Self-referential

Did you catch what I did there? Collect all my old posts from three different blogs I started in the past few years and backdate them and post them all in rapid succession, only to not post again for a week? It has the effect of making me look like some of blogging machine, a blogbot, a homo faber blogis. A call back to the great ponderers of ancient Greece, endlessly spinning and turning concepts and finding their various pathways. Escher in vocabulary. Then I disappear for over a week.

I like to disappoint early. It sets less threatening expectations.

Will I make every attempt to be better? Of course. Will I spend nights awake, kicking myself, for not spending the minimum 20 minutes writing something, anything at all? Absolutely. But if history is any indication (and when people use that phrase, they are telling you that it is), I will come up with many, many excuses to do anything else. Writing, in my personal world segment, is both an unquestionable necessity, and a complete and utter chore. In no other case have I been driven so furiously to do something and simultaneously found myself stretching the limits of my brain to find anything else to do.

Is this how statement of purposes were discovered? Some sort of written treatise with the self to force a change in behavior? I'm fairly certain self-help clinics, workshops, and activity books exhibit this exercise, which makes me think this whole thing has taken a terrible turn. Not any sort of correlation I was interested in making. And not at all the direction I thought it would go. Uhg.

I don't know why I'm still surprised to find that my brain is my own greatest nemesis. With superpowers and everything. The power to distract me from my own intent. How is that even possible? It's like there's another, evil me hidden inside of the greater me. A manipulative me I never knew me to be. And now I'm forced to consider the possibilities of how many mes can fit inside a me. It's a bit daunting actually.

Morning Ritual

Every morning upon waking, I promptly disentangle from blankets, husband, and cats in a frantic search for my phone. Half blinded by the light, and yet to achieve verbal coherence, any outside observer would categorize my existence as that more closely related to any number of burrowing, slithering organisms as I groan and ineffectually throw my mass at the direction of my bedside technology. When I have, by determination alone, grasped the phone and unlocked the screen to look into the depths it can reveal to my hungry, information-starved brain, I'm so exhausted that I fall asleep again. My fingers wrapped gently around the device as I pass into slumber.

Every morning.

It's so ingrained, so automatic that it's passed into the realm of near ritual. I can't get my post-sleep nap without going through all this. My mind worries at it like squirrel with a nut. Or me with Myst before I realized there was an Internet with walkthroughs on it. (Lies. I didn't figure out the walkthrough trick until Riven.)

And this whole thing makes me deliriously happy. I'm now even unconsciously making decisions that lead me to my eventual full-technological integration. I may look ridiculous with my HUD goggles, and I may move awkwardly, laden with too-many technologies. But I'm going to live in the future, dammit, and it will be awesome. Also probably lit in blue.

lolcat speak just became an actual thing

(Admit it. My puns are hilarious.)

From NekoFont

The Summer-Break Work Schedule

I spent the early part of the day on the design of this blog. Which I also consider to be work. And exercise.

Fact: Photography requires that you contort the body into a variety of unnatural positions to look as natural as possible while simultaneously manning equipment with the atrophied stump that is the non-dominant hand. It is similar in form to a yoga/tai-chi hybrid.
Fact: Blogger's automatic background image scaling algorithm is the devil whose ever-shifting requirements are both mysterious and a surefire way to devolve oneself into a protohuman state of mental cohesion.

So in a fit of uncharacteristic motivation, I threw myself into CSS education. After a tenacious 12 minutes, I took a Reddit break for four hours.

I name this day a success.