New Kid on the Hallway

Okay, I know I just posted something

But I HAD to share this with all y'all.

I just found the following message in my New Kid e-mailbox:

Our website [redacted to spare the spammers' delicate sensibilities] is a informational databases and online news publication for anything and everything related to science and technology. We recently ran a poll asking our website users regarding what online informational resources they use to keep up to date or even to simply find great information. It seems many of our users have labeled your blog as an excellent source of Space information. We have reviewed your blog and must say, we absolutely love the information you have made available to the public and would love to make your blog a part of our top science blogs. After browsing your blog, our research team has decided to award you a Top science Blogs award banner.

I'm honored, I really am. But anyone who's labeled this blog an excellent source of Space information is, quite frankly, on crack.

This is not a commitment to joining NaBloPoMo, or whatever it's called

But I feel I've been neglecting this space, so perhaps all the discussion of posting every day in November has been a little inspiring.

I can tell I'm out of practice blogging, though, because while I do semi-note things of semi-interest that might make up a blog post as I'm going about my day, by the end of the day when I have a free moment, they have all vanished from my head entirely. So I'm quite sure there was something this morning about which I thought, Yes! I'll blog about that! And now? Couldn't tell you what it was to save my life.

So I'll leave you with two random observations from my day:

First, you'd think that a guy driving a big-ass (doubtless American-made) pickup truck, encrusted with umpteen stickers about being a Vietnam vet and being in the Marines and so on, would feel secure enough in his masculinity not to need to hang a fake set of balls from the ball hitch on the back of said truck.

Second, I really like The Good Wife. But I'm not sure whether I like it because it's especially excellent T.V., or if I like it because I have to like any show that's about a close-to-middle-aged woman going back to work as junior associate at a law firm, surrounded by people fifteen years younger than she is. (For the record, Julianna Margulies is older than I am. But I'm not going to say by how much...)

My teaching flashback for the day...

(courtesy of I Can Has Cheezburger, of course!)

Today I resemble this LOLCAT more than I look at it.

Now back to the grind...

Some days it seems like the only good use of the internet is for posting cat pictures

see more Lolcats and funny pictures

(In honor of my own dear departed Basement Cat.)

I also recently enjoyed this one, originally seen on someone's Facebook:

And, of course, there is always the genius that is Maru.

Now back to whether it violates the Constitution to award someone $1 million in compensatory damages and $145 million in punitive damages.

Let's navel gaze metablog, shall we?

I've been struggling somewhat with the purpose and function of this blog for a while now. I recently came across a description of it as "self-absorbed," and while part of me wants to be outraged (what! how dare you imply my every thought isn't a precious jewel offered up for the greater good of humanity!!), I also have to admit that, yeah - this blog is pretty self-absorbed.

Because, you know, it's a blog. About me. And my life.

It got me thinking, though, and I do think this blog was less self-absorbed when I wrote from the position of a professor (although it's also possible that my self-absorption was just more interesting to my usual audience, since I was talking about the kinds of things they all encountered in their own academic lives as well). I would not be at all surprised--or offended--if some of you who started reading this blog when I was a professor find it less interesting now that I'm a student again, since I think most of my original audience were either academics or people interested in academia for whatever reason. 

I'll be honest, I think this blog was better when I was a professor, because by the time I'd started, I'd been in academia for thirteen years (counting all my time as a grad student). I wasn't an authority by any standard, but I had enough experience to offer commentary on the profession--commentary that wasn't all about me, myself, and my own experiences--and in which I could respond to some of the themes and issues that profession was facing.

It is very hard to maintain the kind of analytic distance that allows you to offer that kind of commentary when you become immersed in an entirely new endeavor, one that also places you in a the explicitly subject position of student. (I've talked about this before.) First, I don't feel like know enough about the law as a profession to offer any kind of informed commentary. Second, everything is new! and overwhelming! and coming at me a million miles a minute! (not quite as bewildering as last year, but still lots of new stuff, and just lots of stuff to deal with, period.) It's hard to maintain analytic distance when you're frantically treading water till the next wave comes your way--to totally shift metaphors, it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff when you're buried under the harvest (I am abandoning this metaphor now). This blog becomes a way just to process what's going on, even though it's nothing remotely different from what every other law student experiences, nor is what I have to say about it remotely original.

It's funny, because I read some of my old posts--often posts I've forgotten I even wrote--and think they were actually pretty good. This blog never was a work of academic scholarship, but it was about academia as much as it was about me. Now, I think it's more about me than it is about the law, or even legal academia. 

And I suspect many of you will say, "So what?? It's your blog! You write about what you want to write about!" Which, if you do, I completely appreciate. It's just been an interesting shift - I have met, through blogging, a whole community of wonderful people who are now my friends regardless of what we do for a living. But it changes this blog for me to talk to "friends" instead of to "fellow academics," and I miss the kinds of conversations that used to take place here, rather than just providing updates on my life.

Which is not to say that I have any magical plan for how to change what I'm doing. And you know, maybe it really isn't all about me, and my blog has changed because blogging has changed. (I'm thinking especially of what Laura wrote here, which I wanted to respond to at the time, but never got around to.) But these thoughts have been tumbling around my head for quite a while, so I thought I would finally let them out, and see what they look like in the light of day.

Even though this entire post simply proves the whole self-absorbed thing.

This is one of those posts I hate about how I don't have time to post

Seriously, this is the most pathetic post ever, because its point is to say, I don't have time to post!!, which you have all probably figured out, and since you probably read through an RSS feed, you'll know when I do post. But I felt a little rude just leaving the last (interesting) conversation in the air, so to speak, so wanted to assure you that it's not you, it's me -- it's finals here, and between Con Law and Property last week and Crim Law and Civ Pro next week, I've done nothing but study lately (well, study, and rotate between e-mail, blogs, and Facebook when I'm dying for a break. I can gauge the efficiency of my studying by how often I take these breaks; when I reach "write 2 lines of outline, check blogs again, repeat," I know I should just pack it in for the night).

Last night, in fact, I dreamed that I went to a review session for my Property class. Except that after it was over, I realized that I'd already TAKEN my Property exam. And I couldn't remember what other exams I had yet to take. Which made me very, very nervous...

Anyway. By the time I finish up this year my medievalist friends will be immersed in Kzoo, so have fun! I'll try to think of something coherent to say to sum up this first year of transition, for when I return.

The journal meme!

And no, this has NOTHING to do with academic journals.

Rather, the Bittersweet Girl (who is clearly good at this) has come up with a new meme: the Journal Meme. I've neglected my journals quite a lot since getting married (because my habit was always to write last thing before I went to sleep, which seemed odd with NLLDH lying beside me), and since starting this blog (YES, my blog is the navel-gazing substitute for keeping a journal, okay? satisfied?). But I still identify myself as someone who does keep a journal, and like Bittersweet Girl, I have a storage box full of old ones (sadly, they're in our storage space, so no pics available). So here goes:

1. When did you begin keeping a journal/diary?
I'm pretty sure I was nine.

2. Do you journal regularly or sporadically?
Now, sadly, sporadically - I was consistent about writing until maybe ten years ago, when I became much more sporadic. NLLDH has never once even intimated he wants to read my journals, but writing in them while lying in bed next to him always seemed odd. Plus, he'd make comments about me writing bad things about him in the journal (which I was never doing), and he'd always apologize, but it kind of interfered with the moment.

And, of course, once I started writing here, the journaling declined significantly. Kind of embarrassing, but there you are. I find I'm most consistent now when I travel, especially by myself, and I don't have anyone to bounce my daily observations off of.

3. Which, if any, of the following things do you use your journal for?: recording dreams, creative writing, arguing with particular individuals (your boss, your parents, your lover, etc.), listing books/movies, tracking your weight/diet/exercise, composing unsent/unsendable letters.
My journals are NOT repositories of elegant writing. Mostly I argue with particular individuals (I love that formulation), and/or rant about something awful (or, conversely, something wonderful) sufficiently to exorcise it from my system, which I know is usually at greater length than is socially acceptable to do in public. I have done the tracking of weight/diet/exercise thing, too, but that's never been super consistent. Mostly I used journaling as a way to work through something that was bothering me - if I went back and read them, most entries probably say the same basic thing about seven times, because that's how long I had to write about it to come to peace with it. This might fall into composing unsent/unsendable letters, too, though I never wrote explicitly to anyone else - when I journal, I'm always talking to myself.

Occasionally I had aspirations of using the journal to hone my writing and set goals of commenting on at least one interesting thing per entry (where interesting ≠ my current obsession), but I never did this especially consistently.

I've never used journals for actual creative writing or listing books/movies.

4. What other purpose(s) do you use your journal for?
Hmmm, think I mostly answered this above. I'll add that I did a lot of analysis of interpersonal relationships in my journal (which is a fancy way of saying I'd write about, "He LOOKED at me today!!!!!!" Or, "I don't know why she's been so cranky lately." That kind of thing).

5. What kind of material text do you use for a journal? (For example: leather bound hard-cover, cheap spiral notebook, etc.)
It can't be an "ordinary" notebook, like one you'd use for taking research notes or the like. My very first journal was in a very teen-girl type "diary" - there was a lock and a key, and a picture of a unicorn on the front (hey, it WAS the 1970s), and the paper was sky blue. I might have had at least one other journal that locked, but usually they're just "blank books" like the kind they sell in Barnes & Noble. I have to have lined paper, because left to my own devices, I can't write in straight lines, and it bugs me for my journal to look "messy" (although frequently my handwriting degenerates into a scrawl). But I didn't much like actual leather-bound books because they were too "dark" - I like bright and cheerful colors for my journals. I also prefer journals that stay open easily, so quite a few are spiral bound. And they MUST be fountain-pen friendly. There was a stretch during my senior year in high school when I typed my journal on onion-skin paper, but I think those all got thrown out when my parents moved.

6. Where do you keep your old journals?
I have a banker's box full of completed old journals in our storage space. I also have a bunch of half-used journals sitting in the drawers of my nightstand. (These are the ones I am theoretically using now.)

7. How often, if ever, have you read through your old journals?
Pretty much never. Ugh. I can't quite bear the thought. Since I pretty much used my journals for self-therapy, I really don't really want to go back and see how messed-up I was over a given issue at a certain time. (For instance, I remember when I went through a horrible bout of bullying in the seventh grade, I wrote about wondering what would happen if I drank a whole bottle of Nyquil. I don't want to go back and relive that. Seriously.)

I have occasionally glanced through the earlier entries when I've picked up a half-used journal to write in again many months (or years) later. But usually I try to avoid doing so.

But then, I'm quite good at cutting my losses and walking away from bad things in my life, on a range of levels.

8. Have you ever allowed anyone else to read your journals?
No. If historians find the stash sometime a few generations from now, go for it. Otherwise, not going to happen. They are NOT for public consumption by anyone who knows me.

9. How has your journal keeping changed since you began blogging?
Sadly, I really have stopped writing in a journal with any regularity. Like I said, I think that means this blog has replaced my journals as a means of self-therapy. On the other hand, I promise you that the writing here is at least somewhat more professional and focused and, hopefully, has some appeal to others, and believe me, my journal writing is NONE of those things. So the two kinds of writing do serve different purposes, and I keep planning to pick up the journal again. I do tend to write right before going to sleep, though, and because I get up so early to commute to school, I'm always trying to preserve sleep time. So it hasn't worked so far. And I also think there's only so much non-assigned writing I can produce at a given time - I can write either in my journal, or here, and more recently, it's been here. (And sometimes it's neither.)

10. Upload a picture of your journals (or as many as you can).
Well, most of them are in the storage space, and as for the ones that are here - so, if I dug them all out of their drawers, stacked them somewhere to photograph (after cleaning off whatever place that was), searched for the camera, made sure it has working batteries, wrestled its sticky buttons into place, took pics, downloaded the pics to my ancient laptop (because this one doesn't recognize the camera), then found my flash drive so that I could put the pics on my flash drive, then transfer them to this laptop and uploaded them... it would be June by the time I finished. So I'll pass on this for now, but if I get inspired (or we get a new camera), I'll post a pic sometime in the future. Sorry!

Like the Bittersweet Girl, I don't know who out there does or doesn't journal, so I'm not tagging, but if you do keep a journal, I'd love to see your answers!

(Final aside: I actually hate "to journal" as a transitive verb. I know I've used it above, because "to keep/write in a journal" gets really cumbersome. But "journaling" always seemed like a weird word to use to describe what I did. I never think of it as a specific genre - I'm just writing. For me, in a place no one else will see. That's perhaps why I've never been behind any of the structured "journaling" exercises one can do. I write when I feel like it, whatever I feel like writing, and if I don't feel like it, I don't. No offense meant to anyone who does think of it as "journaling.")

Blame NLLDH for ruining your childhood memories

But this is one of the most hysterical things I've seen in a looooong time:

Because I continue to be very, very tired

I'm still recovering from the business of the weekend (it probably didn't help that I had a piece of espresso-chocolate cake last night after dinner; it was delicious, and I crashed at 8:30, then sprang wide-awake at 11:45 and lay in bed unable to sleep for a couple of hours). So I think all I can manage is a meme:

Where I was when....

1.) Challenger space shuttle exploded (1986): My high school chemistry class. We were actually having a study hall that day (no idea why), and one kid, one of the class clowns, was listening to a transistor radio with one earpiece (hey, I'm old, technology was simpler back then). He heard the news and announced it to us and the teacher didn't believe him, so the teacher rolled a big old TV into the room to check. Its visual was nothing but snow, but we could hear the news. When the bell rang, everyone was walking through the hallways wondering how that could have happened.

2.) Berlin Wall falls down (1989): I don't remember this as one moment. I did know, though (without looking at the date), that it was 1989, because I was on a study-abroad program in England, and some of the people in my program went to Germany over Christmas break and bought pieces of the wall to take home.

3.) Oklahoma City federal building bombing (1995): In the first grad-school apartment I shared with NLLDH. I think I was wearing a white sweater and a navy skirt. (Don't ask why I remember that.) When the talking-heads on TV were speculating wildly that the bombers were radical Islamic terrorists, NLLDH turned to me and said, "That's bullshit. This is totally home-grown."

4.) OJ Verdict (1995): I have no memory of this at all.

5.) Princess Diana dies (1997): I do remember this; I woke up one Sunday morning (August, right?), went out of my apartment for whatever reason, and saw the headline on my neighbor-across-the-hall's newspaper, lying in front of her door. I was surprised by how upset I was about this. But I am English, so I have some excuse.

6.) Columbine massacre (1999): Embarrassingly, I remember the massacre, of course, but I have no idea where I was when I first heard about it.

7.) JFK Jr. Plane crash (1999): Don't remember hearing about this, either, though I know I was slightly saddened by it (I think I'm perhaps more horrified to realize it's been 10 years since this happened!). I grew up in Massachusetts as a Kennedy fan. I didn't think JFK Jr. was any kind of great white hope or anything, but we Bay Staters feel protective of our Kennedys. (Unless, of course, you loathe them.)

8.) Bush/Gore crazy election (2000): I don't remember this, either. It was my first semester at Rural Utopia and I was a little crazy-busy. I mean, obviously I remember that it happened, but it didn't leave a big impression on me. I think this is because I wasn't especially surprised.

9.) September 11, (2001): I know I've told this story before, but: I was in the living room of our house in Rural Utopia. Sound traveled up from the basement, directly below, in an amazing way. NLLDH was on the treadmill we had in the basement in front of a TV, and I could hear the noise of the TV, then he yelled up to me that a plane had hit the World Trade Center and I should on turn the living-room TV. I did, fully convinced he was describing a tragic accident, in time to see the second plane hit. NLLDH came back upstairs and we sat and watched terrible things unfold across that clear blue autumn sky.

10.) Space ship Columbia disintegrates (2003): Was this a Sunday? I remember hearing about it, and I remember hearing about the horror of bits of space ship, and, sadly, astronauts, raining down on Texas (I think?).

11.) Hurricane Katrina hits (2005): I'm not sure exactly when I knew how badly the storm had hit Louisiana; I remember the general time-frame, though, because the tail end of Katrina made it through Former College City, and knocked out the power on campus. I got to campus early, couldn't get into my building, and sat in my car waiting for them to decide what to do about classes. Went to my first class in the dark, humid building, decided that I really was NOT going to hold class in an un-air-conditioned room in the south in August, and was relieved to hear that the school gave up and canceled for the day. (Former College was in an elegant residential neighborhood, which lost power constantly because it had old, above-ground wires. My cookie-cutter neighborhood built sometime after 1989 never lost power, yay!) I also had students who would come up to me at the start of class and say things like, "I might have to leave class early - I'm waiting to hear from my family in New Orleans."

Another stream-of-consciousness post, as a placeholder till I can write more coherently

The following things are making me ridiculously happy right now:

• Location: I snagged a great seat in the coffeeshop - not in direct sun (it gets too hot), but in the front of the building, by the nice big sunny windows. Light! Air! My own marble-topped table! An outlet for my laptop!
     
• Open windows: sorry, everyone above the Mason Dixon line, and some below it, but it's in the mid-60s here today, with the sun beaming down in the wonderful bright clear air of the desert. (Some days, the sun feels harsh and oppressive, and I kind of miss the softness of the light in the south. But most of the time, the incredibly bright sun buoys me.)
    
• Good dogs: There's a guy here in the coffeeshop (a regular) who tools around in a mechanized chair/scooter, and he has the greatest little black terrier dog, with long-haired ears sticking out from his head af 45 degree angles, who sits all good and quiet on the scooter, behind the man's feet. I love that this guy is able to tool around accompanied by his dog at all times.
     
• Happy cats: One of my classmates, knowing that I am a cat person, showed me pictures of the kitten she is adopting this afternoon. She was SO excited, it was just lovely (and another shelter cat is getting a home! yay!).
      
• Freedom: Today was a short day, with only two classes. On short days I get to rise a little bit later, and head back to Home City significantly earlier. It even makes me feel like I have a little bit of control over my schedule.
      
• Potential: I'm writing an essay for an application for a summer thing, and I actually think it's kind of good. (This probably means it's crap, and I don't really know what they want, anyway, but it's nice at least to enjoy the process.)
     
• Accuracy: The barista let me know when my "panino" was ready. Panino! Grammatical correctness! (For the non-Italianate: panino is the singular, panini is the plural. Means "little bread," I think. And it was yummy.)
     
• Gluttony: I just ate the most amazing peanut-butter chocolate chip cookie - this place makes the absolute best. They're probably a gazillion calories, but the weather is so nice, I can take a nice long walk outside later today. (Which may require ignoring a little bit of my work, but hey, don't harsh my mellow.)
      
• Anticipation: Friday is another short day, so it feels like all I have to do is get prepped for tomorrow and survive tomorrow, and then it's the weekend! (Never mind that I have a gazillion commitments this weekend...)

What good things are going on in your day?