Half of the Brain :
the place all those random thoughts that flit through my head each day go to die

we did it

made a decision, made an offer, and now we have a contract... got the good-faith estimate from the lender and all for monthly payments $25 less than we're paying in rent now. . . woohoooo! I'm successfully getting excited about getting out of this sorry excuse for a town and moving on, it's the sheer amount of junk that needs to get done between now and then that leaves me cranky most days. (Well, that and the fact that I have some work deadlines I simply can not blow.)

and you know, it occurs to me... I always thought I was pretty good at multi-tasking, and yes, contrary to popular belief I can walk and chew gum simultaneously. Multitasking though really isn't multitasking, but instead it's compartmentalizing and as long as the compartments stayed small enough that I could switch between them quickly... all was well. The problem now is that all my current compartments are penthouse rather than studio sized. I'm surrounded by projects rather than tasks, and I'm finding that "multi-projecting" isn't working as easily. I swear, I find myself saying, I can't even think about "X" today because I don't have the four hours in my schedule to devote to it. Question: do you know anyone that has 4-5 hours of their day to devote to one task... i don't.

Come to think of it.... i used to be pretty good at time management as well. :-)

on an up note: it's premier week (now that's a good use of my time, don'tya think?) But hey, it could be worse, I almost wasted a perfectly good 2 hours this evening watching T3. It was tempting, if only because it would further compound for me the absurdity of CA's current political plight. I held the line, though, and instead i spent a marvelous evening filtering photocopies and adding to the pile in my living room loosely labeled "garage sale". Here's a pragmatic as well as a somewhat philosophical question: Any reason I just can't burn it all and start over from scratch?

lowbrow chow
im just a movie nut-- sometimes i like the artsy, indie flicks. sometimes i'm partial to those brainless hollywood blockbusters or canned, formulaic comedies; then of course there's all those 80's classiscs.

my DVD collection is growing to beyond epic proportions-- there is, however, a short list of those films that I can watch over and over-- the films I grade papers to, or transcribe notes to, sometimes I even write to them because they are so familiar by now they blend into the background.

Moulin Rouge
Pulp Fiction
The Rookie
Shawshank Redemption
Apollo 13
(don't laugh) Varsity Blues
(don't laugh even harder) A Few Good Men

the current film on the box is Moulin Rouge and-- as the elephant love-medley scene winds down--it strikes me that in it's own way it's a combination of those artsy indie flicks, canned hollywood formulas, and 80s classics. But beyond that I'm trying to figure out why the films on my forever list are there... hmmmm

Apollo 13 is easy-- I've always been a space nut. I even like the bad space movies. But then you put together a good space movie with Howard at the helm and Hanks, Sinise, and Bacon in front of the camera, how could it miss. But I think what really gets me about 13 is "the deep blue hero shit" (that's the phrasing that Owen Wilson's character in Armageddon uses to characterize their save-the-world- mission). But more engaging is the fact that despite the hollywoodized storytelling, the Apollo 13 events happened. What's the catch phrase... ordinary people doing extraordinary things?. I see it every day and most extraordinary people don't get movies made about them, but those everyday stories are just as inspiring.

A Few Good Men is on the list because of my "Few Good Men Theory"-- D and Me and all situations, summed up more or less (metaphorically, of course) by scenes from AFGM-- "Does Aunt Ginny have a barn? Maybe we could hold the trial there. I'll sew the costumes and maybe Uncle Goober can be the judge. " " You don't want the truth because, deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall." "What I do want is for you to stand there in that faggoty white uniform and with your Harvard mouth extend me some fucking courtesy" "You and Dawson, you both live in the same dreamworld! It doesn't matter what I believe. It only matters what I can prove! So don't tell me what I know, or don't know! I know the LAW! " "You can't handle the truth!" "My client's a moron, that's not against the law." "Dave, Sherby doesn't think the Navy hangs people from yardarms anymore." "Well, sir, like everybody else, I just followed the crowd at chow time, sir. " "You gotta trust me, Sherby. You keep your eyes open, your chances of catching the ball increase by a factor of ten."


with Moulin Rouge, I'll be honest, it's Ewan McGregor's voice-- I am not an auditory person, but that singing voice though not particularly technical hits a chord with me, but beyond the voice. . . it occurs to me that the one thing that my list of films have in common is some central sentiment. In Shawshank Redemption its friendship, faith and perseverence and yes, I'm still bitter that Forrest Gump got the best picture nod that year. Varsity Blues--trusting in the idealism of youth. In the Rookie it's the recapturing some of that youthful idealism. In Pulp Fiction it's the metamorphises of the characters and their compelling, "everyman" natures even though most of us will never know anyone as overthetop as Travolta, Jackson, Thurman, and Willis in that movie.

moving sux

and it's only going to get worse before it gets better.

And as if moving wasn't enough there's this whole buy-a-house thing that's driving me batty. Yep, we're going back once again this weekend, but we're just about out of time and have to make a decision and make an offer. The problem is that there's just not anything we love (within our price range) but it just makes good fiscal sense for us to get off the rent cycle. So if nothing new rears its head we'l have to pull an eeny-meeny-miny-moe with what we've already seen.

I'm actually in this space where I'm working for escape, which is great because it means I'm actually getting things done. The casualty in all this though is my house. I can't even stay in it these days. I look around and say: wow, look all I need to ____ (clean, sort, organize, pack, put away, etc). So, I have a permanent table staked out at the local BAM, that way my escape is complete.

Last year I read this book, "write your dissertation in 15 minutes a day" . It's a good book; pedagogically it echoes everything that I've come to believe about teaching writing so I can't say it had anything new in it, but it served this... duh! why don't you actually do all that stuff you tell your own students to do ... kind of purpose for me. However, author of said book advised three things not to do while writing the Diss: have a baby, get a puppy, and move.

After going through this past year with K and C, I definitely get the baby thing, and here I am-- 3 MOVES LATER and preparing for MOVE 4 I can personally attest to the move thing. The problem really is that moving interrupts any sense of momentum, and in my case meas that with every move I have to reorganize all my materials and regather all the library research. BLACHH!

I am however in the process of trying to assemble a ist of blogs from folks who live in the middle-georgia region. (not that i think there's a huge regional difference in bloggers-- my sense is that most blog-types blog for a short list of similar reasons). I would like to blogroll a "local" grouping, as I really was intrigued by that entry I read on Frolic earlier this summer that categorized the character of DC bloggers by their blogging location.

here I go...(rant to follow: read at own peril)

so i said to myself when I started blogging, "self, remember you're blogging about the other half of your brain, which in my case would be the non-academic, not-consumed-or-obsessed-about-work half. You are not to let discussions of that never-ending opus creep into this space."

Right, i know--foohardy wasn't it. Some ill-fated attempt on my part to deny this maddeningly absurd Institution I've chosen to spend my entire adult life wrapped up in.

Who exactly thought this thing we call the academy was such a good idea anyway? I've spent the afternnoon reading about various "metaphors of self" (ala James Olney) employed by diarists and it got me thinking, among other things, about the metaphors I would use to describe various aspects of my own life. My metaphors for the academy aren't particularly innovative or creative but they are pefectly apt.

1). The academy is like a black hole-- one big ole blob of mass collapsing uncontrollably and unstoppably in on itself... sucking into its dense nothingness everything in its path.

2). The academy is like the inbred-to-imbecility royal families of old who take more pride in their lineage then in the fact they can think straight or smile without drooling.


I've spent yet another afternoon reading and I can now say I've spent a serious 6 months steeped in research and can count on less than one hand the number of book-length studies that actually needed to be book-length. I'm fed up with navigating 250 pages of adnauseum effluvium for one or two paragraphs of important or intriguing observations. See what happens when you carry the "publish or perish" metaphor to its ultimate conclusion... So here we are in today's academic environment: BOOK to degree, 2 BOOKS to hire, 3 BOOKS to tenure... and what do we end up with . . .

nothing but a library full of crap with academics so busy being academics that they no longer have time for the other aspects of their careers which leads me full-circle back to a system (be it an astrological or familial system) collapsing in on itself.

I watched the conclusion of boy meets boy last night and I am today reminded of the thread earlier in the summer on IA sketching out reality shows centered around the professional academic. Here's mine: Prof meets Prof.

20 professors(ages and gender vary as do fields of study) share our stage and the goal is for the "Leading Prof" to narrow down the field over the course of six weeks to determine which colleague's work has the greatest bearing on his own, and which colleague might he most want to work with in developing a new innovative research project. Funding for such a project is the "romantic cruise" awaiting at the show's conclusion as is a book contract with a reputable University Press with the option for a mainstream spin-off to a national publisher should all go well.

In the end... our leading prof comes to the unfortunate yet not entirely unpredicatable conclusion that of the 20 scholars gathered no one is as brilliant as he, so he chooses himself as his most compatible collaborator-- takes himself on the cruise-- and thus continues the feeding of the ego.

The expose behind Real World: University is much the same as the expose behind the other shows that form the corpus of reality programming--be it big brother or marry a millionaire or boy meet boy-- it's fixed... all of it.

You've got folks (good folks too might I add) cranking out book after book in order to have that competitive edge. A situation that stacks the deck against most people acheiving a "successful" academic career-- you've got to have something after all to use to explain/rationalize to the large numbers of extraordinarily qualified yet jobless academics why there's simply no room for them in the inn. "We'll you just don't have 8 books out with Harvard UP, we can't offer you that assistant professorship"

Which in my own cynical world ends up translating to. . . "We really had no intention of ever finding space for you within our system, we simply needed warm bodies for indentured labor, place holders to put in front our underclass students so they don't get wise and stop forking over tuition. So, instead of doing the responsible thing and appropriately limiting our graduate programs before you spend 6, 8, 10 years of your life and $20,000, $40,000, $60,000 of your money, we'll just use you up, spit you out, and let the "free-market" take care of the glut on the other end. " HRUMPH-- (and this from folks who by and large think Republican and big business are both dirty words and who as a group tend to pride themselves on their open-minded and democratic social progressiveness. ) How's the view from way up there in that ivory tower?

I want out of my contract and I want off the show but. . . in an ironic twist that testifies to my own presence in said tower... dadgummit if I don't want the piece of paper first.

back to the grind. . .