In which I get uppity

My Peculiar Aristocratic Title is: Her Eminence the Very Viscountess St. Eph the Disheveled of Wallop upon Deane Get your Peculiar Aristocratic Title

{Something more substantial coming soon, I promise.}

In which nous n'amuseé pas

Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.

Drat, I was hoping for Henry VI. (And please forgive the bad French.)

In which things are better now

Two delightful things happened today. First, I got a response from one of my advisors, the Demanding Advisor who has never quite accepted my dissertation premise. He gets it now, and calls my approach "profound and promising." He also started the message with "Hooray!" and had some specific ideas for fleshing out the chapter to a more chapter-like length. So, yay.

Then C. got an interview call from the university where I'd most like us to go, and is high on his list as well. He's been itchy the last couple of days waiting for calls, so this has settled him down nicely. And tickets to Philadelphia aren't looking crazy-expensive, so it's off to MLA for him. So, woo.

Also, the quarter is officially done for me. Finally. I have two late papers to deal with, but I can't change the grades until January, so I'm not worrying about them. I'm also finishing up an incomplete with a student that requires some actual thought on my part, but that's not so bad and is making me reconsider the course and how it went. Oh, and the teaching observation thing was fine, kind of helpful but more telling me I'm fairly awesome, which is always nice to hear. I think I just waited too long to jump through this particular hoop; it would have been very useful the first year I was teaching, before I figured out how to stand up and use the board. I'm better now.

In which I am... not right

I'm halfway through this last batch of grading and I just... enh. Nothing's particularly wrong with any of them, but nothing's spectactular, either. They're all solid A- papers, which is not a bad thing by any means, but I'm feeling... not right. I don't know if I'm not in a good enough mood to be grading, or not in a cranky enough place. I should be happy that this batch of upperclassmen know enough to foreground their claims, to engage with the quotations, to have a position from which to argue, but I'm getting hung up on their inability to format quotations and put the quotation marks in before the parenthetical citation.

I'm not sure what this feeling is that I'm sucked into right now. It's not the Mean Reds, it's not cranky, it's not depressed, it's just minorly annoyed with the ongoing minutae of day-to-day life. Which I'm not even engaged with, since I've left my apartment, like, twice in the last week. I have no excuse. It's almost like bershon, but the grown-up version, where the object of disgust is my pajama-wearing self.

But halfway done! Eleven more!

Oh, and I forgot to report back on What I Learned from My Teaching Observation. I don't get the official feedback from my observers until Monday, but I watched the tape and learned that I 1) wave my hands around my face all the damn time, making me look like I'm doing some kind of seizure-inflected dance, 2) say "all right?" and "yes?" pretty much constantly (I'm thinking about replacing the first with "aiight?"), and 3) I read textual quotations much too fast. C. says that, shockingly, my teaching approach, performance-wise, mirrors his. Because, of course, we share a brain. Which is just as romantic as it sounds.

In which I check in

So, yeah, it's the end of the quarter and I'm mostly MIA 'round here. Sorry about that. How about some random bullet points?

• I finished the chapter that I've been plugging along on since, oh, this time last year. It is somehow no longer than the last draft. Eh, whatever. I'm turning it in tomorrow, and I like its new title.
• Attention: Internets--The word you're looking for is "simple" not "simplistic." Not synonyms, and stop pretending they are.
• All my shows are fall-finale-ing! So sad! What will I do without Heroes and Betty and Gilmore Girls for the next month? Read books?
• Speaking of books, yet another pleasure-reading novel from the UChaos library has been recalled. Uncool, people. Stop it. I'm going to start leaving nasty notes again in the books I return.
  
• I've been sucked in to an online monster-killing game. It's only a bit compulsive.
  
• Oh, dear, I have papers coming in tomorrow and grading to get behind. Drat.