links (or, my cyber-life)

I know I don't post many links in my individual blogs. In fact, I treat my blog more like a digital diary than anything else; I personally find the political commentary blogs were designed for in the first place a little boring. And I just need a writing outlet that is non-academic (and I will get to my academic writing as soon as I am done with this post) to relieve my mind. I actually enjoy this type of writing, but if all I do is the academic kind--well, I'm likely to stop writing forever.


Today I thought I'd give you a word about the links located to the right side of my blogs (under my archives). What are they doing there? Why do I have them? Because being 600 miles away from home and only sitting in your living room working 12+ hours a day makes one lonely for outside world contact. So I browse blogs. And I share what I find.

First, we have my friends' blogs. Ado upward, I'll have to admit, isn't updated much. Err, ever. A friend from back home (who shall remain nameless, since she didn't post it herself on her blog) said she got "inspired" by me and was going to start her own blog. Who knows? Maybe it's the kids, the husband, the job, and the running combined that take away her time to blog, but we can see just how "inspiring" I am. :) Camp festivus is a blog about an annual weekend-long camping trip/festivus celebration I attend. You have to be a MySpace member to look at this one, and... uh... it's run by a couple of crazies. It goes in spurts, and is mostly designed to hype people up to celebrate festivus with opportunities to air grievances and suggest feats of strength (one of which is pictured here--my sister pole vaulting using the very unflexible official festivus pole). If you're a Seinfeld fan, this will sound very familiar; if you're not, watch the little clip on the Festivus MySpace page. You'll see what I mean. Last, but not least, is Waiting for Magic, which is my friend Dana's blog. When I moved here a year and a half ago to go to grad school, I met Dana. I thought she didn't like me until we started talking at a Halloween party and discovered that we're (we were) both huge Alias fans. It's been friendship ever since, and I'm going to miss her dearly and tragically when she graduates with her MA this spring and moves back to Colorado. The second pic in this post is of me and Dana from last summer.


The next group of links is to blogs I've found browsing. I browse around, and if I find one I like, I link to it. Antarctica is one I found today, and I wish I'd found it earlier. It's this cool blog from an artist/writer that got a grant from the National Science Foundation to take a trip to...Antarctica! (duh) He's already back from the trip, but I want to browse the archives and his last post mentions that he will probably post here and there about the stuff he gathered. Blogs of Note is the way I find a lot of these blogs--they're the ones the Blogger guys like, although you have to wade through a lot of political stuff and computer stuff to find the good ones (well, what I consider the good ones, anyway). Earthshine is a blog by some professor in Georgia. It interested me because (a) he has some stuff on new media, which I might start getting into; (b) he's only five years older than me and way ahead of me in the game; and (c) he's into photography and has some cool pics. Depending on what shows up here, this may or may not last on my list long--just thought it would be nice to keep around for a while. The Wikipedia Knowledge Dump is for fun. I make (err, ask) my students write and post articles for Wikipedia, and they don't always stay up. I gave my students a post to this on our class management system (CMS/website). It might be kind-of funny if they appeal to this site when their articles get threatened. Last, but certainly not least, is willettephoto. This guy is a great photographer who lives in Chicago, and he posts fairly often.


So there you have it. A list of my links and the reasons they're there. And, as far as blogs go, I think I've met my quota of links for the month--don't you? :)