"101 in '10" | monday | january 4, 2011 | 11:11 am

CANNOT BELIEVE THAT A WHOLE YEAR HAS PASSED. A long, winding, but somehow extremely fleeting year. A year that left my poor blog in the dust. A whole year without a single entry save for last January. I guess that is just how busy and bothersome and all encompassing the past year has been. (I was also working with the idea of shifting over to a WordPress format, which never really got off the ground.) My energies were just elsewhere. Good for things elsewhere but bad for this here blog.

So, with a renewed sense of renewal, I hope to at least keep this fire back burning. And to start things off, I hope I can reconstruct a sketch of what happened, what I did, and what was going on last year. Clearly, 2010 was a doozy.

101 Things I Did in 2010

1. Greg and I celebrated our second year anniversary. Being together continues to be fun, wonderful, surprising, and a good thing.
2. I taught ENGL 131: Composition: "Critical Approaches to Harry Potter."
3. I taught with my friend Timothy Welsh CHID 496: Focus Group: "Why So Serious?: Video Games as Persuasion, Politics, and Propaganda."
4. I attended a lecture (with Greg) at the Gage Academy of Art, part of the "Anatomy for the Artist" series. This session was on "Anatomy and the Greeks."
5. As a HASTAC Scholar @ UW for 2009-10, I attended Jentery Sayer's presentation on "Evaluating Digital Scholarship."
6. I started thinking about revising Tellings, my tabletop role-playing game. I wanted to try to get a new revision done because 2010 would mark the game's 20th year anniversary. My gaming group was still meeting regularly, too.
7. I worked on my dissertation. More like I thought about working on my dissertation. PhDepression was still reigning over my life.
8. I clearly got tired of hand coding my website. I wanted to start a WordPress but never got the details off the ground.
9. I saw the The Young Victoria with Jane and some of her class.
10. As a past recipient, I was invited to and served on the committee for the UW's Distinguished Teaching Awards and Excellence in Teaching Awards.
11. I did not eat as well as I should have been.
12. I started a little game with myself: every time I got a fortune cookie, instead of adding "in bed" (as the idiom goes) to the end of the message, I would add "in my dissertation." For example, "Counting time is not so important as making time count...in my dissertation." Sigh.
13. I continued to help organize and participate in the Queer + Public + Performance graduate intereste group.
14. I had a meeting with the Simpson Center for the Humanities to talk about applying for a graduate interest group on video games.
15. I saw Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief.
16. I met with Brian Reed, the new Director of Graduate Studies, just to get some advice about dissertating.
17. Jason, Karl, Jane, Chris, Greg and I went to see Rent at the Tacoma Musical Playhouse. It was a pretty good production (though we did not like Mimi at all) and fun.
18. My podcast (featuring Tim Welsh and Rebecca Slingwine) "Playing (with) Power: Video Games and the Fantasies of Control" debuted on the On the Boards theatre website (in conjunction with a dance performance by Rimini Protokoll).
19. I was invited to design the cover for the new Expository Writing Program's reader called Acts of Inquiry.
20. I participated in the ENGL 111 in the High School grade norming session.
21. I attended another HASTAC Scholars @ UW presentation by Meghan Trainor on "Digital Fabrication and the Database." It was about 3D printing and really cool.
22. I attended a session to talk to a former job candidate (applying for a position in the English department) to talk about dissertations, professionalism, and publishing. Though mostly useful and interesting, I found the whole experience a little condescending (unfortunately).
23. A better fortune: "You out distance all competitors...in your dissertation."
24. Knowing that I was heading into my "seventh" year status as a grad student, I made sure to talk to key people in the department about funding and what not. I met with the director of EWP Anis Bawarshi to talk about teaching for the 2010-11 school year.
25. Another fortune: "Your fastidious nature has much more fun this year...in your dissertation."
26. I taught ENGL 207: Introduction to Cultural Studies: "Virtual Worlds and Video Games." It was the second time teaching this particular instantiation of the class, and it went much better than the first time.
27. I taught CHID 496: Focus Group: "Heroes & Monsters: Understanding Live-Action Role-Playing Games." Second year in a row. It was a lot of fun.
28. In March, Tim and I attended the Cultural Studies Association's 8th Annual Meeting and presented with my sister Alenda a roundtable called "Keywords for Video Game Studies." It was a great success.
29. Took a short vacation to San Francisco (for the CSA conference) with Greg.
30. While in SF, Greg and I visited the de Young art museum (which was brand new to me).
31. I took Greg to Serious Pie for his birthday.
32. I attended a discussion/conversation with Manuel Castells sponsored by the Simpson Center and the Communication department.
33. I attended a HASTAC conversation with Tara Rodgers, author of Pink Noises.
34. Another fortune: "After a big storm comes tranquility...in your dissertation."
35. In April, Tim and I presented a poster at the 2010 UW Teaching and Learning Symposium on "Teaching (with) Video Games."
36. I updated the English Graduate Student Organization's (GSO) website, turning it into a WordPress blog.
37. Another fortune: "You will have great fortune and luck...in your dissertation."
38. I went to a 19th Century Studies Group presentation by Suzy Anger (great name for a scholar and professor) called "Consciousness and Volition in George Eliot, Samuel Butler, and Thomas Huxley; or, Are We Not Automata."
39. I participated in the student protests of the budget cuts at the University of Washington in the Spring Quarter.
40. I rewned my WA State driver license.
41. I turned 41.
42. For my birthday, Greg took me to "fancy dinner" at Joule in Wallingford in Seattle.
43. I held a scaled down EDstravaganza to celebrate my birthday.
44. I caught an awful, awful, awful stomach bug from Jane that knocked me flat for two days. (Then Greg got it from me a week or so later.)
45. I attended a screening of an independent film called Criminal Queers as part of the Spring Quarter programming for Queer + Public + Performance and the Race/Knowledge Project's conference at UW.
46. My LARP class was featured in the UW's student newspaper: "Heroes & Monsters."
47. I organized an application for funding from the Simpson Center for the Humanities for a graduate interest group (GIG) on video game studies.
48. I prepped for the Summer LEAP program.
49. I attended the UW's Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps Commissioning Ceremony to witness a former student, Adam L., graduate and recieve his commission.
50. I wrote my first "academic" blog post for the Critical Gaming Project @ UW's blog: "'There is No Controller,' Or, Meditations on Immersion/Interactivity."
51. My proposal for the Keywords for Video Game Studies GIG was accepted and approved. The group got nearly a thousand dollars to hold six events in 2010-11.
52. Greg and I went to Portland, OR for the July 4 weekend to visit his sister and to have a little get away.
53. While in Portland, we both got new tattoos from Tiger Lily Tattoo.
54. While in Portland, I visited Powell's for the first time.
55. While in Portland, we ate at a few nice places, including the fun food carts in downtown. We also checked out the gay scene.
56. On the drive back from Portland, we took the long way up the Oregon and Washington coast. We stopped in Astoria, OR and saw the Goonies house.
57. On the Washington coast, we stopped at Cape Disappointment State Park to see the Maya Lin installation of the Confluence Project.
58. I watched The Last Airbender movie. It was okay; I was a little disappointed. The cartoon is so good.
59. I helped Jane move out (to live with her partner). I decided to stay in my apartment by myself for another year. I spent a month just trying to get everything set up and sorted out. But now I have an office. It is an investment in my dissertation even though I really cannot afford it.
60. I met with Kathy Woodward, the director of the Simpson Center, to discuss nominating all of the Keywords for Video Game Studies graduate students as HASTAC Scholars for 2010-11. She felt it was a good idea and a good opportunity. Therefore, for a second year in a row, I was a HASTAC Scholar (and the lead scholar).
61. I saw Despicable Me.
62. I saw the documentary Stonewall Uprising.
63. I taught ENGL 108: Writing Ready for the Summer LEAP program. It was my third year teaching and my fourth year with the program. Still great as ever, still tiring as ever.
64. During LEAP, we took our students on "urban plunges" into the city. For our Capitol Hill trip, we had lunch in Volunteer Park catered by the new Creole soul food truck Where Ya At.
65. The Summer LEAP program was featured in an article in University Week.
66. Another fortune: "You may be conservative, cautions, and practical...in your dissertation."
67. I saw Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.
68. A fortune that makes no sense: "Photographic memory! Remember to put in film, or its digital!?"
69. Jane, Greg, and I went to see the stage production of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog at the Balagan Theatre.
70. I ate some very yummy sushi at Cutting Board in south Seattle.
71. I found some groove in my dissertation writing and worked really hard in August to produce a draft of a second chapter. Yay, me! Two chapters drafted. Two to go. I hoped to write a third chapter in September but did not make it.
72. I was asked to teach a double load in autumn quarter (which would give me winter quarter "off"). I took it since I had not yet been awarded money for winter. So, I taught two sections of composition: ENGL 111 and ENGL 131, both on "Critical Approaches to Popular Fiction." Yes, I taught classes on Harry Potter and Twilight.
73. I co-taught with Tim Welsh CHID 496: Focus Group: "Keywords for Video Game Studies" to coincide with the Keywords GIG.
74. Greg and I attended Mobile Chowdown V, Seattle's "food cart" festival.
75. Greg and I went to see the play Breaking the Code at the Erickson Theatre. It was really good (about Alan Turing).
76. I helped organize and moderate the inaugural Keywords for Video Game Studies GIG session on "PLAY."
77. In October, Greg and I took a whirlwind trip back east to Maryland for my father's birthday. 78. While in Maryland, I got to show Greg around the University of Maryland, my home town of Silver Spring, and a little bit of Washington, DC. I got to visit my mother's grave, hang out with my sister and my father (a little bit), and do a little bit of sight seeing. I took Greg to a new nightclub called Town.
79. I ate at Ben's Chili Bowl in DC.
80. I attended a talk at the Henry Art Gallery on "Speculative Computing" by Johanna Drucker.
81. I went to see Tim Welsh's talk on "How NOT to Teach Video Games" at THATCamp PNW.
82. I helped Jennifer Self of the Q Center at UW give a training on LGBTQ issues to the School of Social Work faculty.
83. I helped organize and moderate the second Keywords GIG session on "IMMERSION/INTERACTIVITY."
84. I completed Book Thirty-One of my personal journal and started Book Thirty-Two.
85. I adopted a stray cat and named her Groosalugg or Groo for short.
86. I went to see Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I. I loved it.
87. Another fortune: "The kind of advice we do not like to take often turns out to be the best...in my dissertation."
88. I had Thanksgiving Dinner with Greg and some of his extended family (some of whom I was meeting for the very first time). It was a lovely night. I made macaroni and cheese.
89. I was never busier than I was during the Autumn Quarter of 2010. I had a lot of stuff on my plate.
90. I was interviewed for a story about LARPing for the Georgetown The Guide: "Knights in Shining Armor: Role Players Step Outside Reality.
91. Another terrible, horrible, depressing fortune: "One who does nothing but wait for his ship to come has already missed the boat...in my dissertation."
92. Jane and I planned to teach a ChID focus group on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
93. I played entirely too many social network games, particularly the Zynga family. I suppose it will become fodder for some sort of scholarly work.
95. I wrote another post for the CGP blog: "Frontierville, a Casual Queer Reading."
96. I was interviewed for (though did not make it into the article) a piece about the Critical Gaming Project: "The Poetics of Play."
97. As with every year, I watched entirely too much television. I was on Facebook entirely too much.
98. I wrote a follow-up piece about the Xbox Kinect and immersion/interactivity for the CGP blog: "Much Ado About No Controller, Or, Further Meditations on Immersion/Interactivity."
99. I did a lot of shopping as procrastination.
100. I went down with Greg to Portland for an early holidays with his sister's family, his father, and his half-sister. I made dinner for the whole gang. Then, for the holiday's proper, I made Christmas Eve dinner for Greg, Chris, and Tim. Then I went over to my friend Jason's house for Christmas Day dinner.
101. The worst fortune of them all: "There is absolutely no substitute for a genuine lack of preparation...in my dissertation." Fuck. Suffice it to say, by the end of the year, I still did not finish my third chapter. But there is always the new year.

Overall, it was a full, full, heavy, crazy, happy, and stressy year. I got a lot done. I didn't get a lot done. But I am hopeful for the new year. I think 2011 will be a very big year. Lots of change. Lots of growth. Lots of new opportunities. I hope.

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