Today was a day of open doors. My building was full of them, leading--I knew--to colleagues I haven't seen since the departmental holiday party nearly a month ago. So I stuck my head in most all of them to say happy new year and to see how everyone is doing. I heard descriptive and woeful tales of traveling and staying here. It took one colleague THIRTY SIX hours to get back home from Los Angeles, and another regaled me with the most horrifying description of her spouse taking a nasty spill courtesy of the Christmas Eve ice storm WHILE they were waiting for the emergency 7.5K furnace replacement. We're talking staples in the head. Yikes. Got to see these colleagues too, which is always a treat. Everyone seems more rested and generally cheerier. That's because classes don't start for a couple weeks yet. 

I also had the pleasure of going to three libraries today--including our main university one (where I did a little research on ancient mirrors in the Classics library), and the two public libraries, which are just plain awesome. I am the first to request Stephen Berlin Johnson's new book about Joseph Priestley (thanks E!), but I am 78th on the list to receive Gladwell's book on Outliers. The irony is of course not lost on me.

Oh! Speaking of Priestley, word of an article acceptance arrived early this morning from London (the article is half about Priestley), as did a query (also from London) about whether I want to go to Morrocco this spring. Yay and yes. Love it when those doors are open.

I am not a devoted fan, though sometimes I feel like I should or could be given my basketball past. I did however score some of those free tickets to the game yesterday vs. Minnesota, and I have a thing or two to say. Okay, just one. I think you all are making too big of a deal about Jenna Smith. Yeah, I know she made honorable mention All-American last year, and maybe it's because I played on a team that had an All American every year--sometimes two. But by *only* and always spotlighting this one player, you are hurting this team in more ways than you know, but in ways I will try to explain to you.

First off, the hype contributes to what is apparently the game plan to defeat Illinois: shut down Smith, and you notch a victory. Now it might be argued that this would be the game plan regardless, and it might, but if this year's recruiting class is in fact the second best in the country, then how about talking about the freshmen? I left the game not knowing who the first years were or even how many there were; instead, I can now tell anyone who cares that Jenna Smith likes to chew 6 different kinds of gum before games, and also that she prefers Harry Potter to Lord of the Rings (much to the dismay of Illini fans, in fact). If you are going to cultivate long-term fans, you have GOT to get people interested in watching players' careers as they develop, rather than always flaunting your one star player. Tennessee fans, by contrast, were so devoted that they became obsessed with the players who didn't start the game. They waved signs to put us in the game. They knew we could contribute, that we had to contribute for the team to be successful. At least four players were sent to the press conference after the game, usually at least one nonstarter. We were a team. Our All Americans were phenomenal, to be sure, but we made them better by scoring when we needed to.

Secondly (and relatedly), by always putting Smith in front of cameras, in the headlines, etc., you are ignoring some very good players who might be made better with a little more hype. For example, yesterday, number 21 had a phenomenal game. Her name is Macie Blinn, but I just had to look her up on the website to make sure that was her name. She kept the team in yesterday's game. Smith had a pretty crappy game actually (she needs to toughen up a little if you ask me), but Blinn did what she needed to do: got steals, made good passes, tore down rebounds, and scored 16 points. And I don't even think she started the game (though she did the second half). The first headline I saw, though, was that Smith scored 21 points. I'll bet she did! She shot like 80 times! This is not her fault, but rather how the offense is designed. And the hype machine.

Finally, if you emphasized some of the other players, Smith would be free to focus on her role on the team. My god, she has great mobility and really wonderful hands. I would love to feed her pass after pass--she catches everything. And she is only a junior. Luckily all the attention doesn't seem to be going to her head, yet. Don't force the issue, or worse, burn her out.

Hey! I just figured out that Blinn is one of those awesome freshmen. There we go. My point here is that this is a team. Not a beehive, not a monarchy. You would do Smith a favor if you pulled back and focused on some of her teammates. Give little kids a range of players to holler for; give devoted fans a sense of the talents of the other players, reasons to come back to games after a star has graduated. Jenna Smith--and the team--would be better for it.

sincerely,
debbie

Happy new year, everybody.

Since we returned from our holiday triangle trek, JM and I have been doing brainy work in the morning (well, I've been reading some and researching the local real estate market), and then manual work in the afternoon (namely, organizing shit and throwing shit out).

New Year's Day will be no different. I started 2009 by reading two Aristotelian treatises that have a lot to say about sense perception: On Sense and Sensible Objects, and On Memory and Recollection. There were lots of great tidbits in these short pieces, but my favorite comes in a long meditation on how sometimes once the faculty of recollection is set in motion it becomes unstoppable, as when we try to remember something but can't, and then it eats away at us, or, "in the case of names, tunes and sayings, when any of them has been very much on our lips; for even though we give up the habit and do not mean to yield to it, we find ourselves continually singing or saying the familiar sounds"  (453a29-32). 

That's right. Aristotle theorized earworms.  

Off to organize some tools.

this graph comes from a book JM has been reading over break: Larry M. Bartels' Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age.

Yesterday's Times ran an article about the "coaching tree" of Pat Summitt--about the impressively high number of her former players who are helping to achieve what, really, was Summitt's aim all along: to raise the level of the women's game. That number, believe me, would be much higher if it weren't for the WNBA or european professional leagues. It's a terrific article, and the print version of the Times features an uncanny shot of one of Pat's many point guards, Kellie Jolly Harper, squatting and squinting, Summitt style, on the sidelines.

Reading this piece made me spiral back a couple of decades to my explicit decision not to go into coaching. The 1989-90 season was a particularly challenging one for Pat. We had some behavioral issues, the details of which escape me now, something to do with missed curfews or spending nights with boyfriends. We had some rifts on the team. One player was perceived as the "coach's pet," which can be devastating to team chemistry. My best friend Regina's unlucky eye twitch happened more times than ever that season (we lost every game before which her eye twitched). We played some pretty raggedy basketball that year, and we didn't make it to the Final Four, which as it happens, was being held on our home court (for more on that particular devastation, go here). Pat made us sit in the stands and watch every second of the 1990 final four. We watched as the Stanford point guard from Oak Ridge who had really wanted to play at Tennessee won her team a championship. The next week, Pat called us in one by one.

Regina and I waited for our meetings with trepidation--my stomach turns just writing about it. After those meetings our team numbers dwindled to 9 scholarship players; nearly a third of the team transferred or rotated elsewhere by mutual agreement. Apart from the fear heading in to the meeting, and the fact that I, like Regina, came out of mine okay (we both were team players with easy-going temperaments), I remember nothing.

At that point I wasn't planning on a coaching career--the pressure cooker that was my high school coach's job already made that option less than appealing--but around 1990 I decided there's no way I wanted to coach basketball for a living because I didn't want my livelihood to depend on the motivational levels or the mercurial temperaments of 18-to 22-year olds. Regina and I talked about this a lot, and we agreed that much as we loved basketball, it was not our future.

It's not that I don't like 18- to 22-year olds, I do. I ended up deciding to become a college professor after all. But there is a big difference in having one's job hinge on the win-loss record posted by a small handful of young adult women and having student evaluations of your performance as a teacher figure ever-so-slightly into promotions and raises. 1990 showed me that no matter how much talent you have recruited, or how hard you work to prepare your team, things still might not turn out well: players bicker, sulk, and rebel much as they hesitate, slough, and miss. Students may do these things too (especially sulk and slough), but one need only wait out the semester, and there's a fresh batch of faces the next term.  Personality management, it seemed to me, had to be one of the most frustrating parts of coaching. Pat--and all those former players who are now coaches--have far more patience than I would, and I admire them for it.

1990 was also, as it happens, the year I changed my major to English. That summer, I fulfilled my major's Shakespeare requirement, and one of my teammates taunted me by swiping my Riverside and coloring in Shakespeare's eyes with red pen.  

The book itself is still a few months out, but here is the cover. I think the graphics designer at U of South Carolina Press did a great job. As it turns out, the cover is the same color I painted the walls of the office where I wrote most of it.

When I was in kindergarten, I sometimes got to come up to the split first and second  grade because I could read pretty well. The teacher was a little on the mean side and also seemed to forget that I was a fair bit younger than most of the kids in the classroom and would ask me to assist her with various classroom tasks--like I was a tiny research assistant. Once she gave me a bunch of papers to staple together, and I went off, happy to have my little task, but also a little bit unsure about which papers needed to be together. So I attempted to staple the entire stack of papers together--it was about a half-inch thick. After much wrestling with a big industrial-size stapler, the likes of which I had never seen, let alone used, I ended up with a bloody finger and a set of papers with seriously mangled corners. The teacher yelled at me. My finger hurt.

I--and my finger--have thought of this long ago tiny trauma several times over the course of the weekend as I grade and then print my grad students' papers with my comments. The papers that exceed 25 pages prove to be the most difficult to get a staple through, but it's also the case that my stapler sucks ass. Apologies to those of you whose papers will arrive in your mailboxes with so many mangled corners (the worst of these are pictured here). I hope you'll be more understanding than that grouchy, mean old teacher.

Like most of you, probably, except for those of you who are done (yay!) or on leave (double yay!). I do my grading on the computer, so my wrist hurts, my eyes are tired, my head is throbbing, and if I hadn't taken a break to go see Slumdog Millionaire (which, by the way, is really fantastic), I think I might be a little crazy. It's so nice during the semester, I'll tell you, to have a seminar that is so packed there is no room for anyone else. The discussions, as I've mentioned on this site, power through any break, spill past the bells, and out in to the hallways. But then it comes time to grade the papers, and I admit that a little part of me wishes the seminar had been a nice medium size with lulls and fits and starts. If it were, I would be done. But instead, I am a little over half way finished with seven more papers to go, and leaving on Monday. Wish me luck.

(made by Sean Pecknold, a video artist and the brother of FF's lead singer Robin Pecknold.)

JM played this Bowie cover (by M.Ward) at dinner, and it kind of blew me away. I've included the 25-year-old version below.

Brad Anderson's Transsiberian plays on several of my own personal fears, and maybe they are yours too: the inflexibility of train schedules, sharing small spaces with people i do not know, getting lost in a foreign country, being a dumb american in another country, and being outside without a hat when it's forty below. And now we will just toss in a couple more: having the dining car suddenly and without announcement removed from a train that is making its way across one of the globe's longest countries, and being the primary cause of someone else's torture.  If I were Emily Mortimer, I would also be afraid of being too skinny when it's 40 below, but there isn't much chance of that, so we'll stick with torture.

At any rate, we watched this movie Saturday night, and when we turned it on, I was comfy, warm, and worried that I would fall asleep. Not so: this movie begins as intriguing and builds and builds to the point where the prospect of sleep is threatened altogether. If you got stuff you need to get off your mind, go rent this dvd.

It came recommended from our neighbors down the street and their 20-year old daughter whom we adore, and also E!. I won't giveaway any more of the quite exciting plot, but the casting I thought was good (Ben Kingsley is of course first rate), and the cinematography was fabulous. I am a sucker, it should be noted, for trains in general, and this film's shot of the long train winding through snow are at once lovely and sinister. And also, snow is an excellent backdrop for, shall we say, fresh blood.

I tend to like it when my grad students are toiling away on their papers, because I, in turn, do the same thing. On Wednesday I noticed a few grad students fiddling with what looked to me like the material instantiations of their inventional processes. G, for example, had index cards in a set of bright pastels. M (1) had plain white index cards with long, flapping ribbons of paper stapled to them. M(2) had a beige sheet of paper with a conceptual map scrawled on it.

Before we started our abstract workshop, I asked these folks to do a little impromptu show & tell in order to get people thinking about what they do when they write a seminar paper. G held up his cards and told us that all the quotations he wanted to use were there. They were color coded, not by topic, as I had assumed, but by source. M(1) explained that the stapled pieces of paper were sentences that had formed part of her draft that she had cut apart and reordered according to topic so that she could find a good organization. M(2) held up his map and when M(1) asked him how that drawing would become a paper, he walked us through the many circles connected with lines. A, another member of the class, proudly held up his flash drive and indicated that we would have to trust him that a draft was on it. I told them about my method that combined M(1) with M(2), wherein I sometimes use a giant sketch pad and sharpie pens to reorder a messy draft by taping cut-out chunks of the draft under handwritten headings. Sometimes I end up writing transitions and forgotten passages in the margins, even on the tape itself.

Just having that chat about invention helped me to see the problem with the current draft of an article I'm working on: it's all crammed into one Word document, and it was getting a little claustrophobic. It needed room to breathe. So over the past few days, I have pulled out my sketch pad, resurrected endnote, and even--in honor of G--implemented note cards that I staple together by topic. The thing is still something of a mess, but it's coming together. I can see it.

A PhD advisee of mine, C, did her exams yesterday. The exams in Writing Studies are oral (the exams in Communication—formerly Speech Communication—are written, but this curious transposition is a matter for another post).  C, more than anyone I have ever met, is a writer. She has an M.F.A. in creative writing, for starters. She wrote her way through two seminars with me, and when I say that, I mean she sat through each class, head down, scrawling in a big notebook from one end of the page to the other, top to bottom, page after page, occasionally looking up to see who was talking. This is how she learns, and I’m reasonably sure that what happens in her notebooks tilts more toward invention than transcription.

Her response papers are the reason I became very strict about length limits. They always spilled over, and she also prefers a smaller-than-usual font, which more than anything else, serves to underscore the density and liveliness of the writing. (I had to finally ask her to at least bump it up to 11-point.) Emails from C, too, tend toward the unusually long, thoughtful, and carefully crafted. The most challenging part of these exams, she and I have both known for awhile, would be that she would need to put down her pen, pull her head up, and speak rather than write. This was the cause of much anxiety for C, and has been since she first entered the program three and a half years ago.  

I don’t know the details about her exam preparation, except that she read or re-read probably 250 or so books and articles in the past several months. I’m fairly certain that writing featured prominently in her preparation—I rarely saw her in recent months without the 3-inch-thick notebook she brought back from Portugal, which seemed to be getting thicker.

Listening to C in her exam yesterday, I realized that she speaks like a writer, like she writes—in full, vivid, paragraphs, her answers forming something like narrative arcs. Plato talks about writing taking the place of memory, and whether he is right about that or not, it is definitely the case that writing facilitates memory. C buttressed her answers with quotations, illustrations, descriptions (my favorite description was when she compared reading one particularly troubling scholarly book to watching a house burn down—“at once fascinating and horrifying”), weaving answers on the spot to our pointed questions.

C's answers brought the seventeenth-century chironomist John Bulwer as close as he has ever been to composition researcher Janet Emig, thickly described psych-lab experiments that suggest gesture does not just convey thought but helps constitute it, and explained to us precisely and without hesitation why Descartes ought not be so easily tossed out with cartesianism.  Toward the end of the exam, I wondered whether it was possible to speak in a 10-point font. If it is, she was doing it, only instead of filling the page, her words filled the room. No squinting was necessary.

Just a few excerpts from the 78-page affidavit I decided to spend some time with this evening. I'm particularly intrigued by the escalating awareness of possible surveillance interspersed with his highly illegal utterances. As awful and of course corrupt as the senate-seat trading is, I find the attempted quashing of the Tribune writers to be the most stomach-turning. Oh, and by way of OA, here is a terrific little one-act play drawn from an earlier part of the affidavit, and starring Patti Blagojevich as Lady MacBeth, er, Patti Blagojevich. 

76.
[On the Chicago Tribune] ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated that “our recommendation is fire all those fucking people, get ‘em the fuck out of there and get us some editorial support.”

84.
On December 4, 2008, ROD BLAGOJEVICH spoke with Spokesman. On December 4, 2008, the Chicago Tribune announced it was reducing the size of its workforce by 11 members. During the phone conversation, Spokesman informed ROD BLAGOJEVICH that the Tribune had its “cuts” but that Spokesman did not think the “person we mentioned” was cut. ROD BLAGOJEVICH asked “McCormick?” Spokesman responded “right.”

91. On November 4, 2008, ROD BLAGOJEVICH spoke with Deputy Governor
A. This was the same day as the United States Presidential election. With respect to the Senate seat, Deputy Governor A suggested putting together a list of things that ROD BLAGOJEVICH would accept in exchange for the Senate seat. ROD BLAGOJEVICH responded that the list “can’t be in writing.”

92.
On November 4, 2008, ROD BLAGOJEVICH spoke with JOHN HARRIS regarding the potential vacant Senate seat. ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated that the “trick . . . is how do you conduct indirectly . . . a negotiation” for the Senate seat. Thereafter, ROD BLAGOJEVICH analogized his situation to that of a sports agent shopping a potential free agent to various teams, stating “how much are you offering, [President-elect]? What are you offering, [Senate Candidate 2]? . . . Can always go to. . . [Senate Candidate 3].” Later ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated that he will make a decision on the Senate seat “in good faith . . . but it is not coming for free. . . .It’s got to be good stuff for the people of Illinois and good for me.”

101.
On November 10, 2008, ROD BLAGOJEVICH, his wife, JOHN HARRIS, Governor General Counsel, and various Washington-D.C. based advisors, including Advisor B, discussed the open Senate seat during a conference call. (The Washington D.C.-based advisors to ROD BLAGOJEVICH are believed to have participated on this call from Washington D.C.). Various individuals participated at different times during the call. The call lasted for approximately two hours, and what follows are simply summaries of various portions of the two-hour call. [ . . . ]
c.
ROD BLAGOJEVICH said that the consultants (Advisor B and another consultant are believed to be on the call at that time) are telling him that he has to “suck it up” for two years and do nothing and give this “motherfucker [the President-elect] his senator. Fuck him. For nothing? Fuck him.” ROD BLAGOJEVICH states that he will put “[Senate Candidate 4]” in the Senate “before I just give fucking [Senate Candidate 1] a fucking Senate seat and I don’t get anything.” (Senate Candidate 4 is a Deputy Governor of the State of Illinois).

111.
Later on November 12, 2008, ROD BLAGOJEVICH talked with JOHN HARRIS. ROD BLAGOJEVICH stated that his decision about the open Senate seat will be based on three criteria in the following order of importance: “our legal situation, our personal situation, my political situation. This decision, like every other one, needs to be based upon on that. Legal. Personal. Political.” HARRIS said, “legal is the hardest one to satisfy.”

ROD BLAGOJEVICH told Fundraiser A that “you gotta be careful how you express that and assume everybody’s listening, the whole world is listening. You hear me?” ROD BLAGOJEVICH told Fundraiser A to tell Individual D if there is “tangible political support (campaign contributions) like you’ve said, start showing us now.” Fundraiser A stated he will call Individual D on the phone to communicate ROD BLAGOJEVICH’s message. ROD BLAGOJEVICH responded that “I would do it in person. I would not do it on the phone.”

1. Last week we did practice interviews for our students who will be attending MLA and hopefully interviewing there. I had a good discussion with one of our students in Writing Studies about the unfortunate separation between Linguistics and Rhetoric.

2. I am working on an article about ancient notions of rhetorical vision, the idea that words help people see (this is not, for the ancients at least, strictly metaphorical).

3. That article folder, into which I have been tossing anything related to the idea for the past three years, contains a piece by Dan I. Slobin, an emeritus professor of psychology and linguistics at Berkeley. The essay is titled "Relations between Paths of Motion and Paths of Vision: A Crosslinguistic and Developmental Exploration,"* and it examines what Slobin calls "the recruitment of path expressions to verbs of looking." The upshot of this "recruitment" (which incidentally is itself a verb that I like a good deal) is that verbs of vision are most usually accompanied by prepositions and other words that indicate motion, e.g., we "look over" or "into" something, or "across" a room. In other words (namely mine), vision travels, and that observation is performed and preserved across a number of languages.  Slobin intimates (rightly I think) that such an idea probably owes to the ancient Greek notion of extramission, whereby vision was thought to emanate from the eyes (some thought)  through invisible fire that travels toward and "meets" the fire emanating from objects (I write about theories of extramission in Bodily Arts).

4. The linguistic residue of extramission is an instance of a feature of language that Kenneth Burke always was quite interested in as well: the incorporation of physicality and physical movement into language and grammar. Such incorporation is so subtle as to be stunning when we (with the help of the likes of Slobin) notice these tendencies.

5. That such tendencies largely go unnoticed speaks volumes about scholarly preferences for disembodied ideas, which is one of the points of chapter 7 of my forthcoming book.

*I found the piece on the internets, but it is no longer there. It is, however, slated to appear in a fetschrift later this month. Here is the citation:

Slobin, D.I. "Relations between paths of motion and paths of vision: A crosslinguistic and developmental exploration." In V. M. Gathercole (Ed.), Routes to Language: Studies in Honor of Melissa Bowerman. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Thanks everybody for your comments on my bittersweet post. But enough about me, let's talk about Oronte Churm, one of my favorite features of these here parts. Oronte, for those of you who don't know, has a column called "Dispatches from Adjunct Faculty at  Large Research University" at McSweeney's and a blog/column at Inside Higher Ed called "The Education of Oronte Churm." "Oronte Churm" is of course a pseudonym, and while it used to be an air-tight pseudonym, it's now a pseudo-pseudonym, because he revealed his identity earlier this year, and with a fair bit of local publicity, I might add.

But I had been on to Oronte before that. It started when I was sitting in the waiting room with my colleague who was about to have his wisdom teeth removed, and said colleague (also a fan of Oronte's) announced to me that he had almost tracked down this person's identity and that maybe I could help him because he was fairly sure Oronte taught in my other department. He explained that he kept noticing little local coincidences. Apparently the clincher was the topic of a particular talk Churm mentioned in one of his columns, and it happened to be a talk my colleague had noticed in the scores of titles that flash across our screens. He then started to narrow things down.

While my colleague's head was rolling from his surgery drugs, I came home and picked up the matter from there. I looked through McSweeney's backlogs and discovered an anecdote that overlapped with my first year here in which Oronte was asked to leave a job market meeting. It was a meeting I also happened to be in (as a guest speaker), and I remember the moment as quite tense. I didn't understand why people who didn't happen to hold degrees from our program ought to be asked to leave, but as a brand new assistant professor, I really couldn't say anything. Anyway, his descriptions of the players were unmistakable. This particular entry, like so many of his others, combines range with wit, the intimate with the political. His prose usually makes me forget I'm reading on a screen, or reading at all.  

Anyway, it has been cool knowing that he's in our department, and reading his occasional pieces that reference life in and around the University of Illinois Hinterland University, even though I never see him. Check that: ours was one of the random houses he brought his kid by this year for trick-or-treating, and it was kind of appropriate that his son, whose screen name is "Starbuck" and whom I've read about but have never seen, was in disguise. I was distributing candy and looked up at John/Oronte waiting on the stairs. I have never properly met him, but not knowing his son's real name, and not bothering to introduce myself, I asked: "which one is Starbuck?" He sweetly pointed out one of the masked characters clamoring for tootsie rolls.  Being a local celebrity is probably weird that way.

All of this is to say, that the department that hires him will be a lucky department indeed.

I am not good at leaving places. The summer before I started high school, my team spent a long week in Pulaski, Tennessee, a wretched place. We slept on hard tiled classroom floors, the only good thing about which was that the tile was cool at night, and summers in middle Tennessee are blazing. We played basketball for 10 or 12 hours a day and got sick on long john silvers fish. I got kicked out of a game for fighting with a girl who weighed way more than me, and our coach yelled and yelled and yelled at me and our point guard, the only two rising freshmen who would (he could only hope at the time) become starters that year. I should have been miserable--it was objectively miserable--but I cried when we left.

When I left for Illinois from central PA in the summer of 2000 to start my new job as an assistant professor, with my new (to me) whippet Jada rolled up in the back seat next to my big television, I went off the road a couple of times because my vision was all blurry and watery. State College had been so good to me.

When I left Illinois the first time (and yeah, yeah, as one colleague helpfully pointed out, I know we can't come back again), I was totally fine, quietly excited even, until I went to give my office keys to the secretary, a sweet woman who had just started working in the English department. One moment I was cheerfully offering her my keys, and the next moment I was sobbing so uncontrollably that her eyes filled with tears. Before that day, she had never even met me.

All this is to say what some of you already know: we are moving. I told my last phd advisee yesterday, and appropriately it was the most wrenching of the conversations. Let's just say there were, once again, tears, and I have been mopey ever since. If I think about how great my Aristotle students have been this semester, I'm afraid I'll break down even more.

JM and I are very, very excited about where we are going (Penn State), but the joy of going to a great department where rhetoric is cheered by department heads and higher-ups alike, and where there are hills to bike and hike, and where there is my favorite indian restaurant ever, and where E! and Z will both be seven or eight hours closer, still does not make it any easier, any less heartbreaking, to leave a wonderful place with such smart, good people and great friends.

On Thanksgiving night, having stuffed ourselves for hours, John and I came home at 6 and crawled into bed to watch Tina Fey's 2008 film Baby Mama. Now, I love Tina Fey. I do. And she looked really great in some of those dresses and suits, especially the short sleeved navy dress one with piping, and those pre-Sarah Palin Sarah Palin shoes. Amy Poehler has some hilarious scenes--my favorite is the one when she is trying to take the horse pill--and Steve Martin's long ponytail is a character unto itself.

But I was still underwhelmed by the flick, actually. I'm not sure if it's because it's hard to make comedy out of reproductive choices or because my sense of humor lost its vital fluids to my digestive processes, but this movie didn't do it for me.

Tonight, though, we watched Definitely Maybe, and I admit, I liked it. The narrative frame--the youngish dad telling his daughter a "mystery love story"--kind of worked. And yes, it was sappy, and even maybe a tad predictable, but there was something compelling about watching it all play out. There was recognition. There was reversal. More than once, in fact. And the three women in the movie are all, of course, so very lovely (especially Sacha Baron Cohen's pardnah Isla Fisher, left). This movie definitely isn't for everybody, and maybe I liked the early- to mid-nineties setting with Bill Clinton as a minor character, or maybe I just like the novelty of being narrated into the position of a bright and sympathetic eight year old, but yeah, I kinda liked it.

1.  by my estimation, between 71 and 88% of the time "lol" is a big fat lie. these people are not even laughing, let alone doing so out loud.

2. holy mother of god, our library just added a little feature whereby you can, by clicking on a little button, have call numbers and locations texted to your cell phone. i've been using it all morning long. i may well still prefer the paper version when on the library portion of the hunt, we'll see about that.

3. the new gym on campus, which JM and i don't go to because it's further away than the other new gym, and because it is so gargantuan that it's like being in a multi-level mall, but which i have been going to this week because the other new gym is closed for break, has all new cardio equipment with individual televisions attached to the machines, and squat racks as far as the eye can see. it is total and complete workout nirvana.

4. facebook is glutting my inbox, but for some reason i don't really care.

5. i am quite fond of looking at people's photos on facebook, but if those same people were to send me these photos directly, i would find that extremely offputting. what is that about?

6. ebay bids on items i am selling seem to go up only during the night. i'm not sure whether this is because a) people wait until they get home and put the kids to bed, or b) people have a few drinks and lose their sense of restraint bidding for items that are not all that exciting.

7. i once did 6 b) with a women's denim jacket that i hardly ever wear and haven't bid on anything since. i feel certain i was in a bidding war with another size XL tipsy woman, or maybe a drag queen.

8. visual medical technology is INSANELY, unbelievably cool, the feminist critiques of it notwithstanding. in fact, the next time i see a paper that is dismissive of the medical gaze, i am going to raise my hand and say "but they can SEE STUFF INSIDE YOUR BODY, WITH LIGHT!!!" and i will expect the nearest person to give me ten dollars for raising this insight. okay, maybe fifteen. my copay has recently gone up.