driving home

So, um, yeah. I have another bad driver’s license photo.

I didn’t end up going to the RMV on Wednesday, and went this morning before John had to go to a meeting. I wasn’t sure there would be time, but I thought I should give it a try. In the end, my number got called just at the point that I’d determined would be the latest time I could wait before heading back home. The transaction went fine, except I had trouble getting a decent signature with that stupid plastic fake pen dealy. By the time it was time for my photo, I just really needed to get out of there. I went with the first photo. I look bedraggled, disheveled, and weary.

In other words, just how I felt.

I guess I’ve been feeling rather run down. I just hadn’t really realized how much. I’ve been falling asleep while working at night and waking up bone tired in the morning, I’ve been so fatigued the past few weeks that I was actually convincing myself that I must be pregnant. The last few days had me practically at the point where I was choosing names for the twins (as surely it must be twins).

But I’m not pregnant. I’m just really damn tired.

Yesterday was a particularly tiring (and trying) day, with rushing around and a long commute and meetings, and trying (not all that successfully) to fit in pumping. I ended up getting stuck in traffic, being late to meet with the friend who was kind enough to be my subject, late to my scheduled lab meeting, getting a parking ticket, rushing out of my meeting, and having a really long uncomfortable drive back to pick up Phoebe and Theo from daycare. And I was late for that, too.

So today, I should have probably just taken it easy instead of rushing around some more. And now I’m stuck with another awful photo for up to ten years. I was amused when I left the RMV with my new temporary license, and drove home feeling mildly victorious for having gotten that dealt with.

But by the time I got home, I was hating the photo, and feeling like crap. I’m actually pretty comfortable with my looks in general. I mean, I’m not thrilled with them all the time, but my appearance is just not all that important to me. Until I see a bad photo, that is. And it reminds me that I haven’t managed to get my hair cut in over a year, and that I’m tired and busy and rushing all the time and that most of my clothes don’t fit me all that well. It reminds me of how little time I have to take care of my own needs, let alone my appearance.

Nothing like a bad photo to drive all of that home.

validation and renewal

I find myself cranky today, for no good reason. Well, it’s rainy, and I have a lot of work to do. I also need to get myself down to the RMV to get my driver’s license renewed, as it’s only valid for a couple more weeks.

I’ve had the license for 10 years now, which means I have to get a new photo for it, too. So I don’t get to renew online. Aside from the laziness factor, and not wanting to waste my productive hours hauling my cranky ass down to stand in line and deal with potentially cranky RMV employees, I should probably be glad to get a new photo.

I got my first driver’s license in California when I was 17. It was a really good photo. I mean, really good. One of those photos that look better than the live person. I remember at least one occasion when some guy at the CVS counter looked at my license and asked if I was a model. Heh.

I think I may have had that license (or at least the same photo on it, since I had to get my actual license replaced when I was mugged) till we moved to Massachusetts in 1995. I lived in Rhode Island for about 6 years, but didn’t have a car there. I may have had a license there, but I don’t really remember it.

I don’t remember, either, what the photo looked like in that first Massachusetts license. I don’t think it was particularly good, because what I do remember is the determination to get me a good photo for the next license.

I remember the day well that I went for renewal. I made efforts to wear a flattering color, wore make-up (which I almost never do). It was a good hair day, even. And then I stood in line for over an hour in stuffy hallway on a hot day. By the time I got called to get my photo, I was tired, sticky, limp-haired, and just in a hurry to get out of there. My interest in getting a flattering photo was drained out of me. The forced smile under the glare of the glasses has been irking me for 10 whole years.

So now I get to prepare for the next 10-year photo. I haven’t had a haircut in over a year. I’m pretty sure no one will mistake me for a model now, with my glasses and perma-ponytail look. I’m okay with that, as long as I can manage a less downtrodden expression.

Maybe what I need is some validation:

Check out at least the first few minutes, if you don’t have time for the whole movie. Found via BipolarLawyerCook, who is back online with a spankin’ new url, after her old blog disappeared for a couple of months. Glad you’re back, BLC!

So, what about you? Have you ever had a really good ID photo? Or a really bad one?

Canadian blogging conspiracy revealed

Go read Pride and Twitterverse at Under the Mad Hat. Right now. It srsly cracks my shit up:

Darcy:
@biz Why must avatar pictures be so small? #twitterfail

CharlotteL:
@LizzyB Darcy keeps looking at your profile. What’s up with that?

LizzyB:
@CharlotteL I dunno but it’s freaking my shit out. Srsly.

You may have seen someone else’s Austenbook, which was Pride and Prejudice on Facebook, as shared by casa az and raincoaster. It was very funny. But Pride and Twitterverse rocks my world.

You know something else that’s funny and Austenish? The book Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which sits unread (or undead?) on my kitchen counter. When I read about it at Celebrating the Absurd, I had to order it.

You know something else that’s funny and Twitterish? The Skwib’s Twitterpocalypse.

And you know what else made me laugh at the Skwib this week?
Ten spurious facts about Queen Victoria:

#3 Victoria was the youngest and first Queen of England who had the ability to fire laser beams from her eyes.

And you know what else made me laugh in reference to Queen Victoria this week? Bon at cribchronicles.com with her educational post on May Two-Four: if we don’t get a holiday.

You know what’s freakin’ me out? All of the bloggers I’ve listed above are Canadian, and their combined brilliance and humor is keeping me from getting work done. I think there must be a conspiracy. Perhaps to get me to start spelling humour with that extra u.

They are also all on Twitter. I fear I may be doomed to go over to the dark side after all. Bite me.

mmmm: some comments on commenting

What can I say? I love getting comments. This is because they prove that the world revolves around me.

Actually, I love the discussion, community and relationship-building aspects of blogging, and commenting is a big part of that. (Response posts and linking are the other big part, and I’m all for those, too.) Plus I do like to get confirmation that someone out there has actually read a post, and comments are the clearest indication.

On getting comments

I admit that I am spoiled. I tend to get several comments on most posts that I put up, which I realize is not the case for everyone out there.

If I write a post and no one comments, I actually find it unsettling. I wonder if I said something to offend or made myself look like an idiot. Or (possibly worse) just bored people.

Reading comments

I read every comment that anyone leaves on my blog. This includes those on older posts. I get an email notification whenever a new comment is left. (Occasionally, the email gets eaten, and I discover a comment weeks or months later, but I think this is rare.)

I also read most of the comments on the blogs where I comment. (Do you?)

responding to comments

The blogs I read have varying responses to comments: some bloggers comment back in the comment section, some will send an email response, and some will not respond directly at all. And me, I’m so mixed up, I do all 3 of these behaviors!

I’m a big fan of getting responses to my comments, and I will check back at blogs where the author tends to respond.

Because I like getting responses, I have the goal of also responding to other people’s comments. Sadly, I typically fall short of this goal.

When I do reply on the blog, I try to reply to everyone who left a comment for the particular post. I will sometimes also/instead send an email response to comments. (Actually, I’d love it if WordPress could just send an email to commenters when there is a response to a comment. I believe that LiveJournal did that. There’s now a little checkbox where you can request to be notified of subsequent comments on WordPress, as there is on Blogger, but I only occasionally use this feature. Do other people use this?)

I fully understand why bloggers don’t respond to every comment, especially when they get lots of comments. I’ve noticed that the bloggers who tend not to reply directly to comments tend to leave frequent comments on my blog and around on other blogs, so they keep up a discussion that way.

Leaving comments

I generally tend to assume that everyone else feels the same way as I do, and that everyone else wants proof that they are the center of the universe. Or that they at least want comments. Therefore I make an effort to leave comments. I more-or-less always have the goal of leaving a comment when I visit a blog (except on blogs where I lurk).

Sometimes comments come easy, sometimes I have to think.

I make extra efforts to leave comments on blogs or posts that get fewer comments. If I see that a post has already gotten dozens of comments, I am less likely to work at writing a comment.

I also sometimes read blogs when I don’t have time (or two free hands) to type comments. Sometimes I go back later to comment, but many times I don’t get around to it.

I leave comments on blogs whose authors leave comments on mine. If I leave comment after comment on a blog and never get any sort of return visit, I’ll eventually stop commenting.

Every once in a while, I’ll come across a blog where the author does not allow comments, and I find this odd. I tend to move along, because without being able to leave a comment, I don’t expect to be able to establish any sort of conversation with the blogger. (I can understand turning off comments for the occasional post, though.)

How many comments?

I’m not sure how many comments I leave (per week, for example), but I probably actually leave more comments around than I get. The number of comments I leave, though, is roughly proportionate to the number of comments I get. If I go through a stretch where I don’t leave many comments, I tend to get fewer comments; if I go wild with comments, I get more comments.

It frightens me to realize that I have probably left thousands of comments around the blogosphere in the past couple of years.

My WordPress stats page tells me that I have gotten 5104 comments on 564 posts. This is over 2 and a half years. (2 and half years to the day, as it happens.) Of course, the 5104 number includes response comments that I have left on my own posts, as well as pingbacks (most of which are from my own blog). These probably account for a good quarter of the total count.

The biggest number of comments I have gotten on a post (not counting my own responses) is probably 33. I have quite a few posts that have gotten 0 comments. Most get somewhere between 4 and 12.

My stats also inform me that “Akismet has protected your site from 61,870 spam comments.” Yikes! Thank goodness for spam filters.

More thoughts

I have more thoughts on comments, but I should probably just post this, since I’ve been drafting it for over a week now.

By the way, have I ever mentioned here that I wrote a paper on blog commenting for the sociolinguistics class I took a couple of years ago? At some point, I may share some of it here.

Here are a few other questions I may or may not get back to. (If anyone wants to chime in, please do!)

What makes some posts get more comments than others?

What makes comments good?

What is the right length for a comment?

Are lame-ass or short comments better than no comments? (My short answer: usually!)

When (if ever) should comments be deleted or edited?

What makes us lurk?

I remember a couple of other posts from blogs on my blogroll on comments:
enkerli offered Solving the comment problem (which was in part in response to my own chart of suggested comment shorthand) and YTSL wrote more metablogging.

If you have more, please leave a link in the comments.

This post has been another installment of my Merry Merry Month of Metablogging, which may well meander out of the merry merry month of May.

dam

We have some foam letters that Phoebe plays with at bath time. We’ll often talk about and name letters, and sometimes spell a few words on the tub walls.

A couple of nights ago, Phoebe picked up a D.

“What words start with a D,” John asked.

“Dog,” says Phoebe, quite quickly. We are impressed, and feel quite pleased with our parenting.

“Right! What else?”

Phoebe thought a bit. “Um…”

“Door,” I suggest.

“Dandelion,” says John.

“Daddy,” I say.

“Damn!” Phoebe suggests. John and I pause. Crap, we do swear too much in front of her.

“Oh…dam! Right! Like the dam where we go for walks sometimes!” I say, gladly remembering the dam where we go for walks sometimes.

“And dammit!” Phoebe says proudly.

Phoebe on the dam where we go for walks sometimes.

Photo by John.

April Just Posts

The April Just Posts roundtable is here, and Holly and I are pleased to serve up another round of posts on topics of social justice from around the blogosphere. Come join us ’round the table!

This month, I’d like to raise a glass to recent progress in the US towards marriage equality rights. In April, Iowa and Vermont joined Connecticut and Massachusetts in passing legislature allowing marriage rights to same-sex couples. Just a few days ago, Maine followed suit. There’s also news of progress in New Hampshire and New York.

While this doesn’t serve to wash away the bitterness of California’s Proposition 8, it shows that more and more people across the country are becoming more accepting of marriage equality.

Of course, there’s still lots of work to be done, with a vocal portion of the population speaking out “in defense of marriage” in its less inclusive definitions. In response, I offer up “Defenders of Marriage” by Roy Zimmerman:

Mr. Zimmerman scores bonus points for this line:

Let’s get the government out of our lives and into our pants

And now, the April Just Posts:

• Amanda at Love Letters in Hell with I chose my choice!
• angielynne76 at Angielynne76’s Blog with Equality for All
• antiracist parent with Oprah and the secret lives of moms
• Ashley at The Dhaka Diaries with Faces of Poverty
• Emily at Wheels on the Bus with Bea and Eve
• erika at Be gay about it. with Marriage equality again — VERMONT!
  and Marriage equality — IN IOWA!!
• flutter with RAINN dance
• flyingtomato at flying tomato farms with the un-holiest marriage
  and Quit calling me a “Hobby Farmer,” and I’ll quit calling you a shill for Big Ag
• GirlGriot at If you want kin… with Will This Make My Mom an Immigrant and Ceremonies in Dark Old Men
• Hispanic Fanatic with Prepare for Impact
• Holly at Cold Spaghetti with Where I Ponder Charity
• Julie at Using My Words with Breastfeeding is like five whole minutes of your life, total…so to speak
• Julie Pippert at Momocrats with Senator Roland Burris supports National Equal Pay Day, co-sponsors Paycheck Fairness Act
• Mad at Under the Mad Hat with Dear John
• Painted Maypole with Ten
• Phoebe at Rectory Entrance with How’s that Gentrification Going?
• Planet Nomad with Do They Know It’s Christmastime
• Quadelle with A mini home makeover
• Rae at Journey Mama with Thirteen Follows a Long Time After Twelve
• Thailand Chani at Finding My Way Home with Susan Boyle and Necessary Rant
• zoom at Knitnut with A few highlights from Rethinking Poverty

THANK YOU to April Just Post Readers:

Alejna
Elizabeth (no blog… yet?)
Holly
Lucy
Mad

Thanks for reading! Please also pay a visit to Holly at Cold Spaghetti, and see what she has set on the table.

—-
If you have a post above, or would just like to support the Just Posts, we invite you to display a button on your blog with a link back here, or to the Just Posts at Cold Spaghetti. If you are unfamiliar with the Just Posts, please visit the information page.

mmmm-hmm?

The trouble with blithely promising to put out a month-long in-depth series of blog posts is that my life doesn’t always prioritize time for blogging in quite the same as my head. So, my Merry Merry Month of Metablogging series now clocks in at one post in 10 days. At this rate, I should manage to pull off a staggering 3 posts in the series by the end of the month.

Anyhow, life has been busy. Nothing too dramatic. More of the same. Work. Parenting. Chaotic house.¹

We also went down to the in-laws this weekend, for the first time since December. It’s not that big of a trip, but it still takes a lot of energy. Between time in the car, time spent dealing with little ones, and time spent socializing with the people we made the trip down for, I end up with pretty close to zero time for online activities. We got home at around 2:30 last night (or this morning, if you want to get technical), and I find myself feeling jetlagged, even though it was a car trip.

Now that the wee ones are sleeping, I have a bit of time to blog.² And there is a backlog of things to write. Again. I really want to do the Monday Mission for this week, which just sounds too tempting, so I’ll probably do that before doing things I actually should be doing.

Anyway, that’s where I am.

——-

¹ There’s been some ongoing stuff relating to home repairs that has sucked up an inordinate amount of time and energy, too. I don’t even want to get into it here, because then it would be allotted more time and energy, and I’d rather have fun blogging than get riled up. I get riled up even thinking about how riled up I would get if I started blogging about it.

² Especially if I ignore the mess in the kitchen, the laundry, the remaining unpacking, the bills, the letters I owe, and the work I need to do for my job.

not quite Sesame Street

We don’t watch a lot of TV in our family, but sometimes we do let Phoebe and Theo watch some short videos. They like shows best that have colorful costumed characters and musical numbers with lots of rhymes:

This episode was brought to you by the letter T.

mmmm: on the blogroll

When I come across a blog that is new to me, one of the first things I do is look for a blogroll. It gives me some insight into the person behind the blog: tastes, humor, worldview and whatnot. It’s fun to see if I recognize any blogs on the list, and to see if we share common interests. It reminds me a bit of my tendency to go right to the references section of an article I’m reading when I’m in research mode.

Why I have a blogroll

I see the blogroll as a courtesy feature of a blog. Potential visitors can get insight into who I am by way of who I know. It’s a courtesy to the bloggers on the list, as I am potentially sending them traffic, whether directly through people who like to explore blogrolls, or by adding to their rankings for search engines or Technorati. Foremost, my blogroll acknowledges that I read and enjoy those blogs (and/or that those people read and enjoy my blog). Like a references section in a journal article, it lists the bloggers whose voices have influenced and inspired my own writing.

Who is on my blogroll?

If I list a blog in my blogroll, it means that I regularly read that blog. I may miss a post here and there when my life gets hectic, or may skim over a long post on a topic that is alien to me (such as about a TV show I don’t watch). But if a blog is up there, that means I am a loyal reader.

I admit that there are blogs in my feed reader that I have not put on my blogroll. Usually it’s because I haven’t established a rapport with those bloggers. Sometimes I’ve just forgotten to add a blog.

Some of the blogs there are fairly dormant. This applies especially to a few of my near and dear real life friends who started blogs, but didn’t keep them going for long. (But they should have!)

I’m considering paring down the list, and removing blogs that have not been updated in, say, 6 months. (So post something if this applies to you!)

Removing blogs from the blogroll

It makes me sad to remove blogs from my blogroll, and I’ve done so only a few times. Mostly this has been when a blogger has deleted the blog or made it private. In at least one case I took a blog down after faithfully reading a blog and leaving comments for an extended time, and never getting back any sign of a visit back from that blogger. Another time I noticed that my own blog was removed from a blogroll, so I responded by removing that blog from my own.

Adding to the blogroll

I usually will add to my blogroll if I find my blog on a blogroll, and/or if I get regular comments from the blog author. I used to be fairly stubborn about not adding blogs without these happenings. Now I’m quicker to add if I find a blog I like (and if I happen to be in the mood to add links).

I’ve been rather hesitant to add big, high profile blogs to my blogroll, but I have started to do that more. There are now several big blogs in my sidebar whose authors don’t read my blog, though they have at some point been courteous enough to come by for a visit and leave a comment (or otherwise acknowledge my existence).

to blogroll or not to blogroll

I’m not quite sure why some people don’t have them. (Well, laziness I understand, if that’s the reason.) Some prefer instead to share favorites from their feeds, some prefer to link to blogs in posts. I think these ways of expressing appreciation for other bloggers are great, but for me don’t supplant the blogroll.

It seems that some people find blogrolls quaint and outdated. Well, call me quaint and outdated. (It wouldn’t be the first time.)

Still others prefer to keep their reading lists to themselves.

Where I stick it

My blogroll has gotten a bit unwieldy, but I still like having it on my front page. In fact, I like having a theme that keeps the sidebar showing for all pages. Some people think a gigantic blogroll clutters the page, and detracts. But I like giving it the extra exposure. Call me cluttered. (It wouldn’t be the first time.)

Blogrolling by numbers
And to demonstrate my compulsive tendencies, I actually counted up the blogs currently on my blogroll, and tallied up how many had blogrolls. I made a spreadsheet. Call me a dork. (It wouldn’t be the first time.)

blogs on my blogroll: 78
blogs on my blogroll with blogrolls: 58
blogs on my blogroll with blogrolls with my blog: 47

Blogroll me, baby!
In case you haven’t guessed it, I like being listed on blogrolls. It feels like support and validation. Also that acknowledgment of existence, which I seem so partial to.

So, what are your thought on blogrolls?

This was the first post of the metablogging series I threatened to write as part of my self-declared Merry Merry Month of Metablogging.