Note to self:

List of organizations and things I’m doing this semester:

1. 9 credit hours of classes (including Foundations of Criminal Justice, Teaching Sociology, Classical Sociological Theory)
2. Teaching Assistant for Race and Ethnicity
3. Research Assistant for research on Bangalashi women
4. Graduate and Professional Student Council sociology representative
5. Secretary/Treasurer of GA United (GAU, the grad assistant union)
6. Illinois Education Association (IEA, the state-wide union GAU is affliated with) Higher Education Council member
7. Organizing a legislative platform for GAU and local lobbying efforts
8. Finishing my thesis on adult female video game players (seriously, if I haven’t talked to you yet about this and you want to do an interview, leave me a message)

…whoops.

Also, I slipped a disc in my back about two weeks ago. Which was fun. Physical therapy two times a week and prescription drugs. Go me.

What else is going on? Not much. What about you guys?

Too much travel.

Mostly so I can keep it straight myself, here’s a list of places I’m going to be through August:

June 30-July 7: Washington, DC
July 30-August 4: Boston, MA (with a trip on the 31st to MIT)
August 29-31: Seattle, WA

And I think I’m missing one in there somewhere.

It is the end of the semester. I have one of my seminar papers done, and am in good standing with finishing the other. Unfortunately, I sort of have to hold off on it, as it’s a quantitative paper, and we’re not learning the techniques I’m using until the last week of class. I can pick it up fast, but statistics and (quantitative) research methods are really something I have to be taught, I can’t just learn it by reading about them.

What else?

My gender and sport class is still torture. Earlier this month we actually made the instructor cry. So, instead of paying any attention at all, I’ve been writing bits and pieces in class. Maybe I’ll get around to typing it all up.

So, that’s really all I’ve got; except for the fact I’m on campus and really just… have no motivation to get work done. Not a whole lot of work to get done.

Worst. Night. Ever.

Well, probably not, but it was definitely not fun. Let’s start from the beginning.

Yesterday was shaping up to be a splendid day. I have a bit of a cold that’s going around, so when they called a snow day and closed the university, I was esctatic. It meant a chance to stay in bed and try and get better. Even my realtor called and cancelled my appointment in the afternoon to go look at places for fall (apparently the backroads were pure ice).

I was happy. Until about 6pm.

When the power went out.

No lights, no HEAT. IN WINTER. WHEN THE TEMPERATURE WAS IN THE TEENS.

I lit a bunch of candles, fumbled around in the dark until I found two flashlights. Got all my blankets and piled them on my bed. And curled up with a book. (But not before this happened to me. Sadly, I was only wearing socks at the time.)

My power came back on at around 5am this morning, but apparently a lot of people are still without. My house still hasn’t quite warmed up (or hadn’t when I left at 7am).

The fun continues today, where the university is not closed. The main roads are patchy, but mostly clear, and the backroads are… pure ice. I did a little sliding getting to the main roads, but nothing serious. No, the serious part happened when I got out of the car. And did a nice wipeout on the COMPLETELY ICE-COVERED SIDEWALKS on the way to the building. Luckily, my laptop is fine. My back and rear and the ankle I slid on before going down… throbbing and will probably be nicely blue by the time I go home this afternoon.

But since I’m here on campus (and warm, so warm), time to attempt to get some work done before my 1pm meeting. Of which I still don’t have the materials needed. Wonderful.

127.0.0.1 is the loneliest number.

I really would like this shirt, because it makes me laugh. However, I feel it would join my collection of geektastic shirts that alternately get me weird looks or people stopping me on campus pointing and jumping up and down and going “O.M.G. WHERE DID YOU GET THAT?” (This would actually be fairly cool if these random people didn’t actually spell out ‘O.M.G.’) The Han Shot First shirt is especially good for this reaction.

Anyway!

I’ve been insanely busy this week, between meetings and classes and my assistantship. But somehow I managed to write a 3500 word essay on video games, the perception of games as less, the violence/sexuality debate, and the deviance of adult female gamers. And how they aren’t really deviant, but society refuses to wake up and smell the next-gen consoles. I might post it at some point, if people are interested. It’s not anything really publishable, but it’s a memo for my thesis. For those who don’t actually do qualitative research, memoing is basically something you do throughout every step of the process. You write theory, you write observations, you write reactions, you write basically everything up. I love writing, but sometimes it’s enough to make me remember why positivism is so popular. (Not that I’m not doing a pretty heavy quantoid project this semester — ordered probit and trend analysis, anyone? — but…)

Oh, and I did a crapload of work for the union. Yep. Here at SIU we’ve got a graduate assistant union and just finished bargaining our first contract, but there’s still a lot of work to do to strengthen the union and truly create an environment of solidarity and just working conditions. I’m actually going on a retreat this weekend to plan and organize. I’m looking forward to it, it’ll be fun (and hey, it’s paid for, including free booze and food) but I’m also not sure I want to spend three days in close contact like that. Oh well! Too late to back out now, I’m a union officer (head of the stewards council), so it’s sort of part and parcel of leadership.

I’m sure you all don’t want to hear me babble about that.

In other, er, virtual news, the Devil May Cry 4 demo was fun but… same-old same-old. Rock Band drums are difficult; I just can’t get that foot pedal down. I’m fine with the pads but whenever I have to hit the pedal, whoops, there goes all my rhythm.

The Mighty Boosh is hilarious.

truth and consequences

It’s been ages since I last blogged and that is entirely my fault! Really. Very sorry about that. I’m going to try and be much more conscientious about it. It’s not that I don’t have the time to write, now that I’m back in school, it’s more that when I’ve finished all the other stuff I need to do (studies, mostly), I find I don’t have the energy to apply my brain power.

Today, of course, I have both time and energy. Yes, I know, I could be using that to get ahead on work (such as seminar paper writing, finishing up my lit review coding for my qualitative research project, writing the feminist essay that’s due December, working on that editing for the journal I’m assisting with, ad nauseum) but I decided I’d spend a little time before my stats study group blogging.

Let’s give the quick and dirty update:

1. Next time someone asks you to proof a 55 page prospectus, ask for money. Trust me on this one. Really. Either that, or something equivalent to the amount of headache, eyestrain and exclamations to your pet “HOW COULD [PERSON] GET A MA WHEN THEY WRITE SENTENCES WITH NO VERBS; INSANITY!” (see also Confessions of a Journal Editor by Jeffrey J. Williams)

2. It’s the “rainy season” here now. It just finally started getting cold and, shortly following the onset of 50F temperature, it started to rain. According to someone who did her undergraduate work here, it’ll keep raining until winter hits.

3. I think I’ve fairly well settled in here, at least with my cohort and the other MA students. A few of the first and second year PhD students too, I suppose, since they’re taking classes. The third and fourth years… I’ve only met once or twice. I’m getting along really well with all the professors too, which is nice, even the one who drives me up the wall with the insane (and one might argue unreasonable) amount of work she assigns for the semester. This is the qualitative methods class, of course, so on top of everything else we have to do, we’re also conducting a “good, non-descriptive research project” with a final paper that should be “journal-ready.” Not that any of our research, at least us first year students, will be journal ready of course. No reputable journal would publish research, even qualitative research, based on “at least two interviews.” Given that some of us didn’t get our human subjects approval back until late September or even early October (like me, of course), most of us won’t have time for follow-up interviews or anything like that to make the methods conducive to in-depth study. Oh well. It’s not like this is what I’m going to do for my thesis.

4. Speaking of my thesis, I’ve decided what I want to do. I won’t actually be starting until next semester when I take deviance. Essentially, I’m going to be studying female gamers; how they “do” gender on the internet, their interactions with the games, their interactions within female gaming communities, their interactions with male gamers, thoughts of educational gaming, games as toys, and how they reconcile the expectations of femininity with the masculine image of gaming (despite marketing studies on game use and consumption). It’ll be fun; I’m looking forward to it.

5. I am not, however, looking forward to writing up fieldnotes and transcribing the interviews I’m going to do this weekend. Hooray for laziness.

6. Virtual worlds threaten ‘values’: I read this news item earlier this morning and cringed. While I agree in concept — have you seen; some of those Bratz dolls? — that letting toy companies teach our children is probably a bad idea, I cringed more at the sensationalism that the BBC indulged in when they reported the item.

7. There is no seven. There is only Zuul.

I’ll try and actually post more often. At least twice a week. Honest.