It was cramped, it was dark—it was fun.
I shared the office with several good people over the years—Rachel Nikolaev, Julie Groesch, JeFF Stumpo, Olympia Sibley, the great Olivia Burgess.
Furniture for grad offices—the lamps and chairs, at least—was whatever you could find left out in the hallways. I went through a lot of chairs before I snagged one that wasn’t excruciating.
I like that comfortably cluttered desk.
I moved the Alfred Jacob Miller print with me to Kansas in 2012, and brought it back with me to Texas in 2015, and it hangs over my desk at home right now. The masks are downstairs in my apartment now. The clip-on lamps are in my current office at A&M now. The xmas lights are in my A&M office (yes, the same string of lights!).
(I haven’t been to my nice big windowed A&M office since March 9. I keep threatening to go down there and collect a few books I need, but I’m too terrified of the goddamn virus!) (But some day…).
I don’t tape things to my door anymore—one of the custodians when I was in Kansas said it was very hard to scrape tape off doors. So—I’m sorry about how I left that door, Blocker custodial staff.
Behind the door some sad grad student had scrawled a line from Melville: "Hold fast to the dreams of your youth."
Overall memory of this office: good, positive, would cocoon in there again and get some work done if I had a better chair.