Friday, April 25, 2008
(12:00 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Friday Afternoon Confessional: The End of the End
I confess that as of Thursday, I have completed all duties related to being the convener of the PhD Students Association, including finding a replacement. I confess that I had anticipated that my exaggerated sense of duty and difficulty saying no would lead me to sign on for another year after no one volunteered. Losing the stress of planning a chapel service in the fall will add years to my life.I confess that the first of my qualifying exams is on Monday and it's the one that I feel most confident on. I confess that I may also have a lead for some adjunct teaching work next year at a respectable institution, nicely rounding out the old CV. I confess that I've been neglecting my language work in recent weeks due to my impending exams and that I need to get to work on a new excuse for when exams are over.
I confess that I've recently started to pay more attention to how many L stops I've used. The occasion was when circumstances conspired to put me at the Montrose Brown Line stop, which I had never used before, and I realized that I was only three stops away from getting full coverage on the Brown Line. I confess that I've developed my own internal rules about what counts as "sincere" usage (as opposed to using the stop just to fill out my list), and I'm still not sure whether using a stop only for a transfer counts. If commenters could decide this for me, I would know whether I can rightly claim the Howard stop. I confess that getting the remaining three on the Brown Line could be challenging, particularly the Francisco stop.
I confess that the L stop thing is much less intrusive than a previous neurosis I developed about walking -- trying to find as many possible routes between two points that involved crossing only once per intersection. That is, my rules disallowed moving to a corner diagonal from the one where I was standing. I confess that T-intersections were a major help whenever I could find them, because I could get to the equivalent of the diagonal corner without technically "crossing the street." I confess that my system fell apart when I realized that there were no routes satisfying my rules between the Regenstein library and my then-girlfriend's house. Well, actually there would've been, but the main rule was that I couldn't go out of my way -- it had to fulfill the street-crossing rules while being equal in distance to the shortest possible route.
I confess that that last part feels more like a true "confession" than most of what I've written here over the years.
