wickedqueen.net

Isn’t it cute how I totally thought I’d be writing my dissertation by now?

To be fair, I do have a paper I wrote this spring that I plan to transform into a chapter, and I also didn’t realize when I made the post linked above that I would be spending Spring 2007 as a not-TECHNICALLY-enrolled visiting student at MIT rather than taking classes for actual credit back in Madison. I’d still only have a semester of coursework left, except that our required methods course is ONLY offered in the spring. It’s not so bad; I’m going to be TA’ing anyway, so a light course load is a good thing. And I HAVE passed both my prelim exams, which is probably difficult to appreciate if you don’t have any of your own to take, but believe me, it’s a relief (even if no one can figure out how I managed to finish prelims and still have classes left to take). Finishing up my coursework this spring, I should still be able to get out by Spring 2010, which puts my time in the program at the average for students entering without an MS (seven years*).

I still want a dining room table. And possibly another cat,** because I have not done enough damage to my marital prospects with all this graduate education.

I’ll be back in Madison in a week.*** It’s a little weird to consider, having spent a year away in places with TRAINS and many sources of Indian food, but at least they got a Trader Joe’s, and I miss my friends there. I’m feeling more positive about it this week than I have pretty much since last September, which I suppose could be a last-ditch self-preservation trick of my subconscious, but you know, whatever, I’m willing to just think I’m content if necessary. I’m looking forward to the farmers’ market, and having my cats again (and a vet who I trust at the UW vet school), and half-price cocktails at the Opus (the Cha Cha Cha matches my hair, and as we have recently learned, is a vital source of antioxidants by virtue of containing berries in its alcohol). I’m looking forward to classes (yes, finishing them especially) and being a TA.

I’m also looking forward to buying a commuter-road bike. Any recommendations on where to buy a new bike in Madison? Preferred retailers, etc.? I sold my 10-year-old mountain bike on craigslist this weekend,**** so this week I am riding my absent housemate’s commuter-road bike. I feel as if I have gone from a comfortable, well-bred mule to a high-strung Arabian warhorse, but this is probably largely due to the bicycle frame being too big for me, even with the seat all the way down. I still don’t want another mountain bike; even the good ones are too heavy for my needs. I do, however, anticipate that I will probably have to paint the new bike myself if I want it to suit me.

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*Mention this figure to a student in the hard sciences and watch them recoil in horror, but I sort of like the symbolism of it–v. folkloric. About the length of time you’d expect to spend, say, in the thrall of an evil witch+ or asleep inside a pearl at the bottom of an ocean of dragon spit.

+Not to imply anything about my advisors. No! Really! Please let me graduate.

It happened in Madison, too, although the victim is not a sociologist.

In a telephone interview Tuesday with The Associated Press, Lipscomb said he has had some lingering headaches and a stiff neck.

“All things considered, that’s about as good as it can get,” he said.

Despite the close call, he said, he has to focus on school because his qualifying exam for the Ph.D. program is next week.

“I think it will probably hit me when I’m done with exams,” Lipscomb said.

Lipscomb does plan to ride again, he just prefers to wait until after exams are over.

All I ever did while studying for prelims was go on a diet, and a lot of people were pretty amazed that I was willing to do THAT.

Of course, as a helmet proponent of many years, I find the story interesting for its clear demonstration of their value, but man. I think you have to have spent a month buried in your office reading the Social Psychology Handbook, coming home at midnight only to watch episodes of Cold Case in your darkened living room and WEEP, to really understand why this guy does not currently have the emotional energy to process having had HIS HEAD RUN OVER BY A TRUCK.

Yes, every morning when I wake up, right before I start worrying about my dissertation, I experience a little shock of bliss that I am DONE WITH PRELIMS. And also I am grateful not to have been run over by any trucks thus far.

Fruity cocktails count as health food, study finds

Oh, the Cha Cha Cha. Bright red and gaily garnished with raspberries. Madison people: does the Opus still do half-priced drinks from 5-7 on weeknights? I think we can all guess my plans for September.

Hey, Madison peeps… does anybody have a truck? And want to drive me to St. Vinnie’s to pick up an entertainment center that doesn’t fit in a station wagon, as it turns out?

I will pay you $10. It is all I can afford, what with the extravagent purchasing of entertainment centers.

It needs a back on the cabinet part, and the cabinet part also needs shelves, but plywood for those purposes shouldn’t be too pricey, and Home Depot will cut it to size. I was seduced by the prospect of so much DVD storage.

I don’t know how I managed to reach the age of 23 without ever having been miniature golfing. It’s like I grew up in the USSR or something.

I was 15 before I ever ate at Sonic, too. And my parents didn’t allow me to have bubblegum, with the consequence that just the odor of the stuff makes me ill to this day. You know how the orthodontist always flavors their disgusting stuff for making molds of your mouth? Sometimes they’d use bubblegum flavor without asking me. They’re lucky I never threw up on them.

Anyway, tonight I rectified the mini-golf situation by going to a course on the West side with my friends Greg and Anna. We got there about 8:30, so it was already dark and actually a bearable temperature–it was pretty hot today. I’m glad we went relatively late, because I think the floodlights and all the lit-up bits of the holes really completed the whole atmosphere.

We got the 36-hole (two courses) package for $9 a head, figuring we might as well get the total experience. At the very first hole, there was a slide for going down to the lower level of the hole after your ball (which had ideally been putted down a much smaller slide). I like slides.

I pretty much sucked on the first course, which was about what I expected as a person with a poor sense of spatial relations in general and exceptionally poor hand-eye coordination. I don’t always actually HIT the ball with my putter. Sometimes I go over it.

Mostly what I was good at was making the ball go really far, sometimes in the air, although my attempt to catapault it over a particularly tricky water hazard, rather than going around, backfired when it continued out of the entire hole area and almost got lost in the undergrowth around the perimeter fence (but Anna found it). Greg felt that this was not Taking Mini-Golf Seriously, and lectured me about Keeping the Ball on the Ground. Anna made faces.

HOWEVER.

On the second course, I WON. By two strokes. But still! I was one under par! I made some pretty amazing shots, for me, at least.

Of course I recognize, even as a newcomer to mini-golf, that the main thing is the kitsch value (and the slides–there was also one on the second course). Before I put my purse in the car between courses, Anna took a picture of me at the Buddha hole with my phone:

Please ignore my haircut–she did the back a little too short, although I guess this offers the advantage that it will be awhile before I need another one.

Sadly, in answer to Travis’s inquiry, there was no Jesus on the course, although they DID have a rainbow-striped Eiffel Tower with an American flag wrapped around the top. AND a windmill. I guess you can’t really have a mini-golf course without one.

frippy tells it like it is about bicycles on the sidewalk.

Seriously. Every time someone on a bicycle comes rushing up from behind me, they escape being hipchecked into the street only by virtue of my tenuous mainstream socialization and, on occasion, my impractical shoes. Many is the time I have dreamed of carrying a big stick around town with me to put through the spokes of all those sidewalk-biking fuckers.

I mean, frippy is writing from St. Louis, which I suspect, like the rest of Missouri, is hardly a center for bicycle-informed motorists (or bicyclists, for that matter). But I live in fucking Madison, Wisconsin, where there are bike lanes and paths fucking EVERYWHERE. There is NO EXCUSE for riding your goddamn bicycle on the sidewalk, okay? And guess what? They call them “pedestrian crosswalks” for a REASON.

Of course, my advisor has noted that there is a separate problem of people blithely biking along in the wrong direction in the bike lanes of one-way streets. Some very large one-way streets, like University, have bike lanes in both directions, but they are separate lanes on different sides of the street.

Johnson and Gorham, fairly large one-way streets (but not as big as University), have one-way bike lanes. Since they are only a BLOCK APART, it is no great hardship, but apparently some people either don’t care or don’t realize that the one-wayness of the street applies to their bicycles as well.

I suspect they are just fucks, because that is my default opinion of most human nature, and I knew that I wasn’t allowed to ride my bike the wrong way down a one-way street even when I lived in Missouri.

Actually, I have recently been considering just making a sign that says, “WHY ARE YOU BEING AN ASSHOLE?” that I could hold up at appropriate moments throughout the day, like to people who leave piles of gum wrappers on the benches in the locker room. Bicycles on the sidewalk would probably still be the #1 stimulus, though.

So there’s this article on CNN about an anthropologist who decided to study college freshmen via participant observation, including living in the dorms (in a single) and taking freshman courses.

The article describes her as “50-something,” and talks about how she totally learned about the stresses of being a college freshman, but on some reflection I think this may be something that a 50-something year-old person cannot, in fact, effectively study by participant observation.

I mean, take the single room alone. Admittedly, I don’t think she would have gotten anything close to the “typical” dorm experience even if she had let them place her with some poor unsuspecting 18-year-old, and it would have been kind of cruel to the 18-year-old anyway. But one of the major stressors of being a freshman in college for most people is suddenly having to share a shoebox with someone they don’t even know, who may play on the internet until 3 am or constantly be having half the floor over to watch TV, and that’s just completely absent.

And one of the REASONS that it’s a major stressor is that 18-year-old kids who have never been away from home before don’t have much, if any, experience with having to share living space and compromise with strangers like that (and of course, they make you share a shoebox–I don’t think anyone could be 100% calm in that situation, even if I personally am abnormally uptight about roommates).

The 18-year-olds are away from home usually for the first time, too, not to mention in a state of basic identity flux and possessed of still at least semi-raging hormones–you cannot reproduce this experience as a 50-something even if you “didn’t go to [your] Flagstaff home and didn’t contact regular friends.”

I’m not saying that you couldn’t learn things about college freshmen by following them around and interviewing them and whatnot.* I just think that living in the dorms with them to do it, and pretending that somehow you are actually having a comparable experience to theirs, is a ridiculous conceit.

On a related note, here in Madison, the streets are alive with the sound of freshmen. All the banks have little tables in front of their branches and, in some cases, randomly placed on State Street, the better to convince Mom and Dad to set up Junior’s checking account with them. The gym was considerably busier yesterday than it has been all summer, and many of the new faces appeared to be about 12 years old.

Sometimes I feel like I could have accomplished more as an undergraduate than I did–I periodically regret not double-majoring, and it might have been a good idea to go to the gym before my senior year–but I don’t think I’d want to be a freshman again. A junior, okay, but freshman year was really stressful in a lot of different ways. Roommate issues, a poor initial major choice, weight gain…

I did have fun, too, of course. I made friends,** dated,*** changed my major (for the first time), and did pretty well on the forensics team. But everything was so significant and terrifying; it was exhausting. When I see freshmen at the beginning of the year here, they don’t look like grown-up people.****

My youngest sister is starting college in Boston in about a week; my middle sister noted that it seemed ludicrous given that she’s “only 12 years old” (no, not really), but of course this is basically how I feel about my middle sister graduating from college next year. I’m sure my sister will enjoy her freshman year, of course. It is exciting, and I kind of miss that, but I’m still glad I’m a little older now.

ETA: Ironically, it is only as a graduate student that I am noticeably freakier than my student ID photo. When I got my undergraduate student ID as a freshman, I had a shaved head, so that as the years wore on, I actually looked LESS like a militant lesbian in person than on my student ID–not the normal progression of things. My graduate student ID, however, shows me with normal-colored hair, which I do not currently have.

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*Although I think the results of the interviews as presented in this write-up are pretty weak–if the kids tell their peers they don’t care about classes and tell you that they do, why do you assume that they are telling YOU the unvarnished truth? They know you’re an anthropology professor at their university, in addition to being a general “responsible adult” type. It’s not like they don’t know what you want to hear.

****This is partially because they have not gained 15 or 20 pounds yet. It’s not just that they’re skinny, it’s that they are WEIRDLY FORMED to my eye. Sort of alien and childlike.