Well, I just love the little orange fruits, that's all. And I find that they are endlessly useful in a sort of Mediterrasian fusion cuisine. I have diced them into an Asian-inspired slaw; I slice them into green salads; and tonight I minced them into braised fennel. The bright sweet-yet-tart flavor was a perfect complement to the fennel.
If they had no seeds, I would be completely in love.
I tried a Greek garlic chicken recipe from the Globe tonight as well - less of a success, helas. Too much lemon (bitter); and the rest of the ingredients (garlic, onion, oregano, olives) didn't really add up to anything more than their individual flavors. No synergy: I hate that. Food must be more than the sum of its parts.
Still, the concept is intriguing. I'll have to work on it.
Sometimes you slog along, day after day, week after week, just blindly "getting it done." And then once in a while, there's a convergence of opportunities to think and reflect.
This week has been one such collection of opportunities. On Monday, I attended a more-or-less mandatory workshop on student assessment at my workplace, and then the rest of the week I've been attending our annual geography conference in Boston.
The workshop left me thinking that I don't work nearly hard enough at identifying what my students SHOULD know, and WHY, and then figuring out ways to have them show me that, and be assessed as to their success. The workshop also raised the usual questions of "what is important to know in a geographical education" and "how can we make sure students possess that knowledge." I have a feeling that such a conversation would be quite contentious in our department as well as in my home (grad school) department.
Ah, geography...the discipline with no clear sense of itself. (Like landscape architecture, which I to some extent got out of for that very reason, and urban planning, which has no clear set of ideological precepts on which to build a body of work.) Why am I attracted to disciplines with identity crises?? It is NOT a recipe for career success!!
At the conference, I've had the chance to reflect more strategically on my future plans. I am interested in the intellectual frameworks of tourism geography, but I see myself shifting more into economic geography. I am particularly interested in regional science (or what is left of it these days), particularly as it intersects with newer cultural ideas in geography.
I am also interested in sustainable development, but it's such an emerging field that it will be difficult to pin it down and get a real research focus. It's probably the most important thing I can do, though.
I am always interested in heritage and history and preservation.
If you try to look for trends in AAG program books, it's really hard to do year by year. But this year I was more struck by quirky takes on issues: everyone's looking for novelty. Is that an artifact of the conference format, or a reflection of our interdisciplinary nature? Cynically, I'd guess the former.
I marked on a calendar, and then totally forgot to celebrate, the fourth anniversary of this blog last week. I started writing in this space towards the end of my first year of PhD school. I thought it would be fun to participate in what was then a fairly tech-centric form of public communication. I really had no other expectations than that.
It has been fun, although I don't blog nearly as often as I wish. I'm (believe it or not) kinda picky about what I put out there, and a lot of personal stuff from my daily life (involving family, friends, or even colleagues) is censored in my mind before I even start to type. (Someday, when I am dead, someone will chance across my personal journals, and will publish them as an account of a woman in the late 20th century. Or, I'll be like Henry James and burn the whole lot before I go.)
Anyways, happy anniversary to me!
There's been a flurry of emails on one of my listserves related to "should we automatically know where in the world Temple University is?"
Temple U, in geography at least, favors the caste system. They hire tenure track people to do research and teach limited classes, and they hire contractors on fixed contracts to do the icky work of teaching undergrads, so as not to unduly burden the researchers.
I had a phone interview there last spring, and frankly I counted the minutes until I could decently end it. It was clear early on what they were interested in (warm bodies to relieve the "stars" of the drudgery of teaching) and It's another example of the hypocrisy of academe: you'll find that the tenure-track researchers there are all interested in class/race/disadvantage, yet when it comes to equity in their own department...well, it goes no further than their own self-interest.
Typical, I'm finding, of the world of academe. Full disclosure: I didn't get an offer. But frankly, I was so horrified at the setup that I would have turned it down in a heartbeat if they'd called back.
They are advertising again this year like crazy. Must be a helluva place to work....