We’ve been having an ice storm all day. Very cool-looking in that cinematic way that ice storms are (I thought of Tobey Maguire wandering raptly through the icy landscape in The Ice Storm* as I cautiously navigated the driveway to my building, admiring the icicles surrounding each individual conifer needle), but murder on the power […]
("BORC" would be "Bullets of Random Crap," a term that’s been floating around the academic blogosphere; I spotted it most recently at CultureCat.) Signs that exam period is upon us, 1: The library is packed this week. All available study spaces have been snapped up. I overheard a student saying that she’d spent twelve and […]
See that big blob of white on the weather map up above? That’s the first snow of winter, and it’s been sitting on top of us all day. And it shows no signs of stopping. When I left work (a little early, having been kindly offered a ride home), a couple of students were busy […]
I’m off to my native city for Thanksgiving dinner at my grandmother’s, followed by day-after-Thanksgiving dinner at my aunt and uncle’s. There are half-formed plans to see either Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire or the new Pride and Prejudice adaptation or possibly both, and definite plans to eat a lot and play Scrabble. […]
Curious: Halloween seems to last longer and longer every year. Yesterday, out on the town for a haircut and dinner and a Virginia Film Festival screening (The Ice Harvest: funny up to a certain point, then it just got disturbing), I kept seeing people wandering around in costume. There seemed to be groups of trick-or-treating […]
Yesterday morning I got up, noticed the chill coming in from my open window, and thought "I’d better put more covers on the bed tonight." On my way out the front door, I donned the first jacket of fall, which I took off after a few blocks’ brisk walk, with the sunlight still aslant but […]
It’s a Saturday afternoon and I’m sitting at my office desk working on this article I’ve been writing.* (I can’t seem to make myself work on it at home, and if I need to track down a citation at the last minute, the stacks are a five-second walk away — one of the many advantages […]
Things I love about living in the 21st century (a partial list): The way the advent of blogs and social tagging services (del.icio.us, Flickr, and the like) has created so many wonderfully geeky conversations about low-tech tools like pens and paper and notebooks. That I can share bookmarks pertaining to the kinds of obscure topics […]
I would like to track down the following people: 1. The person or persons who designed the smoke detector in my apartment, a smoke detector so horrifically loud and strident that every time it goes off I jump like I’ve been shot, my hands shake, and I get the ominous feeling that my lifespan has […]
That little inner voice that whispers "You’ll never be smart enough, well-read enough, or knowledgeable enough to succeed at anything," that voice that I got to know extremely well as a graduate student — does that ever completely go away once you’ve left the academic track? Or does it just keep coming back to make […]