2.28.2008
Upbeat Mundanity
I need:
-a loaf of bread
-shampoo
-exercise
Swiped from Jo's blog: people I know need to see this. We're starting Hamlet in Shakespeare next week, which makes this even funnier.
Today was a good Writing Center session. This seems odd, inasmuch as it was very slow going and I didn't always really know how to explain what I meant. But honestly, I often like working with ESL students (as this girl was) more than native speakers, because they're more okay with needing help (in ESL, that's a necessity, with much less shame attached to it) and therefore less intimidated and more engaged right off the bat.
I've just spent almost two hours goofing off (though it was really enjoyable), but oddly enough, I probably can afford it, inasmuch as I did homework all through my Writing Center downtime. But okay, either I'm making myself some real dinner, or I'm going to Wegmans.
-a loaf of bread
-shampoo
-exercise
Swiped from Jo's blog: people I know need to see this. We're starting Hamlet in Shakespeare next week, which makes this even funnier.
Today was a good Writing Center session. This seems odd, inasmuch as it was very slow going and I didn't always really know how to explain what I meant. But honestly, I often like working with ESL students (as this girl was) more than native speakers, because they're more okay with needing help (in ESL, that's a necessity, with much less shame attached to it) and therefore less intimidated and more engaged right off the bat.
I've just spent almost two hours goofing off (though it was really enjoyable), but oddly enough, I probably can afford it, inasmuch as I did homework all through my Writing Center downtime. But okay, either I'm making myself some real dinner, or I'm going to Wegmans.
2.27.2008
Things that don't change...unless you're in graduate English
Actually, while I'm still up, here's the better version of an entry I wrote, deleted, and then decided to come at from another angle:
I've been thinking for a few weeks that I should re-find the John Adams quote I cited nearly four years ago on this blog (not that I'm proud of every sentence in that melodramatic entry, but it's remarkable what things don't change from one election year to another), but before I was ever motivated enough to do so, I was introduced to this one:
I am wearied to Death with the Life I lead. The Business of the Congress is tedious, beyond Expression. This Assembly is like no other that ever existed. Every Man in it is a great Man--an orator, a Critick, a statesman and therefore every Man upon every Question must shew his oratory, his Criticism and his Political Abilities.
The Consequence of this is, that Business is drawn and spun out to an immeasurable Length. I believe if it was moved and seconded that We should come to a Resolution that Three and two make five We should be entertained with Logick and Rhetorick Law, History, Politicks and Mathematicks, concerning the Subject for two whole Days, and then We should pass the Resolution unanimously in the Affirmative.
And, lest you think he's exaggerating, let me say that tonight in Shakespeare class I discovered (via the poor ["poor" because he has to deal with us] evolutionary biologist in our group, and the objections he raised) that apparently 80% of the students in my class believe that there is not even any such thing as objective scientific truth, that it's all just socially-constructed. Not just our understanding of it, which could certainly be refined, but apparently its reality itself. Even to, say, the law of gravity.
Mathematics is next, right?
Okay. Now to bed for real.
I've been thinking for a few weeks that I should re-find the John Adams quote I cited nearly four years ago on this blog (not that I'm proud of every sentence in that melodramatic entry, but it's remarkable what things don't change from one election year to another), but before I was ever motivated enough to do so, I was introduced to this one:
I am wearied to Death with the Life I lead. The Business of the Congress is tedious, beyond Expression. This Assembly is like no other that ever existed. Every Man in it is a great Man--an orator, a Critick, a statesman and therefore every Man upon every Question must shew his oratory, his Criticism and his Political Abilities.
The Consequence of this is, that Business is drawn and spun out to an immeasurable Length. I believe if it was moved and seconded that We should come to a Resolution that Three and two make five We should be entertained with Logick and Rhetorick Law, History, Politicks and Mathematicks, concerning the Subject for two whole Days, and then We should pass the Resolution unanimously in the Affirmative.
And, lest you think he's exaggerating, let me say that tonight in Shakespeare class I discovered (via the poor ["poor" because he has to deal with us] evolutionary biologist in our group, and the objections he raised) that apparently 80% of the students in my class believe that there is not even any such thing as objective scientific truth, that it's all just socially-constructed. Not just our understanding of it, which could certainly be refined, but apparently its reality itself. Even to, say, the law of gravity.
Mathematics is next, right?
Okay. Now to bed for real.
Free Stuff
School has put me in the way of a lot of free stuff lately: one guy left four big ol' Rubbermaid-type containers of free books in the English graduate office, all from the Book Thing of Baltimore. I took, among other things, A Man For All Seasons, which I remember from tenth-grade English and really like. Another thing I grabbed was a copy of Watership Down, since my original's falling apart, but I guess it's actually even odds as to which copy's more beat up.
Also, let me echo Micah in enthustically plugging Ruckus.com. If you're a college student with a functional .edu address, you can sign up for free and get free-and-legal access to a really generous repertoire of music. You can't burn them to anything--it's a license, not a purchase--but you can keep it on your computer, freely, legally, until you graduate. (It's not as good a catalog as iTunes, but it's very respectable. They have, for example, a lot of U2 and REM. As for lesser-knowns, I found the band my cousin's in, Skeeter Biscuit.) The downside, yes, is all the advertisements on the site, but you don't get third-party spam.
'kay. Time to get to bed.
Also, let me echo Micah in enthustically plugging Ruckus.com. If you're a college student with a functional .edu address, you can sign up for free and get free-and-legal access to a really generous repertoire of music. You can't burn them to anything--it's a license, not a purchase--but you can keep it on your computer, freely, legally, until you graduate. (It's not as good a catalog as iTunes, but it's very respectable. They have, for example, a lot of U2 and REM. As for lesser-knowns, I found the band my cousin's in, Skeeter Biscuit.) The downside, yes, is all the advertisements on the site, but you don't get third-party spam.
'kay. Time to get to bed.
2.25.2008
Self-warning: I am not allowed to post something cranky later tonight. I am to go to bed.
Yesterday, post-nap, started off well and only got better and better; I called one friend, had dinner with three others, and heard at length from another. I take back, at least for now, every iota of angst I've inflicted upon everyone.
For the record, however, I am really hoping that it will be many, many days before I put myself again in a situation, hospitality-influenced or otherwise, wherein I end up having chai tea, an afternoon nap, Diet Coke, and citron tea, all within the same twelve-hour period. It was not entirely my fault, but my body simply cannot handle that kind of chemically- and sleep-induced stimulation. Fidgety, cotton-headed caffeine hangoverness, thy name is Laurel.
Plan for tonight, rather than attempting any homework at all: get home from Shakespeare (hopefully close to 7:30, but if I miss the bus again, it'll be more like 8:30), have some dinner, and go to bed. If I play my cards right, I'll make up some of the sleep and be up early enough to attempt to finish my readings for Tuesday's class.
Sooner or later I will get the hang of being a grad-school adult. Or so I fervently hope.
And...break!
For the record, however, I am really hoping that it will be many, many days before I put myself again in a situation, hospitality-influenced or otherwise, wherein I end up having chai tea, an afternoon nap, Diet Coke, and citron tea, all within the same twelve-hour period. It was not entirely my fault, but my body simply cannot handle that kind of chemically- and sleep-induced stimulation. Fidgety, cotton-headed caffeine hangoverness, thy name is Laurel.
Plan for tonight, rather than attempting any homework at all: get home from Shakespeare (hopefully close to 7:30, but if I miss the bus again, it'll be more like 8:30), have some dinner, and go to bed. If I play my cards right, I'll make up some of the sleep and be up early enough to attempt to finish my readings for Tuesday's class.
Sooner or later I will get the hang of being a grad-school adult. Or so I fervently hope.
And...break!
2.24.2008
Clearly, I could use a nap.
I was going to write all this stuff about the junior-high sleepover, but here's one big take-home lesson I learned: it's hard to tell which kids come out of difficult family situations. It's not so much poverty as it's, I don't know, neglect--sometimes flat-out abandonment. Serial misbehavior is a clue, but some kids don't act out.
It wasn't a disastrous night or anything, but it was difficult, even though it was also entertaining at many points (best line all night: bubbly Jenna, suspicious of the logical Indira during a game of Mafia: "I bet she's the killer, 'cause she's accusing other people with all her smartical talk!"). To be sure, running a fourteen-girl sleeproom by myself is something I'm hoping not to do again. But really the problem is just that I have so dang few practical skills, and am so self-sheltered--and happily, too; my desire to be watching more TV and following more popular bands is essentially nil. At heart, I'm simply too nerdy and too impatient, without Micah's repertoire of games and slang and goodwill, to be working with anyone younger than high school. Writers & Books was (incredibly) a bit less of a problem, in that the demographic was different: honors-type kids, studious enough to be in writing/acting/photography camps by choice. The spoiled ones were hard to deal with, but at least I have somewhere to go with them; school-hating athletes (they all seem to play something) mystify me.
Sorry. This has been a pessimistic year for blogging anyway, and I'm also tired and overworked, which tends to make me easily discontented. How many people am I going to whine to all the time?
The son said, "But I am not successful."
His Father said, "At the end of the day, will My word be 'Come, thou good and successful servant'?
...The son said, "But I do not care for what I have to do."
His Father said, "At last thou hast touched the root of the matter..."
It wasn't a disastrous night or anything, but it was difficult, even though it was also entertaining at many points (best line all night: bubbly Jenna, suspicious of the logical Indira during a game of Mafia: "I bet she's the killer, 'cause she's accusing other people with all her smartical talk!"). To be sure, running a fourteen-girl sleeproom by myself is something I'm hoping not to do again. But really the problem is just that I have so dang few practical skills, and am so self-sheltered--and happily, too; my desire to be watching more TV and following more popular bands is essentially nil. At heart, I'm simply too nerdy and too impatient, without Micah's repertoire of games and slang and goodwill, to be working with anyone younger than high school. Writers & Books was (incredibly) a bit less of a problem, in that the demographic was different: honors-type kids, studious enough to be in writing/acting/photography camps by choice. The spoiled ones were hard to deal with, but at least I have somewhere to go with them; school-hating athletes (they all seem to play something) mystify me.
Sorry. This has been a pessimistic year for blogging anyway, and I'm also tired and overworked, which tends to make me easily discontented. How many people am I going to whine to all the time?
The son said, "But I am not successful."
His Father said, "At the end of the day, will My word be 'Come, thou good and successful servant'?
...The son said, "But I do not care for what I have to do."
His Father said, "At last thou hast touched the root of the matter..."
2.22.2008
Random Loquacity
Micah's current away message:
jr. high all nighter.
pray for my soul.
Which is to say, he and Jason D. and I are about to take on some twenty screaming middle-schoolers, from almost-now until something in the neighborhood of eight o'clock tomorrow morning, and it's going to be a little crazy. But hopefully fun, too.
On another note, I've been called out on my consideration of vanilla extract as a food "staple." So, people still playing Oregon Trail, take note: buy cereal at the frontier outpost, buy juice, but leave the vanilla where it is!
jr. high all nighter.
pray for my soul.
Which is to say, he and Jason D. and I are about to take on some twenty screaming middle-schoolers, from almost-now until something in the neighborhood of eight o'clock tomorrow morning, and it's going to be a little crazy. But hopefully fun, too.
On another note, I've been called out on my consideration of vanilla extract as a food "staple." So, people still playing Oregon Trail, take note: buy cereal at the frontier outpost, buy juice, but leave the vanilla where it is!
2.21.2008
Please, Kanakadea, say it isn't so.
I've been meaning to post this. With a facepalm and an anguished sigh. I love Alfred. And I really like Dan Napolitano, whom I'm pretty sure wrote most of the captions for the calendar. But oh, the painful irony (click to enlarge before reading on).
Note to d'Artagnan: did we even look at that caption, or were we too busy picking a fault in the one whitened letter in "February"? I feel like I would have remembered the paragraph being that bad if I'd actually read it.
Note to Binghamtonians: among the many problems, a) the professor's name is Mike McDonough, and b) shortly after the calendar came out, he took a job at another school.
Swiped from Jo
If anyone writes one of these, please comment below and share it with us. Please? I want to write one, too, but I have to think of something pithy and hopefully witty.
Okay, Wegmans. Seriously this time.
Okay, Wegmans. Seriously this time.
On Thesis Statements
Help me out here. Maybe I've made a really stupid mistake, but I seriously can't tell:
This girl came into the Writing Center today. Shy, sweet girl. Math major, but writing an analytical essay for children's lit (the same class, in fact, for which I was almost one of the TAs). Seemed bright, just uncertain about her writing. And she'd gone at her essay in the most creative (if potentially-problematic) way I've ever seen in an undergraduate, telling a short, fictional story of several nights' worth of bedtime-story reading, incorporating analysis as she went. The organization was solid. There were too many sentences--some had to be combined--and some extraneous detail. But on the whole, simple to follow, and she'd obviously put a lot of thought into it.
But what she was trying to have as a thesis statement was that fairy tales have two meanings, one for the child, one for the adult reader, and essentially all she did was point them out. In this story, the child understands this, but the parent understands both the obvious moral and an underlying one. In this other tale, the child understands this, the mother understands that. And sometimes she'd give some detail to show how she was arriving at the moral (as in, to summarize, "The princess reluctantly does as her father commands her and invites the frog to stay, and is later rewarded for this when the frog turns into a prince; from this the child hearing the story learns that it's important to obey his parents," that sort of thing), but sometimes she wouldn't.
To my understanding, that's actually not a thesis statement. Yes, I suppose you're "proving" that there are two sets of morals, in the sense that children are not going to understand certain ones, and adults are not necessarily going to explain them (for example, she was reading the Frog Prince tale as a warning in favor of chastity, particularly premarital, though she wasn't citing text as to how she got there). But I feel like that's not analytical. The idea that they're supposedly for children but also hold lessons for adults is something generally accepted about fairy tales, isn't it? Even at the English 119 level, that doesn't seem like something you write five pages to prove. And since I'd guessed from the syllabus description that they might have been covering those sorts of double meanings in class anyway (though I never asked her about that), I was still more wary of letting that stand as the centering point of her whole paper.
So I was trying to explain that a thesis statement is not so much a what as a why...what is it about that presence of a double meaning that's interesting or significant? Except we couldn't go anywhere with that because she couldn't think of any question connected to that (and neither could I) that was literary instead of, I don't know, psychosociological (why teach chastity through symbols? Why write for adults as well as for children?). And I'd asked her if there were common morals between the tales she was citing--she said she couldn't find any. I asked her if there were things she'd wondered about while reading them, things that kept coming up. She couldn't really think of anything offhand.
And in the end, though we talked a little bit about sentence combination, literary present, whatever, we came to a halt because I was pretty sure that the paper didn't actually have a thesis, and she couldn't come up with another one, and she didn't want to try to talk about the fairy tales until we found another one because, frankly, we were both wondering whether the TA might just consider it close enough. So she left early to talk to the TA, and I sat wondering, for at least the third time in as many weeks, how to talk about where to draw the line between a thesis and not.
I know I haven't done the best job of describing the paper--and in terms of confidentiality, even though I haven't given you any way to identify her as anything more than an ENG 119 student, I feel weird having done even that--but do you see what I mean? And, not being able to find any potential thesis statements being explored, nor able to get any potential other ones out of her, I didn't know what to suggest, except that she talk to the TA.
I mean, that really wasn't a thesis statement, right? I'm afraid of being that jerk tutor who forces a total rewrite over, frankly, something the TA might not care nearly as much about as I do (we've got some people here who're very much into breaking students of the five-paragraph essay habit, and they're into essays I would deem vague and exploratory...I know I, for my part, am a little too in love with ultraclarity in thesis statements, and that for 100-levels, I tend to expect too much...and yet those're the only college classes in which thesis statements are ever taught, so I don't want to just shrug and go with it).
To be sure, it makes me nervous about the sixty essay tests I'll be correcting next week for ENG-300T. Professor Schneider is very much a give me something interesting, not something precise kind of person, and who even knows where she draws that thesis-statement line.
Well, enough of that. I've got to go to Wegmans. I need a bunch of staples...milk, juice, bread, flour, butter/margarine/whatever, pasta sauce, cereal, vanilla extract, basically any kind of meat at all...do you know how many things you can't make, lacking all of those? I have peanut butter and jelly, but would have to eat them on animal crackers. So, yes, it's time to get some groceries, and then I am going to slog through more of The Tin Drum and hopefully glide [enjoyably] through more of Much Ado About Nothing.
This girl came into the Writing Center today. Shy, sweet girl. Math major, but writing an analytical essay for children's lit (the same class, in fact, for which I was almost one of the TAs). Seemed bright, just uncertain about her writing. And she'd gone at her essay in the most creative (if potentially-problematic) way I've ever seen in an undergraduate, telling a short, fictional story of several nights' worth of bedtime-story reading, incorporating analysis as she went. The organization was solid. There were too many sentences--some had to be combined--and some extraneous detail. But on the whole, simple to follow, and she'd obviously put a lot of thought into it.
But what she was trying to have as a thesis statement was that fairy tales have two meanings, one for the child, one for the adult reader, and essentially all she did was point them out. In this story, the child understands this, but the parent understands both the obvious moral and an underlying one. In this other tale, the child understands this, the mother understands that. And sometimes she'd give some detail to show how she was arriving at the moral (as in, to summarize, "The princess reluctantly does as her father commands her and invites the frog to stay, and is later rewarded for this when the frog turns into a prince; from this the child hearing the story learns that it's important to obey his parents," that sort of thing), but sometimes she wouldn't.
To my understanding, that's actually not a thesis statement. Yes, I suppose you're "proving" that there are two sets of morals, in the sense that children are not going to understand certain ones, and adults are not necessarily going to explain them (for example, she was reading the Frog Prince tale as a warning in favor of chastity, particularly premarital, though she wasn't citing text as to how she got there). But I feel like that's not analytical. The idea that they're supposedly for children but also hold lessons for adults is something generally accepted about fairy tales, isn't it? Even at the English 119 level, that doesn't seem like something you write five pages to prove. And since I'd guessed from the syllabus description that they might have been covering those sorts of double meanings in class anyway (though I never asked her about that), I was still more wary of letting that stand as the centering point of her whole paper.
So I was trying to explain that a thesis statement is not so much a what as a why...what is it about that presence of a double meaning that's interesting or significant? Except we couldn't go anywhere with that because she couldn't think of any question connected to that (and neither could I) that was literary instead of, I don't know, psychosociological (why teach chastity through symbols? Why write for adults as well as for children?). And I'd asked her if there were common morals between the tales she was citing--she said she couldn't find any. I asked her if there were things she'd wondered about while reading them, things that kept coming up. She couldn't really think of anything offhand.
And in the end, though we talked a little bit about sentence combination, literary present, whatever, we came to a halt because I was pretty sure that the paper didn't actually have a thesis, and she couldn't come up with another one, and she didn't want to try to talk about the fairy tales until we found another one because, frankly, we were both wondering whether the TA might just consider it close enough. So she left early to talk to the TA, and I sat wondering, for at least the third time in as many weeks, how to talk about where to draw the line between a thesis and not.
I know I haven't done the best job of describing the paper--and in terms of confidentiality, even though I haven't given you any way to identify her as anything more than an ENG 119 student, I feel weird having done even that--but do you see what I mean? And, not being able to find any potential thesis statements being explored, nor able to get any potential other ones out of her, I didn't know what to suggest, except that she talk to the TA.
I mean, that really wasn't a thesis statement, right? I'm afraid of being that jerk tutor who forces a total rewrite over, frankly, something the TA might not care nearly as much about as I do (we've got some people here who're very much into breaking students of the five-paragraph essay habit, and they're into essays I would deem vague and exploratory...I know I, for my part, am a little too in love with ultraclarity in thesis statements, and that for 100-levels, I tend to expect too much...and yet those're the only college classes in which thesis statements are ever taught, so I don't want to just shrug and go with it).
To be sure, it makes me nervous about the sixty essay tests I'll be correcting next week for ENG-300T. Professor Schneider is very much a give me something interesting, not something precise kind of person, and who even knows where she draws that thesis-statement line.
Well, enough of that. I've got to go to Wegmans. I need a bunch of staples...milk, juice, bread, flour, butter/margarine/whatever, pasta sauce, cereal, vanilla extract, basically any kind of meat at all...do you know how many things you can't make, lacking all of those? I have peanut butter and jelly, but would have to eat them on animal crackers. So, yes, it's time to get some groceries, and then I am going to slog through more of The Tin Drum and hopefully glide [enjoyably] through more of Much Ado About Nothing.
2.18.2008
Professorial Quotations So Far
So, in honor of my being in a good mood on a Monday night, here's a sample of my professors, both last semester's and this, at their wittiest/most thought-provoking/oddest. I don't promise that the quotes are in order, but I've tried to reproduce them accurately:
Dr. Strehle ("Fictions of Diaspora"):
[trying to explain their nutritional value] "Yams are serious, serious tubers!"
Dr. Keith ("Introduction to Literary Theory and Criticism"):
[on the assigned reading we were about to start] "I don't know how to put this...don't lose hope."
"If you've ever been to MoMA, and you've sat in front of a painting and gone, 'What the [mild expletive] am I supposed to make of this painting?'...I would argue that you have a similar experience reading some of the essays for this class."
[to the undergrads] "Boy, you guys are much trippier than I am! ...No, I like that!"
[repeated description of his sister's three-week-old baby] "It's a blob of desire[s]."
[on the word "verisimilitude"] "It's not a type of pasta, either."
"People know Monet because you can't go to a dorm-poster sale without being inundated with lilypads."
Dr. Church ("Visions of Reality in 19th-C. American Literature"):
"Well, that sounds a little bit crackpot. Forget that! Strike everything I said over the last few minutes!"
Dr. Stoever-Ackerman ("Popular Music and Representation"):
[on researching bands] "Use your internet stalking skills to good purpose!"
Dr. Whittier ("Studies in Shakespeare"):
"I assigned the book to my [undergraduate] class because it's completely baffling..."
"If you want to envy someone else['s personality trait, possession, whatever], remember that you won't have it unless you're that whole person. ...Still want to go there?"
Professor Schneider ("Tales of Violence, Love, and Power"):
[on the course's name] "It had to have 'love' in the title because...everything does."
"Some days--not Mondays--I know how to spell my name."
"I'm in an existential crisis--I usually am, but this is a particularly poignant one for me..."
[to us] "You all look the same--you look under forty."
[on her friends calling her to share strange dreams] "It's like I'm the Weird Dream Hotline, and I'm thinking of starting a blog site."
"My dad once spanked me for lying, and I can't write fiction anymore."
"I'm infatuated with electronics." [huge feedback noise as she tries to turn something on] "...Always infatuated, never in love."
[during a class discussion featuring a wide range of opinions]
Professor Schneider: "I love disagreement, so I just want to enjoy the moment." [spreads arms and looks up to sky, eyes shut]
Charles (the other grader): "You don't love disagreement!"
Professor Schneider: [stares] "What?"
Charles: "You don't love disagreement!"
Professor Schneider: [beat] [then gets it, laughs] "You're fired!"
More to come, I assume, as the weeks progress.
Dr. Strehle ("Fictions of Diaspora"):
[trying to explain their nutritional value] "Yams are serious, serious tubers!"
Dr. Keith ("Introduction to Literary Theory and Criticism"):
[on the assigned reading we were about to start] "I don't know how to put this...don't lose hope."
"If you've ever been to MoMA, and you've sat in front of a painting and gone, 'What the [mild expletive] am I supposed to make of this painting?'...I would argue that you have a similar experience reading some of the essays for this class."
[to the undergrads] "Boy, you guys are much trippier than I am! ...No, I like that!"
[repeated description of his sister's three-week-old baby] "It's a blob of desire[s]."
[on the word "verisimilitude"] "It's not a type of pasta, either."
"People know Monet because you can't go to a dorm-poster sale without being inundated with lilypads."
Dr. Church ("Visions of Reality in 19th-C. American Literature"):
"Well, that sounds a little bit crackpot. Forget that! Strike everything I said over the last few minutes!"
Dr. Stoever-Ackerman ("Popular Music and Representation"):
[on researching bands] "Use your internet stalking skills to good purpose!"
Dr. Whittier ("Studies in Shakespeare"):
"I assigned the book to my [undergraduate] class because it's completely baffling..."
"If you want to envy someone else['s personality trait, possession, whatever], remember that you won't have it unless you're that whole person. ...Still want to go there?"
Professor Schneider ("Tales of Violence, Love, and Power"):
[on the course's name] "It had to have 'love' in the title because...everything does."
"Some days--not Mondays--I know how to spell my name."
"I'm in an existential crisis--I usually am, but this is a particularly poignant one for me..."
[to us] "You all look the same--you look under forty."
[on her friends calling her to share strange dreams] "It's like I'm the Weird Dream Hotline, and I'm thinking of starting a blog site."
"My dad once spanked me for lying, and I can't write fiction anymore."
"I'm infatuated with electronics." [huge feedback noise as she tries to turn something on] "...Always infatuated, never in love."
[during a class discussion featuring a wide range of opinions]
Professor Schneider: "I love disagreement, so I just want to enjoy the moment." [spreads arms and looks up to sky, eyes shut]
Charles (the other grader): "You don't love disagreement!"
Professor Schneider: [stares] "What?"
Charles: "You don't love disagreement!"
Professor Schneider: [beat] [then gets it, laughs] "You're fired!"
More to come, I assume, as the weeks progress.
Seriously, this whole Monday-night late-class thing throws me off.
Today was a good day. Even though it was Monday and busy, and even though Dr. Whittier spent an inordinate amount of time talking about anuses (it's Coriolanus; we knew long in advance that this was coming) and about the evils of creating taboo around bodily functions, and something about rebirth and touching points of a circle, and something about the return from a journey being the point of death, and then an explanation of how she left an Episcopal church in Owego--and talked for so long past the class's ending time that I missed the 7:25 bus back here and had to wait 'til the 8:25. It was a good day anyway.
It's nice to know that some of my fellow rhet/comp students don't like literary theory, and it's even nicer to know that Alfred is so different from Binghamton because it's deliberately chosen one form of pedagogical ideology over another, not because they (Alfred)'re about twenty years behind in teaching style (which, may AU forgive me, I couldn't help wondering).
It's nice to know that some of my fellow rhet/comp students don't like literary theory, and it's even nicer to know that Alfred is so different from Binghamton because it's deliberately chosen one form of pedagogical ideology over another, not because they (Alfred)'re about twenty years behind in teaching style (which, may AU forgive me, I couldn't help wondering).
2.15.2008
Some numbers, but then some comments about whether they matter
Okay, both to help me figure all this crud out and to try to convey what's going on in my life, here's all the reading I should have gotten done this week. I got a lot of it done, but not all; we won't go over what I did and didn't.
And just so you know, this week was on the heavy side of "normal" in terms of how comparable to other weeks that it seems to be. I'll probably have a little less to do next week, but not so much less that this is an outlier. So...
For "Tales of Violence, Love, and Power": Hard to say. We're "supposed to be working on" The Tin Drum, or at least the 208 pages of it that she's making us read (she doesn't like the novel, so we get to stop after Book 1). The way she's set up the class, we don't have precise due dates for the reading. Instead, when we sense her coming to the end of the book we're doing now, we're supposed to read the next one over that weekend, such that when she does start talking about it sometime, the expectation is that we'll have finished it by the first day of her discussion thereon. So I guess I could have gotten away with not reading any of it this week, and just gone at it tomorrow, but I have enough work to do tomorrow, so I have 48 pages done of it right now. Make of that what you will.
For "Theory and Practice of Rhetoric and Composition": For Monday there were 25 pages, but that's sort of a misleading figure because 18 of those pages were a paper in Word format, which would take up more space were it in a book. It was pedagogy, too, which takes me a while to read because it tends to be dense and theoretical. There were also 52 pages in another pedagogy book due that Wednesday. I also had to type a four-paragraph response for each set of readings (250-500 words), though that's not high-responsibility. So okay, 77ish pages of pedagogy due that week for that class, plus responses.
For "Popular Music and Representation": Tuesday and Thursday's assignments were combined, but she didn't really give a clear indication of some not being due until Thursday, so my understanding was that everything was due Tuesday. And for all Dr. S-A is so much easier to learn from and deal with than Dr. Church was, there is too much darn reading for this class. Please note that all my reading for this class is theoretical material, as in literary theory, which means it takes exponentially longer than a novel would, both because it's really dense and has very complex arguments, and because I hate theory and therefore have trouble concentrating thereupon. The work assigned was:
-Chapters 1, 3, and 4 of Paul Gilroy's theoretical text The Black Atlantic, and altogether I think that's 114 pages
-Two articles of 30 and 14 pages respectively
-16 pages out of another book
So that's a total of 174 pages, all of it theoretical. If you want a time estimate, I've never tested the hypothesis, but my theory is that I have a hard time getting through more than about 12 pages of theory an hour. Lit-theory class used to take even longer than that, but we'll go with that and pretend I'm at my best. Either way, maybe I need to double-check with the professor to see whether I'm allowed to split that reading into two sections, one for Tuesday and one for Thursday.
For "Studies in Shakespeare"--this's another one sort of like "Tales of Violence," in the sense that for a while we won't exactly have any reading due, but then we'll suddenly be expected to have the whole thing done--this week we were going to transition into talking about Coriolanus, though frankly it was anyone's guess as to whether that would actually be Monday or whether it'd be Wednesday instead (answer: it managed to be a little of both). So I had to have Coriolanus read, all five acts, which is something like 42 pages of text. And again, I read novels at about the rate of 60 to 65 pages per hour...novels, I can read very quickly. But I'm not yet to the point with Shakespeare where I can read it at less than, say, three minutes per page if I'm really getting it. And this is where I get my comeuppance for being so lax about the reading during Mayberry's class last year...we read this play, at least in theory, except that apparently I skimmed it after seeing it at Stratford because I was busy. Ha. I probably didn't know what busy was. Actually, maybe that's not true, but all the same.
Oh. And I had assigned reading for the Writing Center, since that's essentially considered a class (it's listed as Rhet 491 or something like that; we meet for an hour every week...grads' responsibilities are a bit modified, but yes, I still have to do the weekly readings). That's a combined nineteen pages, but that's very readable stuff; I probably got through it in about half an hour. Forty minutes if fellow tutor Kaitlyn and I were wilfully distracting each other; I don't remember.
So this week's reading amounted to 251 pages (though it should be more because of the Word document) of pedagogy and theoretical reading, 42 pages of Shakespeare, 19 pages of other required reading, and 48 pages of advance reading. Allowing (and this is a very conservative estimate, allowing for only minimal distraction/noncomprehension) five minutes per page of theory, three per page of Shakespeare, and one per page of everything else (and with Tin Drum, that too is conservative), that's 1,442 minutes of reading, which is just over 24 hours. If I'm not getting considerably distracted, and if I understand what I'm reading and don't have to go back. Which does not, in real life, happen.
And compared to the number of hours of work I was supposedly doing as an undergrad, that looks sort of reasonable (particularly if you're going by the Dr. Tolhurst Addressing the Freshmen workload equation). 24 hours of work, for somewhere between twelve and sixteen credits (depending on how you count the Violence/Love/Power work, it being part of the GA stuff). Except that, again, it really doesn't only amount to 24 hours of work, but again, never mind that for now.
This figure becomes significant in that I did calculations about how many hours per week I'm not in class, in the Writing Center or related meetings, in InterVarsity (small group, large group, prayer ministry stuff), asleep, at church, keeping a homeworkless Sunday, doing Bible-reading-and-prayer times, or buying groceries. (I didn't include weekly transportation time or, I don't think, meals, but I should have.) I came up with somewhere between 45 and 50 hours a week to be both doing my work and having a life. But that's a conservative estimate. And it's conservative on both ends, pretending my work only takes 24 hours, and pretending I actually have a chance at 25 hours a week where I go, huh! My work and obligations are done, but it's not Sunday. What do I do now? Because in reality, no such thing ever happens. In reality, time leaks out of my schedule everywhere, and I end up with no time despite the fact that not all my work is done.
But it's possible. On paper, it's possible.
And these calculations may also generate a certain amount of scorn from my undergraduate friends, who may well be (though I haven't seen their own math) doing every bit as much..
So, in the end, why complain at all?
It's a lot of mental weight, is the other half of the problem. I hate theory and relativism. I'm not used to pedagogy and am worried about the prospect of holding even partial sway over scores of the young minds of America, since everything is taught, in every class I take, as being very high-stakes, very important. And not that I think the stuff's not important, but I can't deal with troubling a star every time I pluck a flower, and some days that's how life is laid out to us. I'm working on learning to not freak out about that. You don't have to all send concerned messages telling me not to freak out. I'm trying. Sometimes I succeed, and it's getting better.
Let me say one other thing.
Everything I said, some entries ago, about why I am Christian was as true as I could express it. But it's still misleading. Yes, God has made my life as joyful and hopeful as it is. But it's not a thing where happiness is the primary benefit. I am not happy right now. I am not certain. I'm given a lot of things, but right now perfect happiness and security are not among them. And that's been sort of a point of anger for me for a while, but honestly, they're not things I'm somehow owed by God as payment for my service, as though that were even a good way to look at it. I follow God because it's right, because He's true. And things in my life happen to be the better for my having honored that, but I'm not owed happiness, though I'm promised joy. I'm not owed a feeling of security, though I'm promised that all things will eventually work to my benefit (Romans 8:28).
Part of the problem is that I just don't want to work that hard. But while my job is not to take on unnecessary things that make my life harder, my job is to do my work and to live in a Christian way, no matter how hard or inconvenient that is, and even if I'm asked to rearrange my life and time in the cause. All of this will be understandable sometime. As for right now, am I going to try to demand an explanation of Someone to whom I supposedly gave my life and time without reserve? In some ways, does an explanation matter? It would be nice to know why I've had two semesters full of classes I dislike. It would be nice to know whether I'll ever teach, or whether this's all going someplace else. It'd be nice to know a lot of things. But I don't have to know. My eventual good is promised. But an explanation along the way is not something I was promised as I came in.
I might tweak this over the next day or two to try to make things clearer or better, but that's graduate life right now.
And just so you know, this week was on the heavy side of "normal" in terms of how comparable to other weeks that it seems to be. I'll probably have a little less to do next week, but not so much less that this is an outlier. So...
For "Tales of Violence, Love, and Power": Hard to say. We're "supposed to be working on" The Tin Drum, or at least the 208 pages of it that she's making us read (she doesn't like the novel, so we get to stop after Book 1). The way she's set up the class, we don't have precise due dates for the reading. Instead, when we sense her coming to the end of the book we're doing now, we're supposed to read the next one over that weekend, such that when she does start talking about it sometime, the expectation is that we'll have finished it by the first day of her discussion thereon. So I guess I could have gotten away with not reading any of it this week, and just gone at it tomorrow, but I have enough work to do tomorrow, so I have 48 pages done of it right now. Make of that what you will.
For "Theory and Practice of Rhetoric and Composition": For Monday there were 25 pages, but that's sort of a misleading figure because 18 of those pages were a paper in Word format, which would take up more space were it in a book. It was pedagogy, too, which takes me a while to read because it tends to be dense and theoretical. There were also 52 pages in another pedagogy book due that Wednesday. I also had to type a four-paragraph response for each set of readings (250-500 words), though that's not high-responsibility. So okay, 77ish pages of pedagogy due that week for that class, plus responses.
For "Popular Music and Representation": Tuesday and Thursday's assignments were combined, but she didn't really give a clear indication of some not being due until Thursday, so my understanding was that everything was due Tuesday. And for all Dr. S-A is so much easier to learn from and deal with than Dr. Church was, there is too much darn reading for this class. Please note that all my reading for this class is theoretical material, as in literary theory, which means it takes exponentially longer than a novel would, both because it's really dense and has very complex arguments, and because I hate theory and therefore have trouble concentrating thereupon. The work assigned was:
-Chapters 1, 3, and 4 of Paul Gilroy's theoretical text The Black Atlantic, and altogether I think that's 114 pages
-Two articles of 30 and 14 pages respectively
-16 pages out of another book
So that's a total of 174 pages, all of it theoretical. If you want a time estimate, I've never tested the hypothesis, but my theory is that I have a hard time getting through more than about 12 pages of theory an hour. Lit-theory class used to take even longer than that, but we'll go with that and pretend I'm at my best. Either way, maybe I need to double-check with the professor to see whether I'm allowed to split that reading into two sections, one for Tuesday and one for Thursday.
For "Studies in Shakespeare"--this's another one sort of like "Tales of Violence," in the sense that for a while we won't exactly have any reading due, but then we'll suddenly be expected to have the whole thing done--this week we were going to transition into talking about Coriolanus, though frankly it was anyone's guess as to whether that would actually be Monday or whether it'd be Wednesday instead (answer: it managed to be a little of both). So I had to have Coriolanus read, all five acts, which is something like 42 pages of text. And again, I read novels at about the rate of 60 to 65 pages per hour...novels, I can read very quickly. But I'm not yet to the point with Shakespeare where I can read it at less than, say, three minutes per page if I'm really getting it. And this is where I get my comeuppance for being so lax about the reading during Mayberry's class last year...we read this play, at least in theory, except that apparently I skimmed it after seeing it at Stratford because I was busy. Ha. I probably didn't know what busy was. Actually, maybe that's not true, but all the same.
Oh. And I had assigned reading for the Writing Center, since that's essentially considered a class (it's listed as Rhet 491 or something like that; we meet for an hour every week...grads' responsibilities are a bit modified, but yes, I still have to do the weekly readings). That's a combined nineteen pages, but that's very readable stuff; I probably got through it in about half an hour. Forty minutes if fellow tutor Kaitlyn and I were wilfully distracting each other; I don't remember.
So this week's reading amounted to 251 pages (though it should be more because of the Word document) of pedagogy and theoretical reading, 42 pages of Shakespeare, 19 pages of other required reading, and 48 pages of advance reading. Allowing (and this is a very conservative estimate, allowing for only minimal distraction/noncomprehension) five minutes per page of theory, three per page of Shakespeare, and one per page of everything else (and with Tin Drum, that too is conservative), that's 1,442 minutes of reading, which is just over 24 hours. If I'm not getting considerably distracted, and if I understand what I'm reading and don't have to go back. Which does not, in real life, happen.
And compared to the number of hours of work I was supposedly doing as an undergrad, that looks sort of reasonable (particularly if you're going by the Dr. Tolhurst Addressing the Freshmen workload equation). 24 hours of work, for somewhere between twelve and sixteen credits (depending on how you count the Violence/Love/Power work, it being part of the GA stuff). Except that, again, it really doesn't only amount to 24 hours of work, but again, never mind that for now.
This figure becomes significant in that I did calculations about how many hours per week I'm not in class, in the Writing Center or related meetings, in InterVarsity (small group, large group, prayer ministry stuff), asleep, at church, keeping a homeworkless Sunday, doing Bible-reading-and-prayer times, or buying groceries. (I didn't include weekly transportation time or, I don't think, meals, but I should have.) I came up with somewhere between 45 and 50 hours a week to be both doing my work and having a life. But that's a conservative estimate. And it's conservative on both ends, pretending my work only takes 24 hours, and pretending I actually have a chance at 25 hours a week where I go, huh! My work and obligations are done, but it's not Sunday. What do I do now? Because in reality, no such thing ever happens. In reality, time leaks out of my schedule everywhere, and I end up with no time despite the fact that not all my work is done.
But it's possible. On paper, it's possible.
And these calculations may also generate a certain amount of scorn from my undergraduate friends, who may well be (though I haven't seen their own math) doing every bit as much..
So, in the end, why complain at all?
It's a lot of mental weight, is the other half of the problem. I hate theory and relativism. I'm not used to pedagogy and am worried about the prospect of holding even partial sway over scores of the young minds of America, since everything is taught, in every class I take, as being very high-stakes, very important. And not that I think the stuff's not important, but I can't deal with troubling a star every time I pluck a flower, and some days that's how life is laid out to us. I'm working on learning to not freak out about that. You don't have to all send concerned messages telling me not to freak out. I'm trying. Sometimes I succeed, and it's getting better.
Let me say one other thing.
Everything I said, some entries ago, about why I am Christian was as true as I could express it. But it's still misleading. Yes, God has made my life as joyful and hopeful as it is. But it's not a thing where happiness is the primary benefit. I am not happy right now. I am not certain. I'm given a lot of things, but right now perfect happiness and security are not among them. And that's been sort of a point of anger for me for a while, but honestly, they're not things I'm somehow owed by God as payment for my service, as though that were even a good way to look at it. I follow God because it's right, because He's true. And things in my life happen to be the better for my having honored that, but I'm not owed happiness, though I'm promised joy. I'm not owed a feeling of security, though I'm promised that all things will eventually work to my benefit (Romans 8:28).
Part of the problem is that I just don't want to work that hard. But while my job is not to take on unnecessary things that make my life harder, my job is to do my work and to live in a Christian way, no matter how hard or inconvenient that is, and even if I'm asked to rearrange my life and time in the cause. All of this will be understandable sometime. As for right now, am I going to try to demand an explanation of Someone to whom I supposedly gave my life and time without reserve? In some ways, does an explanation matter? It would be nice to know why I've had two semesters full of classes I dislike. It would be nice to know whether I'll ever teach, or whether this's all going someplace else. It'd be nice to know a lot of things. But I don't have to know. My eventual good is promised. But an explanation along the way is not something I was promised as I came in.
I might tweak this over the next day or two to try to make things clearer or better, but that's graduate life right now.
2.14.2008
Oh!
So it turns out that I had no new homework for PM&R this morning, which I would have discovered if I'd checked my syllabus last night instead of just reading Don Everts. (For the record, Old Man was more of a set of reminders than something that offered much I hadn't heard before, but was good to read all the same.) Not that this means I get off scot-free, morality-wise, inasmuch as I never finished the old homework, but it's encouraging all the same.
2.13.2008
(um)
This is a much better post about Ash Wednesday and, by extension, Lent, than mine was.
What else I'm doing instead of homework right now, even though in a future post I might try to mathematically show why it is (besides moral obligation) that I should be doing homework: reading some of Don Everts's "One Guy's Head" series, which I have on loan from Carrie. Specifically, having gotten through All the Ideas Living In My Head, I'm starting The Old Man Living In My Head, which is kind of about why I shouldn't be freaking out about graduate-English relativism. Kind of.
So I'm going to read the book (it's only about 75 pages, and it's Don Everts), and then I'm going to go to bed, and then I'm going to get up tomorrow and do as much homework as I can before class. Hopefully all of it, but we will see.
It's seriously not only because of my irresponsible time management that I'm perpetually behind on my work. You're going to have to take my word for it until I get the mathematical post up.
What else I'm doing instead of homework right now, even though in a future post I might try to mathematically show why it is (besides moral obligation) that I should be doing homework: reading some of Don Everts's "One Guy's Head" series, which I have on loan from Carrie. Specifically, having gotten through All the Ideas Living In My Head, I'm starting The Old Man Living In My Head, which is kind of about why I shouldn't be freaking out about graduate-English relativism. Kind of.
So I'm going to read the book (it's only about 75 pages, and it's Don Everts), and then I'm going to go to bed, and then I'm going to get up tomorrow and do as much homework as I can before class. Hopefully all of it, but we will see.
It's seriously not only because of my irresponsible time management that I'm perpetually behind on my work. You're going to have to take my word for it until I get the mathematical post up.
Anguish in the Snow
Today, by contrast to (contrast with?) yesterday, was fairly awful.
Two of my toes got mildly frostbitten. But they're pink again, and I'm okay.
Two of my toes got mildly frostbitten. But they're pink again, and I'm okay.
Contentment As the Snow Falls
The day I'm just ending may well have been the best of the semester so far. I'm so richly blessed with daring, hilarious, sincere, protective, loving people.
Tomorrow it will seem to matter that I should have been in bed two hours ago. But oh, how it doesn't seem to matter right now.
Tomorrow it will seem to matter that I should have been in bed two hours ago. But oh, how it doesn't seem to matter right now.
2.12.2008
Calling All Geeks
Okay, guys. So I do, in spite of myself, like XML templates on Blogger. I like that my archive links are set up more like drop-down menus than like one massive column of date ranges. I like that the new posts are being archived by title instead of by a random-looking string of numbers. I don't love that my few HTML skills are going to waste, but I'm willing to live with that.
But this comment thing is really bugging me.
If you want to comment on this blog, under XML, right now you have to click on my timestamp to get to the comments page itself, and then you have to tell it you have a comment to post. I don't like that. I want a link next to the timestamp, like virtually every other Blogger blog on the planet has, that tells me "(x) comments," and which I can click instead of the timestamp to get to the comments.
Now, I know I have my Blogger settings such that this is possible, because when I revert to classic templates, I get that link back. But I lose the drop-down archives, the post pages, and everything nice about XML. I don't know how I messed up my XML template originally such that my comments link got deleted, but Blogger's help files on restoring a comments link are only directed to HTML templates, not XML.
Can some geek help me have it both ways? Can I either, working through HTML, get the nice parts of XML, or can somebody please tell me how to manipulate my XML template (I can send you a copy if it helps) in such a way that suddenly the comment link appears on the title page? Name your price and we'll negotiate. Binghamton geeks, if it's any sort of motivation, remember that I am currently the only person in Binghamton who knows how to make Laura Kim's famous chocolate-chip cookies.
But this comment thing is really bugging me.
If you want to comment on this blog, under XML, right now you have to click on my timestamp to get to the comments page itself, and then you have to tell it you have a comment to post. I don't like that. I want a link next to the timestamp, like virtually every other Blogger blog on the planet has, that tells me "(x) comments," and which I can click instead of the timestamp to get to the comments.
Now, I know I have my Blogger settings such that this is possible, because when I revert to classic templates, I get that link back. But I lose the drop-down archives, the post pages, and everything nice about XML. I don't know how I messed up my XML template originally such that my comments link got deleted, but Blogger's help files on restoring a comments link are only directed to HTML templates, not XML.
Can some geek help me have it both ways? Can I either, working through HTML, get the nice parts of XML, or can somebody please tell me how to manipulate my XML template (I can send you a copy if it helps) in such a way that suddenly the comment link appears on the title page? Name your price and we'll negotiate. Binghamton geeks, if it's any sort of motivation, remember that I am currently the only person in Binghamton who knows how to make Laura Kim's famous chocolate-chip cookies.
2.10.2008
Culinary Endeavors: Baked Potato Soup
I should explain this before I start. Yes, this is a busy semester and I'm complaining all the time about how much work I have to do, and blaming all my crankiness on how much work I have to do. And here I am making soup? Ah, but I do not do homework on Sundays unless I totally can't help it. Not that I come out of a church tradition that forbids that or anything (though that doesn't mean I don't wonder about it anyway), but I need, for reasons of mental self-defense, one day a week when I can do all (or at least some) of the things I've spent my busy week wishing I could do.
So tonight, inspired by a recipe from a cookbook my mom got as a gift and passed on to me because she didn't really want it (it's true), I made baked potato soup. A lot of baked potato soup. Hey, without an apartment key 'til tomorrow (never mind that for now), it's not like I was going anywhere.
What I had to do:
-bake five potatoes (I did so according to the Alton Brown method, not deliberately because of my geeky affection for Good Eats, but because it was the first thing that came up when I googled "baked potatoes"), then cool them, then remove the skins (I pretty much just pulled them off in strips and ate them), then cut the potatoes into small pieces
-fry about ten rashers of bacon until crispy, then crumble them (sorry, Matt...if I ever make this for Ninth Hour, I'll leave the bacon out of the pot and just have everyone add it individually to their bowls!)
-slice one bunch of green onions
-grate some Cheddar cheese
And then, since the prep was done:
-make a flour-butter roux in the bottom of a Dutch oven (that's the name for one of those common, biggish pots with two handles)
-stir in five-and-a-half cups of milk (it actually called for more, but this is where I stopped; I like my soup thick. If I had it to do over, though, I'd follow the original recipe, since what I got was almost too thick)
-let the thing come "almost to a boil"...I didn't quite know how to interpret that, so I eyeballed it (and subjected my finger to a milk-from-a-spoon drip-test...so I guess I will tolerate mild self-abuse in the pursuit of culinary achievement, if you were wondering or anything)
-add the potatoes, bacon, and onions
-add the cheese and some (light, in my case) sour cream
-let it all heat through
I did this, and it thickened up nicely (I'd had my doubts during the "almost to a boil" stage, since beads of roux had been floating around in the milk, I think because I didn't heat the milk before I used it). Had a taste--it needed something. I threw in some more salt (there'd been none called for in the recipe, and very little across the ingredients, so I'd salted the cut-up potatoes before adding them), some pepper (not a Tom-caliber amount, thank you, but I wasn't as shy as I can be about it), and a literal pinch of dried parsley. It was better then, and two bowls proved very filling. If I had it to do over, I might put in more cheese, though the jury's still out on that, and I'd probably put in more bacon. I expected the soup to be oniony like whoa, considering how much green onion comes out of a whole bunch, but it was actually a pretty good amount. It still seems to need something, but I can't quite tell what. I think the problem's in the base--potatoes in and of themselves, backed up only by what's basically a diluted béchamel sauce, are kind of bland.
Roux in general, in my inexperienced hands, tends to be a little unsatisfying. Maybe I should have cooked mine longer, browned the flour more. Doesn't that provoke Maillard-type action? If so, it probably could've used it. Or, hey, maybe I should've put some of the bacon fat in instead of the butter. That might've helped, actually.
And again, this recipe made a lot, almost a whole Dutch oven full, and that was having reduced the liquid involved. Hyewon and Mijeong ate some and appeared to like it; the rest sits in three Gladware-type containers in the refrigerator, daring me to tire of it. Next time, if I'm not feeding a crowd, I'll halve the recipe. Or two-thirds it; I don't exactly feel like trying to bake two-and-a-half potatoes. (And that's another thing: would the potatoes have tasted mostly the same if I'd just boiled them instead of spending the seventy minutes on baking them, or no? I'm willing to try taking the "baked potato" in "baked potato soup" figuratively if it'd make things a little more convenient.)
*
"Does your mother like to cook?" Hyewon asked me. I said she did (though maybe it's truer that she likes to cook as a hobby, since she enjoys making party-type food, but not normal dinner-type stuff, whereas I'm new enough that almost everything's enjoyable as long as I'm not so hungry or tired as to be impatient), and laughed a bit because I knew where she was going with it. Sure enough, she went on, sounding amused, "I think your hobby is cooking, too!" I laughed again and admitted that it was.
"Mine's watching TV," Mijeong said, sort of defendingly. "This one's better--you get something when you're done."
"Good for roommates!" Hyewon replied, grinning.
So that was that. And now it might be bedtime.
So tonight, inspired by a recipe from a cookbook my mom got as a gift and passed on to me because she didn't really want it (it's true), I made baked potato soup. A lot of baked potato soup. Hey, without an apartment key 'til tomorrow (never mind that for now), it's not like I was going anywhere.
What I had to do:
-bake five potatoes (I did so according to the Alton Brown method, not deliberately because of my geeky affection for Good Eats, but because it was the first thing that came up when I googled "baked potatoes"), then cool them, then remove the skins (I pretty much just pulled them off in strips and ate them), then cut the potatoes into small pieces
-fry about ten rashers of bacon until crispy, then crumble them (sorry, Matt...if I ever make this for Ninth Hour, I'll leave the bacon out of the pot and just have everyone add it individually to their bowls!)
-slice one bunch of green onions
-grate some Cheddar cheese
And then, since the prep was done:
-make a flour-butter roux in the bottom of a Dutch oven (that's the name for one of those common, biggish pots with two handles)
-stir in five-and-a-half cups of milk (it actually called for more, but this is where I stopped; I like my soup thick. If I had it to do over, though, I'd follow the original recipe, since what I got was almost too thick)
-let the thing come "almost to a boil"...I didn't quite know how to interpret that, so I eyeballed it (and subjected my finger to a milk-from-a-spoon drip-test...so I guess I will tolerate mild self-abuse in the pursuit of culinary achievement, if you were wondering or anything)
-add the potatoes, bacon, and onions
-add the cheese and some (light, in my case) sour cream
-let it all heat through
I did this, and it thickened up nicely (I'd had my doubts during the "almost to a boil" stage, since beads of roux had been floating around in the milk, I think because I didn't heat the milk before I used it). Had a taste--it needed something. I threw in some more salt (there'd been none called for in the recipe, and very little across the ingredients, so I'd salted the cut-up potatoes before adding them), some pepper (not a Tom-caliber amount, thank you, but I wasn't as shy as I can be about it), and a literal pinch of dried parsley. It was better then, and two bowls proved very filling. If I had it to do over, I might put in more cheese, though the jury's still out on that, and I'd probably put in more bacon. I expected the soup to be oniony like whoa, considering how much green onion comes out of a whole bunch, but it was actually a pretty good amount. It still seems to need something, but I can't quite tell what. I think the problem's in the base--potatoes in and of themselves, backed up only by what's basically a diluted béchamel sauce, are kind of bland.
Roux in general, in my inexperienced hands, tends to be a little unsatisfying. Maybe I should have cooked mine longer, browned the flour more. Doesn't that provoke Maillard-type action? If so, it probably could've used it. Or, hey, maybe I should've put some of the bacon fat in instead of the butter. That might've helped, actually.
And again, this recipe made a lot, almost a whole Dutch oven full, and that was having reduced the liquid involved. Hyewon and Mijeong ate some and appeared to like it; the rest sits in three Gladware-type containers in the refrigerator, daring me to tire of it. Next time, if I'm not feeding a crowd, I'll halve the recipe. Or two-thirds it; I don't exactly feel like trying to bake two-and-a-half potatoes. (And that's another thing: would the potatoes have tasted mostly the same if I'd just boiled them instead of spending the seventy minutes on baking them, or no? I'm willing to try taking the "baked potato" in "baked potato soup" figuratively if it'd make things a little more convenient.)
*
"Does your mother like to cook?" Hyewon asked me. I said she did (though maybe it's truer that she likes to cook as a hobby, since she enjoys making party-type food, but not normal dinner-type stuff, whereas I'm new enough that almost everything's enjoyable as long as I'm not so hungry or tired as to be impatient), and laughed a bit because I knew where she was going with it. Sure enough, she went on, sounding amused, "I think your hobby is cooking, too!" I laughed again and admitted that it was.
"Mine's watching TV," Mijeong said, sort of defendingly. "This one's better--you get something when you're done."
"Good for roommates!" Hyewon replied, grinning.
So that was that. And now it might be bedtime.
2.09.2008
Saturday Night Semi-Mundanity
I made some cinnamon toast just now, for the first time in years. Since our toaster doesn't work well, I used Jessica's toaster oven (burning a knuckle in the process) and discovered that if you stick the cinnamon toast back in the toaster oven after buttering/sugaring/cinnamon-ing, and play your cards right, you can get the topping to sort of thinly crust over the bread. It's very good that way.
It's been a pretty big schoolwork-and-laundry day. I did all the pedagogical reading for rhet/comp (which took a long time), I finally finished the forty-page Paul Gilroy chapter for Tuesday (anyone want to guess whether I'll make it, before 10 AM on Tuesday, through the other hundred-or-so pages of theoretical reading for that class?), and now I'm (re)reading as much of Coriolanus as I can before fatigue overcomes me and I go to bed.
It's been a pretty big schoolwork-and-laundry day. I did all the pedagogical reading for rhet/comp (which took a long time), I finally finished the forty-page Paul Gilroy chapter for Tuesday (anyone want to guess whether I'll make it, before 10 AM on Tuesday, through the other hundred-or-so pages of theoretical reading for that class?), and now I'm (re)reading as much of Coriolanus as I can before fatigue overcomes me and I go to bed.
2.08.2008
Americana
From the Good Shepherd weekly online bulletin:
The Spring Bake and Lenten Clam Chowder Sale will be Saturday, March 8, 2008.
Besides making me giggle (such a sale has got to be a tradition, which means that Cookie's almost certainly in charge of it...and was there a time, then, when GS didn't eat meat on Lenten Fridays?), it reminds me of Alfred somehow. Maybe St. Jude's soup dinners? Maybe because Good Shepherd is smallish and underdoglike and warms my heart?
The Spring Bake and Lenten Clam Chowder Sale will be Saturday, March 8, 2008.
Besides making me giggle (such a sale has got to be a tradition, which means that Cookie's almost certainly in charge of it...and was there a time, then, when GS didn't eat meat on Lenten Fridays?), it reminds me of Alfred somehow. Maybe St. Jude's soup dinners? Maybe because Good Shepherd is smallish and underdoglike and warms my heart?
2.06.2008
When asked what was wrong with the world, G.K. Chesterton apparently replied, "I am."
I missed Ash Wednesday service; apparently I hit "cancel" instead of "save" when I changed the alarm time on my phone. That's the only explanation I can think of as to why it never went off and shows as never having changed in the first place.
I think maybe Lent runs the risk of looking like God is angry and telling you to get down on your knees, because it's a time when the global Church shows a lot of grief about its (usually our individual, but also our corporate) sinfulness. But it's actually sort of like...okay. This isn't a perfect comparison, but there've been these times where I was consistently, or fairly consistently, cruel or rude or just stupid to people I've loved. And I think they knew that they could call me on it, but they didn't, I guess because they aren't as proud as I am or something. But I'm a little reflective (over-reflective?), and a lot of times, I do manage to look back later (sometimes way later) and be like, whoa. That was kind of awful of me. And the fact that they didn't say anything, just sort of took it, even when sometimes I thought I was the one being wronged, makes me want to be like, I'm really sorry.
I'd never thought of it that way until this morning, but I think it's sort of like that (though God and others should correct me where I'm wrong). Ash Wednesday is not something that we were commanded to do, a take this day and be sorry from above. So it's something we choose to take some time to do. And it's taken me until this morning, lying in bed wondering why I'm so angry these days, wondering too how Paul could have been serious in expecting worldwide church unity when I can't even submit to the people around me, to get a good sense of why, though it's not compulsory, it's still something people do every year.
I think maybe Lent runs the risk of looking like God is angry and telling you to get down on your knees, because it's a time when the global Church shows a lot of grief about its (usually our individual, but also our corporate) sinfulness. But it's actually sort of like...okay. This isn't a perfect comparison, but there've been these times where I was consistently, or fairly consistently, cruel or rude or just stupid to people I've loved. And I think they knew that they could call me on it, but they didn't, I guess because they aren't as proud as I am or something. But I'm a little reflective (over-reflective?), and a lot of times, I do manage to look back later (sometimes way later) and be like, whoa. That was kind of awful of me. And the fact that they didn't say anything, just sort of took it, even when sometimes I thought I was the one being wronged, makes me want to be like, I'm really sorry.
I'd never thought of it that way until this morning, but I think it's sort of like that (though God and others should correct me where I'm wrong). Ash Wednesday is not something that we were commanded to do, a take this day and be sorry from above. So it's something we choose to take some time to do. And it's taken me until this morning, lying in bed wondering why I'm so angry these days, wondering too how Paul could have been serious in expecting worldwide church unity when I can't even submit to the people around me, to get a good sense of why, though it's not compulsory, it's still something people do every year.
2.04.2008
...whuh?
Excerpts from my vivid series of dreams last night, thus:
-Jose and Ryan and some other girl supposedly from our program and me, all hanging out together over the course of about a week. The girl crashes my car and pretty much mangles it, but rather than tell me, they get a radio DJ to run a fundraiser behind my back, they pool their money and the donations, and buy the same make/model/year of my car, which isn't bad except for a few kind of icky paint-flaking dents to one side. I find out about this, but not until the switch has actually been made and I've fallen for it.
-Stuff with two big, icky, slimy bugs running around the room I'm in, and then a bunch of tiny black ants sealed in a Ziploc bag on a table nearby. As I'm chasing the free bugs around, they go for two greasy slices of pizza with which I'm trying to lure them, but unfortunately I've placed the pizza right next to the Ziploc, and the ants are so enthusiastic that they actually chew through the bag and get out all over the table. Some of them go for the pizza. Some of them, apparently confused, start crawling on me. Some are just everywhere else. I start screaming, except that my voice is gone, and apparently my blood pressure spike wakes me up into the real world, because suddenly I'm in bed, remembering the dream, with the sense that I've probably just been voicelessly screaming.
-Something with my parents and brother and maybe Lily and some kind of trailer in an evergladesy sort of woods? I remembered more before I started writing this post.
-Ditto on the last one, which was back to graduate English, I think to some lecture class run by...Dr. Church?...and something unpleasantly weird happening.
And now I'm awake, but wish I weren't, considering the homework I still have to do. Fine start to the day, this.
Maybe I should start getting to bed earlier.
-Jose and Ryan and some other girl supposedly from our program and me, all hanging out together over the course of about a week. The girl crashes my car and pretty much mangles it, but rather than tell me, they get a radio DJ to run a fundraiser behind my back, they pool their money and the donations, and buy the same make/model/year of my car, which isn't bad except for a few kind of icky paint-flaking dents to one side. I find out about this, but not until the switch has actually been made and I've fallen for it.
-Stuff with two big, icky, slimy bugs running around the room I'm in, and then a bunch of tiny black ants sealed in a Ziploc bag on a table nearby. As I'm chasing the free bugs around, they go for two greasy slices of pizza with which I'm trying to lure them, but unfortunately I've placed the pizza right next to the Ziploc, and the ants are so enthusiastic that they actually chew through the bag and get out all over the table. Some of them go for the pizza. Some of them, apparently confused, start crawling on me. Some are just everywhere else. I start screaming, except that my voice is gone, and apparently my blood pressure spike wakes me up into the real world, because suddenly I'm in bed, remembering the dream, with the sense that I've probably just been voicelessly screaming.
-Something with my parents and brother and maybe Lily and some kind of trailer in an evergladesy sort of woods? I remembered more before I started writing this post.
-Ditto on the last one, which was back to graduate English, I think to some lecture class run by...Dr. Church?...and something unpleasantly weird happening.
And now I'm awake, but wish I weren't, considering the homework I still have to do. Fine start to the day, this.
Maybe I should start getting to bed earlier.
Wry thought before bed
Someday I will write an e-mail or blog entry past 10 PM that doesn't have any mistakes in it, and which doesn't say anything that I read later and go, "Wait, I'm not sure that's fully true." I don't think it's ever happened, but someday it will. I'm determined.
2.03.2008
Post-Super-Bowl Entry
The Giants are my dad's favorite team--and, let's face it, for several reasons, I don't really like the Patriots, so I was in favor of their losing--so we're pretty happy right now. I have to say, most of the game wasn't that interesting unless you yourself play a defensive position on a football team, but the fourth quarter got better. Eli Manning almost getting sacked, somehow getting out of it(?!), and then throwing this pass that the receiver pretty much caught on top of his helmet? Easily the most impressive play of the game.
So...yeah!
So...yeah!
2.02.2008
This might be about average for me...
76 words
...since on the try after that, I got 79 words, but with one or two mistakes; the one I copy-pasted was mistake-free. I tried three times in all. People who can beat me across their first three tries (mistake-free is more impressive) should comment and say so.
I didn't go through the free lessons or whatever, of course.
...since on the try after that, I got 79 words, but with one or two mistakes; the one I copy-pasted was mistake-free. I tried three times in all. People who can beat me across their first three tries (mistake-free is more impressive) should comment and say so.
I didn't go through the free lessons or whatever, of course.
Okay, so...
I want to know: does it help to have a side-column describing everyone, or is that sort of awkward and intrusive? It occurs to me, about five years late, that maybe not everyone wants a description, over which they've had no control, side-columned for the world to read and to supposedly know them by.
If it's intrusive, would it help if I gave people who read this blog (since not everyone side-columned is necessarily a reader) the option to write their own mini-autobio? Or would it just be simpler/better to take the whole stupid column down?
If it's intrusive, would it help if I gave people who read this blog (since not everyone side-columned is necessarily a reader) the option to write their own mini-autobio? Or would it just be simpler/better to take the whole stupid column down?
2.01.2008
Bitlet
I've heard or seen in print now, three times over the last three days, the word "excoriated" (or some alternate conjugation thereof). I can't help pointing this out, because I'm not sure I'd ever even heard it before this week, though it's easy enough to figure out from context, and all of a sudden it's apparently New Word of the Whenever. It's euphonious, though, if you want to call something that despite its semi-icky meaning.
Passing a Quarter-Hour on Campus
Well, I didn't hear from the Writing Center, so I took the bus here (didn't want to drive), only to find, of course, that the Center was closed. So I went to the English department and asked if they had any work to be done, since that was probably what I would have done this morning anyway, and the secretary, of course, found a tactful way to tell me that she thought I was crazy.
Just kidding. Mostly. So anyway, having been dismissed from work for the day, I went to the bookstore, since now I have books to get for PM&C (I never bothered buying the books for Visions of Reality). I figured I'd let the campus bookstore win over Mando's by virtue of my not having to drive anywhere, but in fact, despite the order today for workers to report to the University, the bookstore was closed.
So that's an oh-for-two on the reasons I came to campus at all, haha. But that's okay. It's not a really cold day, just a really icy day, so I got to tromp through the wet ice (it's not slippery right now, just thick) and marvel at the sort of shallow, translucent quality of the tracks I made in it. It doesn't seem to give under my finger when I try to poke it, but I think even those sections will give under my foot when I step. This is interesting, and I wish I had my camera so that I could take pictures and show you what I mean (though it would probably be less impressive, actually, if I did). I have my cell phone camera, but don't feel like spending the seventy-five cents or whatever that it would take to get the picture off my camera and into, say, my e-mail.
Things I'm thankful for this morning, in no particular order:
1) Cracklin' Oat Bran from a newly-opened box.
2) Talking to Christina over AIM this morning. She's in Kenya, but in Nairobi, which is where the negotiations are going on, and I think mostly the violence isn't. She misses everybody, needless to say. What a time to be on a long-term missions project, right?
3) Free city-bus transportation.
4) Not having to do anything responsible today, except maybe the IV GIM.
Also, whoa! If I look at my blog on this updated version of IE, the formatting is fine, and the colors are different from how they look back at the apartment. I had no idea. And ruddy crud, my blog wasn't so dang green-looking from home. How come everything I do is green in color this year? It's fine and all, but getting a little tiresome.
Update: Looking at the colors now that I'm back in the apartment, I guess it was green all the time, but more gray-green. Are you guys seeing gray-green or grass-green?
Just kidding. Mostly. So anyway, having been dismissed from work for the day, I went to the bookstore, since now I have books to get for PM&C (I never bothered buying the books for Visions of Reality). I figured I'd let the campus bookstore win over Mando's by virtue of my not having to drive anywhere, but in fact, despite the order today for workers to report to the University, the bookstore was closed.
So that's an oh-for-two on the reasons I came to campus at all, haha. But that's okay. It's not a really cold day, just a really icy day, so I got to tromp through the wet ice (it's not slippery right now, just thick) and marvel at the sort of shallow, translucent quality of the tracks I made in it. It doesn't seem to give under my finger when I try to poke it, but I think even those sections will give under my foot when I step. This is interesting, and I wish I had my camera so that I could take pictures and show you what I mean (though it would probably be less impressive, actually, if I did). I have my cell phone camera, but don't feel like spending the seventy-five cents or whatever that it would take to get the picture off my camera and into, say, my e-mail.
Things I'm thankful for this morning, in no particular order:
1) Cracklin' Oat Bran from a newly-opened box.
2) Talking to Christina over AIM this morning. She's in Kenya, but in Nairobi, which is where the negotiations are going on, and I think mostly the violence isn't. She misses everybody, needless to say. What a time to be on a long-term missions project, right?
3) Free city-bus transportation.
4) Not having to do anything responsible today, except maybe the IV GIM.
Also, whoa! If I look at my blog on this updated version of IE, the formatting is fine, and the colors are different from how they look back at the apartment. I had no idea. And ruddy crud, my blog wasn't so dang green-looking from home. How come everything I do is green in color this year? It's fine and all, but getting a little tiresome.
Update: Looking at the colors now that I'm back in the apartment, I guess it was green all the time, but more gray-green. Are you guys seeing gray-green or grass-green?
Perk of graduate education...or possibly not
So all classes and activities were cancelled today because of the ice-encrustation of, like, Binghamton, thanks to the freezing rain.
On the other hand, it's up in the air as to whether the Writing Center counts as a class (for the undergrad workers, it actually does, but for me it doesn't) or a job, and therefore whether it'll be open. If it's open, I have to come in and work.
Actually, maybe I should go in and work anyway for the English department, considering that today I was probably going to be working for them, not the actual Center, during my hour, and the BU website says that all University employees are to report.
It's all very confusing. I left a message on the Writing Center machine, asking them to let me know what to do (though I phrased it differently). When they open (or not) at 10:00, I suppose I'll find out.
Regardless, it's shower time.
On the other hand, it's up in the air as to whether the Writing Center counts as a class (for the undergrad workers, it actually does, but for me it doesn't) or a job, and therefore whether it'll be open. If it's open, I have to come in and work.
Actually, maybe I should go in and work anyway for the English department, considering that today I was probably going to be working for them, not the actual Center, during my hour, and the BU website says that all University employees are to report.
It's all very confusing. I left a message on the Writing Center machine, asking them to let me know what to do (though I phrased it differently). When they open (or not) at 10:00, I suppose I'll find out.
Regardless, it's shower time.