the month of June

I am lurking in Kim and Megan’s Personal Essay Filmmaking class for the next couple of weeks. The deal is that I’ll give them feedback in exchange for learning how to *finally* use my digital video camera. This will bring me back to the summer days I spent in my basement making videos with my little brother and best friend. Right now, however, we’re practicing embedding videos. Unfortunately I don’t have one of my friend and I performing the Eagles’ “Take it Easy,” so I’ll bring you this video instead (I actually have no idea what this video is; I’m just practicing after all):

• Went to five movies: Juno, Charlie Wilson’s War, Sweeney Todd, No Country for Old Men, and The Great Debators
• So far I’ve written eleven pages of my 1st/introductory chapter (I still have writing time planned for tomorrow and the next day). It is certainly not as much as I had envisioned writing. I had hoped to have the entire chapter done in really, really rough form, but the writing has been painful. Yesterday I worked on the section on technology (in particular educational technology / instructional technology software) as ideological and connections between surveillance capabilities of propriety software with Foucault’s panopticon and Crowley’s argument in Composition and the University about the surveillance, gatekeeping, and subjectivizing functions of composition. I spent an hour and a half on that and didn’t get terribly far.
• I met with two friends who are in the process of writing and we workshopped the text we’d produced over break. This is something I’ve been *talking* about doing for a very long time but never follow through on (we’re all friends, so the intended meetings generally digress into lamenting the overwhelming nature of writing a dissertation and dissecting our respective relationships). But this time we actually read and commented and inspired each other to wake up the next morning, head to our desks, and keep writing!
• Started my paper/presentation for CCCC. I have only spent a day on this toward the beginning of break and have not gone back to look at it (scared). I did, however, finish reading Convergence Culture, which our proprosal was based on.
• Began watching new seasons of The Biggest Loser and the L Word (not a major accomplishment, but still…).
• Went cross-country skiing once (not nearly as much as I had hoped for and now all the snow has melted). Also, planned a Vermont cross-country ski getaway with D for later in the month.
• And, returned to blogging.

It might seem as though the titles of my blogs having nothing to do with education, writing, or research. And they don’t.

My first blog was titled “the most cake.” When I started the blog I was going through a (re)bonding experience with Hole. “Doll Parts” was probably stuck in my head at the time and wanting the most cake seemed to fit my life at the time. I wanted to have the academic career, the relationship, the sports and poker playing, the yoga, the TV watching, the social life, and I wanted to be good at all of it (especially the TV watching)!

Fast foward three years, and I’m in the process of starting a new blog, and I go to see the film, Juno. There is a short scene in the film where Juno is playing guitar with the potential future adoptive father of her baby, and it is a Hole song that they are playing. Juno, who in the film we learn was not named after an Alaskan town but rather after the Roman goddess and wife of Jupiter was such a fun character that she too got stuck in my head. In addition, the month of June was named after Juno, and being the month of my birth as well as the month during which I sometimes have enough time off to write (and garden), I decided to so name this blog.

I guess this is much more a free association than an etymology per se, but here it is — the half-wacky and not entirely clear thinking that is my (writing) life.

Welcome to my “new” blog, which is actually a continuation of a blog I kept for a little more than three years. This is my new year, new blog blog — all the clichés apply — turning over a…, a fresh…, a resolution that I’ll write more, find more balance, complete my dissertation, all of that. Aren’t those the promises we’re all making?

In fact, I could pretty much just borrow (steal?) Dr. B’s resolutions. Those pretty much cover what I want 2008 to be — minus the racquetball, and our date night consists of not leaving the house and watching Project Runway.

Anyhow, as are all new blogs (and old blogs for that matter), this one is a work in progress. The blogroll is unorganized. I haven’t played with every possible widget yet. The picture is probably just a stand-in for now (**coming up — an attempt at explaining why this blog is a blog about writing and not about summer gardening and cooking…or rather an attempt at explaining why the URL has cake in it and the title has June in it).