(no subject)
Good Sunday morning from seemingly the only person currently awake in the Eastern Time Zone. 7 years since I officially became an item with the missus, as of around 1:30 or so this afternoon - long may it run.
I've had writer's block on here for ages, which is kinda funny considering that probably nobody has any expectations for anything I do (nor does anyone probably care that I'm finally breaking the silence). But I was reading in last week's New Yorker, where one of the staff writers has been visiting a Manhattan soup kitchen for the last couple of decades & setting up a writer's workshop there. Now, most of you probably can gather what a writer's workshop is, but I never did anything extracurricular in my academic career outside of WREK and I can therefore be a bit slow. But in reading the activities of the workshop, everyone having a week to write a paper on a fixed theme, keeping the word limit at a max, etc sounded like a fun challenge to me. I thought "maybe I should try to find something like that. I do have the audacity to think I have a voice, however distorted it may be", and then I counter-thought "hey, didn't I set up a livejournal like 6 years ago to accomplish this same task?"
My journal, which originally branched out in a couple of directions, eventually settled into the verse-chorus-verse of "here's what I ate for dinner"/"here's my fabulous vacation plan"/"here's some obscure record review for you to scroll through". Not that I don't like writing such things (or reading such from others), but not exactly what I had intended. And then I'll be in the midst of some 20,000 word essay on it all only to say "what's the point?" In fact I've written 2 full LJ posts in the past 2 months, only to finally cancel them instead of hitting "post" just because my internal editor made an all-too-rare appearance.
It's not lost on me that by far the most successful thing I've written on here (in my internal definition of "success") is my Japan encyclopedia from 2005.
So that said, I have the goal of trying to turn this back into what I originally wanted it to be. Relatively short (note I said "relatively") ruminations on whatever is in my head. Not as much straight autobio as before. We'll see what happens.
And now everyone else is awake.
I've had writer's block on here for ages, which is kinda funny considering that probably nobody has any expectations for anything I do (nor does anyone probably care that I'm finally breaking the silence). But I was reading in last week's New Yorker, where one of the staff writers has been visiting a Manhattan soup kitchen for the last couple of decades & setting up a writer's workshop there. Now, most of you probably can gather what a writer's workshop is, but I never did anything extracurricular in my academic career outside of WREK and I can therefore be a bit slow. But in reading the activities of the workshop, everyone having a week to write a paper on a fixed theme, keeping the word limit at a max, etc sounded like a fun challenge to me. I thought "maybe I should try to find something like that. I do have the audacity to think I have a voice, however distorted it may be", and then I counter-thought "hey, didn't I set up a livejournal like 6 years ago to accomplish this same task?"
My journal, which originally branched out in a couple of directions, eventually settled into the verse-chorus-verse of "here's what I ate for dinner"/"here's my fabulous vacation plan"/"here's some obscure record review for you to scroll through". Not that I don't like writing such things (or reading such from others), but not exactly what I had intended. And then I'll be in the midst of some 20,000 word essay on it all only to say "what's the point?" In fact I've written 2 full LJ posts in the past 2 months, only to finally cancel them instead of hitting "post" just because my internal editor made an all-too-rare appearance.
It's not lost on me that by far the most successful thing I've written on here (in my internal definition of "success") is my Japan encyclopedia from 2005.
So that said, I have the goal of trying to turn this back into what I originally wanted it to be. Relatively short (note I said "relatively") ruminations on whatever is in my head. Not as much straight autobio as before. We'll see what happens.
And now everyone else is awake.