Who wants this? With the consolidation of media companies over the last three decades perhaps there’s no distance between journalism and tech any more. Companies that produce software that people have to be sold that they want are intertwined with the media companies that will hype up the usefulness and turn a novelty into a necessity.
I assure you a good copy editor could write this summary (and fast, too) but news outlets have pretty much abandoned good editing of most of their content because 1) it will be replaced immediately, and 2) they don’t want the labor costs. If only someone figured out how news media could monetize without being beholden to social media or browser-breaking ads.
Literally, according to any health article from the early 00s through 2010s. We all are sitting too much due to the transfer of our work from moving to sitting. We work longer hours and drive farther to reach those jobs. And since sitting is the new smoking, and I quit smoking (nearly six years now), then all of that was for naught since I’m driving an hour each way to campus.
To be fair, I enjoy this time, this relaxing death drive into oblivion (apparently). I listen to podcasts or Kpop. Sometimes I play one of the lo-fi hip hop channels as I drive under the canopy of trees that line the back roads. Many times I don’t listen to anything at all and just ride to school or to home in silence.
Well, that’s not exactly true.
I wrote a couple of poems on the way home one day. I pulled over in a church parking lot to dictate them into my phone. This happens a lot when I don’t listen to anything in the car. Writing is something that my brain does automatically, sort of. I always have a part of my mind that’s narrating what I’m doing, what I’m feeling, shuffling around what I’m thinking. I’ve noticed in all the times I’ve had long commutes, that the writing part of my brain really lights up when the muscle memory kicks in and the ride is smooth.
This is one of the best parts about my commute and I know where all the safe places to pull over are in every stretch of road.
But those silences are also potential pitfalls. I’m not sure if it’s the ADHD, or the only child, but I talk to myself. Not just muttering, but full on conversations with, well, no one. If you could listen in, it would sound like I was talking to someone, because I pause and react and laugh and the invisible person in my passenger seat.
I know what you’re thinking (maybe), but it’s not an exercise in rehashing conversations, or arguing where I’m always right. I am often wrong. I am wrong a lot. In fact, it’s kind of weird how often I discover I’m wrong when the only person I’m talking to is me.
What I am is basically doing is journaling. I’m doing the “writing is thinking” without being able to use my hands. If I could trust my phone not too lock half way through a monologue, I would record my voice with the intention of transcribing when I got home.
I would never transcribe it though.
Exhibit A
It’s best that some of these conversations stay in the stale-coffee smell of Big Red (my car.) Some of those are big releases of frustration and some of them are vile, mean, mostly focused at myself. I know that I am purging negative thoughts this way before I come into contact with anyone else, but I think that sometimes the release isn’t 100% complete.
There is residue, like old crumbs woven into the seat upholstery. Those feelings I don’t write down, not with any depth linger, and I wonder if I need to pull off into that church parking lot and disgorge.
A note: I have done this kind of talking to myself for as long as I have memory. I have heard anecdotes of my imaginary friend (David from Sesame Street, if you need to know) and my conversations in my childhood room. This is one of the ways I process the world. It has always felt a bit strange, but also a bit real. My mind feels realer in these moments than when I’m being a proper person.
Anyway, I don’t think that too much introspection is good for us. I think there are benefits to being a bit unaware of yourself. Self-awareness should always be powered on when you realize you’re being hurtful, or negative, or if you feel that the universe has it out for you (it does not, sorry.) But I think switching that awareness off is best when you’re with (good) friends, or enjoying your hobbies, or laughing. Never be aware of your laughter. Projectile laugh all over the place.
When I originally came up with this idea for a post, I think I had a different plan. I think I wanted to talk about the time that it takes away from my responsibilities, or the fact that taking a walking break halfway is logistically hard to do, since it just adds time to my commute. I don’t really remember what blog I wanted to write. But this is the one I wanted to write now.
Reading Charlie Warzel’s latest article in The Atlantic brought up one of those situations that I’ve had in the back of my mind. You know the one that sometimes rears up and says “halloo” and you’re like, “Yes, that’s something I should do something about, or consider more thoughtfully,” right before you’re distracted with taxes or cats or something much more important to the present moment.
My digital inventory is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I have so many files saved in so many places, it really is a roadmap to my 30+ years online. I have a couple of external hard drives and all of the computers I’ve owned since 2002, just waiting to be scavenged. I can’t tell you what I’ve got saved there, and that’s the problem.
I have my entire thesis, notes, PDFs, and versions saved on Google Drive. My dissertation is moving into the folder next door. I have a ton of audiobooks saved on a red Western Digital Passbook that doesn’t like to keep ahold of its cord. There’s an old laptop that may have some embarrassing chat logs saved on it (not embarrassing to me, but still). And a host of other cloud accounts that have pieces of me scattered through the Intarwebs.
This is the first step to having a functioning teleporter: the atomizing of a human life, one jpeg at a time.
My life runs on a semester schedule, so there may be some time available this summer (while dissertation writing) to make a start on curating and culling this unwieldy collection. I think it would be interesting to go through every file, every photo, every stray bit and byte that makes up a good chunk of who I’ve built myself to be. So many little corners of the internet hold the me-equivalent of that stray 2×4, a half-full can of primer, and some brass bracket from the 1950s. I may need that GIF one day.
Without children to burden with my digital legacy (my nephew would be the only one I’d trust, and I like him too much to make him go through my “SORT THIS SHIT” folders), I often wonder who am I saving all of this stuff for? Did that snippet of a poem from 2011 really mean something to me, or is it just one step on the path to becoming a mediocre writer? I have twenty photos of a stapler from my old writing center because I thought it would be funny to give it its own Facebook page. (It was funny, for a while, but then I forgot about it.)
If I really think about it, I’ve saved all of this, every last byte, for me and for right now. Perhaps, instead of waiting for circumstance to bring the borders of my life into clearer view, I should take this opportunity to “sort this shit” now and keep only what is a reflection of who I was, and who I aim to become. Perhaps, I will make a multimodal journal of my life so far.
I just thought of this now, writing this post (because writing is thinking, friends) and this could be a nice project for this blog.
I haven’t had an idea for a post in a while. I’ve been writing, not necessarily the things I’m supposed to be writing, but writing nonetheless. I have a year’s worth of short bits in my journal that have given me a new outlook on my life.
I don’t change much, really.
I think that it’s hard to see a whole year unless you’ve chronicled it in some way, whether in a scrapbook a bullet journal, or even your photo albums on your phone. Without that easy avenue to look back, you’ll never leave the path you’ve been on for, well, your whole life.
By having a link that forces me to see what I wrote on this day last year, I can spend a moment lamenting over how the obstacles and complaints are still the same and that, whether by my own fear or others’ handiwork, I have not moved forward as much as I’d like. Alas, reflection is not always a positive experience, but it is always useful.
Diss-combobulated
I am supposed to be writing the revision of my dissertation proposal, but I am a bit lacking in the motivation department. I even set up an appointment with my diss chair to get me moving and, maybe when it is imminent (as in that day) I will finally get something workable on the page. I would like to not be like this. I don’t think it’s fair to me or my chair.
How much do you want to hear about this journey? I wonder if it would be helpful to future Ph.D.s to hear about my experience. I know I found a lot of advice online (for reasons) and wouldn’t have made it this far without it.
However, it’s not a path I would recommend to most. It is not necessarily healthy, mentally or physically, and the rigor of the work is largely performative. There are small movements, particularly in the humanities, of making the PhD process more a communal practice instead of an individual struggle. They are slow though and largely rooted in the departments outside STEM.
This is my sixth year in the PhD program. I am a bit jaded now, which is why I wonder if it’s time to go. Not leave the program, but leave the fellowship, find full-time work doing…something…and finish the dissertation on the side.
I love working with students. I love reading their writing. Teaching, though, is changing and I’m not sure I want to change with it. I’ll talk more about that later.
For now, I think I will try to post more often and talk about school, my interests, and various things. I am not interested in creating a personal brand, though I am not completely against creating merch. (But I’ll probably forget to.)
Sorry about the break. I really did think I could write a blog post about each day of the written portion of my comprehensive exams. Friends, I could not. I had no idea how much energy that was going to take out of me, including the one-hour commute each way. The day I wrote 5000 words, I slept the sleep of the dead. But, I’ve handed in my answers and it’s in the hands of my committee now.
How do I feel? Terrible. Well, not today. Over the last day or two I have settled down, but where I thought I would feel relief I only felt shame. I came out of the process feeling stupid, unprepared, more than an imposter, but a charlatan. I was (and kinda am) still thoroughly convinced that my oral exam will just be my committed expressing this disdain and then handing me packing boxes to clear my things and go. I was exhausted on Friday and cried. I blew up on Saturday morning and cried. Today, no crying, but still anxiety.
I’m going to stay as busy as possible this week so I don’t have time to think about anything negative. I will listen to every Agatha Christie book my library has and catch up on all my manga. Yah. That’s the plan.
Thanks to the advocacy of previous graduate students, our school changed the structure of the English Ph.D. comprehensive exams from a 5-hour, in-person essay test to a take-home, multiday writing test. We still have questions that test the breadth and depth of our knowledge, but now we’ll be answering them in a way that more closely reflects how we actually do scholarly work.
Today I received my questions via email at 7 am. I was ready, so ready I forgot to take my pills. (I didn’t notice a difference aside from my disappointment, but I will not forget tomorrow). I took some time to read over all the options, made a few early selections, then grabbed a few relevant books (yes, I had to take the heavy one) and left.
I have a long commute, so it gave me the chance to let the back of my brain stew while I focused on my breathing. By the time I got to my office, I was ready to go. I took some time to create my draft documents, copy the selected question into the file, then do a preliminary–more like prepreprepreliminary–outline and listed out the texts/authors I would be using. Some of the questions were really interesting and I felt myself being pulled into working on them. Others I’d already written a thousand or more words about the topic. I chose the latter where I could.
That all done, I spent the next thirty minutes just going through papers and taking notes while my MacBook updated…
…
…then I was ready to go! The writing was sluggish at first. I felt myself tripping over how to phrase ideas and wrote too floridly and sometimes too simply, then convinced myself to get SOMETHING down because you can’t edit an empty page. I was aiming for 2400 words and I left at 1911. That’s not a failure.
I still had to finish grading the work in my summer class and needed to get the final papers out. But after getting that finished, I still ended up working on one of the other questions and getting more words in. Since this is a different format, the word count doesn’t really matter, but the hard work of selecting texts is done.
I think tomorrow will be a more productive day. I’ll be able to start writing right away, knowing I have minimaps in every draft document. I plan to come back to my DAY 1 answer tomorrow night, after I’ve allowed it to stew while I work on DAY 2’s answer. NIGHT 1’s answer has the bones to it, and I have a book here that can help me make sure I put them in the right spots.
Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club is discussed in detail and while I’m pleased we found the time to discuss a female writer, I’m saddened that her story has to be about hope generated through the expression of her psychological and physical trauma and that her contribution is about forgiveness. Thank goodness for the lady nurturers. “It might seem that by organizing these readings in this way, I’ve been building up to a spirited defense of the social and therapeutic value of writing one’s memoirs” (24). Reader, he is not. Amis, Krakauer, Descartes all new that writing could exemplify, amplify their anxieties: “extend one’s sense of despair and one’s sense of superiority” (24) but they lacked the knowledge that Karr had, that writing could generate hope and forgiveness and an understanding of one’s own past and path. Miller forgets to point out that men often have the space, time, leisure to amplify their pain because the women compromise, cajole, and cooperate. Karr finds hope and optimism because she is not allowed the space to brood and sulk in the literary world. Her pain isn’t vented through literary doppelgangers or shooting sprees—it burns until it’s contained and only valued when her trauma is transformed into that most useful of all stolen artifacts—hope.
There was a video get-together for the launch of a fiction anthology that I have a story in. It was a little awkward for me since I didn’t know anyone, but someone asked me about teaching freshman composition and here’s my 3.5 minute response (Starts at 53:34 if the video link doesn’t work properly):
