After having lunch with a fellow blogger and academic, I head over to Left Bank Books where I get a chance to promote my blog by leaving my blog card.

And here I’m trying on another outfit, going for a Midwestern look. I was hoping that it would help me fit in better. But as you can see, the shirt is hopelessly small.

Oh well, who needs to fit in anyway?

Sorry for the cutesy pun title, by the way.

I’m trying on clothes at my favorite Macy’s. I know this dress looks boring but I promise to show you how I decorate it with my beautiful scarves and shawls of which I have a huge collection and you will agree that it makes sense to buy it.

Plus it’s great for work because you can put any jacket over it. If the weather ever gets to the point of requiring a jacket, that is.

A young man at my favorite cafe left his computer and his bag and just wandered off. I remember this feeling of being so at home at “your coffee-shop” that you feel as safe in it as you do at home.

In contrast, people at my tiny town forty minutes away treat the neighborhood coffee-shop with the respect and detachment of folks who are not used to hanging out at a place for no reason whatsoever other than because that’s what they want to do. Small town people see cafes in a strictly utilitarian way: they grab what they need and run. The leisurely people-watching is something you only experience in big cities.

N drops me off at my favorite coffee-shop and drives a way to work. What I love about N is that he is completely unpretentious. It would never occur to him, for example, to buy a new car for reasons of prestige. A car is supposed to take you places, so who cares what it looks like, what model it is, and how much it costs?

I’m not completely unpretentious myself, to put it mildly, and I really admire people who are devoid of all pretentiousness.

The first time I saw the Arch was when I was taken back to the airport after my campus visit by a kind future colleague. Of course, neither he nor I knew we were bound to become colleagues.

I was convinced that the campus visit had been a disaster, so I viewed the Arch with resentment. At that point, it symbolized failure to me.

It turned out that I did get the job, though, and now I’m quite addicted to the Arch.

If I’d seen this billboard saying “Women’s Conference” (I’m not sure if you can read what it says) even just a few years ago, I’d be very happy.

“Ah, feminism, scholarship, research, human rights, science,” I would think.

I’m a lot more jaded nowadays, so I immediately knew that this was some religious outfit educating women on their wifely duties.

When we came close enough to the billboard for me to read the small lettering at the bottom, I confirmed my guess. This “conference” is organized by a ministry and has to do with love and relationships. Because, as we all know, women need regular reminders only to care about love and relationships.

One day I know I will see a billboard saying, “Women’s Conference! Scholars discuss feminism and women’s rights across the globe!”

Today I will be documenting one of my regular trips to St. Louis. If you are not into photo-logs, then you will find this boring. But it’s just for today and it’s something I always wanted to do, so bear with me, OK?

There are these people who are so popular with the representatives of the sex that interests them that they become very spoiled and picky. Nobody is good enough, everybody is somehow flawed, no one deserves their attention. This candidate’s ears are funny, this one has an annoying laugh, that one has a weird shirt in his closet. Never mind that s/he doesn’t wear the weird shirt. Who needs a person who is capable of owning such a piece of clothing? There has to be something tragically wrong with them. The Spoiled type will disregard every wonderful thing about the admirer to obsess about some insignificant little detail. This is one of those cases where too much choice is a bad thing.

However, if Spoiled meets somebody who manages not to annoy them for the first couple of weeks and avoids providing them with a reason to end the relationship, Spoiled will be so stricken by this novel feeling that s/he will elevate this unusual partner to the category of special people s/he considers herself to be part of and will worship them forever.

People interested in Spoiled should try to be as silent and evasive at the very beginning as possible. Once the trial period is over, Spoiled will become unbreakably loyal forever.

I’m shaky, I’m anxious, I drop everything, I feel overwhelmed by every little task. There seems to be so much to do, yet I flail between tasks like a headless chicken, accomplishing nothing. The idea of getting myself to a departmental meeting on Thursday is daunting. It looms ahead like a formidable task of terrifying proportions. I try answering student emails but can’t formulate a single sentence. The need to choose what to make for dinner scares me. When I imagine that starting next Monday I will have to get up, get dressed, put on make-up, and go teach my classes gives me a panic attack.

“What is it?” I ask myself. “What’s happening to me?”

I vaguely remember reading about this. All of my symptoms sound very familiar.

Finally, it hits me: I have the “housewife syndrome”!

I’m not even a real housewife. In these past four months, I worked a lot. I taught my online course, translated, worked on my research. Still, being at home, away from the structured environment of the workplace, the hierarchy, the network of daily professional relationships has turned me into this indecisive, unproductive, disorganized creature who is daunted by the simplest tasks.

The year I spent writing my dissertation produced very similar results, only they were more intense. It took me almost a year to get fully rehabilitated and reintegrated into the workplace.

If anybody has any advice or suggestions on how to get myself together, I will appreciate that.