This afternoon I received an email from Mr. Lovas about how my (academic) weblog was now up and ready to go. To be honest, I was a little bit anxious to try this whole "academic weblog" thing out. I've had a few in the past (via. Blogger), although I wasn't very committed to them. The longest one I've had was probably during my junior year in high school when my news editor (at the time) offered to set one up for me. That was my very first blog that lasted a whole year before one hiatus lead to another until I completely stopped writing. Since then I had one or two that lasted for a few months each. I guess what's interesting this time around is that half the time I'll be required to update and the other half I'll update whenever I please. Maybe I'll stick with my old blogging habits and include passages/quotes that I come across that I would like to remember -- at the end of (almost) every post. I found it nice to look back at my old posts and see beautifully written excerpts that I had found and kept track of. edit -- Today, Mr. Lovas mentioned making a link to another page that would hold our sentence collection but I decided to do that in another notebook that I would like to keep writing in even after this class.

Well, I'm a little behind in the Odysseus readings so I'm hoping to catch up to where I am suppose to be at before the next class session. I've been enjoying the class sessions we've had thus far. It's just as it was described by previous 1B students that I spoke to: "at times boring, dull, slow, and excruciating to sit through" were, of course, not the words that they chose. ; ) But actually, I'm really glad that this class is so discussion-oriented. I think that's really important especially for an English class - to have that sharing of ideas and interpretations. And that's also exactly why I enjoyed my Intro to Fiction and senior-year English class so much. Lately, I've been thinking about how much more enriching it would have been had I taken Ewrit1B with Lovas last quarter. Anyway, I'm curious to see how the use of my academic weblog will play out.

-- aesun

Perhaps its true that things can change in a day. That a few dozen hours can affect the outcome of whole lifetimes. And that when they do, those few dozen hours, like the salvaged remains of a burned house -- the charred clock, the singed photograph, the scorched furniture -- must be resurrected from the ruins and examined. Preserved. Accounted for. Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Imbued with new meaning. Suddenly they become the bleached bones of a story.

A God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy.

(--- post written April 18, 2004)