Wednesday, December 17, 2003
 

Portrait of the Artist as A Young Grad Student

I've been crawling around on my knees, duct-taping carpet edges down for the umpteenth time this year.

Reading heavy musty tomes whilst drinking hot tea, glasses perched delicately on edge of nose? Sitting at an old, oaken heavy desk, studying by light of the leaded glass window?

Right. Re-duct taping my old where-the-parquet-used-to-be floor (sticky with adhesive paste) with the newspaper I taped down the first time, because I don't have enough duct tape to put down a new layer of paper. So I'm desperately trying to resuscitate that which the maintenance dudes ripped up, using what little duct tape I have left to get it back into place.

So now I'm completely out of duct tape. That's probably a violation of the Patriot Act.

At any rate, it violates my sensibilities. Most of which violate the Patriot Act, anyway.

Further griping (backing slowly away from politics; retreating to safer ground of carpet guys before a counterterrorism team descends upon my residence): They (the maintenance guys, not the counterterrorism team) always manage to come when I'm either asleep or just waking up. Admittedly, I keep weird hours. But how to they always manage to time it like that? They probably think I'm constantly hungover or something. Actually, I wouldn't mind if they thought that, because that's a lot more exciting than the truth: I stayed up all night writing a seminar paper about an obscure 19th century transatlantic abolitionist. Yeah, that'll get you noticed at parties. How to win friends and influence people and all that.

So now I'm bitter, I have a headache, and I don't want to grade papers. Or write them.

Elvisette philosophized at 4:27 PM