My world is all about potty-talk these days. Except in my case, it is the literal rather than metaphorical potty. I never expected to spend so much time discussing excrement. And really, there are other things I'd rather do. But the end result (I hope!) will be that I don't have to change diapers anymore, which I have to admit is rather appealing. The audio-visual aids for this purpose are really atrocious. The books are all badly rhymed and poorly written in general with lines like �The potty�s where I pee and poop morning, noon and night.� After reading that, I think I�d steer clear of the whole apparatus, if I were a two-year-old. AJ seems unperturbed, however.

The most frightening thing we�ve encountered, however, is this video, featuring the catchy song, �I�m a super duper pooper.� It won an award. And if you�re really committed, you could also get the squeezably soft diapered bear that sings �I�m a super duper pooper� when you squeeze its paw. Somebody please shoot me now. Even AJ didn�t go for this one.

But while AJ�s been working on his personal habits, I�ve been trying to hone my own (but not in the bathroom, in case you were wondering). I�ve recently been corresponding with a friend and fellow academic about work habits and the process of habituation. I�ve recently been feeling like my diss has been going better because I�ve developed a pretty rigid routine for myself. My friend feels that there is also a danger in habit, that it can result in stale thinking and pointed out that Schopenhauer recommended changing ones habits every six months. My response was that if you�re changing on a regular schedule, isn�t that habit too?

This actually reminds me of one a high school English teacher I had. He was a wonderful teacher and it is through conversations with him that I had my first exposure to all kinds of things that continue to be of serious interest to me � musical minimalism, Laurie Anderson, John Cheever, and French avant-garde film, among other things. But he was very quirky. He had a rule that we could never sit in the same seat two days in a row in his class. The idea was that it would break us out of habitual thinking. But of course, as we pointed out, this became habit too. And most of us, I think, tended to alternate between the same two seats. He also taught much of the first class standing on his desk with a wastebasket on his head, but that's another story.

The same friend has reminded me, however, that academics can get in the gutter with the best of them. Where my friend teaches, there is a course entitled �Analytic Techniques� that is abbreviated everywhere as �Anal Techniques,� resulting in widespread snickering. And in my own personal gutter, I had to turn of a PBS documentary a couple of days ago (I no longer even remember what it was about) because the first expert they called on had the unfortunate last name of Titballs. Yeah, I really am over the age of 12. I swear. But all I could think of were the historian bits of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

And now that I�ve returned us to the gutter where we began, I�d better sign off.

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