I Am an Idiot
I don’t even know what to do with this stuff… It’s late — not that late, but I’ve been working (in various sense of the word) straight for two weeks. And I will work again tomorrow.
A couple months back, when my friend Emily was visiting, I told her about my fears concerning the quality of material in my blog. Emily had good advice: ‘You should just write, “I am an idiot. You are probably an idiot, too. Don’t take us so seriously!” at the top.’
In that spirit:
I Am an Idiot
First off, a bunch of new readers have come to my attention. Hi! Caveat lector: I know that most of y’all have come here because of personal connections to me, or because of my #Poetic indiscretions. However, if you’re interested in the anthropological side of this blog, you should know that this is not the blog of a brilliant, trained anthropologist. The best anthropological discussions on the Web are available at Savage Minds. I also recommend the fine blogs at Anthropology.net, though I often disagree with the writers. What’s here is very idiosyncratic, and often less well-informed and well-polished than it ought to be. I hope that this situation will be remedied by mid-2007.
But Not That Much of an Idiot
I’ve had a very stressful couple of months. My situation’s been unstable, and my behaviour’s been erratic: I lost a job, I started a new job, I lost my best friend and two other friends, I got involved in an organisation that I’ve come to care about deeply and have begun to feel like what I’m doing matters for the first time in years, I got down to my literal last dollar the week before rent, &c., &c., &c.: Typical urban half-punk drama. In any event, I’ve been zonked as all, and I’m quite aware that a lot of the writing here has not been up to snuff — I haven’t been putting in the time that I should. Heck, my last posting didn’t even really make sense. I’m also sorry about being so slow to respond to comments. A reader asked me if I didn’t see the B-Log as a discussion forum. To be honest, I don’t know how I see it — though I post this on the Internet for anyone to read, I didn’t actually expect to have readers. However, I do intend to reply to most comments — it’s just been a very busy time for me. I want to thank you guys for attempting to engage in conversations with me. I appreciate that a lot.
But I Really Am an Idiot
One of the new readers expressed amazement at how much I know. I hope that I haven’t been misleading, here. I pick up a lot of news stories from the Anthro-L listserv (which I always cite), and Google News (which I never cite). Google News does daily e-mail updates on search terms of one’s choice. I get ‘anthropology’, ‘anthropologist’, ‘thai’, ‘thailand’, ‘ghana’, ‘ghanaian’, ‘asante’, ‘menashe’, and ‘bushmen’.
I also use Wikipedia extensively. I believe that folks who have beef with Wikipedia either don’t get it, or are just trying to be chuckleheads. Wikipedia may be edited by any reader, which means that it’s very easy to plant incorrect or misleading information in the articles. Thus, Wikipedia shouldn’t be trusted any more than hearsay. However, it’s an excellent first reference for a good many topics, and can help one get a good grasp of the extent of information to be verified or further researched elsewhere. I often don’t cite Wikipedia if I can verify info in another source and if I deem it to be common knowledge — the sort of thing one could find in an encyclopaedia or through three minutes’ Googling. So, too, information found simply through Googling.
So, I’m not really that hep to the world — I just depend on a few very nifty research tools.