Thankssieving

This is the holiday you get when you drop it through a filter and get only what you need. For me, it's family. I don't get round to seeing them enough so anything that essentially forces me to see them is a plus in my book. Why don't I see them more? Life, distance, choices, money, excuses. Not everyone likes their family, and so while I think of this holiday as a great gathering of family and food, feel free to substitute family with friends, friends who really end up being your family anyway.

Now sure the original tale of Thanksgiving that's taught, well at least in my day, is one rife with fiction, but that doesn't mean that good can't be squeezed out in modern execution. And when I say this, I'm not referencing Black Friday sales. It's a touch disturbing to me to look back and see how these same thoughts came to mind in the past. But there's also nothing wrong with a little consistency. Or a lot. Perhaps even a real whole lot (author's note: this last link contains an embedded image linked from a Lycos-hosted site. How about Lycos for a shout-out to the pre-Google days).

It seems there are plenty of those who dislike the homecoming nature of Thanksgiving and it's understandable. Being around your hometown and all that it entails can manage to be worse and/or more depressing than simply returning to see family and answer a lot of questions, and usually you're looking at all of these together. That I don't go to my hometown may have a softening effect for me. And let's face it, as much as people love to bloviate on the internet (what's that pot? oh hello kettle...), non-digital confrontation with honesty about ourselves is not a lot of fun. Knowing we should get our shit together is a little different than knowing we should get our shit together.

After that brief and cursory treatment of some of the struggles and intricacies of the fragile psyche, I'm going to leave with a link to a cartoonist I had the pleasure of meeting the other night, one Alex Nall. There was a time I read comics far more, from the Sunday offerings, to Calvin & Hobbes and The Far Side compendiums, right on up to your X-Men and so on. Though I've strayed, I'm glad to have been brought back by someone like Alex, to see there are still those holding the torch, that there's still a beautiful honesty accompanied by nice art, and that the fundamental problems and struggles we have are age-old, in spite of shifts in outward appearance.

This all runs the risk of sending me off on a bloviant tangent, but I'll stop here since several sentences back I said I'd leave you. Sometimes I'm bad at goodbye.

At any rate, tally it up as one more thing I'm thankful for.

Disruption

There are words that rise and fall in popularity in our world. Several years back with the beginnings of the Google book project you could search in one of the offerings of Labs to see a word's popularity graphed by year. I am certain I once posted about this and that you can still do this but as I compose this (I'm trying to set a record for saying "this") post from my hi-jacked and out-of-date Firefox browser that presents much content in Japanese, I'm going to forgo looking for a proper link out of, well, laziness.

If you're a reader of this here blog from time-to-time, you'll note that, from time-to-time, I get incredibly (and probably unreasonably) frustrated by such excessive use. In the past that word has been "awkward" and oh how I'm aware that this is one half of the title of this blog. In the past that word has also been "sexy." Neither has completely disappeared, but hey once you vent to your blog I mean where do you really go from there? Seriously, if the entire world hasn't taken notice based on the 30-50 hits I tend to get, then I just don't understand. Maybe I need to learn a way to be more...disruptive?

Okay nail, I'm going to hit you over the head here. Disruption, disruptive, and any other use of this word —I'm so disrupted I can't even think what all of the forms are and I'm deciding not to Google on my predominantly Japanese browser —have got to stop being used. Now it's true, it's a function of what news you focus on, who your friends are in social media and, once you've seen a word, how much you choose to focus on it (there's a scientific term for this phenomenon that I also won't Google — go brain!), but I promise you, DISRUPTION is everywhere. It's the buzz word for how to be entrepreneurial and innovative and attract attention to change or, um, disrupt, the status quo. But most of these things do no more to disrupt the status quo than but to place disruptive, disruptor, and so on more firmly in the ether. Because hell, as I'm sure I've said, and at any rate I'm sure you just know anyway, when you use a word over and over its emphasis, its power, is diminished.

If I wanted to distract from disruption I could cite the prevalence of overly-enthusiastic language storming through the web in the form of sites like Upworthy that contend that everything happens to simultaneously be the most mind-blowing, earth-shattering, life-changing shit in history. The only thing there might be more of than canned enthusiasm on that site is share buttons. It's the other side of the Epic Fail coin, a movement that was nice and eponymous. Ordered regular, got decaf! Not epic fail. And look, I get it, we're about click-throughs on this Internet — which I know well from not getting a lot — but holy hell, how about a little gradation? Think if every day I took the biggest shit of my life? Well shouldn't I realistically start to worry about my colon, my diet, and perhaps the size of my asshole?

I apologize for the use of profane language in the preceding paragraph, but should it not be expected in a place where griping is listed near the top of the list? So hey, let's disrupt things. Let's stop calling everything disruptive. Let's look at a thesaurus. Bollix? Upset the apple cart? These are excellent. You can even abbreviate that last one as UTAC. I can't wait for that to be the name of some new agency! UTAC that one right to the bank...

I'm From Nowhere

As good old Facebook seeks to expand how much information it has about you, it's been desperate to know my hometown for a little while now. It does a good job of assessing where I'm probably from based on how many of my friends claim a certain place as their hometown. But what is really excellent is the last option: I have no hometown. As it is, even my hometown had a hometown. Well I suppose you can say it still does. At any rate I'll continue "suffering" through my incomplete profile.

I'm not a good Facebook user. Too many people send too many requests. The problem of course, is that sometimes I want people to see messages or notifications I send them on there, but I'm likely lost in the same world of mass they are on my end. Ah the social media vortex. Instead I stand at the edge from time-to-time and do my best to not let gravity pull me fully in.

Speaking of gravity, the gravity of language is something I consider probably far too often. It ties into what I was just getting at all too well. When there's so much presented to us so easily, how can we boil down to what matters? Well nevermind that since I'm not going to come to some grand epiphany at the time being. Instead I'll just have fun reading apartment listings that say things like "Heat, Water, and Garbage included!" Now you might think that an apartment full of garbage wouldn't appeal to anyone but Oscar, but remember the old adage: "one man's trash is another man's treasure." I wonder what the implication of that adage is for women...
 

Hall of Wien

For whatever reason, Wien has been on my mind today. I suppose it's simply Wien being pronounced ween and the last syllable of today's holiday, coupled with my childish amusement concerning speculation as to residents call themselves Wieners. I mean, they're either Wieners or losers, right?

And speaking of losers, we've definitely got Ventra. As I mentioned in the past and as you might have noticed if you were a Chicago transit user, the system is performing rather abysmally. And it's tough for the employees of the CTA, many of whom I have interacted with over the years, and many of whom I like. People get pretty frustrated with the service already and there's a tendency to take it out on someone wearing the logo. Throw in another wrench with Ventra and I worry about the remaining hair on the already one-third bald head of a man at my nearby station.

CTA's pretty aware of just how unenthused riders are with the crap service — though not aware enough to have considered not implementing the unnecessary "upgrade" in the first place. Alas, profits [for someone]. The result is that the stop I get off at every morning has recently acquired a new jovial man to greet everyone and to tell us all to have a wonderful day. I know why he suddenly appeared and I'm sure other riders do too, but that doesn't stop me liking the guy. Using such a tactic only makes me dislike the CTA even more, but hey, I'm transported most of the way to work without having to do anything but stand there. That can be a little more difficult at rush hours, but hey, other people want to travel most of the way to and from their destination without having to do anything but stand there too. Some of them even sit.

In the spirit of Halloween, Kind was giving out bars this morning. I could have sworn when these launched they were nothing but natural ingredients but now they've got the soy lecithin and the soy protein isolate of every other "bar." Or perhaps they were always loaded with these artificial goodies and now they just choose to report it. Either way, doesn't seem so kind to me. What I mean is they're not the kind of thing I want to be putting in my body. Not at a premium cost, and [almost] not for free. But not eating free things that aren't good for you wouldn't be following the spirit of the day. Sometimes you gotta give into the spirit.

A Happy Halloween to one and all.

 

All Hallow's Eve's Eve

If you're a regular reader of this blog, that probably means you're me. If you're a regular reader of this blog, you also know I am a harsh taskmaster to myself regarding posting four times a month. And though that corresponds quite nicely to weekly, sometimes I get behind. And while I can get behind getting behind (as well as getting behind a behind), I can't abide the missing of deadlines. Not when I know they exist. I've never missed a deadline I knew existed. The problem is I'm just not always aware of the deadline.

Those lines are pretty dead, which is only fitting for The Day of the Dead, or day of the undead if you will (you must, it's my blog). But I've no burning desire to talk about vampires, nor zombies for that matter, even when cranberry.

Tomorrow there will be children and adults in costumes but so it was today and perhaps every day since last Saturday. Sure I understand how excited people get for Halloween (actually, I don't entirely, I'm not much of a costumer of note), but hey it's already a franchise, so go and enjoy how you like though, if you're using fake blood, maybe it's time to stop using Heinz since they too have gone to the conglomerates. Businesses of the world are always falling to conglomerates, so I guess Heinz was just playing ketchup. Independent companies can continue to join the dead it seems.

Anyway, tomorrow there will also be candy, and you don't have to be from Mars to be excited about that. After all, you could also be a dentist...or a doctor specializing in diabetes.

Somewhere in a Vienna Airport...

There's a book I wrote and had published in limited (5 copies) release -- since I had a coupon code for free printing and I love deals. The secret romantic in me has a lot of love for the found object and it perhaps being a sort of serendipitous event. To that end I'd decided I should drop off a copy of said book somewhere in Europe while there with the wife-to-be. There was a most excellent venue presented to me in Prague, but alas I wasn't carrying it. Or I may, in fact, have just been too nervous about it. Probably overzealous to drop it in the Kafka section. With a touch of sadness, I czeched out.

Nearing the end of our journey another great and eclectic book shop within the Museumsquartier that might be this place presented itself. Again I don't recall whether I was bookless or ball-less in the circumstance, but once again opportunity passed. After all, it's a little embarrassing to stick your own book into a place like that.

So at last I gave into halfway guerrilla marketing, purchasing the latest Junot Diaz book at an exorbitant rate in a Vienna airport book shop, and replacing it with my own offering. Inside was just an inscription hopeful that someone would pick it up, read it and, most importantly and least likely, enjoy it. Who's to say how much of this will or has taken place as one thing I didn't do was include any sort of contact information, save even a link to this blog or perhaps a twitter account.

At any rate, between the swapping of [book] places with another writer from New Jersey, and that the book is about an itinerant and then left in an airport, it all seems to have come in not too far shy of 360 degrees. Sometimes you don't get to find out where or how a thing ends up. And since fiction is about inventing outcomes (or lying and calling them invented -- one might use the terms "repackaging" or "repurposing"), an invented future for this work fits just fine.

Tee Mobile

But isn't every tee mobile so long as you pull it out of the ground? Or you throw it on as shirt. Tea can easily be mobile as well, as it was for a certain tea party. Mobilitea even has it built right in. And, just in case, a list of the other set of tangents I might have selected. But maybe tea's not your bag. But look, what I'm really getting at, unfortunately, is T-mobile, and this ad I didn't see on TV a few minutes ago, but just as I typed that, the ad appeared again, a couple of parents saying something about their son for this Catch Jeremy campaign. And I went to that link because I'm familiar with the name. And if you've read this far, don't go to that link, unless you already have, in which case it's too late. And we could discuss how stupid it all is, but honestly, that's the first thing I'm discussing for the month of October? Synopsis: thinner Jared aka old Verizon guy is meant to be globe-trotting and has a crappy international data plan. I think. I just scrolled a bunch to avoid wasting even more of my time. Basically, if Evan Ratliff from Wired could be found trying to stay off the grid, it wouldn't be very hard to catch this idiot.

The woman to whom I've recently become engaged wishes I weren't engaged in this right now and instead maybe mentioning the fact that we've become engaged. So I, who clings to a vague anonymity on the internet (but clearly, with what I linked above and the fact that I'm blogging at all is quite vague indeed), will make quick note of this milestone. In real life this is a huge deal (at least for me, who plans to do this once), but here on my nonsense blog, actually it still matters. In a place where absolutely nothing and thus everything is sacred, you've got to keep track of the milestones.

 And that's a wrap.