Arctic Blast

Remember the other day, when I stayed home because it was -17 when I got up? Today it is -22, again, three hours after I got up. The weather people keep calling this an "arctic blast" and then laughing in that smug, fake-sympathetic way, as if they could bring warmer air if they felt like it, but they know what's good for us, and it's this cold. It's hung around long enough that they've exhausted their tiny vocabularies (arctic, frigid, and bitter cold) and also their usefulness.
There has been some news of "weather rage." It's only human, though, to get kind of cranky when you can't go outside for more than two minutes without getting frostbite. I went out with the dogs and my teeth had goosebumps.
Aside from the weather people, my short temper is directed at those who are dumb about the cold. I recognize that it is irrational and unproductive, but I get annoyed at the girl waiting for a bus with me in SUBZERO temperatures who was not only too vain/fashionable to wear a hat, but had no gloves, no scarf, and only a pair of strappy, open-toed high heels (no socks) on her feet. If it had been warm enough to move my scarf off of my face to speak, I would have verbalized what was going loudly through my head: really? REALLY?!? WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!? That was the other day. Now that it's dipping to -24 and lower at night, some of our pipes are freezing, and my irritability is directed at the former owner of this house, who thought it was a bright idea to run water pipes to the upstairs bathroom by way of the UNHEATED BACK PORCH. Luckily, nothing has burst, and we've managed to thaw them out again with a space heater, but it's still got me wandering around the house, unbathed, in my ratty wool sweater like a crazy woman muttering REALLY?!? WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?!? and scheming about rerouting the pipes myself. The crazy is exacerbated by the fact that I've been wearing the same outfit every day for about a week, occasionally accessorizing it with one slipper (I left the other one under the bed at the cabin) and mittens and a cocoa mustache, since tap water is frankly too cold to drink. Also by the fact that my skin has had it with this weather - it's trying to secede from my body and escape to warmer climes, and refuses to stop cracking and bleeding and peeling and itching no matter how much lotion I put on it or how much cocoa I drink. I also just finished Northern Lights by Tim O'Brien, which involves some people getting lost in a blizzard in MN and nearly freezing/starving to death. I thought I had snapped when I spotted a midget sneaking around our house yesterday, but I'm pretty sure it was just the meter-reader.
Cross your fingers for me and hope that it warms up before I lose it completely.

Snow Day

I'm home with the dogs today because a) even though I have Things To Do, there are no meetings which require my presence at the office today and school's not the boss of me; c) it snowed 5 inches yesterday and they still haven't plowed; and b) when I got up this morning to let the dogs out, it was COLD. I don't know exactly how cold, but cold enough that Cricket only did one lap, peed, let out a single, half-hearted yelp at the neighbor coming out to start his car, and came back in without having to be called. For reference, she usually goes berserk whenever anyone in our neighborhood so much as shows their face before sunrise. This is the procedure for getting her to come in: 1) whistle from the porch, 2) call from the porch, 3) whistle in a more insistent tone, 4) call her from the deck, 5) stomp out into the yard where she can see you and call her again while clapping, 6) stomp over to her, calling and clapping, 7) chase her around the yard as she playfully frolicks through the snowdrifts with a huge piece of frozen poop dangling from her mouth. So when she came back in without any of that, I knew it was bad out. An hour later, it had warmed up to -17. As evidenced at left, it's still cold out.
Since I don't have to go outside today, I'm kind of enjoying it. This is real winter. We're supposed to have this kind of winter: it's Minnesota! Of course, I also feel a teensy bit of schadenfreude toward those hysterical Minnesotans who meant to to California or something. They are very confused by the snow, and seem to think they'll make it go away through vigorously bad driving, inappropriate winter dress, and exclamations of bafflement and woe ("It's cold?! But a hat will ruin my hair! Oh, it's cold! Oh, it's so cold that even my Uggs won't keep my feet warm! Someone should really do something about this weather. This must be the beginning of the next ice age! Woops, was that my turn?" *slams on brakes, fishtails, nearly hits pedestrian).
So I'm staying home, away from them and out of the cold. It's all I can do to keep myself from curling up on the couch right now with a book and some cocoa - like I said, I have Things To Do. Lesson planning, proposal writing, laundry. We got the wallpaper off the dining room walls over the weekend (so easy! and no, we didn't just smear them with bacon grease for Cricket) and it's already much better, but I'm hoping to get the walls cleaned up so we can patch and prime and paint this weekend. You can see the current state of the room to the left. It's the center of the first floor, kind of a focal point, so I'm having major color indecision (Rob, consider yourself warned). Bright or neutral? Rust? Burnt orange? Eggplant? Butter? (Why do so many of the colors I like have food names?) Le sigh. Suggestions? Extra points if you create an entire pallete we can eventually use to make our living room and kitchen also look stylish.

Happy New Year!

Aaaaah, 2009. Let's be frank. 2008 was not a great year (not really terrible, but still), and I'm not sorry to see it go. So far, 2009 looks better, but that might be because I'm still on official break. You can blame my optimism on that fact if you want, but by doing so, you will forfeit any right to complain about my lack of optimism later on.
I could bore you with my resolutions (I did make a few) or a recap of 2008, but instead, let's return to the time-honored tradition of Good News/Bad News for 2009 so far.
Good News: Despite ample opportunity (lots of trips, storms, and unusual foods), no disasters (yet).
Bad News: Still 357 days to go.
Good News: I am being much more productive during this break than I expected. I have several running lists filling up my new calendar (thanks, Cathy!) and I'm actually doing that stuff instead of reading the internet in my pjs every morning until midafternoon.
Bad News: Some of that productive energy has been misdirected to the kitchen, where we now have enough food to last until the apocalypse. I can't seem to remember that the two of us just don't eat enough food to justify a new, huge dish every single day, so our fridge is overflowing with my culinary ambitions/boredom (spinach lasagna, green chile enchiladas, minestrone soup, homeade applesauce, etc.)
Good News: Can't fit any more in there, so I'm holding off on making that pot roast, which has forced me to turn to other projects.
Bad News: First I ate the last Christmas cookie. Yes, it took us this long. No, I am not wearing pants with an elastic waistband.
Good News: Those other projects are going swimmingly. I got a wedding dress, and it cost less than our mortgage payment.
Bad News: I still need to get it tailored.
Good News: I rewired this lamp that I bought at Goodwill:
It's sideways, but I'm lazy. The point is, it works. Subpoints: I didn't electrocute myself, burn down the house, break the lamp, or have to call an electrician, all of which are major accomplishments considering that I haven't spent any time thinking about wiring or electrical currents since the 3rd grade potato battery project. This gives me confidence and also makes me accutely aware of the wiring problems in our house. Not a single light switch makes sense, some of the outlets are loose, and we'd like to replace a few of our light fixtures....
Bad News: I don't have an appropriate shade. Ten points if you send me one!
Good News: We also successfully completed our first joint plumbing project over the weekend, capping a supply line to the sink in what was once an upstairs kitchen, without hurting ourselves, flooding the basement, ruining our relationship, or having to call an emergency plumber. This lucky streak also extends to the Horrible, Terrible, No Good, Very Bad Wallpaper Situation. If you've visited, I've shown you the top layer of awful beige '70s-era wallpaper and the even worse bottom layer of bright green and yellow textured '40s-era wallpaper in our dining room and living room. One day, not too long ago, we came home and Cricket had eaten some of it. We would have been furious (what dog chews on walls?) except that she had managed to get it off completely, in the kind of way that you really only see on infomercials for cancer-causing wallpaper removal products that cost $85/bottle but come with a free scraper. She also loosened a bit, so we pulled, and an entire section came off, just like that! I'm tempted to just rub bacon grease on the remaining wallpaper and let her at it, but I don't want to set a precedent.
Bad News: It's hard to be serious about training a dog NOT to chew on the walls when you're so happy about it.
Good News: This means the wallpaper should be down soon, and we might even get to start painting before classes begin! Cue: delusions of interior decorating grandeur.
Bad News: It's a domino effect: once the wallpaper is down, we will debate color choices for the walls and the trim, which will lead to a discussion of whether to paint the crappy trip or just replace it, which will bring us to the ceiling and the light fixtures and remodeling the entire first floor.
Good News: By the time we finish that discussion, it will be spring, and we will forget about the inside of the house so we can play in the garden.

Another gem

Hey, now is my chance to make up for having written so little about my academic life this semester. This morning's struggle brought to you, as usual, by our pal Derrida:

An allegorical metonymy, too, which says something other than what is says and manifests the other in the open but nocturnal space of the agora - in its plus de lumiere: at once no more light, and greater light. It speaks the other and makes the other speak, for the other will have spoken first. It has no choice but to let the other speak, since it cannot make the other speak without the other having already spoken, without this trace of speech which comes from the other and which directs us to writing as much as to rhetoric. This trace results in speech always saying something other than what it says: it says the other who speaks "before" and "outside" it; it lets the other speak in the allegory. Whence the structure of the "rhetoric of temporality." But what defies the simple and "objective" logic of sets, what disrupts the simple inclusion of a part within the whole, is what recalls itself beyond interiorizing memory (Erinnerung), is what recalls itself to thought (Gedaechtnis) and thinks itself as a "part" which is greater than the "whole." It is the other as other, the non-totalizable trace which is in-adequate to itself and to the same.

I tried to cut it down, but then it makes even less sense....

I know...

Two posts in one day can only mean one thing: procrastination. But I'm lonely at my desk and my paper is still hard and I need to share this important bulletin from the front lines of what I think we are now calling postmodern deconstruction (Derrida, at any rate):

Already installed in the narcisssistic structure, the other so marks the self of the relationship to self, so conditions it that the being "in us" of bereaved memory becomes the coming of the other. And, however terrifying this thought may be, the first coming of the other.

That is all.

Death of the Author

You know what's hard? Writing about intransitive, authorless writing. Have you ever tried to write about writing? If you want a headache and writer's block, you should give it a try. If you just want the headache, I recommend reading Roland Barthes writing about how writing is performative (something where the action is the saying of it or its name - like how saying "I thee wed" when you get married makes you married, except that when you are writing you are working with syntax and grammar and meaning, unless you are a) Mr. Barthes, in which case your hand takes over and writes without you, which is clear BECAUSE YOUR TEXT MAKES NO SENSE, or b) me, writing "writing" over and over and getting NOWHERE.). See? Headache. And I haven't even told you about intransitive writing, or gotten you tangled up in memory and subjectivity and all that.
The good news? I'm already on page 3 of my 25 page term paper, and I think I can easily fill up 22 more pages repeating this simple formula over and over with different fancy and/or made-up words: How can this theory possibly make any sense at all? Then, in the end, I get to say that the questions it raises are beyond the scope of this paper, although I'm already tempted to end it by saying that I would write more, but it is my authorial duty to die.
The bad news? There are quite a few other things I could/should/would rather be doing right now, like baking cookies or reading a book that's not for school or cleaning the bathroom or Christmas shopping. More bad news: if I don't get this paper done by Tuesday, when I leave for Wyoming, you'll probably get a shot glass from a truck stop in South Dakota for Christmas. It's the thought that counts, right?
On the other hand, Christmas shopping usually requires that I a) leave the house and b) spend money, two things which I am not very interested in right now. For one thing, money is tight. As for leaving the house, there was a cold snap here on Sunday, followed by a bunch of snow, and even though the sun is out and it is all of 5 degrees, my boogers still froze when I went out to shovel this morning, and I think it's reasonable to expect that all those idiots who had the bright idea to buy Mini Coopers in August for the fuel efficiency are still out there, skidding to a halt in the middle of busy intersections while trying to make illegal U-turns and then just sitting there, through 3 stoplight changes, not moving, with that grim, blank "I-have-no-idea-what-all-that-honking-is-about" look on their faces, refusing to make eye contact with anyone or to move OUT OF THE INTERSECTION but hopefully remembering to count their blessings (1. My brakes work really well, 2. Minnesotans are too passive-aggressive to confront a stranger).
Now, doesn't that make my term paper seem more appealing? Yes, yes it does.

The trenches

It's that time in the semester that makes me refer to campus as "the trenches." It's a bad time (if you couldn't tell by my last post), one for slipping and nearly breaking my neck on icy sidewalks, for vitamin D deficiency, and for obligatory why-am-I-doing-this-to-myself anxiety. This is always accompanied by vivid fantasies of Other Things I Could Do, along with a very Eeyore-ish moping that I am utterly unqualified to do anything but this. This year's fantasy is a bookstore/coffee shop. I have already scanned a number of help-wanted ads on craigslist and established that no one in their right mind would hire me for anything. So I guess I'll stick around.
Things look grimmer than ever for academia, which has something to do with my fantasies. Funding at public institutions is getting slashed, there's a hiring freeze across the entire university, and there's so much infighting and competition for funding that many great ideas and projects never get off the ground. Meanwhile, I'm reading Derrida and Barthes and some other French guys (despite the fact that I'm in German Studies) who all write about the inability of language to convey meaning, authors to write literature, and literature to hold value.
BUT! This is so far my most humane finals period so far. Teaching has given me much better balance in my life, and while I'm worried about my finals, I'm more focused at the moment on getting my kids ready for theirs. I'm also writing a final paper which is both difficult and interesting (it's about memory, authorship, and trauma), AND is relevant to my long term research plans.
So I'm sitting on a vaguely uncomfortable office chair instead of a throne, wearing pretty worn-out clothes that I can't really afford to replace at the moment, instead of a drapey gown and tiara, and I only have a slowly dying laptop instead of a scribe monkey. Oh well. I'm pretty lucky to be here, instead of sitting in an even less comfortable chair in a cubicle somewhere, in pantyhose and high heels, typing expense reports on a machine running Windows 97. I guess I'll save the bookstore for when I really need it....