Here’s the problem with house cleaning:
Not only does Nature abhor a vacuum, but she seems to have something against a clean horizontal surface.
As a blogger, or at least as someone who plays one on TV, I read a lot of blogs. Now, as it’s eating up more and more of my life, I’m trying to figure out what I want to accomplish with my blog, and what I want to be aware of on other blogs.
Early on, I picked up on a meme. It comes in handy when I’m trying to describe to a newbie what blogging is all about, and what it said was that there are basically two types of bloggers, Linkers and Thinkers.
Over the last year or so, I’ve certainly tried to be both, but I’m starting to realize that there is also a third type (By the way, there truly are three kinds of people: those who can count and those who can’t).
This third type is what I’m going to christen the “Free Spirits.”
These folks sometimes link and they sometimes think, but often they just write honestly about what’s going on in their lives, draw a cartoon, tell a story, show you a picture, or post a song, and damn the torpedos, full-speed ahead.
I like that! You never know before you go there what the heck you’re going to see, and novelty rocks!
Therefore, it is my intention to herewith institute the Carnival of Asparagus Pee, wherein I will select blog entries of note from my current blog-trolling and present them for public consumption. Here we go…
First, I’d like to congratulate Brian Lewandowski for a hilarious series of rants on product quality and corporate mission statements that is nominally about Domino’s Pizza. It reminds me of a direct marketing seminar I was at night before last where they quoted the guy from the leading online marketer of wines as saying something like, “We are in business to provide absolutely the best customer service in the world, and it just so happens that we serve it in a glass of grape juice.”
Then we’ve got Drunk Bastard, who’s trying to do everything all at once.
Here are a couple of local sites, from the Sacramento Blogger Meetup (to my knowledge, we’ve never met), and the Sacramento 25 (sort of): Motel Mag. the “website for people made mostly of water,” and Flourish’s web shit kollektiv (sic), (and her related) Blog (if you go, please let Madeline know that Asparagus Pee guy sent you.)
But the ultimate Free Spririt continues to be The O to the Bee to the S to the Gee. I suppose that might be biased, but show me someone else who would say, “I think I need to eat more art.” and I’ll read them in a heartbeat.
I think I should also recognize the person who commented on my next most recent post, because I actually did enjoy her Curvature Blog.
Very briefly today, the thought crossed my mind, “My life sucks.” Then I realized that wasn’t true at all, so I revised it a bit to a quote I’m pretty happy with: “My life doesn’t suck, but it sure keeps trying to!“
Here is why I read Orange Blossum Smut Girl’s blog – it’s stuff like this:
I am so alive and so tired.
I enjoy the present tense. I wish more journals used present tense. We are I am he is. Everything is was was was. He was here. We are going to go there tomorrow. NOW NOW NOW!
Well, gosh, I thought I was writing something to try to explain to myself how I feel in my mid-life crisis, or tell my wife what was going on in my head or something, but it got pretty weird pretty fast, and it’s not very personal, so I’ve decided to share it. Turn away.
What’s On My Mind
I’m looking for some way to let you know what’s going on in here.
It is my only intention to type freely. I have little idea what I’m about to write. I do know that I want to express some things that I’m feeling and thinking about lately. Here we go…
I’ve toyed with the idea of doing a sort of “here’s what I think about moment by moment as I go through my day, from the moment I first wake up until I go to bed,” and I think that could make for a really powerful presentation of my stream of consciousness.
I’ve also toyed with the idea of just typing a true stream of consciousness, but right now, that feels almost like what I’m doing!
I’ve also also toyed with doing a running, fictional, allegorical narrative.
I’ve also also also toyed with the idea of doing a topical outline and just saying, in effect, “here’s what I’m thinking right now about pets in the household.”
What do you think? Hey, here’s an idea… let’s try a little of each!
Waking Up:
It’s 2:30 am. I don’t feel so hot. What time did I go to bed???
Oh, that’s just the cat. Should I feed her? What time is it? Oh, yeah, right… 2:30. I don’t think that’s a good time to feed a cat. Sure don’t want to train her to expect that!
OK. (Clears throat.) Do I need to pee? No. (Thank God!)
…sounds of snoring…
It’s 4:30 am. I don’t feel so hot. I think I went to bed around 1:15?
Oh, that’s just the cat again. Should I feed her? What time is it? Oh, yeah, right…4:30. Thinks angrily: Think again, “furball.” (I typically put this into mental quotes now because of that Berenstain Bears episode where they pretend it’s a dirty word.)
…sounds of snoring…
(Boy, this gets boring pretty quickly. Let’s try device #2…)
True Stream of Consciousness:
I’m typing. No, wait, I need to pretend I’m in the past or something. Still typing. I’m clever.
Return.
Really liked that last one. No one knows what I’m typing or talking about, but what the fuck do I care anyway? Insects. Of course, I don’t really feel that way, but I’m typing whatever the hell comes into my head, and BOOM!, there you have it. I don’t recommend this. (technique) (or overusing parenthetical statements [I started to type “parentheses” {I dug correcting my plural of parentheses to have the ‘es’ on the end… GOD I’M SMART!}])
Boy, that goes quickly, but I’m sure it’s a lot more boring to read.
(And I’ve really enjoyed doing italics in reverse and nested parentheses to make all that syntax work.)
Fictional Allegory:
Once upon a time, there was a little boy whose parents told him he could do whatever he wanted with his life.
The boy loved and trusted his parents, and up to that point, he’d gotten pretty much everything he’d ever wanted, so the boy believed it.
He decided that he would be a scientist, an astronaut, a philosopher, an author, an artist, a photographer, a composer, a chef, a mechanic, a poet, a programmer, a gardener, a father, and a lover all rolled into one. (This turned out to be too much work, so he became an alcoholic.)
(D’oh! That damned stream of consciousness is creeping back in. Gonna have to watch that!)
Topical/Hierarchical:
1.The Hot Tub.
a) I really like having a working hot tub.
b) It has a leak.
c) I have the part.
d) I need to install the part.
e) If it doesn’t leak, we need to make time for family hot tubbing.
f) If it still leaks, then what?
g) I’d love to build a solar heating panel on the roof of the garage.
h) Either that or go to 220V or gas. (Is it worth it?)
2. The Garden
a) I like dirt.
b) I like compost.
c) I like seeds.
d) I love plants.
e) I love flowers
f) Gardens are a lot of work.
g) Our garden doesn’t perform very well.
h) I want fresh tomatoes and peppers and onions and cilantro for salsa.
i) I eat a lot of salsa.
j) I like salsa.
k) The garden space conflicts with the vision for the new play structure.
Etc., etc., etc., ad infinitum… God! Is life really this boring?
You can lead a horse to water, but you know, once he’s there, watching a horse drink water isn’t really all that exciting.
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll always smell like fish.
It’s really important to stop and smell the roses. Otherwise, someone might come up to you at any time and ask you how the roses smell, and you’d just say, “Huh?”
If I ever meet a bear in the woods, I think I’ll just play dead. That way, if he starts to maul me, I probably won’t even feel it.
In the unlikely event that you experience a loss of cabin pressure, I sure hope I’m not sitting next to you.
A penny saved is a penny earned, but a penny earned is like a penny that you didn’t have before you earned it, and a penny saved really isn’t like that at all.
I want to thank J-Walk for reminding me to blog about Daylight Saving Time (without an ‘s’). As an adamant non-morning-person, it’s hard to get up an hour earlier for a few days, but I can’t imagine anything better than an extra hour of evening daylight. I mean, what the heck is the point of shorting me an hour in the winter when the morning is still cold, dark, and uninviting? If it were up to me, I’d adjust things weekly to maintain an 8:00 PM sunset and vary the work schedule accordingly.
For some reason, it really bugs me the way airlines want to charge me for beers and headphones, but ‘exact change is appreciated.’ Of course, as The Lady Janet pointed out to me when I brought it up last week on the plane, I could solve this problem very easily. Since I know I’m going to drink a beer, I just need to carry some small bills.
So sometimes I go buy something like a cup of coffee just to break a $20, but sometimes I forget, and it just seems kind of silly and arbitrary to me that they charge $5 for a can of MGD that cost about 20¢ more retail than the soda pop they’re serving for free, when my family paid like $800 bucks to sit there, and then they add insult to injury by asking, ‘Don’t you have anything smaller?’ when I obviously don’t, like it’s somehow my fault that ATMs spit out yuppy bucks in $20 increments.
I’ve had the same gripe with my doctor’s office. If everyone who walks in has a $10 or a $15 copay, you ought to start the day with a big stack of fives, and on the flight where Delta charged $2 for a pair of headphones and $4 for a beer, they must know they’re playing Crazy Eights. How hard could it possibly be to figure out what cash drawer you need for a typical flight instead of getting on the blowhorn and asking if any passengers have change for a twenty? I mean, come on, I wouldn’t sell lemonade from a stand on the sidewalk without a few dollars in the till.
Of course, there’s another elegant solution that comes to mind. I could just hold out the $20 bill and say, ‘I’ll have 5 beers please.’
On the way into Santa Fe from the Albuquerque airport, I noticed a bunch of prairie dogs in the dirt of an on-ramp, and I raved about them, so my sister-in-law told us about a store called Jackalope that actually has an on-site prairie dog colony in a walled-in enclosure. We also had a few prairie dog holes in a dusty median between our hotel and the IHOP next door, but I only saw one very briefly, so it was really cool for Emily to be able to gawk at them at her leisure. (And me too!)
Click the little pic for a page with a couple of bigger pics.
Here’s a cool idea I just had: They should have a place on every prescription that describes what’s inside, especially if it’s a new prescription, like, ‘Small, round, blue pills, imprint “Watson 407,” or, ‘Pink powder. Mixed with water as directed, smells and tastes like cherry bubblegum.”