voncookie | September 29, 2009
I’ve been absent again. My bad. But I have a good excuse, one that I really, really wish I didn’t have. So, while innocently checking my bibliography on Tuesday morning after starting the rewrite, I discovered an article… written in 2006… whose premise is uncannily like to my own research. DOWNRIGHT SPOOKY. This would be [...]
voncookie | September 22, 2009
11:39 pm Benchmark vs. landmark vs. watershed — which term do you think carries more weight when one wants to say “significant”? Or should one just say “significant”? I’m back to writing. Damn this is hard. It is SO good to be back. I wish, though, that I were still on fellowship, dammit, because it’s [...]
voncookie | September 20, 2009
Depression is one thing. It seeps into you and then you carry it with you everywhere, leaving an oozy trail of sadness and/or indifference behind you wherever you may go. People stop to ask you what’s wrong and you shrug, you shrug so much and say “I dunno” enough times that people stop asking after [...]
voncookie | September 19, 2009
My ritual has been disrupted, but I don’t mind this time for some reason. Every Saturday I relax and listen to Weekend Edition and Car Talk (I used to listen to “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”, but, much to my surprise, I have no sense of humor when it comes to current politics– it was [...]
voncookie | September 18, 2009
I’ve signed up for another 4 weeks of climbing the Academic Ladder at academicladderwriting.com. For those of you who aren’t acquainted with Academic Ladder, it’s an online support group that encourages you to write every day, and has your back if you fall a little short of your own writing expectations. I have “met” some [...]
voncookie | September 17, 2009
Oh, it has begun, and how! I am writing my first postdoc application, due, well, practically yesterday. I feel like I have committed about a million faux pas in asking for letters of rec already. Damn. And if I’m not mistaken, my hair is already falling out thanks to the cumulative stress in my life [...]
voncookie | September 15, 2009
I think I’ve finally nailed it: what it takes for me to be on top of things in the classroom. And I learned it from a Medieval text that we’re about to study tomorrow and Friday in class… “Lo que sucedió a un mozo que casó con una muchacha de muy mal carácter”… Or, en [...]
voncookie | September 15, 2009
That’s how many jobs were listed today in my field as the opening bell rang on hiring season for the Big Scary Convention people. By the time I culled the list, I had about 24 potential jobs and/or postdocs on my list. To put this in perspective, as one person pointed out to me on [...]
voncookie | September 13, 2009
Slick Management Firms’ hiring processes (those of all three of them) are currently on a collision course with the highly convoluted and time-consuming nature of landing a job in academia that culminates in Big Scary Convention. As mentioned in a previous post, the thought of me being unfaithful and window-shopping outside of academia is an [...]
voncookie | September 9, 2009
As a friend pointed out to me yesterday morning, it is wise not to believe everything one reads on Twitter, but when Big Scary Convention is availing itself of Web 2.0 technologies to point out that The Market su-hu-hucks this year, one tends to stop and pay attention. The exact Tweet was the following: “Sadly, [...]
voncookie | September 7, 2009
For those of you who aren’t in the know, I have somewhat recently come down with mono. I know, you all are thinking that only 15-year-olds get mono after sharing milkshake straws in the cafeteria, or making out under the bleachers by the Rec Field. Yeah, wrong. Sometime this summer, somehow I got mono. Don’t [...]
voncookie | September 6, 2009
Superman was most certainly an INFP. Or perhaps an INFJ. Otherwise he wouldn’t have needed the Fortress of Solitude in which to collect his superhero-thoughts about saving the world. I have created a Fortress of Solitude for myself this weekend. Not that I’m comparing myself to Superman… or any man for that matter. All I’m [...]
voncookie | September 5, 2009
For those of you who don’t know the work of Mariano José de Larra — and really, why would you, if you are not sitting in the trenches of the formal study of Spanish Literature, you angloparlantes — the man was a brilliant writer of the Romantic period in Spanish letters. He was a principally [...]
voncookie | September 3, 2009
I feel like Elmer Fudd today as I hunt down Calls for Papers (CfPs) that pertain directly (or even not-so-directly) to my field. I’m tiptoeing through cyberfields in search of the Wild Humanities Forum, an elusive creature, given to the pursuit of tweed and arcane knowledge. Be very twiet… Humanists frighten easily. Kind of like [...]
voncookie | September 2, 2009
This was the question that I asked in class today as a part of a writing workshop, the first part of which (in the previous class) had involved seriously deconstructing the argument of a traditional essay. Today I wanted my students to start thinking for themselves a bit, and so I had them read some [...]
