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so muscle tone then

Somewhat predictably, the health kick planned for the last couple of weeks of term didn’t come off. I remained in a holding pattern in that respect. Really need to regain muscle tone this holiday. It’s not far away – lurking below the surface. A few days should do it.

Every holiday since my teaching career started, I’ve begun each break with a head full of all kinds of improvement projects. Have I ever accomplished the full list? Well – I’ll leave you to fill in the answer to that from your own imagination. This one feels different. There is a momentum that will escape me and remain unexploited if I don’t keep up with it. DIY, academic progression, assessment of coursework, business development, creative writing, website development. Let’s see.

Michelle Obama has the same natural eloquence as her husband. Inspiring. Parallels with Kennedy are obvious but inescapable. Much has been made over the past several years of Bush’s inability to marshal the subtleties of language (charitable description) to the extent that it has become something of a mass media cliché. But the fact remains that skill in manipulating words is life-changing. Witness international diplomacy: the destinies of millions determined by verbal spin. Would Bush have had the wherewithal to get those missiles removed from Cuba? It’s not just about posturing. How you sell the posture is absolutely critical. For the first time in many decades the world’s biggest power is in the hands of an ethical salesman.

1635 characters. Feels good to escape from the 140 character limit for spell. Now back to The Discipline Of The Twit. See you there people.

04 04 2009 09:23:47 structure Comments (0) Permalink

so the last week of term then

Has come round remarkably quickly. Time has that habit of passing, regardless of what people do. The trick is to fill it with valuable stuff. Speaking of which, I opened a Twitter account just over a week ago. Couldn’t ignore it any longer. I guess the idea of it is that it provides carefully selected microscopic windows on people’s daily lives – but as I’ve said to others – in an odd way it’s helping me to structure daily life. Maybe that says more about me than Twitter. But there is a sense of “if I’m Twittering about it I’d better actually be doing it”. Quite clearly, many people think it’s very strange and wonder why anyone would do it. My question, as ever, is “why would you not do it?” The more weird people think it is, in a way the more it makes me want to do it. But maybe that’s just me being odd.

First dark morning of BST. Leeds Fest tickets on sale tonight. Not sure what’ll happen with that. Don’t have time to queue at HMV. Don’t really hold out much hope of getting any tickets online. It’s really irritating that they don’t announce the headliners until minutes before the tickets go on sale. It’s not as if they’ll have any trouble selling the tickets. Seems almost as though they want the process to be chaotic.

30 03 2009 06:55:14 each to each
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structure Comments (0) Permalink

so austerity then

Seem to have let the weight drift up just a little bit. Nothing drastic you understand. The significant loss over the last two years remains very much in place. It’s just edged into a bracket that doesn’t feel good symbolically. I’m very much a person who needs symbolic acts and events to provide structure. A sustained flow of literal thoughts is something I just can’t do. So, time for a short period of austerity methinks. Clean the system out, ready for the Easter Break. Mini-Lent. I hereby set myself the ridiculous target of losing a stone by April 3rd. You just see if I can’t. 12 stone 4 by April 3rd. By the way I’m a twit now as well. Username mark_boardman. What are you doing? Updates in the sidebar: look left.

23 03 2009 06:35:12 structure Comments (0) Permalink

so looking and sounding like an idiot then

Construction of self is a funny thing. It’s quite clear that many people don’t do it: they appear to proceed daily without any apparent need to assess how they interface with the world. I still find myself doing quite tortuous empathic calculations about how someone might feel in response to what I’m about to do or say, and then still very often getting it wrong. Which I suppose uses up quite a lot of mental energy. That’s it really. If that sense of how to interact comes naturally then I suppose you have significant spare energy for other stuff. I still look back on things I’ve said and wonder who it was that was saying them. I wonder if I’d even like to meet that person, let alone have anything more sustained to do with them. It applies to things I’ve written as well as things I’ve said, but not as much. With writing, you at least have that time to think offline, recompose… before it goes live.

17 03 2009 06:46:33 stream Comments (0) Permalink

so a technology epiphany then

It strikes me that no explanation is needed for using and embracing technology. The people who need to justify themselves are those who have decided not to use it.  Technology exists to share thoughts with the world. It’s socially acceptable to do so. Why would you not do it?

03 03 2009 11:01:41 stream Comments (0) Permalink