In which I discover a new thing

How is it that I had not previously been aware of this information? This will be making my life easier in so many ways.

That is all. (Oh, and the chapter did, indeed, get written, in two marathon days. It's not fantastic, but it's decent and needs only minor structural and logical revisions at the moment. Yay!)

In which I make some staggering observations

• When one waits until two days before an immutable deadline to write the final 2/3 of a chapter, in addition to whipping the first 1/3 into manageable shape, the concomitant stress may result in a certain wild-eyed demeanor and uncontrollable twitches.
• When one achieves the completion of said chapter, one may spend up to five hours playing World of Warcraft in celebration.
• When one's youngest cat, a normally hefty young fellow, suddenly refuses to eat for a number of days in succession, one may become panicked. After taking said cat to the vet for a battery of tests and x-rays, one may be confused at the lack of clear diagnosis. When the vet finally suggests that the cat may be suffering from low-grade asthma and maybe the cat owner could cease smoking in the closed-up-for-winter apartment in which the cat resides, the cat owner may feel overwhelming guilt.
• When one ceases smoking in a closed-up-for-winter apartment, said apartment almost immediately becomes much better-smelling and more pleasant to be in.
  
• When one begins smoking exclusively on a semi-enclosed back porch in Chicago in January, one's cigarette consumption is almost immediately cut in half.
  
• Chicago in January is quite cold.
• When one's cat finally begins eating normally again, even begging for extra treats in the middle of the day, one may be quite happy about this turn of events. One may even feed said cat canned chicken in celebration.

Addendum 2/1:

• Just when one thinks all is well with the cat, the cat may develop a decidedly distressing UTI, resulting in even more anxiety and vet visits for all involved.
  

In which I make no small plans

Hey! Guess what I'm doing today? Writing! No, really! I have at least half a paragraph of totally brand-new stuff! And about a page of copy-pasted stuff that totally counts!

Argh. I've been entirely off my game lately, with absolutely no progress being made on either the under-revision chapter or the new one that I want to have done by the end of the month. Part of the problem is that up to this point, I've basically be re-working previous material, which is not fun, but not terrible either. And now I have to make the turn into working from scratch on the rest of the dissertation. And I haven't started from scratch in a long, long time. I think I've forgotten how to start.

If I were smart, I'd take my own advice to my students: start writing somewhere in the middle and worry about the beginning later. But I just can't. So I'm cobbling together a provisional beginning (which will actually turn up in the middle of this two-play chapter) and hating every letter of it. Bah.

But my point here wasn't so much to complain (ok, maybe a little), but to plan. I want to churn out at least three pages every non-teaching day, and get some reading done on teaching days. Weekends will be negotiable, as I suspect once I hit stride I can (and will have to) do far more than three pages at a stretch. I need a reasonable version of this material ready for public consumption by the 29th, so we'll see if the threat of a deadline will help. And then I have two conferences back to back, presenting material that's in decent shape already. Wish me luck.

In which we take more quizzes

This is because of the nail-biting question, clearly. And maybe the counting. And correcting the song. And the number of times I messed with the formatting of this stupid thing is probably testament to its truth.

My score on The Neurotic Test:


The True Neurotic
(You scored 52 anxiety, 60 awkwardness, and 51 neuroticism!)

Congratulations, you are The True Neurotic, you nail-biting, conflict-avoiding worrier, you. You're plagued by self-doubt and anxiety, which makes social activity hard--even though you may be well-liked, you feel under a storm of silent criticism. It doesn't help that people give you funny looks for organizing all your pens by color or sharpening your gnawed pencils to a delicate point.


Your high anxiety score implies that you are unable to relax, worry about the future often, and probably are plagued by irrational fears and self-doubt.

Your high awkwardness score implies that you are socially inept, probably stick out from the crowd, and feel uncomfortable in large groups of people, such as at parties.

Your high neuroticism score implies that you exhibit neurotic behaviors--probably organization, fanatic obsessions (can you recite the entire first LOTR movie?), repetitive mantras, constant checking, or orderly rituals.

Link: The Neurotic Test
(OkCupid Free Online Dating)

In which I make some lists

Hi! I'm back from my hectic holiday schedule of sleeping all day and playing nerdy computer games all night. It was exhausting, but someone had to do it.

I'm clearly in denial of the fact that the winter quarter starts on Thursday at 11:30 a.m. for me. I did manage to update the syllabus, but I haven't decided what to do about the final exam/essay option. I really don't want to read 40 essays on Why Rosalind Is Awesome, but I'm also thinking that an essay exam in a class intended for upper-division English majors does a disservice to the students.

So, looking ahead, I have two lists to make, one domestic, one academic:
Domestic:

• Laundry!
• Take down the cute li'l tinsel tree
• Organize my closet so I can dress like a grown-up again (strides were made toward this with the 10 bags of donations we dropped off on the 31st)
  
• General dusting, sweeping, vacuuming
• Call landlord about the tragically slow drains in the bathroom sink & tub
• Make a hair appointment (only three months after the last)
• Disassemble & felt sweaters for the felted-throw project I'm planning
  

Academic:

• Revise Chapter One & resubmit to committee
• Plan meeting with committee
• Draft Chapter Three
• Read a bunch of Marlowe-related stuff
• Sort & file Fall class notes
• Sort library books, renew & return
• Turn in receipts for conference-travel reimbursement
• Get an old essay into shape for journal submission
• Get Chapter One into shape for journal submission
  

Well, it doesn't look so bad laid out like that. Now I just have to put it in motion. Oh! And I have a resolution: I'm going to stop being lazy and whiny about going out to eat. This is step one of the Plan to Enjoy Chicago While We Can, which goes into motion tonight with a date with C. to go for steak frites.

Oh, yes, there's also news on the Get C. a Job front: two interviews at MLA, both of which went well, both of which were with schools located in places that wouldn't suck my soul dry. Now comes the fun part of waiting for the campus-visit calls, as well as news from the schools that weren't interviewing at MLA.

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.