To Begin Where I Am

As I make my grand entrance into this performance of nostalgia, I offer the following obligatory comments about my “real” life for those of you who have not been following along.

Act I

[narrator: off stage]: I hear an indefinable noise, and then a strobing white light dominates my field of vision…

I wake up in a cold sweat to find myself in the midst of my second year of a doctoral program at a large research university somewhere in the south of Indiana. I have no memory of how I arrived here. I open my mouth to try to speak, and a flurry of unidentifiable utterance tumbles out, words I do not recognize and that have no application in ordinary speech: metropolitan, temporality, commodification, neo-imperialism, dyadic relationship, prosity, valence, essentialism, topos, subjectivity, prurient, inscribed…I clamp my hands over my mouth, and the dissonant speech dies off. Where am I and what have they done to me?

I have no answers to these questions. [blackout]

Act II

[stage lights come up to reveal a tan, suburban house with a red door.]

Katie and I have now been married for a year and a half, and are not planning to keep up with the Joneses as progenitors of a race of eccentric children, at least not yet. What’s that you say, by the time I have children Dave’s will be old enough to conduct bizarre medical experiments on them or employ them as improvised music instruments? True enough, but it’s a risk I am prepared to take. Perhaps there will be more of Sarah in this child than Dave. Only time will tell. We bought a house this summer in Bloomington, Indiana because of the spotbillig cost of living in this little college town and are happily enjoying our space after living in an apartment last year. Like Herr Strauss, we too have entertained our share of visitors, and love having people drive down (or up) whenever they feel led to do so. If I can locate a photo of our new home, I will post it at a later time.

Katie is working as a teacher in the local school district, and has just been accepted into an MA program in library science. She will be starting part time in the spring. I taught my first undergraduate course this semester, a freshman writing class equivalent to writing effective prose at Wheaton. There are many stories to tell from this experience, but I will retain them for a later post.

I believe this will suffice for incoherent ramblings and other sundry news of my provincial existence. We should begin to discuss some topic of mutual interest—the bagel bag is an excellent first step.