voncookie | December 30, 2007
Today everyone is leaving, the lobby here at Massive Ginormous Hotel is crammed with geeks and their suitcases, both very tweedy. I’ve slipped off my I.D. badge, and am now returning to my place as one of the masses, all set to find some chi-chi place for New Year’s festivities tomorrow. To recap: yesterday at [...]
voncookie | December 28, 2007
Talking with my cousin on the phone, I was saying how I didn’t feel like going a-conferencing today, that I just wanted to stay in the room and work on the Diss. I asked her, Is that bad? To want to stay in and work on my dissertation even though I’m here at the conference? [...]
voncookie | December 28, 2007
This hotel is just crammed with humanists—it’s very disconcerting, and yet kind of wonderful. It’s sort of like being with your extended family, and you’re all, of course, competing over a game of horseshoes, only here the competition is for jobs, recognition, peer evaluation… Some game of horseshoes this is! I had an interesting day [...]
voncookie | December 27, 2007
It has begun, the MLA. I got here yesterday, as you know, and it was relatively calm, not too many people milling about. Today it is Geek-Chic Central here at the Sheraton Hotel & Towers, Hyatt Regency, and the Fairmont Hotel. You can tell an MLA-attendee from a mile away… perhaps it’s the effete eyewear… [...]
voncookie | December 27, 2007
This sucks. This re-he-heally sucks. And it does *not* bode well for the future. The fact that “regularly scheduled programming” is continuing as usual on the major networks is pretty disquieting; I guess TV in general hasn’t really grasped that the assassination of a major politician on the world stage is a *little* more important [...]
voncookie | December 26, 2007
The above is my “K-Family Boxing Name”, something my cousin Colleen and I invented a few years ago when we realized there was enough tension in our family for a real Rumble in the (Suburban) Jungle. My constant need to have a drugstore nearby is (in)famous, and it’s only partially because I need a place [...]
voncookie | December 26, 2007
It’s 4:30 a.m., I’m up, I’m up!!! *Please* stop the voices playing “Reveille” in my head! (And please get “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” out of there, while you’re at it.) I’m off to the MLA, to the wintry steppes of Chicago, where it is indeed supposed to snow today. What’s more troublesome than [...]
voncookie | December 24, 2007
No, I’m not frustrated that WordPress won’t upload my picture of a Christmas Tree… No, I’m not completely appalled by the fact that my Knit-Along group (spelled Knit-a-Long, which prompts me to wonder, knit a long what?) has fired up my secular humanist tendencies when the organizer of the group went against her own rules [...]
voncookie | December 22, 2007
Dad and I went shopping in Union Square today, going from store to store, watching the people (like the over-dressed, stick-thin French girl in the red coat that couldn’t navigate the revolving door at Needless Markup—you enjoy that weak dollar, ma fille!) and barely tolerating the incessant, mediocre Christmas music being mainlined into every department [...]
voncookie | December 21, 2007
The author of The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva, Jennifer Radden, mentions in her introduction that, traditionally, the major characteristics of melancholy/melancholia have been noted as fear and sadness as a general tendency, a sort of personality quirk as it were, stemming from nothing in particular, thus “without cause” (p. 10). Well, isn’t [...]
voncookie | December 19, 2007
I’ve been asking myself, ever since I received a job announcement for an otherwise perfect academic position (with the exception of the fact that it really was located in East Jesus Nowhere) just how far I’d be willing to go for an academic job. I’ve been asking myself, “Really, vonCookie… REALLY… Would you relocate to [...]
voncookie | December 18, 2007
I’m currently reading a book titled “The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva“, and I was thinking about maybe opening up a discussion on Melancholy/Melancholia/Unipolar Depression/Bipolar Disorder, all those things that are still stigmatized (with terms like “batshit insane”, “the loony bin”, not to mention the tendency of crime-and-punishment type TV shows to exaggerate [...]
voncookie | December 17, 2007
As seen on “The View from the Bay” on ABC7 when they profiled Elephant Pharm (a Berkeley institution with branches Los Altos, San Rafael and Walnut Creek) this afternoon: A wonderful little reusable canvas shopping bag with the perfect slogan for your favorite environmentalist (who must also have a healthy appreciation of irony): The “What [...]
voncookie | December 17, 2007
My birthday felt like a lull between storms, kinda like it was on the East Coast where Saturday actually was a lull between storms, the icy, snowy kind. My internal storminess was as intense as your average Nor’Easter, and when that happens, it scares the hell out of me. My depressions are not to be [...]
voncookie | December 15, 2007
I’d like to thank everyone who made turning 32 so pleasant today—those with whom I dined and chatted and saw perform. And to my lovely bed with its two comforters for providing me with the most delicious afternoon nap that was nearly as good as other pleasures that shall remain nameless. Let’s hope that this [...]
