Quick Medusa Update

• Tenure: I still do not know. All good on all fronts so far but I still do not know. You cannot imagine how frustrating this is. This has been the most stressful process and the most agonizing year, in this regard.
• Real Housewife of Atlanta: The Someone got a tenure-track job in the Southland. This is wonderful and exciting news and a brilliant coup in a market that is temperamental on its best days and was, as many of you know, downright beastly this year. This also means we'll be having a Mason-Dixon romance and maintaining residences in two cities. Yes, we need your advice and wisdom.
  
• Wardrobe: I have just over a month to make some very important fashion choices for my Grand European Tour. Actually, it's just a conference and then a few days in London and a few days in Paris. I'll take it! I have to a) look fabulous at all times; b) be comfortable; and c) pack lightly. This is going to be VERY DIFFICULT TO ACHIEVE. I will be posting two This Week's European Wardrobe posts: the fantasy one and the practical one. Maybe I'll come out somewhere in between.
  
• Random obsessions of these past months: The Someone, Facebook, Wii Fit, Leo Babauta's The Power of Less, trips to New York (and Uniqlo, Brooklyn Industries, cocktails with fabulous former students, too salty salt bagels on hungover mornings, missing the bus to drink Lambrusco in Little Italy), Sober House, Bon Iver, Tom Tykwer, cyborgs, and Marcuse.
  

Triumphant return to the blog and full post to follow soon.

Observations from the road

• The airlines are seriously totally utterly broken.
  
• Heineken is yummy.
• I miss The Someone so very very much.
• Wild Turkey is cheaper than Heineken in certain Southern states.
• So is Jim Beam.
• I can no longer not own an iPhone. Seriously. The desire, it is strong.
  
• Nancy Grace is obsessed with missing and dead children.
• America needs a jeans makeover.
• Why not be drunk upon arrival to the MLA? Why not?
• This plane might actually depart at 6 p.m., with a delay of a mere six hours and fifteen minutes.
  
• My nieces and my nephew are awesome.
  
• My longing for The Someone occurs, I am convinced, on a molecular level.
• I wonder what would happen if I switched from Heineken to Wild Turkey.
  
• Or Jim Beam.

There are conferences and then there are conferences

And that, my friends, was one hell of a conference. I am spent in all the best ways. My liver is no longer speaking to me but otherwise. . .

Giddy like a little professing child

What do I love more than almost anything? Off I go!

(Oh, and if you are reading this and you think you might know of the super secret location in which I might be super secretly heading and you think you too might be super secretly heading in my super secret direction, email me!! There might just be super secret meetings of super secret blogging folks at this super secret location.)

Happy Winter

This is the view from the kitchen window. Yes, those are icicles. I know. It's like a frickin' ice prison.



Which is why the Chalupa and I are very happy to be flying South for the winter, at least the first couple of official weeks of it.

Will be in touch from the Deep Red!

Home, safe and secure

Gate



Spikes, barriers, heavy artillery


Cops love me


Shy

Happyhappyhappyhappyhappy

I am done with the filthily stupidly theoretically dense paper and it really isn't that filthy or stupid at all. Needs some tweaky* but I am pretty happy with it, happy enough anyway to deliver it.

I am very close to getting out of here for a few days. This makes me ridiculously, deliriously happy.

Chalupa is going to be staying at her vacation home, the home of my friend Paloma and her dog, Milo. Milo, an Australian Ridgeback mix weighing in at about 125 lbs., is literally 15 times bigger than the Chalupa. She could not care less about him, even though he steals her toys and follows her around the yard, peeing immediately on any spot she has sniffed for more than two seconds. She is, however, insanely in love with "Kitty" (because that's what Paloma names all her cats), a Katrina rescue from New O.

I will try to blog from the road. Yay! The road!


*Okay, that's a typo but I like it, so it stays. What exactly is a "tweaky"? Whatever it is, I think we all might need a little.

When the academic gods give you lemons . . .

I usually give two papers at conferences per academic year. My MLA panel proposal was rejected and now it appears my panel proposal for Important Conference, where I have given papers for the past three years, has also been rejected. This is no real surprise, as I have been paying attention to the cosmos and its message has been pretty flippin' clear: "Not your year, my dear Medusa."

But, BUT, my friends, I have concocted a delightful Plan B, the very thought of which is making my entire being shiver and tingle and smile. Instead of using my travel money to go to Important Conference, I could use it to go to Medusa's Version of Heaven. Without revealing too much, I can say that it is not an academic conference, but it does have to do with one of my areas of teaching and research expertise. And I would actually be doing Actual Things Related to my Teaching and Research. I would also be in heaven. Foggy C has footed the bill for me to go once before.

It is expensive, as in my whole travel money wad for the academic year and then a little. It does mean I would miss an entire week of classes, and the timing is especially unfortunate as that week of school is the week after Spring Break. But, BUT I would have missed half of the very next week for Important Conference anyway, and this only means cancelling one additional class session. And have I mentioned that I would be in HEAVEN???

I should do it, right? I should at least try to get the proposal through, right? Right? Right? Am I right? I am right. Right?

[Edited to add, 1/8/07, 11:25 a.m.: Dammit! I can't follow the very good advice of Artichoke Heart and Wol. I just found out that there was a screw-up and that my panel was indeed accepted for Important Conference! Now that I have an excellent and more desirable Plan B! Well, I do want to go, kind of, and it is Important Conference, but but . . . I am sure there is a lesson in here somewhere, but I think it might be that lame "you will get what you want at the second you no longer care" lesson. I wish there were a way I could do both, but, alas. If only I were an heiress. I would do much more interesting things than the Paris Hiltons of the world.]