My recent outburst on my blog about my wife was in very bad taste. Mental note:  never do that again. Jess is, yes, taking a nap right now with our dog Ellie. Whenever she talks about John Stewart and the Daily Show, she calls it the "John Daily Show." Can't beat a malapropism like that.
Last night I went to E. Hayot's house and watched the outtakes from "Derrida The Movie" with the other twelve or so members of the class. We ate pizza and conversed after staring at the subtitles on the screen. Not a great time, but a good time. I'm still trying to understand myself as a graduate student. I really, really don't care whether a given English Department is rated highly or lowly by U.S. News and World Report. I often think that the whole graduate school milieu is a little self-congratulatory and smug. I really don't care about who's "hot" in literary criticism nowadays.
That's why I balked in our colloquium when we were supposed to say what our interests are. I said I was still trying to work that out. I used to say I was interested in critical theory, but come on, saying such a thing sounds so absurd to me. I can't even do well on my seven page paper in the Derrida/Foucault class.
I'm a perfectionist, and I feel down when things don't go perfectly. More specifically, when my expectation of things does not go as planned. I can be as happy as ever if things go totally shitty, like one time when I pulled out into an intersection when I shouldn't have but wasnt' much afftected, or when I didn't get to play much on town team baseball in Iowa, but these were possibilities I had accounted for. I did not account for me being the primary income earner between Jess and me, nor did I not account for my poor time-management while in graduate school (though my teaching is actually not so bad). Anyway, only the blessed return to the earth.
Carry on my wayward son.