Where's the Rug?

So, whenever I get my pics uploaded, I'll post my Bostonian pictures, and I'll share my experience serving on a jury this past week, but there is a much more grave issue at hand. I read my email this morning for the first time in a few days and learned that the class I was teaching this summer has canceled! What do I do now? Find some ridiculous, not related to my field, drudge job (a la the mall)? Not work and live off of my savings while I read?

I will definitely not be taking the class that I was signed up for; it didn't meet any requirements, just looked interesting. So, I'm left with a lot more free time than I'd anticipated. I guess that's good because I'll have more time to study for my field exams. But, there's even more free time to manage, and I'm much more productive when I'm busy.

But, since I'm in vacation mode (I was waiting for the summer term to start), I've been reading Special Topics in Calamity Physics by Marisha Pessl. I quite like it. I think I could be friends with the protagonist and narrator Blue. According to her father's advice, the book is "exquisitely annotated" (12), which I can see being grating for some people, but is the life that I live.

A Moment of Silence.

Last night, my U2 special-edition ipod was pronounced dead at my local (ish) apple store. I had little time to mourn, since I'm travelling to Boston today and I am not ready to have an ipod-less existence. As I bought my new ipod, I had to give up my old one. I know there's probably nothing that I could/would have done with it, but it was sad--especially since I was too cheap to spring for the U2 one this time (the last one was a gift). So, my grieving continues and today is Bono's birthday, which keeps the sting of loss fresh (not that yesterday wouldn't be fresh on its own).

Huh

I have become a professional academic because I get excited about reading and then writing and talking about said read (or watched) texts. I'd like to think that I am not without some skills in the field. Yesterday confused me.

I received grades back on the two big papers that I wrote this semester. Granted neither subject (Milton and the Renaissance Essay) are the reason that I have stayed in school so long, but at least for my RenEss paper, I was sort of excited about my topic, which was theoretically tangential to what I do in my particular field. For my Milton paper I chose the topic as something I might like to read, but nothing that I was going be invested in for the larger picture of my research agenda. Why then, did the throw away (and a little bit of a nod to the teacher's interests) topic get a better grade than the far more original, interesting to me one? Why am I a better academic when I care less?

I find it rather disconcerting that I perform better when I care less about my subject.

I Think I See a Light and Why I Love Reading

Well, I was up until 2am writing a final for my class, then I got up at 7:20 to make cupcakes for my friend's birthday lunch. I'm beat. My two big papers are done, now I just have tons of grading and reading to do. I was doing an awesome independent study this semester, but I think I had an overly ambitious reading list and I know I should have somehow (I'm not sure when) done more on it during the semester. I've got six books left that I want to read--most of them are over 300 pages. Blurg. But, on the bright side just when I was completely disconnected and a little bored with my book Oscar and Lucinda (Peter Carey, 1988), I came across this amazing passage:

"...he had an idea involving it, an idea that involved such a dreadful laceration of his own feelings that it is really hard to credit. And yet it was all born out of habits of mind produced by Christianity: that if you sacrificed yourself you would somehow attain the object of your desires. It was a knife of an idea, a cruel instrument of sacrifice, but also one of great beauty, silvery, curved, dancing with light. The odds were surely stacked against him, and had it been a horse rather than a woman's heart he would never have bet on it, not even for a place."

Those last two sentences make me want to weep; they are so beautiful.