One Tough vonCookie

voncookie | January 31, 2008

Didn’t get it, ah well. Hey, at least that means I can stay snug as a bug in a rug in my lovely apartment for another year. Every cloud has a hardwood-floored, large-windowed lining. Still…. damn.

Category: A Cookie's Life, Educating Cookie | 2 Comments »
Tags: fellowships

voncookie | January 31, 2008

So, today is the day that I find out about Big Prestigious International Fellowship—not whether I got it or not, but whether I’ve been passed on to the next round, at which point I will have a 50/50 chance or greater of being recommended by the host country. And then will come a wealth of [...]

Category: A Cookie's Life, Educating Cookie | 1 Comment »
Tags: fellowships

voncookie | January 31, 2008

I went to bed too early in anticipation of an early morning (I’m subbing for a friend’s 8 a.m. class for just four days, but it’s killing me nonetheless) and now I’m awake, doing the “If I fall asleep now, I’ll get seven hours of sleep… But if I fall asleep now, I’ll get six [...]

Category: A Cookie's Life, La Tesis, Sleep of the Damned | No Comments »
Tags: dissertation, insomnia, poetry

voncookie | January 26, 2008

I am now perfectly convinced that these surveys, floating around the internet, really are phishing trips, as something turned up in my stats as a Google search that said “‘where were you born’+ ‘diamonds or pearls’ + phishing”. My paranoias have been confirmed and I now say: watch out! It’s all fun and games until [...]

Category: A Cookie's Life, Memes | 1 Comment »
Tags: surveys

voncookie | January 25, 2008

Beautiful orange on the radar, wet wet mess below the clouds. But here’s the satellite image, just so you know what we’re going through out here at the Hotel California.

Category: Mother Nature | No Comments »
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voncookie | January 25, 2008

My body decided it wanted to be awake at 4 a.m. I tried to go back to sleep; alas, my body would not let me. So I got up and did things I needed to do, like pay bills and finish grant applications and update my students’ website and write necessary emails to necessary people. [...]

Category: A Cookie's Life, Health Matters | No Comments »
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voncookie | January 24, 2008

1) Teaching = Piece of Cake, 5 days a week, 3 hours per day for prep/classroom time 2) Dissertation, where n = number of original chapters, n + 1 = 7 over t, where t = time left until MLA, or 11 months. (::Ack::) 6 weeks per chapter, putting in 4-7 hours/day. 3) Lit Mag [...]

Category: A Cookie's Life | No Comments »
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voncookie | January 22, 2008

I have to go teach my first class of the semester—usually pretty simple the first day—going over the syllabus, class policies, drop policies, waitlist policies, grading policies, policies, policies, policies…. Usually on the first day I feel all “butterfly-ish”, as Evil Exbf wrote in a poem composed in the 4th grade. But today, no. Today… [...]

Category: Teach It | No Comments »
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voncookie | January 21, 2008

If you’ll permit me a moment to express some concern about my State of the Noggin as it pertains to the Diss… A few Random Bullets of Content: I keep restructuring my dissertation. It always makes sense to me at the time. The Overlords always make me see that it is never so simple as [...]

Category: La Tesis, State of the Noggin | 5 Comments »
Tags: dissertation, writing

voncookie | January 19, 2008

Last night, at the SF Symphony, we saw an intriguing program, comprised of Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 2, Xenakis’ A L’Île de Gorée, and Schubert’s Symphony in C Major D. 944, The Great. Sometimes, when listening to great music in a large collective setting, my brain sets off on flights of fancy that are occasionally [...]

Category: Entertain Me, Music and the Mirror, Rabid Intellectualism | No Comments »
Tags: avant-garde, dissertation, music

voncookie | January 18, 2008

It is going to have to be a very political semester, I feel, as I step out of my lovely 8 months free of teaching responsibilities and into what promises to be a very different way of doing things. … A little back-story… When I came to Big University in the early ’00s and given [...]

Category: Educating Cookie, Teach It | 1 Comment »
Tags: grad school, teaching

voncookie | January 16, 2008

Tonight I watched a film adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s 1934 play Yerma, and all I can really say is: ¡Ay! (And not in a good way…) Yerma is part of the Rural Trilogy, comprised of Bodas de Sangre (1932), Yerma, and La casa de Bernarda Alba (1935) (about which I wrote an entry last [...]

Category: Entertain Me, Literature | No Comments »
Tags: film, Literature, Lorca

voncookie | January 16, 2008

Category: A Cookie's Life, Mother Nature, Take a Picture | No Comments »
Tags: half moon bay, pix, travel

voncookie | January 16, 2008

I can think of no better afternoon than hanging out with great friends in one of the prettiest ocean towns that I know of, Half Moon Bay, just a dozen or so miles south of San Francisco. We had yummy food, window shopped on Main Street (the yarn shop was closed, which we took as [...]

Category: A Cookie's Life | 1 Comment »
Tags: half moon bay, life

voncookie | January 15, 2008

As I was walking to the coffeehouse this morning, it was so foggy that I couldn’t see but two blocks ahead of me, and the light from the traffic signals was all haloed and misty. I couldn’t even see the light emanating from the coffeehouse door, as I usually can when it is 6:30 in [...]

Category: A Cookie's Life | No Comments »
Tags: life