If you misuse "quotes" you might look silly!

Even for being a grammar geek site, this blog has me cracking up:

http://quotation-marks.blogspot.com/

This blog collects different examples of people using "double quotes" to emphasize things, but since double quotes change the meaning of whatever they're quoting in an ironic way, the examples you'll see there are quite funny as some unfortunate meanings are produced.

TGIFFFFF!!!!

I lost my cell phone.

Yesterday I dozed off on the bus after class, and after waking, and walking home, I realized that my cell phone was no where to be found.

Immediately, I clenched my fists, then beat my chest, and called out to the sky:

"Oh NOOO! Class might not start this week at 2 PM standard cell phone time! NOOOOO!"

Feeling overwhelmed with the actions I would now have to take to get my phone back, (if it would be possible at all), I took a nap because I couldn't deal. Besides, I don't even like my phone. I hate talking on the phone; texting is OK but expensive, and I am instinctively annoyed when people call me usually--I don't know why.

Well, long story short. The kindness of strangers supervened, and someone named Carl Williams found my phone on the bus, called my Mom, etc. etc., and today class will once again start at 2 PM standard cell phone time.

Mini story of the day.

Blog of Week 9, Due By Week 10

Blog this I say!!!

Write me an email (post it in your blog, don't actually send me the "email") about:

-what you have learned in this class
-what you would like to know more of
-what you like about class
-what you don't like about class

Tell me these things! It will help make the remainder of the semester more productive for you and I!

Bye!

Oh, Research Wednesday!!!

When talking about the usage of the word "BITCH", I decided to approach the topic from a Sociological perspective. I found a book on contesting stereotypes and creating identities. The first section, "How Social Categories and their Meanings Shape Educational Opportunities and Barriers" histroicizes black education--hmmm, maybe I could discuss how white girls and black girls use the word bitch differently; hmmm, after reading some of the first section of this book, maybe the American education system has something to do with the way this word is used...

"Ogbu believed that by anchoring blackness as the opposite of whiteness and by including schooling and education under the rubric of 'whiteness,' blacks initially developed a cynicism, estrangement, and resistance to achievement that stemmed from the slavery experience."

So, maybe I could locate the use of words in categories of race... More to think about!!!

Radical Honesty

How honest do you think your writing is in the papers you've done so far?
Have you written anything you'd consider a "white lie" or half truth?

Here's an interesting article from Esquire Magazine on "radical honesty"

Read the whole thing here:
(I think you're fat...)

---

"Do you think it's ever okay to lie?" I ask.

"I advocate never lying in personal relationships. But if you have Anne Frank in your attic and a Nazi knocks on the door, lie....I lie to any government official." (Blanton's politics are just this side of Noam Chomsky's.) "I lie to the IRS. I always take more deductions than are justified. I lie in golf. And in poker."

Blanton adjusts his crotch. I expected him to be a bully. Or maybe a new-age huckster with a bead necklace who sits cross-legged on the floor. He's neither. He's a former Texan with a big belly and a big laugh and a big voice. He's got a bushy head of gray hair and a twang that makes his bye sound like bah. He calls himself "white trash with a Ph.D." If you mixed DNA from Lyndon Johnson, Ken Kesey, and threw in the nonannoying parts of Dr. Phil, you might get Blanton.

He ran for Congress twice, with the novel promise that he'd be an honest politician. In 2004, he got a surprising 25 percent of the vote in his Virginia district as an independent. In 2006, the Democrats considered endorsing him but got skittish about his weeklong workshops, which involve a day of total nudity. They also weren't crazy that he's been married five times (currently to a Swedish flight attendant twenty-six years his junior). He ran again but withdrew when it became clear he was going to be crushed.

Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

I think this week is hard because the entire process of writing a "research paper" is so huge. It takes years before you get an idea of who you "are" as a research paper writer--which is totally different than any other kind of writer.

Academic research is often not too fun until you've found your narrow niche and get off on really specific topics like Victorian dinner party favors or the Revolutionary Potential of Tofu Cheese Fries.

Anyway, the ways I go about tackling a larger paper are:

1) explaining my paper out loud to my roommate and making them write down/take notes about everything I say.
2) reading a ton of stuff on the Internet--not always the best way, and often it makes your topic seem insurmountable because you think it's already been done, but it's a necessary way to get an idea of what has already been written on your topic
3) next, I probably would try writing out what my main argument will be in, approximately, three sentences.

BLEH! It's getting dark so early and I think I'm the only one who hangs around after 5 PM on the second floor of the Marvin office area. I feel like I have computer face and fried coffee brain.

BY THE WAY.....!!! The second essays I've read so far look SOOO much better than the first essaYAYYYYYSSSS!!!! Way to goooooo!

Week Seven Blog

Your "official" blogging action will happen again in class this week. But feel free to blog in the meantime. Tell me a story.

Michel Gondry, The Science of Sleep

Gondry's The Science of Sleep flickered in front of me early this Saturday morning as I couldn't muster the energy to accomplish anything productive.

I find it a poor choice of a film to watch before you attempt going to work. The viewer, having been assured that love and relationships are fleeting, misunderstood, and temporary, will have to go to a wage labor job feeling completely detached from their surroundings, more unwilling than usual to pour coffee for rich old people.

In a small French city, a typical missed-love-connection situation (similar to 2046) plays out between a Mexican/French man, Stefan, and his neighbor, Stefanie.

Stefan falls for Stefanie pretty hard--but not at first. In fact, in a weird lucid dream he asks her for her friend's phone number and she gets totally pissed. Stefanie seems to get pretty turned off by Stefan's odd behavior, (he denies at first that he lives across the hall from her, and acts out "walking over" to her apartment from a fictional location across town), and even as tides turn and Stefan becomes completely infatuated with Stefanie, it will always be too late for them to be together--even though they are neighbors in a small apartment building.

The film ends on the same note of lack that it began on: no situations resolved, no flat-ironed endings.

Good morning.