So it’s clearly time to stop thinking about all this pointless, whiny nonsense about my “career,” and whether or not any recent markers of “success” or “failure” indicate that perhaps I’ve made some colossal “miscalculation” about whether I was in fact “meant” to do the thing that I’ve spent the last fourteen years or so of my “life” in preparation to “do,” or whether there exist such “inequities” in our prevailing “social structure” and “institutional climate” that no amount of “talent” or “hard work” on my part could possibly allow me to “achieve” the thing that I’ve been convinced that I “want,” when, in fact, it may well turn out that I just “don’t.”

Enough of that.  There are more important things for us to consider.

Like my toenail.

The nail of the toe that is right next to my big toe, on my right foot.  The nail which I discovered day before yesterday is in an advanced state of toe-abandonment, and is preparing to pull up stakes and light out for the territories.

Despite previous issues here described, I’ve never lost a toenail before, and I’m just not sure what to expect.  Interestingly, the one I’m losing is not the one I expected to lose; this one’s on a whole other foot, and is a normal toenail, as toenails go.  A toenail that has never given me a minute’s trouble.

The toe proper has tended to blister a bit, in recent years, when I run, on the top edge next to my big toe, because I think the big toe overlaps it a bit and rubs in an inappropriate way when I run.  So I’ve dealt with blistering and callusing and general nastiness, but that’s the nature of toes.  I never thought much of it, and just tried to keep after it with the pumice stone, when I could.

Post-marathon, though, once I could bring myself to look at my feet again—something I resisted at first because I wasn’t sure what state the toe I’d had trouble with before was going to be in—I discovered that, in fact, the nail of the bad toe had gone completely black, and there was a bit of blistering, and I thought, here we go, dead toenail walking.  I never expected the other foot to have gotten in on the act, but, in fact, it had.

The usual blister-on-edge-near-big-toe was there.  But the blister extended around over the tip of the toe, in a way I’d never seen before.  I didn’t think much of it at first, assuming that it would reabsorb, as things do, and I’d be able to go on ignoring that toe, as I have pretty much all my life, but for the pumicing.

Instead, the blister grew a bit.  Not much—no elephantiasis of the toe or anything—but just enough that it became uncomfortable.  Shoes were no fun.  So I did the thing one has to do with such a blister, and let me just say that it was nasty.  It turned out that there was a small pool of blood right under the edge of my toenail, but I got it drained out, and all seemed well.

Over spring break, I got a pedicure.  All of my toenails were a lovely red, and my calluses and blisters professionally attended to.

And because of the red, I had no idea anything was amiss, until earlier this week, when I noticed that my toenail just… didn’t look… right.  Like it was at a weird angle or something.  And I reached down to touch it, and it moved.  And the uncanniness of this can only be compared to that feeling of moving your tongue around a tooth, as a kid, and suddenly feeling that tooth’s edge separating from your gums, and knowing that teeth aren’t supposed to do that.

The toenail is about eighty percent detached, at this point.  The last twenty percent is not letting go, and—I say from unfortunate experience—screams like a mofo if you do something like catch it funny on a sock you’re trying to put on.  So the whole thing is band-aided over, until the inevitable separation finally takes place.

From what I can tell, what’s underneath is none too attractive.  This toe is not likely to see the outside of a band-aid for some time.

The stupid bloody toe from before, though, is soldiering on, as ever.  Toenail still black under the red polish, but going nowhere.

And isn’t that just the way of things.

I’ve never deleted a post from the site before, and somehow I can’t quite bring myself to do so now.  But I am moving the previous post below the fold, because I don’t want to have to look at it.  I feel like a real shmuck, and I need to find a way to move beyond both feeling miserable and feeling bad for feeling miserable.

The colleague to whom I referred is a fantastic guy, and he deserves nothing less than what he’s received.  I’m just suffering a bad case of “why not me?” And that’s unfair, to both of us.

So the previous post is remaining on the site, for my sins, but is moving off this page, for my sanity.

And I’m going to be writing more about this in the coming days.  Because I’m in the process of developing a pretty good sense of why-not-me, and it bespeaks the need for some serious changes in direction, on my part.

In the meantime, there’s good Irish whiskey to be drunk.

[UPDATE, 3.30.05, 10.30 pm:  Post moved below fold.  Details in post to follow.]

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This may be just about the coolest thing ever:

We are pleased to announce our newest feature, package tracking. Now, you can have Bloglines track the status of your UPS, FedEx, and USPS packages. From your My Feeds page, click the Add link in the left pane. Then, click the Package Tracking link in the right pane. From there you can enter tracking numbers for UPS, FedEx, and USPS packages. Also, you can do a search on a specific tracking number. Entering a tracking number will create a subscription in your account that is updated whenever the status of your package changes.

Now that’s handy.

Be careful who you ask to write your papers for you.

Better yet, write them yourself!  It’s far less trouble.

On the way home tonight, I heard a DJ on KCRW refer to a new film that’s out as “a story replete with sex and cultural theory.”

And after I stopped laughing, the first thing I thought was “sounds like grad school.”

The second thing was “except with sex.”

Okay, the world is determined to leave me running around with a permanent case of the willies.  Last night I went to the grocery store, and you know how they print those coupons at the end of ringing you up, tailored to the kind of stuff you’re likely to buy?  For instance, you buy cat food, you get a coupon for cat treats or cat litter.  Those things already make me nervous, as does most targeted marketing, but here’s the thing:  last night, I got three coupons, one for pickles (the same ones I’d just bought, so okay), one for pasta sauce (inoffensive, and I did buy something that could loosely be construed as pasta, so alright).  And one for what I will delicately refer to as a feminine hygiene product.

Now, I didn’t buy anything that would indicate that I’d be in the market for such.  I bought shampoo and conditioner, sure, and a bottle of shower gel, but there are no real sex implications to such purchases.  So already I’m a bit weirded out.

But then I look more closely at the coupon, which reads (caps and size included):

DO YOU WANT TO FIND THE BEST [name of brand] PROTECTION
FOR YOUR DAUGHTER?

What am I to draw from this?  I used my grocery store club card, so they’ve got my demographic data.  Did they look at my age and decide that I’m likely to have a daughter coming into puberty?  Or are they just handing these things out to everyone?  Which of these two options is less upsetting?

And the questions just keep coming.  Are parents really so interested in their daughters’ menstrual supplies that they’re going to direct their purchases?  And, quite honestly, if I’m really looking for the best protection for my daughter, are menstrual pads really what I’m after?  As opposed to, say, condoms?  Or mace?

I make light, in order to be less creeped out.  But it’s frankly not working.

Where is the line between being that cool professor who shows up to student events and that skeezy professor who used to be cool but still shows up to stuff?  Is it 40?  Tenure?  Marriage?

Wherever the line lies—and it’s a preciously fine one, and one that you mistakenly cross at your peril—I seem still to be on the safe side of it.  One of my former students, who graduated some years back, is in a band* that passed through campus last night, and a current student of mine, who put on the show, asked me to come.  “Keith would love to see you,” she said, and of course I would love to see Keith, so I sucked up all the courage I needed and went.

And I did need that courage, because in the very dim light of the Doms Social Room, in the basement of the Smith Campus Center, I could no longer see that line, and spent much of the evening afraid I’d crossed it.  My student reassured me that I had not, and a couple of my other students did spend some time talking to me (one of them, I’ll note parenthetically, quite significantly stoned, a state that made me… envious.  Man, do I miss being young), so I felt a bit better about the whole thing, at least for the moment.  I just don’t want to cross that line unawares, you know?  As I told R. sometime back, when, post-tenure, I dropped the super-professional drag I’d been wearing and went back to dressing a bit more hoochie, as my sister puts it—anyhow, as I told R., it’s one thing to look like you’re twenty-five.  It’s quite another to look like you’re trying to look like you’re twenty-five.  And I never, ever, want to fall into the latter.

But clearly the possibility was on my mind, even after deciding I’d safely navigated the show, as early this morning I dreamed that I was having an affair with not one but two of my students.  And… how to put this?  If I were the kind of professor who did that kind of thing, which I most decidedly am not,** these were not the students I’d have chosen for the position, so to speak.  I spent the first half of the dream flabbergasted that not only was I having these affairs, but apparently the students involved were talking about them freely.  I kept nervously moving around the room, trying to bring order back to my house (the students in question had tried to help by “cleaning” the house, but had put things away in entirely the wrong places).  Finally, I decided to give them a tour of the place, and here’s where the dream phase-shifted into the recurring dream I have about living in a house in which I suddenly discover extra rooms, rooms that I did not know were there, rooms that can be mine, if I want them.  There’s always at least one extra kitchen, and one very large room with many beds, large and small.  The new spaces I find are usually uninhabited, though sometimes there’s the vaguest of notions that they belong to my father; this morning, though, the very large room with many beds was inhabited by lots of young girls, orphans, I think, and then there was some opening at the end of the room through which one could see a barn-like structure, and outside, where it was green and idyllic. 

(Plus there was this whole sidetrack in which I discovered that my bad roommate from grad school was living in part of the house.  When we actually lived together, she was trying desperately to meet someone and get married; in the dream, her room was littered with pregnancy tests and ovulation predictors, which gave me the willies.  Not to mention that she wasn’t supposed to be living there at all.)

Tell me that’s not ripe for analysis.  I’ve always understood the extra-rooms dream to be some kind of psychic warning, a poke from the unconscious saying that there’s more hidden inside me than I could think possible.  That coupled with the student-affairs aspect of the dream just gives me shivers.

—–

*The band, incidentally, was fabulous.  The last time I’d seen Keith play was the night before he graduated, with a previous band, and while he was good then, this was a quantum leap beyond that.  Keep your eyes out for these guys:  We Are Scientists.  They’re based in Brooklyn, and just played shows at SXSW and the Viper Room (which is wayyyy too hip for me), and are about to head off on a tour of the UK, where apparently they’re getting radio play.  Rumor has it that a major-label deal has recently been struck; you can say, with me, you knew them when.

**I want to emphasize that I am not, really really not, that kind of professor.  Really and truly.  I tend, however, to take rather a more tolerant view of such behavior in others, though, in no small part because I was that kind of student.  It was a radically different time, though, before “sexual harassment” was really on anybody’s conceptual or litigious radar, back when we actually had the temerity to think that some people—even young, female people—might have the emotional wherewithal to be actual consenting partners in such an arrangement.  And while I won’t go quite as far as some who claim that such affairs can be productive and good and should be promoted, I will say that my college life would have been severely impoverished if even flirtation with the idea of such an affair were as severely proscribed as it is today.  There’s something intensely libidinal about the work done in an academic environment, and the effects of that spillover into the physical were mostly only positive, for me, lending both my life and my work a kind of charge that I wouldn’t have wanted to miss out on.  But I’m still not that kind of professor, because I look at these kids by whom I’m surrounded, day in and day out, and think, “good grief, they’re kids.” Which thought really does make me wonder a bit what that professor back in my past was thinking, for god’s sake.

Here’s the thing:  I’ve resisted the whole syndication wave for eons.  I’ve provided various feeds for this site, mostly because the software made it really easy, but also because I knew there were folks out there who I wanted to keep up with the doings here via Bloglines or other such aggregators.  For myself, though, I’ve really stuck with my blogroll, checking the sites that ping blogrolling.com religiously, and the others a bit less so.  Reading blogs has been for me as much about the personalized interface as about the text—actually, probably not as much, but the site design creates an important sense of the blogger for me, and I didn’t want to lose that.

Last week, though, I started thinking about the number of sites that don’t ping blogrolling.com, whose updates I frequently miss out on.  And then a couple of days ago I dreamed that I opened a Bloglines account.

Honestly.  I dreamed about reading blogs via Bloglines.

So I figured this was an omen, and who am I not to follow its dictates?  I’ve opened my Bloglines account, and have been adding feeds this afternoon.

But here’s the massively stupid question—and I do mean massively stupid, i.e., so stupid it’s not even included in the FAQ, because who could possibly ask a question like this:

What’s my Bloglines username?

When I created the account, I was asked to log in with an email address as my user id.  But if you want to make your subscriptions public (and I may or may not), you are told to direct the folks you’re sharing with to “http://www.bloglines.com/public/USERNAME”.  And clearly that username is not meant to be the user id/email address I created the account with.  And when I attempt to update my user profile, where I’d assume such a username would be either created or stored, I get bupkis.  The form has entries for first and last name, and whether you want those to be shown, but nowhere does it specify a username.

A little help…?

Why are my blogrolling.com pings suddenly producing database errors?  There, I mean, not here.  Other folks’s blogs are showing up as updated in my blogroll; is this retribution for the Foghat debacle?