The sound of one hand clapping

The hit rate for Silentio has been pretty low the past couple of days, so I don't think too many people have noticed this, but I'm trying to cut back my posting until I have something halfway interesting to say. This doesn't mean I won't occasionally throw out five posts that consist only of links; it just means that I think that my inclination to do so is on hold for a while. I've been trying to get my head around a couple of things here for school, and just couldn't find the words to reflect on the thoughts that I have about the things that you may or may not finding interesting. That seems like a pretty fair description of this blog, don't you think?

I'm at a sluggish point of the term, it seems, in which self-imposed expectations are emerging. It's not yet April, but I sense the cruelest month around the corner. The more I anticipate, the more I dread; the more I dread, the more I delay; the more I delay, the more I frustrated I grow; the more frustrated I grow, the more I drink. That said, I'm trying to break the cycle tonight by drinking before the frustration sets in. Perhaps later tonight I'll report on my relative success.

Here's a wishlist of things to comment on in the coming days, or perhaps coming week. Hold me accountable, or it may never happen:

• How the distance I feel from American popular culture is equal to the proximity of American news, and how this relates to the myth of globalization.
  

• The interplay between sex and technology in the construction of self.
  

• My absurd tale of my afternoon of deceit, abnormal breasts, and James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake at a postgraduate seminar dedicated to the question, "Do animals have souls?"
  

• Comments upon my first reading of Shawn J. Rosenheim's book, The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from Edgar Poe to the Internet.
  

Interspersed here and there, of course, will be the obligatory links that I find interesting and/or funny. Regarding the latter, I'm sticking by a private promise to keep my reflections, pro- or anti- (however I feel that day), about the war to a stark minimum; to not inundate Silentio with reminders that millions of people might very well die in another war in Southeast Asia; and to post absolutely no more naked pictures of myself. Agreed? Good.