Intellectual Stimulation

Both yesterday and today have been so eventful it's been hard to find time to blog about them. If you are reading this, you may have noticed that I've tried to improve the frequency of my blogging. This because for the whole of this year Pocket of Bolts has been keeping a little day calendar and writing a short record of what he's done each day. Over the course of the year I have become increasingly jealous and really want to start one! He says he won't mind if I start one, but because it's an actual calendar, I have to wait until New Years. I have been impatient. Then I realized that the things to do would be to start the discipline on my blog. It hasn't been easy!

Anyway, yesterday I had a very productive morning. I wrote several pages of dissertation, in addition to drawing the above picture. Irises are one my favorite flowers. I think they are so amazingly beautiful. I never buy them, though, because they fade so quickly. I guess that makes them especially essentially flower, insofar as part of the essence of flower is its fading. Anyway, Pocket of Bolts bought me some the other day and I had to draw this picture because they were so very lovely.

I wasn't too productive in the afternoon, but by 5 I had managed to get myself all the way up to Evanston, to hear a lecture by one of my intellectual heroes, Hayden White. If I start on how great Hayden White is, I won't ever finish with this blog post. Suffice it to say that he's a guy who tried to shake up the field of history, and maybe even succeeded, by making various arguments about its similarity to literature. Very applicable to my field, though he doesn't seem to do anything with China. Actually, that's a good thing or I would be out of a "job"--well, a task anyway, a direction.

I came back from Northwestern, very excited, in time to watch most of the debate. I have now watched all the debates, and I have to say that I've found them reasonably entertaining. I like our candidate. He seems calm and intelligent. Actually I like his VP even more. After I saw Biden in action, I stopped worrying about the experience issue.

Today I spent most of the day at the U of C. There's not too much to say about that, except that it makes me really happy going down there and hanging out with people in my field. Also I found out that I can get a "reference card", which is basically a pass that lets me go into the library. Alas, I still can't borrow books. At least if I want to I can now go in on weekends now, even when the visitor office place is closed, and I don't have to get a day pass each time.

I spent a long time helping one of my classmates scan some articles that we all have to read. Much better to centralize that work than have us all looking for the articles at the same time, and it was really fun talking to him too. I got home late again though and for the third evening in a row Pocket of Bolts had dinner waiting for me. He is turning out to be such a good husband I feel almost guilty about it. Well, I surely owe him three lovely home-cooked meals in a row as well this weekend. :)