Seven Months of Nothing Special

I'd love to say I neglected my blog because I was deeply involved in all sorts of terrific projects. But, I wasn't. I was just doing rather normal things. I made it through my year of being a full time student and a full time teacher, and emerged relatively unscathed and with only six credits left in my PhD program. Well, there is still that dissertation looming in the future, but that doesn't really worry me. The writing will be okay, I'm nervous about the defense, though. I can't imagine being in a room full of people who are watching me convince them that the last two years of my life were worthwhile, especially when I intend to spend my dissertation hours playing.

I've assembled my dissertation committee - I have two English people, an Advertising person from Mass Comm, and two artists, both part of the Kinetic Imaging Department. I only know one of them well, but think it will prove to be a helpful committee.

I'm now working on my bibliography, and am worried about not getting on it all the things I need. I should just go ahead and have a prototype and add to it as I find more things, but I'm hung up somehow.

This fall, my class is Form and Theory of Poetry, and suddenly, while I can usually sit down and write a poem at the drop of a hat, now that I HAVE to write, I'm absolutely blocked. My first assignment is to write a 30 line blank verse poem, and I've started and scribbled out about nine poems thus far. They begin nicely, then suddenly get too sappy, or too wordy, or don't go anywhere at all. It's gonna take me awhile.

In the olfactory realm, as that's the purpose of this blog, I'm reading a WONDERFUL new book called What the Nose Knows, by Avery Gilbert. It seems to jump around a lot, but in a pleasant, fun to follow way. I learned recently that it has been proven scientifically that men have more gas, but women's gas smells worse. How cool is that?

Anyway, the next few weeks will be consumed by studying for comps, writing poems, getting my Internship Program - Year Two off the ground, and trying to write a bibliography.

One more final interesting olfactory tidbit - this morning, I cleaned the shower with Tilex. It bothered my nose, significantly enough that I had to stop cleaning before I was done. For about two hours, even though I was outside, lounging by the pool, sitting on my towel, walking through grass, I only smelled the hot cardboard box smell of frozen individual sized spaghetti dinners. It was just the box I smelled, not the spaghetti, it could have been a box of macaroni, or chicken fettuccine, but that hot cardboard smell overpowered my nose for a long time, and I missed out on much of my final Labor Day pool romp (and lovely Sam Adams Summer Ale) because I was only smelling cardboard.

Here's a fun website:

www.myheritage.com, you can find out which celebrities you look like, based on (I'm guessing) your facial dimensions and shapes. Here's mine: