Tuesday, January 9, 2007

American Apparel, Pending Crisis, Aphasia

A week past the full-blown holiday insanity and everything is settling back into normality, minus the normal part. While not so much in celebration mode about our vacation from school extending even into the first part of next week, C and I are slipping through liminal states. I've been resisting the urge to indulge in utter hibernation, sleeping ten or eleven hours a night, by forcing myself to set the alarm even when I don't really have to get up.

Somehow, regardless, I am getting a fair amount of reading done. Some of this is new stuff, mostly disappointing (luckily), and everything else I've already read and am going over briefly once more to take some more focused notes. Of course, I still have a list of books I want to read that is at least ten titles long... and this before I'm likely to let myself start writing. Really. I say luckily, above, because if everything I read was freaking amazing I might feel like I had nothing to add. So goes the life of an academic. Perpetually disastisfied BOTH with my own work and that of others. I met a psychiatrist when I lived in the Valley (pronounced Shen-n-doh-uh--the trick is to make the second syllable as slight as you possibly can...as though it were the ghost of a syllable) who liked to tell me a story about when he was in med school. Apparently, all the psychiatric med students had a joke about how thankful they were for English majors, apparently because, being the sullen, introspective lot that we are, we tend to bread and butter the pocket books of the profession. Yay us!

Much as I love American Apparel, I've just gone through a month and a half long process of trying to get an order corrected. I won't bore you all with the details, but suffice it to say that the affair has hopefully just ended with a mildy hysterical email to the customer service representative apparently assigned to deal with me. He ended up confusing my replacement shipment with the original, months were flipped around, time collapsed on itself, and I sent a strongly worded message in which I even went so far as to include a not so ambiguously encoded indicator of my dismay and frustration: "(!)" Ah, the power of prose.


Why aphasia? Because it is...

3 comments:

B said...

I'm glad you're getting lots of reading done, because the book I just loaned you might put you off track. I'm not saying The Voyage Out will become a chapter iny our diss, but it's similar enough to what you do that you just might want to hibernate with it and forget about your American Apparel problems. 350 pages--you have until Tuesday. Ready...GO!

queercat said...

I feel the same way about Sacred Hunger, which just a fucking totally awesome book, but might not be exactly related to your ideas. (Whiny voice) "Whyyyyy don't you liiike what Iiii liiiike? Whaaaaaa!!!!"

asenath said...

Awww shucks. You guys are the best nerds a girl could have. I'm actually currently in the early stages of reading BOTH of them. I started the Woolf last night, and the Unsworth this afternoon. I was driven to the latter by Doris Sommer, whose brilliance usually dazzles me, but by whom I was simply exhausted today. Insert frowny face here.