A bad sign

I try to unlock my house with the key to my office. Repeatedly. And no, they don't look the same. Sometimes when it doesn't work, I try the key to my building.

Happiness for $10 or less

Their title, not mine. Good wine even a grad student can afford

Autumn

It's fall. Not just because the equinox was yesterday, but because the other day, as I was dozing on the couch in the middle of Friedrich Schlegel's Lucinde (on the nap-inducing aesthetic of universal poetry and the religion of love) a flock of geese woke me up with what sounded like a heated argument about which way was south.
Also, the leaves are turning, you can get apples but not much else at the farmer's market, I have to write my first grad school paper, swimsuits are on clearance, and we're having tornadoes.

Discursive violence

At Macalester (where I got my B.A.), we did a lot of textual analysis. Hegemony this, postmodernism that, blah blah. But here in grad school, we're not just analyzing texts. People here do textual interrogation. The bright light/Miranda rights/see-through mirror kind of interrogation? Or are we talking about strapping Marx to a chair and putting out cigarettes on his arms and breaking his fingers?

I know, I know...

Not the most creative title in the world. But hey, at least I have a blog going. I let the Berlin one die a quiet death, partly out of laziness and partly because I was going to be able to do a good job of keeping in touch with everyone without a blog.

Obviously I was mistaken. The books have sucked me in.

The guilt and shame (and Emma's glowing example) are working their magic. Now, I'm not promising frequent or particularly interesting (for anyone outside my program) posts, but let's face it: you need a distraction and I need a way to procrastinate.

Plot synopsis: I'm at UMN in the German track M.A./Ph.D. program. If all goes according to plan, I'll be done in about 6 years (312 weeks). Three down, 309 to go.
Week #1: Eeek. Classes cancelled, schedule changed, don't know anything, strike, bomb threat, 200 pages of Turkish homework. Lost all the time.
Week #2: Umm. Still don't know anything, including how to work the treadmill at the gym, the translation of Middle High German (MHG) suenne, the significance of the fact that Weber's definitions of class, status group, and political movement were published posthumously, or Turkish. On the upside, lost only occasionally.
Week #3: Better. Strike is still going, still lost every other day, still don't speak Turkish. But: made a relevant point or two about Schiller, not the worst student in MHG, got snacks to keep in my desk, went to the gym without hurting or embarrassing myself, and stayed on top of my reading.
Coming soon: profound insights into graduate school, office-sharing, public transportation, and other fascinating topics. At least you'll know I'm alive!