the happiest public restroom stall in Boston

[aesc]

As reported yesterday, I had to go to Boston to do vaguely professional-type things. It was a nice trip and everything went well. More on that in a minute, but I wanted to start out by saying that, if you need cheering up, go to the first stall in the women's restroom at the Alewife T Station's main entrance (Cambridge Park side, not Russell Street

Comments

[altri_uccelli]

Sorry, random person off your flist commenting, but I had to because there were so many little things here that touched me. Like, when I was a grad student I used to live a couple of blocks from Alewife. And in my teens I competed as well, not at your level, but jumping and dressage, and I know so viscerally what you meant when you said "you can cut time by taking a line of jumps in four strides instead of five..." And I'm ABD, partly because I got to the point where I was 35 and thought I could do it and have a kid, but then I had another kid, and then my partner finished and got a good job, and...well, that was part of the ABDness, but the bigger part was that the higher I got, the more I felt I was just that hair's breadth over the line into inadequacy (but at a certain level a hair's breadth feels like the Atlantic Ocean). I didn't have the superb Carolingian Latin of this guy, and I didn't have 8 languages like this other person, and I wasn't having orgasms of geekitude when faced with notarial hands in the fucking archives, and no, sorry, I haven't read this seminal monograph on subaltern studies because it's not in my field omg, and...*sigh* oh, academia, how I miss you and hate you passionately, both.

I hope you can get yourself back into a place where you trust the worth of what you have to say. I only know you from your lj fic and art, but I feel that I can extrapolate to your scholarship because you have such an elegance of expression and that edge of boundary-pushing that usually means an independent and creative mind *send academic solidarity your way*