13 days until we move. I was going to pack some boxes yesterday, but never quite got to it. Living in a place with bare bookshelves and walls and mantelpiece is depressing and a little disorienting. But I think I'd better deal with it and see what I can get done today.
This past week was just a horrorshow. The lecture notes that were unfinished in the last entry "disappeared" from my jump-drive - in that I could see the file listed, but when I tried to open it, the computer insisted that I had the wrong path. So I started over on Thursday morning (skipped a class to do it, gack) and didn't quite finish and gave a REALLY boring, abstract lecture that at least was mercifully TOO SHORT and my students were bored and disengaged and hated the case study I'd thrown together at the very last minute.
Instead of having 2 1/2 hours of seminar this week, we had TWO 3-hour sessions with some guest scholars instead. And when THAT was finally over on Friday, instead of making copies of next week's readings for my three classes, I just went home. I so CAN'T WAIT for this semester to be over. Three more weeks, plus a few days for exams, and it's summer freedom.
I read S Draculic's book How we survived communism - and even laughed yesterday, nominally because I can use some of it for my seminar paper (the draft of which was due on April 6) but actually because it's so wise. It's depressing though, to think that all those nations of people living under Communist rule were (egalitarianally) dirt-poor, and perpetually bowed down by the stupidity of a system they didn't choose. I can't really do it justice here, but: If the Eastern Bloc countries were a color, it would be grey. If they were a food, it would be cream of wheat cereal. Made with water instead of milk, no salt. If they were music, it would be the underlying drone of a bagpipe, without the tune.
And so on. You see my point. They saved everything - cardboard shoeboxes, bits of fabric, plastic yogurt containers, old pantyhose. You never know when you might be able to use that stuff. They would be shocked at the landfills of America.
For my paper, the point is how the vestiges of all that (the ghosts, to speak the lingo of the class) still persist. The people thought that the day after the Wall fell, everything would be different. In some ways it was different of course - but not always in good ways. Some people (the older ones) long for the old days.