Work work work work work work

Just downloaded the Blogger app. I guess this way I'll probably post more frequently.

I've been reading a great book about machine gambling addiction. Yesterday I read one chapter about how gamblers direct all their life and activities towards playing (and being "in the zone" (of disolving as a subject and away from every problem and mundane issue)). So when they are not gambling, they are planning their routine in order to have more time to play.
I kinda feel the same way about my work. Every single thing that I do is thinking about how it will help me produce more, and better, my final dissertation. So my eating habits, my exercise routines, my yoga habits (or at least I'm trying), my rest, my vacation, my weekends, everything is designed first thinking about how will it affect or not my thesis process. I feel really stressed out by it. Sunday night I couldn't sleep and had a terrible nightmare. This is my last week before my holidays and I am freaking out thinking I haven't produced enough (and won't by Friday) to have a deserved month off. I'm already anxious about the time left I will have in August to finnish the article I'm writing (it's due by the middle of the month, sort of), and thinking that at some point during my trip in July I will have to write a bit not to get too busy later. So everything is about work and the fucking phd. I should change this mindset.

'Cause we are liiiiviing in a new materialistic-approach-epistemic world

and I am a(n)...

...new materialistic scholar?

...Applied Linguistics researcher struggling with "material" and "language"?

...indisciplined academic person who have no idea what kind of 'framework career' to follow?

My mom sent me a viral video/text today with some waves, apparently in Siberia, that were freezing as they hit the shore. It was kind of a joke to the cold weather Brazilians are facing lately.

Funny thing is that as I was seeing the video, my nose started feeling stuffy, and this kept me thinking a bit about affect theories and all those crazy sensations images can make on us.

This was in the afternoon. It's 11 pm and my nose still feels a bit cloggy.

Ok, I did it. A blog. A fieldwork journal. Online. Private. But public otherwise.

This is part of a project I am starting now to display my scientific trajectories publicly. As I am studying online intimacies and the disruption of private/public spheres on the web, I want to make my very epistemological moments intimate, paying attention to what does intimacy mean to my work and how do I relate to it.

The idea started with "A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term", Malinowski's diary entries of his fieldwork that were later published in book format. I have not read it yet (I promise I will), but it seems that the renowned ethnographer had it as a personal task and would never have wanted it to leak.

Malinowski's straightforward passages about his ethnographic inquiry appear as the backstage of science making that no scientist would like to disclose. And this is one of the things I want to do here: to uncover this idea of science as something clean, precise, beautifully delimited and organized, symmetric, aesthetically coordinated, and, mainly, surgically removed and suspended from the daily world of those who make it.

I wanted the page to be libidosciendi.bloghost.com. Libido sciendi is a concept that Latour develops in some of his work that relates to scientists' own desires per knowledge and being certain about things. It sounded like a cool name to put in a blog about desire in online and research settings. But then, of course, all of 'libidosciendi' nice name attempts were already registered in all well-known blog hosts - blogger, wordpress, and tumblr. After much thinking, I thought about adding the 'fi' to the acronym - 'libsci-fi' - to make a link between science and its fictional facet. And voilà.     

The posts here will not follow any general rule: I will post things as I feel the need to. They can be about science issues in general, notes from my ethnographic fieldwork, daily entries about my research routine, random curiosities about my life experiences, and so on. I will try to leave it that way so I can force myself to post more. As I know me, my perfectionist self would never allow me to publish stuff without some careful text structuring. But this is also what I am trying to change - at least about my own mode of being.

Here, I want (and will try) to expose all my trajectory as a scientist and all the dirtiness and uncertainty that comes with this making. I also want to know how does it feel to have things exposed that way. Breaking boundaries is dangerous anyways, for it can lead to unexpected outcomes. I'll take the risk.