And miles to go before I... something... something... good night, folks.

Some bullet points conveying my current status:

--Sweet llama of the Bahamas, I'm tired. This one's important, because it flavors what follows. In preparation for the class I start teaching next week, I'm taking steps this week to slowly adjust my sleeping schedule. The first two days went tolerably, but right now, I'm somewhere between "dozing while awake" and "near comatose." The only thing that's granting me any satisfaction is the knowledge that doing this next week would be much, much worse.

--Happy Birthday, Mom! Well, actually, yesterday was my mother's birthday. I phoned her up and we chatted for a bit. Without getting into details, it reminded me how lucky I am to have the family I do and how I should talk to them more.

--No, student, YOU are it! I was torn on what to do for my first class next week. I like to do some sort of meeting exercise in the first class, but I also wanted to relate it to the course's actual subject, digital media studies. I think I stumbled on a way today. I've been reading Richard Coyne's book, The Tuning of Place, which, among other things, joins spatiality with pervasive media using the metaphor of tuning. I'm going to borrow his discussion of tagging to get the students to create "tags" for each other. The details need a little hammering out, but I feel like the core idea is here now.

--Here comes the new group, same as the old group.Sometimes, in all the hustle of undergraduate Frosh Week, we forget that it's Frosh Week for graduate students too. Specifically, after orientation today, the new grad students in our department are herded into a bar with the promise of bonding and social mixing. I went briefly today to get to know them, met a few, and went home. I meant to stay till the end, but honestly, I am so exhausted I couldn't do it. It's strange; this is my fourth "orientation" point, and I remember them being anxiety-ridden. The first time around, it was the "stranger in a strange land" thing, where I didn't know anybody. The next time, it was the awkwardness of how to present myself after I'd just spent a year getting comfortable with the people I knew. This time--it was just something I did. I met a bunch of people who seem perfectly nice, I may or may not get to know them better, and I left with a tired but pleasant glow. Maybe I've become jaded, and no longer put forth the same effort to get to know the newbies. Maybe I've become more socially broadened, and grown more efficient at breaking the ice and subsequent small talk. Or maybe I was just too tired to care one way or other.

Actually, it's probably that last one. They still seem like good people, though.

Later Days!

Saturday Fake Quotations: These Are Actually Harder Than the Friday Ones

"For all sad words of tongue and pen, The saddest are these, 'where the hell are my glasses?'"

Last night was the official birthday celebration. Drinks! Food! The at least temporary disappearance of the back-up emergency glasses! More on some future date.

Later Days.

The Birthday Post

I gotta admit, I really wanted to do another review here before I did this post. I've been watching movies--Steve Martin's "The Jerk," the quintessential "funny hats" movie, according to Roger Ebert (Not a good thing). I've been playing games--Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box. It's a point-and-click based game for the DS that takes place in an alternate universe where currency appears to have given up on that silly bill system and been replaced by a puzzle-based economy. (Actually, the idea of a society where wealth and prominence is predicated directly on a subset of intellectual skills is kind of interesting, in a survival-of-the-Sudokuist kind of way.) And books--HaveMercy, which is a steampunk fantasy novel about dragons, Dragon Keeper, which is a gothic fantasy novel about dragons, and White Teeth, a slice-of-life story about Londoner families and immigrants from WWII into the turn of century. (Which of these things is not like the other?) But instead, we're doing the birthday post.

Last year's Birthday post was spent on reviewing how last year's New Year Resolutions went. Can't quite do that this year, since I spent the 2010 New Year Resolutions on a list of things I'm thankful for, as I apparently mixed up New Years with Thanksgiving. Take out the turkey, and they're the same, really. Generally, they cater to different overindulgences, but the similarities are there. Anyway, let's check in on the 2009 resolutions:
1. Find an agent for the novel. Status: no progress.
2. Stringent exercising. Status: sporadic.
3. Romantic conquests. Status: Reading more Mauve Binchy novels. Depressing.
4. Watch More TV. Status: exponential successes.

Well, to continue the tradition of mix-matching holidays, let's make some new resolutions for the birthday. Add these to the permanent list:
5. Let it go. Those that know me can attest that I have a tendency to overanalyze. Of course, they probably wouldn't say that unless prompted, which makes me question their motives. Anyway, it's fairly common for me, especially in situations that I'm not sure of, to apologize to someone afterwards. Then apologize for thinking the apology was necessary. And then apologizing for overapologizing. And so forth. And that's the best case scenario. More often, I don't get to the apologizing stage, and just stew endlessly. So I'm going to stop making a big deal about some things that don't require that much attention, and see where it gets me.

6. Chase after it. My first response when dealing with the unexpected is to wipe my hands of the matter. It's instinctual--the unplanned for is the unwelcomed, because how could I welcome it if I didn't know it was coming? Well, I think it's time to foster a spirit of... general welcomeness. Like the shaking of the hands ceremony we used to do at my church before the whole "Sars" thing.

7. Watch the Scott Pilgrim movie. OMG, I just read book six and it was soooo good and I went back and read them over again and it's amazing how O'Malley has evolved, not just in terms of the story, but in terms of art and artistry and the movie looks like it's going to be really awesome, I've got my doubts about Michael Cera, because he's usually pretty typecast and Scott kind of breaks from the norm but it's directed by Edgar Wright, who did Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead and they were cool, and I think his action/comedy sensibilities will really serve him well here and it's out August 13th, and everyone should go see it, ok?

Yeah, those seems like some good additions.

ASIDE: I'm typing this post from a university public computer. The individual who had this computer before me left her resume open, and apparently, her first name is Sunday. That is an awesome first name. It also has her email address, last name, phone number and personal address, and was probably not a wise document to leave open on a public computer. It leaves her open to all sorts of weird people. Like me, for example, since I just sent her an email suggesting a few improvements she could make. Don't look at me like that. I'm an English grad student. I HAVE RESPONSIBILITIES. These include correcting people's grammar, providing nonsequitor literary references to show how educated I am, and proofreading resumes I find on computers. It's all in the grad student handbook. At the very least, someone should tell her she needs to say "2008 to present" rather than "2008 to preset." And now I'm realizing I should have led with the Sunday story, because it's far more interesting than the main event. Ah well.

Later Days.

In Which I Make Not One, But Two People's Birthdays All About Me

One of the handy, how-did-we-ever-do-without-it features of Facebook is a little box that tells you when one of your friends is having a birthday. Given that a typical Friend list is approximately at least 100 or so friends long, that means you've got, on average, eight birthday notifications a month. Of course, not everyone posts their date of birth, so let's round that down to four. Still, that's a lot of birthdays. And you can't skip a birthday--not unless you want to face THAT social stigma. So you're left with posting birthday message after message, until the sheer banality makes you envy the creative powers of greeting card writers.

Happy Birthday, X!
Happy B-Day, X.
Have a gooder, X.
Hey man, happy birthday!
Birthday wishes!
Hope your day is nice!
Way to be born!

And the pressure to conform and just go with Facebook's own brand of birthday expression (Send X a Gift!) builds and builds, and the evil that is social networking is revealed in all its internal systemizing glory.

But no. I refuse to succumb to such mediocrity. I started a campaign to create meaningful, caring birthday messages that contain layers of symbolic meaning: each message represents what I think of that person, what I think they think of me, and what I think is appropriate for a Facebook birthday message. This entry was an early foray into this bold new genre.
Future attempts focused on the historical moment. One friend, for example, was born on the same date that featured, years earlier, an historic defeat of the Scots at the hands of the British. So he got to hear all about that war. Another friend was born on the day of composer Albert Lortzing, so he got a summary of the opera Der Waffenschmie, and a short note about why it was relevant to his life. Plus a short youtube clip of the opera.

Yes, my friends love these messages. Why do you ask?

But with this last message, I discovered you could attach youtube links, and suddenly, I had access to a new bold venue. That's why, for this Tuesday, I sent out two radically different Facebook birthday messages. First, this message:

“Youth is happy because it has the ability to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”
- Franz Kafka

So here's to growing wiser, but not older. Happy birthday!

And second, this message:
Birthday!


And the point, which I have reached in my classic roundabout manner, is that, in posting these two particular birthday wishes in short succession, is that their incongruity really struck me. The radical difference in tone made me consider not just what each of these girls meant to me, but rather, what image I wanted to present to them. The process really drove home to me how much identity is constructed, and, sometimes, willfully constructed. Which birthday wish is more authentically me? Is there an authentic me?

Facebook: good for existential crises AND wishing people happy birthday. Hallmark WISHES they could do both.

(Special bonus: people who know me in RT can try and guess who the two ladies in question are. No fair cheating by looking on Facebook.)

Later Days.