End of the Year Meme

Still getting back into the swing of blogging again, and with a departure for parts homeward happening in the wee small hours of tomorrow (no one on the road but me and the drunks), this might be it for awhile. I saw this over at Maggie's awhile back and it seemed like as good a way of catching up (with where I'm at, with blogging, with whatever) as anything, so...

1. Will you be looking for a new job?

Still. Ugh. I think I've got 11 applications still out there; no word from the two places I did some sort of interview with. And again, I'm thinking about jumping the academic ship (or shark - pick your metaphor) if something good doesn't turn up.

2. Will you be looking for a new relationship?

This question makes my head hurt. Honestly, should a meme make me feel like I'm on the phone with my parents?

3. New house?

Probably. I've moved ever year for the last decade, so why break the trend? And if I get a new job, it'll be a certainty.

4. What will you do different in 08?

This sounds like a sneaky way of asking about a New Year's Resolution (see the next question), but generally, I'll be a bit more healthy than the last half of '07. And I'll try to be a bit better about protecting my time and energy from the job.

5. New Years resolution?

I don't really do resolutions since it seems to me that if you want to do something, there's no need to tie it to the change of the year. Seems like making an event out of them - putting them up for display - just adds pressure to them.

6. What will you not be doing in 08?

Not letting the degree dictate so much of the rest of my life.

7. Any trips planned?

Flying home tomorrow for a few days; hopefully to see some friends in various drivable locations throughout the term.

8. Wedding plans?

I barely plan my meals. Let's be serious. Though if I attend one, I plan to object, just because I want to be at a wedding where someone objects.

9. Major thing on your calendar?

The book submission.

10. What can’t you wait for?

Summertime. Also the return of "Battlestar Galactica."

11. What would you like to see happen differently?

Driving in this city, politics in this country, peace in this world, meaning in this universe.

Also I'd like to be able to find my favorite beers wherever I live.

12. What about yourself will you be changing?

I'd like to have a lifestyle again, as opposed to having a sort of "sleep mode" between teaching assignments.

13. What happened in 07 that you didn’t think would ever happen?

Paris! Also having to get a roommate as Ph.D. to pay the bills.

14. Will you be nicer to the people you care about?

I hope so, which isn't to say I'm not nice to them. But who wouldn't want to be nicer?

15. Will you dress differently this year than you did in 07?

Two words: latex kilts.

Okay. Seriously, no, probably no differently than before.

16. Will you start or quit drinking?

I long for the days of bourbon smoothies in the office with my fellow grad students, but really, I'll probably just keep the same habits here, thanks.

17. Will you better your relationship with your family?

I will if they will.

18. Will you do charity work?

I could argue that teaching this much for this little while having no life is pretty much charity work, but that's not what the question means I'm guessing. So probably a little but not as much as I should.

19. Will you go to bars?

I'm sure sometimes. But probably not much.

20. Will you be nice to people you don’t know?

As with being nice to the people I care about, I hope I'll be nice to people I don't know. I'll start by voting against wars and such.

21. Do you expect 08 to be a good year for you?

I do indeed.

22. How much did you change from this time last year till now?

I'm edging closer to financially stable (albeit at a fairly glacial pace), I've got a good sense of how much I'm willing to take, and I'm starting to get a pretty good sense of what I'm willing to give.

23. Do you plan on having a child?

And miss the only time I'd ever use a hockey metaphor in my life? Hell no. Besides, that's not how my family does it.

24. Will you still be friends with the same people you are friends with now?

I'd like to keep the old ones and add some new ones, please.

25. Major lifestyle changes?

This question made me think of the line, "Looks like a picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue."

But really, I don't feel like I've got much of a lifestyle so any change feels like it would be major. I hope they're good ones.

26. Will you be moving?

Oh, I do so hope to move!

27. What will you make sure doesn’t happen in 08 that happened in 07?

I don't think I've quite that much control over the universe. But I intend to allow more time and resources so that I can do things I want rather than just the things I have to do.

28. What are your New Years Eve plans?

Packing to go home, possibly talking to a few drunk friends around the country.

29. Will you have someone to kiss at midnight?

Does a lick on the face from my dog count?

30. One wish for 08?

Three more wishes. And if you're sticklers that say you can't do that, then I'd wish for a satisfying, comfortably paid job in a place that offers me all the sorts of things I like to do with a slice of cheesecake.

And with that, a Happy New Year (and a piece of cheesecake) to you all!

Information Vacation

So much for being good about posting and such, but really, I imagine there's not many folks out there at the moment anyway. Things have been busy in that non-busy holiday way here. I had a guest for a few days, and then I was a guest elsewhere for a few days, and somehow in the midst of that, I managed to pull myself away from the Internet and e-mails and the blog for several days in a row (a near-Herculean feat). I need to remember in the future just how relaxing that can be.

I've read and read and read, tired the pooch out, watched movies (check out "Once" if you get the chance - the story's a little slow but the music is good). And I taught myself to make omelets, a thing that deserves mentioning only because it's so ridiculously easy that I'm embarrassed that I just got to it. Honestly, they're so good, shouldn't they be harder to make? The best one so far: bacon, cheese, and pico de gallo.

The roommate returns from MLA tomorrow, and I'm off to visit family just after that. And when I return, I've got a syllabus to design and readings to copy, and - of course - job applications for the position we're hiring for to go through while stressing the state of the applications I put out elsewhere, so things will be back to the usual mayhem shortly.

Why is it...

...that nothing can spoil a song (or an artist, for that matter) faster than they're being played in a) an iPod commercial or b) an Old Navy? Just walking by one the other day put me off of two different artists the same way iPod has put me off Feist.

Next time, I'm going to have to park in a better spot, I guess.

The Book Meme

So Dr. Crazy mentioned this to me awhile back (and finally posted on it) and it was also seen over at Kermit's and Belle's. And since I'm not doing much this break (so far), I thought I'd chime in since being tagged is now pleasantly opt-in.

For those of you who haven't seen it, the deal seems to be to list five books you've read (or re-read) in the last year that have made a difference to you. I'm going to exclude things I've read for work, though there are some that are probably worth mentioning (maybe some other time). And I'll try and give some sense of why plus - stealing from the other Dr. C. - I'll try to give a good quote from the book itself. But I won't order them because, well, I don't feel like it.

Slam - Nick Hornby

I'm glad there are things you don't know and can't guess, weird things, things that have only happened to me in the whole history of the world, as far as I know...

I just finished reading this last night. And the thing that I think is important and worth considering is that Hornby writes male characters that are reasonably like the males you might know in real life. I've heard from a few female friends that they hate his characters because they're flawed and often stupid in crucial ways. That's how I feel about Bridget Jones. But you know what? Neither one needs to be a hero or an antihero. They manage to be fairly real. In this case, Hornby tackles a late teenaged boy, and while he struggles like most adult writers with the contradictions of writing a young protagonist, he never seems to falter.

And who wouldn't agree with that quote? Who doesn't still have a bit of that teenage need to be unique and mysterious?

The People of Paper - Salvador Plascena

He learned how to graft roses into carnation stalks, cultivating a flower of tight petals but no thorns. On graph paper he uncovered the saddest of all polygons - not the scalene triangle, as previously thought, but the love triangle.

So, I'm a sucker for magical realism and for tales that sound a bit like places I'm from. So let me first suggest that best magical realism isn't just sci-fi written in Spanish but that it carries a romance with it that only a few moments of sci-fi have ever truly achieved. This one has it all, really, and though I read it much earlier in the year, the feel of it more than the words have stuck with me.

The History of Love - Nicole Krauss

Part of you thought: Please don't look at me. If you don't, I can still turn away. And part of you thought: Look at me.

I don't remember why I picked this up, but the story is involving. It is also one of a few rare examples where a young protagonist truly worked for me because it seems to draw on the sorts of logics and impulses so many of us remember and carry over from childhood. It is alternatively heartbreaking and mending in good measure without ever feeling maudlin or saccharine.

Down and Out in Paris and London - George Orwell

Then the question arises, Why are beggars despised?--for they are despised, universally. I believe it is for the simpel reason that they fail to earn a decent living. In practice nobody cares whether work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable....Money has become the grand test of virtue.

I read this long after I was back from Paris - in fact, I finished it two nights prior to this post. But the reason was that it was a book recommended by a friend or a guidebook or some such while I was in Paris this summer. The attraction, initially, was reading about an author who had a trip to Paris that was seen from the other side (and for the record, one which my last days in Paris could have resembled). But what become truly interesting by the end of it was the number of things his story spoke to in our modern sensibility. As a joke to myself, I began in one chapter about his work as a plongeur (a sort of dishwasher and kitchen whipping boy), by substituting "assistant professor" for "plongeur," and sadly it didn't seem so far off as one might hope. Facetious as it was, it spoke about the specter of poverty in Western society while also suggesting a sort of creep of poverty that means it has to be more real than fear.

A Moveable Feast - Ernest Hemingway

I've seen you, beauty, and you belong to me now, whoever you are waiting for and if I never see you again, I thought. You belong to me and all Paris belongs to me and I belong to this notebook and this pencil.

Isn't Hemingway's tragedy really that he romanced all the wrong things? I mean, sometimes it's like he wanted to mail a letter but went right past the post office. I read this in my first days in Paris, along with sundry guidebooks, an academic book, and a short volume of Tony Hoagland poems. And of all of it, with the exception of the academic epiphanies that came while I was there, it's this sentence that sticks out. Something about the power of memory, really, and about the loss of the self to things beautiful and beyond us. And I can't help thinking that maybe sometimes we all miss those moments and those realities even when they're right there in front of us.

Curmudgeon at the Holidays

So I'm a bad blogger these days, but there are reasons why. It is the holidays, for one. And I take the holidays seriously, or at least I've attached all sorts of behavior to them like not bothering with e-mail or blogs much if it all. During the term, I'm often chained to the computer. I'm one of those profs who makes it tough for everyone else because (during the term) I love e-mail and respond quickly to it. But when the term ends, I like to take some time away from it, checking maybe once a day. Maybe not at all. And this, it seems, has translated to blogging as well.

And now, having answered the complaints from students about their grades, the requests from colleagues for my holiday schedules, the demands of Christmas cards and trips to the airport, I am relaxing and generally doing my best to forget about things like (what feels like) my rapidly failing job search, my unprepared course for next term, and my third year review. I am trying to be positive, which is not the most natural position for me raised as I was to "hope for the best but plan for the worst" (don't believe me? see this). So I'm reading - yesterday I finished Orwell's "Down and Out in Paris and London" and starting Nick Hornby's "Slam." The hope is to read enough over the break that I forget about how I barely got to read anything pleasurable all term and, perhaps, to build a little cushion for the likely "not reading" that will happen next term. This urge also means that I must not be allowed near a bookstore under any circumstances.

My roommate is gone for a week, so I get to sit at home in my pajamas as much as I like and largely let my beard grow (though I suspect that I'll have to cut it off tomorrow). I can listen to music rather than watch TV. There will be much lying on the floor with my dog. Also I will watch many movies from Netflix (yesterday I watched many episodes of "The Wire" and also "He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not" which goes to show you that if you "Fatal Attraction" is a uniquely American fear). I'm also thinking of overhauling the blog a bit, as I should probably redesign my personal web page (something that's become a sad sort of holiday tradition and that perhaps there won't be the time for this year because....).

This year, I get to go home, though not actually at Christmas or New Year's - just after. The last two years that hasn't happened, so this year I'm trying to make a production of it, even if I'm not there for all the jingling and fireworks and whatnot. And I'm trying to temper that with the fact that my family has plenty of what they want and little of what they need (or so it seems to me).

The holidays are the one time of year that I really enjoy shopping, though that is more qualified than it would seem. I like shopping for people. I hate shopping where people are. I would be fine with this if I could carry (and occasionally use) a cudgel. People who complain about the cost of baby clothes while coming out of Baby Gap deserve what they get as do people who park their carts lengthwise across the aisles. But there's something lovely about having gifts appear for the person you're thinking of. It is almost enough of a thrill that battling for parking in a place where people feel you can park anywhere seems more amusing than irritating (seriously, kids, if there's plowed snow on both sides of a two lane road causing it to narrow to a lane and a half than you shouldn't park your car there - it shouldn't take an out-of-towner to point this out to you).

So things are good here. I'll try and blog a bit more. I've seen and heard about some memes that I might dive into, just because it seems like those would be more fun and relaxing and appropriate right now. We shall see.

Sunshine enough to spread...

*taps the microphone* Testing...1...2...3. Check...mic check....

Blog-world, I'm sitting here listening to "Sticky Fingers," sipping hot chocolate, and stacking up the books I intend to read over the break. Grading is done and all is right with the world - at least until the grade complaints roll in about a half hour from now. The day is quite lovely, by virtue of finally being finished. The dog is under the table, snow-drunk and content. We're a postcard waiting to happen here, at Curmudgeon Labs.

Were I one to ruin such moments with practicality (I am), I'd be soon thinking about the job search we're doing, about the job search I'm doing, about the book I've got to dive into writing next term, about the student caught plagiarising and what that means, and all manner of other things. But my Christmas cards are done and sent, my ticket home is bought, and right now the hot chocolate is enough to make sense of the day.

Winter interlude

It was enough today to
see Paris dreams in front
and the light setting on the snow
out of the side of my eye.