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.