I know I’ve heard multiple people–therapists and others–say this, but trying to Google it only yields responses about internet addiction. “Going offline” …meaning taking a break (not from the literal internet, just from thinking), shutting down, quieting. I don’t know if this is a mixed metaphor or not. I’ve heard people give it both positive and negative connotations, but more frequently negative ones–like your brain panicking and shutting down (note: “shutting down” is a much better metaphor for the negative version… Read more »
Posts By: Claire
Enjambment…ality
I thought I loved enjambment. But I only learned as I was writing this that enjambment is ANY instance of a line break that occurs in the middle of a sentence (and with no punctuation, i.e. the line doesn’t end with a comma or semicolon or dash indicating a pause/break). How unfathomably boring! Is there a separate term for what I *thought* enjambment was–a line break or pause that creates a double meaning? i.e., one meaning is suggested by the first… Read more »
Technology Metaphor of the Week // 05
I checked out about 8 books on epidemiology and illness from the library and have been working my way through them (in general the ones about infectious and zoonotic diseases are the most interesting). Most recently I finished The End of Illness, which I didn’t feel particularly strongly about–too prescriptive to hold my interest, but not devoid of interesting content. Near the end of the book the author writes, “…sleep acts like a built-in technology app for our brains, cleaning out old files… Read more »
Things that could stand to retire: an ongoing list
*Acoustic covers of No Diggity. *That ubiquitous Mary Oliver quote. She did say other things, everyone. You can read them during your one wild and precious life.
Technology Metaphor Of The Week // 04
When I first bought a smartphone two-ish years ago, I found myself playing Angry Birds/Candy Crush/Alphabetty Saga during waiting moments–standing in line, on the subway, while waiting for someone to meet me–the typical. Maybe reaching for a positive spin, I always thought of it as This week’s technology metaphor: Defragmenting my day. But if I give it more thought, it’s not a very precise metaphor. Defragging a hard drive consists of getting rid of those interstitial spaces and jagged files… Read more »
Technology Metaphor of the Week // 03
It can be a struggle to find a technology metaphor that ISN’T referring to some aspect of the human brain (although there’s always, well, “the web”). Not that this is surprising–the correlation between brain and hard drive is pretty blatant–but I would love to come across a technology metaphor that referred to something completely outside of humans and their processes… This week’s is a little bit of a cheat, because it’s two related metaphors that I heard spoken by different people. Imagine… Read more »
Technology Metaphor of the Week // 02
Comment from last week: “I don’t know, technology metaphors–particularly that yoga one–strike me as desperate and insecure. Yoga has its own thing going, did we really need that metaphor to grasp what she was talking about?” Need? No. But I think that drawing the comparison to refreshing a website says something different about the function of downward facing dog than the teacher would have communicated if she had been more straightforward. People sometimes think of down dog as a resting… Read more »
Technology Metaphor of the Week // 01
One of my favorite things about technology is that new inventions, processes, and objects can be exploited for metaphor. Even if you believe there’s truly nothing new to be thought or said, you have a better shot (shot: a word that through the ages could be used in analogies relating to bows and arrows, guns, golf, basketball, photography, and on into the future) at originality if your comparison involves something that hasn’t been in existence for long. I’ve started to… Read more »
On the line
I used to read a really odd assortment of blogs. By that, I don’t mean that I read a bunch of Mormon Mommy Blogs (though I do that now) or that I read the AOL Baby Name message boards (which I did when I was 13 and thought Cinnamon might be a good name for a human), but that back in the days of LiveJournal–late high school, early college for me–I often came across the blogs of friends of friends,… Read more »
To begin…
For my first blog post, I decided to share my three favorite songs about former presidents (in no particular order): 1. A Q&A with the one-term peanut farmer: 2. The predecessor to the listicle? by my favorite 90s emo band: 3. And with animation and backbeats: Addendum: One of my favorite songs of all time, not about a former president per se but which does *mention* a former president, meriting its inclusion. I vacillate between preferring this version and remaining… Read more »
