I left Halifax on December 19th and I haven’t touched my thesis work since then. Yes, it’s hard to work during the holidays, but there’s more involved in my non-productivity than that. Going permanently back to my house in Northern Ontario has broken my work habits, and now I have to create new ones in accord with my new environment.
Plus, there’s a lot more stuff to distract me here. My brother has an extensive dvd collection that he’s added to since last I was here and he’s also gotten a bunch more books. I’ve just seen a boatload of movies, including the Children of Men (Holy shit! See it!), and I managed to start and finish Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian. There’s an anthropologist in that one, by the way, although the stuff she does makes her sound more like a folklorist, but since she’s a Hungarian scholar practicing Soviet anthropology, I’m willing to suspend my disbelief pending more knowledge about Soviet anthro. And there’s the PS2, with which I’ve already finished Ultimate Alliance despite getting it for Christmas, and I’ve just started Final Fantasy X-2. The kitchen here also has more appliances and special spices and delicacies, so I can make ever more complex meals for the eating.
Which is to say that I’ve landed myself in Procrastination City. On the pro side of the equation, Sudbury is a complete car town and I don’t know how to drive, so I can’t go watch a movie on a whim. It’s also less — how can I put it? — less, umm, less than Halifax. There, I said it. There’s not as much to do in Northern Ontario. I also don’t know as many people here, since everyone I knew has graduated and gone somewhere else.
That’s why I’ve been so quiet lately. However, I was already blogging far less before moving. That was mostly because I’d gotten serious about writing my thesis and can pretty much focus on only one thing at a time. I wrote rather long posts in the early months of my old blog mostly because I had no other work to do or I was procrastinating on the work that I did have. Now, though, I actually find myself procrastinating on blogging itself.
Look at my ScrapBook folder of stuff that I saved away to blog about later and you’ll see that I’ve posted about maybe less than half the stuff listed here. That’s not even counting the drafts that I’ve been opening and listlessly poking at every now and then.
I can understand why Michael Bérubé is quitting blogging (Incidentally, his final post is also the first post of his that I’ve ever read). Always Be Composing is a hard thing to do, and thinking about what to blog about takes away brainpower from other projects. I wonder how s0metim3s (Link is now defunct) and N. Pepperrell can keep writing such long posts, although as residents of Oz they have their summer break now, the lucky bastards (“bastard” is friendly in Australian, right?).
Okay, sometime before the end of January I’ll finish and post the draft I have about various bits of media that I’ve been playing around with. Scout’s honour. And I will so totally blog about the new episode of Battlestar Galactica.
I actually have a very similar looking folder of things I’ve come across and was too tired or busy to blog about at the time. Every once in a while, I give up and purge it…
As to how I write such long posts – haven’t they told you? Us bloggers down under, we get paid by the word, we do… ;-P
And yes, I’ll take bastard as a friendly term – might be the friendliest thing someone has called me in quite a while… ;-P
But I have such good ideas. They deserve to be shared. How could I abandon them? And I still haven’t looked at migrating posts from WordPress to Movable Type, either. I think I just need to get back on a daily schedule that involves getting up before noon. It’s the cold weather, it makes me want to stay under my covers all day.
Sounds familiar. I’ve lots of stuff I’d like to blog about. And after the Christmas – New Year break I haven’t been quite motivated.
I’ve just found you here at anthroblogs after your move from edublogs. You know that your theme is broken in Firefox and Opera? I cannot read the description of your blog. It is cut after the second line.
Yeah, but who’s motivated to work after the holidays, anyway? It’s like going back to prison after a weekend pass. I’ve been screwing around with my theme and that’s probably why the description has been cut off, since I use Firefox too and it was fine before. I think I’ll try to have the new theme up by the end of this week.