So now that I'm working in an office setting, there are new dangers lurking around the corner, to slice up your fingers and remove bumpers.
First of all, watch your fingernails, when you're using a staple remover. They really are sharper than you think. (I mean the fingernails are... Well... The staple remover probably is too, but it looks like something from beyond the grave anyhow, so you know not to toy with that)
Second. the bumper of a car can come off. Like, not all the way off, but enough to make a horrible noise when you start moving out of your parking space. Beware of those little cement curbs. They steal bumpers. Thank God for little pocketknives, eh?
Third. Watch out for copiers that eat things. it's not pretty. Keep them happy, give them their offerings and sacrifices. DOOM.
Fourthly and Finally, beware the jub-jub bird, and shun the horrible "ipod ear"!
Since I'm doing something that requires little auditory concentration, I listen to music while I'm working, and by the end of a day, my ears have little red marks on them from all the times I trapped the cord of the earbuds under some papers and tried to walk away. Ow.
You know you've been working too long on your term paper when...
~ Your fingers are so sore from typing that it hurts to type in your dreams.
~ You start speaking in academic language in normal conversation
(this actually sounds creepy, if you think about it: "Hmm...One must understand that the speaker feels hungry. Nothing could be further from the truth than to say that when one is hungry, they are completely satisfied. Therefore..." You get the picture :-P )
~ Syntax for you, of sentences, no longer normal is. Read, have you, much english old.
(sounds like yoda, does it not? Reason for this, there is. Borrowed from Chaucer, did George Lucas, and from Spencer, their syntax he did emulate)
~ You begin to notice threads of arguments that fit into your paper as you watch movies. You wonder if you could cite that Frank Capra movie as a secondary source.
~ You begin to hear the mockingbird across the street start making frog sounds.
Other symptoms may include, irritability, nausea, a hot lap from holding a laptop computer on it for hours on end, inexplicable urges to defenestrate obstreperous authors, and extreme cases of procrastination.
...when, as the echoes and reverb are dying in the sanctuary, the last ringing of the beautifully dissonant chord at the climax of "Go to Dark Gethsemane," just as the beautiful denouement of the good friday hymn is about to begin...
...you hear a loud AY-MAEN! from the congregation...
...that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, and always expecting a different result...
well...
not exactly.
I read it in a comic strip once, though...I think...it must be true, right?
Anyhow, I know now that that particular principle cannot apply to computers. One is most definitely not insane, if they try something on a computer twice the same way, expecting a different result. There is a definite precedent for doing that, whatever those silly comic strips might say.
Also, if one wishes all the ancient poets to be insane, one needs look no further than this idea, for if we apply the saying "if again you don't succeed, try, try again" we must, by this definition, be wholly insane.
if we, like Ahoshta Tarkaan, intend to continue quoting "the poets," I think we must discard this evidently corrupted definition.
We might, otherwise, also have to throw out our computers... :-)
...that I actually might survive the next few years is upon me.
Don't you love the feeling? I mean the one when you realize that life isn't so bad after all, and that nothing horrible is likely going to happen to you in the near future. Usually, of course, it's dispelled by the next online health article you see, but hey! What do I care? Keep up the good life, Go read some comic books or something...
(I hasten to say how much it very much disturbs me that I'm writing such godless literature as this...forgive me :-P)
It's been over a month...wow... My poor lonely blog...it needs some attention.
I'm kinda weird, as You probably know, if you've spent any time reading this blog at all, or if you've even seen me, or heard me talk. That much I know is true.
However, does it make it worse that I work in a place where I am a minority just for speaking the king's English, and my regular vocabulary includes words like "peachy" and "chum" and "toodle-oo" and "salubrious"? My co-workers think so. ** For some reason, when your first language isn't English, and someone says "peachy" (meaning, of course, "cool" or "great" although I know that none of you needed to know that), you have funny ideas of what that might be.
Go ahead and imagine it for yourself... Forget all preconceptions and all knowledge about the colloquilal use of "peachy" and think about what would go through your head...
Aren't idioms hilarious? No? Well...Like I said, I'm a little different.
People give me the strangest looks when I start talking about how funny language is, but I can't stop it. It's just funny, and I can't get over it, so everyone's going to have to deal with it.
I also think the fact that my ribcage is compressible the most random thing in nature...I love it! I can entertain myself that way, just squishing it, and watching it retake its shape, and squishing it...etc, etc...ad inifinitum.
That, and when the juices in my stom.... oh wait... I better not tell you about that, you might stop reading, if you haven't already :-)
Entertain yourself with the little things...go ahead, do it!
That, and nothing else is the secret to Hilarium ad infinitum...
** This is in no way a snub directed at my coworkers...they are amazing people, and I learn more spanish from them than from anywhere else.
Yes, I've been reading Dante.
No, that's not what this is about.
About a week ago, I had an interesting experience at work, quite a funny one, actually, and I thought "Why, I should post this on my blog!" Then Isaid to myself, "I should definitely do more than just post this on my blog...I should poetize about it, and then post it on my blog...hmmm..."
Noble sentiments, no doubt.
One of my favorite poems is Egar Allen Poe's The Raven, and so, subconsciously, the metre for it had been running through my head.
You know that feeling, when everything in your life seems to happen to a metre? When you walk, you feel it in your steps, when you find your brain entertaining itself, it's chanting it's nonsense syllables in the cadence that fits your favorite poem.
Ok, so maybe you don't always have a rythm in your head, and maybe I'm just a little weird (big surprize, no?)
Either way, I had the metre and words of this:
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over a many quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. `'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door- Only this, and nothing more.'
running around somewhere between my scalp and my half-emerging wisdom teeth. This caused the poem I was thinking about writing to come out in the exact same rythm:
Once upon a windy October, as the gusts entreat us to be sober,
They kindle sentiments, noble and nobler within the hearts of doleful men
The clouds were softly, swiftly flying, the leaves were slowly, sadly dieing,
The wind, in eddies, sweetly sighing, around the eaves, and back again.
The solemn wind, in swirling currents, came ‘round the eaves and back again.
And a moan escaped me, “never again”
Unfortunately, I liked the beginning of this too much (and it was also much too sombre) to convert into a comic piece for a blog. Now, without the motivation to write it so I can post it on my blog, and the responsiblilty that I gave myself by putting work into this first verse to do the rest in the same caliber, chances are, I will never, ever finish this, and if I do, it won't be posted on this blog.
Your loss. :-P
This isn't the only poem in such straights, though. I started another parody the other day about Fresno, the city just north of here to the "tune" of The Cremation of Sam Magee (by Robert Service), and it is likewise in Limbo:
There are strange things done in the hot, hot sun by the people who live around here;
Out great wide valley has a long death tally, and terror is built upon fear.
The dim streetlights have seen queer sights, but the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the corner of Maple and Horner, I was a hero of the Fresno Bee.
Now the Fresno Bee was a paper, you see, and a better there’d never been had,
For the Bee had column, right down at the bottom, that was entitled, “Who went bad”
Eevery week of the year will a story appear, each telling the story of how,
Through thick or thin, by wine or gin, a man’s character went south.
Maybe if I ever finish this one, I'll put it up on here...I guess we'll just have to wait and see, won't we? :-)
You have now entered the only known portal through which the combined insight of Ignoratus and The Minister of Hilarium can issue forth to corrupt youth. This is not philosophic insight, though it may stray into that occasionally, but rather insight into how the world makes us laugh. We believe with all our tongue-stuffed cheeks that the world is made up of Hilarium ad Infinitum.
