Shop in Haste?

I just ordered a bunch of stuff from here. I didn't mean to order as much as I did. But every time I checked my shopping bag, something else was out of stock, so I finally hit "check-out" in a panic, and now I'm hoping that I don't live to regret the almost-$250 I just dropped (in my book, that's a lot to spend on clothes).

On the other hand, we bought our house in haste, and it is a delightful treasure! --And with that ever-so-natural segue, I shall finally (FINALLY) put up the rest of my house pictures, since I'm sure you've been dying to see them.

The kitchen:



(With skylights!)


The bedroom:


The basement (not terribly exciting, but it is mostly finished):


The wine cellar:


And...the bathroom. Admire! Admire! This sucker took me like a WEEK to paint.



Note the Gothic cathedral theme: gold stars on a dark blue ceiling, corners that are suggestive of a dome, a gargoyle, the candle-holder. Here's the power switch (I cut out God to make room for the switches):


And here are some little pictures I put up (I paid $0.60 for all four frames, and the images came from medieval conference CFPs and catalogues). What puzzles me is that people always tell us how cute our bathroom is; apparently they haven't noticed the bleeding Christ or the suicidal woman.


Funnily enough, we are daily tormented by a cardinal who is determined to fly through the window of the bathroom. As TM remarked, "It stands to reason that the cardinal would seek entry into the Gothic cathedral, no?"

Party Time

I love my husband, and I love our evenings together. But it is kind of fun to have a night alone now and again, isn't it?

He's got a dinner thing tonight and I do not. So! Here's what's on the agenda:

Cook up a pot of spaghetti and my favorite sauce-from-a-jar (Newman's Own Sockarooni).
Eat too much spaghetti, drink wine, and watch back episodes of "30 Rock."
Throughout, cuddle kitties.
Put on pajamas and read some stuff until he gets home.

It's funny how sauce-from-a-jar seems like a special secret treat. It's so declasse: a guilty indulgence. And that just tells you something about the fantastic-fancy cooking guy I married.

New Year's Day and we're off to a poky start

Two posts in December, eh? That's a new low for me, I think. Hm. Maybe Resolution # 4 will be to do something about the pitiable rate-of-blogging around here.

Anyway, the holidays were fine etc. etc. Relaxed at Mom's house until we just sort of had to...escape. I can't relax for too long, I find. (I used to claim that I didn't understand the need to "relax," but somehow having an actual job has changed my tune there. I've noticed that I have a propensity for making sweeping and unfounded pronouncements of that sort. It could be endearing. I suspect that it's annoying and bizarre.) Anyway, after a few days of Mom's House of Decadence--with the wine, and the cookies, and the hugely fat cat, and the squishy dusty sofa, and the movies on demand--I kind of start despising myself. I need activity. So it was a lovely visit and it was lovely to come home.

I'm feeling a bit put out about how 2010 is starting off, though. First, I am, frankly, anxious about next week's very very safe "procedure"--the heart thing--and am even more anxious (I hate to admit) about the $1700 price tag. I mean, thank goodness I have insurance, etc. (If I didn't, though, I just wouldn't have had this checked out, and the likelihood of its actually killing me is minuscule, soo...? Okay, are my priorities completely off here?) But that's a solid slab of cash. And TM and I, with our loans and on our salaries (hooray we have full-time jobs, but still--Field just ranked in as the lowest-paying college in the state, at least among colleges and universities that shared their salary information), are not rolling in dough. The money issue alarms me. I'm also hoping to go on a couple of trips next year--one to Ireland with my mom, and one to an overseas conference, and there's talk of going somewhere fun for spring break--so...yeah, my priorities are ridiculous. Never mind. Writing this paragraph has made it clear that no one should pity me at all.

Nonetheless, this stuff is stressing me out, and, since we start classes on the 11th, I'm feeling that I won't really have the chance to restore myself and get all organized and refreshed for the semester ahead. And I am also consequently beating myself up for not being more upbeat and energetic during these last weeks.

Another reason for the sluggishness, at least today, is that I celebrated New Year's Eve with a scorching urinary tract infection that hit me just before midnight. (Prior to that, TM and I had a lovely quiet evening together, full of fun and delight. It wasn't all bad, by any means.) So I stayed up in the bathroom until 4 am reading and shivering (it's damn cold here) and drinking appropriately calibrated fluids. It's pretty much gone now, though I'm still guzzling cranberry juice to make sure, and I've had some naps and things and feel okay. But heck, today has not been the restorative and energizing January 1st that I typically enjoy. And the irony of getting this infection really no earlier than 11 pm, so that it fully hit me right around midnight, after more than a decade with no such troubles--hell, what's that about? In a completely irrational way I'm a little worried about this year.

But okay, it's time to move on from all that. 2009 was, in many ways, pretty awesome. TM and I got engaged, moved in together, and got married. We traveled to Dominca and France. I gave papers at Kalamazoo and Leeds. I got a book contract and scored an extra course release for next semester. My brother and his wife conceived a child. In fact, other than the irritating medical issues and, oh, the health care debates, wars, etc., it was a pretty good year.

Here's what I'd like to think about for next year.

1) I want to work on learning to promote my research and to network better (an idea I got from a recent post of Dr. Crazy's). I suck at these things, actually changing the subject when people ask me about my work, and this is a problem.

2) I want to more consistently make time to exercise, but I need to give some very concrete thought to what this will look like before I make some kind of resolution, since amorphous "exercise more!"-type resolutions don't work very well. In fact, I need to be more concrete about no. 1, too.

3) Work on my relationship with money. I don't like the fact that what scares me about my procedure is the cost (which is not even all THAT unreasonable, and which I can cover quite easily from my savings), and that the price actually makes me want to cancel it, despite the preceding parenthesis. Anxiety about money hampered my enjoyment of our France trip last summer. These things bother me; I am not at all wealthy but neither am I about to starve. I am not profligate, so the occasional bigger expense is not a catastrophe. I'm trying to see next week's credit card hit as an opportunity to work on how I think about money: to be grateful, for example, for its ability to cover such costs without actually affecting my day-to-day living at all, rather than begrudging its removal from my account. I think that it's very important that I try to do this.

There are other things I'm kicking around, too--I sure do love me some self-improvement--but I think that that's enough for now. Time for a glass of cranberry juice. And happy new year, everyone!

Owoo pity me.

You want to know about the best thing that I brought from France? Seven bottles of wine and calvados, neatly packed into a small, foam-lined suitcase. TM brought another seven or so himself. We are set for a while with the nice wine.

The worst thing I brought back? Two GIGANTIC RED EYEBALLS.

I am having a bout of conjunctivitis. I think that it started about two weeks ago; I stopped wearing contacts, and it seemed to be going away. Wore the contacts yesterday for a yoga class, and whooo--GIGANTIC RED EYEBALLS. Way worse than they were before. Obviously the contacts had become contaminated, and I re-infected myself.

I did go to the doctor this morning, and I do have medicine. But the medicine hurrrrts me. And my eyes hurrrt now, worse than before, what with all the Slaughter of the Bacteria that's going on on their surfaces. And I think my pupils are dilated or something because I'm not caring for bright lights, much.

Owoooooooooo ow. I know, a minor thing, really. And it should be all cleared up in a couple of days. But until then, I intend to exploit fully this excuse not to do anything too visually taxing. (And my glasses are driving me nuts because the screws really need to be tightened--they keep falling off my face. My problems are HUGE.)

How Heu Mihi, the Haughty Dame of the Field, was taken ill with the same illness that had plagued her before, and of her anger thereat

Yesterday eve I was wonderly wroth to discover that the illness that had infected me before had once again opened within me, that its button was all to-brast and the soreness of the throat had returned. And I said, Thou false recreant student, whoever thou art, that hast to-give me of the illness yet again, I said, I shall find thee out and smite thee with mine sword, or if not mine sword, then with mine pen of bad grading. For though thou art perhaps a true student, I said, who meant not the harm that thou hast caused me, still thou hast had a sneezing on a paper, or it may be a coughing in the office upon the hours thereof, I said, and thou hast all forsickened me yet again, much to my weariness thereat, wherefore thou art a false recreant student and a traitor, and I would like to have thee all to-brent, but law forbids it. And thus I spent another weekend lying about feeling pitiful, and could not take my ease there at that time.

And so with great dolor out of measure I began to resort again unto mine cold medicine, and there was weeping, or if not weeping at least I fell down aswooning, for the cold medicine made me wonderly weary and I fell down as though dead and lay as a corse for many a long hour.

I'm teaching Malory these days, and I find the language working its way into my brain. Indulging its rhythms here is my solace in this time of sickness. You should try it sometime.

And fine, "Haughty Dame" is more of a Chretienism, but I couldn't resist.

On Habits, or, More of My Profound Wisdom

What with all the new year's resolutions that have been buzzing around, I've been thinking about habits, and how to form them. I am, of course, embarking on my own (previously unannounced) Program of Reform: namely, I am striving--for the eighth or ninth time--to start practicing yoga at home, regularly. There are too few yoga studios around here, offering too few classes and located too far away, for me to count on classes to get my yoga in (anyway, a year and a half of living here has proven that that is not feasible in this location). In the past, I've sort of half-thought that, since I figured I wouldn't be at Field for all that much longer, there was no real point in developing sustainable habits adapted to this location. Well, it's been a year and a half, and that kind of thinking isn't doing much for me. So the plan is this: 20 minutes of yoga--whatever I want to do--per day, unless I engage in some other fitness activity (swimming or soccer). So far, so good; in fact, I've been having a hard time sticking to only 20 minutes. But we'll see what happens when classes start next week.

Anyway, the point is that this has me thinking--not for the first time--about how to form habits. Unsurprisingly, I'm far from perfect on this score, but I'm a fairly willful person and I've had some success in getting myself to do new, potentially unpleasant things on a regular basis. My two major categories of examples on this score are yoga (going to classes, anyway) and fiction writing. I've written two novels, one when I was 23 and the other when I was 30; they're both quite likely bad and will probably never be published, but having written them makes me happy, and I'm proud of the accomplishment, as they really did require some pretty serious discipline and general unpleasantness. I also went, in my 20s, from a fairly lackadaisical exercise schedule to serious vinyasa yoga classes 3x/week, despite all the usual reluctance and malingering, and stuck to that schedule for several years (until I moved to Field. I still miss my studio so terribly!) Doing these things has led me to develop a pretty reliable set of rules for getting myself into gear when it comes to forming new habits. And so, while these may not be useful to anyone else, I offer my reflections--some of which are, I'm sure, obvious and hackneyed.

But what else is a blog for, other than to offer hackneyed and narcissistic reflections on topics of general interest?

Anyway. Here goes.

1. Make your goal reasonable. This is probably the most obvious and hackneyed of them all, but it's the one that I break the most. I seriously convince myself that I will make such changes to my life as, for example, starting to get up at 4:00 am for an hour of yoga followed by 45 minutes of meditation. Um. Yeah, I haven't done that once. So planning to spend two hours a day at the gym or write ten pages every morning before class are pretty much dooming yourself to failure. We all know this.

2. Focus on form, not content. It is better to do something lame than to do nothing at all. So, for example, when I wrote my second novel, I committed to writing 1000 words a day, but the words themselves could be totally stupid and it wouldn't matter. Knowing this was a help when I felt "uninspired," because I would tell myself that I could just describe a room for half a page or write a purely functional action sequence (this happened, then this happened, etc.). In practice, I usually got into the swing of things pretty quickly, but sometimes I did have to resort to a kind of "summary" paragraph. The point, though, isn't for every single day to be brilliant, but to get into the habit. If the habit is what matters, then the details of what you're producing don't. And the habit really is what matters, typically.

Similarly, when I committed to going to a particular yoga class every week, there were certainly days when I was "tired" or "out of sorts" (or just whiny). So I would tell myself that I would go, but I didn't have to try very hard or do much and I could sit out in child's pose for half the class if I wanted to. Invariably, once I was there, I worked as hard as I ever did, so all the whininess was just that--whininess.

The point, I think, is to get out of your own way. There are a billion content-related reasons for not doing something (I don't have any ideas, my leg hurts, I'm distracted and can't put my all into it today). But form-wise, there isn't much. Just show up and see what happens. If nothing happens, at least you showed up--and that's all you've asked of yourself, so good for you!

3. Make it non-negotiable. This is, for me, the most important thing.

When I started my first novel, I was 23, living in a new city. I was unemployed, running out of money, and plagued with great pretensions of being A Writer. (Someday. Not yet.) And one day I got thoroughly fed up with myself and said, OK, I'm unemployed, I have only one friend in this city and nothing to do all day, and I never write a goddamn thing. So here's the deal: four pages per day for 100 days, or I never get to pretend that I'm going to be A Writer again.

I was very stern with myself. It was quite intimidating.

So, I started. And then I got a (very boring) 9-5 job.

But I'd written about 20 pages, and I wasn't about to give this up; the idea I'd had for the novel interested me (although I was a bit embarrassed about it--it was genre fiction! So not what I wanted to be known for!). And I did the only thing I could: I started getting up at 6 am to write as much as I could of my 4 pages before work.

This was not in tune with my natural rhythms. But I reminded myself that it was just for a few months, and if I didn't get up early I'd have to write when I got home and was tired, so I got my ass up every frigging day, and I wrote the damn thing. In fact, I exceeded my limit and wrote more than 500 pages of melodramatic, self-indulgent, dearly beloved prose. (I really do love this novel. I do not think that it is particularly good, and I don't really like showing it to others. But I love it.)

And when I started going to yoga every Monday at 5:45 pm and Thursday at 6 and Saturday at 3, I did something similar. It was non-negotiable. I wasn't allowed to talk myself out of it. So I'd walk to class with a whole monologue about how I was tired and so forth and shouldn't I just stay home?, but my body had already left, and my mind could chatter away as much as it wanted--it wasn't running the show. I scheduled things around classes. It was a priority--an immovable fixture in my week. There was no "I'll go on Tuesday's class instead"; Tuesday's class was dead to me. It was Monday, period.

The thing is, once you introduce exceptions, every day becomes an exception. Be stern. No exceptions. (Unless, of course, something truly extraordinary happens. It's a little like your late-paper policy....)

4. Spend a lot of time thinking about how awesome you are. This is extremely important for me. Positive reinforcement is terrific. Again, focus on form, not content; if you're just developing the habit, it doesn't matter that you ran slowly and only for half a mile. You ran; therefore, you rock. It also helps me to have someone to whom I can brag routinely. Boyfriends are good for this; parents can work well, too. Or just a friend who has a high tolerance for your absurdities.

5. It might take a few tries for the habit to "take." As I said above, this is not the first time that I've tried to establish a regular home practice. But that's okay. As my old yoga teacher used to say, it's all practice--and the more you practice making a positive change in your life, the more likely you are to succeed down the line. If you can't stick to something, think about what didn't work and then try again. My problem with the home yoga practice in the past may have been trying to practice a certain way or for a certain length of time every day; an hour is too much, and a particular DVD gets boring after a while. Make it fluid. Find what works for you.


That's it for me, I think. I did a pretty soft yoga practice today--Womanly Issues and all that--but hey, I did it, and now I'm finishing up this post and a little glass of scotch because hell y'all, I spent all friggin' day on my comp syllabus. Damn.

Why I Am Drinking a Beer at 5:15, Even Though I Have to Go Back to Campus Tonight and Have A Lot of Grading to Do

1. Today I got a "rejection that is not a rejection" from Dream U. Goodbye, Dream. There will be others.

(May I also interject here a request to search committees? When you reject a person, reject her. None of this "Our search is completed! I'll bet your search is going well, too!" nonsense. Seriously. Dream U was absolutely splendiferous in all aspects of the process saving this one, so I'm really not too bothered by it and I think it just comes from an exaggerated anxiety about upsetting people--a misplaced courtesy, in fact--but it's not the first such letter I've received and I don't relish having to reread rejection letters two or even three times to figure out what the hell they're saying to me. It doesn't cushion the blow.)

2. People were crying in this afternoon's faculty meeting. Crying. Obviously I can't and won't talk about why--and honestly I haven't been here long enough to know what the real deal is--but suffice to say that there is Drama. And I will be accepting the Field offer in the next two days, so. The Drama will soon be mine.

3. In the last three days, I wrote up extensive comments on 47 drafts (10 to go!) and conferred with 18 students (2 to go!). So there's cause for celebration + lobotomy.

4. Hey! I have a job! It's almost official! So, in spite of everything, I get to have a small mid-week celebration. Right?

Not Looking Good

I'm getting used to the idea of becoming resigned. No Dream U for me. There hasn't been word either way, so "who knows what might happen," but realistically? It's getting to be a little late in the week.

All is not lost. Other possibilities in the works.
But none are quite so exciting.
And..........it was such a good year for medievalists.
And yet I didn't....................

Ah, there you are, old friend!

And the old friend--let's be clear--is that omnipresent job-search sidekick, Self-Pity.

Yep, I've started skulking on down that thoroughly unpleasant path. I got a post-campus-visit rejection today. Not from the Dream Uni, but from the other one (visit no. 2), which I liked and thought seemed like a great job but where I didn't get that real sense of fit--so no, this isn't a devastating rejection, but it's still disheartening. It's disheartening because it reminded me of what it feels like: that sudden drop in the stomach, the evaporation of a particular set of daydreams, the clipping-off of one possible path that the future could take. Nope. I'm not moving there. Those will not be my colleagues. That isn't my office.

It also signaled the dramatic reduction of my chances of getting an offer from either place. Weirdly enough, if the selection process were totally random, my odds of getting one or both of these two jobs would be 5/9. Two jobs, three candidates--5 to 9 odds that I'd get something out of that. No, it doesn't seem like that should be right, but there it is; probability makes absolutely no sense. So now that I don't have one of the jobs, my chances have slipped back to 1/3. Right? Or is it still 5/9, only...no, wait, that can't be right. And of course this is pretending that the selection process is totally random, which it isn't. I could be a secretly toxic candidate. I could be juvenile and naive and admit way too much about myself too soon. Was I too forward? Am I too comfortable with my own shortcomings? Was that comment that I made about my hair taken as a sign of frivolity? Did anyone notice when I dropped that glob of hummus at the dinner? Oh dear God. Oh God. I want to crawl up under an afghan and weep. I want to crack into that bottle of bourbon over there. I don't want to grade, I don't want to prep two classes and a teaching demo, and what's this about a mandatory campus event tomorrow afternoon? I need to hide. I'm inept, I'm absurd, every hope has been dashed--dashed, I tell you.

See? This is what happens. This is what that damned rejection has done to me.

And oh yes, I remember it well. I remember last year, when I actively avoided junior faculty at my grad uni because of course they got fabulous jobs at GradU when they were ABD, and while I'm sure that their queries into my job search situation were wholly sympathetic, I was too bitter and wrecked by my failure to even get myself a campus visit to even look at such people. Oh yes. I remember all of this--the anger I felt at ABDs who got tenure-track jobs, the startling depths of my jealousy. It all passed, of course. It usually passed pretty quickly, like within 24 hours of each major disappointment, but when it was there, it was there. And I don't want to swim in those waters again.

But. It did pass, every time. And I know that disappointment is only disappointment, and I can handle it. It's just that awful feeling--that wrench, that deep desire to withdraw and hide and close oneself off from everything else until one has adjusted to the new bad news and everything is okay again--that's not something that I want. And I'm afraid that, by the end of the week, I'll have to absorb the fact that Heavenly U doesn't want me, and all that background hoping and wanting and imagining what I could do there will have to be abandoned, forever, and I'll fall back down to the dusty reality of not having found my job just yet.

Or, if not forever, at least until next year's JIL comes out.

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This post nominated for age of perfection self-indulgent post of the year. Thanks for reading, guys.

The current state of affairs

One thing I forgot to mention yesterday was that I wrote my Highly Successful Toast in the car between the wedding and the reception. No one can accuse me of over-preparing! Even if I am already thinking through my lectures for the fall!

I have returned to my apartment, and the subletter left it in...okay condition. It's tidy, and he washed the sheets and stuff, but the bathroom was not in very good shape. In the last 2.5 hours, however, I have cleaned the bathroom, vacuumed, washed the bathmat, made the bed, unpacked, put away groceries, and straightened up all the things that were slightly misplaced in the last two weeks (yes, I'm very uptight about my living space. That's just one of the things that makes me such a pleasure to live with).

It's extremely hot. My apartment is roasting. Once my laundry is done, I'm seriously considering stripping down to underwear.

Not sure I feel like cooking, either. It might be a beer and cheese and fruit kind of night. Beer, cheese, fruit, and TV.

Speaking of which, I bought an $18 piece of cheese today. It's an Epossies. Anyone who likes cheese must eat this cheese! It is delicious. So very delicious. I had it last week at a beer and cheese tasting I got to attend for free, and it was splendiferous. So when I was in the grocery store today, I considered buying it, rejected the notion, and then thought: Hey! My dad just gave me some money for my birthday. All of that money is going to go into necessities. But perhaps $18 of it should go into a piece of cheese?

And yes! It did!

Of course, because it was so expensive, I might postpone eating it. Which will eventually mean that I will have spent $18 for a piece of cheese that I never got around to eating.

Or perhaps I will eat some of it tonight?

Stupid Liquor Store!, or, Disconnected Ramblings

Last night I went to my local liquor store for some beer. Standing by the cooler, I was distracted by a young pair at my left: the male was enthusiastically telling his female companion that, because they would be eating goulash, they should purchase a German beer. While I was contemplating how (or whether) to tell them that goulash is in fact Hungarian, I selected what I thought was a nice, ordinary Brooklyn Ale. However, due to my lack of focus, I evidently selected Brooklyn's Black Chocolate Stout instead. What's the problem? Well, it's a whopping 10.7% alcohol (yet conveniently priced at only $8.55/six-pack!). So tonight I had one beer, but then I really wanted another beer (in order to prolong the overall drinking experience), and thought, Hell, I'll have that other beer, why not? But of course now I'm only halfway through beer no. 2 and a little on the tipsy side. Which was decidedly not my intention.

You know what I hate? I hate it when, in movie trailers, they splice up the characters' dialogue so that it sounds like they're responding to the voice-over for the movie commercial. Like the one I just say for the new Pirates of the Carribean movie, where Johnny Depp says "Ooh, I like that," after the voice-over guy says something about seeing the movie right when it first comes out. It's irritating. And they aren't kidding anybody.

Speaking of movies, they're filming part of a movie right around the corner from my house! It's very exciting. The Costumes trailer is literally in front of my building--like, I could step from my front door into the trailer, if I had extra long legs, or something. Today I watched them shoot a scene where two of the main characters rush into a hardware store, and then some people walk back and forth in front of the store. (After three takes, I'd pretty much had enough; I think that the interesting part of the scene was happening inside.) It's kind of cool--they totally created this store out of an empty shop in about 3 days. I actually thought there was a new hardware store in town when I got home from my travels last week. And apparently the star of the movie (the one I watched rush into the store a couple of times) was on "Gray's Anatomy," but I've never seen it, so I don't know anything about her.

Well anyway. It's kind of a nostalgic week for me. On Friday, I'll be heading to my 10th college reunion, where I'll be rooming with a really good friend whom I haven't seen in a long time. The prospect has me thinking a lot about days of yore; I've even busted out some old diaries. Damn, college was crazy times. I do not feel at liberty to disclose exactly what about college was so crazy, but I'm sure your collective imaginations can fill in the blanks. Also, because I finished the sweater I was knitting (pictures forthcoming--I'm very proud!), I decided to resume work on my photo albums from last summer. Which inspired me to look at some other albums from the last six or seven years. It's kind of scary to find a picture of myself from 2002 and think, Damn, I look so young. Shouldn't that not be happening yet?

Okay. I think it's kind of a good idea not to drink and blog, so perhaps I'll stop here. Good night, one and all....

Think harder and you'll come up with something

I just read this post on The Weblog, in which Adam Kotsko promises, as representative of the symbolic order (and his logic in claiming this position is amusing in itself), to grant people permission. To do whatever. Like, to take a nap, if you'd rather do that than read, or something.

So I was thinking a little about what kinds of clever things I would ask permission to do, if I were inclined to ask such things. But I couldn't really think of anything.

What would I want permission for? I mean honestly? Is the fact that I can't think of any questionable action on my part that I actually want to have endorsed evidence of a failure of imagination on my part? Or does it mean that, despite my periodic complaints, my life is acutely in line with what I want it to be? -Well, no, it doesn't quite mean that. A better way to put it would be that my life is organized such that anything I want to do is supported and endorsed by the rest of its structure, even if my attempts don't succeed. Right?

Or maybe I'm just not thinking hard enough. Because surely, two months ago, I would've asked for permission to quit fussing around with my introduction. And three weeks ago, I would have begged (in fact, I think I did beg, right here, and here too, for that matter) to stop preparing for my defense. So never mind. Things just happen to be in a nice state right at this moment, is all.

Addendum (25 minutes later): I obviously wrote all this without giving it any thought at all. Obviously the reason that I was having trouble thinking of anything to ask permission for is that I feel fully entitled to do whatever I want. For instance, I just spent the last twenty minutes, when I could have been reading, reviewing my conference paper, polishing my article, or getting ready for my trip doing nothing more than drinking a cup of tea and knitting. Clearly, what's going on is that I've simply moved beyond work-related guilt. And to a certain extent I think that this guilt-free existence is merited: seven years of grad school should earn you a couple of weeks, or possibly months, of freely engaging in other activities. Right?

Sick Sicky Sick Sick

Yes, I'm SICK. A strange stomach-ache has morphed into a head cold. I've never heard of that happening, but there you go.

It's quite awfully cold out, and windy as a bitch, but soon I'll need leave the house for tissues and videos. Other than that, though, I think I'll spend the better part of the day in bed. In fact, I'm writing this from bed. Vive la laptop!

In other news, I had an interview yesterday and I think it went pretty well. (The cold was just in the stomach-ache phase at that point, thank goodness.) They asked me harder questions about my dissertation than my committee ever has, but I was able to answer them to my satisfaction, at least. The job is non-tenure-track, but renewable, and somewhat prestigious if low-paying. It also has the advantage of being a commutable distance away--meaning that I could keep my apartment and not buy a car. So I'd be pretty excited if it panned out. I won't hear for another month, though.

Hm...am I ready to brave the cold and the wind? I'm not sure that I am. But I can't stand to go on blowing my nose with my scratchy old recycled-content toilet paper. It's brutal, it is. Maybe I'll go in 15 minutes. Yeah, 15 minutes seems about right.

And then what will I do? I don't know! There are worky-type things I could tinker around with, but I'm not sure that I want to. (Uh, okay. What I mean is, I'm sure that I don't want to.) I've been re-reading the novel that I wrote in the darkest days of my job search anxiety, and am actually enjoying it, which is pleasant. Maybe I'll do some more of that. Or maybe I'll, I dunno, look through some of my old papers and books and things. Relics of bygone selves. For some good old self-indulgent fun.

If it weren't for the kleenex situation--which will soon be remedied, I swear--being sick isn't half bad, sometimes.