I defended my dissertation this morning at 10:00 a.m. I passed. t was anticlimactic. Perfectly good, but kind of a letdown also.

I'll tell you all about it some other time. Because I'm tired.

Here is an actual email I received this morning from a university in the Chicago area which shall be nameless. I applied there way back when, and had pretty much figured out by now that they weren't interested, but this is worth sharing ( Read more... )

Karisa told me once that I see the world through Val-colored glasses, and she's right. So in that spirit, here is an entry all about me, me, me ( Read more... )

Called gutter repair and chimney guys to do repairs from the Tree Attack.

Cleaned a bunch of NASTY shit out of the fridge. Eck ( Read more... )

Part of the reason for my long LJ silences these days is that I've been busy running/driving all over creation, and I generally don't like to announce on the interwebs whenever my house is going to be unoccupied for long periods of time. There are some weird people around here, after all ( Read more... )

You gotta be careful who you say this to in higher ed, but ( Read more... )

Here's an article I sent out to someone who expressed an interest. We'll see if they decide to take it ( Read more... )

When I tell people that I had a benign brain tumor in high school, the summer I was 15, they go, "Oh, that sucks." And that's pretty much the end of it. It's fine if I'm not the center of everyone's world. But what hurts sometimes is how inadequate that one-sentence explanation is, how little it conveys of what actually happened. I never add that I ( Read more... )

"Enjoy your life," a guy screamed at me on the sidewalk this evening. We were hurrying down the Rue de la Roquette in Paris, on Place de la Bastille, and a thunderstorm was gathering. He was probably drunk, but I reckoned he probably had a point anyway ( Read more... )

This is a quote from Mike, whose interest in British history, I am discovering, begins with rock n roll and ends with sports. Today I tried explaining who's from what dynasty and who lives in what palace, and had to give up out of mercy for us both. I also had to take picture after picture of him crossing Abbey Road barefoot. This I think more ( Read more... )