isoglossia

So we’re now several days into November and welcome to it. As last year, we’ve pledged to post something on this site every day of the month, thanks to Fussy.org’s OCD-enabling annual project called NaBloPoMo. Last year the obsessive-compulsive disorderliness got a little out of hand, so this time I’ve decided to be all super-mellow about it by interpreting the ‘post something every day’ stricture in the most liberal manner possible. Specifically, by declaring a subset of NaBloPoMo called the NovNeurPhoPro. This is the third of 20-something entries. In general, text to accompany the day’s neurotic picture culled from our snarled photo archives will be minimal if present at all, but for this picture I give you

Redundantly meticulous redundancy
I need to be well-supplied with backup supplies of necessary supplies. This means that if I use a fountain pen I begin to get nervous if the ink-cartridge reserves fall below ten. Also true for vital foodstuffs, as well as for the hard disc drives which are scattered around my office and home like autumn leaves, each one unique in the version of backupped useless crap and snarled photo archives it holds.
Misanthropism
See stupidity, intolerance of. Related: behind-the-wheel hatred. If you are sharing the road with me I am likely to despise you for any number of reasons. For example, you are driving:

• too slowly
• too fast
• while talking on the phone, which doubtless has a ringtone I would happily see you skinned alive over
• a car with Ajdovscina plates
• into a roundabout with your indicator on
• a Fiat
• at all

Total recallability
I have a preternatural ability to remember every single dumb, pretentious, cruel, pompous, inadvertently hurtful, wrong, or pathetic utterance ever to emerged from my enormous, stupid mouth. This is my brain’s usual way of entertaining itself when I wake up at 3.30 am. NB: the excruciating level of detail of this ability does not extend to things I might actually wish to remember.
Odd phobias and predilections
Extreme illumination pickiness: If you invite me over to your house and your living room is illuminated by only the overhead light, we will have to stop being friends. Likewise, if your kitchen does not have under-cabinet lighting, I will not be able to prepare pasta puttanesca for you after all. Sorry. And: my weird LED fixation has already been mentioned.
Bizarre collections of gadgets & items of dubious utility
Take the ice axe in the cellar. No, really, take it. Why do I have this Bluetooth headset? At what point did I think this was something so necessary to my continued existence and productivity that I sought it out and spent enough to keep my son in chocolate eggs for months? We could also cross-reference here to the assortment of hard drives mentioned under Redundantly meticulous redundancy. And the LEDs. This frenetic fixation on acquiring useless stuff is counter-balanced by an obsessive reluctance to purchase things I actually do need, even in the face of the obvious. E.g., I have this pair of shoes I wear to work. They are old and shabby and close to falling apart, and my wife loathes and despises them with the crushing intensity of a billion black holes full of 16-ton weights. Despite her feelings about this, I have been planning to replace them for several years. I will probably get around to doing it in 2010.
Obsessive-compulsive disorderly conduct
Punctuality: I am a frequent visitor to sites such as the USNO’s cesium-calibrated atomic clock page, ensuring that my chronometers are all set to its “accurate to better than a billionth of a second per day” standard. I am not even kidding. And if you are late I will glare at you through slitted eyes of hate because I KNOW WHAT TIME IT IS.
Proofreading: though the occasional error does appear in these pages, their frequency is very low due to the fact that for every minute it takes you to read any given entry, I have spent 45 minutes obsessively proofreading it.

Your welcom.

CROSS-REFERENCE TO NABLOPOMO 2006:

Gunpowder isn’t cheap
Things I suck at

A random piece of flotsam found around our place

• Ever since being given a chemistry set at about eight years old, I have had an unnatural interest in laboratory glassware. Our measuring cup, for example, is a Pyrex^® beaker, and the above photo was taken with the aid of a glass Petri dish which I was moved to purchase the instant I saw it through the pharmacy window.
• Light-emitting diodes are also among the things I have a fetish for. So bright and lovely and efficient. Those are involved in that picture, too.
• Among my fallow skills set is the ability to manipulate yeast for the powers of good. Give me a dish of substrate, a live slant, and an inocculation loop, and I can easily propagate enough Weihenstephan to produce a delicious, estery Hefeweizen. When I was brewing I had an extensive, some would say ridiculous, refrigerated library of various strains of Saccharomyces cerevisiae and S. carlsbergensis from various regions. This is perhaps related to the first item above.
• Though I have never had any bees of my own, I am a big fan of their work. The idea of insects and fungi doing useful work for their human masters, completely gratis, fills me with joy and hope. Here is a picture of me doing some free-lance beekeeping in the Southern Cone. In spite of all this, I find the words ‘beekeeping’ and ‘beekeeper’ hilarious, especially when prefaced with ‘U.N.’
• I go through periods of having (or at least remembering) no dreams whatsoever, alternating with times of vivid recall of dreams of the utmost randomness. In the last few nights, for example, I have dreamt of Sea Monkeys and of rescuing a carp. Though it wasn’t explicit in the dreams, subtext made it clear that neither Sea Monkeys nor carp survived.
• Speaking of monkeys: I do not like them. I am sorry. I just don’t. Not even Sea Monkeys, frankly.
• I would much rather swim in salt water than fresh. I don’t really mind if it’s cold, as long as it’s salty.
• I would prefer not to be covered with sand, if at all possible, and watching Adam play on/ingest the beach gives me the heebie-jeebies.

Kilowatthour, recently become Dr. Kilowatthour, M.D., requested this post.

The picture is our latest contribution to the Flickr group ‘Choking Hazards’. Why haven’t you joined it yet?

Here you’ll find what is surely the most original idea for a post on this, the last day of November.

Especially alert readers will have noticed that there’s been a new post here every damn day this month. This is because I accidentally signed up for an activity called “NaBloPoMo” or something similar. I am still not entirely clear on why I did this or how it came to be, but lacking definite answers to the lingering questions on that score, I’ll blame Laid-Off Dad, whose site I began reading around the same time I found that I’d committed myself to posting every day throughout the month of November (so that acronym up there probably means something like “National Blog Posting Month”, in case you’re not really paying attention, like I wasn’t).

The month in review: what have we learned?
• Lots and lots of crumpled up little Post-It^™ Notes are the sine qua non of daily posting
• Actually pulling out a calendar and seeing how many days there are to fill with your half- quarter-baked vaporings is not a bad idea
• November is a great time to sneak in some drafts you wrote two years ago that somehow never made it
• ‘Post’ is actually a much more generic and flexible concept than was previously thought
• Random Picture Stream and Conversations are under-utilized categories during the period of December-October
• Sleep is overrated
• It appears that knitting is quickly replacing pr0n as the raison d’etre of the internet
• Sweet fancy Moses, there are a lot of cats out there

Actually, it wasn’t nearly as difficult as I thought it would be when November 1st dawned. By the end of the first week I had a pretty decent editorial calendar roughed out, and within a few days many posts were in the pipeline, which is to say already pre-quarter-baked. If time permitted I baked them a little more. If not, not. I didn’t really need to do anything differently this month, except to be slightly less lazy, marginally more organized, and significantly less obsessed with proofreading. If the photos, conversations, posting-to-the-future, and other tactics I used to get through NaBloPoMo were cheating, then I’m cheating all the time and you by extension are soiling yourself, ethically speaking, by even reading this.

The official rules of this activity (which is a new adjunct to the eight-year-old NaNoWriMo) don’t say what does or does not constitute ‘cheating’, and they couldn’t be much simpler: post every day. I added my own rule to this: don’t post every day about the fact that you are posting every day. The organizer put up a randomizer to direct you (at random) to the billions and billions of participating sites, and I quickly found a strong negative correlation between overt mention of NaBloPoMo and the likelihood that I would enjoy the content of the place where I found myself randomly deposited. So I made my own rule: save all this meta-talk about how OMG I’m like totally posting everyday! for the end of the month.

Another rule: do it without pimping out my child overmuch.

Some interesting sites I discovered through the randomizer or branches bifurcating from it:
• Banjeroo
• In the Gutter
• Notes to self
• the kilowatthour
• Citizen of the Month
• The Babbling Brooke
• One Child Left Behind

I also found a lot of stuff out there, not necessarily cat- or yarn-related, that I did not want to read, no matter how large I tried to make my heart. Maybe someday when I am feeling especially misanthropic I will post a list of things that will cause me to click on through before your site has even finished loading.

Overall I enjoyed having some pressure brought to bear, some RIGOR, as a colleague would say, and I think it was probably good for breaking out of a rut — note that November’s post total is greater than the previous three months’ combined. I spent a good deal less time over-editing this month, and enjoyed having a bit more spontaneity injected into the process of posting. The pressure decreased as the month went on, and by the middle of the term of commitment I had more than enough posts or ideas in progress to make it through without whining or panicking. During this month, though, my regular reading habit suffered tremendously.

It occurs to me that this event, assuming it’s to be repeated, should be renamed to reflect its international scope. (For some reason most of the good blogs I stumbled upon in the last 30 days turned out to be, well, Canadian). I realize that InternaBloPoMo doesn’t have quite the same ring, but what about GloBloPoMo?

Don’t be surprised if the pace around here slackens somewhat in December.

A friend writes: “Hey, do you have the list of grievances […] anymore? If not, why not?” She’s referring to some notes I kept back in school about one particular fellow student who seemed to register for every damn class I was taking. I was easily annoyed during those years. Regard:

List of Grievances

Unfortunately, the annexes have been lost to the mists of time.