Homemade Granola

By now most of us are aware that granola (bars, cereals, muffins) isn’t exactly a health food.  Various websites have put it at the top of their list of “health foods that are actually bad for you,” mainly because granola products usually contain tons of sugar to make the oats more palatable.  Since I still [...]

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The Long Dark Twilight of the Teenage Soul

During my early teens I found sex and everything that surrounded it more confusing than algebra.  Glam rock music videos taught me that desirable women wore skin-tight leather and glowered seductively at the camera while the boys screamed and played their guitars.  Said music videos also gave me the idea that sex involved some kind of [...]

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The Japan “Not to Do” List

When I first moved to Japan back in 2000 I’m sure I had a fairly long list of things to do, especially since I was only planning to stay for a year (I ended up staying for six).  Said list probably included things like becoming competent in the language, taking a Japanese calligraphy class, wearing [...]

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Alternative Acacemic Careers: Publishing

This is the fourth and final in a series of posts on “Alternative Careers for Humanities PhD’s,” a roundtable organized by my university on May 10, 2010.  Our fourth speaker, “Mary,” came to editing and publishing like a lot of people–she fell into it.  The editing / publishing world does seem to be a fallback [...]

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Alternative Academic Careers: The Film Industry

This is the third in a series of posts on “Alternative Careers for Literature and Humanities PhD’s,” a roundtable discussion organized by a professor in my university’s English department. Our third speaker–we’ll call her Alice, this probably isn’t sensitive enough material to hide everyone’s names, but you never know–responded to a dismal academic job market in the early [...]

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Alternative Academic Careers: Private High School Teaching

This is the second in a series of posts on “Alternative Careers for Literature and Humanities PhD’s,” a roundtable discussion organized by a professor in my university’s English department.  Skipping around a bit, the third speaker (we’ll call him Mark) earned a PhD in English literature and has been teaching in private high schools ever since.  [...]

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Alternative Academic Careers: The Ethics of Adjunct Teaching

This will be the first in a series of posts on “Alternative Careers for Literature and Humanities PhD’s,” a roundtable discussion organized by a professor in my university’s English department.  The two-hour session was some of the most productive conversation I’ve ever taken part in, and while there was a lot of very grim information [...]

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Now THAT’S How You Do Fried Chicken. And Waffles.

I wrote a few weeks ago about that L.A. institution known as The Pantry, which had some of the more disappointing fried chicken I’d ever tasted.  Luckily there’s a place in L.A. that gets fried chicken right–amazingly, foodgasmically right. Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles was one of those restaurants I’d heard about in passing [...]

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Post-Quals Limbo

The stress of qualifying exams is almost worth it for the  post-quals indulgence, the feeling that you can finally justify reading a book or watching a film that has absolutely nothing to do with your dissertation topic without feeling an ounce of guilt, that you can get that massage, eat that coronary-inducing comfort food, and [...]

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