taking it personally – Page 27

March 30, 2005

fe.male

Just spent a few minutes in the car listening to today’s Talk of the Nation on NPR. The topic is, why are there so few female voices in political journalism? The answers are, of course, complex, and the issue extends far beyond political journalism.

And a thought occurred to me, as I’m writing a paper to present this weekend at a conference: I tend to quote men. It’s true. Like most other people, I have an implicit bias towards men when it comes to giving automatic credibility to expressed opinions or published research.

Not getting into the whys and hows of this issue, nor indeed into whether it’s a problem (after all, there is more writing authored by men in the first place). But I’m going to make a conscious effort to cite more women over the next few conference papers, and see what happens. I’m curious as to whether I can actually find enough such citations to get to a 50-50 ratio.

March 29, 2005

Goodness, but time flies.

I’ll come back to the blog someday. Hopefully someday soon. For the moment, life is full of life!

I leave you with this poem. Safe for work, natch. I wish I knew who wrote it.

Edit: Fixed URL. It works now.

March 9, 2005

Nuked organic spinach with olive oil and salt.

Now that’s happiness.

Wonderful spinach, too: soft, moist and flavorful. Hard to believe it had been [flash-?]frozen. Another reason to *heart* Trader Joe’s, where we’ve started going for obscene amounts of food each time, since it’s all the way in Boston. The chest freezer was so, so worth it.

Reconnected with an old friend after a decade’s worth of silence, more or less imposed by me. It’s strange to be in that phase of the email exchange when you’ve already established that you had the right email address, but no substantive conversation has yet happened. I felt strongly about him, back when we were on the same continent and for a long while after. There are some things that I couldn’t take, and so I stopped writing letters; but the memory of him has stayed with me, vivid and inextricable and compelling and good.

And now we’re suspended: how have we both changed in each other’s eyes?

And how will I deal if the answer to either is “no change at all”?

February 15, 2005

Working out some more

I’ve slacked some days, but so far I’ve stuck to biking at least 5 times a week. Given my track record with sticking to workout routines, this is pretty satisfying.

More satisfying, though, are the results I’m seeing. Weight loss, yeah, a bit; but also increased endurance. I can bike for a longer distance now, 7 miles as opposed to the 5 I’ve started with. Haven’t been pushing myself to increase the distance until I really felt like it, because that was a way to ensure I’d actually keep working out. The seven miles are getting much easier, today I felt that I could’ve biked for quite a bit longer. But there was work to do.

February 12, 2005

[meta]

I keep feeling I should be blogging more, but you know, when it comes to impact on the outside world, blogging is just about the least useful activity I pursue regularly these days. It’s been important lately to feel useful.

Too bad that this feeling seems to be inseparable from a need to be appreciated. Luckily, I do not lack positive feedback. But I’m not crazy about the necessity of expending energy on my self-esteem. Shouldn’t that be all set, at my age?

(rhetorical question.)

February 12, 2005

Seattle.

You know, this article makes me a bit sad. If what it describes is true, I’d be miserable in Seattle.

The only time I visited it, I fell in love with the city. I even decided, right away, that it would be great to live there for a while. This was unusual enough to be surprising; the feeling of “this could be home” is generally reserved for non-North-American cities. Seattle’s been calling me back ever since that first visit.

And I still want to go back… to visit. But it would be frightening to move to a city where people actively rebuff attempts at meaningful communication often enough to warrant a Seattle Times article.

February 9, 2005

We are Zogg.

Too damn funny not to pass along. Entirely work-safe. No sound needed, it’s just pictures and text.

February 8, 2005

Okay, all right, I get it!

Dear body:

Thanks for the reminder, although you could’ve been gentler about it. Lessons learned (I hope):

– stopping exercising for three days makes me more randomly hungry, not less, and also unhappy;

– when feeling like the world is crashing down for no particular reason, eat protein; preferably in the form of red meat, fish or soybeans;

– in the past stress stemming from procrastination followed by being overwhelmed with work was a good motivator to do said work. That is no longer a viable option, as it is Not Worth It;

– maybe new moon does affect me negatively after all… or maybe this is a coincidence;

– I’ve got to find coping mechanisms to deal with guilt. It is the single most unproductive feeling I experience on a regular basis: it gets nothing accomplished and absolutely drains me of energy.

Now can I have my serotonin back please?

Sincerely,

-V.

(This isn’t intentionally cryptic, Reader. The suck of yesterday and today may have been caused by a combination of individually insignificant factors, but the problems I talk about above are quite generally applicable to my life. At least, to the unhappy moments in it. Which, now that I think on it, don’t occur often at all. But man, when they do, it’s bad…)

February 7, 2005

bursts

It just hit me: a large part of the reason I love [living with] Ethan is that, most any time I get into one of those nostalgic-open-expressive-personal-revealing-vulnerable moods and need to talk, he’s there and even interested.

Most any time. Now it’s quiet for several more hours, and I am alone and afire, reading. Sentences come with difficulty, more fragmented outbursts. Maybe they’ll coalesce into another blog entry, or maybe not.

There’s nothing, nothing like conversation.

February 1, 2005

Well done remix commercial

Don’t know whether it’s real or another fake one, but this Golf commercial is pretty impressive!