Look with your eyes, not with your hands.


Such a minute fraction of this life do we live: so much is sleep, tooth-brushing, waiting for mail, for metamorphosis, for those sudden moments of incandescence: unexpected, but once one knows them, one can live life in the light of their past and the hope of their future.



A grad student muses on her life, film, friends, politics, reality televizzle, and music.

 
I know I've been Quieter than Usual...

Hum-drum, the drone of daily life. I know I've been quieter than usual, but what can I say? The week is finally over - and it was a long one, I've carried home close to 900 pages of student speeches, finished my first behemoth of a grad student paper, and then just worried enough to keep my head above water on the daily requirements of my life. Overall, I think I've been craving nice, interrupted chunks of time that might allow for starting, working steadily, and finishing a project all in one go. I feel like my life is full of interruptions lately - but it just might be the tenure of the new routine. The lousy thing about my schedule this fall is that it is dense and spread out. I often find myself with a few hours off here and there, but largely, I am busy everyday and from morning 'til night. Now approaching another weekend, I really just long for big chunks of time to sit and either do nothing or just do work. I am feeling a little reclusive (a big pendulum swing away from social-overload weekends), but I think I just need to re-affirm my identity as a student and take solace in my work. Depressingly uninteresting, I know, but I think it's healthy for everyone to put in some library time every so often. I am also trying, whenever possible, to think beyond the immediate, short-term concerns. I hated living paper-to-paper, day-to-day, deadline-to-deadline, as an undergrad. As I've found, it's much preferred to be a few days ahead and always better prepared (it is also a luxury, afforded by my new lighter course load and fewer demands on my time).

I downloaded itunes (you can too - just go here) it's a free download and available for both apple and PC machines. It has a nice interface and it's a nice Mp3 player-program. I am happy to be rid of Winamp and this is a nice trade-up.

I've started working on the research for the documentary term paper I think I am going to write (it is pending approval). I want to write about personal, autobiographical documentary. Although my list of films isn't terribly long at the moment, I am interested in exploring the differences between use of the cinematic medium for personal diary / journal representations and then the more reflective and constructed idea of writing an autobiographical memoir. Film usually struggles with these abstract ideas because it doesn't handle "telling" or "reflecting" especially well. In light of those technical shortcomings, it is perhaps more interesting to see how filmmakers appropriate the technology in telling their own stories or revealing aspects of themselves. I am definitely driven by the on-going questions I've generated as a blogger, prolific journal writer, but I think there's room here to do some interesting stuff. Back to researching this... it's a slim scholarly niche... but I think it can be expanded by drawing on critical writing about other kinds of autobiographical writing (like journals and memoirs). If the paper is a success, I may turn it into a paper proposal for a conference this July, in Maine that is taking up biography / film. That's a long way off, but something, potentially, to shoot for.

Anyway, back to work on a cloudy, chilly, Friday afternoon nestled away in the 24hr, all-access, Internet room of Memorial Library.
posted by lmjasinski at 5:10 PM