Episode 1248: Sniffles

Apparently, the undergraduate secretary in my department thinks that I'm a member of the teaching staff, as I got an e-mail reminder today about getting my students to do module evaluations. Couldn't decide if I should reply to the e-mail jokingly, or just ignore it. Anyway, my plan to start working my way through submissions today has been scuppered by my cold. So instead, I've been watching lots of TV. Gossip Girl this week was actually okay! I'm glad the Dan/Blair pairing is being given some mileage, since it was pretty much the only remaining heterosexual relationship among the main cast that had gone unexplored so far. (I must say, it's also pretty impressive that Rufus and Lily haven't been carted off the show, unlike all the parental figures on 90210, which has always clearly been the West Coast counterpart to Gossip Girl.) Also managed to have an awesome haircut. Usually my hair looks quite weird right after I cut it, but it's perfect this time, which leads me to believe that I've been cropping it too short all this time that I've been using the salon on campus. Meeting with my supervisor after that went well, I think, although he's still all for my interviewing the poets in the anthology and doesn't get why I don't share his enthusiasm for that idea. We'll see! Getting to interview Edwin Thumboo would be a coup, that's for sure, even if I'm not sure why he'd accept my request. At least my supervisor supports my decision to entirely abandon postcolonial studies as the basis for my argument, even though it's one of his research interests. I still feel like I need to address it though, if only to state why I'm rejecting it as a framework, and he thinks the way to do that is to set out my case in the introduction, in order to explain why I think the concepts of floating signifiers and liminality are for me a more productive way of reading the poems.