Wait...it's not over yet?

So life goes on.

My ridiculously ambitious goal of having two complete drafts before my trip to Oxford has of course fallen to bits, and I'll be lucky to have one half-draft and a solid outline. I like writing the papers when I have long chunks of time to devote to them, but right now...I just don't. Too many little assignments to worry about. I'm hoping I can bang out a bunch of pages in that last week leading up to the trip, since all the little stuff will be done and I can really focus on that.

This week has not been as productive as I'd like in the sense that I don't feel like I've taken a chunk out of the pile, but in reality I'm doing ok. And it's been a big week for...personal revelation, let's say. There have been three specific things, which I may not be able to verbalize well but which are all very interesting. For me, anyhow.

1) I made a big breakthrough on understanding my resistance to theory (which, ironically, is the title of the first theoretical article I read in grad school). It's a bit clumsy to explain, but essentially I realized that while I had accepted that people believe in theory, so I have to read it and demonstrate that I can see how it's expected to be used, I didn't really believe it could do any of the things it says it can. Like, to use the example that brought me to this conclusion, knowing intellectually that it must suck to live your entire life in the closet but never having actually *thought* about how people go through it, what it entailed, embraced the reality of what that would mean. It seems like a ridiculous comparison, and I would be lying if I said I wasn't a little on drugs when it occurred to me, but it remains interesting and helpful to my theoretical work.

2) Continuing the theoretical line of thought...I decided I believe in subjective truth. In certain kinds of cases. I'm not even going to try to describe how this came about.

3) I've become one of those annoying people who can only talk about their work. I have very little else to say currently...it hit me hard yesterday, when I had numerous conversations with non-grad students and found myself oddly silent when I wasn't talking about school. Last night I was watching an FotC episode in which Dave (who is Indian for those living in a comedy-free box) refers to Bret and Jermaine as "English," and I literally paused the show to ponder the postcolonial implications of a member of one ex-British colony calling white members of another ex-colony English. Not British mind you - English. I've lost any semblance of being a normal person.

Ben comes tomorrow. I'm *thrilled*. It gives me a good excuse to stop working for a bit, and hopefully do some things that needed to be done anyhow but are vaguely fun. These things would include buying a coat, going to the Kohl's sale and looking for furniture at St Vincent's. I'm sure he'll be so excited.

I bought a bar of Lindt 80% Dark the other day, and when I opened the cardboard wrapper and peeled back the very-thin silver foil, I had a Proustian moment. My mind actually got confused about whether I was standing in my own kitchen in Madison or my tiny kitchenette in Limoges. It made me miss France (and specifically Trimble) a lot. When I was bored to death and dragging myself through every day and being sick and tired of the same three bars, of *everything,* I knew inside that someday I'd miss all of it terribly, as hard as that was to believe at the time. Well, the moment is here. I miss everything. Not just France, the language, the wine...I miss everything. I miss being so relaxed it was stressful.

Along the same lines, I've been daydreaming a lot about vacation. My dreams about Thanksgiving and Christmas are very different, but just as appealing; when I think about Oxford I think of doing things and when I think of NC I think of not doing things. In Oxford I'm going to go to London, drink, see the sights, bike around, work on papers, go to pubs, make Thanksgiving dinner, have a fucking blast. Over Christmas I'm not going to work, not going to think about school, not going to leave the house for days if the mood strikes me, not going to work on anything. I can't wait for either. Seeing the Marauders, seeing the family, Strongbow, good wine I don't pay for, Pangos in the college bar, karaoke in the gay bar...it's going to be good.

Just got to make it there. Hard to believe the first one's three weeks from Saturday. Not sure if that's awesome or utterly terrifying.