Yesterday wasn’t a teaching day, but I did have to go to campus for a morning meeting. As usual, I awoke 10-15 minutes before 5 and flipped on NPR’s Morning Edition. Yes, in that order. No, I don’t need an alarm. Don’t hate me.
Then I ground some beans, put on my coffee, and jumped into [...]
Archive for January, 2009
31 Jan
Achilles’s Louboutins
26 Jan
What Sarah Palin taught me about teaching
As former readers of the Huffington Post know too well, the recent candidate for Vice President won’t go away. Either uncloseted liberals are obsessed with her, or they want to keep the spotlight on her so that her zany opinions will prevent her from being a contender for much of anything in ‘12. I never [...]
24 Jan
Hooked on demographics!
I hate American Express with the heat of a nova. Like apparently thousands, if not millions, of cardholders, I received an email last November informing me that my credit limit had been slashed by tens of thousands of dollars, down to a bloody nub. To justify such draconian financial punishment, the message cited the “poor [...]
20 Jan
Isn’t it
amazing how long eight years have felt?
But when the new President graciously paused to let the inexperienced Chief Justice figure out the oath of office (“President to the United States. . . faithfully”? What English language is this?),
When the elder of the First Daughters recorded the day’s events with her camera,
When the Rev. Joseph Lowery’s [...]
20 Jan
Butterflies
As if in response to our incoming president’s call to commemorate MLK Day through service, I spent the evening performing an act of departmental service that doesn’t even count as service. That’s right: as much as I would have liked to stay home under a pile of woolly sweaters and eiderdown, sipping green tea, prepping [...]
16 Jan
Yet another burden on Obama
I am a bad influence, and not because I lie to my students about how excited I am to see them. The more I think about it, the more I’m not sure I’m lying.
But then I won’t be seeing them—or at least one group of them—on Tuesday. My afternoon class meets during the inauguration. Because [...]
15 Jan
The Lie
It’s morning again in Funky City, and I’m not extremely happy about it. Sure, every morning you wake up is a good day, but in three hours and change I will be presenting myself before students I lied to on Tuesday, when I met them for the first time. This lie wasn’t always a lie. [...]
12 Jan
The Life
More than ten years ago now, The Life, a musical about hookers and pimps on 42nd Street, ran on Broadway. The show starred Sam Harris, winner of Star Search, Ed McMahon’s cheesy and uninteresting precursor to American Idol, which as far as I can tell is also uninteresting, though I haven’t seen enough of it [...]
11 Jan
You know you’ve neglected your blog for a freakin long time when
. . . the calendar on your navigation menu points back to not a past month but a past year (then again, it is January)
. . . by the time anyone notices you’ve resumed posting, your great nation will have a new leader for whom you don’t need to apologize incessantly when you’re abroad
. . [...]
