anywhereisbetter

I’ve been busy. And before I was busy, I was uninspired. That’s why I haven’t written much lately. If you care, please forgive the lull.

Having finally decided to apply to graduate school, and working at a place that allows me to take classes tuition-free, I’m taking two classes this semester. One is a graduate class on social research designs, and the other is statistics. Given my flimsy quantitative background, stats seemed like a good idea, and even if the credits don’t technically transfer anywhere, more sociology courses can only help me in the future. Besides, it’s good to have a reason to read important but dense work that you might otherwise avoid. My brain feels alive again.

The one thing that worries me about academia is that I will forget how to write. Reading all that text, stuffed with endlessly complicated sentences and specialized terminology, tends to affect one’s own style. In general, I don’t count this as a good thing. In fact, it’s exactly what made me start this site in the first place: after years of writing papers about postcolonialism and modernity and historical materialism, I began to worry that my personality was slowly being sucked out of my writing. I needed some other reason, self-constructed as it may have been, to write in a non-academic sense. That no one would ever read it didn’t really matter. And for the most part, it’s been a fairly successful venture, and I’ve even picked up a reader or two who aren’t friends or relatives. Neat.

But now, things are a little hectic. For multiple reasons, I haven’t been writing the kind of essay-length pieces that are generally posted here. But rather than leave things blank, I’m thinking of changing the format a little. Call it selling out, but I think I’ll try shorter posts at a hopefully more frequent rate. I’ll try to keep the “dear diary” material to a minimum—no mentions of my bad day at work or how I scored a good deal on pants at Macy’s. Well, maybe if it was a really good deal.

So if you’re still reading (both the site and this stupid post), maybe I’ll try something new. As I’m reading a whole lot of sociology these days, maybe I’ll try to post some of the more amusing little tidbits here and there. Believe it or not, there are amusing tidbits. Even Marx had a sense of humor, you know.