Lately I’ve gone low-tech. I’ve been bullet journaling, commonplace booking (common placing), and playing with Wreck This Journal by Keri Smith. So much fun. Here is a teacher’s packet for Wreck This Journal. I hated journaling until I found this book. It’s a delight.

… so slip inside this funky house. It is a fact of age that home has replaced voice as the central metaphor for my life. Lately my blog has added home as a new theme to my various motifs. “The home” has always been in my thinking and writing, but it’s surfacing differently these days. This is a year of symmetry and reckoning for me. I reckon fifty years of life, twenty five of them sober, one of them divorced. I lived in my house just a year, now, with it as mine alone. Poverty forced me into transience, from place to place for thirtyRead More →

It’s been some time since I’ve blogged. There’s so much to say I don’t know where to begin. I’ll just chalk it up to a year lost and found. I’m waiting for Typekit to populate/propagate my font. I’m using Cooper. The font makes the webdesign. I have to finish rebooting things here. I tried to de-clutter the design and my life and get things squared away into a single-file,  simple column. Maybe it worked. The Sells-Jaros household is now just the Sells household. Quite surreal. The Sells household is also without the beloved cat. That was a devastation too great to be accounted for –Read More →

My first version of VoXYgen was posted in 1996. It was fun building the most rudimentary webpage and exploring what could be done on the internet. Since then, things have changed, and I’m suffering from “information fatigue” sans the extreme levels of anxiety or sleeplessness that it presumably provokes. I have noticed, however, that I can’t keep up with Facebook. I bookmark sites that friends post and then waste time deleting them without reading them because the list is obscenely long. I skip surfing my usual reading spots. RSS readers have made blog surfing incredibly easy. The downside, however, is that with a simple clickRead More →

Thank God for Akismet keeping my blog clean.  Some of the posts trapped in the Akismet toilet bowl are hysterical. Here are some trends: 1. People who are obviously not native English speakers posting in “Engrish.” The errors are amusing. Yet, some SEO company is probably outsourcing spam comments along the lines of third world WoW gold farmers. This is not about ethnocentric “English-only”-ism. This is about the ridiculousness of the spam comments. 2. The usual “your post is interesting, you’re brilliant, I will come back and read you every day.” These comments are completely random and usually don’t fit the content of the post.Read More →

To revamp this site, I read a lot about blogging, and learned there are now rules about how to do it. Apparently, I violate many blogging conventions. These rules are funny considering I didn’t even know what a blog was when I started. It just seemed like something enjoyable to do. Of course, as a rhetorician, I know the most important rule is audience-centeredness, but I just defined my audience as myself, the occasional friend or student, and perhaps whoever else stumbled onto my site. The internet was generally empty at the time, and I decided early on that my blog would avoid a heavyRead More →

Writing is difficult for me.  I have never been good at journaling. I’ve always wanted to be good at it, but it’s never worked out for me. I love to buy journals to write in. I have many beautiful, elegant, empty journal books. I also have a stack of journal books with maybe only five or six entries in them. The most successful journaling I did was trying to work through my writing block. I read a book, The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, about dealing with creative blocks. Like most self-help books, this comes with a whole array of accompanying workbooks, inspirational CDs, blahRead More →

Facebook has changed the way I blog. Even election-watching, cabinet appointments, and Obama’s first 100 days brought me to Facebook and not my blog, and instead of participating in the HuffPo–New York Times linkfest, I only liked.  When I occasionally found an interesting, off-the-beaten-path link, I shared. For now, I will post my summer goals. That should be a sufficient sacrifice to satisfy the blogging gods. Summer Goals: 1. Clean out and de-clutter my office, damn it. Especially my desk. 2. Clean out my closets and get rid of old clothes. 3. Read Wendy Brown’s Regulating Aversion, which is about the dark side of tolerance,Read More →