Last night, summer beer, delicious bbq... It was one of those occasional, unanticipated grand evenings of perfect indulgence. I am reminded of the sentence Geoff often repeats when he's having just such an experience: I have reached maximum sufficiency; any more would be a superfluent abundity. I don't know if he "got" that from somewhere, or if he composed it himself (I should ask!); but the level of drunkenness required to trigger its recitation (and to appreciate it) raises mirthful doubts of whether any abundance could ever truly be superfluous.
As I'm prone to do in the throes of such satiety, I lingered too long. People begged off at or near the typical Thursday witching hour of 10pm, and I was left in Craig's living room virtually alone, with Craig and Andy wanting to play video games. I must make note to myself that this is always a good time to leave -- I have some level of psychic resistance to social video gaming, which I'm not yet willing to either explore or overcome. It may help me to bear in mind how much this mental block resembles, in practice, my father's resistance to any technological development, and how elderly he seems as a result -- but whatever! If I'm just simple, well, "'tis a gift to be simple", so nyah, nyah, nyah and shut up!
Anyway, while Andy took a piss, Craig helped set me up a "mii", a video avatar, on Wii Bowling, after that was determined to be the only game suitable for a party of three -- another hint that it's time to leave at this point: I'm pretty sure these two would rather be engaged in a first-person shooter escapade. When it came time to actually pay attention to the process, my feelings of carefree abandon started to attach a lot more weight to the "I-don't-care" end of the Happiness Equation, the other variables for which are slipping my mind*. Minimal effort and focus on entering my name into the system resulted in my inadvertently making a mii named Damp -- which crystallized my attitude about the whole venture, yet paradoxically brought me as much cheer as I anticipate a Wii is ever likely to do. I was further delighted to find, when Andy came back from the toilet, that the mii he'd already created for himself on some previous night, is named Stank! So, it was Damp and Stank, rocking the lanes on league night!
11 July 2008
05 July 2008
Nbsigns' Secret Blog Arises; Defies Recalcitrant Neglect
I started a blog for the sign shop. I don't imagine I'll update that one any more frequently than I do this one, but whatever -- a bee in the bonnet one day, becomes a blog the next. On that blog, at least, I can hope that, eventually, once I admit it exists, other people at the shop might update it. It might be a good repository of sign shots from day to day, from which the best will be culled for the website. Or so I might imagine. At any rate, I can document my biz-related creative output there, since I don't seem so inclined to do so here.
I set it up on Wordpress. I don't have a clear reason why, other than variety. I got the impression that it's a little less bell 'n' whistley, imperceptibly more refined. At the very least, it's name isn't onomatopoeic of puking. Blat! belongs on Blog-ger -- it's coming out both ends! But New Bohemia posts updates from its "wordpress". It's friggin' professional! Wordpressional! Plus, in the FAQs it said I could import whole blogs from Blogger, should I so desire. I'm sure the reverse is true, but I've already written in excess of my concern for the topic.
So, as a result, I'm thinking maybe a change of tack (or is it tact? Does the phrase originate in ethics, or is it a sailing metaphor?) might be appropriate for this blog; a lowering of sights that might reduce how intimidating it seems to be for me to just tap out a few words and publish. I.e., perhaps I'll just make this more of a diary type thing -- the sort of thing I guess that people typically blog for anyway, right? I mean, I imagine that's what "Livejournal" is. I don't think I know anybody blogging on that -- no, wait: Dave, I think, has a page there... I vaguely recall him posting updates from a trip to Hawaii, or something like that. Oh, see now -- that doesn't bode well. I mean, that's the same sort of thing I was trying to do on the Honeymoon blog: I don't think that was a very studiously updated effort, and it was only 3 weeks...
But see: Livejournal, as I understand, has a reputation for being the home of tortured, depressed adolescents. And I think that might be just who I am, trapped in the broken-down body of a lazy, lower-middle-aged man. Well, anyway, I read Dick Cavett's column about depression, in the Times this past week, and it resonated. Specifically applicable was the coin-op fortune-vendor diagnosis, "Two prime victims of the disease are your libido and your ability to read" (hence, you have the disease). I've had the same three books on my bedside stand for over a year, with minimal desire to finish and no retention of what I've read; and my libido rarely comes up for air from its cozy cave in the briny deep, double entendres be damned -- hence, I have the disease!
I think the cure is to just do things. My two problems with that are (1) I just don't, and (2) if and when I do, I really don't appreciate it much. Somewhere, I've gotten the idea that writing a blog will help with both of these, but the notion has a couple problems of its own: it compounds my resistance to writing with the responsibility to publish; and it diffuses (confuses?) my responsibility to appreciate what I do with the hope that someone else can appreciate it in my stead.
Anyway, now I've got a couple of blogs to both claim and ignore, as befits the occasion. And with them I shall write me either a recipe for psychological disaster, or a roadmap to redemptive wholeness! Or I'll just keep on keeping on, as I have been.
(UPDATE: long about April or May of 2009, Scott, the shop manager, finally discovered, in his interweb meanderings among online occurrences of "nbsigns", the New Bohemia Signs Weblog. Now, everyone at the shop knows about it, too, but since then, not one of us has seen fit to add any postings. Without looking, I think the last post was from about the same time as this one, in July 2008. Anyway, we've done a much, much better job of uploading pictures of our work to a New Bohemia flickr set, which has attracted us some fans and followers, and makes lots more sense as a sign shop web presence, being more visual than verbal).
(UPDATE UPDATE: about a couple months ago, say, June of 2010, I hired a friend, Rani, to help us in "online marketing", and went on a bender of blogging as a result. So, now there are a lot more posts up over there, but I still haven't been able to convince anyone else in the organization to contribute... I need to devise some sort of encouragement...)
I set it up on Wordpress. I don't have a clear reason why, other than variety. I got the impression that it's a little less bell 'n' whistley, imperceptibly more refined. At the very least, it's name isn't onomatopoeic of puking. Blat! belongs on Blog-ger -- it's coming out both ends! But New Bohemia posts updates from its "wordpress". It's friggin' professional! Wordpressional! Plus, in the FAQs it said I could import whole blogs from Blogger, should I so desire. I'm sure the reverse is true, but I've already written in excess of my concern for the topic.
So, as a result, I'm thinking maybe a change of tack (or is it tact? Does the phrase originate in ethics, or is it a sailing metaphor?) might be appropriate for this blog; a lowering of sights that might reduce how intimidating it seems to be for me to just tap out a few words and publish. I.e., perhaps I'll just make this more of a diary type thing -- the sort of thing I guess that people typically blog for anyway, right? I mean, I imagine that's what "Livejournal" is. I don't think I know anybody blogging on that -- no, wait: Dave, I think, has a page there... I vaguely recall him posting updates from a trip to Hawaii, or something like that. Oh, see now -- that doesn't bode well. I mean, that's the same sort of thing I was trying to do on the Honeymoon blog: I don't think that was a very studiously updated effort, and it was only 3 weeks...
But see: Livejournal, as I understand, has a reputation for being the home of tortured, depressed adolescents. And I think that might be just who I am, trapped in the broken-down body of a lazy, lower-middle-aged man. Well, anyway, I read Dick Cavett's column about depression, in the Times this past week, and it resonated. Specifically applicable was the coin-op fortune-vendor diagnosis, "Two prime victims of the disease are your libido and your ability to read" (hence, you have the disease). I've had the same three books on my bedside stand for over a year, with minimal desire to finish and no retention of what I've read; and my libido rarely comes up for air from its cozy cave in the briny deep, double entendres be damned -- hence, I have the disease!
I think the cure is to just do things. My two problems with that are (1) I just don't, and (2) if and when I do, I really don't appreciate it much. Somewhere, I've gotten the idea that writing a blog will help with both of these, but the notion has a couple problems of its own: it compounds my resistance to writing with the responsibility to publish; and it diffuses (confuses?) my responsibility to appreciate what I do with the hope that someone else can appreciate it in my stead.
Anyway, now I've got a couple of blogs to both claim and ignore, as befits the occasion. And with them I shall write me either a recipe for psychological disaster, or a roadmap to redemptive wholeness! Or I'll just keep on keeping on, as I have been.
(UPDATE: long about April or May of 2009, Scott, the shop manager, finally discovered, in his interweb meanderings among online occurrences of "nbsigns", the New Bohemia Signs Weblog. Now, everyone at the shop knows about it, too, but since then, not one of us has seen fit to add any postings. Without looking, I think the last post was from about the same time as this one, in July 2008. Anyway, we've done a much, much better job of uploading pictures of our work to a New Bohemia flickr set, which has attracted us some fans and followers, and makes lots more sense as a sign shop web presence, being more visual than verbal).
(UPDATE UPDATE: about a couple months ago, say, June of 2010, I hired a friend, Rani, to help us in "online marketing", and went on a bender of blogging as a result. So, now there are a lot more posts up over there, but I still haven't been able to convince anyone else in the organization to contribute... I need to devise some sort of encouragement...)
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