something profound tomorrow

That's it my friends. No sooner did it begin than the mid-year break is over. Five weeks between the end of Term 1 and the start of Term 2 sped by in a flurry of finalising grades, marking, preparing for a Moodle upgrade, recovering from a Moodle upgrade, finishing my own assignments, preparing for a conference and trip to Adelaide, going to Adelaide and a conference, getting back with three days to get ready for teaching this term. Luckily I have had the #blogjune challenge to keep me motivated or I fear there would have been precious little posting here at The Spiralling Shape. Many days it has been a scramble to post something. I had grand visions of one substantial post after another but it has not turned out that way. I shall try for something profound tomorrow.

Stay tooned

For a while there in the last weeks of winter I was starting wonder if I would ever get out of bed at a decent hour again. Even though my alarm would go off at 6:30 most days I would still be snuggled under the doona at 7:30....even 7:45 on a bad day. Then I would have to race around like a very late person in order to get ready and be at work teaching at 9am three days out of five. Thankfully, the sun has started to rise earlier and I am getting out of bed a little bit earlier each day. This means there is time again to drink a cup of green tea before heading off to work instead of scarfing down a bowl of cereal and running out the door. There is also time to write a blog post which is what I am doing now. I am most unimpressed with my reduced blogging activity this year. My twitter addiction, study, work and other writing, as well as piano students and accompanying have all kept my weeks full. Now, though, as the year starts to draw to a close I have a little more time so I plan to try and raise the post count before Christmas. Stay tooned.

Distraction

2009 was the year I became caught up in the whirl that some people have named "social media" (like media wasn't social before the invention of the computer). That aside, I've been feeling lately like I've been neglecting The Spiralling Shape in favour of facebook status updates, twittering, and youtube. Where once I would put everything on to the blog, now I have started favouriting videos on my youtube channel rather than posting them here. And I feel incapable of writing my thoughts in more than 140 characters thanks to the live action of the twitter stream which keeps me amused throughout the working day. Facebook also worked some evil magic on me during 2009. For a while there I became obsessed with completing the quizzes to find out just what my star sign meant, what animal I was, was I true nerd, what 2009 movie and/or song I was, and which Simpsons character was most like me (Lisa if you're interested). My attention span, already destroyed by a lifetime of watching television, became even shorter. I seem incapable of concentrating on any one thing for longer than 5 minutes.

It's a technologically induced distraction. The first thing I do when I get to work in the morning is open my email, twitter, facebook, the university homepage, windows live messenger, and then anything else that takes my fancy. I also have the iPhone close by so I can periodically check my home email. Now I realise this is probably a mild case of distraction compared to what others might get through in the day. In one sense it's valuable in a multitasking sort of fashion. In another, it's hopeless because when I really do have to concentrate I seem to have forgotten how.

So my aim for this year is to reclaim the blog if possible. Starting my research secondment in June means I need to find some writing skills again. And the only way to do that is to write. This doesn't mean I won't tweet or update my facebook status, and I'll certainly continue my vanity project of playing the piano and sometimes singing, recording it on my iPhone and forcing my few friends to suffer through the viewing of the videos. However, it's time to return to thinking and writing about....well....stuff...TV...music...reading...shopping...trivia...all the tremendously substantial and thoughtful content that readers of the Spiralling Shape have come to know and adore.

(Yes I know, I did go too far with "adore". Sorry)