I’ve decided to move the old Phoebe Blog over to WordPress. The iWeb application was great to get started, and handy for publishing pages of photos, but cumbersome for blogging. (I got a bit fed up with having to change the default surfer picture for each post, for one thing. And the bit about not being able to publish a post without also publishing any exisiting drafts was also quite irksome.)
So, updates about Phoebe will now be at this (new) version of The Phoebe Blog.
I’m seriously amused. There is a quiz out there called “The Blog Cuss-O-Meter,” which I saw at casa az last night (and at raincoaster a few days ago when I was too busy to give it a spin). I thought to myself “screw it, I hardly ever swear on my blog,” but I took the quiz anyhow. Here is the result I got:
(The site further gives this bit of info: “This is 791% MORE than other websites who took this test.”)
This surprised me more than a little, especially given that others who took this were surprised at how low a score they got. In spite of having decided, and stated, that I reserve the right to swear on my blog, I tend to shy away from using certain words in my writing that more easily leave my lips when I am, for example, driving. Hell, I wrote a whole post last week where I played with “crap” as a theme, but I somehow avoided using the word shit.
For example, I’d just like to point out that the word fuck appears to appear in only 4 posts in the history of this blog, which means just over 1% of the posts. (And one of those uses is on an image of a little candy heart. Doesn’t that make it sugar-coated?)
But I do use a lot of mild taboo words. My guess is that somehow, the ass in kick-ass, as in my tag “kick-ass women” is responsible. (Yes, I’m saying my ass is responsible.) It’s in my sidebar, so may count as being in basically all of my pages somehow. Otherwise, what do they consider?
Seriously, this makes me want to do an experiment. Anyone want to try adding some shit or something to their sidebar to see if they can inflate their score?
(Oh, and by the way, I’m back home. The conference and trip were really great. The presentations went well. I saw lots of people I wanted to see. And now I’m really fucking freakin’ damn quite palpably tired and need to get ready for the next conference, now less than 3 weeks away.)
From the AP article:The Johns Hopskins University Center for Human Health and Technology Studies issued a report last Friday indicating that individuals participating in activities relating to the internet format of weblogs were at increased risk for a variety of health problems, including rickets, schistosomiasis, kuru, high blood pressure, Omphaloskepsis, and vitamin D deficiency. Many subjects further exhibited lethargy and reduced reaction times to external stimuli.Blogging practices most strongly correlated with risks to mental and physical health include the publication, reading and exposure to weblog entries on topics including, but not limited to, politics, humor, family, music, news and the personal lives of the weblog authors. The study identified the following practices as being most strongly correlated with mental health risks and cognitive deficits:
When asked for details on the concurrent study for risks associated with so-called “lolcats,” images of animals which have been augmented with captions using poor grammar, Dr. Percival Jones-Quinderpants replied: “The final results of that study are not yet available, but preliminary results show that subjects may be at higher risk for certain types adult-onset language disorder, such as Lolcat’s Aphasia and hyperacronymia.”Related studies also found that subjects who spent late-night hours engaging in various online activities (such as social networking sites) were more 5 times more likely than the control group to have decreased attention spans and reduced ability to focus, leading to an inability to complete a coherent
Jon Stewart: …and the award for the Most Distinguished Pants Blog, the coveted Golden Pants Award, goes to alejna of collecting tokens. [cue cheesy music]
alejna: [choking back the tears] I can’t believe what an honor this is for me. It seems like just yesterday that I first tried on pants blogging. Now with 31 pants posts under my belt, I feel that I’ve come far in the world of pants blogging. But I know that there are many more important issues of pants that need to be laid bare. I will continue to strive to dress them…I mean address them in the dignified manner which they so richly deserve.
I would like to thank the Academy of Pants. I’d of course like to thank my mother, who put me in my first pair of pants. I’d like to thank all my friends and family members who encouraged me in the pursuit of pants, with the occasional kick in the pants. Thanks to those who brought pants crises and pants celebrations to my attention. And thanks, above all, to my various pairs of pants, which were always there to cover my ass in times of need.
—–
This week’s Monday Mission, which I chose to accept in part because I have many other things which I should be doing and this seemed like more fun, was to write a post in the form of an acceptance speech. I’d also like to extend my thanks to Painted Maypole, for the specific inspiration for this post. When she wrote her pants entry for last week’s Mission, I told her I felt like I’d been awarded the Golden Pants Award. It seems only fitting that I should have my acceptance speech ready.
So I sat on my ass
All this cold dreary day
And I said “How I wish
I had more time to play.”
No time to write posts
That are well thought-out rants,
No time to write lists
about movies with pants.
So I all I can do is to
Bitch,
whine
and moan
And each time the phone rings
Shout “leave me alone!”
No damn cat came in wanting
To show me his “things”
But the living room’s trashed
And the bathtub’s got rings
Glued to the keyboard
With deadlines a-loomy
The house is a mess
And my mood is all gloomy.
I should do my work now
While the clocks say it’s lating
But this is a fun way
Of procrastinating.
——
I couldn’t resist this week’s Monday Mission, which asked for a post in the style of a children’s book or poem.
I’ve been feeling a bit funky lately. No, not that kind of funk. I seem to have been in a bit of a funk. And I want to give up the funk.
You may or may not have noticed that I haven’t been writing so often. I’ve been really tired, and pulled in lots of directions. The result is that I’ve felt a bit like hiding away in a cave.
The good news is that several of the big deadlines are now behind me, and that most of them involved getting the planned tasks done. Data was collected, annotated, and analyzed. Abstracts were submitted for one conference. An accepted paper was revised and re-submitted for another conference. The class I’m teaching is rolling along, for better or worse. (Some days are better, some days are worse.) There are some more big work deadlines approaching, but they are not as oppressively immediately pressing, so I feel like I can relax a bit for a few days.
I ended up largely (or perhaps completely) flaking on the computational linguistics chapter presentation I had said I’d do. I don’t like flaking, and I felt pretty crappy about it. But by the time the abstracts were done Friday night, I had very little left in me. I still had hopes of throwing together a handout Saturday morning, but Phoebe would have none of it. She made herself quite needy that morning, and didn’t allow me to take my attention from her. So we (John, Phoebe and I) went to the group without a presentation. People had read the chapter anyhow, and of the other 6 people there, 5 of them knew more about the topic than I did. So as John points out, any sort of formal presentation would have been largely wasted. We all worked on the exercises from the chapter, which I think worked out better. But I still feel unhappy about the whole thing. I’m usually someone who somehow manages to do everything I commit to, even if I wear myself out in the process. I just have to realize that I’m not always in control of my time anymore, and I can’t go volunteering to do extra things. Or at least so many extra things.
I did end up getting some time to be a vegetable. By the time Phoebe was in bed Saturday night, I was too tired to focus on the paper revisions. So, I got to watch the two first episodes of the new Terminator TV show (“The Sarah Connor Chronicles”), which John had downloaded. I enjoyed the episodes, and now have another show to add to my kick-ass women list. (Last night we watched the third episode, too.)
Anyhow, I’m hoping to come crawling out of my cave now.
——-
(Oh, and by the way. I did update the Phoebe blog a bit. I decided to just publish the whole thing, even though it included unfinished drafts.)
I’ve wanted to avoid the sort of post that says “sorry I haven’t been posting lately,” but well, um…It would appear that I haven’t been posting much lately. So, um…Sorry?
Things have been busy, and I find myself too tired to write the posts I’ve been meaning/wanting to write. (It has not escaped my attention that I haven’t even posted a “Themed Things” list in 3 weeks.) I mentioned a few months ago that I would be spreading myself a bit thin over the next few months, much like too little cream cheese for too big a bagel.
Well, as often happens, I enthusiastically used a lot of cream cheese up in those early weeks. But the truth is, there is still a lot of bagel to cover. I’ll be co-teaching an 4-week course starting this Tuesday, which will need a healthy amount of cream cheese. Then my group at work is planning to submit at least one abstract (hopefully two) to a conference with a deadline of January 18th, for which we have a lot of work to do, and for which I have committed quite a bit of cream cheese. There are other school- and work-related odds and ends I’ve committed to, which will require dabs and dollops here and there. Holiday travels and activities, while good, ended up taking up more cream cheese than I’d anticipated. Phoebe requires quite a lot of my available cream cheese, as always. So it would appear that blogging is the part of the bagel that has had to go with the thinnest coating of cream cheese, and at times must make do with no cream cheese at all. I’m not yet ready to give up that part of the bagel, but realistically, it may not get a decent layer of cream cheese for a few weeks yet.
There are lots of things I’d like to share, like photos from our trip and other stuff that’s been going on. I also have a few posts I’ve been planning, both of a serious and a frivolous nature.
(Speaking of things of a frivolous nature, I noticed a couple of weeks ago that due to some sort of WordPress change, suddenly a whole list of pages I’d carefully hidden away were exposed right there on my front page index, including a page that consists entirely of the word pants repeated 100 times. My stats indicated that this page was viewed 8 times before I hid the pages away again, and that other related pages were also viewed. If you are among those people who stumbled across those pages, I can only wonder what you thought of them. I mean, beyond the usual, “damn, alejna’s weird.” Or “wow, she really does love pants.”)
Sometimes I forget to tell myself that. I’ve never been an accountant. Nor have I ever planned to be one. (Not that there’s anything wrong with accounting. I can see the appeal of putting things in order.) But this lack of accountancy in my life is usually not at the forefront of my mind.
Day after day I can go about my non-accounting-related business without once thinking, “hey, I’m not an accountant.”
But just a few days ago, I became truly aware of this. “I’m not in accounting!” I loudly proclaimed. And I realized how true a statement that was. And I have Blogger to thank for this epiphany.
You see, Blogger has made some changes to their comment forms. Now, instead of being able to type in my name and the URL for this blog when I leave a comment, I must choose between logging in with my Blogger ID, using a “nickname” (Should I have a nickname? What about Snake?), or being anonymous. So I’ve been using my Blogger ID more often lately. And on a whim, I decided to check out my minimalist Blogger profile. After all, someone might follow the link from a comment I leave here or there. (Well, not here. But there.) And imagine my surprise when I saw that my profile said I was in the field of accounting.
I quickly went to edit my profile, and select “not specified” for my field, since, shockingly, “linguistics” was not listed on the drop-down menu. When viewing the profile next, I was relieved to see that I was no longer masquerading as a grad student of accounting. But then I thought to myself, “maybe I should say a bit more about myself.” So I added a bit of stuff. And saved my profile. And lo and behold, I was once more in accounting. I went back in, changed the field. Saved the profile. All was well. But, oh crap, there was a typo in my link. Fixed it. Saved. Dammit, there was the frickin’ “accounting” thing again.
“I am not an accountant!” I cried. I felt I needed to affirm this. It’s been good to have this reminder.
I have a lot of trouble defining my identity. When asked for a description, I tend to give a list: student, wife, mother, friend, blah, blah, blah. It varies how many items I put on that list. But I have never once in my life listed “accountant” as an identity.
Of course, I have never listed “not an accountant,” either. And this opens up a whole realm of possible identities. I am also not a butcher, baker, candlestick maker, chiropractor, dancer, mime, mugger, jogger, juggler, or provost. The possibilities are staggering. But for now, at least, I can just remind myself that indeed, I am not an accountant.
Yes, I admit it. I got a bit burnt out in the blogging business. 40 posts in 30 days is too, too much. And I have far too many blogs in my feedreader. And I’m busy with work. And busy with life. And I’m just really tired. I need to go to sleep.
So, even though I have a bunch of posts in progress, and owe some stories based on that done/not done checklist, I’m just going to post a couple more jokes. Many of our last round of jokes featured the theme of “walking into a bar.” (Thank you for all those contributions, folks.) Here I give the other perennial favorite, the lightbulb joke.
These two lightbulb jokes are my favorites, and I’ll give you a bonus story. I first heard them while on a boat going down the Amazon, sitting around on hammocks. On Thanksgiving day, no less. That would have been in 1991. There were other jokes, and plenty of other tales from that trip, but here are two jokes that I can share quickly. (And yes, I realize that they are pretty similar.):
Q: How many flies does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: Two, but how do you get them in there?
Please share your lightbulb jokes with me. Pretty please?
collecting tokens 