This blog is fat.
One more thing I have to do to publish a new blog page (see previous entry, if you care): add a new link to index.html. Haha, I forgot to do it last time. The entry for 06 apr 05 languished for 2 days, unread. Unless...
nope, my stats tell me no one typed /0070.html in their location bar. It was just a thought; I haven't given anyone reason to check, paranoid, for unpublished material. I publish as soon as I write (unless I forget, as I did this last time). It's not like there are secrets buried in future blog pages before they are linked from index.html (hint -- or not; you just never know).
A big reason I haven't been publishing much lately is that someone (an electronic phantom, but still 'someone' in some sense) used a few of the personal details I give here in my blog to inflict insults that were especially wounding because they're true. I publish as an open-arms gesture to the world that says 'look at me! I'm pathetic! Take pity on me!', as cathartic rambling, and to solidify in my own mind rants and screeds on a variety of topics. This past incident has made me a lot less eager to talk so openly about myself.
Someone once told me that the most interesting parts of my blog aren't my bumbling through postmodern, pantheistic, spiritual metaphysics with my state university education (surprise!), but rather my pained ramblings about how my life is a stinking pile of refuse. I'm inclined to think that not every reader feels this way, but that a large portion of them do.
My life is terrible! I should kill myself! Actually, it's not so bad, either objectively or subjectively speaking. I'm not suffering unbearably (unless I make a mistake on the job, in which case I mutter 'i hate myself' for a while), nor is my lot in life comparatively bad: I don't work in an office couched in abstraction, goofy language and institutional politics, but rather with my hands with other mechanics who are disdainful of the white-collar lifestyle.
I earn about $6/h, which is enough to buy my own food and pay back my student loans (sort of -- I've been meaning to discuss this with sallie mae, but have been avoiding it). I have some free time, and don't feel as though my job is EVERYTHING in my life. I've seen some tragic examples of people who either 1) are never able to turn off 'work mode', and constantly think/talk about their jobs, or 2) have absolutely no energy left on weekday evenings and weekends, and spend that 'time off' watching tv in a kind of recovery incubation.
For me, mental health and happiness are more important that money. This seems clear, but I'm afraid it's a concept lost on a lot of people. They're stressed and angry, lead unpleasant lives, but just keep on frantically and frenetically making money for some reason. Not to state the obvious, but how can one enjoy all of the things bought if one has no spark left to do so, because it's been extinguished by 50 hard hours a week? Doing nothing, or at the very least moving slowly from activity to activity, is nice.
However this is sort of a stupid and oversimple idea for a couple of reasons: 1) some people have obligations (principally children) that necessitate working a lot. 2) suffering can't be an objective measure -- someone whose can of coke is flat might suffer more than someone whose leg is mangled in a factory accident; it all depends on the way one's brain is set up. Someone who is constantly working might suffer less than someone who leads the life of reilly.
Moreover, I shouldn't talk about the joys of working part-time and how everyone is stupid for not doing it while my primary means of support comes from mommy.
Furthermore, who am I to moralize about others' priorities? I've snapped at the imaginary person who lectures on zen and 'not really needing anything' when they have everything one could possibly need or want. It's really not my place to generalize my ideas of what 'should' be important to other people. All I can do is talk about myself, and say what makes me happy.
What makes me happy are the drugs soaking my brain in happy-juice. In the interests of non-cynical fairness, I should point out that I was prefectly happy in baltimore (a non-medicated era) when I was working on something I loved (art) and living on my own. Of course, if I hadn't had a terrific surplus of government money, I might not have enjoyed myself so much. But I don't know -- I certainly didn't live like a rich person, biking to school every day.
If you throw someone in a 5' x 5', spider-infested cell and give them prozac, they eventually start enjoying the coziness and naming all of their cute little pet spiders. Is there such a thing as an objectively miserable situation? Disease? Hunger? Loved ones dying? I don't know.
Perhaps beyond food, shelter, a reasonable degree of freedom (?) and health (and maybe some others), there aren't any objective causes of happiness. All the rest depend on prozac! We have to assume that the pit-dweller lives with non-biting spiders, that he is given adequately nutritious gruel, that the pit is kept at room temperature (and a bit warmer at night), and that the pit-dweller can escape his pit if he so desires.
I don't like living with my mother, I don't like that I'm fat, and I don't like that I don't do more interesting things. I'd like to sell paintings and play my guitar for people. But I do like biking to work, my job itself, being generally well-treated (after I let everyone know that my memory and visual problems are brain damage-related), writing and playing my guitar.
I discovered that my favorite use of my $239 pitch-shifter pedal is as a $50 chorus pedal. C'est la vie, non? Surprisingly, this doesn't bother me at all -- I have no regrets about the purchase. It's not like I never use the pitch shifter; just not as often as the chorus. It's also nice sometimes to play without any effects.
But I think there's a danger in being overly-zealous in 'not using any effects'. As always, I base this on my own self-analyses and maybe three additional observations.
When I was at the guitar shop getting my pedal (which, incidentally, cost more than my used amplifier and about half as much as my actual guitar, before modifications), I asked an employee if he had some experience using it. He retorted with 'i don't play through effects' in a snappy and unilateral way that made me think about human behavior and psychology as it pertains to guitar effects.
Ahem.
My observation is really about overcompensation for perceived affectation, thus producing an even graver affectation in itself. Another example comprises people who seek out larger cell phones because it's become cool to be counter-cultural and avoid the tiny cell phone-lusting of the mainstream. Apparently, there was an article on this. Another might be bike-accessorizing: I put a kickstand on my bike because it's considered cool NOT to have a kickstand.
But then we get into the practicality of it all. Some would say that kickstand-preference is culturally determined, just like everything else. Others might assert that no, a kickstand is practical in some circumstances and not in others -- consequences of the physical world determine action. I think it's both. When something doesn't matter that much, like a kickstand, then we can afford to let our actions be culturally determined.
I think the 'guitar center' employee's behavior was culturally determined (as I think all aesthetic behavior is). There's no practical reason to play through effects or to play 'dry', as they say, so I arrive at the conclusion that his behavior is born of a desire to 'be cool by being uncool' -- he's had enough of guitar effects, and sneers at people who have to pepper their sound with them.
All of this, of course, is born of the desire to be unique in a crowd, to be totally original, to share nothing save physicality with 6.5 billion (or whatever it's up to these days) other humans.
Despite my plea, not one of my SDF readers contributed some automation help to the blogging-tedium that I expounded upon one entry ago. EAMONNW AND MICAHB, I KNOW YOU'RE OUT THERE. YOU CAN'T HIDE FROM ME.
I've made a new rule: no chatrooms, bulletin boards or web-surfing on weekends. For some reason time spent interacting with electronic friends absolutely flies by. Of course, email counts as interaction, so maybe I'd better stop trying to categorically analyze this too finely. All I'll do during my three days off is maybe blog a bit, check email, and update candocanal.org.
Here's what I have to do when I start a new blog page:
<a name="xxxxxxx"></a>becomes...<p><a href="xxxx.html#xxxxxxx">xx xxx xx</a></p>
<a name="06apr05"></a>...or, if I'm still on the same page, I just need to copy that chunk of html code from the previous entry, paste it at the top of the page, and edit it to reflect the current date. By the way, that chunk of html creates the little linked date before every entry. Each link is stand-alone, so someone can link directly to individual entries if they want. I seriously, seriously doubt that anyone ever has, ever does, or will ever. But, it's a blog-style issue.<p><a href="0070.html#06apr05">06 apr 05</a></p>
I get exhausted just thinking about it; it motivates me to make blog pages really, really long, just so I can avoid making a new one. But bloggin on the whole isn't as bad as I might make it sound. The only tedious part comes when I start a new page. Other than that, I don't use strange tags or special characters that much, and copy-pasting the dated entry-linking code isn't a big deal at all. You'll notice that I use apostrophes instead of quotation marks, since html recognizes quotation marks as code-related.
It should be noted that I actually did up this page in dreamweaver -- the endless special characters proved to be too much for me. It's wonderful to be able to type <tag> and actually see <tag> on the browser screen, and not have to reference some chart for &20897523098; to print out a single character.
I was sort of anti-dreamweaver for a long time, thinking that hand-coding was somehow aesthetically purer. However I have always admitted that dragging CSS-positioned <div>s around the page and color-matching tables, backgrounds, etc, with colors in an image, required the use of dreamweaver. I considered it a necessary evil in these cases.
That aside, I generally prefer my little black-and-orange puTTY screen for editing html. I suppose I've just gotten used to it, and there's no reason that typing a blog in a word-processer-like interface (as I am now) is inherently worse. It might even be inherently better; if given the chance to adjust, it's possible that I'd come to prefer it.
And therein lies the danger -- I'd lose my 1337 powers if I did up blogs in dreamweaver. To dissuade myself, I'll think out loud that it'd also be a chore switching back and forth from code-view to design-view. Also, I can foresee problems with multiple entries on a single page (I'd have to copy a bit of appropriate code and paste it back into my puTTY screen, as opposed to the whole kit and caboodle).
I might leave work early today. I'm really tired, having woken up at 6:30am despite my completely blocking out my windows with cardboard and tinfoil.
Another advantage of editing a blog in dreamweaver is that the text is much larger -- I can lean back in my chair as opposed to hunching over my keyboard like some meganerd gamer. Of course, text-size is a changeable puTTY setting, so I shouldn't complain. All in all, I think I'd like to continue to edit blogs directly on the SDF server as opposed to here, on my local machine, in this bastard piece of macromedia software. I don't save much effort -- really, the only tags I usually have to fiddle with are <p> and </p>. Today was a special case, because I actually wanted several tags to render in a browser.
How often do I talk about tags? Almost never. This is one of those blogs for a limited audience, sort of like the previous. But, I have a sneaking feeling that a good percentage of my readership comes from SDF, and so is largely familiar with this sort of hooey. By the way, if any of you has some idea on how to automate this process further, let me know. This is, of course, without installing bloxsom -- I refuse.
Ok, time to edit this and then paste into vim! I can do a spellcheck first, since I'm here.