mean girls

Yesterday I commanded a homeless man to admire my fabulous legs in silence because it was my "quiet time".

hypercubical memo

Hilary picked up a cube of post-its and folded one of them to represent the dawning realization that she acutually kind of had a crush on um. m. It did not take a molecular biologist to realize that this was not a good time for a crush. Hilary, for example, had too many molecules. For some time now, friends and family had been overfeeding her. Or maybe it was the oversized clothes, which she was expanding to fit into like a goldfish. Now, I admit that Hilary's struggle with obesity is a bit of a straw man, designed to mask more complex concerns such as her intrinsic dislike of new people. But whatever. The important thing is that, at that moment, Hilary realized that the post its in contemplation belonged to Kim Lacey.

Update: Hypercubical memo is a googlewhack.

A Christmas Miracle

And so the pretty girl in Ferndale added sea monster green to genetically modified orange, and Hilary's hair was magically restored back to its natural color of dark chocolate brown. And so, the end.

Waiiit a second, said Hilary, walking out of the door. I just paid fifty dollars to make my hair boring.

The end.

I mean, Fuck!

And then the first person omniscient narrator whacked Hilary over the head with a mallet, and the rest was silence.

to: L'Oreal Marketing, c/o blogger.

Dear L'Oreal,
Holiday greetings and shit. I am writing to let you know that "Light ash brown" is a misleading name for your product L'oreal Preference b 71. After carefully viewing my resulting haircolor, I'd like to suggest a like to suggest a potential, but not exhaustive, list of more accurate names for the product:

Vomited yam.
Chemo treatment.
Dennis Rodman.
Tetanus shot.
Loch Ness Monster.

I promise to suggest more names as they occur to me.

Hilary

threat

I am going to put Neal Robert Klomp into my scanner, close the lid and compress him into a .jpeg.

Happieness is the pursuit of attainable goals.

Practicum: A
8050 (Writing in the discipline): B+

The B+ (my first one in graduate school) made me hug my knees in the corner for like twelve hours. Then I got my Dr. Phil on and was like, okay, from now on it is a core value for me to never again get a B+ in a graduate level course. This should be a very easy goal to fulfill considering that I will never again be enrolled in a graduate level course, or receive any form of grade.

The Reassuring Hum of Celibacy

Note to parents everywhere: This holiday season, if your twentysomething single daughter is visiting your home for an extended frame of time because her house in Soutwest Detroit caught on fire, and then:

a) she disappears, and
b) you hear an inexplicable humming noise,

this is NOT a cause for alarm that requires investigation. The hum is simply a normal sound made by a celibate sleeping daughter. It is the sound of her not bringing into your home a man of varying national origin, a range of married faculty or, god willing, a Really Nice Girl.

transparent

And you know that if I write that I plan to adopt a "mixed methods approach" for qualitative design (Cresswell), Ellen will take one look at it and say: you can't just put TBA in the methods section.

methods

I want to just write TBA in the methods section and call it finished, but it's not like this is English 1020 or something.

I think we all know the answer to that.

This dissertation project, then, is designed to broaden the scope of technical writingresearch (Dobrin, 1985) by describing the underlife of technical writing in a software development organization. While Geisler’s analysis describes the ways in which information technologies facilitates “the migration of the documentary reality of the workplace” into social life (2001, p.1), my research investigates how information technologies facilitate the complimentary migration of social life into the organization. A pre-existing tradition of social science research has already explored the underlife of writing in complex organizations (Goffman, 1961; Brooke, 1988; Turnow, 1999; Larson and Gatto, 2004). My research extends that line of inquiry by describing the transfer of writing about technology across social networks to address the overarching research question “What happens when technical writing becomes unprofessional”?

you know you work in a research discipline when:

you start counting the paragraphs till Christmas.

reporting the findings

It's that time of year: your project starts making "multidisciplinary contributions" to the related fields of baa, baa, and that one discipline you never even heard of until you had to cite an article from their journal.

meeting notes

f: With PhD students in the field of Composition, if you want to write a last minute MA essay, you have to sign this form agreeing that you understand what is entailed in order to get the degree.

h: But I do not want to sign that form.

f: I know. And I do not want to make you sign the form. How about if we put it this way: Hilary, I just created this new form! And I would like to have your feedback on the form as a usability test: Does the form make sense? Is it readable? Is it clear? Now, in order to provide me with informed feedback, you are going to have to actually read the form--

h (excitedly): --and then sign it in order to get the full experience as a user!

f: If you say so. Seriously now. I really do just want feedback.

h: Where is this form? Can I read it and sign it now?

....

h {reflectively}: Wow. Thank you for reasoning with me on my level.

jealousy

So I log on to Hillary's livejournal to discover that she finished school forever six full days before I do. She's probably drinking/sleeping/drinking while I sit here formatting my references. Whatever. Just don't tell me that you _lost_ weight during finals. :>

Question 4: "How did your group members respond to your participation?"

Well, we responded to Hilary the way we usually do, said Sharon: by laughing. Then she turned off her phone.

smarter than the average bear

While I am drafting my QE preface, Sharon calls me, drunk. "Beer helped me see that my project is just fine the way it is", she says:

Also, I know why they make it shaped like a bear: so you can talk about it in public.

make it stop

On Ipod: Paganini, "24 caprices for violin".

I mean, okay, a) I'm so mad at this recording that I couldn't even type my password into blogger. and b) Paganini was smart enough to have written "24 caprices for violin and piano accompaniment" if that was what he had in mind, which it clearly wasn't and, c) the piano drags down their unbearable lightness.

HorsePigCow

"Finally", said anonymous mean boy, "now we can all watch Fried Green Tomatoes in peace".

from confronting my inevitable mortality.

Despite a disciplinary history of progressively expanding definitions of work, from Miller’s “humanistic” perspective (Miller, 1979) to Johnson-Eilola’s (1996) post-industrial “relocation” of the value of work to symbolic-analytic tasks (p. 263) and Spinnuzzi’s (2000) recent investigation of the technology-work relationship, it is, in the last analysis, the “situational exigencies” of the workplace that infuses technical writing with social and disciplinary value (cite).

writing this preface kept me

In his widely cited essay “What’s technical about technical writing?” Dobrin (1983), drawing on the language theories of Wittgenstein and Searle, extends the definition of technical writing beyond the simple transfer of technical information to encompass all “writing that accommodates technology to the user” (p. 54). As Dobrin suggests, this redefinition should broaden the scope of research in technical writing from the immediate workplace context to the wider context “of groups the writer is writing to, writing for, and writing from” (p. 58).