Tabard’s in!

I’ve been feeling like I’ve become personally and creatively stagnant over the last couple years. I need some change, even if it’s just symbolic to start. I think I might back up everything here and scrap Ti! in favor of another domain I own (the symbolic change, growing/up/moving on to something new). I’ve got a working idea what I’d like to do with it, and a secondary site too, actually, both ideas with more direction than just me (not) talking about everyday life, which doesn’t seem to differ much day-to-day. :/

That sounds a little depressing outside the confines of my skull. :p But seriously. I haven’t written or drawn anything in months, and don’t have any real &91;internal&93; motivation to. I haven’t even been able to make myself sit down and just read much in the last 6-12 months. (That trend was enough to make me sit down and say, “Wait a second…”) And when I do actually get it in my head to do something creative, it feels like my attention is strung between about eleventy-billion things at once, and takes what feels like an impossible effort to pick just one, so my attention span goes kinda haywire and nothing gets done. The only thing that seems to be able to hold my attention is web code/design, and when that happens, it’s like I can’t do anything else. My super multi-tasking abilities! They are waning! >.<

In a related aside, I’ve been considering seeing a professional to talk about the possibility that I might have adult ADD/ADHD, and seeing what sort of (non-chemical) forms of treatment I could do. I feel generally okay, but it’s seriously frustrating when it seems like all I have to do is start doing something (drawing, writing, whatever), but I can’t even make myself do that. And I have some amazing friends, and follow some amazing people online, who always seem to be doing something creative or in the middle of some project, and I feel like I’m missing out somehow.

Bleh. I didn’t intend to get into it, so I’m gonna stop now. :p Don’t worry. There’ll be advance warning so anyone who might actually follow this place can drop by and say hi. :)

I had a great, if not terribly exciting birthday.

Saturday night, Paul and I went to an awesome laid-back party (really late — like 11:30 :p) where we hung out and listened to a couple friends spin and sat in the dark playing with things that lit up and blinked and were generally visually interesting. Got home/to bed around 7:30am, and commenced to sleeping until about 4. Got up, putzed around with Paul, and just enjoyed doing nothing for a bit, then got dressed and headed over to one of his brothers’ place. His niece was turning 4 (another Taurus!), and his family put my name on the cake too, and I got a pointy birthday hat and everything. :) His parents gave me a flip-cookbook of recipes for the crockpot my mom gave me around Christmastime (I’d mentioned it the last time we were over for dinner). I can’t wait to try some of them out! Paul’s family is awesome (and OMGhuge), and we didn’t end up leaving until around 8, then went back to home where I spent a little while recovering from what had turned into a splitting headache, then lounged around in muh underoos while we snuggled and watched the Final Fantasy 7 movie Advent Children.

So, yanno, like I said, not the most exciting birthday, but awesome anyway. Got to party a little, and spend lots of time with the man I love, and his crazy/awesome/ginormous family. I think the only thing that was even remotely disappointing was that the massage studio I went to last year, and had a membership to, closed its doors May 3rd, and I procrastinated too long and didn’t get a chance to check out other places to get a birthday rubdown. But hey, there are 364 other days in the year, and at least two other studios/spas within walking distance of the new place! :D

April was crazy to say the least. Lots of ups and downs, and one or two full-out crashes. -.- Bullet list?

Ups

• XKCD’s linux-flavored April Fools’ Day website kept me entertained for a large portion of the day, and they archived it so you can still play with it!
• Started working on color website. (Which has since stalled for the most part, but I’m still poking at it occasionally :p)
• Signed papers/moved in to a new place with Paul within walking distance from my work, in a really nice part of town. (I’m totally okay with being a geek living in Yuppieville. The fact that people are willing to still be walking around at dusk makes me happy.)
• Went to an MC Frontalot show, and it was awsm. (If you don’t know, you better ask someone.) Got tshirt. Got pics. <3
• Ordered/received Catherynne Valente’s Palimpsest and The Orphan’s Tales, which I’d been eyeing for months.
• Ordered/received stuff from BPAL for the first time. So much win in such a little box!
• Got a pair of bubblegum pink Converse One Stars.
• Saw Kick Ass on Paul’s birthday, and it was.
• Got the refund check from the old apt complex (for the break-in shenanigans), and it was TWO months, not the one we’d actually agreed on! O.O (They also rented a Uhaul and moved all my stuff for me, and I didn’t have to deal with any of the cleanup or anything afterward. Turned in my keys the next day.)

Downs

• Found out ex-boyfriend got engaged, barely a year after our breakup. Was not incredibly surprised, but still felt like I’d been punched in the gut.
• Had like two or three weeks straight where every time I ordered food somewhere something was wrong with my order. (Seriously. Every. time.)
• Developed the 2nd sty I’ve ever had, and the second in about 6 months. Stress induced maybe? Argh.
• [All in the same week:]
• Old apartment was broken into (sort of) the day after we started moving stuff out. Turns out it was caused by a huge and v. stupid mistake on the parts of both the leasing office and maintenance. (Got most of my stuff back. A couple small/mostly insignificant things disappeared for good, but I got all the important stuff back.)
• Paid about $320 for two tickets. (Which were completely my fault. Couldn’t stupid hurt when it’s NOT me? :p)
• Paycheck was shorted a vacation day. (Got this worked out within minutes of realizing what had happened, but STILL. Heart attack much?)
• My two most frustrating customers both came in for work and commenced to driving me crazy all week.
• [Seriously. I don’t think I’ve been so stressed out since I was in the military. >.<]

So yeah, April? Fired. :p Though the end eased up a bit on the PITA, and so far May’s not looking too bad. (Not that that’s a stretch after last month.) I still have no idea what I’m doing for my 30th birthday (in just over a week OMG O.o), but fun will be had whatever it is. We’re settling into the new place. Paul and I went to Ikea last night and bought a couple dressers because we seriously needed them. Thinking about maybe getting a kitten. I think Bellum could use the company. Also thinking that I would love the next place I move into to be a house with my name on the deed. We’ll see. :)

Tell me if you find this as interesting as I do:

Health Care has been in the news constantly for months — a year or more even! And now it’s been “dealt with” and suddenly all’s quiet on the HC front. There’s the occasional blip about someone suing someone over constitutionality, but it’s not Big News anymore. HC reform has become part of the paradigm. The herd is at rest again.

But wait! What dark shape looms on the horizon! Immigration? And what’s that? There’s a drug war going on? And gang activity on the Mexican border? People are dying?!

How convenient is this timing? That we’re just starting to hear about these border attacks and this huge drug war right now? If this has been an ongoing thing, and such a huge issue, why haven’t the news hounds been chewing away at it before now? This metaphorical bone should be gnawed to pieces already.

I’m still kind of gathering my thoughts on it, but it just seems funny to me; not funny HA-HA, but funny Hmm. :/

Okay, maybe not quite like beer pong, but just as strangely entertaining. The “we” referred to here, is myself and my pal Dr. Billy, with my boyfriend to “referee” ocassionally. I know it’s been a while since I’ve updated this thing, and I’ll get around to an actual update at some point. But this has to be shared.

We three were just sitting around chatting late last Sunday night, and I absently tossed a ball to Billy. It bounced off the table, and he caught it, of course (because he’s not just a doctor — he’s also kind of a ninja), but not before it sent a small stack of cd’s sliding. What happened next was made simultaneously of both win and lose. It was 2am before we knew it (with both Paul and I needing to be up for work in roughly 6-7 hours).

The equipment:

• A clear, flat surface that you and your opponent can sit on either side of. We used the wooden coffee table in the living room. It’s about 4 feet square. so we had about 6-8 feet between us.
• At least one ball. This is a photo is of what we used. I found them (randomly) at a Borders bookstore, and bought three (because the ball is one of the world’s original kickass toys). More than one makes play a little faster if one gets away from you. I’d recommend rubber for the easiest bounce, and to avoid damaging the playing surface.
• Some cd’s you don’t care about, in an odd number. Conveniently enough, one of the roommates uses old AOL cd’s as coasters, so we were set (and had, in fact, begun play before we even knew it existed).

The idea is that you bounce the ball back and forth across the table in an attempt to knock the cd’s off on your opponent’s side, and the one with the most knock-offs wins. And it’s not as easy as it might sound. Seriously, we did this for at least two hours, and it was hilarously fun/ny the entire time. Also, my arms are still a little sore. O.o And you can still socialize while you play, which is kind awesome. Err…well, between trying to take your opponent’s head off with a fastball, and dodging the curve on their return, I mean. (I apparently have a little bit of a competitive streak. Who knew?)

I’d like to note that the idea of making this a drunk party game is kind of amusing, but I’m pretty sure that would just end in tears. And broken windows. And lamps. And electronics, and anything fragile in any way. So yeah. This is your disclaimer saying don’t be dumb if you want to try this out, and I’m not taking the blame if you break your mom’s best china. :)

Afterward, we did a bit of gamer-geek brainstorming and figured that this can be played with a varying number of people, and in multiple forms. There’s the one-on-one version we played, with multiple cd’s in an odd number. Then the party version of one-on-one, with one cd, and the loser switches out (with optional championship match after initial-round eliminations). And there’s potential for different versions of two on two or free-for-all, as well as the “adult” (i.e., “strip”) edition.

So, uuuh… My birthday’s coming up in May, and I think a RouterBall tourney just might be an awesomely fun way to ring in the big 3-oh. Any challengers? :)

I’ve had this idea for years: A website about color. It was inspired by my ex-husband, who is colorblind, and was originally conceived as a tongue-in-cheek explanation of color for men. The general idea was to go through all the random and weird colors that, stereotypically, men don’t get — magenta vs. pink? off-white vs. cream? peuce, anyone? — and to give amusing visual descriptions of them.

This idea resurfaces every now and then, and over time it has developed past simple humor, as my interest in the subject of color has evolved. These days, I want to include things like explanation and discussion of color theory, and the symbolism/meaning behind different colors and how it’s applied in the world around us. All these elements together would make a website that, to me at least, would be informative but still interesting and fun. So where the heck is it?

That’s the problem, see.

I can’t seem to get past the feeling that this is not going to be a small undertaking, and if I’m going to do it, I want to do it right. Add the fact that I always get stuck on where or how to start, and voilà! No website! :p

I’d really appreciate some thoughts on this. Would you find this sort of website interesting? Where would you start with a project like this? What other features, if any, would you want to see?

This entry has been sitting mostly-done in my drafts for a couple days now, but amusingly enough, “anachronism” popped up as today’s Merriam-Webster Word of the Day. I think someone’s trying to tell me to get off my keister and finish this up ;)

You will often hear people say things like “I should’ve been born in the sixties,” or the middle ages, or one of various other eras in history. It’s not uncommon for people to feel like living anachronisms. But I can’t be the only one who feels like they might have been born too early. I find myself genuinely baffled sometimes that technology hasn’t yet seemed to have caught up with where my brain tells me it’s supposed to be.

The particular instance that prompted this entry was while reading “What the Hashtag?” an entry by Meghan Wilker on Geek Girls Guide (ironically, my sense of time is stuck in the future, and my general online reading is a couple months behind); specifically the section subtitled “What does each hashtag mean?” where she introduces the readers to What the Hashtag, a “user-editable encyclopedia for hashtags found on Twitter.” She says, “…this approach of asking the public what [hashtags] each mean is the only way it can be realistically managed.”

And immediately, my brain says, “Why isn’t there a program handling that? You know, one that processes each instance of a hashtag and understands them logically and linguistically, and outputs the gist of each, as well as divergent/aberrant meanings based on cases of irregular usage?”

Yeah.

Then I think about it with my “Now Brain,” and I assume (without any personal knowledge of AI programming, of course) that it’s probably because that sort of program would require huge physical and intellectual/programming resources and likely lots of funding. But even Now Brain thinks this technology has to be out there somewhere, maybe in a research lab or something. Then Future Brain chimes in again. No no, this kind of thing should be so ubiquitous, people don’t even think about it anymore. Where the heck is this technology?!

This is not the first thing Future Brain and Now Brain have disagreed about, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. Generally, it has something to do with technology that Future Brain says should be so pervasive as to be trivial, invisible…and isn’t, (and Now Brain grumbles about how this disparity inevitably impacts my bank account because things are expensive when they aren’t commonplace). And this is more than just a thought that crosses my mind occassionally. It’s an odd sensation that I feel at once in both my gut and my head, like my senses are telling me the wrong things. Very weird. Usually that part of it only lasts a moment, and then it turns into something almost completely intellectual.

Do you ever get this feeling? Like you’re out of place in time? Share in the comments! You are not alone! ;)

Another One Word. I’ve actually decided to go with the side-blog. These and stuff like them will be posted there in the future.

So many aspects to every facet of life, the world. Like a fractal that starts with one thought and spreads outward connecting everything, everyone, everywhere, even though outside our perception. Find the connections and you have the keys to everything.

One Word
One Word. Sixty seconds.
Don’t think. Just write.