How generous?

I was walking around the bus stop yesterday, trying to move around a little to contrast with sitting around at a desk all day, when I noticed a cultural phenomenon that I'm not sure has ever been explored.

Smokers are typically generous with their cigarettes towards other smokers. "Hey man, you got a smoke?"

The typical response is a free cigarette. So I wondered how generous they would be with something less valuable. Cigarettes are expensive for their size.

What would be the response for "Hey man, you got a fry?" I mean, it's kind of a personal thing, a single piece from a larger package, and it fits in the same category as something that isn't particularly healthy, but is enjoyable.

I imagine that the response would be something along the lines of a strange look and some form of "No". But I can't be sure it's something I think would be interesting to do field research on.

Also, I'm excited for the new Firefox to show up out of beta. The little banner below will take you to a page where you can set up a notification for when that happens.

Out of books

I've reached the interesting and intermittent problem that many readers have in that I'm all out of books to read. I suppose I could re-read something, like I just did with Buckaroo Banzai, but I feel like tackling something new. If you've got a suggestion for a book I should read, please tell me in the comments. I'm not saying I'll read all of them, but I'm all for gathering suggestions from both of you who read this blog. In the meantime, I'll just spend my bus rides watching old episodes of Mission: Impossible I've put onto one of my digital devices.

Girly man

I was at the bus terminal, walking around while I waited for my bus when I saw a soft-in-the-middle mid-30s guy standing outside the bus in one of those close fitting fitness shirts with the embroidered logo of a massage school, trying to negotiate something with the driver. It was apparently not going well, because as I came close enough to hear, the door closed, the guy started walking away, and the bus engine growled louder to move the big hunk of metal.

Right then, the guy waved his girly, hairless arms and shouted, "Why does everything have to go wrong today?!" And he headed off to what was certainly going to be the next disappointment. I could speculate on what else had gone wrong by about 8:30 in the morning, but he looked fairly well put together, wasn't bleeding anywhere I could see, and seemed to have a backup plan, so it couldn't have been all that bad a morning. It was his question to the universe, soft girly arms stretched out that made me pause and take note.

Sweet weekend

The next couple of weekends I expect to be freaking sweet. This weekend, we went boating and I got to play with my new wakeboard for real. We'd gone a little earlier to test drive a new boat and I was afraid I was going to hurt myself that time. The water was rough and really cold, it was a new board, new boat, different driver and we were going way faster than I'm used to going. So I played it a little more conservative.

Last night, though, I felt a little more at ease because it was a boat I'm used to, a driver I'm used to, the water wasn't as rough or cold, and we were going a good speed. So I got to play with the new board and I really like it. It felt much easier to control than the one I've been using. And I nailed a move I'd been working on at the end of last season.

Also, this weekend, we're going to do some playing outside and some container gardening.

Next weekend though, Memorial Day weekend, my cousins are coming here to play. I don't know if they've spent enough time in Salt Lake to see some of the fun things around. I mean, they've come up for my wedding, but they weren't here for very long. And on top of that, I got tickets for everyone to see the new Indiana Jones movie together. It'll be fun to do that together, even if my worst George Lucas related fears come true and the movie makes an unexpected, highly sucky twist in the Indiana Jones universe. You know, something along the order of JarJar Binks and midi-chlorians and just about anything else related to the prequels.

The weekend after that, I'm going on a date to a matinee performance of the ballet, and a couple of weekends after that, I get to meet my little boy. I'm really excited for that. Words don't do justice to my excitement. It's time to go do something fun. I'm off and running!

Who do you write for?

So this last few days, I've been thinking about voice and thinking about what my voice is when I write and who I tend to write for. Everyone's got an ideal reader, a person we're trying to please when we write. Kurt Vonnegut talks about this in one of his books, although I don't remember which one it is off the top of my head. He wrote for his sister. I can rule that one out because my sisters aren't huge into reading. That, and I don't care what they think of my writing.

Joseph Williams seems to write for himself, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. I think he sounds like a fun person to meet at a party. So I may write for myself. I know I did in high school, but that may have changed. Maybe my problem of feeling a little lost could have something to do with the fact that I haven't written anything of consequential length that I've enjoyed. I started writing something and worked on it for months, but it was unfocused and I didn't like it anymore, so I stopped and started working on something else.

It's been suggested that my writing tends to be very intense and I probably burn out trying to prolong the intensity I've set up. That could very well be true. I think that another part of the difficulty is that I keep trying to make something powerful and literary when I'm not that kind of person who can punch gaping holes in your brain by sheer force of research and verbiage (which my writing hero does). I feel like my voice is more like Vonnegut's: hands in pockets, shrugging and shuffling around almost idly. But under the unassuming exterior, there's a wry, sharp view of things that aren't usually asked because they're taken for granted. Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout
character was a caricature of himself, a disregarded figure who made wild penetrating cuts in the world view of any of the few people who read Trout's work.

While Kilgore Trout usually threw out absolutely batty scenarios to comment in things, I feel like my method would be more like making some unusual but fitting connection so that we can all point and laugh at it. Kind of like the article on Wired today about how Microsoft-Yahoo!-Facebook is like being back in high school. That's the kind of thing I'd do. So I'm still trying to figure out my voice and who I write for. I'll let you know when I figure it out.

Memories of Scout Camp

Scout Camp is one of those events that ranks highly on the list of male bonding moments and not only because you spend a whole week with a bunch of other guys. Although I guess you could argue that the mere proximity of so many adolescent boys has a significant impact on the
dumb stuff that could go on.

I'm standing at the bus stop, listening to the rain on the canvas cover, listening to music, and wondering how it's cold and rainy in May in the freaking desert.

It rained almost every year I went to Scout Camp. And it rained for the whole week each time. So we'd sit in our tents between classes, rain hitting the canvas of the old square framed tents, shoes covered in mud, and write things for the requirements of the merit badge classes. To keep from going completely batty having to deal with the paradox of staying inside while we were outside, we came up with some pretty typical 'boy' activities, most of which either involved the threat of physical injury or making a huge mess. Not the threat of making a huge mess, we actually made them. I remember one year, we got ourselves so scared about alien abduction (we weren't too far from Roswell) that none of us could sleep for hours. In retrospect, it was completely ridiculous, especially considering an actual bear showed up in the camp a couple of years later and tore some kid's tent apart looking for some popcorn he had stashed away.

But we invented games that involved throwing sharp sticks at each other's feet, wrestled each other into the mud, stuff like that. I wasn't a huge fan of that second one, considering I'm not on the big side of the size spectrum. But we did all kinds of stupid things and had fun doing it.

Funny how that sound of rain on canvas brought back memories of some of my less-than-bright moments.

In an unrelated note, I was listening to a writing podcast, where they were talking with a book editor and the editor mentioned something I probably knew at some point but had forgotten; she said that an editor can help a writer with plot but voice is something that a writer just has to have. So I'll probably be trying new things to develop a voice that's mine. I feel like most of my writing feels sterile, with just flashes of me every now and then. I tend to be more serious and staid in my personal writing and explore some of my humor in, say, technical instructions that I write. Does that make nonsense to you too?

Cinco de Mayo

I don't know if you ever have a flash of completely ridiculous brilliance, but I was sitting at my desk yesterday, contemplating what I could do to celebrate Cinco de Mayo that wouldn't cost me money or get me fired, and had one of the aforementioned flashes of ridiculous brilliance.

A paper Pancho Villa mustache!

There are a couple of reasons I was excited about that idea. It's easily reproducible, it was totally cheap, I could make one using things I already had at my desk, and it seemed to fit in the same category as a giant sombrero in terms of its cultural relevance.

The best part of the day was when we had a team meeting and everyone wore the paper mustaches I made for them. So there we all were, a room of professionals, sitting in a conference room at a reputable company, paper Pancho Villa mustaches on our faces to celebrate Cinco de Mayo. I laughed really hard at that realization, while we sat there, looking like we were pretending to be Pancho Villa.

The Unabomber

So a couple of years ago, I decided to read the Unabomber's manifesto. I don't remember why, maybe because I like the emotional connection I feel with the word 'manifesto'. It's got that sense of containing radical thought that's probably well-considered, but still rough, meaning that others can come later to refine aspects of it themselves. I'll blame all those literary theory classes I took in college for making me not afraid of reading radical thoughts and finding strong and weak points. But I digress. You've probably gathered I do that frequently.

Anyway, Unabomber manifesto. While a lot of the process and background leading to his argument didn't fit with my experience and realistic predictions, he made a couple of useful points, which I think fit fairly closely to those made by the Transcendentalist writers. Kaczynski and Thoreau had very similar approaches to life: simple and self-reliant.

They both ask the same question, which is one I'm frequently considering. Am I being a capable individual today or am I just a cog in the machine, a mass-producible, fully interchangeable part of the machine?

Most days, I don't even think about it, but when I do, I'm frequently feeling more like a cog in the machine. Unsurprising, since if I felt otherwise, I probably wouldn't be asking the question.

I'm writing this on the bus and there's a guy sitting across from me just grinning like an idiot. I know that just because he's smiling doesn't mean he's dumb. I'd cut the guy some slack if he were reading a book or listening to something on headphones or even talking on his phone. But he's not. He's just sitting there, goofy, vacant smile all the way across his face.

I wonder what people on the bus think of me. I'm sure there's someone like me, taking character notes on the same busses I'm on, and I wonder if I'm any kind of interesting character to them. I try to be fairly low-key, but I'd be curious what kind of a personality I exude.

I'm going to end heee because the guy across from me became the guy next to me and I don't want him to think I was being mean.

Doesn't work too well

I was walking around at work a minute ago and since my hands have to have something to do, they frequently fiddle with the security badge around my neck. I just tried to use my badge like nunchakus while it was around my neck, but I decided that didn't work particularly well. Just thought I'd share.

Under attack

This blog post will probably land me in some hot water with a significant part of my readership in the next couple of days, but this is why I have my own blog that I don't share.

There are times I'd like to just like to be off somewhere serene by myself and not have to deal with the drama that comes with living with other people. Before I get further, let me say that I typically enjoy spending time with the people I choose to spend time with. That's why I choose to spend time with them. This particular displeasure is uncommon for me and is temporary. (Can you tell I'm trying to do some preemptive damage control here?)

But I got attacked this morning for, I was going to say no reason, but there was definitely a reason. I'll even admit it was a valid reason. What bothered me most was that I felt like it was unnecessarily harsh. I was waiting for the referee to come out on the field and make the call, but he didn't, meaning that I'd have to take care of it myself.

There are times to fight back, times when you should just take it because it's stupid and doesn't hurt, and then there are times when you deserve to get smacked. I fit into this last category, but I didn't deserve the reaming that I was getting, so I set some boundaries for what I would listen to and what I wouldn't.

Which made me think of a meeting I was in today. Someone (not the person in charge) was blanketly condemning everyone in the meeting for not being prepared enough and that caused us to "waste time". I was tempted to point out that our little discussion about wasting time was wasting more time than continuing the way we were going, but that wouldn't have gone over well. And I didn't feel like picking a fight because that really would have derailed the meeting and no one likes to be a captive audience to two purposely obnoxious people verbally slugging it out. I was thinking about the other people in the room.

So I'm listening to Ben Harper redo a Led Zeppelin song and it's got me thinking about that kind of thing. I tried to remember if Led Zeppelin remade someone else's songs, but then gave up and decided they probably did. It shows you're a part of the club, educated in that sphere. I can't remember if there's a specific term for that, but I'm sure there is. And I'd be willing to bet it's something obvious, like "referencing." But filmmakers do it all the time, authors frequently refer to previous works, and even the most innovative bands remake someone else's song at some point.

Anyway, some days, I would just like to be a mountain man, but only for a little while. And not today, because it's cold. Maybe I could be a mall man today or OOOH! I know! A Barnes and Noble man. That sounds highly appealing. Or maybe I could see a preview screening of Iron Man today. I thought I saw that there were tickets available around here.