kirby1024 | The short and skinny of it. (Reply)

There are issues currently in my life, this I don't deny. But, I try hard not to angst. Regardless, there are issues that are better dealt with by telling everyone about them, so I made a deal with myself. The good and the bad will share equal space in this journal. Bad to the left of me, the Good to the right.

The Good

The Bad

Well, there are several good things that've been happening in the past few days:

I finally got my copy of Nobilis back. I'm enjoying reading through it again, before it once again goes back on loan.

It seems that the readings for subjects this semester are going to be much easier than last semester's. It could also be that I've got a lot more time on my hands, so going through and reading the readings for each week is starting to become something I'm enjoying to break the tedium. At any rate, it makes a welcome change to my regular habit of falling behind readings in the first week, then not bothering afterwards.

I went through a box that's been sitting in the corner of my room for the past, well, several months. Turns out a lot of stuff that I'd been looking for for the past few months was in there, including all my character sheets for my Adventure! Game. Also, I found the character sheet for that game that I thought I'd lost. This, it seems, is what typically happens when you clean your room...

Honours seems to be falling into place quite nicely. Spent quite a bit of time last week talking to various Linguistics staff members, making sure that my idea was something that was appropriate for an honours thesis. Both Kate Burridge (my favouritest lecturer in the whole wide world) and Julie Bradshaw (the not-quite-as-favouritest, but still really cute in that computer illiterate sort of way) have stated that the topic I wish to do is really interesting, and I should start looking through the literature now, to make sure noone else has done it.

For those of you who are interested, my thesis will basically attempt to probe the question of whether, when looking at webforums or other forumspeak-type environments, the virtual location of the community or the geographical location of the speaker is more appropriate to consider when looking at spatial variation in language use. Or, more simply, whether there's meaningful language variation between online communities. Currently I have thoughts, and I will most likely be doing research. As of yet, am uncertain what sort of webforums would be appropriate to collect data from.

I am worried about Lara. Those who read her livejournal may note that this is not without justification. In a lot of ways, I feel really torn. I want Lara out of there before something really bad happens, but I can't make her do anything, not yet anyway. One of my greatest, top-most fears in my entire life is that I'm going to lose Lara. I think rationally I know that that's probably not going to happen - but that Lara is putting herself in a situation where there's a vague possibility of that happening scares me, really badly.

Lara's trying to put on the brave face, but I can see right through it. This is affecting her. And it frustrates me so much that I can't do a damn thing about it.

In a lot of ways, that's the really big bad in my life at the moment. most other things are pretty okay. But I think it was important to get that out.