Afflicted

The good news is that I can still eat Chinese food---I'm not having an allergic outbreak of hives because of something weird in the Buddhist Delight. The bad news? It's not hives. How I wish it were hives. Hives can be cured with a short burst of steroids and a strict avoidance of the trigger allergen. Other than the fear of developing a resemblance to the East German women's swim team, it's a pretty quick fix. What I have, on the other hand, something called pityriasis, likes to linger. It hangs around for, say, 4-16 weeks. You heard me. Between 1 and 4 months. But, the doctor tells me, all chipper, it goes away by itself! There's no cure! Try not to scratch and make it infected! I guess you won't be wearing a bikini anytime soon! [Slim chance of that, but definitely not now.] Try not to get overheated! [Um. Summer. Northeast. 1930's house, no air conditioning?]

If this isn't the cosmic kick in the head that I've been anticipating, I'm not sure what is. It's all part of a larger pattern, really. Not a pattern of periodic medical grossness, although I do have a charming history of that. Rather, it's a pattern wherein I push myself too far for too long, and then have some sort of major bodily malfunction. I get the impression that for most people, when they work too hard, get too stressed, don't sleep enough--essentially do all of those things that shred one's immunities---they get sick. Immediately. And that's the cue to slow down. It's never worked like that for me: I've almost always been able to push through til the end of the task, semester, etc., but then I get hit with the big whammy. In college, it was like clockwork. I'd spend the last month of the semester eating coffee grounds and writing papers all night, I'd turn everything in, drive home for break, and by the next morning I was sick. The best time was when I had worked my ass off on a 35 page paper on Kristeva and Tristram Shandy (because that's just the kind of little prat that I was), made it the 4 hour drive home and ended up with a 104 degree fever. Boiled my brain better than Revolution in Poetic Language, that did.

So clearly I've learned nothing in the last 10 years. I still think that I can drive myself past all reasonable limits and it will be okay. Sure! Why not teach a full semester, be an administrator, run a speakers' series, give a conference paper, teach an intensive summer class, go to a workshop in the Midwest. You can work for six months without a break! What's the worst that could happen?

For the next 1-4 months, I 'll look like a leper, but only underneath my clothes, which is one small saving grace. Very small. Pityriasis is apparently also common in dogs and bears. Do you think they push themselves too hard too?

Karma, Karma (Maybe even Karma Chameleon)

Back when I was at the hippie school (which I'm mentioning often enough on this blog to give it it's own name. Nothing occurs to me at present, but I'll take nominations. Jerry Garcia College? Bong Hits U.? Underwater Basket Weaving Vocational School?). As I was saying, back when I was at hippie school, I had a penchant for theory, as did the professors with whom I chose to work. So, somewhere in my dark, dank basement molders an overflowing file of undergraduate papers on topics like "Kristevan Carnival and Tristram Shandy" and "Time and Narrative: Winterson as read through Paul Ricoeur." Thankfully, this is before I caught the horrible disease that I have now, which involves making terrible puns in my paper titles. If I had had it back then, these papers might announce themselves thus: "Kristeva and Sterne take a Carnival Cruise" or "Time is Like a Clock of the (Ri)Coeur: Winterson and Temporal Narrative." (I think I'm on a Culture Club roll today). Thankfully, theory fever did not overlap with bad a-pun-dicitis. Ba-dum-dum!

Right. Back to the point. Those monster papers are like 20-25 pages a piece, and there are a LOT of them. Which means that some poor fool, some of whom actually still talk to me when begged, READ those suckers and gave me comments on them. Serious comments. Not drunken ramblings in which they contemplated shoving a sharpened pencil in their ears because I was butchering the texts.

I bet you know where this is going, right? Because I'm reading theory papers now, and they're only 5 pages. Why do I grade them on the computer, when it means that I don't have a sharpened pencil to shove in my ear?! How on earth did these scions of patience and pedagogical love manage to deal with me? Bring me the Koo-Aid, and I'll drink it right down!

Somewhere, beneath this screed is the solemn belief that theory is freakin' hard, and that there's no way anyone gets much out of it the first time around, and that it really helps to have had ten more years of reading and training in philosophy, and let's be honest, to what extent do I really understand what we're reading? And all of this is true and relevant.

And thus, I return to Derridean readings of Google videos.


**I wonder how long I could go by titling each post with a reference to an 80's song? Probably pretty long. Some, like "We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off (to have a good time)" might be easy to link to my traditional content. "Caribbean Queen" on the other hand, might present more of a problem...