I got my birthday wish! The Red Sox won the world series, after 86 years of not-winning! Toward the end of the game, the announcers trotted out some stats to assist us in visualizing how long ago that was - women couldn't vote; baseball games weren't even broadcast on the radio. There was no TV.
I started to think - my parents weren't even born. Which is something since they're both in their 80s. Amazing that you have to live to be that old before your team wins.
Also today I mailed off a paper to a journal, after frantically editing it for the last 10 days. Lesson learned: you can't really resuscitate old work. Your ideas are old; your thinking is less sophisticated; your writing style has much improved in the interval. You've learned new stuff you want to add, but it's not a very good match for what you have.
That possibly means that Western Front trenches, Thoreau/Abbey comparisons, and the Eye's I are all headed for the dustbin of history. Lesson's corollary: write up the stuff while it is fresh. It may suck, and you may do better with it in a couple of years, but then again - Dubya may win the election and we may all be annihilated by terrorists. So carpe diem; seize the glory.
The Red Sox could win the World Series on my birthday - how cool would THAT be? For the next 80-something years, that would be a noted anniversary.
I didn't get to watch much of last night's game, though, because I was in class.
Sorry, this title is just a teaser. I am happy about the Sox, and I like watching the games, but I have nothing to say about them that hasn't been said better a thousand other places.
I am doing well in Polish class - as measured by the grades I'm getting. But I fear I'm learning Polish as I learned Latin (about a thousand years ago) - I learn vocab and the rules to generate the patterns and then I can generate new patterns by writing on the pages of the quiz.
But when Polakiewicz talks, it's really hard for me to understand. And when he asks me a question, I am really hesitant about responding. I don't mumble - I wait until I can get it right, thinking ahead to all the permutations. (Same as my interactions with people in Paris last spring - I would have to have the sentence or question entirely formed in my head before I would begin to speak.)
So I'm disturbed that I am not really spending enough time with aural and oral components of the language. Although one thing that pleases me - it's starting to be so that if I see a Polish name or word (if it's not too complicated), I can immediately visualize/say how it sounds. That's a LOT different than 7 weeks ago, when I had to refer to my cheat sheet and sound out the sounds.
I have gotten two e-rants this week about the shabby assessment of the achievements of Jacques Derrida by the philistines at the New York Times. Apparently there is a petition being circulated too.
I think the problem is that people forget that there will always be something new. Modernism thought it was "it" but then there was postmodernism. Post-structuralism thought it was "it" too but presumably something new is brewing. As someone whose intellectual life was on hiatus from about 1986 to 2000, and who therefore missed out on the excitements of post-structuralism, I don't have the same emotional attachment to its passing as someone who was participating in its heyday.
The trouble is, while you are "in it" it's very hard to recognize the new thing. Is it materiality? Empiricism? Is it just too early to know?
This may be the first time I've blogged away from home - I'm actually in my office so it's not like I'm "away." I'm just waiting for B to be finished with classes so we can go home and have a nap before the FINAL! GAME! of the Red Sox-Yankees series.
How many Octobers of my life have been spent this way - I mean, really?
Stayed up til 1 working on a paper and got up at 5:50 to finish it. Between the anxiety of THAT and the buzz from Polish it wasn't high-quality sleep, anyway. Time to plug away, though. I am actually looking forward to some research time.
Man, this is a boring entry.
There is a black squirrel who lives over by Walter Library. Another Blog on the Fire has noticed it too. I saw it twice yesterday in Northrop quad.
One of the readings I got copied on Wednesday only has every other page. I noticed right away - in the past, with economic geography readings, I sometimes haven't noticed until I'm well into the article.
What this means, since the library is now closed, is that I'm done reading for that course until at least tomorrow noon when the library opens. But it's not like there's not plenty else to do, and I'm not even including the BoSox Scankees game. Go Sox!!!!
I really love reading historical geography about landscapes and iconography, and I really DON'T love reading about political geography (especially neoliberalism) so that should tell me that my dissertation subject is all wrong. Oh well, maybe I'll warm up to it as I get familiar with the literature. Some of my affection for landscape art writing is my long familiarity with it.
Busy, busy. In the last 24 hours I have:
1) nursed a massive hangover (courtesy of our debate party and my own stupidity);
2) organized and ran a brown bag lunch for undergrads interested in grad school; and
3) prepared and filed two sets of state income taxes. Had a couple of hours even left over before the Post Office closed. That extension we filed six months ago sure went by fast!
I am looking forward to a pleasant evening on the couch, reading from the very large stack of readings for next week. My timing is all messed up: I party during the week and study on the weekends.
AND - we got our new cheese-of-the-month today: Shropshire Blue. It smells kinda foul but tastes really good.
Being at the brown bag lunch, listening to faculty talk about "why go to grad school," reminds me that I am really doing what I want to be doing, and that I should enjoy the ride and worry less about "the next thing."
As mentioned yesterday, we had a substitute teacher in Polish today - our professor is in, I think, Lublin. (Does NOT rhyme with Dublin!)
She was terrific - lots of interaction, lots of pushing the envelope of new vocabulary. That's not to take anything away from our usual professor, who is fantastic at keeping us interested for 3+ hours every Tuesday - but this woman had a much more relaxed approach - don't worry so much about endings, because people will understand you even if you are wrong. Work on building vocabulary: if you don't know a word, look it up; don't confine yourselves to the arbitrary vocab of the textbook. Learn opposites (if you learn "wide," look up "narrow" too - it will help you remember). There was just a real joy for the language that she communicated that really broadened my scared, will-I-get-the-right-ending point of view.
Of course, this joy comes at a price - and the price is sheer exhaustion. 'Til tomorrow...
I am unaccountably non-anxious for a Monday night; why is that?
1. I have done all my reading and emailed comments/questions for my seminar but haven't taken any notes. A tremendous time-saver.
2. We are having a substitute in Polish. I've started but barely touched the homework and new grammar/vocabulary.
3. I am about half done with the readings for Wednesday and again, have taken few notes.
By all accounts I should be pretty freaked out but I am in that "don't care" mode, which is something that should occur in week 12 of the semester, not now. Maybe when I can't answer any questions tomorrow and Wednesday I'll snap out of it. Oh, I DID learn "nie wiem" (I don't know) over the weekend, which will certainly be helpful in Polish class.
My sister and her family were here for the weekend. Fun! - we went to the hockey game;, Ft. Snelling for the millionth time; the downtown trolley tour; the MOA for the billionth time. We didn't end up eating out much though - a surprise to me. My niece is kind of a picky eater.
Gopher hockey beat Denver tonight, 5-2. It was great - I'd forgotten how much I like hockey! My sister and her family are in town for the weekend, and my niece is a HUGE hockey fan and getting to be a good player, too.
It was an evening full of serendipity - first we got free parking in the lot right across from the Xcel Center courtesy of the Dex phonebook. My brother in law, who was driving, said, "hey, thanks! What's Dex?" Then we got two free skybox tix from Dex. It was crazy, since we ALREADY had tix, but no one seemed to be looking for tickets, so we rotated up and down out of the box.
I'd never had a luxury sporting event experience before and it was a trip! Free food all elegantly laid out in warming trays where appropriate, tables and chairs to sit at before the game, comfortable stadium-style seats, awesome view. The crowd was friendly and family-oriented, not like the beer-infused, brawl-oriented crowd you get in Boston.
Now we want to go to more games - but we hear hockey is sold out for the season. Maybe women's hockey? That would be more fun anyway.
These rhetoric blogs are killing me! Every day I drop further down the list in number of posts.
What to do, oh what to do? I can't just write nothing (despite this entry, which is a rare exception) so I guess I'll just accept the inevitable.
Sitting on the grass outside Wilson Library today, soaking up the sun, I realized I couldn't remember the last time I just sat on the grass and watched the world go by. For once I had no compulsion to be DOING anything. Just enjoying the day was enough.
That's one of the reasons I enjoy walking from West Bank campus to East Bank and vice versa: it's a chance to do nothing but walk and think random thoughts. (Although I did read/memorize my Polish dialog on the walk yesterday. Fat lot of good THAT did - my inability to say "zadowolona" (happy) became the class laugh of the night, argh. Multi-tasking doesn't always work.)
Trying to gear up to read one more article about social movements, especially those opposing the evils of neoliberalism. I'm kinda burned out on reading - I've been doing it since about 10 this morning, with breaks for meals and chores and 'The Simpsons.'
I think blogs have natural attrition rates. Some that I started reading several years ago have petered out when their owners found writing to have become a chore rather than a pleasure. Shane, our inspiration here at UThink, wonders if the pressures of the semester will result in diminished postings to the personal blogs. It's interesting to see so many class blogs this semester, but a bit sad to see so many posts because "it's required."
Enforced sharing with the world (or a subset of it) has always felt coercive to me. One of the biggest shockers of my freshman year in college was reading my admissions file. My most demanding teacher wrote that I didn't contribute much in class, which was a pity. This says something about perception, since MY take on it was that I was usually one of the first to speak up, and only sometimes held back to give someone else a chance.
Here at the U the model for graduate seminars is to have to email a summary of the week's readings, with some questions for discussion, to the instructor and classmates a day or two before the class meeting. This is multipurpose. First, the instructor can check to see if you've really read the stuff (although it's not terribly difficult to fake it once you get the lingo). Second and most usefully, it's good practice to get in the habit of writing about what you've read. Third, the instructor can gear discussion around difficult or debatable points (the cynic in me says it saves on instructor prep time, too, although that may not always be true since it takes a lot of time to read through the dreck that everyone produces).
Which brings me to my final point: writing because you HAVE to, not because you have anything valuable to say, is wasted effort - for you and for your readers. It's why publish-or-perish has led to a proliferation of academic journals, most of which are filled with truly forgettable material. If academics only wrote when they had something burning to share, there would be a lot less to read, and its quality would be markedly better.
Research is really so time-consuming. I spent the morning looking for case studies about capitalist influence on Polish planning practice. There are a few possibilities, but as usual you don't know what you have until you have read it all.
Same with research proposals. It's really hard to plan for what you will do until you are doing it. I'm much more a fan of grounded theory - let the questions evolve as you go along. But all the funders and professors want to know exactly what you plan to do, and when - regardless of how little you know and how likely it will be that your ideas will have to be completely changed. It feels so wasteful of effort.
Haven't done much of the "regular" work for the coming week either. And it's getting near the end of my useful workday.