I finished another one a few minutes ago. They're easy to make now that I've gotten the hang of knitting on double-pointed needles:

Here's the finished product:



These umbilical cord hats have been a big hit with my friends who are mothers, but now I'm ready to move on to an adult hat. For myself. Made from some gorgeous crimson merino wool yarn I scored on clearance.

Amanda says that everyone has linked to this story in the Chronicle about Invisible Adjunct. I'm embarrassed to be so slow on the uptake, but thought I would comment on it since I recently posted a paper I wrote about the Chronicle and IA.

The article is nice, quite an encomium. It's written by Scott Smallwood, the same staff writer who interviewed Jill Carroll in an article titled, "Less Whining, More Teaching: Jill Carroll, a Proud Part-Timer, Thinks Many Adjuncts Need a New Attitude." (Subscribers only.) Of course I know that Smallwood shouldn't be held accountable for writing a rather celebratory piece on adjuncts' embracing capitalism and entrepreneurship, as the one on Carroll is. (Interestingly enough, he quotes IA's response to that article: "'For all practical intents and purposes, the adjunct is a low-wage worker without benefits who can be hired and fired at will,' she once wrote. 'So in what way can the adjunct be an entrepreneur, except in his or her own mind?'" but doesn't provide the context.) He's writing for a specific publication with specific generic conventions that, I still argue, uphold the status quo. True, he characterizes the hiring system as "broken," but it remains the case that most of the Chronicle's inculcations about academic labor are jeremiads, not radical critiques such as IA's weblog.

Just for kicks, I've changed my picture again. This is what I look like right after I work out. Speaking of which, I'm disturbed by how weak my chest muscles are compared to the rest of my body. I did the chest press and could only lift two of the plates, and when I did the fly, I could only lift one. :o

Edited to add, as I wind down for the night...I am feeling the strain from the lateral pulldowns. I need a massage.

I just got a message from a guy on Orkut who, inspired by Poem in Your Pocket Day, suggests that we blog about our favorite poems. So here's mine: Spelling by Margaret Atwood. Once, in a Modern Poetry class in college, we had to write a paper in which we did a close reading of a poem. I chose this one, and the more I read it and thought about it, the more it affected me. It's the only poem that has ever made me cry. Parsley by Rita Dove has come close, too.

You might have noticed that I've added a link at the top of the site to my essays, research, and conference notes. It's something I've been meaning to do for some time now; I was thinking that if anyone came here only wanting to see my essays and representations of my research interests, a portal to those would be in order so that sifting through everything in the Rhetoric and Feminism categories wouldn't be necessary. I've been admiring Andrew's "Recent Essays" section of his sidebar and Anne's research section for ages, and finally I've done my own. I'm still working on it; I probably need to break it down into shorter essays and longer essays in each category, and I think I'll take a cue from Anne and include an abstract (or annotation for the shorter essays) of each piece. I also need to put them in some order--chronological, reverse chronological, or alphabetical. Come to think of it, this is a great opportunity for me to write a statement of my research agenda.


Edited to add: I meant for this to be a request for feedback. How do you think I should arrange the work here? Would you like to see it divided into short essays/long essays, rather than rhetoric and feminism? Reverse chronological? What?

A lot of women find this kind of thing sexy. I do not; I think it's sweet and cute, but not sexy. I guess I just don't get it. I prefer stuff like this and this. Oh, and this. :)

I got back from Fargo a couple of hours ago, and now as my eyelids droop, for some reason I'm experiencing renewed annoyance at the fact that my university does not have an electronic submission option for theses and dissertations. The University of Tennessee has had it for about five years now, and I can't tell you how satisfying it was not to have to buy all that archival cotton paper, print out my M.A. thesis, and haul it to the Office of Graduate Studies. Instead, I saved the file on a Zip disk and took it over for the administrative assistant to copy it onto her hard drive, got my imprimatur from the Dean, and walked away. I'm taking my prelims this summer, and as far as I know, there isn't even talk of implementing electronic submission. Perhaps Shane will know who would make that decision and would help me.

Now that I've secured approval for my technical communication theory & research reading list, I thought I'd post it. Yeah, I know the formatting's not great; I used the OpenOffice html editor, since there was no way I was going to hand-code all that. Behold, my summer: