Oh, week 6.....and OMG, SHOEZ!

This week has been an exercise in terror. For real.

To begin, we had a Halloween part at the house last weekend. It was a resounding success. I was the Queen of Hearts, complete with red mesh petticoat and knee socks. Ryan was Mr. Smee (his Peter Pan and Captain Hook sadly did not make it down from San Francisco), and Vik was a kangaroo. As it was Vik, it was a slightly perverted kangaroo. We also had Imperialist Barbie, Wagnerian opera stars, the Virgin Mary (complete with Black Baby Jesus), a zombie MAC girl, and a startlingly realistic gorilla. I tapped out early, which is one of the perks of hosting a party when you have roommates. I was tired, and knew I had profound amounts of work the next day.

Sunday I locked myself in my office for about 7 hours and wrote 12 pages of my Rwandan independence movement article. When I got home, I sort of stared at the wall for a couple hours, and then went to bed. RIDIC.

Monday was not much different, only it was about 5 hours, and 7 pages. 19 pages in 2 days. I turned in my draft of 23 pages (incomplete, but better than the 10 page prospectus from June, which was the last I had produced on the subject) at 5pm, and went to see the Michael Jackson documentary to celebrate. If you haven't seen it, DO IT. There's only one more week, and it is so worth it. I saw it twice. That concert would've been phenomenal. Say what you will about MJ, but it's impossible not to love his music. When he was on stage, he had it all together.

This week was pretty much a nightmare. I had about 60 student papers and outlines to grade, and I didn't get them back on time, resulting in a lot of mad students. They have to deal with it, but damn. I hope the next batch of papers are better. I usually have a lot of A's, but my overall average on this last one was quite a bit lower. I don't know if it's that they didn't really understand the assignment or what. Most of them seemed to understand the material but had a really hard time expressing that. Organization was a problem. So was analysis. I hope it was just the assignment and not me being unclear. Sigh. I guess we'll see.

Also had to present on Durba Ghosh's Sex and the Family in Colonial India and Anne McClintock's Imperial Leather in seminar this week. If anyone would like to purchase me a copy of the former, I would happily accept. It's a very good book, thoroughly and meticulously researched, carefully argued, etc. It's exactly what one's dissertation should be. McClintock, on the other hand.....WOO. I love her. I know she probably went WAYYYYYYYY over the line with some of her critiques (the whole King Solomon's Mines male anal birth thing left me scratching my head with a disgusted look on my face), but she sure knew how to start a conversation. I think expressly political work has an important place in academia. I will come back to this in a minute.

My presentation, I felt, was a little haphazard. I thought my questions were a bit too broad, and I completely blanked on doing my own response paper, which I need to do because we're getting down to the wire. But I felt really lobotomized by Tuesday night (NOT a good thing), and just forgot. Talked to the prof about it, and she was super supportive and awesome. I've heard some real horror stories about grad school, but my own experience so far has been fantastic. I've gotten nothing but reinforcement and encouragement from the faculty I've encountered. The criticism has all been constructive, and everyone I've found has been really good at remembering that, even though we're students, we're also human beings with lives outside of academia, and while we need to focus on our work and be good scholars, we also need to be complete people. I don't know if it's just my department (or just the people I happen to work with), but it's really awesome.

I also had a meeting with my advisor and some other colleagues on Tuesday evening about our campus African Studies Research Focus Group. My friend Franklin (a brilliant anthropologist) and I are heading up the graduate group for the RFG this year, and we wanted to figure out what precisely our responsibilities were for the group. So we met with the two faculty conveners (my advisor and the very talented Christina McMahon) and planned a bit for the year. We're going to try and have a really great speaker this Spring. If we are able to get him to campus, I will certainly be writing about it (not least because I'd really like for him to be a dissertation reader down the road.....I have a title now, damn skippy I'm going to use it!).

I also had a meeting with my advisor on Wednesday about teaching next quarter. I'll be the only TA for his Survey of African History from 1800-present, which means that the class, which is usually over 100 students, will only be open to about 60. We were trying to find ways to accommodate a few more without me going over my union contracted hours. I HATE BUDGET CUTS. It's ridiculous that so many students are going to be left out of this course. I'm already getting emails from former students who want to take it and are asking to crash. I'm a sucker for former students and want to get them all into the class, especially now that I know so many are having trouble just getting the minimum number of credits to keep their financial aid. Oh, California, why are you so stupid? REPEAL PROP 13!!! (and Prop 8 while you're at it. I know it's not really economic, but it's bigoted and awful and makes a lot of my friends into second-class citizens and hates on them and their families, and civil rights should never be up for a vote anyway.) The fact that the state has systematically seen fit to divest from public higher education over the last few decades is becoming apparent; this is what happens when no one wants to pay taxes. Anyway, we talked about readings for the students, and I'm going to do a guest lecture on the last quarter of the 19th century in Rwanda and how it facilitated the encroachment of German power in the region by 1896. As I pretty much know this stuff like the back of my hand, I'm hoping to totally rock this. I just need to find the right reading for the kiddos. I really like having a little bit of creative input on the course; this is the advantage of TAing for a smaller course instead of one of the humungous ones (not that I'm not having fun this quarter too, though!).

Thursday was my biweekly meeting on the independence movement article. I was pretty terrified going in that she was going to rip it apart and tell me I had no idea what I was talking about. Let's face it, after writing 19 pages in 2 days, there was a distinct possibility that it wasn't even in recognizable English anymore. Fortunately, this was not the case. In fact, it was just about the best meeting I've ever had regarding my writing. While it is clearly a work in progress, she really thinks I'm onto something. It was some much-needed positive feedback. I have some theory reading to do this weekend, and then I can have another draft ready a week from Monday. I'm quite a bit more energized on it now.

There still remains the precolonial paper, of course, the abstract of which has now been accepted to 2 conferences in March. Eek!! It's crunch time (and not least because I currently have an "F" on my transcript....). So that's going to be my focus this week, especially on my glorious day off on Wednesday (Thank you, veterans, for the day off and, you know, the whole "serving your country with your life" thing....).

We're having a launch party on Wednesday for our new department t-shirt on Wednesday, which is, like, totes exciting. I'm going to wear the lovely shoes featured above. They are Michael Kors. I love them. They are exceedingly comfortable (not joking) and obviously dead sexy. Also having my voice midterm on Tuesday, the first time I've actually sang in front of people in a LONG time (other than weddings and karaoke, but this is a very different, potentially-getting-judged-in-front-of-professionals thing). Deep breath.