Melissa Miles McCarter

http://www.kleinbottle.com
Right now Oprah is in the background and I am eating organic microwavable macaroni and white cheddar cheese and drinking all natural cola from Whole Foods. This is when you know you are an adult--when you find yourself hungry, but instead of getting a few dollars out of your piggy bank (yes, I have one) to buy some pizza or fast food, you eat the health food you bought on a whim. Actually, I am running out of food--the health food I bought is fine and all, but it doesn't fill you up. I felt kind of down today. Perhaps it was an end of the week let-down. It doesn't help that I have to go into class tomorrow to meet with my professor and another student for my Foundations of Rhetoric class. I mentioned to my class today I was thinking about the difference between love affairs and relationships. I think that very few people actually have romances, or love affairs in their life. I always go back to love affairs when I was to remember a good memory. I think I had a love affair with Europe when I visited last summer, and I always think back to that trip when I want to be happy. Love affairs are the stuff of memories, while relationships involve day to day realities. I think you can have a love affair and a relationship at the same time, but part of the love affair aspect is that it is temporary. It has a clear beginning, middle, and end, and has the arch that a good novel does. Often the ending is due to circumstance, not loss of love, and so you can remember the person with no hard feelings. It isn't even the same feeling of falling in love you get at the beginning of a relationship--it is contained, and like the punctum for Barthe--it is a sting, a stab, which shocks you and stays with you. And I don't think you can look for love affairs, it involves a certain amount of kairos, of good timing. I can never figure out in movies why they want to extend love affairs into relationships, like in Sleepless in Seattle, or even in the movie Love Affair. I don't think it is tragic when a love affair ends. I think it is poetic, and would make an even better movie. I will have to try and see if there is any movie/book that does it. Of course, maybe this is the cop-out of someone who is not in a relationship right now. It is easy to look back at love affairs when you are single, than to pine for a relationship. And being in a love affair is like being single--there is an element of independence and autonomy you don't get in a relationship. And that is what I can't even imagine giving up right now...in the past I desired that merging, and every time I looked at someone attractive I viewed them as a potential mate. Now, I look at someone attractive and wonder what a love affair would be like. And I am less likely to act on it, than in initiating relationship moves/courtship partly because a love affair is so special, and can not be sought out. Now that I write this it does sound like a cop-out. I think I might put some of these thoughts into my character in my What Moves Her novel, if I ever get around to rewriting it. I am going to watch my tape of Law & Order:SVU, which will be a change of pass. I need to get out of this nostalgic frame of mind. go get a different frame of mind yourself.

I had a good day today, which began with letting my students hang out outside to do work. I would have gone outside myself but I just got my period so I was feeling under the weather. Then I hung out at home with my kitties and then went to class tonight. My professor is out of town so the students met casually to talk about the video we are going to make for class. Tomorrow should be nice too--I did too much translation this past week so I am ahead for my class and I am not sure if my night class is on. I can't remember if the professor said we would have class or not. I have been working on my paper for my other class little by little and I need to start doing it with this class too. I have been thinking a lot about post-critical objects--we are supposed to make a video which is post-critical/post-modern vs. writing essays, which are modern constructions. I like this approach, because I really don't like writing essays. Recently a student of mine asked why I was getting a Ph.D. in Rhetoric, and I answered in jest, you shouldn't ask a graduate student why they do anything. However, more seriously I ask myself this almost everyday. The simple and most basic answer is that I like academia more than the real world. However, I am not sure why I want to be so specialized in this subject. I am not into rhetoric as a method of social change, so I am not wanting to use language to change the world, not do I want to teach composition for the rest of my life. I think the real answer is that it is a field (and credential) which best allows me to do what I want, even when I am not sure what I want to do for the rest of my life. On ER a few weeks ago, Benton was trying to coach an applicant for med school and asked the kid why he wanted to be a doctor. His immediate answer was "To help people" which frustrated Benton because he had found recently that all med school applicants say this. So, Benton asked the kid again, who said, "I don't know, to make money." And Benton responded, at least that's honest, but advised the kid not to answer that way. I think people have this notion that we have this well-thought out reason for why we want to do things, but in reality I think we just adapt to situations and make up reasons to justify it to others. I think we do very little out of our normal sphere. For example, I grew up being comfortable with academia, being good at English, but balanced with a theorectical inclination. I was not a hard core lit person growing up, but I was definitely an intellectual. So, being a professional intellectual makes sense, even though I don't really care what I think about. Maybe that is the true notion of a intellectual--being an all purpose thinker. However, I do feel like grad school is similar to med school in that there are certain hoops that are there just because other's have done so. I go through all these classes, write about something, and this makes me an expert--to do what? Teach? But the real learning to teach doesn't come from the classes, just like the real learning to doctor doesn't come from med school classes. I will become more skilled as a professor simply by doing and teaching more. So just like a doctor, who is really a scientist-practioner, I am learning to be a theorist-practioner. And the balancing the two seems to be the trick. Anyway, I am going to go to sleep early tonight, and just hope I don't have class tomorrow night. (Wishing it away, will it make it so?) I have to finish grading the papers and post questions for the chat on Friday.

Right now I am preparing for my class work. We are going to do some groupwork on Invention and Research papers. I just finished grading 90 percent of the papers--I have three piles right now: excellent, good, and okay. I am going to have my class tell me what grade they should get and then average our two judgments....the joys of being a liberal professor type. I have my phone set up to give me daily horoscopes as message mail.
Today it said I should have a romantic dinner. Instead I went to Whole foods and then watched NYPD Blue. But I got yummy fruit stuff, since I think I am deficient in Vitamin C. Anyway, I am procrastinating, so back to work.

P.S. I saw the Mexican this weekend.

My sleep schedule is all messed up. I went to sleep at 6 AM and then woke up around 2 PM. Part of the reason my sleep schedule is messed up is that my family visited this past weekend so for my sister Lindy I made my futon couch into a bed. It is still a bed, and so I keep going back and forth between my downstairs bed and my upstairs bed. It will get more complicated when my new Pier 1 bed frame comes in and I will not know which bed to finally choose! Anyway, I also stayed up working on my translations and that took forever! We had a huge passage to translate, and even though it wasn't hard, it took a long time. It probably didn't help that I was watching TV and playing literati at the same time. Tonight I plan on watching Buffy and NYPD Blue while I work on all the papers I have to grade by Weds. But for now, I have to go to my translation class...

In order to appease certain people who are eager to see my private thoughts embossed in a public domain I have created this blog. However, it really has more to do with my laziness than anything, otherwise I would just update my lissa.scriptmania.com website. I will have more to talk about soon, but right now I am in the middle of this long german translation. --Melissa