Courtesy of the other Lauren, a clever way to squeeze out a first-of-the-year post: the first sentence from the first post of each month of last year. Let’s see how goofy/sardonic/boring/bizarre I managed to be…
January
This is the traditional first-of-year filler post to let you know that I’m still here despite seeming not to be here.
February
I have not been posting lately because…
March
One thing that has kept me from posting practically all semester has finally been settled: late Tuesday night my union settled our contract negotiations with UM and reached tentative agreement.
April
Just back from Sociolinguistics Symposium 17 in Amsterdam, jetlagged, just in time for finals!
May
A while ago - before the presidential primary races really heated up - I wrote something that intimated a feeling I was getting about media coverage (as one genre of public discussion) of the primary candidates.
June
I’m not sure if there’s discourse in the box or if the sign is a contemporary commentary on itself, kind of “This is not a pipe” style, but this box of discourse is sitting in our department…awesome.
July
Steven Levitt reports in Monday’s Freakonomics blog about an urban policy researcher, Jeffrey Grogger, at UChicago who did some analysis of the correlation between wages and speech, more particularly the quality of “sounding black”.
August
I’ve finally gotten around to reading Asif Agha’s (2007) Language and Social Relations, in which the author attempts to provide a holistically semiotic approach to language use and its valorization.
September
…I somehow managed to go more than a month again without posting.
October
It’s the grammar.
November
Readers will have picked up on the fact that I have a certain political preference; I hope this preference comes through not as loyalty to a party, but rather as loyalty to particular ideas, values, and goals (of course it’s “ideological,” but that sounds so negative…).
December
I’ve recently joined a Facebook group dedicated to my high school class, supposedly an organizing tool for our upcoming reunion (cf. “Lemon out” if you want to gage my feelings on this, though I’m slightly more amenable to the idea).
—
So I guess the theme of the year was me neglecting my blog and me being mentally and actively involved in political processes. I think that I will do better at posting again this year, because (ding ding ding) I’m a candidate now! Hoorah! So now that I just have to come up with a dissertation topic, surely I’ll have plenty of time for blogging…erm… Actually, teaching college writing last semester was extremely fun, interesting, and gratifying, and I’m teaching it again this semester, so I’ll probably have some stuff to write about that. And Obama will be in office, so that’s exciting. And the blog is now 4.5 years old, so just the fact that anyone still checks in at all is really satisfying. Thanks to you (and the magic of RSS feeds)!
Also, here is a beautiful rainbow from Maui for you which I saw on my winter vacation:



