Soul-Devouring Worry
¤ Being "wanded".

Curse of the Day:
¤ May all of your dreams appear to be coming true.

I'm leaving Tuesday morning, early, and taking up my spare computer to live at her house, and she's got internet access from there, though it's cursed dial up.  But we'll be busy with um... stuff, and blogging here might be accordingly sporadic. I suspect I'll just be filing shorter updates with very little news, since I won't be surfing much/at all.  Once I'm back in a week I'll do some catch up and overall vacation discussion.

I'm also itching to write some fiction, and I need to prioritize that over all other activities not immediately required for my continued survival/ability to pay the rent/Malaya romance, so I might be skipping some days of the blog update even once I'm back home.  I nearly did yesterday, as the urge to write struck me, however it was just too late at the time and I instead spent 45 minutes on the blog and crashed.

I am hoping to write some while I'm visiting, and I'll probably be doing the blog as well.  I might just write up impressions of each day, like a diary, and then save it to organize and post in a longer article type thing once I return.  I don't know what I'll write about though. Don't think we're going to be doing all that much "tourist stuff", so I doubt I'll be writing about our ferry visit to Alcatraz or driving over the Golden Gate Bridge or whatever.  And what we will be doing I don't think I'll be writing about at all. *cough*

Malaya does have Internet access, of course, but it's just tin can and string dial up, which we'll be dueling for to update our blogs (Yes she has a blog.  No I can't give you the link to it.) and check our emails.  Now if Blizzard can just keep from coughing up the damn v1.10 patch for another week, (And they can, according to the Bill Roper E3 interview question I just posted on the D2 site.) I'll hardly be missed.

I'd say my pets will miss me, but I'm not that delusional, and no, they really won't. The snakes don't know if I'm alive or dead other than when I come bearing a thawed rodent carcass, and the rats (the non-frozen ones) like to get out and scamper and like to sniff fingers, but mostly they like to sleep and eat.  And if they are given a reasonable amount of food, they're fine without ever having any human interaction, since they have each other to play sleep with.

Today I must run a ton of errands and buy stuff and get files transferred to the old computer and pack it up and pack all of my clothing and so on and so on.  Malaya has it 10x worse, what with tons of unpacking still to do in her new condo, and still needing to get food, get kitty, get a deadbolt installed on her front door, get clothing, get her hair done, etc. Of course she doesn't have to get up at 7am to get to the airport 90 minutes before an 80 minute flight.

Security is nice and all, and I'd rather not end up incinerated as my hijacked plane impacts the Empire State Building at 500 MPH, but it's sort of annoying to figure I'll actually be waiting in the airport longer than I'll actually be on the plane.  Assuming you aren't a white person with typically object-spoiled offspring, and bringing along two children under the age of 5, you seldom spend longer getting into your car than you do driving to your destination.

Of course your car can't travel at 500 MPH or 30,000 feet in the air, now can it?

Some news.

¤ Here's a real winner.

Hoskins was on a boat just off the beach in the 600 block of Gulfview Boulevard on May 26, 2002, when he started blowing the boat's horn, then dropped his shorts to his ankles and started gyrating, police said.

About 100 people were on the beach, including many children, witnesses said. When adults asked Hoskins to stop, he cursed and swiveled his hips even more, police said.

The funny part is someone got him on video tape, with a distinctive dragon tattoo on his chest, and got his boat number also.  The cops tracked him down, of course. He sounds like a real upstanding citizen too.

Hoskins also is facing unrelated charges of sale and possession of marijuana, driving with a suspended license and careless driving, court records show.

¤ A guy has a heart attack and literally drops dead inside a 24 Hour Fitness.  The paramedics come immediately, but leave the corpse there, I guess since he was already dead. What happened to the old, "shock him again!" heart paddle stuff?  Anyway, the weird part follows:

...his body was left for two hours.

Authorities say the body was covered and the area restricted but club members say it was within their view during their workouts.

So I'm wondering, is that motivation or not?  I  mean you're in there on a treadmill and you're looking at a corpse with a couple of towels over it. Are you running faster to get into better shape so you won't die?  Or do you just want to go home and never work out again, since you'll just drop dead on a treadmill yourself, someday?

¤ Here's a weird study. Racists who talk to the sort of people they hate do worse on mental tests afterwards.

The study included 59 white college students. They were given a test to assess the degree of racial bias in their thinking. The students then spent time talking with either a black or a white person and afterwards were given a test that measured their ability to concentrate on a challenging mental task.

The more racially biased the students were, the worse they did on the mental task after speaking with a black person. But racially biased students who spoke with a white person, even if they discussed racially sensitive issues, had no decline in mental function.

"When you have to control your behavior, it takes a lot of energy. And if you expend energy in a social interaction, then you don't have so much left over to do something else," researcher Nicole Shelton says in a news release..

My first thought is that now I have something on which to blame the idiotic behavior of most racists I know.  I mean yeah, I blame it on them for being racist and stupid, but now when some of the white boys at work come in with some especially stupid comment, and follow it up with Rush-aping incoherent babblings about "towel-heads", I'll figure they talked to some security guard or something on the way in, and haven't yet recovered.

ooce's latest update is a good one.  Apparently the NY Times ran an article about blogs, and one of the ones they profiled was hers. This resulted in an influx of clue-deprived non-blog readers, who clearly thought they were slumming by viewing a blog, and therefore felt compelled to express their delusions of superiority to the slumlord.  Dooce herself, in this case. As her update relates:

High-minded Times reader Leslie Morsillo, in an email titled “can’t help myself” says: “Found my way to your site via an article on blogs, so yours may be my first AND my last. My only suggestion is that you lose the camera, at least until you have something to say — the photographs have all the wit and soul of a Hallmark card. That’s the truth, sorry.”

To which I responded, sincerely: “does sending email like this make you feel better about yourself?”

High-minded Times reader Leslie Morsillo then responded: “why yes, doctor, thank you for asking. how much better do you feel by publicizng your impatience with the world and posting rambling insults to total strangers? for all the effort you put into your website, you should aim higher. in the meantime, go give blood.”

Why can't I get mail like that?  I would kill for stupidity of that nature.  Reading a blog advertised as a personal one, and then complaining to the person running it that they're posting too much personal stuff is just astonishingly dumb.  Do you go to McDonalds and insult them for serving hamburgers, when you wanted Chinese food?  Dumbass.

Thusly motivated, I hunted up the NYTimes article, which you can read here, assuming you're registered to view the NYTimes site. If not, bring two forms of ID. The article is mostly about how people write things about friends or family on their blogs, thinking they can speak freely, and then get into trouble when the friends or family end up reading it somehow.  Total nitpicking honesty is never a real good idea about friends/family. The Dooce portion details the double whammy she suffered by being too honest and candid on her site:

Heather Armstrong, a 27-year-old Web designer from Utah whose blog is at www.dooce.com, might be the ultimate example of blogging gone awry. Her parents are devout Mormons, she said, but because they are also technophobes, she felt perfectly comfortable publishing an entry on her site in which she harshly criticized her Mormon upbringing.

Unfortunately for Ms. Armstrong, her brother in Seattle stumbled across her Web site that very day and alerted her parents to the entry. After that, Ms. Armstrong said, "all hell broke loose." "Next to my parents getting divorced 20 years ago," Ms. Armstrong said, "it was the worst thing that ever happened to my family. It was shocking for everyone."

Ms. Armstrong's run-in with the perils of self-publishing did not end there. She also wrote about her job and her co-workers in her blog, often hyperbolically.

When her bosses were alerted that Ms. Armstrong was writing about her office life, they fired her, she said. She is now much more careful about what she publishes in her blog, and she had a word of caution for bloggers who write furtively about others. "If you're publishing under your own name, they'll find out," she said. "I was extremely naïve."

So um, yeah.

Your bosses know that you and all of the other employees spend much of your free time talking shit about them, and they are in the main office eating donuts and talking shit about you in return.  Which is all good, until something gets into virtual print, when it becomes much more formal and part of a record.  And remember, you're (most likely) the employee; keep in mind who can fire whom.

Funny how it's always so much easier to give advice than to take it.  Even when it's your own advice.

The article also discusses why so many bloggers talk about such odd stuff in their personal lives.

Indeed, for many bloggers being noticed seems to be the point. John M. Grohol, a psychologist in the Boston area who has written about bloggers, said they often offered intimate details of their lives as a ploy to build readership.

"It's like, `How do I get people to read this?' " he said. "Then you want them to keep reading it. It becomes a snowball rolling downhill that becomes very rewarding for the blogger because they're getting feedback from their friends and from random folks."

So um, yeah.

I was going to write something this morning about how eager I am to at last go spend time with Malaya, and how I'm leaving Tuesday morning, in just over 30 hours.  And how we're both withholding sex (from ourselves) for several days in advance.  And how that's not ordinarily a big deal, except that ordinarily we're not spending a couple/several hours engaged in relatively hot phone chat of a speculative, predictive, and tantalizing nature with the person on earth we most desire sexually.  Which is a very long way to say that I am so fucking horny right now.

But that sort of borderline-TMI disclosure would just be a cheap "love me daddy" ploy to get and keep more readers, and therefore I would never stoop to it.  Why next I'd be writing condom or sexual position reviews with Malaya, or something outrageous like that.  If you can imagine!

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