This is the time of year when my desire to partake in the pleasures of the season crashes headlong into a workload that makes it difficult to relax, much less frolic. I should be staying up tonight to grade, since I struggle to get much done when I'm doing parental activities. But I'm just too tired -- mentally -- to manage. Hell, I can't even focus my thoughts long enough to decide on something to watch. For the fourth time this week, I find myself sitting in front of the television with a vague urge to consume something culturally meaningful. Yet the knowledge that whatever I pick may quickly prove tiresome, because I Iack the energy to invest in its reception, makes me feel paralyzed by doubt. I had all sorts of ideas for meaty entries to write here, too, without the will or the way to realize them. At least the lights are pretty, even if my back is turned to them.

Tags: blogging, everyday, work
Current Location: 85704

It's been a while since I posted much here. But my absence was not the result of a conscious decision to disappear. I just lacked the conditions necessary for me to do much social networking. My parents were out here for Thanksgiving, meaning that I spent a lot of my time bustling about in the kitchen. The whole time they were visiting, my daughter Skylar had the flu, further prying me loose from my daily routine. Although she apparently had the H1N1 strain, it was a mild case. Basically, she had a persistent fever for a week and felt weak and easily overwhelmed by excessive stimulation. I felt bad for her, but am glad she was still able to enjoy her grandparents' visit and partake of the Thanksgiving repast. And then there was the simple fact that my parents' aren't computer people. Although I did have to work on a few deadlines while they looked on, I just didn't feel comfortable blogging in their presence. I had the sense that doing so would be like text messaging at a dinner party. Anyway, I'm back. I grew sort of attached to the freedom that came from not posting, so I may produce fewer entries per week going forward. But despite the anxieties stirred up by my "blogiversary" a few months back, I have decided that it wouldn't make sense for me to call a halt to this journal. As Neil Young didn't say, it's worse to burn out than to fade away. . .

Tags: analysis, blogging, everyday
Current Location: 85719

My years on Live Journal have brought plenty of pleasure and pain, far more than I'd bargained for when I began to post, after many months of passively reading, in the hopes of putting my ideas about personal blogging to the test. Lately, though, as the active participants on my "Friends" list have dwindled and some of my long-time stalwarts have vanished, I've been finding it harder and harder to muster the enthusiasm to continue. I could go on a vacation, as I have advised others to do. But I'm fairly certain that, once I got out of the rhythm of posting regularly, I'd lose the sense of responsibility that motivates me to make personal blogging an integral component of my everyday life.

Friends have suggested that I seek out new folks for my "Friends" list in Live Journal communities. I've found a few I really like there over the years, so it's a good idea. I'm just not sure I have the mental strength to keep posting in a time of diminishing returns. I use Facebook now, which satisfies some of my need for socializing, on a daily basis. As much as I love to connect and reconnect there, however, the ephemeral and brief nature of most of the content people post can't replace the sense of continuity that Live Journal provided. I love the fact that I can go back in my archives and relive periods -- even ones that were largely negative -- through my entries about them. Facebook just doesn't offer that sense of historical depth. And that's what I want or maybe even need from the labor I expend in crafting posts. I don't know. Maybe I'm just being silly. Recent events have me feeling unsteady on my virtual feet. Perhaps I should just worry less and do more.

Tags: analysis, autobiography, blogging, everyday
Current Location: 85704

Well, this journal has made it to another year. This is my sixth anniversary here. But it's also the most bittersweet, since many of the friends I looked forward to reading have abandoned the site and others only post infrequently. As a measure of how things have changed, I almost went back and changed that "here" in the second sentence to "there," since most of the comments I get these days come indirectly, via the "notes" I import from Live Journal into Facebook. Sigh. It depresses me, because there are many things about LJ that I still dig, despite its many problems, from the ease with which concentric circles of friendship -- intimate to casual -- can be managed to the comment threading that still makes Facebook's implementation seem ridiculously lame. And I say all that despite a pretty strong hunch that my life would have gone a lot better if I'd never taken the plunge into personal blogging. Anyway, here's the tally, for what it's worth: 3267 journal entries, 13,849 comments received and 11,350 comments posted. I wonder if I'll make it to 4000?

Tags: autobiography, blogging, everyday, nostalgia
Current Location: 85704

A few years ago, when internet troubles kept me from posting for several days in succession, I received a number of concerned messages from friends, both of the Live Journal and "meat" world sort. When I failed to post for several days in succession this week, nobody thought it remarkable. And it wasn't. I post now when I have something to say. Lately, I haven't felt like there's much of anything I can say in public that's worth saying. Or private, for that matter. Still, I was saddened by my failure to have my absence register with anyone. But then I remembered that, even though I haven't posted here, I've commented on other LJ-ers' journals, as well as leaving traces of my "travels" on Facebook and Twitter. It seems that disappearing in cyberspace requires more dedication now than I'm willing or able to muster.

Tags: autobiography, blogging, everyday
Current Location: 85704

The past week has been filled with upheaval, again, only this time for good reasons. Due to a manic, but much-needed spurt of home improvement, including extensive painting, I either haven't had access to my office or have had to navigate through clutter imported from elsewhere in the house on top of the clutter that was already there to begin with. While there's a lot left to do, however, I'm fairly confident that this stage of the renovation process is past the halfway point. If I'm scarce over the next several days, as I have been this week, it's not -- or at least not necessarily -- because more bad things have been happening. Also, I'm still reading my friends, on Live Journal and Facebook, when I get a chance.

Tags: blogging, everyday, home
Current Location: 85704

I'm trying out Blip, on the recommendation of several friends, as a way to diversify what I do with music on the internet. I'm not going to automatically import here, since it doesn't work well. But my "blips" are going to be over on my Twitter account as well as Blip itself. Here's what I wrote about the "Baltimore Club Remix" of Curtis Mayfield's "Move On Up" by DJ Ayres:

The original ranks as one of my all-time favorite songs, moving me on up out of the doldrums of even the worst of days.

I'm feeling very nostalgic for Baltimore. It must be time to watch that final season of The Wire, which I need to be in a particular mood for, though I think it's superlative.

Tags: blogging, music, new media
Current Location: 85704
Muse: (Curtis Mayfield Baltimore Club Remix)

I continue to be fascinated and at times repulsed by the uses to which Twitter is put. I know I'm probably making a specious distinction when I complain about the degree to which Twitter and Facebook updates short-circuit reflection while mourning the decline in personal blogging of a wordy sort at sites like Live Journal, but I can't help myself. Take this Tweet from this morning, for example:

I just burned my tongue! Making some soup, and burned it while tasting. What a day.

My first thought was that it was an April Fool's provocation. But given the frequency with which this particular person posts -- and often about the need to post more frequently -- I am pretty sure that it was sincerely intended. Perhaps "intended" is too strong a word, though, or insufficiently intended. To repurpose one of my favorite analogies, most Twitter content is analogous to the category of manslaughter, an action undertaken on the spur of the moment without deliberation, rather than first degree murder. "I just burned my tongue!" is only slightly more pre-meditated than the exclamation one spits out upon burning it. I think I'll make an update playing off that convergence: "I just posted to Twitter!"

Tags: blogging, humor, new media
Current Location: 85704

It's getting harder and harder for me to think of things I can write here that won't feel like an overstepping of boundaries. But they're my boundaries, which have become increasingly easy to discern with the passage of years. The pacing I do back and forth along their perimeter has doubled as road-building. I could decide to change the map, but it takes longer to undo injuries of habit than to produce them. Sometimes I have the impulse to get out the breaking bar and till the soil with savage force. What I lack is the will to amplify that impulse into progress.

Tags: analysis, blogging, everyday, health
Current Location: 85704

In his latest set of responses to reader questions, ESPN.com's Bill Simmons, my favorite sports columnist, takes a complaint about boring status updates on Facebook as the occasion to make points that I've been fumbling towards in my head, even as I participate in the very forms of social networking that inspired them:

The more interesting angle for me is how Twitter and Facebook reflect where our writing is going thanks to the Internet. In 15 years, writing went from "reflecting on what happened and putting together some coherent thoughts" to "reflecting on what happened as quickly as possible" to "reflecting on what's happening as it's happening" to "here are my half-baked thoughts about absolutely anything and I'm not even going to attempt to entertain you," or as I like to call it, Twitter/Facebook Syndrome. Do my friends REALLY CARE if I send out an update, "Bill is flying on an airplane finishing a mailbag right now?" (Which is true, by the way.) I just don't think they would. I certainly wouldn't. That's why I refuse to use Twitter.

As for Facebook, I don't mind getting status updates and snapshots of what my friends' lives are like -- even if "Bob the Builder" is prominently involved -- as long as they aren't posting 10 times a day or writing something uncomfortable about their spouse/boyfriend like "(Girl's name) is … trying to remember the last time she looked at her husband without wanting to punch him in the face" or "(Girl's name) is … just going to keep eating, it's not like I have sex anymore." Keep me out of your personal business, please. Other than that, the comedy of status updates can be off the charts. Like my college classmate who sends out status updates so overwhelmingly mundane and weird that my buddies and I forward them to each other, then add fake responses like, "(Guy's name) … snapped and killed a drifter tonight" and "(Guy's name) … would hang myself if the ceilings in my apartment weren't too short." It kills us. We can't get enough of it. We have been doing it for four solid months. And really, that's what Facebook is all about -- looking at photos of your friend's kids or any reunion or party, making fun of people you never liked and searching for old hook-ups and deciding whether you regret the hook-up or not. That's really it. All in all, I like Facebook.

I agree with him about Facebook, where most of the thoughtful content is imported from elsewhere on the internet, but which is fine for the cyberspace version of hanging out with friends at a café or pub. I also like Twitter. Again, though, most of the good stuff I get from my network is pointing me towards more substantive material elsewhere. Unless I have the time to follow the links, it feels like being in a room full of people talking animatedly about what excites them while everyone else does the same and no one can really catch the specifics of what's being talked about. That sort of social networking is always already on the verge of turning into pointing in which participants are more interested in sticking their own index finger out than they are in using their eyes to track anyone else's. Does pointing have no point if the thing being pointed to isn't registered?

Tags: blogging, theory, writing
Current Location: 85704

I feel really, really good today. My allergies were giving me hell when I woke up, but I went on a hard bike ride, exclusively in high gear, and seem to have suppressed my natural histamines with the help of this morning's Claritin. I'm starting to wonder whether I haven't, shamefully, taken the cue from the birds that are chirping all about. Could it be that I actually welcome spring here now, even if it comes way too early? I know that being able to exercise regularly again is helping my mood. I can't wait to get physical again, starting with the hardwood for which I am presently destined. But maybe it's just the pleasure of making a poll -- a big thank you to those who have already responded -- that has dislodged the blockage in my mind. Whatever the reasons, I am most happy for the change. Indeed, my good feeling is so strong that I am going to imaginatively share it with those LJ friends who need a little something extra right now, such as chefxh, who has been really sick and stressed out from trying to finalize the purchase of a house, e_compass_rosa, who has to travel to Mexico to help a relative in distress, siyeh, who is dealing with a lot of the same issues I've been confronting myself and xxxpunkxgrrlxxx, who has had a rough go of it over the past week in a personal relationship. Feel better, folks!

Tags: analysis, autobiography, blogging, everyday
Current Location: 85704

Poll #1356321 Input Requested
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 18

Are polls a way to rev up participation in these parts?

Should I write more about music?

Should I post more photos?

Should I make startling confessions?

Is the problem simply that everyone is now Russian?

Does absence make the heart grow fonder?

Would a little more nastiness be a pleasant alternative?

Should I stay or should I go?

Tags: advice, blogging, poll
Current Location: 85704

Back when young people still paid attention to MySpace, I used to regale my students with stories of how I once had long talks about abstruse topics, such as the implications of post-structuralist thought for Marxism, with Tom Anderson, everyone's first friend on the site. Some of them actually believed the rumors that his identity was fabricated. I corrected them, noting that he had sent me a message back when he was first starting MySpace, urging me to participate. Despite my protestations to the contrary, however, I think a lot of them thought I was pulling their leg, if not about Tom, then about the fact that I had mentored him in cultural theory.

Anyway, I was going through my Pictures of the Moment album today, trying to boost my sagging morale by remembering how many good shots I've taken, when I came upon this image, obviously not my own work, that I posted once in an entry about my experiences with the graduate-student union at UC Berkeley and, further, as evidence that I had once sported locks capable of inspiring near dread, if not dread itself:

As I studied the image, suffused with nostalgia for Telegraph and Bancroft, not to mention the camaraderie of the picket line, I realized that the dark-haired man standing behind me, to the right of the balaclava-clad Kevin Cook, is Tom Anderson. So now you have proof not only that I was once a long hair, but that I also consorted with a pioneer of social networking. Take that Barack Obama, with your tenuous connections to the Weathermen. I will accept payment of respect in credits at Insound or, failing that, Amazon. Please e-mail me if you have any questions about the amount due.

Tags: autobiography, berkeley, blogging, humor, nostalgia
Current Location: 85704

I was talking about social networking protocols recently when my daughter, overhearing the conversation, interrupted with a question:

Skylar: Are you talking about Twitter?

Me: Yes.

[A few minutes later]

Me: How did you know I was talking about Twitter?

Skylar: It often happens that when you're talking about something boring, you're talking about Twitter.

I'm trying hard not to reach the same conclusion. But I do find that type of networking less appealing than the sort that involves more expansive musings, as I noted here recently. The same goes for Facebook, though it seems to be shifting towards a more text-friendly format.

What interests me more than the majority of what I see on either Twitter or Facebook, though, is my daughter's ten-year-old perception of that sort of communication. She is simultaneously attuned to its presence in her environment, as her comments quoted above suggest, and inclined to regard it as something of littler interest to her personally. I wonder if that will change when she's a little older. Or will she go in a sharply different direction in her interactions with the media old and new? And if she does, will that simply reflect her already idiosyncratic tastes or be a signal of a generational shift as well?

Tags: blogging, daughter, new media
Current Location: 85704

I've been experimenting, fitfully, with other "delivery systems" for my words over the past month. Getting a new phone and an unlimited data plan to match has radically changed the way I relate to the internet. I'm not sure I'm happy about that, though. Or, rather, I'm not sure that I like what this reorientation of my approach has done to my reading. My sense is that phone-based communication, which puts word count at a premium, is doing the same thing to social networking that tighter word counts at newspapers and magazines did for journalism. It often feels to me like reducing missives below a certain threshold evacuates them of substance to such a degree that the world would be better off without them. Mind you, I have rationalized the virtues of economy. I can see the appeal of OULIPO-style constraints on my own writing and those of people who share my conviction that prose should strive for effects, like poetry, that can't be wholly retranslated into factual data. But I struggle to live up to that standard in my own micro-communications and get the sense, further, that a lot of the people who favor that mode of exchange aren't even trying to write creatively within those constraints. And that saddens me, both because I miss the sort of extended Live Journal entries from which I could extract nuance even in the absence of good writing and because I fret that I'm becoming the sort of elitist I have historically submitted to withering critique. Still, I wonder whether the latest round of "democratization" in the domain of new media, in which word counts make it hard for all but the most adept stylists to publish consistently captivating material, isn't propelling us into a future where aesthetic judgments become harder and harder to sustain.

Tags: blogging, new media, writing
Current Location: 85704

One reason I've been more out of touch than usual is that I'm using a new computer, a MacBook with the flat key design. Some people swear by them. But for someone who is used to typing relatively quickly without being a touch typist, chiefly by exerting a good deal of force, the absence of concavity is sorely felt. I haven't been able to get in a flow thus far. And the use of an external keyboard defeats the purpose of having a laptop. Plus, the USB port seems slow to respond at times, which can lead to awkward delays. I was about to write that this entry is as literal as I ever get or, to put that insight in my usual parlance, absolutely, positively not an allegory. But then I got to thinking and realized that my struggles with typing might have some deeper significance. After all, I've been feeling hostile towards ideals, particularly on the Left. Maybe I'm engaged in an unconscious meta-commentary on Max Weber's applicability to the present conjuncture. Or maybe I'm just getting old.

Tags: autobiography, blogging, everyday, humor, theory
Current Location: 85704

As I was already telling people as soon as the election had been called for Barack Obama, the aftermath felt like the day after Christmas. I would start to write something and suddenly sense myself being pulled back down by the undertow. I had some good ideas, too. But it wasn't happening.

It still isn't. That said, though, I can at least give an impression of what I've been doing. I spent much of today dealing with troubleshooting computers and networks, as I tried to fulfill my promise of giving Skylar a functional machine. I am so, so sick of that "You are not connected to the internet" message.

I cooked, a pork tenderloin with onions, apples, raisins and a fortuitous mixture of savory and sweet spices. On Friday I baked cod with bell peppers, onions and pre-cooked eggplant slices. Both meals were delicious, among my best culinary improvisations.

I realized, in the course of writing this, that this is the anniversary of both the Berlin Wall's breaching and of the Kristallnacht in 1938. Maybe I should have cooked something other than pork. Or posted that Buzzcocks song from their comeback album.

I watched Cal play a bad game at USC, yet still have a good chance to win. They didn't, naturally. But at least it was close. And Texas Tech won handily, which greatly pleases the underdog-lover in me. Next week, though, they travel to Normal to face the Sooners, which will likely mean the end of their BCS Championship hopes. A victory, however, would put them in pretty good shape.

It's finally getting cold here. I have all the windows open at night still, but that means that it gets pretty chilly by 4am. Strangely, the late-to-bed and early-to-rise tortoise Felicia is still cruising for food. I fed her yesterday, even though it had been a cold night, and she ate heartily. Maybe she's a postmodern tortoise.

What I really want to say to you, though, is that I'm so exhausted that I've fallen asleep at the keyboard three times while composing this entry. Make that four, since I briefly nodded off in the middle of that last sentence. Normally I barely register Veteran's Day. This week, though, it will be forcefully on my mind, since I don't have to drive up to Phoenix on Tuesday. And that means that I will able to "sleep in" until 6:30am or so!

Tags: autobiography, blogging, everyday
Current Location: 85704

Yesterday was this journal's fifth anniversary. Strangely, particularly given my susceptibility to the documentary impulse, I did not muster the energy to commemorate the occasion. It occurred to me, but I had other priorities. That said, I did renew my paid membership for another year. And I've been following the entries of my friends with my usual care, even if I've been commenting with less frequency elsewhere and replying to comments with less speed and meticulousness here. In case you're keeping score, I'm trailing 12,610 to 10,324, a gap that I have little hope of ever closing significantly.

Now that I'm writing this, I remembered that I've always felt strange celebrating my anniversary on August 31st, since my first entry with meaningful content was posted on September 1st:

We were on vacation in the Blue Ridge Mountains, our last family trip before I was to go to Germany as an exchange student. The night of the draft, I watched the sports news in our motel room and was happy for Len. The next morning, we walked across a dewy field to get breakfast and I let visions of Bias in a Celtics uniform flit through my brain. And then we went inside. There were newspapers on display with the news. And I was just so stunned. It was really hard to take, what with my post-graduation euphoria and visions of the future suddenly darkened by needless death.

I like to think that my prose has changed considerably as a result of writing so much and so regularly in these parts. But the evidence belies that conviction.

Still, I know that I've become much more adept at sizing up the complexities of audience response since I began this journal. And that was, after all, the main reason I wanted to start blogging in the first place. The irony is that, for all the nuances I'm able to discern in my limited but still remarkably varied readership, both within the context of Live Journal and outside of it, I'm still not able to communicate the messages that matter most with much clarity. Part of that is because of my readership, whose composition has made it impossible for me to write as freely as I would like or, indeed, as I once did here. There are other reasons, though, including my reluctance to commit to a position that forecloses the possibility of maintaining good relations with those who do not share it. As I've suggested recently, that position on taking positions has proven increasingly untenable over the last few years and is one of the first things I want to overhaul in the course of the self-refashioning I'm presently undertaking.

Tags: autobiography, blogging, everyday
Current Location: 85704

As I pondered John McCain's choice of running mate throughout the day, I rapidly moved through a series of opinions. It was stupid, I concluded. And then, just a little later, it seemed brilliant. Then it was stupid again, though for a different reason. Back and forth I went. What I eventually decided, though, was that this move, conjectured by some insiders but a big surprise to most of us, was first and foremost an attempt to inspire this sort of protracted scrutiny. That is, in picking Sarah Palin, McCain guaranteed that he would prod professional and amateur pundits alike to discuss his campaign with far greater fervor than if he had made a "safe" choice like Mitt Romney. The adage that there's no such thing as bad publicity certainly applies here. But it's also a little too diffuse in my estimation, because what the McCain campaign seems to have decided, taking a page from Barack Obama's Art of War, is that playing to the blogosphere and its cable-news corollary was more important than choosing someone who would make sense in terms of the strategy it had been pursuing until now. Arguing that Obama lacks the necessary experience simply won't fly now. Perhaps McCain and his advisers determined that Joe Biden was going to make that argument less effective. Whatever the reasoning, though, people like me feel compelled to do what I'm doing now, which may be a bigger boon to the Republican Party than conventional support.

Tags: blogging, media, politics
Current Location: 85704

I keep sitting down to write something meaningful, only to realize that I can't sit down to write anything for more than fifteen minutes without my foot and ankle acting up. The strange thing is that I don't have much trouble walking, even on a bad day. It's specifically the angle my lower leg is at when I'm at the keyboard that's the problem.

Enough of that, though. What I'm here to report is that I intend to be more direct here in the coming months, rather than spending all my productive energies constructing riddles that may never be solved. I'll start by saying that I'm poised at a crossroads in my life, but have so far been emulating Hamlet's approach to decision making. Luckily, though, my identification with his dilemma does not extent to his critique of the "too solid flesh" of earthly existence. Shoot, it wasn't that long ago that I discovered the virtues of touch. I'm not ready to surrender tactile sensation just yet.

Tags: autobiography, blogging
Current Location: 85704