Some Thoughts from A Really Scattered Weekend

- The girl two machines in front of me at the gym today had a ridiculously nice ass. Like the Platonic ideal of what a white girl's ass should be. To quote Ron Burdgandy, I wasn't even mad, just impressed. I was tempted to tap her on the shoulder and ask what her strength routine is but I decided in time that that was kiiiind of creepy so I abstained.

- Big shout-out to Dmitri for drunkenly hassling me about learning and using the multi-touch shortcuts on my new computer. Because man, they are amazing. It's not quite as "how did I live without this?" as when I first switched to a Mac and learned about keyboard shortcuts, but it's definitely increased the ease with which I navigate documents, especially in terms of web surfing and reading long articles. It's a good reminder to me not to be a secret Luddite who never upgrades her software because learning about all the "improvements" is too much of a pain. Turns out calling them "improvements" is not merely a scam to make you reboot - software upgrades are useful! (See also: my giving numerous students higher grades on presentations because I didn't realize that the reason their powerpoints looked so much better than mine was because they were using a version that didn't predate the Bush administration.)

Also - considering how much money I didn't have I paid for this thing, it only makes sense to get as much out of it as possible.

- Holy crap my back is sore. (Doo-dah, doo-dah...) 

- After a successful (almost too much so) day at the mall with Marshelle and Jessie, I realize the reason I feel like all my clothes are boring and plain is not in fact because it's hard to find any other kind these days, but merely because I almost never go shopping anymore (and when I do, for the past year or so it's pretty much exclusively been at Target).

- I've been starting to think that the question of whether or not a given dude has any potential traction as someone who'd fit well with me (and vice versa, of course) is not in fact as difficult to shed light on as I've been feeling it is for the past year or so - but simply a matter of asking myself if I could imagine him working at a Tarsa family Christmas. Not necessarily instantly fitting in like one born to the role (I'm looking at you, Tom Harper) - just that the idea of them there doesn't make me wince in discomfort. I feel like much wasted time in my romantic history could have been avoided if I had realized this earlier on. But then - such is youth.

- Writing that last point started off being about dudes but definitely ended up being about my family. And has made me realize that I really miss them. I think a lot of my distance from them over the past year or so is more a defense mechanism than anything else. I can't see any of them more than a few times a year at this stage in my life. There's nothing I can do about that. I was brought up to value opportunity over geographical fidelity, and my life to date reflects that. But damn - sometimes I wish that was not among the family values (especially the ones I got an extra-large dose of as the oldest) and we'd all settled down within an easy drive of home. (Which would still be in New Hampshire in this fantasy, btw.)

- This weekend has completely fucked my sleep cycle and is threatening to set off my anxiety issues about falling asleep. Joy. Hopefully I can drag myself out of bed early enough tomorrow to start repairing the damage. 

- Some really great, productive reading and thinking for my prelims question this weekend - somehow, between the not sleeping and the staying out too late and the shopping excursions. Looking at a few theoretical approaches to the word vs image question in regards to meaning-making and then finishing with what amounted to a practical-minded and applied consideration of the same issue by Edward Tufte (whose Beautiful Evidence I am 100% assigning next time I teach 201) was incredibly useful. It highlighted the benefits and shortcomings of both theoretical and practical approaches to the question (and all questions, I guess) - both from a scholarly standpoint and a pedagogical one. 

And less convolutedly - if you're looking for a good starting point for thinking about how to begin bringing multimodal work into your teaching (or your own writing), this is a really great book to check out. It's by no means perfect -  its focus on quantitative content doesn't always result in a clean map onto Humanities writing, and he's kind of a jackass at many points. But by jettisoning all the anxiety about the word-vs-image hierarchy and simply asking "how can we use the visual to present evidence in as effective and beautiful a way as possible?", he's able to come up with some truly incredible ideas and illustrations of them.

Note to Self: Do it Right the First Time

So when I got my new computer I was (understandably, I think) too eager to start poking around on it and experiencing its amazing new speed and clarity and much louder speakers and such to transfer my files properly; rather than use Migration Manager or whatever the hell it's called, I simply used a portable drive to ferry over my music, photos and documents wholesale. This worked fine in the short term, but cut out all the associated information with my photos and music - playlists, play counts, events, etc. And as I am a huge packrat when it comes to personal records of all kinds, this has been annoying me. I've actually managed to put off plugging my iPod into the new machine so as not to lose the old playlists and settings. And for some reason, I decided that this afternoon was a good time to import all those settings and such.

It's a huge pain. Half the time the directions from Apple are ambiguous about whether a particular transfer technique will preserve the info I want (play count is a particular bitch in that regard), and the other half my old computer just isn't up for the task. Below, a selection of my thoughts on the process:

- How cute and somewhat twee that Apple has updated the Energy Saver light bulb icon to be a compact fluorescent.

- This is so easy. Well, not for what I want to do now - but it would have been if I'd just looked up how to do it in the first place. Goddamnit.

- Wait, is this going to make duplicates of all the files I already imported? All 67 gigs of them? Shit. [rushes off to move iPhoto and iTunes libraries to alternate locations]

- ...4 and a half hours?? Fuck that noise. I'll run it while I'm at Benoit's thing tonight.

****

I'm seeing more spinning wheel than cursor over here

My new computer cannot get here fast enough. Ever since I ordered it in the wee hours Friday night it's like a veil has been lifted from my eyes and I see that life with my current one is and has been for months now like being nearsighted but never having had glasses: you have a vague idea things aren't working quite as well as they could be, but can continue to live with it because you don't really realize just how shit things are.

Right now I'm like a nearsighted person who's been to the doctor and looked through the proper set of lenses in that flippy-lens machine/mask thing, but is still waiting for her glasses to arrive. The scales have fallen from my eyes (oh mixing metaphors) and man - my computer is *awful.* SO slow, SO loud, SO prone to rebooting itself one out of every 5 times I close it.