6 posts tagged “academia”
I see, in sorting through my piles of stuff, that I have made a note of some things I might post about. Because I want to be sure that you have the absolutely most entertaining reading experience possible, except the opposite of that, I will share this list with you:
- "Jury duty": in which I was an insufferable ass.
- Thanksgiving: a delicious success
- Friends: the handy way that other people make them for me
- Making up syllabi: all of the fun, none of the trouble
- Things to wear under suits: an endlessly vexing genre
- Choosing Christmas presents for oneself: an annual fuckwad
The scare quotes on "jury duty" are there because our friend R. is taking a course in trial tactics this semester, and it's time for the mock trials. Each student has to provide jury members for another student's trial, round-robin style. Last week we served for a "case" in which a woman was suing for wrongful arrest, malicious prosecution, and defamation after having been arrested for allegedly stealing a bottle of perfume. The sub-claims and varying standards of proof were many and complicated, man, and we had no printout of our jury instructions. This was something of an impediment to our making our decisions quickly. Another impediment, however, was that I am apparently ENTIRELY INCAPABLE of restraining myself from talking over every fucking thing, and also kind of incapable of waiting my turn to speak. Because, you see, I am a jackass. Hooray!
I gave a guest lecture for F's class this morning. I got a couple of good laughs by way of using Scooby-Doo as an example of low-quality twist endings, a topical deployment of the "how do you keep an idiot in suspense?" joke, and my stage-whisper delivery of "I see dead people." I count that as a success. Less successfully, I forgot all my skills of kicking off post-lecture discussion with a group other than my own class of adorable moppets, but F. provided a very effective assist there and saved the day.
Happy Halloween eve. That's right, it's the day before the day before All Saints Day! Woo. *shoots finger guns into the air* I'll be wearing the same witch's hat I always wear. Simple, classic, flattering, impossible to mistake for a non-costume, goes with everything, the perfect solution. How about you?
I'm tired, y'all. I want to spend a week in a hotel, supplied
with beautifully clean sheets, fantastic breakfasts, an enormous and
luxurious bathroom, lots of sex, and a fantastic reading library. Just
to be perfectly clear, the hotel should merely provide the setting for
item #4, not the partner, thanks.
No thanks to you and your old trombone.
I won a
prize! I'm not going to write down the name of it, because it would
ruin the tenuous anonymity of this site, but it is a nice prize that I
didn't apply for, for the best [something something] article published
last year. Obviously, this makes me very happy. It was all a little
odd, because I learned about it second hand, and had to write to the
chair of the awarding organization to confirm that it was true. The
extremely nice chair wrote back right away to say that she was very
sorry not to have let me know sooner, but she only had an (old)
physical address for me, and yes indeed I HAD wone (typing
quickly, clearly). This pleasing typo prompted Snark to compose the
following couplet: "All the prizewinners I have known / and all the
prizes they have wone." Catchy.
Count the ways in which this is an infelicitously named event.
The 14th Annual Academic Happy Hour, a discussion on a topic of interest to the campus community, will take place on Friday, February 2, 2007 from 12:30 p.m. to 1:50 p.m. The planning committee is accepting suggestions for a topic for this 90-minute community dialogue.
(1) There will not be discounted alcohol, nor indeed any alcoholic drinks at all.
(2) This event is most unlikely to increase happiness in any way.
(3) Ninety minutes is not, in fact, an hour.
Sent off a batch of applications today. I wish it had been the last of them, but it wasn't. Someday. I am trying not to think too much about the daunting piles of other work that have been getting neglected in favor of the orgy of self-description. I worry, too, that if I do this too many more times I will lose all ability to distinguish between sense and nonsense, and will send off an application that is all deranged spliced-together fragments of previous letters and research statments, all adding up to utter babel.
This process is getting associated in my mind with sickly fluorescent light as the days get shorter and greyer and I have to turn on my office lights earlier and earlier.
The weather today has been truly vile, rain and sleet and pellets of snow coming down in sheets. On the way to the post office I saw a dead cat. It looked quite perfect, sad and damp and entirely dead, curled up next to a lamp post. Perhaps someone moved it there after it had been hit by a car? Hard to imagine that it would choose such a relatively exposed spot to crawl off and die on its own, and yet it seemed undamaged. I walked back on the other side of the street.
Last night I dreamed that there was an exciting new television show called IRB, about the thrilling adventures inherent in reviewing human subjects research. From the people who brought you CSI!
Did you know that when you tell people you are going to Paris, they tend to think that you should be looking forward to it? (I'm sure it will be lovely.)
Also, ONCE AGAIN I forgot to put my email address on my handouts, and only noticed after I had made all the copies.
