femminista: thoughts of a feminist rhetorician

Anxiety has been a constant companion today. The semester is starting on Monday and my websites aren't going up as smoothly as I'd hoped. And, to be honest, I'm a little sad to be back in Lafayette after my sojourn to NYC. I miss my partner and I miss the city I love...if only they were in the same place. I try not to overdo the minutiae of everyday life in this blog, but today feels like the appropriate time to vent and contemplate.

Well, it's happened; I'm officially thirty. On the plus side, I'm also done with prelims! Now I'm just hoping that I pass.

I have even better news. I'm going to NYC to see the Yanks this weekend. I leave tomorrow and have every intention of blogging my experience, which actually might happen since I got one of those little Asus laptops, the Linux-based pocket sized ones.

And by "losing it" I mean weight. In spite of my feminist leanings, in spite of everything that I know about the unrealistic expectations placed on women's bodies, I am still preoccupied with my own weight. For once, I have reason to be. I look back at how frighteningly skinny I have been at times in my life and seem to recall being unsatisfied even then. Gaining this weight has put those times in perspective and made me realize that I don't want to be that skinny again. Still, I want to be thinner and that means dieting and exercising. Dieting is new for me and difficult. Being unable to eat gluten makes it even more of a challenge to make healthy choices for weight loss as I can't have many of the meal bars and other pre-prepared diet items.

If I aspire to be a semi-professional blogger, I should probably post more than once every couple of months! What can I say; these posts--"the apology posts" as I like to call them--have become staples of my site. I have a writing disease--perfectionism. My anxiety over making a post perfect prior to posting it is causing me to not post at all. I vow to overcome the writer's anxiety. I'd like people to actually read my work at some point:)

It seems that time--without consideration for your comfort and wishes--continues to go on. The result is that all those things you thought you'd get done during your short break, they're still undone. In my defense, I have been under the influence of drugs this last week. My dental work on Wednesday required sedation and the pain, well the pain resulted in almost a week of Lortab and then, starting Monday, Valium at night. Hello, from Valley of the Dolls! Seriously. Just to be clear--it's not Lortab and Valium; it's one or the other but not both.

So, all of my time limitations (and intermittent cognitive disfunction) has resulted in no blogging. My goal is to be a more reliable and consistent blogger. My strategy to achieve this goal is to add certain features to my blog that place stricter deadlines on my blogging. Also, because there are frequently tidbits of information that I'd like to blog about but lack the time to fully explore in writing, I will be using the short blurb with a link strategy. My tentative weekly posts are: Monday's News of the Weird, which will feature odd (but true) stories from around the globe, and Friday's Link Roundup, which will feature interesting links collected throughout the week. The Link Roundup will likely be theme-based and we'll go from there....

The first and most important rule of usability (in my opinion) is quite simple--don't piss off your customers. Seriously. Unless what you're selling can't be found anywhere else, it doesn't matter how fantastic it is if you piss your customer off before they get a chance to see how awesome your product is. My current complaint is with email newsletters.

Introduction to a hybrid genre

I like to begin with explanations to render my writing and its purpose as transparent as possible. This is an academic essay; this is a blog entry; this is an academic entry in a blog that can best be described as a hybrid. This is a blog entry/academic essay that attempts to extract the important generic conventions of both to create a piece of writing that is reflective of its content. This is an academic essay about blogging posted as a blog entry.

Update:
Because this is meant to be a scholarly essay, its length does not fit well within the normal blog genre in which posts should be relatively short and succinct. After careful consideration, I have decided that this post and future "formal" scholarly work will be posted in a different area of the site using the Drupal book function. You can read the rest of the
post by clicking here.

Okay. I admit that I need help. I have thousands of emails in multiple email accounts. I've got so many archives and filters that I'm really not sure what is going where and/or if I'm receiving all of my emails. I've been searching and searching for a good system that will allow me to use my gmail accounts with Apple's Mail.app. Unfortunately, Gmail labels and Apple folders don't sync particularly well and some emails mysteriously reappear after being deleted. Gmail has some great advantages that I'd like to make use of--starring conversations, tagging with labels, filtering, the GTDInbox Firefox add on.

Happy Earth Day! Recycling, reusing, and conserving has become even more important to me lately. I spend a lot of time trying to recycle everything possible, to reuse, buy less (I've had limited success here) and to give what I can't use.

The internet is an amazing rabbit hole. You follow a path of links and they lead you to a place that you didn't know existed (yet are unsurprised to find). As it turns out, the rape culture reality that exists in the F2F fleshy world is thriving and prospering in its cyber-counterpart. In researching the attacks of Anonyomous, whose aim is not explicitly anti-feminist and anti-woman (although it clearly is if you look at actions and statements; in other words, Anonymous doesn't have a centralized mission statement that is hostile towards women), I found a plethora of blogs who are outwardly hateful in ways that make me incredibly sad. I'm alternately stunned and disappointed, shocked and resigned, angered and saddened by these blogs and websites.