Archive for the 'Cheese Sandwich' Category

Back to the Grindstone

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on October 5, 2008
in Academia and Cheese Sandwich
. 2 Comments

Thanks, everybody, for the words of encouragement here and elsewhere.  It was really nice to wake up the morning of my presentation and see your friendly comments in my email!

My talk went well, even though the panel chair managed to cause some delays and technical difficulties — almost setting the room on fire by overloading an outlet and causing sizzling sparks! –  before we even got started.  She is now prominently featured on my Enemies List for that as well as for the fact that 30 seconds before the panel was to start she asked each of us what we wanted her to say when introducing us.  My response, when she kept pressing me after I demurred, was to say “I can’t come up with a bio on the spot, so please just say I am an instructor at Wordsmith and that’s all.”  Sheesh. Anyway, that bit doesn’t matter, because I had fun presenting my paper and listening to the others, which were all very interesting.

Tomorrow it’s back to work!  I’ve got midterms to grade (significantly less painful than papers, except for the occasionally appalling handwriting) and classes to teach.  I’ve also got to get my butt in gear on the job market — yes, I’ll be back on the stupid job market this year, looking for some fool university to double my salary and offer me instant tenure based on nothing more than my witty banter and killer rack.  What? It could happen!

In other more exciting news, the TV world has been exploding with greatness lately, which leaves me a lot to post about over on the media blog.  Time to go get caught up there.

Mercury Retrograde, Please Let This Be All You Have in Store for Me.

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on October 2, 2008
in Academia and Cheese Sandwich
. 4 Comments

I’ve got to dash off a quick post while my laptop seems to be working — earlier today, the display backlight wasn’t functioning, and, though the computer itself was working just fine, I couldn’t actually SEE anything on the screen.  Knock wood and all, it seems fine now. In fact, I suspect that the only reason it wouldn’t work before was because I was sitting in the DMV waiting room (again!) (and there’s a happy, happy story about the DMV this time, but it will have to wait until I get the chance for a longer post).  Of course it makes perfect sense that my laptop would stop working within the walls of the DMV office, since, apparently, NO WORK AT ALL is allowed to go on there.  Seriously, WHAT DO THE EMPLOYEES DO?

At any rate, I’m free from all those worries for the moment, as I am taking a few days off from school to present a paper at a big conference for my discipline.  I present my paper tomorrow morning, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t freaking out about it a little.  For one thing, it’s one of my favorite ideas ever, so I’m really hoping I can convey it well to the listeners.  For another thing, I had thought that, with the broken laptop and all, I wouldn’t be able to spend the evening lovingly tinkering with my sentences.  (Fingers crossed, the laptop will KEEP working long enough for me to do that.  Just my luck, I will hit “publish” on this tedious and inconsequential blog post a split second before the screen goes black again, leaving me and my paper in the dark.)

And now, I leave you to go watch the vice presidential debate.  Have you seen Sarah Palin recently?  Here are some videos on the media blog just in case you haven’t.  That bitch is one fierce pitbull.  [And by the way, the political button is staying up until the election.  I normally never get all political over here, but for once I actually really care, so just accept it, OK?]

Wish me luck on my paper, wouldja?  I am a horrible public speaker, so I need all the luck I can get!

Perfect Friday?

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on September 26, 2008
in Cheese Sandwich
. 5 Comments

It’s been a long, long week of grading and other lame duties — no, seriously; my week even included that quintessentially Lamest of the Lame Duties, an afternoon spent at the DMV. Actually, a morning and an afternoon. Five hours, almost!

(Sidebar: Can you believe it? FIVE HOURS? ALMOST? I had only ever heard stories about DMV inefficiency, but had never had any problems myself. Luckily for the employees, I was there for a friend who’s getting her license, so I decided for her sake not to go ballistic on their lame, lazy, inefficient ASSES for making us wait that unbelievably long! May I assure you, however, that I did cast some extremely stern glances their way!)

Today, blissfully, all that is over. I decided to skip out of my office hours and embark on my weekend a little early.  So far, it is going swimmingly! To wit:

The weather has been lingering delightfully in the lower 80s (and even sometimes in the 70s, OH THE JOY), so I took the dog outside and let him play fetch until his tongue was almost dragging on the grass. There is nothing like the sight of a happy little dachshund bounding across the lawn like a bunny rabbit to lighten your mood.

I hit the grocery store before the hellacious, suicide-inducing 5:00 rush and bought all the ingredients for an excellent dinner, including stuff to make brownies, which I never do, but DAMN my house smells delicious right about now!

I even had an extremely excellent 4:00 cocktail while lounging on the couch with my pants undone.  Could the evening be any more perfect?

(Sidebar, the Second: apparently, the ingredients for my happiness include shirking my work, chocolate, whiskey, and dogs. I am nothing if not predictable.)

The rest of the weekend is going to be filled with grading and scholarly activities (working on a conference paper and my job-search dossier, both of which induce extreme anxiety and pain), so I figure I had better tax it, wax it, and relax it tonight.  Later on I’ll be tuning in for the first presidential debate at the University of Mississippi (SO EXCITING).

And what are YOU doing? I hope you’re having a Perfect Friday, too.

Game Day Excesses (Now with Bonus Excesses!)

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on September 20, 2008
in Cheese Sandwich
. 4 Comments

New Wye is a big college football town, as I may have mentioned before.  Every home game, the town fills up with tailgating fans in their giant RVs.  Sometimes ESPN takes over all of the parking areas on campus with their tents and trucks. All week long, the grocery stores stockpile giant “tailgating trays” heaped high with cheese cubes and then sell out of them in a flash by Friday night. The streets downtown become a sea of tee-shirts and flags in the school colors, and general fun and revelry proceeds, or at least it appears to.

I live close enough to the stadium to witness a lot of the insanity.  For example, I just walked outside this morning with the dog, and we were confronted by a very large Goodyear Blimp doing low circles over the building — the dog did not approve of this at all, but he did seem marginally less offended than when the Blue Angel fighter jets were practicing their moves above the stadium a while back.

People like to cite statistics about the huge influx of fans on game weekends, saying that the town’s population triples or even quadruples.  I don’t know how accurate that is, but let’s just say I’d definitely believe it.  Things get slightly absurd around here.

Here’s the problem this week, though: all the crazy fans are here, doing their crazy fan things and buying out the local supplies of beer and cheese cubes, which is fine, but they might not be able to leave because there is no gas for sale in town.  We  ran out of gas during the Hurricane Ike Gas Freak Out, and new supplies haven’t been delivered yet.  Does this, um, seem like a problem to you, too?  I really hope those huge RVs all have giant reserve gas tanks somewhere, because I do NOT want these crazed football fans sticking around any longer than necessary.  Otherwise, I will be stuck in a town completely bereft of cheese cubes with no way to escape.

BONUS FOOTBALL-EXCESSES FACT! The head coach here makes 81x my annual salary.  Eighty-one times. Each English instructor teaches 7-8 classes per year, equaling about 220 students. For the cost of one football coach, 17,820 kids could take an English class. FACT.

Case of the Scintillating Acid Flashback

Published
by
Alfina the Vague
on September 17, 2008
in Cheese Sandwich, Food and Drink and Gumshoe
. 4 Comments

Saturday morning, while puttering around the internet, I thought I was suddenly either going blind or experiencing my first real acid flashback.  What was in store for me? Either tragedy and woe or mind-bending hallucinations and fun, but who could say?

I felt like I had stared at a bright light for too long and was being afflicted by those spots you sometimes see afterward, like, say, when a camera flash causes momentary bright spots in your vision.  The only problem was that I hadn’t been looking at any bright lights.  Nonetheless, there was a bright spot directly in front of everything I looked at, and no matter how I blinked or rubbed my eyes it wouldn’t go away.  It stopped me from being able to read, watch TV, or even properly look at anything at all, so I resigned myself to lying down on the couch with a blanket over my face for a while to see what happened.

As I lay there with my eyes closed, I could get a better look at the spot that was afflicting me as it sat there against the black backdrop of the insides of my eyelids.  Upon closer inspection, it turned out not to be just a spot, after all.  It was boomerang shaped and made up of a thousand tiny diamond facets, each one twinkling in a different color.  The two facets at the central point of the boomerang were fluttering like tiny diamond wings and changing color.  What the fuck was going on?

At this point, part of my mind was sort of academically interested but emotionally disengaged, all “Oh, how fascinating; I wonder what this portends,” but the other, much bigger, part was screaming “No, seriously, WHAT the FUCK?”

I was a little worried about the state of my rods and cones, to say the least, and thoughts of strange brain malfunctions began to creep in as well.  Was it a tumor? Nerve damage? Was I finally answering the Cylon song that only I (or only my eyes) could hear?

I waited and waited, keeping my eyes tightly closed for at least an hour, watching the sparkling boomerang, and trying to find some corner of my mind in which the experience of an unplanned-for hallucination would be at least somewhat amusing.  Finally, I noticed the sparking, kaleidoscopic boomerang shape slowly drifting toward the right side of my vision, and, after another ten or so minutes, it finally disappeared beyond the bounds of what I could see.  I spent a while nervously working up the courage to open my eyes again, and when I did, I could see just fine.  (I decided, nonetheless, that I’d better rest my eyes some more, so I then took a nap for the remainder of the afternoon.)

Now, Reader, if you are familiar with these symptoms, you may have already solved the Case of the Scintillating Acid Flashback, but I still had not.  That night at the movies (Burn After Reading, which I almost skipped due to the eye issues, but which I am glad I did see and which we all loved), I told my strange story to all of my friends, and one of them eventually had a possible answer for me — her ophthalmologist had recently described these symptoms to her and had called it an “ocular migraine”: a migraine without any headache pain.  Well, huh.

I came home and looked it up and was shocked to find this article on scintillating scotoma, with a picture of almost exactly what I had seen earlier that day (mine was prettier, though).  I think I might have actually screamed out loud a little when I saw the illustration.  That was it!  That was exactly what I had experienced, and the knowledge that this was associated with a migraine helped to explain the mild headache and nausea I’d felt for the rest of the day (but had basically disregarded at the time, as I feel that way a lot).  Migraines!

Well, as you can imagine, I spent a while reading up on migraines themselves, too — not just the “ocular” kind — and it eventually occurred to me that what I had thought of as just “my usual headaches” were probably migraines, but without the aura: pain on one side of my head that is intense and pulsating and gets worse with movement or activity and lasts for several hours or up to 2-3 days.  Yes indeed, that describes my headaches!  At times I had thought the headaches were brought on by too much indulgence in alcohol or cigarettes, but how could I explain having them when I hadn’t indulged at all?  “Why do I feel hungover if I haven’t been drinking,” I would ask myself.  Suddenly, shit was beginning to become clear.  I have probably been having migraines for YEARS now.  Like TEN years. WHAT THE FUCK.

(The weirdest thing, though, is why I have been, up to now, having the headaches without the aura (the visual/perceptual symptoms preceding it), and why I’ve now had the aura with only mild headache pain to follow? This remains unclear!)

As you’ll predict, I also learned a bit about possible migraine triggers, and in addition to such triggers as being a Lady and experiencing the Special Ladies’ Time for Ladies, triggers may include: alcohol, caffeine, cigarettes, chocolate, and cheese.  So, basically my entire way of life is a long series of migraine triggers.  That news did not please me, but, realistically, I think that I can just try to moderate the things on that list that I already know are triggers (cigarettes, red wine, maaaaaaybe coffee?) and go from there. (Yes, I do plan to ask my doctor for advice, too, just haven’t yet.)

At any rate, it doesn’t seem like I am going blind or having an acid flashback, to which I say “YAY” and “BOO,” respectively.  I mean, when are all those years of hallucinogenic drug experimentation finally going to start paying some fucking dividends, I ASK YOU?

Nonetheless, I am quite pleased to have this (possible/probable) explanation for what I experienced on Saturday.  What a lucky coincidence that my friend had just learned about these ocular migraines from her doctor, or I might not have figured it out at all.  The knowledge of what was (possibly/probably) going on in my brain made it a lot less stressful for me when this happened again yesterday afternoon.  In fact, I saw the twinkling spot of light start to grown and scintillate in front of my eyes and I felt the weird tingly dissociation of my limbs, and just decided to lie down and close my eyes again — this time I fell asleep and had quite the pleasant nap.  Again, only a mild headache followed the visual effects. Maybe one day they will become fun?  Recreational? Scintillating, in more than the literal sense?

Case Status: Pending, also Sparkly