dream out loud

I know that right now it’s still the middle of the summer for most of you. But believe it or not, I am heading back at this very moment. Yes, I am on a 4 hour layover. Granted, I have over a week of orientation, meetings, and set-up time, but we start school on August 11. So I realized it is yet that time again, time for me to decide my New (school) Year’s Resolutions for the school year of 2010-11.

First I’m going to have a quick refresher of what I decided to do last year

1. Be less negative.
I think that I have been…

2. Get to the gym.
I didn’t go very much at the beginning of the school year, then did a huge burst of it in the late middle of the year. But then when my membership expired (around May?) I decided not to renew because I was leaving Suzhou soon. I told myself I’d run outside in lieu of that but could never wake up early enough.

3. Save money / spend less.
I think I did. Finances are happy now.

4. Cook more / eat more healthily.
I tried and I believe I did pretty well. It’s easy to want to order in on a bad day. Overall, I think I cut down on restaurant food considerably.

5. Learn more Chinese (character recognition)
Unfortunately, I didn’t do a lot of studying and didn’t take lessons but I think I have improved a lot. Just noticing when I travel and need to read signs, and also the fact that I can read and reply to texts in Chinese. I will try to learn more – and now I also need to practice my Cantonese pronunciation. It’s in my head, just doesn’t come out of my mouth right!

6. Keep in better touch with friends and family back home.
I think this one was… FAIL! As a poor excuse, the firewalling of Facebook has caused me to drop off a lot of correspondence. It sometimes is just too busy to write email! I tried on the phone but people aren’t often free in the morning (best time given my time difference) My friends forget to check my Flickr and Blog, which is where most of the updates about me are.

So for this year….

1. Exercise – I have found that there are dance studios in GZ. Finally!
2. Consume less. This is both for the environment and to save money.
3. Continue to cook more / eat more healthily
4. Continue to learn more Chinese
5. Keep in better touch with friends and family back home
6. Write more and read more. I used to carry around a little notebook and jot things down. Similarly I always had a book to read during any kind of time spent commuting or waiting in line. I have forgotten to that in recent years in the interest of traveling light.

While I was having lunch, my phone rang – the caller ID showed an 800 number. I was very confused but answered. It was a recording telling me that my flight had been canceled! It even ended with “We apologize for the inconvenience. Goodbye.” No further information.

I immediately call United to find out and was put on hold for 40 minutes. Thankfully I was re-routed to an early flight. All is good now, but I vow never to fly United again.

* note: Since I have become terrible at keeping in touch with people, I’ve decided to write brief updates here, as they import to Facebook. Think of them as long status updates

Recently I got tipped about a new web site which has a tool that analyzes a block of your text, then tells you which author you “write like.”

I don’t know who could pass up a chance to play around on this web site. I hop on over and first paste a block from a recent blog entry. I have to admit, I almost feel a little bit nervous as I click the big “Analyze” button. Something like the feeling you get when you hand a finished exam to a teacher and he or she gives it a once over while you’re still standing there. My first result? Margaret Atwood. I am quite pleased with this but always a supporter of a bigger sample size, I start to paste a few more paragraphs. I intentionally choose what I consider to be a few different styles.

Second try? Cory Doctorow. This was a blog about my “identity crisis” in China. I don’t know who this Cory Doctorow is but my friend Wikipedia offers a bit of insight. Hmm… okay, I’m alright with being similar to this guy.

Third try. Dan Brown. Aaaaghh… I run screaming.

Fourth try. Stephenie Meyer. I am as annoyed as a vampire who needs blood. Or something like that.

Thankfully, my next three pieces from my blog return Cory Doctorow. I am satisfied with that at first. Then, I realize that when I write to my blog, it’s kind of a casual tone which it sounds like Cory might. So I look for the only pieces of academic writing on my hard drive. The first paragraph of my Master’s thesis reminds this analyzer of Vladimir Nabokov. Shocking. My graduate school admissions essay? Jonathan Swift. A part of a huge curriculum project I wrote is like the writing of H. P. Lovecraft. This last one is particularly hilarious because the paragraph I used described the developmental age of eight year olds.

Were there any lessons learned from the 30 minutes I wasted fooled around on this web site? I would say… 1) I have multiple personality disorder, 2) I write like Cory Doctorow 3) My thesis might be as strange as Lolita 4) This web site doesn’t really work.

“I don’t want to see us descend into a nation of bloggers…I think we need editorial oversight now more than ever.” – Steve Jobs, June 2010

To put this into context, Jobs said this in regards to hoping that the new iPad will be a content delivery tool. He adds, “Anything we can do to help newspapers find new ways of expression that will help them get paid, I am all for.”

I would lean more towards agreeing than not. My first life, my first “career” was in news and magazine publishing. Now, nearly a decade later I still think that content is king, even when the dollars mean nothing to me anymore. Why? Well, a blog is short for a ‘web log,’ a public diary if you will. Since blogging became easy to do and free in some cases, to boot, scores of blogs on all sorts of topics have cropped up. Of course, everyone says this is wonderful, since the media is biased, and now journalism is accessible to everyone, not just journalists. To some extent, yes. But in the generation of “if it’s on the internet, it must be true,” this can be dangerous. It’s getting exhausting seeing all these blogs that crop up posing as an online magazine. Sorry, you’re just… not.

I do think that blogs should stick to personal things – interests, experiences, etc. But it’s a big, wide open internet so the iPad probably won’t change the trend of blogging, and what is blogged.

This is so funny. I used to check dpreview.com for tips and inspiration for my photography. I haven’t done so in very long time due to… well, life. It’s busy. They have this “Challenge” that I used to look at, and sometimes enter. Well, I just logged into the site after not checking it in almost a year and I see that I was #8 in the top ten runner-ups in of the challenges I entered. The challenge was “The Daily Round.” See it here. It’s not one of my best photos in terms of quality, color, etc, though.