Stop and Smell the Flowers

So, did I get my nose back to the grindstone and work diligently at my dissertation in the remainder of this week? No, I did not! Instead, we went out to see the wildflowers, as it is wildflower blooming season. (and horrible allergy season, at home, but that’s another post.)

I had read some reviews of how amazing and beautiful the wildflowers are in March and April, so I did extensive research on the web and planned up a little trip. The first problem was that the famous areas all got burned up in a wildfire, and those trails and camping places have been closed indefinitely and are desolate heaps of ashes, anyway, but we managed to find a scenic road and drive up it. Much more my lazy style than hiking all that way!

I drove up through the wine country, around and over the side of the wine country, along a valley, and then through a cute little touristy town that Dissertation Buddy had been wine tasting in frequently and promised she’d show me the place. Then we drove out to the mountain.

Of course, I forgot my camera, so I’ll have to describe all the wonderfulness. But I got my idea for the route from this site documenting this guy’s bike ride (Lance Armstrong uses this path to train in the winter months, so hell no I am not biking up this mountain!). Right outside the town it was all soft and green, and the road quickly narrowed until it was barely wider than our car. It climbed so steadily that I worried I might get tired, pushing on the gas, and have the car slide backward if I were to ease off the pedal. There were lots of crazy-tilted switchbacks which we mounted ever higher, and lots of blind turns in and out of the hills where I thought we’d be annihilated by fat SUVs barreling back down the mountain (assholes!). There were, indeed, some intrepid cyclists kitted out in full spandex glory. We passed them as if they were stopped, they were pedaling so hard and moving so slowly. I felt sympathy for them, especially every time I hit a blind curve and nearly ran into some.

I was only doing 20 or so as we ambled through rolling green fields, then green fields with uninquisitive cows, then the beautiful mountain turns and switchbacks. The grass was long in places and rippled like the surface of a lake. In others, the ground cover was scrubby and patchy --- there were agaves and other cacti in places, and the earth was reddish, rocky, and extremely dry. My familiar California habitat! In places the hills/mountains were broken by striations of rocks pushing up out of the earth --- serpentine, which glimmers in the sun, and copper, mostly.

And as we’d come around one bend or another, sometimes dangerously close to the edge of the road where it crumbled off into nothingness, we’d gasp at the absolute beauty of the view below --- glimpses of the lake in the bottom of the valley, dense forests of pines and evergreens, fields of scattered oaks both sturdy and the cool twisty-gnarley kind, and an amazing shade of blue sky.

It was a wonderful drive, and sometimes we’d even see a lupine or a poppy plant. “Ooh!” we’d say, “Look! Wildflowers!” But in truth, inside I was a little, “eh? the newspaper pics had carpets of these flowers stretching everywhere you could see!” It was a gorgeous trip anyway, but I was feeling a bit misled. When we stopped at a scenic view turn off, another car with an elderly couple stopped and got out with their dog. The woman asked if we had seen any wildflowers and she had the same basic complaint as I did. So I felt a bit vindicated, although Dissertation Buddy tried to get me to close the conversation. Her friend is going blind and she was of the opinion that telling them we had seen more (or any) wildflowers would make them really upset and remind them of their fading eyesight. I’m of the opinion that people with fading eyesight should not be driving on hairpin turns through the mountains. But anyway.

We got back in the car and continued. A mere fifteen (a beautiful fifteen) minutes later, we passed a steep hillside that was literally blanketed in wildflowers. It was gorgeous, and like an optical illusion: as we approached it, it looked like a carpet of orange --- California poppies. As we passed it, noting another scenic turnout for us up ahead, the colors changed and it became a magnificent blue-purple as the lupine became visible. Ahhhhh!

(I hope the grumpy elderly couple continued on, because, yes, there was one carpet of wildflowers and it should have satisfied even her.)

There were a couple people there enjoying the flowers when we got out. We parked under a pine ---- sugar pine, I think ---- and the place was quiet except for distant birds and the squeak of pine needles under our feet. I breathed in deeply the spicy tree smell (like cinnamon and vanilla and sap), the gentle breeze, the dryness of the dirt; this is what I associate with California and camping. Dissertation Buddy loves the coast and Big Sur but I grew up camping in the valleys and not in places full of salty air and fog. This was familiar: chaparral, forest, the West.

We crossed the road to the flowers. The lupine smelt amazing, like blueberries. The bright petals of the poppies were as fragile as a butterfly’s wing. Dissertation Buddy was so taken with it all that she tried to use her cell phone camera to capture some of the view. It was peaceful, even with some other tourists around. Fat bees buzzed everywhere and gnats chewed on my shins, but I didn’t care. It was one of those perfect California days where it’s too chilly whenever the breeze blows and too hot whenever it stops. (Perfect if you’re hiking, that is.)

Eventually we got back in the car and headed ever upward, the views becoming downright spectacular as we wove in and out of the mountaintops. We weren’t sure if we could go to the very top, as some of the campsites here were closed by the fires as well, so we kept our eyes peeled for a good spot with a view in preparation of a picnic.

If you know me you know that I always prioritize food and that food must come everywhere with me. So of course we had planned picnicings. We had bread and cheese and salami and a really tasty chickpea/tabbouli salad thing DB had made and added all sorts of interesting nuts and seeds to. Mmm! We lounged around and looked at the view and talked about all the different places we needed to go camping before we left California. (for it’s just a matter of time, right? I’m sure my one job offer will be from rural North- Southeast Arkansas Technical College and I’ve just got to make peace with that now. But it will be hard to leave all this.)

I was a bit worried when I remembered my usual response to eating a large meal is to immediately fall asleep, which bodes ill for driving, but I managed to get us back down the mountain just fine and it was even prettier the other way. If that’s possible.

We drove back through the town and stopped off at some lavender farms. They were disappointing as they weren’t really growing. No blooms ---- just some small sad-looking green lumps. Tsk. It seems odd that they wouldn’t be growing when now is declared the flower blooming season, but evidently they don’t follow the California wildflower schedule. DB said she knew some of the nicer wineries were outside town --- less pricey, less pretentious. So we drove around and got lost for a long time and then just picked a random winery, which may have been the one she was thinking of and she had misremembered the name.

Have you all seen Sideways? I haven’t, but I guess it’s set somewhere around here, roughly, and the LA Times had an article about how, since the latest thing has been to charter a bus up from LA with a bachelorette party or otherwise loud and rude and crude mob that does not understand the intricacies of high-class wine tasting, the prices of everything are going up.

Luckily, it wasn’t too bad where we stopped. I really liked the first thing we tasted --- a Sauvignon Blanc --- nicknamed “sunshine in a bottle!” It was good. The rest ranged from “meh” to a really weird metallic strong taste, that DB said was tannins. I didn’t like those. DB, being a veteran wine taster and grad student extraordinaire, cadged tastings for us of their pinot and all the other wines they make but didn’t include in the price of our tasting. Atta girl! Still, I liked the first one best. She raved about the pinot and we proceeded to have an argument about pinots because she is my only source of wine knowledge, and has either told me something wrong or is changing definitions and information on me when I’m not looking, which is not fair.

Anyway, pounding a bunch of wine and having an argument is a sure sign that we should hang around a while until I was good to drive back, so we went into the garden out back and then wandered all over someone else’s property next door, talking and being silly. Luckily, no one had any problems with this. We chased some baby goats, because they are cute. And we saw a hawk just hanging in an updraft, looking out at the expanse below him, and we were jealous. It was still a beautiful day, although the wind was picking up and getting chilly. After a long talk about nothing in particular we got back in the car at last, and drove drove drove back towards home. We were quiet most of the way back, tired out I guess.

I’m so glad I went, even if I really should have worked on the diss. I wish I had time and money to do more of these types of things. In any case, I need to promise myself that I get out and do this more often, and not lock myself up in my apartment avoiding both my dissertation and the outside world.

Belling the Cat

Belling the cat my ass; it should be pilling the cat. I've just found my little troublemaker's secret stash of drugs, and unfortunately for me, he's not stockpiling them to take them. All those claw marks on my leg and this probably means I'll have to go back to the vet for more ---- more expenditures, more frustration and pain, more chasing a little black blur around the apartment for another week. Great.

So it appears that my cats are smarter than me; why am I not making them write the dissertation for me then? Oh wait, I think I've answered my own question. Little bastards.

On the other hand, I bet my cats are more of the lab scientist types than lit scholars, anyway. If I let them loose on my chapter they'd probably produce a study of the relative fascination indexes of various bugs, the Realism Mouse, toilet paper, and the laser pointer. ("Fascination increases as wiggliness (W) approaches infinity, while decreasing in inverse proportion to stinkiness (S)...") The most I've ever gotten them to do on the humanities side was to put their pointy little teeth marks all over a draft that was conveniently hanging off the table edge (obviously they were making a sly reference to Distinction: Critique of the Judgement of Taste).

On the other hand, tonight they were licking this one library book and knocked the whole stack over, making a huge mess and scaring the bejeezus out of me, so perhaps there is a future for them in textual analysis yet. I don't know what was on that book, but I had to hide it in the closet eventually. Thinking on it, that was a bad idea, because that's where I keep their food and now they know that this book must be wonderful and edible. I'm going to have them meowing and leaping on me like when I bring out the treats when next I go to take some notes.

Here's my little Watson and Crick (Laurel and Hardy?), conducting tests with the now retired and obsolete Purple Mouse.

Why Timido always looks so startled in pictures, I don't know. He actually has other expressions. It was a guilty look as he wriggled out of my arms and the blanket that tipped me off he thought he was getting away with something --- and yes, he was stashing his pills. You can't hide from me forever; I have nieces and nephews --- I know that look!

But even when they torment me and claw me and annoy me and mug for my attention, I'm still captivated by how damn cute they are. How the hell do they manage to do that?

Now that would be a worthy experiment for the scientists.

Random Bullets of Spring Break

Hello all, welcome to spring break! How much dissertation work has this cog done? Absolutely none! That makes it a little over a week since I have even touched it. On the bright side, I have finished and uploaded all my grades. Well then, what have I been doing, if not what I'm supposed to be doing?

---- I invited people over for a delicious meal cooked from scratch which involved almost every dish and pan I own (not hard, actually) and which we luxuriated over with the accompaniment of large quantities of wine,

---- The next day I alternated between lazing around, half-heartedly doing the resulting mountain of dishes, and interspersing these activities with copious amounts of internet time-wasting,

---- Then I invited more people over, who had a movie they wanted me to see, and offered to serve them all the leftovers from the previous night. A brilliant idea ---- I spent another half hour washing dishes and then had lots of fun totally impressing people with stuff I hadn't even cooked that day. And, I have only a little bit of leftovers rather than an overload to look forward to in the coming week,

---- I spent quality time outdoors, on the beach (it's beautiful weather out these days, not to inspire envy in anyone, but it's true),

---- Entertained los gatitos with much play and spoiling, first with a spare toy donated by friends. Length of time before the tail was gnawed off: 5 minutes. Length of time before the body was chewed apart (see pic to left): another 10 minutes, spread out over a couple days because I got wise to the fact it had elastic string and I was locking it away when I went to bed.

Post-Purple Mouse, I obtained Realism Mouse, which was made of leather bits and what seems like fur. That caused hissing and fighting and I had to throw the carcass straight away after five minutes --- it didn't even make it to the Drawer of Forbidden Toys.

After Realism Mouse I got new batteries for the laser pointer and also saw, at last, a "chew toy" designed for cats. I got two this time. I suppose I could take a picture of them too, but I won't bother. So far they have lasted well and are quite the hit. They make a squeaky snapping sound when they are chewed on hard, but are relatively indestructible so far. They are wrapped with a latticework of nylon and then fabric and then have catnip stalks in the center. I fully expect my little troublemakers to put on weight, saying "Duuuude" a lot and veg out on the couch with the remote now. Just as well --- the little fuckers weren't getting anywhere with my dissertation or my grading.

---- Went over to another friend's and was fed delicious homemade soup from scratch. Ooo! And a custard (meh. --- I'm not so fond of mushy foods.) I'm feeling enjoyably connected back into the gossip of the department, though I fear I have but scratched the surface.

---- Oh, and I tried Pilates for the first time ever ---- aigh! Shit! What muscles! I had no clue I could hurt in such places. We'll see if I can get back into some sort of exercise habit ---- even though it's warmer, I'm just not able to work up the effort to go swimming. Besides, despite Pilates being the absolute embodiment of everything that fucking pisses me off about California, I'm very tempted ---- they had me at "makes you seem taller."

---- And today, when I was supposed to be getting back into the work groove and getting tons of shit done before starting a new quarter and a new load of teaching, I abruptly decided, screw it, and went out shopping. For some reason I bought a lot of skirts and dresses, as if I wanted to become the Girliest Girl Ever. These dresses have some serious foof, although they are not full-on ruffle-butt kiddie dresses. Nor are they the skanky style that pairs so well with ugg boots after the manner of my students. And, really, considering I so rarely make the effort to dress nice and shave and coordinate and sit on chairs like a lady rather than sprawl with one leg up in an ungainly position, I don't know what came over me with the foofy dresses. I guess it's spring.

Unfortunately, I went back to a store fully planning to try on and shell out for this one dress I saw last week in their display window, only to be denied. I was thinking this would be an awesome graduation dress, considering that people are insisting I wear something underneath the robes, but there was no large and the medium did not zip up. Sigh.There were other problems with the fit too, but the dress had such style! See for yourself:

Yeah, I know: bra strap. And a really strange fit with the cleavage that doesn't work. The light in the dressing room was dim, so you're not getting how electric neon hideous that orange and yellow and green truly are. But they are indeed wonderful. So loud. Sigh.

The skirt is, indeed, only mildly foofy. It could use a, whatever it is, a petticoat or something. Not sure I'd put that much effort into getting dressed in any such way, but perhaps I would if the dress actually fit. Ah well.

So that's what I've been up to ---- I should post some cat pictures for your further enjoyment and edification, but perhaps later. Tomorrow is another day. Oh yeah, tomorrow ---- I guess I should deal with my final chapter tomorrow, huh?

Thanks for the Meme-ories

Dr. Crazy, and I believe other people as well, have tagged me for a meme ---- the assignment is to write one's memoir in six words. Now, I know I haven't really done much (see The Way of the Couch), but really, only six words? That's more of a character sketch than a developed life story. (But then again, I hate memoirs and autobiographies in general --- they fail to live up to my sense of a well-plotted novel or five-act play. But I digress.)

What follows are the rules, but I'm going to break them, naturally.

Instructions:

1. Write your own six word memoir

2. Post it on your blog and include a visual illustration if you’d like

3. Link to the person that tagged you in your post and to this original post if possible so we can track it as it travels across the blogosphere

4 Tag five more blogs with links

5. And don’t forget to leave a comment on the tagged blogs with an invitation to play!

Of course, you realize, this means war!

Because I am never so ridiculous and foolish as when I am angry. While I wish I were the rabbit in this scenario, I'm more often the duck, shooting off my own nose to spite someone else's face.

And if I were going to make up a six-word mantra or slogan for myself, it would have to be Daffy's "Woo-hoo! Woo-hoo! Woo-hoo! Hoo-hoo! Woo-hoo! Woo-hoo!".

Now everybody go meme yourselves.

In the Pipeline Part II: When the Plumbing is Clogged

Long long ago, I asked if it was better to go on the market while ABD, in a "trial run," or deal with finishing the dissertation first and have a gap year while going on the market (for me, the "gap year" is much more about "how will I eat and pay the rent" and much less worry about gaps opening up on my CV).

Having survived two job market attempts now, it is clear to me that the answer is "PUBLICATIONS!!!!! PUBLICAAAAAAAAAATIONS!!!!!! Publications You Motherfucker! We Rejected Candidates Who Had Published Entire BOOKS As Not Worthy To Even Wipe Our Feet and We Should Charge YOU For Forcing Us to Look At Your Sniveling Job Materials You SCUM, UNPUBLISHED SCUM I SAY!!!!!!!"

And those were just the ones kind enough to send the Please Fuck Off letters. Most schools seem to think that acknowledging failed job applicants will make them ritually unclean, as if our unworthiness will rub off on their schools and make them drop a level in the US News and World Report Rankings.

So, Ok ---- after going off and crying in a corner for a while I went back to the twin tasks of working on my dissertation and getting stuff out to publishers. (Don't even get me started on how my department assumes we will finish the whole program, including the dissertation, and graduate in four years, teaching the whole time, including getting trained in comp and then moving back to Eng after a year, with no summer support and almost no help or advice on publishing or even time to wedge in some work on publishing --- but anyway.) In fact, you may remember that after Mostly Disastrous Job Market Year #1 I got right down to work on a chapter and three articles (one of which got rejected and I scrapped), and I sent out finished manuscripts into the publication pipeline last summer. (Then I went out on Truly Disastrous Job Market Year #2. But we won't talk about that now.)

The problem now is that those pipelines appear to be clogged.

I mused about this a little last year when I compared the constant process of having ideas and writing them up and sending them out and getting them back to either juggling or pinball. I understood, at least I thought so at the time, that the whole publishing process was another of these aspects of being a professor where you need to be incredibly self-directed and able to think ahead and organize long periods of time, being able to shoot something out there and then turn back to do something else, keeping busy, while your shiny little idea pinged and panged back and forth and set off little lights and buzzers until eventually it came back and you thwacked it back off again.

I had no clue that the ball might hurtle off into the ether and be never seen or heard from again.

Now what? It's been eight freaking months, people! I would like to have something worthwhile on my CV when I go (sigh) back on the market yet again in the fall. So if I'm getting rejected, I would like it to happen now so I can go take my pinball and play it in another game and get it rolling along its new tracks before market season again. (Has my metaphor lost anyone yet?)

Or alternately, if it's any good, I would like to hustle along some revisions and shoot it back out there, because it has been pointed out to me that sending an article out to a top journal, such as, I don't know, PMLA, takes absolutely no skill whatsoever and thus doesn't really count for much on a CV. I have been further informed that there's no point to listing a revise-and-resubmit on one's CV either; no one will care or count it as a publication unless you can say "accepted" and "forthcoming." Someone else told me that "grad students these days" will list articles as "submitted" to various journals when they haven't actually submitted anything yet but they have been thinking about it, and so search committees treat CVs with submitted publications exactly the same way as blank ones. Turns out, some of my peeps here did exactly that, to which I said, thanks guys. Way to help me out.

If you want any advice (and would actually take it from an unpublished scum like me: look at the turnaround time of the journals you want to submit to. Harass your profs and people in your field, if need be. I think that journals that publish quarterly or more often meet more frequently and have faster turnaround times than journals that only publish a couple times a year, or annually. Or maybe I just picked super duper slow venues.

With one journal, I've been checking in since MLA (someone told me that December "doesn't count" in journal turnaround time because everyone knows the semester is ending and full of grades and holiday preparations and then it's MLA. I totally accept that. I waited until I was back before trying to nag people.) This has become a routine for me now at the top of each month:

• send rent check
• send polite nagging email to journal

And then, a few days later:

• rent check clears
• return email explains that the editorial board has not yet met to evaluate the reviews of my article

This is getting frustrating. I had set myself up for the idea that publishing anything takes about a year, but this is looking like it will take years before it actually appears anywhere in print. I mean, I've been told that the best I can hope for is a revise-and-resubmit since it's very rare to be straight-up accepted by a journal. I've also been told that it takes about as long to go through the R&R part as the first part, if not longer.

Crap! Crapitty crap crap! I wouldn't be so upset about all this if I didn't feel the pressures to get something real on my CV in time for the next job season! I would just go back to writing more things and pinging them out. Do people on the tenure track feel the same way, what with tenure standards and internal reviews and whatnot? Gah!

The other journal is stuck too --- after a few reminder emails I got a response that they would be happy to work with me and that they were sending back the readers' reports after X happened. I think that may be an unofficial revise and resubmit, and the editor was very very nice and encouraging. So I have all these hopes and excitements about this one. But. The reader reports have never arrived. The polite, questioning emails I have sent about them have never been replied to. X deadline is months and months away and I could see that, if this editor is organizing the X as well, the editor is not doing anything journal related in that harried and crazy time. So now what do I do about this one? Or that one? Gahhh!

Some people have told me that this turnaround time is completely unacceptable and I should pull both articles and start again. But I have no assurances that starting again somewhere else would be any faster. And I would like these articles to go in these journals; that's why I submitted to them first. And I haven't been rejected by either. And that last, hopeful-sounding email from the one journal, like the faint shadowings of land to some shipwrecked survivors, really did seem like they wanted my article if I only fixed whatever mysterious things the reviewers suggested, but since I never did see the reviewer reports, it feels like the land was really a mirage, never to be seen again.

I have gotten some conference proposal stuff out for Yet Another Idea, and I am working away at finishing the dissertation. But, you know, the timing on these won't be quite right for the fall job market either. Dangit! I was hoping my mantra would be The Third Time's The Charm, not Four More Years.

What to Bring to Conference Papers

I recently (well no, a while ago) did my due diligence and departmental support by sitting in the audience for someone's talk on campus. Luckily ABDs like to procrastinate, or else no one would ever have an audience for student talks and round-tables and such. (Of course, if you want to fill your panel's audience, I have made suggestions for packing the aisles in the past.)

And I believe that advanced grad students (I hate the term "old") and professors do a valuable service, sitting in and critiquing the presentations of new grad students, and ideally they model how to be good audience members as well, but I could probably write a whole other, much funnier, post about all the right and wrong ways to be the audience at an academic talk (Flavia has an amusing example of audience body language here). Grad students with conference experience can give advice on presentation style and hopefully nip some of the embarrassing tics or unfortunate conference assumptions before the new grads venture into larger venues and bring humiliation down on themselves and the department. (One tip: when you are asked to give a "bio" of yourself to the panel organizer, that means a short statement about where you are studying/working and your interesting current or past research. Not a 10 page actual life story or personal philosophy. And for heaven's sake, not in verse.)

So while I believe sitting in these talks is part of my uncompensated service requirement, to help out our department and the profession, the one I listened to most recently taught me much about what I do not want to hear about at a conference presentation. Which made me wonder, what does one bring to a presentation of one's work? This is not surprising as I can over-think anything to the point that I no longer have any clue how to do it, including writing or reading my own name if I stare at it hard enough.

I think the question of what to bring varies from conference to conference, depending on your expected audience (is it an author-specific conference? a field conference? interdisciplinary?) and the particularities of the field or discipline you work in. But I think of the conference presentation as one small part of a larger conversation with scholars, with the end goal to use your research to somehow help or teach them.

So, for example, I could see that simply bringing the existence of a text to your colleagues' attention could be a valuable project in itself, if it is a recently recovered or relatively unknown text, and so you bring them the text and show how it fits into their larger canon or framework.

Or, conversely, you want to bring in some context that no one puts with your text --- I love presentations with lots of pictures, but that could just be a comment on my own deficiencies in paying attention at conferences.

Or, perhaps, your specialty, like mine, is Bizarre Metaphors and you love to yoke together the most disparate texts imaginable --- say, for example, The Piano Teacher with Jane Austen's Emma --- to show us something new and surprising with the comparison. (This works often with theory --- oops, excuse me, Theory --- and the bringing together of texts with theories that are not commonly used on those texts. It's sort of like the person at the potluck who brings poached pears with pickled greens and then convinces us that this unlikely combination is in fact terrific.)

But what you should not do is to point out an unusual image pattern in an Extremely Familiar Canonical Text and then enumerate the appearances of these images In. Excruciating. Detail. Particularly if you find yourself running out of time and frantically jettisoning bits of your talk that explain why these patterns are important. Nor should you set up such elaborate framing and clarification and foreshadowing statements that you have to declare you are out of time as soon as you get to the "meat" of your argument. Nor should someone be able to summarize your paper before they've heard it.

In short, when you consider what to bring to the conference paper, consider what your audience already has. You wouldn't bring tomatoes to a salsa convention, of course, but you might consider even further than that and realize that you probably won't need to bring chips, either. Or perhaps you do, but you bring only a little bit and balance it all out neatly on the plate with other things. And there's the trick of it, right? Dr. Crazy has been blogging about the frustrations of writing a conference paper --- actually, it may be at the article stage now --- where she has to "write tight" to fit the constraints. And balancing all the things you have to say in order to bring your colleagues something lovely and useful in the time constraints of a conference paper is fucking hard.

Personally, I find my conference papers written "from the ground up" to be a huge mess compared to the ones I had the time to write out a huge rambling lumpy argument and then cut down from the chapter. But I think I need to learn how to start with smaller, self-contained ideas and "write tight" up from them because I need to go to conferences more often than I produce chapters. Bleah. I'm still not at the stage where I have ideas that occur to me at the level of arguments. I still start with "whoa, that bizarre image keeps happening in this text!" and then I have to brainstorm and write my way up from listing every instance in excruciating detail to developing some sort of argument about them to then figuring out what the stakes are for my argument and then finally turning it into something that resembles academic writing. And whoo! is that a lot of work. But at least I know to cut out all the useless early crap and I know when I'm far from done.

So if you see me at some conference, bring me something tasty and new and unusual. I'll be the one with the roasted garlic and jicama.

A Question for the Ages

Whew! Fifty essays, four days, a long and tiring TA meeting to prep the final that will soon descend upon us (and we didn't even have the sure-to-be-equally-long-and-painful paper norming session yet), and my mind is about as sharp as cream cheese. Mmmm, cheese for brains! (drools.) I have about twenty posts I want to write and another twenty I want to respond to, but that will have to wait for some sleep.

I gave up on cooking supper tonight and went straight to the Trader Joes chocolate raspberry sticks. Weight and health will return as actual concerns after this bout with grading, but not during.

So it's time to ask my peeps for some important and highly intellectual help: what shoes do you wear at a graduation? Under the fancy robe-thingys? At an outside ceremony which involves processing in down a long grassy hill?

I'm thinking any sort of spiky heel thing would get stuck and at best, aerate the turf, and at worst, send me careening down face first, perhaps to start a huge chain of pratfalls like those cool displays of dominoes that make patterns, except that this would not actually be cool at all, barring perhaps those sadists in the audience.

On the other hand, everyone's doing those ballet-flat type shoes, and I think if you are already short and have wide, flat feet like a duck (thanks for pointing it out, Dad!), those shoes don't fit very well or look particularly flattering either.

And while huge ass-kicking Dr. Martins or maybe even motorcycle boots sound great on a metaphorical, message-sending level, I'm not sure that I actually want to go for that look.

So, what to wear, what to wear? Suggestions?

I should add that I am a fashion schizophrenic (no offense meant to actual schizophrenics) ---- I bounce back and forth wildly between wanting whatever makes me "fit in," as in blend in and be invisible among the crowd, and, desiring wild and funky stuff that either seems "unique" (yes yes, I know how loaded that term is for the fashion system) or sets me apart as too smart for or somehow transcendent of the fashion system. Sometimes I aspire to both at once, which I understand is not really the way to go.

So: color? Should you stand out, contrast, wear black or neutrals? The school colors?
(Some of you might recognize that I have these in leopard-print... but leopard-print just doesn't seem the right tone for graduation, does it?)

Strappy sandal-ly things or closed? shoes? Go for funky and weird or try to make your feet the most unobtrusive things about you? Eh?(I've been liking bronze lately... no clue why. I'm a little scared of pointy-toe-ness.)

I went and pulled a bunch of pics off zappos. You can see my random, occasionally retro, tastes:

Some of these are cute and some of them are so hideously ugly that I'm fascinated and must have them anyway. Isn't that strange? And I thought I had uploaded more sandal-type shoes, hmm. Where did they go?

So, I like all of these or am fascinated by the idea of wearing something that screams, Look at my hideousness! I don't know if any of them would go with regalia or what I want; I'm mostly posting pretty pics for my own amusement and am completely open to suggestions.

What say you? And: send me you relaxing and mindless shopping entertainment suggestions! As I will have finals soon, very soon.