my life in a tag cloud
Sorry to be so screenshot-y lately, but I couldn’t pass this one up. The above image is a tag cloud of my del.icio.us bookmarks generated by wordle. You should have heard the loud gasp that issued from my lips upon seeing this image. Why? Because IT IS MY LIFE represented in a tag cloud. Well, my life at the moment, at any rate. Here’s the what’s what on that:
- I’ve read that “to read” (or some variation thereof) is arguably everyone’s most frequently applied tag. As you can see from the image above, it’s definitely mine, and it always has been. This is particularly poignant at this very moment in my life because it feels like I’m not doing much more than wading in a pool of good intentions, gathering data and content that could potentially have some impact on me if only I had time to digest it all. You see, I’m one of those odd types that actually removes the “toread” tag once I’ve read something, so the fact that it is, by far, my most frequently applied tag drives home the point that I’m not reading enough. At the rate I’m going, I might never get through the “toread” backlog and that makes me disproportionately unhappy.
- Of course, one of the main reasons why I’m not getting to all that juicy, bookmarked content is because I’m teaching my LIS course again this term (“lis9763“). It’s the first time I’ve taught it during back-to-back terms and I’m starting to wonder if that was a good idea. In some ways it works well: I got into a groove balancing it all last term, and that’s continued nicely into this term. On the other hand, it’s a lot of work and requires me to drop a few other things from my plate (to wit “toread”; see also: dust bunnies running amok in my house). At any rate, the relative weighting of “lis9763″ in my tag cloud is spot-on.
- And then there’s that little project that is swallowing me whole at work: our website redesign (“redesign“). I’m in the thick of it at the moment, and when you’re in the thick of something so huge, with a deadline that looms (September!), you have to keep reminding yourself how much (a lot) and for how long (years) you’ve wanted to blow up the website and start over. I can’t tell you how exciting it is to finally be doing the work (this is my favourite project ever), but boy howdy, it is all-consuming. Even more so than its relative size indicates in my tag cloud. “toread” will necessarily remain on hold for a few more months.
So, there it is, my life distilled into three tags. I am at once horrified (I’ve GOT to get our more), vindicated (so THAT’s where all my time is going!), and amused (O, tags! you never fail me!) by it.
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