Resuscitating

This is an experiment. We started this blog over the summer to keep interested parties informed about our whereabouts while traveling, but since August it has been lying dormant. I decided I'd like to try to resuscitate it. I'm interested to see if anyone will notice (do the people I know check defunct blogs, in the hope that they'll find something new there?), and specifically whether or not the "Jo" in Jolyse will find my online musings.

If you are reading this, I'd be much obliged if you left me a little comment. I might structure my writings differently if I know that I have an audience. I'll suspect, for the time being, that I do not.

When we started this blog, a friend of ours said something along the lines of "I wish I had something interesting to write about so that I could justify having a blog." That made me question whether I should have been setting one up, but it also made me smile because I consider him a very thoughtful, insightful and well-spoken person who could easily fill the pages of a book/blog/etc. with interesting comments and questions for us all to ponder. What makes someone think that her/his thoughts are blog-worthy? I haven't found my answer yet, but I am motivated to try to take this up again for a different set of reasons.

I recently started graduate school. Who would have thought that reading hundreds of pages a week, writing lots of papers, and playing with numbers and statistical software would be a lonely venture? I actually find myself missing the staff meetings and other forced moments of social interaction that peppered my previous work-lives. Now I spend all of my non-class time in front of a book or a computer. It makes me miss people a little bit. After all, isn't that what I came to graduate school to study?

I have mixed feelings about using an internet-based medium, which will inevitably require me to spend more time in front of the computer, to try to connect with friends, family...really anyone who would be willing to read this. But I figure I'll just siphon off some of the time I would otherwise be playing spider solitaire and dedicate that to blog-writing. At least until someone discovers me. And please let me know if you do.

I spent this afternoon at the Chicago Public Library, and I originally wanted to give them a friendly shout-out in my first resuscitated-blog post. In lots of other public libraries, you are not allowed to sleep. One of the staff people often comes around with a big wooden stick and bangs on the tables where people are sitting. It scares the crap out of people. Think of Mr. Bruce gently waking up a sleeping student in his class, for anyone who went to high school with me. I saw a lot of that in the big public library in DC. So I fell asleep today at the library, and woke up with a jolt, afraid that a library employee would be standing over me, about to slam his/her stick down on the table. But no, no one seemed bothered. "Another way that Chicago is a wonderful, welcoming, open-hearted city," I thought to myself. Well, not quite. I actually just got lucky. An hour later, an official-looking man came around to wake everyone up -- though he did do it by gently tapping a pen on the table, instead of scaring the begebies out of everyone. So I'm now wondering if Chicago actually is any different? (in this one respect...) Maybe a little bit nicer around the edges, but still the same anti-homeless people, anti-tired people, anti-student measures at its core. What do you think?