I win the week

Dear everyone,

This week, I win. If anyone else out there had a good week, congratulations and all, but you're really an also-ran. I'm the big winner.

Monday, I got re-elected to the Sierra Club Board. Anyone who has hung out with me in the past month or so knows that this was no sure thing. Anyone who saw me over the weekend knows that I was positively flipping out about it. Turns out I placed third (top 5 are elected, I was 5th last time), and had a good 4,000 vote margin between me and sixth place. So woohoo, score one for me.

And this afternoon I defended my dissertation prospectus. For those not entirely fluent in nerd, that gives me a cool new acronym (ABD - All-but-dissertation) and is one of the few major signposts left on the road to academic success. Now all I have to do is conduct my research and write the damn thing (piece of cake. Right? Right?!?) Anyone who has hung out with me in the past, oh, couple of years knows that this was no sure thing. I'm excited about my project (on MoveOn, Democracy for America, and progressive bloggers) and have now gotten the go-ahead sign from my advisors.

Therefore, I win the week. I can phone it in on Thursday and Friday, because I'm so far ahead that there's no way anyone is going to catch up with me. Time to rest my starters and give the bench some solid minutes. Woohoo.

I am convinced these sorts of things only happen to me...

So I was cleaning up my place a bit today and also putting together a new table from IKEA. That required a socket wrench, which was under my bookcase. I wriggled it free, no problem, but that tilted my generally-unstable bookcase just enough that the whole thing fell on me.

I'm fine, mostly because I wasn't in the dead center of the thing. Only the books on the right side of the case (about 50 of them) fell on top of me. Most of those were in a particularly large stack that I've been actively working with for my dissertation prospectus defense (which is next Wednesday, btw).

There is so much academic humor in this that I'm almost speechless. I was nearly crushed under the weight of my literature review!