I decided to try a new public forum this summer; it got briefly off the ground, but didn't move much beyond the prototype stage. I like the varying privacy levels here, and without any pressure to keep a Serious Blog for the General Record, I posted more frequent fluff about food and birds and my own absurdity, all while considering the amazing posts I would put up at the Phoenix Complex when I got around to writing them. That is the current state of things.
There are plenty of academic bloggers out there, but, I have noticed, very few of the serious, time-intensive blogs I've seen are written by people still doing coursework. For most people, coursework is a big brain-eater, and unless you're lucky enough to have convergent classes on fascinating topics it doesn't produce a wealth of blog content per se. Moreover, you have ample opportunities to talk about the material in seminar, or on discussion boards, and so the impulse to blog about it is muffled. If I were hugely dissatisfied with my program, I might post more; but I love my program, and in this instance love is the less garrulous emotion.
Also: most of you are probably aware by now that I'm a colossal perfectionist, of the quixotic and destructive kind— the ones who won't ever finish stories for fear they might be crap, who would rather not say a thing in class for fear of sounding uninformed, who will not try new things for fear of doing them badly, and who will devote far more energy to cheap self-criticism than to substantial self-improvement. This means, obviously, that blogging for a sizeable audience is paralyzingly hard. Even if it's anonymous, the thought of having . . . [I don't even know what— it's more or less an existential terror] . . . as a response to what I write is enough to keep me revising, deleting in frustration, and apologizing for long stretches. And because part of the fun of reading blogs is the spontaneity, extensive revision is counterproductive (and apologies are tiresome under any circumstances, no matter how readily they leap from your mouth).
But because I still believe anything worth doing badly is worth doing well, and because I don't think I have it in me to keep two separate blogs going, I'm going to move this endeavor to the Phoenix Complex for 2008 (with a few possible posts this month, including a review of Gomorrah). I may still post privately here, and for the time being I'll leave the archives up. I also have a hard time taking it on faith that anyone besides the known reader-commenters read this thing, but the URL has circulated enough that some strangers may be keeping up with it (I don't keep user logs here). If that's you, thanks for reading.
When the girls out here— and the guy I just held the door for— say "thank you," they in fact say "thenk yow", or "think yo," or something between, and then they shuffle off in their flip-flops. I can't reproduce this pronunciation at all; I've only ever heard it on this coast. Got any data on this?
I think I'd feel better with an acorn woodpecker around. These guys are loud! Loud, loud, loud, and they look like cartoon birds. They are all over campus.
Like most woodpeckers, they are wholly adorable, and they cache acorns in acorn matrices of their own design. Image from wikipedia.
Things are basically great. I wouldn't complain unless I could face the sources of complaint without despair. It would be much harder to say anything negative about my life if I were still working at the bank— I'd just talk about how much money I was saving up to invest in various socially and environmentally friendly things, and you'd hear from me once a year.
For the sake of context, let that be said.
