June 5, 2008

low level anxiety

Posted by dogpossum on June 5, 2008 1:37 PM in the category djing and teaching

I have to write some lectures RIGHT NOW. Stop procrastinating, you! Stop thinking about pop ups!

I have to DJ tonight, but haven't even thought about my music in the two weeks since I last DJed. I'm also doing a blues set on Sunday night, and I certainly haven't thought enough about that lately. So I have to spend some time with my laptop, listening to music.

I have to go to the library to (hopefully, fingers crossed) find a nice reading on advertising, from a cultural studies or media studies perspective, which involves or at least refers to semiotics and 'ideology', as a sort of follow-on from the previous two weeks ('intro textual analysis/semiotics' and 'ideology'). There's a full sick chapter by Johnathon Bignall from Media Semiotics, but I'm using him elsewhere (week on news values, to be precise). Goddamn copryight, goddamn it.
I have a short list of other stuff, but the library is kind of bare this time of year, particularly in Melbourne, where the libraries are full of computers and stoods facebooking on them and decidedly bare of books. Ordinarily, that's fine by me - bring on the ebooks (Goddess bless them). But some of the Olden Days books (as in, the ones from before the 90s) aren't on the internet. So I need the paper ones.
I had to trek all over the universe last week (three universities, 4 libraries) looking for a copy of Thwaites, Davis, et al's Tools for Cultural Studies (in whichever editorial incarnation). I'm not a dumbarse, so I'm pretty sure I didn't stuff up the whole 'using the catalogue' thing, but I'm pretty sure one copy's not enough for a giant university. I ended up buying the latest edition (to replace my collection of photocopies from a very early edition) and it cost me FAR TOO FREAKIN' MUCH. But I know it will be useful, as I've managed to use it nearly every year since I first did my undergraduate degree with messirs Thwaites, Davis et al.

--a short, impassioned digression---
But I did manage to find a copy of Cohen and Young's The Manufacture of News: social problems, deviance and the mass media, which was an absolute nostalgia-thon. Oh, news values, how I love you. How I loved Stuart Hall when we first met. It was love at first skim-read. How I adored that book. I miss those days. When I was all about newspapers and developed mad microfilm skills. When Galtung and Ruge were fully sick and cultural studies was first listed in my wicked kewl book. Sigh. Then they made the internet and it all changed. Goodbye microfilm reader headaches, hello monitor headaches.
---

I have to buy some groceries. Milk. Bread.

I have to catch up with about half a dozen people I haven't seen lately.

I HAVE TO MAKE POPS! Last night I had pop up dreams. It's just like when I was going through a lol-making frenzy. Disturbed sleep. Decline in existing communication skills, incline in new 'skills'...

Yoga still rocks. I am half moon queen. Not so much with the down dog. I just don't think my arms will ever be straight. I think it's congenital, and no amount of moving my shoulders up my back body and broadening and flattening of my collar bone will work.

And I have a few DVDs out that I need to watch.

So I have a little low level anxiety, and am dealing with it through the time honoured and much maligned process of procrastination. And there is no better source for that than blogging.

Posted by dogpossum on June 5, 2008 1:37 PM in the category djing and teaching