The Ad First we secured the line. Then we wrote the job ad. Like most things decided by committee, it ended up a miscellany of priorities and desires—a cross between an eHarmony mash note and a letter to Santa Claus. Please, Santa, bring me the perfect colleague, someone who can teach competently in several incompatible [...]
Archive for the ‘Conversations’ category
When I Change My Life
“When I Change My Life” — The Pretenders Probably the most brilliant idea I ever had was the discovery that I could run away. When I was a miserable little kid, I fantasized about death because I couldn’t imagine my way out of my situation. I was eight, and I told people what I needed, [...]
Not to be reproduced: New Year’s open thread
Rene Magritte, La Reproduction Interdit / Not to be Reproduced (1937) On January 1, 2011, I was lucky enough to wake up in the home of dear friends, with whom I had joyfully celebrated the night before (at a party complete with bicoastal buddies, disco dancing, and a “gorgeous gateau”). As we eased into the [...]
Happy New Year! . . . ?
Happy 2011 everyone! Here’s a photo of a bunch of random white people drinkin’ and smokin’ snatched from the google image search “new years eve” : – }
Peasant stuff
Since I moved in with a friend of mine a few months ago, I often walk into the kitchen and find my roommate standing at the stove, stirring a pot of stew or checking on a loaf of something in the oven. “What’s cooking?” I ask. “Eh. Peasant stuff.” She’s from a small European country [...]
Zombies
Overheard in the Bar at Chili’s: A: Did you see that movie, “Zombieland”? B: No. A: It’s really funny. B: I hate Zombies. A: Why? B: You can’t kill them. They just keep coming. They can’t die because they are already dead. A: You can cut off their heads or blow them up. C: Or [...]
Religion is boring
This semester I keep running into religious boredom from my students. At Religious College, the students are totally entranced by the text we’re reading except when I try to say something about the religious context of the author, whom they far prefer to judge according to the standards of their own beliefs. At Secular College, [...]
Bad Faith
I often get the sense that people are asking me questions they don’t want answers to. It’s a kind of social blindness I have, which is weird because my parents did this all the time. You’d think I’d be used to it, but somehow I never learned to tell when it’s best just to tell [...]
Be my guest
A sleeping bag and maybe a towel⎯that’s all we used to need. Crashing at a friend’s place required no great forethought⎯a few days’ notice, maybe. But combine age, bigger incomes, more complicated lives, and greater needs for privacy and independence, and all of a sudden hospitality is a fraught issue. It’s Monday morning as I [...]
Obstruction
I wrote two long posts here in the past few hours. They were about something that has been happening to me recently, which is that I find myself limited in my paths through my neighborhood by various social forces—an ex’s children, whom I miss terribly and who hate me because they think I abandoned them, [...]
