Professor Whitney Wilson

My relationship with the various computerized systems at Texas Tech has not been an easy one. My struggle to get an email address lasted for months, and I managed to teach for an entire semester without my actually existing within the University's system - I began my first class by reassuring my students that even though they would find no record of me on campus, I really was their professor. I thought things had been sorted out, but a couple of weeks ago I tried to log into something called "Digital Measures", a system that faculty members are supposed to use to report on their professional activities. Not surprisingly, I couldn't log in, and thus began many days of confused emails to and from various IT people. I finally got an email saying that my account was ready, so I logged in, only to be greeted by a page welcoming "Professor Whitney Wilson". For the occasional reader who doesn't actually know my name, it is not Whitney Wilson. I sighed, and began another round of emails to correct my identity. When I mentioned this to a friend of mine from my Georgia Tech days, she suggested that I could take this opportunity to make Professor Whitney Wilson into a George P. Burdell figure.

Who is George P. Burdell, you ask?

Here's the story: In 1927, a student received two acceptance forms to attend Georgia Tech. He decided to enroll as two people: himself, and an imaginary person named George P. Burdell. Students who were in on the prank would complete assignments and sit exams on George's behalf, and he eventually received his degree. This has become an important part of Georgia Tech culture, such that GT folk can always find one another by, for example, paging George P. Burdell at an airport to see who shows up. Good fun.

Anyway, my friend and I started to fantasize about what sorts of things Prof. Whitney Wilson could accomplish in her time at Texas Tech. I am open to suggestions.

Provocation

When I was in Winnipeg, my cousin and I went to a cafe to recover our strength after a vigorous afternoon of shopping for yoga pants. We borrowed someone's newspaper to check if there were any movies we wanted to see. Alas, the showtimes weren't going to work out, but as we were leaving, a woman called us over to her table.

Woman: What movie are you girls planning to see?

Us: We actually decided against it because the timing won't work.

Woman: I was going to warn you about Up in the Air.

Us: Oh, really?

Woman: Yes - don't see it. It has a message and it's thought-provoking.

Heaven forbid! We really dodged a bullet there. I saw Up in the Air last night, and indeed, it transmitted messages and provoked thoughts.

Dating

I went on an interesting date this weekend with an archaeologist who works for the Texas Tech Museum. He picked me up in his jeep, and gave me the behind-the-scenes tour of Lubbock circa 16,000-10,000 BCE. We crawled around dig sites while he explained things about sediment and GPS devices. Then he took me to the lab to admire stone tools and, of all things, a 3 million year old jawbone from a woolly rhinoceros. I was delighted at the rows and rows of little boxes, each containing skeletons of local animals and birds - they use them to help identify the remains of their ancestors. Actually, the boxes of mammoth bones weren't so little. I asked where the modern skeletons came from, and he showed me the "animal morgue" refrigerator, which is exactly what it sounds like. There was a whole shelf of prairie dogs in ziplock bags. As a girl whose favorite childhood toy was her dissection kit, I found this pretty cool. Then we went out for huevos rancheros. I may reciprocate and take him to the IMAX theatre.

Holiday Inn

For the past couple of Christmases my family has had the good sense to move into a hotel for Christmas dinner. The food is good and plentiful, there's a suite for late-night partying, people can retire to their rooms when overwhelmed by holiday intensity, and nobody has to cook or do extensive cleanup. Plus, the hotels have pools with awesome water slides, which keeps the kids amused, but, more important, also keeps me amused. This year's water slide was truly exceptional - four stories high, and mostly enclosed and therefore dark and extra scary. My young cousins soon discovered that the acoustic qualities of the tube were such that if you shouted into it, the person in the slide would hear your voice as though it were directly behind them, thus enhancing the freakout factor.

Dinner was a buffet in one of the ballrooms. The vegetarian option consisted primarily of an endless supply of pierogies, which made my day since there isn't much Ukrainian cuisine available in Lubbock. The ballroom was clearly equipped for business presentations, as there were six digital projectors and screens installed in the room. In support of the Christmas theme, they were each showing a video of a fireplace - not unlike the fireplace channels one sees on tv at this time of year. It did strike me as strange, though, to have six of them in one room, and all showing the same fireplace. Between that and the spooky water slide, it was a bit like spending Christmas in a Janet Cardiff installation. My young cousins embraced the opportunity for performance art by posing in the projection beam to make it look like they were being consumed by flames. This might have come across as mere mischief, but I preferred to read it at part of a larger tradition of video art. So there.

Millinery

I was working off the Christmas season's champagne cocktails on my treadmill while watching Lover Come Back, a delightful Doris Day/Rock Hudson movie. An eternal virgin and a gay man - sounds like the perfect relationship! Anyway, someday, when I get tenure and they can't get rid of me, I can start to teach crazy courses on my true passions, such as, Doris' amazing hat collection:
This hat is suitable for sitting at one's desk and thinking up ways to advertise furniture wax.

This hat says "Take me seriously! I'm a girl with a job!"

When it's time to have a serious talk about "our relationship", I always find it helps if I put a purple cone covered in pom-poms on my head.
Doris' segregated flowers tell us that she is experiencing internal conflict.
Rock, do you like my gigantic pink flower? It goes with my suit. (Note that at this point in the narrative, Rock has a beard because he has been roughing it in Canada.)

Luck

My New Year's Resolution is to be a more consistent blogger, since I have so many fans who depend on me for their Monday morning amusement. Here I go.

I spend a lovely Christmas in Winnipeg (more on that soon) that was marred only by that lame-o terrorist setting his pants on fire, resulting in a cascade of crazed overreaction from the TSA. Therefore, my day of return travel started at 3:30 am, giving me plenty of time to hang around airports. In Minneapolis, I noticed this video arcade, featuring a collection of aviation-themed games.

Lucky Lindy? The image in the center, if you haven't guessed, is Charles Lindbergh. The back wall is painted with details about his historic trans-Atlantic flight. Since, as I said, I had a lot of time to sit around on my travel day, I started to contemplate the naming of this arcade. It seems to me that Lindbergh is not someone who should be considered lucky. Skilled aviator? Yes. Strategic thinker? Yep. Good writer? Totally. But anybody whose child is kidnapped and murdered as a result of his fame should be exempt from the "lucky" label. If only it had occurred to me to go and explain this to the teenagers in the arcade and thus ruin their day.

Thanksgiving Smackdown

My students' final paper was due before Thanksgiving weekend - a tactical move on my part, since I would prefer not to read papers that have been thrown together in a haze of tryptophan and football. Still, they whined that they wanted to have the weekend to work on the paper. The conversation in class went like this:

Them: If you give us the weekend, the papers will probably be better.
Me: In my professional experience, you are wrong about that. Also, do you really want to have the paper hanging over you during Thanksgiving?
Them: Do YOU really want to grade papers during your Thanksgiving?
Me: I'm Canadian. I had my Thanksgiving a month ago. Nice try.
Them: You mean you aren't going to celebrate Thanksgiving because you're Canadian?
Me: I will have a meal where I eat too much, but that won't interfere with my professional life.
Them: But don't you want to watch football?
Me: I find few things less interesting than football.
(General shock and confusion. Muffled sound of student saying "That's twisted!")

Them: But I bet you like hockey!
Me: No.
(Stunned silence)
Them: Do you like to watch any sports?
Me: I enjoy watching the stranger Olympic events, like Luge and Curling. However, the Olympics will not take place until next semester. Your paper is still due on Tuesday, y'all.