Recent Miscellany

• Yeah, it's been a while. I know.

• I'm too serious. I need to lighten up. Seriously.

• My boyfriend from my college days and I recently had a manuscript accepted into the Journal of Sex Research. Which is incredibly funny to me for so many reasons.

• Remember how I got that keyboard for my birthday so I could add melody lines to lead sheets in Band-in-a-Box? Yeah. I haven't actually done that. Mostly I've been messing around with the cool options I didn't think I needed in the first place. If you need someone to play "Hot Stuff" at your next event, let me know. I can totally hook you up.

• I have very limited leadership skills. I stink at chairing committees. Absolutely horrendous at it. My apologies to people who have to serve on committees I chair. I took two "strengths inventories" for one of my classes, and all of my strengths are very much related to my own little inner universe and very much unrelated to anything dealing with the outside world and the people who inhabit it. The good news about this is that if I'm ever stranded on a desert island with some books and maybe a box of trivial pursuit cards and items from that old analytical portion of the GRE, I'll be perfectly happy.

• It's no secret that I have a thing for the late 1950s/early 1960s. I don't regret that I never lived in that era because frankly, I like having a job as a professor and eating tofutti and driving a car that has air bags and being married to a guy who thinks it's perfectly reasonable for men to do laundry. But I do love my 1958 ranch home and my collection of mid-century bar glasses. I love jackets with 3/4 sleeves and Vera Neumann linens. And I adore the 1950s version of Chet Baker. His trumpet playing was amazing, and his voice . . . I can't even describe it. And would you just look at him?
  
  
  I'm more than slightly obsessed. Luckily, similar to the way in which I'm very good at ignoring the fact that the original cabinetry and flooring in my 1958 ranch home's kitchen are quite worn, I'm good at ignoring Chet Baker's later years, when alcohol and heroin and other nasty things took away his angelic voice, his ability to form a coherent sentence, and his teeth:

Most people acknowledged that Chet Baker was a talented musician who could "swing pretty," but there were many who also criticized him for sticking with the cool jazz sound of the 1950s when it was well past its prime--and while other musicians of the same era (like Miles Davis, for example) were adapting to the changing musical times. Apparently, I'm stuck in that era right along with Chet, which is OK with me.

• I just received a list of prospective students, and I've been asked to call them. On the phone. Ugh. (Refer to the earlier point about my not-so-fantastic people skills.) Is it really unreasonable for me to not want to call a prospective student on his or her cell phone?

• Not so stuck in the 1950s, but more like the late 1990s, I've been listening to Neutral Milk Hotel. Does anyone else listen to Neutral Milk Hotel anymore besides me and several hipster-dad bloggers?

• It's fall break. Finally. FINALLY!