Archive of things to do with 'blog'

• 04.03.08 Looking forward, looking back:

  Technology, or new media, or google, or somebody, has helped take the mystery out. There are plenty of blogs written by Peace Corps volunteers in the Caucasus. And I actually recognize a lot of what they describe, though I’ve never been near there. There’s a certain post-Sovietness that seems to be common to where I was (from September 2002 until January 2004, I lived in a small, ethnically Buryat-Mongol town in Eastern Siberia).

  I can look forward to the same old exhortations to drink, the same condescending and infantalizing behavior by those who know me, the personal questions from strangers, unasked-for honesty, aggressive dogs, and mini-celebrity status. The same catechism of questions, even, persisting unchanged over thousands of miles of the previous Evil Empire. How much do teachers make, are you looking for a wife, is our vodka better than yours, how do you say kaif in English.

  
  Tags: blog, travel, siberia, future, time, memory, film, weather, caucasus, compulsion, garbage, illness.
• 03.20.08 New habits bear easy:

  I have started up a couple new habits recently. It makes me have to do things a little more deliberately, because I am still having to choose to do them instead of doing them automatically. But it’s important to keep changing habits, or at least it has become habitual, to me. There is something about a habit that shapes the time it is found in, or that flows through it. And old habits which I resurrect seem to bring with them a little bit of the former time, like a flavor of the atmosphere that you didn’t necessarily feel at the time. Like when you are away from home long enough that you notice how it smells on your return.

  It’s an accidental time capsule, like a picture of the pile of library books I had out at one time, or an old recipie file, there’s an atmosphere that comes with that. The ghost of a life that you used to live, ghosts being distortions in the air. I remember the carpet that I fell asleep on one night up late working on a short story I was writing, I was in the habit of walking every evening twenty minutes to work on it and not leave until I had met a certain word goal. I think I was seventeen, I was working late, I thought I would lie down and take a rest, and when I woke up I had a spotted red area on my cheek, but the carpet I was on had waves on it. I remember that result seemed unlikely. It’s a whiff of the past in the present. The feeling was alienating and it remains a little strange.

  
  Tags: blog, change, writing, thinking, time, memory, habit.
• 04.06.07 Sketch of character:

  If I’m going to write I’d better do it. (It’s easier to steer a moving ship.) I might make a series: people I have known. Character sketches. I’ve never liked the idea of writing about people. It seems somehow disrespectful. People are large, and mostly invisible. How can I claim to know them well enough to represent them? They could always come back at me and deny my representation: I’m not like that at all.

  
  Tags: self, blog, shame, travel, writing, project, siberia, draft, composition, fear, failure, unfinished, ambition, anxiety, character, arrogance, navigation.
• 03.28.07 Idle thoughts:

  Idle thoughts while at work. (This means: not enough material for a post in any of them alone. So I put them together on a tray and serve while other posts stew in the kitchen. How bloggy.)

  1. Have you ever actually heard anyone say that two plus two equals four in “the tone in which one says that two plus two equals four”? When I was taught it, it was an important fact to be studied and learned (so I heard it in tones of incantation, tones of authority, and tones of confusion).

  
  Tags: blog, reading, personality, work, boredom, thinking, research, music, throat-singing, overtones, mood, time, ambition, idle.
• 03.24.07 Tristes Tropiques:

  Blogs collect unfulfilled projects. (It’s a form of internet lint.) Why should this one be different? One more thing I plan to use this site for, another thing I get to avoid doing in avoiding coming here, I won’t notice it. So let’s announce it: We, Mfc and I, plan to read Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, a couple chapters a week, for the next however long, and blog an exchange about it.

  
  Tags: blog, reading, travel, writing, project, dialogue, boredom, philosophy, thinking, levi-strauss, Tristes Tropiques, ambition.
• 01.23.07 Piling up:

  I’m not being productive unless I’m feeling overwhelmed. Usually I don’t do much. Then I’ll have a burst of activity. Then the energy will run out, and I’ll find myself overcommitted. & then I retract from my commitments, rest, then feel ashamed of how little I do, and start the cycle over.

  
  Tags: self, blog, personality, work, setback, writing, project, composition, thinking, water, drained, simile, failure, rhythm.
• 01.19.07 Low:

  I haven’t been blogging, because I haven’t been writing posts, partly because I’ve been feeling low, and strung out. That shouldn’t keep up for too long.

  By wieght, blogs are 75% and upwards apology, like zines and communications with thesis advisors and editors.

  
  Tags: self, blog, shame, change, writing, draft, composition, thinking, drained, failure, unfinished, mood.
• 01.02.07 Off on the right foot:

  Today I feel like my life is a series of setbacks and I pass the time in between them struggling to make up for lost ground. I took off from work today to fight a cold I felt approaching. Result: I feel worse, I spent an hour and a half walking outside in the rain, and I feel like if I see my office again I might have to scream. (I whimpered a couple times today thinking about it, but that was purely optional.)

  Maybe that doesn’t sound like much, but I don’t feel like drawing the full-detail picture that would indicate its place in the larger pattern I seem to see. Partially because I’m sure I would be ashamed of the inadequate result. In any case, I would never finish it. The cruelest hit I took today was logging into google documents, I saw that I had nothing showing in my active documents: I haven’t touched a single one of my projects for a whole month. Hoping to shame myself into getting back to work, I had the idiotic idea of talking about one of them in a public place.

  
  Tags: self, blog, personality, work, shame, change, setback, travel, writing, project, siberia, turkey.
• 12.27.06 The immediate reason:

  “If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all!”

  If I don’t say anything at all, I’ll never say anything nice. So, resolved: I’m reopening this blog.

  
  Tags: self, blog, splagkhna, reading, change, taste, writing, iris murdoch, art, irritation.
• 12.26.06 To get things rolling:

  Just getting started here - so if things are a little messy or hard to find, that’s why. Should even out in the next few days.

  
  Tags: blog.