Stuff I took notice of and wrote a post about. Sums up function of blogs in title.

Have been a prolific blogger of late.  I chose to see someone’s comment that I should blog more, as my cue to class ‘blog time’ as ‘productive time’, and not procrastination.  Oh not at all 

Of late, have been a stater of the obvious  (shall I elaborate, I’m good at that…).

Was surprised to notice American Psycho is still sold in plastic packaging.  (Oh, come on! At the very least you would think that the Christian Bale film would have made this redundant-  There’s a whole post lurking in here somewhere, but I can’t be bothered fleshing it out.  You can all imagine what I have to say about this anyway- just pretend I bothered to write it.  In fact, keep pretending; I’ll stop writing, you can stop visiting, and we can all end this vicious time wasting cycle)

Click here (from this blog). You know you want to.  I’ll wait.  I’m not even sure how I got to that blog.  I think I have this bizzare talent to always get back to a Melbourne based site, no matter what I’m doing.  Researching for an essay?, end up looking at Melbourne blog on cats.  Looking up possible presents I can send to niece overseas (suggestions welcome- think light people, airmail is expensive), end up looking at Melbourne blog on staplers.  Or some such thing.  The unifying elements seem to always be: ‘melbourne blog’ and ’student’.   

My name.  Everytime I come to this thing, I am inundated by my name.  jenshin.jenshin.jenshin.jenshin (say it enough and you get gengin and then… ker-ching!),   Login? Jenshin.  Comments: jenshin.  Header: jenshin. Logout? jenshin.  Argh!  My name has never been this irritating.  When I started this thing, the title was really only for ease of marking.  It didn’t occur to me I didn’t have to use my name.  I feel cheated… and silly. 

In a seperate incident, I received an email which started with: “Hello Jennifer”.  Not a groundbreaking introduction, I know.  But- it felt really unusual.  Confronting my name like that was super odd in the sense that I suddenly experienced the arbitrariness of my ‘proper’ name.  It didn’t really mean anything to the person who was using it, and it didn’t mean anything to me, because said emailer’s ‘investment’ in my name was merely proprietry.  Generally emails adressed to me from friends and family use no name at all, or if using ‘Jen’, ‘Jenny’, ‘Jennifer’- becomes implictly infused with their unique inflections of my name, thus giving ’Jen’ an emotional connection and signficance. 

Truly arbitrary nature of names (even though they give the impression of personalisation/catergorization/meaning) hit home last night when I received an email adressed to ‘Samantha’ (contact for work- understandable, I’d forgotten his name as well…).  So, while there have been many theorists who have pointed out the fact of the signifier/signified arbitrary relations, I’d like to point out evidence that shows this message has not infiltrated popular consciousness: 

1) names and ‘meaning of names’ books;

2) soon to be parents agonising over possible names and discarding options because they ‘knew a Tiffany once and she was bitch’;

3) names of children of celebrities- ’nuff said.

Finally: I haven’t sung the banana song in ages.  You know the one- the ’make those bodies sing’ jingle from ad promoting… that’s right, bananas.  I miss you banana song.