Wednesday, January 04, 2006

Keeping Busy

There's something remarkable about the holiday season. It's enormously time-consuming. I've been running about, in a state of perpetual stimulation, for quite a while. It's not just the friends and family, it's the normally-long-distant friends and family that really do it. When you know someone well, and then don't see them for a year (or six months, or whatever - a while), it's like getting to know someone afresh, with the added bonus of already know you're going to like them. Each conversation reminds one of a dozen things the other person hasn't seen/done/heard about, and much sharing takes place. The time literally melts away.

Now, I'm famously bad at remembering what I've shared with whom. I've told stories to people present for the original event, and I've talked to people about things I've done with others, only to discover that the person I'm conversing with is the very person I shared the original experience with. My brain's definitely using some strange mental shortcuts to squirrel that information away, because, like many strange shortcuts, the resulting path is much longer than intended, confusing, and actually harmful to getting where you're going. So I shared certain things redundantly. In particular, the flash animations of Bruno Bozzetto got thrown around quite a bit.

Being around my old friends almost invariably inspires in my bursts of creative activity, something I have decried in the past as being obnoxious both for their persistence in the face of no free time on my part, and in that they are apparently vital to my ongoing sanity. Well, this time is no different, and something actually came of it! I present to the world Wikraffiti, a collective effort to reveal the weird world of Google vandalism. I'm quite taken with it, in particular because it literally writes itself. There is simply no limit to the vandalism on Google, and some of it is actually amusing (though, naturally, all of it is reprehensible :-). Of course, a lot of it is terrifyingly bigoted, but I don't find that funny, so I'll have no truck with it's presence on any blog I'm supposed to be administrating! Regardless: the time has come for me to whittle away a few more inches of my day on that, but on the plus side, it's effortless to post one a day. By building up a buffer (which I can do in less than an hour), I'm good for a few days. In related news, a new digital camera might resurrect my unfortunately dead Asshole Horticulture blog, allowing me to explore new realms of invective.

I've noticed a lot of my friends are engaging in increasingly bloggish activities. Two have started real blogs, while others engage in blog-like forum activity. The effortlessness of creating them conceals the time consumed by maintaining them. It's like HP printers or Gillette razors: the original item's so cheap, it's practically free, but the cartridges/razor blades cost a lot! To explain my metaphor, actually maintaining a blog with any frequency is, without question, time consuming, and it's easy to imagine that one will have the time to update it when, in fact, such time is preciously rare. Such as it is, I have enough projects that I could, were I inclined, be buzzing away like a apian wage slave all day and night. Of course, my dear, dear readership (Hi, Taquito) knows that I don't exactly lavish such attention on this blog, so procrastination is to be expected. I *could* burn myself out on my own hobbies, but frankly, a certain span of "not using my head" is needed on a daily basis, too.

Apart from that, though, I'm having no difficulty keeping busy.

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