Thursday, February 16, 2006
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
A little bit of good news
1. I don't have to fill out a FAFSA this year. Because I. am. almost. done. with. my. degree.
My, that feels good to say. Now I just need to remove "almost" from that sentence.
2. I found out today that I'm being nominated for a university-wide award for graduate student teaching. Fantastic Adviser sent a message out to the department's undergrad listserv asking if any students wanted to share any thoughts about my courses, and she said the response was overwhelming. I heart American Studies students and faculty; I wish I could have earned my degree in that department, but alas! alack! they have no grad program (hence my opportunity to teach for them).
More good news on that front: Whereas I usually struggle to fill my summer courses because there just aren't enough students around to really warrant holding them, I already have 25 signed up for this spring's offering on life in the 1890s. Yay!
My, that feels good to say. Now I just need to remove "almost" from that sentence.
2. I found out today that I'm being nominated for a university-wide award for graduate student teaching. Fantastic Adviser sent a message out to the department's undergrad listserv asking if any students wanted to share any thoughts about my courses, and she said the response was overwhelming. I heart American Studies students and faculty; I wish I could have earned my degree in that department, but alas! alack! they have no grad program (hence my opportunity to teach for them).
More good news on that front: Whereas I usually struggle to fill my summer courses because there just aren't enough students around to really warrant holding them, I already have 25 signed up for this spring's offering on life in the 1890s. Yay!
Monday, February 13, 2006
Johari window
All the popular kids (Profgrrrrl, Scrivener, Phantom Scribbler) have them, and so must I.
Please go here and click on the characteristics you believe me to possess. It does a nifty trait-triangulation thingy once you submit your choices. I'm especially interested to see what traits my offline friends see vs. those who know me only in cyberspace. (Too bad "geeky" isn't one of the choices in the Johari window.)
Thanks for participating.
Please go here and click on the characteristics you believe me to possess. It does a nifty trait-triangulation thingy once you submit your choices. I'm especially interested to see what traits my offline friends see vs. those who know me only in cyberspace. (Too bad "geeky" isn't one of the choices in the Johari window.)
Thanks for participating.
Damn you, community college bureaucracies
Why, why must community colleges have such damn complicated application forms? I can't remember how many units I took for each of my degrees (and I hate having to look up this information), nor do I know my supervisors' phone numbers for the past 10 years, nor do I remember all the grad seminars I took that remotely have to do with the field in which I'm applying. And yet all this information is required, and it must be typed into PDF forms that, once filled out, can't be saved but must be printed and mailed. (And you get all of, oh, 200 characters to describe each teaching experience.) But I do love the teaching of eager young working-class minds, so apply I will. An additional incentive: I looked at the salary schedule for one of the colleges, and tenure-track Ph.D.s with teaching experience bring home absolutely yummy paychecks. Really, I was shocked.
Other random thoughts:
1. I went shopping today and bought my first nice (i.e., not Target-brand) clothes since fall 2004 (pre-pregnancy). Of course, the way the clothes fit isn't at all what I'm used to--I'm in a not-so-fun size right now, that netherworld between maternity clothes with elastic belly bands and did-I-really-used-to-be-a-size-10? I know the weight will come off eventually (but oh, how aggravatingly slowly!), so it pains me to shop at nice department stores knowing that the clothes won't last me more than a season or two. But I had Macy's gift cards from two Christmases (last year's didn't get spent because my local Macy's didn't have maternity sections), so the eight pieces I bought today cost me nothing at all, and I have some gift card $$$ left over. Yay!
And bonus: I bought not one, not two, but THREE pairs of shoes on sale at Aerosoles. Trillwing's feet are going to be very, very happy starting tomorrow.
2. My "little" sister is a fabulous writer. When I asked her how she's doing this week, she sent me a copy of an e-mail in which she vented her righteous indignation over a lousy, expensive seminar she was required to attend for continued certification in her field. She's always been articulate, but the terrific, biting prose is new to me. She told me she writes best when she's angry. Funny--that's when I'm most articulate, too--when I'm filled with indignation about something.
I first noticed this phenomenon my junior year of high school, when my physics teacher tossed our midterms at us (literally, into the air over our lab tables) and yelled at us for failing to perform well on them. He told us we'd all be sleeping on park benches one day and then promptly locked himself in the little office/storage room behind his classroom. That evening, I reported this behavior to my schoolteacher parents. Dad called and left a message for Mr. BadTeacher. The next day, in an obvious attempt to embarrass me and thus head off any parent-teacher headbutting that might result in disciplinary action for him, Mr. BadTeacher waited for the crowded classroom to quiet down and then asked, "Trillwing, what did your dad want to talk to me about?" All students' eyes turned to where I was sitting in the back of the class. This, of course, was the ideal position from which to project my voice so that everyone could hear what I was about to say. Since I hadn't uttered a word to Mr. BT during the entire semester (I suck at math and so wasn't an eager student), you can imagine his surprise when I announced that my father had concerns about his pedagogy, that we didn't think flinging exams at students was either professional or fruitful, that we believed this was just the latest in a series of such incidents, and that Dad would like to discuss the situation--as well as my (lack of) progress in the class--with Mr. BadTeacher. Had Mr. BT considered even for a moment, I asked, that if every student in the class scored a C- or lower on an objective test, he might not have prepared us adequately to answer the questions? (Many smirks from my fellow students.)
Mr. BadTeacher called my father that very afternoon, explaining to my dad that he found me "surprisingly articulate." He also mentioned that I was lucky to be in sixth-period physics because the students in seventh period were "braindead." (Um, yeah. . . High school students who take a physics elective are positively comatose. And, I must add, Mr. BT said this to my father, who taught kids with real learning disabilities.) I recently learned that Mr. BadTeacher, who moved on to teaching elsewhere shortly after my stint in his classroom, lost his credential over untoward affairs with underage female students. (Is it wrong for me, as a feminist, to gain some satisfaction from these events? Trillwing, who is otherwise endlessly forgiving, has a tiny vengeful streak.)
Anyway, I wonder where Sis and I get this sudden, er, facility of expression when we're pissed off. Certainly not from Mom and Dad, who don't joust verbally (except with one another).
3. A little bit of mommy/photoblogging:
New toy exploration by the little guy. Note the classic pincer grasp, which the American Academy of Pediatrics manual tells me is a milestone for 8- to 12-month-olds, and Lucas is but a wee five-month-old. (I'm such a proud mommy).
Lucas, who has on the whole been a pretty happy-go-lucky baby, has learned to show his anger and frustration with, well, just about everything. Here he decides he's had enough of (a) his new highchair and (b) those plastic stacking doughnut thingies:
Awwwwww. . .
The Lion, Lucas, and Mr. Trillwing on Monochromatic Clothing Day:
4. I hope you all enjoy your Valentine's Day. . . As a friend of mine penned on her Valentine's Day cards for her classmates at the all-female Immaculate Conception Academy, "Happy VD!"
Other random thoughts:
1. I went shopping today and bought my first nice (i.e., not Target-brand) clothes since fall 2004 (pre-pregnancy). Of course, the way the clothes fit isn't at all what I'm used to--I'm in a not-so-fun size right now, that netherworld between maternity clothes with elastic belly bands and did-I-really-used-to-be-a-size-10? I know the weight will come off eventually (but oh, how aggravatingly slowly!), so it pains me to shop at nice department stores knowing that the clothes won't last me more than a season or two. But I had Macy's gift cards from two Christmases (last year's didn't get spent because my local Macy's didn't have maternity sections), so the eight pieces I bought today cost me nothing at all, and I have some gift card $$$ left over. Yay!
And bonus: I bought not one, not two, but THREE pairs of shoes on sale at Aerosoles. Trillwing's feet are going to be very, very happy starting tomorrow.
2. My "little" sister is a fabulous writer. When I asked her how she's doing this week, she sent me a copy of an e-mail in which she vented her righteous indignation over a lousy, expensive seminar she was required to attend for continued certification in her field. She's always been articulate, but the terrific, biting prose is new to me. She told me she writes best when she's angry. Funny--that's when I'm most articulate, too--when I'm filled with indignation about something.
I first noticed this phenomenon my junior year of high school, when my physics teacher tossed our midterms at us (literally, into the air over our lab tables) and yelled at us for failing to perform well on them. He told us we'd all be sleeping on park benches one day and then promptly locked himself in the little office/storage room behind his classroom. That evening, I reported this behavior to my schoolteacher parents. Dad called and left a message for Mr. BadTeacher. The next day, in an obvious attempt to embarrass me and thus head off any parent-teacher headbutting that might result in disciplinary action for him, Mr. BadTeacher waited for the crowded classroom to quiet down and then asked, "Trillwing, what did your dad want to talk to me about?" All students' eyes turned to where I was sitting in the back of the class. This, of course, was the ideal position from which to project my voice so that everyone could hear what I was about to say. Since I hadn't uttered a word to Mr. BT during the entire semester (I suck at math and so wasn't an eager student), you can imagine his surprise when I announced that my father had concerns about his pedagogy, that we didn't think flinging exams at students was either professional or fruitful, that we believed this was just the latest in a series of such incidents, and that Dad would like to discuss the situation--as well as my (lack of) progress in the class--with Mr. BadTeacher. Had Mr. BT considered even for a moment, I asked, that if every student in the class scored a C- or lower on an objective test, he might not have prepared us adequately to answer the questions? (Many smirks from my fellow students.)
Mr. BadTeacher called my father that very afternoon, explaining to my dad that he found me "surprisingly articulate." He also mentioned that I was lucky to be in sixth-period physics because the students in seventh period were "braindead." (Um, yeah. . . High school students who take a physics elective are positively comatose. And, I must add, Mr. BT said this to my father, who taught kids with real learning disabilities.) I recently learned that Mr. BadTeacher, who moved on to teaching elsewhere shortly after my stint in his classroom, lost his credential over untoward affairs with underage female students. (Is it wrong for me, as a feminist, to gain some satisfaction from these events? Trillwing, who is otherwise endlessly forgiving, has a tiny vengeful streak.)
Anyway, I wonder where Sis and I get this sudden, er, facility of expression when we're pissed off. Certainly not from Mom and Dad, who don't joust verbally (except with one another).
3. A little bit of mommy/photoblogging:
New toy exploration by the little guy. Note the classic pincer grasp, which the American Academy of Pediatrics manual tells me is a milestone for 8- to 12-month-olds, and Lucas is but a wee five-month-old. (I'm such a proud mommy).
Lucas, who has on the whole been a pretty happy-go-lucky baby, has learned to show his anger and frustration with, well, just about everything. Here he decides he's had enough of (a) his new highchair and (b) those plastic stacking doughnut thingies:
Awwwwww. . .
The Lion, Lucas, and Mr. Trillwing on Monochromatic Clothing Day:
4. I hope you all enjoy your Valentine's Day. . . As a friend of mine penned on her Valentine's Day cards for her classmates at the all-female Immaculate Conception Academy, "Happy VD!"
Saturday, February 11, 2006
A few numbered thoughts from a messy mind
1. As seen at New Kid's, a personality quiz. I'm not listing the details of my results, which underscores my apparent (according to the test) paranoia. But I will share my "trait snapshot":
Likes large parties? Then why did Mr. Trillwing and I call the police on the raging kegger in the neighboring apartment complex last night? I tell you why: because, in Mr. Trillwing's words, we're old and boring. (By this standard, I turned old and boring at 22.)
Weird and assertive: a magical combination, I assure you!
I do, however, take issue with vain. That's just BS, and I *know* it's because I said I'm mildly into myself. *sigh*
2. As of this afternoon, I have a Creative Memories consultant. Does that make me a bad intellectual? Can I call it American studies participant-observation research? I'm not particularly enamored of the actual scrapbooking, but I'm fascinated by the aesthetic and culture of the whole affair. Lots of thoughts on this to come, I'm sure.
3. I've been unconsciously clenching my jaw for the past two weeks. Ouch.
4. I'm not really that fond of Babies R Us.
5. All of a sudden, my old freelance writing clients are coming out of the woodwork or are referring their friends to me. Normally I'd welcome the extra income, but why now?
6. Mr. Trillwing has been asked by his employer to add a sixth weekly newspaper to his already-full plate of five weeklies and two weekly news websites he designs (and by "designs," I mean "does just about everything but sell ads and run the presses"). She asked him how much he'd charge for this service, and he underbid. By an astonishing amount. I was sitting right there when he said the number into the phone's receiver, and I just about fainted. The number in my head was about 3x to 4x the amount he quoted her. He must really, really like his employer. He also admitted to me this afternoon that, when he owned a business fifteen years ago, he charged EIGHT TIMES what he quoted her for that kind of job. Fifteen years ago!
Mr. Trillwing is too nice. I'm not angry or upset, just amazed that he'd undersell himself like that, especially when he's already working at least six days a week.
7. I just printed out the 65 pages of TCTRTBC. I think I need to see them all to impose order on them. A faculty member holding a dissertation workshop once recommended taping all the pages of a chapter together into a long scroll or laying them all out on the floor and eyeballing them in order to discover. . .I don't know what. I'll let you know. (Don't worry--my scanning won't involve tape.)
messy, outgoing, open, self revealing, ambivalent about chaos, unpredictable, not good at saving money, social, likes large parties, likes to stand out, risk taker, quick to make friends, does not like to be alone, rash, fame seeking, sarcastic, craves attention, social chameleon, low self control, food lover, not rule conscious, weird, assertive, not a perfectionist, anti-authority, thrill seeker, vain, likes to fit in, reckless, emotionally sensitive, leisurely, trustingAmbivalent about chaos? I guess so, if that means "General apathy about dissertating."
Likes large parties? Then why did Mr. Trillwing and I call the police on the raging kegger in the neighboring apartment complex last night? I tell you why: because, in Mr. Trillwing's words, we're old and boring. (By this standard, I turned old and boring at 22.)
Weird and assertive: a magical combination, I assure you!
I do, however, take issue with vain. That's just BS, and I *know* it's because I said I'm mildly into myself. *sigh*
2. As of this afternoon, I have a Creative Memories consultant. Does that make me a bad intellectual? Can I call it American studies participant-observation research? I'm not particularly enamored of the actual scrapbooking, but I'm fascinated by the aesthetic and culture of the whole affair. Lots of thoughts on this to come, I'm sure.
3. I've been unconsciously clenching my jaw for the past two weeks. Ouch.
4. I'm not really that fond of Babies R Us.
5. All of a sudden, my old freelance writing clients are coming out of the woodwork or are referring their friends to me. Normally I'd welcome the extra income, but why now?
6. Mr. Trillwing has been asked by his employer to add a sixth weekly newspaper to his already-full plate of five weeklies and two weekly news websites he designs (and by "designs," I mean "does just about everything but sell ads and run the presses"). She asked him how much he'd charge for this service, and he underbid. By an astonishing amount. I was sitting right there when he said the number into the phone's receiver, and I just about fainted. The number in my head was about 3x to 4x the amount he quoted her. He must really, really like his employer. He also admitted to me this afternoon that, when he owned a business fifteen years ago, he charged EIGHT TIMES what he quoted her for that kind of job. Fifteen years ago!
Mr. Trillwing is too nice. I'm not angry or upset, just amazed that he'd undersell himself like that, especially when he's already working at least six days a week.
7. I just printed out the 65 pages of TCTRTBC. I think I need to see them all to impose order on them. A faculty member holding a dissertation workshop once recommended taping all the pages of a chapter together into a long scroll or laying them all out on the floor and eyeballing them in order to discover. . .I don't know what. I'll let you know. (Don't worry--my scanning won't involve tape.)
Friday, February 10, 2006
Argh. Argh argh. (Dissertation blues)
This is sooooo hard. I'm definitely firmly wedged between steps 6 and 7 of Professor Me's stages of dissertation hell—between, that is, "This project really sucks!" and "Am I ever going to be done with this stupid thing?" (Except I call it the "f**king thing" at this point.)
Damn this work is isolating. My cohort members, who constituted a pretty close-knit group while we were all still taking classes, are all also dissertating, but they each have their own personal challenges (much worse than mine) to deal with, so we're not communicating much with one another. A sampling: one is faced with having to return to his native country for at least two years, despite having found a life partner in the States, to fulfill the terms of a fellowship; another buried her father a little over a year ago and is now providing in-home hospice care to her mother; and yet another friend, a year ahead of me, just turned in a diss that nearly killed her long marriage and whose stress worsened a chronic condition so much that it's rendered her considerably less ambulatory.
I think about these challenges and realize it's really petty of me to complain about my own dissertating when I have such a fabulous situation in which to accomplish it (childcare shared with Mr. Trillwing, a 50% TAship that takes considerably fewer than 20 hours/week, Mr. Trillwing's income to purchase such luxuries as DSL and Netflix).
I'd join a dissertation reading group but in the past I've found I put a lot more into such groups than I take away, and I'm not ready to dedicate that kind of effort without getting considerable in return. Selfish? Yes. Practical? Also yes.
My fantastic adviser, who has always been a terrific sounding board for all things academic and personal, has become swamped with responsibilities (other students discovered her, the bastards, and now I must share her) and has also begun commuting this year, so she's less available than she has been in the past. I do give her credit for helping me to completely revamp the chapter's organization in ways that are proving fruitful. And her comments, while sometimes discouraging, do mark my progress. For example, among more constructive criticisms, her frustrated comments on an earlier draft of the first part of The Chapter that Refuses to be Completed (TCTRTBC) included such gems as "yuck" and "Oh, trillwing, don't do this," but the latest round features such encouragement as "At this rate, you'll get a contract with Duke!" (Duke University Press, are you listening? I give you linky goodness, you give me a book contract, 'K?)
Mr. Trillwing is a dear and a constant emotional support, but we don't really discuss the diss because I'm afraid when I bring it up I sound to him like the adult voices in Peanuts TV specials: Mwah-mwah-MWAH-mwah. And besides, I haven't been the best spouse, procrastinating as I have on reading his sexy, action-packed, 900-page screenplay-opus on the 18th Dynasty of ancient Egypt, as fascinating as it is. (Honey? I promise to finish reading it shortly after I turn in the diss. It's just too damn good and I get discouraged. Seriously. I mean, you're brilliant with your high school diploma and autodidactism, and here I am with an almost-Ph.D. and years of experience as a writer and editor, yet I can't write a paragraph without evoking an occasional "yuck" from Fantastic Adviser and a zillionfyucks from Inner Critic.)
I find the academic blogosphere cheering on most days, but it's also a too-tempting source of procrastination for trillwing, who has occasionally taken to referring to herself in the third person when she's feeling ashamed of her recent lack of progress. Seriously, the expert Queen of West Procrastination has nothing on me, despite her claim to the heavyweight title.
For TCTRTBC, I blame in large part my archival sources, all 125+ of them congregated so far in the footnotes. They're handwritten. They're too numerous. They're bad photocopies. They're oblique and too open to poor interpretation and trillwing's flights of feminist fancy. They cover too much time (1880s-1950s) for there ever to be one nice, clean argument that can be made about them. (Yes, I'm tackling too much at once.)
Aside from the fact that I'm sick of bringing in a teeny tiny "salary" as a TA, I have little extrinsic motivation to finish grad school, since this year's academic job search has been, shall we say, considerably less than successful. By which I mean not. a. single. nibble. It's hard to continue work that no one else seems to find meaningful.
Thank goodness for antidepressants, eh? (Five years and counting! Yay me.)
Don't worry, bloggy friends. Soon we'll return to your regularly scheduled cheery trillwing. Until then, this is defeated trillwing, signing off. . .
Damn this work is isolating. My cohort members, who constituted a pretty close-knit group while we were all still taking classes, are all also dissertating, but they each have their own personal challenges (much worse than mine) to deal with, so we're not communicating much with one another. A sampling: one is faced with having to return to his native country for at least two years, despite having found a life partner in the States, to fulfill the terms of a fellowship; another buried her father a little over a year ago and is now providing in-home hospice care to her mother; and yet another friend, a year ahead of me, just turned in a diss that nearly killed her long marriage and whose stress worsened a chronic condition so much that it's rendered her considerably less ambulatory.
I think about these challenges and realize it's really petty of me to complain about my own dissertating when I have such a fabulous situation in which to accomplish it (childcare shared with Mr. Trillwing, a 50% TAship that takes considerably fewer than 20 hours/week, Mr. Trillwing's income to purchase such luxuries as DSL and Netflix).
I'd join a dissertation reading group but in the past I've found I put a lot more into such groups than I take away, and I'm not ready to dedicate that kind of effort without getting considerable in return. Selfish? Yes. Practical? Also yes.
My fantastic adviser, who has always been a terrific sounding board for all things academic and personal, has become swamped with responsibilities (other students discovered her, the bastards, and now I must share her) and has also begun commuting this year, so she's less available than she has been in the past. I do give her credit for helping me to completely revamp the chapter's organization in ways that are proving fruitful. And her comments, while sometimes discouraging, do mark my progress. For example, among more constructive criticisms, her frustrated comments on an earlier draft of the first part of The Chapter that Refuses to be Completed (TCTRTBC) included such gems as "yuck" and "Oh, trillwing, don't do this," but the latest round features such encouragement as "At this rate, you'll get a contract with Duke!" (Duke University Press, are you listening? I give you linky goodness, you give me a book contract, 'K?)
Mr. Trillwing is a dear and a constant emotional support, but we don't really discuss the diss because I'm afraid when I bring it up I sound to him like the adult voices in Peanuts TV specials: Mwah-mwah-MWAH-mwah. And besides, I haven't been the best spouse, procrastinating as I have on reading his sexy, action-packed, 900-page screenplay-opus on the 18th Dynasty of ancient Egypt, as fascinating as it is. (Honey? I promise to finish reading it shortly after I turn in the diss. It's just too damn good and I get discouraged. Seriously. I mean, you're brilliant with your high school diploma and autodidactism, and here I am with an almost-Ph.D. and years of experience as a writer and editor, yet I can't write a paragraph without evoking an occasional "yuck" from Fantastic Adviser and a zillion
I find the academic blogosphere cheering on most days, but it's also a too-tempting source of procrastination for trillwing, who has occasionally taken to referring to herself in the third person when she's feeling ashamed of her recent lack of progress. Seriously, the expert Queen of West Procrastination has nothing on me, despite her claim to the heavyweight title.
For TCTRTBC, I blame in large part my archival sources, all 125+ of them congregated so far in the footnotes. They're handwritten. They're too numerous. They're bad photocopies. They're oblique and too open to poor interpretation and trillwing's flights of feminist fancy. They cover too much time (1880s-1950s) for there ever to be one nice, clean argument that can be made about them. (Yes, I'm tackling too much at once.)
Aside from the fact that I'm sick of bringing in a teeny tiny "salary" as a TA, I have little extrinsic motivation to finish grad school, since this year's academic job search has been, shall we say, considerably less than successful. By which I mean not. a. single. nibble. It's hard to continue work that no one else seems to find meaningful.
Thank goodness for antidepressants, eh? (Five years and counting! Yay me.)
Don't worry, bloggy friends. Soon we'll return to your regularly scheduled cheery trillwing. Until then, this is defeated trillwing, signing off. . .
I <3 Lost
Did anyone else notice Locke flipping through The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge? I remember reading that in seventh grade. I wonder if it's a red herring or if it has something to do with the warping of time to which Hurley alluded at the end of this week's episode.
Anyway. . . I guess I'm this dude:
You scored as Locke. You're Locke! People underestimate you, but you know you can do anything you want to. You hate limits being put on your life - you don't like it when people don't believe in you.
Locke 63%
Hurley 56%
Michael 56%
Jack 56%
Shannon 38%
Sun 38%
Claire 31%
Charlie 25%
Sawyer 25%
Jin 19%
Kate 19%
Boone 6%
Sayid 0%
The best of all? Sayid is my favorite character. Opposites attract, right? ;)
Who is your Lost alter ego? (As seen at Cheeky Prof.)
Anyway. . . I guess I'm this dude:
You scored as Locke. You're Locke! People underestimate you, but you know you can do anything you want to. You hate limits being put on your life - you don't like it when people don't believe in you.
Locke 63%
Hurley 56%
Michael 56%
Jack 56%
Shannon 38%
Sun 38%
Claire 31%
Charlie 25%
Sawyer 25%
Jin 19%
Kate 19%
Boone 6%
Sayid 0%
The best of all? Sayid is my favorite character. Opposites attract, right? ;)
Who is your Lost alter ego? (As seen at Cheeky Prof.)
Thursday, February 09, 2006
Reading meme
Because everyone else is doing it. Seen most recently at Aspiring Academic.
Instructions: Bold the books you have read. Italicise the books you might read. Cross out the books you probably won't read. Underline the books you have on your shelf to read or have started reading. Pass it on.
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (yuck!)
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J. K. Rowling
Life of Pi - Yann Martel (highly recommended!)
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien (though I might read it to Lucas someday)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
1984 - George Orwell (shameful, I know!)
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - J. K. Rowling
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut (I like the other Vonnegut I've read, and I have his A Man without a Country on my shelf right now.)
Angels and Demons - Dan Brown
Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë (tried it awhile ago, and couldn't get into it; I should revisit it)
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
American Gods - Neil Gaiman
Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C. S. Lewis
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
Good Omens - Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman
Atonement - Ian McEwan
The Shadow Of The Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood (a longtime favorite, and a terrific book to teach)
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Dune - Frank Herbert
Bonus recommendations:
My Year of Meats - Ruth Ozeki (highly recommended!)
All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren (lovely prose from a poet)
Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse - Louise Erdrich (a terrific novel!)
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf (one of her best)
Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow (especially neat if you know anything about the Progressive era in the US)
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal - Christopher Moore (a very fun read)
Instructions: Bold the books you have read. Italicise the books you might read. Cross out the books you probably won't read. Underline the books you have on your shelf to read or have started reading. Pass it on.
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (yuck!)
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Life of Pi - Yann Martel (highly recommended!)
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
1984 - George Orwell (shameful, I know!)
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut (I like the other Vonnegut I've read, and I have his A Man without a Country on my shelf right now.)
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë (tried it awhile ago, and couldn't get into it; I should revisit it)
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
American Gods - Neil Gaiman
Ender's Game - Orson Scott Card
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
Good Omens - Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman
Atonement - Ian McEwan
The Shadow Of The Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafón
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood (a longtime favorite, and a terrific book to teach)
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Bonus recommendations:
My Year of Meats - Ruth Ozeki (highly recommended!)
All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren (lovely prose from a poet)
Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse - Louise Erdrich (a terrific novel!)
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf (one of her best)
Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow (especially neat if you know anything about the Progressive era in the US)
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal - Christopher Moore (a very fun read)
Friday Poetry Blogging
Here's the first poem I wrote as a creative writing grad student way back in 1997. The assignment was to craft a poem that concerned names or naming.
Kingdom
on Carl von Linné
I.
A bird turns in a man’s pale hands.
It is ruffled from handling, its feathers
still clotted with dust and blood.
Candlelight. The glint of ink,
scritch of nib against paper.
Carolus Linnaeus knows the mind of God;
he writes a vast unspoken Latin mass.
Kingdom, class, order, genus, species:
bits of life mounted, labelled,
preserved like Bibles under glass.
II.
In the Museum of Natural History,
species rattle through the sunlit halls:
Tyrannosaurus, Eohippus,
Canis dirus, Corpus christi.
Bones mingle with brown plaster casts.
Linnaeus stoops before a plaque,
squints: Barosaurus.
Lines like a basilica’s draw his eyes
up a neck improbably long;
the lizard rears like the old man’s mind.
He watches the believing world pass by—
fathers expounding heretic theories,
mispronouncing the names
to attentive waist-high daughters.
He sighs. Contented their gazes yet rise,
he notes that, faced with old bones
and all their fleshless spaces,
we resort to his language of praise,
those Latinate names grasping
(pterodactylus—a wing, a finger)
at what little we know.
Kingdom
on Carl von Linné
I.
A bird turns in a man’s pale hands.
It is ruffled from handling, its feathers
still clotted with dust and blood.
Candlelight. The glint of ink,
scritch of nib against paper.
Carolus Linnaeus knows the mind of God;
he writes a vast unspoken Latin mass.
Kingdom, class, order, genus, species:
bits of life mounted, labelled,
preserved like Bibles under glass.
II.
In the Museum of Natural History,
species rattle through the sunlit halls:
Tyrannosaurus, Eohippus,
Canis dirus, Corpus christi.
Bones mingle with brown plaster casts.
Linnaeus stoops before a plaque,
squints: Barosaurus.
Lines like a basilica’s draw his eyes
up a neck improbably long;
the lizard rears like the old man’s mind.
He watches the believing world pass by—
fathers expounding heretic theories,
mispronouncing the names
to attentive waist-high daughters.
He sighs. Contented their gazes yet rise,
he notes that, faced with old bones
and all their fleshless spaces,
we resort to his language of praise,
those Latinate names grasping
(pterodactylus—a wing, a finger)
at what little we know.
Fun with Lucas
(Warning: Mommyblogging about cute infant milestones ahead. Read at risk of rolling your eyes.)
All he wants to do these days is eat, eat, eat. Last night we moved him up to the bigger bottles, which increases by 50% the amount of formula he gets each day, and he's been nursing more enthusiastically, too. We started him on "solid" food this week (organic rice cereal), and at his first feeding he grabbed the spoon and tried to shovel the stuff into his mouth. After five feedings, we're at the point where almost all of the pablum goes down the gullet, and he's leaning forward and grunting for more, more, more!
So we're using this renewed interest in food to our advantage to solve the poop problem (Lucas is, er, anal retentive). We've tried again and again to get him to drink diluted prune juice, but he'll only swallow a few milliliters. However, he's become quite keen on holding his own bottle. So. . . tonight I gave him a bottle that contained 4 oz. of watered-down prune juice and watched with delight as he fought between his desire to feed himself from the bottle and his extreme displeasure with the taste of the juice. And he. drank. the. entire. bottle. W00t! (I can't believe the things that bring me joy these days. . .)
That was course two of a four-part meal; in a single hour, he consumed rice cereal, breast milk, prune juice, and formula. Can you say "growth spurt"?
Last night while I was crafting my posts for BlogHer, Lucas was sitting next to me in his aquarium bouncer (best baby distraction ever). Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed he was squirming a bit, but until I turned to check on him, I had no idea he had done this:
Well, there's another pillar of our childrearing technique that's jumped the shark--following the playgym that recently became The Pitch Pit.
Lucas is also into grabbing at our faces. Today he tried to rake out my eyes. Yesterday Mr. Trillwing was treated to some baby love:
Finally, Mr. Trillwing had a tough time getting work done today because Lucas has returned to his advocacy of attachment parenting and high-touch babyrearing. When I returned home from teaching, I encountered this scene. It says "Daddy's had a rough day" all over it:
All he wants to do these days is eat, eat, eat. Last night we moved him up to the bigger bottles, which increases by 50% the amount of formula he gets each day, and he's been nursing more enthusiastically, too. We started him on "solid" food this week (organic rice cereal), and at his first feeding he grabbed the spoon and tried to shovel the stuff into his mouth. After five feedings, we're at the point where almost all of the pablum goes down the gullet, and he's leaning forward and grunting for more, more, more!
So we're using this renewed interest in food to our advantage to solve the poop problem (Lucas is, er, anal retentive). We've tried again and again to get him to drink diluted prune juice, but he'll only swallow a few milliliters. However, he's become quite keen on holding his own bottle. So. . . tonight I gave him a bottle that contained 4 oz. of watered-down prune juice and watched with delight as he fought between his desire to feed himself from the bottle and his extreme displeasure with the taste of the juice. And he. drank. the. entire. bottle. W00t! (I can't believe the things that bring me joy these days. . .)
That was course two of a four-part meal; in a single hour, he consumed rice cereal, breast milk, prune juice, and formula. Can you say "growth spurt"?
Last night while I was crafting my posts for BlogHer, Lucas was sitting next to me in his aquarium bouncer (best baby distraction ever). Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed he was squirming a bit, but until I turned to check on him, I had no idea he had done this:
Well, there's another pillar of our childrearing technique that's jumped the shark--following the playgym that recently became The Pitch Pit.
Lucas is also into grabbing at our faces. Today he tried to rake out my eyes. Yesterday Mr. Trillwing was treated to some baby love:
Finally, Mr. Trillwing had a tough time getting work done today because Lucas has returned to his advocacy of attachment parenting and high-touch babyrearing. When I returned home from teaching, I encountered this scene. It says "Daddy's had a rough day" all over it:
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