Potpourri

Hi. There are only about four more weeks until I am done with my first year of PhD coursework. I have to admit, while it has been a good semester and a good year in general, I can barely wait for summer to get here. True, I'll be working all summer, but it will be nice to have a few months of doing jobs that actually end when I leave at the end of the day/night.

Things are going good around here this week. I finally caught up on grading (only to be inundated with another round of papers and quizzes from both classes on Wednesday, but at least I finished a huge chunk of it). I'm still staying just barely half a step ahead on all of my coursework, but at least I'm that half step ahead and not, like, two steps behind. My goal for this weekend is to actually finish my paper for my Tuesday evening class sometime before Tuesday at noon. Every week these papers are due (and they're really freakin' work-intensive papers to do every single week) and every week it's Tuesday morning at 6 a.m. and I'm dragging myself out of bed so I can finish working on it. I do NOT want to do that this week. Anyway, my work is going well. I'm getting positive feedback in all of my classes at the moment. Every week I feel like I have probably failed, and yet I'm getting "A"s and a lot of positive comments. I don't know at what point you finally feel secure about your work. I think in my case, the answer is probably "never," because I have been getting "A"s pretty consistently my entire life and yet I never feel like I have done anything worth praising. Then again, maybe that's just a psychological thing. If I tell myself that I did badly, then if I DO end up getting a less-than-stellar response I can just tell myself, "Well, it figures, I didn't put enough effort into it. I could have done better." And if I do manage to get an "A", I'm thrilled.

Hmmm, what else? I'm still cooking a lot. This is the first year that my New Year's resolution to cook more has actually stuck. Last week I made chicken caesar burgers. This week I've been addicted to eggs scrambled with artichoke hearts, spinach, and herb cheese. Yum. I pretty much only eat out for two meals a week now on average, and generally only one of those is fast food. It started out mostly as a way to save money, but I know it is healthier for me, too. A lot of fast food grosses me out now. Weirdly, the only fast food that still sounds appealing to me on a regular basis these days is McDonalds (which has to be the fast food that is least like actual food, don't you think?) I had Quizno's the other day for the first time in a few months and it was okay but it wasn't as good as I wanted it to be. And Taco Bell, which I used to like, literally made me gag when I tried to eat a taco from there a few weeks ago. It's so bizarre. And really, I didn't want to stop liking fast food. It's inconvenient. I just wish I could find even more time to cook since I'm discovering that even with my still-pretty-pathetic kitchen skills, most of what I can make for myself is better than most of what I can get in a drive thru.

The weather is finally really nice here! It had been cold and rainy through most of March and early April, but this week the highs are finally in the 70s and it has been beautiful and sunny. And I'm loving the spring flowers. A few weeks ago there were daffodils blooming along the highway I take to campus. Now the daffodils are dying but in their place bright red tulips have popped up. I'm in awe. The daffodils popped up while I was out of town for spring break, so the bright yellow wash of flowers along the highway was a surprise on the first morning I drove to school when I got back. I actually gasped out loud the first time I saw them because they were so nice. I think I'm okay with winter if we also get flowers like this in the spring. And I realize an entire paragraph about flowers is a bit boring, but, well, I like the simple things.

Another simple thing that has made my week? The guy I've been talking to (and I'm using "talking to" here in the literal sense, not as a silly euphemism, and I'll give him a blog name if he stays in the picture long enough) sent me a link to a website that allows you to stream movies onto your computer, so I have watched a ton of movies in the last week while I've been doing school work: No Country for Old Men, There Will be Blood, Away from Her, and Atonement. I also watched my copies of Breakfast at Tiffany's and Snatch last weekend. That's six movies in the past week, which is more movies than I had watched all year prior to this point. Now I just need to see Michael Clayton and I'll finally have seen all the best picture nominees from this year (I actually managed to see Juno in the theater). I definitely think No Country was the right choice for best picture. The suspense of that movie was intense. Normally I have no problem doing other things while I watch a movie (grading, cleaning, internet browsing, whatever) but that one drew me in to the point where I finally gave up and just sat and watched it without doing anything else for the last hour, which is very rare for me. I also loved Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood, although I thought the movie itself was a bit uneven (Is it just me, or did it feel like nothing happened in the first hour of that movie and then a bunch of stuff was crammed into the last fifteen minutes? That doesn't mean that it wasn't still compelling and watchable; even in the first hour when nothing was happening it kept my interest, but still.) Anyway, now that I have this newfound ability to access movies, do you have any recommendations for things I absolutely have to see? I currently have Michael Clayton, Once, Little Children, and Gone Baby Gone on my to-watch list since those are movies I remember hearing a lot about over the past year or so. I also want to watch Persepolis, although I'm going to have to set aside time to do that since it's a foreign language film and even I can't do other work while having to read subtitles. But yeah, that's only five movies, and at the rate I'm going these days I might very well have watched all of them by two weeks from now, and then what am I going to do? (Other than get a life, I mean)

I have a lot to do this weekend. Tomorrow I have to clean the apartment and hit the grocery store. Tomorrow night Dr. AMP is throwing a party since it's Grad Student Appreciation Week (P.S.-We get paid less than $20,000 a year and we work our butts off doing the jobs that nobody else wants to do: every week should be Grad Student Appreciation Week!) Dr. AMP invited my dog to the party. I mentioned him at the last grad student party that Dr. AMP threw, and s/he said, "Oh, you have a hound? I just love hound dogs! You should bring him over!" Well, I'd forgotten all about it until we got the party invitation and it said, "Significant others, children, and pets welcome." I figured the "pets welcome" might be directed towards me, and sure enough, my friend told me yesterday that Dr. AMP had been talking to her about the party and said, "*A* is bringing her dog, right?" She was like, "Uh, why don't you ask *A*?" So I e-mailed my RSVP and mentioned that I would bring the hound if the weather was warm enough for us to be outside, and s/he e-mailed back just this: "YES!!! Bring the hound regardless of the weather. See you there!" In other words, I don't really need to be there, but my dog damn well better be. I'm just hoping he behaves well and earns me brownie points rather than humiliating me. Because I'll admit that while I love my dog to death, but he's not the best-behaved dog in the world. He gets happy and excited to see people and he barks his fool head off, and he has a tendency to try to jump up and "kiss" people, and he thinks that the best way to befriend children is by wagging his tail like a maniac and howling in the hopes that this will make him seem approachable (of course, all this creates is a park full of sobbing toddlers with their hands over their ears). But there's no way I can't bring him when Dr. AMP is so excited. Fortunately, most people usually end up liking him, over-excited howling and all. He can be quite charming like that. And a lot of my friends who will be there have already met him and already do love him. But pretty much all of my professors will be there and all of the grad students from both sides of the department, and a bunch of ex-grad students, and apparently some visiting scholars from another school...in other words, this party could easily turn me into, "Crazy Hound Dog Owner" for the rest of my career here. Awesome.
Saturday during the day I need to get up early enough to get some work done and then I'm going out on Saturday night. Sunday is "free", except that I need to write a paper for my Tuesday class, do a bunch of research for independent study, read for all of my classes and, oh hey, I'm presenting a paper at a conference a week from Sunday and I need to actually write the damn thing. It's only a ten minute presentation and I think I can put the paper together with research I have been doing throughout the semester for other class projects, but I'm still worried about finishing it on time and making it semi-presentable.

How's that for a hodgepodge of stuff? I have a few ideas for more substantial posts in my head, posts that actually have a theme and at least a little bit of coherency. Maybe I'll actually get around to posting one soon.