Meh
Not much to report these days. My cold is still kind of stuck in my eustachian tubes, especially the right one, and I'm still at the point where if I laugh with any serious intake of breath I end up with a little coughing fit, kind of like a 70-year old smoker, although with a bit less depth and richness. So this has me feeling kind of bummed out, I think. And it's been rainy and dreary and ick every day for a while now, with lots more rain to come.
But I've started yoga again, which has me feeling a bit more centered, even if my balance isn't so great yet, and tonight I had the second meeting of this restaurant exploration club (the REC) that I started in December, searching out fun places to eat in the $10 and under entree range -- so things do seem to be on the upswing. And upon reflection there have been more than a few bright spots this week. Most notably: 1) being nominated by an anonymous undergrad for an award for innovation in teaching with technology. The people who have won this in the past have done stuff like write programs that allow users to enter virtual murals and other really high-level stuff involving, you know, code. *I* by contrast was nominated for showing a YouTube clip of Valley Girl in the first class. But I found it terribly sweet that some undergraduate of mine felt compelled to nominate me for a teaching award after just four lectures -- I guess that's at least one good evaluation out of the 200 that'll be coming in at the end of the quarter. 2) I may have mentioned this before, but for my official boring here-are-my-talks here-are-my-articles website, my domain host has software that lets me see the IP addresses of people who visit the site. So I look every day, because I find it remarkable that I have any visitors at all. And every day at least one person comes to my site by means of searching for me on Google. Typing in, correctly, my weirdy first name, and my weirdy last name. Just in the course of the last week, these mysterious people typing in my name have been located in Tokyo, Albuquerque, Boulder, London, Moscow, New York, Switzerland, and, less surprisingly, Lala Land. It's just so cool to think of people in these places actually reading my work. I mean, you spend all this time acquiring all this knowledge and then gathering data and then doing an analysis and then trying to extrapolate this so people can see its significance in terms of the field and of the world, but once your stuff is out there, it feels so obscure and tiny and influence-free. So it's good to think it hasn't all been a total waste...
Today a friend in DC who usually sends the most hip and profound links while gchatting (he is young and tuned in) sent me a straightforward and completely unironic link to a YouTube clip of a super-talkative Siamese cat in England. And there are many, many more such clips out there. I think I'm going to go watch a few right now.
But I've started yoga again, which has me feeling a bit more centered, even if my balance isn't so great yet, and tonight I had the second meeting of this restaurant exploration club (the REC) that I started in December, searching out fun places to eat in the $10 and under entree range -- so things do seem to be on the upswing. And upon reflection there have been more than a few bright spots this week. Most notably: 1) being nominated by an anonymous undergrad for an award for innovation in teaching with technology. The people who have won this in the past have done stuff like write programs that allow users to enter virtual murals and other really high-level stuff involving, you know, code. *I* by contrast was nominated for showing a YouTube clip of Valley Girl in the first class. But I found it terribly sweet that some undergraduate of mine felt compelled to nominate me for a teaching award after just four lectures -- I guess that's at least one good evaluation out of the 200 that'll be coming in at the end of the quarter. 2) I may have mentioned this before, but for my official boring here-are-my-talks here-are-my-articles website, my domain host has software that lets me see the IP addresses of people who visit the site. So I look every day, because I find it remarkable that I have any visitors at all. And every day at least one person comes to my site by means of searching for me on Google. Typing in, correctly, my weirdy first name, and my weirdy last name. Just in the course of the last week, these mysterious people typing in my name have been located in Tokyo, Albuquerque, Boulder, London, Moscow, New York, Switzerland, and, less surprisingly, Lala Land. It's just so cool to think of people in these places actually reading my work. I mean, you spend all this time acquiring all this knowledge and then gathering data and then doing an analysis and then trying to extrapolate this so people can see its significance in terms of the field and of the world, but once your stuff is out there, it feels so obscure and tiny and influence-free. So it's good to think it hasn't all been a total waste...
Today a friend in DC who usually sends the most hip and profound links while gchatting (he is young and tuned in) sent me a straightforward and completely unironic link to a YouTube clip of a super-talkative Siamese cat in England. And there are many, many more such clips out there. I think I'm going to go watch a few right now.
posted by Pangea at 10:09 PM
5 Comments:
What's so weirdy about your first name? I think of "Pan" as a name that everyone has heard of and can spell (unless they have difficulty with spelling in general). Sure, it's not Madison or Olivia, but it's not like it's "Erma" or "Lance" either.
Erma, I've told you about the significance of the names Madison and Olivia? In one of the voicemails from our endless post-Korea exchange? Because I for the life of me do not remember doing this, but it's way more likely that you're pulling these names out of our remarkably viselike memory and not the thin air. Well, I'm glad *one* of us is paying attention to things that I say...
You have not, I don't believe, though I'm looking forward to it. I am pulling these names out of the zeitgeist, not thin air.
Ok, Erma, now I'm really impressed. Both of those names are significant to me, one recently, one going further back, and have been a topic of discussion in the last week or so. Madison is a new name for me -- last week I got an e-mail that appeared to be automatically generated asking me to be a reviewer for a newish journal that's related to stuff that I do, and it was addressed to "Dear Madison [Pangea]". As if I had two first names, and one of them was Madison. Went on their website to accept and get the paper and saw that in the first name field it had indeed been filled out as "Madison [Pangea]." Olivia, meanwhile, relates to my nonexistent last name. Now I have a faux middle name, that's the A. that comes in my e-mails and that stands for Arthur, which is my dad's middle name, which he has generously donated to the entire family. Stovielet was graced with a middle name at birth, but I and my mother were not. (Sexism at work over generations here?) When I complained about this as a child, my parents said, "Well, we could have given you Olivia as a middle name, then your initials would be [female pig]. That would have been funny!"
So there you have it. An incorrectly presumed first name. And a nearly given middle name. And those are the two that you picked. Impressive.
Girls don't need middle names because their last name becomes their middle name when they get married. Duh.
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