It’s prospie season, round these parts, and the campus is full of admitted students and their families, who are going to various panel discussions, browsing through department fairs, and attending classes. Both of my classes this morning were prospieful — 7 or 8 in Intro to Digital Media Studies, and something like 20 in Race, Gender, and Science Fiction. It’s great seeing the excitement of these students as they’re pondering the possibilities ahead of them — and it’s particularly nice seeing it right now, with three and a half weeks to go in what’s been a long, hard spring. That’s one of the beauties of this environment, if you ask me: a continual sense of renewal, of looking forward.

The other joy is the return; alumni weekend is in a couple of weeks, and — at least according to the alumni association’s “who’s coming?” list — several of my former students should be showing up. The class of 2003 is a particularly important one to me; they were first-years in my second year here, so they were the first class in which I was assigned advisees. Their first year was also the one and only time I’ve had the opportunity to teach our first-year seminar, and though that class was in some ways a deeply painful one (not least due to its 8.20 am time slot), something like six out of the fifteen students in the class became my advisees, and the seminar itself later morphed into the Race, Gender, and Science Fiction class I’m now teaching.

It’s the circle of academic life, I guess, or something else equally schmaltzy, but boy the sentimentalist in me just loves these moments…

But no actual cats. I saw this animation the other day, and something in it resonated so deeply that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It’s viral, I think, in an infectious way. The only thing that’s left is for me to pass it on.

I’ve been writing up a storm in whatever stolen moments I can get, and working like a fiend at every other hour of the day, with the exceptions of the ones where I sleep (not enough, and not terribly well) and the ones where I watch season 5 of The Wire, which has completely and totally broken my heart this season by being so devastatingly good that I cannot bear the knowledge that I’ve only got one more new episode to watch ever, and In Treatment, which I began watching out of mild formal curiosity (how long can a narrative series that’s on five nights a week hold up?) but have gotten quite caught up in.

Aside from those bits of narrative pleasure, it’s sheer madness: preparing for class, producing endless amounts of administrative paperwork, responding to ridiculous numbers of email messages. And, not least, event planning.

On the one hand, I hate event planning; I don’t like the kind of organization that it requires of me, I don’t like being responsible for a bunch of details that I honestly don’t care about, and I really, really hate having to wrangle people who temperamentally resist wrangling.

On the other hand, this week’s events — Thursday, the English department’s big annual lecture; Friday, a gala celebration for the Media Studies program, its alumni, and its friends; Saturday, a day-long symposium thinking about the shifts and transitions in media production and consumption being produced by the digital — promise to be amazing.

I intend to sleep all day on Sunday, if I can possibly get away with it. I’ll hope to have something new to say thereafter.

From the Broadsheet, without comment:

Bill Kristol: Look, the only people for Hillary Clinton are the Democratic establishment and white women. The Democratic establishment — it would be crazy for the Democratic Party to follow an establishment that’s led it to defeat year after year. White women are a problem, that’s, you know — we all live with that.

[Laughter]

Juan Williams: Not me!

Brit Hume: Bill, for the record, I like white women.

Kristol: I know, I shouldn’t have said that.

I’m off to the eye doctor, foax, which doesn’t bode well for the old productivity today. I’ll be spending part of what remains of the day in a meeting, and the rest of it trying to ignore the increasingly loud ticking of the clock. More later, I hope, when I can see the keyboard again.

Which is less anxiety about the semester, per se, than anxiety about the fact that the break between semesters is all but over, and that I’ve still got an enormous pile of stuff that really needs to be done before the spring gets fully underway. And this spring — yeesh — promises to be nuts: between, say, February 28 and April 5, I have four speaking gigs plus a conference I’m organizing here in Claremont. And that’s just five weeks out of the fifteen ahead of me, which will otherwise be filled with teaching an overload, advising senior theses, and the usual spring administrative insanity.

So the countdown has begun: a precious few days remain in which I can hope to get anything done. If you don’t hear from me, you know where I am.

Why is it that, even when I’ve realized that the book I’ve started reading isn’t the text I actually need to be reading — either it doesn’t do the thing I thought it did, or it occurs to me that my attention would be more fruitfully placed elsewhere — I nonetheless feel the need to finish the thing before moving on to another book?

I’m finally acknowledging this morning that the holidays are over, that there are two weeks left before classes start, and that if I’m going to get anything done, now’s the moment. I’m hoping to return to some regular writing here in this new year, and so am going to begin with a few relatively random bullets, just trying to capture some of what I’ve been pondering.

snow
Originally uploaded by KF

• The big-ass storm that pounded the west coast seems finally to have passed. The radar pictures I watched much of the weekend were quite dramatic — rain, at one point last night, stretching solidly from Palm Springs to the east to the coast, and from southern Orange County to well north of San Luis Obispo. Storms of that size are like a homecoming of a sort — one of a few things that I really miss from Louisiana — but they’re unusual enough to be a bit of a pain here: flooded streets, crap drivers, and a general creeping damp cold that my heating system can’t seem to overcome. On the upside, however, is that the storm has left us with enough snow that the desperation of this year’s drought might be a bit ameliorated.
• The first episode of season 5 of The Wire already has me hooked, but that was pretty much a foregone conclusion: combine my absolute adoration for the show’s narrative strategies, its complex web of characters, and its focus on the systemic obstacles to really fixing serious social problems with the fact that, this year, the media provides the primary system in question, and I’m one hundred and four percent sold.
• I’m back to work on some MediaCommons projects, which I hope I’ll have more to show for, soon.
• I’m also attempting to move forward with my own writing projects, but as usual, they’re getting short shrift. I keep saying that I want to find ways to integrate that writing with posting here, and I keep not following through. I’m determined to get some blog mileage out of the research I’m doing right now, though, and some project mileage out of the blog, too. I’d call it a new year’s resolution if I really believed in those.

More from the homefront, soon.

With one exception, every single Christmas card I have received so far this year has been produced by Shutterfly.

… since R. took off for the holidays:

1. Some percentage of my not-blogging is directly attributable to his presence here in Claremont. Which is to say not that he’s interfering with the writing process, but that some percentage (that same percentage) of my blogging was fueled by a general need for communication. And with him in the house, there’s always somebody to talk to. Hence, a much lowered need to talk to the internet.

2. I develop very bad habits when he’s away — or re-develop, as the case may be. I indulge all of my worst impulses, just out of a need to make myself feel better. Also because I can. Not that he’d fuss at me if he were here, but I’d feel like he ought to fuss at me, and so wouldn’t indulge in the same way if he were around.

These two things together might seem to suggest some sense in which blogging is a bad habit, which I don’t at all believe. But it is a habit that I associate with my living-alone-dom, rather than my life with him. And so if I’m going to re-cultivate that habit, without re-cultivating the actual bad habits (of which the less said the better, I think), I need to figure out — for the umpteenth time — some new mode or means of writing here, that can keep me going.