is this thing on?

i am admittedly a bit late to this game. i've considered having a blog before and even went so far as to set one up a few years ago. it was called paper and polaroids. i never posted a single time, and then polaroid stopped making film. it seemed a bit disingenuous to have a blog whose title suggested there were going to be polaroids, when, in fact, there were increasingly few polaroids.

so i'm giving this a whirl now, mostly because i'm inspired by my pals' blogs, a pocket novel and the museum cupboard. these are two of my dearies in real life, and really, who wouldn't want to be like them? i am a total copycat. it's a good thing they sort of like me.

one of the biggest reasons i haven't ever blogged is because i am intimidated by the idea of coming up with a good blog name. that's right, i exiled myself from the blogosphere over a title. over the past couple of weeks i have been considering coming out of exile, and then this morning as i looked around my room and pondered witty phrases that might somehow describe me in a limited number of characters, i knew exactly what i wanted to be called on the internets. nevermind that some french blog already had my url, i was not deterred. so here i am, no day without a line. don't be frightened, it seems highly unlikely that i will actually post a line here everyday, but "no day without a line" is one of my favorite combinations of words in the whole wide world. it comes from pliny's natural history, when he's getting down with the ancient artists and writing about how apelles never let a day pass without drawing a line. this is exactly how i want to live my life (and since i'm about to start my seventh year of graduate school, how i *need* to live my life). you can take the phrase to mean all manner of things, but in the end it reminds me to never let a day pass without remembering what i love, whether that means typing out sentences for the dissertation or writing a postcard to a friend. no day without a line.

let's see what happens, shall we?