grr

Okay, so here was my plan for next semester:

CLT 235 Fairy Tales and Gender (Betsey Harries) TR 1-2:50
ENG 261 What Jane Austen Read: The Eighteenth-Century Novel (Doug Patey) TR 10:30-11:50
ENG 281 Modern American Poetry (Michael Thurston) TR 9-10:20
WST 312 Queer Resistances: Identities, Communities, and Social Movements (Nancy Whittier)
and maybe ECO 153 Introductory Macroeconomics (Randy Bartlett) MWF 9-9:50

Thing is, WST 312 doesn't come up on the electronic catalogue. I e-mailed Nancy Whittier and she said "Yes, I'm teaching it. Not sure what the problem is with the electronic catalogue, but thanks for alerting me. I'll try to fix it. 312 is meeting on Thursdays from 1-2:50, I believe." NO!!! I love fairy tales, so i've wanted to take Betsey's class since my first year, even though it has the dreaded "gender" in the title. It's offered every other year and i wasn't eligible as a firstie. Queer Resistances is the reason i suffered through Intro to Women's Studies, though. Why can't it be in the 3-4:50 seminar block? I will totally choose Betsey's class over this, but i am aggravated that i took Intro WST for no reason, because i generally hated that class.

It's like having my own personal think tank.

I have really solid, quality people in my life. I appreciate that a lot. So yeah, big general thank you to y'all.

Am still tweaking next semester's class schedule (registration is in a couple weeks) and have now started thinking about next year also.

More abuse of the friendslist will follow.

Reminding you that op/ed pieces must be sent to Cate by Wednesday at 6pm.

These are the topics that we would like addressed this week:
1. Copyright and file sharing
2. the HONS issue
3. the saving-Energy contest

Let me know if you are interested in contributing on those topics or any others.

[Whoa, that e-mail was sent to 14 people. 5 editorials appear in an issue. 3 of us have a weekly column. Wow, that's a lot of "when I feel like it" writers.]

I don't feel capable of writing on any of those topics. So someone tell me what to write about.

As soon as the partial-birth abortion ban passed and everyone freaked out i thought about writing an article on that. It's such a tricky issue that i'm still working out what exactly i think, so i'm not sure i could manage a coherent piece on it.

When i finally update there will be stuff about the Buddhist talks i went to yesterday. One of the things which came up (though unfortunately it felt mostly like lip service) was being compassionate, not being antagonistic towards one's opponents; deep listening, trying to understand where one's opponents are coming from. Can that somehow be worked into a piece that isn't horribly vague and preachy?

I didn't watch the Democratic Debate tonight, so unless there's a transcript around i can't write on that. (The friends-of list will be abused again once i finally have time to start investigating candidates.)

Hmm. Logic 100 every year has its students break into 4 groups and chalk the campus arguing about some controversial issue which is actually fake but is presented as real. It didn't work so well this year because it was over Family Weekend and the rain meant flyers in the Campus Center instead of chalkings all over campus, but the issue this year was Smith establishing a Military Science department. I feel like somehow one could make an article out of that, but whatever vague plan i had seems to have fallen out of my brain.

There are those blinking studies i was talking about with akronohten the other night. The problematics of searching for and/or finding a "gay gene" or something similar. That could be a cool article. And it would just be an opinion editorial about an issue which has been in the news and happens to be relevant to Smithies but it gets me out of the all-about-Smith groove i've been in (Celebration, Grecourt Gates, political diversity at Smith). I feel like not only have i been in a Smith groove but it's been a complaining about Smith groove and even if no one else notices i feel like that's bad (not that there isn't plenty to criticize, i just think it's bad to do only that every week) so it would be nice to have a breather from that.

Or maybe i could just write a piece on SCMA's Undomesticated Interiors (which i heart muchly). Though that's really an arts piece, and i would want to wait until the companion exhibit "Photographing Undomesticated Interiors" went up (that starts this Friday). And i really have no idea how i would go about doing a piece on that, i just lurve the exhibit so it popped into my head.


[One of the many reasons i heart LJ is that writing things down helps me clarify them and apparently gets me thinking. I'm now thinking blinking studies as my piece, which totally wasn't on my possible list when i started this entry. And i may Letter to the Editor if the inevitable abortion piece makes me want to defenestrate desk chairs.]