west of the moon

that familiar sinking feeling.

We have a mixed household, Matt and I, with competing loyalties to the Mets and the Red Sox.  If you're going to have a house divided over baseball, though, you could do worse than this pair.  We can agree that we hate the Yankees, for instance, and since the teams are in different divisions, the only time they're ever going to be in real competition is if they both end up in the World Series.

There's something else we share, though.  Years of following these two teams have left us both with the same attitude towards watching baseball: there's no lead so strong that our guys can't find a way to blow it.

(Why yes, I am talking about last night's debacle.  Giving up SIX RUNS to the Yankees in a SINGLE INNING?  That was just painful to watch.)

housekeeping.

The semester has started well, if busily.  More posting in the next few days, maybe, but in the meantime, some links I want to get out there before my computer loses all of these lovely open browser windows I've mentally tagged "of possible use in weblog".  Mostly academic-related, although not entirely.

• New Kid on the Hallway has had a series of great and thought-provoking posts recently, but the ones I'd specifically tagged for notice is this one, about the  "intro to history" class and what should be included in it, and this one, on envy and houses. 
• Similarly, Sterling Fluhart's been on a roll lately, of the kind that can be very depressing to history graduate students (or recent history doctorates).  There's a round-up of the disheartening statistics in this post, but he's also been posting some intelligent analysis of actual job of the history professor and the changing nature of graduate research topics, and that's just in the last week or so.
• The most recent History Carnival, packed full of great material, which I haven't really had time to read yet.
• Free downloads of Zork. 
• Over at Body Impolitic, Debbie posted something months ago that I've been running through in my head ever since.  The context was the apparent paradox of women at WisCon, a feminist event, having so much fun getting super-girly dressed up.  (At the dessert salon, when I commented that I hadn't worn high heels since the previous year's dessert salon, there was a little chorus of "me too!" from all around me.)  Debbie's take on the situation was that in that explicitly feminist space, we all feel safe in the knowledge that the highly gendered behavior of super-girly dress-up is a performative act.   My point in bringing it up now is that I was reminded of it again, with her recent description of some weddings she'd attended, and her analysis of the performative (and gender) aspects of weddings as social rituals.

I think that's it for now.