Hello there.

Right now I am alone in my office on campus, having a super-secret gourmet picnic lunch.

I am having mixed greens with bell peppers, carrots, red onions, and edamame. These vegetables are so fresh, they are practically technicolor. I also have two of the most fragrant satsuma oranges I have ever smelled, and a lovely lemon tartlet for dessert (it has powdered sugar dusted on top in a crisscross pattern... sigh). I bought everything this morning at Central Market, and I think that if it were possible for a human to marry a grocery store, I would propose.

The reason for my lunchtime extravaganza? Today I filed my dissertation. This all feels a bit anti-climactic since I've already been a professor for a year. The lack of climax is not helped by the fact that I filed the dissertation from afar. I didn't get to have the walk of triumph into Grad. Div. proudly waving my signature pages and finished manuscript. Instead everything arrived bit by bit in the mail. Oh well.

It's done, and that's all that matters. So I celebrate small with the most amazing, out of control lunch that ever existed, today I am officially a doctor.

Only a bottle of really good champagne could make this better.

P.S. Let this officially be the LAST TIME I ever use the "dissertation blogging" tag.

FYI friends with paid livejournal accounts: you can claim three days of account reimbursement for the recent LJ outage by clicking here. Thought I would pass this along to you because I almost missed it myself.

Back soon with real updates, I promise.

Summer is almost over, and I head back to work in two weeks. When I think about all the boring work stuff that I need to do before then, my head threatens to explode. So this is an anti head-exploding to-do list.

The Fun Stuff List:
1. See Harry Potter in 3D at the IMAX theater
2. Check out South Austin First Thursday
3. Visit my local library; sign up for a card and check out a book
4. Spend a day at the pool
5. Have a farewell to summer dinner at Wink
6. Go dancing in the Warehouse District
7. Invite my newly returned Romanian colleague over for a Wii party
8. Go crazy with my Sephora discount (really crazy)
9. Play tourist and go to some museums
10. Day trip in search of good barbecue

I could go on, but then fun starts to sound like work. What about you? What are you hoping to accomplish before summer ends?

I fixate on the weirdest things. This morning, as I clean house and go about my daily business, I have a certain song playing over and over in my head. Any minute now, I expect a man wearing a blond Prince Valiant wig and a gold fanny pack to appear. I give this fascinating stranger full reign to help me with my "look."





(an aside, are The Roots not the most amazing house band ever?)

I think I've forgotten how to be a professor.

I will compare this feeling to what happens when you've first been studying a foreign language for a year. You've mastered the basics of "My name is" and "I like hamburgers," and maybe you've gotten into some intermediate verb conjugation. Just enough that you start to feel accomplished but you begin to realize how much work is still ahead of you, how hard this language is. And then school ends for the year, you go on summer vacation, and you don't speak this language the whole time (you weren't lucky enough to have travel plans or study abroad, I guess). You forget that you ever spoke anything other than your native tongue. Your mouth slowly loses its knowledge of the new sounds it acquired, and you are so full of summer heat, flip flops, and suntans that you don't mind. You never even notice.

Fast forward to the fall and the first day of class when suddenly the loss is keenly felt. You pray that when the language instructor calls your name and asks you "What did you do for summer vacation?" that you remember the right words, and that it all comes back in a flood of information and you are just as fluent now as you were three months ago. This doesn't happen. Instead, you get really nervous, stumble a little over the pronunciation and forget the proper verb tense. You resent the classmates who pick up where they left off, making you wonder whether they practiced conjugation and vocabulary all summer long while you were busy doing nothing. It gets better, though, after a couple of weeks. Slowly you begin to reclaim the ground that was lost, but not without a feeling of dread as you learn everything again.

Yeah, it's kinda like this.

Just came across a bizarre little blog, Dead Man Eating, which posts final meal requests for death row prisoners about to be executed.

For example:

THOMAS TRESHAWN IVEY
May 8, 2009
Last Meal: Ivey had a final meal request of pizza and donuts.

Pizza and donuts, who knew? This raises the question, what would you eat if you knew it would be your last? ...if there were no consequences, because let's face it, you can't get fat (or heart disease) when you're dead.

Here's someone who really got into it:

Michael F. Rosales
April 15, 2009

Last Meal: Rosales had a final meal request of six beef enchiladas with cheese and jalapenos, one bowl of rice, one bowl of beans, diced lettuce and tomato, four pieces of fried chicken with three biscuits, one bowl of mashed potatoes, one vanilla cake with vanilla icing, one double-bacon jalapeno cheeseburger with no onions and a side of fries, one pint of sherbert, two glasses of Mountain Dew and two glasses of cold milk.

Hijole!

Although I am tempted to say I would want something exotic or gourmet, I'm pretty sure I would be happiest with a really, really, REALLY good double cheeseburger (or chili cheeseburger, there's this one place in my hometown, oh my God...), some perfectly done fries, a regular Coke, and a brownie sundae for dessert. I'm lactose intolerant and perpetually on a diet, so this meal sounds like heaven.

And for you?

Dear Person that Facebook Thinks I Know,

Voodoo Facebook is correct-- I do know you. But I still haven't forgiven you for breaking my heart back in '97. So I will never add you. And I am glad you have the sense to not do so either, which is why I've been forced to stare at your picture in my list of people I know for months. It really bothers me that even if I click the "x" and try to get rid of you, you somehow resurface after a few weeks. This is exactly what you did to me in '97. JERK.

Some good things:

Wilco (The Album) and Maxwell's BLACKsummers'night
Supersizers Go and Supersizers Eat (this might be the best show ever)
Happy Go Lucky
summer rain
cicadas
new red sandals
iced coffee
cold plums

I feel like I've gone into hiding. I haven't had much to say recently, or maybe I just haven't felt like talking. Describing how lonely I get is boring. Sometimes this happens when Chris calls me: I've been desperate for his voice all day, and then when we're actually on the phone I have nothing to talk about. It's like there is an imaginary barrier between me and my loved ones, people I imagine carrying on normally while I spend too much time with myself day after day. I find myself irrationally resenting people for being away from me. And since I'm already resenting most Texans, I'm pretty much screwed (or screwing myself).

I'm very aware of the fact that I could have left Texas for the summer, so this is self-imposed exile. I wanted to stay because this is where I live, and I need to stop thinking about California as "home." What I had there no longer exists. And being here for the summer hasn't been entirely unproductive: because I was here I finished my dissertation and I got a start on course planning for the fall. Texas, though... killing me. I think it's a mistake to live anywhere where you cannot imagine yourself as a year-round resident. Heat is literally very isolating. I would give anything right now to be able to open my windows and feel cold air.

Each day is the same: I wake up, exercise before it gets too hot, do a little work, read for a while, watch a lot of tv, fall asleep. I can go days without ever leaving the property. It kills me that I have time and resources to do what I want, and this is what I'm doing. My mom was here last week, and that was a nice break. We saw Maxwell in concert, went to some restaurants, saw some rad turtles swimming in a creek, braved the heat (which nearly killed us) and went to the capitol building, etc. I think I will buy a ticket today to visit her in a few weeks.

No progress to report on the dissertation front, I'm afraid. The only real news is that my chair has been sending bits of revision commentary every few days. This is odd because we've never had this kind of relationship, and suddenly she wants to correct my use of "twentieth century" over "20th century" and "twentieth-century." I am humoring her and attempting to sort through what needs to be done now and what can wait. Trying to be patient, but I feel like throwing up my hands and walking away. Really walking away.

I might adopt a kitten today. I think this every day.

Things you don't want to do when it is 105:
open your blinds
go outside
get in a hot car
touch anything exposed to the sun
wear a bra
wear pants
use a hair dryer
put on makeup
eat hot food
eat period
breathe
move
speak