Relocation

Well, it's not quite done, but it's done enough. Check out the new spiffy blog over here.

Ode to George

My husband and I are a perfect combination when it comes to goals. I like to plan elaborate structures that will help me get stuff done. I am in love with Excel and the spreadsheet. George, not so much. However, I have no follow-through with my goals (see two posts down on 2008 goals). I tend to plan ways in which I could do and be everything I ever wanted to, and then promptly sit down and play video games or watch reruns of What Not to Wear and Good Eats.

This is where George comes in. Although he couldn't plan his way out of a paper sack (at least by my standards), he doesn't really need to. When he wants to accomplish something, he simply does it. And it's done. I am shocked by the simpleness of this plan, but very often it has the audacity to work. I find this very attractive.

Why do I bring this up? Well, George has already started to help me out with my 2009 resolutions. You know how I mentioned that I might want to start a family blog this year? Well, on January 2nd, George spent all day researching hosting companies, picked a plan and domain name by dinner time, purchased them, and started installing blogging engines.

Accomplishing a New Year's resolution by doing it--inconceivable!

What this means is that over the next few days I'm going to be mucking around in WordPress and whatever dot net blogging engine George has decided on for the family blog. And shortly thereafter, this blog will be migrating and the new blog will be open as well. You can thank my amazing husband for this.

A Clarification on the Nature of Blogging

After reading my 2009 goals, George pointed out that a blog post a day is unreasonable. I agree for a few reasons. First, how in the world could I come up with enough to write? No one likes junk blog posts, the ones that people put up just for the sake of filling a day on their blogging schedule. Once you start posting like that, people start ignoring your blog in their feed reader, no matter how interesting they think you are. I do not intent for my blog to go this way. Second, a good blog post takes longer than 15 minutes to write. Many of my favorite posts took about one and a half hours to write. Obviously I had more free time back then.

So here's a clarification: when I say 15 minutes of writing on my blog, this doesn't necessarily mean I will finish a post each day. Just because blogging can be instant publication doesn't mean it should always be. Writing something good takes time, but you don't always have all the time at once. So I'm turning my blogging back into a revision-necessary form of writing. Blogging has always been a balance between quality and quantity: if you have a life outside of the web, you have a limited amount of resources to distribute between the two. Your blog with either be infrequent but meaningful, or full of daily, maybe hourly, posts linking to videos or commenting on the weather. Since I view my blog as a place to cull material for future essays, the former is more helpful to me.

Take a look at this post: that is what 15 minutes of blogging looks like. Barely enough time for one coherent thought!

Two Powerpoints

I find the contrast between the two powerpoints I'm making today quite humorous. They also illustrate the idiosyncrasy of my education--I pretty much only write about things I'm interested in. To hell if they don't match other people's conceptions of classic English major subjects.



And now to write my 20-page medieval exegesis of T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets." Sigh.

The Internet is a Many Splendored Thing

Why are all of the Google ads on my DailyLit email of Anna Karenina about pole dancers? Oh the scandalaciousness of those Russian balls!

Speaking of experimental reading forms, I've been reading a short story called "goodcaptain" (based on "Benito Cereno" by Herman Melville) on Twitter all this semester. Basically, the story comes out a few sentences each day. A good twist on the old serial novel, and it's surprisingly easy to follow. The story's reaching a climax, so you still have time to subscribe on Twitter or Google Reader. It's free!

I'm considering writing a top 10-20 highlight list for this blog. Is this appropriate since I've sort of let it die? On the upside of this, my husband has threatened to make me a new blog over Christmas break, on our own server space and everything. Shiny. I think my New Year's Resolution will be to get back into blogging. All in favor, say aye.

The following comic proves my geek theory--people are just jealous of us:

We Write According to our Prophecies

An interesting scriptural exercise just came to me. Search your gmail account for "Christ" and consider this scripture:

And we talk of Christ, we rejoice in Christ, we preach of Christ, we prophesy of Christ, and we write according to our prophecies, that our children may know to what source they may look for a remission of their sins. (2 Ne. 25:26)

What? Only 62 emails out of 419 MB? And most of those are my daily mailings of Ensign articles from If Ye Are Prepared. And 20 blog entries out of over 200? (Ten percent?) Hmm.

And Christ is the Holy One of Israel; wherefore ye must bow down before him, and worship him with all your might, mind, and strength, and your whole soul; and if ye do this ye shall in nowise be cast out. (2 Ne. 25:29)

Rating

I'm just glad I didn't do this back when this post was on the main page. It's apparently rated R. I suppose that makes sense. The best part about that post was that it caused my blog to be blocked by the firewall at George's parent's house. :D (Hat tip to Times & Seasons.)

Farewell, My Friends, This is Where My Story Begins

Dearest family, friends, and assorted others,

As you may/may not have heard, I'm going on a study abroad program to England this spring. I leave tomorrow (April 26) and I'll be back on June 22. I probably won't be checking my email (or blogging) as often as you are used to, so I apologize if I don't respond to your desperate pleas for my attention.

If you're interested in following my journeyings in England, here are the places to do it:

• Official program blog -- http://greenpleasantland.blogspot.com/ -- updated by a group coordinator.
• My personal travel blog -- http://www.mytb.org/lizmuir -- updated by me regularly as I can. There will be lots of maps and pictures. On the main page, there's also a button you can use to subscribe to have everything I write emailed to you so you don't have to check the page all the time. (There's also an RSS feed for those of you who know how to use that.)

I'll say hello to England for all of you.

All the love I have,
Liz

When It Rains, It Snows!

Too many exciting things are happening at once. I feel my life is viable to explode.

Today I got my first assignment from John Welch for contributing to the Collected Works of Hugh Nibley (CWHN) project. They want to have all his papers processed in time for what would be his 100th birthday, March 27, 2010, so they need all the volunteers they can get. I'm working on retyping a transcription of a speech Nibley gave in the 1970's on translation (the language related kind, not the gospel type). It's very exciting, though I'm not sure how in the world I'll have time for this. Ah well. It makes me excited anyway.

I'm presenting my early Mormon rhetoric paper at the AML meeting at UVSC April 7th. I did all right when I read it at the Humanities Symposium at BYU, but hopefully this time I can slow down so people can actually understand what I'm saying. And maybe they'll have a podium tall enough that I can actually look at the audience without losing my place completely. Any tall people with me on that? (PS - You're all invited to come hear me! The conference is free.)

In exactly a month from today, I will be in Scotland hiking Ben Lomond!! And I've been wasting much valuable homework time mapping out the study abroad stops on Google Earth. Don't worry, I'll make the .kmz file available to y'all when I finish it, so you can all be properly jealous and stalk my journeyings efficiently. I've also been scoping out the various travel blogging sites to decide which one I want to use for my forays in England. Any suggestions from fellow travel bloggers?

I've been dating George for 48 days now. Not that I'm counting. Not that they've been some of the best days of my life.

And he's coming to my brother's baptism and the extended family after-priesthood-session dinner on Saturday.

What am I doing taking off to England for two months without him?

Speaking of, general conference is coming up, and I hear they're going to rededicate the tabernacle, which should be exciting. I'm trying to decide whether or not to do a blog-cast of conference like I did last year. Maybe I'll just settle for eating junk food and doing some general conference Snuggling. Mmm. (And now I can't remember if the Church style guide says I should capitalize general conference or not. Good thing I'm in the Writing Center and can look it up. Guess what? You don't, unless you use the full official title with the number. Does anyone else feel like they never seem to get out of the 170's? My brother and I have a long standing joke that every year it's the 176th or 179th and they never really change.)

The cover art for the final Harry Potter book is also out. Gah! I'm so excited! I just finished charting all the Harry Potter film locations I want to visit while I'm in London. :D

And to top it all off, there's snow on the ground this morning. My life is complete.

Posting Angst

After much angst and a busy weekend, I finally made my first post on BCC today. Yay! I was going to do something a little more daring, but perhaps you'll see why I decided not to when I get around to posting my original first post on this blog later instead. It should be sometime later today, unless I'm hindered by school.

Going Up?

So, yeah. To the three of you who I haven't already freaked out to, I've been asked to guest blog on By Common Consent for two weeks starting Wednesday! I'm very excited, but also a little scared. How do I write to an audience who doesn't know me and my spherical chickens? I'm very protective of them, you know.

On the other hand, this is my chance to wield some "influence" in the blogging community. Which of course leads me to wonder what the purpose of blogging is. The audience for blogs in general, though ever expanding, is still rather limited, as I realized when I tried to explain the magnitude of my excitement about BCC to some non-blogging friends. Just like everything else, blogging only holds weight if you are part of the "in" community. (This is one of the things that holds me back from wanting to be part of official academia--who wants to write to an audience that small? You've gotta write for the masses to make it worth while! But that's another post.)

So after much inner wrestling, I've decided this: the reason I like blogging is because it's brought dignity back to the form of writing we call the essay. Down-trodden by bad academic jargon and careless students, the blog has once again made the essay (and more generally writing) a viable form of entertainment and art. And it's the kind of writing I like--I have a hard time with fiction (because of characterization, mostly); my poetry's all right, not stellar; but the essay is my forte, for sure. It's just the joy of being able to organize ideas clearly and lead someone else through your thoughts--to unify minds, if only for a moment.

In OChem this morning I sketched out a list of topics I could possibly blog about on BCC as well as here. There were 12. Hugh Nibley class added three more. And I just remembered Soul Force is coming to BYU next week--with one of my former coworkers as a "rider"--which would be interesting to blog about, assuming I'm daring enough to open that can of worms. And then I remember how crazy busy I am reading Middlemarch right now . . . . (Ooh, Middlemarch--good topic! The possibility of a Protestant saint, Eliot says? How about a Mormon one?)

How do people outside of college ever come up with enough content for a blog? All I know is that I feel inundated with more ideas than I have time to develop. I better figure out how to merge a few of these topics together so I don't go insane.

Editing Life

So, in the past 24 hours, I've had two people complain to me that I can't keep cheating by posting only Nibley homework assignments to my blog. Although I object to the distinction between my real life and my school life--the Nibleyesque musings are mostly things I would have written about anyway--I supposed I must submit to the will of the readers. I can't be angering all three of you and ending my promising blogging career, now can I?

I guess it's a fair evaluation that my blog has been consisting of mostly homework lately. Even the post on Japan was something I wrote on the discussion board for my study abroad class. I'm blaming the recent lack of blog posts on a recent increase in real life--the two seem to be in an equilibrium which is currently being driven towards life. In addition to the five blog posts in my head, I still have two draft posts languishing in the depths of blogger--"A Mormon Literature" (this one is from Christmas break!) and the final installment of "Problem of Perfection." But I'm busy. I've started a writing group with Ben, Joni, and Marisa. (The name Neo-Inklings still sounds too pretentious for me, but I guess it'll do for now.) I'm also working on a presentation for the Rocky Mountain Peer Tutoring Conference, expanding my essay on Mormon rhetoric for potential publication, and preparing to go to England this spring. (Darn, I still need to get my passport! I better do that today. I hear you need 6-8 weeks, and I don't want to pay the expedite fee.) Oh, and I'm spending several hours a day with George. (No emoticon is big enough for the smile this causes.)

So I came across this great post on zen habits this morning called "Editing Your Life." I saw that list of commitment categories and what did I do? Go out an make a spreadsheet of everything I'm doing right now. (Seriously, my obsession with Excel borders on totally creepy.) It's nice to see everything I'm doing in one place. No wonder I feel so disorganized though! With that many things going on, of course I'm going to drop the ball on a few of them. Lately, it's been the wrong ones though, and I need to rectify that--exercise needs to rise to the surface again, since I'm planning on surviving hiking all over England, and according to my journal, George and I have still only been on two dates. Not good.

I think I'd be able to get everything done if I didn't mind being completely busy all the time. Unfortunately, I believe downtime is super important. This is one of the major dichotomies of my life: I want to be militarily disciplined so I can accomplish everything, but I also value the serenity of taking time to just be. My whole life, I've envied people who are hyper-organized (like Ben, for example) who can, by regulating their time like a soup Nazi, accomplish everything and the kitchen sink. I have this perverse fascination with over-organization. Pathetically enough, I envy Harold Crick from Stranger than Fiction--to have the discipline to do the same things every day. (I've tried to create similar patterns for myself before. Thank goodness I'm too . . . me to stick to them.) I read Multiple Choice--a book on a girl with OCD--at least five times during high school, not to remind me that I shouldn't be obsessive, but to look for new tips on how to be more obsessive.

(Tangent: Great book, by the way. I still love the main gimmick of the book, which is introducing forced randomness into your life by making a multiple choice decision every day.

Example: What to wear to school:
A) A normal choice, one that you might do anyway. (Jeans and a tee)
B) Something just plain dumb. (Pajamas)
C) Mean, completely out of character. (Junior bridesmaid gown)
D) Charitable, sacrificial choice. (Old black pants-- will donate new ones to Salvation Army)

See? Doesn't that sound like fun? Okay, it's fun until the end of the book . . . which I won't spoil for you. Maybe it'll work out better if I figure out something to displace the mean choice.)

Something in my brain thinks that such order and control over my life would be a good thing. But then my heart tells me that life with that much order is hardly life.

There. You happy? As Marisa says, Miracle! Two posts in one day!

And I spent so long writing this post that I forgot to clock in for work. Priorities.

Constant Change

Hey, I've been playing around with the blog a bit. New template, as you can see. But also I added links to the comment and post feeds on the side there under my profile. Hurray for figuring out how to get blogger to work better! Now you can more easily follow the spherical-chicken-ness of my blog. :D If you don't use a feed reader yet, try out Google Reader. I'm addicted.

Speaking of, I added the Google Reader widget to my sidebar which will keep you informed of interesting things that I'm reading.

Not a Solution, but Still!

Meta-Post

Hey, you! Yes, you. I know you're reading this blog. Or rather, I don't, and that's why I want some information out of you.

Basically, I spent an hour or two converting my blog over to Blogger-Beta. While doing so, I got to reread a lot of my old posts, and now I'm in the mood to move the furniture around in my metaphorical blogging room. I'm doing some brainstorming about the nature of this blog--reconsidering what it's all about--and I'm looking for some feedback from you, my presumably existant readers.

The main idea that I've been toying with is creating some sort of regular schedule of topics. For instance, Tuesdays have already informally become BYU devotional/forum days, when I comment on the BYU speech of the day. Literary essays and science/technology essays could fill another two days. Saturdays might be for serial long essays, including some of my dwindling essay series like "In Defense of the English Major" and "Thoughts on Homosexuality," along with some new topics I've been thinking about like "A Mormon Literature" and "Storyingtelling and Science."

But are you guys at all interested in hearing about more stuff like that? How about my more esoteric posts--the ones focused on my life rather than on idealistic issues? I sometimes wonder if anyone cares to read those or if you simply find them boring. Or maybe it's the other way around, and you'd rather hear more about me and less about my philosophies.

So, fire me off a comment. At the very least, just write a three word comment letting me know you're lurking out there. I recognize that the point of the internet is that I don't know if you read this or not, but the curiosity is overwhelming me. Do it 'cause you love me? Please? If you're feeling up to it, you could also let me know what you think of my blog:

• What do you like best? What needs to change?
  
• What do you think about a regular schedule of topics? Good? Boring?
• What topics do you enjoy hearing about from me?

By the way, you don't have to be a Blogger user to comment. You can simply select the "other" option on the comment page. :D

Oh dear. Posts like this always seem so awkward. What if no one replies? X-(

On to the Beta

Hey, Blogger Beta finally decided to work! Now I can have tags! Hurray, hurray. Being the organization freak that I am, I feel the need to go back and add tags to old posts, so I apologize in advance to anyone subscribed to the feed. It may get a little repetitive this weekend. :D There's not too many posts--118--so it shouldn't take terribly long.

A Little More Insanity in the Blogosphere

Oh dear, now my sister has a blog. This could be then end of your sanity as you know it. But seriously, I love my Heather. She's much more writerly than me. Seriously, I admire her creativity and confidence in her work. Nothing much on her blog yet, but she's good at producing interesting stuff, so keep an eye on it.

I promise there will be an actual post later . . . .

What's a Spherical Chicken?

So today I'm going to do something I've been meaning to do for a long time, that is, write a full explanation for the title of this blog.

When it comes to blog names, as Milton Glaser would say, just enough is more. Coming up with a title for a blog is sort of a pain. It's like picking an email address, only perhaps worse, because the people you give your email to already know you but your blog title may be your first impression to strangers. You don't want to pick anything too cliche and obvious, but also not anything too trendy and random. A blog name needs to be generic enough to fit the many moods of your blogging career, but be different enough to say something about you to the people who wander over to your blog from goodness knows where.

In titling this blog, I toyed around with a lot of different ideas, but finally settled on "Spherical Chickens." The name is derived from a classic physics joke, which I usually tell thusly:

A farmer noticed that his chickens were sick, and called in a biologist, a chemist, and a physicist to help diagnose the problem. The biologist observed the chickens, concluding, "I can tell you there's something wrong with your chickens, but I don't know what's causing it." The chemist took fluid samples from the chickens back to his lab, and returned saying, "I can tell you what's infecting your chickens, but I don't know how they got it." Meanwhile, the physicist had been sitting on the floor, scribbling maddly on several notebooks worth of paper. Suddenly, he jumped up, exclaiming, "I have the answer, but it only works for spherical chickens in a vaccuum."

Okay, okay, so it's not very funny, especially if you aren't in the middle of a physics class. But I think the joke has a good point: in all branches of knowledge, the only people who can be perfectly certain of all the answers are those who make vast simplifications and wildely inaccurate approximations. In my humanities classes we called them "vast over-generalizations," in chemistry "useful lies," and in physics simply "spherical chickens," but it's the same concept. In order to make any sense of the world, we must ignore and leave out a lot of inconvient details, or work only with very special cases that happen to work out.

In my writing, I find these sort of spherical chickens popping up a lot. I am not one who can be satisfied by mere criticism of other people's ideas; instead, I insist on creating my own theories and justifying some sort of positive assertion of truth, rather than a negative assertion of falsehood. But there's no way to account for all cases in every theory. There are a lot of underlying assumptions in everything I write. For example, I pity anyone not familiar with Mormon culture and more particularly with BYU culture who tries to read this blog, since it contains so many implicit references to these aspects of my life. Yet it would take much more time to explain the background behind these things than I actually have. So I tend to just leave these things unsaid, which of course leaves my writing wide open for attack. Basically, I count on a friendly audience who doesn't need me to justify my spherical chickens to them.

I've been pretty satisfied with my blog title, though I have thought of changing it to something like "Seeking Balance," since that seems to be the conclusion of so many of my blog entries. However, I've stuck with "Spherical Chickens" because, in addition to its higher meanings, it also gets across the fact that I am extremely odd. And random.

Here I Come Back From the Dead

Hallelujiah!!! After many, many frantic emails to the Blogger Team, my blog has been salvaged from the crushing jaws of the Blogger Beta switch-over. And it couldn't have come at a better time. My blog withdrawal symptoms--composing blog entries in my head on my way to work, strong urges to write long comments on other people's blogs, cursing Blogger (even Google on occasion) in my spare time--were getting so bad that I was about to do something drastic like switch over to another blogging site. I don't think I could have faced a new school year without this outlet, so good timing, Blogger support. (I think I'm probably addicted to Blogger.)

So here's a run down of some of the insane things that have been going on during the downtime.

Trapped by weddings - People around me should stop getting married. It makes me depressed. *pout* But really. Two of my cousins got married this month, plus several couples in our ward got engaged and/or married, and "Someday" from The Wedding Singer musical (track 2 on the sample player) has been stuck in my head for the last week. I seem to be surrounded by weddings and I don't like it one bit. I know it's odd, but I've yet to encounter this problem at BYU--somehow I made it through two years unscathed by the marital influence of Happy Valley. Now all of these weddings are suddenly contributing to a strange transformation in my life, that is, I'm becoming a hopeless romantic. I'm trying really hard to resist it, but I feel a bizarre compulsion to read romance novels (which my collection appears to be lacking in--why in the world do I only own classics and fantasies?) and watch chick flicks (ditto). This whole business annoys me to no end, since I've always thought romantics were a little out of touch with reality. Now that I'm becoming one of them, I know I was wrong: romantics are a lot out of touch with reality. Reality, come back! I need you! Snap me out of it, because at this rate I will either become insanely depressed or insanely flirtatious, and I don't think anyone wants to see either of those.

Writing fiction - I've still only made it about half way through "Swan Song," but hopefully I'll get to spend some good hours writing on Labor Day and finish that up. It's probably going to end up a little too long to post here, but if you guys are interested in reading the rest, let me know and maybe I'll, I dunno, make it downloadable from my BYU webspace or something. And I've generated a few other short story ideas that I'm going to work on after that's over. This is really exciting, since the last time I wrote something creative and entirely fictional was . . . elementary school? Yup, I think so. I just didn't feel like I could write fiction; I didn't know where to begin. But after actually, you know, trying it, it's not that hard.

NaNoWriMo - Speaking of fiction, my withdrawal period from blogging made me realize how much I really enjoy writing--not just for self-analysis and communication and that, but real creative writing. And I don't do nearly enough of that. Through some random internet surfing way too late at night involving massive amounts of sugar-derived energy, I've made the decision to participate in National Novel Writing Month 2006 (affectionately known as NaNoWriMo). Yes, this November I am going to complete a novel of 50,000+ words in less that a month. While still in classes. Right after midterms. And working 15 hours a week. Ha ha, I am insane. Try to stop me. No, no, don't try to stop me. In fact, I challenge anyone who reads this blog who has ever thought about writing a novel to participate with me. Don't be one of those "someday" novel writers--the best time to write is now! You don't need experience or a plot. Just sheer will power. Do it with me! Plus, I need a support group to force me to write--we're talking the equivalent of four single-spaced pages a day in order to finish. :D

But I really like the concept behind NaNoWriMo: force yourself to write, and don't think too hard about how crappy your writing is. I like this quote from a review of No Plot? No Problem!:

The key is to lower your expectations "from 'best-seller' to 'would not make someone vomit,' " says Baty [founder of NaNoWriMo], who maintains that stress and a deadline are important parts of writing.

True that. If you just do it, it will get better. And I've already got an interesting idea for the novel. So I'm set to go. Hurrah!

Bonus points if you can figure out where the title of this post comes from.

Oops, I Bwoke It

A repost from the comments of the previous post, just in case none of you read it.

Yeah, so Blogger released Blogger Beta and I wanted to try some of the new features--tags, CSS-based layout, etc. (Incidentally, I've been feeling really unsatisfied with the look of my blog lately. As I've researched a bit, I've got some good ideas, but I'm too lazy to bring myself up to speed on CSS enough to do what I want. This seemed like a lazy-woman's way out.) In my over-zealousness, I merged my Blogger account with my Google account, assuming that my blog would carry over into the new account. So far, it hasn't. I'm desperately trying to get a response from someone at Blogger to fix this and get me control of my blog back. Luckily, I remembered that I enabled email posting, so hopefully this will post. If I can't get it up again in a few days, then I may resort to simply creating a new blog. But I really want to keep the old one because I like the address. Grr. Curse technology.

Meanwhile, it's nice to know that you people are actually reading my blog. Nothing like being gone to find out people miss you. :D So I've been using my blog time the past few days to work on a short story that's been rolling around in my head. Here's two paragraphs from near the middle to keep you entertained.

Excerpt from "Swan Song" by Liz Muir

As the guests mingled, the band slipped through the darkness onto the stage to test their equipment. Under the dimmed floodlights Jane could see the lead singer, a lanky man with hair too greasy and matted to be called flowing but too loose yet for dreadlocks. His eyes stared earnestly at the microphone he was adjusting. He always manages to look so surprised that they actually set up for him, as if he hasn't been doing this for years, she thought, watching as he tilted the mike back and forth on its stand with intense concentration. His wide-eyed expression contrasted with the scruff on his face, lending him the look of one who, having reached past the boundary of adolescence, had run from adulthood, striving to keep from acquiring the knowing expression that experience would mark him with.

He held his guitar like a father might hold his newborn son: loving, proud too, but still slightly uncertain how best to position this new extension of himself. Placing the shoulder-strap around his body, he slowly removed his right hand from under the body of the guitar, as though making certain the strap could bear weight. His now free hand reached down to adjust his grey striped running shorts—too short to seem natural on any man over thirty. His skinny legs poked out of them, whiter and hairier than would be considered desirable, but he was a seasoned singer, not a pop icon. Meant to be heard, not looked at.