Mecology
Nothing profound to be found here this evening. I have this bad habit of winding my legs around chairs when I'm sitting and typing, and since I re-aggravated my knee yesterday, I've tried to avoid chairs (as opposed, say, to couches and beds) when possible for a stretch. Tonight I'm in the office, facing the daunting prospect of de-bunkering about three years worth of accumulated stuff. Since I'll be on leave in the fall, and since office space in the SU WP is at a premium, I'll be office-less during that time. I've already filled five boxes, with little visible effect.
But it's gotten me to thinking. This summer is the first in almost ten years that I won't be teaching a course, and this fall will be the first extended stretch in even longer that I haven't had access to office space. And so I've been thinking lately about how important (& implicitly so) it's been to me to have separate home/office spaces. I organize my email partly via the fact that I have both home and office access. I came in to the office tonight to work, knowing that if I had the NBA finals on TV, I wouldn't. So I'm catching an ESPN radio stream, and able to do other stuff. My office gives me immediate access to a sizable library. I'll bring home books to work from, but my office is my base. Not this fall, though.
For me, this connects to a bunch of stuff that I'd been thinking about this weekend. I've been feeling a little bit of a disjunct between the writing I'm doing for my book, and the writing I do here. Part of it is topic-based, certainly, but part of it is the kind of writing that I can do on cgbvb. I don't really want the overlap, frankly, for reasons I'm still thinking through.
Maybe more on this later. What it boils down to, though, is what I've come to think of as my personal media ecology, the various ways that I manage and organize my space, time, resources, memory, information, etc. I'm just bumping up lately against the fact that mycology is going to have to change soon...