sheafrotherdon prompted: Three defining life moments!

( three stories from the same small town )

I've hit that point -- it happens every semester -- where my life feels like it's spiraling completely out of control. Big projects that I should have been working on for weeks or months are coming due frighteningly soon, and the reason I haven't been spending enough time on them is that in the interim all sorts of little crises popped up and had ( Read more... )

I'm writing this from my treadmill, which I find simultaneously ridiculous and awesome.

( more under the cut )

I have a PhD.

truepenny called this afternoon to tell me that she'd successfully turned-in-by-proxy the thesis and paperwork, and to be the first to congratulate me on the official completion of my degree. (In return, I am spending Saturday reading the latest draft of The Virtu and having helpful thoughts about it.) She got my answering machine when she ( Read more... )

So I've been working on this conference paper, and it's been driving me nuts. The proposal I sent in is very smart, but gave me very little to work with in terms of setting up a step-by-step argument I can advance in under twenty minutes. So I've been sitting here, Mr. Earbrass-style (sans sherry), with a pile of slips of paper that say things like ( Read more... )

After I mentioned my notes on Clarissa in the closing tag to a completely unrelated post, coffee_and_ink, batwrangler, and redredshoes all said they wanted to see the notes.

Never let it be said that I don't post things I promise to post; it just takes me a while. Sometimes an extremely long while.

Let's move on, shall we?

( a bit of context )

I did a lot of journalling while in Philly for last week's conference/job interview gig; the whole event just seemed so wildly improbable that I had to keep writing things down to convince myself they were really happening. This post is my first attempt to process and synthesize some of that stuff.

Warning: this got pretty long.

( interviews )

I mentioned a while back (in this post) that some colleagues and I were putting together a panel on BtVS for a media conference early next spring. Turns out that our panel's been accepted, so we'll be going to Albuquerque in February to hold forth about the epistemology of evil and whatnot. Go team us ( Read more... )

I've been thinking about the Slayage con that sisabet and sockkpuppett and tzikeh were at this past weekend, and thinking about the intersection of fandom and academia.

And just now I checked the site stats for paper cup and discovered that the Donnie Darko vid has been downloaded a tidy 300 times since I posted it - 200 for the large size and 100 for the small. And that' ( Read more... )

Thanks to all who offered sympathy about the job yesterday.

Better news today: a different job, which I mentioned a while back (in a locked post, because it involved news that was not mine to make public) came through today. Huge relief - it hasn't been at all clear that the funding would be available for the position, so while I knew that ( Read more... )