As I was leaving the house this morning, my mind in its random ramblings replayed a few bits of the Monty Python Dead Parrot sketch. "Lovely bird, the Norwegian blue! ... 'E's not dead, 'e's pining for the fjords!"
The upshot of this being that my status line on Facebook says "CJ is pining for the fjords."
Of all the various crack-like elements of Facebook (they have online RISK through Facebook now! I am so never getting work done again), one of my favourites is the status line. Scanning through my friends at any given time offers a range of status updates ranging from the hilarious to the absurd to the genuinely informational. Sometimes all at once, as in my fellow-CAAS member Jennifer's, which currently reads "Jen is wondering if getting teary-eyed at the sight of coffee is a bad thing." Given that I happened to read that one before I'd had my own first sip of java, the empathy in me was overpowering.
And the hated IS ... if there is one thing that unites regular status-updaters, especially those who like to be funny or creative, it's a hatred of the fact that we are constrained to using the present-tense passive verb ... leading to sometimes awkward locutions (which as an English professor can be really galling), and the delimiting of possibilities.
Anyway, I thought I'd share a random sampling of status lines that were current as of a minute ago ... leaving out names of course in the interests of whatever privacy may actually be left in the age of Facebooking.
... is not being aloof, friends, just insane with overwork.
... is confused.
... is calling it karma.
... is one letter away from a scream.
... is even more useless than yesterday.
... is I hate when people just write random stuff here without following the proper grammatical sequence that follows the conjugated verb "is."
... is wickey, wickey, wha, wha.
... is what I'm trying to say.
... is no longer ill. All praises be.
... is the eggman.
... is aspiring.
... is paid the dollar, sidekick rings what's up holla!
... is Lessing, Schiller? Definitely not Hegel.
... is perpetually baffled.
... is finding out that it is actually possible to eat too much pastry!
... is itching for a new razor.
... is pale in intensity with good legs and a long, dry, clean finish.
... is lacking bounce-back-ability.
... is driving to Ottawa. Home of the shitty-ass Sens.
... is as she appears to the left.
... is on a midnight train to Georgia.
... is a winter wonderland!
... is genuinely excited about her horoscope.
... is at the level of barely functioning.
... is exceedingly drunk, and is pondering the beatific benefits of red wine.
... is trying hugs AND drugs.
... is oh so quiet (shh! shh!).
... is walking a very fine line.
... is gonna pick the meat from the big city bones, because the hot is getting cold.
... is too cool for school.
... is in a plain brown wrapper.
... is a source of nine essential nutrients.
Showing posts with label Facebook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Facebook. Show all posts
Saturday, November 17, 2007
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Breathing space
This semester has been a perfect storm. And while I might blame Facebook for its depradations on the blogging world (and mine in particular), the fact of the matter has been that I quite simply haven't had the time and/or brain power to be a particularly good blogger. Or even a passable one.
I make no promises that this will change much, but I do promise to try. I miss my old blog here, truth be told. As do some people who have told me so in no uncertain terms. So I'll get myself back on something resembling a regular regime: I'm thinking once a week won't break the bank, especially now that I feel like I'm finally on the downslope of the semester.
The hump I had to get over was this past weekend: I was in Montreal for the annual Canadian Association of American Studies (CAAS) conference, an organization I renewed my membership in at last year's conference in Kingston. Unlike last year however, when I was just a participant, I found myself this year in the thick of organizing the conference ... which meant a significant amount of work smoothing out details, increasing (exponentially, it seemed) the closer we got to the actual conference (which incidentally included the writing of my own paper). This conference, I might add, would not likely have happened this year at all without the long-distance work done by a handful of some of my truly amazing colleagues. As it turns out, not mentioning any names, the one person we were relying upon to organize stuff in Montreal turned out to be a little bit of a tool. And when I say "a little bit of a tool," I mean the Platonic form of human-toolness. Normally I wouldn't be so impolitic as to vent such professional grievances in my blog, but this was an extreme case and I kind of hope the individual in questions stumbles across this entry. Not likely, but entertaining to imagine.
The upshot being that there was a lot of frenzied running around and brushfires to be put out by the conference committee, and from wednesday through sunday I think I got a cumulative total of twelve hours sleep -- between the going out with colleagues in the evening, and the insomnia that had me up at 4:30 most mornings.
That being said, the conference went off quite well, and I was privileged to see a significant number of truly amazing papers. I was also pleased to see that a lot of the good presentations were delivered by grad students, including at least one former Western student.
And now I'm back, and staring at a stack of marking that has come to feel like a really bad credit card debt, one for which I'm paying interest on until the end of term. But without the conference looming over my head, I feel as though I can breathe a bit more.
I make no promises that this will change much, but I do promise to try. I miss my old blog here, truth be told. As do some people who have told me so in no uncertain terms. So I'll get myself back on something resembling a regular regime: I'm thinking once a week won't break the bank, especially now that I feel like I'm finally on the downslope of the semester.
The hump I had to get over was this past weekend: I was in Montreal for the annual Canadian Association of American Studies (CAAS) conference, an organization I renewed my membership in at last year's conference in Kingston. Unlike last year however, when I was just a participant, I found myself this year in the thick of organizing the conference ... which meant a significant amount of work smoothing out details, increasing (exponentially, it seemed) the closer we got to the actual conference (which incidentally included the writing of my own paper). This conference, I might add, would not likely have happened this year at all without the long-distance work done by a handful of some of my truly amazing colleagues. As it turns out, not mentioning any names, the one person we were relying upon to organize stuff in Montreal turned out to be a little bit of a tool. And when I say "a little bit of a tool," I mean the Platonic form of human-toolness. Normally I wouldn't be so impolitic as to vent such professional grievances in my blog, but this was an extreme case and I kind of hope the individual in questions stumbles across this entry. Not likely, but entertaining to imagine.
The upshot being that there was a lot of frenzied running around and brushfires to be put out by the conference committee, and from wednesday through sunday I think I got a cumulative total of twelve hours sleep -- between the going out with colleagues in the evening, and the insomnia that had me up at 4:30 most mornings.
That being said, the conference went off quite well, and I was privileged to see a significant number of truly amazing papers. I was also pleased to see that a lot of the good presentations were delivered by grad students, including at least one former Western student.
And now I'm back, and staring at a stack of marking that has come to feel like a really bad credit card debt, one for which I'm paying interest on until the end of term. But without the conference looming over my head, I feel as though I can breathe a bit more.
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