a little at a time, then all at once

I have decided to put this blog on hiatus, at least for awhile. When I started it, I didn't really intend it to be anything more than a goofy outlet for whatever cognitive runoff came to mind while I was working--a natural extension of e-mails I would send out to groups of friends. I didn't think that anyone who wasn't already a friend of mine would read it, and, for that matter, I didn't actually think I would stick with it for more than a week or two.

I certainly did not imagine that having a blog would be a way for me to make many new friends--you know who you are--which has been the single best thing about it.

But then, sometime over the past year or so the audience problem caused by all the different relationships I had with people who were sometimes reading--family, friends, students, colleagues, prospective employers--made it harder for me to write with the same spirit with which I started. I've also sometimes felt like I was morphing into some kind of peculiar jester-statesman for my discipline, which I'll profess to some ambivalence about.

Dealing with troll-commenters has also sapped some of my enthusiasm for blogging, especially as having to turn off anonymous comments has reduced comments from non-trolls as well. (It's strange: I blogged along for quite awhile without comments and not missing them, but once you have them, it's hard to feel the same energy from blogging when their number is sharply reduced.)

In any case, I don't want to be melodramatic about this, especially since given my tendencies toward distracted logorrhea I'll probably be back sooner or later, here or somewhere else. (And especially since last time I proclaimed a hiatus it ended up not being for long.) Even so, it seems opportune to repeat how grateful I am to everyone who has been a supportive reader over the years.

my very slow adventures settling in, virtual edition

Today, I switched my professional webpage so as to list my Northwestern affiliation rather than my Harvard/Wisconsin one. I had forgotten all about this until an NU student apologetically sent a message to my GMail account, saying said she couldn't actually find my NU e-mail address anywhere online.

I am still deciding whether to move my professional webpage from jeremyfreese.com to jeremyfreese.org or jeremyfreese.net. Opinions welcome. I would set up a blogpoll if I had the energy for it right now.

One of Northwestern's staff, meanwhile, asked me either to send a photo of myself for the webpage, or to set up a time to have one taken. I've been avoiding it because their faculty page does something strange with the photos that makes a large percentage of them look like the resolution or aspect ratio is inappropriate. I am unphotogenic enough that I don't need technical deficiencies making my visage more unsightly.

for whom the belle trolls

First, my Wikipedia entry gets deleted for lack of notability. Then, I discover that the mysterious troll prone to leaving especially abusive comments on this blog isn't even my troll at all, but someone else's troll who just comments here because the other person doesn't allow anonymous comments and summarily deletes all of hers. (I did some investigating after the troll's penchant from using details I've revealed about my family to criticize me escalated to invoking my deceased sister. Batbother crazy, I know.*) So, anonymous comments are off, permanently, and any comments from Mary or a Mary-like substance will be immediately and forever deleted, as however bad it is to have an abusive troll, it's way worse to feel like some abusive troll's sloppy seconds.

Hmph. I now feel even more stupid for whatever mental energy was used up contemplating this person's past remarks (or, even, writing this post). It's one thing to wonder why somebody could go from reading various innocuous things you post to drawing all kinds of negative conclusions about you as a human being; it's another just to realize that all along the person only baits you because of your perceived connection to someone else. Oh, well, I suppose I can keep pining for a mentally imbalanced person to walk into my blog life who will hate me for me and be trolly-true to me alone. A boy can dream.

To certain people that I value as commenters but who stop commenting when I turn off anonymous comments because they are too lazy to set up a Blogger account: come on, I can help you set one up if you want.

Another thing I really liked about having anonymous commenters was that, when I would talk about academia, graduate students would comment anonymously because they didn't feel comfortable posting under blogger-identities. I regret this, as many of those comments were insightful and instructive. But, even setting one psycho troll aside, it's probably time to stop anonymous comments. I'm starting a new chapter of my life, and have uncertainty where this blog fits in it anyway, but I might as well scale back on providing opportunities for defamation by complete strangers.

I'm otherwise happily visiting Cornell, btw, where I am giving a talk later today on health disparities. I'm staying in the hotel that is run by the hotel management program, which means especially energetic service from fresh-faced college kids. Three people immediately greeted me as I got out of the car that brought me from the airport, and the person who came around for turndown service was oddly persistent when I said I did not need turndown service (which I've never understood anyway) or any extra water. Even so, it hasn't been as striking here as at the equivalent institution at Penn State, where the servers for breakfast looked so nervous about making a mistake that I would not have been surprised to learn they were wearing shock collars under their uniform.

* "Batbother crazy" is one of my two favorite expressions for insanity that we used back on the farm; the other is "Kookier than a cack-handed cricket bat."

deleted from wikipedia!

I have been judged to have failed the notability criterion, and so my entry is gone from Wikipedia. Read the neurosisogenic non-debate (because of its unaninmity) about my non-notability here.

Update: So we're clear, I'm not upset or anything about this. I can think of a few dozen people in sociology, at least, who deserve Wikipedia entries more than me and don't have them. This does not mean that it isn't neurosis-and-various-other-emotions provoking to watch anonymous people with no clear connection to your discipline debate your notability.

(And, now, due to troll-baiting, I also can't resist pointing out that: given the affinity for textbooks in their stated "notability" criteria, and that the CDA-Stata book and software gets used a lot as a graduate-level textbook and has been very successful by any standard for such books, I am over the bar on Criterion #3. I hate that I just wrote and am going to post that sentence.)

sociology bloggers: are we having a get-together at asa?

Sorry if somebody has already posted about this and I've missed it. It has become an annual tradition, though.

UPDATE: The current plan is to meet at Saturday, 6pm, in the Hilton Lobby. Presumably we will go somewhere else, which means we need to have a plan for how to let people know where we've gone.

better late than never? maybe next week i'll start getting friendster invites...

Facebook, which is so old that it was becoming big while I was still physically housed in Wisconsin, appears to be making the rounds of certain social circles of mine, so now I'm adding friends after having signed up and not doing anything with it. So, feel free to befriend me. Unless you are a troll.

BTW, I got a conditional acceptance on a manuscript from AJS today. I told someone about it today and they said, "You should post that on your blog, so that people don't think you are incompetent like that [reference to my recent troll] thinks." I'm not sure which of the troll's recent accusations prompted this, but perhaps the claim that I owed whatever occupational success I have had to "diversity" initiatives (whatever else might be said for being a white male, I thought I was supposed to be exempt from having to deal with accusations of that). Anyway, beyond reveling in hilarious blurbs, I am much more comfortable on here recounting the more screw-up and screwball parts of myself than whatever parts may, from time to time and for who-knows-what reasons, end up working out okay. Can we just have an understanding that episodes I present on my blog should not necessarily be taken as a exhaustive or especially representative sample of the entirety of my life? Yes, I realize this will do little to assuage those friends who think this blog is a longrunning ruinous exercise in self-destructive professional self-presentation.

anonymous commenting has been turned off

Thank your local troll.

the technology giveth, the technology taketh away

The other night I marveled at the miracles of this world as I rode in a subway car that contained ads for both laser hair removal and laser hair restoration.

Unrelated: I made some small changes to my Blogger template. But I can't figure out how to modify the "Labels" part of the post to make it small like the byline. Does anyone know how to do this without having to upgrade one's template to the new Blogger layouts?

i barely have time for a blog with typos. i don't have time for a blog without them.

Not that I mind having typos corrected. Just don't be surprised by their frequency and their occasional inexplicability.

labels: meta

I've started to use labels for my posts. I have also retrolabelled some posts, which I will probably continue to do--ah, like so much else in my life--sporadically and incompletely. Whether going back or going forward, I am not going to go labelloony, either in giving many labels to individual posts or thinking that a post is naked if there isn't some label stuck to it.

I don't know if it is possible to include labels in my sidebar without having to entirely overhaul my template to the new style Blogger uses. If it is and I figure it out, I'll include them in my sidebar, as I know people are eager to be able to spend hours going back and re-reading all of my posts about karaoke or my short short fiction writing.

jfw 2.0 (alpha)

I have just upgraded to the new Blogger at last--although I have not upgraded the template. Given all I have going on the next four weeks, the last thing I need to do is get mired in is messing around with a new template, especially since I suspect what I would mainly be doing is trying to get it to look like the template I presently have, only with tags. (And especially since I've got myself concurrently mired in trying to work my way through a graduate microeconomics text, as though I have time for that.)

I have thought about trying to contract the labor out (the template upgrade, not the microeconomics). Does anyone know if there are reasonably priced templateers for hire?

resolution for 2007

(my first experience with the tradition of trying to eat 12 grapes in the first 12 seconds of the new year. i thought it would be harder and hold some risk of my choking and dying. it's easy. plan for next year: bigger, more treacherous grapes.)

Shorter posts.