le sigh

Apr. 10th, 2011 06:28 pm
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Can I just say--the sky is completely clear, the weather has not been finer in a coon's age, and YET my flight is canceled. There aren't even clouds in the sky and my flight is canceled.

Not that being stranded in New Jersey is a bad thing. It is, in point of fact, my absolute favorite place to be stranded seeing as it is my home. But I really do need to get back to school. So now I am all finger-gnawing and nervous-tapping. And if I'd known I would be stuck here and unable to go to class tomorrow morning, I would have gone somewhere fun like the Natural History Museum or...somewhere less geeky. What do un-geeky people do in the NYC area?



In the meantime, I watched The Squid and the Whale. Watching it was a lot like how Jesse Walt describes his childhood experience with the titular exhibit in the Natural History Museum. I couldn't watch it a lot of the time--I literally had to watch it from between my fingers at some point. It struck awfully close to home--every fault in every character rang true (and felt somewhat accusatory and/or damning) in some way.

Though I am super-thrilled to be able to say my two PhD-in-lit parents raised me and my siblings to have earnest enthusiasm and not disdain. And they would never have allowed me to not read Tale of Two Cities because it wasn't the so-called "best" Dickens. And I would have been grounded for a lifetime if I tried to pawn off my failures on teachers.

But that movie still struck veeeerrrry close to home.

Also: that exhibit in the Natural History Museum. In fact--that whole room. I think I can remember every single visit--and there were sooooo many visits--in extreme detail. I think it may be the best room in any museum I've ever been in. You've got the blue whale hanging over your head, you've got the battle in darkness in one of the corners, and you've just generally go the awesomeness of all the world in dioramas around you. What more could you want from life?
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My undergrad adviser--from Jersey, Land of Awesome--was in town for a meeting of the Historical Poetics Society (this is a made up thing--it's actually a bunch of awesome people who know each other from grad school who like to hang out and chat about poetics because they have so much awesome in them, it must overflow)...and she stopped me during the break to say hi.

I should probably mention now that she taught my mother before she taught me and that my mother died two years after I graduated from undergrad.

So my former adviser--she asks me a couple of nonchalant questions about my mom (who she really liked) and then...when I was telling her a couple of the things that make me happy but I forget seem horrifically tragic to other people (like my mom decided she was going to teach herself Spanish in the month before she actually died because the hospice sent her a nurse who spoke very little English and learning a foreign language when your own grasp on reality is slipping is the kind of solution my wonderful, wonderful mother often came up with)--and my adviser teared up and gave me this giant hug, right there in the middle of all our colleagues.

I have so much love for this lady. I can't even put it into words.

(I also, in my effusion of Feelings, pre-ordered her book that's about to come out at the end of the month. This makes no logical sense but, dammit, I have feelings.)

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