(no subject)
I'm feeling smugly, serenely domestic. I just pulled off a three-layer apple cake with carmel frosting and decorated it with little bits of marzipan shaped and dyed to look like apples. It would be kitsch, but something about the beige of frosting and the slight irregularity of the apples just makes the cake look un-campily precious, at least to my doting eyes. I'd thought about molding a snake to twist around the central apple--a nod to my research interests--but the Augustinian impulse (quite uncharacteristically) deserted me. Though as an ascetic (Jerome-like?) antidote there's homemade yogurt going warm and sour under the pilot light. I've gone a little mad and decided to do *everything* from scratch for the party I'm having Saturday--boureka pastry, yogurt for the tzatziki, almond paste for a "snake" pastry (though in a rare bit (bout?) of sanity, I'm buying the phyllo).
***
In a frenzied month I managed to redeem what was otherwise a stale and listless season. Somehow--still not sure how--I banged out passable drafts of two chapters. Still mountains of work (molehills of philosophically interesting writing, towering cliffs of footnoting medieval philosophy's greatest hits, dues paying to latter day Scholastics) left. But I'm pleased in a way that's (literally) peculiar to grad students--I've been praised with faint damnation, quite an achievement for my ilk. Now I'm paying for my late starts and later nights: the usual roster of phantom aches, fever, and the kind of un-earned exhaustion that makes me ashamed. I slept 14 hours Friday--the kind of adolescent indulgence I thought I'd kicked...
***
In a frenzied month I managed to redeem what was otherwise a stale and listless season. Somehow--still not sure how--I banged out passable drafts of two chapters. Still mountains of work (molehills of philosophically interesting writing, towering cliffs of footnoting medieval philosophy's greatest hits, dues paying to latter day Scholastics) left. But I'm pleased in a way that's (literally) peculiar to grad students--I've been praised with faint damnation, quite an achievement for my ilk. Now I'm paying for my late starts and later nights: the usual roster of phantom aches, fever, and the kind of un-earned exhaustion that makes me ashamed. I slept 14 hours Friday--the kind of adolescent indulgence I thought I'd kicked...