I've been in Madison the last couple of days, which included Sal's going away party last night. Now I'm waiting for Sal so we can, in fact, go away--drive down to Northwestern for the Cells to Society workshop. I see that Cells to Society is now listing my joining their faculty on their webpage, having taken my photo off the Robert Wood Johnson website. I need to get a professional publicity photo taken or something. Although, as important, I need to make sure that I'm reasonably shaven and that my remaining hair is in order when I have a professional take my photo.
I spent some time today continuing the multitrip project of cleaning out my office. Last time I was here, I spent an afternoon filling half of one of these giant plastic dumpsters of recycled paper and put all kinds of stuff on a free table for any takers. This time I put all my books and various other things in boxes. The experiences moving has been sometimes as if I had chosen an emotion at out of a hat, and then twenty seconds later choosing another emotion out of a hat, only instead of being random it was entirely induced by whatever I happened to have pulled out of the cupboard or file cabinet next.
A general virtue of moving is that it provides the opportunity to reduce clutter, especially if one applies the principle that something one hasn't used or missed since one's last move is something can get rid of. What was different about moving my office, though, is there were all sort of things associated with proto-projects that I don't exactly have any specific plans of going back to, but I hadn't exactly concluded I was never going back to. Some of these I'll move with me, but others I threw out.
Understand in several cases we were talking about materials and ideas from graduate school. For that matter, some of it was stuff from the first half of graduate school, when I did an entirely different kind of research substantively and methodologically from what I've done since. Still, hard to let go. And yet, for the most part, I did.
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8 comments:
Good for you!
When I moved I found a whole box of undergraduate papers and notes, half of which were for my history major. I decided to keep most of them. I was really struck by the amount of comments both my undergraduate and graduate professors wrote on my work. I really need to get better at that.
don't be too hasty jeremy, you never know when the CA bug will bite you.
I'm a collaborator on a CA project, in fact, but I'm pretty confident that I would be bitten by any bug about it.
Speaking of portraits...
I've often wondered what the world would be like if we all had to put our resumes on the back of our head shots like actors do.
But instead of
"Roles: Victim, Murder She Wrote Episode 619"
You would have
"Previous Experience: Personal Assistant, J.D. Salinger: 1989-1992"
Who's with me?
The cheese-themed rubber ducky from the free table has found a happy home with all the other ducks in my bathroom (about..oh...12 of them). I think they've accepted the new member of the herd.
Carly, you should have seen the Larry Fine rubber duck floating around our office for years. That thing was horrifying.
I met you in my dream last night. I was eating at some restaurant in Madison, and glanced across the room and saw you. Then, you actually were the one to come and approach me. Are you Jeremy Freese? Yes. Then you mumbled something about Judy Garland. By the end of it all, I was helping you burn stuffed animal tigers. I do not know why.
This is what I get for reading blogs before bed.
I can't abandon old projects. It's impossible. And now it's been reinforced because I have a paper coming out this year based in large part on a paper I wrote in my first grad class ever at Wisconsin! Resurrection is a beautiful thing.
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