So, as is quite obvious, I am not tracking my academic life on this blog anymore. Honestly, I just found that I had too much to do and this was not a project I felt that I could really keep up with. I probably should have posted a “good-bye” post at the beginning of this past semester, but I guess I figured my silence would suffice.

I may return to this when I finish coursework and am working on comps and my dissertation because, while my time will still be filled with work, the rhythm of it will be more conducive to keeping up something like this.

If you are interested in following my personal life and the various things I find interesting (some of which may indeed be focused on academic stuff), feel free to check out Living the Liminal.

So, mayhap I’ll be seeing you here in 2012. Until then, be well and dream big.

Sometimes I wonder if, with all that is happening in the world, I’m doing the right thing with my life. Should I be out there in the streets or trying to smash into the corridors of power and make a difference socially and politically? If I believe in theatre and the arts, should I be devoting my energies to bringing it to the people who have the least opportunity to access it instead of to those privileged enough to go to college?

What, really, am I doing, and why? There are days when I can answer that question and feel positive about myself. Today is not one of them. In part, it’s probably because I’m at the end of the semester and up against writing deadlines that make my life stressful and I never, ever feel positive about the papers I write at the end of the semester. Still, sometimes I do wonder.

As you can tell, posts here have slowed down to a crawl and odds are I won’t be doing much over the next 15 days other than working on papers and grading and trying to work on papers and grading. I definitely plan on taking a good hard look at what I need to do better next semester to keep things a bit more balanced and productive in my life and how to manage being both a PhD student and a creative, healthy person at the same time. Or as close to healthy as I can get. Look for that sometime in the second half the December. Until then, I leave you with one of the more amusing spam comments that have attempted to be posted to the site.

I commitment never thoughts the dead for now I went to France and Germany, it was my finest respite ever. Western Europe countries are great repayment for tourists, as there are illusive attractions, beautiful landscapes and you can comprise believable in good time there. The prices could be slash, but pacific is quality prosperous there.

Seriously, Dada poetry or spam? Sometimes it’s hard to tell.

For all of you grad students or loved ones of grad students, good luck over the next couple of weeks.

Sometimes I regret starting this blog in my own name and wonder if I might be more productive with it if I’d chosen to be anonymous and felt safer talking about certain aspects of my experience in graduate school. For example, I don’t feel like I can really address some of my feelings on the theatre produced by the department, or certain dynamics between professors and students, or even students and other students. Not that I would want to turn this into a gossip fest, but it might be nice to tease out some of the complications of working toward a PhD with an eye to the actuality of working in a specific department.

On the other hand, as I care about theatre, theatre pedagogy, and how theatre departments operate within the larger field of academia, these are issues that I will always grapple with and probably now is as good a time as any to develop strategies that are respectful to my colleagues while allowing me to be as honest as possible. This is a challenge for me because bad theatre and poor teaching are among the things in this world that make me get angry and very, very riled up. Again, however, now seems as good a time as any to start learning how to handle this challenge.

Any tips?

Oscar Brockett, the world’s foremost theater historian and a former University of Texas professor, died early Sunday morning after suffering a massive stroke late Saturday.

Brockett, 87, leaves behind hundreds of former students and colleagues around the world, as well as a daughter, Francesca Brockett, and her husband, Dr. James Pedicano of Austin. (Link)

There’s no doubt that the field lost a remarkably influential and well-known historian. Please click through to the Austin360 site for more information.