So I've been wanting to get my livejournal printed and bound for awhile now, and so today, as a means of putting off work, I took the initial step of running it through LJBook's pdf creation app (which can then be edited and submitted to one of numerous online book publishers). I figured it would be too long for one volume, so I set it to include everything through graduation - the first four years I had it.
...that shit is *1100 pages long.* More than 375,000 words. I knew I wrote in it a lot as an undergrad but daaaaaaamn. By comparison, the next four years take up a mere 187 pages - granted I moved my public blogging here in the middle of that time and also did a lot of paper journalling for awhile in there too, but still. Wow.
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label writing. Show all posts
Sunday, September 18, 2011
Sunday, September 11, 2011
First weekend back in the game
Ten years ago today I walked into homeroom after Senior Assembly just in time to see the second tower fall. My memory of the scene is incredibly vivid - particularly Mr. Raymond watching, how he was standing, his complete fixation yet lack of visible outward emotional sign. (This incredibly vivid visual recall of the moment of realization is something I know is incredibly common, and is one of the things that fascinates me most about 9/11 from a public memory perspective - that despite the incredible attention paid in academic work to the visual impact of media images, for me and many others the most vivid and personally "iconic" image of the event is relatively banal.) I remember seeing the first crash on TV while in Bio and laughing, everyone thinking it must be some stupid lost pilot in a Cessna. I remember wanting to feel it more deeply/seriously than I did, but really just reacting to the drama. How little I knew. How young I was.
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I'm reading through my long rambly draft of my prelims question to prepare for my meeting with Christa tomorrow, and it's actually kind of encouraging. I had been dreading it, but it turns out there's really a lot of good stuff here. And it reminds me that I often am capable of being a pretty damn good writer. Which in a time where I'm feeling pretty insecure about my ability to finish this shit and pass, is a welcome feeling.
It was a remarkably full/eventful weekend. [Aside - I have *got* to kick this habit I've fallen into of using slashes rather than making relatively simple word choices. It started in late spring in an effort to facilitate faster drafting, but it's gotten out of control.] I did a very respectable amount of work while also having two major social nights (each of a very different flavor to boot). After an August of the same monotone lethargy-tinged shit over and over day in and day out this is a nice change, but also an adjustment. It's hard to wrap my head around the fact that tomorrow starts another whole week full of activity, obligations and social potential. But while it's a change it's one I welcome. I'm tired, sure. But I'm alive again. The rhythm of the semester is cutting through the paralyzing influence of anxiety and grief - and for that I'm thankful.
Even if such liveliness, both personally and professionally, can sometimes be a pain in the ass..
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I'm reading through my long rambly draft of my prelims question to prepare for my meeting with Christa tomorrow, and it's actually kind of encouraging. I had been dreading it, but it turns out there's really a lot of good stuff here. And it reminds me that I often am capable of being a pretty damn good writer. Which in a time where I'm feeling pretty insecure about my ability to finish this shit and pass, is a welcome feeling.
It was a remarkably full/eventful weekend. [Aside - I have *got* to kick this habit I've fallen into of using slashes rather than making relatively simple word choices. It started in late spring in an effort to facilitate faster drafting, but it's gotten out of control.] I did a very respectable amount of work while also having two major social nights (each of a very different flavor to boot). After an August of the same monotone lethargy-tinged shit over and over day in and day out this is a nice change, but also an adjustment. It's hard to wrap my head around the fact that tomorrow starts another whole week full of activity, obligations and social potential. But while it's a change it's one I welcome. I'm tired, sure. But I'm alive again. The rhythm of the semester is cutting through the paralyzing influence of anxiety and grief - and for that I'm thankful.
Even if such liveliness, both personally and professionally, can sometimes be a pain in the ass..
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Facebook and Mechanical Perfection - On Faina's response to crediting her with discovering DamnYouAutoCorrect.com:
First comment to Faina (actually published): I strive to keep the balance between me and everyone else as close to 50-50 as possible when it comes to contributing to that project.
Second comment to Faina (only published here because it was that much too shaming): ...which can take effort, since my spending 3-4 minutes constructing the above sentence in order to subscribe to my increasingly particular aesthetic mechanical demands is becoming more and more typical.
...I'm not even going to tell you how long it took me to format the title of this post and determine if portions of it should be placed in the body instead. I think I'm being haunted by the Ghost of Current-Traditional Rhetoric.
Second comment to Faina (only published here because it was that much too shaming): ...which can take effort, since my spending 3-4 minutes constructing the above sentence in order to subscribe to my increasingly particular aesthetic mechanical demands is becoming more and more typical.
...I'm not even going to tell you how long it took me to format the title of this post and determine if portions of it should be placed in the body instead. I think I'm being haunted by the Ghost of Current-Traditional Rhetoric.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
[sings] "I Saw Five Hundred Thousand Tasks Come Sailing In, Come Sailing In, Come Sailing in..."
- Just cited my professor in the paper I'm writing for him. Here's hoping I'm correct in thinking his is not one of the articles I grossly misrepresented in my annotated bibliography, since I pulled the text from there...
- I fucking hate not having a parking space. I've literally paid more in tickets than I would have to get a spot. I need to do something about this. Anyone have a driveway/garage spot I can rent for the winter? (Bonus points if I can pay in cookies, hugs or stimulating discourse on visual rhetoric.)
- So while I'm slowly working to distance myself from my self-assigned title as the Worst Graduate Student of All Time, I'm falling deeper and deeper into the pit of being the Worst Adult of All Time. See: unpaid parking tickets, unspeakably stressful UW Credit Union debaucle, failure to have bought AN single Christmas gift, the fact that upon waking this morning and realizing I had eaten the last of my Candy Cane Kisses my first thought was "dammit, what the hell am I going to eat for breakfast now?", etc.
- I have still not watched the film upon which the bulk of my aforementioned paper's argument will rest. My draft currently starts with "[insert stuff about the scene where he walks btwn Towers here.]" That scene is the basis of my whole case.
- I discovered that Penny's recent gastric distress was almost certainly due to her new habit of eating my hair elastics. Guess that's a good reason to follow through on my constant resolutions to stop leaving them all over the house.
- It's been a year since I wrote a long paper so I might simply be forgetting (altering my own memory of the historical narrative, if you will - which you shouldn't), but I do not recall having this much trouble organizing the initial presentation of my idea. Sheesh. Turns out situating yourself in a scholarly context is complicated. Yeesh.
- [A bit later:] ...okay. I might have dramatically underestimated what I have to say for Mike. For the first time EVER, I think I have too much theory and context to present and not enough of my own ideas. I might not have to come up with a new argument for Christa - I might just split the idea further and make Mike's paper entirely about framing the kind of images I'm looking at and Christa's entirely about Man on Wire and what it's doing with 9/11. Maybe. Because I am looking at some serious length issues here.
Fucking ideas. And standards. Bah. I'm going to Woodman's.
(A second later - How is all that typing only 2 pages long???????)
- I fucking hate not having a parking space. I've literally paid more in tickets than I would have to get a spot. I need to do something about this. Anyone have a driveway/garage spot I can rent for the winter? (Bonus points if I can pay in cookies, hugs or stimulating discourse on visual rhetoric.)
- So while I'm slowly working to distance myself from my self-assigned title as the Worst Graduate Student of All Time, I'm falling deeper and deeper into the pit of being the Worst Adult of All Time. See: unpaid parking tickets, unspeakably stressful UW Credit Union debaucle, failure to have bought AN single Christmas gift, the fact that upon waking this morning and realizing I had eaten the last of my Candy Cane Kisses my first thought was "dammit, what the hell am I going to eat for breakfast now?", etc.
- I have still not watched the film upon which the bulk of my aforementioned paper's argument will rest. My draft currently starts with "[insert stuff about the scene where he walks btwn Towers here.]" That scene is the basis of my whole case.
- I discovered that Penny's recent gastric distress was almost certainly due to her new habit of eating my hair elastics. Guess that's a good reason to follow through on my constant resolutions to stop leaving them all over the house.
- It's been a year since I wrote a long paper so I might simply be forgetting (altering my own memory of the historical narrative, if you will - which you shouldn't), but I do not recall having this much trouble organizing the initial presentation of my idea. Sheesh. Turns out situating yourself in a scholarly context is complicated. Yeesh.
- [A bit later:] ...okay. I might have dramatically underestimated what I have to say for Mike. For the first time EVER, I think I have too much theory and context to present and not enough of my own ideas. I might not have to come up with a new argument for Christa - I might just split the idea further and make Mike's paper entirely about framing the kind of images I'm looking at and Christa's entirely about Man on Wire and what it's doing with 9/11. Maybe. Because I am looking at some serious length issues here.
Fucking ideas. And standards. Bah. I'm going to Woodman's.
(A second later - How is all that typing only 2 pages long???????)
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