random/tired
* California voters, good job! Maine, you rock. Dover PA, nice going! Texas and Kansas are still teh suck.
* The key to giving a successful presentation on Deconstruction in one's theory class is to [insert big fat ironic DUH here] throw out your outline as soon as you begin speaking and ramble on extemporaneously and use lots of hand signals. Bonus points for reading a quote from the book which was the subject of the report (the aptly named
Deconstruction), noting all glassy eyes, throwing the book down for emphasis and saying "ok, screw Norris, it's like this" much to the delight of one's prof. He actually said, "that was an excellent report" right there when I was done, with everyone listening. That rocked.
* I am going to hear Azar Nafisi, author of
Reading Lolita in Tehran, in a few minutes.
Dr. Free-Ride is going to go to the noon talk/discussion tomorrow, and since she can't make tonight's event and I can't make tomorrow's event, we're going to exchange notes. Dr. F-R, if you get to teach "Philosophy in Literature" in the next three semesters, I'll find a way to take it!
* I am excited at the prospect of sleeping tonight, uninterrupted and for longer than 15 or 20 minutes.
* I have anywhere from three to six different projects I'm working on for various faculty here and elsewhere. All of a sudden I've gone from having no place in the academic world to being shockingly valuable from a technical/research standpoint. Thanks a lot, Mel, for planting ideas in my head...because I'm not nearly busy enough, you know. Also? None of these projects revolve around authors/eras I'm personally interested in, but that's ok! The Alcott stuff (Bronson, not Louisa May) is the closest in time and place, with Steinbeck stuff a distant second (right continent, wrong time), but everything else isn't even the right continent. Or genre. Fun for all!
* On Friday I get to register for classes. In Spring 2006, Thursdays will be known as "19th Century British Thursdays" what with Romanticism at 4pm followed by Victorian Lit at 7pm. That's 6 solid hours of ... that. Yes, I know I
wrote a note to myself not to take the Victorian seminar because you know...
Middlemarch, but I am going to anyway because I like the rest of the stuff we're going to read.
* Before theory class the other day, I was reading the just-published description of courses and got to the description of the Romanticism seminar. Now, I would have taken it if its only description was "big six," but the newly-minted-PhD-enthusiasm of the person teaching it totally comes through in a description that begins: "Girly girls, supermen, tough-talking viragos, queer fairies and cross-dressers are all part of the celebrated class we'll meet this semester as we read poetry, novels, and essays of the Romantic period. What was it about the 1790s that caused all hell to break loose in the field of British letters anyway?" Come
on, that's awesome. I said as much to the person sitting next to me in class, who thought it was cool but obviously didn't think it was quite as cool as I did. But the women who
writes poetry in lieu of a presentation on Wellek, she said, "that's a really weird description" in a totally I'm-a-dumbass kind of way. Since I was so stoked by the description, my little filter wasn't turned on and I shot back with an incredibly condescending "you obviously haven't read your Romantic poets, now have you?" You know what? I didn't feel bad about saying it, either, especially since other people chuckled at it. I know, I'm going to hell.
* I made up for going to hell by writing a long and detailed email to a classmate in both my methods class and my theory class, explaining assignments and expectations and registration and stuff. She's Indian and very well-read but assignments in the classes aren't making sense to her in the explanations given by the profs. So, I'm helping her, and so are a few others in my theory class. She remarked how happy she is that we are helping her and that she hasn't experienced fellow students being so genuinely concerned and helpful as we have been. She also remarked in class how in America was just have
too many drinks. I always have a water and a coffee, others have a thermos of tea or a soda or a juice and so on. She looked around the table one day and just said, "In America, you have so many drinks!" It was funny.
* I will be writing a post later about randomizing header graphics for all you bloggy people into changing your
header graphics.
* I am tired!
