Mew Special

The title is what band and song that I awoke to, running through my head. It goes like this:

"Special, blah blah blah blah blah....
You know blah blah blah blah..."

I don't really know all the words, or enough to form a sentence, but it's still a beautiful song.

I have two more days of work left before I'm unemployed for two months. Here are some goals for this summer, or at least this month.

By August 20th I'd like to have written my first novel. Fer sure.

By July 22nd, when I'm getting married, I'd like to be in good shape. That's exercise, people. I've got the time. I need an hour a day, 6 days a week. But I have the time, so I should do it. Last week I overexerted and hurt my back though. I took a week off, and am going to the gym today. I'm also keeping track of what exercise I'm doing and when I'm doing it. So far it's just not enough on paper.

Also by the wedding I need to have everything planned for the wedding. I need a caterer, some sort of flower arrangement, a bartender, some sort of parking solution, clothes for me to wear, and some wedding playlists. Yow! Maybe we need a wedding photographer too, although we know so many photographers that I don't see why we'll need to pay.

Oh, and a honeymoon as soon as possible.

A to-do list!

The end of the year, the beginning of the project

Yow! I'm going to write a novel this summer. School is over in two days, but I basically have about 3 hours left of work to do. Maybe 4 or 5. That's plenty of time. All I have to do is grade two small classes worth of finals, clean up, and do the end of the year procedures. I always kind of like the end of the year stuff; it's like a scavenger hunt of people's signatures. I think it's because it comes in this nice list format, and I always like crossing things off lists.

I'm also going to be planning our wedding, and getting in shape. Those are my only activities. Everything else is secondary. I'm considering this a job this summer. Maybe not during our honeymoon, and maybe not on days when Jessica is off, but I'm going to be at my computer typing an awful lot. I also think that I might start drinking tea. Maybe not though, as it stains one's teeth, doesn't it. I'll have to think about the tea.

I should keep in mind that if I really just sit at my computer all the time, then I'm going to forget how to be social. Also I'm not going to give Jessica any space. So, I guess I need to figure out other activities as well, probably based on exercise. I like hiking. Maybe I'll go on lots of hikes and give Jessica days off. Those are like vacation days at the house.

What's my book about? Well, you'll have to wait and see!

25 most censored stories, 2007

Here's a link to the 25 most censored stories of 2007, as compiled by Sonoma State University.

I look for it every year. Some years it's easier to find than other years. This year it slipped by, but a friend of mine, the Rabid Wombats blog, caught it.

Check it out. Save the world.

Caffiene and your brain!

Wooo! Zooom! My mind flies by at 1000 miles per hour, which is really fast for sitting in a rolling chair. (Get the implied double meaning? I'm sitting in my chair while my mind is moving, but I'm also conjuring the image or literally rolling, in a rolling chair, at 1000 mph. That's seriously fast, past the sound barrier. (Of course, theoretically this is easy to imagine. With frictionless wheel bearings, on a good slant, in a vacuum, gravity will pull you faster than 1000 mph. (But, frictionless wheel bearings are imaginary - they don't exist, how could they? You only need bearings that are good enough to have a max speed of over 1000 mph. (See? I did it again! I implied that the giant vacuum with the slant long enough to roll a rolling chair up to 1000 mph DOES exist, by the mocking tone I used when noting that the frictionless bearings don't! (Anybody else realize that I'm now inside of 5 sets of parentheses? This is seriously off topic. These metatopics just keep coming to me. (I'm thinking very much nonlinearly. Of course, grammar is an art (some call it a metalanguage) and the use of parentheses is subjective. This could've been written with much different prose. In fact, I think almost no one would open such a ludicrous amount of parentheses; maybe Gabriel Garcia Marquez would. (Ms. Charlip made me read 100 Years of Solitude in 11th grade, and while only about 5 of us read it all, and I thank her kindly for years of excellent teaching (I still think about the 5 types of comedy also), I think my readers might have some words for her (Another pun! 'Have some words for her?' Wooo! Zooom!) Of course, maybe they'd pass their thoughts on to the great Colombian grammarian savant instead.) The problem with thinking this nonlinearity, is that it is very easy to lose your train of thought. This comes about much more frequently in conversations with multiple people, but with me it happens, occasionally, solo. The problem with WRITING nonlinearly is that, even though we have the grammatical structure to do so (parentheses,) it makes the reader strain to figure out what the hell is going on. (Of course, Joyce still got published, as well as many other prose artists. Grammatical engineering is just another tool in the literary artists' box.) Illegibility is a problem, however, and isn't really something to be sought. )))))) The reason I'm thinking so fast is that I had a small cup of weak coffee at the donut shop this morning. I also had a bran muffin and a sesame bagel - no cruller. I don't usually partake in caffeine. When I do, Wooo! Zooom! (Triple-O-mind explosion!) Of course, the mind is influenced by chemicals. The ancients knew this, in a way. They didn't know much about what those chemicals were, but they knew which plants to chew, frogs to lick, and so forth. Recently we've learned about how life's basic activities alter our brain chemistry. (Recently meaning the last 100 years or so.) Food, sex, exercise, sufficient sleep, sleep deprivation, stress, et cetera, all effect our affect. (I couldn't resist! (I should've. (Oh man, totally non linear again, but now I've got a nagging conscience to return to the train - the train of thought. (It's going to be hard though, if I can't lay off the puns. (I need a plan of action: no more puns or double entendres. If one slips out (I seem to not be able to help it,) then try to refrain from commenting on it. (I seem to be having difficulty with this as well.) That's a plan!))))) Caffeine works profoundly on me, but for the last 15 years I've been trying to get better at noticing the subtle changes of brain chemistry. Eating healthily changes me over the next day or so. Exercise changes me for the next two days, or so. Coffee works for about 2 days. 36 hours of hyperness, then it tapers off into a lull of less energy, mood, and esteem for the rest of the second day. Sad, but Wooo! Zooom!

Find your own brain chemistry, and you can be your own engineer. Most all of us self medicate, but an advanced technique is to self diagnose, and treat the causations of happiness, rather than the symptoms of unhappiness. Experiment on yourself, and enjoy.

20 days later!

This has been my longest dirth of bloggery. 20 days have passed since my last blog expedition, and I haven't even been infected with a fast zombie virus. Yes, we saw 28 weeks later last night, with an old friend. It was terrifying, heart rending, and apocalyptic. With 28 days later, these are the best horror films of the decade. There are only one or two good horror films a decade anyway, and these are excellent.

Blair Witch in the '90's, if you could trick yourself into buying into the hype.

Poltergeist of the 80's. The Believers was pretty good too. Oh, and The Hitcher. I think Alien belongs here too.

The Shining and The Exorcist in the '70's.

Hitchcock before that.

What am I missing?

The crap/worth ratio

So, through out my life there have been periods of great reading and periods where I'll read one book in a year. As I've matured I've tried to make sure that I always have some time to read. One of the few great joys of commuting on public transportation is the free hour of reading each day that one is offered like an hors d'oeuvre at a wedding reception.

In the spirit of documentation, I've been recording all the books I've read since the mid '90s. Of course, books serve several different purposes. Any mathematician, indeed anyone with a liberal arts education, knows that books impart knowledge. However, most of what I read is fiction. Within the genre of fiction there are categorical differences as well. For instance, Charles Dickens probably fits in a different space than Judith Krantz. Don Delilo probably has more in common with Dickens than with Krantz. Harry Potter, though, well, that's more debatable.

Literature has an amazing transformative power. At the end of any great novel the reader is a different person than when they started. This is not necessarily the case when one is reading a silly little science fiction book about cats in space, or a Stephen King novel. Sure, technically neutrinos have passed through your body, and isotopes inside you have decayed, so really you are changed, but you haven't been transformed by the book in the same way that you would if you finished War and Peace or A Farewell to Arms.

So, I've recorded all the books I've read in the last ten years, and I've rated them all as crap or worth. Thus was born the crap/worth ratio. I try to keep it about one. That is, for every Game of Thrones (the best fantasy book since the lord of the rings) I try to read something valuable. Of course, literature is valuable, but so is Barbara Kingsolver. Douglass Adams is fun, but too fluffy for worth. (Oh, it's wonderful, and you should read everything he ever wrote in his short life, don't get me twisted.) Nick Hornby counts, and Vonnegut counts, and David Sedaris counts. Neal Stephenson only sometimes counts.

I'm making it seem like the other books are crap, and that's not really what I mean. I guess what I'm really trying to say is that when I reread Narnia a few years back it was for entertainment only. When I read Beth Lisick's Everyone into the Pool, sure it was entertaining, but it was a poignant memoir as well. I ruminated more about the human condition through the consumption of the memoir than the fantasy, even though C.S. Lewis' moral masterpiece is so grand in scope.

Read, read anything. With every other book, push your boundaries.

Exermacise

So it's easy to sit around and indulge. Sometimes I just indulge myself in daydreams, imagining what it would be like to just eat fast food and pizza every night, never exercise, not go to work, but just hang out with friends, sleep, and play. That'd be great. Of course, it wouldn't be as great as accomplishing the goals that I've set up for myself, love, travel, financial security, et cetera. The indulgence of slack would be great in that it would taste good and be so easy. Of course, when you gorge yourself on round table your blood leaves your head to go to your stomach, your mind slows down, you get a little release of endorphins, and you score a food drunk. Really, when I'm daydreaming about dropping out into slackdom, isn't my body just asking for drugs? Is this different than just wishing I could get drunk all the time, and buy cough syrup by the case?

It's more difficult to intentionally be cognizant about your own behaviors. I really enjoy playing basketball, tennis, and ping pong. Hackey Sack, soccer, frisbee I also enjoy. Yoga, weight lifting, jogging, these are work. I don't actually enjoy doing any of it. What I do enjoy, however, is the results. Those last three activities I do much more often that the previous six. Sure they release their own exercise endorphins, but they also keep me centered, keep my energy levels up, keep me healthy, and keep me strong. They are an important component of my life, and I wouldn't be able to cut it with out them.