Excuses for not posting.

1. Nothing too interesting has happened this week.
2. The leaves are changing colors, it's cooling down, and this is my favorite time of year.
3. I suddenly have so much reading to do that I think my eyeballs might shrivel up and fall out of my head.
4. Masud is visiting for the week and he stole my computer desk.
5. I got a C on my first stats exam and the shame has made me crawl under a rock.
6. I attended the Conference on South Asia and spent three days listening to presentations with titles like, "Disjuncture and Difference in Feminist Transnational Practices: Imagining Women through Law, Documentary Cinema and the State". Brain might explode.
7. Also at said conference, I bought five books: Unraveling the Garment Industry, Juki Girls - Good Girls, Explaining Growth in South Asia, Doing Development Research, and Urban Women in Contemporary India. I'm a book whore. I love them, I spend lots of money on them, and then have no time to read them.
8. I've been cooking. I made some really gross chocolate chip cookies (something went wrong). I think I'll return to frozen prepared foods for this week.


So I hope that I'll be able to return to regular posting soon, but don't hold your breath. Until then, here's a question for you to discuss in the comments: If academic writers presumably were forced to read thousands (and thousands) of pages of boring academic writing during their training, why do they make their own writing so boring? Is it part of the rite of passage of graduate school? If you plan to write a book, wouldn't you want to make it non-boring for your readers? Take this book I'm reading on transnational conflicts. Exciting title, right? But here's an actual sentence: "The intervention of agency at the level of the global system in the form of transnational functionaries from the US state and the IFIs liaised with agency at the local level in the form of ascendant transnational fractions." I had to read it four times just to understand it, and then I wanted to poke out my own eyes.