Blog Archives
Back in the Saddle
Well, I knew I was going to be a little behind and have to play catch-up, but I certainly didn’t expect to take a whole week off! By my count I need six posts to get back up to the line, so I’ll try to manage two or three a day until I’m all caught up. Let’s start easy with a Daily Post subject:
Topic #328:
Would you rather have $50 million or live for an extra 50 years?
Naturally, I have to answer the question with a bunch of questions. What quality of life are we talking about for those 50 extra years? Are we talking 50 active, healthy years, or are you going to take me at the end of my natural life, when I’m bedridden and barely hanging on, and stretch that out for another half century?
Also, what’s with that exchange rate? A million dollars a year seems awfully cheap, I’d have priced a year of life at a hundred million at least in today’s economy. Makes me suspicious of the quality of life thing above.
Am I the only one who gets this choice? Am I looking at 50 years past when everyone else has died? I’m not very good at making new friends, that could get awfully lonely.
Have you noticed that I enjoy dissecting the question more than answering it? not sure what that says about me. Well, unless it really is 50 years in a hospital bed I’d probably take the extra life. I mean, time is the one thing we can’t buy, and we live in such interesting times. I can only wonder what I’ll see in my lifetime already, imagine if I had another half century to see what comes next…
Technological limitations
Yesterday the winds came. They blew down fences, trees, power lines, and my internet. Today I made lasagne in bulk. In fact, I think the only practical thing I did today that wasn’t lasagne was shopping for more stuff to make lasagne. I’m not even confident it’s going to be good lasagne, I tried a new technique a little old lady told me about and frankly I’m not sure there was enough cheese.
But I should still try to make up for the missed post yesterday. Just because it was physically impossible for me to post anything is no excuse to not catch up. And I think at least one of the Daily Post blogs was a decent idea for something to write about, so I can go back and write about it.
That’s going to have to wait another day or two, though, because I’m surprisingly busy all of a sudden. It’s good news for me, but bad news for my blog. Well, seems like everything’s a trade-off.
I promise you four posts in the next three days, even if that’s four on Monday. For now though I’m going to sleep, it’s been crazy today.
How long must Xmas last?
Every year people make the same tired jokes about Christmas starting early, myself included. But I’m really starting to wonder about that, I can sort of understand how stores would want to start getting their hooks in early, but surely there must be a point where it’s counterproductive. I mean, eventually they’re not getting anyone else fired up about whatever dumb toy they’re trying to convince everyone they can’t live without and further efforts are just wasting resources and annoying people, right?
The deeper cultural implications of the holiday, including the laughable “War on Xmas” bullshit, I’ll save for another day when I’m up to writing a longer post.
We’re up to slightly more than a sixth of the year for xmas, which is clearly too damn long for me. Like summer, the issue isn’t that I don’t like it, it’s simple fatigue. I get sick of the damn thing dragging on and on and just want it to end already. I remember reading a book when I was a kid, and a character was shocked that his dad was thinking about Christmas so early, when they were still eating Thanksgiving leftovers, and even then that seemed like a joke to me.
It especially seems cruel to small children to stretch Christmas hype out for months. When you’re five, a month is a very, very long time.
This post brought to you by the realization that by the time December starts I’m already tired of Christmas music.
Friends help you move…
Helping friends move this weekend. I thought I’d still find something interesting to say, but after thinking about it for over an hour, I’ve got nothing. Since I’m going back for more work tomorrow, it’s likely there won’t be anything new and interesting til Monday.
For tonight, I’ll just say that I’m surprised by how tired I am. I don’t really feel like I earned that.
Copping out again.
Well, at least I have the excuse that I’m still sick. Getting better, but so very slowly.
What really bugs me though, is that I had something I wanted to write about when I finally got out of bed around noon. Well, maybe tomorrow I’ll have enough sense to do my writing when I can, rather than hoping to do it when it’s convenient.
Learning curve
Topic #307:
What skill would you most like to learn in 2012?
I’d really like to learn to turn my vague ideas into concrete reality. If that’s not practical, if that’s too much to ask, then I’d like to learn to flap my arms and fly to the moon.
The Fucking Patriarchy, Part 5
There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, this is the end of Fucking Patriarchy Week. Whatever I still have to say on the subject after this post (and there’s still a lot more) is just going to have to wait for another opportunity. Read the rest of this entry
Walk Without Rhythm
So, here‘s what I got from the Daily Post today. It’s a fairly interesting post about rhythm in words, sentences and paragraphs. But I was intrigued by the very end, which I will repeat here:
Pay attention to which sentence configurations you find most appealing. What makes a given arrangement more appealing to you than another? Can you think of ways in which you might use different sentence lengths to accomplish different rhetorical goals?
If you’ve read, well, any of my writing, you’ll know that I like to use long, complicated sentences with lots of commas, purple prose, and sometimes digressions in the middle. Sentences that often could be acceptably split into two or more. Meanwhile, my paragraphs often have very few sentences, and sometimes could be reasonably connected to an adjacent paragraph. Read the rest of this entry
Everything’s a pain. It’s still hot, too.
Hopefully that title got all the whining out of my system for a while.
So in naive anticipation of cold weather, I’ve returned to the manly art of crochet. I’ve decided to start off this year’s projects with another scarf, partly because of my limited skill, but mostly because I like scarves. A big part of that is probably because I can only wear them comfortably when it’s genuinely cold, and I suspect I only really like the cold weather because where I live Summer lasts for eight solid months. Read the rest of this entry
This accelerating rate of change
When I started this blog, it was with the simple goal of forcing myself to write more often, by setting a wordcount goal and expecting myself to reach it weekly. By now it’s clear that this has failed.
In fact, it’s gone so far as to be counterproductive to that goal, as I’ve more than once skipped something because I didn’t want to post trivial stuff until I’d caught up on my requests, or because it would be a short post and it seemed such a pain to maintain the tally for small changes. I’ve now totally lost track, I don’t recall when I last updated the score, so I have no idea how many words I would owe now. I do know that I didn’t post once during the entire month of August, and worse that I’ve been putting off things I might have posted during the last week or two.
So, new rules. For the time being there are no rules. I’ll just write when I feel like it, about whatever subject I have in mind. I’ll probably work out some sort of structure to it later, I’ll certainly try to maintain the “write anything requested” idea, and I’ll update the About page with proper info just as soon as I figure out what that should be. I fully intend to catch up on the Requests someday, but that’s looking like it’s a long way off. Read the rest of this entry
Writing is hard
I never learned how to write an outline. I just don’t get it somehow, something eludes me that’s so basic and fundamental that I can’t articulate it usefully, and nobody’s ever been able to help. The closest I ever got, I think, is when I wrote a lot of little synopses for a collection of short stories with a loose continuity between them. Tiny, one paragraph summaries like you might see in TV Guide telling you what to expect on Tuesday’s episode. I think maybe I had the essence of it there, perhaps I’ll try building on that concept later. Read the rest of this entry
The Adventures of Leo Tarvi 