to pair it against. And one "suggested writing" prompt elsewhere that asks students to make an argument against abortion. Hey, editorial committee: fuck you!

While it might not be great on the pro-choice angle, it has surprisingly liberal readings about the wars we have going on in the Middle East, terrorism, Abu Ghraib scandal, etc. A lot of which are so clearly holding a left position that I don't really feel comfortable teaching them. Like I said, if I had a chapter labeled "arguments about the Iraq/Afghanistan/etc. war here" and I could teach students to pick apart a range of analyses and prescriptions for the future, I'd be happier.

Instead, the chapters are loosely grouped by "disciplines," but not really. For example, most of the readings in the "society and world culture" chapter are not sociology or anthropology, but, once again, personal memoirs. Damn you editorial committees! Annie Dillard is, indeed, a great writer, but she does not ever make an explicit thesis or use any textual evidence ---- she is a subtle and complex model and not at all a model of good social science writing. And in all honesty, a nice clear social science article with a hypothesis and methods section is soooo much easier for inexperienced students to analyze for structure and argument. So once again I will be trying to teach academic essays when the models in the book are largely people walking around in the forest and thinking about things and then writing about it, which my students all think they can already do and then don't understand why they are not allowed to just ramble about whatever friggin crosses their mind at any moment. Argh.

Luckily there are more articles that I can point to as having a thesis and making an argument than there were in the last one. But I am still kinda stumped on how to do "sequences," if not my topic approach. Was no one else taught to teach essay sequences? Am I doing something wrong and backward? Do you just assign 10 or so completely unrelated essays and have students make up arguments in response to one or none of them? (This is not what we actually do when we write in the disciplines, I will point out.)

I also notice that the questions/prompts/writing suggestions at the end of the articles and chapters mostly ask students to respond to one text at most or none at all, which confuses me. Especially when the prompt asks for a full-on official essay of three or four pages "analyzing" a reading that was itself only two pages. How are they supposed to keep that up for so long, I wonder. It's not like it's a Shakespearean sonnet; it's an NYT article on cyberbullying. I mean, there's not that much there really to close read! A lot of the other prompts ask students to read and respond to one text or maybe at most compare and contrast a couple. Which I guess means you can assign whatever readings you want and then have students pick one to analyze for that "sequence," but then I don't see how it is a sequence. And it doesn't help them practice the idea of joining an academic conversation.

I mean, you're studying Bleak House or American dating practices or public protests in Cairo or whatever, the first thing you do is go read what a whole bunch of other experts say about your topic. Then you synthesize these all together, explain how you agree or disagree with these arguments, and present your own take on the issue, which may involve collecting data, or may involve thinking about something really hard and coming up with a new interpretation. You don't usually read some lit crit on Dickens and then a bunch of content analysis about The Bachelor and stats on American teenagers and an ethnography of Egyptian protest movements --- or if you do, you're making some really complex arguments to justify tying them all together. And I imagine some really heavy-duty theory too. So why don't we have comp anthologies built up this way?

I suppose that by combing back through all these chapters once again I can get some more focused topics, but then I am confused about what the students should be doing with the articles. So it would be more like that lit article on how Dickens uses the conventions of melodrama, a history bit about the Irish Famine, The Communist Manifesto, and an overview of how Darwin's discoveries prompted a crisis in late-Victorian religious thinking. So, ok: we have a more focused time and place for our articles, but they are all from wildly divergent disciplines and don't really talk "to" each other in any direct way. (I think my students are not the strongest academically and need a lot of guidance to make obvious connections like "The Internet: Good or Bad" with "Why Facebook is Beneficial.") I don't think they could do much with my imaginary articles. Unless there is some way to structure an essay prompt that could get them there? Do you have the magic answer?

I can see pairings in the essays but nothing in terms of larger "clusters" that get at the same topic and argument areas. And I don't want to only teach comparison-contrast level essays. Stumped stumped stumped. I will continue to ponder this, and hope that my comp orientation will somehow resolve how I should structure essay sequences and prompts. I would rather knock this all out now than later, but, eh.

Restocking

2011-08-04T18:15:00.000-07:00

So I went out and got food and cat food and toilet paper and all sorts of the stuff you need to stock up on when getting ready to start back in to the new school year craziness, and got totally derailed when I walked past the clothes section of Target. They have a lot of cute new dresses out if you are interested! Of course, I already stocked up on cute dresses over the spring and summer and really shouldn't be continuing with more, sigh. And I already had a bunch of skirts, but they had cute skirts too, like a lovely gray pencil skirt that looked great on the hanger, but, alas, did not work well on my short frame. (Mid-calf skirts are not my friend.)

I did, however, cave and get a cute tan colored a-line skirt and pair of shorts. There were also a bunch of really funky patterned cardigans that I thought would look nice with the fairly plain dresses and skirts I already own --- or they will once it's not four million degrees outside.

I know I need to not spend all my money, but I am so tempted to go back and get these dresses. Luckily if I'm all stocked up on everything I won't need to go out and be tempted by the stores. Of course, there is always the internet. Damn internet! You temptress!

I know, I know ---- think of the million extra books I could read every year if I just didn't spend all that time window shopping on the internet. And I haven't even done the deep cleaning the place needs after having been away for so long. But I haven't been back for those shoes I wanted! Can't I get the shoes, pretty please? Sigh.

What are other people buying to spruce up their teaching wardrobes?

The new definition of "sisyphean"

2011-08-04T09:54:00.000-07:00

Le sigh.

The General August List

2011-07-30T17:09:00.000-07:00

(or is that the August General List? Heh heh heh!)

- return to Postdoc Town and resituate (will have a sublist for this)
- finish teaching summer class (mid-month)
- finish a complete clean draft of article and show to Dr. Does Everything
- massive class prep:

update Fruit and Stripey class
revamp comp class completely due to new textbook

- update job materials yet again (will have a sublist for this)
- attend a party
- throw my own party, long promised
- orientation stuff (which might involve some parties, but nothing as rockin' as postdoc parties)

Anything else? Hmm.

- continue regular exercise
- avoid going crazy

Damn. That is a massive list.

And there went my brain again

2011-07-28T14:30:00.001-07:00

Ok, my brain officially melted, so I am taking a moment or two to socialize on the internets instead. I did pretty well working today --- almost three hours this morning and a couple hours this afternoon --- so I am ok with acknowledging that my brain is now currently speaking the equivalent of Smurf, where where "smurf" and "smurfy" get replaced by "things" and "interesting." It's kinda pointless to write a paragraph when the only analysis you can squeeze out of your brainmelt is that the passage is "interesting," no?

I'm not sure whether being depressed about my article was about my article or me getting fed up with staying at my parents' any longer, but I actually felt better when I wrote about it longhand. I also switched to writing longhand when I went back to peek fearfully at the article, so I think there is something important here about me needing to not be on the computer all the time, especially when doing a lot of activities that can be procrastinated on the internet. Teaching online was ok for getting me back to visit, but otherwise it's really not a good fit for me.

I realized that what I like about teaching is having a rigid schedule (yes, really!) that makes me dress up and get out of the house and then lets me interact with students in a classroom setting. Although I find classrooms and the whole speaking to students thing anxiety producing as well. But online teaching divorces you from any of that aspect and just has you evaluating their prose, which really holds no interest for me. So I would think long and hard before taking on a job like this again. Speaking of which, I get their next essays tomorrow and should really grade this past set of essays before then. Hmm, avoiding grading also helped my mood a lot.

Going back to my article, however, was also a big horrible shock. I read it all in one sitting from the beginning and realized that lots of it was crap. Ok, I knew that lots of it was still bolded or had four paragraphs from four different critical articles dumped into one spot still to deal with; that's fine. What I was shocked and horrified to discover was how crappy some of the "better" parts were. Like, why is this paragraph there? As in, in the article at all? My article is about how the aesthetics of nose-picking were influenced by legal treatises, let's say. Does this paragraph mention nose-picking? No. Legal treatises? Aesthetics? Anything related to my topic? WTF was I thinking??? Dammit!

Also, while I was throwing in tons of quotes in the close reading section, I was so totally in love with how great this text was that I had to quote eeeeverything even though no critical articles quote it so extensively. And rereading it after a break from it made it painfully clear how much this was overkill. ("And now I want to point out example number 212 of nose-picking in this text. Look at the delicacy and humor of this 212th example...") Ugh.

So I was disheartened and depressed and feeling like I was totally unable to produce any new or interesting work anymore and they were all right when I didn't get any job offers because clearly I can't hack it any where above a McDonalds' position. And I still think that about the article; my way of dealing with all these problems I found was to repress and ignore them. I still have plenty of places with bolded sections and "incorporate these two critics here after you find them" quotes, so I filled a few patches yesterday and I filled another couple patches today and I feel like I have made slight progress although really I have so many more of those pages left to do. Tunnel vision: a necessary academic survival skill! Although I don't know how I will feel when it is finally time to fix all the problems that my tunnel vision has introduced. Eh; deal with it later.

I had been depressed that I have a longing to go back to Postdoc City even though there is absolutely shit to do there and all my friends and family are out here, but managed to turn that around by reminding myself of what I really miss about CA. So I am sitting out in my backyard, writing and typing, after having spent the morning writing at a nice coffee place. I had been working indoors by the tv, but hey, I can do that back in Postdoc City! What I realize I really miss from here is working someplace, like my backyard, where it is so easy to move outside and inside. I can go inside for the bathroom, another book, snack, or just to stretch my legs and don't have to worry about packing up and watching over my laptop and everything I own. Ahhhhhhh!

I didn't even really have this at GradSchoolLand, since I won't leave my laptop and stuff unattended at a Peets or whatnot. It makes staying in the work zone a bit easier if you don't have to look at every bathroom break or move from the shade to the sun to back as a major trip that requires all your stuff. And I have no worries of mosquitoes! There are bees dancing all over the grass. They don't interfere with me, though.

I am a little bummed still that I hardly went anywhere or saw anyone this trip, but I don't have the money to rent a car and go visit GradSchoolLand and Friends, and all of my friends here near my folks are working full time, as is everyone in my family. Even my little nieces and nephews have jobs or summerschool. Which lets you know how "little" they are, eh? It makes me both want to and not want to move back here. Though I would love to have access to this backyard! But then I'd have too much access to my parents. Maybe I could build a shed back here and live in it. That way I could have both a beautiful yard and some privacy.

Sliminess of a more delicious sort

2011-07-26T13:54:00.000-07:00

Ok, I have done all the grading required of myself today, and I finished it around noon! (Then I took some time off to lie around digesting while I looked at timewasters on the internet.) I should go work on my article or find something more interesting, recreation-wise, than sitting around on the couch with my computer.

Does anyone else here get those silly upscale catalogs? I kinda love them. Mom is on every catalog list known to mankind and she keeps them in a big stack by the fireplace. It's especially great cause everybody comes over and flips through them and orders last minute Christmas gifts (hence mom being on all the lists.) And they are often hilarious and entertaining.

Now, Williams-Sonoma. I admit I love looking at their catalog and pressing my nose up against the store window. If I had money, I would totally invest in some of their gourmet, high-quality knives. And their pots and pans are shiny. I like looking at their beautiful copper pans. I have no desire to cook in or polish copper pans, just to look at their pretty layout in the catalog. And to imagine I have a clifftop home with huge garden and kitchen full of copperware and somebody who actually gives a damn about polishing to do it for me.

But their latest catalog is all kinds of silly. Seriously, WS, are you planning on contributing to the obesity epidemic? Or to get people on to Hoarders? 'Cause I can't imagine people needing a gourmet popsicle maker and ice cream maker, bbq smoker that roasts an entire animal at once, home poptart/pastry baker or most of the other stuff you are pushing in the summer catalog. Unlike, say, a bowl, these all have very limited uses and take up a lot of space. And you could just buy the food --- unless you're going to roast a pig every couple days or make your own breakfast pastries or minidonuts every day, having your own equipment for it seems like overkill (and if you are making this kind of food everyday, and you aren't selling it at your restaurant, you are going to have some major health problems).

Likewise, I have always thought their highly-expensive-gourmet food was also kinda silly and overkill. Surely you have a place in town you can stop by and pick up good olive oil and sides of meat?

However.

I just saw this.

Wait, you can make savory jams? Carmelized onions and balsamic vinegar? How interesting! I can think of a lot of sandwiches this would be good on. Or roast chicken. I wonder if this would be good as a topping on lentils with greens?

I think I'm going to need to go and research if there are onion jam recipes out there. Do you think it would be hard to make? Would I have to actually learn how to can, considering it's a preserve? I know nothing about canning jars and all that stuff and am overly freaked out about botulism.

If the time/difficulty ratio of making onion jam turns out to be too much (I am pretty impatient with chopping), the jar is only 9 bucks. On the one hand, 9 bucks for a jar of jam? On the other hand, oh my god I really need to taste this stuff. Onions!!!!!! Sweet, slimy, mushy caramelized onions!!!!! And balsamic vinegar. Yum.

Work, Slack, Slump, Recover (I hope), Slime!

2011-07-25T14:48:00.000-07:00

All right. I hope that I will miraculously break back into productivity in a minute or two, but while I wait for something to change (maybe for lunch to be digested?) I will post here.

My list of accomplishments so far (no laughing at the pitifulness of the list):

yoga
wrote and uploaded final ss assignment
tracked down and graded and uploaded little pile of straggler assignments
checked school email (I had one angry "why did I fail back in spring?" email that I saw Saturday and was avoiding with dread. Answered it and all the other anxiety-producing angry summer session emails)
went out to lunch with dad
survived his terrible driving on the way home
graded reading assignment 6

The good news is that all of the instructions and assignments for the rest of the session are now posted. (The bad news is that all that is left is grading.)

What I have left to do:

~~grade assignment 7~~
grade assignment 8
grade essays
continue revising my essay
~~randomly: I have a skirt I wanted to fix the waistband of. I could do that in between all the computer staring time.~~
~~laundry? (maybe.)~~

I could write a post all about dad's health and bad driving, but would rather be slightly entertaining instead. And so I ask you: what is worse for you to encounter, scaly things or slimy things? I must clearly come down on the slimy side of things, as lizards are cute! And snakes, as long as they are not rattling at me and rearing to strike, don't bother me. But slugs, snails, slimy centipedes, or any other gooey things ----- ehweheheheheehehewh! (like "aaaaaaaaaaah," but with shuddering.)

What's your heebie-jeebie? Slimy or scaly? Take the poll!

Or tell me stories about the worst thing you found in your house/car/camping tent/boot.

Bored.

2011-07-24T14:46:00.001-07:00

It must be time to go somewhere! Because I am bored of here.

Not that the idea of leaving the beautiful weather of California for the extreme hotness of Postdoc City and Practically Everywhere Else sounds like a good idea, but I am feeling bored and unwilling to do much of anything. Surely, I think, with my perennial case of Grass-Is-Greener-Wherever-I'm-Not, I would be able to do amazing amounts of research and get all caught up on my grading without any complaining if I was Somewhere Else! And my parents and their lifestyle at almost 80 are getting on my nerves. They are irritating me, but we haven't been exploding into any particularly bad fights this time around. I feel sorta like I'm under house arrest, but there isn't particularly anywhere I'd want to go, or have any money to spend while I'm there.

What I need is some way to refresh and rejuvenate all my summer goals, from health to research. I have managed to drop to one pound below my standard (too high) weight, and stopped. I think I would need to make some more major changes in terms of exercise to get anything more here. Mom and dad have finally put lots of fresh fruit in their diet, but we still eat very midwestern Better Living Through Chemistry. Like WonderBread and Velveeta and Minute Rice and Steak-umms on rolls. (Today we fried generic bologna slices and ate them on WonderBread with mustard. This was my favorite lunch growing up.) My mom hates cooking and came of age in the middle of the worst of 50s foods. Growing up, we'd eat this and maybe have a frozen or canned vegetable on the side, but mostly not. So the healthiness has improved a bit, until you look at the number of processed things we eat with HFCS as the second ingredient. I am taking walks, but it's hard to eat small enough portions to drop the weight. On the other hand, I have been good with my yoga exercise and might have done it regularly enough to make the habit stick!

Is this post too boring? I am afraid it might be too boring. Maybe pictures will help.

Here is a picture of fried bologna. Don't listen to the recipes on the internet that say you should add something healthy like a slice of tomato or onion! Real families only eat cheap meat and reprocessed bread, saving money so that they will be able to afford all sorts of pills to clean out their colons and allow them to digest food later in life. Don't mind me; I know I have issues with my family and food and class.

Anyway, where was I? Ah yes, rejuvination. I have not looked at my article since a week ago Thursday. I fear I have officially passed to the point where I do not remember where I'm at and feel guilty and try to avoid the article. Uh-oh. I must get back to it! I need to finish it and send it out before school starts! My deadline I set for myself is August 19!

Nope, that's not working. I still don't want to look at it. If anyone has any suggestions for how to make oneself look at an article again, to get oneself back in the groove, I'm all ears.

Here, have a picture.

Mom makes this too: apple raisin salad. But where the online recipes actually have ingredients, like sour cream or spices, she just thins the Miracle Whip with some milk and dumps it on the apples and raisins. Also, no celery ---- probably because that actually takes time to slice.

Well, if I can't energize myself into working on the article, I should at least do lots of my grading. Ha hah hah. Do you see me grading? Actually, I did grade one set of stuff and upload one instruction sheet yesterday, so if I do the same today, I'll be fairly caught up. Sigh. I'd rather eat my mom's food.

In other news, I thought for an instant about the fact that in August I will need to gear up for the market yet again, including figuring out when to pester my committee to actually update my letters, and I just about started to cry. It's too much to do! I really don't want to face teaching four classes again and updating and sending out all those damn job applications and continue plodding away on my research! Ugh, it is so upsetting I'm going to repress the thought entirely and put it out of my mind. Vooot! Gone.

The recipes for serving canned sauerkraut also confuse me, because they added ingredients! And stuff like salt and pepper! Don't you just dump the can into a saucepan and heat it for a few minutes? And where are the instant mashed potatoes? This plate is missing one third of dinner!

Anyways, if you have any advice for getting me off my butt and doing what I need to do, let me know. Until next time, I leave you with a video my niece told me about, and probably the only thing my family can think of to do with vegetables:

Refruiting

2011-07-22T16:09:00.000-07:00

I have spent a pleasant afternoon doing what I absolutely should not be doing at this moment, which is planning Fall's Intro to Fruit Studies class. It is the same course as from Spring, but now I know how to teach it. At least more than I did. So I am avoiding getting ahead on my current class grading* by instead contemplating the many things I hated about the Fruit Studies course setup.

Now, the Fruit Studies People had no requirements (or even, guidelines) about how to teach Intro to Fruit Studies except that the students had to know this list of Important Figures in the Discipline; they have to take an exit test when they graduate if this is their major. My fellow postdoc who also taught Fruit Studies (both semesters while I only did Spring) decided to have students to class presentations and they each picked a figure and reported on his/her life and contributions. So I blocked out a week on my syllabus to have us do the same, and really hated it. My students, even more so than in my comp class, just aren't prepared for college or really know what it should be like, and I got really terrible presentations --- they ranged from completely incoherent and wrong to merely dull and stultifying. I told them they had to do something more interesting than powerpoint presentations and I wanted them to be imaginative and creative, and they all did bad powerpoint presentations instead. Having them fumble with the room technology and the powerpoint technology slowed us down and killed any momentum, and a lot of them couldn't ever get the PP program to work.

Maybe, just maybe, you could say this is an important skill for them to learn, as is public speaking, (they are a very insecure/shy and passive bunch, who don't know the ins and outs of being a good student or public figure) and I should accept that prepping them/grading them on doing good powerpoint presentations would be a good assignment. But the students themselves looked so bored, dozing off in each others' presentations, and one senior guy (not a FS major) even mouthed off about how boring and what a waste of time the week was for him. I didn't appreciate the rudeness or the attitude, but that was basically my experience of that week of presentations.

The other total clusterfuck was that I believed all the people who say "Fruit Studies is so interdisciplinary and collaborative! We should always have a student-centered pedagogy in our classes!" Bleah. I put in a "student facilitator" system where a different student would be on the spot to help lead the discussion or bring in some sort of interesting related material, and that totally bombed. Remember how I was complaining how none of my facilitators were showing up on the day they were supposed to go? Yeah that was all FS students. When they did show up, their "facilitation" was either to stand behind the podium and read off a summary of the readings from a powerpoint slide in a monotone, or something even worse that they hadn't really thought through --- like the person who brought in a 3-hour movie for a 1 hr 15 minute class and ate up my entire time. Even when they did show up their stuff usually conflicted with whatever I had planned, even though I warned them again and again to let me know their plans ahead of time.

So since they don't know how to facilitate a class or even participate effectively in one, and since I'm a total control freak in class and not knowing what my lesson plan is until after I walk into the room totally gets me all worked up, I'm dropping that aspect from the class. I'll revamp the discussion grade and really push for them to present their findings from the small groups. I can still have it be "engaging" by me finding interesting current event articles and working up a bunch of questions/problems they have to solve, since I actually try to think about the desired learning outcome.

My fellow postdoc was so angry and frustrated that entire first semester because the students just wouldn't talk and wouldn't read/bring their books that zie rewrote the syllabus to have reading comprehension questions and/or a quiz (announced in the syllabus) due every class session. I did not ---- mainly because I thought the questions in the book weren't very good but I didn't have time to make new ones ---- and I had mostly the same experience. So I am following Fellow Postdoc's footsteps and instituting regular homework and quizzes in addition to all the little assignments (5, a film analysis paper and a take-home final) I had before. I'm not sure where it all fits in the syllabus yet, and I haven't figured out how I am replacing the Famous Figures of FS presentation ---- add another paper? some sort of class wiki or online thing? Hmm.

Oh, and I still haven't added anything about Fruits and Finance! (remember me discussing some sort of "take charge of your life/responsibility/think bigger/don't be so passive" activity I wanted to teach these students? I can't find the post. But I still want to, I just don't know what that activity would be.)

And will going to constant little assignments/quizzes totally kill me in terms of workload? Would you? (Would you drop/rearrange/consolidate the larger assignments?) Would you actually read/grade them all or just hold on to them? Or just check/plus/minus them? (I admit that I hardly ever read the comp classes' in class paragraphs I was having them do every day. Oops. Mea culpa or something.)

So, to wrap up, in shorter form:

Presentations on Important Figures sucked. What would be a better alternative assignment, since the department requires I cover these figures in some way?
Setting up reading homework/quizzes for every class session: Good idea or madness and overwork? Is that madness and overwork for me or the students and does it matter?
How might you teach/set up a project/activity thingy to have your students be more ambitious and assertive about their own lives and life goals, whether financially, career, or something else? (In the comments to the post I can't find, we discussed the book Your Money or Your Life, which I agree opens up interesting discussions about why we work, and I want to do something with it/related to it.
Anything else you'd want to suggest? What's your favorite fruit?

*Oh, like you grade an assignment the day it comes in!

Internet Shopping and Bad TV

2011-07-21T22:30:00.000-07:00

Hello. I'm indulging. I watched Glee tonight, despite not being too into it, simply because it's a show on tv in the evenings that isn't Law and Freakin Order. Glee's growing on me. I don't like what I call "identity work" shows, where flat and unbelievable characters serve as viewers' fantasy identifications: is this who I am? is this who I am? is this who I am? Pffft. Soap operas and teen shows, usually. And any shows that have a glamorous career that is never covered in favor of the banal doubts of the main character. And Glee totally has that, along with silly conflict and completely unrealistic levels of perfection. But it also has some pretty snappy dialogue when it puts its mind to it.

Likewise, I have been watching Suits, since it is one of the few shows I actually caught the pilot for, and I tend to hate jumping in to a series in the middle of a season. Unfortunately, it is rapidly going downhill. I knew the show was going to be formulaic, like all other shows that have to wrap up and achieve closure in just one hour, but it had some snappy dialogue and I liked the combative legal stuff (also snappy) ---- it felt like I was learning a smidgen of what practicing law is really like, that sense of it being like a combination of a game of chicken and a chess game where you have to think six steps down the line on your opponent. But, really it only has that at small moments, and most of the rest of the time I can predict what is about to happen because of 1) how much time is left in the show and 2) the rule of the Columbo Rule (you have to introduce a suspect or solution to the viewer rather than bring in someone completely random and new). And the side plot of trouble-with-gangsters is moving into pure silliness. Plus, it bugged me since the beginning that the two main dude characters weren't visually distinguished enough. Mirrors, foils, ok, I get it.

I will probably continue to watch, though, since it's on and I actually remember when it comes on in the tv schedule. I guess I'll keep it in rotation with Psych, which is basically the same type of show, except with more silly punchlines.

And to occupy the rest of my brain, since I am not invested enough in either show to not multitask, I am clicking around the internet, thinking about shoes. Know what? I did a shoe post, probably last fall? where I said there were a whole bunch of really cute, colorful, patent leather shoes out, and I totally should have just bought them all, because my entire Zappos favorites list is now discontinued. I can see all these pics of gorgeous reds and teals and blues and purples and aquas but they are nowhere for order. Sigh. And I am just not excited by the new releases on Zappos right now.

This, however, was not on zappos, and it is somewhat of a possibility:

As is this, which unfortunately is not as cute as the bronze ballet flats I had saved and should have bought with the chance (sob):

And this shoe is so cute, I love this color, but I opened up all my dress pictures to see what colors I need to go with them and I can't see it working with them. Alas.

Part of my dressing dilemma, as I believe I have said before, is that I buy whatever pieces look prettiest and then I have trouble making some things into a full outfit. Bright orange ballet flats go fine with jeans, but not any of my dresses, and I need to make sure I have stuff that works with the dresses. I have plenty of boots and plenty of funky colored shoes, and I may need to get me some basic brown and black dressy shoes so that I always can wear my dresses when I teach. (I'm thinking ahead to fall, here.) But none of the basic neutral shoes available have cute detailing on them like last year!!!! Argh. I know I was working on paying down my debt and saving my money, but there really is truth to the maxim that if you really love something in the store you have to get it right then. Or be prepared to face the consequences.

Teaching Update: Arrrrgh!

2011-07-19T10:32:00.001-07:00

Why, oh why did I decide to take a summer class? You're cramping my style, yo! And why on earth did I run amok across the state (or the subsection I live in, anyway) that first weekend instead of grading, grading, grading? Well, that is a silly question, for I hate grading and love procrastinating. And yet, this means I have grading, grading, grading to catch up on plus MORE grading that will come in this week! And I am so buried. Gah.

Ok, I will bargain with myself. I ~~must~~ MUST blast through Reading Assignment #2, week 1, right away and without stopping. Then I can take a break and gird my loins a bit before throwing myself in to anything as anxiety-producing as Essay 1 or, god help me, my work email inbox. Ok, "gird my loins" sounds a bit obscene; not what I was going for. Nerve myself up? Stiffen my upper lip? Sheesh, they're all pretty terrible. Well, whichever it is, I must go suffer through a pack of assignments! Go Go Go Go Goooooooo!

I'll be back with my updates. Expect plenty of boring blogging in the near future. Nothing so exciting as loin-girding. ;)

OK, Update: I have completed Assignment #2, #3, and half of #4 and I promise to finish #4 and upload them all tonight. I have also responded to all the festering emails in the inbox and emailed all the students who have some missing assignments, so that is ahead of my to do list minimum. Tomorrow I will do a session of yoga and then grade all the Essay 1s. Or maybe I will squeeze in a session on the article draft first? It has been ages since I really grappled with it. Hmm.

Procrastinating.

2011-07-14T20:19:00.000-07:00

Sigh. This summer class is going to be like a lead weight around my neck for the whole session, isn't it? I spend the whole day feeling bad, that I should be working on grading and finishing the prep for that last week of class, and I don't do it. And, really, course work is never really "done," during a session, so even if I do work on it, this leaves me making myself feel bad about not working "enough" or not being "done" for the whole damn duration. Hmm. I don't know if I can make myself not feel that, considering how long this pattern has existed. On the other hand, I want to work on my procrastination patterns and get into the habit of just doing the grading right away, and that's a long-standing pattern as well. On the other other hand, maybe the idea of changing long-term procrastination habits is just as futile as changing how I have feelings of guilt and dread around grading.

I dunno. What do you think? That I've been watching too many tv shows with pop-psychology and I am psychologizing myself in silly ways? You are probably right.

In other news, I am still feeling stuck and confused about my article. Today I read (reread, actually) a historian on that topic and thought about things. Yesterday night I called my sister and lobbed ideas at her head for a long time. It felt good. I used to do this all the time, with writing projects or my dissertation or love life problems or (even more frequent) roommate problems, and my sis is great at being supportive and asking questions that then help me rethink the situation. I didn't figure out my quandary yet, but I told her my main idea for the article and she said, "cooooooool." Which, yeah, that could be her blindly being supportive, but whatever, it made me feel good, which is important when I'm feeling stuck and slow and like I will never finish my summer to do list.

Just like I have made mixed progress on the research and teaching front, I have done ok, but not consistently well, with diet and exercise (I am going to actually bore my readers to death, aren't I? Oh well.). I have done some nice walks and hikes and yoga (still on the to-do list: go to the beach!) but I have also skipped plenty of days. And I am watching portion sizes and eating less ---- the conference weight I gained is gone, but I am still at the very top of my acceptable usualy school year weight range ---- but I am eating total processed crap. Seriously. My parents eat processed Wonder Bread, Velveeta, Minute Rice, Steak-Ums ---- any oversalted crap with high fructose corn syrup as the top ingredient. I guess that's ok since I eat lots of fresh stuff and beans and rice that I cook up myself when I'm at home. And beer. We'll pretend that if it's local, craft beer it's good for you. I had wanted to miraculously lose tons of weight this summer, and it is going down by a little, but, again, I am frustrated.

Furthermore, while I am complaining ---- oh yeah, I should rant about how my parents are driving me crazy, except I just finally put it all out of my mind in a state of zen-like forgetfulness ---- it seems like everybody has left blogland for the summer, and nobody is posting! Post interesting stuff, everybody! Lots of it, since I check the internet obsessively whenever I am attempting to force myself to do class prep/grading! Grumble, grumble.

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Ok, I am watching those "I'm buying a house" shows and am, as usual, completely confused by these single professionals without family/kids and the size of the houses they are always looking at. Don't they think about how hard it's going to be to furnish and fill a huge house? To clean it? There's this obnoxious chick --- ok, I know I have been singing the praises of California, but yes, Californians are obnoxious and this chick who is moving from San Francisco to Austin just so she can afford a house is one of the most annoying, self-centered, ohmigaaaawwwd! Californians ever --- but she is buying a house with like 3 bedrooms and a living room and a dining room and an informal living room (den?) and an upstairs bonus room and I'm like, WTF, lady? You are going to have three floors and be the only person in here? You can be only on one floor at once! I just do not understand. On the other hand, I hate Criminal Intent and NCIS and that's all that is on in the evenings, so I watch these shows and yell at them for exercise. I am strange.

Any interesting procrastinating I should be doing? Point me to some silly websites. Alternately, you can fix my article.

Shit. Shit shit shit.

2011-07-12T17:14:00.000-07:00

I'm working on my article, as I have been, bit by bit, and finally decide to google a term that appears and I think I know but really, am just assuming I know.

Shit. There are whole fucking pages about this term and this time and it is clearly a contemporary culture allusion/parody ---- an allusion that none of the criticism on this author has bothered to cite before. Thanks, lit people who only study literature from a strict literary standpoint! There's a whole flock of historians who could add more depth to our understanding of this literary text if we'd only read other disciplines' works! Mother. Fucker.

I don't know if this means the lit critics knew all this and just didn't think it was interesting enough to write an article spelling out all the allusions here, or if this is important new ground that should be brought up. Crap. I have to think about this a lot. Not only is this not the article I wanted to write, but it means what I was trying to conclude at the end of my article might be wrong. Crap. And that person who I just wrote a paragraph disagreeing with is wrong in terms of which genre of pop culture the text is alluding to, but in the general picture, more right. Crap crap crap.

And yes, this is a big aspect of the story. As in, if you knew the allusion it is clear that we are supposed to take the death of a major character as funny. Not tragic as everyone has read it.

Sigh. Re-tooling? Scrapping and restarting? Writing the article that needs to be written in light of this discovery but is not at all my article draft here? Pretending I never saw it? Argh.

Let that be a lesson to you --- never Google. Only search and read the big critics you already know you are supposed to read. And don't ever admit your historical ignorance and try to research to rectify the situation.

In California, we hike with lattes in our hands

2011-07-12T10:48:00.000-07:00

Damn, why did I not bring a latte with me on the hike? That would have been soooo satisfying! That and a lab on a leash and I'd have fit right in with the crowd!

So I have finally been hiking! This was tougher than I had expected because I don't like to hike alone (mountain lions, you know. And/or Congressmen.) and everyone back here seems to have a regular job. Even my nieces and nephews are doing the summer-job thing, with varying success. Sigh. I will complain about that later.

But I finally managed to get one of my nieces to go hiking! Yay! It was especially odd because she hates the outdoors and hiking in general, and I had to entice her with the promise of a fairly flat and partially paved, easy-to-navigate trail. It turns out that she has a lot of applying-to-school and job prep to do, which has been keeping her trapped in her little studio apartment, and no money, so she was much more amenable to the thought of getting out of the house and seeing something different for free. And I spent the entire day with her chatting, not even getting caught up on big newsy stuff, just getting to know her better, which was also awesome. I think I need to nag the others into going hiking with me one-on-one as well, so I can hear about their lives without parents on the listen nearby. Plus, my nephew is preparing to be an Eagle Scout and has just come back from camping with the troop, so if there is anyone who should be interested in a hike, it's him.

Anyways, I should describe the hike. I should first point out that I hate palm trees. They're so overdone, you know? I am over them. And they don't make nice shade or a lovely bower-like experience. So I have been looking at hikes on the internet and searching for a hike with lots of trees, even redwoods. What, redwoods? Hey man, we have two redwoods planted in our back yard. The neighbors planted banana trees. There are non-native eucalyptus growing all around here. Plus all the damn palm varieties. So you can go see whatever kind of tree you want if you pick the right trail.

Of course, it was dark and misty and cloudy when we got there, and it rained actual rain, not mist, on us several times as we hiked about. I should have realized that anywhere there were redwoods it was gonna be wetter. Duh. But actual rain in California, even in the misty parts, is rare. I apologized to my niece several times. Also when the trail got steeper than we expected. And also when the trail posts no longer appeared so I took a couple wrong turns and then was on a totally random trail that didn't lead back to the ranger station. Ooops. Reading the map several times and correcting our course finally put us back on a trail that had a post, but it wasn't the trail that it should have been, based on our map readings. Luckily I had my iphone which has a compass app, and we set off in the right direction on something that sorta looked like a trail but wasn't marked as one. And we abruptly ran into another trail across our path, with a fence. These two little old ladies were walking past as we emerged from the underbrush and climbed the fence (just a little waist high railing, really) and they shot us the dirtiest looks.

I had been making jokes about one of the postdocs, who went on a hike with me a while back and had left all the maps she printed on the kitchen table. We took a couple wrong turns and had a trail marked with a "danger, don't go that way" sign, and got totally lost. When we finally made it out to the trailhead, we checked the wall map and decided we had hiked every. single. trail. in the park! That was so tiring! Anyway, I made this joke to my niece and we were talking about this and that and everything, and around the time it became clear that we were on a totally different trail than we should have been, I said "ooh, I shouldn't have joked about hiking every damn trail on the _____ park" and my niece got verrrrry quiet. But we did eventually find our way out of the park and to her car, and I thanked her and apologized about twenty million times, so I hope she wasn't too freaked out and had a good time.

Here's a picture of awesome trees, complete with mist:

It was gorgeous. We agreed that we were disappointed we didn't see any actual Ents. The place looked like Ents should live there. And I love the smell ---- the rich mulchy smell of ferns and needles all wet and mushy underfoot, the spicy smell the bark gives off (my niece and I argued about whether that was the Pines or the Redwoods that made that smell.), the clear, wet air that even when it is full of moisture feels nothing like the humidity of Postdoc Town ---- I love it.

I even love that we have stupid birds here who don't actually do birdsong, just "grak, grak, grak," and someone else following up with "wheeet! whip!" And, like I said, the place was decently full of joggers and dog walkers and hikers and possibly some homeless people camping in their car and using the public bathrooms ---- not too crowded, but definitely not an isolated back-to-nature place either. And I kinda like that. I'd rather be hiking and overhear some people planning the next hostile takeover of a social networking site than be out away from all civilization and get eaten by a mountain lion next thing. Not that this doesn't happen in our urban California parks, too. I'm just sure the mountain lion would have to ask his running partner to hold his mochachino and his bluetooth while he stepped out for just a second to make this little kill.

Putting in the bones

2011-07-08T15:17:00.000-07:00

So this time when I started to write my article, Floyd, I started with some theory and then went straight to the primary text. And I wrote a little and then outlined it, outlined it and then wrote a little more, and moved stuff all around, until I thought I had figured out a structure for the whole article.

Only then did I really go start looking at any secondary criticism. It feels weird, like I'm doing something backwards:

It feels like I am trying to put bones into my boneless chickens so that I can later de-bone them. Hmm. For one thing, I found a lot of critics who say basically the same thing I say at various points of my article --- not argument-skewering stuff but basic statements like "Mr. Cuckold had lifelong troubles with the meaning of masculinity, possibly because of his relationship with his wife, Debbie*" --- and then I am stuck with who to cite or not on this basic claim. It's tempting to just copy/paste everything I have possibly read that could work there, and then I have an essay that is six times as long as it was and I need to boil down all those quote paragraphs to something manageable that will fit in the flow of my argument. And then I go partly anxious and partly lazy and think to myself, "that will be a brilliant part of the essay once I've just fixed that little spot!" and then I don't work on it.

It doesn't help that I vacillate between wanting to quote all the juicy snarky phrases or poetic bits that critics have written, and just using social science citation style and reduce everybody to a name and publication year (Whangdoodle, 1969, Pibbett, 1975, Snotpucker, 1983 and 1984, Sterne and Fielding, 1995).

Maybe I will get better at turning books into summaries/paraphrases as I read and someday be able to avoid my compulsion to Include Everything! as I get more fluent at writing articles. I sure hope so, as it is slow going.

In an only-slightly-related note, I have been working for years on training myself to start working first thing in the morning, and to work every day. (mostly. I have gotten better, even if I don't work every day.) But I am still terrible at keeping focus and keeping working for any length of time, say after the first hour. And if I can push myself for two full hours I really can't concentrate and everything falls apart after that point. Anybody have any advice, not for getting started or confronting the blank page, but for continuing?

*Debbie did Dallas, in case you hadn't heard (Sysquirt, 1972, Hufflepuff, 1987, Rassett and Frassett, 1990).

Heh. Love to hate it.

2011-07-06T19:15:00.000-07:00

Watch it and weep, people. This is no parody.

This is so true. I love this! I forget that a lot of loving California is actually the act of getting together with like-minded people and bitching about how much we hate it. I mean, there's a lot to love about CA, but, what I love is getting together with all the people who do not seem stereotypically "Californian" and go, "Gawd, did you see that obnoxious overtanned and botoxed bimbo nearly run over a homeless person with a Hummer? Shaaa!*"

And that reminds me of my favorite Decemberists song:

Or you can do the live version accompanied by the LA Phil, which I kinda love despite the poor live quality --- the soaring, over-the-top schmaltz of the strings makes for a nice contrast with this hatesong.

* Shaw? Shaha? You might have had to be here to know how to pronounce/spell it. It's post "Fer sure!" and pre "OMG!" ---- about the same time as some of my poor unfortunate friends from the state's hinterlands were saying "cool beans." We won't even go into the hella/hecka divide, or debate the use of the "the" in front of freeway numbers.

But it's a DRY heat!

2011-07-05T11:36:00.000-07:00

Oh, California, I love you, I love you, I love you ---- Ahhhhhh. This is what I mean when I say I don't care if it's 90 degrees out and that I kinda love it. All you people on my facebook page who are whining about this "heat wave" ------ hahahahahahaha! I totally don't believe you wimps any more. Try the 90 degrees at 100 % humidity and a sheen of biting bugs clouding the air everywhere you go and you will understand that a California "heat wave" is actually perfect hiking weather.

I think I am never going to go back inside again. Especially because dad shuts off the airconditioning at night, so it has been 60 degrees inside all day (bleah!) and then it pops up to 78 at night (double bleah!).

I have been working a bit on my online class, but still need to do a lot more prep. This is interfering with my desire to go hiking and then hit the beach. Hmm. And of course, I got derailed on my article what with course prep and packing and riding around on a plane and whatnot. So I need to get back to that too. But --- sun! And a blue sky without a single cloud in it!! And a nice breeze!!! And shops and restaurants that all have lovely shaded patio areas for lounging!!!! And OCEAN!!!!! Must! Go! Run! Around! In! Surf! Must work. NO MUST PLAY ON SAND! Must work. NO MUST PLAY ON HIKING TRAILS!

Um. Ok, I'm going to try to go back to work, but I may have to rethink my goals and to do list for the summer. Hmm.

Can't. Get. Derailed.

2011-06-28T17:09:00.000-07:00

Ok, what have I been doing? What have I been doing?

Today was dr. day and I did a checkup and a women's exam and got my blood drawn and looked at for this required health prevention thing, and that ate up my whole day. First, I had to fast for the bloodwork, and then they didn't do the blood draw until after all the appts and waiting around in the lab room, which means I fasted from 10 pm to 3 pm the next day. And then I stuffed my face immediately with the worst possible fast food meal --- ironic that they make you fast for cholesterol and diabetes tests, no? I was so hungry I was dreaming of double bacon cheeseburgers while in the waiting room --- and then of course collapsed afterward for a food-coma nap.

I managed to go through a pile of library books and return them this morning, but couldn't concentrate on writing pre-dr's appts. But the good news is that the appointments went well! Doctor's visits are usually anxiety-producing for me, but these were fine. And I have finally found out the right way to describe my teeny, hard-to-find veins, so that this time it hardly hurt at all, and I didn't have to suffer through three or four different vein punctures! Ugh. So glad that's over.

I am also undercaffeinated from the fasting and trying to not drink a soda later in the day (I've been having sleeping problems but don't know why) and trying to figure out if I should do a drastic caffeine reduction period (like a cleanse, but caffeine wise).

To make a long story short, I did not work on the article today, and yesterday I was doing packing and trip planning stuff, and I have not started my online class prep. Argh! I need to keep up my momentum, and not be distracted by this other stuff! I can just see myself not working on the hard part of revising because I haven't looked at the article recently. Hmm. Ok.

Thus, I am making a list and a plan! Right now! Tomorrow I will get up and do my yoga bright and early, and make myself some coffee, and,

incorporate Difficult Book into the article
incorporate last of the important books into the article (I think I'm down to two?)
start condensing and really kneading the various critics into the article (I just cut and pasted them directly in with no regard for making them footnotes or transitions or anything)

Ok, I can deal with a three-item to do list. I might not be able to finish all three of them tomorrow --- I have to do justice to the first text while still claiming my argument is different and valuable, which is why I am calling it difficult.

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In other news, I totally can't go outside without someone pushing me to overcome my inertia (inertia and momentum --- the theme of the day!). The day someone pointed out to me it was the first day of summer, I got four mosquito bites on the way to my car. Since then I got totally eaten up while out at my friend the postdoc's place, and just haven't been able to bring myself to go sit outside on my little deck. I'd rather sit in here with the airconditioning than slap bug spray all over myself in order to sit outside. Sigh. I don't hate this state, but I kinda hate this state.

Bleah.

2011-06-26T15:33:00.000-07:00

I went and hung out with the postdoc people, as usual, last night, but drank way more than I usually do. I don't usually go more than a couple beers, but the Friendly Yet Creepy characters hereabouts love to buy rounds as part of the conversation, and supplement with what's in their flasks. I didn't get sick, but it was bad enough that when the party broke up I commandeered one of the poor postdocs and insisted he walk me home instead of ride his bike, and then I sat around and talked with him and we traded funny youtube videos for a couple hours until I was sober enough to walk back and drive home. I think he may have been annoyed. I don't think guys really get that the crazy and entertaining characters who invite themselves to our tables are hitting on the girls and are waiting for any opportunity to bring someone home, which means waiting it out for a couple hours at the bar to sober up isn't an option.

See, this is why I wish I lived within staggering distance of the other postdocs. Of course, that could just mean I'd have to deal with strange people trying to follow me home when I left the bar. Meh, the whole situation just blows.

Anyway, when I woke up, I did not have a hangover, but I am so tired. Going to bed at 4 am will do that to you. I only just now started to get my energy back. I have done nothing all day, barely making it through 50 pages of my reading. And I haven't done anything related to my online class or packing or planning. I did, however, finally clean the catbox just now. So the day isn't a complete waste, I guess.

What I have been doing is sitting around on the couch, giving myself a terrible neck ache, staring at paint color swatches and sample room layouts, cause someone is decorating and got me off on a whole new tangent of decoration procrastination.

I have stared at so many different styles and rooms and things that I have no idea what I like anymore. And I have an open space above my tv that I think needs something, but I can't figure out anything I like that I am willing to pay for, especially considering that I hope to move next year off to some wonderful tenure track job. I finally decided I may just cover some boards or cardboard in a brightly-printed fabric and hang them. Not that I have the energy to actually go do that, but we'll see about later.

Anyway, I saw this randomly (it is from West Elm) and quite like it. Which is funny, since it's not really at all my style.

I like the strong geometric lines, how they're sorta like feathers or trees. Modern, but not that too cold and sterile modern that people are always loving. By the way, everyone seems to be obsessed with white and gray as the new fashion decoration colors, and when I look at them I just keep thinking of how Betty had her living room redone in those very odd and cold "sophisticated" colors of gray and silver and ugly yellow on Mad Men. What season was that?

Anyway, I like that bed, but think it is silly to buy a new bed (when I have no money) and then have to move it to whatever new place. But I know it will be nowhere to be found next fall when I was moving in to a new place somewhere else and actually had a real paycheck. Oh well, probably for the best, since I have no idea how to decorate around it.

(anybody want to join me in a decorating discussion? Am I the only person who feels like there's this matchy-matchy rule where absolutely everything must be one of the main room colors? Not like it's a rule, but more like an OCD or paranoia thing.)

All I want for Christmas:

2011-06-23T08:48:00.000-07:00

I know it takes a lot of electricity, and it's loud, and it only holds about two single spaced pages at a time, and it goes grind grind grind and keeps you half awake all night long, but if I could write all day and have the writing polish itself at night ...

Can we have Christmas in July? Please? Please???

House Envy

2011-06-22T16:55:00.001-07:00

I went and hung out with one of the other postdocs the other day. I am jealous of the place they are renting, which is all big and spacious and decorated up all shabby-chic cute. And they have a covered porch. Although in the few minutes I took to get from my car to inside I was devoured by mosquitoes.

Look up ---- tree! Cool, huh? This is in the decaying neighborhood right by campus, where the other postdocs live. The house is about a hundred years old, which is about what the rest of the places around there are, but it is very well kept up and updated nicely. Most of the places around there, if they are rentals, do not look this nice. But if you are partnered with someone who has a full-time regular-person paycheck, and no kids, you can pay a lot more for rent than I do. Though this place is less than what I paid for my one-bedroom in CA, which is so laughable when you think about it. Just crazy.

Anyway, none of the places available down by school have been this nice --- the floors are bowed and the overall building frames seem warped. But, still. Le sigh.

Not much else to report except that I might go stir crazy in the next few hours, having been home working, and then "working," for a couple days now. I was supposed to be writing the end of my last section and then the conclusion, but I glanced at my ILL book pile and realized I was going to have to send stuff back pretty soon, and I know I need these. So I have been in an orgy of reading until my eyeballs fall out of my head. You would be shocked at how quickly reading shit gets old. Clearly I have burned out all my intellectual circuits, or my persistence-circuits, or something. I intend to pack up all my stuff and drive out to Starbucks tomorrow, come hell or high water, just to have a new location and maybe talk to some people. Unless, of course, I go stark raving mad first. Gotta keep my options open.

Update on Floyd

2011-06-18T10:28:00.000-07:00

First of all, I think it's hilarious that I get more comments and suggestions on my rice cooker posts than on most of my academic-style stuff. Still thinking about what that tells me about potential job directions. And I will give you an update on all your suggestions when I switch back from leftovers to cooking again soon.

Anyway, Floyd ---- who gets a name since I don't want to tell you my topic and I have had so many new articles that at some point "my new article" doesn't really tell you much about anything. You might remember that I announced the birth of Floyd not too long ago, and I have been working with him steadily ever since, so I thought I would give a little note of progress.

So here is Floyd. I have been writing for about a month and a half, with some time out for finals and a conference. In my last announcement, he was about 5 pages.
Here is Floyd's growth update:
Now he is about 32 pages, but the last 6 are still in the question/quote/note form without any complete sentences. I haven't worked on those last 6 at all yet. He has six subsections (including the intro and conclusion subsection) and once I work my way through the last section and throw together the intro and conclusion I'll have a complete draft!

Wait, what? Why do people keep saying that, "a face only a mother could love," when I show off Floyd??? Are you saying my ideas are half-baked? That my complete draft might have a long long way to go before it actually looks like a draft?

I'm hurt. See if I let Floyd feast on your corpse when you turn into bloated carrion. So there!

Even Goldilocks would be daunted by these odds

2011-06-14T17:09:00.000-07:00

Ok, so my rice cooker-less rice cooking attempts. As a side note, I must not have many Californian readers, judging from the lack of rice cooker use out there. Did you not learn to cook from your Asian American friends and roommates? I can't imagine people not having ricemakers --- hell, I can't imagine any of my friends' families giving up one of their three or four different machines to help me out ("No, you can't have that one; that's for when everyone wants rice. No, you can't have that one; that's the small one for when only a few people want rice. Or a snack. And that one we boil the duck eggs in, so obviously you can't have that, because if you're boiling the duck eggs, you can't use the rice cooker for rice, and we don't have any burners left open on the top of the stove!)

Anyway, I looked up "basic rice" in my Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone Deborah Marsden book, measured out the rice, and then measured out the water:

Then I set a timer, chopped up some veggies, and went off to do other things:

So far, pretty much like the rice cooker, except that you don't have to be careful about the exact amount of water you put in since it adjusts for you.

After 40 minutes, the rice was "open" but still pretty soupy. And I had taken off the lid, which I guess is a no-no.

After 10 more minutes of cooking and 10 more minutes of cooking, the rice was cooked to chewlessness (complete mushiness?) and there was still tons of water sitting on the bottom. I took the lid off and turned it up to boil for another 10 minutes.

You can't see that it is still pretty watery, but it is. And it was completely tasteless. And the texture of risotto, which I would have minded less if it were flavored like risotto and had lots of cheese in it. I like my rice --- not "crunchy," not "chewy," but when you chew it there's something there; it's not like porridge or oatmeal or any of that gross gloppy stuff. Al dente, perhaps? And I had already eaten almost all of the veggies because I was hungry and tired of waiting.

Luckily I had tons of parsley that I wanted to use up, so for the next meal I chopped it all up really fine and added lemon and olive oil and lots of salt and pepper. Then it wasn't bad.

But see, the nice thing about rice cookers --- beside the fact that they will keep the rice warm for you when it is done and you don't have to worry about turning it of or eating it right away --- is that it takes the guesswork and training out of the cooking process for you. My poor rice cooker! I miss you, darling:

Tonight, I have been experimenting with trying to make red beans and rice. I usually cook vegetarian at home so I thought I might as well try to fine a vegetarian version of the Louisiana stuff. Taste-wise, it was ok, but after three hours it still looked like a bunch of beans. I don't know why mine didn't fall apart into a wonderful sauce like in her picture.

And after the last rice-cooking adventure, I put in exactly two cups of water instead of the 2 and 2 quarters cup or whatever the ratio is, and look!

Grrr. I probably only got a half cup's worth, and look at the rest there. You rice-advice people!

Random Updates

2011-06-13T16:27:00.000-07:00

after being slothful and avoiding my writing all weekend (that includes Friday, actually), I managed to get to a coffeeshop and work today. Hmm. Looking at my notes (I sign myself in and out to keep me slightly more honest), I only wrote on the new section for an hour today. That's not much; I will try to work more steadily tomorrow. (see why I need a punch-clock?)
and though I grumbled and was tired and did not want to get up, I actually did get up and do yoga. Yay! Ideally I'd walk too, but my desires to make lots of progress on the article and to get in lots of exercise are in conflict with each other.
Speaking of my article, I may have to kill my brother and my dad, who I told that I was working on a new project. Since that was a month ago, they have decided this must mean the project should be done right now. I keep getting "well, aren't you done yet?" comments on my phone calls home. Argh. Of course, with my dad, explaining to him that humanities articles don't work like engineering papers isn't going to do anything from one conversation to the next. Ah well.
I like the library here. Our holdings might be pretty pitiful, but all the upper floors have windows on all sides and they have put group study tables around the perimeter, which allows me to bask in the light and a view. I find that really nice when working (after lunch I went there to type up booknotes and prevent myself from taking a nap.) It's also quiet --- deathly quiet even though we are in the middle of summer session. Heh.
Speaking of summer session, I should prep my online summer class. Sometime.
Speaking of avoiding naps, I accidentally pushed myself very hard in that yoga session and suddenly found myself in the middle of a nap attack right before lunch. The cats took full advantage of my sudden loss of consciousness to drape themselves all over my body.
What that will mean if I am to die in my apartment and not be found for several days, I don't want to know.
I have a rice-related update for you all but will make that a separate post. Or not, as I am strangely tired and unwilling to upload the pictures (yes I took pictures for you).
I got caught in the rain in the laundromat yesterday, my clothes all dried and folded but unable to leave because of aforementioned rain. Met some real characters but have a half-written post going on that.
I shouldn't check my blog reader in the middle of the day, because I have no willpower and waste valuable midday time reading them instead of working and then have no posts to read in the evening after dinner. Alas.
I am going to visit the fam in California for a bit this summer. I might be more homesick for the place than the family.
I have yet to win the lottery or have a rich distant relative remember me in their will. I could really use that at the moment.
I don't really have anything else to post.

Rice Cooker?

2011-06-11T16:10:00.001-07:00

I have killed my rice cooker. Sigh. I noticed it making lots of funny noises last time I cooked up rice and finally I put water in the pan to check for leaks and held it up to observe drips. It has a hole slightly larger than a pin. Grumble.

I must have bought this as a senior in college. I hadn't thought about the life spans of rice cookers but that is a pretty long time.

My first reaction was to do nothing. Nothing, that is, except eat things that were not ricey. See me trying to control my spending? Unfortunately, I lapsed and went to Kohl's to find cheap t-shirts. I now have a huge pile of t-shirts to wash and put away, and a couple bras that I hope will actually fit comfortably for more than a week this time. Dangit. So, I spent money, and really my ideal solution would be to learn how to cook up rice in a saucepan instead of buy a rice cooker.

But where's the fun in that? Also, I only eat brown rice, the short fat grains. Tasty! And, all heart-goodness-y. Is it hard to cook brown rice in a saucepan?

You know how I dither about (oops sorry, "research" the best consumer value) before I actually go and choose anything, so we might as well begin the discussion now. I will then be ready to make a decision about when school is ready to start.

What's a good rice cooker? Do you have any favorites? Recommendations? Anything you know does brown rice well? I don't need it to make bread or porridge or the crazy stuff some of these things advertise, just make rice.

In other news, I want a coffee-making robot. But I wouldn't have him actually make any coffee, just clomp around the house scaring the cats. See?

Cuuuute.

Crazy-Ass Movie Review Episode Two: The Unknown!

2011-06-07T18:37:00.001-07:00

The Unknown (1927), being what is known as a “programmer” or the kind of filler movies they cranked out as fast as possible in the days before sound, is probably not as good as the last crazy-ass movie I reviewed, Baby Doll. But it is directed by Tod Browning, who made Freaks, and stars Lon Chaney, the Man of a Thousand Faces. And even though it’s a silent film and therefore a little more difficult to watch, it definitely has plenty of Weird. Ohhhhhh yes.

You clearly want to watch this. No? Well then, you won’t mind me giving away the whole plot. Chaney plays Alonzo the Armless Wonder in a gypsy circus. I know! You’re thinking that this has got to have a lot of deviance and depravity and deformity, considering that its another circus movie by Browning. Well, honestly, I could have used more depravity, but Chaney is an amazing actor.

See that? I can't really get a screencapture of how good he is as an actor because his skill is in the quicksilver way he flashes through emotions. Want to see Chaney go from lovesick to possessive and controlling to brutally murderous to insane with jealousy to almost hiding a sneer of hatred and plotting behind a smile of goodwill? All in a single take? He is good. Good at eeeeeeevil, I mean.

Amazingly, this is one of Joan Crawford’s very first starring roles and it was so strange to see her on screen in this. She didn’t really do much acting, per se, but she is still magnetic --- I can see why they say the camera just loves her --- particularly when she’s still, her beauty just glows through at you.

Damn, that’s hot. Crawford plays Nanon, the gypsy daughter of the circus owner, and she is pathologically afraid of men, because they are always trying to put their hands on her. Here’s where Browning has a little fun, making a little allegory of how the good girl is innocent and frightened and has to be initiated into sex.

She’s a passionate little spitfire, but men’s … hands … just leave her terrified, and she shrinks away when any come into contact with her. The only man she is not afraid of is Alonzo, because … you guessed it. He has no hands. And he swears to protect her for ever, for he loves her. And he confesses to his friend and henchman, the evil dwarf (how could we have a Browning circus movie without an evil dwarf?) that he must own her, that he will possess her at all costs.

But here’s where the fun gets a little perverse, or the perverse gets a little fun, depending on how you like it.

Arms!

The character you thought was safe and protective because of a lack, actually possesses an excess. And who would go to the trouble to hide in a circus as an armless man, but a murderer who is wanted for strangling so many people!

Browning externalizes this inner depravity by making this killer-disguised-as-deformed actually deformed under the disguise:

I told you he bore an excess of signification. (That’s what she said.) So, while Nanon kisses Alonzo and allows him to touch her because she thinks he lacks those strange and scary … hands, he is actually doubly depraved! Maybe even triply, because, you know, he’s got a whole ’nuther … ok, just nod your understanding because the dirty metaphor doesn’t really hold up if you look at it too closely. Which is Nanon’s problem, after all!

I should have mentioned up at the beginning that Nanon was part of Alonzo’s act. Just in case you didn’t pick up on the idea that we are substituting for something with those … hands, Alonzo’s act consists of using a gun to shoot Nanon’s costume off her body and then throwing knives to make an outline around her silhouette. Look at all that masculine power and prowess Alonzo has even without any arms!

Oh wait, that’s not Alonzo the Armless wonder, that’s strong man Malabar, the guy who gets fresh with Nanon, bending a massive bar with … ok now this is just getting silly.

Anyway, the problem is that Nanon has feelings for Malabar the strongman, but is also afraid of him and his manly hands. His difficulty was that he was just walking up and grabbing her and throwing her around roughly, which you gotta admit is kind of a drag when you’re just walking down the way to get some chow after a performance, minding your own business. Once he learns to go slow, offering her flowers and saying he loves her and wants to be around her forever and that he understands she is afraid when he touches her, the relationship improves. They start walking around places together and she gradually brings herself to trust him and look at his … hands, and one day they just happen to be walking on a ledge or wall or something and she slips and he catches her! With his hands! And after she gets over the shock for a minute she decides she really kinda likes it and hey, they should get married.

(from the Dialogue Slide: Now I understand what you are afraid of. Jeez, make it more obvious, guys.)

No baby doll this girl. Even when she is supposed to be looking terrified she looks like a man-eater. Which is probably why she was able to move up into stardom.

Anyway, to make this review longer than the actual film, let me point out what Alonzo the not-really-armless-wonder has been doing. Upon being told by his sidekick the evil dwarf that he can’t let Nanon hug him anymore because she might be able to, um, feel through his disguise, Alonzo makes plans to propose to her and then despairs of what will happen on their wedding night; what will she do when she first sees him naked? She’ll be expecting to not see any … hands, and instead she would see hands! Craaaaaaa-zy hands!!!! She might even recognize that he is the strangler who keeps mysteriously murdering people wherever the circus group goes, including even her own father at one point! (Forgot I left that out.) So he comes up with… a plan.

What sort of secret sexual past does this doctor have, I wonder? Whatever it is, he knows the truth about Alonzo’s … hand, in all its queer deformity. Ohhh, yes, I think there was some major deviance here, for Alonzo blackmails him and tells the doctor he must do whatever he says in order to keep Alonzo silent.

So, just like he is ordered to, he secretly saws off Alonzo’s arms. Operates. Whatever. The point is, Nanon was deathly afraid of men’s … hands, so Alonzo hides his past evil secrets by becoming what Nanon thinks he already is by amputating his … hands. When really, all she wanted was a little romantic foreplay before being, er, manhandled. That and for him to not kill people, like her relatives. I hope all you guys out there are taking notes about What Women Really Want.

And what does the now-really-armless-wonder Alonzo do when he returns and discovers that his sacrifice was for nothing and Nanon got over her fear of … hands and plans to marry this dude?

He acts up a storm, like he was going for the first Oscar!!!

Cue insane maniacal laughter ... now! Seriously, this scene is just amazing and he was awesome.

But then, he hatches… another plan!

In a nice piece of symmetry, he plans to sabotage Malabar’s act and instead of Malabar mastering and overpowering wild horses, they will tear out his arms! Mwahahaha!

And did I mention that Nanon ties her husband up to wild horses and then cracks a whip to excite them into a fury? That’s hot. That’s … ok, I should just move on now.

To sabotage the act, all Alonzo will have to do is push that big lever over there … but ohno! However will he do that now that he really has no … hands, instead of just pretending it is so?

Well, he’s manly enough to do it, and he does! Unfortunately, it being a Hollywood film from the 20s, we do not then get to see Malabar’s arms ripped out and Alonzo win his vengeance. In fact, the evil plot is foiled, Alonzo is accidentally killed by the horses, and good and justice is restored to the world. Bummer.

I wish it had been darker and dirtier, but I’ll take what I can get. For all its salacious hinting at deviance, I give it a round of applause.

Or would that be two thumbs up?

Moving House? You know how I am about decisions

2011-06-06T20:14:00.000-07:00

Ok, so you might remember that I am here with a big group of postdocs, and at the beginning of the year we were spread all out all over the city. Now, several of them have moved in closer to each other in the Student Ghetto, and Angry Anarchist Postdoc is looking in to moving in upstairs from one of the postdocs who is my office mate. I am kinda against moving this summer, in that I hate moving and the time suck and the backache and the fear that all my nice stuff will be dinged up and all my cheap stuff that barely survived the move will be destroyed, but I am also feeling the urge to move closer to them. Hmm. Help me think this through.

Now --- ok, have you ever visited Yale and the area that used to be nice and campus-oriented right around the campus fell apart and became a bastion of Section 8 housing and racial resentment? Postdoc City kinda has that too, but more class-related than race, I'd say. If you want a new place where the residents have middle-class or professional jobs and there is a working kitchen and heat/ac, you move where I did, the circle around the edge of town. In the middle is a burned-out, postindustrial wasteland, that's the downtown, and across the freeway from that is the university and the hundred-year-old houses that have all been chopped up for student apartments and places that pay cash for gold, which seems to be the major business around here.

In short, it's not gentrified, it's not cute, it's not walkable, but I would be close to school and the other postdocs. I'm kind of a loner, but I really am liking this idea of moving closer to them. Except that I had already decided against it. And my sister might kill me because right now I have a nicer kitchen than she does.

********

And now an update, before I'd even actually posted this post. This ad for a "cottage" ---- that is freestanding 1 bedroom house about a block from my friend the postdoc appeared on craigslist, and when I called about it, they said they had already had several people make appointments to see it, so I asked for an appointment right then and there and asked my friend to meet me out front. Hmm. So having seen it, it is a bit grottier than I wanted (instead of freestanding, it's more like listing to one side, and the floors are a bit warpy, and the inside doors probably don't close well), and is only $50 cheaper than my current nice shiny place, and they clearly took the pictures from a good angle to hide the fact that it hadn't been painted. But. There is another place that I happened to mention to Angry Anarchist Postdoc and he went to see it, said it was gorgeous, but was a downstairs unit in a house and he would never do that again. So I emailed AAP this listing and might go check out the one I sent to him originally. But, I don't know. You'd think writing all this out and then going to see a place would help me decide. Maybe lists?

Current House Pros:
new! clean! gorgeous! everything works!
has a dishwasher!
has a high efficiency heat pump/AC and is built to be super energy efficient!
very quiet
good back porch w. lots of birds and trees (no covering)
spacious
would not have to pack anything or move it until I get my tt job (or go live in a van down by the river)

Current House Cons:
kinda far from school and postdocs
no sidewalks in area, so must drive everywhere
can't go outside on porch in the rain or after 11:30 when the sun is out and annoying
I have W/D/ hookups but no washer or dryer here

Hmm. Dunno. I will email that first place I sent out and see if it is still available for a walkthrough. It looked nicer and more kept up than the first place, but it is a house divided into 6 rentals and the kitchen looks teeny with no dishwasher. On the plus side it is very close to school and pretty close to the postdocs, though probably pretty loud due to all the students in the area (frats are the next street over.) There wasn't all that much else with a "for rent" sign in the yard otherwise, and the only places we saw lots of availability were the places on the non-frat side of the frat street. I'm not up on being that close to party town, particularly if students don't party there but out at the bars circling the town --- that means they are all coming home drunk and loud and running over my cats or something.

Sigh. Why can't I make up my mind about anything? If stuff was like 100 or 200 cheaper, or you could guarantee me a dishwasher and good quality AC, this might be an easier decision to make. But, of course, right now I'm waffling.

A Day for Exclamation Points!

2011-06-05T09:35:00.000-07:00

Yes!!!!!! I am awesome!!!! One hundred percent pure organic free range awesomeness. I felt so full of energy when I woke up. (at 7!!!) I did 40 minutes of yoga and then took a walk! Whoo-hoo! I can feel all the muscles of my legs and butt --- not in a painful way, but like they're saying "Hey baby! Hells yeah we exist! We are right. here. Oooooh yeah!"

Then I wrote on my article, Floyd, for 40 minutes, and after I took a shower I scrubbed up the whole bathroom and did a bunch of cleaning! And then had lunch! ...aaaaaaaand I have a feeling that my energy might slack about now. Which is fine; I've done a good day's work already. I'll go type in booknotes from this book or the biography I've been reading for Floyd now. And may possibly go get groceries later.

It's just so nice to wake up and have a lot of energy after dragging along by so much the past week, especially when it was a day you didn't plan on being particularly productive. You know what? I had counted stuff and thought I might be able to finish this subsection by Monday, and if I keep working hard, by the end of Monday, I just might!

Grumble grumble clothes these days

2011-06-04T10:53:00.001-07:00

Ok, I know I said I was going on a financial diet, and other than buying tp and stocking up on coffee one day and filling up the gas tank another day, I haven't spent any money, which is good. Unfortunately, to really improve my finances I'd need to not spend any money at all for anything discretionary for the entire summer. That's pretty outside of my level of willpower. Especially when you consider my casual summer clothes are looking pretty shoddy and worn. This is why I was at the Old Navy this morning. And I bought stuff, to my disgust --- and not even disgust at me breaking my budget; I'm pretty pissed off at them.

See, I live in cheap, brightly colored t-shirts. And I may be turning into my parents, who are still stuck in pre-70s-inflation price standards and think that no single item of clothing should cost more than 20 dollars, but I don't want to spend a lot of money for something that's not in any way special or embellished. So while I raise an eyebrow when my parents say, "you paid more than 19.95 for those jeans? Insane!" I kinda do have that expectation when it comes to a plain red or blue t-shirt. It's freaking mass-produced, people. And there aren't that many special seams, and no rivets or nothing. Don't tell me it costs anything like 10 bucks to make.

So I have been peeved at t-shirts on the internet, which for some reason are running around 50-60 dollars for anything cute. I will go stock up on a bunch of colors for cheap at Old Navy, I told myself. But when I got there, the fabric was so thin and slubby I could see through it! Old Navy people, I know you are maximizing profit, but fuck you! I do not want to buy multiple t-shirts and layer them; it's too damn hot here!

My other complaint was the cut of the neckline: on t-shirts that basically fit me everywhere else, the scoop neck was cut so low it almost followed the edge of my bra. Even the "crewneck" was much lower than I would define it, and the v-necks were just unacceptable. I have wondered, off and on, in my journey toward crotchety get-off-my-lawn-you-are-going-out-in-That-elderlyness, why so many of my students, regardless of the location of where I am teaching, seem to insist on totally inappropriate tops for school that show off their entire rack. Now I know: it's not so much that they are saying, screw you, rules of appropriateness! They are just too ~~dumb~~ young and inexperienced in the ways of the world to realize that if the cheap and popular shirt does not fit them well, don't buy it. I think it has way more to do with the power of the fashion industry, which is not offering other options right now, than any actual decisions or conscious thinking on my students' part. Which sucks because when everything is becoming pornified and women's bodies completely sexualized, including this PETA ad:

then it's hard to even get students to realize that they are being sexualized/objectified as much as they are. Maybe I'm wrong for insisting certain levels of cleavage are only appropriate for certain venues, but I think work (school=work) is a place where you should not have overtly sexualized bodies, and I would rather my students learn that than say, hey, let's just throw out all the rules of appropriateness and class. (do I go off on my rant about visible bra straps? Nah, one rant a day.)

But mostly I would like cheap and easily available options for those of us who have some extra weight to cover our bodies. News flash to the designers: America, statistically speaking, is overweight! Maybe just a few pounds, maybe by a lot. And most women are at or below 5.5 in height. So, really, Old Navy, most of the women --- and even the teens --- in America are not tall, thin, broad shouldered, A-cup shapes like your mannequins here. When I tried on a scoop neck in your store, I had three inches of exposed boobs and the bottom of the shirt almost touched my knees. Please embrace the square over the thin rectangle for your fitting.

And, funny, when I went looking for "pictures of girls in t-shirts" to accompany my post, weirdly enough, I couldn't find any of what I was describing, even though I see it at school all the time. All the pics were of these extremely thin women with no boobs, who look fine in a low scoop tank because they couldn't show any cleavage without some major structural garments underneath. (But then I typed in "cleavage" for an image search and got to see a lot of what makes me sad about humanity. Sigh.) But I did find this blog post that I liked, which shows some pics of "regular women" and asks "how do you feel about showing cleavage"? Go read the discussion (oh, the final pic of the girl in the blue dress --- minus her flat skinny waist --- looks the most like me in the dressing room today) and leave your own take on the whole dress/appropriateness/fashion industry/weight/gender issue here. Or any other related comments. What do you think?

If it's not one thing, it's another

2011-06-01T12:51:00.001-07:00

You know, I'm basically only running the AC at night. It's fine in here now --- the thermostat says its 75 and it feels perfectly ok --- and I'll just deal with the hot upstairs by not going up there. The fact that the sofa is directly in front of the window (which the cats ate the blinds for) is something I'll still have to think about, though.

No, this time I couldn't sleep because of cramps, argh. After tossing and turning while my inner organs played the equivalent of techno music in my midsection (thump-a, thump-a thump-a), I finally gave up and tried to hunt down some sort of medicine. And took the very last of my Midol, which was the daytime, caffeinated version. Sigh. And definitely no yoga for me, since I feel tired and achy and crampy.

So, yeah, didn't get much done today. I re-typed a handwritten paragraph that I wrote yesterday, and then decided that, since I felt like crap, I should just do a bunch of other crappy things. So I flea-treated the cats and made all sorts of calls about my health insurance and made dr's and haircut appointments. I hate phones. And am I done with all those annoying things on my list? No, of course not, because those are the types of things that it just isn't possible to finish off in one go-round. There was a long digression where I had to go to a bunch of websites and call various people to figure out what my health insurance policy number was and why I have two different cards with different numbers. (The answer? I don't know. But I do know which is the real number, and now I can give it out when making dr's appointments, so problem resolved.)

I also got more books from the library and did some stupid campus errands, which are not all finished either. And started compiling a to-do list to prep for when I go back to visit California (yay!) for July. If I'm not careful, though, I will pack everything immediately and then suffer because I'm not leaving for an entire month. Heh.

And, I also got ice cream. It can't be helped. I grabbed blueberries on a whim while at the grocery store last, which is silly, since I don't really like straight-up blueberries. But they are very good on some vanilla ice cream and I will just pretend that the antioxidants counteract all of the fat and calories of the ice cream. Mmmm. I may need a second helping.

Tomorrow, yeah, that's it. Tomorrow will be the magic day when I both want to write a lot and make tremendous progress. Yes, tomorrow will be the day. Oops, when did I schedule the haircut appointment? Ah, crap.

I came, I saw, I wrote something-or-other

2011-05-30T17:11:00.000-07:00

I had a pretty productive day of writing today. I took one of my five pages, and split it up and made it three pages. And kinda-sorta-almost got it all the way grafted back in to the original five pages. And I looked at another part of my notes, which is almost ten pages. Unfortunately, they are not really useable pages, since every single sentence in the notes is a question. Sigh. I'm going to have to find answers to those questions and make some decisions in order to progress. I worked steadily for most of the day, too, which means I made amazing progress.

But why, when you work all day on an article and make amazing progress, don't you get to be done with it at the end of the day? Why do they have to be longer than just a few pages? Sure, I made progress, today, but that just means when I get up to work on it tomorrow, I will be covering some new ground. Grumble!

I shouldn't complain. And I certainly shouldn't beat myself up when I actually worked very hard. Especially when you consider I didn't sleep well last night at all. I was so smug and congratulated myself for not having the air conditioning on at all yesterday and it was still pretty pleasant in here, quite fine. And then I went upstairs and went to bed, and couldn't sleep, even though I had put the air on. So it seems that upstairs gets all hot and stuffy and uncomfortable even when the downstairs is nice, and today I've left the air on and it has been downright chilly down here, but it is still a bit hot upstairs when I just checked. Hmm. Sleeping on the floor down here is an option, I guess, although my cats have chewed through enough of the blinds I don't think it would get really dark or private from the neighbors. Plus there's the sheer annoyance of having and paying for an entire upstairs that you don't actually ever use. We'll see what happens tonight, and I will continue to ponder, since the thought of running the AC as little as possible sounded good to my wallet.

I'm still avoiding the hard questions about my finance goals at the moment, btw. Although I did get on the computer and tote up all my bills and set a few in the online billpayer. I'm going to have to go on a serious money diet in the near future to scrabble out of the hole, and I'm not up for dealing with it yet.

The same, alas, can be said for the food diet. I have done yoga or some sort of alternate exercise every day this week, though! And about three of those days included reasonable portions and healthy food as well. There is a big drawback to working at home because the library is closed for memorial day, however. And this week I may actually get to the gym for some cardio. Maybe I should do like some people and set up a standing desk or desk at the treadmill ---- make progress on two of my goal areas at once! (if I could get paid for doing this it would be perfect! Yeah, not gonna happen.)

Summer Goals 1: Research

2011-05-27T12:58:00.000-07:00

As my last post might have indicated to you, I am thinking of various summer plans and how to keep motivated to achieve my goals. I have several areas that desperately need improvement and lots of willpower: my weight, my finances, and my research agenda. I am making some plans for the first two but they are so damn depressing that I will return to them later. Today, I will contemplate the first of my research/writing goals:

Look! It's a new article! Isn't it ... cute? Or something? It's currently about five pages long. I think I will name it Floyd, because it was getting to be hard distinguishing all my various "new article" attempts without using distinguishing topics. Now, you might be asking, whatever happened to the last article you had been working on and on for such a long time?

Uhhhh... (pokes at it a bit). It's not moving. Maybe you shouldn't ask about that one.

Anyway, Floyd. I have been hatching this idea since ... maybe January? And haven't been able to devote much time to the egg what with all sorts of grading and traveling and whatnot, but I at least was thinking about it off and on, which will have to do for "keeping research momentum." But lately I have been able to devote time to it and have had some progress!

I made some research goals with the intent of working one day a week at the end of the semester (which clearly didn't happen, really) and had a first draft deadline of ... June 1st. That's, like, now. Hmm. I'm not going to say that turning my five pages into a finished draft by next Wednesday is physically impossible ... but I am also not expecting anything then. I've been progressing pretty smoothly (turns out I might have subconsciously simmered some of the ideas over the semester and writing is coming without too many blocks right now) but am not sure what new date to set for my finished draft --- June 15th? Arrgh why won't the damn thing just write itself and be finished already! Jump out of the nest already, Floyd! Hurry up and fly!

See? This is my problem. Even when I make progress, I beat myself up because I want instantaneous results. Ah well. Let's make that a goal and really push to get it, because if I can get it out to my friend Dr Does Everything for a read-through, I can turn my attention to setting up the summer class and get all that ready, and maybe get back to some of my other projects soon after, like my book introduction. However, right now, all I am focusing on is the new article, Floyd. That way I won't be overwhelmed.

Anyway, I may not be posting much in the near future, as I wait on Floyd around the clock and busy myself with little vitamin droppers and mashing up worms and carrion and all that good stuff. On the other hand, I might be on here constantly, bragging about my progress and showing off pictures of little Floyd's growth. I can't wait to shove him out of the nest!

Introducing the Awe-Inspiring D-90X!

2011-05-25T20:26:00.000-07:00

Academic Cog offers the exclusive, Exclusive, EXCLUSIVE new program, D-90X! Turn your dissertation from scrawny to ripped in 90 days or no money back!

(metal guitars begin crunching in the background, then squeal into full-on 80s-hair-band glory.)

D-90X ---- a Revolutionary Home Dissertation Program

In just 90 days, you can take a dissertation draft and build it into the manuscript you’ve always wanted. Only got a few pages? No problem! Have endless unorganized pages of notes? No. Big. Deal! Because the secret proprietary formulas in D-90X, will teach you How. To. Bring It!!!

(screeee! go the guitar tremolos.)

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...and I feel fine!

2011-05-21T17:13:00.000-07:00

So, any news from anybody? Anyone missing? How's the post-rapture looting going? Please bring some sanity and world peace if you find any stockpiles. Oooh, and chocolate-covered raisins! I love those.

PS doesn't Michael Stipe look so cute here? And young???

Fashion Fiasco

2011-05-18T21:20:00.000-07:00

Ok, not really fiasco, per se, but sadness.

Remember how I bought that green dress and decided it needed big chunky "statement" jewelry? Well, a long time ago one of my roommates handed off some bracelets she didn't want, and one of those was what I had in mind. Yet I kept going through my jewelry box over and over and just couldn't find it. Ah well, I thought. Maybe this means I could go out and buy some new thing, like a big heavy brass cuff or bangle. Something big and geometric just seems right.

So the other day I opened another box and ta da! There was this bracelet I couldn't find. Yay! Except when I went to touch it, it fell apart. Look:

Does anyone know if it is possible to re-string these sort of stretchy elastic bracelets? I am sad ---- I really like the strong geometric type jewelry, not really being much of a flowers-and-hearts person.

Also, and this is really more of a note to myself than a public statement, I need to get some sort of better storage container for my necklaces --- one that lets them stretch out straight rather than coil up all in balls and get tangled with each other. At one point, I was hanging them from thumbtacks on the wall, which actually works really well both for anti-tangling and to remind you of what all you have, but clearly this is not feasible with cats. Must fix the situation soon. I've been saying that for, what, four years now?

I will get around to updating on my research progress and my getting up early progress soon, along with providing some pictures, but I have other stuff occupying my time right now. Will get back to you later. Maybe you-all can sweeten the pot by posting something fun and interesting of your own? *hopeful grin*

Storm Time

2011-05-14T19:04:00.000-07:00

I stood on my back deck, eating a piece of toast with honey and watching the rain come.

First, the air thickened, became so wet it was almost palpable. I had brought my little table and chair inside at that point and gotten my snack. But then I went back outside again. Gray clouds hung off to the left, over town. I heard something that sounded like it might be thunder and it might be a Mac truck rumbling by. There was a long wait.

Time passed, the air suddenly got colder, and the little wind-break of trees and bushes to my right started to move with the breeze. The gray clouds were now a wall on my left, and darker. But still there was only a haze of white overcast above my head. It might have been raining, or it might have been just thick and misty.

Finally a fat drop spattered on the deck. I wished it had hit my foot. Was it cold, or hot? When the wind-break started to whip back and forth like it was being attacked, I went in, and continued watching from the window. I was sad because I had no more toast.

One, two, three cars pulled out of my apartment complex in the next fifteen minutes. Is there something you know that I don’t know? I couldn’t fathom heading outside right as the rain was starting. Is this place not safe? It’s home! Surely you don’t want to be driving out in the thunder and driving rain. Guy With a Boat had been gone all day and I wondered about that, too. Getting rained on while out fishing, I can understand, but wouldn’t being out on the water draw the lightening to you?

(I figured out why he backs the boat from the blacktop on to the green strip that I call my lawn: he gets someone to help him tip the boat back enough that all the water runs out, and sometimes he takes a hose to the bottom inside, presumably getting the fish cleanings out. My “yard” is mostly parking lot, however, and usually he parks the boat outside his garage and the car inside the garage.)

Then the sky off to my left was gray, with distinct fluffy clouds instead of a wall. That must mean that the wall of black angry clouds was directly overhead. Fat drops of rain were pouring down, and the wind-break was madly thrashing about.

From the front window I could see rain driving across the blacktop as strongly as water from a power washer, slicing across the drive at a sharp angle. Another car left. They would warn me if this place were subject to flooding, no? Why on earth do they all leave? I remembered that I have two stories here and attempted to quell all worries of flooding. I could just go upstairs. And then, out the window on to the roof? That's some pretty disaster-prone thinking.

Timido the scaredy-cat hid in the cupboard as soon as the rain started pounding hard. After a while the wind slackened and the rain was continuing to pour, but mostly vertically. Mostly. It still doesn’t look like California rain. It looks like hell to be out in with an umbrella if you’re not completely encased in plastic.

Then the thunder. I’m getting peal after peal of it, sometimes so close it makes the walls shake. The lightning is never a clear fork here, but more of a generalized brightness. Slowly, the thundering rolls from my left to my right; gradually the intensity of each burst rises as it approaches, then subsides beyond me. And then it becomes much brighter outside as the clouds look almost white and thin, but the rain comes down harder than ever.

My grandmother once told me that the larger the raindrops, the shorter the rain storm, and there seems to be some truth in that. The raindrops here are huge.

The rain slackens, and becomes barely audible from inside. I curl up on the sofa and drift off into sleep.

Operation Get Up Early

2011-05-13T13:42:00.000-07:00

I have commenced. With varying levels of "success."

Yesterday I got up around 9:30. (Yes, that is an improvement!) And I did yoga. Today I got up at 8ish and took a nice walk. And then went home to discover that my clothes do not fit. FML. Grr!

(I really really wish they had such things as spin classes around here --- no, they don't; I have already searched the internets, trust me --- because walking isn't really going to get my weight back down in the amount of time I can commit to it. Gah.)

Tomorrow, I hope, I will get up when the alarm actually goes off, and if it is threatening rain like the forecast says, I will do yoga inside. Otherwise --- maybe a hike? Maybe I should contact the postdocs for a hike somewhere interesting!!!

I have no desire to write about the things I currently have to write about. I have been procrastinating on the internet and all sorts of other places. Bleah. That may be partly why I am having trouble getting out of bed --- I am avoiding. But another trouble seems to be the cats leaping and playing and wrestling on my head at about 4:30 --- I have such a hard time going to sleep that when that happens I often don't make it back to regular sleep sleep before 9 or 10 in the morning. Sucks. So tonight's experiment is to chase the cats around a bunch and get them to sleep during my all-important early morning time.

But I am still in need of advice for getting up early!!! What are you-all's special tricks or routines? Especially for those days you don't have anything "scheduled" but you still have plenty to do. I am thinking that having the proper wind-down evening routine is as important as a morning routine --- what do you think? What are your tips? Do you have advice, like on a special alarm clock or anything? Cat-wrangling tips? Playing music as soon as I am up?

Or maybe you could just tell me your funniest early-morning getting-ready snafu.

I. Hate. Grading!

2011-05-08T14:33:00.000-07:00

I am taking a break after some fairly productive plowing through the grading today. I have finished the Stripey Class except for my exams I have to pick up from Office of Disabilities, which I can't do until Monday morning, obviously, and I am finished with my comp class except for 3-4 final exams which I am not sure if they should pass or not, so I am holding on them. I hate making decisions like this. The final is an up-or-out situation, so you can't fail the final and pass the course. These are borderline and I am waffling about whether it would be totally humiliating for whoever has part two of the comp course to get these students and see their writing and know they were mine. (I know you're supposed to consider if taking this course over again would be beneficial for the student, but, let's be honest, if I were to ask if they still needed to learn all the skills from this class I would fail the whole section; if I were to ask if they would get anything out of taking the class again I would pass along all of them because I don't think they would put in any more effort this time than the last time.)

I still have to do the entire set of Fruit Studies finals and calculate grades. And the grades are due tomorrow. Bleah. A short break, I promise.

I must say I'm liking having a back porch to relax out on, even if it is small and has bars and is under-decorated. It's a gorgeous day ---- after being warm and cloudy all morning it is now sunny and warm (and on my porch, a little too hot.) One of the postdocs mentioned I should get an umbrella like for a patio table and set it up back here if I am too hot and lacking shade, but that somehow seems kinda silly. It might be nice, though. Although the big umbrellas with a big heavy stand are expensive, no? Hmm. Dunno. I'm getting a nice breeze and enjoying hearing birds twittering, though. Terrible laptop glare, on the other hand.

Sigh. I don't want to deal with the last of the grading! or my conference paper! Or figure out my research and job-search-y plans.

I had cookies for dinner last night. I am well on my way towards spoiling tonight's supper as well. And the floors need vacuuming because of the cookie carnage. Luckily, I will soon no longer have any cookies in the house to ruin my meals. I have impeccable logic. And a very strong drive for eating everything that's there, regardless of how hungry I am. Diet and exercise are also on my list of things to plan out for the summer. Meh.

At least the weather has shaped up nicely today. They seem to alternate a nice day with three or four nasty days, which is unfortunate when one has a flexible schedule but also a huge to-do list, because every day I really need to go work in a coffee shop and then do a zillion errands on campus, it is beautiful out, and every day I set aside to go do something else, it is super cold and windy or raining.

Uncas just went by! I said hello and he froze, tried to blend into the weeds. I'm sure he was thinking "I'll just stop by and see if there is any food in the bowl OMFG there is a PERSON out on that cage thingy and I did not even see it! Quick, hold still and maybe it won't eat you!" Just a sec.

* * *

I went indoors, via the back door, got out the cat food, and then went out the front door. Sure enough, Uncas was sniffing at the bowl and zip! went to hide under my front porch steps as soon as I opened the door. He is getting more and more skittish compared to when I first got here. And smaller. Poor thing! I fed him and he came out. I bet he is still confused about me and the back porch though. Can't be helped.

I suppose I have to grade things again now. Phooey.

Ngruuuaggghurgh

2011-05-06T12:56:00.000-07:00

Bleah. Two words: lemoncello.

.

.

.

.

.

Me: Yay, happy end of finals! *clink* So what is this "lemoncello"?

Partner of a Postdoc: It's ... sorta a after-dinner liqueur. Italian. It's meant to be sipped, or could be used as an ingredient in a cocktail.

Me: It's so tart! I could see this being really good in a granita or gelato. I like it! And you say you "infused" it yourself?

PP: Thanks! Yes. You take about a dozen lemons and zest them and soak them in the alcohol until the lemon bits are white and the vodka --- well in this case I used Everclear --- is yellow...

Me: *blink blink* wait, this is Everclear? You gave me three shots of this stuff before dropping the second word?

When Your Get Up and Go Gets Up and Leaves

2011-05-04T07:41:00.000-07:00

Blarhgh. I think I will need to schedule some sort of morning class or meeting or workout. I have been having such trouble making myself get up in the morning, now that classes are over. It doesn't help when the one thing on the to do list is to grade massive amounts of assignments. And more are coming in tomorrow! Sigh.

So far I have had breakfast and coffee. I was supposed to do yoga this morning and felt absolutely not like moving. Even getting out of bed was hard. I don't particularly remember sleeping badly, and I went to bed at a reasonable time, and yet, just like the other non-teaching mornings lately, I got up super late. Clearly I do not have the motivation or willpower to get myself up and going in an unscheduled environment. I had this same problem with my dissertation fellowship year, I think I mentioned before. I guess this means I will need to put money toward a morning exercise class, even though I don't really have room for it in the budget. (I did this back in GradSchoolLand once I signed on for that swanky spin/pilates studio. A class with a set meeting time and money that will go to waste if I don't make it there on time does wonders for getting me out of bed in a way that a free class or dvd doesn't. Great ---- one more thing to plan.)

Mm. Still don't feel like moving. Or thinking. Or dealing with papers. Sigh. More coffee? Maybe I should start those shots of "vitamins" they were always injecting into the Hollywood stars who needed to be bright and bouncy on the set. I don't think I could pull off a good Judy Garland-style crazy, though. And I don't have the wardrobe for some Bette Davis histrionics.

And I have a horrible, terrible admission to make. You know my office? The one I share with two other postdocs and have left completely undecorated because I'll just be moving out soon anyway? The one that has no window or ventilation and is far too overstuffed with three sets of office furniture? (I do love that it has a locking door and the walls go all the way up to the ceiling, though.) Well, I do not like being in there, what with it being all cramped and dark and stuffy. And yet, yesterday afternoon I managed to put in an entire afternoon of grading. Ok, a lot of it was paper shuffling and organizing so that I could total up people's grades, but it still is unusual for me to work that long without taking a nap, after grading at a coffeeshop all morning. Sigh. I may have to go in to the cellblock and work regularly there this summer. I'll need to get a more comfy chair and have the IT people fix the non-working speakers on the computer so I can have some tunes going, but if I have trained myself to associate that space with working and this space at home with napping with the cats, I will just have to go with it.

In other news, my school parking pass works all summer too! This means that I can come on campus as often as I need (see above paragraph about working in the cellblock. Sigh.) I still have to plan my summer, both in terms of what I need to get done and a daily schedule. Why does that seem so overwhelming today? And why have I gone from mid/late morning being my most high-energy and clear-headed time of the day, to this? Bleah.

Maybe I should take a day and take out the recycling, do my laundry, and clean the place instead of grade. Usually I am at my most high-energy and full of caffeinated bounciness by now, and working it off with some errands and housecleaning is great. Not today though. Maybe I should go back to bed? Mm. Dunno. Wish I could figure out what is going on.