As a graduate student studying children’s literature, I often reread books that were important to me as a child with a critical, scholarly eye.  Usually I find them complex and interesting.  Sometimes I just find them awesome.

I have been delightfully surprised that A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner in particular reward re-readings.  Milne’s creation has certainly been obscured by the unstoppable behemoth that is Disney, but I am rediscovering the original texts as they existed before that sugary theme song that opens Disney Pooh cartoons echoed through the Hundred Acre Wood.  Milne’s work is fresh and funny.  You laugh at Winnie not because he recalls the simple humor you enjoyed in the days when a fresh box of crayons (with a sharpener on the side!) was a sort of nirvana.  You laugh because Milne, and the bear he created–they’re witty.  Take this example from the first chapter of Winnie-the-Pooh.  Said bear is aloft, hanging onto a balloon and disguised as a raincloud, after some delicious honey.

There was no wind to blow him nearer to the tree, so there he stayed.  He could see the honey, he could smell the honey, but he couldn’t quite reach the honey.
After a little while he called down to you.
“Christopher Robin!” he said in a loud whisper.
“Hallo!”
“I think the bees suspect something!”
“What sort of thing?”
“I don’t know.  But something tells me that they’re suspicious!”
“Perhaps they think you’re after their honey.”
“It may be that.  You never can tell with bees.”
There was another little silence, and then he called down to you again.
“Christopher Robin!”
“Yes?”
“Have you an umbrella in your house?”
“I think so.”
“I wish you would bring it out here, and walk up and down with it, and look up at me every now and then, and say, ‘Tut-tut, it looks like rain.’  I think, if you did that, it would help the deception which we are practising on these bees.”

As a self-admitted bear of very little brain, Pooh is imaginative, and optimistic, and unrelenting in his quest for what he wants.  And he is calm in a crisis.  Sure, he’s a little egotistical.  He believes, in his small plush heart, that “the only reason for making honey” is so he can eat it.  But he more than compensates for his self-centeredness with a healthy thirst for adventure and a brutal honesty.

Because I have rediscovered a love for Winnie, I am excited to teach his stories in my class this week.  I decided to do a quick survey of the criticism to see what’s out there, written about Pooh.  And you know what?  It’s not much.  I was baffled, until I read the following, from a book review by Paula T. Connelly in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly:

In 1963, while an assistant professor at UC-Berkeley, Frederick Crews wrote what he called a ‘freshman casebook,’ offering different critical readings of children’s books. The books were Winnie-the-Pooh and The House at Pooh Corner. The critical readings, ranging from Marxist to Freudian, were proffered by twelve fictional critics whose names often hinted at their perspectives. And the freshman casebook, of course, was The Pooh Perplex. There, among others, the fictional Simon Lacerous asserts that “everything Milne wrote . . . is a vast betrayal of life” (104) . . . and Myron Masterson in “Poisoned Paradise: The Underside of Pooh” does things with Roo and Tigger you don’t want to tell your children about.

Through misreadings and overreadings, foibles in logic and insularity of viewpoint, The Pooh Perplex satirizes both literary theory and academia. It was pointed, funny, and a best-seller—yet its effect on children’s literature was not as propitious. As real-life critic Alison Lurie has pointed out, “writing about the Pooh books . . . has been awkward (if not impossible) since . . . The Pooh Perplex” (11).

I have heard of the Pooh Perplex but haven’t read it, and now I really want to, of course.  And perhaps the follow-up volume, Postmodern Pooh.  If Lurie’s assessment is correct, I’m a little annoyed that this book apparently stymied a body of criticism that could be useful for my own teaching and research.  But I’m also considering how this book might work for any children’s literature courses I will (hopefully) be teaching sometime in the future.

For now, I’m going to try to convert my father back to Milne.  He has developed a deep and inexplicable distaste for Christopher Robin.

I think it’s the Mary Janes.

 

I’m sitting at a high school geography teacher’s desk while two students take a practice SAT.  My job is to walk up to the dry erase board every twenty minutes or so and tell them that they’re running out of time.  That last geometry problem will go unanswered.  And your carefully planned five-paragraph essay is a sad four and three quarters.

(These students are, actually, uncannily expedient test takers.  So far the final moments of each section have been an uncomfortable staring contest, in which I require them to sit still for the allotted twenty-five minutes and they accost me with their eyes, demanding that they just be allowed to complete the test already.)

This is the second test I’ve proctored this semester.  While I don’t particularly like arriving at 8:30 am on a Saturday to oversee standardized testing, this is an easy way for a poor graduate student to earn $60.  Because these are practice tests, I’m not required to walk the aisles, scowling away any attempts to cheat.  Instead, I work on my own research and writing, or read, or stare off into the distance reminiscing about my own high school days, when SAT scores seemed really important.  Those were the days when the SATs included analogies, which was awesome.  Because I am the analogy master.

Carrots is to analogies as Yo-Yo Ma is to the cello.

This morning, I’m proctoring at a big high school west of Houston, a school is much bigger than my alma matter in Charlotte, North Carolina.  Their hallways require cardinal directions:  North Hall, East Wing.  The military precision of the school rules posted near lockers and restrooms suggest a student body much bigger than my high school’s.  You can only visit the registrar’s office before and after school or in the twenty minutes between Lunch A and Lunch B.  And the students filing in for what I’m assuming is Saturday detention are required to show IDs and initial beside their names on a pre-printed roster.

But high schools are like Target stores.  No matter where you are in the country, you will be able to navigate through the building with relative ease.  There will be recognizable fixtures, standard signage to guide you if you become momentarily disoriented, and even familiar odors.  If Target smells like popcorn, synthetic fabrics, and floor wax, high schools smell like copy machines, stale cafeteria french fries, varsity basketball sweat, and puppy-love desperation.  When I was in high school, that desperation smelled a lot like an overdose of Blue Water cologne.  These days I suspect it might smell of Axe body spray.

I can’t decide if this predictability is soothing or a cruel cosmic joke meant to recall adolescent anxieties.  Probably both, because high school nostalgia seems to be organized spatially.  The cafeteria recalls lunch hour with Bee, Rin, and Noel.  Soothing.  The gym evokes at best a heavy-headed malaise about physical education and at worst a desire to leave, immediately, or I may have to participate in some sort of fitness test in front of my peers.  (The flight impulse would not be so powerful, of course, if this fitness test includes the flex-arm hang.  Carrots is to the flex-arm hang as Roger Federer is to the high-speed serve.)  Anxiety.  High school classrooms recall either hijinks in Mrs. Baker’s junior AP English class or that stomach-sinking moment when, during a Calculus test, I realize (again) that I am not meant for math.

Mixed bag.

 

Last night, Danny and I went to Kroger at 10:00 at night and bought a chocolate turtle cheesecake.  We had planned to get one slice of their caramel-topped vanilla cheesecake — a portion ideal for two people in need of a cheesecake fix — but the bakery was closed, the lights off, and no one behind the counter to dole out a single serving.

When it comes to no cheesecake or whole cheesecake, the Smiths go whole cheesecake.

Our apartment has been bereft of all dessert foods for about a month, save a packet or two of hot cocoa mix and a few rogue marshmallows.  This was in part due to a collective decision to cut down on the processed sugars and other junk food we keep in our pantry.  But while I would love to chalk up our dessert situation to health consciousness, it was part laziness, too.  We haven’t been very good about regular trips to the grocery store.

I know you’re not supposed to completely deny yourself the fatty and sugary foods you love, even when you’re working on a healthier diet.  This, apparently, will only result in spur-of-the-moment overindulgence.  See above.  And Danny and I have been thinking about healthier desserts to keep on-hand, like all-fruit popsicles and single-serving pudding cups.  (They are a great source of calcium!)  I’ll have to pick up some options over the weekend.

Even if our desserting habits change, I hope the spirit of the 10pm cheesecake continues in our apartment.  Really, one of my favorite things about being married to Danny is that he’s the kind of guy who will change from pajamas into a tee-shirt and jeans late at night to go pick up a cheesecake.  My brother recently blogged about the importance of trying new things as a couple, and I commented that I had heard on the radio that such novelty releases a surge of dopamine in your brain — the same chemical sensation that happens when you first fall in love.  Apparently.  I’m an English major, not a neuroscientist.

Late-night-cheesecaking is, of course, a small-scale example of this, and recent job market discussions have proven that Danny is game for spur-of-the-moment decisions a little more life-changing than hot fudge and graham cracker crust.  I’m lucky to be partnered up with a guy who, when faced with “some small town in the middle of Ohio,” checks out the town’s chamber of commerce website rather than bemoaning the potential demise of his urban lifestyle.  Now if one of those small towns would only hire me.

Cheesecake time.  I’m out.

 

While I have been a rather negligent blogger, I did update the weekly pick this weekend, so check it out!

Back in December, my awesome college friend Amy invited me to join a mix-tape club.  Six of Amy’s friends joined, and we swapped CDs earlier in the month.  While there was no pressure to be an indie label guru, there was the intention to expand our playlist horizons.  I shipped off my mixes of self-conscious folk and a few college throwbacks — because really, who doesn’t want to revisit “Singing in my Sleep” by Semisonic? — and was delighted to have a great variety of new music delivered to my door.  Er, the door of my apartment complex’s leasing office.

This new music comes at the perfect time, because it’s perfect running weather again in Texas — sunny and in the high 60s or low 70s.  When 4:00 pm, Running Carrots Time, rolls around, I’m usually eager to lace up my tennis shoes and head out to circle the neighborhood a few times.  I think it’s supposed to precipitously fall to the 40s on Friday, but I suspect this will be a chilly anomaly.  Late January, February, and March.  These are the months when I can brag about living in Houston.

As I dodged dog-walkers and baby strollers this afternoon, I realized that many of the songs on my current Running Carrots playlist are contributions from the Mix Tapers.  I rounded the dual swimming pools of the condos next door to “Stardust Kids” by David Bowie vs. MGMT and deftly avoided some dog poo to “Saturday Nite” by Blitzen Trapper.  (The dog poo is a coincidence and not a commentary on Blitzen Trapper.)  It was nice, having some new music sent to me by (mostly) strangers (hi, Ames!), and it almost felt like I had some friends out there cheering me along.  Instead of handing me paper cups full of water, they were keeping me going with Grizzly Bear, Arcade Fire, and the Eurythmics.

I’ve also earned a small following of locals.  Well, a very small following.  A very kind lady who usually pulls into the parking lot during my second lap always shouts a hearty “You go girl!”  And then there’s the gentlemen with the nearly-blind maltipoo who has told me twice that “no one around here moves around quite as much as you!”  Strange, but good-natured.

While I remain a very inept runner, my almost-daily jog has been the only way I have been really consistently taking care of myself over the past few months.  I haven’t had a successful year on the job market, and this means that I have been angry and stressed out and a little mean.  All of these bad feelings have crowded out healthy meals and meaningful conversations with friends and family and time to decompress without a small, angry storm cloud overhead.  Last week, I realized that I am two shades paler than normal.  As a redhead, this means I am nearly translucent.  And my body just isn’t healing or staying energized on schedule.  And I haven’t been blogging, because I’ve been (a) feeling sorry for myself and (b) unwilling to be introspective at all, because it just stirred up aforementioned evil feelings.  And what is blogging but electronic navel-gazing?

But this afternoon, as David Bowie’s advice for me to “take only what I need from it” helped me keep my pace, drowning out the traffic from Westpark and the ache in my shins, I realized that I need to snap out of it already.  I have lots of people — friends and family and neighbors and smart students who say amazing things in my class — who are showing me in big and small ways that I need to focus on those worthwhile things that I have going on.

Sorry to get schmaltzy.  But, in the words of Guster, time to face forward, move slow, forge ahead.

 

New pick, loyal readers.

Danny and I had our friends Eric and Melissa over for some baked ziti on Thursday night, and toward the end of the meal, as we were mopping up some stray tomato sauce with the (somewhat disappointing) bread from Kroger, the conversation turned to math.  More specifically, it turned toward the moment when, as a non-math person, you realize that yes, you are a non-math person, and this is how things are going to be.

Melissa apparently had a traumatic experience with a dried-lima-bean counting exercise in first grade.  Her traumatic math experience reminded me of the horrible incident of the math-themed rocket ships in first grade, and as I soaped up the ziti pan that evening I thought AHA! I have a blogging topic for the week!

But dude.  I’ve already blogged about the evil math-themed rocket ships. This makes me realize something that, on the edge of my brain, I already knew.  I am a story repeater.  When I launch into a childhood anecdote during friendly conversation, I have to preface it by saying, “I may have told you this before, but…”  Sigh.  A non-math person and a story repeater.

What all of this boils down to is that, while I set Saturday afternoon aside for some blogging action, I am at a loss.  And I’m not really in a mental place to come up with something witty, as I spent the morning proctoring a practice SAT at a high school in Clear Lake.  I wasn’t even taking the test, but I still left feeling a little woozy and grumpy, as if I myself had spent hours filling in tiny Scantron bubbles.

I am, however, going to provide a Wilkie update.  Some of my loyal readers may remember my previous post about Wilkie — a short botanical history followed by a mournful meditation on his ill health.  I am happy to report that with the aid of some new soil, some sunlight, a few whispered sweet nothings, and a jug of Miracle Gro, Wilkie is BACK IN ACTION! In fact, he is growing so quickly that he has become somewhat top-heavy.  He’s leanin’ back like a dancer in a Terror Squad video.  Danny is convinced that he is in fact inclining himself toward the outdoors, a gesture meant to communicate that he is ready to be planted in the ground so that he can become a mighty tree.  I had a sit-down with Wilkie and let him know that his attempts at tree-dom will have to wait until our residence and more permanent.

So witness, dear readers!  Wilkie’s progress:

Wilkie in August 2009

Wilkie in January 2010

 

(New pick!)

Danny has more video gaming experience than I do.  After I had conquered a few dragons in the game Adventure – remember that?  when your character was just a yellow box?  No?  Anyway, after Adventure I had a few early yearswith Atari, and in elementary and middle school I shared a Nintendo and Super Nintendo with my brothers.  I had a briefaffair with Metroid, and there was a time in my life when I was kind of a Donkey Kong master, maneuvering Diddy Kong through the circuitous railways of an underground mine with what can only be described as careless ease.  CARELESS EASE, PEOPLE.

Once the Super Nintendo lost its cache, I didn’t pick up a controller for years.  No quirky video game soundtracks.  No puffing air into a game cartridge to remove dust particles.  No up up down down left right left right A B select start.  When I started dating Danny my senior year of high school, his roommates in Apartment C had a gaming system — some version of the Playstation, probably? — and I would sometimes watch for a while, but I could never get the hang of Halo, their game of choice.  I once spent an entire game thinking my controller was maneuvering the figure on the left side of the screen while the man on the right remained strangely frozen in place, dying over and over again.  Oh wait.  That’s me?

All of this is to demonstrate my gaming inadequacies.  BUT!  Times are changing.  My dad and stepmom gave Danny a Best Buy gift card for Christmas, and he used it with a few coupons and reward bucks to buy a Wii.  We have a Wii.  I amso psyched.

The day we hooked up the system, we quickly set to creating our Miis.  (For the uninitiated, Miis are the avatars you create on the Wii system — cartoonish caricatures of yourself that can maneuver in the… the what?  The Wii-verse?)And I’ll tell you something.  I’m not sure if it’s Danny’s training as an illustrator, or his general aptitude at all things spatial and visual, or his self-awareness, but his Mii is much more accurate than mine.  He managed to peg the shape of his face, the placement of his nose, and bushiness of his eyebrows within five minutes.  When I took over the controller to create a Mii for me, it took forever.  And I have to say, I don’t really like considering so carefully the exact roundness of my cheeks, or where on the sliding scale of svelte and obesity my avatar should fall.  And the nose.  Hmmmm.  I’d like that cute ski-jump one, but let’s be honest.  The creation of my Mii turned into a series of terribly cliched exchanges between Danny and me.  ”Is this nose right?  Should my eyes be closer together?”  I might as well have been whining, “Do these jeans make me look fat?  You didn’t even look!”

Overwrought insecurities about your physical appearances can creep up on you anywhere, even in seemingly innocuous places.

Now that the Mii is complete, however, I am thoroughly enjoying my re-entrance into the video gaming world and loving, in particular, a game that requires me to stand up and flail, which is refreshing after a marathon of dissertation work.  We only have Wii Sports at the moment, the game that is included with the system, but I’m already a Wii Tennis MASTER, and I schooled Danny at Wii Golf.  He still triumphs in Wii Bowling and Wii Baseball.

On a side note, Danny was a good sport, despite the fact that (a) golf is his lifeblood and (b) he is probably the most competitive person I’ve met.  One Thanksgiving at the Ford household, Danny and I played that game Boxes — where you draw lines between dots in the form of a grid — for hours.  Okay, maybe not hours.  But far longer than anyone has any business playing Boxes.

He really wanted to win.

 

The day after Christmas, I was in the airport waiting for my flight from Charlotte to Philadelphia, and I picked up a copy of Vanity Fair.  I admit that I purchased Vanity Fair instead of a less-exulted magazine because I was riding on an airplane that, assuredly, was also carrying other academics to MLA.  The magazine was all part of the charade of intelligence and professionalism that begins as soon as I began my journey toward the conference.  BUT I did remember how much I like Vanity Fair.  Very few overpriced handbags and heroin-chic models.  So much writing!

Anyway.  In the current issue, A. A. Gill ends his short article on “stalking rutting stags” in Scotland (seriously) with a brief account of an old man who recently died trapped on a mountain overnight with his family.

“The paper reported that they’d become crag-fast,” writes Gill. “This is a psychological shock that renders the victim immobile.  It strikes climbers and those unprepared for their journeys.  It happens when you descend a path and reach a point where you dare go no further and can’t manage to go back.”  Gill finds the phrase useful.  ”Crag-fast precisely encompasses so much of my own life.  And, indeed, so much of current affairs.”

I love discovering handy phrases like crag-fast.  Some of my more loyal readers may remember my post on the cone of uncertainly, which I still think is an extremely useful concept, especially for graduate students.

I realized, as I read Gill’s article, that this coming year holds a lot of crag-fast potential.  I can definitely see the possibility of being trapped on the mountain.  In the current academic job market — when each tenure-track position garners 300 applications or more — it is possible or even probable that, come February, I will realize that, this year, I won’t get the type of job that I intended to get when I enrolled in an English PhD program.  I will be clinging to the last revisions of my dissertation, hanging onto the last course I’ll teach at Rice, too afraid to get off the mountain into a landscape that is not a tenure-track professorship.  It could be a community college position or a secondary school position.  It could be a job outside of the field of education altogether.

If this is the case, I need to reformulate my perspective, find a place where success is defined in a number of different ways.  This is difficult as an English PhD.  Even the friendliest programs — and I count Rice’s among these — often implicitly define anything less than an assistant professorship or competitive post-doc as failure.

And if I do get a tenure-track job — as that is still a possibility — the danger remains.  The transition from graduate student, a role I’ve been in for over five years now, to faculty, will be an exciting but truly frightening transition.  Being a graduate student in May and teaching and advising them in August? Wow.  If I arrive at a new institution, there will have to be a moment when, sitting in my new office, I decide to let go of the graduate school anxieties and really step into this new position, confidently and wholeheartedly.  Even if I have to fake it.  For now, I’m going to put any worries about that transition in a mental holding pattern, until a know a little bit more about my future.

This may seem like a cynical way to begin the new year, but it’s really not.  It’s an attempt to be open of all the directions my life could lead this year.

So happy 2010, everyone!  Make it a good one.

[I've posted a new pick by carrots.  The holiday selections are gone and will return next year!]

 

When Danny returned to the States in March 2004 after a year-long tour in Baghdad, I had very little notice.  We were engaged but not married, and this means I didn’t receive any updates about his unit’s deployment or return.  Danny had managed a call from Kuwait and then another from Europe on their way home.

Thankfully, the drive from Killeen to Houston is only about two-and-a-half hours.  By mid-morning the day of their return — and after a harrowing moment when, briefly unable to locate documentation for my car insurance, I was told that I couldn’t enter Fort Hood — I was sitting on cold metal bleachers with hundreds of people: wives, husbands, children, mothers, and fathers, all waiting for a Greyhound bus that would finally bring their particular soldier home.  The night before, I had bought a white linen skirt — a mistake, because it was so freakin’ cold out there, waiting, facing an empty parade ground for hours and hours.  Danny told me later that his particular unit had arrived quite early in the afternoon but were informed that they would have to wait on the bus until at least two more plane-fuls of soldiers touched down.  The reason for this?  They wanted their homecoming to look “more dramatic.”

[Sidebar: As anyone who has seen a military promo before the movies knows, the last thing the Army needs is more delusions of romantic drama.  According to the stylized propaganda you sit through before your feature film, the Army is all about running solo through deserts (why is that appealing?), and rescuing children from hunger and disease (a noble but ultimately infrequent occurrence for most servicemen and women), fighting with those giant Q-tips that American Gladiators slug it out with (they actually do that!), and slaying dragons!  Oh, wait.  That last one is the Marines.  In any case, Danny hates these commercials and yells at the screen when they play.]

The buses finally pull up to the parade field.  By now, it’s almost dark, and I would kill for some sweatpants.  The decked-out military horses nervously paw the ground while someone who is, probably, a big-shot decides to talk for fifteen minutes.  I had scanned about half of the soldiers, looking for Danny’s glasses, when I was rattled by the bark of “DISMISSED!“

And then — chaos.  Someone did not think this through.  There are hundreds of soldiers on the field.  Families overrun the soldiers’ tight formation as if they’d just won the Super Bowl.  I have no idea how to find Danny, and I begin to panic, convinced that he is standing right in front of me but that I don’t recognize him.  Because seriously.  Everyone is wearing the same thing.  I am about to cry, and not in that Hallmark-moment type way, when I see him through the crowd and violins start playing.  I am about to cry because I am convinced, within these brief five minutes, that I am a terrible person because I can’t find the one person I’m supposed to be able to find.  I become increasingly certain that everyone is going to pair off and stride happily to their sedans and station wagons until Danny and I are the only ones left.  And then it would be awkward and terrible.

Of course, I am not the only person having this problem.  Eventually, frustrated family members commandeer the microphone.  ”Bobby!  Bobby Hammond!  We’re up here by the snack bar!”  Danny borrowed a friend’s cell phone and called me.  I was standing about four feet away, doing that almost-crying thing and panicking.

That day is a really strange memory.  When I think of those hours on the bleachers, I remember anticipation and excitement but also a little fear.  He could be sent back again.  I could be sitting on the bleachers a year and a half from now.  Or worse.  I could get a phone call, mid-way through his second tour, before I even made it to the bleachers. Something could go wrong.  And I felt a little anxiety.  I think the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are invisible to many civilians in a way that World War II or Vietnam were not.  I didn’t know what a returning soldier meant.  I hadn’t met one yet, not one returning from Baghdad.  And even though, at that point, Danny and I had been together for almost eight years, I didn’t know what it meant to be the person meeting him.  What do you say?  Was there some memo I missed, telling me what to do?

Today was Danny’s last official day in the Army.  Unless our country reinstates the draft, they can’t call him up and send him away anymore.  (They probably couldn’t have sent him overseas, anyway, but that’s another story.)  The past year or so, it definitely has felt like Danny has been living a civilian life, but still.  Today feels good.  I am promised from here on out that I won’t have another year of wondering, when I don’t get that morning email, if something has happened.  I won’t have to carry my cell phone when I run, won’t have to put it within earshot while I shower, because I’ll be able to call him back instead of listening to that reassuring but depressing message.  ”Hope to catch you next time.  I’m safe.”

And when he walks in the door tonight, I’ll be wearing sweatpants.  In our apartment.  I’ll hand him a “You’re out of the Army!” cupcake, and I’ll know just what to say.

 

When I was in San Francisco for MLA last year, I didn’t see the Golden Gate Bridge or Sausalito or the Fisherman’s Wharf.  I saw the sad inside of my closet-sized hotel room, where I spent the first few evenings sitting in front of the bathroom mirror practicing the same interview questions over and over.  ”What do you consider the stakes of your project?  How does it contribute to the field?  How would you teach a world literature survey?  What color were Elizabeth Bennet’s bonnet-strings on page 63 of Pride and Prejudice?”

In theory, once my interviews were over I could have explored the city.  Instead I picked up a pizza, ordered an over-priced glass of wine through room service, and watched a reality TV marathon in my pajamas.  The constant mid-level anxiety of circulating through that enormous conference — surrounded by search committees who could probably pick me out as a job candidate, dressed in one of the two suits I own, from across a badly carpeted hotel ballroom — and the brief, thirty-minute high-stakes interviews had taken their toll.  I did not want culture.  I did not want anything that required effort.  I wanted Dress My Nest and Jon & Kate Plus Eight.

I leave for Christmas in Charlotte on Tuesday and then on to MLA in Philadelphia the day after Christmas.  The good news is that I’m pretty sure I have a better hotel room — perhaps something a little less depressing, with a view of the city street below instead of a bricked-in alley.  And I have both a paper presentation and an interview.  The bad news is that I only have the one interview (for which, of course, I am grateful).  And, unfortunately, my brain is somehow anticipating the stress.  I feel prematurely shell-shocked and exhausted.  Hence my blog delinquency.

This is not an acceptable state of affairs.

I had a mock interview yesterday, and it went very well.  So I’ve decided to prepare not my obsessing about my one interview.  Instead, I am going to concentrate on not freaking out.  I will cook stir-fry and wrap Christmas presents and watch my cat chase the laser pointer.  In between these activities, I will eat cookie dough.  I’m still working a few hours each day, attacking my dissertation introduction with the clumsiness of a bear jostled out of hibernation and, in a better mood, assembling the course packet for my spring children’s lit survey.  But seriously.  I would have burned out before I even boarded the plane at the rate I was going.

I’m hoping that this means I will be more aware of Philadelphia in a few weeks.  I don’t really like cheese-steaks, but I do like exploring new cities.  So if you have any Philly suggestions that are walkable from the central downtown area, let me know.

 

The holidays remind me of Crate and Barrel.

When I was an undergrad in Washington, DC, I worked at the store on Massachusetts Avenue as a sales associate, and beginning in early November they played Rat Pack Christmas classics, the type of holiday music that, compared to the dogs barking out “Jingle Bells” on the radio, was supposed to emote sophistication and class tempered by a sense of humor.  On Sunday mornings during the season, before we unlocked the doors, I would tie on my apron — red, as opposed to the traditional black, to intensify holiday cheeriness — and join one of my favorite coworkers in a clumsy dance to Dean Martin’s “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” twirling down the central accessories aisle and barely missing the ornament bins.

That store is in an affluent part of town, and we would often ring up 100 place-settings of bone china for a diplomat’s formal dinner, or help an upper-class couple from some political or military circle register for an embarrassing number of hand-blown wine glasses for their housewarming.  Sometimes the elitist clientele were a little too uppity to tolerate, and I had to seek refuge in the basement stockroom, where I would pace fuming between the jute coir area rugs and the artfully distressed sideboards.  I remember one particular night when I hurried downstairs before I could go ape crazy on a man who was WIGGING OUT because we weren’t selling Adirondack chairs.  In February.

For the most part, though, I really liked that job, and for some reason the holiday season was more fun than manic.  The whole place smelled like peppermint mochas from the Starbucks next door, and next to every register there was a small bowl of the designer candies we tried to sell for something ridiculous like $20.  But man, those minty meltaway things were good.  And it just seemed easier, full on pilfered chocolate, to laugh at the snobbery of a woman who asked me to take her floor-length fur coat to the back for safekeeping while she shopped for a dame aunt with a ridiculous name like Mimsy or Mumsy.

(We did keep the coat in the back.  And we all tried it on, striking our best Cruella De Vil poses and snapping polaroids with the cameras reserved for customers who just couldn’t decide on that leather couch.)*

I know I’m idealizing.  These days I spend from 9 am until 9 pm either working on my dissertation or feeling guilty about not working on my dissertation.  The constant human interaction required by retail — even the most horrendous encounters with primadonna customers — seems preferable to long days alone in my apartment, staring at a computer screen, writing a sentence only to declare it ridiculous and delete it.  And I miss having a job that you can leave at the end of a shift.

But at least I can be certain that, if I get any MLA interviews, no one will scream at me about Adirondack chairs.  At least, I hope not.

I suppose you never know.

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* Carrots is an anti-fur blog.