We finally got to Lafayette the day before yesterday. We had expected our things to arrive yesterday, as it had been four to five business days since we loaded the truck and they picked it up.

HOWEVER. Our stuff is...still in North Carolina! They have "committed" to having it here by Friday, though we don't know what time on Friday. Gah. So now we're sleeping on body pillows for a couple of nights and drinking canned Starbucks coffee in the mornings.

Blogging, then, will still be light for a while. Today we're going to campus to get office keys, fill out some various paperwork, and join a credit union.

Jonathan and I are staying for a few days at my parents' house, as this is around the midpoint of our 1000+ mile move. It'll soon be over.

Also, comments have been re-enabled. I adjusted the comment closer setting, so please comment away.

Anyway, I'm starting a cake meme, as that's about my brain's level right now:

Cakes I love

dark chocolate
red velvet
coconut
Italian creme (with almonds)
yellow
strawberry
spice

Cakes I dislike somewhat

cheese
carrot
black forest
tres leches
caramel

Ever since reading Hollywood Babylon recently, I've been on a silent movie kick, mainly watching Clara Bow movies from Netflix. The following stills are from The Show-Off and The Plastic Age. I find it interesting that Bow, the original It Girl, the hottest of the hot in her day, isn't as skinny as most celebrities now.

Also, I'm intrigued with how queer and alt these women look. I think of a post Margo, Darling wrote a long time ago about getting her hair cut really short:

I cut it because my building has very weak circuits and my blowdryer kept knocking the power off. I cut it because I teach an early class this quarter and this requires no fixing at all. I cut it because I lost about twenty pounds last year and I promised myself that when I got my cheekbones back (sharper, stronger, bolder now, because I'm older) I could pull it off. I cut it because I didn't want to look preppy, or upwardly-mobile. I cut it because I wanted more queer visibility, because it seemed important that I not acquiesce to the tyranny of socially-normative standards of white female beauty (watch for women with short hair on tv tonight. You will not see one, unless she is an old woman in a posture-pedic bed commercial, or a crying contestant on a rerun of last season's America's Next Top Model.)

She's right. I know, for example, that my family -- not Jonathan, he would like anything I did with my hair -- would be horrified if I got this haircut (Louise Brooks):

But in these films, literally all the women have haircuts like those of Bow and Brooks, and it was fine. I wonder what happened to make this look so fashionable, then what happened to give it the queer cast it has now.

Professing Mama just pulled forth the most impressively obscure reference ever:

I had forgotten all about the existence of The Jets, and that's a shame. May we all remember fondly.

Wow. I'm not sure how to change the animation to make it a little slower, but there the image is. Via Jezebel, and here's the annotated guide. I had noticed the arm resizing and the trimming down of her back, and obviously the removal of wrinkles, but I hadn't noticed some of the other stuff. I need to start reading Jezebel more often.

Edited to add a link to their manifesto.

Those of you on the WPA list may have notice the article that's sparked all kinds of excited discussion:

Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning “First-Year Composition” as “Introduction to Writing Studies”
Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle

In this article we propose, theorize, demonstrate, and report early results from a course that approaches first-year composition as introduction to Writing Studies. This pedagogy explicitly recognizes the impossibility of teaching a universal academic discourse and rejects that as a goal for first-year composition. It seeks instead to improve students’ understanding of writing, rhetoric, language, and literacy in a course that is topically oriented to reading and writing as scholarly inquiry and that encourages more realistic conceptions of writing.

That abstract doesn't tell us much, but the article is based on research and observation from pilot courses taught by the authors. They include case studies, but I haven't finished the article yet, so I'll stop there. I do plan to post a detailed review tomorrow, so if anyone else would like to get in on an MMTOR (Massive Multi-Thinker Online Review), or event, or seminar, what have you, let me know.

I'd love to see a new program available online which would let users enter what they eat. I know FitDay already does this, but it doesn't have the flexibility I would like. I want a food log program that would let me do the following:

• Enter times for when I eat, in addition to letting me enter what I eat -- or better yet, timestamp the entries but let me change the times if I want
• Turn off calorie, fat, protein, and carbohydrate counting if I want -- because sometimes I'm more interested in just logging my foods, not entering all that nutritional information about each food
• Tag each food item I eat (in other words, there would be one entry per day, but within that entry there would be subentries, like to-do lists in Nozbe and Jot. The subentries would be the foods, and you'd be able to tag those)

Right now I'm using my LiveJournal account for food tracking, to see how that works. It's particularly important for me to be able to enter the times I eat, because that helps me to see my overall patterns and sort out the difference between actual hunger and perceived hunger.

For example, yesterday I was pretty much ravenous all day. At about 11:00, I ate some cherry Jello and some yogurt with granola, then about 2:00, I ate some brown rice and vegetables (peas and peppers) with szechuan sauce. I was working on some writing after that, and I became aware of acute hunger. I looked at the clock, and it was 2:40. I thought to myself, there is NO WAY I'm going to eat again, not a mere 40 minutes after I ate a generous portion of vegetables and rice. It helped to see the types of foods, portions, and times I ate so that I could recognize the hunger as a psychological perception and not a true physical need. I'm also interested in seeing if the feelings of hunger pass after a half hour or so. My general guideline is that if I'm still hungry three hours after eating, I eat something else. Otherwise, I'm okay, and there's no good reason to eat more.

Anyway, I think a good web application would probably help a lot of people who are trying to lose (or not gain) weight. Tagging and dating/timestamping would be key, though; it would be useful in all kinds of ways. People who were trying to switch to a vegan diet could tag meals "ovolacto" or "vegan," and people who go off the wagon and have a big slab of cake could tag that "cake" or "sugar," then track those patterns over time to see when they're the most vulnerable to cravings.