- ME: I'm so happy that I can spend unlimited amounts of time around you and not need or want to be alone. I've never had that before.
- HIM: It's because I don't have much of a personality.
- ME: I love you.
- ME: the talking in the hallway is distracting, do you mind if I shut your office door?
- PROF: No problem.
- ME: Thanks, I find noise really distracting.
- PROF: Oh, me too, I'm terrible at multi-tasking.
- ME: I can't have a conversation with someone if the radio is on.
- PROF: I can't have a conversation and drive at the same time.
- ME: I can't walk and drink from a straw at the same time.
- PROF: I can't teach a class and train for a marathon at the same time.
- ME: That one is different.
- Student 1: How can you not like Mr. Darcy?
- Student 2: He's a babe.
- Student 1: My whole life I've been trying to find a modern Mr. Darcy!
- My teaching assignment this semester is ENG241, a British Literature class. At my university, graduate teaching assistants don't teach their own classes--they *assist* the professor--and that role changes depending on individual professor needs and preferences. This semester, like last semester, I've been given quite a bit of freedom to come up with lesson plans and lead classes. Yesterday we were discussing Paradise Lost, which for some reason included several references to pop culture, including Freddie Mercury, Star Wars, The Dark Knight Rises, and Jennifer Lopez.
- Professor: [reading from Paradise Lost, Book I] "The mind is its own place, and in it self / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n. / What matter where, if I be still the same." So what Satan is saying here is that the mind is autonomous, independent of circumstance, because it carries with it its own environment.
- Student: it's like saying that it's your attitude that determines how much you will enjoy something--if you go into something feeling happy and optimistic, you're more likely to enjoy it; if you go into something feeling miserable, you're more likely to just continue feeling miserable.
- Professor: Yes! Good. Or like when people say things like money or fame won't affect who they *really* are--which, I mean, I have a hard time believing, but it's something we try to tell ourselves.
- Me: Satan's still Jenny from the block.
- Students: [laugh]
- Professor: [blank stare, doesn't know what I'm talking about]
Mirror stage
Just recently found this photo while looking through my baby book
I’m currently enrolled in a graduate course called The Bible as Literature. Because I am excessively inquisitive, I have taken to attending my professor’s office hours before class to deal with a handful of my questions, so as to avoid derailing class discussion over pet-peculiarities.
Yesterday, I brought in a passage I wanted to discuss with him in more detail. It comes from Joshua 5:13-15:
Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him, grasping a naked sword. Joshua walked towards him and said to him, ‘Are you on our side or on that of our enemies?’ He replied, ‘On neither side. I have come now as the captain of the army of Yahweh.’ Joshua fell on his face to the ground, worshiping him, and said, ‘What has my Lord to say to his servant? The captain of the army of Yahweh answered Joshua, ‘Take your sandals off your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy.’ And Joshua did so.*
The scene is reminiscent of Moses and the burning bush (Exodus 3:1-6), but also of the many scenes that involve a test of faith before going on a mission (Genesis 32:23-33, Exodus 4:24-26).
During this discussion, I brought up a detail that seemed odd to me—which I then realized was the result of a mis-reading, not a point in the text. I had read that both the man and his sword were naked, instead of realizing that the man wasn’t naked and the sword was unsheathed. We laughed over my error (and possibly wishful thinking) and moved on.
Nevertheless, once I had drawn that image of a naked man with a sword, it was permanently lodged in my brain every time I read the passage. I told my professor, “that image, however falsely acquired, is now implanted in my brain. All I see is a naked man, looking fierce and brutal and barbaric.”
My professor laughed, “I think you’re revealing something about yourself now.”
I shot back, “I didn’t say it was an attractive image!”
*The New Jerusalem Bible. New York: Doubleday, 1990. Print.
[His poems] are kind of bullshit. And I don’t mean that in a bad way. I mean it in the way that *everything* is kind of bullshit.
Apparently patriarchy and bad taste are under-represented, so one may now purchase Magnetic Poetry: Mustache Poet, which provides “over 200 manly word magnets.”
I have constructed a feminist response.
I found Szymborska when I was a teenager, and she transformed my understanding of poetry and language. I found her poems daring, precise, dark, cutting, brave—but humorous, and I needed to see how poetry could be both serious and light—how I could be both serious and light.
RIP, Wislawa Szymborska.
From “Written in a Hotel”
For everyday purposes I believe in permanence,
in the prospects for history.
I can’t go on munching apples
in constant terror.
