Say I can say words only simple

I feel the nervousness in my stomach and in my head, but I think it's the good kind.  I set up mail forwarding today, and started making appointments.  I booked a hotel room tonight, and printed out my driving itinerary.  Tomorrow, I have to go to campus for the last time ever, and get all the books moved out of the office and return my keys.  I need to eat or throw away the last of my perishable groceries by Tuesday.  Two days from now, I will drive out of Cornstate and begin the process of relocating myself (and eventually, my stuff) to Bosstown.  Eeep.

Stuff is beginning to happen, rather fast.  Not just stuff, you know, but Stuff.  I'm pretty scared, honestly, but I'm also hopeful.  I'm too excited and scared and nervous to say much more than that. But I'm hopeful that all the changes will bring good things.

Wish me luck, friends!

Back to work (and I'm glad of it)

Good grief, but I am tired.  It's been an utterly miserable few days here for weather, as everyone knows from the constant news reports.  I now consider 20ºF to be balmy and pleasant, after several days of -15º to -5º.  I've been on an online shopping binge for heavy weather clothing: boots, sweaters, socks, wool pants.  I'm considering browsing the sites for nice long underwear.  (This may or may not be a cry for help.  I'll see what the going prices are.)

I'm additionally dragged out from playing host to a friend who just moved to the area and pleaded to come stay with me until the deep freeze and snow had passed — zi was terrified by the prospect of being snowed in when zi had no internet and, really, no local contacts as yet in case of emergencies.  The upshot of this was two high-strung, stir-crazy people eating too much, drinking too much, and eventually getting into bizarre fights.  I am heartily sick of hosting, maybe even more so than I am sick of this fucking winter weather.

But I am free now, and can enjoy the solitude of my apartment as an asset.  Plus, tomorrow is the first day of my stupid little January term course, so I'll be getting out of the house regularly for work purposes.  I'd actually be thrilled to be going to campus tomorrow, if it weren't for the frightening road conditions between here and there.  I drove to the supermarket this afternoon to replenish my locust-despoiled post-visit refrigerator, and it was honestly scary.  My little Beetle has some good qualities, but road-worthiness in snowy, icy weather is not among them.  I got stuck once in snow too deep for my wheels to get traction, and I was fishtailing at little about 40% of the time thereafter, even at 20 mph.  I've never been so exhausted by quick trip to the grocery store.

On the plus side, a colleague with a sturdy all-wheel drive vehicle has kindly agreed to take me to and from campus tomorrow, so I don't have to fear dying on the road before I even start teaching this calendar year.  I'm hoping that Cornstate will get its act together and have the roads properly cleared off for Friday's commute, for my poor car's sake.

Enough of this f-ed-up winter vacation.  Get me back to the office!

My greatest lifehack ever

My lower back has been bothering me lately, and I've noticed more that I slouch in my desk chair in an injurious way when I'm focused on my writing.  I've had the idea in the back of my mind for a while now that I should try a standing desk, particularly since Dr. Becca blogged about building her own makeshift standing desk arrangement in her office.  Now that I'm spending so much time sitting at my desk at home – with my little MacBook, not with the lovely ginormous computer at my office at CBU – my back has begun to revolt.  I nearly had back spasm until I stood up and walked away from the computer for a bit, and that was the tipping point. 

I am now standing in comfort, typing this as my computer sits on top of an obnoxiously colored file crate turned upside down.  If laziness and cheapness are our criteria, then I daresay that my solution is even more awesome than Dr. Becca's — if only because it is HOT PINK.  :D

RBOC: New year edition

• I'm doing my best to maintain a social life over winter break, so that I don't cloister myself in my apartment and get all weird and stir-crazy.  Mixed results so far, but at least I occasionally get to hang out with Fie and her family.  Fun to start the new year with some good old-fashioned hang-out sessions.
• Speaking of Fie, I can't believe that teh internetz still have not commented at all upon this photograph.  The sheer cuteness has overwhelmed all of you, hasn't it?
• I am righteously sick of planning my spring syllabi.  Can't these things just work themselves out? I'm starting to feel dread when I sit down at my computer and see my unfinished syllabi sitting there.  More than anything else, it's planning out the day-by-day schedule that irritates me.  It's not how I conceive of the material I teach, but I guess it's hard to avoid doing this for the students' sakes.
• Reading what I just wrote above makes me realize that a vision of my own private hell is a split consciousness in which half of me is my professorial self, and the other half is me when I was a junior in college.  Both halves would deserve the other, I fear.
• Might as well admit it: I'm fussing with my syllabi partly to procrastinate from working on my manuscript revisions.  I need to get my head into that game for real, now that we're into January and my winter break no longer feels like an endless Siberian hibernation.
• The thermostat in my apartment appears to be partly a theoretical construction.  I am always a little cold nowadays, and as a result, I have become obsessed with acquiring woolen clothing.  I'm trying to convince myself that I've already bought all that I need, especially now that the clutch of crew neck sweaters has arrived.
• To continue with obsessive acquisition, I recently indulged in a small online shopping spree of goods relating to my vainest, geekiest interest: nice shaving gear.  I'm getting to know a little badger-hair brush that I acquired, and I have a slightly larger one on the way.  I'm also currently working my way through a sample pack of aftershave splashes and colognes, all of them variations of a particular scent that I like.  My life may be an unending stream of chaos and confusion, but damn it, I will confront all of it with an amazingly smooth, close shave, and smelling good.  (I finally grok my female friends who just don't feel capable of leaving the house until they have applied their lipstick and mascara.)
• Unless some more deals get worked out in Congress soon, I expect to be paying more in taxes this year.  Please remind me not to buy any more shaving stuff until I settle on an aftershave.  And maybe a cologne.

RRBOC (Really RBOC!)

• One of my students has a pair of shoes more awesome than anything that I own.  It eats me up with envy.  I don't want to give him a swelled head or cross any lines of appropriate professor-student relationship, but I'm dying to know where he found those shoes.  I'm also scandalized to think that his shoes might cost four times what I'd spend on a pair.
• Speaking again of footwear, I continue to despise this godawful trend of wearing black socks and shower sandals.  I have yet to see anyone wearing this who doesn't look like zi just escaped from an insane asylum.  I am utterly baffled that any person in possession of hir full faculties would ever think of putting on such items together, much less walking out of doors like that.  It actually makes those running shoes with toes look reasonable, even stylish.
• Crickets keep making ill-advised incursions into my garage when I come home in the evening.  They don't seem to realize that they are cutting themselves from their friends and family by hopping in there.  They probably neither realize nor care how much it irritates me when they start chirping in there, and the walls and cement floor magnify the sound half a bajillion times when I'm trying to sleep.
• It always shakes me a little when a student tells me that they can't attend one thing or another because a hugely traumatic event has befallen them.  I was such a blissfully ignorant college student, I now see.  There are so many awful things that can happen out of the blue that can throw a student totally off-track for a semester or more.  Had I even been aware of them all, I might have become an insomniac by my sophomore year.
• I used a BB&B 20%-off coupon as a flimsy pretext to treat myself to a new roasting pan, a small saucepan, and a rice cooker.  I am excited.  (I suck at cooking rice.)  I briefly considered going hog-wild and getting a pressure cooker too, but I don't yet have a clear idea what I'd do with the thing, and the trustworthy models all seem to be at least $100. 
• I think I'm going to use the book contract as a reason to host my first house party in years.  It'll be my first time to have colleagues over to my place.  Maybe I should buy a coffee table ahead of that?  And maybe put up the wall art that I've had leaning against a wall for months now?  And Christ, I should probably at least unpack that freaking vacuum cleaner that has sat unopened as a makeshift end table for way too long now.

Cows, corn, and trees

A bit of my ongoing acclimation to Cornstate and Tinytown: I'm participating in a workshop this week – my second one of the week, in fact – that meets off-campus at a little nature-y getaway that the university owns.  It's kinda-sorta tucked behind a nature reserve next to campus, and I had the devil's own time trying to find the fucker this morning.  I drove several miles on a sonofabitch of a gravel road littered with deep puddles that ran over several one-lane bridges and eventually dumped me out in...some exurban neighborhood I didn't recognize.  My iPhone's map function completely fucked me over this time: it swore to me that the institute I was looking for was at a particular point along the road, but when I got to that point, there was yet another one-lane bridge.  Google Maps doesn't know fuck-all about these rural locations.

In desperation – for heaven's sake, I hadn't even had coffee yet, much less breakfast! – I called a colleague who I knew was attending the workshop.  Zi has lived in Tinytown for years, and demonstrated it admirably.  When I explained to hir that I had gotten lost while searching for CBU's little institute, zi asked me, "Okay, what do you see in front of you: cows, corn, or trees?"

Five minutes later, zi had guided me over the phone right to the front door of the institute.

Apparently, there are only so many natural phenomena that a person can even hope to witness in Tinytown.  Oh, wait, there was one more: as I got close to the last turn I had to make, zi inquired, "Okay, now, do you see any turkey vultures?"

Strange landmarks these country folk use.

Frazzled: the run-on

OMG I am so tired that I can barely focus my eyes right now but despite that I am drinking an after-work beer at my desk because I'm underslept from trying to work on my syllabi and tone up the response to my readers' reports and all of that was sort of thrown off to the side last night because I had to change my cell phone number because it used to belong to some cheap thug and I was getting scary text messages and so now I'm underslept and had to go to a workshop on campus this morning and don't get me wrong the workshop is actually through Wednesday and then I have another workshop to go to on campus for Thursday and Friday for which I'm even less prepared and all I really want to do right now is finish my response and then think cool thoughts about my upper-division syllabi but I can't really do that right now because I'm a little stressed out because my entire back from my hips all the way up through my shoulders and neck is sore from helping Fie Upon This Quiet Life do a little preparatory moving and also I'm totally stressed out because my car's electrical system is slowly going on the fritz and my car title is totally fucked because the bureaucrats in Godforsaken State fucked up the odometer reading and now I'll have to get a notarized document and mail off the title certificate so that they can send me a corrected version if they feel like it and so until then I'm driving around Cornstate with expired license tags from Godforsaken State and a broken headlight cover and apparently as of last night a burnt-out turn signal and as if that weren't enough my dishwasher is on the fritz for real and I half-suspect that my leasing company will have to replace the whole damn thing so I guess it's good that I've built up so much experience in hand-washing dishes because that's what I'm still doing until they get around to that and that decreases my energy not only to cook but to worry about the subtleties of pedagogical method that this workshop is exploring and as if that weren't enough to fray my nerves I learned this morning that a family friend has died and that creates a lot of unpleasant unbloggable problems for my family so enough about that but at least I suppose I have my own health and I'm slowly figuring out my syllabi although I have four freaking days at the end of the semester for my Intro to Libel and Slander for which I literally have nothing fucking scheduled because I will have completely run out of things to say and again I must remind myself that life really could be a whole hell of a lot worse and hey I guess I've had much worse problems than my new-found difficulty in juggling schedules to go out with the sudden and I mean really sudden and unanticipated rise in women who want to go out with me and hell I suppose that if I have to take the constant low-level risk of driving with expired license tags in a dodgy car in order to have a dinner date when my work life is in overdrive and the unbloggable anxiety is rising once again then I'll just have to do that and be content that my social life is suddenly quite interesting.

RBOC: Arrival in Cornstate

• I now live in Cornstate!  Seriously, some of these stereotypes of an abundance of maize in the Midwest have some truth to them.  It's everywhere.  The city I live in isn't necessarily defined by corn, but the state at large sure is.  Hence that particular pseudonym.  I'm still working on one for the city.
• Many thanks to Fie Upon This Quiet Life and her husband for putting me up for the night in their swanky, sophisticated digs!  (Not kidding.  It's awesome.)  I was so tired out after a day of cleaning and driving that I fell asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow — even though there was a big portrait of William Shakespeare staring down at me from the wall.
• Fie and partner also served me a scrumptious dinner when I arrived.  One of the featured dishes was, of course, corn.  :)
• It's fucking hotter than a fucking motherfucker.  I continue to despise this heat wave, and global warming in general.  It's bad enough having to haul around boxes of books while sweating buckets, but I'm actually more irritated by having to drive around the area to one furniture store after another, looking for cheap yet not-so-crappy furniture, while the sun beats down on my car and me.  It doesn't help that these stores are all in strip malls, either.  Strip malls are not friendly places.
• Neither are big-box stores.  Blech.
• One the one hand, I'm going to move again in two years, so I can't really purchase the most beautiful, durable, heavy furniture around — I really want to limit myself to stuff that I could conceivably haul away with me.  On the other hand, I'm reaching a point of stubborn, bourgeois refusal to buy the cheapest, flimsiest stuff available to spare myself money and time.  Bourgeois consumption appears to be a progressive syndrome.  
• I'm making the best of this tendency, though.  By forcing myself to comparison-shop, I found a wonderful, lower-back-friendly bed for less than half of retail price.    
• I also bought a discontinued model* of office desk at a big discount.  Since that would require a $100 delivery charge obviating the discount, I figured that I could get a cheap piece or two of living room furniture.  After searching exhaustively with a very patient salesperson, I found a decent enough sofa-loveseat combo for $500.  It's not the leather upholstery that my inner contemptible bourgeois fuck craves, but it looks nice anyway.  With all of that delivered in one go, it's a good deal. Won't have any of it until next week, but such is the way of furniture shopping.
• On top of all those needs that keep me driving around in the heat, I won't have internet access in my home until next week, either.  My office at CBU isn't air-conditioned right now – I think they turned it down low on the assumption that no one would be in the building until August – so it's not exactly a pleasant workspace.  After hauling a ton of books into that office, periodically wiping the sweat from my face so I wouldn't drip on the texts, I was not inclined to stay there to work.  Guess I have to keep café-surfing for another week.  
• And work I must!  I have to give my (potential) editor a formal response to the reader reports by tomorrow.  Yikes!  Gonna be a heavily caffeinated evening.
• Did I mention that it's hot?  How hot is it, Koshary?  Weeeeeelllll, it's so hot that the cover of the left headlight on my car fell off the goddamn car last week before I left Ghosttown, after the adhesive holding it in place melted.  I am not making this up.  I didn't even realize this was possible.  I was frankly astonished that I made it all the way to Fie's house without some wayward dragonfly zooming into the exposed bulb and exploding it.  Gotta find a VW dealership next week and see about fixing this.

*Extra chuckle for you all: the store discontinued the model because it sold poorly in comparison to other office furniture sets: it has a metal frame supporting the wooden top, and true bourgeois consumerist fucks disdain anything other than a pure wooden desk.  Suckers!!

RBOC: The Great Escape edition

This isn't an ordinary house-move coming up for me.  It's an escape.  Sweet, sweet escape.  Details:

• The bulk of my possessions have been loaded into a trailer and shipped off to my new location!  (The pseudonym 'Balltown' got a distinctly lukewarm reception; I'm pondering upgrades.)  If only I didn't have to clean the daylights out of my old place to get back my deposit, I'd already be halfway there.  But, since I do have to clean the daylights out of my old place, I won't get to ship out myself until Sunday morning.
• I'm already sick to death of the stupid prepared foods in my fridge that I've been eating since I packed up all of my china and utensils.  It's going to be a while before I get a craving for hummus.
• Once again, I am homeless (on the internet).  I surrendered my modem to the cable company and closed my account, so I am now dependent on cafés with wifi.  It's odd to have greater internet access on my telephone than on my computer.  It's also odd that the patron with the most inane and irritating things to say also seems unacquainted with the concept of "inside voice."
• I am constantly dehydrated, since it's motherfucking 8,000 degrees and I have been hauling and cleaning all day.  It's probably not helping that I'm determined to finish off the bottle of tequila, rather than pour it down the drain.  (I know no one around here who favors tequila, or else I'd have given it away.)  
• Seriously, it's hotter than the devil's nutsack.  I want to lodge a formal complaint about this.  Weather should never be hotter than 87 degrees.  And I fucking despise moving in the summertime.  This might actually be the worst thing about being an academic — even worse than not getting paid in summer.
• I think I will actually have to use a toothbrush to scrub grout in my shower.  Crap.
• To end this post on an up note, I get to crash at Fie Upon This Quiet Life's house the night before I move in!  Chez Fie, I do believe, will be far superior to some scary-ass roadside motel along my dismal route.  There really isn't a single place where I even want to stop my car between Ghosttown and The City Formerly Dubbed Balltown.  TCFDB will be my destination on Sunday, come hell or high water.

Moving destination locked in

I've secured an apartment in my soon-to-be location, and now I can happily, if a bit harriedly, start planning the details of my move and resettlement.  I have a few appliances on my shopping list, as well as some serious needs – I'll have to buy a bed when I get there – and some less-serious needs, like a proper muddler to prepare my fabulous mixed drinks.

First things first: I'm considering the pseudonym Balltown for my new location.  Technically, I'll be living in a small town unto itself, but urban sprawl has long since made the town itself an outlying suburb of the huge regional city, for practical purposes.  You've probably never heard of the small town, but everyone has heard of the huge regional city.  I haven't spent enough time there to form really strong associations, but it has quickly become apparent to me that most people there are die-hard sports fans.  Balltown seems as handy as anything else.  My new neighborhood will be about half an hour away from Tinytown by car, which I'm willing to live with.  Lots of my colleagues make that commute every day, even with little cars that don't seem ideal for snowy weather.  That said, I was told by my chair there that I will simply have to accept the reality that I must buy new tires twice a year: snow tires when winter comes, and all-weather tires when the weather warms up in the spring.

I know, Balltown isn't the most evocative name, but frankly, after the deeply resonant misery of Ghosttown, I'm ready for a touch of blandness.  Just a touch, mind you.

So, questions for those in the know, or who care to toss in their two cents:

1. Is it worth the savings to look for a used microwave oven, or do used models have too high a tendency to break down?

2. On a similar note, what should I do about a washer/dryer?  For some damn reason, the Balltown metropolitan region is the only housing market I've ever seen in which renters are expected to furnish their own laundry machines.  My apartment, like every other one, has hook-ups for the machines, so I could just buy a set for myself that would either move with me to my next location or be re-sold later.  But even a low-end set costs about $1000 retail!  This actually leads to several questions at once:
    2a. In the long run, assuming that I neither marry nor spawn in the next few years, is it more cost-efficient to buy the machines or just do my laundry at a laundromat?
    2b. In the long run, no matter what my family situation, is it too time-inefficient to go to the laundromat?  In other words, are the purchased machines ultimately worth buying in terms of time and convenience as well as money?  There's definitely something to be said for being able to power through grading or other grunt work with only two-minute breaks to transfer clothes from one machine to the other, instead of putting everything on hold for a few hours to go out to the laundromat.
    2c. Is it reasonable to buy a used washer/dryer set?  Who on earth keeps a second set of machines hooked up to demonstrate their efficacy?  How would I confirm that the machines are in working order?
    2d. Since the hook-ups are installed side by side in a relatively spacious one-car garage, does it make any sense for me to search for a stackable "apartment-style" set?  I'm pretty sure it doesn't make sense, but want to confirm with people more experienced than I in these matters.

3. Should I buy a television set?  I've never bought one that had any reception; the last one I owned was, perforce, merely a very large DVD player.  As a consequence, I really don't care much about TV, and I certainly don't feel much like paying for cable access or a dish or whatever to get all the premium channels.  But I would also like to have people over now and then, and I worry that I will seem either too austere and Puritan or just a supercilious asshole without a TV for them to watch.  I will also admit that I know how awkward it feels to drag a chair in front of a sofa so that I can position my computer on it to watch DVDs.  (Particularly on dates.  Yeah, awkward.)  Crap, did I just talk myself into buying a TV?  Fuck.

Apartment hunting and blogger meet-up!

So, guess what?  It turns out that the greater metropolitan area in which I'm looking for an apartment right now is also home to another distinguished academic blogger.  Last evening, I got to have dinner and drinks with none other than Fie Upon This Quiet Life!  Most exciting, most exciting!  We dined upon pub fare, threw down a few pots of small ale, and enjoyed some sophisticated conversation.  I even caught a photograph of the two of us on my iPhone!  See here:


*NB: May not be real, or accurate, or a photograph.


It's nice to know that I'll be acquainted with at least one or two people in the area with whom I can get together for a bitch session and a few beers.  

Meanwhile, the hunt for a place continues.  I am quickly coming to the conclusion that I would not be happy living in Tinytown, and it would be worth the commute to live over in Huge Regional City.  That's actually where my department chair lives, and I'm due to have lunch with hir today.  I'll be probing for information on that as I nibble at my victuals.  And, no doubt, driving over to HRC to look at soulless (but clean! and sturdily built! and away from meth-heads!) apartment complexes afterward.

RBOC: Pre-moving prep

The grumbles:

• How nice of Ghosttown's municipal government to summon me for jury duty right at the end of my time here.  How extra-nice of them to mail the letter late, so that I have per force missed the deadline to fill out an affidavit explaining that I'll be out of town at that time.  How stupid and bizarre that the letter somehow had to be routed through Major Regional City, even though I live a mile from the courthouse itself.  How charming that I must explain to these chuckleheads that, because of their slowness, I will just have to fill out the affidavit one week before the jury duty date that I will miss.  Sigh.
• It's actually befuddling how many options there are nowadays for moving house.  After lining out price comparisons of trucks, pods, and trailers, it seems the easiest thing for me is, bien sûr, also the most expensive: hiring a trailer that will drive my stuff to my new location for me, so that I don't have to mess around with winching my car to a moving truck or hire some hapless, feckless grad student to drive one vehicle or the other.  (Yes, someone actually suggested this.)  It's annoying to have to put so much on my credit cards this summer, since there's no way even to begin paying it down until I start getting paid again, but since I have a decent sum of moving expense reimbursement from CBU, I'm not going to sweat it.  
• I'm trying to be parsimonious with my increasingly sparse cash reserves, since I may have to part with two months' rent up front for whatever place I might rent.  That means that I can't pay my credit card bills in full as usual, so right now I feel guilty and embarrassed about carrying balances.  And then I remember that I have a tendency to be too hard on myself about mundane crap like this.
• On Thursday, I'm driving up to CBU to hunt for an apartment (or a house?) to rent, since it has proved so difficult to find good prospects via internet.  CBU is located in Tinytown, which is so small that, as I suspect, people don't bother paying for classified ads; instead, they just rely on word of mouth through their social networks.  Either I'm on the scene to present myself to the potential landlord, or I'm not.  Gonna be a freaking road warrior this week: after streaking up there and running around the area, I have to drive back to Ghosttown on Sunday.  It will be a very tired Koshary that staggers into his apartment that evening.
• Speaking of the apartment hunt, I'm starting to admit to myself that I might not be able to find anything in Tinytown, period, and must therefore extend my search further.  The immediate surroundings of Tinytown have precious little to recommend them, so the obvious choice is to start snooping around the western suburbs of Huge Regional City, which is where most CBU professors live.  I was hoping to avoid a daily 45-minute commute, especially given what I have heard about winters in Tinytown, but perhaps this is just the way it must be.  

The exciting murmurs: 

• Today, I powered down my office computer for the last time, locked the door, and surrendered my university keys to the department secretary.  I'm really out of Ghosttown U.
  *turns a digital cartwheel of delight*
• The fun part of watching my finances, insofar as there is one, is that my brother turned me on to an online bank with better rates than any brick-and-mortar bank I could have found in my soon-to-be-new state.  I closed out my account at the regional branch here in Ghosttown today, and deposited the cashier's check for the balance in my new account — by photographing it and uploading the pictures to the online bank.  Seriously: I now deposit checks by photographing them with my iPhone.  O, brave new world that has such gadgets in't!
• On the positive side of heading for the suburbs rather than the small town, living over in HRC would at least lessen the sense of isolation.  I've heard great things about downtown HRC, and it's only 45 minutes from there down the road to Massive University Town.  (As well as to Tinytown.)  MUT is supposed to be a lot of fun for overeducated, liberal elitists like me, particularly given the mainstream culture of the state, and I have every intention of getting down there from time to time to explore.
• Oh, and another thing about HRC and MUT: there are women there.  Many, many women.  I'm not sure that anyone who reads this blog can fully comprehend how exciting this is for me, after a year of living in a town in which there appear to be virtually no women in my natural dating range.  I'm hoping for a lot of positive unbloggable interactions.  (But I'll keep the sadsack breakup songs, just in case.)
• One more thing about HRC and MUT: I know, I'm going overboard with the acronyms here.  Once I land in my new location and have a chance to gauge the atmosphere, I'll try to come up with some more evocative pseudonyms.

Packing and pop music

Man, I'm being diligent: I've started packing already.  I figured that it would be a good idea to start boxing up my books and getting them out of my office at Ghosttown U., so everything will be in one place for the move.  Remind me to get a full-sized car, whenever I have to replace my little Beetle.  It's a cute car, but it's not much use for hauling.  (And, frankly, a bit of a disappointment on gas mileage.) 

Meanwhile, more pop music!  Those of you who check in on Haphazard Musing's blog may have enjoyed the unstoppable earworm she posted about recently.  In fact, the female vocalist in that song, Kimbra, is herself an up-and-coming singer-songwriter, and her music is pretty different in character from the stuff that Gotye does.  She may be the only young singer I've heard who can sing scat and sing it well.  One good earworm deserves another, so here is one of my favorites from her: the kinda-sorta live recording of her song "Plain gold ring."  I say kinda-sorta because, as you'll notice, Kimbra makes extensive use of recording loops of her own voice for back-up parts, but also hires flesh-and-blood musicians to perform the guitar, bass line, and percussion work – things that are very commonly recorded and looped in pop production – in a single take with her.

And, as you'll hear, she has a fucking phenomenal voice.

Summer to-do list

All right, I'm going to take a page from Haphazard Musing's book, and post a list of the things I want to accomplish this summer.  Aside from needing to keep all of this stuff clear to myself, I need to ratchet up my sense of accountability — 'tis oh so easy on pleasant summer days to find that an entire working day has gone by and I have done nothing but mix myself drinks and eat processed food while fucking around on the internet.  That will not do, friends.  Let's see what I have on my docket:

1. Read Painfully Boring Book and write a review of it.  This will actually be my first book review for a dedicated pseudological journal; I've done a few others before, but they were always for journals in allied disciplines.  Now I've been solicited (on a senior colleague's recommendation!) to write a review of a book very much in several of my subfields, for a respected journal.  And I'm so fucking bored by the goddamn thing that I can hardly stand to pick it up.  I'm already dreading concocting a suitable review for it — we all know that you don't want to write a really negative review unless the piece under consideration is truly dire.  I'm just not excited by the methodology, nor the analysis, although there is nothing wrong with either.  I need to bang this one out before anything else, since it's on deadline, so I must focus myself and power through it.  I fear this will be one of those reviews that summarizes a book more than assesses it critically, if only because I do not want to translate my yawns of apathy into a review of a book by a colleague whom I am almost bound to meet soon at one event or another.

2. Work out THREE (count 'em, three!) new syllabi.  Or, to be more precise, two new syllabi and a revision of one I've already taught.  I'm just beginning to comprehend the scale of this task, since I am
a) painfully ignorant of my intro course material;
b) obliged to re-structure and enrich my Pseudology of Area Studies syllabus to suit an academically intense SLAC; and
c) have not actually read most of the texts I've considered assigning for my new seminar course, Super Awesome Cool Stuff.  (Admission: the actual course title is very much in the vein of Two Apparently Unconnected Things Juxtaposed to Suggest an Insidious and Fascinating Structural Relationship, as discussed several years ago on this here blog.) 
All of this means that I have to catch up on as much of the material as possible before I can even attempt to parcel out readings by class session.  I've already looked over the academic calendar at CBU, so I know that we have precisely fourteen weeks per semester.  (Which, given the clusterfuck of outside obligations that occurs every fall without fail, means that we really have only about twelve or thirteen weeks of class time in the fall semester.)  I have to figure out what we're going to read, when we will read it, and what evaluative assignments I can/should cook up so that the students are challenged but not crushed.  Sigh.  At least I can start naming texts I like for the area studies class off the top of my head.

3. Start making plans for apartment hunting ahead of time in Tinytown.  I know from last year's experience how stressful it is to search for an apartment when you're already in town and have to worry about paying for a motel room while you look.  It would be that much worse if I did that in Tinytown with an entire moving truck full of my belongings.  It's a little easier to drive from Ghosttown to Tinytown than my last move, so I'm planning to drive to Tinytown some weeks from now, do my recon, and secure an apartment before I make the big move.  Really, that's the easy part.  The bitch will be the big move, since I will have to transport both my car and my possessions.  I'm hoping that I can wheedle a relative into coming out to Ghosttown to perpetrate a one-way road trip with me.  But if I can't, I'll have to do the same pain-in-the-ass rigmarole I did last year, doing the one-way drive twice over, with an expensive one-way airfare in between.  (ATTENTION BLOGGING FRIENDS: Come with me to Tinytown!  Drive the truck!  I will pay your meals and beer, I promise!  Don't make me do this by myself, please!)
The other thing that comes to mind with apartment hunting is that I should be a little pickier this time around.  I'm slated to be at CBU for two years, and I want a more comfortable, homey dwelling space than the serviceable but kind of crappy apartment I'm in now.  I'll need to schedule sufficient hunting time to get something good, and not just something cheap and immediately available.

4. Plan short visit to Hometown.  Sigh.  I should go home for a bit to say hi to everyone, since I'm going to be dead busy once July comes around.  I'm dawdling about figuring it out, since then I'd have to actually, you know, commit.  And I'm pissed that I have to pay yet another airfare for this.  Maybe I can find something cheap on a red-eye.  Sigh.

5. Exercise more.  Which is to say, exercise at all.  I can feel how soft and pudgy I'm getting, now that I'm not obligated to go anywhere on a daily basis.  I don't kid myself that I'm going to start paying gym fees here in Ghosttown, although I have every intention of getting more serious about this stuff when I get settled in Tinytown and can make good use of the facilities at CBU.  I do plan to walk more, though: with a little extra drinking water and some sunscreen, I wouldn't need to drive to get to about half the places in town that I frequent.  My spare tire tends to balloon during the summer, which has a number of unpleasant effects for me.  I wonder if I could actually force myself to start doing crunches at home...?

I can look ahead to a whole other to-do list that revolves around moving, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Tornado?

I am sitting anxiously at my desk right now, during the first serious tornado watch of my life.  We had these things occasionally in DOU-Town, but they were kind of a joke: the landscape, as I was told, did not easily permit such things to form, and tornadoes were exceedingly rare. 

Apparently, that is not quite the case here in Ghosttown. 

I have vast experience in comporting myself appropriately in, say, heavy rainstorms, snowstorms, ice storms, sandstorms, hurricanes, cold snaps, and heat waves.  Been there, done all that.  I do not fear them very much.  (Even though ice storms are a godawful pain in the ass to cope with afterward.)  But I'm afraid of tornadoes.  *whimper*

We're only half an hour into the "peak severe timing" for this tornado watch, and the weather service, which I am now checking obsessively online while I am still blessed to have internet access, says there are already tornado warning sirens going off in half a dozen towns and cities not so very far away from Ghosttown.  There have been periods of intense rainfall tonight, and some high winds.  I've been through all of that many times before, and wouldn't really think much of it if I didn't know the larger forecast.  The peak severe timing – what does that mean, anyway, 'be even more afraid right now'? – isn't due to end for another four and a half hours.  Seriously, until 3AM!  How the fuck am I supposed to get a decent night's rest when I may have to somehow rouse myself to stand in my bathroom as Dorothy's express commuter service rips my house off its foundation?

Needless to say, this is not how I hoped to unwind on the evening before my first day of classes.  It's entirely possible that both professor and students will be frazzled and underslept tomorrow in my classrooms. 

I guess I'll have a shot of whiskey to calm my nerves, and then prepare for bed, where I will sleep with my iPhone by my ear, in case Ghosttown U.'s alert system sends out a "take shelter immediately" warning.

*whimper*

Diplomas in the office

Ah, finally I have finished (for this year) my long-ass driving trips across this festering cesspool of late capitalism great land of ours, and I've got all my stuff in my house.  That is, all of my stuff except for the boxes of books I schlepped over to my new office.  The living room floor, of course, has not been touched this week; apparently, the contractor couldn't locate the tiles yet.  This means that my home decorating has to stay pretty much in flux, since everything has to be moved out of the way of the contractor whenever he bothers to show up.  In sum: I can't buy any living room furniture, since there won't be any place to move it.

Naturally, this means that I can only put bookshelves in my study, and, I suppose, in my bedroom as well, but that last bit seems like overkill.  Since I have two huge bookcases in my office, I figure that I should off-load as much of the books as possible there, and then figure out what I need in the house.  There's a good bit of room in my study — too much, really, given that I'm not in a financial or practical position to buy too many bookcases.  I'm hoping to keep it to one tall sucker that I keep across the room from my desk, and a shorter, credenza-like bookcase next to the desk that could support a small printer.

All of this is preamble to a question that came into my head while transferring all my belonging to Ghosttown.  What should I do with my diplomas?  They're all framed now – BA, MA, PhD – since I wanted to keep them in good shape, and I liked the idea of treating the visible symbol of my years of hard work with a little more respect than a filing tube.  I had the idea that I should hang, if not all of them, then at least my doctoral degree in my office.

But...I'm a VAP.  I'm temporary contract labor.  Would it be weird to display my PhD in my office, when I'm expected to pack up and clear out in a year?  It feels almost like putting my feet up on a host's coffee table: too familiar and presumptuous.  Just writing that down makes me feel like I'm coming into this situation with a little less self-confidence and professional demeanor than is warranted, so I don't know now.  To what degree are VAPs really (as opposed to what polite folk will tell you) expected to act like one of the team in these little ways, and to what degree are they supposed to keep things simple and streamlined?

On a less angsty note (I think), how do you feel about displaying your diploma in your office in general?  I'm of two minds about it, partly because DOU insists on printing terminal degrees on really huge sheets of paper, and then fixing it so that their offer of framing is actually cheaper than any frame shop I could find in DOU-Town.  This yielded a framed diploma that seems half the size of a wall, rather than a clean and simple frame like you'd put around a photo print or something.  I find it all a little over-compensating in appearance, although I admit that the woodwork is nice enough.  (On the plus side, they use whatever non-acid paper thingie is supposed to make your diploma last through the ages so that the apes can smash it ceremonially after they overwhelm their human overlords and conquer the planet.)

On the other hand, I fucking worked my ass off for that degree, and I'd feel silly hanging it in my house, where almost no one would ever see it.  And it's my understanding that professors have a stronger expectation on them than most professionals to display the terminal degree in the work environment.

Thoughts?