I finally arrived in Ithaca, NY yesterday. I'll be here for most of the summer, at Cornell's School of Criticism and Theory program. Ithaca is beautiful . . . pictures will be posted tomorrow. And my posts here for the next few weeks will likely be annoyingly theoretical.
I'm optimistic about the summer, and about finishing my dissertation -- despite the bad omen that slopped its way onto my shoulder this morning. As I was sitting outside at a local bagel place enjoying a bagel with cheese, egg, avocado, onion, and bacon, and waiting for my scalding but weak coffee to cool, I felt something wet, warm, and slimy land on my shoulder.
A bird had shat on me. (Is "shat on me" grammatically correct?)
Gross. This also happened to me one other time: when I was at the "leaning tower of Pisa" in Italy, many years ago.
It got on my light blue knee-length shorts, too. But I just laughed, wiped it off, and kept eating. And my family thinks I'm uptight . . . haha.
But, surprisingly, the rest of my day was not quite as shitty. I met some super cool people, and we exchanged lots of big laughs and more than a few pints of good beer. They even laughed at my jokes, though I don't know whether it was because I am really that funny, or they were really that drunk. Either way . . . it was fun, and I'm optimistic about the rest of the summer.
And, anyone who knows me, knows that I don't drink beer (you're more apt to find me with a martini, or even a martini shaker, in hand), so tonight was another new experience for me. I felt so "not pretentious" . . . it was cool.
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There is no stop, there is no interval between dreaming and waking. In this sense, it is possible to say: never, dreamer, can you awake . . . -- Maurice Blanchot
About Me
- Monica
- Studio City, California, United States
- I am a writer, storyteller, and former professor (UCLA, Pepperdine, LMU, Purdue) with expertise in representations of trauma, multi-ethnic literatures, Christianity and Judaism, immigrant narratives, and Critical Theory (I'm a graduate of the Cornell School of Criticism and Theory). I love to create stories. I adore books, wine, traveling, and shoes. I wrote a book called THE MIDRASHIC IMPULSE AND THE CONTEMPORARY LITERARY RESPONSE TO TRAUMA and have published pieces in Newsweek, The New Republic, The Jewish Journal, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Forward, and other places.
Places I Visit
- Monica Osborne at The Jewish Journal
- StrangledSleep on TWITTER
- Jewcy
- A Novel Blog
- Both Wearing Black Masks
- Hebrew Language Detective
- Postcards from Bedlam
- EV Comics
- Fido the Yak
- Fractal Ontology
- Jeffrey Goldberg at The Atlantic
- Jewish and Other Media Links
- Jewschool
- Luke Ford
- Mxrk
- North American Levinas Society
- On Being Impermissible
- Rhetoricat.Com
- Side-effects
- Perverse Egalitarianism
- A Chair and Two Apples
- SOMA
- That Celestial Thought
- Third Guy Ducks
- Trauma and Philosophy
- Wishydig
- Perverse Egalitarianism
Posts
4 comments:
Hmm... with these theory people you never know -- drinking beer might find a way to be uber-pretentious.
Have fun out there!
Oh if anything beer made me more pretentious. There's nothing worse than insisting on Belgian.
And is there anything more pompous that the phrase "This is a great microbrew"?
May the Aeolian winds reverse their course and bring you back safely.
Actually, and this is entirely serious, there are some Italian peasant traditions in which getting shit on by a bird is actually an auspicious sign.
Ah, yes, Casey and Wishydig, I've quickly learned that beer is just as pretentious as anything else in the hands of the pompous.
Adam -- I'm glad you said that! I was thinking that I had heard something like that but was convinced I had made it up. So I guess this means my summer is really off to a good start . . .
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