Ok, so 9:15 on Thursday morning.  As soon as I finish this post, I'm going to start working on my conference talk.  I don't know why, but it's like I have to write myself into writing.  Did that make sense?  Yesterday was a good day in terms of getting work done.  As a reward, I bought some wildflower seeds to sprinkle in the wooded area around the perifery (how do you spell that?) of my lawn.  I'm pretty excited.  Spring in New England is a much bigger deal than in central or southern CA, let me tell you.  I remember my first spring in Vermont thinking, "Oh, I finally get it.  I understand what spring really is."  And seriously, after such a long, cold, relentless winter, spring is a big relief and so joyful all at the same time.  And after it's been in the 20s for so many days 45 or 50 feels really good.  There are days when I take the dogs outside for a potty break, and Guinnie especially just wants to lay on her back in the grass, sunning her belly.  And it's like I know how she feels:  Your enitre being wants to soak up warmth and sun all the way to your bones.  I'm hoping that today it won't rain so that, even if it's only high 50s, I can sit on the deck and read and listen to my iPod.  It's just so wonderful.  Ok, so maybe I should move on to Twilight, which isn't so spring-timey.  In fact, it's set in a particularly dreary part of the Pacific Northwest.  So far, I'm finding the writing of this whole thing less a chore than I was expecting.  And in spite of dispising the novels, I'm rather enjoying thinking about them and analyzing them.  I feel like I'm mostly doing a close reading and that I should have some sort of theoretical framework to which I can refer.  I've never been very good at that.  And I'm sure that the paper will work well enough for this particular conference, so I guess it's fine, but I kind feel like it's really not much more than a glorified undergrad paper.  Glorified only in the sense that I do speak with authority.  Oy.  What would Eco do?  As you may know, chatting with Umberto Eco is my big fantasy.  Maybe it's like porn for academics--I really don't know.  And normally, I really bristle at the use of "porn" as metaphor anyway.  But seriously, I often think my way into papers or talks or just topics by this whole imaginative game of what Eco would say and what I'd say and how he'd think I'm just dazzlingly clever, or at least "adorable."  (As me later about the whole "adorable" thing.  I'm not sure it belongs on my blog.)  And sometimes I wonder if Eco would be at all weirded out if he learned that he's the nexus of my fantasy, because I'm pretty sure he doesn't think of himself that way.  Ok, I really need to get to work.