Today I emailed out my dissertation proposal to my committee members. Granted, I’ve done this before, but now it was sent out with the explicit request of setting up a defense hearing in early December. What this means is that I might actually be ABD before the end of the year. I know, I know. It sounds crazy. I mean, who ever heard of getting one’s dissertation proposal accepted after only 5 freakin’ years in the program?* Not that I should be counting my chickens before they hatch. Even though I’ve sent this proposal out to everyone on my committee before, I don’t know that any of them have actually read it before. So it seems entirely plausible that with the prospect of a deadline looming, they will actually read it now and tell me that I need to spend another six months working on it. Man, that would be so awful. Yet entirely plausible. Regardless, it’s out of my hands right now. So I’m going to spend the rest of the afternoon trying to read a little French (don’t ask me why no one ever translated this Treatise on Insanity in Animals into English) and then I’m off to dissection lab later. Woohoo!
*Sarcasm alert: for those of you not initimately acquainted with the normal academic timeline.
Can someone please explain the Spice Girls to me? I never really understood why anyone liked them when they were all popular back in the day, but at least I could get my mind around the idea of a cutsey little pop band that sang catchy songs and made their record label millions. But this whole Spice Girls reunion thing is really blowing my mind. I had always assumed the Spice Girls were just some passing phase, part of the neverending jetsam and flotsam that is popular culture. But their reunion concerts are selling out in minutes, and they’re releasing their weird music videos that look like the cast of Desparate Housewives filming a perfume ad for Victoria’s Secret. What exactly is their demographic? And why do people still care about them?
Regular blogging is hard to do when you’ve nothing to talk about. I could tell you about all the trivial things, like how my much needed USB hub arrived from Amazon the other day. Or I could talk tiresome local politics and complain about how our much maligned cooperatively owned grocery is finally going to shut down leaving our neighborhood with zero places to buy groceries (who would have thought I’d actually have misgivings about the co-op closing!). I could also bemoan the fact that the little French reading skills I picked up over the summer seem to have disappeared completely. Or I could bitch about how the movie In the Mood for Love took an interesting concept and a really fantastic sense of style and turned it into one of the most boring movies I have ever seen, adding to my annoyance by getting that damn theme song from Coupling stuck in my head. Alas, I realize none of these things are really worth talking about. So I will live you on a high note in my laundry list of trivialities: I think I managed to keep my bedroom radiator from making those frighteningly loud banging noises. Yay for undisturbed sleep! And now, I shall go eat some Reese’s Peanut Butter puffs ’cause I’m a grown-up and I can have kiddie cereal at 10:45 at night if I want!
Again, I have been struggling to maintain my vows of regular blog posting. If only I lived a live filled with action and adventure, wealth and power, champaign and bikinis, I might have more interesting things to say. Then again, if I lived any of those lifestyles I probably wouldn’t be sitting around telling people about it. At least, not until I published my riveting memoirs, which you could purchase at any major bookseller for only $24.95 plus tax. 5% of the purchase price would be donated to my private foundation: Rats Are Beautiful Too, Inc., that brings the gift of cosmetic surgery to fancy rats in underprivileged nations.
Then again, since my RSS feed is apparently not functioning properly, maybe of you aren’t fully appreciating my posting efforts anyway. Quite a shame since my entry today isn’t just a post, it’s storytime! That’s right, instead of saying I was in a miserable meeting today squaring off with one of my advisors about funding recommendations to our University’s Provost, I will instead begin to tell a completely non-allegorical fairy tale about a poor little village and their efforts to rid themselves of a big, ugly, brutal dragon. Did in mention this is non-allegorical? Okay, good. I wouldn’t want you to read too much into this. Nope, this is pure fantasy, folks.
I waited patiently for the dragon to return to its cave. It was already mid-afternoon. I had been waiting for some time, expecting the dragon to arrive a little earlier. But dragon’s aren’t especially known for their timeliness, and this dragon was no different than any other in that respect. At last, the dragon lumbered into view. My blood boiled as I anticipated the showdown. I knew the dragon was a fearsome creature, that it would fight tooth and nail to protect the happy little nest it had built just on the outskirts of our village. Of course the dragon enjoyed being where it was. It could eat little farmers alive whenever it felt like it! But the poor, struggling farmers were obviously not so happy with this arrangement. Ah, the dear, inconsistent little farmers! When the evil dragon first appeared, we would all rally together to drive it away together. We would gather together in big groups and make a lot of loud noise for hours on end, sometimes late into the evening in the hopes of someday driving the dragon away completely. Some of the especially zealous ones would wave their flaming torches right up in the dragon’s face and shout “viva la revolution!” But those days were past. Now most of the farmers, tired and resigned to their fate, just toiled in the fields and hoped the dragon wouldn’t come for them next. And thus I stood today with only two other brave companions to face the horrible menace, lumbering ever closer…
Again, no sequel to the non-allegorical fairy tale yet because I’m tired and lazy. But I’ll make it up to you by telling a different story, the story of one ambitious woman’s clever film project that involved stop animation and the clumsy chump who volunteered to help with it. ;-)
One upon a time there was very clever graduate student with a very clever cat. The cat is not at all relevant to this story. The film class that this clever graduate student was taking is relevant. Because it meant she needed to make a film… a brilliant film… a film involving a Dia de los Muertos style skeleton marionette… a skeleton marionette who was going to be the star of her stop-motion animated film… a skeleton who would dance and find a stunning hat and put it on his head and admire himself in a shiny sun-shaped mirror. Brilliant!
But the skeleton marionette, as is so often the case with skeleton marionettes, could not move under his own power. No, he needed assistants in order to move. And unfortunately for Señor Skeleton, one of his assistants for the day was our very own clumsy R. Batty! Batty really wanted to make Señor Skeleton and the very clever graduate student director happy, so she tried her best to make S. Skel whirl and dance and discover his groovy hat with finesse and pizzazz. Most likely, this will look more like seizures on film. But Batty tried. Batty tried really hard. Batty’s hand only accidently got in the shot once. Maybe twice. That’s pretty good right? Well, even if it’s not, the clever graduate student pretended that it was, and Batty was most generously rewarded for her clumsy work with much good food throughout the day. Batty could get to like being a clumsy skeleton marionette assistant. Yessirree. Especially since it seems Batty’s chance to be a breakout zombie star will never reach fruition. Drat.
Just dropping in to say “Happy Thanksgiving” to all my peeps out there in cyberspace. And to give an extra big thanks to Celia and Redking for once again hosting an awesomely good Thanksgiving meal. My stomach thanks you, even if my ass won’t when it no longer fits in my jeans tomorrow. But boy was it worth it. Maybe I’ll be able to steal some pics from Celia of the fantastic turkey to put up with this post tomorrow.
Oh joyous day! Continuing in the spirit of Thanksgiving, this evening I had another lovely, gut-busting dinner with Celia. This time, the meal consisted of sushi rather than the countless carbs of my Thanksgiving meal, but the satisfaction remains the same. Mmm mmm good.
However, you dear readers will undoubtedly find my recent site upgrade to be my more significant acheivement for the day. I finally upgraded WordPress (I was about half a dozen versions behind). For starters, this means the archives finally work! I know, I bet you thought you’d never live to see the day. I’m hoping this also means the RSS feed is working again, although since I’ve no idea what was wrong with it in the first place, this is a somewhat more dubious acheivement. Other than that, things will pretty much look the same, but hopefully this update will nevertheless enable smoother sailing for the future.
Maybe this has been around on the internet for over a year, but I just now discovered it and it totally amused me. And right now, that’s really saying something because I have been in a foul, I-hate-academia-sooooo-much mood lately. So enjoy the frighteningly hilarious (or is it hilarously frightening?) Scary Mary.
