"I'm still alive." It'd be a helluvalot better if I were like Love & Rockets and "So Alive," but we'll take what we can get these days.
Spent last Wednesday through Friday in Seattle, doing a little bit of an anthropologist job with a research group in Bioethics at UW. Interesting "conference" of sorts (more like an extended lab meeting) - they were coordinating a grant-approved project on genomics, translation and health disparities, but trying to frame it using discourse analysis, a methodology developed by ASU grad (and communications PhD) Marianne DeGreco. My job was basically to get a grasp of the research going on (to some extent in fly-on-the-wall mode) and see if the methodology being employed would be of use to, say, me, and student-colleagues like me. Discourse analysis is essentially a qualitative method for tracking sometimes literal conversations but also "cultural dialogs;" the idea is to have a rigorous way of tracking ideas across people, locales, popular culture, within academic/political/whatever domains, etc. I'm not entirely convinced that the methodology will prove to be useful for me*, but it was certainly a fun week to spend hanging out with a bunch of very anthropologically and post-structurally-oriented academicians who are all kinds of successful.
* - The main problem, as I see it, is that I'm interested in popular cultural narratives, but if I want to be able to declare something to be something of a dominant narrative, I need some methodology for picking, say, text A over text B. The responses I got were largely of the "as long as you can justify it" variety, but given that I'm interested in having a rigorous take on exactly what counts as "justified," that advice was not entirely helpful. Oh, well.
Otherwise, it's just the usual school deluge that's keeping me off the streets / interwebs. I graded ~80 essays from the intro bioethics course over the weekend; they were largely not good, though I just calculated my average grade, and it was 78. And I've been doing a lot of reading. I'm still terrible at balancing school / TA / research work, but I'm certainly being kept busy. We've also been having candidates visit every week in February for a new bioethicist position in our department, each of whom has grabbed at minimum five hours out of our schedules (between lunch meeting, lab meetings, job talks, etc.). It's been an interesting experience - nothing like seeing a job talk bomb to motivate you away from the "what not to do" direction - but the missing time adds up quickly, as your grading time replaces your reading for class time, your reading for class time replaces your research reading time, and your pleasure reading gets shot to hell. Anyways, things were particularly busy the last week, which is why the Ballad rested.
My left knee is still bugging me, and I've been going to PT on a weekly basis for it, plus doing exercises constantly and getting a little more serious about my weight-lifting regimen. And doing a lot more non-Ultimate exercising lately, generally. I'm down to 179 as of this morning's weigh-in (WOOHOO!), though it's hard to tell how much of that is water-weight, blah blah blah etc. None of it is helping out with the knee thus far - I played Sprawl SLUG this weekend (AND WON!), and my jumping was still incredibly suspect (though I was able to cut pretty decently on O, and my D is still lagging). Anyways, the goal is still to get down to 170 by tryout time (May), which allows me to eat light but not drive myself insane by depriving myself all the time (note that MoJo is still in my diet). I think it's doable, and in combo with weight-lifting / ab-work, should leave me as a rather more-in-shape Sprawl captain. We'll see...
Have been utterly LOVING Olympic hockey - caught the USA - Canada game Sunday night, and am currently enjoying Canada-Germany. So much passion and skill on the ice simultaneously, and the games themselves have little tweaks that are quite nice - no-touch icing, a lack of fighting, few commercial breaks - just very fact-paced competition, and in some of the games, it's effectively All-Star squads battling it out, and everyone cares. Couldn't recommend it more if you've been missing it in favor of, say, ice-dancing (which is great in its own right).
3BK got crushed 15-7 in Beck's and my absence. JD just killed us, by all reports. We'll try to right the ship soon - we've got J-Ro and the "Pasty Gangstas" tomorrow, featuring Paul and Trant amongst others. Should be exciting.
Running out of gas here - I'll try to get the album reviews back on track*, but in all honesty, I'm gettign that crush of a feeling that every second should be spent on something else. I'm going to pass on fantasy baseball this year for this reason - GASP - and try to, as they say, GET SOME THINKING DONE. It's incredibly sad, but I need to re-orient my mind to how important I think the research is to get myself *really* going on it, and if that can be facilitated by not spending 40 hours reviewing draft magazines, then so be it.
* - Interlude - I throw down reviews on a couple of requested albums and reveal a desert island disc that was released in 2009 (!!!) and no one comments? Man. I was pretty sure we were all tragically alone before; now I am convinced.
Out of gas here. The beat is generally rolling on, with S / W / F doign just fine, and the day-to-day not getting us down too much. I really wish I could do more "pleasure" reading, but I find myself collapsing into sofas at day's end these past few. It's just way too tempting to watch the Olympics with my brain in a state of nothing. I can't even bring myself to comment on Tiger right now, other than to say that the very concept of "Billionaire Buddhist" is rife with absurdity. Anyways, big game tomorrow; I'll play and try to do something awesome so I can write about it. Wish us luck. This has been a boring life-review / diary entry kind of blog post that did not go into a level of detail adequate to render it interesting...
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