Month: August 2002

Once more, from the top, the Friday Five:

1. Do you have a car? If so, what kind of car is it? I own a ’02 Honda Civic Ex. It’s blue.

2. Do you drive very often? I drive every day, mostly to and from work. Sometimes, in the summer, in the evenings, I feel a little guilty about it. It’s not great for the environment, and I’m not getting enough exercise. But since I moved, walking home isn’t really an option anymore, and the bus adds at least half an hour and a fifteen-minute walk to my commute.

When I was younger, the idea of learning to drive terrified me for some reason. Maybe the idea of trying to control something as big as a car seemed impossible to me, I don’t know. I put off getting my learner’s permit as long as I could. I was happy to take a week off from driving lessons to go to summer camp. I just didn’t want to drive. Now that I know how, I love to drive. I absolutely love it. I try to remember that whenever something new — like some untried experience that terrifies me — comes my way. I was wrong about driving, maybe I’m wrong about this. It doesn’t always work (as anyone who really knows me could probably attest), but I try.

3. What’s your dream car? I have no dream car. I like the one I’m driving. It looks nice, it’s comfortable, and so far it’s been reliable. That’s enough for me.

4. Have you ever received a ticket? Parking tickets only, although I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t been known to speed on occasion. Both times I was ticketed, it was because the meter next to which I was parked had expired. The first time, the minutes left on the meter didn’t change when I stuffed it with my last handful of dimes, and since I was in a hurry, had no more money, and it was after five, I thought I’d take the risk and leave my car there. That’s probably when the University police pounced on it. The second ticket I received downtown. Attack of the Clones was longer than I had expected it to be.

It also wasn’t half as good as it should have been, but that’s another story altogether.

5. Have you ever been in an accident? Yes. I was in junior high, and my father had picked me up from school one Friday afternoon, since we were going on a canoe trip with the Boy Scouts maybe an hour from then. A car at a cross-street in front of us didn’t stop at the stop sign, and we crashed into it at maybe twenty-five or thirty miles an hour. I wasn’t wearing my seatbelt, and while I didn’t go through the windshield, I did crack it with the top my head. We found hair in the splintered glass later that evening. I missed the first night of the campout, missed the canoeing (which I didn’t think was any big loss), but managed to get there by late Saturday afternoon. I was a little shaken, but I felt fine. I have always worn my seatbelt since.

I have a lot of fun writing ten-second fiction for 600 seconds. I’m never entirely sure what my brain is going to come up with, and the knowledge that I have to come up with something forces me to write. Today, I wrote this, which was fun, and then, because there were ideas still bouncing around my head, I wrote the short-short story below. I decided to post it here just for a change. I hope you enjoy.

They called themselves the uaomons, although their true name, they said, could not be pronounced with our tongues. We found them on one of the planets closest to their sun. They, too, were explorers, they said. They had never left the face of their planet — indeed, had only recently begun to dream that such things were possible — but they claimed to have arrived from distant shores and traveled other continents. They showed us their vessel, built of iron and thick wood, showed us the maps they had pieced together on their journey. They no longer believed the old stories, they said. Here there be dragons. Here lies the end of the world. They had seen their breath in the icy dawn of the north, had traveled west where their maps showed nothing but darkness and death. They were explorers, and they were not afraid when we showed them our ship and charted the course we had followed on our own system’s map. They were men of honor, they said, servants of their king. Our arrival filled them not with fear, but with wonder. It was the dawning of another age. They were wise, they were brave…

And they were delicious.

Yesterday, according to my stats, I received a total of eighteen hits from a weblog called the ShanMonster Page. And do you know why? Because someone else had found both of our sites by looking for “the best bland long hair vagina gallery”.

Now, look. I’ve searched for some strange things in my day, and I’ve seen some odd referrals pop up in my stats. But whoever you are, why-ever you’re here, please don’t come looking for things like that. The same goes for “steve guttenburg naked” and “twilight zone pictures natural nude”, all right? The less I have to post at Disturbing Search Requests, the better.

Whoever came here looking for “mongo never kill a customer“, though — keep up the good work.

The search function at Blogdex has been “temporarily disabled” for about two months now. I don’t think it’s coming back. I guess that’s okay — I really only ever used it to stroke my ego and see if any strangers had linked to me, which they never had — but would it kill him to update his error message?