DrJoolz Snapshotz on Life

So Christmas is over and tomorrow is New Year’s Eve. 

TT and I went to the outlaws and then came back only slightly scathed and then soaked ourselves in alcohol in the privacy of our own home.

Today I discovered that you can get Banksy stencils on ebay; and even Banksy repros especially shipped in from Hong Kong. (I wish I was joking.)

And in the meantime, having bought the kiddly wigglies a keyboard for Christmas, TT and I are fighting each other to have a turn … learning to play Jingle Bells and We Wish You a Merry Christmas is like performing brain surgery at the moment.  (TT is particularly bad). And somehow Miles has managed to work out how to play ‘Imagine’ using both hands and chords. (I can see we will need to ban him for a while.)

It’s nearly Christmas!!

We are so glad that we made the last minute decision not to go to NYC over Christmas (as previously planned) since apparently we would have spent days in the airport this week, rather than going where we wanted to.

Went to Liverpool yesterday to shop with  Sam the Man and got a few last minute bits and bobs including the book of the website ‘PostSecret’. Howemad is that? To buy a book of a website. Anyway I did.

But I have to go now … as TT is standing by the door with his coat on ready to drive to the outlaws …. oh well.

Happy Christmas and see you in a few days.

The fridge may seem as if it is just an appliance to keep your stuff cold; but actually in many homes the fridge is the place where domestic acts are played out, displayed and negotiated. The fridge door is a text where multimodal communicative acts take place and is an expression of life in a partcular household.

I am not just talking about the way we leave food stains on the handle, or where milk seeps out and round the rubber seal.  I am talkng about magnetic poetry; I am talking about postcards blu-tacked on the sides; I am talking about post-it notes as reminders; and I am talking about the way members of households use fridge doors as boards for creative expression.

The fridge door in my house changes over time; we all seem to contribute to the  changes. And the things around and on the fridge seem part of the display….

We improvise around the fridge. The latest addition is the ‘grape text’. I discovered it this morning when I came downstairs to make breakfast; it was the trace of my nocturnal daughter who was clearly in a good mood last night, feeling frivolous, when the rest of us were in bed, wanting to make us laugh while we were up and about in the day and in her absence (when she slept till 2p.m.)

The grape text is surrounded by other people’s jokes, and holiday mementoes. I know we are not alone as there is a flickr group here showing that other people do this stuff too.

So.

We continually story our lives for ourselves and for others; that is to say, I believe that individuals perpetually structure (and reconstruct and even deconstruct) their lives. They tell stories about themselves to themselves, and offer versions to others; trying out their narratives in social arenas sometimes.

We do this with our images too; taking photos of ourselves in familiar places, in new places and with different people. We look at things with our eyes, through camera lenses and on screens. We use images to tell stories, to reinforce stories, to collect data; we arrange and re-arrange the images and look at the world in different ways.

I think that in creating the narratives about ourselves, we draw on larger ‘grand narratives’ about life; the story of a marriage; of a person growing up; of a person having a career, for example.  I think we structure our stories in relation to others we know and understand the meanings and significances of lives in relation to others we see. Our local stories are saturated with the cultural values of our social worlds.  So, I value things in my life which my culture values. (it is hard not to.) 

Schriffin says that:

‘we construct our own individual experiences as a way to positon ourselves in relation to social and cultural expectations’ 

 (Schriffin, 1996:2)

And Benwell and Stokoe (2006: 139) say that this is a ‘kind of interdependency betweeen personal stories and culturally circulating plotlines’ .

I am interested in this and the way this happens; that we draw on narratives around us and see our lives in relation to them and perceive our own stories as being similar to, or different from, these.

I am fascinated for example, by the story of transformations that are so commonly told on tv;the ongoing project of the self. Self improvement, self enhancement - looking 10 years younger; better dressed; fitter; slimmer; richer, etc etc. The ‘truth’ of these stories is so embedded in our culture; i.e. that it can only be a GOOD THING to live a life where one is forever on a JOURNEY, to one or another of those things.

Here are some figs:

It has just been so HARD this term. I think I haver never worked so hard in all my life. Is anyone else feeling this?

At the risk of getting CONTROVERSIAL… how is it that the harder you work, the more there seems to be to do, and the more your boss tells you that the department is losing money? This is a great mystery of life. I think I need some sort of New Year’s Resolution that is based around improving the quality of my work/life balance as in fact it is not the case that workload decreases with the more you do, but the opposite. There will never be a point where we cannot see more to do. (Yes. It has taken me this long to realise that.)

And how oh how did I end up with more administrative work again this term??

So, yes I have still been thinking about narratives and identity and I love this by Riessman (2003):

‘We ‘become’ the stories through which we tell our live ..Telling stories configures the ’self that I might be.’

I

Where does that leave the blogger?? Well it means that I have to get back into blogging so that I can make myself become what I write and become more the academic I want to become and LESS like the administrator I have fallen into being.

I am drowning in nonsense.

for a few days with TT. It was a wonderful break and the SUN SHONE. Twas really warm. It is a really good idea to save up some holiday every year to go away late October or November (not in half term) and go somewhere warm. It is a real tonic.

Barcelona? Well there are some very interesting photos to be had .. the tourist run is good, with all the Gaudi architecture everywhere; some excellent art galleries (not as good as Berlin) and some graffitti - but it has been mainly messed up by scrawlers.

By far the best thing was people watching and the weather.

As for my thinking … I have been thinking about NARRATIVES and IDENTITIES. On Flickr we tell stories within our photos, through our photostreams and we show how we want to structure the narratives by the sets we make and the tags we choose. We also weave narratives across the groups we belong to - this is what I think can be called ‘distributed narrative’ (Walker.)