Kick-Ass Title Goes Here

I finished a twenty-four page paper today for my Intro to Old Testament Class. My topic: a Lacanian reading of Lamentations! Believe me, it was every bit as fun to write as it sounds.

Oddly, I never even did a Lacanian reading of anything while I was at TTU. Then, teaching this semester, I happened onto a tangent during a discussion one day where I was basically spouting off a bunch of Freudian nonsense. My students, I'm sure, didn't really know what I was saying at that point, but they did look interested--at least I was talking about sex. Anyway, that sparked an interest in Lacan for me this semester, and I followed it up, I guess. I think it worked; my theology professor seemed interested at least. He made me explain my paper to the whole class, who didn't know quite what I was talking about but seemed interested because at least I was talking about sex...

The thing about the whole writing process this time, though, was that I didn't much enjoy writing it. Truly. While I was a TTU, I complained a lot about writing three (or more) term papers at a time, and it was miserable at times. Still though, it was sort of fun to be staying up all night for weeks in my office with some friends, huddled around the electric heater, eating pizza that had been sitting out on the file cabinet for three days (probably feeding the giant flies), and extracting weird papers from by weird brain that seemed like crap at the time (both my mind and the papers) but that are really pretty good, I now see (well, not so much the mind...so it goes). Anyway, if you're going to write a paper about workings of the unconscious in Lamentations or about the epistemological anxieties evident in the epidimiological literature of the Colonial America or about T.S. Eliot's appropration of Yahweistic poetry in 'The Waste Land' or some other insane topic, that is the way to do it.