is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Cute TV.
B.E. walked into my house the other night and the first thing he said to me was, �Wow, your new TV is cute.� I wasn�t sure how a girl was supposed to respond to such a thing, but there it is. Look at how cute she is!
For those of you wondering about the mythic etsy shop, all I can say is, my intentions are good, and spring break approaches. I hope to get something set up some time between March 9 and 19.
But my plans for spring break are, as always, epic and way too ambitious. Spring break is supposed to offer me time to: leave town for a few days, hopefully with B.E. and/or hopefully to see my cousin in Claverack; set up the etsy shop; make some new jewelry designs, including earrings; do a little h2so4 project to mail to my subscribers; and, of course, work: turn a conference paper into a chapter of a collected volume; write my contribution to the Levinas/Nietzsche book (ha, everyone else�s is due already, but I�m the boss); get ready to comment on a paper by a mentor of mine at a conference in a few weeks; prepare for the Symposium I�m running here at QB at the end of March. Also: relax? Yeah. We�ll see how it goes.
And, BECKY!, if you want a necklace now, but you are afraid you�ll like the newer necklaces later, you are allowed to have one NOW, and then exchange it LATER. So much is possible. Just so you know. In public.
So, not only do I have a job in New York City, as an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice (part of the CUNY system), but it also looks like a book I�m editing with a colleague, on Levinas and Nietzsche, will be published by a major university press, simultaneously in paperback and hardcover! We�re just awaiting the final OK, but my editor at the press tells me she thinks it�s a done deal. I guess astrologyzone was right that February was going to be a huge career month for me. That�s right. It was all in the stars.
Perhaps this was also in the stars. The other day I had the worst day! I woke up early to go to my cardiologist but when I got there no one was there. The door was shut, office dark, mail shoved under door. This made me sad, because if it weren�t for this appointment, I could have spent the whole day at home, unshowered, working, and I kind of need a day like that. So I paged him, the doctor, and his wife/receptionist called back and told me that there�s no way I could have an appointment. She was not nice about it at all! I told her I had had it scheduled for three months, at which point she began to realize it was her mistake, and began to apologize profusely. That of course meant that I was supposed to say everything was OK. Because when people apologize profusely you are supposed to tell them that everything is OK. Especially if you are a woman. If you are a �woman,� it is your job in this life to say things are OK, even when they are not! But I was not going to tell her that! No I wasn�t! So she kept saying she was sorry, waiting for me to fill in the blanks with �it�s OK,� and I would just say, �So I�ll see you tomorrow at 11:30?� and etc.
This was a moment of a clash of principles for me. Not a clash of me against the receptionist. No, a clash of my belief in civility (it is a practice that improves all the lives around you) versus my desire not to say things are OK when they are not. It�s not that I couldn�t say making a mistake was OK. Of course that�s fine, it happens. What I could not say was OK was the way she treated me before she realized it was HER mistake. No, she was not getting that vote of OK from me!
Anyway, that conversation sent me into a spiral of angersadness, at which point I realized I was also panichungry. So I made a series of bad decisions which ended with me sitting in a diner full of children eating a mediocre tuna melt that tasted just like how my day felt. The only thing that salvaged the experience at all was my IM conversation with Evany about how bad the food was, and the day, etc.
Then I went to the grocery store, and a strange produce guy kept stalking me around the store. I certainly can�t prove that he was actively following me, but he was EVERYWHERE, and always had something to say to me. By then I had recovered my commitment to civility, so I was probably too nice to him. It was almost funny, because it felt a little bit like I was in one of those games where targets keep popping up and you�re supposed to decide which ones you shoot and which ones you don�t shoot. Except that the same target kept popping up over and over again, in many different spots, and it wasn�t clear if he was a good guy or a bad guy, and no one handed me a gun.
Two hours later I had to fire someone from my freelance job, and arbitrate a dispute between two other people at that same freelance job. None of it was all that dramatic (and the dispute was actually a bit funny), but it just added to the unpleasantness of the day.
But then!
I got the news about my book being published. And then B.E. came over, told me my TV was cute, and we hung out talking about things both serious and silly. And, let�s just face it, even when you love your solitude like I do, days tend to end better when you�ve got a B.E. in the house than when you don�t.
11:55 p.m. - March 02, 2007
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