Positively Glorious!

So, like many people, I’m finding it hard to update my blog during this year’s Solstice season (with a nod to less popular holidays like “Christmas” and “New year”). Much of the reason is that I was traveling to the home of my my parents-in-law for our annual holiday journey. There, I did foolish things like “spend time with family” rather than properly glued to my laptop like any self-respecting geek would be. Recently I got home and have yet to get back into the swing, work being what it is not and all.

Blah blah, yada yada. Result: 11 days with no post.

Not good for someone planning on trying on NaBloPoMo for size in January.

There are plenty of things I could have written about. But I’m taking pages out of many other books and saving them for when I have nothing to write about.

I need to practice, so for the next 3 days I’m going to start posting shorter, if saying less.

Then in January, I’ll come out swinging. You ain’t SEEN empty-headed yet, buddy.

Cami Kaos wrote a post about bedtime, and it got me thinking about possibilities.

Wait. Scheiße, that’s not right. Let me start again…

Cami Kaos wrote a post about her daughter’s bedtime, and it got me thinking about possibilities for when Jessie and I have kids. We’ve been talking about having them lately- or at least at some point in the future- and I have to admit a bit of fear about the reduction of my already too reduced personal time.

That fear is furthered by statements from even blissfully happy parents like Cami, statements such as:

“She didn’t want to use the bathroom, wash her hands, brush her teeth, put on her pajamas or get in bed. She did want bed time stories. Lots and lots of bedtimes stories (which she totally didn’t get, I only read her one story because I’m a hard ass that way).”

That’s the point when I start thinking “Man, having kids would suck.”

But just today I was listening to a great Irish air by Mary Bergin on Last.FM and started to wonder if I was just flat out wrong about that thought. Continue Reading »

I was asleep at the wheel on this one, and should have posted this yesterday, or at least before the end of the work day today. I didn’t see it until checking my feeds at day’s end and noticing that Kathleen McDade had already posted it. Still, I’ll get it out because it’s a really cool idea.

Here’s the scoop: Every unique visitor to Jack Bogdanski’s Blog causes a $1 donation to the Oregon Food Bank. From the announcement page:

One of our readers, Mr. Fearless, has pledged to keep donating a buck to the OFB for every visit to this blog today — through 5,000 unique visits.

So Check out Jack Bog’s Blog.

Okay, I just wrote a post about being mean. It was actually addressed to someone specific, but that person will unfortunately never read it. Even if they did, they would never conceptualize that I could be talking about them.¹

It is kind of a negative feeling post. I mean, I’m basically complaining to someone who will never wake up and get it. Pointless. I wrote it anyway because it’s a good message to take home for everyone. You are who the world sees. The rest of us do not hear your internal monologue. We see your actions, we hear what you say out loud. We are affected directly and indirectly by your presence.

It’s a fact that mean, arrogant or selfish people should think about. But it’s also a fact that nice people should remember.

So, here’s another post written to a specific person who, I believe, is finally starting to get it. But it’s also written to the rest of you people who are never convinced. It’s odd to me, but there are actually a large number of people who are really very nice, and don’t know that they are nice. They are somehow convinced that they are mean.

It’s a strange world.

Look “actually nice but think you are somehow mean” people, I know that you think you are selfish and that you want things for yourself. I even know that you sometimes sneak a bigger piece for yourself because you want more and that you never noticed that the person you snuck from was giving you a bigger piece anyway. I know that you often try to be nasty to people who are nasty to you because it’s just not right to be nasty.

The thing is. The rest of the world doesn’t see your internal monologue. The rest of the world doesn’t see that you are desparately trying to be selfish and nasty. They only see what you actually do.

The rest of the world loves you- maybe more than you do.

Strangely, unexplainably, the rest of the world loves you- maybe more than you do. They see you giving things to other people. They see you smiling. They see you being- or at least acting- nice.

Yeah, you can say that you’re selfish and don’t care about other people enough to buy them Christmas presents. You’re too stingy to actually spend money on them. They’re not important enough for that. So you’ll do something cheap like make them something by hand. You’ll just whip up something so that you can say you gave them something, right?

I mean, if they were important to you, you’d buy them something. But they’re not, so you’ll try to be stingy and do something like, oh, bake them cookies. Because somehow, baking for 2-3 days straight makes you feel like you are being a really mean person.

Look, seriously, read my last post and turn it all around. It still applies.

Ask yourself the question: “Am I baking cookies because I’m too stingy to buy my so-called friends something with actual money because they are just not that important to me?”

Or, maybe, are you baking cookies because… well… because you honestly rock?

I’ll tell you a secret: We- the people who are sitting here eating your cookies- don’t really care.

You know why? Because we’d rather have the cookies anyway.

But deep down, in that nice part of yourself that you try to hide, you already knew that, didn’t you?

1. I know this, because I’ve said it all directly to the person in the past, and the person has assumed I was talking about someone else. [↩]

I’m addressing this to the world at large, because the people who need to read it— mean, selfish, and/or arrogant people— would likely not think it pertains to them.

Try this at home:

Put aside all those things that you think about yourself. All your  justified motivations for doing things. All those reasons that you are forced to do things that negatively affect other people, even though you don’t really want to.

Put those aside, step out of it all, and view yourself as the world views you. Continue Reading »

We’ve been praying to Ullr and Skaði for weeks that they would bring us snow.¹ Finally it’s happened. We’re at about 4 inches and it’s not stopping!

Here’s our front yard and back yards in the glory of snow. We’re still about 4 hours from peak snowfall here in Hood River, so Jess and I are pretty excited about what’s yet to come.

I’ll tell you what’s next to come: skis! Continue Reading »

1. And by “praying” I mean drinking homemade mead and moaning “Man, I wish it would snow!” [↩]

So, I’m going to try to do something that I may or may not succeed at: I’m going to tap my shift key repeatedly.

Okay, I won’t try that, but I am going to try something else, I’m going to try to pull of pretending to be as good as one of my blogging heros: Cami Kaos.

What am I going to do? Dress like Sean Young in Blade Runner?

No, I’m going to try to write a short post, that reaches no conclusion, never even comes close to approaching a suggestion that a resolution is possible, and yet that shows a heartbreakingly intimate view of my humanity.

Well, I’m going to try, at least. Continue Reading »

So, this Thanksgiving Jessica ran off and left me. Luckily, I had friends that I could turn to, so I prepared to make my signature squash pie. Luckily, as she so often does, Freyja had other plans for me because the Goddess of fertility didn’t make the squash people have babies. Not finding any good pie squashes, I decided to buy cranberries planning to make a sauce. Still she planned, and my friends didn’t want cranberries. So, faced with a large amount of these small tart jewels, I had to come up with a use for them. Since I was in the middle of making a large amount of mead, I finally realized what Freyja wanted: cranberry mead!¹

This is actually my first berry melomel, although I’ve made a blackberry mead using blackberry honey. It’ll be interesting to see how the brewing of berries goes because cranberries have one of the highest pectin concentrations ever; thus, I’m guessing that either this mead will clarify beautifully (not be cloudy) or it’ll be damn near opaque. Continue Reading »

1. Quite honestly, she probably wanted Lingonberry mead, since Freyja’s from Northern Europe, but I imagine she’ll take what she can get. [↩]

CyborgCamp PDX? No thanks.

I mean, considering that I’m an anthropologist, a programmer and a geek, you’d think that I would want to go to something that bills itself as “An unconference on the future of humans and technology.” You’d think that this is the kind of thing that would be right up my alley. You’d think that I would ignore whatever social obligations I’d have in order to attend.

Not me.

Why? Because it’ll probably suck anyway. Continue Reading »

I found myself in an interesting and unexpected position earlier today. I want to talk about this position because it’s important in the context of The Live Web. But first, a little background.

Iterasi’s Woes

Earlier today, I realized that I’d fallen a bit behind on reading some of my RSS feeds. While I like to pretend that I’m not, I have to admit that I’m a bit of an information junky, so when I realize that I haven’t been reading, I want to catch up quickly. I hit the normal stops- which are mostly personal blogs- before swinging by one of the Social Web’s “watering hole” equivalents. it was there, on Silicon Florist, that I first saw the news about Iterasi’s layoffs. Continue Reading »