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.)

mommy?

I have recently become a mother, and so am in the process of exploring what this means. I have a daughter who is now 9 months old, and these past months have been a learning adventure. I was perhaps not very well prepared for motherhood, and expected to learn a lot about what it means to be a mother. But I thought I had, at the very least, a reasonable grasp on what the word mother means. It turns out there’s more to it than I realized.

I was at a meeting where we were looking at materials from an NLP course. We got to a section on word sense ambiguity, and instead of having just the standard bank/bank examples, a slide had this example of 2 definitions for mother:

a woman who has given birth to a child

or

a stringy slimy substance consisting of yeast cells and bacteria; is added to cider or wine to produce vinegar

Stringy slimy substance? A quick look up confirmed it:

moth‧er2 /ˈmʌðər/ –noun
a stringy, mucilaginous substance consisting of various bacteria, esp. Mycoderma aceti, that forms on the surface of a fermenting liquid and causes fermentation when added to other liquids, as in changing wine or cider to vinegar

Not just stringy and slimy, but mucilaginous. Shouldn’t I have known about this?

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