Andare, Partire, Tornare ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Zing! go the hormones Heh, Mimi Smartypants totally nailed one of the biggest perks about the Web. ****** That is a use of the web that does not get nearly enough play: the web as a place to store stuff. For instance, I use my Amazon wish list as a repository of books I want to read. I get stuff off the list from the library and if the book sucks I remove it from the wish list, and if it was good and needs to be purchased it stays on. I like paying bills and banking online not just for the convenience but for the nice history of my finances, and as far as I am concerned the paper bank statement is completely useless, as it is my money at a particular moment in time rather than the constantly-updated page. And of course, there is this Thing. The only time I ever read myself is when I am trying to remember something interesting that happened, and I have actually caught myself using Google to search my own memories, as it were, which sets up yet another graduate-thesis-in-waiting about the interplay of technology and self. Who Wants To Get All Philosophical? ****** Part of the reason my Amazon wish list is about four pages long is because I use it as my virtual pile of Books To Be Read. If I find the book in the library, or in a used book store, it comes off the Amazon list unless I still need to actually purchase it. Plus, I check my bank accounts online constantly - at minimum once every two days, but in general it's a couple of times a day. I don't balance my checkbook using the register anymore - I just go through and write a big "P" on the carbons when I see online that the check has cleared. As for this diary being a memory aid, well - fucking bingo. My paper diary was one as well, but I find this one to be easier to maintain. For whatever reason (insert something technobabbly about interfaces here) I find it much simpler to pour my thoughts into Diaryland than I did into my little paper folder with the sticker of the carousel tiger on it. If you go back through my paper diary, you see that in the beginning I wrote in it every time my parents had a fight, but as I got older, the entries got sparser and sparser until I was lucky to have two per year written. But I want to document myself a little better than that, so when I'm an elderly crone with no memory, I can read things over and see what I was doing and when I was doing it. I'm sure it will seem like it was a story that happened to somebody else, long ago - but it will be my story, and I want to preserve it somehow. Took three large groups of freshmen through our exhibit. They were fun to watch - some of them spending all of the time gossiping about tv shows and punching each other, some of them actually reading the text of the exhibit and writing things down, and most of them falling somewhere inbetween. As the director said, you could practically see the haze of hormones floating above their heads as they bounced around and chattered away at each other. I remember being their age, but it's starting to get more distant. Part of it is that they're more teenagerlike in big groups - most of them were very charming one-on-one as they came up to ask questions. Sent my friend Chessica a care package to Chapel Hill. She's not only been accepted to UPenn, but has been given a three year fellowship! She totally rocks the house! Especially when you consider the fact that they're not accepting her masters degree from Penn State, and are requiring her to do another year of masters work before she goes back to her doctoral stuff. (I would have flipped my shit and told them where to stick it. This is why I'm not in academia.) Lastly, I'm waiting on a package from Lush with Cherbear's pressies in it. Here's hoping that she likes the things I got her - but I have never heard anybody say anything bad about a Lush product, so we'll see. It's my first time ordering from them, and I'm really curious to see how it all looks and smells. 2:54 p.m. - 2003-05-16 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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