Questing for the Quotidian

Choice is good, but there's such a thing as too much. This morning, for instance, if I had a burning desire to find the answer to the question "Is Tom Cruise a Modern Fridolin?," I could listen to a scholarly paper by that title, but if I did, I'd have to skip the one called "No Sex, Please, We're Arthurian," which is in the same session as " 'Don't worry, I won't let them rape you': Repellant Homoeroticism in King Arthur 2004." Some paper titles promise to satisfy different kinds of hunger: "The Chop Suey Craze in Early Twentieth-Century Popular Culture" is in the same session as "Hess's Strawbery Pie and Community Memory" and "Apple Nation: Semiotics of the Native Americanin Washington's Apple Culture." If I want to pursue mortification of the flesh, on the other hand, I could attend a paper called "Broken Bodies and Wrinkled Faces: Humor and Disability in Contemporary Birthday Cards" or another called "Too Fat, Too Hairy, Too (In)visible: Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome and Normative Femininity." Or what about "Women Collecting Doll Parts: Beauty, the Uncanny, and Voodoo as a Source of Bodily Subversion"?

More appealing titles include "Dames, Babes, Battleaxes, and Tomatoes: Women and the Three Stooges" or "Act I: Handsome Man Rescues Prostitute," but I have to look pretty hard to find a title without a colon: "Hip Hop Video Vixens." The Buzzword Bingo grand prize winner would have to be "Dynamic Indigenous Transnational Exhanged Reinscribing Frozen Reification: The Windigo Spirit in Post/Colonial Cinema," but if I go to that paper then I won't be able to hear "Here There Be Ronsters: Gender Trouble in the Scooby-Doo Movies" or "NBA 'Sign Language': A Case Study of Detroit Pistons' Fans and Their Acts of Sign Making."

The paper title that appeals to me most, though, provides little clue to the paper's content: "The Quest for the Quotidian." Story of my life, but do I really want to hear a paper on that? The quotidian is so mundane, so ordinary, so everyday...but when I try to choose from among all these fascinating papers, today's quotidian quest looks almost heroic.