Category: blogs

Because I Am A Lemming

I am participating in BlogDay2008:
BlogDay was created with the belief that bloggers should have one day dedicated to getting to know other bloggers from other countries and areas of interest. On that day Bloggers will recommend other blogs to their blog visitors.
With the goal in mind, on this day every blogger will post a recommendation of 5 new blogs. This way, all blog readers will find themselves leaping around and discovering new, previously unknown blogs.

I must say that I like getting out of my comfort zone now and then. So I did the next blog thing on Blogger. I avoided the ones with fewer than five posts for no particular reason. I found these:

Nicole Jarecz Illustration by Nicole Jarecz, Detroit, MI, United States. A junior at the College for Creative Studies, majoring in illustration.
Unsurprisingly, she does a lot of drawings, many of which I like. Occasionally, she even talks.

VERACRUZ TURISMO DIGITAL. Las Noticias de Turismo del Estado de Veracruz Mexico
It’s in Spanish, and I don’t really read Spanish, but it seems to be a site about the
culture of Veracruz. Has photos, so it was worth looking at.

Kundalini Splendor.
Poems and Reflections on the Spiritual Journey by Dorothy Walters
She writes: “I invite you to contact me.” She has a kindly face. Pictures accompany her photos. I’m not much into poetry, I’m afraid, but the page gave me a soothing feeling, somehow. Clearly, my favorite of the five.

ADESPOTO Halandriou
Σύλλογος φίλων των ζώων Χαλανδρίου
It’s all Greek to me. This person from Athens takes photos of animals. I like animals OK, but my Greek is non-existent, so the context is lost on me. Yet that’s all right.

吕昕展 臭Baby部落格.
Shinzhan 吕昕展, Mersing, Johor, Malaysia
OK. Not my favorite kind of page; that is, a bunch of pictures of somebody’s kid with no context, plus short videos. I don’t mind an occasional pic- been known to do it myself, but no narrative, even if I could read Chinese.
Still, I’m fascinated by this page because I put it through the Google translator, and the title of the page reads: “Lu Hsin-Chin foul Baby blog”. Really. Does this mean in translated Chinese what it means in English? And in the Chinese title: Are there no characters for “baby” in Chinese?

ROG

ROG

Snake in the Garden

Back in the early days of this blog, before I knew any better, I would write a “state of the blog” piece every month, on the first of the month. Now that I’m a more “mature” blogger, I tend to do this only on the anniversary of the blog, which is May 2. So consider this a (temporary) reversion to form.

There was a point in June when I seriously considered quitting doing the blog. not only were my numbers down, I was having this dispute with this other blogger that I didn’t understand over things on that person’s blog,

But then I started having dreams. Vivid dreams. Disturbing dreams. Dreams that pointed out my mortality to a degree that would wake me up and not allow me back to sleep. At the same time, it seemed to help answer unresolved questions that were lurking just beyond my conscious awareness. Sometimes, essays would come nearly fully formed. A couple became blog posts.

Another factor mitigating in favor of continuing – or maybe it’s the same factor – is that I realize I have more to say, whether anyone’s reading it or not. And occasionally, when someone like Shirlee Taylor Haizlip or Glenn Weiser, who thanked me for this piece (and in return, I corrected the misspelling of his name), write, it makes it worthwhile. As did a 13-year-old girl writing in response to my piece on my vitiligo.

I got a Twitter account on July 11. That would be July 11, 2007, made one post, then not again until this past week, when I wrote: “Saw a piece on ABC News about how some companies such as Comcast, JetBlue and Dell track Twitter for customer complaints. Very cool indeed.” So, I’m trying it on for size. Don’t want to have a “300 days ago” notation on it, so I’ll see.

I also finally added SamuraiFrog to my links. One of the curses of being in a cubicle is that pretty much anyone can see your computer, and sometimes, when I’m checking websites at lunch time, there are materials that don’t disturb me but probably would disturb others. So I just check him at home, where my wife can be disturbed instead.

Coming up this month: four or five posts that I started weeks or months ago that I never finished – it’ll be cathartic, at least for me; a feature I was doing regularly, but somehow dropped; on August 28, my annual FantaCo publication piece, already written in my head, but alas, not electronically; plus all the usual nonsense (yikes, I have to take more pictures of Lydia).
***
Me and Johnny B.

You are an Airbender!

Airbender

The Sky Bison taught the first airbenders how to bend the air around them. While they cannot fly, airbenders can soar in the air for long distances by using a glider. Most important to airbenders is the concept of non-aggression. When they fight, they do not attack but defend themselves through circular movements that confuse their opponents.

Which Element do you Bend?

(Photo by Mary Hoffman, July 2008.)
ROG

ROG

Take a stroll through my mind

From time to time I read these blog improvement posts such as the best time of the year to post to your blog and This is the MOST IMPORTANT BLOG POST of 2008, so READ IT!
This is the easiest thing you can do to attract clients on the web, and it’s free, and fast. I think these have value, and sometimes I even do them, though not always.

The harder thing is to find the balance. Mr. Dymowski wrote about some of this in his 10 things he’s learned about blogging, such as the balance between doing the blog and networking, or avoiding the blank page. Well, sometime during the month, I got unbalanced, maybe literally. I was away for three days at a work conference and I decided to write nothing. The upside is that I didn’t have to haul the laptop – which is REALLY slow – or go bother people to borrow their computers. And since I had content written for the days I was away, it didn’t have an immediate effect on the output.

So much of the time when I’m blogging, I write about what strikes the muse. So I might write a post about Flag Day – indeed, I already have, and you won’t see it until June 14. I’ve also finished my post for June 20 and August 10. Really. But without writing regularly, I found writing to suddenly become onerous.

Think about an exercise routine. You do it every day, or three times a week, and you take off a few days. If you’re like some people, it’s hard to get back into the groove. In fact, because I’ve missed riding my bike when I was away in April and again in May for the conference, and I didn’t feel well a couple of days, and it was cold and/or rainy a couple days, and Lydia was running late a couple days, I’ve ridden my bicycle far less at this point in the year than I have in previous years. Once I get derailed, it can be very difficult to get back on track.

Well, the same thing was true for blogging. I’m usually working at least a little bit ahead – I’m writing this on Friday morning before Lydia wakes up – but for the three days of the Memorial Day weekend, I had to get up and write something for the blog. What I realized: I HATE GETTING UP AND WRITING FOR THE BLOG. And, stupidly – you might think – I was writing at least some of those nights before, for a future post, because that’s where the muse took me.

Now, you might say, “Well, just pass on that day.” The trouble is that, to quote Billy Joel, “I go to extremes”. It was more like, “I think I’ll just quit blogging. Forever. Period.”

But that didn’t work, either. How do I explain this? All the things I used to sit around thinking about writing about, before I started blogging, would float in and out of my head, with no place to go. It was cacophonous, all the storylines in my brain. The GREAT thing about the blog is that it severely lessens the noise in my head. So, even if I don’t post it – and there are failed posts, posts I’ve written, but for whatever reason I never published – I still need to WRITE about. The blog is the methodology of publishing it, as it were, but the actual writing, removing certain stories from my mind into the keyboard, is a grand psychological release.

I saw Iron Man last weekend. My brain has composed what I THINK is a different POV on the movie. But until I actually write it down, and a musical I saw, and something that happened at the Greek festival, and some amazingly stupid and costly thing I did, it remains as an out-of-tune symphony in my head.

Specific to Memorial Day weekend, while I could have blown off two of the days, I could not have blown off the third. For that was the 26th of the month, and I seem to have a “contact with God” to write about Lydia on that date. (Which reminds me, I have this Will Eisner thing to write about.)

So I hope this view of my pathology makes sense. I believe it was inspired, at least a little bit, by this post from Mr. Velez. Thank you, Anthony.

ROG

ROG

The bachelor list

I’m so happy that Kristi Yamaguchi won American Idol and that David Cook won Dancing with the Stars. Wait a minute, that’s not right…

My wife, who IS happy Kristi won on Dancing, and daughter, who was rooting for some guy (hey, I don’t watch), are going away this weekend to visit the parents/grandparents. Oh, boy, this means I can set my own agenda! Come now – on these rare occasions, there’s always a list. Surprisingly, only a couple of them have come from my wife, and a bunch of it comes from my internal sense of responsibility. In roughly the order of importance:
* Pay some bills. I ran out of checks last week. While most things I have paid automatically or online, there are a couple that I hadn’t set up or aren’t available to be paid that way.
* Burn some CDs for some people; they know who they are.
* Cut the grass. I have a standard, Roger-powered machine, and if I don’t cut it every week (or even more frequently), I’ll have go borrow someone’s gas-driven machine.
* Move a bunch of CDs from the inconvenient furniture we bought a few years ago to some drawers I bought at a library auction a couple weeks ago. A MASSIVE undertaking I’ll probably do in sections.
* See the movie Iron Man. If I don’t see it now, I’ll never see it.
* Watch two movies on DVD that I borrowed MONTHS ago from friends and haven’t seen yet, Defending Your Life with Albert Brooks, and Independence Day. I’ve never seen either of them.
* Take the CD player to the shop to see if I can get it to work. It doesn’t seem to recognize that there is actually a CD IN the machine on a regular basis. I end up using the boom box, if I can wrestle it from my daughter.
* Read a week’s worth of newspapers.
* Watch at least some recorded TV.
* Write two blog pieces that have been floating in my mind for weeks, plus some ten-part thing I started a while ago, for which I BLAME TOSY.
* Get printer cartridges. I used up the last black one, and the color one just doesn’t work.
Then there’s church on Sunday morning and cleaning and laundry at some point. The problem with The List is that it’s always longer than the amount of time available to do the items on The List.

ROG

ROG
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