...academia, what is you??

So I'm now the only Victorianist in my year. The only other one has had a giant kerfuffle happen around/to him--I am hazy at best on the details but it seems like his committee advanced him to candidacy and then dissolved itself??--and so I am now the only Victorianist. He's apparently moving to Brooklyn to start a chicken farm.

We share(d) an adviser, though, and I'm not seriously terrified of her. If one half of the things he says about this experience are really as little his own fault as he claims they are, she's done him serious wrong. I've never heard of such shady, back-door dealings before. And if she's capable of it with him, she must be with me as well. So. Terror. Good for staving off lethargy, I guess?

So I just drafted my pre-prospectus in the last three hours. I'm going to submit it after I edit out the crazy in the morning...but I want something on her desk before she decides she wants my head on a platter too. She likes me now...but I keep getting only Dr. Jekyll. Mr. Hyde must just be biding his time...

So. My pre-prospectus. It rambles between Austen, wood-print porn, Whistler, Wilde, Dickens, postcolonial feminism, and about a thousand other things. I think I can predict at least one comment she'll make: "You might want to include a little organization in your next draft." True fact.

PS: Mondays. I hates'em. They usually end up with me being awake for 21 hours straight.

Yaaaaay funding!

I finally have funding to go to the conference in my home state! I will be at my old undergrad university too...and will be able to take a fabulous friend home to meet my dear old Da (who got a PhD but couldn't find an academic job back in the 70s and is totally happy in his job now as a copyeditor at Sports Illustrated (because then he can be nerdy about sports and grammar at the same time) but who, deep down, loves the opportunity to waffle on about literature/theory). The friend in question is particularly fabulous and my Da has been getting lonely now that he lives alone most of the time. I'm looking forward to the opportunity to have vibrant conversation all over the house to cheer him up. Maybe bake some bread together. My dreams are limitless.

I also do not feel quite right without a sojourn to New Jersey every couple of months. I don't get attached to places, really, because I love moving and starting from scratch....but I still need a NJ fix. I just love Jersey so very, very much.

So. NeMLA, here I come!