Gnosce Te Ipse

or something like that. I'm tired, gang. My application packet for the other campus in my district is due Thursday. It's Tuesday. And I tend to take these things seriously. I haven't updated my vita, my resume, since 99, and it it taking me hours of deeply critical work. I say critical, because that's how the writing feels. Every word, every sentence...though my tone is much more relaxed, I notice, than in the parts of the resume I wrote in 99. Then I was gasping for professional life; now I'm tenured and pink-skinned and that's not going anywhere. Tooling around the blogspot world I find several professors writing truly anonymous blog (unlike my poor attempt at anonymity here). Maybe there should be a webring; we're an anxious and driven bunch, and chatty as kathy. I'm still tired. And of course, I don't have much time today. So much of my past I want to articulate, but that will have to come slowly. One thing I will say is that the vestr...

I know I've mentioned this website before, www.ratemyprofessor.com; I hate it. I don't even want to link it to my blog. I had some extra time at work today waiting for traffic to thin to head up the hill for my second anglican class, and I looked up someone else and ended up looking up myself. Yes, the reviews are generally quite positive. But those couple of students who slammed me...it makes me so hurt and angry, more than I should be. So I'm blowing it out here. One student even knocked my Am. Lit. class on 2/1. The class began two weeks earlier. Two. So many things come to my mind: my dept. rotates lit classes so it's impossible to truly specialize. You get one three times in a row and then are bumped into something else. True, we all request what we get, but to make sure I get at least one lit. I've signed up for the entire brit. lit. and am. lit. surveys, plus myth and poetry. I actually like the variety of the changes, but it means I go into a ne...

There's so much to say about my trip to San Francisco two weekends ago. I don't know if I have time to it justice...what happens when you mix blog with hurried... blurried I guess. One thing is that ZAP is just too much wine in one place. It's true I had some of the very best zins in the state (thought the turley was gone by the time I got to their table; I have had the honor of being served that wine twice in my life). I also had lots of marginal, or moderately successful wines. A few very poor ones, but not many. Yet while I tried to pour out everthing but the little I needed to taste (though this didn't happen with those I truly loved) about three hours into it I was completely gone. Over-zinned. Forgive me for I have. Beyond buzzed and into drunk, S and I went outside, watched the light on the gray winter water, and managed to have a pretty good talk about our relationship, one I want to have again, sober. In its most succinct form, more talking, sharing fee...

Tonight, for many Christians, is known as fat Tuesday. Why? As the final night before Lent, at least in the Anglican tradition, this is when people would take all the fat in their house and make pancakes. There were pancake races, lots of eating. This tradition has survived, and tonight at 5 I'll be eating pancakes with the rest of my parish. ( Mardi gras , incidentally, means fat tuesday also, and some groups celebrate this with much more than pancakes). Tomorrow, of course, begins the great, and for many solemn, season of Lent . The forty days before Easter (not counting Sundays) when those awaiting baptism used to be catechized, or instructed, and now a time when some Christians actually fast, eating just one full meal, and two very small meals, and no meat. Others give up something else; for Episcopals, it's not uncommon to hear booze, chocolate, tv, etc., as the thing to be set aside (we really are Catholic-lite). It's also not uncommon for Episcopals to em...

I haven't been hiding out on purpose, but with my trip last weekend and then school really rolling, I haven't had a chance to write. Or rather, I started a long blog about the trip and it's still sitting in draft form. I haven't resolved the issues I talk about in the post below, but I'm still slogging, or blogging, ahead. There is an article I enjoyed right here about a phenomenon I missed in the media, lawmakers staining their index fingers. It is possible in five years Iraq will be a democracy the way Bush envisions it; I have grave doubts however. The apparent landslide in the Shiite vote (could that have been a surprise to anyone) the so-far silence on the part of the Sunnis, the daily death toll in American and Iraqui life. I would like to resort to choice, navy-quality profanity at the moment but I will refrain and instead focus my energy on my ideas: did not Bush and his people really believe the Iraqi's would welcome the americans, would op...