Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

Here it is, the day after Christmas...I have almost survived another year. If nothing else, I have accomplished that. Most informed thought I have encountered or read agrees that the Holidays are the most stressful time of the year. More suicides, divorces, et cetera. Yeah, well I can dig it. Fortunately most of my extended family has the Christmas routine down to the point where most holiday angst is minimal at best. Seeing each other throughout the year, we express our weirdness gradually over the course of the 12 months, rather than all at once. My 18 year old has been struggling with Christmas this year. He's incredibly perceptive and cyncial: a dangerous combination. He sees the bullshit surrounding Christmas, but has not learned to filter it out. Here's the deal: Christmas has been morphed into the cult of the Baby Jesus's Birthday Party. It's all well intentioned, and often produces much social good. But the Christmas story is (at least to me) in...

Sunday morning I was awakened to the news on Weekend Edition (NPR) that George W Bush was named Person of the Year -- AGAIN!-- by Time Magazine. Oh please.

Finished, earlier this year, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay , by Michael Chabon, about a couple of guys who create comics during the 1930's and 40's. I found it on the discount table at the Kellogg Ave Barnes and Noble in Wichita, Kansas, during my tenure up there last year. It went on to win a Pulitzer prize. A good book, by turns funky and moving, written by the guy who wrote Wonder Boys . Currently attempting to read Neal Stephenson's CRYPTONOMICON , which is a great read for the likes of me -- lots of geeky in jokes and the like -- but hard to get a lot of momentum with, since I'm trying to write my own geeky novel (see previous posts). Oh yes, (sigh) The Novel. I've made scant progress since the end of November (now up to ~54,000 pages). I have made numerous handwritten notes, attempting to figure out how I will wrap this thing up. Last night's interruption was watching 'Shaun of the Dead' with Ed and John, a very amusing film. Not...

...is the title of a book by Adolfo Bioys-Casares I read some years ago (back when I was cultured and well-read). According to a review reprinted on Amazon.com , the "relationship between prisoners and keepers is a dominant theme." It was, as I recall a very strange, but interesting book. It came to mind since we are all attempting to escape something or other. This week is turning into a hellish mess. Yesterday I was depressed. This morning while sitting in traffic on my way into my office I had an epiphany concerning my job. The reason this sucks is that I need to be encouraged to do something else. The ONLY reason I am doing what I do right now is for the money. Once I realized I was only being pushed to make a change, it all took on a new context. Here I am trying to be a Project Manager in an IT department. While it is slightly ego-boosting to know that I can more or less pull this off, it's not what I want to do, was trained to do, have any inter...

Last night we (some of we, anyway) went to a gingerbread house building party. This was hosted by a good friend, a woman (hospitality minister at our church) and her husband. She supplied pre-baked gingerbread walls and roof slabs, and the builders stuck these together and decorated the heck out of them with candy and goo. I know a lot of subdivisions that operate on this principle. The first step is always to cement the pre-baked parts together. This is accomplished by using a substance made from marshmallow cream and God knows what else. All I can tell you is that it is gooey when first made and like mortar when dry. Getting the walls and roof to stay together is a bit of a feat, since the goo takes a while to set up, and the would-be gingerbread contractor is usually eager to get on to the real task: globbing as much candy and stuff on the house as is possible. Adding all this of course makes the pieces heavier, so it is a fairly common event to have the house collapse under it own ...

As one of the countless tiny cogs within the wheels of the American Economy, I find myself doing many useless things. Once I did mostly useful things, but as I continue to navigate the twisty little paths of the Corporate Life, I find myself engaged in more and more meta-work. Work about work. Today, between participating in phone conferences and editing documents that no one in their right mind would read, I did compliance modules. For those of you who have never enjoyed these, they are little web-based self-paced slide shows that are supposed to teach Right Thinking on various topics like: sexual harrassment, ethical behavior, and careful corporate communications (one of my personal favorites). The worker bees (like me) flip through these and then take a 10 question quiz at the end. That way, when the worker bee goes and does some unthinkable thing, the Queen bee can throw up her hands and say: "I did everything I could. I gave them training." So, the reality of it is that ...

Okay, true confession: I am deeply ashamed of my website. Not my blog - I mean my personal website. I've been doing web-related stuff for 10 years now (yikes), and yet my personal site is a piece of crap. Old, dead links, all those terrible things. I should know better. Blame it on busyness, blame it on business. Whatever. This is my vow to you. Over the Holidays, I am going to facelift my site, fix the dead stuff, prune everything else back, make it....managable. And skin my blog with the design. And finish my book, watch the rest of the Alias DVDs, and.... Never mind.

Score Blogger: 2 LiveJournal : 0 John (18 year old) found out I was keeping a blog and did not disparage it (much) when he saw it. "How does it work?" he asked. I showed him and he pronounced it much superior to LiveJournal where, he revealed, he had started a blog a while ago. Started and later abandoned, as is common with blogs. So, having set up his new Blogger fueled blog, he refused to reveal what it was called, since he didn't want me reading it. Hell of a note.

Well, Christmas is finally in the air. I sang (selections from) Handel's Messiah last night (I'm a lowly member of the choir, which is fine with me). The day before snagged a Christmas tree. I was instructed to bring home a Noble Fir, instead of the Douglas Firs I routinely bought. Noble: is this because they cost a King's ransom? By the way, if any one in the financial community ever mentions a "wasting asset" and you have a hard time grasping the concept, think of Christmas trees as a prime example. Before Christmas: 7 foot Noble Fir = $89. After Christmas: 7 foot Noble Fir = Land Fill. The local Optimist's Club was a little short on the 7-8 foot trees, which meant hard decisions, since I had borrowed my Dad (and his pickup truck) to bring home said tree. I didn't especially feel like talking him into driving all over the West Side of Ft Worth in search of the perfect tree, since they're all landfill at the end of the month. After muc...

It's Friday. As I work on how to resolve the colossal mess that is brewing in my novel, I was reminded of one of my many mantras of IT work: our biggest problems in IT tend to be at their heart political issues, not technical issues.

The so-called novel continues to progress. One thing that now comes to mind is this: without the pressure of "30 days - 50,000 words" I am more acutely aware of the bits of flakiness that need to be resolved in the 2nd draft. Bummer. I'm also thinking, oh right - I need a way to wrap all this up. Now at approximately 51,500 words and counting (another interesting factoid: different word processors give different word counts) Distraction: I am back to watching Alias on DVD.