The timing of the Christmas tree (and the associated good cheer, etc) is particularly fortunate, since the end of the semester is making me a little melancholy. I’m looking forward to my courses next semester, and it’s nice to have a little break from the lecture schedule, but I’m going to miss these students. It’s [...]
Posted in academic, personal | 1 Comment »>Autumn in Berkeley. Originally uploaded by Susan Groppi. Sometime in college, probably freshman year, my friend Dan asked me to take a walk with him. We’d just had a heavy snowfall, and Dan wanted to go down by the river to take some photographs. As we picked our way over the icy sidewalks, Dan explained [...]
Posted in personal | 5 Comments »>Oregon fans. Originally uploaded by Susan Groppi. Usually, when I come to campus on weekends to work, everything is very quiet. This Saturday, it was a zoo. It was homecoming weekend, so the campus was crowded with alumni, and Sproul Plaza was packed full with a student-run carnival. (Complete with food! I went for a [...]
Posted in personal | 2 Comments »>Yesterday was the last lull, the quiet before everything starts moving. The campus was empty, the libraries closed, the lights off in all the classrooms. Today it’s crowded again. It’s been a couple of years since the first day of classes had anything but a symbolic meaning for me–it’s a nice change.
Tags: berkeley
Posted in personal | No Comments »>So, for those of you who haven’t had the chance to hear this from me in person, the update. I’m going to be teaching at Berkeley next year. It’s a one-year lecturer position, and I’m doing two classes each semester. This fall, I’ve got one lecture course and one seminar. The seminar will be what [...]
Posted in academic | 11 Comments »>Getting ready to leave the house on Thursday morning, Matt and I agreed that “regalia” is a really good word. So here’s the thing. The night before graduation, we were out for dinner with my family, and in the middle of dinner my mother turned to me, looked me straight in the eye, and asked [...]
Tags: berkeley, commencement, graduate school, ph.d., regalia
Posted in academic, personal | 2 Comments »>I called the manuscript finished about a week before I actually officially filed it. That was the point where all of my advisors agreed that it was in good enough shape, that I didn’t need to rework the conclusion, and so on. That didn’t mean I was done, though. That just meant I was ready [...]
Tags: berkeley, dissertation, graduate school
Posted in academic, personal | 3 Comments »>Friday night, stopping at the video store to pick up a movie, it felt like Berkeley itself was on display. Two kids, I’d guess around eight and ten years old, wearing hand-knit fringed ponchos in ugly earthy colors, were running around the store backwards with their arms stretched out. Their mother browsed the “Independent Cinema: [...]
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