May 29, 2006
hiatus
i've been off a while, trying to get my head & life & house together. there's a lot of getting-together to be done, & it doesn't help that i'm in the center of a technological rebellion & everything i own with working parts has stopped working, in fractions or in whole...
laptop's screen is shattered (i'm half on a friend's monitor just to post this), all CD players in the house are hosed, all 3 cassette decks are dead, the microwave has no visible display, the toaster oven works as an oven but not as a toaster, my bookshelves have been mysteriously dropping shelves & thus dropping books somewhat at random, & a large piece of plastic plus several potentially important bolts fell off my new-old car two days ago (plus it makes some weird-ass rattling noises); as it's a holiday weekend i can't even go about getting the things i can afford to repair repaired, so there's a lot of hobbling happening.
i'll be back with the program eventually, i promise. but i'm not creating any imaginary due-dates to aim at & miss. moving & becoming un-married are stealthily time-consuming; you think you've got a handle on any one part of them & another slips. so i'm spending a while juggling slippage, & reading fiction, & rearranging the furniture trying to decide what i want my space to look like--and rearranging finances to figure out what it's possible to fix!
the house is kinda broken too--leaky faucets, seriously troubled washer-dryer, a bathroom door that just yesterday quit latching closed, but thank god sometimes for being just a grad student in a rental; those are somebody else's fish to fry.
Posted by ttobryan at 03:55 PM | Comments (0)
April 09, 2006
excuses
the strikes in the entry below are because i crapped out on the oswego conference. i feel bad about this, for myriad reasons: my advisor expected me to go, and to be brilliant, and to represent her & my school well, & also to keep her company & see her present, & i've done none of those things. plus, the organizer of the conference had lost one panelist already--from my panel, it turned out--& when i bailed lost the third as well, b/c (as you can imagine) the fellow didn't want to be a panel all by his lonesome. negative karma for letting people down is piling up all along my shoulders, guilt & black ooze & where's mulder now? it's also bad to pass up opportunities for professional development, and (don't lie) CV lines, and chances to meet cool people with whom you might want to work later. it's worse to stand up & thus let down those same people, who will likely then not want to work with you later.
it's not bad, though, to take a few obstacles out of one's path when one's already stumbling into everything a little wildly & with a great likelihood of smashing something or something else by accident, & it's also not bad to practice saying "i'm sorry, no," once in a while. (maybe someday we'll graduate to without-the-sorry, but that day's a long way off if it's coming at all.)
overall the guilt is winning. it often does. i'd say i'd been catholic in one too many of my past lives if catholics believed in past lives. as it is, i'll have to stick with i'm always dodging one burden for another, & all in all that's really okay; i don't know what to do with myself when i've got nothing to carry. & at the moment, i've got plenty.
Posted by ttobryan at 07:11 PM | Comments (1)
May 15, 2005
this is for HEATHER...
...and anybody else out there who reads this & a) wonders why they bother checking back, when i never say anything or b) thinks i'm secretly a supergenius & should be much more talkative about it or c) wants to buy me another cape for my collection. i've got one with an "e" for "exception-girl" and another with some as-yet un-drafted insignia for "insightful-fortune-cookie-girl" (this for my ability to always come up with a pithy saying about courage or suchlike any time it seems even vaguely warranted).
HI, HEATHER!
it's official. i'm losing my mind.
i was taking 2...and 3/4? 3 1/3? courses this term? 2 actual, 3-credit (which in a phd program is just a laugh-riot of a designation) courses, one audit i did almost all the reading for despite there never being credit in the picture, and one independent-study variously designed and redesigned until nobody was really sure what it was supposed to look like. i was also teaching a class-and-a-half, which is a fair average; at the beginning of the term it really was 2, and by the end entirely 1, so the math will do. those i'm thankful to be done with, not because i wanted them to end--i never do--but because everybody else who's behind in their schoolwork is also moaning about getting their grading done, and i get to project a focused, one-track-only moan instead.
i did a lot of early work for the audit, and then phased out when the pond ph got not-exactly-to-my-liking. i finished one of the credit-courses on time. i finished the independent-study on time. & i've just pushed back the pushed-back deadline for my last one a little longer, which was supposed to give me more time to work, and has, instead, given me more time to stare glassy-eyed at the screen, vaccuum, drink tea, and woolgather. i get more work done when i'm cheerleading. last stint of reading-for-school i did was while playing spy in the empty late-night office-halls. the wool i've gathered, by the way, is neither fluffy nor untamed, but is already dyed and neat-woven into a soft tartan i'll never get to wear.
i need to get materials on the web for the online course i start teaching the 23rd by tuesday, which is the day after tomorrow. i should have been doing that all weekend while i was shirking my reading list. i need to annotate the last 2 books i've read, & read & annotate another 5 or 6--and then write a PAPER--by next-next thursday, by which time i'll already be a week into the summer class i'm sitting in on and planning to do all the reading for. and i'm late (i think) in getting feedback back to my chair about exam-lists.
laundry-list, anybody? why are they called that? laundry doesn't involve lists. you take what's dirty, shove it in the machine, guess what's best on the dial, add potions & go. which reminds me i need to do laundry.
if only scholarship were half so simple.
listening to:
Posted by ttobryan at 06:28 PM | Comments (0)
March 03, 2005
letting other voices speak
what somebody said about grad school: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/comics.php
what somebody else said about grad school: http://members.terracom.net/~dorothea/gradsch/straighttalk.html
what a whole lot of somebodies said about grad school:
http://www.phdcomics.com/proceedings/viewforum.php?f=2&sid=6c1d66419738721b1f0276913cb35fb9
what i should have said, but wasn't feeling, and should have felt instead, and perhaps if i were sarah i would have, but at least i'm closer to for knowing her: http://www.livejournal.com/users/1dioscuri/913.html
add this to your lexicon:dooced:
(story here: http://www.dooce.com/archives/daily/02_26_2002.html)
all, any, or none of which may or may not have anything to do with anything i might or might not have said or thought or considered saying or thinking in this or any other forum or medium.
"i can neither confirm nor deny the presence or absence of any truth or falsehood in that or any other statement."
Posted by ttobryan at 10:37 PM | Comments (0)
February 13, 2005
the blood of coding?
becky at stepaside suggests vampiric metaphors: MT coding is an addictive blood that, once we've started sucking, none of us will ever live without. she's crazy. it's not true. i didn't code this:
listening to:
i don't know what she's talking about. but if she's right, she's so the head-vampire.
Posted by ttobryan at 11:51 AM | Comments (0)
February 11, 2005
substitution
"he had me juggling teacups all night. teacups! with tea in them!"
"she had me reading about quantum physics all night. quantum physics! with mechanistic paradigms!"
Posted by ttobryan at 03:50 PM | Comments (0)
February 06, 2005
one limitation of print media
here's at least one way that blogging is just like other forms of conveying the written word... you still have to write it. with your hands.
i've written at least 6 clever, pithy blog entries today. entries for 711, entries for lj, entries for here. problem is, i've written them in my head. while i was virtuously vacuuming the house, washing dishes two three times today, scrubbing bathrooms, running & switching & folding 4 loads of laundry... and no matter the alarmists' predictions, the technology doesn't allow for automatic telepathic thought-transmission during other thought-inducing but hand-occupying activities.
(linked from 711 b/c my limited tech prowess doesn't include proper trackback-pinging ability.)
repercussions:
1) my rhythm's off. blogging is exactly not supposed to happen all in a chunk on sunday nights.
2) i've mostly lost track of those 6 (or more?) bright ideas, and whatever i come up with in their stead, even if it's brilliant, won't feel as brilliant as it would have if i'd done it in the moment.
3) "virtue" is negotiable. i feel good about what i've accomplished. i feel bad about what i haven't. this isn't a new conundrum, of course, but it is one i didn't expect to happen with "post to your blog" as the thing i feel guilty about not doing.
4) i had more things to put in my teaching journal instead of fewer this week, & so now i'm further behind than i'd have been had i been inspired to clean last week instead.
5) i find myself complaining in a post about what i haven't posted about. i hate when bloggers do this. i NEVER want to do this AGAIN.
6) when i catch myself reflectively complaining, in my head i sound a little bit like madeline. and i find that charming.
7) all day, while i was cleaning, blogging in my head, accomplishing some things, neglecting others, and watching inspiration run down my arms and into the sudsy sink un-recorded, i kept thinking: "derek does this & raises a teenager. ty o'donnell does it with two toddlers. aleshia & jonna do it--all of it--with three kids to come home to. every day. madeline goes home to four. and i'm proud when once in a too-many-week period i find time to vacuum?"
8) re: the mommy-blog defense... these maligned women are at least posting about children. real children. real diapers. real learning to share about besting real challenges. real communitiy-building. me? the inconvenient overlap of the assignment schedule & my threshold for cat-hair accumulation. hardly a cultural assertion of anything at all.
9) another thing i wonder: who are the real alarmists, the ones who think all of this technology is leading to direct brain-to-machine encoding, or the ones distressed that it's taking so long to come about?
10) in a way, there's probably a very cogent point in here about embodiment & technology. my cyborg tendancies aren't supported by my hardware.
Posted by ttobryan at 07:35 PM | Comments (5)
February 05, 2005
thought-full
"reading cannot be separated from thinking. reading is a thought-full activity." --frank smith, understanding reading, 20.
sometimes scholarship reminds me of winnie-the-pooh.
(xp to lj)
Posted by ttobryan at 04:23 PM | Comments (3)
January 26, 2005
on blinker's barley and mushroom soup
"don't goats eat barley?" -elisa
"and little-lambs-eat-ivy." -tyra
"horses eat barley. that means people shouldn't eat barley." -elisa
"i'm sure all kinds of animals eat mangoes when they can get ahold of them, but that's not going to stop me--them things are good!" -tyra
"mangoes don't look like barley." -elisa
(it's a notoriously bland stuff, just for the record, although i'm not convinced the barley, particularly its aesthetic, is to blame.)
Posted by ttobryan at 02:28 PM | Comments (2)
January 21, 2005
"let me explain..."
"... no, there is too much. let me sum-up."
- teaching journals: i've known for the 11 years i've been a practicing educator that i should keep teaching journals. for a class or two, here or there, i've actually done so. this semester, two different surveillance-bodies (neither of them as nefarious as that sounds) have asked me to do so in a format that someone intends to follow up on, so i'm doing it. and yes, while i complain about added workloads, i both respect the merit of the activity and appreciate external pressures demanding that i do what i already knew i should have been doing anyway. more information about these courses can be found here
- academics: i also have two courses this semester using blogs as a primary communications-medium; one expects external-to-the-course blogging in addition to on-the-course-page blogging, the other only the latter. in order to keep some sort of continuity in my own head, i plan to abuse the hell out of cross-posting by keeping copies/versions of my contributions (and sometimes others') to those ventures here also. here are 611 and 711 in, as it were, their natural habitats.
- extracurricula: and of course you couldn't possibly have expected me to go to this much work to set up and maintain this site and then only use it to do what i'm told.
Posted by ttobryan at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)