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December 7, 2005

Perhaps I Should Have Left My Ex For Galaxy Then? or, The Joy Of Online Referencing

Posted by dogpossum on December 7, 2005 11:31 AM in the category people i know

And, because it seems to be the order of the day...
and because I apparently have words to burn at the moment...
another blog entry.

I was reading a friend's blog just now, and she asks

Does this happen to other people? Do you stick to what you intend to write about? Or do you get all Virginia Woolf and attempt to write down every thought that occurs to you?

Nope. Never happens to me :P Never on my blog, never in my thesis, never when I kept a diary, never when I talk, never when I'm lying in bed thinking before I go to sleep, never when I'm posting on the board, never when I'm tutoring or giving a lecture and never ever when I'm giving a paper.
As Galaxy writes,

there’s something that happens when I start writing: thoughts are sparked and tangents beckon, or as Dostoyevsky writes in Notes from Underground, ‘I practise thinking, and consequently each of my primary causes pulls along another, even more primary, it its wake, and so on ad infinitum’.

I can't help myself. I'm never at want for something to say or write. If I ever am, I know there's something up, and I worry about me.

To demonstrate the point....
as I was writing and referencing the bit above, I got to thinking about how neat hypertext is for referencing. Footnotes on the printed page are so oldskool - I love the way hovering over my footnote markers in my chapters in Word give me a little pop-up window with the footnote's contents. I love clicking on a link to see the page/site that's being referenced. I like links within a page, guiding me through the contents, especially if it's links in a table of contents. How wonderful!

But all that 'yay for hypertext' stuff got me thinking about the paper I gave in Sydney, and how it'd be nice to post it online somewhere so all the people who've asked me about it could read it. It'd be cool to link to the clips I showed in the paper as well... though I have some reservations about that - it would certainly be in breach of my ethics agreement, unless I managed to get permission from all the participants. And I'm not sure the paper would work as well without my excellent intonation and timing for the jokes. Or the random forays into (un)related topics, mid-paper...

... I guess the tangents only beckon when you a great many thoughts jumping around in side your head. Wouldn't it be horrible to never have anything to say or think? I remember once when my ex exclaimed in response to an observation I'd made (and I paraphrase the following): "You think too much!" and Galaxy stepped in with "Oh, I don't think it's possible to think too much - it's certainly better than never having any thoughts at all". I know that it was one of those moments where I suddenly thought 'Yeah! More thinking! Yeah! I'm ok - I'm not a fool! Yeah!'. Thank heavens for Sisterhood: effective self-reflexivity is far more difficult when you're busy paying too much attention to yourself.

Perhaps I should have left my ex for Galaxy then?

Posted by dogpossum on December 7, 2005 11:31 AM in the category people i know