moo.

{learn something new}

Tipping should be too.

learn something new

interesting.
{via learn something new everyday}

learning french with Eddie Izzard

reduce, reuse, recycle, or how to be a successful academic part two

{found at phdcomics}

I love PHD Comics. There are so many good ones.
And, by good I mean painfully accurate.
Luckily, I haven't had to many bad experiences with professors
and I'm not in the hard sciences. So there are many that don't apply.
Still. Some of them just about take my breath away.
Take notes.

silver lining part one

{photo found here}

While going to my French class is miserably brutal and enduring multiple quizzes per week is not my idea of summer fun, there are quite a few great things about learning French. Not least of which is getting to read this book, and this book, and this book in a new language! Okay, maybe I'm not quite to that last one. But I can hold my own with The Giving Tree!

Plus, of course, there is always the food. Oh the food.

ick.

{PHDComics}

A quiz on day two. Another on day five. C'est très crappy.
Still. I'm in it to win and by 2:30 I'll be free flyin' for the weekend.

how to be a successful academic, lesson one

{from HERE, click to enlarge!}

So true. Take notes.

bonjour

The philosopher and I have begun our summer jobs: learning (or at least passing) French. Don't kid yourself, it is brutal. I know, I know. It sounds "so fun" for anyone and everyone not a.) required to take it b.) being graded on progress or c.) royally screwing their GPA in the process. We had our first quiz yesterday (oh yeah, DAY TWO) and we'll meet Friday for another - yikes! I think the worst of it is the incredibly LONG class periods. 11:50 - 2:10 is horrific. By 12:15 I am very ready to leave. *Hopefully in the end it will all be wonderful and worth it. But as my mother used to say, the light at the end of the tunnel is the train coming towards you.

{photo by Anne Geddes}

On a different note, L & I received some *very* exciting news on Sunday - - someone very special to us is going to be a NEW FATHER in about 7 months! There is a serious baby boom going on around here - my sister just had a baby, one of the philosopher's cousins just had a baby, and now we've got news of another! In all honesty, the baby fever makes me a little bit sad because sometimes it just feels so far away from my near-future. But nonetheless I'm thrilled for the joyous expansion! Until more is known about the little person in making, I'll have to remain content showering the happy couple with gender-neutral gifts. I wish them all the best as they continue falling in love with their growing baby!

lazy day lectures

The philosopher and I love to listen to lectures,
especially from The Teaching Company.

Recently, I've been listening to lectures on 20th century American Fiction.
It is a particularly good series, I think, by Arnold Weinstein.
Anyhow, the lectures on Walt Whitman have been really interesting.
Several times I've been reminded of Deleuze and Guattari - -
of course, lately I've been reminded of them all over the place.
Nonetheless, I'm itching to get my hands on a copy of Song of Myself.

home grown goodness

This morning Luke and I picked fresh lettuce from our own little garden.
I love it. As I think about having a larger garden of our own at some point
I must remind myself that I've gotten a very special, low maintenance
introduction to gardening. Do you remember the end of Wall-E when the
ship captain is showing the kids how to garden? He is so enthusiastic
as he talks about the things they'll be able to produce
- pizza plants being one of them! That is about how I feel.
Anything is possible. Plant the seeds and they grow!
The philosopher and I tried to start slowly, only planting things
that are difficult to mess up or ruin.
Meanwhile, my will-be mother-in-law has perfected everything else.
All together the garden has: snap peas, lettuce, spinach, carrots, tomatoes,
bell peppers, watermelons, cucumbers, squash, rhubarb, green onions,
cauliflower... and probably some more things I'm not aware of.

{the garden}

{our little plot with lettuce, spinach, carrots, green onions, and bell peppers}

{the view from the street}

psychoanalysis...

{cartoon source}

I'm currently writing a paper for a class I've been taking on the history of psychoanalysis. Most of our time in class has been spend considering Freud's thought and legacy but my paper concerns a few of his followers - Reich and Jung in particular.

I've read so much about these two thinkers in the last couple of weeks I'm having a hard time keeping it all straight. But there is one especially humorous anecdote that is impossible to forget.

Jung was really interested in schizophrenics because he felt they provided special insight into the workings of the unconscious. Accordingly, he worked with a lot of schizophrenic patients - talking with them, etc... The patients would often share with Jung their hallucinations and he would jot them down hoping to discover cosmic unity down the road. One such hallucination was especially important for his concept of the collective unconscious. Jung explains, "I once came across the following hallucination in a schizophrenic patient: he told me he could see an erect phallus on the sun. When he moved his head from side to side, he said, the sun's phallus moved with it, and that was where the wind came from" (Symbols of Transformation, p. 101).

sometimes a kaleidoscope is a catastrophe

I was never a "wedding" girl. If you had asked me 5 years ago if I'd be engaged, much less thinking about a wedding, before I was 30 my response would have been: a. roaring laughter or b. a roll of the eyes followed by an exasperated "no". But, alas, I am not a seer. I am engaged AND thinking about a wedding. When I first started considering possibilities for the fete I felt completely overwhelmed. Actually... I still do. Part of the difficulty is that I've got about 30 competing preferences. Should it be formal or casual, rustic or seaside, mod and hip or garden fresh? I don't know! I like elements of each. I got to thinking about this the other night though and realized something important about myself. This inability to choose between styles is not a peculiarly wedding-related quirk of mine. The clothes I like, the music, the dinnerware and decor for my (current and dream) home are all highly eclectic. Unfortunately, I am still fine tuning my inner coordinator; I'm still learning which elements can be mixed together in an aesthetically pleasing way and which ones simply can not. When it comes to something small or something for someone else I generally have no problem. But if it is for me, the larger the scale - be it an event or a home - I just don't know what I like most. I suppose it helps that the philosopher is pretty clear about particular issues regarding our wedding. It helps narrow the possibilities a bit. Then again, we tend to have slightly different tastes so the game of compromise can be tricky. I thought, for instance, since he's not a big fan of extravagance he would be all over a kitschy, casual shindig at the lake. I had even gotten excited about it myself. But, without these I just can't see it happening. :) I'm sure there will be plenty more updates on our growing reject bin but I'm hesitant to expose too many rejects just yet. Why? Well, *shame* I keep pulling things back out of the bin. For instance, I spent about a week thinking these were really cute (even though I am not a cake topper kind of girl). Then, I spent about two weeks thinking they were totally frumpy and stupid. And back and forth the pendulum swings... Hopefully within the next year I'll learn to be a great mixologist. In the meantime, it might be a wild ride.

"Decorating for yourself is agony. It's easy to figure out what will make someone else happy. It's easy to make someone else's dreams come true. But to get into your own head as a decorator is hard because you're exposed to so many things."

- Robert Kime

procrastination by accident

It's not that I don't want to focus on the final I have coming up Monday
or the final paper due Wednesday that has to be good
or the 25 page paper that needs to be finalized for publication by Friday...

But somehow I find myself thinking about weddings
and houses and napping in the sun over and over and over again.

Why is it so hard to focus when you have to?

business model.

found this {here} and had to share.

{photo by Nick Stankus}

dear philosopher

even when you have to stay up late
into the wee hours of the night
writing a paper you hate...I


it is true.

{poster awesomeness}