freckles_and_doubt | Entries tagged with pollage

I haven't forgotten about the Facebook/LJ cross-post twittishness and my resulting impulse to leap overboard from the Good Ship LJ: I have been Brooding on it, and sending my minions forth to find alternatives. I'm still a bit torn by the whole thing. I love LJ's community feel and its friends tool, it's been a happy home to me for nearly six years, but it's now taking that whole "network" thing to a point where it's being deeply silly and I don't really trust it any more.

As always, when doing hand-stands on the horns of the ol' trick-rider's dilemma, I resort to pollage. You are all net-sussed and intelligent people who will think of all sorts of things I haven't, and I shall use you heartlessly. As always, if you are going to gratify my whims by succumbing to the lure of ticky-boxes, please throw a sop to my inner teacher by supporting your argument/demonstrating your working in the comments.

[Poll #1619808]

Current Mood: randomly analytic
Current Music: Eurythmics, We Too Are One

Speaking as a happy atheist and sturdy rationalist, the meaning of Easter to me is a blissful four-day weekend and the excuse to make waffles. (Apparently to stv it's the chance to make horrible jokes about the real hot, cross bunny being the one you set fire to before crucifying it, but that's quite enough symbol mixing right there, thank you). So jo&stv came round on Sunday morning, and we had waffles with cream and ice-cream and berries and pecan nuts and chocolate sauce and maple syrup and bananas and bacon. (Not, as far as I know, all at once, although some of the tottering piles achieved by the Evil Landlord and stv probably came close). Coffee, orange juice and two bottles of champagne were also implicated in the scene. I always see my waffle-making activities as being choreographed by John Woo, on account of how we have two waffle irons and twin-iron mayhem is my signature style. My Seekrit Sorrow with waffles is that I can't toss them, like I can with pancakes two goes out of three. The third one very rarely ends up on the floor.

In the process of the wafflination, a terrible truth was revealed. Jo, owing possibly to some kind of weird Polish genetic predisposition, likes her waffles soggy. As in, not crispy. Not properly cooked. Squishy. Doughy. Eeuw. I did violence to my feelings by providing a couple of batches undercooked as specified, but I think she's odd. However, there's always the chance that in fact my monolithic preference for crispy waffles is the result merely of ignorance and lack of exposure to How The Other Half Lives, so therefore, pollination!

[Poll #1547551]

In other, completely unrelated news, the new musical genre seems to be children's dinosaur heavy metal. This caused me unseemly levels of merriment, the more so because it's not just children's heavy metal performed in dinosaur costumes, it's children's heavy metal performed in dinosaur costumes in Finnish, which raises it to a whole new level of surreal. If they did it in English I'd have to get a copy for my niece.

Current Mood: hee

Today's piece of real-life pathos: I just gave curriculum advice to a student all worried about potentially failing an exam. She apparently felt she wrote really badly because her boyfriend chose to break up with her the night before. By SMS. The youth of today have whole new levels of technological enablement to basic lack of class.

While on the subject of curriculum advice, I need to do one of my periodic Hit The Witterers For Input things. I figure if I'm going to collect a bunch of highly intelligent and accomplished people in this random virtual fashion, I may as well make the most of them.

There is a job being advertised in my faculty, for the full-time, full-contact version of the curriculum advice I've been doing part-time all year. Certain of the Powers That Be have intimated that they would be rather happy if I applied for it. This creates a sudden, sharp dichotomy in the field of possibilities for next year. The lineup looks approximately like this:

Option 1. Full-time curriculum advice.
Advantages: regular salary in high pay-class, with medical aid and benefits. A job in which I have experience, knowledge and skill. Continued contact with students. Respect. (Probably). The chance to organise people to within an inch of their lives. Possiblity of doing it for a couple of years while publishing madly before attempting re-admission into actual academia. Ability to move all the junk from my current campus office into another campus office. Continued contact with academia and my Cherished Institution.
Disadvantages: may not be offered the damned thing anyway. Lack of access to teaching. Nine to five job. (I suck at those). Administrative responsibilities of position considerable, and likely to drive me demented at certain times of year. Full-time job unlikely to leave much room for research. Definition of self as Non-Academic, doing violence to identity. Sense that Those Bastards would have Won. Fear that sticking toe even further into admin waters will cause the somewhat circumscribed thinkers who might inhabit academic selection committees to take me even less seriously as an academic than they already do. Continued contact with academia and my Cherished Institution.

Option 2. Freelance editing, teaching and Independent Scholarhood.
Advantages: independence, flexibility, work from home. Editing is closer to the research/writing mindset than is administration. (Trust me on this). Ability to structure in enough teaching to keep my hand in without draining my energy as currently. Less likely to look bad on an academic CV. Portable, should I eventually choose the Bugger Off Overseas route. Closer to Ideal Sense Of Self.
Disadvantages: irregular earnings and concomitant tendency to keep my mother awake o'nights; no benefits. No commercial editing experience. No real idea as to what I could realistically earn doing freelance work, or how fast I could start said earning. (Memo to self: pick

pumeza's brain.) Home study really small and would need to absorb all the crap from my campus office: warped space-time levels already dangerously high owing to knitting.

[Poll #1085057]
Any insightful, disparaging, encouraging, illuminating or other comments gratefully appreciated. I'm slightly tying myself into knots with this one.

Oh, and by the way. The repeat incursions of Sid (today is like Tuesday, only more so) are making me cheesebrained, which means

d_hofryn and I still owe

first_fallen a birthday present (f-f, you can stop reading now). I got as far as actually pricing said article yesterday, and it's slightly more than I expected or we're able to pay. Anyone else out there who shares the first-fallen love and still owes her a present of the birthday persuasion? Other chippers-in sought! Please drop me e-mail! (Part of the reason for the organisational debacle of abovementioned present is that the go-to co-ordinating person for present conspiracies in my immediate social circle is

first_fallen. These ironies bite.)

Current Mood: severely be-Sidded

The cruel universe randomly woke me up at 6.30am yesterday. On a Sunday! How rude! Miffed, I crawled out of bed, flung myself into the embrace of hot water for a while, and then with self-flagellatory zeal embarked upon book updates. An almost uninterrupted 8-hour burst of manic energy resulted in the death of the penultimate chapter (pop culture), which I have to say is a purer, higher, stronger version of its former slightly shoddy and badly under-researched self. As a reward, The Horror That Is The Bunny has received mitigation: I removed the wings and The Claw, so it sits here tweely clad only in a cheesy plastic crown. (With the full consent of the perpetrators, I might add, although I notice that motivational rewards only go so far: the bastards kicked my butt at Magic again last night. As usual).

Today I have been assailing the Disney chapter, which I am forced to admit is somewhat over-endowed in the frothing and unnecessary gnashing of teeth departments. Bits of it are indefensible and completely crap, although there are some moments of sense. Have been judiciously nurturing the latter while weeding out the former. I may end up with something which delicately suggests that Disney is a bit shamelessly manipulative at times, which is something of an improvement on the old version, which pretty much had DISNEY IS THE ANTICHRIST! up in giant flashing lights.

Come the dawn, i.e. the Giant Birthday Celebratory Party to which you lot should all have received e-mail invites by now, I was planning some appropriate celebration of the book completion. This should entail borrowing the Evil Landlord's second-biggest anvil and dropping it on the bunny, but it seems a bit ungrateful after Bunny has sat here all these months exuding Motivational Field. Not sure what to do. Advise me!

[Poll #1001178]

Obligatory Random Linkage: those of you who enjoy Girl Genius might like Othar's Twitter journal. Pleasingly silly.

Bunny Threat Level: amber, shading to red. Theoretically.

Current Mood: moderately pleased with myself
Current Music: The Cure

Goodness. Yesterday was apparently the tenth anniversary of the first unleashing of Buffy upon an unsuspecting world. Given that I picked up the bug only a couple of years into its run, it seems a remarkably short space of time for me to have arrived at my current all-seasons-owning, ravening-fangirl status. I'd blame

d_hofryn, except that I think I might have infected her rather than the other way round. At any rate: I'm looking forward to seeing the new Dark Horse comics, but in the meantime, have any of you Buffy/comic geeks actually seen the 2003 futuristic-Slayer series Fray? Looks interesting.

In default of any more earth-shattering ideas for a blog entry, I shall summarise the last few days with a poll.

[Poll #944289]
I think some kind of definite theory might be therapeutic, actually. Last night I dreamed that a new species of moth had infested the blister, and several layers of their hibernating larvae had to be removed from my flesh by a random, friendly doctor with a scalpel. Freaky.