What I did today

I woke up around 9:30. Last night I was up late and was in any case exhausted. It was the first day of the History of Christian Thought class that I am “co-teaching” with Ted Jennings. Class got out at 9:30, and Ted and I split a pitcher at Jimmy’s afterward. I had good CTA karma for my impractically long commute up until the single-track construction zone on the Brown Line, which left us sitting still for quite a while. I had to give up on my designated CTA reading, Doug Henwood’s After the New Economy, due to fatigue, but I didn’t want to fall asleep during the indefinite wait because I was technically only one stop away from home. I seriously considered getting a cab for the four block walk home from the train station, but none were nearby.

I realized this morning that I would need to go grocery shopping right away. I could get by without cereal, having bread with peanut butter — a breakfast staple of my dad when I was growing up, but a fallback for me — instead, but I needed to get coffee. I ate breakfast, showered, did my Supermemory exercises, read my feeds, checked my bank and credit card balances, and then went to the store. I forgot a coupon for a cheap brand of coffee, and so bought an expensive one. I also got pasta and sauce (2 each), cereal, bananas, chips, and a loaf of bread. When I got back, I unpacked the groceries and unloaded the dishwasher. I then talked to Brad on IM for a while, wrote a blog post, and caught up on the feeds that had come up while I was at the store.

For lunch I decided to get bahn mi, and while I was at the Vietnamese bakery, I got enough sandwiches for several days. On my return, I boiled some frozen green beans to accompany my bahn mi, put the bahn mi on a plate with some chips, and watched the Prison Break season premier. It was entertaining enough and seemed to promise a better season than last, once I got past the resurrection of Sarah Tancredi.

I spent much of the afternoon going through my notes over Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks and my underlinings in Schmitt’s Roman Catholicism and Political Form and Laclau’s On Populist Reason for a paper for a panel on Laclau. During that process, I also paced about the apartment trying to think of how to structure my argument and fit it within the constraints of a conference paper and at some point paused to write the previous post on this blog, about Sarah Palin. Conversations with Brad and The Girl occurred intermintantly throughout this period, and I also read and commented upon this post, which tagged me with Infinite Thought’s Dogmeme.

Then a friend called who was concerned that I seemed very angry, based on my blog postings — we had previously discussed my self-reported moodiness and depression. We also talked about the possibility (or necessity) of moving abroad, specifically to Latin America, after finishing our PhDs. After we hung up, I began preparing some pasta for dinner. Right now I am letting my pasta cool. My plans for the rest of the day are to watch an episode of The Sopranos over dinner, then get at least a start on the Laclau paper.