Pilcrow

I spent a while this afternoon working on a big paper, and now I'm going to a big party at a friend's house. So this is all you get from me today for a post, because going to a party is better than spending more time on the Internet. You might not get much more out of me tomorrow, because that big paper is going to take a long time to complete and besides doing laundry, I'll have to devote most of my time to editing it. Anyhow, for now, party!

Okay, so here's the thing. I feel like I should be doing these posts in the evening, when the day's done, so that it'll be easier to have something to write about. However, because my schedule—whether in it's usual irregular state or even when I do have to get up regularly in the morning before 8 am—always runs past midnight, it's difficult for me to ensure that I get a post done and up before the calendar day ends. A potential benefit from this difficulty, though, is that it would encourage me to write quickly and concisely, and not worry too much over details.

Alternately, I could write in the mornings. However, the difficulty there is that my morning routine already takes longer than I want it to. Here is my morning routine:

1. Use the toilet and clean the catbox—about 10 minutes.
2. Do my exercises (more on that another time)—about 10 minutes.
3. Shower, alternating daily between also washing my hair or shaving, and get dressed—about 45 minutes.
4. Feed the cat—about 5 minutes.
5. Get breakfast, check the morning websites (weather, little news, webcomics, email)—about 20 minutes.

That's 1.5 hours right there. I need to expand on step 3: showering does not in fact take 40 minutes; I think I'm usually in the shower for about 10 minutes, 15 minutes if I'm also washing my hair. And I'm certainly capable of taking a quick shower and being done with the bathroom in about 20 minutes or less if I really pressed for time. Shaving does seem to take at least 15 minutes—I don't want to hurry too much, of course, what with razor blades being involved, but it seems like it takes longer than it ought to need. But somehow even on the days when I'm not shaving, I still seem to end up being in the bathroom for about 40 minutes. Obviously that's something I could work on changing.

Anyhow, my point is that currently my morning routine takes at least 90 minutes. Although I do want my journal posts to tend toward the short side, if I'm going to be doing this daily, I still think I should allow about a half-hour for the writing, but I'm reluctant to add that on top of my other morning rituals since that already takes up so much time. On the other hand, if I make journal writing another thing that I have to get done first thing in the day, then I'm more likely to get it done. (That was when I did most of the 40 T/D/Y posts, too.)

Since I'm making this post now, when it's still night-time but calendar-wise is a new day, that means I'm actually getting my post done for Monday. And that means I don't actually have to worry about posting again until at least Tuesday morning, which means if I do want to switch to posting in the morning, I'm now set up to do so. I'll have to think about it. I also don't want to fuss too much about a regular schedule, since there will certainly be times I have to be flexible, but having a regular schedule is key to making this a habit.

Quick* because March 1 is almost over, and I'd like this post to go up on March 1. (As I discovered back while doing the 40 T/D/Y posts, LiveJournal now updates the post date and time to when you actually click post, instead of keeping whatever date and time it was when you started writing a new post.)

When I wrote the "final thoughts" post for the 40 T/D/Y series, I actually meant to talk a bit about whether I'd learned anything about myself, and then forgot in my effort to wrap things up. But then, I neither intended the series to be a learning exercise, nor did I actually think it would be a self-contained thing that I would do and then put aside for good. It spontaneously became a meditation on where I've been and how I've come to be the person I am, and if I learned anything, it was just reminding myself that the habits and patterns I'm susceptible to were formed early in my life and crop up in all aspects of it. Still, the series is meant in part to be a reference point: okay, I Am Here, now where do I want to go? I do intend to come back to that.

Intentions are all well and good of course, but two full months into the year, I haven't been doing more personal writing here, and I'm still struggling with the same problems, internal and external—not that I believed or expected or even hoped that a simple writing exercise would exorcise those problems. So, yes, all February went by and I only managed to make a token post last night.

About that token post, though: when the iPad was finally announced, my initial reaction was on the indifferent side: it seemed to be simply a large iPod Touch, which while nice wasn't anything particularly exciting. And when I watched the presentation, a couple days after it happened, that continued to be my feeling through most of it. I was not swayed by Jobs's claims that the iPad would offer the best experience for all those common functions such as Web browsing, e-mail, managing photos, and so forth: although there were a couple obvious neat things one could do with the iPad interface, there wasn't anything to it obviously superior to the experience I already have using my laptop.

But, well into the presentation, when they talked about the iBookstore, I thought about how convenient it would be to have all my RPG books in digital format on the iPad, instead of carrying around a heavy stack. And they talked about third-party apps, and demonstrated some cool games, and I started to realize the true advantage of the iPad: it wasn't all the digital lifestyle stuff that Jobs had talked about in the first part of the presentation, it was the opportunity for third parties to take advantage of the larger format and other improvements the iPad offered to create some really cool apps. And I started thinking about some cool things that I'd like to see on an iPad... and realized that what I should do is learn how to program for the iPad and become a developer, myself. The more I thought about it, the more interested I was in the possibilities; the idea wouldn't be easily dismissed as a passing fancy.

So, I used a Christmas gift and had "Santa-mazon" bring me a book to teach me the basics of programming in Objective-C, the language used for the iPhone and iPad. The picture I posted is the first, very basic, exercise in the book, but it's my first step on the path to a concrete goal that I'm excited about. I don't expect to become a full-time iPad developer, I don't have the years of experience in programming, but I do believe I can at least start out making a couple simple things that might even earn a little money. And then I'll see where that might lead. At the least, it'll be something fun and cool I've done for myself, and that's enough.

*(For the record: started writing the post at 11:40 PM, finished at 11:58 PM.)

As I explained at length in topic 27, "Papers and Zines and Blogs", this series of posts was inspired by a desire to return to more personal writing in my journal. Although I intended to come up with the complete list of topics before I started writing, I spent some time thinking about possible topics but didn't get around to setting down a whole list. Initially, I simply thought I'd have a diverse set of topics with no particular organization, but as I started writing it made sense to begin with topics from my earliest years, and inevitably I came to structure the series chronologically, with each topic more or less corresponding in order to my age. 

As a result, I dropped some prospective topics, and never fit in some others that I'd have liked to discuss. After I'd already started writing the series, I finally made a draft list of topics to plan ahead. These are the topics I dropped or changed:

• Vision—getting glasses and my eyesight issues
• Cowardly Lion—acting in the school play in sixth grade, and again in eighth grade
• NHYO—became "Student Orchestras", as I realized there was more to cover
• Brains—was effectively replaced by two entries, "Geek" and "Most Likely to Succeed"
• Driving—how and why I enjoy driving, and driving-related experiences
• The Faire—attending King Richard's Faire every year from 1988 until 2001

And these are a few other topics I considered:

• Names and Nicknames—what I've called myself, what others have called me
• Sex and Sexuality—no shocking revelations or details, just how I feel about it
• Walking and Bicycling—activities I've done for fun that also helped me get to know my home cities very well

I may yet write about some of these topics in the future.

Writing this series was occasionally challenging in surprising ways. Sometimes I had to think a while about how to get into a topic, other times I had to work to stay focused and not ramble on for pages. Sometimes it was harder to remember details than I expected. The closer I got to the present, the more difficult I found it to write about some topics, because they were things I'd been spending lots of time thinking about, and sometimes writing about, already, and I felt I was just repeating myself. Or I was concerned about saying too much and somehow putting myself in a bad position, in particular with posts about work and about my efforts to find romance—the concern that led me to stop making personal posts in the first place.

I enjoyed writing this series very much, and I'm pleased and grateful that some of you let me know you were reading along and enjoying it too. Thanks for your comments and support. 

Back in fifth grade, near the end of the school year, we had a special kickball game event pitting our classroom against one of the other fifth-grade classrooms, complete with the teachers themselves participating—not the typical recess-time game. When our class was up to kick and I had a lot of downtime waiting my turn, I started to amuse myself by pretending to be a news reporter interviewing others about the big game. In talking with my friend Andy, we became enthusiastic about the idea of actually creating a school newspaper, and we stuck with it. We figured we could get our fellow students to submit stories and articles and whatever, and produce a few pages a month. Conveniently, we happened to be in the same classroom for sixth grade, making it easy for us to work together. We went to a meeting of the school’s PTO to present our idea and ask for paper supplies and use of the school’s ditto machine (I remember it being called a mimeograph, but it turns out that’s a different technology) to produce the newspapers, and they decided to support it.

It ended up not being much of a newspaper as such; we had some kind of school news blurb in each issue, but mostly it ran stories, drawings, poems, and recipes submitted by our classmates and some of the kids in the other sixth-grade classes. I don’t recall specifically what I wrote for it, and haven’t gone looking in my box o’ memories in the closet for my copies which I should still have, but I think I wrote at least some of the letters from the editor about each issue. I also don’t remember how many issues we did; it was less than one a month of course, because we did still have other classwork to do and we had to get other people to submit things, but I believe we did at least five or six over the course of that year. It was a lot of fun and enjoyed by at least some of the kids—near the end of the year I was even approached by two fifth-graders who wanted to take over the paper the following year. (I still wonder what came of that, I know at the time I explained it wasn’t really up to me, they’d have to get the support of the PTO to continue.)

In junior high, I joined the yearbook staff and served all three years. And I can hardly remember any work I did on it. I know at least one year I got stuck on the advertising team, trying to sell ads to support the yearbook, which I had no interest in doing at all. I don’t remember how the writers or editors were chosen, but I was never one of them, although I do remember helping to choose the fiction contest winner at least once. If it weren’t for the fact that I’m listed on staff and appear in the photos for all three years, I wouldn’t even be sure I’d participated. It may have been due to that less-than-memorable experience that I never sought to be involved in the senior high yearbook or even with the regular monthly school newspaper.

In college, my friends Tony and Conrad first came up with their own take on an unofficial student paper, The Goliard; I believe they did manage to put out two issues, but no more than that. I did contribute a poem to one of the issues but otherwise had little to do with it. A year or two later, another student, Kevin, revived The Goliard and put out several much nicer-looking issues, but again I think at most I promised to submit something and never did.

However, during my college years I also became good friends with one of my younger sister’s friends from high school, Jay. Jay (and my younger sister) was more in touch with the modern alternative music scene than I was, and he was interested in zines, the small amateur-press photocopied magazines often connected to the underground rock scene. He put out the first version of his zine, Banner Bauhaus, just after he graduated from high school, and then a few years later as I was finishing college he revived and expanded his zine under a new title, The Maudlin Order. With the second issue of that version, I became involved as an editor, helping to get the various stories and articles into shape, and that began our off-and-on collaborative efforts as zine publishers. After another couple-year hiatus, in late 1996 we agreed to revive and rename the zine yet again, this time as The Park Bench.

For The Park Bench I played my most active role since elementary school, editing all of each issue’s content and writing some content myself. The zine was always Jay’s baby, though, and we clashed over it on occasion: I never wrote as much as he would’ve liked, and my writing was almost always done last-minute when Jay set a firm deadline for starting his layout and going to print, making him worry each time about having enough content. We did publish three issues in the first half of 1997, but then Jay felt burnt out again and quit; I finished up the third issue myself, but did not follow through with any further ones. We bounced back in 1999, putting out volume two in two issues that year and following on with another three-issue volume in 2000. Jay then moved to Los Angeles, and although he was there only a matter of months, the zine fell back into another long slumber.

Shortly after moving to Seattle, I joined LiveJournal and started blogging. For my first couple years my writing was very sporadic, but two things changed that: late in 2004 I decided that I wanted to attend concerts more regularly and should make a point of seeing at least one show a month, and early in 2005 I made a list of goals for the year which included posting in my journal at least once a week. Those two decisions naturally combined to start me writing reviews of the concerts I was attending, which increased along with my show attendance. After a couple years, I added a new goal of getting my music writing out to a wider audience, which I finally achieved this year when I started writing for the KEXP Blog.

Unfortunately, at the same time my journal writing dropped off this year. Mostly because of my dismal feelings about work and finances and my perceived failure to improve those situations, I was too disheartened to set down any goals for the year. Although writing weekly in my journal had seemed to become a habit, I couldn’t bring myself to keep writing publicly about how miserable I was feeling over those issues, nor did it seem a good idea to write much about my struggles with finding work. I also started feeling more pressure to be discreet about my dating efforts. The thing is, I’ve always felt that my online journal served a useful purpose by being public: I was able to work out my feelings and get troublesome thoughts out of my head through the process of journal writing, and by doing so in a public venue such as LiveJournal, I had the opportunity to get feedback and advice from friends without having to ask anyone to sit down and listen to my endless agonizing. Once I started feeling that I had to restrict my writing, avoid topics like work and friends-lock topics like dating, I lost the heart to write much at all. My journal became largely about music, and even that writing tapered off later this year as I developed a backlog of reviews to write and it started to feel like a chore.

This series of posts about my life was directly inspired by the drop-off in my personal writing this year. I was restless and unhappy that I hadn’t been writing, and wanted something to get me back into it; doing a series of 40 posts on 40 topics, leading up to my 40th birthday, was an obvious idea to accomplish that. I don’t yet know what will happen after that; I expect I’ll set down some goals to get myself back on track, and returning to writing weekly in my journal will be one of those goals. I also want to step up my writing for the KEXP Blog, and perhaps there are other opportunities I may want to pursue. It’s worth remembering that all those years ago in elementary school, I had a fun idea and without any real understanding of what it would take to make that happen, I pursued it and did make it happen. I can still do that.

At the end of this year I will be turning 40 years old. I've done very little personal writing in my journal this year, for a few reasons I'm not going to discuss in this post, and I'd like to change that. It occurred to me that one thing I could do to get back into writing is mark the occasion of my 40th birthday by writing a series of personal essays, and the obvious thing to do would be 40 posts in the 40 days leading up to my birthday.

So, I need some topics! I have a few ideas already, but I'm going to put this out for suggestions. What would you like to know about me? What topics would you like to see me write about? The topics don't have to be directly about my life, they can be general subjects that I might have thoughts or opinions on, though of course I'll only end up writing about topics I care about in some fashion—I have nothing to say about china patterns, for example. 

40 Topics, 40 Days, 40 Years Old starts on Sunday, November 21 22. (Edit: oops.)

 Ever since I started my journal, its title has been "This Journal Has No Title". I've been tired of that for a while, but I haven't come up with a new title for it. When I changed to a layout that allowed for subtitles, at first I was changing the subtitle every so often, but once I came up with "We Put the 'Pro' in 'Procrastination'", I've stuck with that one since. I still like that subtitle, and as it's implicitly a corporate slogan, I feel like the journal's title ought to be some kind of mock-corporate name. The subtitle and the page links at the top - Present, Past, People, Profile, and Persistence - alliterate on the letter P, so I've been thinking of something like "Paragraph" or "Pilcrow" (the name of the paragraph symbol ¶, and also the name I used for my abortive blog at 3Sharp). But I'm not sure about those either. Any thoughts or suggestions?

A week ago Wednesday, I attended my second HurryDate event, this one intended for 25-35 year olds of both genders. This time there were 14 men, including one guy who just walked in on a whim, and 10 women, so apparently once again three women were unable or decided not to come. I'll be getting yet another free pass code as a result. One of the women was one of my mutual matches from the previous event. It turned out that I never saw her reply because of problems with the site and my possibly-mistaken expectation that the HurryDate site would email notification of messages. In any case, she was happy to reconnect, and we exchanged regular email addresses. Hopefully we'll meet for a date soon. She was also my only mutual match for this event.

Meanwhile, the conversations with the Salon women I mentioned in my last post on the topic have gone well. I had a date last Saturday evening with one of them, meeting for coffee and a few hours of conversation. I think it went well, but she's really busy right now and I'm not sure if we'll have a second date any time soon (if at all). The other woman and I have been working on arranging a date, and I think that will happen next week.

Now that I've actually started having dates, I'm faced with the issue of discretion. How much is too much to write on my journal? So far I've been careful to avoid any kind of identifiers beyond how I'm contacting or meeting these women. But my journal is easily findable through Google; am I courting trouble by even acknowledging here that I had a date with someone but am trying to arrange dates with two other women? or by mentioning which services I'm using, in connection with who I've met and who I haven't? I don't want to go completely silent on the topic, but I wonder whether saying anything at all is saying too much. parkbenchzine has already expressed the opinion that even what I've said here will be too much, that hypothetically one of these women (or some future one) could find a post like this and decide to stop bothering with me. That seems extreme and unlikely to me, but still, it's not unreasonable to think I could be confronted with, "so, tell me about this other woman you're dating," which would certainly be awkward (at best). Any thoughts on this?

I feel that this is totally cheating, but I'm making a quick note here just to fulfill the weekly-writing requirement. I've had a few things on my mind to write about, but haven't had or taken time earlier this week to write. I didn't have plans for this evening and was expecting to be at home, so I figured I'd write tonight. However, John gave me a call because he's free for the evening, so I'm going out. I'll have to write something more substantial later.

I did catch a show for February after all, I went to the High Dive last night to see The Airborne Toxic Event after hearing them on KEXP yesterday morning while on my way to work. It was a good show, and that's what I'll be writing about soon. I also wanted to do a post summarizing the shows I've been to so far, just so I have a handy reference post - I can use the concerts tag to get just those posts, but I've now got at least three pages of them. I'm sure I've got some non-music stuff to write about too, but for now all that will have to wait, as I'm off to hang out.

For a while now, Friendster has offered free blogs for its users. I didn't bother starting one because I already have this LiveJournal and didn't know what I'd put on a Friendster blog instead of my LiveJournal. However, at the beginning of August, it occurred to me that I could cross-post my concert reviews there as a way of attracting more attention to my profile. I've got that blog linked in my sidebar here now, but if you don't normally view my journal page directly, the link is: http://philaros.blogs.friendster.com/my_blog/. If you enjoy my reviews and have a site of your own where you could post the link, I'd appreciate it. And of course if all you enjoy of my journal are the reviews, then you could start going there regularly instead of here. There's an RSS link on the site too for those of you who read things that way.

I think that unfortunately it's not actually bringing more attention to my profile. The blog entries don't appear on the profile page, as would seem to be the smart thing to do; instead there's just a small, not particularly noticeable link that says "view blog". However, they did add a feature for posting reviews that do appear on the profile page, so I've been using that to post a brief excerpt from each new review and a link to the full review on the blog. So, instead of using my Friendster blog to get more people to check out my profile, I've ended up using my profile to drive traffic to my blog. That seems screwed up, but that's how Friendster's set up.

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Meanwhile, a month or two ago, LiveJournal added instant messaging support for its members, calling it LJTalk. It uses the Jabber protocol, which works with Gmail (GTalk), Earthlink, and iChat. I've long maintained a vocal dislike for IM, but a lot of that prejudice was based on experience trying to carry on conversations on a MUD, where other things are going on and it's hard to keep up with the flow with all the extraneous interruptions. Now that I've used IM a couple times, it's not so bad, though I do still prefer email. So, I've started logging in to LJTalk when I'm at home - I can't use it at work because only Windows Messenger works there, and anyhow, I don't really need that kind of distraction at work. If you want to add me, it's philaros[at]livejournal[dot]com. If you see me online, feel free to say hello.