Recently in A Little Learning Category

Last night, I stayed up until 3 a.m. whacking away at an essay on Antony and Cleopatra, and woke up not enough hours later with a notion of how I could rip it apart and restructure it. My brain then crossed its little symbolic arms, snooted its little symbolic nose up to the sky, and refused to do anything until I bent to its will.

Stupid brain. Why can't you shut up and leave me be?

In any event, the paper is done now. I have no business writing here when there's so much else to write before the semester is out, but I promised myself I would bang out a few words, just enough to reassure you I'm alive.*

I'm intensely sleep-deprived: I'm seeing sparkles of color, flashes of light, and dark slithering tails of what must be large scaly creatures lurking just out of the corners of my vision. It's Jacob's Ladder around here, my friends, and the infusion of caffeine I gave myself this afternoon guarantees I'll be awake to make the most of it all night long.

The Fella has been my stalwart through the havoc of this week. He surprised me Saturday night by arriving home from work with a pizza and a Red Velvet cake ("because I'm so proud of you") just around the time I blearily looked up from the keyboard and started wondering what I could throw together for dinner.

Yesterday afternoon, I started with "I was going to make ---"

He cut in, "No, no, you're not making dinner. I'll get something, anything! What would you like?"

"Oh, uh... really I can easily make ---"

"You. Are. NOT. Making. Dinner. What would you like?" Taking in my utterly blank look, he (bless him) got up, put on his coat, and said, "I'll be back with something."

Tonight, he made spicy-hot quesadillas heaping with vegetables, because I've been talking about Tex-Mex. And he bought ice cream.

Yes. Yes, I am the luckiest. Thank you, Dr. Beardface.

*Tonight, I heard a term for this, a term I love so much I promptly stole it. The phrase is "waving, not drowning."

Just in time for the fall term and its heavy load of papers, here are some lesser-known proofreader's marks. Like students of The Little Professor, from whom I cribbed the link, I could benefit from the "remove permanently from your lexicon" symbol. (It occurs to me that "lexicon" tops the list of overused words in my lexicon. Whoa --- how meta.)

As children, we have so little concrete information about the world, and such a random collection of experience-based learning, that we construct oddly poetic worldviews and beliefs.

Some of these misconstructions of knowledge have their origin in semantic misunderstandings. Having been told repeatedly by our parents that we could be anything when we grew up, I decided at about age 4 that I would be the Pope. (We weren't a Catholic family, and I had not the faintest idea of the Pope's role; I just liked the hat.) Given the same sort of encouragement, my sister N. eagerly looked forward to becoming a circus bear.

Other childhood misconstructions are simple mechanisms for coping with common fears. Like many children, I believed a) that the night was filled with horrors, looming unseen in the dark, hungry for my innocent self; b) that keeping my head under the blankets protected me from these monsters. As an extension of this logic, and based on I-know-not what previous evidence, I further hypothesized that c) if I kept my head under the covers and held my breath for exactly sixty seconds, I was safe uncovered for the rest of the night. Although I cannot claim that my hypothesis was proven, it surely gained credibility as, night after night, no monsters attacked.

Ah, childhood beliefs. Some are just plain silly, some are quite touching, and some have the strangely comforting Lynchian quality that pervaded my own childhood.

I had a strange fear that if I closed my eyes in the bathtub, William Shakespeare would come up through the drain and kill me. I knew his name, but I had no idea who he was, so I just naturally assumed he was some sort of bathtub vampire. ----- Dan

Naturally.

Whoa. Having printed off my last two papers at 8:30 this morning, I have finished another semester.

This has been a trying term, with the convergence of several particularly taxing classes. I didn't help matters much by deciding, after two months of researching the fairly straightforward methodology of foodways and subsistence studies and only ten days before the deadline, to switch my research focus (in History of Archaeological Thought) to the much more baroque and contested field of feminist epistemology in gender archaeology. Phew.

I owe several debts of gratitude

to Elli, who was crucial to the dialectic of determining my approach to the subject, who has offered unflagging support and cheering in the face of massive boredom, and who has endured countless updates on my progress,

to Dr. H., who accepted on faith the last-minute swerve in my research, and who perhaps knew (as I did not) how much of myself I would identify in the process;

to C., whom I've been helping out during her busiest season and who told me to take the week off and come back when I was done with my papers;

to interlibrary loan, who took up my offer to make them cookies in exchange for hastening the transfer of a watershed article;

to anyone who has actually read this far, for letting me release my hazardously elevated levels of blah blah blah.

I mustn't rest on my laurels just yet; although I have printed everything out and packed my bookbag, I still need to get to the campus and turn in the darn things before the deadline.

In a shocking exposé, a Maine couple announces that schools are scheming to teach young people, actually going so far, in some cases, as to use books:

"They see it as, they say, 'Hey, it's a book, let's expose the kids to it, and see what they learn from it,' " said Minnon, who with his wife operate [sic] a greenhouse on Route 202 in Lebanon.

The Minnons, parents of a first-year student at Noble High School, object to his class's study of The Catcher in the Rye. Not satisfied with the school's provision to allow their son to study another book, the Minnons are attempting to prevent the entire first-year literature class from studying Salinger's classic.

(link thanks to Bookslut)

So many bloggers keep a pretty sidebar with links to "Books I'm Reading!", and I love to see that, since my usual broad-spectrum foraging technique for contemporary fiction is woefully unfocused. I typically go into the library and fling myself toward the new fiction shelves, castigating myself for not writing down that author's name and hoping I can find something promising in the ten minutes before my bus is due.

I'd love to maintain a "current reading" sidebar myself, truly I would, but with the quantities of texts I'm reading for classes and research, it simply isn't feasible to be entering and linking them here. No, really.

No, really.

This term, I am taking my first class with a particular Lengendarily Scary Professor™. So far, she has handed back each of my papers littered with remarks like articulate and good clarity, very thorough. Phew!

Yesterday, we had the midterm.

I now find myself in a state of indeterminacy. The prof has not graded them yet, and her faith that I am still the same solid A student is touching. I, however, am breathlessly waiting for her to open the box and report the dead cat.

Out of nowhere, a prof asked, "So, who knows what
kuru is?" Mind you, this has nothing to do with our classwork; he just likes to make conversation Jeopardy-style.

I happen to have read an article about kuru several years ago, so I was able to shoot back (or, more honestly, stutter back) "Um, the disease brain-eaters get, right? Human brains? With the, the, the prions?" (I am less than eloquent on the spot, but all the key points are there, my friends.)

But who, having read this once in her life, wouldn't remember it? Brain-eating cannibals, people.

Is it normal to feel one's brain wiggling agitatedly in the brainpan? It feels like a live fish trapped in my head. This could mean I'm done studying for the semester, not just for the night.

One more semester is hurtling toward its close. At this point, I always suffer from something akin to vertigo: my expectations and my backlog of work have climbed to staggering heights, and the hasty plummet is sickening.

Therein is a perfectly good explanation for my absence from these pages. With three papers weighing heavily on me (one is due tomorrow, in point of fact) and thousands of pages to read, I thought the best time management plan was to bugger off for a few days of fun. My weekend included unplanned meetings with old friends, shopping, an afternoon at the museum, a trip to the bead and yarn shop, an evening in the pub with girlfriends, and a long late talk with the dear friend I stayed with.

I also paid a long overdue visit to my much-valued longtime barber; although I moved out of town several years ago, I manage to see her a few times a year, bringing her desperate cases of Hair By Misadventure. Once again, she has coifed me but good.

Maybe is the haircut, maybe is the new shoes*, or maybe is the delirium of academic panic, but I feel gooood. Dangerously, flirtatiously good. A change has definitely hit this small patch of New England: the wind is crisp and fragrant, birds are chirping, green shoots are transformed into great blooms of scent and florid color, bloggers are noticing that their male acquaintances smell really great: it must be spring.

*Expect more on the shoes later --- so embarrassingly much more.