2002-09-24 - 11:50 p.m.
The cat is gone. It has new, lesbian parents now, who are excited it went to live with them, instead of this dysfunctional family, which treated it like an unwanted child. I'm not sure how I feel about dumping a cat -- which had the primary problem of being confined and bored -- with people who live in Dort, but since it's not my problem anymore I'm not going to think about it. Today I saw its ghost licking a half-finished plate of food I left on the kitchen table, and later I saw the ghost run our the front door when I left it open. So hopefully it ran out for good.
Today in class Uzi had someone read an excerpt from an article in Science magazine, and then asked what the class thought of it. I gave a response, something that involved rolling my eyes while I was saying it, and Uzi exclaimed, "That's why I like having you in my classes!"
I'm not sure what to think about that, so I thought, hm, okay, and then he asked me to expand on what I had said. I made some general comments, nothing too specific. Uzi then said, "as [me] picked up on," and explicated his point, at which point I realized that actually I missed what he was going for -- my comment had been so obliquely sarcastic that he had assumed I hit it on the head.
Although embarrassing, especially coupled with his "that why I like" comment, only I have to know about it. And while maybe it could hurt me, I feel that my reputation with him will bring me positive returns, as this evidences. That class is filled with non-majors who are just interested in the subject matter -- my exact condition for my second year when I took two anthro classes, the second being historical archaeology -- and now I'm a major and a star. The class is not, either, without its table-turning incidental ironies. It just so happens that Tuesday of last week contained, in microcosm, Anna's thesis. It wasn't inspiring to me, yet she picked it up an made it her thesis, based on an analysis of the subject to the article and others, such as Mark Twain, who Uzi mentioned in class. Or maybe Uzi mentioned him because Anna used The Innocents Abroad in her thesis.
Anyway, when she was writing that in Spring of 2001 I was about to (although I didn't know it) undertake a paper for Historical Archaeology on the John Ringling estate that would inspire my thesis; I was setting up with Maria Vesperi to become an anthropology major; Anna was becoming the love of my life and (I didn't know this either) was about to drop out of my life almost entirely; and at the paper I was an editor and a star.
Now, the other thing distracting me from my "great thesis" has become such a nightmare I don't like to think about it, but can't -- have you ever seen the old movies or cartoon parodies in which a character is shown looking steaming mad from the shoulders up, while little heads repeating phrases from earlier in the plot appear floating around his or her head? Well, that's what my life on the paper is like after almost every meeting.
On my PC, I have for my desktop picture a picture of the challenger in flames as it takes off. It is comforting, for some reason.
