We got another campus police alert this week for sexual assault, which makes this the third police alert in two months (stabbing, stabbing, assault, in that order), which I find worrying. The campus I work at is fairly well known and has a good reputation and is surrounded on one side by villas of people who have way too much money and thinks sculpted topiaries and rococo moldings are a thing (I went for a walk through the area a few years ago, curious about architecture). People have tried to make that area a closed neighborhood for the wealthy and elite back in the day. This -- three incidents either on campus or within fifteen minutes walking distance of campus, should not be happening.
Yet here we are.
Which brought me to the point on Thursday where I realized I might have to stay a lot later than my usual time on campus. I actually had to plan out possible ways to ensure my own safety and had decided that, if I had to stay late for an hour or more, the bus stop was empty, and the street light there broke again (it does that) I was going to text my way through my contact list until I find someone to keep in touch with until the bus arrives.
Consequently I have suddenly become a lot better at remembering to recharge my phone.
On that note, I just want to mention that this week's Thursday was awful. It was awful not in the sense that something horrible and/or tragic happened but the grinding dreariness of hundreds of little things not going my way all within a twenty-four hour time span. The highlights of those hours include but are not limited to: nose-piece on glasses falling off, sudden and inexplicable cramping in my calf muscle, bad enough that I couldn't walk, missing the bus, and somehow switching the electrodes on one of my protein gels -- which is a mistake I have never made in my entire life-- so that I needed to re-do the whole thing. By the time the evening came around I was at the "I hate everybody and everything" stage and ready to declare war on nameless deities and abstract concepts alike, so it was probably a good thing that the day ended.
Friday was much better. I have a new-found appreciation of Fridays, even above and beyond the usual joys of the arrival of the weekend.
And now, I have tea.
20140118
Hello, hello
It's been awhile since I've updated my blog -- my current schedule being what it is it just hasn't been possible to do daily posts like I've done, once upon a time. I could make time, it's true -- I can always make time -- but as is the case with everything else, it comes down to priority lists and cost-benefit analyses and at the end of the day, nothing gets written (that's appropriate for posting here, anyway).
That being said though, I do think that it's still good practice for me to write regularly. Tumblr is well and good because it's more informal and there is VERY little low pressure to generate unique content when all I can do is hit "reblog", but it'll be good for me to write something more structured that is NOT related to what I have to do at work, because I have a very (justified) fear that I may forget how to write something that's not a science report.
Still, I'm a bit short on time still, and given that this IS my blog, I've made the executive decision that I'll write one post a week, regardless of the length, and if I'm really short on time I'll just ...not revise / edit it. Editing takes about 2-3x as long for me than writing these stream-of-thought posts, you see. You have been warned: you will get to see my informal writing in all of its grammatically questionable glory and if that's not your thing...well I assume since you are here, you know how to operate a browser.
No seriously, I feel that my academic writing is slowly destroying my ability to write anything else. One of my acquaintances had said that writing an article and writing a short story shouldn't be all that different (she...doesn't write stories) since they're both narratives that need clear writing with beginning and end and you are essentially telling a story in both cases. Having thought about it, I concluded that yes, there are similarities, but for me, who has written both, the differences are more obvious than the similarities. It's like the different between Monet and Mondrian -- they are both painters and paintings are very similar as an medium of art in that you do need technical skills to apply pigment to a surface in order to convey certain kinds of thought and emotion in the viewer. However, if you will google image Claude Monet and Piet Mondrian, I think you will agree with me that the style is VERY different, the technique to paint each other is most likely different, and the general feelings of looking at a Monet, regarding which one, is very different from what you get from a Mondrian.
Scientific writing is, for me, the Mondrian; fiction writing is the Monet.
That being said though, I do think that it's still good practice for me to write regularly. Tumblr is well and good because it's more informal and there is VERY little low pressure to generate unique content when all I can do is hit "reblog", but it'll be good for me to write something more structured that is NOT related to what I have to do at work, because I have a very (justified) fear that I may forget how to write something that's not a science report.
Still, I'm a bit short on time still, and given that this IS my blog, I've made the executive decision that I'll write one post a week, regardless of the length, and if I'm really short on time I'll just ...not revise / edit it. Editing takes about 2-3x as long for me than writing these stream-of-thought posts, you see. You have been warned: you will get to see my informal writing in all of its grammatically questionable glory and if that's not your thing...well I assume since you are here, you know how to operate a browser.
No seriously, I feel that my academic writing is slowly destroying my ability to write anything else. One of my acquaintances had said that writing an article and writing a short story shouldn't be all that different (she...doesn't write stories) since they're both narratives that need clear writing with beginning and end and you are essentially telling a story in both cases. Having thought about it, I concluded that yes, there are similarities, but for me, who has written both, the differences are more obvious than the similarities. It's like the different between Monet and Mondrian -- they are both painters and paintings are very similar as an medium of art in that you do need technical skills to apply pigment to a surface in order to convey certain kinds of thought and emotion in the viewer. However, if you will google image Claude Monet and Piet Mondrian, I think you will agree with me that the style is VERY different, the technique to paint each other is most likely different, and the general feelings of looking at a Monet, regarding which one, is very different from what you get from a Mondrian.
Scientific writing is, for me, the Mondrian; fiction writing is the Monet.
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