Yesterday I re-read my last blog post - the one written with half a bottle of white wine running through my veins - and I learned something about myself: my spelling and grammar go to shite when I'm drunk.
For the spelling, I don't know why it should be; there's a decent check-as-you-type spell-checker in my browser from which I write these posts that underlines every misspelled or suspicious word with squiggly red lines that grasp my attention more effectively than any sexually-suggestive advertisements on TV (or it seems any word not part of popular culture since before 2003 - case-in-point: in the paragraph above, the word 'blog' is underlined in red).
As for the grammar: no Firefox extension as yet exists for giving assistance to my inner grammar nazi, so I'm left to rely on my own proof-reading ability which apparently also takes a back seat when the communicative hemisphere of my brain is fuelled by fermented grapes instead of reason and H2O.
So as I was reading what I vaguely remember writing the other day, I laughed, I cried, I cringed, and then I cried some more. I was tempted more than once to hit the Edit button on that post, but I thought it best that I leave it as is, thus turning that post into a lesson for my present and future selves of what had transpired here.
Bah, drunk again. I don't mean to make this some sort of running theme of posting blogs while I'm inebriated, but at the moment it feels like the best ideas are coming to me when I'm not thinking straight.
Once again, the reason for my slight intoxication is because there's some leftover wines at my place. No, a friend didn't leave it behind like last time - I finished that one off pretty quickly. This time, I bought this one myself. Why? Because I was told white wine was an ingredient in a good pasta sauce htat I oh so enjoyed.
If you haven't already figured-out from my food-related blog posts, I strive to make a lot of Italian dishes because I like Italian food. Oh 'like' is too weak a word for it: I've been to the same Italian restaurant for my birthday since my 21st, and when I was making travel plans for Melbourne for a friend's wedding and was told about Lygon St - a street lined with restaurants serving all manner of Mediterranean cuisine - I almost kissed my travel agent right then and there (oh nevermind that Lygon St is now in the news because of all those gang killings; that can all happen in the background while I'm chowing-down on some epic gnocchi dish for all I care).
Much like with my documenting of Pizza 1.0, 1.1, and 1.2, I'm trying to do the same thing now with a white pasta sauce: create something which contains all the parts I love most about pastas based on white sauces. With Pizza 1.x, it was easy to list my goals because all of the things were based on very tangible parts With the pasta however, it's all a matter of taste.
I did however come across a pasta dish which approximated what I was after when I was at one of my favourite cafes one Friday lunch time, and so I asked one of the staff if they could maybe ask the chef to share with me the recipe so I could make something like that myself. She came back and relayed the words of the chef back to me: "...it's the same as your usual cream-and-bacon sauce, but with some white wine added."
Now I should've asked WHICH white wine they used, but because I'm not a wine connoisseur (holy crap I spelled that right while my head is swaying side-to-sode out of my rational control and in time to the music playing right now) and to my unsophisticated palette all white wine tastes like all other white wine and all red wine tastes like all other red wine - yet I can tell the difference between regular Coke, Diet Coke, and Coke Zero... go figure - because the next time I went shopping I was planted in the middle of the wine section surrounded by more bottles of wine than there are stars in the sky, and without a damn clue as to which one to buy. So I picked one and hoped for the best.
I didn't hope hard enough.
The next time I tried my pasta sauce, I added the wine and, while it did add that little something that my normal sauces had been missing, it didn't add the right flavour, so now I'm stuck with this bottle of wine which I am now drinking down like water (and if my guitar buddy read that part right now she'd tell me off because she's trying to get me to slow-down my drinking since I still drink anything, alcohol included, like I do my Coke). I should really throw it out of just give it to somebody else who might actually enjoy it more than I, but there's another overriding part of myself that really hates being wasteful and throwing things out. So, down the gullet instead of down the bin it goes.
I don't know where it came from, but I really hate throwing things out or being wasteful. Back at my family's house my dad keeps a compost that helps fuel the garden he keeps in the back yard - I really like the idea of having our food scraps being put to good use. Also, they participate in the city's recycling program. The apartment building I'm in however, doesn't even participate in the recycling program, so every time I throw a piece of recyclable paper/plastic/glass into the massive bin at the side of the building I feel like I might as well eat a new-born baby for all the good I'm doing the world. So you know what I do to absolve my soul? I actually save-up my paper (all my utility companies still love sending me paper bills no matter how many times I click the 'e-mail me my bill' option on their websites) and when the pile is large enough, put it in my bag and TAKE IT TO WORK where they have a some semblence of a recycling program.
(I haven't even verified if the sort of recycling my work does is actually good, or if all it does is collate our various piles of waste into neat bundles of similar material and then ship it off to some overseas developing nation's slum where they drop it on unsuspecting children. If that's the case, then I might as well just throw the rubbish out and eat a new-born baby to spare the transport company all those wasted travel miles - cut-out the middle man.)
I did come to some sort of conclusion in my white pasta sauce endeavours recently, and I made a variation of that recipe (one that didn't include the wine which is why I still have so much of it to waste on myself) for my family when I stayed with them for dinner last weekend. Hell the meal even included ciabatta bread with pesto on the side. It was the most Italian my family could ever get and I swear I was peeing olive oil the following morning.
I had a dream about you
While not my exact words, I pretty much said the title of this blog post to somebody yesterday.
The day before, that somebody and I were talking over Facebook chat about food, lots of it, and so the dream I had that night was basically a rerun of our conversation. However, instead of the 2 of us sitting behind our respective computers using the internet to talk to one another, we were sitting at a table together eating all of the food that we were talking about. I relayed these details to her the next time I caught her on Facebook chat, and her response was: "That's scary Em".
Reflecting on that line, I have a bit of trouble trying to understand what was so scary about my dream; it's not as if we were eating in the dark while a serial killer was lurking in the shadows. The thing is, this isn't the first time I've got that reaction out of people when telling them about the dreams I have.
I can trawl through some of my old e-mails from work and find one where I told a friend she was in dream of mine where she found herself lost in some weird dimension and had to be rescued by a crew that consisted of her husband, myself, and the rappers from what I believe were 50 Cent's G-Unit. Her reaction: she thought it was scary. (Re-reading that paragraph, I think that one qualifies as scary in the 'horror' sense of the word.)
I can also remember telling one of my mates about a dream of mine he was in (can't remember the dream unfortunately) to which he responded by telling me that that's pretty scary, before telling my my head's all fucked-up.
Thinking about those and other incidents, I'm not really sure what constitutes the 'scary' part of my dreams. Is it scary in the uncanny sense that I can recall my dreams or put people I know into such strange scenarios, or is it scary in the sense that I should be admitted into a mental hospital for what my mind is capable of coming-up with when I'm asleep?
Seeing as my dreams are often influenced by the things in my day I'm not too surprised to find my friends or others who make up my day in them. I've also always had a pretty good imagination, and after hanging-out with anybody long enough I can imagine them in any situation with almost any expression or emotion (I once had a school friend cry in my dream even though I had never seen them cry before). I mean, we all have that ability where, when we read some words from someone (either in a text or an e-mail), we put their voice to the words and imagine it as if they were reading to us. I'd like to think my dreams are just an extension of this ability.
This ability of mine does seem to fall short in one department however: Scottish accents.
I've always had trouble replicating the voices of Scottish actors/actresses in my head. This is particularly annoying when there's all those great Sean Connery movies and there's Scotty from Star Trek with all those great lines. I fail in this department because, when trying to recall their voices, they always end-up sounding more like pirates.
That's right. Pirates.
What's even worse is that now I've made a Scottish friend (previously dubbed 'laundry lass') whom I e-mail more often than I actually see in-person, and my imagination always makes their reading-to-me voice devolve into pirate 'arrs' and 'yarrs'. They even featured in a dream of mine several weeks ago; their voice, after a while, became too hilarious in my own dream that it caused me to wake-up in a fit of laughter.
So much for nightmares forcing a person awake to escape a frightening situation; here's me being forced awake to escape a terribly imagined accent.
Maybe I am a scary individual after all.
Question: what the hell is FQ?
No-longer-on-dial-up girl's Facebook status made mention of her being exciting about it being out. FQ? I thought, WTF? Last time she did this, it was ANTM, which, thanks to Google, I was able to find-out meant America's Next Top Model.
So I started thinking that maybe it's another TV show, but nothing that came to mind had a 2-word title with the first word beginning with F and the last word beginning with Q. Google wasn't much help this time either, pointing me either to fashion publications, or letting me know that it's the SMS version of "fuck you".
So I just asked her what FQ could possibly mean, and she dodged the question by pointing-out one of my eccentricities instead.
There are just way too many acronyms for me to keep up with now. I don't know whether to blame computing (where almost every new technology or idea conceived can be shortened into a TLA (three-letter acronym) or XTLA (extended three-letter acronym)), or the trend towards laziness in our written language that I mentioned in my last blog post, for this over-abundance of acronyms.
There was a time when I used to refuse putting my written words into acronyms. This was when I was first introduced to the world of IM when a friend of mine suggested I install ICQ on my computer, circa 2000 AD. From then I was exposed to a new language; a language of LOLs, ROFLs, OMGs, and emoticons. For a long time I replaced LOLs and ROFLs with "hahah" and the like, and expanded every word I could because I thought I was 'above' degrading my English. (Looking back, I realize I was just being a pompous jackass in the same way some people say "I don't have a television; I read.")
I did eventually succumb to the use of acronyms in chat messages, texts, e-mails, and this blog. Hell, I even say LOL in real life. I did draw a line somewhere: I continue to refuse using those kinds of acronyms and smilies in more important communiques, like essays, reports, documentation, or other formal messages. And in all of this I continue to use proper punctuation and grammar, because nothing makes baby Jesus cry like reading a headline that says: Students failing because of Twitter, texting
Aside: the first acronym ever given to me over ICQ was ASL (age/sex/location), by some random Australian girl who found me just 1 day after I had installed ICQ. I had to ask her what it meant, because Google didn't exist then. She was the only random IM chat buddy I ever had.
So I still don't know what FQ means in the context of no-longer-on-dial-up girl's status update. Ideas?
Number of acronyms in this blog post: 23
Young on the outside, old on the inside (and uncool all-round)
My perceived age seems to be a running theme on my blog as the running-into and meeting several new people thanks to dance classes has my age coming into question time and time again. What about how old I am on the inside then? Well, according to a study that has recently come out about social media amongst young adults (which has been getting referenced a lot this past week from the sites and blogs I follow) I'm likely to be 30 or older.
According to the study, blogging amongst teens and young adults declined since 2007 (went up with the 30+ crowd over the same period) who have exchanged "macro-blogging" for micro-blogging with status updates. It's more likely the status updates are just confined to their online profiles on sites like Facebook, as the study also showed that a majority of young adults have a Facebook profile, but not a Twitter account.
So blogging and Twitter are both uncool and for the old folk. *sigh* Can't catch a break can I? And all of this on the back of a dream I had a few nights ago where I was getting gray hairs O_o
I guess being told you're old on the inside isn't as bad as being mistaken for young on the outside. It carries with it a lot of the better connotations associated with age, like wisdom and responsibility, and it kinda makes me feel good about myself, much like that feeling you get when you did reading tests at primary school and were told by your teacher you had a reading age beyond your years. Pride, I think it is - the sense of achievement kind, not the self-important seven-deadly-sins kind.
Back to the study, it's probably just showing the trends of today: Facebook is an easy way to share certain content with your friends, and status updates are an easy way to do what blogging does but with less characters; say what's on your mind to those who are willing to read/listen.
When I started this website in 2001, I was just following the trends of those days which was to get your own Geocities (or equivalent free-hosting) page and add whatever spastic animated image or annoying follow-your-mouse-cursor JavaScript to the site. The blog was the natural extension of the personal website and so that was added quite soon afterwards, although I didn't start calling it a blog or blogging until late 2005.
Little did we know that maintaining the thing takes actual effort, and so came the decline of the personal website / blog, paving the way for the multitude of social networks, each with their own little way of doing relatively effortless things like uploading photos from that drunken 21st, or telling your friends about what food you're ingesting AT THIS VERY INSTANT.
If the long-term trend though is to replace effort-requiring things with effort-less things, then I wonder what will be superseding the Facebooks and Twitters of today? It's bad enough that today's kids have forgotten what punctuation is for in their goal to say as much as they can with as few characters as possible.
What are we going to forget next? The ability to act appropriately in social situations because everything is done with non-face-to-face communication methods?
Oh wait...
Finally back from my New Year's holiday, which included something of a technology blackout: no cellphone coverage, so no day-to-day Tweets of the day's happenings, so no receiving or sending of New Year's text messages, much to my chagrin because those on rival cellphone networks did get some modicum of reception and were still able to receive New Year's text message love :(
So, on to the blog post backlog I had in my mind. First-up on the list: my mum.
At a Christmas party a week before Christmas day of good ol' 2009, a certain someone - who I haven't yet mentioned in this blog before, and so doesn't have a witty nickname to which I can attach to them, to which I am surprised considering the contribution this person made to my 2009 which in turn made it so great - asked me a pretty tough question:
"What kind of person is your mum?"
How we got on to the topic of my mother, I can't remember - it might have something to do with a certain button badge I was given prior to this party - but when I was faced with that question my mind drew a blank. After what seemed like minutes of silence from me while my interrogator watched patiently at the cogs turning behind my eyes, all I could respond with was:
"I don't know how to answer that. Give me a day or 2 and I'll come-up with something."
"Good answer." she said, and walked away to leave me to contemplate the sorts of things I could say about my own mother.
So I gave the thought a day, which then became 2, which then stretched out from however many days there are between a week before Christmas and now...
When thinking about how I describe anybody, I usually look for that 1 trait that sets them apart from the rest; the thing that makes them unique to me. In the case of my mum, it would be that she is self-sacrificing for her children: everything she did, she did for my brother and I.
That trait encompasses many things: unconditional love, support, a level head whenever I asked her about the decisions I was facing (giving me the answer that would benefit me the most, even if the answer was not what I wanted to hear), and an almost embarrassing willingness to go out of her way to make sure my brother and I were as comfortable as we could be (eg: driving out from her work after school hours to take us home, giving us more than our share of food at the table, giving-up the window seat on a plane, etc).
That trait however is a bit of a double-edged sword; as well as being what makes my mum so great, it's also what has annoyed me the most: the unconditional love is often blind to what's going-on with others, the support would often make me think I was right when I was in the wrong, the honest answers might have carried me down the much safer path which could've given me valuable lessons or challenges to face, and the 'out-of-her-way'-ness often became too embarrassing, particularly when around my friends throughout those terrible teenage years.
Despite the good and bad nature of a child-centric focus, it's all the sorts of things I have grown to expect from a mother - and all the sorts of things that compose the yard stick by which I measure every mother I have known or will know.
And I wouldn't have it any other way.
"A mother is a person who, seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie."
- Tenneva Jordan
A website through the ages
I was doing a Google search at work last week - looking-up "AGM", making sure that it meant Annual General Meaning, which it does, before I used it in a sentence in an e-mail - and in doing so I came across a blog entry from a local blogger where they described attending their apartment's AGM and how it felt like such a grown-up thing to do at the time. I say 'at the time' because it was written in 2004.
Browsing through to the blog's homepage, I saw that it is still actively updated. OMG! I thought, another blogger from NZ who writes about their day-to-day life, who started the site off years ago, AND IS STILL AROUND! OK, so 5 years isn't forever, but my own website only has entries dating all the way back to 2005, despite having had this site up since 2001, and that was before I even called these updates 'blog posts' or that the word 'blog' was common in the English language.
I was excited! Ecstatic! Glad to find someone out there who perseveres with a personal website for years, even with the knowledge that their readership consists mainly of friends and family, with the odd stranger/passer-by. I became even more excited/ecstatic/glad when, after reading through a few of their posts, I could identify them as somebody who might be a workmate of amazing baking girl. (2-degrees of separation FTW! (NZ joke))
OK, so my excitement probably makes no sense to anybody else. Here's some background for where I'm coming from with all this:
The day before I ran into OrangeBlog (yep, that's their blog's name), I was reading another blog entry from one of the authors I read and follow, John Scalzi, who had just written about how his website has been around for 11 years. That's one helluva milestone, I thought.
Not many personal sites on the internet stay around for 11 years. My own friends' attempts at websites or blogs are a testament to that: one guy hasn't added anything substantial to his site in several years, of 2 overseas/travelling blogs, 1 stopped theirs just a few months in while the other hasn't been updated in over a year, and the 1 guy who went so far as to buy a domain name and host his own Content Management System (think website management program), when he stopped updating it it got bombarded by comment spam bots, before getting domain jacked.
And when the New York Times has a slow news day and decides to take a pot shot at bloggers for lacking discipline and staying power, I find myself alone in the fight back, using whatever skills I have on hand (writing, 'your mom' jokes) and whatever weapons I can find on my desk (unsharpened pencils and dead batteries... wait, that can't be turned into some sort of analogy for my life can it?).
I guess it takes certain kinds to continue something that has no real rewards, no tangible benefits; to throw thoughts, words, ideas, out into the digital ether and not worry about them coming back any better than they were when they left the gap between your brain and the keyboard. I haven't received so much as a cookie for what I'm doing with this website, but it's not an entirely selfless thing; every time I hear somebody I know say "Hey, I read your blog" or allude to something I've written, it becomes a real boost to the ego.
So yeah, I knew I wasn't alone in the whole 'maintain and keep updating a personal website' endeavour - the world's way too big for that - but I feel a lot less alone than I did before.
And hopeful too that there are more like me out there when it comes to keeping to things for the long term. Hope, for now it seems, is the colour orange.
