Shut It Down

Over the past three weeks, I went back to the US for a marathon tour of law schools in New England, reconnected with tons of friends, more-than-friends, and frenemies, made what was probably the most difficult decision of my life, and then linked up with David and Emma in London and went backpacking in Turkey for a week. And at no point during this period of high-stakes decisions, interpersonal dramas, and novel desserts did I feel compelled to write about my day on the internet.

This is either a sign of maturity or a sign that my life has gotten so boring that I don't feel as sassy firing stories out into the ether, but either way, I think it probably means that it's time to shut it down. When I started blogging eight years ago - eeep - it was right after I left Fargo to go to college and knew absolutely nobody, and so nobody I knew read my blog, and it was a good way to brag and vent and process very new experiences to an undifferentiated mass of readers. Now, I think the only people who read my blog are people I know, and I feel weirder about bragging and venting to them, and the experiences don't seem so new, and in any case, the advent of Facebook and Twitter means that I'm more or less covered for my lingering fits of exhibitionist self-performativity.

I've been crap at blogging lately anyway, and I'd rather bow out gracefully than watch my readership continue to dwindle into the double digits. If I resurface and pick up blogging again, it'll be anonymously, and at a time in my life where it serves a purpose that picking up the phone and calling somebody can't quite serve. Until then, know that the glory days of this blog were probably my favorite experience that will never end up on my CV, and wish me luck as I drop offline and try to handle all this on my own. It's been all kinds of fun.

Mmmmmm

You know who would risk missing a bus to New York and getting stranded in Cambridge for a Hubbard Park from Darwin's? This guy, like anybody who is reasonable and has good taste in sandwiches.

(I still managed to make the bus, which I am now on and about to eat my priceless sandwich and pass out, because I made every appointment and meeting today despite getting three hours of sleep, most of it on a pre-dawn Greyhound. I'm the definition of classy today.)

Game On

This is the new obsession that is guiding me toward completion and publication of my DPhil. I feel like anthropologists have an unfair advantage in the crazy book titles category, although "Living with Crazy Buttocks" is obviously tough to beat. (That doesn't mean I won't try.)

This is the Wire, and We Are Now Down to It

Visiting law schools next week was supposed to give me a solid month to make this decision, which I had kind of envisioned making while sitting in contemplation on a plateau somewhere in Turkey. And then that fell apart yesterday, when all of the financial aid information - and a new batch of deadlines - came through, which turned this into a $160,000 question that requires an answer by April 1.

Obviously, that's like super exciting, and a fantastic opportunity, but it took me ten minutes to decide what to put on my bagel this morning and you can imagine how I've been handling these developments. (I got approximately two hours of sleep last night, and when I spilled a spoon of basmati rice on my sock yesterday, I almost burst into tears.) I've developed Stockholm Syndrome with all four of the schools I'm still considering, and the thought of visiting all of them and then making a decision within 24 hours is kind of terrifying, especially when it involves a kind of financial commitment that makes me uncomfortable even when I'm playing Monopoly. The worst part is that I don't even get to have a revelation in a desert in Cappadocia, and will probably instead be making it on Delta - Delta - somewhere above the Atlantic, at 5am, while watching old episodes of Gilmore Girls on their awful in-flight entertainment and trying to get Rory Gilmore to help me understand how to pick schools before I land at Heathrow and have to phone it in. AWESOME.

The Acronym Game

In one paragraph of my DPhil, I've managed to use LGBT, UN, UDHR, ICJ, NGO, ECOSOC, UNGA, and GEAR. One more and I would have a cubed hat trick.

Gross Adventures in Doctoral Study

You know when you read a novel and it says that somebody smelled rotten milk and they retched? And you're like, whatever, plug your nose and I don't understand what the big deal is? Everybody just shut up and leave them alone.

I've never smelled rotten food and almost vomited before, mostly because I pride myself on having a kitchen where I notice when things have been neglected for so long that they are chemically transforming. The same is not true of the basement of my department, which is nominally used by an entire building full of faculty and students but doesn't seem to have anybody specifically tasked with cleaning it. And earlier this week, I opened the kind of gross fridge in the communal kitchen and literally almost threw up. (I didn't, because I have an iron constitution and also because I really wanted coffee and my tiny jug of milk was in that fridge.) It had kind of smelled weird before I left with my brother on vacation, but now it smelled rotten, mostly because everything inside was rotten. Like, there was my milk, but there were also four other things of milk, all of which had curdled, probably weeks ago. There was what appeared to be a piece of bread, which had been completely encased in fuzzy green mold. There was a package of salami labeled "April 4," which had begun to grow moldy, which led me to believe that it was not this April 4, and was possibly not last April 4 either. It was like a Steven King novel.

Except Kathy Bates did not break my knees and make me do it, I did it voluntarily, because I am apparently at the point where I will edit journals and do my taxes and scrape mold out of butter compartments and still think of it as a break from my work. And that is why I spent the next hour taking apart the fridge and scrubbing sheets of mold off the interior so that I can use it instead of walking to our apartment - literally 30 seconds away - for milk. It's probably good that I'm going to the US next week.

Fights in Our Household

RT: "Ooh, sorry I wrecked your progress narrative."
DN: "AT LEAST I HAVE ONE!"

Caption of the Day

Domestic Bliss

DN: "I've always wanted to get the print edition of the New York Times! We could read it over breakfast in Stamford - you could read the arts and culture section, I could read the science and technology section, and we could burn the sports section for kindle in our fireplace."

The Decemberists

I'm still a total sucker for the Decemberists, and actually really like their latest album, and was totally not ashamed to go into London last night for the sole purpose of seeing them at the Hammersmith Apollo despite the fact that nobody would go see them with me. And that was a good choice, because it is unlikely that I will get a chance to sing a cover of "Night Moves" with 5000 people ever again. (This still doesn't top Lily Allen's cover of "Womanizer," but it's up there.)

(Also, they closed their set with 16 Military Wives and I almost peed.)

Family Ties

My younger brother is visiting and I was worried we wouldn't have enough to do, but then we had pies and went to see the shrunken heads and xylophones and bottled witches at the Pitt Rivers and then went to the pub. Ta-da! When it comes to food and weird things and beer, we are not so different, actually.

Slacker

I know that normally my blog is like, "oh, LOL, I am such a shambles" and I'm like performatively overworked but this past month has actually kicked my ass, as evidenced by the fact that I've let my blog sit idle for the longest time in seven years. In the meantime, I got all my law school decisions and have run up a ridiculous phone bill talking to faculty and students and planning visits. I went to Johannesburg for a week to visit a friend and her family, launch the book I co-edited last summer, and go to a conference. I took a red eye back and made it to Oxford just in time to meet Brady and Emma and host a dinner party and go to an auction, then spend the weekend with Brady generally causing total chaos in London. I then realized I was supposed to be doing my DPhil, and did a bunch of other boring stuff including but not limited to writing two chapters, presenting my research to my department, finishing a draft of a book chapter, filing my financial aid forms for next year, and agreeing for some terrible and unknown reason to take on a week of full time work as an editorial assistant for a journal. In the interest of surviving the spring, I also planned a trip with my younger brother to Barcelona next weekend, and a trip to Turkey with David and Emma in a month.

There were things I meant to blog about during this - I got locked in my hotel bathroom in Johannesburg for 30 minutes and picked the lock with a piece of wire I managed to pry from the bathtub drain, and William Shatner is planning to release a heavy metal album, and David and I invented toaster pancakes - but I failed. Miserably. And my only hope is that when I start law school, so many comically terrible things will happen that I will be writing constantly.

Luckily This is Exactly What My Dissertation is About

D: "There are ladybugs all over the house! And I can't kill them, because they're ladybugs!"
R: "Well, then we have to learn to coexist with them."
D: "No. I just have to dehumanize them."

Unnecessary Roughness

If it is possible, there are two last things on earth I need right now:

1) Having my blog hacked into along with my Gmail, so that it redirects everyone to sites for Viagra and cheap prescription drugs from Canada, and
2) A sudden meeting with my supervisor to go over drafts before I leave for Johannesburg in, oh, 36 hours.

(The first part I fixed after twenty minutes of troubleshooting, while the second is unexpectedly on the agenda for tomorrow.)

This is in contrast to exactly what I did need, which was to go into London today to get quiche, see The Children's Hour, and then have a debrief coffee with Emma. Elizabeth Moss was fantastic, and even though Keira Knightley doesn't really do anything except look wispy and alternates between carefree and solemn for the better part of two hours - so basically, exactly what Audrey Hepburn does in the film, slash every film she has ever been in - she totally pulls it out in the last fifteen minutes and goes absolutely buckwild. If I were Ellen Burstyn, I would have wet my old lady clothes.

My plan is basically to keep my head low until I get to Johannesburg, where I'm attending a conference but also - and just as importantly - hanging out with Sam and watching as many episodes of 7 de laan as I can before somebody notices and judges me. And if it turns out that my supervisor has negative feedback, I will just pretend she is Keira Knightley and tell myself that if Ellen Burstyn can handle it after all the horrible things she has done, I should be able to handle it too.

Take That, Pile of Three Ring Binders I Am Currently Buried In

Like somebody playing rock and roll in reverse and hearing the voice of Satan, I've just realized that basically all I need to do for my doctoral dissertation is take the literature review from my old thesis and reverse it. Bam! 10,000 words! I feel like I should write a thank you card to myself circa 2008 and send it back in time.

Happy Together

In the midst of DPhil hell, David and I have been trying to get out and go on dates on the weekends. This week is going to be kind of grueling and then I'll be in South Africa next weekend, so tonight, we went to see Happy Together at the Magdalen Film Society. At the end, David was like, "it seemed like they were not actually happy together." I nodded. And he added, "and they were pretty abusive." I nodded. And David was like, "well, at least we got free wine and I didn't really understand what was happening."

I really need to start reading spoilers before dates.

Why I Invite People Over for Dinner

"I think I've had too much wine. Ooh, can I alphabetize your spices!?"

This Goes Out to the Chicago Manual of RUINING LIVES

Editing footnotes is one of the things I always think I will enjoy because it requires relatively little brain power and I can do it to music without getting distracted. (This is relative - I'm not good at focusing under the best of circumstances, but let's be real, changing commas to periods is not quite the same as struggling to articulate a theory of human agency.)

And then I try to navigate the Chicago Manual of Style and try to format things with like thirty tabs open to help figure out how to format snarky asides made in footnotes or references to e-journals that refuse to do anything but look like a half-baked journal footnote or an overlooked hyperlink. And slowly, I lose the will to live. I've been working on this off and on all day and I'm about two hours away from replacing all of these references with one footnote that says, "I tried my hardest and concluded that if you have any questions it's probably best if you just call me."

Huntsman in 2010!

Signs I have WAY too much time on my hands, and also why tabbed browsing will keep me from ever being successful in life:

Adventures in Basic Daily Tasks

I got to the graduate student office to bang out a press release and a couple hundred words of my dissertation, saw that the alarm on the office was set, and was like, whatever, they gave me the code for the alarm earlier this year, I can handle this. And then I stopped, and I was like, Ryan, empirically, can you handle things like this? I shook my head no.

But I tried anyway. As I'd entirely expected, I punched in the wrong code approximately five times, started panicking and just pressing random buttons to clear the keypad, and set off the burglar alarm for the building, which happens to be where most of the professors in my department work. (In retrospect, I feel like this whole working in the department to demonstrate that I'm an attentive and competent student thing is going to backfire horribly.)