spam for academics

I just received an unsolicited email from Prezi, the online presentation tool. The subject line blares:

K., are you still brainstorming on paper... offline... by yourself?

The answers? Yes...yes...YES! Seems that I truly belong to Prezi's target demographic – the lonely, technologically-averse, and isolated scholar. And yes, I do feel kind of insecure about it. Please, Prezi, show me a link, and I'll click it quick!

Fourth Annual Fitness Day

It's that time of year again: time for Annual Fitness Day! I wrote about our Fitness Day last year. This year's festival of athletics took place on a cool and overcast day – it was more pleasant for exercising, but precluded the time-honored "sun was in my eyes" excuse. Nevertheless, I proclaim this year's Fitness Day a success:

• Tennis: we maintained a rally of 60 strokes, shattering our previous record of 23!

• Basketball: After I was trounced in a game of Horse, we devised a new handicap for me. Whenever Dave makes a shot, I have to stand in the same spot and just get the basketball to make contact with the rim. Less dignified, but hey, I finally won!

• Catch: we successfully tossed and caught a baseball 31 times in a row, shattering our previous record of...3.

There was also baseball and Frisbee. You know what else made this event a success? The First Annual Fitness Day ended with my catching a baseball with my face, bursting into tears, and asking to go home now. If we can end Annual Fitness Day without tears, fights, or injuries, we go home with our heads held high.

But now we're starting to feel more ambitious: should we add new sports? Volleyball? Soccer? Or <gasp> make this a semi-annual occurrence?? Please, let's not get ahead of ourselves...

upgrade!

Thanks to the enthusiasms of my oldest brother, my family used to be up on the latest technology. We had a home laser printer before anyone I knew (600 dpi, folks!), and a home network before we even really had an internet connection (anyone remember Juno?). So I've always assumed that somehow, by osmosis, I'm the kind of person who would have great computer peripherals.

I was in denial. I took a personal printer from my parents' house when I started graduate school, but I usually relied on the departmental printer/copier for larger tasks. Now that I've graduated but haven't yet begun my job, I finally decided it was time to replace this baby:

Yeah, I knew this HP Laserjet 5MP was old. But I still had toner, and though the printing was slow, the device still worked reliably. Only yesterday did I check Wikipedia to find out when this was manufactured: 1995. The year of Braveheart, the O.J. Simpson trial, Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill. I had intended to resell this printer on craigslist*, but I'm no longer sure that's a realistic option – perhaps as a collector's item?

So now I've upgraded to this beauty, the HP Laserjet 2100M, which was also languishing unused at my parents' house.

How exciting: it's newer! It works fine! It's faster than the other one! It's a great leap forward! And I just discovered that this printer was made in 1999. <sigh> We may not be cutting edge anymore, but at least I can say that we buy pretty durable devices...

*UPDATE (7 Aug. 2013): I sold the old printer! To a guy on craigslist! Who was looking specifically for a 5P/5MP to replace his current one, which was dying. Crazy world...

self-control?

I've had trouble focusing this week. I know what I'm supposed to be doing: taking the final chapter of my dissertation and turning it into a standalone article. The problem is that I'm still not entirely sure what that means. So I tackle small, discrete tasks in fits and starts, never developing momentum or becoming truly engaged with the writing.

Enter procrastination. Everyone has his or her personal weaknesses in this regard, and mine lie in the realm of internet news articles. Reading the news is ostensibly a virtuous habit – I'm becoming a better informed citizen, learning more about how the world works, and satisfying my curiosity about the many interesting things out there! What could possibly be wrong with that? Well, it becomes pretty obvious that something is wrong when I constantly click over from my word processor to my internet browser and refresh the New York Times homepage for the umpteenth time that afternoon, just in case a new article was published in the previous three minutes. I know I'm wasting time and avoiding real work, but I can't stop it.

While I was – what else? – procrastinating on the NPR website, I clicked on this article:
Apps Block Social Media Because Users Can't Stop Themselves.

Social media sites have gotten so difficult to ignore that millions of people are using apps to stop them from wasting time on the Internet. So if you lack self-control, no problem. Just download SelfControl — the app.

Although social media/email are not my prime weakness, this struck a chord with me. I often need the internet while I'm working, but certainly not every site. So I downloaded SelfControl and have been trying it out! (Love my modern lifestyle: instead of developing personal discipline, I download it for free!) One thing I noticed is that simply by adding sites to my blacklist and setting the timer, I was much less tempted to even try visiting those sites. But that doesn't last forever, and unfortunately, I find SelfControl to be rather buggy. I love that it's free, but I don't love that it lets me into half the sites I blacklist.

Further searching (procratinating?) led me to LeechBlock, a Firefox extension. Also free, but much more powerful. I can block certain sites during set hours of the day, or block those sites after I've used up an allotted amount of time on them, or combine those conditions! Since my working hours are irregular, I'm currently using it with the "Lockdown" option, which blocks listed sites for any amount of time I specify (usually 60 mins). That block of time allows me to snap out of the mindless-refresh-compulsion that comes over me when I don't know how to start writing.

The goal is not to become a productivity freak (though I do love me some Evernote). I am well aware that a fully-lived life needs relaxation, activities just for fun, rest, social time. My hope is that by cutting down on procrastination, I'll have more time for the things that really rejuvenate me!

a very summer weekend

I was in New York all last week, but returned to Ann Arbor on Saturday morning, just in time for the end of the heat wave! It was still warm and sunny out, but not nearly as oppressive and miserable as the previous week had been. A few hours later, my old college friend Daniel arrived in Michigan as well. Although the motivation for his visit was a fellowship interview with the medical center, we enjoyed some summery, touristy fun together as well.

Does anything say "summer" better than a perfectly ripe watermelon?

I was initially concerned that the large "crevasse" indicated a problematic watermelon. I'm happy to report that it was as delicious as we could have ever hoped for. We ate a lot of it throughout the weekend.

We patronized the newish beer garden downtown...

 ...and even paddle-boated on the Huron River! It'd been two years since I last tried it:

We had a nice time, but I was reminded of why I don't do this often. Despite our furious pedaling and sweaty efforts, someone strolling on the shore could have easily outpaced us! Good thing we weren't being chased by a hungry shark: paddle-boaters would definitely be the first victims.

The summer has been slipping by so quickly, and Daniel's visit provided a great excuse to enjoy the things I might have missed – barbecues with friends, outdoor dining, being out on the water. I keep reminding myself that I need to seize my opportunities to build a life rich in experiences, as the pressure to stay at my desk and in the books is so strong. Here's to more weekends of making memories!

on pigeon-holes

I began my experiment with blogging about a year ago, intending to chronicle a year of many changes. Indeed, I completed my degree, found a job, and got married! I had thought that by this point – having navigated the title-change from A.B.D. to professor, and bride to newlywed – I would have arrived, sitting pretty, smugly secure. But it turns out that a new set of liminal spaces awaited: adjusting to a new stage in my personal life, shuttling back and forth between my old home and new job, becoming a "real professor," and learning how to handle major leadership responsibilities. And until my brand-new husband finds a job near mine, how could I possibly feel settled?

So I find myself in yet another in-between place. This makes me uncomfortable. I love ordering the universe through reliable categories! I like the way Robert Darnton put it in his discussion of the subversive power of Diderot's Encyclopedie:

Pigeon-holing is therefore an exercise in power. A subject relegated to the trivium rather than the quadrivium, or to the "soft" rather than the "hard" sciences, may wither on the vine. A mis-shelved book may disappear forever. An enemy defined as less than human may be annihilated. All social action flows through boundaries determined by classification schemes, whether or not they are elaborated as explicitly as library catalogues, organization charts, and university departments. (The Great Cat Massacre, 1984)

Unfortunately, I'm beginning to realize that I may never achieve that longed-for sense of "settled," "achievement," "permanency," safety in my own little pigeon-hole. So this is adult life, huh?