Category: metablogging

Look who’s stalking

I was recently telling John (my husband) about something I’d read in “one of the blogs I’ve been stalking.” To which he replied “it’s usually called ‘reading.'”

Oh, right. I suppose it is. But it’s just that I’m only now getting used to this business of dropping by and getting a glimpse into someone’s life and thoughts, without them knowing. I feel like a voyeur. Here I am, sneaking around behind the bushes (following links). Peaking in windows (clicking on old posts). Eavesdropping on conversations (reading comments). Tiptoeing back in the middle of the night to see if anything’s changed (hitting refresh). Wondering if I’m leaving my footprints in the mud (a residual ip address).

Now that I’m actually writing a blog of my own, and learning more about the whole blogging process, I’ve made the following startling discovery: bloggers intentionally leave the blinds open. They actually generally want other people to read what they’ve written. Even total strangers.

So while I still feel like a stalker, I’ve decided to try to be the sort of stalker who clumsily waves hello. And perhaps who leaves the occasional calling card. (I’m adding to my blogroll…)

Flashback episode

Remember that time when I wrote about needing to finish my paper? And then I wrote about how I finished it? That was so cool. And then there was that time when I wrote I was going to write about kick-ass women movies and stuff, and then I wrote some lists about kick-ass women movies? And then I wrote my fourth list like that? And remember that time when Fonzie jumped the shark?

I just realized. I’ve now been blogging here for 1 month. So I thought it would be a good chance to reflect on what I’ve done. In the spirit of the clip show. Or maybe I’ll just reflect on clip shows.

Clip shows are a longstanding TV tradition. And one that’s likely to continue. Sadly.

And they really don’t work when you buy a DVD box set and watch episodes basically back-to-back. For instance, I recently discovered Alias, a fun show with a great kick-ass woman protagonist. We bought the first season on DVD, and proceeded to work our way through the discs in rapid succession. And then towards the end of the season, we got to the clip show. In the great tradition of a wafer-thin pretense to show some clips, the episode was “cleverly” set up as an interview between a government interrogator and the main character:

Interrogator: You’ve been working for a dangerous really, really bad organzation pretending to be the good guys. You claim that you didn’t know. Why should we believe you?

Agent Sydney Bristow: In my defense, check out these clips. [Some clips are aired.]

Interrogator: I see that you wore a number of different disguises.

Agent Sydney Bristow: Yes, that’s true. Many of them involving wigs. And look at these additional clips. [More clips.]

Interrogator: Wow. You sure used a lot of neato gadgets. Plus you spoke in different accents. I’m convinced.

It’s kinda hard to get nostalgic for episodes that you just saw within the last few days…On the other hand, my favorite clip show/flashback episode of all time is the second episode of Clerks, the animated series. (Yes, the second episode. Which includes flashbacks from the all the previous episodes.)

Hey, remember that time when I wrote about clip shows? That was awesome.

This is not about “ass”

As may be painfully obvious to me some day as I look back on these early posts, I am new to blogging. Today, I’ve learned an interesting lesson.

It turns out, Technorati has something to learn about compound words, and perhaps about metaphorical usage. You see, a compound does not necessarily equal the sum of its composite elements. Someone writing about, say, the Whitehouse is not talking about the color white and houses. We all know that.

I’ve recently been writing posts about women (real-life and fictional characters) in film, TV and other entertainment industries whom I have admired. I feel that these women “kick ass,” in the metaphorical sense. I have been terming such women “kick-ass women.” A compound with a hyphen. Much like “dog-ear.” An expression, which I’m sure you know, refers neither to dogs, nor to ears. To dog-ear a book is to fold down the corner of a page (or pages) of a book to mark your place. You see, it’s a compound term, as well as a metaphor. While there may be some visual resemblance to the floppy ears of a doggy, we’re not talking dogs, and we’re certainly not talking ears.

Anyhow, I just pinged Technorati last night, after discovering that my blog wasn’t getting hit by their search engine. And I have 3 new hits for the Technorati tag “ass.”

In a way, it kind of amuses me that folks looking for porn will stumble across my site. ‘Cause they’re not gonna find any here. Of course, now someone will probably find this post by searching for keywords “ass” and “porn.” I’m screwed. Oh right, let’s add “screwed” to the mix. Perhaps with all this talk of compounding, we’ll even get “pounding” thrown into the mix. Oh right, we will now. (Oh crap, I just realized I’ve also used the word “doggy.” Nooo!)

What was I saying?

I know I really need to get on with it and start writing something, rather than continuing to write about writing. Or write about potential writing. But I wanted to jot down some of my reasons for starting this blog.

I started a mommy blog a few months back, to document my daughter Phoebe’s various accomplishments. Really it’s intended as a baby book, because we hadn’t actually started a baby book for her. (One obstacle was that we couldn’t find a baby book that we particulary liked. They tend to run quite saccharine. Or twee, which is a relatively new word for me.) So, the Phoebe Blog is really written for Phoebe, and also for various friends and family members to keep up with her goings ons. But as I worked on the Phoebe Blog, I discovered that I was enjoying the writing, and shockingly, found myself wanting to write about things that were not just about Phoebe.

I used to keep journals, mostly as a teenager. (My mother is an avid journal-writer, which I think is where I got it.) I like the idea of writing down my thoughts, and chronicling my life. I recently had a look in one of my journals from a semester I had as an exchange student living in Rio de Janeiro. I was expecting to relive some moments from one of the most interesting periods of my life. The problem was, it was boring to read. I’d like to think that my letters from that same period were more worth reading. I think I write better when I’m writing for an audience. (Whether a real or imagined one.)

Speaking of letters, I am, in some ways, a terrible letter-writer. It’s not that the letters I wrote are particularly bad. It’s just that they so rarely got finished. I have a box in the basement of my correspondances from the days before everything went electronic. And that box is about half full of my own half-finished letters. To family and friends who felt like I never wrote. Well, I did write. I just rarely mailed. (Not finishing things is a chronic problem of mine.)

I need to learn to write faster. I’m an academic, and I have a lot of writing ahead of me. I need to be able to get my thoughts down on paper (or what have you) quickly. And not get bogged down in the process. I need to learn how to bang out an abstract. And right now, I can’t even bang out an email. I edit, rework, etc. (I’m completely hopeless at IM, by the way. It takes me forever to compose a response, and I get left behind.) So anyhow, I’m hoping that by writing a blog, I will become a faster writer. (Yes, I am in part trying to justify this new way of eating up my time that I should be spending on my work.)

token of my affection

My blog title is inspired in part by these fabulous lyrics by the late, great Kirsty MacColl:

“I’ve been the token woman all my life
The token daughter and the token wife
Now I collected tokens one by one
‘Til I’ve saved enough to buy a gun”
From the song Bad, off Kirsty MacColl’s 1994 album, Titanic Days.

Kirsty MacColl died in late 2000 in a bizarre accident where she was hit by a speedboat. The world lost an amazing voice and a talented songwriter.

While I don’t consider myself to have been a token woman (I actually come from a family and background where women predominate), the lyrics of the song resonate with me in a number of ways. I have felt the urge to rebel against my own identity and to besmirch the squeaky-clean behavior record I grew up with. Plus the lyrics are clever. And dark.

The thematic content of “Bad” also bears a striking resemblance to Eartha Kitt’s classic “I want to be evil.” These two songs are members in my collection of “songs about women who seek to break out of their restrictive goody-goody roles and discover the joys of naughtiness.” Actually, so far, this collection (which could perhaps use renaming) has only these two items.

As yet, 2 is the smallest quantity of members in a collection. Although perhaps I will decide at some point that 1 may be a sufficiently large set to merit being called a collection. Especially if I never expect to have additional members in that set. Hmm. “I would like to show you my extensive collection of nose.”

from the collections

I’ve realized that my life involves a lot of collecting. I’m not a collector of collectibles in the limited edition, hand-painted, as-seen-on-a-home-shopping-channel figurine sense of collectibles. And it’s not just things, though I certainly have a lot of stuff. (Way, way too much stuff.) I have a collection of collections.

Books are a big collection. And movies. And music. And with the media, it’s not just that I like to collect the physical objects (though I have a weakness for a first-edition or beautifully-bound book), but I like to collect their contents and other attributes. I like to categorize my media: Hong Kong martial arts movies, superhero movies, TV shows with a kick-ass heroine, Booker Prize-winning novels, signed first editions, songs with a color in their title, rock songs that are waltzes, signed first editions of Booker-prize winning novels featuring Hong Kong martial artist women superheroes whose theme songs are rock waltzes featuring color terms…

Over the course of my life I have started, inherited or accidentally accumulated collections (of varying sizes) of such items as boxes, rocks, socks, scarves, china, post cards, stamps, mobiles, yo-yos, beads, items with a lizard motif, vintage dresses, pens, inks, bottles and half-used jars of jam. I once even had a collection of dimes, and they were really just dimes. (This was when I was 9.)

I also seem to have a collection of hobbies. Hobbies that I am quite serious about, if often serially. I have at times been very involved in painting, jewelry-making, martial arts and music. I’ve devoted varying amounts of time to reading, book discussions, writing, cooking, travelling and photography as well as attempting to learn to knit, juggle, do yo-yo tricks and garden.

I tend to collect facts, too. Sometimes it’s intentional, such as those emails that people send out with lists of funny word definitions. And it’s often inadvertant, such as retaining useless trivia that I read off a cereal box in 1979 or remembering what someone else at my dinner table ordered at a restaurant 3 years ago.

In a way I collect people, too. (Don’t worry, not in the sense of bodies buried in my basement.) I like having friends and acquaintances from a variety of backgrounds, professions, walks of life. And I’ve realized that I will sometimes co-index them in my mind with some commonality like “enjoys bluegrass music,” or “once had a Weimeraner.”

And recently I’ve come to realize that my chosen profession (linguistics) is based on collecting and categorizing, which may be one of the things that has drawn me in that direction all these years. I get to collect patterns and constructions, examples, counter-examples and all sorts of other data and metadata.

So I intend this blog to be, at least in part, a way for me to manage my collections. I hope to sort through the clutter in my mind, and file things away in their various (cross-referenced) places.

By the way, I almost started my blog on blogger, which appealed to me largely because the name reminds me of frogger. But as it turns out, they don’t have a built-in “categories” feature. Since my joy in (and salvation from) collecting comes from classifying and categorizing, this was a deal-breaker for me.

Hello, cruel world.

Here I am. I’ve decided to start a blog. Actually, this is my second blog. (My first has a somewhat limited scope…) But I’m generally quite new to the blog world.

Anyhow, I’ve been mulling over the idea of starting my own blog for a few months now. I’ve in part been inspired by my sister, who started a blog a few months ago. Around the time she started her blog, it came up that a friend of hers has a blog that was voted “one of the top 10 vegetable blogs on the web.” This piece of information made me ask, as well you might, “there are 10 vegetable blogs on the web??”

So I’ve lately come to realize that there are, to date, 594 gazillion and 46 blogs on the web. And I’m ready to sign up to be the 594 gazillion and 47th. I’m at the forefront of those trailing behind.

And here I am. Posting my first entry. Which currently will show up as my second entry. The first is the automatically generated one I got when I signed up at wordpress, which they called “Hello world!” I haven’t decided yet whether or not to delete it. So far, it’s generated quite a lot of hubbub. I have at least 6 comments, by a variety of interesting personages. Okay, by my husband. I know that I should delete that first entry. But I’m tempted to either leave it there for posterity, or at least take a screenshot of it to archive. Because I do have trouble throwing things away…

Day 1 comments

Day 1 comments