Tagged!

On Friday night, Aliki, from World of One Thousand Different Things tagged me for a couple of memes. I don't know if I'll be able to do the second one fully, but the first one sounds fun! Here it goes:

Meme #1

The instructions are:
-Grab the book closest to you
-Open to page 123
-Scroll down to the 5th sentence
-Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog
-Name of the book and the author
-Tag 3 people

Now I have to confess that I had two books close to me on top of my computer desk, I'll be participating of a blog book tour for one of them next week, though, so I decided to pass that one up (moreover, the subject of page 123 was very unappealing -- not to say that what I ended up with is more appealing :) . The other one is a book I recently purchased, which comes highly recommended by Mary McKinney, the Academic Coach. Here it goes:

While they might have put writing aside until things were taken care of or until an illness had passed, most of these writers resumed writing at the first practical opportunity. This pattern held in surprising cases, even where the death of someone close to a writter might have disrupted and even blocked writing; instead, these writers reported a stronger desire for activities like writing that distracted them from their losses.

All but one of the few cases of traumas associated with wrting problems might better be categorized with disillusionment or with lack of planfullness.

From Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing by Robert Boice. This book was on my wishlist since I saw the recommendation on the Academic Coach. I ordered it together with another book I needed to get at Amazon so I could get free shipping because I thought it might be helpful since I need to finish writing the dissertation. I find it very telling that I'd get this particular quotation. It's from a chapter titled "Dealing with Relapses" and one could say I have plenty of those in my dissertation writing. Of course my relapses are not caused by Traumas, which is the subject of the quote above, but it's surprising to see that people who actually suffered traumas continued writing and I quit for much more questionable reasons or no reason at all.

Meme #2

Name your top ten favorite TV characters.

OK, I have never watched much TV and I don't care for it much. Since my sons were born, I have watched even less. I just don't have time to "waste" on it and we don't even have cable. So... I'll try, but I probably won't come up with 10...

1. Samantha from Bewitched.

2. Ally from Ally McBeal.

3. John Cage from Ally McBeal. I thought he was hilarious.

4. Larry Paul (Robert Downey Jr.) from Ally McBeal -- yeah, I thought he was cute...

5. Joe from Friends. He was the one that annoyed me the least.

6. Carrie from Sex & the City. (all I watched was the full last season during the short month when we had cable and free on demand -- I really loved that show, someday I'll watch the whole thing)

7. Kramer from Seinfeld -- funny guy.

I really can't think of any more TV characters. I'll edit this if I remember any other.

I don't think I'm going to tag anyone, but feel free to take up any of them or both memes if you want to!

P.S. I'll try to do the book meme you tagged me for, cloudscome, OK?