Objects of envy

For some reason, I've been reminded lately of various things I used to covet when I was a child.  Things I saw other people had and yearned for myself, while resigning myself to never having them.  They included:

• A treehouse
• Those red-and-yellow plastic cars you could peddle around
• A scooter (the kind you push, not motorized)
• The board game Clue
• The game Battleship (we eventually acquired it)
• Video game consul -- an uncle actually provided us with a Sega, which was HUGE.
• Salami sandwiches for lunch
• A microwave (got one later)
• Cable (read: Nickelodeon).  That was one of the treats of visiting Grandma Weaver.  We got it when I was in high school.
• A CD player.  It was mega-big when I got a Diskman for a teenage birthday.

Looking back at these, I'm still keen on most of them -- so at least I wasn't a massive victim of '80s/'90s fads, right?  Oh wait, now I'm remembering trolls...

Standards and envy are entirely relative, of course.  Recently, I was explaining to a friend that my nuclear family tends to cling to technologies -- that is, we are late adopters.  Our household phones were rotary types, and all our home movies -- through our late-1990s trips to national parks! -- were filmed on a silent Super-8 camera.  I'd gotten this far in the explanation when my friend cut in to say that it was actually pretty advanced for us to have home movies at all.  He's a full 6 years younger than me, and there are NO moving images of him as a child.  Seriously?

Anyway, while I had a pretty awesome childhood, I don't regret growing up, because look at all the freedom you have!  You can decide exactly what you do, where you go and how you get there, and you can buy the object of your desire if your bank account will allow it.  Fortunately, I'm not prone to overspending, but I still got a thrill today out of buying some plastic storage containers to organize my stuff better.  It's more controllable than the editing, after all.  One week before the draft goes to my supervisor!

In search of completeness

Sometimes, ladies and gentlemen, I break the internet.  Google tries its best to suggest what it thinks I really mean, but sometimes it stares back at me blankly as if to say, "Seriously, wtf are you even saying to me?"  This was part of finishing off the tedious process of verifying the words in a glossary Tennyson made in one of his notebooks, then checking a concordance to find out whether he used these words in his poetry.  It's but one example of some ways I've pursued my research over the past four years that were extremely time-consuming and probably unnecessary.  But I wanted to be thorough.

I could credit/blame my engineer father for this fastidiousness, but it also comes from a base level of suspicion I have for how a lot of literary critics go about making their claims.  All too often, they seem to "prove" their points with a representative example or two, and we more or less take their word for it that a general pattern is being described.  For my PhD, I didn't want to operate off my own personal impression of In Memoriam's alliteration.  So I made descriptive categories and I counted them.  It took weeks and some outside assistance manipulating Excel to form graphs.  GRAPHS.  In an ENGLISH dissertation.  Was I insane?  All this for maybe a page of discussion.  Definitely insane.  But as my friend Ian said the other day, the degree must be partly about proving you've done enough work.  That, at least, should not be an issue.

My new workspace

The title of this post has another meaning, too.  I'm ready for this PhD to be done.  It's good to feel so familiar with a topic, but I find it hard to look at it anymore.  It's time to move on to something new and full of potential.  And, let's face it, there are days when I'd really like to go home.  I'd like to sleep in my own bed, spend the morning tidying up, the afternoon sewing at my parent's house, and the evening seeing a double feature at the Stanford Theatre.  But for all its stress, my daily pattern is relatively pleasant -- and I've just moved into a cozy room in a real house, right by the river in a very peaceful neighborhood.  Onward!