I just found out Duke lost in the first round of the NCAA tournament. No big deal, I guess, but I’m sad. I’ve always been kind of a Duke fan, even though I barely ever watch basketball. I went ahead and entered a tournament pool on Yahoo hosted by Derek Mueller. I haven’t done so well in the first round so far, but I wasn’t expecting to do well; I haven’t watched a game all year, and besides a pool I entered when I taught middle school, I think this is my first pool since I was in high school.
I have a record, though, of making poor choices. When I ran a pool my freshman or sophomore year of high school, I picked Villanova, a 3-seed led by Kerry Kittles, to win it all. Lo and behold, they lost in the first round.
This year, my final four is Pittsburgh, Wisconsin, Texas, and Ohio State, with Ohio State beating Pittsburgh in the final. I’ve heard a lot of hoopla around Ohio State this year, so perhaps it was a good pick. Perhaps it’s all hype. I have no clue.
But on to other things. I’m learning the struggles of co-writing a talk as Sara and I work on our CCCC talk for next week. We’ve got quite a bit done so far, but I feel like we still have quite a bit to do. I think Sara and I both have different writing styles. Sara tends to write a lot and then cut what she finds isn’t necessary; while I do this sometimes, I often write what I want to say and then go back and add more detail and analysis in later. Also, our schedules haven’t really helped out a lot. With Sara teaching a lot and coordinating the composition program, she’s really busy, and with my three courses, my GTA-ship in the Writing Intensive Curriculum, my thesis work (though that hasn’t got as much focus this quarter as I’d like), and my queer activism on campus, we haven’t found as much time to work together as either of us would like.
I should probably be working on the paper right now, cutting some stuff and adding in some ideas, and doing a bit of reorganizing, but I have been doing that for the last two or three hours, and I wanted a break. Besides, I haven’t been posting here much. I’m amazing by Google Docs, which has allowed for some great asynchronous work to be done, but the formatting of the Docs page is really bugging me at times.
But collaboration has been rewarding, even if (or perhaps because) it is challenging. It’s taken energy to listen to each other’s interests, work habits, and needs as writers and researchers. I’ve been thinking about how much communication is done on Google Docs when people are collaborating (in fact, even when we’re in the same room, I found myself writing notes to Sara on Docs instead of saying it aloud), and I wonder about the potential with Google Docs to study the way collaboration is done through looking at the various versions of a text over time and how comments are added and removed, dialogue is done in the text document itself, and how text is added and removed over time (and by whom).
March Madness is on, and I just don’t mean in the basketball sense. It’s dead week here, and then finals week. Today (Thursday) I turned in my final paper for my Advanced Composition course. New Historicism paper due Monday. Feminism paper due Thursday (while I’m at CCCC, so hopefully I can get it finished before I leave on Tuesday so I don’t have to work on it in New York). CCCC talk next week. Lots of writing to do over the next few days. Thank god it’s warmer and sunnier out, and although I bemoaned the early time change this year, I’m glad that the days last longer and I’m not as depressed from the dreary winter here so early in the day. (I don’t think anyone at Oregon State has a good winter term — it’s like seasonal affective disorder affects everyone in the valley here.)
