Hibernation, bad blogging, and the weirdness that is Facebook

Hm. Five entries for all of March—that’s some pretty lazy blogging on may part, if I do say so. Possibly my worst month yet. I don’t entirely know why; I suppose I’ve been busy, but I also really haven’t had much to report. I have only recently felt as though I’ve started emerging from winter hibernation, only recently started feeling energized again as the season slowly (so painfully painfully slowly) sloughs off its skin.

It’s odd: even as I feel utterly spent as far as the teaching and administrative parts of work go, my recent glimmerings of energy are all to do with my own research and writing—stuff long since relegated to the back burner this semester. Actually, saying that my own research has been on the back burner suggests that it has still be cooking away all this time, when in reality I think I’m dangerously close to having removed it, cooled it, repackaged it and returned it to the store.

Can I beat a metaphor to death or what?

So anyway, hopefully this newfound energy translates into more and better blogging.

Though to come to my third subject here, it’s a sign `o the times that I have begun to feel as though blogging has become quaintly antiquated, a charming affectation like parchment paper and fountain pens; Facebook is the new blogging, as well as the new email and the new … well, everything. I wondered a while back why so many of my former students from UWO whose blogs I link to had become so lackadaisical in their posting. I was assuming it was symptomatic of spiritual ennui and moral bankruptcy, until it was pointed out that everyone had simply migrated to Facebook—from whence they carried on all of the activities previously inefficiently separated into different forums like email, conversation, social gatherings and the like. Now we’ve arrived at this spectacularly efficient means of wasting time. We truly live in marvelous times.

I signed up for Facebook largely to see what the fuss was about, and for the first little while was a little creeped out—creeped out by me, that is, because as more and more people (students, generally, both current and former) started linking to me I realized that they were all at least a dozen years younger. I felt as though I had blundered into a social scene dominated by people in their early twenties who collectively wondered who the old guy was wandering blindly around.

Fortunately, I have discovered that the ranks of those on Facebook are not limited to twentysomethings (though they do tend to dominate) and undergrads; a few professor friends, and a lot of grad students now link to me. And what’s even better is that in some cases I’ve reconnected with old friends that I haven’t spoken to in a while. So that’s all right then. And really, I’m relieved, because I’d been running out of strategies for wasting time ….