agenda

1. if you're in or near dc (or baltimore, frankly), please consider taking a little time this weekend to come watch at least some of the cherry blossom bonspiel. tickets -- what tickets?! -- are free, and if you don't know the first thing about curling, there will be plenty of people on hand to explain the action to you. it won't be long before you're on the edge of your seat yourself; honest, it happens to everyone. :-D there'll be teams there from all over north america, dudes. this is going to be a hell of a party. (also, out of the goodness of my heart, i've gone over the club website's head with the link, above, and linked to the content of the frame rather than making you click through and find it yourself. well, it's out of the goodness of my heart and the fact that frames make me insane.)

2. happy birthday to cesperanza. :-)

3. i still hate spring. it makes me sleepy and itchy, which are the wrong things to be both at once.

musings on academic strata

last semester, i had three courses and a discussion section, taught by four different individuals. all three courses were taught by full professors, men no younger than about forty-five; the discussion was taken by a graduate student in about her sixth or seventh year, so she's maybe about thirty, max.

( the professors were always called Professor LastName. )

on the other hand, a total ego-boost

well, near-total --

yesterday after morphology, i had to stop and talk to the professor about a problem set that was actually due yesterday but of which i could make no sense whatsoever. i'd arranged this before class, so the fact that i didn't turn it in wasn't a crisis. whatever. class ends, here's me with my bewildered notes, and before we start talking about the problem set, she starts talking to me about what department i'm actually in (no department; stateless), why i'm doing an MA instead of a PhD (i tried), where i might go for a PhD after this, how if i need support at all, recs, etc., i should let her know, because i'm a very good student and she'd like to see me go far.

yay!

now, this is the woman who was preceded by a reputation for favoritism; i might just (not that i'm not glad, mind you) have ended up on her good side. but in fairness, none of us in this class (even those who've never had a class with her before) have noticed anything like the kind of thing we were warned about by people who had presumably not been her favorites last time around. and we can't all be her favorites. [eta: by which i mean, it cannot logically be the case that all of us are her favorites -- because when everyone is somebody, then no one's anybody. (looking at the entry again, the sentence "we can't all be her favorites" struck me like "well, we can't all be at the top of the heap, now, can we, hmm, pass the port," which wasn't what i'd intended at all.] maybe she got a bad crop of evaluations from those other guys and took them to heart, and she's growing. this is the wee baby '99-vintage lecturer, after all.

but still. unsolicited praise for one's academic strength is always a good thing. yay me!