Hello.

THAT was the best two month nap I've ever had.

Well, what happened was a confluence of a number of things. One, I got mired in writing two term papers, both of which I waited a little too long into the semester to start writing (though I had done a fair amount of reading for both along the way). That'll be a good mistake to not replicate. Still, the relevant-to-you consequence was that I spent several days in a row hammering away at papers, both of which i was not thrilled with and so required a lot of nitpicky editing and brain-wracking editing. Basically the sort of stuff that would have made for the worst blog-reading you've ever encountered, things like, "Today, I fixed minutiae X about topic that you do not care about Y; it took me Z hours and this is all i've been thinking about for days and I have become a unidimensional log bump." See, you didn't need that. If you're really interested, one paper was on scientific realism and the need for a working understanding of scientific model justification amongst policy-makers; the other was on the possibility of cross-cultural translation in cultural psychology and a recommendation for statistics-based methods of validating comparisons of intercultural test results. Sexy, sexy, i know.

Two, my hard drive crashed. Well, first my computer turned into a discombobulated pile of mechanical do-nothing, which turned out to be due to the hard drive slowly corrupting and the CPU having trouble accessing the appropriate files for start up, running programs, etc. I spent a couple of days practicing all kinds of ninja-witch magic on my computer getting it back up to form, and it ran well for abut a day before whatever corruption that was going on in the hard drive finished itself and it (the computer's soul) emitted its death croak. Because I am so SMRT, though, I had backed everything important up (well, most everything*), and manged to rebuild my computer on the backup hard drive I installed a while back. Reincarnation, yes. The end of this was that after finishing my papers and having absolutely nothing exciting to write about, I had spend several days frustratingly banging away at my computer. I had become unidimensional in another dimension (what?), and not only that, it was a dimension that made me want to avoid the computer at all costs. So I didn't blog through that ordeal either.

* - I'm still missing some of the miscellaneous software that I can't find discs and/or registration codes for - things like a photoshop clone, my music recording software, etc. Non-essentials, and I'll eventually get it together and put them back on the machine. No worries. The big things - photos, music files - are all good to go and thoroughly backed up. Take that, fallible human artifacts.

Three, I made an executive decision, partially in an effort to save money and partially just because I wasn't using it, to cancel my GoDaddy account and thereby rid the world of nyetjones.org. That website is all backed up, too, so I'll start the slow and insanely boring project of transferring all of those blog entries and any other redeeming content over here sometime soon. I don't know if anybody even noticed this - certainly no one has contacted me about it - which just speaks to the pointlessness of maintaining such an unviewed website. This, in addition to my blogging apathy, only furthered the elimination of my active online presence, and at some point in here I began to seriously question the audacity of updating the unseen millions (okay, unseen twelves) w/r/t my daily activities. This is what is known in the biz as a lack of motivation.

Four, perhaps obviously, the vast majority of my blogging of late had been all about Ultimate, and there were no league games to recap. I could have told you all kinds of exciting things about pickup, but that would have been even dumber than the VOTS writeups. I also could have told you about some exciting softball times (2nd place finish in spring league; lotsa stupidity in the il Vileno realm)... actually, that Il Vileno stuff probably contributed to my apathy quite a bit. Lotsa effort, totally unappreciated. Eff that; no more discussion necessary.

Five, after finishing those two papers, my job has effectively turned into full-time reading. I'm getting a lot done and forming a strong base on which to build whatever thesis plan I'm going to design this year, but again, the daily accounts of "today I read pages 231-398, yay" did not seem especially enticing. I've also been running into repeated super-stupid arguments or, more exactly, clear exhibits of the world of academia being entirely self-concerned/located and not really interested in any application to the real world outside of itself, which is somewhat disheartening. This is a little bit of a difficult feeling to convey, especially since it's not like it's something I wasn't aware of; the concept of ivory tower is hardly a hidden one. But seeing its mechanisms up close, repeatedly, just got old, and I didn't want to blog about a broken-record wah wah of my feelings of how insular the academic world is and how difficult any authentic interaction with the world from within it is likely to be. I chose to silence my inner Eeyore.

Effectively, I've been feeling like quite a boring human being of late and did not want to blog about it terribly much. But I've decided over the past couple days that July 1st was a good enough time to snap out of the fnuk and realize that there have been quite a few things going on of late that I could have thrown on here. In no particular order:

1. Julliette got married! Huzzah! We went to New Orleans. I will post about this.
2. Andy got married. Huzzah deux!!! We went to Long island. I will post about this.
3. I say Mike whilst in Nueva York! And new SLF Jen! I will post about this.
4. Beck's been playign real life women's frisbee! On a team I am coaching! I will post about this.
5. I made the local club team Sprawl! I am an O-line player! I will post about this.
6. Phish has been back on tour! This is unspeakably great! I will post about this.
7. I organized a Saturday morning competitive Ultimate game for money. This is all kinds of awesome. I... have pretty much relayed everything you need to know about that.

Alright. That's a good framework to start, and between those beauts and the backlog of old posts that I'll throw up soon (throw up, HA - no really, you can go down memory lane a read a whole lot of Ali-Ben content!), you should have some entertainment coming up. Soon. I promise. No, really.

Oh, and I have about 2000 saved links to share, none of which will be current any more.