Urban Honking

My grandmother finally died! Bless her heart. It has been a long, long time coming and I am very relieved that it is over. People are living too long these days. Both my grandmother and my grandfather had just awful, hideous final years. Final years that would have mortified and appalled them had they had […]

Currently very much enjoying this article Freddy sent me, which is a review of Jurassic Park written in 1993 by Stephen Jay Gould, who begins by extensively quoting Macbeth, and later reveals that as a child he was called “fossil-face.” He also casually mentions a question he would love to know the answer to but […]

I’m going to stop talking about how much work I have to do. I’ve made this promise before. I will try to stick to it. I’m like a chocoholic, but with talking about work. talking about being overworked : conversations : : _______________:______________ (a) napalm : forest (b) sleeping pills : the human body (c) […]

My Time Breakdown: – 8,000,000 hours a day: writing back to students who email me asking only one of two things: * please can I override the school’s enrollment system because they waited too long to register for classes and now my class is full but they really need my class to graduate so can […]

Oh man. Alex has just alerted me to the fact that it has now been TEN YEARS since I posted my fabled journal, kept while “in training” at a cell phone call center in 2004. And actually the journal was from a couple of years earlier, before I had this blog! I saved it in […]

It happened! It got cold. I know this is the tip of the iceberg (har har) in terms of weather but it is already colder than your average Pac-NW winter’s day and there is something thrilling to me about the approach of a serious winter. We in middle class America so rarely encounter stuff that […]

– You forget how much you miss being around COLLEAGUES. People with whom you don’t have to preface or explain; people who know the basic foundations of your scholarly ideas; people who can give you serious reading suggestions and also suggestions on your own methodologies and arguments; people with whom you can laugh uproariously at […]

It happened It happened….TO ME It became Friday again And Friday is my SATURDAY Hello friends, I got up at 6:00 a.m. even though it’s my day off. It is straight-up pitch black outside, like it could be 3 in the morning for all I know. This is why being an old-timey farmer is bullshit. […]

I’ve been asked in the comments about my hatred of Jeffrey Eugenides, and I was about to write a post all about it, but then I had this weird feeling that I had already done so, and I searched my archives, and Check It Out! Ha ha ha How many times have I repeated myself […]