It’s always better on holiday, so much better on holiday, even if you spent it working and listening to crappy songs like the one I quote at the beginning of this sentence. But here we go again. Another academic year, another meeting of the College, another Faculty Council, another departmental meeting, another convocation, another welcome [...]
Archive for the ‘ms. collegiality’ Category
29 Jun
Done
Not quite ten hours ago, I returned from my twenty-third conference presentation. Moments thereafter I added the line to my CV. It will take me about a week to unpack my luggage, a small, non-hipster messenger-type carry-on.
Call it superstition, but I do not list presentations on my CV until I have actually presented or moderated—I [...]
12 Jun
Repeat after me:
I do not hate this.
I do not hate this.
I do not hate this.
I do not hate this.
I do not HATE this.
I do not HATE THIS.
I do not
I do.
6 Apr
Non-Librarian Library Employee Has Been Watching the Detectives!
A running theme throughout my academic career, which started at age five, has been my love of librarians. They know everything! They can always be found at my favorite place!
Such has not been the case at JPU, whose library is, like its faculty, understaffed. Sure, it employs brilliant, patient, and generous librarians, but they are [...]
6 Feb
No reservations
This is not a post about Anthony Bourdain rhapsodizing over balut or “long pork” or whatever he samples to the horror and bafflement of his swooning, menopausal fans. No, I don’t get it, either. Perhaps it’s that heroin-attenuated physique, shared by so many of my department’s ladykillingest undergraduate menfolk. Or maybe it’s that the man [...]
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 [...]
14 Jul
Bloodsuckers!
Home again, home again, with, oh, thirty souvenirs from Interesting City: thirty mosquito bites, more or less evenly distributed, on my legs. But one standout stands out from the rest, ruining my uniformly poxy pattern of calamine patches. Yeah, calamine. I’m old school. On my right calf, one welt is so engorged that my leg [...]
2 Jul
The One
Nary a week into summer, and already it’s wasting away as I prepare for my one summer conference, a gift from your children and our future selves the Bush XLIII administration. For once, I am not presenting, and I am just about going mad with anticipation at the prospect of listening to what other people [...]
23 Mar
Spring breakage
Chthunk!
That was me, landing in Funky City after twenty-one hours of planes, trains, and automobiles. And waiting.
Most of those hours were spent in a middle seat, next to a long-legged young man who, despite my passive-aggressive attempts to push him within the borders of his allotted space in coach, seemed continually poised for a pelvic [...]
29 Feb
In which I live dangerously and indecisively
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 [...]
