Maybe I'm going to start blogging again here. I don't know. It might be nice to have a quiet place to dilate on things a bit.

I'm trying to think of a few things to say about today and I don't really want to be specific because I don't want to admit that I think I really just spent too much time on Twitter.

things today

Things I did today:

• enjoyed and made visual jokes about a video game on major social media networks
• listened to Orefinder
• did a lot of yard work
• made an offer on a car
• watched a couple Vines
• saw a hummingbird collecting nectar from the flowers of the oleander
• spent a lot of time with the kids: I had the girls most of the early afternoon, and Bugglesworth and I went to the store in the evening
• Maybe some other things, too

Things I read today:

• Nothing.

Tomorrow will be different, I think.

Writing about not writing -- boy does that sound interesting or what

No matter how good my life gets, I will always find something to be discontented about.

Right now, I am feeling deeply constipated with all the stuff I think I should be writing, but scarcely have a moment's attention for. Poems. I have poems I want to write. A dissertation. (Or how about just a dissertation proposal even?) A novel. The next installment of a serialized adventure story I haven't even released the first installment of. Blog posts.

Tweets. Folks, if you want to see me writing, find me on Twitter. That's all the writing I do anymore.

I could actually do most of what I want to do if I got up every morning at 5 AM and wrote for an hour, then wrote half an hour on lunch breaks.

But then that would require that I actually take a lunch break. And that the baby not wake me up three times every night.

Anyway, I have a job and three children and I shouldn't complain. Just somebody please give me some drugs that make it so I don't ever need to sleep.

All of a sudden I am planning product demos and consulting documentation and doing conference calls and fine-tuning document templates and chasing leads. This is the professional life I never thought I would have or even want. But I'm just happy that unlike trying to be a teacher this life never makes me think "Here is the most important thing going on right now and someone recklessly put me in charge of it."

Actually I did have pretty much exactly that thought today while preparing a demo. But that expression of bewildered incompetence is just an approximation of a metaphor of what it means if said about being a liberal arts teacher.

It's a birth announcement!

Still reeling from the stomach bug on Saturday morning, Friday went into labor. That night we brought home a baby (7 lbs. 19 in., in case you want to know). After a couple of hours of sleep, I stumbled through the day, put the kids to bed, and succumbed dramatically to the stomach flu myself. One night of groaning, tooth-gnashing, violently emetic despair and two days of alternately enjoying my new daughter and pursuing the zombie lifestyle of stomach flu recovery later:

It's time for a beer.

Lost Causes

Never underestimate the power of misplacing something important. If you can't find that passport or paycheck, this is your chance to:

• trash out your car
• find all the other important things that have been accumulating in piles all over your house
• organize your file system

Also, remember Hunt's law:

The thing you are looking for is where it belongs, but is invisible until you have looked there x+1 times, where x is the number of times you have to look before you're absolutely sure it's not there.

Bad Index Workaround

Ever tried to study the development of a theme in a book with no index, or a bad one? Here's what I do in this situation:

1. Find the book on Google Books (this works best for books in "snippet view")
2. Search for the term in its various permutations inside the book.

Works for all the books I've tried.

At the end of Greek class yesterday, the prof defended his evaluation of our English-to-Greek sentences by flatly contradicting the textbook and the lexicon. My great accomplishment for the day: I knew he was wrong, but I kept my mouth shut.

The President of the University just got me coffee, chatted about the business of higher ed with me, and offered to find me a job on campus. What? Am I awake yet?

Memoranda

ATTN: whoever stole my bike last night

If you didn't want the helmet, you could have just left it on the patio instead of dropping it in the parking lot and driving your car over it.

ATTN: myself

Get a lock for your next bike, stupid.

Rule of Life

You're not having fun until security shows up looking confused.

Those of you who were concerned about the danger of English-to-Greek translation exercises propelling me beyond the measure of Golden Mediocrity, rest assured that:

• I spent twenty minutes copying out and translating the wrong set of sentences
• The sheet of paper I was working on caught a pool of salad dressing on the table, leaving a healthy grease spot in the upper right corner
• I arrived fifteen minutes late to class to turn them in.
• The sentences came back with their fair share of red ink, but
• I got those bad boys done.

This morning I will be vainly striving to catch up on my flashcard repetitions (I have 400 to get through).

English to Greek sentences. Go!

I woke up before Bugglesworth this morning, and read Wittgenstein in peace for twenty minutes, first thing. It soothes the soul to have done a part of one's work before breakfast.

I'm told that Wittgenstein is either the most or one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. I'm not so sure what it means for a philosopher to be important, but I think he's important to me.

The Mystical Meaning of Cat Excrement

Today is Ash Wednesday, the day when, each year, I wade out unprepared into the shocking obligatory waters of tradition. This year is no different: I have given no thought to Lent, despite my act of foresight of last year, viz. having put a warning of the imminence of this year's Ash Wednesday on the calendar. I do want to do more this year than the bare minimum of barely fasting on the required days. But I also want to do out of some motive more pious than a spiritual agonism.

So what makes sense is for me to pray to be made pious this Lent.

In other news, today is going to be the day when I finally change the cat litter. Now I know that changing the cat litter is something you are supposed to do everyday (unless you don't have a cat), but for me it is not that easy. Changing the litter is a symbol of rising above the everyday squalor of life and taking charge of things for once, and maybe for good. Every time I change the cat litter, I think, maybe, Amos, maybe this is only the first in a long series of days in which I ply the clumpy gravel. Maybe I am pulling myself together this time.

Two People Overheard Agreeing On An Elevator

A: I don't care what the words are, if a song has a good beat, I like it.

B: Yes! It doesn't matter whether it's country or rap, or you're black or white, if the song has good words and a good beat, I like it.

I think they were agreeing that sometimes one thing's being the case does not prevent another thing's being the case.

Bad bad bad

Just when I thought today might be all right, I realized there were not one but two meetings I have to go to scheduled for this evening--one right before I go to work at 6PM and one right after I get back, which means I'm booked from 5PM to at least 8PM, covering the three hours during which Buggle is at his most terrorsome. No one around here is going to be happy about this.

Haste Makes Waste:The First in a Series of Political Allegories

I always think I can do a bunch of things at once because I've always been able to do it in video games. But the truth is that one thing at a time is hard enough for me and two things at once is just out of the question. Last night while clearing the table after a delicious dinner, I found myself standing in the kitchen with two Tupperware containers of chickpea salad stacked one on top of the other, all afire to seal the top
Tupperware and refrigerate both. Friday, who had her hands full with garbage, asked me to open the trash for her. I obliged without a thought for the precarious balance keeping the salad safely stacked. The consequence you have no doubt divined: I scored a clumsy but solid shot in the good old game of throwing Tupperware into the trash.

I think my wife might have been angry that I wasted her good cooking had I not explained to her that throwing away perfectly good leftovers is real good for the economy.

Questions About The Economy

Would Wall Street have any money if no one trusted faceless inhuman monsters (e.g. "banks") to invest their money? If Wall Street didn't have any money, would the rest of us have more of it? If we invested in ourselves (e.g. by acquiring and developing resources for production, by using extra income to buy time to develop our skills and learn to create value), would we be freer, more independent, more capable, more productive, and therefore wealthier? If we invested in endeavors we believed in, would the world look more like our dreams?

Bring on the Student Loans!

I knew the Department of Education had to be good for something.