Zugenia's Procrastination Salon

...bring it to me. Yeah, that's right—'cause I'm the doctor.

I filed my completed dissertation this morning and officially entered the ranks of the professoriate. This is the first time I haven't been a student since I was five.

My sense of accomplishment was slightly tainted yesterday when one of my colleagues, another graduate student in my department, turned to me in the office and asked, "How do you spell Ph.D.?" I am totally not kidding, and neither was he.

And now I believe I'll take a nap.

OHMYGODIFINISHEDMYDISSERTATION.

Now I just have to plan classes, move to Philly, teach classes, apply for jobs, interview for jobs, get a job, move again, possibly repeat, possibly several times, all the while planning classes, teaching classes, write a book, publish a book, and get tenure, and I'll be set.

It's Friday morning and I have no idea what to do with myself.

I'm still waking up, so there may not be a whole lot of, you know, language in this post.

Let's start off by checking in with the Most Disturbing Product Poll over at feministing.com. Personally, I think it's a run-off between

A. The Girlfriend Lap Pillow


B. Truck Nuts


C. Woman Toilet


No doubt I'm being unforgivably naive, but I can't even figure out what the titillating appeal of the woman-shaped toilet is. Are there that many people out there who fantasize about peeing in a woman's lap? Perhaps it will be clear after another cup of coffee.

In dissertation news, I'm pulling into the Last Ten Pages today. I have a week to complete them.

What with the heat and the work and all, I really haven't spent that much energy Freaking Out about how the summer is dwindling away and the dissertation absolutely must be finished in the near future. Until yesterday, that is. Yesterday, I scheduled my meeting with the administrator in the Graduate School to whom I must physically turn in my completed dissertation (10:30am, Thursday, August 18) and I purchased a package of the archival-quality paper on which the document must be printed. And, somehow, taking these two pragmatic steps made the whole thing real, and I had an all-out panic attack in the middle of the street as I walked to the department to print my official Signature Page on my new archival-quality thesis paper. I mean, I still have to check my Works Cited pages, revise the 3rd chapter, finish the 4th chapter, write an afterword, write an abstract. I have to paginate the thing. I have to spellcheck.

For the past few nights, some part of me must have been worrying these details already, as I've been waking up at 4 every morning, which is Highly Unusual. Last night, with the anxiety nestled snugly in my consciousness, I never really got to sleep at all. I tried a few times, tossing and turning in the hot sheets, with the fan flaccidly blowing hot air on my legs, but mostly I sat up and read Kobo Abe's The Woman in the Dunes, a bookring book that arrived a couple weeks ago. And I must say that this book, in which a man trapped in a sand dune must learn to endure the immeasurable passage of time while trying endlessly to dig himself out of a hole, is not quite the right thing to settle one's mind when one is suffering from insomnia because immersed in the sisyphusian task of completing a dissertation. At one point, the protagonist imagines that when he escapes, he'll write a book entitled "The Devil of the Sands" or "The Terrors of an Ant Hell," both of which would be suitable titles for my diss at this point. I finished the book as the sun came up, and I felt terrible.

I'm off to the library to continue checking page references and such. Oh what I would give to be going to the beach instead.

In the Chit-Chat forum at BookCrossing I found a link to this article about the health benefits of sex. Among other things, there's this:

It may seem unreal, but it is a fact: regular sex enlarges women's breasts. Sexual excitement intensifies the bloodstream, which may add 25 percent to a woman's breast size. Furthermore, women can raise their IQ with every orgasm that they experience. American scientists, who continuingly study sexual possibilities of homo sapiens, discovered that the moment of orgasm gives a very powerful incentive to a large number of chemical reactions and physical procedures in the body. The speed of blood circulation reaches its maximum, whereas the oxygen-enriched blood reaches all internal organs, including brain, very quickly. Hypothalamus - the center for control of the hormonal system - also governs the work of learning and memorizing centers.

Thank you, science.

This information comes at a crucial moment. She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed emailed this morning to say that there's a "conceptual problem" with the lastest version of my chapter and she wants to talk to me about it over the phone this evening. Why do I find the prospect of talking to her on the phone so much more terrifying than seeing her in person? There's something too intimate about the phone. It's like having her in my home. Scary.

OK, I have to go and, um, get smart for my phone meeting.

Oh my god it is Christ-sucking hot outside.

I finished the second draft of my fourth and last chapter today. I'm this close to being done. I still haven't decided what to rename this journal once the dissertation is finished.

I have nothing else to say right now because my brain is melting.

That's me booooing today, which began with an oddly sleepless night. I knew I had to rise early, and yet I stayed up till 1:30 to finish Empire Falls (more on that later, perhaps). And then I was wide awake. So I read literary criticism. In bed. Till, like, 3am or something. I thought that if anything could knock me out, that would be it, but no. Apparently, some rule of inverse proportions has taken over Z's and my ability to sleep in the same room, because as soon as I felt drowsy enough to turn off the light and give sleep another try, he sat up, clicked his light on with a heavy sigh, and reached for Vanity Fair. It was very pathetic. I managed a few hours of light dozing before he forced me out of bed at 7:30, exactly as I'd made him promise to do, which did not lessen my general resentment of him until I had my hands firmly around my first cup of coffee.

The reason I had to rise early was because She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed requested a meeting with me to discuss my last chapter at 10am. ( And here I rant for a while. Click at your own risk. )

Hence: Booooo. I gave up on work for the rest of the day. Am I too easily discouraged? Do I care?

On a more positive note, I discovered an awesome blog by a fellow academic (a tenured one, I believe): Bitch Ph.D. Her dialogues with her son, Pseudonymous Kid, had me laughing out loud.

Also, I read Empire Falls by Richard Russo. A wonderfully readable novel, really difficult to put down. Perfect for the 4-hour bus ride between Providence and New York (I didn't look up once on either trip). Less perfect when you really should stop reading and go to sleep so you can get up early the next morning to get stood up for a meeting with your dissertation director. Oh well. I figure books that are better than sleep in the middle of the night are a blessing not to be squandered. Non, je ne regrette rien.

This poor child is never going to live this down: The "Big Enchilada"

( Article text and picture )

I feel her pain. My uncle dubbed me "Sumo" when I was a baby. She should join up with me and that Chinese baby and help us take over (i.e. eat) the world.

In other news, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed returned the draft of my last chapter with many disparaging remarks in the margins. Now, I'm pretty jaded when it comes to her critical marginalia. In the past, I have received "Lame"s, "Yuck"s, even a "Blechh!" which I believe is supposed to be a barfing noise. This latest installment had some real gems, though. The last comment (several pages before the end, which leads me to believe she gave up on reading it) is "Too bad you don't know what you're arguing." And, next to one paragraph, I got a "BOOOOO." I am not lying. My director boooooed my writing.

Today, I need to return to the scene of the crime and try to start draft 2. My reward shall be Dakota Fanning in The War of the Worlds, which opens today.

When I'm nervous, or bored, or thinking, or reading—which pretty much covers the range of my states-of-being—I chew on my nails. It's a terrible habit, and I've done it for as long as I can remember. And I've been doing it steadily for the last few weeks, as I worked on Chapter 3, and decided to stop when the chapter was done, but after getting "the call" yesterday, I've been chewing again, fiercely, like a wolf trying to free itself from a trap, and I keep thinking, "Damnit! If I don't stop biting my nails they won't grow out enough for me to get a manicure before my talk!" and then that freaks me out and I chew more. It is what they call a vicious cycle.

When I stop chewing on my nails, as when, for example, I am typing, I chew on the inside of my lower lip. It is unattractive and, at times, injurious.

Last night I had this totally absurd, full-blown fantasy of my impending visit in which, in a casual moment, over wine and cheese perhaps, a potential future colleague asked me what I like to read for fun (my favorite question to ask job candidates), and I completely forgot every book I'd ever read. This fantasy was brought on, I believe, by the truly tragic game of Trivial Pursuit Z and I recently played, in which I got the question, "What Eoin Colfer book introduced a generation of children to dwarf flatulence?"—a book that I not only know of but have read—you can read my BX journal on it—and I did that thing where I completely blank out on a very simple piece of information that I absolutely know. "You do this at least once every time we play this game," Z helpfully pointed out. Usually, if I grimace and curse for a couple minutes, the information comes back to me, but in this case it didn't. So unacceptable. Anyway. Thinking about my campus visit, this Trivial Pursuit debacle inspired a horrifying image of my standing around with a bunch of professors who are waiting to hear how tastefully I make use of my spare time, and which distinguished authors I most fancy, and not being able to conjure a single title, except, of course, Artemis Fowl.

I then proceeded to try to memorize the titles and authors of all my favorite, non-embarrassing books, as part of a mental catalog of acceptable conversation topics, until the one little part of my brain that has not gone completely loony told me to get a grip.

The uber-generous psychoprince has sent me a slew of new CDs, including the new Garbage, which I am enjoying very much. There is one moment that keeps irking my inner bitch, though, which is the line, "You taste like toxic poison." Is there another kind? But anyway, listening to this band takes me back to my early college years, as does Beck, whose new album I also recently acquired—an album which is playing right now, in fact, having kicked in after the Garbage album ended. This is this morning's loop, the third tray in my CD player being out of commission, by which I mean "inclined to eat the CDs that are placed into it, thus shutting down all other stereo operations."

I'm off to campus, to pick up my newly marked-up chapter, which I must convert from a 65-page draft to a 15-page talk. She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed chided me for being "loquacious"—which is better, I suppose, than "wrong," as I was last time around. [Edited for spelling—for the complete saga, see comments below.]

I just turned in my rewritten third chapter, so hooray for me. My brain is tired so I won't write much here. I'll just mention that I'm wearing the same clothes I was yesterday, I'm out of clean socks, and I'm avoiding my apartment because it's easier not to go home than to face the dishes in the kitchen sink.

Also, my mental exhaustion has been manifesting itself this week in elaborately detailed dreams about baby seals, ex-boyfriends, and phone sex with cellular holograms. In that last dream, I also had a beautiful, airy loft apartment with a balcony and a garden of edible flowers.

I should bathe.

Well. It turned out yesterday afternoon's fate-cursing was grossly premature. Sure, it's irritating to lose one's notes. But they are, after all, just notes. I ended up remembering which book I took the notes from, and I simply reread the section and recovered the information. It was fairly marginal to my argument, anyway.

And then.

Let me lay the scene. I have roughly 50 pages of the second version of my third chapter drafted. I decided, yesterday, to revise the existing 50 pages—you know, go through line by line, fix ugly sentences, correct typos, restructure paragraphs, add them where the argument is patchy, remove them where superfluous. A painstaking but satisfying work. I did this from 2pm to 6:30pm, taking one break to turn the house upside-down looking for those damn notes and then writing a journal entry about it so you all could share my frustration. I accomplished much. I made some truly elegant revisions. I was, dare I say it, pleased with the day's work.

And then.

Oh, another detail. I work on an iBook, about five years old or so. It's a cute little thing, and usually trustworthy, but its hard drive is filled to capacity and it poops out on me once in a while. So I take care to save my work both on the hard drive and on my little USB memory stick, which plugs into the side. I love that little memory stick. I carry it around with me so I don't have to drag my computer about campus. Now, because I had last worked on the chapter on campus, the most recent version of the file was on the memory stick, so I opened the file from that drive and worked from that. Are you following? I could have dragged the file to my hard drive and worked off that just as easily. In fact, that is what I usually do, since the USB connection on my iBook is a little loose, and if the memory stick gets jiggled, it sometimes loses all its data, which is very bad, as I learned last summer when I was editing the special double issue of the journal I work for and I accidentally jiggled the stick and I lost the entire issue, all 200 pages of it, which I then had to reconstruct from old, marked-up hard copies. But, for some reason, despite this instructive episode from my past, I did not drag the file to the hard drive. I worked off the memory stick. I revised the entire 50 pages, for 4 1/2 hours, from the memory stick.

And then I jiggled the stick.

I was trying to transcribe a passage from a book, and the book wouldn't stay propped open, so I was trying to hold the page down with the corner of the computer, and I jiggled the stick. And then a horrible "CANNOT READ DATA" message appeared on the screen, and then my chapter disappeared. It vanished. The words just melted off the screen, and I was staring at a big gaping white hole where, just a moment before, a day's worth of thinking had been written out.

I don't know if there's a worse feeling than losing, permanently losing, the fruits of one's intellectual labor. You may think I'm joking when I say it's a kind of death, but I'm not. It's hard enough to sit down to do my work, and it's rare that I actually feel, as I work, that I'm doing good work. And this is what I do. I don't have children. I have few productive hobbies, like, say, knitting, or feeding the homeless, or stone masonry. I read and I think and I write. This is what I have to offer. And I know it's a neverending process, and it's not a product-oriented activity, and all of that, but when, at the end of the day, you actually have 50 pages that feel, for the moment, like a finished thing, and then they melt off the screen, it's like you're living in a horror movie, really, the kind with blood and guts and brain-sucking forces of evil and something shapeless and foul-smelling and cold that eats babies for fun.

I suppose it could have been worse. I didn't lose the old version of the chapter on my hard drive. I just lost every little alteration, every added paragraph, every rethought step of logic and choice of word and nuance of argument, made in the last couple of days. Oh, also all the passages of Swift poems I transcribed two days ago and the readings of them I sketched out, which were to be the basis of the remaining section of the chapter that I have to write today. I just realized that, actually, and I'm starting to feel a little ill. So I think I'll bring my tale of woe to an end because it hurts me.

I just know this has something to do with those goddamn notes. Curse them.

In other news, it is sillygirl84's 21st birthday today, so do an extra flaming shot in her honor. Happy birthday, baby!

Remember the episode of The Simpsons when Bart gets dragged back to his house by the proprietess of the Springfield burlesque house and Homer, answering the door wearing nothing but a paper shopping bag, says, as if with dignity, "I have misplaced my pants"?

Well, I have misplaced my notes.

My freaking notes!!! Who bothers to take notes only to lose them? Perhaps this does not seem like a big deal to you, but I have a deadline looming and I'm working on a section in which I have to refer to a thing I'm certain I read, somewhere, and I know the exact yellow legal pad in which I took notes on this thing that I know I read, I know exactly how the edges of the first few pages are crinkled, and that it also contains my notes on The Female Quixote and the nasty KILL KILL KILL scribbles I made in the margins of one of the pages because I was working at Ocean where this annoying girl I see there all the time was talking loudly on her cell phone to her dad about why he should respect her rights as a hipster to smoke cigarettes, I know everything about that freaking legal pad except what it says about this thing I need to refer to and where the g***d***muthaf****** it is.

If you could see the organizational system of my dissertation office, which is really less of a "system" than a "bunch of piles of stuff that I move around from time to time trying to find things that I'm certain I saw in there the last time I was looking for something," you would have little sympathy for me.

OMG I can't believe I lost my notes. Arg, and double arg.

My journalling has been patchy this week because I've been rewriting my poor, maligned third chapter. As usual, She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed was right—horribly, annoyingly right. The first draft was majorly sucky. The second draft is, I hope, less sucky. I've finished sections one and two, and have section three on Swift's scatological poems left to go.

And, against all odds, I got the gratuitous nudity I wanted from Miss Sidney Bidulph. She tells this long-winded story about a couple of lovers who can't get married because the girl's brother controls her fortune and doesn't approve of the fella but then she falls on the corner of a table and receives a "hurt in her breast" that is mistreated by a bad doctor so it gets worse and worse and finally he says he has to amputate it and her lover, who is also a doctor, and a better one, comes over at the last minute, as the surgeon is raising his knife, and demands to see the breast! so she whips it out and he declares that he can save the breast! so the brother lets him treat her and she gets to keep her breast and then they get married and live happily ever after, the good doctor, the girl, and her breasts.

No ninjas yet, but I still have about 50 pages to go.

Last night I took a break from writing to reorganize my TBR bookshelf. I won't tell you how many unread books I own that are unrelated to my work, because I suspect it makes me a bad person, or at least a sick one. I also registered some books I'd like to give away on my BookCrossing bookshelf. If you see anything you like that's marked "available," let me know. If you offer to trade me something from my wish list, or that you just think I might like, I'll be your bestest friend.

too much. coffee.

brain. spazzing.

what? oh wait. nothing.

was i saying something?

where am i? oh right. coffee.

this can't be, what do they call it.

healthy.

On the Brown Graduate Student Listserv, someone has posted a request for "sound effect audio files"—he writes, "i am especially interested in monotonic sounds, e.g. something being deformed, metal and wood sounds, etc." Which leads me to the eponymous question. I'm fairly sure that today, a thing being deformed sounds like me. I am having a deformed day. My advisors are having me apply for a one-year teaching position in Philadelphia that even they acknowledge I'm not going to get. Why, then, am I applying? you ask. Well, the official line is that if I go through the motions of marketing myself now, I'll be better at it in the fall when I do it in earnest. But I believe it is because my dissertation committee consists of sadistic ogres who get their kicks by ritually humiliating me. For example, one advisor requested a copy of my curriculum vitae to make sure it had all the right parts, and returned an edited version, saying he "tried to make it look a little less like a CV for someone applying to be an ad salesman at a radio station." I don't even know what that means. Also, my director tore my third chapter several new unmentionables, and then said she sees no reason I shouldn't be able to defend in August. Defend what? My radio ad salesmanship?

On the way home, I had my iPod on random, and the Old 97's song "Lonely Holiday" kicked in for the last stretch of the walk. That's the one where Rhett Miller (oh, the lovely Rhett Miller) sings, "I've thought so much about suicide / Parts of me have already died." I haven't actually thought that much about suicide, but it's a beautiful line nevertheless, and a good one for a deformed day. But it's the chorus that seems particularly apt today: "Lonely, baby I'm not lonely ... I got my imaginary friends." All I have these days are imaginary friends. Most of my real-life friends have moved on or, like me, have ensconced themselves in dissertation-writing dens and shun all social interaction. Fortunately, my imaginary friends are gems. grendel1031 kindly checked in today to make sure I wasn't dead, and the ever-gallant psychoprince has sent me more CDs: Tori Amos, "The Beekeeper"; Kittie, "Until the End"; and Louis XIV, "Illegal Tender." Tori couldn't have shown up at a better time. When I'm depressed, I reflexively throw her in the cd player.

I recently read A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick, the first novel of his I've ever read. I was inspired by a preview I saw for a Rich Linklater film adaptation, animated in the same style as the strangely beautiful Waking Life. A Scanner Darkly was an interesting companion piece to Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World—they both use a science-fictional version of noir and the figure of the split brain to think about the limits of consciousness and identity. And the "end of the world" in the unconscious of Murakami's narrator is actually very similar in its mindless peacefulness to the ironically named "New Path" rehabilitation center in which Dick's narrator ends up.

Oh, and since I'm catching up in the sci-fi nerd department, last night I watched my first-ever episode of Star Trek, which also happened to be the first episode of Star Trek ever aired. Remember, I like things in order, from start to finish. I'm afraid the more Star Trek I watch, the more tempted I'll be to teach it in a course on definitions of the human. And I haven't come this far to end up Professor Star Trek. You know what kinds of kids would sign up for that class. They'd pass notes in Klingon.

Now I'm reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, which is an absolute delight. It is written in what might be the most readable prose I've ever encountered. I offered it to someone in the Book Relays, but I might have to buy a second copy for my permanent collection.

Feeling more myself again. Thanks for listening, imaginary friends.

A constant vapour o'er the palace flies;
Strange phantoms rising as the mists arise;
Dreadful, as hermit's dreams in haunted shades,
Or bright, as visions of expiring maids.
Now glaring fiends, and snakes on rolling spires,
Pale spectres, gaping tombs, and purple fires:
Now lakes of liquid gold, Elysian scenes,
And crystal domes, and angels in machines.
—— Alexander Pope, "The Rape of the Lock"

No one not already given to eighteenth-century verse ever believes me when I tell them that Pope writes amazingly good poetry, but I've had my head stuck in "The Rape" for at least a week now, and it blows my mind every day. Perhaps one can only fully appreciate Pope's gifts in comparison to the reams of contemporaneous, mediocre rhymed couplets out there. If you would like me to furnish you with some truly boring Augustan verse, I'd be happy to oblige.

I fell asleep last night to the sound of rain pebbling the skylight above my bed, and I awoke to find the city dirty, slushy, and gray. I wanted to write some more of the chapter before going to New York today, but the weather has given me a mean case of ennui. It's all I can do to pack and slosh my way to the bus terminal. My baby sister, known locally as sillygirl84, is leaving next week for a year in New Zealand. I'll be trying to cram a childhood-and-early-adulthood's worth of sisterly bonding into one weekend before sending her into the great wide world. It should be a rip-roaring good time, fit for reality television.

CDs arrived in the mail today, courtesy of psychoprince, who has been feeding my music habit for a full decade now. That makes me feel both privileged and, well, old. Can one acknowledge someone in the preface to one's dissertation for providing the rock 'n' roll?

I spent the entire morning elaborating my reading of the section of "The Rape of the Lock" in which Belinda makes and serves tea, with references to other poetic examples of tea-preparation; theories of the centrality of Chinese beverages to consumerism, Augustan beauty, female subjectivity; historical evidence of actual English tea rituals and the equipage involved therein; philosophical considerations of the relationship between tea-drinking and the aesthetics of British mercantilism; and twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was, to be used as evidence against, I don't know, English culture.

And then I realized that Belinda is not preparing tea; she is preparing coffee.

But that's not what I came to tell you about. Came to talk about the gym.

I hate the gym. I have never successfully managed to be a person who "goes to the gym." In fact, last year my new year's resolution was to officially swear off going to the gym, to transform myself from one of the multitude who feel guilty for always failing to the gym to one who is fully living up to her god-given potential never to go to the gym. I was quite successful, if I do say so myself. I also put on roughtly ten pounds—enough for my mother, who used to berate me constantly for being too skinny, to start praising me for looking "healthy." Oh no no no no. No. So for 2005, I recanted last year's resolution and decided to give the whole gym thing another try. Z and I went today and I bounced up and down sweating up a riot on the elliptical machine for thirty minutes, which, it turns out, is not so unpleasant if you listen to the right kind of music. For me, this "right kind" ranges from the psychotically pop-y (Spice Girls, Aqua, Toy-Box) to the mass-produced nymphette sexy (Britney and Christina, of course) to angry grrl (Bikini Kill, early Hole) to post-riot dance party (whatever Le Tigre would play at a party). Today's workout soundtrack was the Guilty Pleasures mix I made last year for psychoprince and his partner in crime, the lovely V. The compilation of this mix, but mostly the track breakdown I included with it, was a momentous example of dissertation procrastination, and so I include it here, hoping the prince won't mind my sharing. Warning: this is quite extensive, and very trivial. Like I said—momentous.

( Guilty Pleasures Breakdown )

With all the snow (something like 5 more inches yesterday, on top of the unplowed mountains already blocking my access to the outside world), my body and brain have gone into full-on hibernation mode. Yesterday I created a nest on the couch out of books and blankets and refused to leave the house when Z and I did our nightly "your place or mine" routine. I read an early Felicity Nussbaum book, The Brink of All We Hate, on 17th- and 18th-century satires on women; a facsimile of a 1729 text called Hell Upon Earth; or, The Town in an Uproar, a diatribe against modern living, which is all "Gaming, Drinking, and Whoring," as well as weird foreign food; and some poems by John Gay, plus the first couple acts of The Beggar's Opera. I realize this all sounds a lot like work, but if you consider that (a) I really should have been writing instead of doing more reading, and (b) I was in my pajamas, maybe it seems a little more decadent.

The department's final job talk is this afternoon, rescheduled from Monday. I (cruelly, perhaps) hope this guy sucks so there's nothing in the way of our hiring the woman who spoke a week ago. Which is a weird hope, I realize, since if he's better than she was, presumably I, like everyone else, would prefer him over her. Plus, since I know I have to sit through his talk, why would I hope for it to be awful? Whatever. I still hope he sucks. More coffee, please.

For those of you who subscribe to the NYTimes online, I highly recommend reading today's Frank Rich column on the Bush administration's hollow "love the troops" refrain. If you're pressed for time or have a spastic attention span, read at least the fifth paragraph on the "Heroes Red, White and Blue Inaugural Ball." It would be funny if it weren't true.

Also, if you can spare a few festive thoughts, wish my sister Kathryn a happy birthday. And, if you can spare a few more, Mozart too.

If my sister hadn't called this morning and mentioned that the blizzard had already started in Rochester, I would have had no idea I was going to get snowed in in a few hours time. Fortunately, she did, so I had ample time to jump on the pre-blizzard panic bandwagon. Z and I went to the library to print stuff and gather books for the weekend, the liquor store to buy a case of wine, and Whole Foods for snacks and dinner. The parking lot was a madhouse (can a lot be a house?) and the store was even worse. There was a young news reporter earning her stripes on the "storm preparation" beat, followed by a guy hauling a huge TV camera, chasing people around the market as they raced around gathering overpriced organic provisions. Why do news crews fly to the supermarket every time there's a snowstorm? We get them ever year. Everyone knows people go to the store before a storm. It's not really news. It's like how every summer, when the heat hits, they send some junior reporter out to Home Depot to report on how people are buying air conditioners. "So, what brings you out here today?" "Thought I'd pick up an air conditioner." "It's pretty hot out there, isn't it?" "Yep." I did learn today that Whole Foods customers stock up on weird things in an emergency. The baby spinach was running low, and the firm and extra firm tofu had been entirely cleaned out.

I spent several hours yesterday wrapped up in "The Rape of the Lock," trying to spell out what seemed like a very simple point when I started making it. I think I have become progressively stupider in my time in grad school. I really want to get through this part so I can get to the icky poems. I did discover some obscure stuff that looks interesting and possibly important to the chapter, including a series of poems Elizabeth Thomas wrote in response to Swift's. Thank you, Literature Online. I do not know how people dissertated before full-text online databases.

In addition to the big ol' diss, I have the following to see me through the storm: The Pickup, a disc each of Six Feet Under and Gilmore Girls episodes, an episode of MST3000, several books on Georgian interior decoration, and the letters of Horace Walpole, which, it turns out, are as entertaining as all those geeky old scholars of the 18th-century say they are. Who knew. And, of course, the ever-present back-ups: The Simpsons, Pee-Wee's Playhouse, and Mount TBR. I hope it snows for days.

Why do post-talk receptions in the English department inevitably lead to nights of utter debauchery? Is it the cheap red wine drunk quickly on an empty stomach at 5pm? Hmm. I think I just answered my own question.

Yesterday was actually quite productive, so I don't feel entirely awful about taking today off. I decided to write a section on The Rape of the Lock and Swift's "scatological poems," which are disgusting and hilarious. "The Lady's Dressing Room" features a piece of furniture resembling the ersatz dresser hiding a chamber pot I saw at the Peabody Museum last summer. The section is entitled "'Celia Shits!': Defiled China." Tee hee.

It's pouring rain outside. I think I'll make something spicy to eat and curl up with The Colour of Magic for a while.

I have a long history of beginning journals that trail off after a few pages of intense and minute chronicling. I don't know if it's the result of a lack of discipline or a compulsion always to be starting over. Since there are no actual pages here, however, I have great hopes for my Live Journal, which I want to use mainly to record what I've been reading. I thank mojosmom from BookCrossing.com for the suggestion.

I'd like to write something about the last few books I've read, but I confess I'm procrastinating at work and I should get back to it. I'll write later tonight, presuming I finish thinking big thoughts about 18th-century japanning manuals and female subjectivity by a decent hour.

Today's work reading: A Treatise of Japanning and Varnishing by John Stalker and George Parker (1688); The Ladies Amusement, or The Art of Japanning Made Easy by Robert Sayer (1760)

Today's fun reading, if I get to it: The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk