Thursday, June 28, 2007

I am posting because it puts off the edits I need to do before printing a copy of this proposal and getting in the car to go.

To go. I'll get a coffee to go and custard tarts for my committee.

A manicure on arrival.

A stack of books waiting for me at a friend's house. Fresh books. Yummy.

And then a hotel with all necessary accommodations prearranged.
And shopping at Target. I need toothpaste. T-shirts. T-minus.

Oh, so nervous to do this exam. Three hours of driving for two hours of testing and then three hours back. I'm not thinking about the three hours back. All I have to think about on three hours back will be, this exit? change for bridge toll? coffee at casablanca?

Ohhhh.

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Indy 500 words: The Great Race and time eraser

NWA cancelled part of my flight, both ways. It's not that I got in twelve hours late, it's that I got in at midnight with a three hour drive to make. It's that the lateness involved a four hour layover in overstimulating O'hare airport (which has a museum store kiosk of creams and books instead of a shop full of cool toys. Oh woe is the he, the kiosk boy).

Yesterday, was almost a total write off, but I got lots of sleeping done. And it's always good to go back to where you came from, Indianapolis, and see how far you've come. (Or you realize that you've been away so long that you could never find your way around alone. Sometimes I'm like the girl in Labyrinth, when they move the lipstick arrows on rocks around. Where, oh where, is David Bowie.) And then, sit down to dinner with your gorgeous great Aunt Mary only to be told, in that stoic understated tone that is supposed to go with that Indiana accent that burbles up in me as graciously as a southern drawl, that I "have done a lot." Most ninety year olds don't seem to know what they are eating for dinner. Aunt Mary knows everything.
And I think you have to manage more than your first four years in "the middle" to be able to articulate the kind of reserved warmth and courageous caution that comes with Indiana talk. Even reading Vonnegut and James Whitcomb Riley from early childhood cannot replicate, I'm sure, the long term effect of living in this dialect.

Aunt Mary gave me a beautiful crystal bowl for my wedding last year; it is a family heirloom, I think my first one aside from my desk, her kitchen table, from Great Aunt Ida who wasn't really my aunt. A year after my marriage, I was prompted by my mom to tell this sharp eyed delicate about my recent work at the shoe museum. Everyone loves Aunt Mary; everyone wants to please her. I told her about my volunteering as her sparkling eyes filled me with pride like I was an heirloom bowl. When I told my Mom last year, she already knew what a "docent" was. So did smart Aunt Mary. Later on, she pulled out some photocopied pages with some underlining and notes added in her tiny beautiful handwriting. It's provenance, said my Mom, proud either of the fancy word or the fact that my family contributes heavily to my research files as much as my recipe book. I wonder if my Mom realizes that she will one day command the same respect as Aunt Mary.

Indianapolis is so detestably in the middle, but I love being in the middle of rooms filled with my family. Too much soggy pasta casserole, cheap beer and bad floral dresses. This what I come from. The midwest. The Nascar zoom around the track, and the hoosier all-star squeak on the court. A line of pace car princesses. I drive my own race car, now. I don't dribble, I just travel. I never drop the ball and my pit stops lube me up and rotate tires in record time (unless the airlines get to cancelling flights.)

We finally got into the Buffalo airport ready to find our car and speed across the border towards our lonesome cats. The car park attendant was chatty. Responding to a strange typo on our parking vouchers, he immediately connected the confusing word to the American government getting "worser and worser." In Boston, yep, I might expect random political ranting from the workers. But in Buffalo, so close to two hour line ups for security check points, I was surprised. I decided to soothe this rebel in a box by sharing some wisdom passed down by my Aunt Mary's photocopies. My great, great Aunt Martha used to say, "If there's no apples, there'll be punkins. He always makes it right some way." The parking man took our voucher and said he looked forward to the pumpkins.

The other thing my Aunt Martha is remembered saying: "Honey, crying is mighty hard work and mighty poor pay, I'll tell you." Well, Aunt Mary, I've done a lot of that, too. Maybe just enough to fill that bowl with tears. But on the other Indiana side of my family, another Aunt insists I'm related to Johnny Appleseed. Whether or not he was doing the lord's work or was "improving" the land for steep profits for himself and homesteadders, if there are not apples, you'll be a pumpkin by midnight at the buffalo border.

My saying: "Roaming free with the buffalo might get you trampled."

Saturday, June 16, 2007

tandem tedium

I talked with my husband about the kind of work I'm doing right now, review literature, writing scant notes and annotations, reviewing literature annotations, making glossaries and scant notes. Sometimes sending out pleading emails explaining the project and begging for information or ideas.

He said he feels like he could do a PhD with his project. Except that right now he doesn't have to take exams for his project, and he gets paid lots of money to do his thing.

I may get to do my thing, too. But they only pay me when I do things for them. I don't regret taking a break from that. He's not doing a PhD yet.

My sometimes roommate and classmate just read my pre-proposal. She love's my topic and said she had a "teencrush." I've been repeating that to myself as I prepare to write more in response to her awesome notes and a few points of WJT Mitchell that I just made yellow.

I never used highlighters until this year. I've always had them around, pesky things, hard to avoid. That used to be the case with overhead markers, which thankfully seem to be out of fashion.

Oh, what a smelly digression. Thinking about pens puts me in mind of teaching in Halifax. I do a six week ESL gig every summer. Once I showed up with suitcases and some lesson materials, but no pens. I still had a chalk holder from the previous summer, but I had a new whiteboard classroom. Back at my old student bookstore I stocked with pens, and I was supplied with whiteboard markers by my supervisor. It seems she had raided the clearance bin at an office supply store. All of the teachers' markers smelled like cheap pipe tobacco or melted peppermint ice cream, depending on who you asked.

They were, in fact, dark brown, choco-mint scented dry-erase markers.
Some teachers don't use the board so much. If you teach a language, you do.
You really do use a lot of dark brown, choco-mint scent to convey the nuances of spoken English to a humid classroom of late adolescent francophone Canadians.
I'll get markers on my next trip to staples.

Good school supplies are essential to my projects. My husband needs good hardware.

Monday, June 11, 2007

10 Days 2 abd, minus c(old mucus)

I'll have a dissertation blog. And I'll have a work plan. And I'll finish my dissertation by July 4th next year. And I'll eat a lot of Blue Water Fish Sticks, which are trans fat free and cook up with a pleasing ding in my non-greasy new red toaster oven.

(During my MA I often expounded on the toaster oven utopia and the abundance of English Muffin Melts that would coexist with such a society.)

Somedays, like today, the first day of the dissertation blog I will keep until I finish on July 4, 2008, the 26 count value pack of Blue Water Fish Sticks is about 53 cents cheaper than the regular 14 count pack. Or is it pac? I'll need ketchup.

And since, technically, I'll have been a PhD student for four years in August, my trans-fat free discipline to finish by July (five years minus some funding), I won't have to "catch-up" to anyone who finished faster (everyone I know that didn't go to my school).

I won't say anything about where I go to school. I intend this blog to be very private. I do go to a private school. It's fancier than I thought it was, so I don't go there very often. I'm in absentia, actually, a very affirming status to hold, really. I'm in the Department of English. I have a great, though eclectic, committee. Their work informs my own more than I might expect, I figure that's lucky, because I couldn't really have chosen anyone else to work with at my small fancy private school. In fact, my supervisor will be on sabbatical in Europe all year, and my second is a brand new hire. She's smart but almost younger than me. That always confuses me. So, its just a happy committee, that's probably pleased that I can't bother them too much and relieved that I have a cool topic.

I can't wait to start working full time on it. Go away field exams. Go.