Amy attended our first baby shower yesterday, expertly hosted by a couple of our great friends, and came home with lots of wonderful schwag. Watching the nursery fill up with stuff drives everything home. At this point, I think we’re as ready as we can be. I hope.

I, however, stayed home with Amy’s dad and installed a couple jacks so we can have wired Internet in the house while he did the tough stuff—crawling around in our attic dropping cables down, drilling through walls, and converting the foot of our futon into a stand-alone ottoman. The man has mad talent and isn’t afraid to use it.

There are about four or five weeks before the end of the semester. I desperately need a triple shot of motivation to get ahead of the curve so I can check out completely after the baby’s coming out party, since my friends who have babies while in school have said that’s it’s near-impossible to get caught up after the fact. What makes things worse is being nearly finished with required classes, when I might suggest that motivation in coursework is (ahem) already on the wane.

The indoctrination process to a discipline is an interesting one. I am finishing my third year of school and knew almost nothing about literary theory coming in. Last week, I managed to paraphrase Michel Foucault, Fredric Jameson, and Friedrich Nietzsche during the discussion of a Marxist critique of contemporary politics—and it all made sense. I have also surprised myself by being able to recognize structuralist theory, and recognizing my own deconstructionist tendencies when critiquing said theories. Furthermore, I can see traces of both in my 101 students’ writing even though these terms mean nothing to them. This is strange.

In short, I can make sense of this stuff even if I’m particularly able to forward the conversation much—at this stage, deciphering what’s going on without a lot of effort is enough. The funny part about coursework is that it exposes you to all these dialogues happening in a bewildering variety of places; after awhile, you start to hone in on the topics you find most relevant or interesting and learn how and where to find out more, and it’s about that time you no longer want to keep taking “general” classes because you want to focus more on the stuff you like—completely losing sight of the fact that those “general” classes seemed awfully jargon-laded and specific back when you started.

It’s almost like these people setting the curriculum knew what they were doing or something…

Current Mood: Flattened Affect |