Month: April 2002

The Friday Five, found initially via kottke.org

1. What are the first things that you do in the morning to start your day?

First, I wake up. I find this helps immeasurably. Then I grab a towel and some clothes and stumble to the bathroom for my morning shower. I get dressed in the bathroom not so much out of modesty — I live alone — but because I don’t want to traipse naked and wet across my cold, cold living room and its hardwood floor. Once finished getting dressed, I brush my teeth and pocket my keys and my wallet, usually spend a few minutes transfixed to the television or mesmerized by the radio while I struggle with the whole concept of being awake, and then I head out the door, locking it behind me. If I’m lucky, I have about five minutes to get to work. I almost never eat breakfast on weekdays, the only days I really have a routine. That might be a mistake — by eleven I’m usually famished and can’t think straight — but food generally doesn’t agree with me until I’ve been awake for an hour, and I have enough trouble allowing half an hour for getting dressed and my commute.

2. What are the last things that you do at night before going to bed?

I make sure my alarm is set, my door is locked, and then I climb into bed and turn off the light. Sometimes, but as often as I should, I leave on the radio, more because I know I’ll forget to turn NPR back on in the morning than anything else.

3. What daily routine have you recently added to your day?

My routine has stayed basically the same for years. The only real difference between now and a year ago is I have a better paying job and a car. But I’ve had the better paying job since September and the car since January, so I wouldn’t really call those recent alterations to my day. I am nothing if not predictable. But then, you probably knew I was going to say that, didn’t you?

4. What routine do you wish you could get rid of?

I’m happiest when I can sleep without setting my alarm at all, so I would like it if I didn’t have to be at work until at least 9 or 10 every morning. Then I could have more time to myself in the morning, more time to adjust — maybe even have some breakfast — and I could still cling to this dream of eight hours of sleep every night. So it’s not so much a routine I want to get rid of, as it is a rountine that needs some serious tweaking. I won’t even begin to bore you with the routines that need tweaking at work.

5. What’s the one thing that makes you feel like something is missing if you don’t do it some point within your day?

Hands down, Caption This. It’s just part of who I am. And, really, if I don’t be me, who will?

I continue to think spam can’t get any more confusing or annoying, and yet it continues to confuse and annoy me. Case in point: today, not ten minutes ago in fact, I received a fake virus warning. “A letter sent to you was infected with a virus,” it says. “It was deleted. Below are the headers of this message and information from the virus scanner.” This didn’t come from my virus detection software, though, and I’m quite sure there is no postmaster at unreality dot net. Maybe someone tried to send a virus using a faked e-mail address and my domain name, but overall what I received looks suspiciously like spam since it, too, comes from an address I don’t recognize. Which begs the question: if you’re not selling or promiting something, and you’re not sending a virus, a link or something else, what then is the point of spam?

It’s the fifth of April and yet, despite that, outside my window it’s snowing. Not much, just a flurry here and there tossed around in the afternoon wind. But it’s enough. It shouldn’t be snowing. Winter should let us go, wish us well and send us on our way. I’m starting to need spring the way I need water. I need the genuine article, too, not these false starts and stops. I need robins chirping in trees, flowers in bloom. I need warm sun, cool breeze, and most of all no more snow.

“I like to say there are three things that are required for success as a writer…” Michael Chabon tells Writer’s Digest, “talent, luck, discipline. It can be in any combination, but there’s nothing you do to influence the first two. Discipline is the one element of those three things that you can control, and so that is the one that you have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and trust in the other two.”

I have decided to heed Neil Gaiman’s advice, which is actually Daniel Pinkwater’s advice, on curing writer’s block. “He goes down to his study,” Gaiman says of Pinkwater, “and sits down in front of the computer, and he has to be there for a certain amount of time. He can either write, or he can do nothing, but he can’t do anything else. No reading books, no doodling, no browsing the internet or making phone calls. He can write, or he can just sit there. Pretty soon, he gets bored of just sitting there, so he writes.”

Every now and then, for whatever reason, I get spam written in other languages. It’s weird — except for un petit peu de francais, I don’t speak any other languages — but who am I to argue with their tactics? It’s not as if I’d be any less quick to delete them if they were written in English. Today, I got bored, so I headed over to Altavista’s translator and deciphered the following e-mail written, apparently, in Korean:

Interest to read the parturition attachment anger work which is in the western sea ocean ‘ island travel ‘. Specially ‘ in the uninhabited island ‘ the heirloom, when it is a minute when it wants the good chance is thought will become. This mail address sending whole aspect is reply to send with the mail address which is to attachment anger work.

There was no attachment, parturition-related or otherwise, but I guess that’s just as well. I’m reminded of the equally awful translation* I performed for the “Constitutional Peasant” scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail last semester for the Penn State Monty Python Society. Other languages are funny.

* Also available in all its glory as an MS Word document