the month of June

My morning/blogging routine is a funny thing. I think that often bloggers read before they write. In fact, I think many writers (at least academic ones) read before they write. That’s how we get ideas to share, items to respond to, etc. So tend to read and read all of my favorite blogs and news sites, and then when it finally comes time for me to write/post, I suddenly feel too tired. I’ve taken too much in. I can’t sort through it all. I’ve been in front of the computer too long. I don’t know what I want to write anymore. The obvious thing to do here would be to write first. The problem is that I generally have my bowl of oatmeal or cereal an cup of coffee in front of me when I start this whole process, and it is much easier to read than to write when my hands and mouth are filled with breakfast.

This morning I spent some time updating my “blogroll.” Last night I just read around and explored some new (to me) blogs. For some reason I found myself really drawn to blogs that belong to academic/teacher mothers. I guess because it gives me hope that if they can do it, I can do it too! (Even if I have NO idea *how* they do it). A couple of my favorites: professing mama (formerly known as ABDmom, so it is kind of cool to follow her through the whole grad school to assistant prof. process) and crunchy granola.

I met with my director yesterday. Today I will send out potential exam dates (March) to my other committee members so that we can all coordinate. My committee wants me to formulate my own exam questions, which they can then tweak and/or revise as potential exam questions. I think it is a great exercise, and I understand the pedagogical reasons for doing the exam in this manner; I am just daunted by the task. I will start writing those on Friday (and will hopefully post ideas and/or the actual quesetions themselves here). I thank all bloggers who have posted their exam questions and/or exam process, as it is helpful to have these models.

Hopefully it is simply misplaced. It is a simple, thin, blue, Mead notebook that contains pages and pages of handwritten notes on texts from my reading lists. I know it has ALL of my notes on Balibar and Macherey’s “On Literature as an Ideological Form” and many pages on Michael Apple’s Ideology and Curriculum. I know it contains much more than that, but those are the texts I’m concerned with at the moment. These notes are obviously from back in the days of studying/reading before I had devon, but now I’m trying to get all my notes and books and photocopied excerpts and articles in alphabetical order by list on my shelves, and I need to find that damn notebook.

We’ve all, no doubt, heard the kt tunstall song (over and over). Maybe even seen it featured in The Devil Wears Prada in the scene where the determined Anne Hathaway character strides through the streets of NYC suddenly transformed into a fashionably hip woman, and we see the look in her eyes: she gets “it.” Suddenly fashion makes sense to her; suddenly she knows *this* is what she wants to be. I mean, suddenly she sees it, that is.

Anyway, lately, whenever I hear that song (tunstall performed it on Ellen last week), I wonder if most academics have this “suddenly seeing” moment. A moment when it just all makes sense, and we become 100% certain that this is what we want to do/be, and we stride through the halls of our institution (well more likely, the halls of numerous institutions while on this very long journey) on a mission…a clear mission…?

I’ve been wondering this, and then came across this. Lately I’ve been calling what I do (PhD work and teaching) my “career.” I don’t know that I was conscious of this word choice or if it even means anything per se, but it was interesting to read this post about the differences between work, career, calling, and vocation. I certainly can’t imagine walking around calling this my calling.

Talk about feeling badly about the failure of my 21 straight days of blogging — check out this guy. He is writing and recording one song over the course of a 24 hour period every day for a year, and he’s sticking with it. Apparently if he fails to achieve this goal for even a day, then the project is over.

But all in all, I simply haven’t been blogging every day because this is “supposed to be” a blogging adventure that documents my life in academe, and all I want to do lately is blog about anything but that. I guess that is also okay; avoidance, I would say, is also a part of this life in an institution. Right?

Yesterday, while at the gym, I picked up a recent issue of Entertainment Weekly and read an entertaining (I guess this is where the name of the magazine comes from) interview with Norman Mailer. Maybe this is typical of an EW article, but I guess I was surprised to actually get engrossed in an article while at the gym. Of course, it also made me long for the days of reading novels (even if Norman isn’t actually reading any himself).

Finally saw The Good Shepard last night. One of the comments on IMDb is “finally a film that doesn’t assume you’re an idiot” (or something to that effect), and I’d have to agree. I don’t consider myself an idiot at all, and yet my head was aching by end. Having never really been a viewer of any type of spy films, and, as it turns out knowing little about CIA operations, I found myself confused, worried, frightened at various points. It also made me feel that D and I should read aloud A People’s History of the United States — a few pages every night.

I’ve obviously failed miserably at my 21 days experiment. But blogging with my students is a great opportunity to help me keep on track.

My ENG106 students are working on their first contributions to our class blog. They’re writing responses to Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif.” And I could just smack my own head, because I just realized that I forgot to discuss the title with them before they started writing. Ah well…such is the excitement of a classroom — it’s always live.

In other news…I had one committee member tell me (via e-mail) that my project is coming along nicely. A marked up copy is waiting for me in my campus mailbox. I’ll revel in “nicely” for a few days before I actually pick it up and see exactly what that means.

There is really nothing else to report. Now I really feel like a student — struggling to fill that eight minute timed freewrite.

A friend of mine, after taking her exams, told me that she spent most of the first day just getting together all the quotes she planned to use. I thought, what a great idea; I should get a head-start on that. So I’ve been going back to various texts and collecting quotes in devon. Obviously, at this point I don’t know what my questions will be, so I am simply gathering quotes that I feel will be most relevant to my project as a whole.

Problem is that a lot of the time I just really like the quote (or the idea contained therein) but can’t really see how it connects to any of the arguments I plan to make. I’ve spent about three days (only about an hour or two each day) harvesting quotes from Stanley Aronowitz’s The Crisis in Historical Materialism. I know I’ve spent too much time and taken waaay too many quotes from this book (there are just so many that appeal to me). One from today that totally doesn’t seem to connect to my project, but that I like anyways:

“Feminist struggles have the possibility for contributing to a new configuration of classes within contemporary society because they go beyond the limits of economic self-interest” (112).

I decided to check out ms. dewey — a search engine (I believe created by microsoft). When I arrived at the site, however, I was a little suprised to see Ms. Dewey is Papi — the l word’s new character, who was just introduced last week. Her name is actually Janina Gavankar. Most surprisingly is that when I put in the search terms: papi and l word and ms dewey, well, Ms. Dewey seemed to recognize herself, saying something about how she likes to take a laptop to work with her so that she can keep up on herself. Pretty hilarious.

infuriating, morning-ruining, unreliable, ineffective let down.

uniblogs failed me big time. For the past couple of days it has been quirky and unreliable — at various times I haven’t been able to login, or once I’ve logged in it doesn’t let me do anything. Not to mention it is soooo slooooow. Once I managed to get up one post, it has been impossible to even update my class blog with a simple post. Today was the day to set up my students with their usernames (in ENG106) and their own blogs (in ENG251). Well, if uniblogs was giving me this much of a headache, I couldn’t imagine how my already skittish and skeptical students would do (and if you can’t login, there is really not much point in having a username or a blog).

I spend all morning trying to get uniblogs to cooperate with me, with no luck. With ten minutes left on the clock before I have to leave the house, I am frantically trying to figure out my best alternative.

I left the house, and got almost all the way to school when I realized that I forgot a document at home that I hadn’t saved to my flashdrive, and that I didn’t know the password to one of my blogs (it was the mumble jumble of numbers and letters that I hadn’t yet changed to something that actually makes sense to me). I would need the password to implement my newly forming plan, which was to have students attain their usernames and blogs directly through wordpress. I had to turn around and head home, and then realized I needed enough time to print out the document as our printer is out of ink. It’s a sad, sad story, I know.

I began with such good intentions wanting to support edublogs and its sister uniblogs, but these technological tools failed me at the wrong time.

At the last minute before class I threw this site up on wordpress, but I still need to return to it and add what was on the original site. I changed the instructions for my ENG251 students so that they would utilize wordpress instead of uniblogs.

Today when I got back home, I discovered something is so very wrong with my computer. I don’t know what, but it’s running at a snail’s pace…no, worse than that, and sounds like it is panting and heaving and never quite catching its breath.

Update: Now I’ve tried to post this entry three times, and it appears that blogger is having some issues. One could say it’s not really my day….

Because it is freezing and rainy and icy and gross outside, I refused to join D at the gym today. Instead, I decided to workout at home. I did this workout. I know a lot of people say that it is tough for them to get a good workout at home, but let me just say that doing this jumping workout today suddenly makes spin class seem less tortuous. Most of the moves I couldn’t do for the required amount of time. One minute of “killer” push-ups??? At first I thought it must mean do one killer push-up, and I thought *maybe* I could accomplish that…. With moves named cancan and hopscotch it sounded like a lot of fun. Overall, the workout took me about 25 minutes to complete (longer than it should have), making it a perfect exercise activity for those exam study days when I want to save some time by NOT driving to the gym but am in desperate need of an exercise break. That is if I am ever brave enough to try it again.

D got me a physioball for christmas, so I can also use that on days when I can’t make it to the gym. I also want to get a medicine ball and a jump rope.