Apology and Meme

I'm back again from the Real World. Sorry about the hiatus. After getting back from the honeymoon, I collapsed into "Get! My! Life! Together!" Mode. My summer to-do list is pretty formidable:

SCHOOL RELATED
1. Write and present paper at National Women's Studies Association conference, End of June
2. Write paper for Middle Eastern Studies Association (draft due October 15, but best to get it done now)
3. Start my field seminar reading and preparing for my first field exam in January (for those who aren't academics: you know how all your college professors had read the same 200 books? That's what a field seminar is for.)

MONEY RELATED
1. Figure out how to make enough money to get by without stipend this summer.
2. Sell all the leftover wedding and other crap on Craigslist, Amazon, Ebay. (Freecycle whatever is left at the end.)

LIFE RELATED
1. Clean the freakin' house.
2. Garden a lot.
3. Preserve local and organic veggies for use in the winter.
4. Watch a whole lot of CSI.
5. Blog like a lunatic.

So far I'm doing reasonably well: the NWSA paper is just about ready to go, I'm slogging my way through incredibly boring books, I've got twice the usual babysitting which is fixing the money thing, the process of blanching and freezing veggies is proceeding apace, and there are about a million CSIs (both Las Vegas and Miami; the original is a better show, but Miami is both beautifully shot and stupid beyond my wildest dreams, so it's a different sort of pleasurable) sitting on the TiVo right now.

Now it's time to work on the blogging thing. Bear with me. I'll probably do a post every day or every two days or so until I'm done with the posts I have in the queue.

In the meantime, bazu tagged me like a MILLION YEARS AGO to list some favorite blogs. I thought for a while about what I should do. A really high percentage of my readers here are foodies, I think; however, my personal blogroll is pretty evenly split into three categories: politics, feminism, and food, with a small subcategory of blogging about the academy. If anyone is interested in what academics I read, I'll be happy to share, but for now I'll post two each on politics and feminism, and one food blog.

• Informed Comment. To be terribly blunt, if you aren't reading Juan Cole, you probably don't have a good sense of what is happening in Iraq. I mean, unless you are reading 3-4 Arabic newspapers a day and have a background in Iranian and Iraqi history. In which case, you're probably set. I don't always agree with Cole's analysis, but the sheer facticity of his blog makes it really necessary. Every day, he starts out his posts with a body count of Iraqis, Americans, and others killed in Iraq. I think we need that wakeup call, and I think we need it every day.
• Abu Aardvark. Marc Lynch writes mainly about the Arab media these days. His analysis of media, public spheres, and American-Arab relations are pretty excellent. This is a little more wonkish than IC, but, hey, I'm a doctoral candidate, I'm SUPPOSED to be a wonk.
• Koonj. Shabana Mir is an extremely smart writer. Her discussions of religion, academia, and motherhood are powerful and sensitive. She is posting less frequently than she used to (due to the very real politics of being on the academic job market), but everything she writes is still worth reading.
• Bitch, Ph.D. Are you a woman in academia? Then get over there. All the snark you can handle, and a lot of very good writing about motherhood, the politics of women's bodies, and bras.
• Tigers and Strawberries. Barbara's recipes for Indian, Southeast Asian, and Chinese food are incredibly useful if, like me, you love the flavors but can't quite figure out how to get them at home. She is very methodical in how she writes, which is an absolute blessing. Also she has a cute baby who she posts pictures of a lot. (I'm realizing I'm writing about babies a lot. Hmm.)

OK! Back to the CSI watching and green-bean-blanching. It's a good life.