Just listening to a little Modest Mouse, “March Into the Sea” squeaking in these cheap headphones.
Bang your head like a gong
‘Cause it’s filled with all wrong
Ahaha! Clang, clang, clang!
Who said anything about the dissertation? Well, no, I haven’t mentioned it in a while. Many weeks ago I dedicated November to accomplishing two things: 1.) write brush-by (pardon me) revisions to chapters zero (the intro), one, and two and 2.) build the tag clouds for chapter three. November has, as of the 28th, gone half well. By this I mean that I am satisfied enough with the writing to pass it along to my chair at the end of the month, but the cloud making has been slowed by coding PHPrustrations. I built a jumbo heap of good and valid XML, but the PHP is quirky, contains a glitchy formula. Trusted hands are at this very moment pitching in on this problem, and I’ve decided to press ahead with as much of chapter three as I can in December–despite the absence of cloud formations. For tomorrow and Friday: twenty more pages of chapter two to unpick (on Latour and also on patterning). Clang, clang, clang!
All day long I have been thinking of drawing a Scrape about the bus ride home from campus last night. I played a couple of pick-up games in Archibold after teaching 105 last evening, then hopped aboard the Centro 344 route to South Campus on bus #9966, which, I was disappointed to learn, stunk like a decaying carcass air freshener was placed immediately in front of the blower for the heater. Ah, but the transportation is free, so I shouldn’t complain. Clang!
The basketball was as good last night as it has been in the three weeks I’ve been back at it. Except, after winning two games, I had to duck out because some long-finger-nailed bum slashed my left ring finger and it wouldn’t quit bleeding. Didn’t matter too much, anyway, considering I was spent. Same ruffians who sliced my tender finger were taking unusual liberties with normal pick-up rules by running in substitutes. They had six and wanted everybody to play. Ever so often they would run off and on, like a line change in hockey. You can imagine what a downer it was to find that a lanky and reckless 6-3 was replacing Short-n-Slow, the cat I’d been happily matched up with for the first five minutes.
I have two or three other things on a short list of stuff to blog about, but none of it is appropriate to tack at the end of this entry. Tomorrow or the day after that.