I know that the Blogging 101 assignments/prompts are piling up unattended, but it’s been another late night, so I am just going to have to write quickly about the topic that is most front of mind for me — and I’ll catch up on Blogging 101 tomorrow and over the weekend.
And why was it another late night for me?
As it turns out, that’s exactly the topic I want to be writing about tonight.
I was out late because I was auditioning for a show.
Today’s post is a Blogging 101 “two-fer”: I’ll be playing catchup on the first two assignments for the challenge — a task made rather a lot easier by the fact that I completed these same two assignments back in September.
Taken as a pair, the assignments are basically a gesture of announcing one’s bloggy self to the big wide world, first with a statement of your intended focus/goals for blogging and, next, a revision of your blog name and tagline to bring it into alignment with said focus and goals.
(Tonight’s title, by the way, stems from my inability to roll with the inevitable Destiny’s Child reference and my insistence on looking to different musical inspiration…)
I am so tired of being sick.
I’ve written before about the challenges of dealing with paper clutter in the house. Well, the last several weeks of gloomy-time meant that I’d been letting all the mail pile up again in a big way — aside from those few essential bills I’d pull out and handle as soon as they arrived. So a big project for me this past weekend and the last couple of evenings has been to once again try to tame the paper dragon.
In addition to handling the most immediate paper accumulation from the last couple months, I also emptied out a couple boxes of longer-term paper accumulation. You know, the kinds of paper piles that built up in other busy times during the last year, but then got shoved into a box in some last-minute cleaning frenzy before an anticipated visitor’s arrival.*
And, after this accomplishment, I am now turning my analytic attention to the other main source of paper influx, aside from catalogs.
My overabundance of magazine subscriptions.
Jezebel tells me that the Wall Street Journal recently ran an article asking “Are High Heels Dead?” The full WSJ article is behind their subscriber paywall, so I can’t tell you anything more about it than appears in Jezebel’s summary.
Look down at your feet. If you’re wearing Crocs or clogs right now, then you win and you’re right on trend. There’s a “low shoe revolution” afoot and it’s all about comfort. According to this Wall Street Journal article, “Are High Heels Dead?” ladies are proudly taking to the streets in their best-worst “unfashionable footwear.”
I honestly can’t tell if the Jezebel staffer is happy, unhappy, or indifferent about this supposed turn of events — she identifies herself as someone interested in comfort, but also comments “there’s no real reason to trash all our favorite pumps.”
What I will say is that I am more skeptical than anything else.
My decision to keep the Comics class out of the rest of my Coursera options isn’t just about the pop culture/high culture divide. It’s also a class where I have a very particular learning goal in mind. I’ve read comics and graphic novels intermittently throughout my life, but I am very aware of the ways that my reading has always been focused more on language, plot, and characterization — the things I’m good at and was trained for in grad school. This approach has always given immense short shrift to the visual content of comix.*
So by taking this class, and by choosing this particular class as the one to stay with, I’m hoping very precisely to strengthen my understanding of the visual elements of comix, and how to read them as visual documents.
Now, there’s no stakes, really, if you take a MOOC course and do it only halfway — watch only part of the lectures, or watch all the lectures while skipping the assignments. But I’m enough a believer in active learning that I usually try to do all the lectures and “homework” in the MOOC courses I take. This is part of why I try to be thoughtful about not overloading my schedule.
What I hadn’t counted on with this class is one of the main homework assignments: drawing your own mini-comic book!
Way back when — I mean, way back when I was right out of college and still in the musicology Ph.D. program I attended, before jumping ship to literature & culture, which was before jumping ship en toto — a few of my school friends and I took a road trip up from Philly to see a performance at the Met.
Enough years have passed that I can’t tell you which opera. It was definitely something 20th century and modern/post-modern, knowing the operatic tastes of the group members (myself most emphatically included in the tally of that preference). Strangely enough is how one of the clearest memories I have from that trip (aside from impressing the gang with my ability to surgically insert my Honda into the flow Lincoln Tunnel traffic) was something that happened at dinner before the show.
And, as with other news stories in past weeks and months, I am returning to Emma Watson’s address at the UN on Saturday for another piece of discussion, through another lens of analysis.
I know that during the time I am returning again and again to this particular well, that there are many other stories I am leaving untold — it is that fact which sometimes leads me to have such vivid fantasies of winning the mega-millions and writing all the livelong day. Nevertheless, I find for myself that there is a value in looking deeply at one event from multiple lenses, rather than always popcorning to report on event after event according to the formula so brilliantly summed up by Kate Harding, back when she shuttered up Shapely Prose:
By last spring, I became increasingly aware that I was doing a lot of “Stock Intro A + Stock Feminism/Fat Acceptance Points B and C + Free-Form Outrage Interlude + Stock Conclusion D = done for the day,” and that is really not the kind of writing I want to be doing.
Rather than throwing myself over too strongly into “wind-up doll of feminist outrage mode,” I believe that by looking deeply at the multiple facets of one thing, I am sometimes better able to point to all the unconscious workings and cultural patternings that so interest me about the world and the patriarchy.
(And by “so interest me,” I mean “that I hope to name clearly in the vain hope that speaking the name of the Thing forces it to magically self-destruct like in the fairy tales.“)
Last night I was still working to finish my first Emma Watson post (and mentally beginning to compose my second for typing and pre-scheduling), when Mr. Mezzo told me he was about to head off to bed. And I remembered: I still needed to take my laundry out of the washer and hang it out to dry.
That task had occurred to me at least two or three times earlier in the evening. I think once before dinner, and definitely right before sitting down to write, and then again in the midst when I was walking to the kitchen to refill my water glass. During the last of those three moments, I even calculated to myself how I was probably about 10 minutes from concluding my post, so I could knock that out and then turn my attention to laundry before writing post #2.
But then gathering and writing my concluding thoughts became a longer and trickier process than I’d expected, and Mr. Mezzo’s schedule update summoned up this incredible sense of (internally-generated) pressure about how I needed to quickly shift attention and get the laundry hung out ASAP so’s not to disturb his chances of falling asleep. (The drying racks live in our bedroom, you see. Usually that’s a very good thing — but all good things have their down sides.)
That pressure, cascading on top of the frustrations over another wasted weekend, the awareness of how much more writing there was left to do, and the general dread over going back into a work environment that’s been kinda ugly for the last couple of weeks. All of it hit me like a ton of bricks. And then I said it.
“I hate my life.”
I had myself a bit of a pajamas day today. I take some comfort in the fact that I took a shower and changed into fresh PJ’s during the late afternoon. I don’t know why that matters to me as strongly as it does, but it does somehow feel more ambitious to have done that instead of to be wearing the same set of PJs from sun-up to bedtime again.
There’s a few contributing factors to this kind of nesting day. Last night’s Shakespeare event was very fun, but we didn’t get home till after 12:30 AM — nothing much for younger folks, but WAY later than Mr. Mezzo and I are used to being out. There’s also been a lot of stress and tension in the office, so I am plum worn out from that.
There’s also the undeniable shift over to autumn.
Self-Love: It's Just Another Lifestyle Change 