Tuesday, October 10, 2006

I wanna tear down the walls that hold me inside

I may have just made a terrible mistake. I got one of these. Remember those things? They're pretty good if you want to label something. And pretty bad if you have strong labeling impulses and a reckless sense of whimsy. Pretty soon everything I own will have a hard alt tag.

Oh, also I have reached new heights in my ability to confuse one name with another. I've never done this out loud, that I recall, but sometimes I think of a person and a similar but importantly wrong name will pop into my head. In my youth it was Gary Cooper and Gary Coleman. A few years ago it was Wilfrid Sellars and Peter Sellers. Now...well, now I just need to keep reminding myself that Maynard G. Krebs was not a five-time Socialist Presidential candidate.

Thursday, October 05, 2006

but it won't pay the rental on your humble flat or help you at the automat

Even though I'm not yet done cleaning, I've already been looking into other things to do with my time. I've been reading a lot, and indulging in various forms of self-improvement, and generally thinking about lots of things. One of these things is Emma Frost's secondary mutation. She can transform her body into organic diamond.
I was about to get very huffy about this, but it turns out that elemental carbon is considered inorganic; organic compounds have to have hydrogen. Not that I really understand what organic diamonds would be like, but at least it is not an oxymoron.

Anyways. As you have surely noticed, I have once again been bitten by the "change your blog name" bug. I don't really like this one, so consider it a placeholder until I come up with something better.

Also, you'll be very relieved to hear that I solved my mucilage conundrum. I accomplished this by accidentally shattering the bottle all over the place. Now if I ever need to find my mucilage, I need only look at any surface in the immediate vicinity, including my sink, counter, carpet, and person. As solutions go, this one was effective, if inelegant.

Sunday, October 01, 2006

and loneliness is cleanliness

Lately, quite a lot of the free time and energy that I've acquired has gone into cleaning. Which is good, because when I moved into this room, I didn't have time to completely unpack, and then I suddenly found myself so busy that even basic maintenance fell by the wayside. The overall effect on my room's organization was akin to that of a hastily assembled and subsequently abandoned shanty perched atop one half of a very nice foundation. But I've recently been cleaning up the place with the fervor of a man desperately staving off the omnipresent ennui of unemployment. It's looking pretty good; I'm kind of wondering how I'll spend my time when I'm finally finished. My guess: alcoholism.

Haha, that was a little joke I told you there.

As should come as a surprise to nobody, all this cleaning has made me give some thought to my cognitive arrangement. Usually I have a really hard time finding anything after I've cleaned, because the places I think to look for something when I need it generally have no relation whatsoever to the places that I think would be sensible to put it when I'm cleaning. On the other hand, when I'm being messy and just drop things when I'm done using them, they are generally to be found in the first place I think of.
Importantly, this is not a place that necessarily makes any sense at all. I first started thinking about this when determining what order to put my office keys in. No matter how rational they may seem, or what heuristics were used to arrive at them, certain key sequences are just impossible for me to keep track of, whereas others are much easier to remember, even though they frequently do not involve any clear pattern of which I'm conscious.
For the same reason, I've resigned myself to keeping hydrogen peroxide under the sink rather than in the medicine cabinet, just because my mind is utterly stymied by the idea of looking for it in the medicine cabinet. The weird one, though, is the bottle of mucilage that goes next to the hand soap. It always seems to find its way there, and I really want to move it somewhere less ridiculous, but I know that if I ever have to find it, I'll be all "dammit where is my mucilage and why isn't it next to the soap like God intended?"