Was just talking to Cam Fraser, cool guy I met in Alberta at a graduate students’ humanities computing conference a few years ago. This is sort of a memo to self, but is also a great example of how THE INTERNET has changed the academic life. Multitask by chatting while writing a conference paper, get idea for a totally different thing, record it, go on. I *heart* these moments.
Cam: have you thought about bringing your cooking into your academic work?
me: Nnno. But it sounds like fun. How would you suggest I go about this?
Cam: boy, I have no idea.
me: drat.
Cam: Maybe something to do with bodies…
Cam: I’m thinking of the scene in “Woman on Top” where she’s smelling a chile and ends up cutting herself
me: hmmmm
me: Seriously, though: hm. Maybe I should take a look at how people (the *general populace*) procured and consumed food over the ages. It’s gone from a communal thing to a family thing and back so many times, I wonder if it’s correlated with the amount of cultural transmission that goes on.
Hmmm, indeed. Raw, but interesting.
Note to self: for the Nth time, when taking mood-altering drugs,* would you just please remember to take them at the right time in the day? Like, morning instead of 5pm?
Jeez. How long does it take to learn?!
*Thank you, modern medicine, for this relatively pleasant winter.
Just spent a few minutes in the car listening to today’s Talk of the Nation on NPR. The topic is, why are there so few female voices in political journalism? The answers are, of course, complex, and the issue extends far beyond political journalism.
And a thought occurred to me, as I’m writing a paper to present this weekend at a conference: I tend to quote men. It’s true. Like most other people, I have an implicit bias towards men when it comes to giving automatic credibility to expressed opinions or published research.
Not getting into the whys and hows of this issue, nor indeed into whether it’s a problem (after all, there is more writing authored by men in the first place). But I’m going to make a conscious effort to cite more women over the next few conference papers, and see what happens. I’m curious as to whether I can actually find enough such citations to get to a 50-50 ratio.
I’ll come back to the blog someday. Hopefully someday soon. For the moment, life is full of life!
I leave you with this poem. Safe for work, natch. I wish I knew who wrote it.
Edit: Fixed URL. It works now.
Now that’s happiness.
Wonderful spinach, too: soft, moist and flavorful. Hard to believe it had been [flash-?]frozen. Another reason to *heart* Trader Joe’s, where we’ve started going for obscene amounts of food each time, since it’s all the way in Boston. The chest freezer was so, so worth it.
Reconnected with an old friend after a decade’s worth of silence, more or less imposed by me. It’s strange to be in that phase of the email exchange when you’ve already established that you had the right email address, but no substantive conversation has yet happened. I felt strongly about him, back when we were on the same continent and for a long while after. There are some things that I couldn’t take, and so I stopped writing letters; but the memory of him has stayed with me, vivid and inextricable and compelling and good.
And now we’re suspended: how have we both changed in each other’s eyes?
And how will I deal if the answer to either is “no change at all”?
