OK DONE.

I've spent the last three days checking each one of my index entries. Yes. Each one. Looking it up and making sure that it's correct. This was simple enough for the names and big obvious words, but things like "epistemology" are not exactly easy to spot on a quick look-over.

Talk about double-plus un-fun.

Was it necessary? Good question. On the one hand, I did find some errors, inconsistencies, and weird items, and some pagination changes from the first to the second proofs had to be dealt with. On the other, the vast majority of the listings were correct and it was not particularly likely that anyone would ever find the mistakes.

Whatever. It's done. I am not rereading the second proofs, though. I've checked to make sure that everything I marked in the first proofs was fixed (not all of it was), and I am calling it a motherfucking day.

So I'm...done with the book? Well, I do need to make some corrections in the index document, but that'll take like an hour.

...Oddly, the hell of indexing has made me almost not particularly care. Whither excitement? Oh, I know: I now have an Amazon listing and a gorgeous cover--which is, unfortunately, not yet viewable on Amazon. Oh well! I know that it's gorgeous (and it'll turn up soon enough). Whee!

Things I Do Not Want to See Right Now

1. Emails from students with the one-word subject line, "Help."

...

That's about it.

In other news, I'm off to visit family for a week. I know--I promised some kind of substantive post a while back, and have yet to deliver. It's possible that I'll blog from the vacation, but not necessarily likely, so it may be that you hear from me again in a week or so.

Have fun! (And I just can't bring myself to open the email right now. I'm off contract, people!)

ZOMG (and I never say that).

I have just found my summer procrastination.

All seven seasons of Buffy are on Netflix Watch Instantly.



I have been waiting for this day.




It's a good thing, actually, that TM doesn't like the show.

Yay!

You've got to love that article-acceptance-from-fancy-journal feeling.


*this is me, basking*


Anyway. I have an actual substantive post brewing about more or less the exact opposite of this feeling--well, okay, maybe not the exact opposite. I guess that there are various opposites here. The brewing post is not on the opposite of the yay-acceptance feeling (which would be the sad-rejected feeling, obviously); rather, it's on the opposite of goal-oriented-hyper-productive-grandly-planned-doomed-to-be-disappointing summer agenda. And I can't really build that into a "Yay! Accepted!" post, which really is all about the accomplishments. So I'll just leave this one as it is and be back later with some musings, if that's all right with y'all.

Well, That Was Disgusting

In the gym today, I was treated to a little show called "Young, Beautiful, and Vanished: 15 Unthinkable Crimes." As the title suggests, it was a parade of stories about pre-adolescent blond girls who were kidnapped, raped, and eventually found. But not recovered--oh no. As the show's TV psychologist (whatever that is) smugly remarked of one of the girls, "Elizabeth will never get over this."

Get over being raped by your father and confined to a cell for however many years? No, I should say not!

And of course we only want to watch re-enactments of young, beautiful girls being kidnapped and raped! Nothing titillating about an older woman, or one of only middling attractiveness. Or, God forbid, a boy. That would be, like, gay or something.*

The worst, though, was that this bit of hideous misogynistic trash was on the Entertainment network.



And that's why I like to pretend that 21st-century pop culture simply does not exist.


*I don't mean to imply by this that the viewership was necessarily straight men. In fact, I expect that it was largely female. But the sexual objectification of women means that women, faced with sexual imagery, frequently inhabit a masculine perspective: Sexualized women typically signify (hetero)sex, to men and women alike; sexualized men typically don't, or at least not as readily. In other words, I think that straight women could be as titillated as straight men by the stories in the show, and that both sexes would find a re-enactment of the abduction and rape of a young boy more jarring than the same story about a young girl.

The Path of Destruction

is what I'm on.

So we're about a week into summer. A week? Two. I don't know. Kalamazoo makes things complicated.

And I have Agendas.

For lo, I cannot possibly actually spend a few minutes relaxing. No, I need to work! For I have ambitions incommensurate with a 4/4 SLAC!

Thus, I am: reviewing three chapters of Wheelock's Latin per day (actually dropped that down to two/day today, because as the chapters get higher they take longer); reading two work books per week (until that ceases to make sense--which might be immediately); writing for half an hour every morning; engaging in some form of exercise every day (mowing counts); meditating daily; making headway through the list of fun reading I've backlogged; and--eventually, not yet--reading ahead for the fall and spring (because I have two new preps each semester, huzzah). Oh, and there's the bibliographic essay I'm writing; that'll be a lot more reading, but it'll help me to prep a course for the spring, too.

All of this is actually not a good idea. I know myself. I'll embark on this for a few days, then get angry and tired and reject ALL work, and wind up equally dissatisfied with myself.

The Middle Way that I am attempting to walk is one in which I make a sort of schedule just for the week (M-F), then come up with a new, different one for the next week, etc. So far, I'm three days into this system, and it's going pretty well--but I know that I a) need weekends to be completely flexible and b) will want to redo my schedule for next week. Boy howdy. Because I'm getting a little bit sick of being So Damn Productive All The Time.

Seriously, people. Somebody teach me how to relax.

In Place of a Substantial Narrative about Kalamazoo, A Brief Anecdote Highlighting My Awkwardness

(I've been reading about the brevity topos in hagiographic narrative. Thus, while I could certainly regale you with endless tales of fascinating meetings and panels both good and worse, of absentee speakers and an actual hour and a half at the Dance, I shall instead bring you the following.)

One of the features of Kalamazoo dorm-life is the Shared Bathroom. Not a communal bathroom shared by an entire hall, a la Leeds (where, however, you get your own sink and real toiletries and nicer bedding), but a bathroom shared with one other person in the room next to yours. Congress-goers bemoan the weirdness of these bathrooms: the doors to the rooms cannot be locked from the bathroom, and there is no stall door in front of the toilet, meaning that your suite-mate could conceivably open the door and find you Fully Exposed. (I've never heard of that happening, but it's all too imaginable.) Also, the sound of the flushing toilet is deafening, so one hopes that one's suite-mate does not need to use it in the middle of the night.

My suite-mate, however, didn't show up until Saturday afternoon. I returned from dinner that evening to find a note addressed "To the person with whom I share a bathroom"; it explained, quite apologetically, that her airline had lost her luggage and asked if I would mind if she used my hair dryer the next morning.

As any rational person would do, I wrote back, "Please feel free! I'm happy to share." And then I appended, "Help yourself to shampoo, hair gel, toothpaste, etc. as needed."

Returning the note to the bathroom, I saw that she had a tube of toothpaste next to her sink.

So I, unthinking, crossed out "toothpaste" on my note.

I looked at it.

Will she wonder why I suddenly don't want her using my toothpaste? But she can still use my shampoo? Even though--as I now notice--she has a bottle of shampoo beside her sink, too?

So I wrote underneath the crossing-out, with a little arrow, "I see that you already have some!"

OK. So now she's going to think that I'm looking through her stuff, right? Even though the toothpaste is plainly visible.... Why would I comment on it? Why edit my note, for Pete's sake? And why am I still letting her use my shampoo, which she patently doesn't need? But I'm not crossing that one out, too, and making this whole situation even worse.

So I crossed out the note about seeing her toothpaste, and crossed out "toothpaste" more heavily, and set the note back on the sink, and fled in great shame and horror to the wilderness.