Planning for the Term

The new term is almost upon us. Or upon me.

I'm slogging under some sort of lingering sickness that has me sore and congested in a manner that only compares with an L.A. freeway. I've been capable of maybe 45 minutes of focused work these last several days.

My syllabi aren't done. I'm teaching a course I've only taught once before - and it was a nightmare. I've applied for a grant, submitted my first year review, and now I'm pressing. Two abstracts due at the end of the week - trying to get to two summer conferences - and one more grant proposal. God help me. Most importantly, though, I've been lamenting how the iPod has stopped me from listening to full albums. And so it is my plan to make office hours useful by listening to as much of an entire album as possible. I think I might even blog about the experience. Because, goodness knows, nothing useful gets done in office hours, so I should at least get a blog post out of it.

Friday Afternoon Musings...

This was going to be a longer post, but the cranky "turn the music down" person next door just came in, and since I just turned in my grant application for the summer, I don't see any great reason to sit in the office any longer today.

Plus, for whatever reason, I might be a little giddy from having survived that was. Who knows?

But for whatever reason, "Go Places" by the New Pornographers is resonating with me very strongly today, particularly the section "...I see/what the moral of the back story could be/Come with me, Go places" - which, if I were to punctuate as the day's motto would look like this:

I see what the moral of the back story could be: come with me, go places.

And so, I was thinking about something off the academic track of posting today. Something about people I'm thinking about. It's leap year, and it occurs to me there are no cool traditions that go with this rare event. Sure, it signals a Presidential election later in the year and the impending arrival of the Summer Olympics which are far, far superior to their shoddy snowy season sibling (though I maintain the Summer and Winter Games should still be in the same year - marketing be damned). But there's nothing that goes with the actual day except tormenting people born on the day by making the same stale jokes about how they're really only five years old or some such.

But leap years seem interesting when you think about them. A day forced into the calendar to make the calendar jive with the world we actually live in.

So here's my challenge for all of you, on this Leap Year, where we attempt to bring our lives into line with the seasons by re-punctuating the calendar year (one of the great systems of grammar in the world: how we organize the language of time) - pick some bit of text, and reorganize however you see fit. And let's see what you've got.