Happy New Year

We are in bed. Kitcat is sleeping, I am typing. It's 2008. I'm doing better about not biting my nails. Even though I hate the New Years holiday, and even though I am suspicious of quick fixes and five-point plans and all suggestions that life in the future will be other than it has been in the past, I like New Year's resolutions. I like fresh starts. I like how different times have different feels. The best thing about this year so far is that I have brilliant, motivated students, and we are analyzing Starbucks cups and Nigerian money transfer spam emails and teaching is fun again.

Tis the season

to be totally, totally insane. I finally finished my Pound paper at 5:30 am last night. Now I have to teach my GRE class in a couple of minutes (statistics, probability, quantitative comparisons) and then grade all 22 of my student portfolios by tomorrow morning at 10. After that, Christmas shopping!

Practice lattes

I'm a lucky girl.

Hilariously

Today was my day off from writing. Therefore, I wrote three essays about Proust in the morning, and six essays about my teaching in the afternoon and evening. Probably about a 3000 word day. And not totally mindless writing, either--but easier than the crazy cobwebby labyrinth that is my Pound paper. To which I return tomorrow. And then final grading. And then . . . done!!! But there will be some fun in there too. I hope.

I admit this is cheating, but

I really wanted to get my Pound paper to 10 pages tonight, so I just pressed the return key a whole bunch of times. It worked! Unfortunately, most of those pages cover about six different possible introductions. My hope is to repurpose most of it somehow. I finally got going when I realized why I like the section I'm writing about so much: animals! (I am officially "the girl who sees the animal in everything.") The few pages I'm writing about contain: feathers, paws, dolphins, stags, sheep, an ancient Buddhist monk famous for animal paintings, horses, birds, lions, spiders, scorpions, an owl, wagtail, firefox, more horses, dogs, goats, cats, lizards, more dolphins, squirrels, bluejays, serpents, worms, snakes, another serpent, eels, rams, birds, a black cat, a water-bug, still more birds, and finally “two mice and a moth my guides." What's not to love? (Kitcat loves it so much he chewed the page.)

Today I was on campus 8:30 am-11 pm. 8 hours in the same windowless building reading student papers. But I got a special visit!

GAArrragghh

As I remarked to my class the other day, reading this book in public is like wearing a button that says "Ask Me About Fascism."

Observed while running

The newish ipod shuffle, when pinned to a black shirt, looks exactly like a clerical collar.



Discuss.

A good week!

Classes are over and finished well. Office holiday party was a delight: a cube of wine, beers in our minifridge, deviled eggs, my four batches of hastily made brownies, two mint and two regular, plus I got to share my beloved theory about "Winter Wonderland"'s subversive gender politics. A very sick cat (not mine) miraculously recovered. And more!

Chair

What does it mean? It means I now have a chair for my PhD exam committee. Acquiring one is basically like asking a professor to the prom, and I was really nervous about it, but I did it today and he said yes and was very nice. Huge weight off my mind!

Coming Soon . . .

Democracy! Watch this space! Vote for your favorite cat name!! (A list of choices will appear with the official poll, but if you have any suggestions about what should be on the list, please let me and little nameless know.)

Tomorrow for the last time I head into my crazy midweek dash. This week will be especially bad . . . I'm even double-booked several times. Here's my schedule: Teach, Proust-Meeting with Adviser-Seattle Review Meeting, Pedagogy, Run Home to Feed the Cat, Tutor Till Midnight, Run Home to Sleep, Ezra Pound, Office Hours, Run Home to Feed the Cat, Tutor Till Midnight, Run Home to Sleep, Teach, Proust-Reindeer Sweater Office Party-Pedagogy, Grad Pub! We crossed the international date line a few times in there, so that brings us to Thursday night. It actually doesn't sound so bad. This makes me feel a little better. Now to make a peer review handout.

What is it, Kitcat?

What is it, boy? I think he wants us to follow him!!

The snow has turned to torrential rain, and this morning the cat woke me up at 5 to tell me that the floor is leaking. Huge puddles everywhere. Then we went to the vet. It's been a weekend of cat medicine and floor issues. Weird convergences. A good weekend, too.

Kitcat's first blizzard

Uh-oh

I didn't get started till 11:00, and have now done 5/18 (but the first few always go slower as I figure out the method and common problems).

I have to share the best line, ever: "Without words, the whole thing lacks everything."

Today

was a banner day: I got my first ever text message from a student! I think that banner is actually the one carried by the first horseman of the apocalypse. Or, as the student would say, the 1st hrsmn of the apclyps.

Today I graded a whole bunch of papers, and I have 18 more to go. I also have to plan my class, but I'm going to do that at the gym (running in place helps me think.)

My proudest accomplishment of the day, however, is not the grading but the fact that I cleaned out my school email account. It was such a mess I couldn't find anything! I always think cyber-housework is kind of funny.

Today my office mates (friends) and I scheduled our holiday party and concluded that my cat is part bear. It's raining and my feet are cold and when I finish typing this I have to go outside, and lo, I'm finding myself with lots to say.

Menu

Part of my problem is that I really like to cook but I have for some reason become shy about cooking for other people, so I end up making these elaborate multi-course meals for myself. Tonight I made tomato-lentil soup, which was good even though I added newly-opened wine before discovering it was corked; collard greens with mushrooms and sugar snap peas; and whole-wheat molasses bread. Before cooking I did my usual 5-mile run around Greenlake in the unusual cold, and watched the three twilights diminish and the stars come out.

It’s a good thing to rise and fall without volition,
and another to be infused with a pale white light and touch all equally.

Bicoastal

I'm back in Seattle and feeling very bicoastal. Coming back from the airport last night, I was thinking about how familiar the view as you enter the city has become to me. I remember the first time I saw Seattle, in March of 2002. My first view as the same one, driving north into the downtown, but then it was daytime and what's now everyday was then new and spectacular. (And that night we played pool at the College Inn, where I now go every single Thursday night and the bartenders know my name.)

Now I'm on the couch in my office reading interesting things about Ezra Pound, having decided not to leave my paper till the last minute (although many people would consider this the last minute) and the cat is sleeping on me. So this feels like home. But New York also feels like home. That's odd, since I've never lived there and don't even know my way around very well, but so many people I love are there that it just seems natural for me to be there too. It was a really good trip. More on that soon.

It's 9:00 am in Seattle, and if I were there I would be reading Ezra Pound in preparation for class in a couple of hours. Actually, I would probably still be in bed, recovering from my 7-midnight tutoring shift the night before, and the cat would be making the international sign for "breakfast" (tapping on face with paw).

So I have been sick, and am only queasily back on solid food since last night. And I have discovered that basically not leaving one's apartment for three days has strange effects on one. I've been slowly working through my first big stack of student papers and discovering that though I've always hated grading it's not the commenting that I mind so much, or even the reflection of my own poor teaching that I see staring back at me from each page, but the feeling of desperation and hurry. So I'm trying to plod my way through and not be faced at midnight with several hundred pages still to go.

Anyway, back to the strange effects: I looked up to see my cat on the windowsill, and then at my hands clutching the paper of the moment ("Ignorance in America") and my pink grading pen, and suddenly felt this incredible thankfulness about having opposable thumbs. The cat must be so jealous! To all the early hominids who took the initiative to find slightly handier-than-usual mates, and so on--thank you.

Also, I know it's ridiculous, but I feel personally outraged by the early darkness. How could anyone have decided it would be okay for the sun to set at 4:30. Huh? Huh, sun? I don't mind (much) the cold and bluster, but the dark I really hate. Night is fine when it comes at nighttime, but at this hour it seems, and I really mean this in the most literal way, it seems evil. Malicious, and promising the advent of very bad times. Also, I think the early dark, as well as the sickness-induced time for contemplation, has been bringing back memories of a year ago at this time. I got a flash of the feeling of that time earlier today as I was playing my guitar for the first time in a while, and it surprised me. A year ago I was unhappy, I was really miserable all fall, but it wasn't as depressive as the unhappiness that set in later in the year. This is a weird word but it's the one that came instantly to mind--I felt powerful. It was a kind of edgy, out-of-control manic energy, and when I think back, I was a little nuts in the fall. I was working out kind of obsessively and feeling everything super intensely but feeling things also, paradoxically, with a kind of fierce detachment. In retrospect, I think I must have been on a kind of adrenaline high for those few months. I think it was how I dealt with having to destroy the happy life I had before I moved, little by little, every day. I almost don't know the person I was then anymore, which is a weird thought and a sad one. Now I feel much more like myself again, which is good. I've always hated the winter dark.

This moment of introspection brought to you by procrastination and Proust and by the hope that anyone nice enough to bother reading a long post about nothing will also be inclined to forgive the solipsism (par for the course anyway) and the psychobabble.

Paws in the face

Photo of the day