Category Archives: academia

this site may be doomed

I’m sharing a grad student office with a nuclear physics PhD candidate and she’s really nice but she comes in and while she’s thinking, she stares intensely in my direction when I’m writing and mumbles under her breath, which I find slightly stifling, creatively speaking. The upside to this is that I’m very focused while I’m there and getting a lot of labwork done instead of dawdling in the office. The downside is that I’ve been neglecting my blog. My home connection is very slow and I don’t blog from my (work) office computer.

If things go dark here for a while, don’t write me off. I’ll be back.

epiphany

I know you’re all sick and tired of hearing about grad school, but I had an epiphany I just had to share.

To briefly recap: My advisor convinced me that taking the fiction screenwriting class would be useful to me in my non-fiction writing.

My epiphany isn’t that he’s right, although he probably is.

My epiphany is that it draws much less attention when you make phonecalls for research purposes if you identify yourself as a fiction writer than if you call and say you’re an anthropologist.

I hope so, anyway, because I imagine that otherwise calls about whether, hypothetically speaking, a pet mummifier could also mummify a person and then disguise the remains to look like a large dog would attract much less attention from, oh say, law enforcement, if the person was just doing research for a movie.

That’s what I’m hoping, anyway.