Last night Special Ops fell asleep holding her biography of Stalin open in her hand, with her pen poised over the page.
Special Ops woke up at 3 a.m. and found herself in this odd statue-esque pose, as though at any moment, even in her sleep, she might feel the need to write down some notes on the Mensheviks, or underline some great Robert Conquest sentence to add to her Special Ops files … and it’s better to be always ready for such an emergency. Falling asleep while reading a novel, or a book of poetry is one thing. But falling asleep clutching a biography of Stalin is strictly Special Ops territory.
“But falling asleep clutching a biography of Stalin is strictly Special Ops territory.”
HAHAHAHA!!!
What about falling asleep clutching Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic Wars? That’s MY latest specialty! Do I qualify to the Special Ops Club? :)
I’ve always been laughed at in my family, due to my insane habit of passing out while reading and remaining in the same position for hours without moving. Sometimes the spell is broken by the book falling on my nose, but mostly: I. do. not. move.
Ceci – hahahahaha You are TOTALLY Special Ops!
Ceci – I can’t stop laughing at the image in my head I have of you falling asleep, in some alert reading pose – holding a book of Caesar’s Commentaries upright … as though you are ready to get back to reading at a moment’s notice! ha!!!
If I’d have only been Special Ops in college, my professors wouldn’t have yelled at me so often.
Poor Caesar – actually, I am loving his Commentaries, but I was so tired the other night, and it was so unbearably HOT and STICKY, that I didn’t dare move. I just passed out, literally. And woke up almost one hour later in the same exact pose.
Anyway – your falling asleep while holding the pen poised over the page: now that is a level of perfection in imitating reading statues that I may never achieve… I am not worthy, HAHAHAHA!!!
I was nodding off last night over a paper by Sternthal, Tybout, and Calder (Journal of Consumer Research, 1987) on confirmatory vs. comparative approaches to empirical research. Not for the first time, either; it’s every bit as riveting as it sounds.
I’m not sure what territory that falls into, but it’s not Special Ops. Given the general state of social science research, maybe it’s “crawl-up-yer-own-(redacted)-and-disappear” territory.
When I was in graduate school, we had Cancer Center grand rounds every Friday at noon and other conferences throughout the week, usually at lunchtime. Without fail, even when the topics were of great interest to him, one of the post-docs in the lab would doze off about 5-10 minutes into the talk/presentation. He would of course have his notebook open with pen in hand. He would wake up for about one minute once or twice during the hour and immediately start taking notes…you know, just immediately start taking notes on someones data regarding growth factor synergy as it relates to jak-stat signaling or something else equally mind numbing. I would give him crap and ask why not just bring a cot to the lecture and quit kidding everybody, but he insisted that he would catch many important points in the 120 seconds of lucidity that he experienced.
“I Told You So, You Fucking Fools”
or … that’s what Robert Conquest reportedly wanted to call the new edition of his book The Great Terror when it came out with updated information – information which basically not only vindicated Conquest (who had been pilloried for years),…