One of many awkward me-affiliated places.
Time-Dependent SemiPublic Memory Bank,
Super Secret Dumping/Proving Ground,
Displaced Miscellany Collection,
3 Hours in the Future (EST)
As a person with some—I will concede this—occasionally byzantine tendencies, I don’t have many life-rules that can be elucidated this succinctly.
But.
There it is. I knew it even on the leading edge of 17.
(It really does want for an E.)
“We do not wish to ruin the fun of the holidays. But, if you want to appraise something, you need to do it right.”
There is a clear voice in this analysis and it kills me a little that there is no byline because I am terribly curious how the author would misspell “Van Hœt”.
Whät Wë Tälk Äböüt Whën Wë Tälk Äböüt Röck.”
One of my former bosses is noted for saying that you can sleep with your ideas, but you should not marry them. Some of them make awfully compelling cases for themselves, though, my abuse of diacritics notwithstanding.
I just like making up titles. While the phrase usually used is “too clever by half”, I imagine one can be too clever by 3/4. I’ll let you know when I get there.
Sweet Past Gigs Auxilliary: “Space Science Terms”
Because I have lived 40 lives, it is possible that you may not have known that, for some time last decade, I was paid by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I was too short to be an astronaut, so that kind of end was never in the cards let alone in the prospective jobs list. It’s not your fault you didn’t know; I overshare selectively so it SEEMS that I’m all open and what not, but I play certain aspects of my life very close to the vest. There’s probably a coarse line between “reasonably compartmentalized” and “maybe a sociopath”. Reader has an overwhelming sensation of constipation. Also: I like rooftops and robots, but not so much heights, with the vertigo and the nausea and the stress and so on.
Anyhow, the phrase “balls* out” came up recently and I remembered I still had the memo (originally from 1968) that my boss had reproduced for us before our first conference call. Glorious.
*“Please be circumspect in the use of this term as it can be misinterpreted by the uninitiated.” I love this sentence so much that I feel a little sick. I think it’s the word “circumspect”. Also: balls.
841 bits of madness. Submitting the 3rd set of proofs here makes the 3 lingering manuscripts there feel like when you flush and it comes back.
“I saved Latin. What did you ever do?”
I’d quipped the other day that I was neither a “Type-A student”, nor even an “A-student”, in high-school. But, after careful spreadsheeting, maybe I was a little bit of the former. That list isn’t even necessarily comprehensive—it’s just what I could remember as I was sitting here.
I used to worry that I got into college on the merit not of my transcript, but of a very rational argument I made in the comic-book I drew as my optional essay. Accepting that “being able to sell oneself” is not necessarily whoring or a con artistry made that less of a worry in later years. There is some re-accepting of that concept that must be done every once in a while, though.
The asterisks indicate activities that involved trips off-site, sometimes during the school-day. Those were the best. A puppet troop given a short bus and an elementary school assembly circuit is pretty much as ridiculous and awesome as one would imagine. Summer Math/Science camp doesn’t get on the list as it was in the summer. And, for the sake of continuity, I used to get in trouble for wearing pants underneath my candy-striping uniform. I didn’t stop wearing them, I just started to avoid the lady who found my sartorial choices irksome.
[201107150121: Links added in for increased narratological continuity. Also, to lend credence to the fact that Reading Olympics was, in fact, a real thing.]
rebarbative |rəˈbärbətiv|
adjective formal
unattractive and objectionable.
ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from French rébarbatif, -ive, from Old French se rebarber ‘face each other “beard to beard” aggressively,’ from barbe ‘beard.’
My deep and abiding love for etymology keeps me pretty set as far as always being amused about something. It doesn’t sound like so objectionable a situation.
If your Bingo card of exciting keywords includes:
…then this is an awesome dog of a wikipedia article. B-I-N-G-O!
(Seriously, it is top notch.)
*Less a keyword so much as an indicator of pleasant turns of phrase.
Thor’s day:
There was a time where I used to be really good at MCEs. I might still be, but I haven’t taken one in a long while. There is a really obvious missing period in the Wikipedia article on Robert Smith. I feel like editing it might be the cure for some weird nerd-stress I’m having, but rationally it probably isn’t, and generating a login is somehow an enormous potential energy barrier. I’m going to put it here.
.
The universe will balance itself out; soon after: Ragnarök.
That may’ve been the thesis to a paper I wrote on The Ring of the Nibelung for a class I almost failed. Comp. Lit: tougher than anticipated. Evidently, just making the connections is “insufficient”. How was I supposed to know what Wagner was thinking? Years later, my blood pressure still rises as I argue with myself about that. I might have as well cribbed the Thomas Nagel argument and been done, right? Classes on the Phil. side of the humanities were easier. Not because I agreed with everything, but making moderately rigorous arguments seemed easier and sufficient there.
Boom.
That’s what it’s like.
(Internally, I might give myself an F-minus-minus for facetiousness, but if asked to grade myself, I’d probably say I’d give myself an A. Just in case it was actually a test of audacity. Which life sometimes seems to be.) Oddly, though flickr says this guy is in my closet, in the version in my closet he’s playing chess, indicative of the fact that I may have made an “error in judgment” as regards “choosing an endpoint”.
A persistent problem, that is.
(It’s why I back-up.)
*Sad trombone.*
See, if I had tried to make this, it might have never gotten past figuring out how to appropriately write “Sartre Was (-e)”.
For the past couple days, every time I read bulletins about the “tiger team” that has been dealing with the cyber-attack/lab network shutdown, I imagine an assortment of glorious neck-bearded heroes dressed kind of close to this, with stripes arranged as vertically as possible.
Staring into the middle-distance and imagining their gearing up montage has been my alternative to the normal “can’t look at my work for a couple minutes” reading. That and scheming. I have greater journal access in my living room! It’s crazy right now.
Just sayin’, if presented with this picture, amid a slew of references to Adam and the Ants, Adamantane, or unwavering stubbornness, there would be nothing in response at the other side of the table. Not a music guy, not a science guy, not a word guy, not even a comic-book guy.
But Aquaman, you cannot marry a woman without gills.
You’re from 2 different worlds!
In my defense, he did look like a young Mick Fleetwood.
It was a really good beard. And an awkward couple years.
Bloop-bloo-bloop. Okay…done obsessing.
I wrote down Harlequin’s subdivisions, though: INTRIGUE, ROMANCE, SUPERROMANCE, NASCAR, READER’S CHOICE, HISTORICAL, AMERICAN ROMANCE. I think I would be most intrigued by “Historical American SuperRomance”. That would be MY choice.
Imaginary excerpt:
MR. LINCOLN, LET WONDER WOMAN HELP YOU ADDRESS GETTYSBURG
…OR UNDRESS GETTYSBURG
The shameful things I’ve felt the need to tell the world are varied and numerous.
Anyhow, TIME-TRAVELING WONDER WOMAN ALWAYS EXPRESSES HERSELF ASSERTIVELY. That sometimes, but not always, involves yelling.
Bibliotecadventures #4: The Council Rock High School Library
It’s not easy being the captain of a High School Reading Olympics team. I mean socially. Struggles with a sporadic eidetic memory made it technically not so bad. Plus, it put me in good graces with the librarians. And it balanced out my mathletics. And helped out my Scholars Bowling game.
Also, I think I made the transition from hypercard to powerpoint in their computer room in 1995, where I looked things up in hard-cover almanacs and wrote many, many papers, some of which were even for me.
