In which my online identity becomes hopelessly fractured...

I've never kept a diary.

Oh, there was the odd attempt back when I was a kid (so many moons ago :P...) which lasted about a month - one week of dutiful daily entries followed by three of slowly losing interest. If I wasn't such a hoarder, they'd have gone to the tip shortly after the last perfunctory entry, but there you go. Those little hardbacked notebooks with flowers on the front or strangely useless locks are still in a box somewhere in my house, waiting to surprise me with embarrassing recollections ('Did I really sound like that? So *whiny*?').

I could blame their continued presence on the Scottish ancestry, but it's probably that stationery fetish most writers seem to develop - beautiful pens, gorgeous notebooks filled with blank, lined pages. Paperclips.

Well, maybe not paperclips.

So here I am, hoping this online thingy will last longer. I don't think of it as a diary per se, which might help. Vive le blogging revolution and all that. It does mean yet another handle, another password to remember, and I can't help but wonder how it's all meant to fit together. I mean, I'm well aware of social masks and performativity, of identities we take up when we interact with the world, but I guess it bugs me that I've become so splintered. So spread out.

My future biographers are so screwed :).

In which I ponder plurality, and fish

Ah, the thrill of newbie excitement as I rush around tweaking things! This is mainly to check how the comments phrase looks when empty (why does 'fish' have to be so durned difficult?). No fishy. One fishy, two fishies. It's a pity I can't modify the comments phrase to spout Dr Seuss (oh, what a lot of fish there are!...).

All this, of course, when I should be doing my readings for tomorrow's seminar. Bad Jess...