This is the new computer. I am upset because I think I might have already destroyed its optical drive. I destroy things inadvertently due to anxiety, so this is possible, but as Undine would say, if it is destroyed, it can be repaired. I just don’t like doing violence to things, especially inadvertently.
It is cold here, physically and existentially, and I miss California and general warmth.
I still claim to be un-depressed. I must be, if I updated my vita before it was required, and am able to look at my files.
In my files I found something I knew I could not have lost: an old book outline I had written in five inspired minutes, as people do. It was on Oswald de Andrade. I don’t think this book has been done yet, and it is still relevant.
I was going to do it, and use the proposal to get a Fullbright year. I was once very intelligent, organized, and motivated, and I should have stuck with those characteristics instead of decide they were failings, as I did.
What is interesting about the book outline is that, although done in only five minutes and so is obviously far from finished, it is very well designed. It is quite limited in scope, but has broad theoretical implications, and would be based partly on archival work.
Now that I have decided I have to be a professor, I hope I live forever so I can do all of these projects.
The adjuncts and the unemployed are all fighting, saying they could have been brilliant professors if certain circumstances were not preventing them, but I say the same.
#OccupyHE
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Have you been following all the hoo-ha about the MLA and the Convention? How much of this is motivated by political attacks on liberal arts from the right?
What is the particular hoo-ha? I know some things about it. I was thinking yesterday that the whole academia was abusive, and that this was why people mistreat each other, and that this is one more reason to become extremely mild in spirit, in protest — I sound downright Christian here, I know, but I mean to be more Buddhist, perhaps.
I had in fact destroyed the optical drive, but got it repaired for $27! You cannot imagine how wonderful this is.