Returning to Old Habits

I won't say I'm back, because that sounds a little like overpromising when I haven't updated this blog in half a year, but if anyone is listening or stumbling across, I apologize for my silence. It has accompanied a difficult period in which I finished my dissertation and found myself both overworked and underemployed. Adjunct teaching and applying for jobs doesn't lend itself to stimulating blog discourse, unfortunately, and I admit that I've probably been pretty depressed. I also hadn't been attending much theater, which was the point of this thing after all. So I've poked around under the hood to give the place a new look, and an updated list of links to things which actually exist (yay!) and hopefully I will have a more exciting life worthy of report and analysis.

I am also returning to old habits, many of which have been sorely neglected in the past year or so. I'm having friends over regularly for communal TV-viewing (Battlestar Galactica, Gossip Girl, Top Chef, and Big Love are the current favorites) and getting together with friends for Bad Sci-Fi film viewings, which are fabulous. After much soul searching, I renewed my subscription to the Mark Taper Forum even though I feel like their programing is still too white, middle-class, and heterosexual. Having the season ticket gets me to go out and see theater that I wouldn't necessarily choose for myself, and that's probably a good thing, even if I'm terribly nostalgic for the days when Gordon Davidson programed theater worth caring about; I still really hate Michael Ritchie's taste. I've also started opening up my RSS reader again, so I'm getting caught up on friends' blogs, local events, and the voices that have been absent from my life for the past year or so. I'm doing some research on local history here in Los Angeles and working on revising a dissertation chapter into an article, and hopefully those projects will help inspire new ideas to share with the world. So, maybe I'm back to blogging as well. It's a good time for new starts.