Friday, April 22, 2005
(7:21 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Friday Afternoon Confessional
I confess that I drove all the way to Kankakee last night, primarily for the sake of a "free" haircut. I confess that I have no idea why the Arby's in Bradley was absolutely packed out at 8:30 on a Thursday night, nor why the ATMs for every branch of my bank were being serviced at that time as well. I confess that 90% of the times that I call my family anymore, I'm driving somewhere.
The Badiou lecture last night was predictable, but not entirely predictable. It was one of the better Q&A sessions that I've attended. Badiou made clearer the ways in which Paul, for him, does not fit into his own philosophical project, and he was actually criticized for being insufficiently rigorous and historical in his treatment of Plato and Socrates, rather than Paul. (According to my professor who attended the lecture, a famous NT scholar named Betz was sitting very near us, but he did not ask his question publicly, preferring to approach Badiou afterward.) I have a lot to do this morning, but I took thorough notes and hope to write up a pretty good summary of the proceedings later today or this weekend.
[UPDATE: My business for the day is done. I have registered for a temp agency. I am ashamed of how proud I am that I did so well on their stupid tests. I am reviewing, 100 times, everything I did and said -- for instance, when the cute young lady was interviewing me, did I do anything that could remotely be construed as looking at unbusinesslike areas of her body? Did I make too much eye contact? Did it hurt me that I didn't get all the way down to the bottom of the very precisely formatted Word document they wanted me to make? And why couldn't I use some of my time left over from the Excel test to make changes to the Word thing? I think, though, that I'm mainly depressed because the last time I registered with a temp agency, I got an assignment the very day I walked in, then proceeded to work at that job, with an infinitely flexible schedule, for the next two years. The odds of repeating that were pretty slim, I suppose. I hope I get work from these guys before some other temp agency wants me to register, because it'd be a lot nicer not to repeat all those tests -- the initial self-esteem boost is great for an obedient test-taker such as myself, but the ensuing patheticness crash is brutal.]
[SECOND UPDATE: undercurrent has a nice skewering of the "European Graduate School." Once I'm ABD at CTS, I'm going to check my student loan balance, and if it's not high enough, I'm definitely going for the second doctorate from EGS. Then people can look at my CV and laugh and laugh -- what a sap! (By then, of course, it will be too late to go to law school.)]
[THIRD UPDATE: I confess that reading this article by Thomas Frank made me feel hopeless -- or maybe it's just the pouring rain and low temperatures, fast on the heels of beautiful spring-like weather.]
Confess away, my children.
