Sometimes You Just Want to Throw Something Through a Window

For instance, when you call your graduate advisor and he tells you that you need to extend your leave of absence, further delaying the already tragically slow and expensive process, because he is retiring and will not be advising any more, you might want to wreak a little havoc. This means you (and yes, I am talking about myself, but currently am too upset to write about this in the first person) will miss this year's grant cycle and in fact may need to switch schools, which can only mean re-doing coursework that you are pretty sure will only bore you more the second time around. And then the aforementioned advisor suggests switching your entire topic from borders to the education system so that you can become an education consultant because you enjoyed a brief stint as an after school program director and somehow he has gleaned from this that you have found your life's work. And then, to top it off, provides you with the wrong citation for a book that is supposed to help you decide whether you should abandon years of work on borders to write an ethnography on the consequences of No Child Left Behind or the tensions between schools and after school programming. Now I hate No Child Left Behind and the Bush administration's education policy almost as much as, well there is no almost. It is enough to say that this country will be cleaning up that mess for decades to come. But none of that means that I want to spend my life working on that particular mess. Frankly, the thought of having to wade through book after book after article after policy piece on current theories of education makes my head want to explode. This to me, seems a slight glitch in my advisor's plan and the whole thing makes me want to run screaming from the proverbial room. How I wish this year's TV season had already started.

Oh, and by the way, Kate, Weese has decided to challenge Elvis to the Biggest Cat in the World Title. It is somewhat disturbing as her face remains small.