wickedqueen.net

Okay, so for the past 12 hours, I’ve been getting a weird error from WordPress every time I try to post, and now suddenly it’s working again. The blog was never down; I just couldn’t post. I guess I was trying to do it from home and now I’m on campus, but I was posting from home before. Weird.

This morning I went to an IAP event on grant applications, which actually freaked me out less than professional development-type stuff usually does–possibly because as a grad student you can’t actually be a PI on a grant, so I didn’t immediately, automatically feel hopelessly behind. In a few minutes I think I may head over to a gathering of MIT writers; it might be a good way to meet some people with common interests.

Just out of curiosity, is the new Flickr sidebar badge a) not working for or b) annoying the shit out of anybody?

(Just so you know, it seems to stop animating after a set period of time. Although if anyone has a link for one that doesn’t animate and also doesn’t require widgets, which are not supported by my theme, I’d be interested.)

I finished uploading all the Japan photos. Now to move on to the largest category of my collection: adorable self-portraits. Oh, yeah.

When I first changed the theme of the blog to the new(ish) pink scheme, I fully intended to replace the header image with one of my own. But you know, I had stuff going on.

Anyway, I have finally gotten around to it, but you will probably need to right-click the image itself and select “reload” if you’re still seeing the pink flower (which, you’ll notice, makes the title of the blog very difficult to read in its new font color). Just because you’re seeing new entries, including this one, doesn’t necessarily mean you will have reloaded the header image, so if you’re still seeing the flower, you’ll need to do it manually.

Carry on, then.

(The new image is from one of my favorite photos from Japan–probably March or April of 2001, when the cherry trees were in bloom in Tokyo.)

Whoops. I updated my LJ to indicate that I had not been eaten by the eels at this time, but neglected my domain blog.

I have not been eaten by the eels at this time. I took my prelim. It was okay, I guess. I felt much the way I felt last time, which is to say, totally incapable of predicting my results. So we’ll see. Anyway, it only took a couple of days for most of the tension in my neck to dissipate. You would think it would have happened faster, with all that booze, but I guess my body has a strong memory for terror.

Right now, I am mostly worried about packing for Palo Alto, and how much will it cost to ship my stuff (there’s reimbursement, but I still worry, because I have a LOT of shoes). And how heavy a jacket will I need in Palo Alto in November, anyway?

The room I’m renting has a single bed. I bought a set of sheets for it, but it suddenly occurs to me that this is my chance to get another set of Hello Kitty sheets like the ones I had when I had a single bed, and gave to my sister when I got a double. I don’t begrudge her, but it would be nice to have some of my own again.

My friend Rikhei gave me a Vox invite. I already have two blogs, but as an aspiring internet researcher, it seemed like the sort of thing I ought to have. Let me know if you have one and I’ll add you.

Goffman, in his famous discussion of the presentation of self via dramaturgical interaction (1959), talks a lot about performance teams–groups of people who have a common interest in maintaining a particular definition of the situation, and depend upon each other to do so. That is to say, one person can fuck up the performance for everyone by behaving incongruously or whatever (and they can do it because you’re on the same team, and because you’re on the same team, it’s not so simple to get rid of them).

It occurs to me that many blogs, and particularly anonymous ones, are perceived as inappropriate, dangerous, wrong, etc. because of the danger they pose to this kind of reality maintenance. The blogs that get famous are usually the ones for which someone gets, or could get, fired, disowned, or divorced–they talk about behind the scenes information that is often at odds with the facade people want to construct. Anonymous blogs are worse because they erode the proposed realities of a large number of structurally similar teams–in many cases you can’t prove that the renegade lawyer or receptionist or housewife or whatever is NOT writing about your particular company/household, and so all companies/households that could be the structural home of the anonymous blogger suffer a blow to the credibility of the realities that they put forth as unproblematic, necessary, and obvious.

Goffman specifically mentions “renegades,” like doctors who talk about other doctors’ fee-splitting and performance of unnecessary procedures. Obviously there are costs to being a renegade, and anyone who’s ever been fired/divorced/disowned for a blog knows it, but the consequences of an anonymous blog are less certain, while at the same time you can potentially reach a much larger audience with your own personal version of reality.

So: it’s no wonder that a lot of people don’t like blogs. They fuck with carefully maintained realities, and that’s not just threatening, it’s immoral, regardless of whether or not it violates a non-disclosure agreement (cf. Pollner 1974).

When I was at my parents’ house this past week, my mother was driving me into town to see my grandmother at the hospital again.* I said something about having heard from a couple of people I knew in junior high school via MySpace,** and she turned to me and said: “Don’t think I’m being all paranoid and parental, but you know, in the current climate, you should be very careful what you say in your blog.”

As you can see, my mother does not READ this blog, which I am thinking of subtitling Academic blather about video games and personal anecdotes about finding bras that fit, with the occasional photo of my hair.

If she’s worried about anyone, she should be worried about Jude.

Actually, I am kind of embarrassed about just how innocuous this blog is. I guess there was that time I hated on somebody else’s research; that got some negative comments, although it wasn’t someone in my field, so the cached version probably won’t prevent me from getting tenure in ten years.*** And I was pissed off about critical of FEMA’s handling of Katrina, but probably they’re not going to come for me before those other ten thousand people on that one. Basically, this blog is not cool enough to get me in trouble, Mom.

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*She was doing very, very badly on Tuesday, which is why I flew down to Missouri on Wednesday, but now she’s actually doing much better–her blood pressure is back up, she’s eating, and they took off the oxygen mask.

***Knock on wood.

I went to see Jim White and the Handsome Family last night–alone, because Kara had to work and I hadn’t been able to find anyone else who even knew who they were, but having heard the Handsome Family’s live CD and heard good things about their shows from numerous people, I really wanted to see them–and I really like Jim White’s stuff, which I discovered only recently when two different people sent me “The Wound That Never Heals” within the space of a week, demonstrating that anyone who knows me knows that I appreciate a good song about a woman killing people.

Anyway, so I went, and it turned out they were having it in the Orpheum’s little side theater, and I got there at like 8:10 and they wouldn’t let anyone in yet despite the ticket’s claim that the doors opened an hour before the show was scheduled to start at 9:00.

So I was standing out there, and there was another woman already hunkered in another doorway to get out of the wind, who said knowingly to me, “Ten minutes, huh?”

We started talking, and I introduced myself with my usual rhymes-with-Scrabble spiel, and then a few minutes later I said something about sociology, and she said, “Wait… I know who you are. You have a blog!”

Crazy.

About ten minutes later, they did let us in, and we sat up in the third row and chatted until Jim White came out and started his set. I didn’t really know how he was going to be in person, and I was at first not encouraged by his opening rendition of “Handcuffed to a Fence in Mississippi,” which I didn’t like much–and I love that song. But then he started talking and was hilarious, and I actually liked the rest of his performance a lot–it was just that one song that compared badly to the album version.

(”You know, my record company tries to sell me as some kind of tortured, demented poet, when in fact, deep down, I’m a comedian. I’m like the opposite of Woody Allen.”)

During the intermission, I bought his first CD (Wrong-Eyed Jesus) and babbled at him about how people kept playing “The Wound That Never Heals” (which he hadn’t actually played in his set, sadly) and how much I loved it.* I should not be allowed to talk to people who I think are cool.

Jim White also had a suitcase full of clothing he calls the “Jimbotique,” clothes he purchased for himself that turned out not to fit. A one-man traveling folk singer thrift store. Keep an eye out.

The Handsome Family were as excellent live as their live CD and the reports of others suggested, but they didn’t finish their set until midnight, by which time, no reflection on them, I was getting pretty yawny. They played “Weightless Again,” which is one of my favorites and the first song I ever heard by them (thanks, frippy!), and they closed their set with “Barbara Allen,” a Child ballad, so that was cool.

Afterwards, I walked home, which wasn’t far, but it was SO COLD.** I am ready for spring.

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*”The Wound That Never Heals” is on No Such Place, which I already own. I bought his first album because it had “A Perfect Day to Chase Tornadoes” on it, which I had never heard until last night and which I love. Apparently he has yet to release another song I liked, “Diamonds to Coal,” so keep an eye out for that.

**Jim White told us at one point that he was going to sing a song about weather, and that when he performed this song in California people just stared at him, but that he knew we would understand.

So I resisted getting a Facebook account for like a year, figuring that hey, I may have an LJ, but I am DEFINITELY too old for that shit.

Then my comm arts prof made fun of me–well, indirectly. But he made a pointed remark yesterday about what happens to people who fail to adopt new technologies. Naturally, I have sort of a misplaced pride in not being That Guy (although: see my unnatural devotion to MUSIC, which faded after 1999 only because my undergrad institution took it away), and I know my sister Sophie uses it pretty obsessively, so I went and made a Facebook account yesterday.

And promptly discovered that not only do multiple grad students in my department have them, but so does my FATHER. Geeze. So much for being the technological innovator in the family.

Then I went to the doctor’s office this morning to get my INR checked, and while I was in the elevator with several people, one of them turned to me and said: “Hey, aren’t you on MySpace?”

Uh, yeah. Yeah, I am. Only because of my old friend Laura, who uses it to blog. I think it has a shitty interface, so I don’t use it much. But this is the second time I’ve been in an elevator* and had someone who I thought was a stranger recognize me from the interweb–and turn out to be someone to whom I am pretty much directly virtually connected.

My comm arts prof remarked yesterday that as networking systems like Friendster and Facebook add blogs and other features, the boundaries between different kinds of internet presence are breaking down. Reflecting on that–it’s probably true–I think one reason I never found the network sites particularly interesting is that I already used LJ, which had very good features for keeping an online journal (particularly filters and commenting, for me), but was also strongly focused on networks already–that’s a major difference between LJ and, say, Blogspot.

In recent months, of course, SixApart has been actively working to make LJ even more like the network sites, adding new fields to the info page like schools attended, and adding features like the ScrapBook (which, dude, talk about a shitty interface, but I get a lot of space on it with my permanent account).

Despite all this, however, LJ remains pretty ghetto-ized in a lot of ways. I think sites like Facebook probably draw a lot more “casual users.” For one thing, they’re not inextricably linked in the minds of many internet users with bad goth poetry written by self-pierced 15-year-old girls who can’t spell. They’re also not billed as being FOR blogging/journaling, which of course a lot of people have no interest in anyway.

On the other hand, this may give LJ an edge when it comes to actually reaping benefits from the network–as long as non-users don’t pay enough attention to it to create actual harmful effects (”we can’t hire HIM, he has a LIVEJOURNAL”), being part of a smaller network might mean stronger ties to other members overall: a kind of underdog team mentality.

One thing for which I use LJ that might work better–but I’m not sure about this–on, say, Facebook, are the kind of general bulletin posts that I make to my Madison filter when I need a ride to the grocery store, or the one I made this morning to my entire friends list, asking someone who already had my phone number to please call it, because I couldn’t find my cell phone.** That kind of thing may be solely a function of how active your particular network is–if you have a lot of Facebook friends frequently checking whatever kind of public messaging system they’ve got, then this is an effective way to get someone, anyone, to call your cell phone; if you don’t have an active network, it doesn’t matter what site you’re using, you’re still just shouting into the virtual abyss.

BUT, overall number of users on any site is probably going to affect the activity level of any individual user’s personal network. So it may be that Facebook is where it’s at. We’ll see.

If you want to see my Facebook or MySpace profiles, I’ve added them to the sidebar under “the rest of me.”

And finally, on a rather different note, I’ve been meaning to post a poem I wrote a few years ago that is all about internet social networks, really: Love song for girl in chatroom #2

(It was the second love song, not the second chatroom.)

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*Obviously it’s happened more than twice, outside of elevators. But twice in them.

**It was in my bathroom. Don’t ask me.

Interesting thing I just learned: there is a five-letter all-capital letter phrase (it has to do with FTP) that I cannot type in an entry, because it causes WordPress to give me a 403 error insisting that I do not have permission to post to my own blog. How bizarre is THAT?

Many thanks to Daniel for solving my redirect problem, anyway.

I just thought I’d note that I’ve been using FireFTP, a FireFox extension that allows you to FTP from within the FireFox browser, and I really like it. My FTP needs are fairly simple, but even just the way it allows you to set permissions on files either by checking boxes for read/write/execute OR putting in the manual number if you need/prefer to do it that way is nice, and you can also keep an eye on your progress in a tab if you’re uploading or downloading a bunch of stuff and want to know when it’s done.

All in all, a nice extension. Does anyone have any other FireFox extensions to recommend?

And can anyone tell that I really don’t want to write this paper? Um.

So I changed my blog template. You’re lucky; it was almost goth butterflies, but then I decided that I should try to preserve some small shred of my dignity.

I got all the font and link colors tweaked the way I want them, but I am really regretting not putting my blog in the domain root directory in the first place. I can’t figure out how to get it there now. All my attempts to set up redirects have failed miserably. I may have to resort to manually moving everything up one, but I hope not, because that would be a pain.

Maybe next I’ll redye my hair. It’s only been blue since the end of October, but the bangs have faded out severely and I’m not that enamored with it anymore. I’m really in the kind of mood where you want to get a new tattoo, except that I can’t get a new tattoo, because I’m on blood thinners. So a new piercing is also right out. This leaves dying my hair and shopping, and my credit card can’t take much more of the latter. Actually, messing with the blog template seemed to meet similar psychological needs, on a slightly smaller scale. Of course, I should have been working on a paper.