I feel like I was really productive this week. I just pawed through all my syllabuses and updated my to do list for the next 10 days and I'm not behind on anything yet. Though there is plenty of reading and watching in my future.
So, good things that happened:
The day after I wrote my "poser" post I went and talked to Debbie. I wasn't after a pep talk, I was there to talk about what I want to do for my presentation in her class to see if she thought it was a workable idea, and see if she had any suggestions for directions to take it. But I find I can't talk to Debbie without it being a pep talk because she always makes me feel good about myself. I admitted to her that I really love the conversations we have in class, but I don't entirely feel qualified to contribute to them. She assured me that feeling would fade. She was also into my presentation idea. I want to talk about modernizing older stories and I want to use Casino Royale as a case study for it. I was worried that James Bond is a little too frivolous to be a topic for academic study, but she was supportive. We talked about what was interesting to me in what they had done, and she thought it would be a fun presentation. And I thought, how lucky am I to have found a professor who doesn't think that in order to be academic you must suck all the joy out of it.
Also that day I talked to Charles about my thesis film. He is what they refer to here as my first reader, which is effectively a thesis advisor. Though I do like the implication that he doesn't have to be my only reader. In the middle of August we had to submit 2 scripts to the committee and they said they would tell us which one we would get to do by the start of the term. It turns out there was no consensus from the group on which one I should do. I think one person had strong opinions one way, another had strong opinions the other way and the rest thought either would be fine. Charles was in the either would be fine group so really he left it up to me to pick. We did talk about it for a while. In the end we settled on Ghost Tours. I'm happy about that. I wanted to do it, but I was hesitating to just pick it because some of the feedback comments I got made me worried that they didn't necessarily understand where I was trying to go with it. I didn't want to end up with a wildebeest. In talking to Charles though, I really think he gets it, so we can work on the script and it's not going to turn into something I didn't want it to be.
Other than that on the good news front, classes are trundling along with interesting discussions, interesting projects, fun movies to watch. And compared to this time last year, the fact that I'm not falling behind already feels great.
And then the bad news: My jaw was feeling a little achy this week. And I thought, I haven't had my teeth cleaned in a while so I'll go get a clean and check and warn them that the check is likely to turn something up. Yesterday I went to the dentist and he determined I need to have root canal. It had been getting steadily worse so that by then all he had to do was touch it with his finger and I nearly screamed. Sadly the soonest I could get the root canal appointment for is next Wednesday. So I've pulled out the good drugs left over from surgery. Only the ibuprofen though. The codeine, which I still have a bunch of, made my brain really fuzzy and took forever to get out of my system. I can't have that during the semester. So it'll be soup and scrambled eggs for the next several days. And I had just been to the farmer's market and bought a bunch of stuff. Sigh.
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