Primrose Road

Tonight I went to Purim services (description for the uninitiated) dressed as my dissertation.

I pinned a title page to the front of my shirt and a few pages of footnotes to the back, then printed out random pages from drafts and pinned them to my sleeves and trousers. During the service, I kept turning around to find people reading my back!

Still, nothing beat the grown man dressed in a full Tigger suit.

I've had wacky recurring dreams about my father lately:

I find him sitting on one of the chairs in my living room (or, in one case, we're taking a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge) and strongly suggest that he visit a doctor. "Dad," I say, "I'm only telling you this because you're the only person in history ever to recover from death. Doctors might be interested."

SigOther: When we have a kid, we should name it so its initials spell "God." Something like George Edward D----.

PrimroseRoad: That spells G.E.D.

SigOther: Right. G-E-D.

(Beat. Sound of wheels turning.)

SigOther: Oh no! "God" is spelled G-O-D!


Needless to say, "praise Ged!" is now a catchphrase around here.

My mother is throwing us an engagement party in April, which we believe is just a ploy to get us to set up a wedding registry even though the wedding is not until June of next year. So, this Sunday, we will be driving out to Long Island and venturing into registry territory.

While Bed, Bath, & Beyond seems to offer a helpful list of recommended items on their webpage, Crate and Barrel's seems to go *justalittle* overboard. Their list includes:

- a muffin pan AND a mini-muffin pan
- a regular wok AND an electric wok
- bathroom weight scale (raise your hand if you'd buy someone a scale as an engagement/shower/wedding gift)
- sectional sofa
- bedside carafe

This should be fascinating.

Apologies for the lack of updates. I've been writing an essay that will become Chapter 4 of my dissertation and trying to complete it in time to submit it to a journal before I go on the job market, working on fellowship applications and my teaching portfolio, and setting up syllabi for next semester (which starts on the 20th).

I am, as a friend likes to malaprop, running around like a head without a chicken.

When I was a child, my Catholic cousins rather innocently explained to me that the reason I didn't get presents from Santa Claus was that Santa skipped over all of the Jewish kids' houses. After that, I received one gift from "Santa" under the menorah every year because my parents feared that I would otherwise believe that Jolly Old St. Nick was anti-Semitic.

Tonight, while looking at the Norad Santa Tracker, I notice that while Santa has been to much of the North Caucasus and Middle East (including Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, and Oman), he has clearly avoided Israel. Thus, we can only conclude that Santa does indeed skip over all the Jewish kids' houses.

(Meanwhile, SigOther wonders why Santa is only stopping for three minutes at a time in Southern Hemisphere cities, where he should be sitting out in the sun and getting a tan. SigOther's goal is to someday have a Chanukah beach party in Australia; he lived in Boston during Boston's coldest winter ever and now vehemently crusades against winter.)

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to all! Take good care of yourselves, kinderlekh. :)

This may constitute the New Yorkiest moment of my life: standing on the steps of the Jewish Museum in 15 degree air after a Chanukah reception hosted by the mayor, I shouted "this is Nebraska weather!" in SigOther's direction, and realized that we were standing next to Dr. Ruth Westheimer.

Bizarre.

I have graded 82 out of 94 papers thus far.
After paper #82, it dawned on me that I was grading all the papers on a 20-point scale, though the syllabus and my gradebook both show that the final paper was supposed to be graded on a 30-point scale.

I've ::headkeyboard::ed so much that the "R" key is now permanently lodged in my forehead.

For those of you not following my grading progress on Facebook: 20 papers graded, 82 remaining.

Granted, final papers for Intro to Fiction (two classes in which they enrolled *everyone* who needs a last-minute 200-level humanities class to graduate) are not officially due until 2PM tomorrow, so we'll see if I actually receive all 102 papers.

Also accomplished today:
- booked wedding photographer 545 days in advance (NYC wedding planning is wacky)
- met with eight freshman comp students
- made dinner that involved green vegetables
- planned Atlantic City trip w/Mom
- planned Washington DC museum-ing trip w/SigOther

Dissertation progress:
- nope

Holiday gift purchasing progress:
- nope

Instances of copy-and-paste plagiarism spotted today:
- zero! (It's a miracle: they finally understand that I HAVE GOOGLE TOO.)

All seemed hopeful until we realized they were talking about the balloons. ;)

Our friend L. lives a few blocks from where they inflate the balloons for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade, so we went to check it out (though tragically, we missed Spongebob).

Hello Kitty:



Dora the Explorer and an excited little girl in a pink hat:



Smurf!



On the way back to L.'s apartment, we found a deflated Spiderman in a trash can:



Distraught, we hurried back to L.'s apartment and comforted ourselves with onion and mushroom pizza.