oh hello! you’ve caught me about to make toast in my new toaster oven, purchased at the hardware store and brought home to surprise my husband with. He (the husband) then spent an hour reading me the entire instruction manual out loud and yelling up the stairs at me about the preparatory cycle he was running it through. And now we can finally make toast without wastefully heating up our whole oven, which I know is a sin to admit but it’s what we’d been doing (not every day).
also I just want to tell you that for two days I have not gotten a single email in my work account and it is AMAZING. I feel like I woke up from experimental surgery and the doctor was like “it was a success, you can go back to leading a completely ordinary life” and I jumped out of the hospital bed and yelled WHOOPEE and went running down the street.
It snowed in the night, which means one happy dog this morning. I don’t know why, but he loves snow. He thinks it is so fun. You take him to the park and he runs and runs and sticks his face in and snorts. He is scared of every other thing that exists on earth but when it comes to snow, he’s on board, in spite of how short-haired and skinny he is, such that you’d think he’d hate the snow. No explanation for it. No point in lookin’ for one neither.
Here’s something fun, as well, which is that I am on the search committee for a new hire we are doing, and weeks ago I got a weird email I didn’t understand from the school, and since this happens to me roughly 3-4 times every day, I just ignored it. Then just yesterday I realized that it must be a link to all the applications I’m supposed to be reading. Shit! I narrowly escaped making a fool of myself at our first committee meeting (could still happen). Now frantically reading job applications. In so little time, it has come to this! From being desperately on the market myself to being in a position of power over others on the market, in just four short months. Thank god, because I love having power over others
Thinking a lot about cops, the police state, how we collude to create a militarized system protecting the rights of private property rather than the rights of citizens. Thinking about power and money and history. Thinking about how all the most prominent feminists are the ones who represent success within the capitalist value system. I wish I didn’t live in the era of late capitalism, when everything feels so overwhelmingly totalized and no one can even envision a different kind of life for humanity, but I do, and that’s that. Culture happens whether you like it or not, and you’re just stuck in it.
Reading The Hobbit. I still have this beautiful 1966 edition with Tolkien’s original illustrations that I’ve had my entire life. Some of my earliest memories are of my dad reading to me from this very book, both of us sitting in my Uncle Granville’s armchair we inherited when he died (he’s the one who collected books his whole life, and then decided he didn’t want them anymore, so he put them all in his car and drove around the city throwing them out the window). The chair was in the piano room in our house in Texas, which was a room I was scared of, which made these nightly reading sessions more piquant. I remember learning what the idiom “out of the frying pan into the fire” meant. I remember asking my dad why the drawings of Bilbo in the book didn’t look like the Bilbo from the cartoon movie version, and my dad’s explanation being weirdly unsatisfying to me. The book is hardcover with interestingly marbled thick pages, and it comes in its own ornate case. Now reading it all I can see is WWII trauma and a man’s lifelong obsession with Beowulf.
Thinking about how drawn we are to fascism. Face it! We had a long conversation last night about how people like wes anderson’s movies because he’s a fascist. I’m not going to explain that remark, deal with it
I like wes anderson’s movies, fyi
here’s my to-do list for today, to hold myself accountable:
– write conference abstract
– write draft of archive review I somehow agreed to do
– read 10 job applications
ok that’s enough, it’s almost christmas after all.
