Week-in-my-Life: Jan 2010 (Pt. 2)

WEDNESDAY 01/13/10

6:15am = after a horrible night of sleep, wake up with excruciating headache, take Advil and call into work late, knowing I'm going to miss meeting for all professional staff

8:30am = email Padre about his doctor visit, hoping he understands we're concerned about him

9:15am = leave for work although head still hurts; halfway to subway realize I forgot work ID, so have to go back home, but since it's so friggin' cold and windy I'm glad to go back for my hat

9:30am = heading back to subway, while crossing intersection almost hit by a livery cab with stickers of Jesus Christ on headlights; ponder for a moment whether the impact would have killed me or converted me a là St. Paul

9:40am = on 4 train to work, head hurts, but force myself to start reading Thomas Crow's Emulation: David, Drouais, and Girodet in the Art of Revolutionary France (1995), knowing RL will be very happy I'm finally reading this

11am = meeting; starting to decide I may need to go home early because head still aches

2pm = leave work early; get to subway and once underground hear announcement that all 4, 5, and 6 trains have stopped running "due to an incident involving the police at Grand Central" (which of course is never explained further); trudge upstairs with everyone else bitching about the NYC transit system, wait in line with 127 other people to take a bus down Lexington Ave., eventually getting out at 68th Street and walking to the F train; commute that normally takes 55 minutes winds up taking me 1 hour and 35 minutes to get home, with head still pounding

4pm = Advil and nap

6:30pm = headache tapering off, so decide on dinner: turkey burger with sweet potato fries and green bean, tomato & goat cheese salad; watch episode of Paula Dean on Food Network and almost vomit when she makes chicken fettuccine alfredo with mayonnaise

7pm = start revising independent study report

9pm = watch Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (4 stars)

10pm = wash dishes, take more Advil because god-damned headache never went away, convinced at this point it's one of the air-pressure-and-stress headaches which, combined, are always impossible to get rid of


THURSDAY 01/14/10

6:15am = wake up very happy because finally headache-free

7:35am = walk to subway across same intersection as yesterday, grateful for divine intervention that there are no Jesus-stickered livery cabs in the vicinity; get a seat on the subway next to a smelly homeless man whose hand keeps eerily brushing my leg; ignore him by reading more of Crow and listening on my iPod to Mozart, Bublé, Streisand, et al.

9:15am = after a day of email exchanges with 3 professors and the art history program office, I receive confirmation of a scheduled date for my Oral Examination: Thursday, April 22, 2010, at 10am (yay!)

10am = meeting

12:30pm = lunch in the staff cafeteria with EB, KZ, and RL, art history students in my program who also work at the museum

2:15pm = panic at my desk realizing I have to teach a new class called "Finding Digital Images" next Wednesday morning, and since we're off on Monday I have to prepare everything for the class before my next meeting in an hour

3:25pm = heading down to meeting with co-workers, encounter Director of the museum who will be our guest speaker; I decide to be gregarious and introduce myself, and then immediately slip into stupid mode when he asks me what I do; saved by the elevator bell

6:30pm = dinner & Netflix: take-out Chinese wonton soup and steamed chicken & snow peas with brown rice, and the first-to-last episode of season 2 of Veronica Mars (the post-modern Nancy Drew)

7:30pm = continue reading Crow, decide art historians should be applauded for writing sentences like his description of Jean-Germain Drouais's 1786 painting The Wounded Warrior (above): "The balanced studio posing of the model ... is transformed into a suspended moment of tense concentration. The alertness of the figure distinguishes it from the vacant upward stare of the earlier version: physical distress ... here produces an intense enhancement of consciousness rather than its weakening or loss. ... Pain and consciousness are all the more identified to the degree that Drouais displaces attention away from the ostensible wound to the body: as depicted, the injury is all but invisible. But in its absence the entire body is organized to mark the spasm of pain that energizes the athlete." (p. 55-56)

9pm = dessert: cup of tea and a Weight Watchers chocolate eclair with raspberries; cannot wait to know how Veronica Mars will end so watch season finale, which turns out to be really good (5 stars)

(To be continued...)