A Few Chances to Laugh

If you feel like working your way through the middle English, Geoffrey Chaucer's Blog has an excellent entry (June 15th) about medieval superheroes. A true delight!

Also, I would recommend the ruminations of Michael J Nelson of MST3K fame, who writes some hilarious little blurbs about movies, his childhood, and hat fashions gone awry.

A Lucky Find

I've been going through my worldly possessions today, getting ready to move in just a couple weeks, and trying to determine how many boxes I will need to find by the end of next week. As I was shuffling through the random artifacts on my bookshelves, I came across a purse that I have not used since last year. I looked inside and, lo and behold, found two unused Barnes & Noble gift cards that I received for college graduation! I'm so very tempted to go on a spree and get a pile of books that I've been itching to get my hands on, but I've decided I will wait until after this last class is over, and I have settled down in my new apartment.
But isn't that just the most wonderful thing that can happen to an English student?

Man Talk

During a discussion this afternoon, Devon and I explored the phenomenon of the junior high heartthrobs. Dev talked about her favorite episodes of Dr. Quinn featuring that pouty-lipped fellow dressed in suede (see her blog for an illustration), and a couple other film characters she had a crush on during the junior high years. It reminded me a great deal of Marcie's young crush on Charlie Sheen's character in Courage Mountain, which she relived when she forced the whole college gang to watch it with her. It was painful, but at least we were able to riff on the movie, which made the bad acting a little more tolerable. (Sorry, Marcie love, but it was pretty corny)

This got me thinking: where were my adolescent crushes? I racked my brain all evening, trying to remember any scenes from movies that I dreamed about during the lonely, awkward years of junior high, and I've come up with only a few fragments, none of them substantial. I guess I was just a late bloomer in the teenage crush department, although it certainly wasn't due to a lack of education. My brother and I both received our first major sexuality-according-to-Hollywood lesson from the old James Bond movies with Sean Connery; we became fans of the movies while still in grade school. Mom and Dad often worried that we were too influenced by the Bond-style approach to relations with the opposite sex: fast, hyper-sexualized, and often ending with the bodies of beautiful women dotting the landscape like blown roses. Luckily, neither of us seem too damaged by this early influence.

I didn't really have any crushes on movie stars back then, I guess. The first time I thought a movie star was truly attractive was when I saw Kevin Spacey's performance in The Usual Suspects. Perhaps my lack of proper training in the discernment of male beauty during those crucial formative years has come back to haunt me, because my current concept of attractive men strikes most of my friends as odd at least, and at most downright bizarre. A study of my current crushes a few months ago led me to sum it up for my friend Emily in the following way: "I like them tall, dark, and eccentric." A rough (and incomplete) list of my favorite film characters will help to illustrate my point:

The Usual Suspects' Verbal Kint/Kaiser Soze (Kevin Spacey)
Jane Eyre's Mr. Rochester (Timothy Dalton)
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' title character (Basil Rathbone / Jeremy Brett)
Pride and Prejudice's Mr. Darcy (Colin Firth)
Rebecca's Maxim de Winter (Sir Laurence Olivier)
Cyrano de Bergerac's title character (Gerard Depardieu)
Oedipus the King's Oedipus (Christopher Plummer)

Well, what does this say about me? Heaven knows. Maybe I just have unconventional taste. If you find it disturbing, just go the route my parents did and blame James Bond. You'll feel better afterward.

Now This Is Art

"The Four Stages of Chocolate Orange Cake with Bittersweet Ganache"
Medium: Flour, chocolate, and tangerine zest on 5.0 MegaPixels





Aesthetically pleasing on so many levels.

The Interview

Success!

I'll first give you all an account of the events, and then move on to my impressions: Dr. Williams picked me up at the train station, and we drove twenty minutes to get to campus. We had lunch (on the English department) at a little Italian place and started talking about the position and what would be expected of me. The talk continued as we explored the campus and walked up to the English department to grab the standard books used in freshman composition. Then we picked up one of the gals from human resources and looked at some apartments about a quarter-mile from campus, which are owned by the university. Dr. Williams had some things to do at home before dinner, so she dropped me off at the guest room in one of the dorms to hang out for an hour or so. Later, Dr. Williams and her husband picked me up and we all went to TGI Friday's, sharing a table with another couple from the English department. The next morning, the school chaplain picked me up and drove me to the train station so I could get home before noon.

Impressions: First, I was so impressed with the English department. All of the faculty members are very professional, organized, and technologically savvy. The current layout and materials used in the freshman comp classes are the result of years of fine tuning by everyone in the department. I liked what I saw. Their philosophy and approach to teaching composition matches very closely to mine; they expect quite a bit from their students. The structure of the classes is very interesting: freshman year, all the students take pretty much the same composition class, focusing mostly on style and grammar. Sophomore year, the students take either an APA or MLA-format research writing class, where they focus on the writing style and research methods that fit with their particular field of study. Both the students and the teachers have really liked this method.

The campus is really lovely, if a little plain. Don't laugh, but I'm thrilled that they have a football team. I've missed going to football games ever since I graduated from high school. There aren't many sports that I enjoy watching, but football is one of them.

The apartments owned by the school are very nice. They were built in the early 70s, but they've been well taken care of, and I would be paying pretty much the same for rent if I moved into one of the rooms. They're tenanted by a variety of people: grad students, university employees, and a herd of little old ladies who have lived there ever since the apartments were built. The only drawback is that all the apartments are two and three-bedroom layouts; even with all my furniture and belongings, the place would seem rather bare. But they are nice apartments, so I might end up moving there anyway.

It was a little odd talking to the professors. I still feel like a student, and I had to remind myself several times that these people considered me as a future colleague, and that I should think of them as such. This whole maturity thing still escapes me a little.

But, the long and short of it is... they want me for the position. They have given me a couple weeks to consider, but I really think that this would be a great opportunity for me. I would gain some experience, and use this as a chance to see whether I really want to teach for the rest of my life. And I would still be close to my dear Chicago, of whom I have become surprisingly fond over the past eleven months. So, I'll be calling the last few places that I haven't yet heard from this week, and if all goes the way I think it will go, I'll be calling Dr. Williams by Wednesday to tell her I'd love to take the job. Oh, I'm so excited!

Evidence of a Lower Intelligence

What I was supposed to do today:
Write a paper for Tuesday's class

What I actually did:
Went grocery shopping
Made a pot roast in my crock pot
Cleaned the bathroom
Drew up blueprints for my ideal library
Baked lemon-poppyseed cookies
Vacuumed
Finished reading The Princes in the Tower
Worked on my Italian lessons
Scheduled a haircut

Four more weeks of class. Oh, will school ever end?

News, and such old news! Taming of the Shrew, Act III, scene 2

About a month ago, I started sending out job applications to different universities and got a couple of immediate rejections since their adjunct slots had already been filled. Just a few days ago, I got an urgent e-mail from a certain university that had previously sent me a rejection, saying that they had a position that needed to be filled by June 15th, and would I be interested in the job. Oh goodness, I'm so excited! I've got an interview lined up for next Friday to meet the chair of the English department and see the campus. Wow, to think that I could be teaching college classes in just a couple months!