Dangerous areas! (Giant City State Park)

I'm finally going to start posting pictures again after my long school-related break!

This sign along the road leading in to Giant City State Park in southwestern Illinois warns visitors about "DANGEROUS areas".

I think a few more dangerous areas in life would be a positive thing, as long as adequate warning is provided.

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Today on Facebook, I "liked" a couple of podcasts that I listen to all the time.* And as I drove here thinking about my plan to do so, I also thought about the frustration I will likely feel if I try to take part in conversation on their Facebook walls.

A lot of it comes from the fact that there is no threading in Facebook conversations. If I want to respond to someone who said something interesting, I have to use their name specifically and hope they see it, as well as that other people won't think I'm responding to something else entirely. And if I want to respond to the original post and I'm not quick enough to get in near the top, it's possible again that other people will think I'm talking to them, or that there'll be enough distance between my post and the original one that the conversation becomes unclear. The whole system produces conversation that feels very disjointed and frustrating to me. It's also a system where I feel pressured to write something quickly enough that it's near the top and therefore still relevant, which leads to ill-considered thoughts or phrases sometimes.

Do any of my readers feel the same way? Do you have effective responses to these issues? And why doesn't Facebook (not to mention all the other sites out there) just do threaded comments?

*For those interested, I speak of Backstory (a cool history podcast) and Polyamory Weekly, a podcast discussing polyamory-related issues. I like Polyamory Weekly a lot more than I expected I would before I gave it a try, so I also recommend it.

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I'm going to have to start thinking really hard about a research statement for grad school applications. But there are too many things I want to research....

A watch, a harp, and Korea.

I wrote up an email to my friend R's father (marie_rex's partner) to ask for more information about the watch he rebuilt that I now possess and about the harp that he and her mother commissioned that I'm going to see if I can find a new home for (more details here eventually). I'm a little embarrassed at how long it's taken to do both of those things, but school was.

While I was writing, one of my professors came by to ask about her computer that she'd dropped off. I didn't know about it (it was with somebody else), but while she was here, she told me about opportunities to go to Korea to teach English as a conversational partner for children in after school programs. She said she'd write me a very strong recommendation letter if I was interested. How about that? I hadn't realized I'd made that much of an impression; it's flattering.

I'd love a chance to go overseas....

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"Everyone always told me I'd hate it in New York because it was cold and awful and mean. I just loved it, every second of it. And I still do. I'm a city junkie. I'd like to find out what makes each place so particular." --Rosalie Sorrells, a folksinger, in an interview with Studs Terkel (American Dreams: Lost and Found).

That's me. That's so me. I'm going to listen to some of her music.

She also commented: "There's a terrible mobility in this society....The sense of being someplace goes faster every year."

http://www.rosaliesorrels.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=home.welcome