100% Rational Fears

I hate city birds.

Not so much for the noise or the hygiene, those are pretty standard forgivable bird-things. Their calls sort of bring a sense of natural peace to an area. Similar to fountains, the sound of wind through the trees, and the silence of the conspicuous lack of children. And I can't expect them to politely order their food from french-inspired bistros, but the food there is good, so I don't blame them for pecking at yet-to-be-bussed dishes.
No, what I hate is their flight.

They swoop around with reckless abandon, as if the entire z-axis from the earth up is their personal territory, and by god they will use every damn piece of it. Diving around bicycles, parked cars, power lines, and pets. Near-missing trees, and barely-dodging buildings.

I don't trust them.

Every time I see one of these birds flying toward my face, and here in Texas, it's usually Grackles, I raise my arm to protect my face. Better to sacrifice my arm to beak-impalement, than my cheek. I fully expect them not to pull up in time, and will find myself with a psychotic flying disease machine embedded in my flesh. Seriously, I prepare myself for lancing every time I exit a building. Seeing one of them dipping and haphazardly making its way in your direction is a terrifying experience. There's no pattern to their madness. Their path cannot be predicted. I drive the Mako with more sense after consuming two-thirds of a bottle of wine.

Husband thinks this fear is hilarious. But he hasn't seen the frenetic, stomach-dropping panic of a pedestrian when one of these flying death beings didn't quite pull up in time, and one claw grazed his scalp. I have. And he looked at me with wild eyes, fight and flight experienced in equal measure. I couldn't help him. There was nothing I could say to ease the trauma of the moment. Still, I had to say something. Reach out as one human being to another, and give comfort in shared understanding of the war between birds and men.

"Oh my god. That bird was an asshole."

He turned and walked away as, what I image to be, a sense of peace and rightness washed over him. I do what I can.

And as I, now many months later, felt the breeze of a very near miss on the back of scalp, and heard the resulting caw that I assume roughly translates to "fuck off," I pulled out my phone to issue a single text.
"My fears are not unfounded."

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.

The Legacy of the Geek Clique

http://www.psmag.com/blogs/time-machine/radio-gender-women-technology-sector-52050 

Is it comforting that this “girls aren’t allowed in my tech-geek club” thing has a long and prestigious history? I mean, radio, that thing changed the world!

It does make me question how deep the gender hegemony rabbit hole goes, however. And more I see the righteous indignation about this “fake” geek girl, the fear that she has infiltrated our precious exclusive club and the rage at her presumption, the more I wonder about the gender-based implications of this. I have heard nothing of the “fake geek boy”. Is he a thing? Because I have seen no such memes on Tumblr yet— maybe I’m following the wrong individuals.

That said, let’s pan out a bit and look at this from a broader perspective. Let’s talk about the fake-geek versus the real-geek and ignore gender entirely for a moment. I know that this group was once fairly small and exclusive, founded on the precepts of liking-something-odd, liking-that-thing-too-much, and not-much-caring-about-the-effect-it-has-on-my-popularity-ranking. And our numbers have swelled to much larger than I ever assumed we would. We found the coolest things ever, but no one else got it and we couldn’t understand why. And then we were shunned, became social pariahs, banished to the far end of cafeterias across the nation and forced to surreptitiously sneak into unoccupied classrooms to roll new characters for the weekend’s campaign. Before it was a subculture, geekery was a clique, and not one you wanted to be in. And it was painful, but we wore that shit with pride when we got on the other side. WE SURVIVED.

But now more people are recognizing how cool those things are. They are joining us in our liking-it-too-much sort of way, and wanting to talk about it and learn the cannon, and write fanfic, and omg did you hear that Joss Whedon is coming to SXSW to discuss Much Ado? We broke that ground for these up-and-coming geeks and now they can like the things that we like and share it with this giant, (usually) accepting community. We should be happy how far we’ve come and be proud that we carried these precious relics through the metaphorical Dark Ages until the rest of the world caught up and saw it for how awesome it is. We helped promote share this with the world and that is ridiculously fantastic! And clinging to the pain-that-was, the exclusionary concept of if-you-didn’t-go-through-real-ostracism-you-aren’t-a-real-geek is the most negative and undeserving way to characterize ourselves. Geeks and geekery is too mindblowingly fantastic for that to be our defining characteristic.

Husband on: Calendars

Me: You want to go to this party on Saturday?
Husband: Sure.
Me: I'm going to make a create a calendar event so I don't forget. I'll add you to it. Which calendar do you use?
Husband: The Julian Calendar...?
Me: /loses it