It's Party Time...sort of

Today is Tuesday! I am celebrating a small break (like 30 minutes) from the rigors of academia to have a glass of red wine and ponder the meaning of life. Random snapshot of my life: Me, in a rusty green VW bus, 14 years ago, on some north-bound stretch of interstate at least 6 states from here, with a pregnant dalmatian in the back. How did I get here from there? I drove the bus back home after my adventure, of course, along with 10 dalmatian puppies! Now that beautiful dalmatian is in doggy heaven and who knows where all those grown up puppies are...

Penultimate Ping-Pong

I am in my penultimate semester for my degree plan. Tomorrow I have an appointment with someone who will do a degree check and hopefully not screw up my plans. The university has been kind of half-A&& with me and I hope I haven't been steered in the wrong direction...I would only have my ULTIMATE semester to fix it. Now...

Today was a bit disappointing. I had a tuna crisis. Madame Monkeywit saved me...I showed up with papers to scan and tuna to spread on bread...thanks, Madame Monkeywit! How did this 'tuna crisis' come about, you ask? Well, I was supposed to make little quartered sandwiches for a coworker who is going away. It was a lunch time going away party in a little tiny office filled with about 12 cubes and their very tolerant inhabitants...we do well for an office of all women crammed together...

Anyhoo...my tuna was prepared and I went to get the bread to spread and OH! That dirty little RAT! My cat Rousa had jumped up on TOP of the refrigerator where I keep the bread and she had torn open the bag and eaten the crust...at the same time I was supposed to be delivering very important papers and so Madame Monkeywit scanned them while I spread tuna (after getting new bread and dragging my tuna and papers over to Madame Monkeywit's monkey house). A labor-saving venture indeed.

Even more disappointing was my women's and gender studies seminar course (which I am taking as a history course). I read an entire book in 2 days and was hoping for some fun and stimulating discussion and it just didn't happen. It was a senior level history course and we had to listen to some guest speaker tell us all about how to write a paper. I was aghast that a class of university seniors and a few graduate students had to sit through this. Is it really that dire? Are young Americans so ill-prepared for scholarship these days?

And why did I choose that picture up there?

Because it is a very strange circus contraption that for me acts a visual metaphor when in motion of the sort of round and round we go through in life to get to some destination. The dark background represents my dark thoughts about subjects that have been so thoroughly trampled on by scholars in the last two decades as to render them unrecognizable although their substance is essentially unchanged. There is no objective interpretation (I think this is from Foucault) of anything, only multiple interpretations with no ultimate standard by which to ascertain their truth. Without objectivity there can't be truth. I don't know who said that. I just know that these ideas manage to trickle their way down from the ivory tower into the ideological sewers that common people drink from.

Ocean and legacy

Missing the beach...tonight would be a nice night to walk along it...I am studying the history of race and citizenship in this country and concurrently the history of women in sickness and health in this country and I shall soon be reading about the history of the vibrator. There are a lot of premed students in my class...they are in for a real rollicking ride whether they want it or not.  A couple of guys are in it only because they couldn't find another class to fit their schedule. We will be talking about abortion and reproductive rights, the decline of the midwife (and rise and fall again after the 60s), the history of birth control, the medicalization of birthing and historical birthing practices, and many, many other things including female sexuality.  In the race class, we will of course talk about race historically and the rights and lack of rights of various racialized groups.  With all this "heavy stuff," I feel I need the healing ocean air...this land is ripe with legacies and they're not all pretty.