Category: Musings

Posted on

#madwriting

The title comes from a couple of female scientists on Twitter who… I’m not sure if they had writer’s block or needed inspiration to sit down and write or what—all I know is that they came up with the idea of “#madwriting”, which basically consists of a bunch of people sitting down and writing as much as they can in 30-minute bursts (and they’re very forgiving if you run past that time). In the past, I’d been okay just watching the Twitter updates, seeing the “And….. write!” tweets, etc. This time, I decided to join in, if for no other reason than to say I did it.

There are actually a few good reasons for me to participate. Given that a lot of the people doing this are trying to write papers or theses, I could have used the burst of speed and energy to work on a paper for school. Unfortunately, I don’t have a topic to write about—there was a long list and we were supposed to send the prof a note with our top three choices (plus an alternate or two… as many as we wanted, really). I made my list and sent it to him on Tuesday night. The problem is that I sent it to the wrong e-mail address.

Consequently, he never got the message and I still don’t know what the topic of my paper is. Shit.

But like I said, I wanted to participate. Plus this is a good way for me to not do the reading that’s sitting next to me. What’s one or two hundred pages between friends? A lot to do before Tuesday night, really, but who’s counting?

So since I can’t write about school, what have I got? I dunno, but along with the paper and thesis writers, there are bloggers out there who manage to come up with material for their 30-minute #madwriting session, so I damn well better be able to come up with something.

Hmmm… I suppose I could write about soccer today, but I imagine people are bored with reading about my epic struggles with playing and playing through injuries. I’m not sure why my shoulder is continuing to hurt, but I’ll be seeing a doctor or chiropractor or someone soon. I sent in a form to the insurance company indicating that I would have future expenses, so I imagine my body will be ready for treatment as soon as the insurance is.

But the weird part is that the shoulder bothering me isn’t the one I went to the doctor about—I strained the muscles in my neck and my left rotator cuff. You’d think that was the problem area. All the physical therapy has helped that side heal pretty well; the problem has been my right shoulder. There’s a thick muscle fiber in there that’s just a giant lump and doesn’t want to go away. Consequently, when I try to take long throw-ins, it protests. Loudly.

I made one or two that were fairly short during the game, which wasn’t a big deal. The first and the last… I put a lot of distance on those and came out right away. My shoulder was not pleased. After standing on the sideline for a couple minutes, it felt okay again, but I don’t want that to be a chronic issue. It’s bad enough that I occasionally twist my knee the wrong way and have to step off the field for a bit—I can’t have more parts of me breaking down.

Thankfully, my fingers are still doing okay, so I can sit here in bed with my feet propped up and laptop in my lap, typing away for no good reason with no specific goal in mind. Man, that pisses me off… I wish I’d gotten in touch with the prof earlier so I could be working on a paper.

Then again, this is kind of typical for me. Back at Kenyon as an undergrad, I’d get close to deadlines on papers and find any excuse I could to write someone other than my paper for class. Hell, that’s when I’d be most productive. “I’ve got a 10-page paper due tomorrow afternoon—time to write another essay about absolutely nothing!” Dunno why that’s the case. Maybe it’s because I didn’t like the work very much, didn’t have the focus needed to work on something that took brain power… riiiiight.

But right now, I have reading that I should be doing, so this isn’t that much of a transition. I suppose nowadays, I’d be more likely to surf around on YouTube or Facebook instead of writing—less brainpower required, more entertainment. I suppose that could be part of the issue. More immediate returns for writing fun stuff (it’s fun), whereas doing actual work isn’t as much fun. I don’t enjoy it as much. Especially when the book I’m reading is boring and putting me to sleep.

Why didn’t I get to bed until 5:00 in the morning? Paradigms. It could be intriguing at times, but when the author started making predictions about the future, that’s when I started to fade. When I’m lying down comfortably while trying to read, it becomes less of a “tired head bob” and more of a “tired book flop”. Eventually, I had to give up and start doing some work on here.

Yes, that’s right, I’m still working on the blog. Not so much anymore (see: this entry), but I still have plenty of entries that could use tags, especially in the “Beauty and the Geek” category. I want to break things up into seasons as opposed to just “Beauty and the Geek” and make the readers sift through everything to find stuff. That’s right, I’m doing it all for you.

So I spent time tagging as well as copying and pasting entries into Word files on my laptop. I started doing that many years ago, which came in handy when shawnbakken.com went down and I lost everything. I still had all the entries backed up on my hard drive, so while it took me a long time to finally get everything reposted (see: earlier this month), it got done. Same thing last night/this morning: copy and paste the content so I’d have it available offline. Tag, then write down the entry dates in a Notebook file (which stretches back to 2003). It doesn’t sound that bad until you consider I had to start midway through PerBloWriMo. Half of December plus all of this year… I think I went through 70 entries. Took a couple hours, fried a couple brain cells, didn’t require any reading from Paradigms. Awesome.

And that’s time. 30 minutes of… I might call it blatherings, but I thought “Musings” sounded like a better category title. Regardless, I haven’t the slightest idea of everything I wrote in here. Hopefully, at least some of it makes sense. If not… I could be in trouble for that paper due Tuesday night.

Posted on

Kick cancer’s ass!

It happened again. I read someone’s status message on Facebook that talked about people having a thousand wishes.

All of us have a thousand wishes. To be thinner, to be bigger, have more money, have a cool car, a day off, a new phone, etc. A cancer patient only has one wish, to kick cancer’s ass. I know that 97% of you won’t post this as your status, but my friends will be the 3% that do. In honor of someone who died, is fighting cancer or even had cancer, post this for at least one hour.

I wrote a snarky comment about someone I know who has cancer—he has a second wish, which is to get rid of a bunch of squirrels that have invaded an apartment building’s walls. Honestly, though, this version of “one wish” bothers me a lot more than the military wishing to come home, probably because it’s more personal.

I know a lot of people who have cancer, have survived cancer, have died from cancer and I’m sure a lot of people I know now will develop cancer. (Sad, but probably true.) One thing I can absolutely guarantee: they have not all narrowed their lives down to the single wish of kicking cancer’s ass.

Surgery is rough. Radiation is tough. Chemotherapy suuuuucks. That’s what I’m assuming—I know it doesn’t sound pleasant. But between cancer treatments, you know what those people do? They don’t just sit at home and wish their cancer would go away. No, they leave the hospital and they live. I imagine they appreciate life more than most of us because they’ve been given a clock, a stopwatch, a fuse that says, “You’ve got a limited amount of time left.” They can be cured or go into remission—they can kick cancer’s ass—but if that wish isn’t granted, the clock is ticking.

But to quote Monty Python, “I’m not dead yet!” The clock hasn’t stopped ticking. They still have opportunities to go out and enjoy life. They still have time to make wishes, achieve them, make more wishes, achieve them (things like growing hair during chemo and radiation may be out of their reach) and the cycle continues until they die. The same thing goes for all of us, really. We can have the same wishes and dreams—we just don’t have the same predetermined finish line.

So if any of you reading this are cancer sufferers, cancer survivors or cancer casualties (if it’s the last one, you probably have some explaining to do), I wish you the best. I hope you can kick cancer’s ass. I also hope you’ve made many more wishes that can be granted while you’re doing it. (Even people with cancer can multitask, right?)

And to quote something that’s not from Monty Python, here’s a message from The Daily Show: “**** You, Cancer.”

Posted on

Books In Your Pants

Someone started this up on Twitter and I had a little too much free time on my hands…

The Dark Tower In Your Pants
The Secret In Your Pants
Genius In Your Pants (which I dedicated to someone)
Much Ado About Nothing In Your Pants
The Fountainhead In Your Pants
Big Trouble In Your Pants
Catch-22 In Your Pants
Life, The Universe and Everything In Your Pants
Napalm & Silly Putty In Your Pants
Desperation In Your Pants
Moby Dick In Your Pants (too easy, but I wrote it anyway)
The Sound And The Fury In Your Pants
The Turn Of The Screw In Your Pants
Something Wicked This Way Comes In Your Pants
Inferno In Your Pants
The Divine Comedy In Your Pants
I Rant, Therefore I Am In Your Pants

Posted on

Are you suggesting military personnel aren’t normal people?

I read someone’s Facebook status this morning and I reeeeeeally don’t like it. There wouldn’t be enough space in a comment box to explain why, so I figure this is a good place to do it. Here’s what it says:

“A normal person has 1,000 wishes. A MILITARY PERSON only has one, to come home safely. I know 97% of you won’t post this as your status, but the 3% that do, are my friends. In honor of someone that died, a wounded warrior, or who is fighting for your freedom, please repost in their honor. God Bless Our soldiers,sailors and airmen past, present, & future. To those still serving overseas … Come home safe!”

This. Is. Crap.

I have friends in the military who have been stationed all around the world. The ones who are on base in places like South Carolina and Florida? They don’t feel an intense desire to come back to Minnesota.

One couple in Germany? They had a lot more wishes than just to come home. Their biggest wish was to adopt a child, so they wished for a healthy child, cooperative birth parents, a competent adoption agency… a lot more than just one wish. Yes, they want to come back to the States, but their lives don’t revolve around that. (Thankfully, their big wish was granted and they now have a charming little baby boy to call their own.)

The person who wrote that status message on Facebook may have had the best of intentions. He/she may have wanted to honor everyone in the military. However, to suggest that their return is the sole focus of their lives is trivializing and demeaning and it pisses me off.

Consider this my alternative status: “I would like to honor those people who made the ultimate sacrifice for their country. To the ones who have served, are serving, or will serve in the Armed Forces, thank you and I hope you have many more than one of your wishes granted.”

Posted on

I think it’s because they’re female

Last week, some people in my business class were talking about how grocery stores have designed their layouts so shoppers will be more likely to buy extra food. A lot of times, people will come in for basics like milk, butter and eggs, so where are they in the store? Tucked in the back corner. You have to walk past lots of different foods before getting to those basics, during which time you might think, “You know, cookies sound awesome right now.” Impulse purchase! Grocery store: 1, You: 0.

Then I thought about how Girl Scouts started selling their cookies this year. Where once parents would post order sheets in the office to suggest that their coworkers aren’t satisfying their sweet teeth properly, the Girl Scouts have become more devious: they’re bringing cookies to your door. You still have to order some of the specialty items, but if you want Do-si-dos, Tagalongs or Thin Mints…

Gimme a second to wipe the drool off my keyboard.

If you want any of those basic cookies, you’ve got ’em right there. You don’t need any order forms; you need young girls with delicious goodies… I don’t think I phrased that very well.

One mother gave us a heads-up a few days early, then she and her daughter came to the house—we picked boxes of cookies while they were standing in front of us instead of using an order sheet. At the office, it was easy to limit yourself to two or three boxes, but not anymore! “You know, cookies sound awesome right now.” Impulse purchase! Girl Scouts: 1, You: … lots of cookies, so maybe you’re a winner, too.

And as a final note, someone asked after buying 10 boxes if we made a good selection. I said it didn’t really matter since they’ll be gone in a week. It’s now Day 4 and I’m pretty sure my prediction will be right. That’s really not a good thing, but at least it’s been a yummy not-good thing.