notes from Parentland

My mother, after watching the movie Julie and Julia: Well, she was a little narcissistic. But I guess that whole generation is a little narcissistic.

Me: Ahem. What do you mean, "that generation"?

Mom: Well, the whole blogging generation. You don't blog, so of course I don't mean you.

Me: Um.

Oh, dear...

boring job getting old

Heu Mihi asks: Has anyone yet written a story (or poem) entirely in Google searches?

Um. I have now?

boring job getting old
beginning the semester+high school
Teaching poetry to lazy AP students
norton anthology, robert herrick, the vine
examples of comments on student papers
“end of the honeymoon”
what is “wanwood leafmeal”
“dreadful people”

4 kinds of jobs job boring as hell;
chronicle careers columnist
ghost hollins college
robin hood the pinner of wakefield
VAP's

inconsequential job for a fifty year old
subconsciously seeing a cat in my office
pirates in bed and body works
drunk angels
making him a maid
maid becomes mistress

back in real life
what was magic like in shakespeare’s time
what difficulties did oscar wilde have to encounter
how did shakespeare feel about the chain of being
why didnt oscar wilde like the upper class
what kind of job did shakespeare like to do
oscar wilde explode

freaking out about MLA interviews
i hate christmas

Things I have learned from the sitemeter...

First of all, it's really easy to freak yourself out. (Oh no! Somebody from Next Town Over where a bunch of New SLAC faculty live keeps visiting this site! They must be associated with New SLAC! Oh, crap, what if they're on the search committee? Uh, wait, it's ... um, me. Never mind.

In order not to look like a complete idiot, I hasten to add that I don't live in Next Town Over, and up until a couple of weeks ago, hits from my home computer registered as coming from Other Town Farther Out.)

Secondly, I seem to be getting hits from an extraordinary number of students looking for analysis of either Herrick's poetry or "Lady Windermere's Fan." The first group will almost certainly come away disappointed; as for the second ... well, I'd LOVE to see someone plagiarize my composite essay on Oscar Wilde. Go on, lazy AP English students. I dare you. (On the other hand, those of you who are seriously interested in learning more about this play should definitely check out this fine collection of YouTube videos.)

Search strings on this topic range from the mundane to the bizarre: oscar wilde nature society passage; how does the play lady windermere's fan by oscar wilde reveal the values of the charachters and the nature of their society; odd trick lady windermere’s fan; oscar wilde highlights of life; tea orwell oscar wilde; Lady Windermere’s AP essay; SOMETHING YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT OSCAR WILDE; and, my personal favorite, farting lord windermere.

Other search strings: st. lucy with a quill; MLA interview "haven't heard" (aw, whoever you are, I'm sorry and I hope you've had better luck since then); making him a maid; harry potter custom robes; petruchio's views on marriage; the pirates have dealth with me like thieves of mercy mean; fun facts Jane Goodall blog; and, most intriguingly, research paper on lipstick.

All in all, this is quite intriguing.

All hail the sitemeter!

So I got one o' them sitemeter thingys. I've always been a little wary of doing that, because it feels a little like spying, but Sisyphus' post about weird Google search strings amused me so much that I couldn't resist.

Thus far, I have learned two things: having a sitemeter makes you click on your own site a great deal more often than you normally would; and this blog is on the first page of results if you Google "The Woman's Prize." (Just as an experiment, I then Googled the title and author of the Work That Is the Subject of Huge Chunks of My Dissertation, My Forthcoming Article, and Multiple Conference Papers, and this site doesn't come up until page 3. Which is a little ironic, as I've only read "The Woman's Prize" once and have no plans to revisit it, but I guess it's as things should be, as I'm trying not to make my RL identity too obvious.)

In other news: One more week of classes to go! (And then a whole hell of a lot of grading, but I'm trying not to think about that.) Also, both of my lit classes said they wanted to have a peer editing day for the final papers when I asked them, so yay -- thirty minutes of instant lesson plan! Plus, there will be film clips.

:: blinks ::

Whoa there, Inside Higher Ed linked to my post about new faculty orientation? Yeep! I feel like I should have said something more profound (and probably revealed less about who and where I am, come to think of it!)

Oh well, it's damned hard to conceal your identity for any length of time on the Internet, so I've always figured somebody would tumble to it sooner or later, and I don't really post anything I wouldn't tell my colleagues if they asked. At least, I find it hard, and judging by the number of times I've been able to spot the online persona of someone I know in real life (I once won a case of beer because a friend bet me that I couldn't), other people find it equally hard. It's funny how distinctive people's voices are; I had a roommate in grad school who, unbeknownst to me, started posting to a message board that I had told her about, and I kept looking at her posts and thinking, "Wow, that sounds so much like something [my roommate] would say," -- and sure enough, it was. It's happened the other way around, too; a few years ago I stumbled across an online journal by someone who was clearly a student at the University of Basketball, in which she wrote about signing up for a course that I happened to be teaching, and by the second week of class I had a fairly good idea which student it was. (That sort of thing obviously brings up all kinds of etiquette-and-ethics conundrums, and of course I didn't visit her journal after that, but eventually I did get confirmation that I was right.)

Anyway, I'd guess that this sort of story is more common than you'd expect, since people with common interests tend to flock together online and in real life, and the population that uses the Internet as a social venue is still fairly small and homogeneous. Still, it feels really weird when it happens.