Ah, sabbatical:
(That should be Santa’s Elves.) How can I ever return to my day job? Maybe I’ll try to pull a Runaway Bunny, and turn myself into a rare book to hide on the shelves of the Huntington Library, and hope that my Department Chair and colleagues don’t disguise themselves as librarians and pull me off the shelf!
Maybe I’ll do it old school and hide in the garden like this:
Catch me if you can, suckas!!!
Historiann 
I always have a little involuntary twitch in the throat when I’m asked (or ask) what my “work” is “about.” (I mean by fellow scholars, not people who might really have reason to snort). I want to say if I called it that I’d probably stop doing it. But this, of course, contributes to a variety of prevalent cultural narratives that we shouldn’t really encourage, so I download a short blurb of the sort we all have on queue. The “about” part invokes another whole set of complexities. Does it really make that much sense to say that one’s “work” lies at the “intersection of” this or that large phenomenological category? I guess it does if it really lies there, and if any such place exists. I tend to say that my work lies at the intersection of “What the F is this?!?!?!?” and “God Damn, there’s another one!!!…” The Ancients said it more pithily with “Eureka,” but that’s a little trite by now.
Nice picture, makes me think Spring, is there an ISBN on that book?
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Me too: even though there ar bad and frustrating days, I’m like: what did I do today? Write a blog post, go back and forth with a couple a$$hats on Twitter, realize that I am right about Noel Jackson, read a book, write about Andrea Dworkin, design a website, go to a holiday party, come home and have a drink.
Now that wasn’t so bad, was it?
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You’ve seen my comments before that the Huntington is scholarly heaven. I loved my two stays there and would return in an instant except for the pesky issues of work and family responsibility. *sigh*
Enjoy and check out some of the corners of the Japanese garden. They’re wonderful for hiding, IIRC.
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Here’s where I was today, all day: a really cool conference on the work of Andreas Vesalius, who is about to celebrate his 500th birthday.
It’s kind of crazy, all the talent, smarts, and material and historical riches here.
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