A friend and I went shopping today, and she pointed out some Doc Martens sandals that were on sale. I've been wanting some of those for over a year now, so I bought two pairs:

Turns out I'm not doing my tour of Indiana after all. Last night, my friend P. called me and urged me to come home again before the fall semester starts. I had thought I wouldn't be able to find a reasonably-priced plane ticket, and indeed, the flights into Nashville and Huntsville were going for about $500.00, but I found a flight to Birmingham for $226! I leave Tuesday and will be home for six days, which is good, because I've been taking stock of my summer. What have I done? I:

• Moved into a new apartment
• Co-authored the introductory chapter of the blog collection and did a lot of editing work before it officially went live
• Taught a Technical and Professional Writing class
• Studied for and took prelims (will be done with those soon, anyway)
• Wrote two short articles for The Encyclopedia of Third Wave Feminism
• Made some smart, healthy, and long overdue lifestyle changes and, as a result, lost 32 pounds (eleven dress sizes)

Sounds good, but despite the fact that I've been relatively productive compared to summers past, I'm not happy (for an soundtrack, imagine Don Henley's "The Boys of Summer" or Bananarama's "Cruel Summer" playing in the background), and I was thinking that if I had spent more time at home, I wouldn't feel this downcast. I hope I'm right about that.

I encountered both of these recently in conversations with colleagues in various departments about academic blogging and using blogging in writing pedagogy.

First: "I want to do A, B, and C in my (Insert discipline here) (Insert course number here) class. Would I be able to use a blog for that, or must I enter the WebCT gulag?"

Second: [Colleague who's just starting to learn about blogs, reflecting after our lengthy discussion of public/private and the pros and cons of real name v. pseudonym in blogging] "You know, academic blogging under your real name is sort of like the intellectual equivalent of going to a nude beach."

Note: I'm putting that second one in just because I found it so humorous. I'm not trying to weigh in on the real name v. pseudonym debate. One is not more valuable than the other, in my opinion, and there are definite advantages and disadvantages associated with each choice.

I heart Merlin so very much. He's put up a bunch of new 5ives, and they're going very well with my morning coffee and Loverboy's "Working for the Weekend" on the stereo. My favorites include:

Five terrible fake Eve Ensler plays
Five things I find kind of hypnotic
Five things you must abandon immediately
Five things that almost always make a song better
Five things whose use by children kind of depresses me
Five things in my pediatrician’s waiting room
Five bastardizations of my first name
Five things that are always funny

Explain performativity to a high school / undergraduate / general public audience, and do it within a 750-word limit. It's harder than it sounds, I'll tell you what! I tried to pack everything in: a definition and history of performativity, critiques of it, and political strategies stemming from it. I'm sure I mucked it up real good. :o

PERFORMATIVITY. Performativity is the idea that gender is a daily, habitual, learned act based on cultural norms of femininity and masculinity. The idea comes from the work of Judith Butler, who was influenced by theorists who studied “speech acts,” or the power of authoritative words to both say and do at the same time. One example is, “I now pronounce you man and wife.” According to Butler, gender works in much the same way. As girls, many of us learn countless subtle ways to groom and arrange our bodies to be feminine and attain approval as “normal” in a culture that puts people into one category: man or woman. For example, girls internalize stereotypically feminine acts such as wearing dresses and makeup, shaving one’s underarms and legs, sitting with legs crossed, and playing with dolls (which, it could be argued depending on the kind of play, is a preparation for the adult woman's traditional gender role of raising children). Women and men continually “cite” these gender norms in their day-to-day behavior, usually without realizing it. Even the simple act of filling out a form and circling the “Mr.” prefix is a performance of gender. Most often, gender is among the first things one notices about another person, and that is not so much a result of biological differences as it is a result of these stylizations of the body and habits of mind supplied by cultural norms. Such norms are oppressive because a person’s social legitimacy and normalcy is dependent on conforming to one of the two genders.

Anyone checked out my new song? Doe Maar is (was) a Dutch band from the 1980s; from what I gather, they're your basic 80s synthesizer-fabulous band, like, oh I don't know, Devo or maybe the Thompson Twins, but with more mainstream popularity in the Netherlands. It seems like they were about as popular as Duran Duran.

If you've listened to the song and you know about my love of happy melodies, you know why I like it; I also like how parts of the song sound almost proto-ska. I'm told the song is about a man who meets a woman, they fall in love, and they're so blissfully happy that they feel young again. The English translation of the title is "since a day or two." I could have this all wrong, though -- maybe Frank will be kind enough to correct me if I don't have my facts straight. :)

Now I want to hear some Thompson Twins...

I am eating the best turkey I've ever had in my life, so good I might have to nudge my mom aside and make this Thanksgiving's meal myself (I'm sure she'd happily hand over that responsibility :) ). Last time I was at the grocery store, I bought two 1-lb. white honeysuckle turkey breasts and froze both of them. I'm already thinking ahead about how I'll cook the other one: with Cajun seasoning or herbes de provence?

But I'm getting ahead of myself. After I thawed this turkey breast by leaving it in lukewarm water for a while, I put it in a foil packet with some of the water, plenty of olive oil, tons of hot Madras curry powder, some ginger, minced garlic, and hot pepper flakes. I sealed it up tight and put it in the oven for an hour or so at 325 degrees. It's unbelievably juicy and delicious. I can't take all the credit, though; Charlie reminded me of the foil-packet method of cooking meat, fish, and poultry in the oven. He'll be terribly embarrassed that I'm saying this, but I will anyway: Charlie can give great advice and recommendations on just about any topic. He can tell you how to fix your computer, cook your food, optimize your exercise routine, and improve your teaching. He's also excellent at recommending movies and music.

I've just finished a draft of the entry on essentialism for the Encyclopedia of Third Wave Feminism. As I've said before, the audience for this book is high school / undergraduate / general public, so I've tried to write the entry keeping that in mind. The editor sent me some entries from the Encyclopedia of Rape for me to follow, and I've tried to stay in keeping with the conventions of those entries, which tend to start out with a history of the thing or concept. In this entry, I attempted to show the "so what" of essentialism too. Hopefully the editor will think it's okay.