I’ve been in a positively vile mood all day today; chalk it up to a very trying afternoon of senior thesis presentations yesterday (which I shouldn’t write about here, given my heavy student readership, but about which I will say that 6 of 12 were extremely good, and that I did a terrible job of (a) setting up the schedule, which inadvertently clustered all of the problems together, and (b) using my tenure-given right to say, loudly, “YOUR TIME IS UP.  STOP TALKING NOW,” so I brought much of it on myself), and a too-late night in Pasadena last night, and a full week of less than six hours of sleep a night, and four nights this week of getting to bed after 1 am.  As my mother used to say to me when I was upset about something going seriously wrong in my life, “You’re just overtired.” Pat, pat, pat.  Which only made me want to slug her, which would only have perversely proven her point, which was ultimately about my irrationality and lack of mature emotional control.

So I got up way earlier than I wanted today, bit R.’s head off on the telephone, stormed around the house collecting and taking out garbage, and then sat down to do the thing I least wanted to do today:  write an introduction for Bill Keller and Barry Siegel, who were closing out this weekend’s Alumni Symposium.  It came together quickly enough, but I resented having to do it, resented having to get out of my pajamas and make myself presentable and go do an introduction for an event that I didn’t plan and for which I’d get no credit.  (This is the kind of vile mood I was in:  put-upon, abused, wanting nothing more than to be left alone, which really would have been better for all concerned.)

In any event, it’s Alumni Weekend, which means that all the parking in town is taken, people are prowling all over campus, all the restaurants are full, and I’m in that on-display position where I have to smile and be sweet when people ask me inane questions.  That said, though, this is the first year that I’ve had a slew of my former students come back for the festivities.  It’s been great getting to see them, if my mondo stacks of grading (which I can’t get done because people keep asking me to do other dumb things that I stupidly agree to) and my foul mood have kept me from seeing much of them.  This influx, though, includes a couple of regular and/or recent commenters here, and what may be another future few.  In fact, the second member of the class of 2000 that I saw said to me, inside of five minutes, “So I hear you have the most amazing blog.”

Which, great.  I’m getting good word of mouth.  I love this site, love meandering around whatever nonsense happens to pass through my grouchy, overworked, underappreciated brain, and I love that people whose opinions I care about read it, and comment, and tell one another.  I’m all for an audience, especially an appreciative one.

But my vileness of mood left me this morning thinking oh great, now people are going to expect things from this blog, and it’s going to be like when you go see a movie after too many people have told you it’s great, and you just think eh.  Or worse, now there’s pressure, and watch me get some kind of writer’s block, and not be able to post anything worth reading again.

Like I said, vile mood.

But the Keller/Siegel show was great, and I was actually glad that I was forced to go to it.  And then I went to my office and got a couple of key bits of paperwork I’d been stalling on done.  And then I took a stack of grading to a local coffee shop and hung out at a sidewalk table, enjoying the sun and actually cranking through some signficant paperage.  And then I took three fabulous graduating seniors, who’ve hung out with me for three years through the faculty resident gig, to dinner.  And later tonight I’m going to go see one of them in Assassins.

So the mood is on an upswing, as today has turned out better than expected, and tomorrow promises all the pajamas and green tea and grading on the balcony I could want.  The weekend may be salvaged yet.

So I spent several hours yesterday having my boobs crushed in order to have various pictures of their insides taken.

Actually, it was only one boob, and the crushing part of the festivities didn’t last all that long.  For those of you who have not had this done, though, you should know that this medical procedure is like the gift that keeps on giving.  You’re aware that it’s happened for way longer than you want to be.

Anyhow.  This is the fourth such boob-crushing I’ve gotten to experience.  And I’m a mere 37 years old.  This does not seem to me to bode well for the future of my relationship with my breasts.

What follows is long, so it’s going below the fold.  Read at your own risk.

Read the rest of this entry »

About a month ago, I very, very belatedly hopped the Bloglines train, putting together a tidy pile of feeds and using them to keep up with all my favorite blogs.  It was a bit of a struggle at first, as I mentioned then:  half of blog-reading for me is about the aesthetics of individual design choices, something almost tactile in effect.  But the sheer speed of using Bloglines to get caught up was seriously attractive, particularly as I was in a moment of organization and streamlining, and needed to minimize the amount of time I spent reading blogs.  For that—and also for making sure I kept up with sites that don’t ping blogrolling.com—Bloglines has been genius.

However.  There’s an unintended effect, one that’s got me reconsidering the switch, at least to some extent.  Prior to getting up to speed with Bloglines, I was primarily using my own blogroll as the link farm from which my reading began.  What this meant was that I spent some portion of the day staring at my own site, and if that site hadn’t updated in a while, I began to chafe a bit.  So I’d write something, and post, just to keep things moving along for me, as well as for anybody else out there who might at this point be reading.  Now, however, it is entirely possible for me to go days at a time without loading this page.  I don’t feel quite the same pressure (or is it desire?) to post.  And so I don’t.

At least that’s what I woke up thinking this morning.  It’s also possible that the last week’s non-posting has far more to do with what week it was—that is, the week of mad commenting on term paper drafts, which also included a super-fast weekend trip to DC—than with my shifted blog reading habits.  It’s hard to have a coherent thought right now, much less write it down.

So I was at home this morning, getting dressed to my usual KCRW soundtrack, when the station cut away to CNN’s audio feed, covering the announcement of the new pope.  I turned on the television and sat rivetted, watching every ruffle of the curtains as St. Peter’s filled to over-capacity and those gathered there and around their sets worldwide waited for the interregnum to come to an end.

And so it did, with the announcement of the accession of Benedict XVI.  And I sat and cried in front of my television set, watching my relationship with the Church be severed once again.

This is a man who as cardinal often dissented from Pope John Paul II’s positions—but dissented to the right.  Ratzinger disapproved of the Pope’s ecumenism, and particularly his praying for peace with the leaders of other faiths, because he felt that this sent a message that there wasn’t one true faith, that maybe many faiths could be right and good.

This is not a pope who can create the more inclusive Church I was hoping for; in fact, he has as his stated goal not opening the Church to many around the world who long for acceptance and inclusion, but instead shoring up the European Church against apostasy through the reintroduction of rigid doctrine.

I don’t find myself quite so upset, right now, as to be motivated to join the Unitarian Jihad, but I will confess that the Anglicans are starting to look mighty good to me.

[UPDATE, 4.19.05, 12.37 pm:  I am stunned to find myself linking supportively to an opinion expressed by Andrew Sullivan.  A coming civil war, indeed.]

I’ve just figured out what the title of my next book ought to be, and it’s my referrer logs and googlings that have told me so:  What to Expect When One Is Losing a Toe Nail.  In the spirit of this, except, you know, about toenails.

Just heard a story on Morning Edition reporting on a push by federal officials to force domain-name owners to identify themselves accurately in the WHOIS database, a database which is, of course, publicly available.  The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) moved earlier this month to make such public identification mandatory for .us domain names, not only making it illegal to provide false information but also eliminating private registrations; they now seem to be on the march to expand this policy across the net.

I’ve seen very little response to this thus far; the folks at GoDaddy.com have launched a petition site urging the NTIA to reestablish private registrations, arguing that placing personal registration information in a public database exposes innocent people to internet predators.  In so doing, though, they make a curious distinction between “privacy” and “anonymity,” suggesting both on this petition site and in an article published on CircleID, that only bad guys really want to be anonymous, but that everyone should have the right to privacy.

I’m entirely with them on the privacy issue; my domain is publicly registered (only because I honestly didn’t know any better back when I registered it), and it creeps me out a bit that that information is so easily searchable.  But is the distinction that GoDaddy is drawing between the privacy of private registrations and the anonymity of falsified public information really the key to this issue?  Are there no other calls for anonymity than criminal activity?  What about political dissent, whistle-blowing, even anonymous blogging?  Is “privacy” rather than “anonymity” a sufficient protection for those who need it?

“The Internet is often a lawless place,” the GoDaddy folks claim.  That frontier metaphor has been around since the public net’s earliest days, so it should come as no surprise that, as in the case of Deadwood, the government cocksuckers* are apparently rolling in to clean it up without any understanding of the situation.  And as Cy Tolliver has it, “If we’re going to be surprised by that, boys—government being government—will we next be shocked by the rivers running and the trees casting fucking shade?”

—

*If you watch Deadwood, you won’t have blinked at that.  If you don’t, you ought to.

In yesterday’s mail, the following, from Educause:

COMPUTER APPLICATION GRADES ESSAYS
A professor at the University of Missouri has developed a computer application that grades papers and offers advice on writing. Ed Brent, professor of sociology, created the application, called Qualrus, using a $100,000 grant from the National Science Foundation. Qualrus evaluates papers based on the structure of sentences and paragraphs and on the flow of ideas. Instructors can specify which factors of an assignment are most important, and Qualrus incorporates that information into the scores it provides. Brent claims the application improves students’ papers and estimated that it saves him more than 200 hours of grading per semester. The tool has been approved for use across the university, but so far Brent is the only instructor using it. Brent is also looking for ways to distribute the tool to other universities and to businesses.
CNET, 7 April 2005
http://news.com.com/2100-1032_3-5659366.html

I don’t know how to respond to this at all.  Sure, I’ve got fantasies of some super hi-tech invention that will get me out of the hundreds of hours I spend grading each semester, too.  But the ironies in this particular version are only highlighted by the article immediately preceding this one in the Educause mailing:

POKING HOLES IN MICROSOFT’S GRAMMAR CHECKER
Sandeep Krishnamurthy, associate professor of marketing and e-commerce at the University of Washington, is so incensed with the grammar checker in Microsoft Word that he has taken to posting examples of what he sees as the checker’s failings on his Web site. He has also called on Microsoft to improve the checker. Citing egregious grammar mistakes that the tool does not question, Krishnamurthy said that although it

might be helpful for above-average writers, it actually impedes below-average writers’ efforts to improve their writing skill. Krishnamurthy said Microsoft should modify the tool to allow users to select the level of help they need, from basic to advanced. For its part, Microsoft said in a statement that the tool is not intended to find or identify all errors. Instead, it is designed “to catch the kinds of errors that ordinary users make in normal writing situations.”
Chronicle of Higher Education, 15 April 2005 (sub. req’d)
http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly/v51/i32/32a02902.htm

So, in case you’re keeping score:  grammar checkers are useless, but this new software is capable of “evaluat[ing] papers based on the structure of sentences and paragraphs and on the flow of ideas.” Because those are more machine-recognizable than all that complex grammar stuff, I guess.

Why, oh why, do I persist in flying through Houston?

Actually, it’s not the flying-through-Houston part that’s the problem; it’s the expecting to do so without incident part.  I need to settle myself into the knowledge that every Sunday evening westward return comes with incident.  The incidentless version is not on offer.

Yesterday’s variant was an oldie but a goodie:  puddle-hopper out of Baton Rouge was delayed by 40 minutes; projected connection time in IAH was 51 minutes, including flying into one terminal and out of another after collecting the unavoidably gate-checked bag.  What mostly annoyed me about yesterday’s version was the bald-faced lies from the gate agents in BR, who kept looking at people’s tickets and saying “oh, your connection’s at 9.10; you’re not going to have any problem.” They waved everyone off, and it was painfully evident that they did so just to keep us quiet and get us on the plane when it showed up, so that we could be Houston’s problem instead of theirs.

I, however, have smartified since the last rendition of this little dance.  Once I got waved off by the gate agent (”8.58?  Oh, you’ll make that with no problem”), I got on the phone and called Continental.  Yes, while standing in the gate area.  The rep I got on the phone pulled up my flights and told me, first off, what our projected departure time from BR was (which the gate agents refused to say), and that I was going to be left with 15 minutes to navigate Houston.  And then proceeded to hold a seat for me on a flight today, saying “at the moment, it doesn’t look like you’re going to make it, and I want you taken care of, in case.”

The other bit of good news is that I didn’t need that seat.  Had my flight out of Houston been on time, I’d still be there, cooling my heels and eating all the airport food an $8 airline voucher can buy; instead, because that flight was delayed as well, I got to my second gate right at the end of boarding, slipped into my seat, and got home a mere half-hour late.  Had I just gotten into the zen of travel at the outset—acknowledging my powerlessness in the situation; recognizing that eventually, you always make it home—I could even have spared myself the stress.

There’s no zen for today, however—the day after return, when the payment is due for a fabulous weekend away.  Frantic attempts at catching up begin imminently.

Here’s a sign of how spoiled I’ve become:  I’m sitting in the President’s Club in the Houston airport, using the free wi-fi, and bitching and moaning because the coverage in the lounge is a little spotty, and for a while my connection kept dropping.

I’m complaining about the quality of free wi-fi.  When, if you’d asked me about such a thing as recently as three years ago, I’d have said “wi-what?”

Next up:  complaints about not getting upgraded to first class!

So everybody’s on about the Google satellite maps feature, which I’ll admit, is mighty groovy.  It’s wonderful and disorienting seeing that eye-in-the-sky view of the mundane places in which my everyday life is carried out.  But despite all that fancy watermarking Google’s slapped on the images, it’s clear that these pics are at least two years old, if not older.

How do I know?  Here’s where I apparently live:

Not only no construction, but no signs of impending construction.  No street. This picture is both a satellite image and a time capsule—just fascinating.