The king is dead; long live the king
That is, my class is over (final papers all read, grades logged with registrar), and so I have immediately started working on my next class. Which doesn't start until January 7, but I am managing a team of four teaching assistants -- which reminds me, I apparently need to take a mandatory online 2 hour sexual harassment course sometime in the next few days -- and so need to get everything in shape now so that I can try and actually take two weeks off from working. Which I haven't done for, oh, if I start to calculate the number of years I will become very sad so let's just say, a while. I am the kind of person who is not so good at "relaxing" when tension-inducing tasks are hovering over her head like a legendary Greek sword, so the more I get done now, the better I will feel.
There's a lot of energy that goes into making a syllabus, at least for me (actually, even making a crappy syllabus takes a lot of time and energy, I'm sure) -- it's a little bit like outlining a book, since each class tells a story and has a narrative arc, and you need to figure out the best way to tell that story and how much you can expect people to read each week. I find that if I put the outline together well, then each week's lectures fall into place a little bit easier, both because they build on the preceding ones, and also I have a good idea of where I'm going. I'm feeling pretty good about how this last class went, mostly because I've gotten so much positive feedback. As in three different colleagues and four graduate students told me that they'd heard great things about the class, and at yesterday's department party almost all of my students thanked me for the class and said nice things about it. So I'm thinking that while I'm feeling good about my teaching skills, I should forge my new syllabus while the iron is hot. Or some such.
It would be a lot easier to work from home if a) the apartment were back to its pristine pre-party state, and b) they weren't jackhammering up the entire sidewalk across the street (leading me to wonder once again why there have not been improvements in jackhammer technology in recent decades -- surely there is a better way to tear up concrete and pavement). One party prop that I am reluctant to throw away/recycle is this fabulous beer bottle, purchased along with some other Eastern European beers, mainly for their Cyrillic lettering. One was a Ukrainian beer called Slavutich, the second was a Petersburg beer called Leningradskoe (so Soviet!), and this was the third:
Now, you can probably already figure out what it says from the giant criss-crossed pistols that make up part of the logo, but again a mini-Cyrillic lesson: P = r, C = s, H = n, lambda = l, and don't worry about that b after the lambda. And what does that spell! Arsenalnoe, which is the adjective form of Arsenal, and by the way you can see it's 7% alcohol = 14 proof, as compared to say, Bud Light, which is 4.2% alcohol, or 8.4 proof. Now this is a beer that did not exist when I lived in Russia -- I switched to beer about 3/4 of the way through my fieldwork, playing the girl card and saying things like (imagine high-pitched girlie voice here), "I can't drink vodka unless there's juice in it! Maybe I can just have beer," thus saving myself, kind of, from miserable hangovers and illnesses the days after the nights I would be hanging out with guys to try and get gender-balanced data. Back then, the most popular beer, at least among the people I knew, was a beer called Fatty, which was advertised in a series of tv commercials in which a fat beer-drinking guy would return home from a drinking bout with his buddies to find that he'd been gone a really, really long time, like months or years in the outside world, and when his wife would say in an annoyed tone, "Where have you been?" all he'd say was "Drinking beer" (it rhymes in Russian). In my experience, a drunk Russian was like 2 seconds away from violence, I mean, I saw many a fist fight break out over what appeared to be absolutely no provocation at all, and I remember when winter coats came off and I started seeing lots of casts on men's right hands, which I first attributed to breakages caused by slipping on ice but eventually realized was probably due to punching. So the idea of having a beer with guns on it, masculine as it may be, seriously creeps me out. Mr. Monster (who in two seconds figured out that the pictured yard-sale figurine that I've been calling "Articulated Businessman" is actually Christian Bale in American Psycho) said he wanted a t-shirt with this logo on it, and while I kind of feel like I owe him for some cool art he made me recently, I think this would be a bad idea (especially on a tall Teuton with really short hair).
Other entertaining things viewed recently include this window in the wholesale garment and textile district downtown (J-ka and I saw a cake stand display in Venice that was remarkably similar, but I forgot to photograph it),
and this model in a store window in my old neighborhood in Spookytown.
I wonder how the store owners feel about certain deceased Ethiopian emperors? I'm thinking "pretty good."
There's a lot of energy that goes into making a syllabus, at least for me (actually, even making a crappy syllabus takes a lot of time and energy, I'm sure) -- it's a little bit like outlining a book, since each class tells a story and has a narrative arc, and you need to figure out the best way to tell that story and how much you can expect people to read each week. I find that if I put the outline together well, then each week's lectures fall into place a little bit easier, both because they build on the preceding ones, and also I have a good idea of where I'm going. I'm feeling pretty good about how this last class went, mostly because I've gotten so much positive feedback. As in three different colleagues and four graduate students told me that they'd heard great things about the class, and at yesterday's department party almost all of my students thanked me for the class and said nice things about it. So I'm thinking that while I'm feeling good about my teaching skills, I should forge my new syllabus while the iron is hot. Or some such.
It would be a lot easier to work from home if a) the apartment were back to its pristine pre-party state, and b) they weren't jackhammering up the entire sidewalk across the street (leading me to wonder once again why there have not been improvements in jackhammer technology in recent decades -- surely there is a better way to tear up concrete and pavement). One party prop that I am reluctant to throw away/recycle is this fabulous beer bottle, purchased along with some other Eastern European beers, mainly for their Cyrillic lettering. One was a Ukrainian beer called Slavutich, the second was a Petersburg beer called Leningradskoe (so Soviet!), and this was the third:
Now, you can probably already figure out what it says from the giant criss-crossed pistols that make up part of the logo, but again a mini-Cyrillic lesson: P = r, C = s, H = n, lambda = l, and don't worry about that b after the lambda. And what does that spell! Arsenalnoe, which is the adjective form of Arsenal, and by the way you can see it's 7% alcohol = 14 proof, as compared to say, Bud Light, which is 4.2% alcohol, or 8.4 proof. Now this is a beer that did not exist when I lived in Russia -- I switched to beer about 3/4 of the way through my fieldwork, playing the girl card and saying things like (imagine high-pitched girlie voice here), "I can't drink vodka unless there's juice in it! Maybe I can just have beer," thus saving myself, kind of, from miserable hangovers and illnesses the days after the nights I would be hanging out with guys to try and get gender-balanced data. Back then, the most popular beer, at least among the people I knew, was a beer called Fatty, which was advertised in a series of tv commercials in which a fat beer-drinking guy would return home from a drinking bout with his buddies to find that he'd been gone a really, really long time, like months or years in the outside world, and when his wife would say in an annoyed tone, "Where have you been?" all he'd say was "Drinking beer" (it rhymes in Russian). In my experience, a drunk Russian was like 2 seconds away from violence, I mean, I saw many a fist fight break out over what appeared to be absolutely no provocation at all, and I remember when winter coats came off and I started seeing lots of casts on men's right hands, which I first attributed to breakages caused by slipping on ice but eventually realized was probably due to punching. So the idea of having a beer with guns on it, masculine as it may be, seriously creeps me out. Mr. Monster (who in two seconds figured out that the pictured yard-sale figurine that I've been calling "Articulated Businessman" is actually Christian Bale in American Psycho) said he wanted a t-shirt with this logo on it, and while I kind of feel like I owe him for some cool art he made me recently, I think this would be a bad idea (especially on a tall Teuton with really short hair).Other entertaining things viewed recently include this window in the wholesale garment and textile district downtown (J-ka and I saw a cake stand display in Venice that was remarkably similar, but I forgot to photograph it),
and this model in a store window in my old neighborhood in Spookytown.
I wonder how the store owners feel about certain deceased Ethiopian emperors? I'm thinking "pretty good."
posted by Pangea at 3:57 PM
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