"Maggie's Farm," Bob Dylan

I don't even really know this song, but a bit of the chorus was in my head when I woke up this morning. Apparently, my subconscious wants me to know that it ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more.

This weekend was a wash, work-wise. And now the rest of the world is heading back to school, which is making me more and more anxious-feeling. I have two weeks until St. Happy starts up, and two weeks after that before UChaos (which is also when I'll have to hand over two chapters to my advisors), so things are not dire quite yet.

But I am going to have to start looking over syllabi soon and decide if I'm going to try to incorporate secondary criticism in my Big Willie class. I'm sure it would be useful, and the best St. Happy students would definitely benefit from that kind of rhetorical model. On the other hand, though, there's a big chunk of each class that struggles just to get a handle on plot and imagery, and I worry that throwing criticism at them would derail even that. And, from talking to a student who was in the other Willie section last spring, I found that the other instructor for this class had assigned a 15-page final paper incorporating 5 different critical sources. Which seems just evil for everyone involved. While I'm still basing my assignments on a syllabus from the tenured professor in the field, I think I'll feel better if I talk to the dept. chair about what I am and should be doing.

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"More Adventurous," Rilo Kiley

Managed about two and a half pages yesterday. I'm starting to get a feel for how much I can get done in a set time-frame.

I should set today's goals, but I have champagne-head from last night's festivities. There may be no writing today.

"Doreen," Old 97's

Again, song in my head.

Today's plan is to work through the last bit of yesterday's scene (I think I know what I'm needing to say about that) and to sketch out the next one. Then I'm off to a thing at my friend A.'s house in celebration of another friend's upcoming wedding. I'm thinking there will be lots of wine drinking and complaining about the department on A.'s balcony. Woo!

I noticed yesterday that I'm struggling both with diction (where have all my words gone?) and the physical act of typing. Don't know what happened to my touch-typing skills, beaten into me by Mr. Greaser (first name Dick, son's name Scooter) in high school. Ah, the happy days of tip-tip-typing along to a Madonna 45 on the ol' Selectric. Good times.

"It's Magic," Pilot

That's the song I woke up with in my head this morning. I had assumed it was ELO, but Google tells me it's a one-hit-wonder by a band called Pilot. Hm.

Yesterday was... not so good. My left eye leaked all day due to sinus stuff, making me unfit for anything other than shopping for shoes online and watching baseball. Will attempt again today.

And I think I'm really done with the hithering and yon-ing and have settled down here. Wordpress is lovely, but that's also where I'm keeping my reading-notes blog, and I couldn't figure out how to isolate that from the main frivolousness, so back to Blogger for me.

EtA: The goal was close-readings of two scenes (the series of close-readings makes up the middle of the chapter, where I'm talking about how a concept is being structured and manipulated). I managed two-thirds of one scene, but it's the knottiest scene I'm dealing with in this chapter, so I'll call that a minor success. Four pages, which is... ok, I guess. There's something more to be said about the closing of the scene, but I don't know what it is quite yet.

Re: Radio Silence

In case anyone's still paying attention, I've moved shop again. This time over to a simple thing that I won't feel the need to prank up with sidebars and such. Just a place to keep track of myself: http://meatcheesebun.wordpress.com/

In which I make the leap

Let it be known, I still hate Blogger. But I've made the switch over to their new template, losing my carefully (though amateurishly) crafted scheme, but gaining the ability to add things to my sidebar without journeyman-level html-wrangling.

But what I wanted to post is a delightful conversation I had with a student this week. He comes up to me after class and says, "One of my other professors, my marketing professor, was talking about Romeo and Juliet in his class."

"Oh, really?" I say.

"Yeah, but--and I may not remember the play right--he said that they were kept apart by their parents. And that's not right, is it?"

"Nope. As we discussed, their parents don't know about the marriage at all until the end."

"So why would he say that?"

"Well, because there are cultural assumptions about the play--like it's a sublime love story, it's about parental disapproval--that have very little to do with the play itself. But now you know what's really going on, because you actually read it."

"Huh."

"But I wouldn't correct your marketing professor. Just know you're right."

"Yeah, at least not until after the midterm."

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
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