You’ve all visited the sites I’m talking about, sites like, "A Starving English Major’s Complete Exposition of Jane Austen’s Opuses: Chapter by Chapter." Intrigued as you are by the premise that Jane Austen was not a Jacobite sympathizer as some suppose, but actually a precursor to what we today would call a ‘neoconservative,’ despite her oft-scathing critique of the English gentry, you browse over to http://www.imanenglishmajorwithnohopeforarealjobwhenigraduate.com/ and click on the tab for Mansfield Park.
As you prepare to indulge yourself in a detailed breakdown of chapter XXXIII, where Mr. Henry Crawford decides that he is most certainly in love with Fanny, who is most certainly uncertain as to whether she too is in love (or whether Ms. Austin loved those dastardly French radicals), you notice the dreaded webpage death sentence: Page currently under construction. You scroll to the bottom of the page and, in six point font you read: page last updated 08 May 2002. The date leads you to surmise that our beloved English major, exhausted from an all-nighter writing a term paper (with a semi-obscure title like "Game/Genre: A critique of Generic Formulas in Video Games in the Context of ‘The Real’") spent 08 May 2002 designing this site rather than studying for his final in Comparative Literature 241. Reading Spinoza and Leibniz with Gilles Deleuze. Unfortunately for him, he still passed his final and was handed a degree the next day, forcing him to put aside his plans for world wide web dominance and search for a real job. (After a summer of flipping hamburgers, Mr. English Major graduate enrolled in grad school.)
No, I say! My blog will not serve as a monument to yet-another-one of my passing whims and fancies. So it is that I am about to (drumroll, please) update you on the life and times of me, myself and I. I’m deploying to Iraq. In a matter of days. I will be there all summer. It will be hot. My world will be shades of brown. I will miss my wife. I will miss my dog. I will miss my cat. The dog will miss me. The cat might miss me. The wife? The wife will miss me at first, but I know she’s going to get used to having the whole bed to herself. When I come home she won’t want to share it with me. I’ll have to set up my one man tent (in tactical woodland camouflage!) in the backyard and pretend I’m on a field exercise.
What? Not enough of an update you say? How about if I add pictures? Will that appease the roaring masses of my fans? Don’t cry for me, Argentina! I promise to run for vice-president, someday! (Please ignore the last two sentences–I do not wish to compare myself to Eva Peron. I have better hair.)
Pictures it is, then. Attached below for your viewing pleasure is one photograph of Melissa and I on the day I was promoted to Lieutenant and one photograph of the two of us at the 2007 Seabee Ball.
As a final aside, the plural of opus can also be opera.
Love,
Peter
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