Ow, my brain. Or, adventures in doctorate-level classes.

So, once upon a time, I got accepted into a doctorate program in higher education. I'm taking two classes this fall, just because. By week three of the quarter, I'd surpassed 1,000 pages of heavy reading. I found out that my "not-practical" music and literary translation degrees involved a lot more action. As in, you learn history and theory, and then you sit your butt down and practice (or sit your butt down with some tequilla and translate 200 year old Spanish poetry into modern English) for hours and hours and hours over years and years and years. Somewhere along the line, you associate tequilla with Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (an old-time poet) and sitting down with good cello posture.

It turns out that a lot of other college majors don't have nearly as much action. Yes, there is a ton of thinking and writing (by the end of this week, week five, I'll have written 60 pages worth of papers), but there is a lot of focus on different ways of nit-picking on other writers, or nit-picking ways of running things, or nit-picking your own results when you study something. But instead of nit-picking, it's called critical analysis. Because nit-picking sounds a lot more like what it really is.

And when you get people nit-picking each other, they even get nit-picky about what they want to call the nit-picking. So. You've got your post-modernism. Post-structuralism. Post-colonialism. Feminist post-structuralism critical theory. And onward with a LOT of different post-things. And after much reading about all these different posts, I decided to come up with my own. Because I can be nit-picky, too.

My first one was called "Post" 1960's Batman Critical Theory. I put the post in sarcastic quotes (sarcasti-quotes! patent pending), because in all these theories, the post doesn't mean after, it means without. Because nit-picky people can't just use words the same way that words have been used for all of ever. But my theory does involve 1960's Batman, hence the sarcasti-quotes.

Anyway, this view of the world is that everyone is good, except the Joker. And you have to sometimes throw in a "Holy _____, Batman!" and that if things were looking grim, millionaire Bruce Wayne would be able to pay for cool gadgets. Things were going fine with my new little theory, until Chris got all post-modern critical theory on it and pointed out that my idea was really a post-modern, neoliberal economic critical theory with some "Holy guacamole, Batman!" thrown in. Dammit.

My new theory is the "Post" Kitty Critical Theory. It boils down to two things: boxes are good, closed doors are bad. This works for everything I've tried so far and Chris hasn't been able to crack it yet with post-modern critical theory. I have five more weeks to go in the quarter. And that is what taking doctorate level classes looks like. Because boxes are good. Closed doors are bad.

An Erinku:
My apartment:
flat boxes everywhere
an Ikea explosion
in all the rooms (some assembly required)