PTSD

Genealogy of a blog, part the fifth

Just put up a draft and then realised you had done the same. Then had to amend the draft to this. Any discontinuities/repeats are part of the genealogy.

Priya:

you know your emails are starting to sound suspiciously like that of WeberMan!
for a moment i experienced a sense of deja vu (no idea of actual french spelling) and had to check email address to make sure you were you. are you you? is there an essential you-ness? i shall ponder that.

Elizabeth:

eh? Don't think I'm channelling Weberman--although his sticking of comments in old emails is very handy.

essential me-ness. hm. and the essential me-ness is being corrupted by too much interaction with WeberMan. that sounds plausible.

Priya:

am disappointed that you are not going to hawaii but you should still take pics of soybean fields.

off to mire myself in self pity. can one mire oneself i wonder. prob not. prob means something else.

Elizabeth:

don't know--usu. it's like "Priya's mired in self-pity." guess you could do it to yourself.

Priya:

ps: while you are on the plane to ohio, i am joining the others for a trip to this one lane where they have heaps of restaurants and pubs and where all the partying danes hang out. apparently. at least that is what we were told.

Elizabeth:

all the partying danes fit in one strip of bars? that's kind of sad

Priya:

haha. yes, all partying danes fit into one strip. when we asked what people did on weekends here (considering shops are closed at 1pm on saturday and then don't open till 10am on mondays) we were told that they visited other danes and played badminton. and i think the person saying this was perfectly serious. bit worrying, if you ask me.

Elizabeth:

Maybe it's full contact badminton. Or some code word for a drinking game? otherwise, a very sad state of affairs. I suppose that's why we never hear about the Danish bikini team.

Priya:

also was told when Britgirl (who is british muslim) asked where the danish muslims hang out that "there are no danish muslims here, only children of immigrants" (apparently though danish turks are the largest immigrant population but they are not danish enough since the essential danishness is obviously not present there)

Elizabeth:

Otherness in action--Inayatullah would be very excited. Can you be Danish without immigrants to be non-Danish? What does it mean to have "essential danishness?" (Maybe it has something to do with pastry and cream cheese?)

Priya:

am getting worried about phd stuff esp as i have been here over two weeks and have done nothing.

Elizabeth:

not true. You've gotten a committee chair, started working on a paper with me (hey, a topic is a start), done some background research, and, umm, started clarifying your methodological and epistemological approaches. see, that's a lot of work for two weeks.

Priya:

been working on bloody awful hobbes and tocqueville paper but then realised i left tocqueville in DC (well, the book, not the man obviously) so am hampered. at least that's my excuse.

Elizabeth:

they don't have books in denmark? no wonder they play so much badminton

Priya: Books are bloody expensive. Cost $20 for a small-sized paperback. Blasted Danes.

Elizabeth:

back to pretending to listen to long presentation on canine distemper virus in seals and polar bears (seriously, it's as dull as it sounds)

Priya:

eh? seals? bears? canine distemper? thought canine was dogs? i know my dog has to be vaccinated for distemper each year...

Elizabeth:

yeah, it's dogs. but it can spread to some wildlife. they've just started finding something that looks very much like it in marine mammals (although it's closely related to measles and a couple other diseases, so I'm not sure how certain they are about what it is.)

Elizabeth:

am writing on plane in order to appear busy (while not doing any actual work). I must recommend the flying out from DCA--v. cool visuals of dc, etc (including my apartment building--which is a bit weird, but still cool). Planning to steal peanuts as I forgot completely to pack anything to give Genius Nephew when I get to Detroit. At five, I'm hoping he won't realize what a crappy gift they are.

Have been thinking about various existential phd issues (yours, mine, and GSpice's, which are posted handily on her blog--we should have a blog for the third year phd's, that way we could eliminate multiple email issues) and have decided to say screw it all and join the french foreign legion. Surely they have a spot open for a lawyer with interpretive methodology leanings and a fear of heights. Or maybe the CIA--they're always looking to hire bright young law students and lawyers for various evil doings...

Not sure if I'm trying to demonstrate that I can ignore very far away closest fields (trapped in seat for 30 minutes out of DC, so no wandering the aisles for me) or that I too can ramble meaninglessly with the best of them...either way, I shall send this off once we touch down, so that at least it can provide you with some Sat. morning entertainment...

Priya:

hopefully you are among young lawyers wondering why you ever gave up the possibility of a 500$ per hour job for discussing methodological issues but deciding it is for the pleasure of conversation (ha) with “intellectuals” who are still trying to figure out what is going on.

Elizabeth:

Not wondering so much--the competitors I saw were bad. Very bad. But it was good to see people from school again. We had food at a terrible Indian restaurant (proof that one should always check with someone BEFORE deciding to go for the salad bar), and then made fun of various people I used to go to school with.

Priya:

did Genius Nephew enjoy peanuts?

Elizabeth:

no peanuts. just juice, and you had to pay for the snacks--bit of a rip off. So he got to get a pop at the gas station on the way home.

Priya:

yes, read GSpice’s blog and did think that some of the stuff in there (esp finding oneself after two years of not finding oneself) smacked a bit too much of whatever (can't think of good word) but then i like GSpice so decided to forgive her her flights of fancy.

Elizabeth:

she's in the midst of writing, and should be forgiven her need to express herself to the outside world. occupational hazard.

Priya:

also, i thought the whole marriage thing is universal (haha) across cultures since i get a lot more of that among my non-nepali friends/relatives than among nepalis.

Elizabeth:

yeah. it's pretty much everywhere. followed immediately by the grandkids thing.

Priya:

not sure if i will ever be able to write anything in her style so am prepared to join you in the french foreign legion. though do we REALLY want to hang out with those french?

Elizabeth:

I thought the french foreign legion sent people away from france? if not, we'll need an alternate plan. The CIA?

Priya:

eh? would love to join the CIA but am foreigner so can't.

Elizabeth:

You could work as an in-country CIA liason...but I think you'd have to do it from Nepal. Which might be okay.

Priya:

didn't come into uni yesterday since was recovering from having had to pay 8$ for a pint of guinness at the irish place we ended up at on friday night.

Elizabeth:

Did it come with a tap, or some sort of gift bag at least?

Priya:

no gift bag but proving that the irish everywhere are good fun, the place was excellent. had live music incl fairytale of new york (spelling?/name? i always found that song funny) and a bunch of expats who were quite willing to come talk with us (unlike snooty danes, who don't).

Elizabeth:

snootiness must be part of that essential danishness. HRDiva is going to be in Baden next week working on a guantanamo case--danishness reminds me that one of her issues is the Germanness (germanity?) of Turkish immigrants and children of immigrants there.

Priya:

alcohol is v cheap in the shops here but bloody expensive in the pubs where anything except tuborg routinely costs around $8. weird.

Elizabeth:

nah. sober people buy alcohol in stores. the drunker you are, the more you're willing to pay.

Priya:

yes, let's start writing an article together.

Elizabeth:

ok--but how to start? I can't build a model w/o the discourse data (well, I can, but it won’t be a very good one). We need a place to start researching.

Priya:

actually like the idea of a 3rd year blog but i think we are somehow at diff stages and people wouldn't bother and it would be us two ranting. not sure if there is a "third year" anymore since we are not in regular contact with each other. not that that is a bad thing, really.

Elizabeth:

I fail to see why the two of us ranting couldn't be highly entertaining. I could bitch about DC politics, and you could talk about the EU. The entire developed world would be pissed at us.

Priya:

reckon you should run away to denmark. haven't my stories tempted you? I am trying to see if i am a relational realist (though WeberMan thinks it is incompatible. I am with tilly in hoping it is compatible. this way i can piss off the realists AND the relationists/relationalists--whatever they are called).

Elizabeth:

I don't get it. How can you be a realist and also use relational methods? (I didn't get it in Tilly either).

Priya:

also, have decided the book Dracula (and i am emailing this to WeberMan too) was about epidemics but also about one of the first ever terrorists. more on this later too.

Elizabeth:

Total agreement on the epidemic part--it's something that's surprisingly common in lit crit. I think I have an undergrad paper somewhere on it. Not sure about the terrorist part.

Priya:

Here's my interpretation of Dracula.

I have decided it is a book about epidemics (vampiricisim (?) is transferred through bites and through blood and spreads rapidly, especially through the medium of the "weak"--women and children)

Elizabeth:

absolutely. not just infectious disease, but often talked about as STD (morality and disease both)

Priya:

but also (I reckon) about one of the global discourses of terrorism :-) After all, Dracula spends a lot of time in his castle (before Jonathan gets there for the first time) reading about England and about trains and machines and all that modern stuff. Then, he wants to infiltrate England to destroy it and yet re-create it in his image. Traditional readings seem to look upon this as a modernisation narrative (poor Third-Worlder comes to England to learn from them) but I reckon it is also the other way around--he wants to (and does) spread his (illiberal, vampiric) values in England and learns about it in order to know what the best way of doing this would be.

Elizabeth:

the threat of the angry third worlder--so now we know what Huntington was reading for research.

Priya:

Isn't this what the current (US/global) security discourse says about terrorists who may attack America/the West? Also, is the writer, as an Irishman at the turn of the 20th century (I think), showing his sympathy for the Irish cause (I really have nothing to support this view though!)?

Elizabeth:

not sure--the Irish didn't really think of themselves as 3d world. But there are accounts of Irish republicans "infiltrating" england / english forces. could be interesting to find out.

Priya:

What do you think? yes, apart from the view that I should really be working on my PhD thesis proposal (on which I have still not done anything) instead of speculating about Dracula.

Elizabeth:

no, dracula is cool--I'm trying to think of how to work the disease / terrorism angle. maybe a way to use it in the paper?

posted by Priya @ 12:34 PM