Dear Neglected Blog

Dear Neglected Blog,

How are you? I wouldn't be surprised if you were upset with me. I can't believe it's nearly two months since I updated you. Of course, you know I have peeked in on you occasionally. I have two half-composed posts, one on Ally McBeal and the other on Michael Jackson. I hope to publish both of these sooner, rather than later.

I would offer excuses, but I'm not fond of abdicating responsibility. The truth is I've been caught up in other things: tutoring, marking, Twitter, Facebook, occasionally my thesis; and those things, combined with my apparent inability to write a quick blog post mean that you have been placed on the back burner. I'm sorry. I will try to visit more regularly, if for briefer periods.

Still, some of that off-line activity may well end up here in future blog posts. For example, the two subjects I tutored in this semester would provide plenty of fodder for a good rant about the working conditions of sessional academic staff. But, aside from being counterproductive, right now I think I'm probably too exhausted to compose something coherent on the subject. Or maybe I'm just over the whole fight, now that the semester has ended.

I could write something about how my thesis also made its way onto the back burner. That's been a bit disappointing, mostly in the sense that I'm disappointed in myself and my lack of priorities. Perhaps I'll take this opportunity to reaffirm my commitment to my thesis, to work on it first before I do work for other people--at least for the first hour of everyday, anyway. I do take heart that I still really love my thesis topic. It continues to be fascinating to me, so I know I'll finish my PhD rather than abandon it from lack of interest.

Dear Blog, I did buy a bike a week or so ago and, surely, as the source of many potential adventures, I will be blogging about my activities with it. I suppose one of the first questions to ask is whether a bike is an it, or a he or a she. Do people name their bikes in the way they do boats and cars? The friend with whom I bought the bike proposed the idea to me and quipped that her bike could be named Barbarella. She said this as a joke, but I insisted on making it stick. In the spirit of the moment I dubbed my bike Gigi, with a vague sense of a pun that she was, after all, a town bike, but I'm still not sure about the whole anthropomorphizing impulse. (Although clearly, since I'm addressing you as if you're a sentient being, I'm not that against the practice).

Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed this visit as much as I have.

Yours faithfully,

Kirsty