Today’s departmental mail brought not one but two packages of examination copies. The sight of them made me gurgle and clap like a two year old. As if that weren’t enough, I tore them open on the spot and cooed at the titles. (The goodies came from Oxford and Penguin: good lord, my love is [...]
Archive for February, 2008
22 Feb
Reprieve
Advisee is now my former advisee, having fired me, citing our inability to achieve a satisfactory proposal. I wholly agree with and am immeasurably relieved by his decision, which saves me from what seemed an inevitable plight. Our work habits and standards were incompatible. At the same time, I cannot help regretting the time I’ve [...]
22 Feb
Pissed off
Hehe, she said “piss.”
Yeah, and she meant “urinate.” Also.
I don’t teach Fridays, but like a typical denizen of the junior faculty ghetto, I am in the office, grading papers and bracing myself for my advisee’s latest effort at describing his project. As I wander the hallways every now and then to procrastinate from my magna [...]
18 Feb
Effing ment-al
After a long, pretty fabulous teaching day, I have returned home. I’m braising kale to make me feel virtuous about the pizza I’ll be consuming with it. Tomorrow’s classes are prepped. But I am vexed, and this is not the post I had intended to post tonight. I am that vexed.
Sitting in the “Drafts” folder [...]
12 Feb
My hero!
One of my former colleagues at Notwilliams, the SLAC where I misspent my first year as Lucky Jane, Ph.D., was reputed to be some kind of super wunderkind. He had finished his Ph.D. in four years or something else obscene and, likewise, had achieved tenure while barely out of his twenties with several books to [...]
11 Feb
The “B” word
The season for writing recommendation letters is coming to an end, for grad school admissions at least. Recommendations for scholarships and awards will draw out the recommendation season for a few months more. (Although only about 8-10% of the grades I assign are A’s, they really add up when you’re teaching jumbo public classes, and [...]
9 Feb
Don’t you wish your girlfriend was hot like. . .
. . . whoever had my new cell phone number before I did?
For all my hatred of cell phones, I caved and got one. I’ve been traveling a lot in the past six months, and the experience seems to have convinced me that the convenience of a cell phone has become a necessity—either that or [...]
4 Feb
The sincerest form of flattery
As I was making copies of a handout for today’s class, what did I find left in the sheet feeder but a syllabus for a course one of my former TAs is teaching right now? From its descriptions of writing assignments and grading policies to its (probably ignored) directions for How to Write an E-mail [...]
3 Feb
Separation anxiety
I am puffed up with domestic achievement as I write this post. See, I’ve just cleaned out my kitchen sink, after a week of being so disgusted with it that I had put a trash bag over it and ignored it whenever I passed the kitchen. Indeed, I’ve only barely been able to pass the [...]
