Cheese and High Heels

This week, I traveled to Madison, Wisconsin for a literature conference. In case I hadn’t figured this out before, I was reminded, first, that English majors and professionals can turn anything into a verb–and I mean anything. (The buzzword for the weekend was “dissertating”: i.e. Are you dissertating yet?)

Second, though, I was reminded that such conferences, and the travel involved, make for some pretty great, albeit quirky, stories. For instance…

Conversations in airports and on airplanes. I had one conversation about mountain biking, small towns in Vermont, the graphic design industry, Macs vs. PCs, beat poets, and werewolves. Another involved Harleys, face masks, and the beach. A third revolved around small businesses, family life, and the oddities of various airports.

The unique characteristics of a town from an outsider’s perspective. U.Wis-Mad has 40,000 plus students, and is essentially a college town. Its residents consider 33 degree weather license for shorts and flip-flops, but also gloves and scarves. The lakes on either side of the city were frozen solid, with a thick layer of snow. What else would you do but set up your hut and ice fish (verb?), cross-country ski, or snowmobile? Well in Madison, they would add a Statue of Liberty emerging from the water (ice), placed in close proximity to a sign left over from summer which said, “No Lifeguard On Duty.” The idea of liberty drowning near a university is beautifully ironic, non?

I love signs. Especially the one in O’Hare, which helpfully informed the patron of the women’s restroom that one of the stalls was “Out of Order: No Door.” Oh, the possibilities. First, the need to inform users that there was no door. Second, the fate of said door. Not your usual target of pickpockets…

I’ve never been one to discount the non sequitur. For example, the combination of classic, even gothic or medieval architecture on the campus with a large number of concrete buildings closely resembling parking decks. Or the fact that all the postcards in novelty stores around the city sell only images of the city in spring and summer. I guess if you’re there in winter, they need to convince you to come back.

Perhaps because I hit an unseasonably warm spell (30+ degrees), I really liked the city. It’s a university town, with tons of small coffee shops and bookstores with names like “A Room of Her Own.” Also a substantial number of specialty popcorn stores (key lime, anyone?), ice cream shops, and, yes, the requisite wine and cheese stores. Local cheeses got an A+ in my book. The main thing I would do differently, in retrospect, is invest in some non-high heel dress shoes. Walking 7 blocks to the conference, 7 back, and numerous in between to sight see, did not make for Happy Feet, despite all the ice.

But I suppose these are the sacrifices we make for professional development. Whatever that’s worth. In all honesty, I think most conferences can be summed up in a few choice phrases (not including the word cohort, the other new buzzword I picked up): free breakfast. sly attempts to read name tags. awkward meet ‘n’ greets. questions unrelated to the speaker’s research. one-upmanship. covert admissions that you’ve never read The Scarlet Letter or Dracula or Virginia Woolf. and so on.

I was in an odd place, not a PhD candidate yet, presenting outside my field, not teaching an undergraduate course. The others on my panel were presenting chapters from their dissertations. I felt a bit like they were speaking a different language. The odd thing is, I picked it up. By the end of the weekend, I could converse (B.S.) as well as the next person–about funding issues, my “specialization,” faculty relations, the job market, and even some Marx or “thingness” (or Sherlock Holmes, another popular reference).

Fun? Yes, especially over fish ‘n’ chips. Honest? Not so much. Did I learn a lot? Yes. Can I see myself jumping through those hoops? Sometimes, yep. Do I want to?

That, dear readers, is indeed the question.

It Might Be Midterms…

…

1) If you begin to compete with the other cars to be the last to leave the commuter parking lot at night, and are irritated because one car beat you out.

2) If your top coffee shop comment card complaint is a shortage of power outlets and the time limit on the free wireless.

3) If your diet suddenly necessitates additional carbohydrates solely to absorb the excess caffeine.

4) If you secretly run laps up and down the library stairs at 11 p.m. in order to stave off the madness of the graduate study room.

5) If you feel under an imperative to update your blog instead of writing a paper, partly because it makes you feel less guilty than being on Facebook.

Three more days.

I Wonder…

Sometimes I wonder what would happen if Jacques Derrida ever met William Strunk and E.B. White?

I don’t know, but I imagine it would involve a lot of commas. Angry commas, with French words in italics and long, tangential commentaries on etymology. And parentheses. Livid parentheses, with honest, energetic, colorful words inside. (And perhaps a few lists of the items that make up a garbage heap thrown in for good measure.)

I could see it being jolly good sport, actually…

Perhaps Charlotte could referee. After all, they’re all dead as well.

Could someone make that happen? Thanks.

I love Saturdays.

Red Leather

I’m starting to have a piece-de-resistance kind of idea in honor of the upcoming Flying Fork Day.

It’s Romeo and Juliet. A new film version. Based on the Yankees/Red Socks rivalry. It’s called Red Leather. It’s directed by David Lynch. And it goes something like this…

———————————————————
VOICEOVER (HARRY DEAN STANTON): Two clubs, alike in history…

–Cut to shot of a screaming fan being violently stabbed in the parking lot outside Fenway Park while rap music blares in the background. Cut to black.

VO: …in fair Boston, where we lay our scene…

–Handheld camera “runs” down Beacon Hill at night, breathing heavily, after a screaming Laura Dern. Fade to a high angle shot of a bouquet of red, red roses against the snow outside a florist shop on Harvard square. Fade to white.
VO: …a pair of star-crossed lovers take their lives…
–Montage of Nicholas Cage…with Isabel Rosselini at sunset while an umpire in whiteface dances on top of a car waving a baseball bat over their heads and a majestic score borrowed from Gone With the Wind cuts to the violins. Fade to black.
–Scene change: Fenway park, seventh inning stretch. “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” plays cheerfully in the background and happy children wave at the camera. Slow pan to the infield.
DAVID ORTIZ: “Do you kick sand in my face, sir?”
ALEX RODRIGUEZ: “No sir, but I do kick sand, sir.”

———————————————————-
It’s going to be brilliant.

Or further evidence that bad ideas spring from procrastinating minds.

Oh Snow-Unaccustomed South

Oh snow-unaccustomed south, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways…

University, thy ways are so wise. When there is freezing rain starting at 8 a.m. and expected to continue until afternoon, thou dost open the campus at 11 a.m., so that the power has time to go out and the freezing rain has time to accumulate on the still-icy roads.

City, thou art a gem. When thou hast not plowed our road in four days after the snowstorm, thou dost–while freezing rain is falling, so that there will be a clean, until recently cooled by the weight of snow and ice, surface on which it can fall and stick, without the remaining snow to give it traction. In the same sweep, thou pushest all the excess of snow and ice from the main road onto the lip of our parking lot, creating the equivalent of a ski jump…from the outside. From our side, thou hast birthed a leviathan.

This parking lot, thou development divine, remains to be touched, except by the spinning tires and smoking engines of those that cannot live without their bread and milk.

How do I love thee?
I scarce can tell.

If Children Were Like Computers

If children were like computers, the education system would be a very different place.

Public school would be much less popular as an educational choice. Every time your child contracted an infection from the other children in his or her group, s/he would not only be sent home, but would have to un-learn everything s/he knew and start over from preschool again.

That might not be so bad in kindergarten, but by the sixth grade, re-learning the alphabet would get pretty old.

It’s probably a good thing that children aren’t like computers.

Speaking of which, I think I might start homeschooling Linus. When he gets back from the hospital. After he relearns his name. The other “children” in his “group” keep giving him the flu, and somehow the IT center doesn’t think hand sanitizer will do the trick.

This whole starting over from scratch thing is not my favorite. Just saying…

A, B, C, D, E, F, G

1 + 1 = 2

Sigh.

It’s Monday.

WANTED

Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go

When I found this I thought: Gee, thanks for telling me now.

But there’s no use crying over spilt…dollars…or hours…or brain cells…or stuff. Right?

So instead, what we need are some super-fantabulous Alternate Careers for Unemployed, Over-Qualified Graduate School…Graduates.

What a great idea. I thereby submit for your consideration the following:

1. Royal Food Testers

Worried about those political enemies? Fearing a bit of Roman-style drink spiking? Call in your friendly neighborhood graduate student. Believe me, after eating unidentified three-week old leftovers that were advertised as “free food,” we’ve pretty much developed the necessary immunity. Your average deadly poison will give us little more than a stomachache, and you can partake with an easy mind.

2. Psychological Research Subjects

You need people who exhibit signs of mental illness? The truly complex cases that will test your new product? Let me put it this way: we ruin our eyesight staring at tiny spots of ink or images on a screen which tell us nothing is real in order that we may produce even more tiny spots of ink which tell other people nothing is real. Need I say more?

3. University “Living Billboard” Marketing Solutions

Can’t afford ads during the Super Bowl? Olympic coverage out of your price range? Never fear–the ultimate marketing solution is here! We willingly wear the same college t-shirts and sweatshirts for up to 10 consecutive years while coming in contact with dissatisfied individuals in your target demographic at up to three different locations. What’s not to love? What’s not to pay?

4. Coffee Shop Undercover Investigators

Does the local cafe water down its caffeine content in an effort to reduce overhead? Are the mugs really washed after every use? Whether you’re the Secret Shoppers, the Better Business Bureau, or the Food and Drug Administration, chances are, you’d like to know. On the surface we’re innocent, we’re loyal, and we’re naive: underneath, we’re hard-nosed investigators waiting to have our caffeine addiction financed. For the price of a cup of coffee a day, we’ll give you the scoop.

5. Scrabble Tournament Referees

Is “Shakespearean” a proper noun or an acceptable adjective? Is “culpa,” as in “mea culpa” sufficiently in popular use to nullify its status as a foreign word? No one wants to look these things up. What you need is an expert in the obscure, the grammatical, and the nonsensical. Someone who, though they may not be able to leap tall buildings in a single bound, can quickly rule on an illicit attempt to use “frumious” as a game-winning word on the justification that it appears in a work of literature.

Trust me. You need us. You just don’t know it yet.

So you see, all is not lost, even for those who wander. A deeply rooted love of learning is not touched by the frost of a cold economic situation. We will endure. And we will do a far, far more useful thing for society than we have ever done.

N’est-ce pas?

Back in Business

Starting back to classes tomorrow.

Graduate school, take 2. Newly resolved NOT to leave final papers for the last week, but not particularly confident in my ability to fulfill said resolution. Newly resolved not to trip on the stairs as frequently, or to patronize Starbucks as often, or…

Cancel that.

Newly resolved that classes start tomorrow.

End of story.

Bucket-less Bucket Lists

Today, I donated my hair to Locks of Love.

Although I’ve been planning to do it for a while, I must confess feeling a little like Jo in Little Women, and that “vain part of me” misses my long hair. However, the fact that I was really worried/nervous/almost chickened out tells me it was probably a good time to do it.

Donating my hair is one of the first things I’ve been able to “check off” my unofficial bucket-less bucket list.

I don’t want to be the kind of person who can only repeat, with envy, the stories of others.

I’ve been thinking a lot in the past year about what it means to live fully, and to live free from fear, rather than carpe diem. I think living free from fear means being wholly present in whatever circumstances I find myself, willing to experience both delight and sorrow without hiding, and keeping my eyes open for glimpses of beauty in the people, events, and places I encounter.

I’m still formulating my ideas, and I doubt I’ll formally write a checklist, because for me it’s harder to take advantage of spontaneous opportunities than to make lists.

Some ideas are trivial, some serious: I’d like to road trip across the United States, volunteer with a humanitarian/social justice organization here or overseas, perform in a musical, and ride in a hot air balloon, among other things.

There are elements of fear in each, and that’s part of the reason I want to do them; because I know there is something more than the fear, and the ability to step out in faith is part of being healed, of being made new.

So here’s to being made new! (short hair and all…)