I’m starting to freak out.

One hour of the defense is focused on the thesis, and considering how much time I’ve spent thinking about all the issues surround that blasted thing, I’m not too awfully scared about that part.

But the other hour is about my coursework. You know, those classes that I took anywhere from 3-5 years ago? Yeah.

I’ve been trying to review the literature I read, but there’s simply no way to do 3 years worth of courses in two weeks (especially when some of it consists of 1400-page out-of-print novels :P). So I’ll do the best I can, then cross my fingers and hope for the best.

Especially since I want to get my graduation present.

I’ve finished my thesis!

At least, enough to schedule my defense. My chair is satisfied with it, and one of my readers thinks it’s “very good work,” which makes me want to dance, ’cause this is the professor whose class I failed way back when. Whew!

In any case, it now stands at 41 (and a bit) pages and 15,864 words. The defense is tentatively scheduled for November 20, but my chair hasn’t confirmed that he’s available yet. Unfortunately, that date is past the deadline for graduating in December, but as long as I finish everything, including getting the thesis submitted to the library, by December 18, I can still graduate in April without having to take any classes. It doesn’t mattert too much either way for me, since if I were to walk (which I haven’t decided if I’m doing it yet) I wouldn’t do that until April anyway. So it’s just whether my diploma says December or April. Po-tay-to, po-tah-to.

I’m almost done. I can’t even tell you how happy this makes me.

Now, to prepare for the defense!

4082 / 5000 words. 82% done!

Unfortunately, I’m apparently not a very good English major, because I must use little words. The above word count only represents 10 1/2 pages. I was hampered by a fairly busy weekend (wedding shower, BYU football game, etc.), and yesterday I didn’t get nearly as much work done as I should have, because I felt a little sick. Turned out I’d put my contacts in the wrong eyes that morning, which had given me a headache, which made me dizzy, and so on, and so forth. So my grand total wasn’t as much as it should have been.

However, Dr. Walker was pleased with what I had gotten done. 10 1/2 pages, after all, is better than no pages at all. We talked about what I planned on doing further (I started in the middle, so I have to go back and write the introduction, lay a foundation, etc.), what sources I planned to bring in, where I needed more commentary, and stuff like that. He wants a full first draft by Oct. 13, two weeks from today. He would have wanted it by next Tuesday, but I’m leaving for Disneyland that day, so that won’t work.

Even though I didn’t fully meet my goal, I’m still really proud of myself. After 5 years of work, I finally have something to show for it. 10 1/2 pages of my own writing, on my thesis topic.

I’ll take it.

0 / 5000 words. 0% done!

I have officially applied for December graduation.

Also talked to my thesis advisor today. He wants 20 pages by Tuesday. That’s approximately 5,000 words. So I stole a NaNoWriMo progress bar.

5,000 words by 2:00 Tuesday. I think I can, I think I can, I think I can. . .

(In other news, I got this book delivered to me today. Am going to try the hypnosis CD tonight. We’ll see what happens. Right now, I’ll try ANYTHING to get me to sleep better.)

2) The new carpet is going in my bedroom tomorrow. Yayness! This means I have to move the remainder of my stuff (my bed, computer desk, bedside bookshelf, and deskside bookshelf) out of my room tonight, and will be sleeping on the futon. Boo. And then I get to put my room back together. More boo. It’ll be nice to have all my books available and on my bookshelves again, though. I’ve been living off only those I could fit on my bedside shelf, which is only about 25/30 books. Eek! At least this included all my Austens.

3) My dad has gout. Seriously. It seems to be somewhat of a side effect of his kidney disease (as it’s caused by uric acid, which is of course found in higher levels when the kidney isn’t functioning properly) rather than because he drinks a lot of wine and eats a lot of red meat (because he doesn’t :P), and it hurts. A lot. But we’ve all been joking about going to Bath to take the waters and having great big white bandages and needing crutches from the missionary barrels but getting a doll instead (who recognizes THAT convoluted movie reference, huh?). My niece also had a very mild case of the croup over the weekend, so my family’s all up with Victorian diseases recently. What’s next, I wonder? Cholera? Ague? Consumption? Or maybe we can get away with just an attack of the vapours.

4) Due to the painting and general room renovation, work on the thesis has slowed rather. I expect it to pick up shortly.

Speaking of Lizzy, wanna see a pic of her newly-repaired trunk?

There’s a couple more in the set if you click on the photo. Doesn’t she look gorgeous? We’re still on the lookout for a new trunk panel (you can see that it’s a bit broken if you look at a larger size) and she smells like paint on the inside still, but other than that, I have no complaints. At all. I love my car.

Except that somewhere during the whole ordeal, her license plate frame/cover thingy got broken (I suspect it was the tow truck to blame, because it shouldn’t have been damaged by the actual crash). Said frame used to read “You think that, Jane, if it gives you comfort.” Which is a great line and an even greater inside joke, but it has two problems: 1) it’s from the 1995 mini-series version of Pride and Prejudice, and therefore was not actually written by Jane Austen, and 2) it was spoken by Mr. Bennet to Jane, which means that it doesn’t match with the whole “Lizzy” thing. So I need to come up with an appropriate line from the P&P book that (preferably) was either spoken by or refers to Elizabeth Bennet, and that will fit on a license plate cover. Because, while “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” is awesome, it would be impossible to decipher if we managed to get it on a frame.

So. Want to help me brainstorm? (I have already considered, and rejected, “What are men to rocks and mountains?” because I’m not really that much of an outdoorsy girl.) Come on, you know you want to comb through the pages of P&P.

I’ve been having a weird vertigo thing the last couple of weeks. I’m not dizzy, per se, at least not in the just-got-off-the-Mad-Tea-Party way. I just can’t seem to keep my balance, and the room likes to spin when I move my head too quickly. I eventually went to the doctor last Saturday, who said it was probably related to some congestion in my head (not in my sinuses or nasal passages, though, as they were both perfectly clear) and prescribed meclizine and Nasonex, and told me I could also take Zyrtec if it didn’t get better. I did end up taking the Zyrtec, too, which made me incredibly drowsy for the last week. And the vertigo still hasn’t completely cleared up. Gah.

This has rather slowed down my promising progress on my thesis, as reading a traditional book is difficult due to the angles involved. And there are a couple of other issues as well, which I’m not quite prepared to talk about in public yet. Still, I do seem to be getting a bit better, and am hopeful that the worst of my writer’s block is behind me.

I spent Saturday shopping for room-painting supplies. I think I blogged about this (but I’m waaay too lazy today to go looking), but just as a review, this spring my window well leaked (unbeknownst to me) and caused a big section of my carpet to go all moldy and mildewy and caused water damage to 5 of my 7 bookshelves (I know, that’s a ton– but in my defense, two of them are just teeny 1-foot-wide shelves, which I use as a stereo stand and a bedside table). And it ruined a library book, too, which was intensely distressing to me. Well, the carpet has dried but needed to be replaced, and we finally went and found a remnant that was cheap and a good color. Which means that I get to repaint my room–it’s currently pink, and I’m not really a pink person. It’s going to be a lovely sage green, and I’m going to go home tonight and remove the rest of my wallpaper border and get stuff prepped. Yay! I shall have to take pictures when it’s all done.

I’m also going to get a new bed. This one, to be precise. I’ve always wanted a bed like that. Too bad my room is too small (once you cram my 7 bookshelves in– and I need all of them!) to have more than a twin-sized bed. I’d like to upgrade to a full. Being 27 years old and all.

It’s okay, though, ’cause Lizzy is coming home tomorrow! They painted her yesterday, and were re-assembling her today. Apparently her new trunk lid was originally champagne-colored, and her new bumper was dark blue. And they couldn’t find a DX model trunk for her, so the back insert was going to be the standard gray kind instead of the spiffy-used-for-that-model-year-only red one. Buying a brand-new one was going to cost $400. But then dad talked to the body shop guy today, and he said that the original one wasn’t really that damaged. So he’s putting Lizzy’s back on, until we can find a completely undamaged one. It also means that Lizzy will be missing the “DX” sticker-thingy on the trunk, but dad found one on eBay for $6.

Can you tell I’m excited about getting my car back?

I’m going to Disneyland in April! Whoot! With my sister Lisa and her BFF Sarah, right after Lisa’s finals end. And I mean RIGHT after. ‘Cause Disneyland is doing a deal where, if you go to the park on April 24 or before, you can get a 5-day Park Hopper pass for the price of a 3-day. And Lisa’s last final is April 23rd, at 1:00 pm. So, we’re flying out that night at about 8, and going to Disney the next day. Staying until Monday, and flying home again at 8:00 that night. I’ve never been to Disneyland over multiple days before. I wonder how many times I’ll manage to squeeze in Pirates? *ponders*

Watched Northanger Abbey last night. Really enjoyed it, although, of course, there were a few things that bugged. I was prepared to hate it, because Mags of Austenblog hated it, and my taste tends to be similar to hers. But I liked it. Quite a lot. It was better than Persuasion, anyway. I’m looking forward to Mansfield Park in a this-is-going-to-be-a-trainwreck kind of way. I have no particular attachment to the novel, you see, so I think I’ll be able to enjoy it as Le Bad Cinema (as our local movie guy dubs really really bad flicks), since it’s rather obvious I won’t be able to enjoy it as Good Cinema. Since they cast Billie Piper as Fanny Price and all. I love Billie Piper, but she simply isn’t Fanny Price.

Of course, the small things that they didn’t get right in Northanger Abbey have me reading the novel again, even though I reread it only a month or so ago. Not that there’s anything wrong with rereading Austen, ever. But I just can’t let all of Henry’s snarky lines go unappreciated. I lent one of my copies (yes, I have several) to Lisa, too, so soon she too will be reveling in the sexiness that is Henry Tilney.

When I first started looking at literature from a critical perspective, it was in my Honors Sophomore English class. Excellent class. Everything I needed to know about how to write a paper, I learned in that class. I also learned the fundamentals of poetry that no one seems to teach any more (can you identify dactylic trimeter at a glance? You could, if you’d had Mr. Wood). Until I graduated from high school and started college, however, my papers were essentially formalistic in nature. You know, I wrote about what was actually in the book/poem, without imposing any kind of theory on it beyond a bit of biographical/historical background.

My first brush with critical theory, then, came in my freshman year of college, when I took English 251: Fundamental Literary Criticism. We had a brief (VERY brief) overview of the different theories, and then got to pick one and write a paper on it. I chose multiculturalism and used Amy Tan’s A Pair of Tickets. Why? Because multiculturalism was pretty much the only theory I actually understood. The only thing I can actually remember learning in that class was from a rap that a fellow student wrote for our end-of-the-year talent show (yes, my class was taught by a grad student; why do you ask?): “Of all the authors we have read, one thing that we have noticed: they all were alcoholics and died of tuberculosis). Yeah. That, and my teacher had written a song called “The Last Train to Tocquerville,” which is a teeny little town in Southern Utah. Anyway.

The next year I took English 252: Critical Writing. Again, we had a very brief overview of the theories. I understood even less this time, I think. The class (there were only 5 of us, it was an evening section) chose a single novel (Pride and Prejudice, much to my delight, because the one male in the class said he didn’t want to read anything depressing, which of course eliminates a good 87% of the English-language canon) and each wrote our own papers about it. Mine ended up being deconstructionist, although not really. I just called it that because my teacher said that that’s what I was writing.

After that, for my undergrad at least, I was almost able to forget about theory. I took a Shakespeare class where the teacher tried to help us understand the intricacies of rhetorical criticism (that teacher is actually on my thesis committee now. Funny old world, innit?), and my capstone course had a post-colonial bend to it. But mostly, I my encounters with critical theory were limited to some of my more annoying classmates parroting a few terms here and there.

And then came grad school. I was required to take an undergraduate critical theory course as a condition of my acceptance, which I did, my first semester. Luckily, my prof was actually able to make Marxism, Feminism, and Postcolonialism understandable to me. I even managed to write what would become the presentation I gave at Lumos on the Sorting Hat and Ideological State Apparati. But was that the end? Of course not! Because after taking that class, I was subjected to a graduate-level critical theory course. I took it in the Spring semester, because the guy who taught it for Fall and Winter talks so fast that I can’t understand him. He’s brilliant, but he mumbles. I thought that might not be the best idea.

So, I took 630. I’ve never been in a class that made me feel more stupid. Everyone around me seemed to really get the theories and the theorists we were discussing, but I didn’t. Well, a few I did. But most I didn’t. And, of course, I had to write a thesis. Which meant that I had to pick a theory and understand it enough to write an 80-page paper about it! I chose a hybrid of moral/biographical criticism. I think. That’s how I’m justifying my topic, anyway. Neither of those theories are currently in vogue, incidentally.

And then last year, I took Rhetorical Criticism, mainly because I’d had to take a rhetoric class as part of my breadth requirement, and some of the issues we touched on seemed vaguely intriguing. That was the class I ended up failing.

So, what have I learned from my experiences with critical theory? Well, first, I don’t understand most of it. Seriously. And I’m a fairly intelligent individual. I have the standardized tests to prove it (my scores, let me show you them). I have a sneaking suspicion that most other English majors, graduate and undergraduate, don’t either. They may act like they understand Neitchze, Derrida, Althusser, Foucault, Burke, Eagleton, Said, and their ilk, but they don’t. They’ve assimilated enough of it to parrot the terms, but they’re, at best, pseudo-intellectual poseurs. I know I am.

But beyond the fact that most theory is utterly incomprehensible to any but the most whacked-out of English professors (I am provisionally convinced that you have to be at least partially insane to understand Derrida), it’s how theory is applied. It’s simply impossible to just read a book any more. No, instead you have to declare that the author is dead and therefore what the author meant to say is absolutely irrelevant, or that everything actually means the exact opposite of how it is portrayed, or that every male character is misognynistic and every female character written by a man is unrealistic and every male OR female character written by a woman must be a Paragon of Every Feminist Virtue. You have to point out the injustice of every binary. Economics and social status are crucial to EVERY story. Anything long and skinny is a phallic symbol. Any character with a physical imperfection is an example of the marginalization of the disabled. Sisterly love is actually lesbian incest. And an author just can’t win when it comes to race–either they’re too focused on it or not focused enough or they’re betraying their own racial roots or they’re dooming their race to continued prejudice or revealing their own subconscious racism or. . . yeah. But sorry, you’re not actually allowed to point out the moral messages a book might be sending. Morality is Taboo.

Even those of you who aren’t English majors recognize much of what I said in the previous paragraph, because you’re all Harry Potter fans, and you’ve seen those same things applied to HP. And therein lies the rub. Because even if I were to write about the books I actually enjoy reading, I’d have to do it like that. And I’m sorry, but that stuff right there? Is balderdash. I distinctly remember sitting in a creative writing class in high school, having a poem I’d written critiqued. My classmates were finding all sorts of things I never even thought of putting in there, and a good portion of them went entirely against what I’d actually been trying to do. I think that colored my perception of the value of literary criticism. Of the hundred or so papers I’ve written in my life, even counting those in which I tried to avoid theory whatsoever, I can probably count on one hand the ones I actually believed. And even those, I’d give odds on. I’m about 87% confident that I’m on a close-to-true track with my thesis.

And I hate that. I hate that I’m faking that I even understand the theories I’m applying, let alone that I think there’s any substance to them. Because in English papers, unlike scientific ones, you’re supposed to write that something “is” happening, not that something “might be.” Weasel words not allowed. It seems dangerously close to dishonesty. And when I imagine doing it for several more years to earn a PhD, only to have to keep doing in for more years after that to earn tenure– I’ve come to realize that I just can’t.

Don’t get me wrong. There are many things about being an English major that I love. I’m absolutely certain that there are things about being a professor that I would love. If I hadn’t thought that, I wouldn’t be where I am now. But my experience in grad school has taught me that if I have to keep doing Critical Theory for the rest of my life, I will go absolutely insane.

So, what does this mean? It means that after I finish my MA thesis, I’m done. No applying to PhD programs. No retaking the GRE lit exam. It’s taken me 3 years to realize it, but it’s not for me. Maybe it could have been. I don’t know. When I started thinking of doing an MA in English, it felt very right. Maybe that was because of the lessons I needed to learn, not because of the career path. But I’ve met with nothing but uncertainty, failure, and panic attacks since starting grad school, and I don’t think it’s a good idea to keep going.

So what am I going to do instead? I’m going to get my MLS. I want to be a Youth Services librarian in a public library. Librarians are semi-in-demand here in Utah, because there are no MLS programs in the state. It will mean two more years of school and a bucketload of student loans, because I’ll have to pay out-of-state tuition. But it feels right. My front-runner program is an online one at the University of Arizona. You see I’ve done my research.

And it’s amazing. I made this decision a few weeks ago. And since then, I’ve felt the most amazing sense of peace. And drive. I’ve been doing meaningful research on my thesis. I should be able to write again soon (although I haven’t tried it, but I have high hopes). It’s like this enormous weight of personal expectations has been lifted off my shoulders. To paraphrase Lois McMaster Bujold, maybe I just needed to free my brain.

I’ve been thinking. About the kind of reading I do, and what that means to my chosen profession.

I’m sure I’ve mentioned before that I first learned how to read at age 4. My brother, who is about 18 months older than me, was learning in Kindergarten. Whether from kindness or a desire to show off (or both), he would come home and teach me what he’d learned. It wasn’t long before he didn’t need to teach me any more, because I’d become just as good as him, if not better. The first thing I can recall really reading is a passage from the Book of Mormon that this same brother (well, I only have one) had used in a talk in our church’s children’s organization. He was trying to give the talk from memory, and therefore was repeating this verse over and over again. And I got out a copy and was able to match the words he’d been repeating to the shapes on the page. I can still repeat a lot of it from memory: “And ye will not suffer your children that they go hungry, or naked; neither will ye suffer that they transgress the laws of God, and fight and quarrel one with another, and serve the devil, who is the master of sin. . .” or something like that. Yikes. I just checked, and indeed, I remembered a good portion of it. I always got stuck on the phrase after that. Although I could recover by “But ye will teach them to love one another, and to serve one another.”

Anyway. We moved just after I started Kindergarten myself, in November, to where we still live now. And the new school district didn’t teach reading in Kindergarten, so while even at my old school I’d been ahead, I now found myself the only one in a class of 30 who could read. My teacher, I suspect, didn’t know what to do with me. At times she had me read to the class while she completed other work. (The detrimental effect of this to my social life is another post in itself.) My first grade teacher didn’t know what to do with me, either. I was far and away above even the highest-level reading group. I ended up spending most of the year reading out of chapter books to a second-grader. Luckily this teacher was a bit more perceptive of how this singled me out from my classmates, and eventually reintegrated me into the highest group, where I was bored. But at least not completely unique. My second grade teacher ignored my skill level and tried to teach me phonics with the rest of the class. I. . . did not react well. I admit that I was a bit of a problem child for my second grade teacher. Boredom will do that. Luckily, by the time I got to third grade, several other girls had caught up with me, and a 5-girl group was formed where we read Newbery books instead of the usual McGraw-Hill readers. The first book I read in this group (I can’t believe I remember this) was The Witch of Blackbird Pond. By the time I was in sixth grade, I read at a twelfth-grade level.

Now. I know I am not unique in this reading-early-and-reading-well thing. But even in that, I’ve come to see my experience as unusual. Because, while I was reading above my level for almost my entire life, my tastes tended toward. . . well. If I’d been Doing it Right, I’ve come to find, I should have been reading Pride and Prejudice at age 12. I should have devoured Hemingway in Jr. High. My shelves should have been filled with Moby Dick, War and Peace, and the unabridged Les Miserables by my sophomore year of high school. But I didn’t do that. I first read Pride and Prejudice my senior year of high school. I read The Old Man and the Sea as an assignment in 9th grade (it was one of several on a list, and I picked it because it was the shortest) and hated it. I’ve never actually read the other three above mentioned. Almost all of the classics that I have read have been assigned in class, whether in my honors/AP English classes in high school, in my undergrad English degree, or my current grad school classes. And to tell the truth, I haven’t really liked most of them. I’ve learned how to read them, how to write about them, but for the most part, I haven’t learned how to enjoy them.

So what did I read, then? Lots of things. Instead of reading far above my supposed level in elementary school, though, I only read a few levels up, and very quickly. Then I’d obsessively reread my favorites. So while most of my peers started reading Nancy Drew mysteries in 5th or 6th grades, I started reading them in 3rd. I’d blow through a Baby-Sitters’ Club book in an hour. I devoured Encyclopedia Brown. I read and reread Little House and the Anne of Green Gables books. Even when, in junior high, I moved away from the children’s section and started on truly adult books, it still wasn’t Steinbeck or Joyce, it was Erle Stanley Gardner–with some R.L. Stine and L.M. Montgomery thrown in for good measure. The librarians would boggle at my stack of books, wondering how I’d ever finish it all in the three-week loaning period. They didn’t know that I’d have them all read by the end of a week.

And, of course, I haven’t stopped. Yes, I’ve got a nice bookshelf full of classics and more recent books of so-called literary merit, but most of them I’ve only read once (and have little to no desire to read again). In the meantime, I buy everything from picture books (have you guys ever read Click, Clack, Moo: Cows that Type? How about Hooway for Wodney Wat? They’re both absolutely delightful) to middle readers (Ella Enchanted was one of those books I wore out in paperback before finding it in hardcover, and I just bought Robin McKinley’s new Dragonhaven), to young adult (just finished The Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale, excellent reading), to sci-fi and fantasy (I need to replace my copy of Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold, it’s falling apart; and of course, there’s Harry Potter), to (tame) historical romance (I’m going to have to start buying my Georgette Heyers from England, ’cause Harlequin has seemingly stopped reprinting them), to mysteries (did you know that the Jane Austen Mysteries are really quite fun?). Maybe it’s a reaction to the regimental reading of grad school (although I don’t think so), but my taste naturally gravitates to genre fiction and children’s books.

I can just imagine all of you going “so what?” Well. . . there’s a problem here. Because when I go to my graduate school classes, when I read literary criticism, when I look at Calls for Papers for conferences– I get the distinct impression that I’m reading (and internalizing) the Wrong Things. It’s simply impossible for some of the people who inhabit the Ivory Tower to conceive that the writers of genre fiction might have just as much to say about the human condition as those who write literary fiction. They’d scoff if I told them that the books that really stick with me aren’t the ones that they think should. And yet– is there not moral ambiguity in, say, the story of Lord Peter Wimsey, whose quest to uncover a murder inadvertently causes the deaths of more innocent people, just as there is in Hamlet? Is Miles Vorkosigan’s struggle for identity in the face of disability and prejudice any less valid than, say, Huckleberry Finn’s, just because Miles’s story involves spaceships instead of a river raft? Why should the One Ring be an unacceptable device for portraying the corrupting influence of power, while an allegory involving farmyard animals is not only fine, but genius? And you will never convince me that Sidney Carton’s self-sacrifice is morally (or even literarily) superior to Harry Potter’s, even if ultimately Harry didn’t die.

See, the thing is, I personally believe that in the examples I gave above, the genre-fiction equivalents are more powerful, simply because they are more accessible. I don’t care what deep, weighty issues a book is dealing with– if the author can’t manage to portray it to me in an understandable, even entertaining fashion, I’m going to forget all about it when I close the book. Maybe even before that. If I can’t comprehend what exactly it is you’re trying to say behind that oh-so-innovative language (or format, or whatever the author decided to do to make their book “literary”), how am I ever supposed to decide whether I agree with you or not? It think that was ultimately my problem with the rhetorical criticism class I took last year– the first class I ever failed. Because I never understood the issues, the theories, well enough to internalize them. (As an aside, you’d think a rhetorician would be able to make themselves understood, wouldn’t you? Hah! Kenneth Burke is as opaque as a piece of wood.)

I’ll admit that things are better than they used to be. There is such a thing as Cultural Studies (as long as you’re careful to make it clear that the pop culture you’re studying is still Just Pop Culture). Every once in a while a university will throw genre fiction a bone, like the British Mystery Writers class I took a couple of years ago. But the change is slow, and you’ll only gain real acceptance in certain circles. I was told by one professor (who I respect very much) that I was committing career suicide by writing my MA thesis on The Lord of the Rings. I shudder to think what he would have said if I’d told him I was thinking of writing on Harry Potter. “Why don’t you write on Austen instead?” he asked, and my answer was that I didn’t have a good Austen-focused idea (and I didn’t, at the time), but I did have a good Tolkien one. “That’s a shame,” he says. Now, my thesis chair, when I asked him if this was a real possibility, said that yes, it would probably close a few doors, but that they wouldn’t be doors I wanted to walk through anyway. At the time, I was satisfied with that answer. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve wondered.

Do I really, really, want to spend the rest of my life in an atmosphere that disdains the kind of reading that I hold most dear? I know, I can join the people in the Ivory Tower to corrupt from within, and I admit that’s my plan. But. . . that means spending at least two, maybe five, more years Faking It. Pretending that the chloroform in print they keep shoving down my throat is worth even reading, let alone writing pages and pages about. And then what? It’s hard enough to get a tenure-track position these days if you’re a canon conformist, let alone if you want to be a rabble-rouser. And if I publish papers on The Female Hero in Young Adult Fantasy, will it even count? (And let’s not get started on literary criticism in general, ’cause that’s yet another post.) Even my chosen PhD topic (if I ever get that far) is unusual– I can just imagine the admission committee reading my statement of intent: “She wants to study Jane Austen paraliterature? Like, sequels and fanfic? Really?”

No wonder I can’t write my thesis. I don’t even know if that’s what I want to be when I grow up.

Phil Collins.

Seriously, why did this guy do so many cover songs? And his original songs are even worse! I’ve been here since 8. It is now 11:15. And I’ve heard Phil Collins three times already.

GAH.

Anyway. A couple of weeks ago, our IT guy at work came and stole my fax machine/printer. The nurses station needed it. He said I’d get it back after the weekend, but I didn’t. This was highly inconvenient. But then, last Friday, I got a brand-new HP OfficeJet Pro L7680 all-in-one printer/copier/scanner/fax. ‘Tis very pretty, and it works SO much better than my old one. I was really giddy about it until I realized how lame it was to be giddy over office equipment. Then I was just mildly pleased.

I’m much more than mildly pleased over something else, though. I mentioned Ravelry in my last (real) post. Well, one of the cool things on Ravelry is the ability to search by knitting pattern, and see who else has done that pattern and how it turned out. Each pattern has a page with a featured photo. A couple of days ago, I got a message that two of my projects had been selected to be the featured photo for that pattern! It made me very happy. Of course, it helped that only two other people had made Snaps and only one had made Flaps (I actually had to add the pattern to the site; someone else then said they’d made it, but that person hadn’t posted a picture at all), but hey, a featured photo is a featured photo. I was quite chuffed about it.

I get Labor Day off! Thank heaven. I’m dearly in need of a break. BYU’s semester officially starts on Tuesday, but I’m not taking any classes, which feels odd. I am registered for two thesis hours, though, which is the minimum hours required for the semester you graduate. Yes, I’m still hoping against hope that I can finish my thesis in time for December graduation. It may take a miracle. But miracles do happen sometimes.

Gah. They just played Elton John. Maybe it’s a tie after all. . .