Hi-diddly-oh, readereenos! I’d like to take some time to talk about the comments some of you have been leaving on this blog. Don’t worry, this isn’t one of those “We need to talk” discussions; those still fill me with dread, and I wouldn’t want to inflict that on someone else. Mostly, I want to talk about my experience with the comments so far.

First things first: I do read them. This blog is so far low-traffic enough that I can take the time to read each comment individually. And since most of my readers are people I know in person (I assume), I haven’t run into the GIFT. Comments have been encouraging and constructive, and I really appreciate that.

That being said, I don’t reply to comments near as much as I’d like. Mostly this is a result of wanting to take my time to form a good reply. Taking that time, however can easily stretch to awkward lengths if enough time passes. Case in point: the whole year I was in France, I couldn’t work up the courage to email my friends because I had waited days, then weeks, then months to reply to a simple “Hey, how’s it going?” letter.

So I guess I just wanted to say that yes, I do read the comments, even if I don’t reply to them. If I do have something to say, I may turn it into a post in its own right (like the one recently one one of my SCA fighting posts). I do appreciate the feedback, as it lets me know that people are reading in a way that viewing stats do not. If you feel the urge to speak up, that’s fine; I’m a perpetual lurker, myself. But if you have something to say, then by all means do so! And feel free to ask for more clarification if something strikes your fancy, whether via comments, Facebook, or email.

Side note: I’m starting to get some spam comments now. Does that mean I’m becoming a R33l Bl0gg3r on t3h Int4rw3bz? Some of them are even in Russian!

Far Side note: I’ve gone back and replied to several comments, and I hope to reply to more in the future.

Free time can be a funny thing. No matter how much we have, we are often left wanting more, but when we have too much we run the risk of getting bored.

Earlier this week I quipped on Facebook about finally having enough free time to get bored. The past month has been quite a whirlwind of activity. It seems like I’ve have one thing after another since the second week of August.

First there was the extra-long work week (10 days, with a close/open shift in the middle); my work schedule is such that I don’t really have any consistent days off, (especially not weekends). Then there was my trip to Los Angeles. Then there was Labor Day weekend, of course filled with an SCA event (I did have fun, to tell the truth). Then my mom, who I hadn’t seen for more than a year, flew into town (don’t worry Mom, I enjoyed seeing you). And then it all culminated last weekend with Crown Tournament. Of course, any scrap of free time seemed to be taken up by preparing for events (especially Crown) or people being in/out of town.

But by this week I was finally in the clear. There were no big events on the horizon (not for a few months, at least), and there was nothing else to do besides attend to the small things that piled up during the mad rush. But those could wait. I decided I needed a mental health break.

So Wednesday was my first full day off in what seemed like quite a while. As was fitting, I did a whole lot of nothing (having short work days on Monday and Tuesday also helped). And yes, I did get bored. But it was kind of nice, a change of pace from having to steal moments of relaxation at the expense of productivity. For a while, I reveled in my boredom.

But as the day drew to a close, I started to think about having to go back to work, and how I would soon have to take care of things like laundry and dishes. I thought about all the video games I would have liked to try, that would have to wait. Even though I had almost a full day to myself, I wanted more time.

I suppose that’s our lot in life, though, to be dissatisfied with what we have until it’s almost gone. Knowing that doesn’t make it any easier, of course, and the drive to slack off wasn’t enough to keep me from fighter practice (as usual, I knew I would have fun once I got there) or from writing a post (even though I had a buffer). I just lament the fact that there’s more I wanted to do, but am going to have to wait (not that long, probably) to experience. It’s silly.

But so it goes, I guess.

This is going to be a short post, but it’s going to address a topic I fully intend to return to once I regain some spoons.

Spoons?

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Man, is this embarrassing.

I’ve been enjoying blogging so far, even if I don’t always know what to write about. In fact, I was planning on writing about not knowing what to write about (because I have several topics which I would like to give worthy effort to), but then I was overcome with a chilling thought.

I had been feeling pretty self-congratulatory when I noticed something weird about my viewership stats. They took a dip over the past weekend, but that was to be expected; I and a lot of my friends were out of town at Battlemoor, an awesome SCA event over the Labor day weekend. I pre-wrote enough posts that they should have taken me through the weekend. I have yet to get back on top of my writing buffer, but this week has been kinda crazy. But no worries, I thought to myself, my record is still clean! One post a day, every day since I started!

Then I looked closer at the stats.

At Saturday the 31^st, in particular.

Now, my stat plugin not only tells me how many pageviews I have on a given day, but also the titles of whatever posts I’ve made. It’s a good way to tell who’s been reading what.

There was no post title for Saturday the 31^st.

I had skipped a day of posting. And even worse, right after my self-congratulatory post celebrating one month of blogging.

Egg, meet face. Foot, meet mouth.

So I’d like to apologize to my readers. Through an honest mistake in calculating the number of days in the month I neglected to post. Not through malice, or boredom, or general distractibility (read: Minecraft). But through a simple math error. The fact that I had just finished celebrating my posting streak makes it even worse for me.

I’m thinking of ways I can make it up to you, or if I even have to. I could post twice in one day, but that doesn’t solve the fact that I messed up. I could write an extra post and change the publish date, but that seems dishonest. I could just move on, being more attentive in the future. After all, I’m the one who made the rules.

And that brings me to the real issue: I need to apologize to myself. I made the rules, and I’m responsible for holding myself to them. No one outside of the guilty voices in my mind is going to punish me for a missed deadline. But those voices are often quite loud, and quite adept at drowning out rational thought. I suppose it had to happen sooner or later, that I would miss an update. I’m just glad it was accidental rather than a conscious decision to let procrastination win.

And I did try to prepare for the weekend away. I wrote three posts in one day (I was quite in the zone) just to make sure there was something on the blog. But (at the risk of sounding melodramatic) it was all for naught.

Yeah, that was a bit melodramatic. Can you tell I need to work on forgiving myself? But that’s probably a post for another time.

Anyway, I just wanted to say sorry if anyone has been sitting on the edge of their seats for my daily posts (probably not). It wasn’t on purpose that I skipped a day; it was just a lousy math error. But I’m glad we had this conversation.

It was probably still better than complaining about the new RoboCop trailer.

 Talk about days getting away from you. This one certainly did, but not for the reason you may think. So given how late it is (it’s before midnight, it still counts as today!), and given that I have to get up in the morning tomorrow (whee, 4am!), this entry is going to be kinda random and low on the thought-provoking meter. In fact, it may sound like a bad observational comedy bit, where the person on stage strings a bunch of “Hey, you know that thing that is really common?” anecdotes together without really telling a joke.

 Don’t you just hate it when you hear a song that you know you’ve heard before, but have no way of looking it up? And even worse, when there are no lyrics to plug into Google? Man, that’s really annoying.

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Wow. I just realized that I’ve been blogging daily for just over a month. True, it took me a few days to get around to make it public, but I still wrote those days, so they count! While I don’t want to sound too self-congratulatory (but definitely a little), that’s pretty cool.

Since I’ve started, I’ve settled on the goal of writing at least 500 words each day. Of course, I’ve had to make adjustments for reality and the various activities that eat up whatever scrap of free time they can find. So while it may not be accurate to say I’ve written every day, I have at least posted every day.

I find it interesting that even one month into this exercise, I don’t have a clear direction for the blog. Admittedly, a fair amount of my posts have been on the dour and depressing end, but that has not necessarily been my goal. My goal was to make sure I had my own place, where I could express my opinions in whatever fashion I desired. In that respect, I guess I have succeeded.

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I’m going to blog about food, and you can all blame Wil Wheaton.

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[NOTE: I started this entry while out of town this past weekend.  It was written over the course of a few days, and finished up once I got back home.  If the tone jumps around a lot (hopefully that’s not the case), that’s why.  There’s more I’d like to say on the matter, but I’m going to post this mostly as a snapshot of my feelings at the time.]

Southern California is… interesting.

As I write this (in the past) I am sitting in a dark rental car, because the alternative is a house party with a bunch of people I don’t know with music that’s way too loud.  So here I sit: in the back seat, with the window rolled down and the doors locked,  parked on the winding road of an upscale Santa Monica neighborhood.  Writing by the glow of my tablet.

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So after my last post, I decided to declare Wednesday evening (see, this is where having a buffer gets weird) a “Mental Health Night,” meaning that I didn’t go to fighter practice. After writing about the number of things I had to do and the relative lack of time to do them, I decided that my energy would be better spent cleaning up my office than hitting my friends with sticks.

This also got me thinking about the mad rush to productivity I often feel. For years, I have always been needing to do something, usually in the form of schoolwork. True, I took a few years off between college and grad school, but the majority of my life has been spent in some form of learning environment that required me to contribute personal time in order to progress. As such, I feel weird when I don’t have anything I need to do.

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I am definitely not as “clean” as the rest of my immediate family. When I visit them it’s almost disturbing how spick and span everything feels. Growing up (especially in high school) I worked hard to keep my mess contained to my room; as long as the door could close, I didn’t see what the problem was. The problem, of course, came when the cleaning lady came by and I had to “pre-clean” my room so that she could “clean” it. But these states of intermittent order never lasted. Entropy always prevailed. And there is one phrase which still manages to strike terror into my superstitious and cowardly heart.

Mom Clean.

Mom Clean is an unattainable state of perfection where everything must be in order down to the most minute, microscopic level. Just finished vacuuming? Wrong! There’s an infinitesimal amount of dust, so small that the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle comes into play. Just washed the pots from dinner? There’s a nigh-imperceptible film that must be destroyed! Just put your clothes in your dresser? It is sensed when they are not folded properly!

Okay, that last one might be a bit of a stretch. But hopefully you see my point. Words alone cannot describe the creeping dread the ideal of Mom Clean instills in me.

Growing up, Mom Clean always seemed like some unattainable Platonic ideal, any effort never enough. Definitely not the kind of thing you want to hold up to a budding perfectionist as a goal. Even to this day it is ever out of my reach, but it is ameliorated by the fact that I now live on my own, and have veto power over which closet doors are opened and which shall forever hold back the gibbering horrors within.

Needless to say, it was quite a source of anxiety for me growing up, exacerbated by my outlier status when it comes to Messy/Dirty. It doesn’t bother me much these days, but whenever I have to entertain family members (not just my mom) it twitches back to life. I often wonder if my general messiness developed as a reaction to Mom Clean during my (surprising un-)surly teenage years.

I imagine other people have a Mom Clean, even if it’s not related to cleanliness, or even their parents. Those things which are ever out of our reach, but we feel bad for not making it as far as we think we should. I’m sure there’s something deep and profound there, but it’s escaping me at the moment. Oh yeah: don’t feel bad for failing to accomplish something that is beyond your skills. You may improve with time, but sometimes there are just limits that we must learn to appreciate.

Don’t worry, I still love you, Mom. Just be sure to give me some advance warning before you visit; it would be better for us both.