Friday, November 11, 2011

Assorted distractions

-Saw a car with three stickers and three only: Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Seems like this would be a faux pas, like you'd need some more humble sticker to counteract this. Meanwhile, if we had a car, we could, thanks to my husband, put something possibly still more oh-la-la on it. Problem is, we're not oh-la-la enough to have a car.

-It turns out that if you need a garbage for what your dog produced outside just before getting spayed, your dog that you had indeed walked to completion prior to heading to the vet, but that sometimes needs to go twice in the mornings, the vet may assume you are, unsolicited, dropping off a stool sample. No, we did not specify "garbage," because we'd thought that was implied, what with it being not shall we say sample-size, and in a plastic bag, as opposed to a vial from the vet's office. We did find it odd when the tech asked, "Is this from today?," like we carry bags of Bisou's poop from various points in the past week or so around with us at all times, but then it was like, surprise, the reason the spaying cost not merely a ton, but a ton plus, was that there had been this additional test. The people at the office were, for the most part, mildly amused, and to their credit they paid us back.

-I feel as though I must have read the abbé Grégoire's essay on the "regeneration" of the Jews, the famous one from just before the French Revolution. I perfectly well remember reading Alyssa Sepinwall's wonderful book on Grégoire, and looking at the text itself, but if there aren't notes on it anywhere, I as good as haven't read it, so I'm on the case. And it turns out the "essay" (French for 200-plus-page book, complete with s-as-f, a-as-o, and other delights that I wouldn't have had to contend with if I'd stuck with the Dreyfus Affair) is far more relevant to my dissertation than I'd thought. I am once again sidetracked by my own dissertation. I know this doesn't sound possible, but trust me, it is.

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