Epistemographer

• I’d always thought of Ithaca as untouched by the rampant spread of franchised stores (or, at the very least, I thought the town would be able to hold them at bay on the periphery of town, where the strip of fast food stores is). One of the quirky things about the town is that there’s nothing to be found in the genre of mid-range American food; no T.G.I. Fridays, no Bennigans, no Ruby Tuesday’s. So I take a bus in Tuesday, and one of the first things I see is a new building going up in a parking lot near the uber-grocery store. I ask one of the construction guys what he’s building, and he points to a sign overhead that reads “A new Chili’s, coming soon!”
  It’s not a McDonalds on the commons or anything, but it still doesn’t feel quite right.
• Ithaca is a lot more tiring when you’re walking everywhere.
• The sheer tedium of flipping through a decade’s worth of Playboy in search of articles on VCRs and videotapes is much more bearable than the vaguely queasy feeling you get when you flip through 5 years of Hustler looking for the same.
• The librarians who pull materials from the Cornell Human Sexuality Collection are total pros – nobody batted an eyelash when I asked them to pull every issue of Hustler they had before 1985. Now, the person sitting next to me in the reading room, however, seemed a bit flustered by all the porn scattered on the table in front of me.
• I miss my friends in Ithaca – it’d been too long since I’d been immersed in the community, both in and out of the S&TS department. There are lots of great people up there that I don’t know as well as I’d like to, and there are old friends who I wish I could see more often. It’ll be great to be teaching a class at Cornell next semester, since I’ll be in town for a few days (at least) every week, but after that, it’ll be even harder to say goodbye to Ithaca for real.
• Ron Kline is a fantastic advisor. He’s supportive, constructive, and just an all around good person. Plus he’s smart as all hell, and can help you figure out how to say what you’re trying to say in no time flat.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 20th, 2003 at 11:00 pm and is filed under General Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.