bring your record player and your raincoats 45s
As I explained earlier, I'm going to try to get in the habit of writing here every day again. The idea of writing a comprehensive update of What I've Been Up To For The Last Several Years is both daunting and boring, so I'm not going to do it. Let's just jump right in, shall we?
I spent the afternoon half-dreading writing this entry, hoping that something interesting or poignant would happen so I had something to say other than "I read some books today." Would I be reduced to writing about the exchange I had with a colleague outside the gym? (It was neither interesting nor poignant.) Then, magically, just a few minutes ago, something actually happened to me. Here it is:
A couple of months ago I had an abstract of an article accepted by a journal of some note. Today I more or less finished the background reading I needed to do for it, and began to think seriously about how I was actually going to write the damn thing. I went to the journal's website, clicked on the most recent issue, and clicked on an article at random so I could check out what their formatting usually looked like. And then I fell out of my chair, because emblazoned across the top of the article was the name of the older sister of a guy I dated in my freshman year of high school. Being skilled in the art of aca-stalking, I immediately went to the website of the university she's affiliated with to see if there was a picture of her on the faculty page, and sure enough it was her! She's apparently landed a tenure track job at a very nice east coast university and I am incredibly, incredibly jealous.
Truth be told, probably the most prominent and certainly the most turbulent of my "private emotional states" these days is abject terror at the prospect of an academic career. This article I'm writing will be a preliminary draft of the first chapter of my dissertation, so I'm feeling tremendous pressure to just, you know, start being brilliant. Poof! Like magic. For my qualifying exams, all I had to be was competent-- all I had to do was manage to recollect the 150 books I read and then say anything at all about them. But now I have to say something original, and compelling, and useful, and that's all really quite difficult. And it turns out, of course, that brilliant dissertations are the result of an enormous series of completely unremarkable days with completely unremarkable accomplishments. Today I met my goal of reading the relevant chapters of the last three books that I needed to read. Woo. Tomorrow I will start taking notes on the passages I have flagged. Woo. It's pretty tough to maintain morale under these conditions, but I met my goals for today so I'm feeling pretty okay. I don't always meet my goals, and I don't always feel okay.
Probably the best part about my two-month relationship with the guy whose older sister I ran across today was that we wrote notes to each other. He was a sophomore and I was a freshman, so we had zero classes together, but there was a particular passing period where we would always walk by each other in the halls. One day, he handed me a delightful little note instead of just kissing me on the cheek or whatever, so I wrote one to hand to him the next day. It was a great little ritual while it lasted, and I'm pretty sure I still have a stack of all 15 or so of his notes tucked away in my old room in my parents' house. The content of the notes was never very spectacular-- they were not passionate declarations of love, just little stray thoughts intended to amuse each other. But that in itself was touching.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that in my re-imagining of this journal, these entries are my non-mushy love notes and I am your fascinating, slightly-older-but-definitely-not-patronizing high school boyfriend. Hows' about it, kiddo?
I spent the afternoon half-dreading writing this entry, hoping that something interesting or poignant would happen so I had something to say other than "I read some books today." Would I be reduced to writing about the exchange I had with a colleague outside the gym? (It was neither interesting nor poignant.) Then, magically, just a few minutes ago, something actually happened to me. Here it is:
A couple of months ago I had an abstract of an article accepted by a journal of some note. Today I more or less finished the background reading I needed to do for it, and began to think seriously about how I was actually going to write the damn thing. I went to the journal's website, clicked on the most recent issue, and clicked on an article at random so I could check out what their formatting usually looked like. And then I fell out of my chair, because emblazoned across the top of the article was the name of the older sister of a guy I dated in my freshman year of high school. Being skilled in the art of aca-stalking, I immediately went to the website of the university she's affiliated with to see if there was a picture of her on the faculty page, and sure enough it was her! She's apparently landed a tenure track job at a very nice east coast university and I am incredibly, incredibly jealous.
Truth be told, probably the most prominent and certainly the most turbulent of my "private emotional states" these days is abject terror at the prospect of an academic career. This article I'm writing will be a preliminary draft of the first chapter of my dissertation, so I'm feeling tremendous pressure to just, you know, start being brilliant. Poof! Like magic. For my qualifying exams, all I had to be was competent-- all I had to do was manage to recollect the 150 books I read and then say anything at all about them. But now I have to say something original, and compelling, and useful, and that's all really quite difficult. And it turns out, of course, that brilliant dissertations are the result of an enormous series of completely unremarkable days with completely unremarkable accomplishments. Today I met my goal of reading the relevant chapters of the last three books that I needed to read. Woo. Tomorrow I will start taking notes on the passages I have flagged. Woo. It's pretty tough to maintain morale under these conditions, but I met my goals for today so I'm feeling pretty okay. I don't always meet my goals, and I don't always feel okay.
Probably the best part about my two-month relationship with the guy whose older sister I ran across today was that we wrote notes to each other. He was a sophomore and I was a freshman, so we had zero classes together, but there was a particular passing period where we would always walk by each other in the halls. One day, he handed me a delightful little note instead of just kissing me on the cheek or whatever, so I wrote one to hand to him the next day. It was a great little ritual while it lasted, and I'm pretty sure I still have a stack of all 15 or so of his notes tucked away in my old room in my parents' house. The content of the notes was never very spectacular-- they were not passionate declarations of love, just little stray thoughts intended to amuse each other. But that in itself was touching.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that in my re-imagining of this journal, these entries are my non-mushy love notes and I am your fascinating, slightly-older-but-definitely-not-patronizing high school boyfriend. Hows' about it, kiddo?