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Busy, busy. Am back to my normal self, after having my dissertation proposal conference yesterday. Keep in mind that the process of writing my proposal has been a byzantine labor involving five faculty members, fourteen-plus (thoroughly revised) drafts, hundreds of pages of original writing, innumerable hours reading and researching, and two-point-something years. (There is no major reason for this delay, besides perhaps my stubborn tendency to unconsciously avoid defining any major terms and asserting any clear claims. Not that such a tendency has stopped certain important academics.) The past few weeks have involved compiling and juggling the availability of five busy individuals, scheduling a conference (and then promptly changing the time again), rearranging my work schedule, finding out a week later that said time and date conflict with a job talk, re-contacting and re-scheduling the conference, un-swapping and re-swapping yet more work shifts, messing with at least three of my ongoing students' schedules for two consecutive weeks, finding out that this new time happens to be when all of the building's even remotely large-ish rooms (both those with and without phone lines) are occupied, and only managing to kludge together a room and a way for a long-distance participant to Skype in approximately five hours before the conference itself. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to the relative anticlimax of having to submit the final revisions to my proposal five weeks from now, and beginning my first chapter. We here at Jejunity Worldwide have reason to believe, or at least hope, that the dissertation proper will be a comparatively easy affair.

But life carries on, and the past 24 hours have revealed that I, even while disgruntled, seem to be making minor improvements to the lives of those who surround me. To wit:

• I have made an informal agreement with a higher-up at a certain local car-sharing service to report back on the workings of a certain other car-sharing service located in Québec's largest city. (Note to self: find out the adjectival form of "Québec" for objects and non-humans. Would that be a Québecian city? Or, as Wikipedia claims, simply Québec?)
• No fewer than two of our immediate neighbors have been spotted using empty 30-lb plastic tubs of Scoop Away Free cat litter to contain sidewalk sand and gardening supplies. Seeing as how we've been setting those tubs out in our curbside recycling bin for the past four-plus years, I bet I know where those came from. In the battle of east-side environmental correctness, though, I have totally lost points.
• While working my shift in the dining hall last night, I was privy to a mysterious Power Point presentation with the title "The Four Year Plan," featuring a flurry--like, twelve--of bullet points describing all of the things that dedicated students should be doing their freshman, sophomore, and junior years to ensure future success in life. Much of this was good advice (getting to know professors, talking to students in potential majors, examining core requirements), but my mind boggled at the idea of having so much... purpose at age eighteen. Particularly because I'd completed oh, three of those recommendations during my own four undergraduate years, and even applying to grad school was a move I'd made for lack of a better idea of what to do after graduation.
  
  The presentation ended (with the final revelation that it was for students interested in applying to the business school, which makes a little more sense), and a senior that I knew stopped by my table. "I just wanted to let you know," he said, "that I'm an English major, and my friend's a History major, and oh my God, we had so much fun watching your facial expressions during that presentation." We got to talking about his grad school applications and some of the professors that he was working with, and ten minutes later, his friend (the History major) dropped in on the bench to push leftover popcorn and enormous cookies on us. "It's OK, I won't leave these all here," she told me as I shooed away the popcorn in favor of a crunchy Snickerdoodle. "But oh, I wanted to let you know that we really enjoyed watching you during the presentation!"
  
  Considering that my husband has always insisted that I have an abnormally deadpan and affect-less demeanor, this is a bit of a paradigm shift in how I've been led to think about myself. I guess my true feelings about the School of Business are just that strong.

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