coding

I need to take a break from my work, which currently entails coding and categorizing 229 racist remarks. It's for a paper using content analysis that I hope to incorporate into my dissertation. Not exactly relaxing to read but I have to say I've gotten way past the point of letting the content disturb me. I've read so much of this shit that nothing really surprises me. Racist comments directed at me as an individual still catch me off guard and stay with me a while. It was only a few years ago that someone driving by in a pick up truck yelled "chink" out the window at me as I was going for a jog in my parents' neighbourhood. It was surprising... but then again, not entirely surprising. Anyways, comments anonymously posted online are just meaningless rants dipped in shit with a side of anchovies. Most of them are poorly written, illogical and often self-contradictory. Not exactly models of powerful rhetoric. But the task of coding each and every remark is getting ridiculously tortuously boring, like I'd-rather-be-looking-for-split-ends-in-my-hair boring. It's really hard not to take breaks to check out facebook, shop online for fun shirts and a new snowboarding jacket, cruise Craigslist for an apartment in Capitol Hill, read blogs and check up on the Canucks. Man I hate coding. I think for this reason alone I want to abandon this silly quantitative methodology forever and go back to critical discourse analysis.

Oh and in other news, I have abandoned all hope of understanding the Fahrenheit scale at cold temperatures. I learned it for temperatures 65 and above because I had 6 years of practice in California. But when we're hovering at freezing, it just makes sense to stick with Celsius so I know how many degrees above or below 0 (freezing) we are. Shove it, Fahrenheit scale!