Resolutions

Honestly, I'm not even sure what I want from this anymore. I started this (after several failed attempts) because I was bored at work in undergrad, and only really stuck with it because I was working the overnight shift at a McDonald's and needed something to keep me from snapping.

I'm not sure that last part has changed significantly. I work eight hours, have some sort of terrible meal roughly in the middle of it, then spend an hour getting angry at traffic. I still have long stretches where I'm not actually doing anything, but I'm not writing because I don't want to be confrontational or because I've set this huge road block for myself where I've got to come up with something brilliant because I haven't written since last year.

That's ridiculous. There are somewhere around five blogs for every person on the planet, and no one's reading this. So to hell with it. This "only writing for March Madness" thing isn't cutting it anymore. The confrontation thing doesn't make sense either, except that I'm hypersensitive to it. When we moved in to this apartment, we nailed something to the wall at 10pm, and our downstairs neighbor came up and asked us to knock it off. Totally reasonable request. Since then, I've been terrified of making noise and have been sneaking around this place like an overweight, lumbering, ineffective ninja.

It's ludicrous.

That's not to say I haven't been trying to get myself to get back to this. I'll record half-assed attempts at notes on my lunch break at work and buying these tiny little notebooks that are annoying as shit to write in because I've convinced myself that if I carry paper and a pencil around I'll become creative and turn this nonsense into something read and fawned over by millions.

The only time I update reliably is when I set some sort of schedule, like I'm forced to with March Madness. Which is great, and I can get myself worked up over a theme, but then as soon as I'm done, it flames out and I'm left with nothing again. I'm not even sure why I'm so reluctant just to relegate Murphspot to the pile of half-journals I've had over the years that go nowhere. It's probably some nonsense about a crippling fear that I've become unremarkable, which I have. And that's fine.

That happens to almost everyone.

Jesus, Peter Francis Gerasi. Could your commercials be any louder?

I thought about doing some sort of list of resolutions challenge to myself. Given
that I never posted it and it's nearly February, that's failed. It was too concrete and too ambitious and changing everything because it's mid-winter and we're out of holidays is completely arbitrary. The upside of that, I guess, is that there's nothing particularly wrong with claiming a resolution and starting it whenever you want.

So then. Let's start now? I guess? The original idea was to use this as a sort of checkpoint, so that I'd give myself goals and then could write about the progress. I'm not sure that's a terrible place to start, but at the risk of jeopardizing the chance that I'll get anything done, I think I'd like it to be less restrictive than I'd thought at first. I'll still post bits of progress on various goals I've got for myself that I'd like to make progress on before next year, but I'm going to not try to set something up that I'll fail at, which'll just lead to me stopping all posting because hey, I've already fallen behind.

At the moment, I'll just resolve to stop insisting that I have fully formed and brilliant posts as a prerequisite for writing, and I'll try to stop holding myself to some kind of unattainable standard. When I posted most often on this, it was primarily because I was getting off of work at 7am and no one was awake, but I don't see why I can't get back to the sort of mindset I was in when that was happening. The first post after a long break is always the most difficult, and maybe I'm still being too ambitious with this, but to hell with it.

And In The End

And so here we are. Twenty nine days and thirty-two posts later, my February Project draws to a close. I've fulfilled my "at least one post per day for the month of February" goal and overshot it by a few posts when I was evidently feeling somewhat ambitious. I'd like to think a good number of my posts were actually somewhat interesting, rather than being filler, but it will be nice to get rid of the to think of something to post about and actually spend the time writing it before midnight. I have to admit that I've been glad to have a few things pop up (like last night's floor hockey game) to help me come up with something the past few days, but overall, I'm happy with the results.

Some of the posts could have been improved if I'd had a bit more time to work on them, but I tend to write these in a pretty stream-of-consciousness fashion anyway, so I can't be sure if that's actually true. What surprised me the most, I think, is that once I committed to doing it for an hour or so a day, it got really rather easy. The days I had trouble were those days I'd planned poorly, and when I just kept putting it off. Aside from the Diary of the Dead post, I was never really aware of writing all that much, and yet all of these posts seem to be interminable. Hopefully they brought you, the reader, an interesting perspective. I hope I'll be able to keep this up and post pretty regularly, because I have gotten some positive feedback and just like having new content, but I may take a bit of a break from it for the next few days, just to let everything settle down. Unless I find something that's actually really interesting, in which case, it'll be right back to this.

I failed to make any new videos, but a good part of that was due to me losing my camera for about three weeks of the month. I'll try to get another one of those up soon, but I'll be playing around with editing those anyway, so it'll happen when it happens.

So yes. February Project Complete. It's going to be a little sad to not include "The February Project" in the labels, though I suppose that was never really all that necessary given that clicking on "February 08" gives the same effect. I still have some work to do tonight before heading out, so I think I shall try to accomplish that now. Stay tuned for more Murphspot.

My Sincerest Apologies

You may or may not have noticed the counter at the bottom of this column on the right here. It's somewhat useless, but serves as a good thing for me to base my self esteem on. I'm not really concerned with how many visitors this blog gets, because it's more a way for me to write down what I'm thinking than to overcome the insurmountable odds to have my blog noticed among the millions of others as somehow insightful or entertaining. What I do enjoy looking at, however, is the other statistics that it happens to include. Wednesday's still the day more people read this than any other day, and most people seem to do that between the hours of eight and nine in the morning (which is funny to me because I'm so rarely awake during that time). Most people use Internet Explorer and most people use Windows XP, though there are some people who find it using Firefox or on a Mac. There are even forty-four visits from someone using Linux, which prompts me to try to remember if the time I've spent writing this blog overlaps with the six months I was using a Linux machine. But none of that is really what interests me.

I'm interested in how people find my blog. For which the "Referrals" tab is incredibly useful.

Most commonly, it's a direct hit, or a link from my profile at the forums at Rum & Monkey. Occasionally, people will show up from Livejournal owing to the feed that Scott set up one day. And occasionally, people will find it through searches. An oddly high number of visitors resulting from searches that come up with this image this picture of my tattoo. A few in the past few days for people poking around technorati for people talking about Simon Pegg or The Toasters. But then, every so often, someone finds this thing through searches that I just don't understand fully.

Today, someone found Murphspot by typing "women crotch" into Altavista.

Which is kind of disturbing, and raises a few questions. One of them being "Hot damn! People still use Altavista?" The other being what on earth links that query and my blog. I'm presuming it's this post about where the eyes of men and women go when looking at George Brett and contains a Spın̈al Tap joke. That post does indeed contain both the word "women" and the word "crotch". If it's not that, I'm not sure I want to know what it is. Either way, to the person who was looking for crotches and ended up here, I apologize. However, if you could maybe open up a second window and look elsewhere for crotches while reading about politics and zombie movies, that'd be fine.

My Metacarpal, A Retrospective

It just occured to me that in addition to it being Super Tuesday and Fat Tuesday and Half-Price-on-Meatball-Subs-At-Subway Tuesday, it's been exactly one year since my fifth metacarpal was cleft in twain by a cruel combination of an uneven sidewalk at Noyes and Sheridan and a sandwich from Rollin' to Go too delicious to sacrifice for the cause of saving my hand from being broken. Which means that about ten and a half months ago, my hand was incredibly weak (well, somehow weaker than it usually is), that all the skin was doing some kind of weird "falling off all at once after being liberated from the hell-cast" thing and I was watching 300 on an IMAX screen.

I was reminded of that because I remember breaking my hand on my sister's birthday. So, Happy Birthday, Melissa. I'm sorry such a joyous occasion is associated in my mind with blinding pain. Well, moreso.*

Those were incredibly painful, then incredibly itchy, then incredibly ab-laden times. Then, some incredibly sad times that I've never posted about (and won't) and then qual-times, which resulted in me keeping my job, which is a bonus.

I meant to make a list of things which I'll try to do this year around New Years, though the resolution thing kind of turns me off. One of those things was "finding a way not to break my bones" this year. The other was to have more incredible adventures. These may work to counter-act each other, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it (and by get to it, I mean jump over it on a dirt bike.)

That'll probably be good for this, as well. Writing about the mundane doesn't interest me. Writing about getting into fake fights in front of a pizza parlor, then having my fake adversary get mad at one of the cheering onlookers because he was wearing a Red Sox cap, then running down the street to a diner seems more fun.

But first, before my adventures can start, I've got to fix this goddamn sleep schedule.

*No, seriously. Happy birthday, kid. It also just occurred to me that this is your 21st. Please with the being responsible.

**I've also just learned from Wikipedia that the fifth metacarpal is the most common broken bone if you're breaking your bones throwing a punch. This bodes well for the story I've been telling about it, which involves at least three tigers and five heavyweight champions.

The February Project

I was gazing lovingly at my own blog when I posted that last video, as I do on many occasions, and looked to the right at that part where it says how much I've posted in any given period of time. As it's now the first day in February, you'll see that I had four posts in January (only one of which was text) and that over the entirety of 2007, I had 22 posts.

That's just sad.

I always say that I want to post more often, and really believe that it might help my readership as I know I'm more apt to read a blog that I know updates constantly like Phil Plait's than I am to read a blog that updates never, like mine, because I give up on checking back for new things and if it's something that I don't usually check on Google Reader, it doesn't get read.

So I'm going to try something. A while ago, Rory (of roriness.com and bleacherblogger.com fame) who is actually funny and interesting to read tried an experiment in which he posted at least one entry every day for one hundred days. The original experiment, which he credits to someone he knows named Keacher, sets a 100 word limit on posts, but I'm really verbose and tend to write boring, interminable passages, so I'm just going to ignore that. I'm sure there's something satisfyingly artistic about condensing your thoughts into short posts, but I'm ignoring it anyway.

This comes mostly as a result of another blogging friend, Kriss, who writes bellablvd.com mentioning that she's going to try to do a 30-posts in 30-days blog-a-thon thing. Which I thought was pretty cool, reminded me of when Rory tried it, and I decided that I'll give it a go.

The really challenging thing with writing a post a day is that it, I think, is probably going to become difficult to keep it interesting, which is what I fear from things like NaNoWriMo. I'd like to get back to commenting on society, politics, cereals and the such, and so I'll try to force all of these to be at least somewhat more substantial than filler, but we'll see how it goes. Some will be text, but I think I'll try to do a video at least once a week, because I enjoy them. I'll try to make some of them funny. That will fail.

So yeah. We'll see how that goes. Hopefully, at the end of it, I'll have a thing on the right that says "February, 29" (what with it being a leap year and all), and I'll have a reinvigorated sense of blog-joy and will actually get around to doing this as regularly as I keep claiming I want to.

(I've also changed the template to make this more readable. Now that I'm using that DarkRoom application to write these, it struck me that the text was very... wide. So I've moved to this. I could make my own, of course, but I've got things to do. I don't. But let's pretend I have things to do.)

Apples, Rick and Art

I've not been updating much recently, but then I've been somewhat busy. So you'll have that. A few things that I've recently discovered which have confused the hell out of me:

1) Food. Mystery. Novels. While I understand how the final two words in that sequence are supposed to work together, I'm still a bit lost on the first. I've discovered the existence of this genre while doing my laundry. In the laundry room of the building I'm living in, which is mostly vacant when I'm home to do my laundry (Fridays after, like, 1am) there's a folding table that holds a stack of apparently communal books. Things to read if you're hanging out in the laundry room near the creepy darkened fenced in section under the tree that wants to die because it's in a laundry room. Many of the books are standard $1.99 paperbacks that never quite made it big, several of them mysteries and some of them, that's right, food mysteries. Things like this that focus a whodunit plot on eating, cooking and the like. Several have recipies in the back that relate to whatever the central food of the mystery is. They've got names like "Dying on the Vine", "Death Al Dente", "Candy Apple Dead" and "Double Shot". They appear to be written mostly by either a man named Peter King or a woman named Ellen Hart, evidently the luminaries of the field. I don't actually know what demographic finds these most appealing, though I suppose it's simply a combination of two things people might like. I remember reading two different mysteries that had a hockey theme when I was very young, presumably because young boys might like both hockey and mysteries, but I don't think I'd be able to comprehend "Hockey Mysteries" as as much of a genre as "Food Mysteries" seems to be. Maybe I'm missing something though. I haven't read any of the books in the laundry room of my apartment building, but may have to just to understand what the hell is going on.

2) Evidently, in defending the War in Iraq, Santorum through out some complex, crazy-assed Lord of the Rings reference at the debate yesterday that kind of implied that the current strategy for the war on terror is to keep Iraq unstable and have terrorists kill people over there so that we're not getting killed. While "not having us killed" is good, simply substituting people to get killed for us is not, some of those people he's substituting are troops, and diverting terror attacks onto other targets isn't really a viable goal. But the real problem, at least from my perspective, is that he likens terrorist organizations to the "Eye of Mordor". Ignoring for a moment the problems with comparing the war in Iraq to a fantasy novel, including the problems of comparing the varied terror organizations and individual terrorists a single consolidated eye, the real issue is that his comparison fails because the Eye was the Eye of Sauron. Mordor was a location, and while that's where the Eye was located, Mordor did not posess the eye.

PA voters: If you're not going to take this guy to town for any of the seriously bizarre things he's said and the fact that he's pretty far off the nutty end of the pool, and that his best defense is to now liken what he does in Washington to Tolkein novels, at least demand of your Senator that he know what the objects in his metaphors are called. Vote. Him. Out.

3) I've been listening to a lot of weird stuff at work lately, since buying my super-awesome and super-freaking-huge wireless headphones so that I can listen to streaming audio in this impregnable radio fortress. Mostly NPR and podcasts of Penn Jillete's radio show, which is pretty damn good, and narrowly avoiding what I would think to be my low point today by refusing to listen to C-SPAN radio. Incredibly strange stuff to be found here, where you'll find a schedule for what public radio station is playing what program when, including Deutche Welle Radio. I figured I'd listen for a perspective outside of the Chicago radio I'm usually listening to, and having minored in German know at least a minimal amount about what's happened in the recent history of Germany. Today's "Movement Featured on DW-Radio That I Never Knew Existed Because I'm Not Exactly Plugged Into Art But Am Not Surprised That It Does": Stuckism.

Who knew.

ADDENDUM:

I'm going to be going through my blog over the next couple days attempting to put labels on as many posts as I can. So watch for that. Also, I have a cut on my palm from a rough piece of glass that I got yesterday and is really more of a scratch, but is in a terrible damn place and hurts quite a lot. So there's that.

New Template

I've noticed in reviewing my posts to make sure they haven't been eaten by some form of Blogger elemental, (Yes. Geek. I know.) it's rather hard to read. Turns out grey on black isn't the best for visibility. I've gone to this template for now, perhaps out of a desire for change, perhaps because I've noticed how much more readable going away from the color scheme I had has made Pat's blog. Let me know how you like it (by you, I mean Rory, Jenna and Hal, so the entire readership of my blog), and what I can do to change it. Grad school has more or less halted my attempts to actually learn how to design a decent page (though now that I don't have to TA anymore, it might be possible), so changes I make will probably be variations on the theme here, but any input would help.

Blogging as a Writing Block

Those of you who write on blogs, whether you've started in the more recent explosion of blogging (this one started in Spring of 2005, and is by far the longest lived of my attempts at blogging) or you've been doing this for years and have amassed an empire of loyal readers (think BoingBoing), will be familiar with the problems that go along with them. It, I think, is an extension of pure vanity to check counter statistics, try to keep semi-regular updates to keep what little audience you (you = I in this case) have managed to gain, to make sure the words you type correspond with what you're actually trying to say, and to worry about being at least marginally witty or, if all attempt at wit is being abandoned, to at least get across your point.

Recently, a blogger who'd evidently been doing such for five years shut down her blog and wrote a happy little Slate article about it. It's an interesting perspective, and probably worth at least a quick glance. I have no intention of finishing Murphspot in the near future, but it's interesting to consider the mortality of these things once in a while.

The Beginning of Audioblogging on Murphspot

Feel free to give some pointers and overall opinions. I'll be deciding later whether or not I'd like to continue doing it based on a) general reception from the three of you that read this b) whether I feel like it c) whether it's actually free.