Category: Musings

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“Yo quiero Taco—” SQUISH!

I spent most of the weekend in a small town called Sartell, MN, which has some decent restaurants. One is a Mexican place called Añejos Restaurant where I had dinner with a couple other people. Tasty food and it has a big wide-screen TV by the front window that plays a slideshow with factoids about Mexico and tequila, pictures and descriptions of some menu options, etc. I could see the TV from where I was sitting and one of those slides caught my eye, mostly because of the final ingredient listed: Chihuahua cheese.

First thought: “Do they smoosh a tiny dog to make the cheese?”
Second thought: “Who milks the dog?”

I was too curious to wait for the server to tell me, so I did a search for “Chihuahua cheese” on Google and found a website that explains it got its name because the cheese (made from cow’s milk) originated in the Chihuahua region of northern Mexico. The description also included a sentence that didn’t use the word “cheese” and is awesome when taken out of context.

“Chihuahua can be used for fondues, breaded fried cheese dishes (queso frito), egg dishes, enchiladas, or simply for snacking.”

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Vaccines vs. “chicken pox parties”

I found a page on Imgur that’s “An Open Letter to Non-Vaxxers”. The short version is that the author has a son with cancer. Chemotherapy damages the immune system, so even though the son had been vaccinated, he still had to rely on herd immunity to prevent those diseases. Thus, parents who think it’s a good idea not to vaccinate their children make Dad pretty upset. They’re not just putting their own kids in harm’s way; they’re putting his kid in harm’s way, too.

I should know better than to read the comments sections on the Internet (aside the ones on here, given that they’re usually spam that I have to delete), but I went scrolling down and found that the responses were almost universal: anti-vaxxers are stupid and selfish.

However, one comment intrigued me: “She I was young my mom took me to a chicken pox party that way I wouldn’t need the vaccine, cause once you’ve had it you won’t get it again”

Strange, but it kinda makes sense. It might keep half the kids in your class out of school for a week while they all have chicken pox at the same time, but now they only have to worry about shingles as they get older.

But that’s not the first thought that popped into my head. The first thought was “If this is meant to justify not getting vaccinated, try throwing a polio party and tell me how that turns out.”

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I’ll write a new blog entry… eventually.

Procrastination has been a problem of mine for years. Eons. Since forever. I was born on time, but everything has been downhill since then.

It’s affected a lot of things of my life over time, but the most noticeable (at least for those of you who know me primarily through my blog) has been writing new blog entries. Sometimes I’m really good about writing them consistently. Sometimes I’ll sit back and think about what to write and plan and edit and everything looks great in my head, but nothing ever gets typed. Totally lame, I know.

Just recently, someone pointed out an article on Facebook called “Why Procrastinators Procrastinate”. Yep, that was me in a nutshell. Even the pictures the author drew made sense. (Yay for pictures!) That article in turn had a link—a Part 2—to “How to Beat Procrastination”. I’m not sure how effectively I’ll be able to apply that to my life, but at least it got me to this point: I planned to write something this afternoon about those two articles and here it is. (If you’ve got some time to spare, click on the links below. You might find them insightful. Plus you might like the pictures of the Instant Gratification Monkey, too.)

Why Procrastinators Procrastinate

How to Beat Procrastination

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Does Dr. Reddy wear a lab coat?

Last week, the Rainbow Foods located two miles away from home became a Cub Foods, which means the Rainbow Pharmacy became the Cub Pharmacy. That in itself isn’t a big deal: the pharmacists are the same, the phone number is the same and the medications they give me are the same. The biggest change I noticed were the new prescription labels on the bottles.

They’re larger, they have a few extra warnings and they also include a little more information on them. For example, the old bottles didn’t show the name of the company that makes divalproex (the generic version of depakote, one of my medications for epilepsy). The name of that company? Dr. Reddy’s Lab.

I’m told it’s a fairly mainstream producer of prescription drugs, but when I read “Dr. Reddy’s Lab”, I think of some guy in his basement mixing ingredients together to make a variety of medications while sitting next to a bathtub filled with chemicals he uses for making meth.

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Scratching the itch of creativity

I was initially thinking about a title involving “fulfilling the urge of creativity” or something along those lines, but I got home from summer camp a couple days ago and they have a lot of bugs there. They bite. Bites itch. Can’t imagine why I’m not completely out of that mindset yet, right? But I wanted to write a blog entry for two reasons.

1) I haven’t written anything in a really long time. Like, a shamefully long time. Posts have been really infrequent for a couple months now and that just ain’t cool. I might be writing for an audience of one, but it still ain’t cool. There’s not much point in having a blog if I never use it.

2) I have mixed feelings about 750words.com.

Don’t get me wrong, I love the website. It gives me extra motivation to sit down and write for 15 minutes or so, pound out a bunch of words every day and I’ve currently got a streak of about 180 days in a row. (It offers little badges for various achievements and I get a pterodactyl badge at 250.)

However! By writing 750 words every day on that website, it scratches the itch that arises every so often, an urge to write, to create something where once there was nothing. To fill the void of existence! To justify my presence in the universe! To practice hyperbole on the grandest scale!

Sometimes I use it as a brain dump; sometimes I write a bunch of random crap. Whatever the case, when I’m done, I’m satisfied. I’ve fulfilled my urge to create something. (When I look at it that way, maybe the title of this post should be “Scratching the itch of creation”, although that only brings to mind “Creation” and “procreation”, neither of which I engage in on a daily basis for 15 minutes or so.)

This isn’t an apology, per se, just an explanation of why I haven’t been using the blog as often as I have in the past and probably should in the future. I like reading what I have to write, maybe you do as well, so why not give us both a more-often-than-monthly treat? In the meantime, though, I’m off to find some ointment that’ll help soothe some of those other itches I picked up during summer camp.

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To vlog or not to vlog?

The time is currently 8:16pm. Trust me, this will be relevant at the end of this entry.

I guess the title might be a little misleading because vlogging probably wouldn’t be a consistent effort. If anything, I’d probably do it less frequently than writing here on my regular blog. Which could mean “almost never” for the time being. I could do it once in a while for practice’s sake, but I wouldn’t do it with any consistency until October. Why October? Because that’s the next time I’ll be taking an extended vacation.

Looking back at other ventures (like my trip to Norway four years ago), my writing blog entries only lasted for the first few days out of the trip because, well, it was taking too long. I can be long-winded when I’m speaking in person, but when I’m writing a story, it can take several pages to cover just one day. A lot of stuff would have to happen to make an entry worthy of that length, but it can (and would) happen. Writing several pages per day when I’m supposed to be enjoying going outside and experiencing what a completely different culture has to offer… it’s not worth the time and effort, so I inevitably fell off the proverbial wagon.

I’m trying to avoid that this time around. My mother got a new laptop, I bought a new webcam (that’s another story that can wait until later) and I’m hoping to put them both to good use. My initial plan was to write “e-postcards”: send people emails with a short video and possibly a digital photo attached. Cheaper than a postcard, I can say more than what I could write in a tiny space… I found some compression software that reduces the resolution of a video and thus reduces the size so a 30-second video might be 3MB instead of some huge amount of space that’s too large to attach to an email. BRILLIANT! (If you don’t think so, well, I’m not gonna send you an e-postcard! Pptbptpbptptpbtp!!!)

That was my initial plan: use the webcam to send people messages. Then after spending hours upon hours of surfing through YouTube, it occurred to me that perhaps I could talk about the trip on video instead. It wouldn’t be as detailed and I wouldn’t be able to constantly edit and reedit the whole time I was recording, but that might be a good thing in the long run. If I try to give a general outline of the day’s happenings in five or ten minutes, that’s a lot less time than it’d take to write a blog entry every day or two. (Time check: 8:33pm.)

I could come home and do a better job providing details, make the videos look more interesting and entertaining… stuff that requires more time and effort, which I would have upon getting back to the States.

So at this point, I’m looking at it as a time-saver more than anything. Record a short video at the end of the day and post them when I have internet access, which should be pretty frequently: we’re taking a scheduled 12-day tour for the latter part of the trip that’s supposed to be using primarily four- and five-star hotels. Good stuff. There might not be an available connection on the night when our room will actually be floating on a river, but aside from that, I might be able to upload videos pretty consistently while we’re there.

I’m pretty sure I haven’t mentioned where the trip is heading yet, but I might as well say where we’re going now instead of trying to hide the details for some future blog entry: Mom and I will be traveling to Thailand.

Writing this last paragraph, I’m already going back and forth about some details and word choices, which is pretty much the issue I always have to deal with when I’m writing blog entries and something I could avoid by recording myself with a webcam and posting that online instead. It might not look amazing—it might all be just one camera angle with no cuts or anything like that while I’m there—but hopefully, the amazing details spoken aloud will cover up that deficiency. If not, well, I’m really doing this mostly for myself anyway, so ptpbptptppbtptpbpt!!!

That’s my current plan: save myself a lot of time and effort by just recording videos talking about each day’s goings-on and that should suffice instead of trying to write a couple pages worth of material on any given day. I might do a little bit of editing, cutting and pasting and what not, but for the most part, I might be able to just go straight through for a couple minutes. If I’m lucky. And if I’m not lucky, it’ll still probably take less time than it takes to write and edit a blog entry.

Note that this has included very few details of things that have happened in the past. Not much in the way of stories, mostly just talking about plans for the future. I may have neglected to mention that the trip will last from October 23rd to November 13th, so I’ve got plenty of time between now and then to change said plans or to practice recording and editing video if that’s what I decide to do.

As a side note, it just struck me as funny that when you’re on TV or in movies, they always tell you not to look directly into the camera and you will get in trouble if it screws up a shot. (I was once an extra in a movie and the director got mad at me. The problem? The people he wanted me to look at were directly between me and the camera, so I was also staring straight into the lens. Oops…) Conversely, vlogging entails looking at the camera and directly at your audience. It’s contrary to everything I’ve ever been told doing work with video before, so it just feels a little odd.

But I digress. The point I’ve been making over many, many paragraphs is that if I record videos, I might delete one and record another if the first one sucks, but it shouldn’t take too long if I try to make them short. Blog entries? It’s currently 9:03, which means I’ve spent 47 minutes writing many, many paragraphs and not actually making a decision about anything. The question still remains: To vlog or not to vlog?

(Final time check after writing, editing, rewriting and reediting: 9:17. Sheesh…)