"Ha ha ha ha!"

"What are you laughing at?"

"Grey's Anatomy."

"Oh. The television."

"What? Did you think I was laughing at your farting?"

"Yeah."

What do you do when the muse leaves you? Worse, what do you do when you're blocked and you have to get thoughts out of your head, satisfy that fickle mistress, but to do it justice takes time? Lots and lots of time?

Easy. Spew.

In high school, when I lamenting about a particular writing assignment, my mother's husband told me the secret to writing good essays: tell 'em what you're going to tell 'em, tell 'em, tell 'em what you told 'em. The simple five paragraph essay. Since then, I've done pretty well with that formula. I don't always write five paragraphs, but I make an opening statement and argument, tell some story or facts, then summarize in some way.

Not happening here.

I have absolutely no intention of connecting any of these thoughts together other than to say, "This is what I was thinking at this moment."

Or rather, I'm going to spew. Spew and see if I can kick that muse in the arse.

One of my aunts died last year. Last year July. She took her own life. She committed suicide. There are so many euphemisms for the act, so many ways to avoid saying she killed herself. So many different ways not to say she was alone, and tortured, and unable to cope with life and was done.

There are people that never have those thoughts, never think of suicide, never consider it at all in life. Never. What is it with tortured souls that the thoughts come too frequently? That the strength to end it all comes all too easily?

Good lord, what is it going to take to avoid writing that post?

You are all jealous of me. I can tell this. George added me as a contact today. Whoo!

I hate linking to outside sites. Actually, that's not true. I hate linking to URLs that go away. Just plain annoys me. I'm about two days from having my mirror module working. It works like this: when I write a post with an external link, my site will go grab the page I link to - sort of a snapshot of where I'm linking to. The URL goes into a table. The cron job that runs will ping each of the URLs in the table (it actually just check that it's there with a HEAD call). If the page returns a 404, the link in the post, will adjust to the cached version instead of the external link, with a note, of course, that the page isn't around any longer, but hey, this is what it looked like.

I'll be happier, and well, that's what this blog is about.

How many people do you know has a diet of broccoli and brownies? As in half a dozen brownies and two cups of broccoli?

At least one.

I need to do work. I'll finish this later.

Yeah, and tags for this site. Been too long.

I lost most of my sense of smell a while back. I don't exactly know or when, just that I lost it. I think I lost it when the dogs showed up. Not 100% sure about the timing, though. Sometimes I worry about it. Sometimes a lot, sometimes not at all. It has its benefits.

"I just farted."

"You did? Um... Okay."

Or like today on the drive up to SFUC, I managed to convince Cal to carpool up with me. At some point, the car was really warm, so he took off his shoes to help him cool down. Now, maybe his feet smelled like roses, maybe they didn't. I wouldn't know, because I don't have a sense of smell any more.

But there are distinct disadvantages.

"Hey, do you smell that?"

"Smell what?"

"Ah! You're burning the oatmeal!"

"Oh, yeah! The oatmeal..."

Food tastes different, too. Not necessarily good or bad, just different.

Ultimate is strange now. I know a bunch of people, but there are so many new people that I just don't know. And, sure, that's the nature of keeping the same life for the last eight years. People grow up, move on. If you're in the same place in life, and haven't moved on, other people come in to fill the spots your previous friends have vacated.

Maybe it is time to move on, get busy doing the things that everyone else is doing.

Eh. I really don't want to do that. Ick and yuck and grody all over it.

Okay, really. Work.

And posts like this are why blogs suck.

In as much as I work for myself, it's hard to get fired. I mean, yeah, my boss is a complete, uh, um, whatever... I can't get fired, I can only quit and find a new job.

But that doesn't mean I will always have this gig. I mean, I could certainly annoy many future clients with this site. If the work dries, up, well then, no job.

Yet, today I was pondering reasons why I would fire myself. It'd have to be a pretty serious reason, I would think. Something that warrants a seriously unceremonious dump on the arse.

Pondering this, I think I might fire myself from this job for

• speaking in tongues such that I didn't understand what I was saying. Communication is key.
• having a kid. As near as I can tell, that would be two full time jobs, which is one too many for anyone.
• fidgeting too much. Sit still already!
• playing too much ultimate. There's work to be done, woman!
• bellowing at the dogs. STFU already! You, too, dogs!
• any form of sexual harrassment. Clearly that's a perfectly valid reason to fire myself.
• eating all the chocolate. I need some, too! Oh wait, not that much.
• working in the office naked. That's just gross. I sit in those chairs!

I'm sure there are other reasons. I'll have to ponder them.

Yeah, so this photo sharing, social network, web two point oh thingie? It's interesting to watch the dynamics of the networks. Take, for instance, my second Flickr spam (I deleted the first):

I deliberately didn't put that one on Flickr because doing so would just make it easy for my Flickr friends to click over to this guy. Since the friend who tell me they actually read this blog and the circle of friends who use Flickr are nominally disjoint, this guy is less likely to get traffic from my posting the image on my site instead of my Flickr photostream.

That said, this guy looks like he falls into the camp of "get as many contacts as I possibly can by adding everyone as a contact.". He has 4597 contacts at last count:

In as much as I really don't have photos that are that interesting, he's clearly not adding me as a contact for my amazing use of a digital camera.

I noticed a similar phenomenom at Orkut. I followed Bharat's example and made myself a fan of everyone who added me as a contact/friend. To my surprise, almost everyone I was a fan of listed me as a fan back. Even some people who I knew only peripherally from college.

It's another example of the strange (to me) social dynamic where if someone says something nice about you, you're more likely to think of them positively. Same situation where a person is more likely to notice and find attractive people he's been told are attracted to him first. An "Oh, you like me? Hey, I'll like you back." sort of thing.

I recently added a person I don't know personally to my contact list. I felt really uncomfortable doing it, but he has cool photos, and I like to view them in my contacts photostream page. The message I received suggests such is a reasonable excuse, but it was still weird. Except for that guy and other person who is a friend of a friend, I know all of my contacts.

After all, they're part of the Web Two Point Oh movement.

Doin' cool shit.