flaneuse.org

Tomorrow, flaneuse is hitting the road, so to speak. I will be “moblogging” or mobile blogging via my laptop from different sessions at the Learning 2.0 conference. Michele and Colin will be as well, from their blog Everyday Literacies (which you can find on the newly replaced blogroll on the right-hand side of this page.

Mobile blogging means just what it sounds like — I am going to try and take my laptop to as many sessions as I can and write about what I hear and see and think about presentations and ideas. I am really interested in the immediacy of moblogging — and I think it might get me out of a rut that I have hit with this blog, where I feel like I am writing and saying the same things over and over again.

I am fighting the urge to clean the entire apartment instead of grading

Hilary looks a lot better on SNL and makes more sense too

If I hear the words “Reverend Wright” one more time, I will spit

I have worked out four days in a row, which is a personal best since January, and that wedding dress isn’t getting any bigger

How the hell do we think we’re going to take the dog when we run away to get married? Oh right, no one else will take her

Have I run out of things to say in this space?

Just to answer that one, no. But I have to play it a little safer (read this as a lot) than in my anonymous, everything comes under the knife blogging days. But in homage to that blog — long gone now — here’s a nice little list to get you going on a Tuesday:

things I hate:

• reading glasses
• pollen
• that my students are mostly done with their semester and moving down the shore while me and my growing belly (weight, not baby) grade their papers
• Chris Matthews and Hardball (but I heart Keith Olberman and especially Rachel Maddow)
• end of semester meetings that involve things with deadlines
• that I always put writing last of my tasks when I know it should be the first thing I do
• people without cellulite and color who can wear shorts already
• tenure

It’s the end of the semester and we have the Learning 2.0 conference coming up, so I am completely buried. The pollen in the air has also given me real trouble, so I am on new meds for the next month — meds that have interesting side effects. Let’s just say my RBI should improve.

What’s interesting to me is that the more I have to do, the more I want to hole up with a good mystery and stay off the grid. To that end, I have forgotten my iPhone at home two days running, which makes me think this is more than accidental. Would it be considered Freudian? Instead of an Oedipal complex, is there an electronic equivalent of wanting to subdue one part of my life in favor of another?

Chris and I have a whiteboard in the hallway of our apartment where we write funny things to read. I think we think we’re much more clever than we probably are, but I wrote on the board the other day the following epithet: Spring is for losers. I always have the biggest problems in April and May. The world is getting prettier day by day, people are wearing less and less, and I realize that I am a little overweight, a lot overbusy, and jealous of the mothers and kids in the playground who can just play.

I need a play day — we saw Ironman last weekend and that was exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about. Just plain fun, popcorn and bubble gum and nothing too serious (plus Robert Downey Jr is way hot). We all need those kind of things — time and fun and no strings attached.