Asides

For various reasons, this semester has been even more ridiculously busy than last year’s, to the point where I feel like I’m barely keeping my head above the surface — and, well, sometimes sucking down a lungful of water. I completely blew a meeting today where a colleague needed my help making a case for a concern related to the staff syllabus; got caught up giving a cadet guidance on his essay after class, and I didn’t even realize I’d failed until I saw the other two people who’d been at the meeting coming down the hall. That’s the way it’s been going lately, and even the breaks — a pleasant, low-key Thanksgiving, taking the cadets in the opera club to the Met to see Aida, giving a good presentation at NCTE in NYC, celebrating my brother’s birthday with him for the first time in ten years — have felt like blurs.

When I find the time, I’ll offer a concluding post about the plagiarized field manual, but I think I’ll also take Clancy’s and Bradley’s advice and develop my reflections on the topic into a journal article — probably over winter break, when things slow down a bit. There’s a lot to be said there, I think, about genre and context, but also to build on the super-smart stuff Amy’s written about the relationship between affect and citation — and there are a whole range of affectual responses to the situation here, and I want to be respectful to that range.

For now, though, it’s back — back, I say! — to the house of pain stack of grading.

If you know me and my writing, you may (or may not) know that my younger brother has served a prison sentence. He’s out now, doing good and doing well; gregarious, forthright, smart, altruistic, and dedicated. And I couldn’t not share this email from him, including a recent snapshot with the Governor at an Orioles game at Camden Yards:

Bumped into the Gov.
He said excuse me.

I said Pardon me, please.

🙂

Halloween night is the worst possible night to have the doorknob on your front door cease to function.

Amanda at Household Opera has been thinking about literary endings, and has posted some of her favorites with invitations to guess. I think it’s too cool a game to pass up, so I’ll add my contributions, and offer my invitation as well: feel free to post your guesses in the comments, and consider yourself tagged to put up your own list of seven last lines, as well.

1. “Am I?” Jesse said.
2. Gold-glowing child, it steps into the sky and sends a birth-song slanting down gray dust streets and sleepy windows of the southern town.
3. Let me pray that, if I do not survive this manuscript, my executors may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other eye.
4. She sat staring with her eyes shut, into his eyes, and felt as if she had finally got to the beginning of something she couldn’t begin, and she saw him moving farther and farther away, farther and farther into the darkness until he was the pin point of light.
5. No one watching this woman smear her initials in the steam on her water glass with her first finger, or slip cellophane packets of oyster crackers into her handbag for the sea gulls, could know how her thoughts are thronged by our absence, or know how she does not watch, does not listen, does not wait, does not hope, and always for me and Sylvie.
6. We were alone with the quiet day, and his little heart, dispossessed, had stopped.
7. The cults of the famous and the dead.

I’ve finally caved in and turned on the air conditioning at home, and Tink and Zeugma are taking turns standing on the printer with their paws on the window sash and their bellies up to the cold air blasting from the window unit.

So this morning, I’m cleaning out cages in the cat room (warning: cheesy MIDI) with D., who’s another volunteer at the shelter, and K.’s the senior volunteer working in the dog room with N., when the phone rings. Ben and Annie, a ginger tabby and a big black and white, are following me around trying to jump into the cages I’m cleaning after I pull out the litter boxen and the newspaper and bedding, Peanut’s guarding my coffee cup, and Reba’s being a bitch and taking random swipes at me. And it’s mostly a quiet morning, not like the chaos with all the dogs excited and barking on Wednesday morning after one of theirs who’d gotten away from the volunteer walking her this weekend had been found in the woods and returned, with the barking getting the cats all freaked out and barfy and yowly and hissy and swatting at one another. The phone rings, and I hear K. pick up and talk briefly, asking questions, and then giving directions. A few minutes later, it rings again: more directions.

K. comes into the cat room, a little exasperated, cigarette in hand, running her other hand through her hair. “This guy,” she says. “This guy’s like driving around, saying he’s by the drug store, and I told him how to get here, and he says he can’t find us. The drug store’s on Main, right?” D. affirms this. “So he says he’s got a puppy he wants to drop off. Says he found this puppy by the side of the road last night and doesn’t know what to do with it. We’re not hard to find, right?”

A few minutes later, a third phone call, and shortly after that, I’m in the front room with the nervous cats — the ones who aren’t so good in the big room with the other cats — cleaning up plates of old food when I see a minivan pull up. I take the food plates back into the big room and put them in the sink, and D. and I are taking stock of what to do next when K. comes hurtling into the cat room with a little yellow rag cupped in her hands, her eyes wide. “What. The fuck. Is this?” she asks.

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I’m not usually one to do the quiz thing, but I saw this at k8’s, and was curious if I’d changed much in the ten years or so since I first encountered the MBTI.

Nope. Still strong INTJ. A little less extreme on the thinking/feeling axes than I was ten years ago, but otherwise mostly the same.

I’m familiar with the criticisms of the MBTI — the concerns with vagueness, and the concerns with telling people things they want to hear about themselves — and I get those concerns, but I also think that people aren’t necessarily coming to the MBTI with high expectations of scientific validity. I mean, I don’t really buy astrology — it seems fundamentally ridiculous to me that your personality traits can be in any way determined by the moment at which you’re born — but at the same time, I’m like “Yeah, I am so totally a Scorpio, and so not a Leo or a Pisces.” The supposed attributes of a Scorpio, in their differences from the attributes of other signs, help people tell stories about themselves in relation to others, much as the Myers-Briggs types do.

It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.

One draft of a co-authored piece, sent off Friday morning: done.

One piece of substantial and enjoyable assistant-editorial work, sent off Friday evening: done.

One draft lesson plan of a session for our arriving faculty workshop: done.

One enormously pleasant afternoon — today — showing an old, good friend around campus, said friend enthusiastic and intrigued by all the military training going on with M16s and camouflage and the balance between that training and the academic project: done.

(And I kinda wish it wasn’t done. Today was a fine day.)

Still to do before summer’s end: a quick-turnaround response piece that’s going to occupy a lot of my time for the next few weeks.

Still to try to do before summer’s end: condense my dissertation’s overarching argument about political economy and teaching writing in the information age into a digestible piece and send it out.

Still to do before year’s end: turn my conference presentation on Tacitus and weblog rhetoric into something to send out.

Still to do right away: stay in better touch with old, good friends.