Sleeping really odd hours or sleeping all the time. Days are melting into one another, marked only by the undercurrent of panic and apathy, which is, yes, a strange mixture. Lost a part of my soul on my birthday and can’t seem to find it again.
Really need to shake this off.
Negativity is breeding negativity, which is all just dragging me down deeper.
Say it ain’t so, Maude. 😦
I was happily wiling away some hours playing Bejeweled Blitz on Facebook and idly watching random tweets go past in Twitter when I saw the news.
I know she lived a long life but…
Dammit!
I feel a little like the subject of Katie Perry’s song:
Cause you’re hot then you’re cold
You’re yes then you’re no
You’re in then you’re out
You’re up then you’re down
Only not for the same reasons, and I’m taking myself on this ride. I think I’d really like to get off now.
Tarot.com gives you a free 11-card celtic cross tarot reading on your birthday. After finding out that I wasn’t the chosen provider for that part-time, remote writing gig I’d interviewed for last week (and knowing that the job I was supposed to start in March is still being endlessly postponed), I was feeling a little down today (actually, “a little” would be a severe understatement) so I decided to use the free reading to ask what the heck was going on with the job hunting. It was a surprisingly insightful reading. Procrastination and being too hard on myself figure prominently, along with a few other home truths. One card that was really interesting was the “near future” card, the eight of coins:
Continue to cultivate your mastery and you will reap abundant success.
With the Eight of Coins in this position, you are gearing up to design and render more sophisticated projects. Everything is in place for great success as long as you persevere. Your artistic and intellectual development are evolving in an upward spiral.
Continue to refine your skills. Master your craft, building your reputation and attracting new projects, and you will be richly rewarded. Stay on track.
Hmmmm.
All I want for Christmas the day before Earth Day my birthday is world peace a healthy planet a little light at the end of my personal tunnel.
Is this really how 44 starts?
Random thoughts. (Because I don’t get it. I’m in it but I don’t get it.)
How do people have the time to tweet all freakin’ day like that? I’m talking about people who actually have lives. Do they live on their iPhones and BlackBerries? Should I feel like a less accomplished human being because (a) I can’t tweet on the go and (b) really don’t have anything worth tweeting about even if I did? (Why am I daydreaming about the smartphone-free, computer-less, information-underloaded era of Jane Austen?)
Why are all the kewl Twitter apps for Macs only? (Ne-ver mind, I know the answer to that one.)
Are you supposed to keep your personalities separate from each other, with their own followers? Or are you supposed to just whitter on about how awesome your lunch is to e.v.e.r.y.one who’s following you? Your boss, your coworkers, your family, online acquaintances, friends-of-friends-of-friends, some snack food-producing stranger (and his wife) in Indiana?
Why am I following all the people that I am? Does it really matter to my life that I know what Bo Burnham is thinking right this very minute? (Well, actually, he’s kind of funny so pretend I mentioned someone else like, say, Oprah. Wait, that wouldn’t work either because I don’t actually follow her. Um…) I was ready to dump a number of them over the weekend (and may yet still do it) because it was all freakin’ sports, all of the everloving, kill-me-now-before-I-gouge-out-my-eyes time. Seriously? Do we really have to watch the entire game/match/bout with you? If I liked you that much (and that restraining order wasn’t in place), I’d be watching it in your living room with you. (Ask me if I care about sports. Go ahead.)
Why are people so indiscriminate about who they follow? You can’t possibly hope to actually keep up with 5,000 people on Twitter so why follow them? Why? Because, like Facebook and Myspace, it’s all about the link love, baby. I follow you, you follow me, both our numbers grow exponentially and then maybe people start thinking we’re cool, leading of course to us ultimately, really becoming cool. (Of course, you’ll never catch up with CNN breaking news or Ashton-f***ing-Kutcher but you have to start small, don’t you? Sorry, aplusk, I appreciate the intent behind your malaria pledge drive but I’m annoyed by all the bandwagon jumping — there *are* other charities and important causes on the planet.)
Why must social networking be the future of anything? All it’s really doing is exacerbating the information overload problem. We don’t need to have that kind of up-to-the-minute finger on the pulse of anyone or anything. It’s an easy access to not just information but instantaneous trivialities far beyond even the most obsessively written blog that breeds a very short attention spa…ooh, shiny.
First, there’s all that trouble on the high seas from and for Somali pirates. (Can’t a rogue swashbuckler just be left alone to ply his trade without all these dogooders rescuing the hostages and killing or capturing the hardworking pirates?)
Now, several of the founders of the bit torrent site The Pirate Bay (which currently shows the headline “Don’t worry – we’re from the internets. It’s going to be alright. :-)”) have been convicted of a number of copyright-infringement-related crimes in a Swedish court of law. (As yet another sign that I should really read the news more, I learned this from Stephen Fry’s tweets.) Some of the news stories:
You can view The Pirate Bay’s own press conference (and other related videos) at http://thepiratebay.org/special/2009epicwinanyhow.php or http://bambuser.com/channel/Spectrial. They seem to be getting a lot of hits on it so the playback might be a little choppy in parts. It’s quite funny to watch — at one point, Peter Sunde (who is boyishly cute and quite personable, which helps the overall impression that digital piracy is the realm of Robin Hoods, unlike high seas piracy) remarks that even if he had the money to pay the levied fine, he’d rather burn everything he owns than give one penny to pay the fine. Shades of Mel Gibson’s Braveheart: “They will never take away our FREEDOM!” 😉
You can also follow comments related to the trial on Twitter.
(As an aside — I like asides, in case you couldn’t tell; I should probably start writing like Lesley at Um…What?? — why on earth do people persist in writing that the four people were “jailed” or “sent to jail”. “Sent to jail” implies an immediate action — if their butts aren’t physically in a cell at the time you write that, they’d better just be in transit there. And “jailed” is exactly what it says — they’re in jail at this very moment. They haven’t gone to jail yet (in fact, they were going to be partying in Malmö the night of the verdict) and probably won’t any time soon (they have oodles of appeals to go through yet).
Bad word choice makes the baby Jesus cry. You don’t want that.)
I usually stop watching American Idol when the auditions are done. I find the early weeks of the actual competition dull. Sometimes I start watching again when it’s down to the top 10 or so, if someone I liked in the auditions is still in the game. XUP’s mention of Adam Lambert singing “Mad World” on the April 7th show resparked my interest. (He’s been one of my faves since he auditioned with Bohemian Rhapsody — and parts of the snippet of Cher’s “Believe” that he sung during the Hollywood auditions were just chilling.)
“Mad World” one of my favourite songs of all time. It’s not a happyhappy song in the first place, but Adam’s performance of it — both live and in the full studio version — is incredibly sad, more haunting, for some reason, than even the Gary Jules‘ cover, on which Adam’s was based. Very much the kind of music you listen to when it’s rainy or foggy or you’re in “one of those moods”.
Even though you probably shouldn’t. Continue reading “Mad World”
I’m in a really weird headspace right now. It feels at times as if I’m trapped in a little soundproof bubble, with nothing getting out and nothing getting in.
There are a number of people with whom I usually have frequent, pretty much daily contact. My emails to them over the last several days seem to disappear into the ether, like balloons cast into the air or messages in bottles tossed into the ocean and forgotten. If you’re in a good mental place, you can logically explain those delays and absences and accept the explanations as being quite sensible.
But if you’re already a little bit…off kilter…it begins to feel a little bit like either there’s something wrong with your technology that you just haven’t fathomed (e-mail not working or misfiltering, phone line wonky, etc.) or that people are avoiding you. And when you rule out the first, the second starts to loom that much larger.
Think I’m going a little stir crazy.
Almost the entire time that I was in Toronto earlier this month, I was working out in my head how I’d blog about whatever it was I was watching or doing. If I’d been there on my own, I’d’ve hauled out my netbook and done it right then and there, but Nik was already glaring at me because I was fidgety — I don’t think she was impressed when I told her what was going on in my head when I was supposed to getting enlightened.
And by the time we got back to the hotel room, there was no time on my own to write everything down. (Yes, I could have written it by hand, but that’s journalling, not blogging — besides, I can’t handwrite fast enough to keep up with my brain and I’d never get around to transcribing my notes either.) I kept forgetting to take my camera with me, which ruined the blog posts in my head. (They needed visuals, dammit, and I blame XUP for that because her posts always have visual aids.) By the time I was home, there was little point in writing the posts I’d had in mind (the moment had passed) so I just wrote the one.
The lesson I learned is that I need a BlackBerry with a built-in camera so that I can write surreptitiously when the urge hits me. Now I just need the job that will allow me to afford that. 😉
(ooh, hey, on a completely unrelated and mostly irrelevant note, today is the day I was supposed to be born 44 years ago, but I held out until the sun had just moved into Taurus. When I’d made the decision that it was time, my mother barely had time to get through the traffic to the Halifax Infirmary — I was almost born on the Angus L. Macdonald Bridge. I like to think I waited so that I could give my older Aries brother a hard time, as only a stubborn cuspal Taurus-Aries can do to an Aries…we know ALL the buttons to push. ;-))
The interviews on Monday went pretty well. I’m one of four people being considered — better odds than you’d normally find for a job opening. It’s part-time and it’s remote, but I’d still like to get it — the company seems like a good company and the three people I’ve talked with are very nice, even in the face of my having inadvertently unplugged the power cord for my cordless (and only) phone, resulting in the first of the Monday interviews starting 15 minutes late. (Don’t ask.)
I also have a lead on a couple of small web design jobs. Not huge moneymakers but good resume/portfolio fodder, and leading to an unexpected industry specialization. My sole proprietorship was originally set up many years ago (before I settled on technical writing as my preferred field) as a (somewhat hypothetical) freelance Web design company, but it has turned into a freelance Web design/technical writing/editing/jill-of-all-trades kind of thing. I never envisioned it being what it’s become.
(I’m a bit loopy right now — it’s 05:30 and I’m hopped up on 5-Hour Energy and listening to “Major Tom” on semi-auto repeat. Just spent three hours organizing my Yahoo mail box folders. I have three folders, containing a total of about 40,000 e-mails, left to tackle. Good thing I have unlimited storage. I know that it seems like a symptom of packratitis, but I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had to go back to find an obscure e-mail from several years ago. There’s a method to the madness.)
Life Begins at 41...or maybe 43 