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July 14, 2007
Storm Your Own Bastille Today (A Photo-ish Essay)
Howdy, bonjour, bienvenue, and aloha!
I've been thinking about blogging (and the lack thereof) lately, and my attempts at the CyberCulture course blog last semester to start a series of very brief items. As you might have noticed, the Digital Dartboard turned out to be just another massive project, rather than a time-saving fun-time project. And "massive projects" are a problem when you're feeling overwhelmed by everything else that's going on, not going on (but should be), and might be going on. As I usually am.
And then I bit into a fortune cookie and received the following wisdom:
LEARN CHINESE - Banquet = "Yan-hui"
Wait, that's the wrong side. Though knowing the Chinese (but is yan-hui Mandarin, Wu, or Cantonese? Why don't they ever tell you this?) for "banquet" is sure to be ... well, maybe it will be good for a particularly tough round of Jeopardy!, I guess.
Anyway, on the flip-side of the fortune I learned that my lucky numbers are 7, 15, 40, 38, 46, and 18. So if you win with these numbers, you're now obligated to send me a very healthy cut of your prize money. And I learned:
Do not let ambition overshadow small success.
And I found myself thinking that, for once in my life* I might have actually found an applicable and revelant fortune. Usually, my blogging works like this:
Step 1: Get an idea for a blog post. This step happens with surprising frequency.
Step 2: This is the choose-your-own-misadventure step.
- If you choose to Get Distracted by the Other Things You Have to Do Right Now, turn to step 3.
- If you choose to Go Teach Your Class, turn to step 3.
- If you choose to Think About All of the Cool and Unexpected Connections Among, Causes Of, and Implications Growing Out of Your Original Blog Post and the Rest of the World, turn to step 3.
Step 3: Realize that your cute and cuddly little blog post has magically morphed into a Big Scary Major Production.
Step 4: Tell yourself that you'll get back to the post when you have the energy and time to spare.
Step 5: Go to step 4.
Step 6: Profit! (You knew that was coming, didn't you?)
So, to implement the mystical power of the Fortune Cookie, to bring some new posts to this blog, and to make myself feel a little less guilty about not doing more of those first two things, and maybe even to start retraining my brain to think about achieveable projects rather than the One Project To Rule Them All -- which of course, requires both the power of Sauron and the fires of Mount Doom to compose, yet neither of which, sadly, is part of UVM's faculty research support -- which would be a Great Good Thing for my research agenda, I'm going to start blogging in smaller, daily chunks.
Of course, we'll have to see how that goes. This post, for instance, started out as a quick note to all of your Francophones, Francophiles, and FrancoAmericans to get out and celebrate the Quatorze Juillet, that's "July 14th," which is Bastille Day for the rest of us.. You see how well that worked.
* Once, while an undergraduate in Austin, Texas, I grabbed a bite to eat at a Chinese place in the foodcourt of a mall. My fortune that day (which I shall remember, verbatim, forever) read: "He loves you as much as he can, but he cannot love you much." I wasn't dating anyone at the time, which may have been the point of the fortune, but I still found the message a bit... forward. If you have a fortune cookie horror story, feel free to share.
Posted by reparent at July 14, 2007 2:22 PM