An open letter to my fans...

I'd like to start this post with an apology to my loyal followers... all 13 of you :P I'm sorry for being so long-winded and linguisticly indulgent. I've just finished reading a friend's blog of her time here in Maastricht and it is succinct, witty, to the point but observational but overall, as Goldie Locks would put it, juuuuust right :)

I on the other hand have been carried away lately with the freedom the internet affords in terms of space. After 5.5 years of cutting copy to fit newspaper holes and trying to make every word count the luxury of an online ramble has got the better of me. Which should not be a surprise to anyone who's spent any time with me in person and tried to get a word in edgeways! Regardless, I fully intended to keep these posts short, sharp and to the point when I started (60 posts ago!) ... but then this blog became a kind of record for posterity as much as an exercise in a different kind of writing. And I didn't want to have to cut anything anymore in case I was one day too senile to remember these times.

The consequence I realise though is that it's probably not always very readable unless you're my parents and then you have to spend the time wading through it anyway! So, from this post on I will try valiantly to keep my loquaciousness in check!

To blog or not to blog...? and other academic musings

Saw this image in a lecture slide and me thinks it is hilarious! Totally encompasses the whole liberal arts study over here and also trying to keep up with this thing - this whole sharing your thoughts and experiences with the world is bloody time consuming!

I also wondered the other day, do you think academics get shitty when we (lazy students) reduce their wonderful, long musings to dot points in order to study for for exams? Or when we totally butcher their theories in paraphrasing for an essay? Most of them here have such crazy Dutch or German names I'm probably pronouncing them wrong each class too :S

And speaking of exams, I saw the other day that an Adelaide researcher wants to get rid of "archaic" written exams. Hear, hear, as the Bard would say. Why can’t we just learn interesting things, enjoy the process and not have to be tested at the end! I felt like I'd been teleported back to Year 12 :S and in the end I reckon I might lose points for writing too much because I didn't see the instruction that said only write one page ... and I maintain my handwriting is fat (not to mention comletely ruined by 5 years of shorthand!!)(P.S. Mum, as an academic reader of this rambling, please don't hurt me!) 

On the flip side, one really cool thing about studying here is the textbooks. At home all I get is dowdy media textbooks on media ethics and law and stuff. This bloc here I got one with Pop Art picture of Marilyn Monroe on the front! Am totally sending home a big box of all my books on a boat so when I'm old I can have them in my study library and reminisce about my days as a European intellectual!

For now though, I suppose I've answered old Willie's question (by blogging) and look forward to acquainting myself with him next semester when I delve into the subject "Shakespere on Screen"!