Since I started working (I can’t name the place I work in because they don’t read this and don’t know I keep a blog, but if I did they’d find out just what it is that I do and maybe start offering advice on what else I should do) I’ve been getting on well with the people who work in our office. I can’t name all of them, because some have particularly usual names that’d be very easy to track. I spend the vast majority of my time sitting in the upstairs office, writing up the news or keeping our main page content up to date. It’s all very dull, but at the same time, it’s work I can manage without freaking out at all so I won’t complain.
I tend to spend most of my time with a set of noise cancelling headphones in. It’s helped me construct an entirely unapproachable air that I’m quite happy with. This is a big help because (as many of you may have noticed) I’m a far more competent communicator in text than in person. What’s strange is that, partially because of this, I seem to work more closely with the people from the lab downstairs than the people in the office upstairs. The upshot of this is that when I decide to work from home, which I usually manage one or two days a week, people I work with often don’t notice.
When someone does notice, it tends to be Ross. Ross uploads all of the content that I write to the page, makes sure it’s all neatly aligned and nicely assembled. In short, he’s one of the people in work I talk to most and he’s generally very forgiving about my tendency to send eight or nine emails before he shows up for work in the morning.
Where all of this comes together is in the few minutes a day during which I actually talk to the people I work with. The water cooler happens to be upstairs, near enough to my desk. Whenever people come upstairs to grab a cup of water, I shout, “No! WAIT!” then tear out my headphones and charge across the office (I’m sure rattling all of the various business types around), often scattering the files other people mistakenly stack on my desk as I go. I don’t deal with any files – they are there in error. I am not responsible enough for files.
When I arrive, usually skidding across the cheap, rough-ridged carpeting, a little breathless and definitely in need of a drink, I get a chance to engage one of my favourite conversations. Ross and I have “water cooler talk” most days of the week. I stand, trying to look much more composed than I really am, and he stands opposite me, pretending the whole idea isn’t fundamentally ridiculous. Then we open the dialogue; it always begins with something entirely silly, like, “So, did you catch the game last night?”
From there though, we proceed to try and narrow the subject as much as possible, without knowing where we’re going, what sport we’re talking about, whether we were playing in the game or not. Often we’ll push through whether or not we were playing, whether or not our side won, whether or not I was responsible for a win or loss directly and whether or not it was a good match before either of us is quite aware of what sport was supposed to have been played, if any.
Sometimes it’s all a big euphemism.
Anyway, Ross was on holiday last week, so I would toddle over to the water cooler a few times during any given day, hold a paper cup between forefinger and baby finger, depressing the blue “cold water” tap while I waited for my cup to fill. It’s strange the things you notice when there’s nobody about to distract you.
Below the taps there is a grill, through which errant water might find its way without getting all over the carpet. It’s a pretty much perfect system… except I have no idea where that water is meant to go. The pipe leading to the cooler seems thin enough that it could only possibly be one way. I stood there for a few minutes staring through the grill, able to make out dimly through the grate the reflection of the lights above and my silhouette. I wondered how long that water had sat there – would it be a corrupt and stagnant pool? Was it black not just because it was in shadow but because it had grown brackish as all standing water left long enough tends to?
Then my boss walked by and asked what was up, and why I was staring so intently at the water cooler. I responded as I probably would anyway,
“Just thinking about the game last night.”
Then I wandered off to my seat to update the news.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Friday, June 26, 2009
Never Write After 00:00 – It Will be Garbage
I’m often struck with the idea that I should write something at around the point when I should be considering going to sleep. I’m not sure why it is, but it seems that the portion of my brain that would normally say, “You’re a hack and will never produce anything of consequence,” seems to fall asleep a good deal earlier than the rest of me.
I’m not complaining about that, it’s fine and dandy to have a small portion of your brain that’s good and critical of your work – it keeps you on your toes. What gets to me is that, once its asleep, I’ll happily sit down and write up a few thousand words in a night, ignorant of the passage of time and breaking only for trips to and from the kitchen – kettle, mug, tea-chest, drawer, spoon, milk.
Eventually I’ll shamble into bed, tired as much from the process of writing as from being up too late and burnt out from the constant rewrites and edits. The problem with these edits is that they’re not born of some internal critic; there’s no element of my brain that tells me, “This is not good enough, succinct enough, comprehensible enough,” there’s just the constant struggle to effectively communicate an idea that just plain won’t make sense to anyone, myself included, who happens to be awake when they read it. If it’s after midnight, I’m not changing text because it’s not good enough, I’m rewriting my rewrites through a tea-soaked haze because I think there’s a neater way to say whatever it is I was trying to say before, but which I’ve probably by then forgotten.
The worst part is that I know I’m doing it right now, as I write this, and I’ve decided that this is the only way to sidestep the whole tedious business and not write some convoluted mess that I’d either forget all about or be dimly aware of in a vaguely embarrassed sort of way. It’s not that the things I write at night are bad necessarily, it’s more that they’re like dreams; they hold themselves together only for the duration of the experience and afterwards, thinking about what I’ve written, they’re just a strange insubstantial slush.
I’ve created entirely ephemeral text and that saddens me.
Moreover, I think I’m like this in general after midnight. If you’ve ever had the misfortune of being around me at night when one of these moods takes me (and here I would look pointedly to Ross and Kev as much as anyone else) then I’m sorry if I go a bit strange sometimes. I’m not editing myself effectively, so you’re just getting whatever is on the surface of my brain, most often.
I’m not complaining about that, it’s fine and dandy to have a small portion of your brain that’s good and critical of your work – it keeps you on your toes. What gets to me is that, once its asleep, I’ll happily sit down and write up a few thousand words in a night, ignorant of the passage of time and breaking only for trips to and from the kitchen – kettle, mug, tea-chest, drawer, spoon, milk.
Eventually I’ll shamble into bed, tired as much from the process of writing as from being up too late and burnt out from the constant rewrites and edits. The problem with these edits is that they’re not born of some internal critic; there’s no element of my brain that tells me, “This is not good enough, succinct enough, comprehensible enough,” there’s just the constant struggle to effectively communicate an idea that just plain won’t make sense to anyone, myself included, who happens to be awake when they read it. If it’s after midnight, I’m not changing text because it’s not good enough, I’m rewriting my rewrites through a tea-soaked haze because I think there’s a neater way to say whatever it is I was trying to say before, but which I’ve probably by then forgotten.
The worst part is that I know I’m doing it right now, as I write this, and I’ve decided that this is the only way to sidestep the whole tedious business and not write some convoluted mess that I’d either forget all about or be dimly aware of in a vaguely embarrassed sort of way. It’s not that the things I write at night are bad necessarily, it’s more that they’re like dreams; they hold themselves together only for the duration of the experience and afterwards, thinking about what I’ve written, they’re just a strange insubstantial slush.
I’ve created entirely ephemeral text and that saddens me.
Moreover, I think I’m like this in general after midnight. If you’ve ever had the misfortune of being around me at night when one of these moods takes me (and here I would look pointedly to Ross and Kev as much as anyone else) then I’m sorry if I go a bit strange sometimes. I’m not editing myself effectively, so you’re just getting whatever is on the surface of my brain, most often.
The horror...
It’s been a while, but it seems that I should only really blog when I have something to write about. Otherwise I end up tangling myself waist deep in a sea of atrocious half-metaphor and poorly constructed part-fiction. I want you to keep that in mind as you read this, because when I tried to explain what had happened to me to Colin and Adam (@oldmanrodgers and @AtomCan respectively) they both looked distinctly unimpressed. This story is absolutely unembroidered fact.
It occurred to me about three days ago that if I were to leave work just as I finish, at 1500, then I can make it outside to the 1508 bus and be home before about 1545, which shaves about an hour and a half off my average work day. It’s not life changing, but I’m very pleased with the arrangement. This new timetable has given me a great opportunity to stop at the shopping centre on the way home from work and have a poke around to see if there’s anything there on which I might spend my hard-earned job-money. I am a man of few enough vices that pretty much all of my income is disposable… it’s a pleasant way to be.
Anyway, I had skipped lunch so that I might read my book and was deciding that, on reflection, it may have been a poor sort of strategy for the day. I decided that, it being only twenty past three, I might reasonably pick up lunch on the way home, still be back by 1700 and sitting pretty.
I picked up a lovely roll from the deli and, it being a bright and sunny midday, wandered down to eat it beside the shallow fountain. I read a book as I ate, enjoying the sunshine, water and general atmosphere, before realising that the entire time I’d been dripping various dressings all down my shirt-front. This is how I eat; I’ll make no apologies for it. I did some quick and flexible mental arithmetic (with an abundance of rounding up and down) and figured I’d be able to excuse picking up a new t-shirt, running to the bathroom and putting it on.
While I was in HMV, buying a truly lovely Mr. Men t-shirt, I happened upon a pair of unmistakably mispriced Sony headphones and, my doddering EX-71’s long since overdue an upgrade, picked those up too. I got a bemused look from the girl scanning my headphones, clearly aware of what I’d noticed the same thing I had, followed shortly by an understanding smile at the t-shirt that clearly took in my spattered shirt. I wandered down a floor, barely catching the lift as a man who looked to be in his fifties hammered the “close doors” button. You know the one: it looks vaguely like this “>|<”. On the way down, I swapped out my headphones, appreciating the new depth of sound, the bass lower than before without the distortion I was clearly used to but had never noticed. I was pleased.
I exited the lift swiftly, still feeling his disapproving bespectacled glare on the mess soaking slowly into my t-shirt, walking directly to the bathroom. There’s a corridor leading off the body of the main room – banks of urinals gleaming too-white in the perpetual post-daylight of fluorescent lights designed to make you feel bad if you make a mess – and lining this corridor are three stalls. The door of the first had swung half open, and I can see that it’s unoccupied, so I stepped in.
I swung the door shut behind me and turned on the heel of my right foot, coming face to face with one of the most putrid stools I’ve ever seen. There aren’t words yet designed to describe it, but I’ll do my best to do so a little tastefully and still communicate the shuddering sickness I felt on looking at it. It’s important to know that all of this happened to the tune of the Autokratz remix of La Roux’s Quicksand, the bass drum a kind of ultimate too-fast heartbeat pressing at the inside of my head. When you’re listening to something like that you think to the beat. Single words spring to mind more than descriptive terms – a kind of musically perforated stream of consciousness from the event:
Yellow (yellow was first, and perhaps most worrying)
Bass-drum
Splash
Bass-drum
Grainy (I was tempted to write dusty, but it doesn’t carry the right viscous connotations)
Bass-drum
Tortured
Bass-drum
I’m not sure I’ve ever been so struck in my life by something so mundane; I turned immediately and walked back outside to the corridor. I would wait for another stall, that couldn’t be hard and it couldn’t possibly be any worse than the first attempt. Never.
The next stall down was occupied. I wish I could say there was some reason not to have waited to enter that one – a scream, muffled gagging, anything. There was no reason not to wait except that I’m impatient. I walked past instead, wandering on to the next stall, door hanging limply, not quite on its hinges, not quite off enough to qualify for any kind of maintenance. It turned with an ominous creak.
This toilet was similarly occupied – not by some clawing monstrosity, barely inanimate like the last – by a tiny sample. I considered myself lucky, stepped up to the plate and depressed the ‘flush’ button for a few seconds. It always takes a few seconds. I can never explain why I did what I did next, but I did it… maybe out of a sense of morbid curiosity, maybe out of a sense of gratitude that it wasn’t as inhuman as the last stall’s occupant. I looked down.
It was streaked with blood… and not even in a manner that might be mistakable. It was lined crimson, like the glow of magma through the convergence lines of tectonic plates on an early earth. I was taken aback, mostly because somehow this was still better than the alternative. Everyone has blood, what’s there to be afraid of?
Then, of course, the flush hit it and it immediately shattered, revealing innards that could only have been predominantly blood. Panic stricken, I shambled through a change of t-shirt as quickly as possible, unlocked the door with the least grateful twist possible and wrenched at the door, an unforgiving creak issuing from its clearly abused hinges. As I walked past the door of the middle stall I wondered why I hadn’t just waited to use that one; it’s door was hanging open now too and it would have been easier for all concerned.
As I walked past it, I suddenly felt that feeling that you get when you’re forced to interact with something you’ve never interacted with before. I’ve tried to explain it a few times before – the feeling of your brain trying suddenly to deal with an entirely new sensory input. Sometimes it’s something that makes you feel insignificant (the pre-romantic ‘sublime’ springs to mind) and sometimes it’s just that your brain has so much new to process that it just has to shift back a bit and deal with it all while you’re on auto-pilot.
This time, I felt that same feeling, but the reasons were entirely different. My father once described the feeling of being tricked into smelling the outlet from drum of ammonia as “like being punched in the chest.” This was a bit different, but similar. It was like smelling being punched in the face.
If you’ve not been punched in the face recently, there’s always a split second where you respond without being aware of it (if it’s hard enough, your legs manage to move themselves around so that you don’t fall over, for example). You just suddenly are aware that some small amount of time has passed and you’re in a slightly different position than you were a second ago, and then your face hurts. This was the smell equivalent of that.
I felt my brain try to divorce itself briefly from my senses, and then I was leaning up against the wall with spots in front of my eyes wondering what was happening, sliding my way gradually towards the sinks on weakened legs… then I was aware of what is probably the single worst non-chemical smell I have ever encountered. It was literally the kind of smell you might find in a nightmare – it had no texture, no material to associate it with, it was inarticulately bad, as though someone had leaned on a part of my brain marked, “smells awful”.
It was terrifying. I think a little bit of me died inside. I’m not really sure how to end this, but I thought I should share it with you all anyway, just so you’d know how awful it was…
The day was okay after that, but I think there’s a fragment of my soul I’ll never see again.
It occurred to me about three days ago that if I were to leave work just as I finish, at 1500, then I can make it outside to the 1508 bus and be home before about 1545, which shaves about an hour and a half off my average work day. It’s not life changing, but I’m very pleased with the arrangement. This new timetable has given me a great opportunity to stop at the shopping centre on the way home from work and have a poke around to see if there’s anything there on which I might spend my hard-earned job-money. I am a man of few enough vices that pretty much all of my income is disposable… it’s a pleasant way to be.
Anyway, I had skipped lunch so that I might read my book and was deciding that, on reflection, it may have been a poor sort of strategy for the day. I decided that, it being only twenty past three, I might reasonably pick up lunch on the way home, still be back by 1700 and sitting pretty.
I picked up a lovely roll from the deli and, it being a bright and sunny midday, wandered down to eat it beside the shallow fountain. I read a book as I ate, enjoying the sunshine, water and general atmosphere, before realising that the entire time I’d been dripping various dressings all down my shirt-front. This is how I eat; I’ll make no apologies for it. I did some quick and flexible mental arithmetic (with an abundance of rounding up and down) and figured I’d be able to excuse picking up a new t-shirt, running to the bathroom and putting it on.
While I was in HMV, buying a truly lovely Mr. Men t-shirt, I happened upon a pair of unmistakably mispriced Sony headphones and, my doddering EX-71’s long since overdue an upgrade, picked those up too. I got a bemused look from the girl scanning my headphones, clearly aware of what I’d noticed the same thing I had, followed shortly by an understanding smile at the t-shirt that clearly took in my spattered shirt. I wandered down a floor, barely catching the lift as a man who looked to be in his fifties hammered the “close doors” button. You know the one: it looks vaguely like this “>|<”. On the way down, I swapped out my headphones, appreciating the new depth of sound, the bass lower than before without the distortion I was clearly used to but had never noticed. I was pleased.
I exited the lift swiftly, still feeling his disapproving bespectacled glare on the mess soaking slowly into my t-shirt, walking directly to the bathroom. There’s a corridor leading off the body of the main room – banks of urinals gleaming too-white in the perpetual post-daylight of fluorescent lights designed to make you feel bad if you make a mess – and lining this corridor are three stalls. The door of the first had swung half open, and I can see that it’s unoccupied, so I stepped in.
I swung the door shut behind me and turned on the heel of my right foot, coming face to face with one of the most putrid stools I’ve ever seen. There aren’t words yet designed to describe it, but I’ll do my best to do so a little tastefully and still communicate the shuddering sickness I felt on looking at it. It’s important to know that all of this happened to the tune of the Autokratz remix of La Roux’s Quicksand, the bass drum a kind of ultimate too-fast heartbeat pressing at the inside of my head. When you’re listening to something like that you think to the beat. Single words spring to mind more than descriptive terms – a kind of musically perforated stream of consciousness from the event:
Yellow (yellow was first, and perhaps most worrying)
Bass-drum
Splash
Bass-drum
Grainy (I was tempted to write dusty, but it doesn’t carry the right viscous connotations)
Bass-drum
Tortured
Bass-drum
I’m not sure I’ve ever been so struck in my life by something so mundane; I turned immediately and walked back outside to the corridor. I would wait for another stall, that couldn’t be hard and it couldn’t possibly be any worse than the first attempt. Never.
The next stall down was occupied. I wish I could say there was some reason not to have waited to enter that one – a scream, muffled gagging, anything. There was no reason not to wait except that I’m impatient. I walked past instead, wandering on to the next stall, door hanging limply, not quite on its hinges, not quite off enough to qualify for any kind of maintenance. It turned with an ominous creak.
This toilet was similarly occupied – not by some clawing monstrosity, barely inanimate like the last – by a tiny sample. I considered myself lucky, stepped up to the plate and depressed the ‘flush’ button for a few seconds. It always takes a few seconds. I can never explain why I did what I did next, but I did it… maybe out of a sense of morbid curiosity, maybe out of a sense of gratitude that it wasn’t as inhuman as the last stall’s occupant. I looked down.
It was streaked with blood… and not even in a manner that might be mistakable. It was lined crimson, like the glow of magma through the convergence lines of tectonic plates on an early earth. I was taken aback, mostly because somehow this was still better than the alternative. Everyone has blood, what’s there to be afraid of?
Then, of course, the flush hit it and it immediately shattered, revealing innards that could only have been predominantly blood. Panic stricken, I shambled through a change of t-shirt as quickly as possible, unlocked the door with the least grateful twist possible and wrenched at the door, an unforgiving creak issuing from its clearly abused hinges. As I walked past the door of the middle stall I wondered why I hadn’t just waited to use that one; it’s door was hanging open now too and it would have been easier for all concerned.
As I walked past it, I suddenly felt that feeling that you get when you’re forced to interact with something you’ve never interacted with before. I’ve tried to explain it a few times before – the feeling of your brain trying suddenly to deal with an entirely new sensory input. Sometimes it’s something that makes you feel insignificant (the pre-romantic ‘sublime’ springs to mind) and sometimes it’s just that your brain has so much new to process that it just has to shift back a bit and deal with it all while you’re on auto-pilot.
This time, I felt that same feeling, but the reasons were entirely different. My father once described the feeling of being tricked into smelling the outlet from drum of ammonia as “like being punched in the chest.” This was a bit different, but similar. It was like smelling being punched in the face.
If you’ve not been punched in the face recently, there’s always a split second where you respond without being aware of it (if it’s hard enough, your legs manage to move themselves around so that you don’t fall over, for example). You just suddenly are aware that some small amount of time has passed and you’re in a slightly different position than you were a second ago, and then your face hurts. This was the smell equivalent of that.
I felt my brain try to divorce itself briefly from my senses, and then I was leaning up against the wall with spots in front of my eyes wondering what was happening, sliding my way gradually towards the sinks on weakened legs… then I was aware of what is probably the single worst non-chemical smell I have ever encountered. It was literally the kind of smell you might find in a nightmare – it had no texture, no material to associate it with, it was inarticulately bad, as though someone had leaned on a part of my brain marked, “smells awful”.
It was terrifying. I think a little bit of me died inside. I’m not really sure how to end this, but I thought I should share it with you all anyway, just so you’d know how awful it was…
The day was okay after that, but I think there’s a fragment of my soul I’ll never see again.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
General Update
I sometimes wonder just how Jane manages to fill her blog; she updates regularly and the updates are interesting and entertaining, but she works longer hours than I do. I think having a regular job makes keeping a blog a little more difficult from day to day. I can’t help but notice that the father seems to have fallen into a pattern of single weekly updates, which may well be the model I end up leaning towards.
I’ve done very little of consequence today – but for those of you who love me enough to want to read, I did have a lot of fun. I’ll give a few details about today; I’m under the impression that’s the normal format for a blog, as opposed to my nascent ramblings just stretching on for thousands of words.
I’m having issues with work. Don’t get my wrong; I like my job a lot. It’s a job I can do without too much difficulty and without hating my life. No, the issue is that I haven’t been paid in (quick mental arithmetic) approaching ten weeks. It wouldn’t be so bad, but I’m given to the understanding that this means I haven’t been paid in a little short of a financial quarter. That’s worrying. Admittedly, I do invoice at the end of the month, and if there are any issues they usually wait until the end of the month to be ironed out, but it’s become disconcerting. Disconcerting and hungry.
So, devoid of income, I’ve taken to not actually showing up to the office. This isn’t as poor a plan as it sounds; I used normally to work from home, so my job is possible to manage remotely. Today I worked from Adam’s house, which was a lot of fun. He played Starcraft while I wrote updates to the product information and recommendation pages for work. That’s one of the easier parts of my job – content that is fundamentally advertising is very easy to write and update.
Aside from the silly work garbage, I spent some time playing Guilty Gear against Adam and Ray. Ray was unexpectedly heroic, so it wasn’t like I was teaching people to play, there was a lot of challenge and enjoyment to take from it. After this break I went back to work and wrote up a blog entry. It feels good to be driving traffic up, and in that respect we’re succeeding without man site integration, which I think I’d like to push for. We’ll see how it all works out soon enough, I’m sure.
We played a quick game of squares before I returned to Gaelle’s house, which brings us up to present. I’m in a writing mood, but the internet is down so I can’t post things to my blogs for now. I’m not sure quite what I’d like to write, but I’ll think on it.
Terence has informed me that my blogs, while enjoyable, read like those of a woman from a century ago. I would like to quiz him in some more depth on this; I do deliberately keep my blogs quite modern, if not masculine. I seldom, if ever, refer to my fascination with the cinematograph, or even with the wireless, my shining Marconi being so sterling an example. Perhaps I should take chocolate with him of an evening and make some stern inquiry as to just what it is that has caused him to take so very strange an impression from my work.
M
I’ve done very little of consequence today – but for those of you who love me enough to want to read, I did have a lot of fun. I’ll give a few details about today; I’m under the impression that’s the normal format for a blog, as opposed to my nascent ramblings just stretching on for thousands of words.
I’m having issues with work. Don’t get my wrong; I like my job a lot. It’s a job I can do without too much difficulty and without hating my life. No, the issue is that I haven’t been paid in (quick mental arithmetic) approaching ten weeks. It wouldn’t be so bad, but I’m given to the understanding that this means I haven’t been paid in a little short of a financial quarter. That’s worrying. Admittedly, I do invoice at the end of the month, and if there are any issues they usually wait until the end of the month to be ironed out, but it’s become disconcerting. Disconcerting and hungry.
So, devoid of income, I’ve taken to not actually showing up to the office. This isn’t as poor a plan as it sounds; I used normally to work from home, so my job is possible to manage remotely. Today I worked from Adam’s house, which was a lot of fun. He played Starcraft while I wrote updates to the product information and recommendation pages for work. That’s one of the easier parts of my job – content that is fundamentally advertising is very easy to write and update.
Aside from the silly work garbage, I spent some time playing Guilty Gear against Adam and Ray. Ray was unexpectedly heroic, so it wasn’t like I was teaching people to play, there was a lot of challenge and enjoyment to take from it. After this break I went back to work and wrote up a blog entry. It feels good to be driving traffic up, and in that respect we’re succeeding without man site integration, which I think I’d like to push for. We’ll see how it all works out soon enough, I’m sure.
We played a quick game of squares before I returned to Gaelle’s house, which brings us up to present. I’m in a writing mood, but the internet is down so I can’t post things to my blogs for now. I’m not sure quite what I’d like to write, but I’ll think on it.
Terence has informed me that my blogs, while enjoyable, read like those of a woman from a century ago. I would like to quiz him in some more depth on this; I do deliberately keep my blogs quite modern, if not masculine. I seldom, if ever, refer to my fascination with the cinematograph, or even with the wireless, my shining Marconi being so sterling an example. Perhaps I should take chocolate with him of an evening and make some stern inquiry as to just what it is that has caused him to take so very strange an impression from my work.
M
Saturday, June 6, 2009
And Then There Was One
For a pronounced portion of my childhood, I would wake early and immediately rise. I had long since convinced myself that there was no point in trying to get back to sleep; I would wake at half past six every morning, getting out of bed shortly after sunrise in summertime and long before in winter. There was nothing unusual about this, I would watch TV or read a book until the rest of the family woke.
As a result, I suffered from headaches that got gradually worse throughout the day once every week or two. I still get them, but I at least have learned that better monitoring my sleep will keep my headache free. It doesn’t always work; there will always be late nights and early mornings I can’t help from time to time, but overall things are a lot better now.
One Sunday afternoon, when I was around ten, I was forced to retire in the afternoon, the light stinging my eyes so badly I couldn’t possibly have stayed up until a reasonable hour. I decided then that I’d be better off just sleeping straight through until Monday morning.
I woke at a little before seven the next morning and dressed for school. I picked my way quietly downstairs so as not to wake the family and grabbed a bowl of cereal and sat down to read until everyone else arose. It being summer, there was no need for lights. The heavy light of the morning sun cast strange shadows across the kitchen and I was struck by the thought that I should tell the others how it had looked – sunlight glinting off the row of mugs on hooks beneath the head height presses that line the kitchen. It was shaping up to be a beautiful day.
I don’t think I realised anything was wrong for fully an hour; they should have been getting up around eight or so if they wanted to make it to school on time. It wasn’t unusual for the father to get up late – all he had to do was get dressed and drive us out, he would breakfast when he got home, before heading to work. At about a quarter past eight I climbed the stairs and called for Seán but, he being a heavy sleeper, I got no reply until I got to our room. Whenupon I realised he wasn’t there.
I wasn’t too flustered really, until I noticed that Jane, Katie and the father were missing too. It’s hard to know what to do under those circumstances. Still, I thought, I had been sick. If they’d gone to the granny’s the night before, they might reasonably have stayed there and decided to go from there to school. It hadn’t happened before, but I figured it might make sense. Anything to cull the slowly welling panic… you’d be surprised what a ten year old dreams up to avoid the idea that they’ve been abandoned.
I thought to myself that the father would have to return to make it to work in time. I sat down, made more cereal, and continued to read my book. Looking for my schoolbag in case they dropped by suddenly hoping I were ready, I walked to the opposite side of the house, where it was still darker, and turned on a light.
Nothing – the power was off. In 1996, before everything cartographic was built on the idea of constantly available power to terabytes of storage, there was no emergency generator in the OS. I walked around the house, making sure the power was off and that it wasn’t just a dud light bulb. Nope.
Alright, checklist time:
No power.
No family.
No cars outside any of the neighbours’ houses (living as close as we did to the OS offices, there were only two houses that should have had cars other than our own).
I began to worry- that’s an understatement. I began to freak out. My options were limited. Margret and Brian, who lived to our left, had no car outside the house, but were gregarious enough that I felt I should knock anyway. No response. Eita Flood lived to our right – she had been old as long as I’d been alive and I wasn’t comfortable around her. House skipped. Next was Tom Shannihan – he should have been in work by now, but some elements of his family or menagerie of cats (14 at highest count) should have been present.
My worry shifted gears to “profound”. I walked to the house of a neighbour who, to this day, I have only ever known as Mrs. Crow. Mercifully, no answer. Last was the Kelly household. I held my breath and knocked. A shuffling sound, a blur seen approaching through frosted windows. A sigh of relief. The blur resolved itself into a cat… it did not answer the door. I panicked and walked to Ross’s house (talkingross.blogspot.com).
Observations from Ross’s house in this order: no car, no family, no cat. Doors locked. Panic setting in, I half-walked and half-ran to The Square as it was (and still is) simply known – a carpark designed to fit the three hundred odd cars of the OSi’s employees. Nothing, not a single car. I sat down on the concrete block that marked a fire hydrant long since submerged in the slowly creeping grass verge from the old administration building. Dragging in deep breaths, I sat there for fifteen minutes, taking stock. The big white clock above the archway into the square had been working then and hit nine o’clock with a kind of grim finality. There should have been someone there.
Checklist update:
No family.
No power.
None of six neighbours.
One cat sighted but not interacted with.
No audible sound at all beyond wind in trees.
No idea what I’m going to do with myself.
Panic.
I have never told anyone this happened before, because of what happened next. In a state of abject shock, I went to bed. I went to bed and eventually I slept.
I woke a little before seven o’clock and went downstairs. The morning sun gleaming off the counters and mugs was different this time, paler than before. I walked to the fridge to get milk for my cereal and the light came on; the power was back at least. I ate breakfast contemplatively. It’s funny what a good night’s sleep can do for you. Things didn’t seem so bad now.
After breakfast I walked back upstairs, not feeling good, but nowhere near as bad as before. I was greeted at the top of the stairs by the father and Seán, looking dazed, but otherwise entirely present. It’s hard to know what to do in those situations where everything is falling apart and you can’t trust yourself to rely on the world around you.
I pretended nothing had happened and dressed for school.
I would later convince myself that I had simply woken at 7pm and somehow not noticed that the sun must have been over the field to the west, not the offices and Ross’s house to the east, despite the clearest of recollections to the contrary – the kind burned into the mind by panic and fear. I convince myself because, once you’ve experienced the absolute terror of everyone you’ve grown up with an lived near having vanished, you want to believe you could never live in a world where that could happen.
Still, sometimes, just sometimes, that conviction isn’t enough. I wonder what would happen if tomorrow I woke and everyone but me was gone. No power, no family, no neighbours, no sounds. Just the slowly rising sun, an empty world and I.
All of this happened to me once already; it scares the living sit out of me. Still, it means I’m uniquely placed to advise. If this happens or has ever happened to you, the odds are that I am still around. Get in touch.
As a result, I suffered from headaches that got gradually worse throughout the day once every week or two. I still get them, but I at least have learned that better monitoring my sleep will keep my headache free. It doesn’t always work; there will always be late nights and early mornings I can’t help from time to time, but overall things are a lot better now.
One Sunday afternoon, when I was around ten, I was forced to retire in the afternoon, the light stinging my eyes so badly I couldn’t possibly have stayed up until a reasonable hour. I decided then that I’d be better off just sleeping straight through until Monday morning.
I woke at a little before seven the next morning and dressed for school. I picked my way quietly downstairs so as not to wake the family and grabbed a bowl of cereal and sat down to read until everyone else arose. It being summer, there was no need for lights. The heavy light of the morning sun cast strange shadows across the kitchen and I was struck by the thought that I should tell the others how it had looked – sunlight glinting off the row of mugs on hooks beneath the head height presses that line the kitchen. It was shaping up to be a beautiful day.
I don’t think I realised anything was wrong for fully an hour; they should have been getting up around eight or so if they wanted to make it to school on time. It wasn’t unusual for the father to get up late – all he had to do was get dressed and drive us out, he would breakfast when he got home, before heading to work. At about a quarter past eight I climbed the stairs and called for Seán but, he being a heavy sleeper, I got no reply until I got to our room. Whenupon I realised he wasn’t there.
I wasn’t too flustered really, until I noticed that Jane, Katie and the father were missing too. It’s hard to know what to do under those circumstances. Still, I thought, I had been sick. If they’d gone to the granny’s the night before, they might reasonably have stayed there and decided to go from there to school. It hadn’t happened before, but I figured it might make sense. Anything to cull the slowly welling panic… you’d be surprised what a ten year old dreams up to avoid the idea that they’ve been abandoned.
I thought to myself that the father would have to return to make it to work in time. I sat down, made more cereal, and continued to read my book. Looking for my schoolbag in case they dropped by suddenly hoping I were ready, I walked to the opposite side of the house, where it was still darker, and turned on a light.
Nothing – the power was off. In 1996, before everything cartographic was built on the idea of constantly available power to terabytes of storage, there was no emergency generator in the OS. I walked around the house, making sure the power was off and that it wasn’t just a dud light bulb. Nope.
Alright, checklist time:
No power.
No family.
No cars outside any of the neighbours’ houses (living as close as we did to the OS offices, there were only two houses that should have had cars other than our own).
I began to worry- that’s an understatement. I began to freak out. My options were limited. Margret and Brian, who lived to our left, had no car outside the house, but were gregarious enough that I felt I should knock anyway. No response. Eita Flood lived to our right – she had been old as long as I’d been alive and I wasn’t comfortable around her. House skipped. Next was Tom Shannihan – he should have been in work by now, but some elements of his family or menagerie of cats (14 at highest count) should have been present.
My worry shifted gears to “profound”. I walked to the house of a neighbour who, to this day, I have only ever known as Mrs. Crow. Mercifully, no answer. Last was the Kelly household. I held my breath and knocked. A shuffling sound, a blur seen approaching through frosted windows. A sigh of relief. The blur resolved itself into a cat… it did not answer the door. I panicked and walked to Ross’s house (talkingross.blogspot.com).
Observations from Ross’s house in this order: no car, no family, no cat. Doors locked. Panic setting in, I half-walked and half-ran to The Square as it was (and still is) simply known – a carpark designed to fit the three hundred odd cars of the OSi’s employees. Nothing, not a single car. I sat down on the concrete block that marked a fire hydrant long since submerged in the slowly creeping grass verge from the old administration building. Dragging in deep breaths, I sat there for fifteen minutes, taking stock. The big white clock above the archway into the square had been working then and hit nine o’clock with a kind of grim finality. There should have been someone there.
Checklist update:
No family.
No power.
None of six neighbours.
One cat sighted but not interacted with.
No audible sound at all beyond wind in trees.
No idea what I’m going to do with myself.
Panic.
I have never told anyone this happened before, because of what happened next. In a state of abject shock, I went to bed. I went to bed and eventually I slept.
I woke a little before seven o’clock and went downstairs. The morning sun gleaming off the counters and mugs was different this time, paler than before. I walked to the fridge to get milk for my cereal and the light came on; the power was back at least. I ate breakfast contemplatively. It’s funny what a good night’s sleep can do for you. Things didn’t seem so bad now.
After breakfast I walked back upstairs, not feeling good, but nowhere near as bad as before. I was greeted at the top of the stairs by the father and Seán, looking dazed, but otherwise entirely present. It’s hard to know what to do in those situations where everything is falling apart and you can’t trust yourself to rely on the world around you.
I pretended nothing had happened and dressed for school.
I would later convince myself that I had simply woken at 7pm and somehow not noticed that the sun must have been over the field to the west, not the offices and Ross’s house to the east, despite the clearest of recollections to the contrary – the kind burned into the mind by panic and fear. I convince myself because, once you’ve experienced the absolute terror of everyone you’ve grown up with an lived near having vanished, you want to believe you could never live in a world where that could happen.
Still, sometimes, just sometimes, that conviction isn’t enough. I wonder what would happen if tomorrow I woke and everyone but me was gone. No power, no family, no neighbours, no sounds. Just the slowly rising sun, an empty world and I.
All of this happened to me once already; it scares the living sit out of me. Still, it means I’m uniquely placed to advise. If this happens or has ever happened to you, the odds are that I am still around. Get in touch.
Just Sometimes, I Love the Rain in Summer
I know I spend a pretty big proportion of my time in the winter complaining, to pretty much anyone who’ll listen, about the weather. I suppose we all do it a bit, but I’m very much more guilty of it than anyone else I know. That said, there’s an element of surprise that lends some charm to the kind of blustery, rain swept afternoon we’re having today.
I woke later than I’d have liked this morning, but it being a weekend that’s not of any real consequence. As I occasionally enjoy, I watched a movie before getting out of bed (Lucky Number Slevin - a bit predictable, but good fun) and then made myself a sandwich. When I sat back down to eat my sandwich (I don’t eat hot food at home, as a rule) and drink some tea, I glanced out the window and saw the heaviest rain I’ve seen in a very long time.
From the window of our piano room, across the tops of the hedges that separate the residential Ordnance Survey from the OSi proper, I can see the pale slate roofs of the offices. Even as I write, the rain is heavy enough to throw up a spray as it hammers the slates*, a cloudy white mist across the rooftops, and with every gust of wind, the spray ripples sideways from one roof to another. I’m not sure if it’s just that I’m in the mood for it, but for now it’s just a refreshing sight.
I’m not sure what I’ll do today, having been effectively immobilised by the whole meteorology affair. It’s been a very long time since I just sat at home and did nothing for a full day; I think it’s been long enough that I might very well enjoy that. I may read a comic, if the fancy takes me, or perhaps watch a film. There are an awful lot of films in my house that have been recommended (not heavily, as Flash pointed out in previous comments) but which I have yet to see.
I’m still not sure how I feel about work, but now that I’ve started to get to know the people I work with a bit better I’m having a bit more fun with it. The strange part is that I’m still not sure what all of the “social networking” parts of my job are for. I’m driving traffic to our “staff blog” – content provided by me – which is great. I’m also managing to engage people better with the Twitter, and using the combination of the work Twitter and the work Facebook to pull more traffic to… the blog.
The only real concern, trust me it is a concern, is that I have no idea what they’re hoping to make out of the whole affair. I mean, more traffic is great, but surely the people on the Twitter and the Facebook are already our customers – the kind of staunch supporters who wear it a bit proudly. It’s a strange thing to work as part of something you don’t think will succeed. It’s stranger still to work as pretty much the sole part of something whose success or failure you couldn’t recognise or don’t understand. This’d be fine if there were elements of Taylorism involved, but I’m the sole source of content here.
I once heard a woman say, “Well, this whole thing’s been a GDCF,” in description of an event. Everyone present knew exactly what that meant and it took me a second, but it comes to pretty much everyone quickly enough.
The rain had let up a little over the last couple of paragraphs, but it’s since started pouring out of the heavens again. I find the only downside to my voluntary semi-permanent headphone-deafness** is that I miss the sounds of the wind and the rain; when I’m at home on my own, I change to the heavy-duty speakers and listen to things at a reasonably enough volume that I can still hear the rain falling with the window cracked.
I should probably stop writing now, because I’ve run out of real concerns and will just continue to dribble nonsense endlessly into this text file to avoid making any real decisions about what I’ll do with my day.
Hopefully it’ll be fun.
For anyone still wondering, it’s “Goddamn clusterfuck”.
*So far there have been some good plurals in this update. I’ve always had a fondness for nouns ending in “f” that go against the grain and don’t ditch it in favour of a “ves” when pluralised. So in this case, I’m loving the word “roofs”. Similarly, I love the word “dwarfs,” though Tolkien has popularised “dwarves” – I believe some copies of The Hobbit still carry a note to the effect that “dwarfs” means basically “people suffering from dwarfism” while “dwarves” refers specifically to mining peoples.
“Slate” is also a good collective noun, meaning the list of people eligible to be voted into a particular position or positions.
** Having heaphones in, not having crippled myself :)
I woke later than I’d have liked this morning, but it being a weekend that’s not of any real consequence. As I occasionally enjoy, I watched a movie before getting out of bed (Lucky Number Slevin - a bit predictable, but good fun) and then made myself a sandwich. When I sat back down to eat my sandwich (I don’t eat hot food at home, as a rule) and drink some tea, I glanced out the window and saw the heaviest rain I’ve seen in a very long time.
From the window of our piano room, across the tops of the hedges that separate the residential Ordnance Survey from the OSi proper, I can see the pale slate roofs of the offices. Even as I write, the rain is heavy enough to throw up a spray as it hammers the slates*, a cloudy white mist across the rooftops, and with every gust of wind, the spray ripples sideways from one roof to another. I’m not sure if it’s just that I’m in the mood for it, but for now it’s just a refreshing sight.
I’m not sure what I’ll do today, having been effectively immobilised by the whole meteorology affair. It’s been a very long time since I just sat at home and did nothing for a full day; I think it’s been long enough that I might very well enjoy that. I may read a comic, if the fancy takes me, or perhaps watch a film. There are an awful lot of films in my house that have been recommended (not heavily, as Flash pointed out in previous comments) but which I have yet to see.
I’m still not sure how I feel about work, but now that I’ve started to get to know the people I work with a bit better I’m having a bit more fun with it. The strange part is that I’m still not sure what all of the “social networking” parts of my job are for. I’m driving traffic to our “staff blog” – content provided by me – which is great. I’m also managing to engage people better with the Twitter, and using the combination of the work Twitter and the work Facebook to pull more traffic to… the blog.
The only real concern, trust me it is a concern, is that I have no idea what they’re hoping to make out of the whole affair. I mean, more traffic is great, but surely the people on the Twitter and the Facebook are already our customers – the kind of staunch supporters who wear it a bit proudly. It’s a strange thing to work as part of something you don’t think will succeed. It’s stranger still to work as pretty much the sole part of something whose success or failure you couldn’t recognise or don’t understand. This’d be fine if there were elements of Taylorism involved, but I’m the sole source of content here.
I once heard a woman say, “Well, this whole thing’s been a GDCF,” in description of an event. Everyone present knew exactly what that meant and it took me a second, but it comes to pretty much everyone quickly enough.
The rain had let up a little over the last couple of paragraphs, but it’s since started pouring out of the heavens again. I find the only downside to my voluntary semi-permanent headphone-deafness** is that I miss the sounds of the wind and the rain; when I’m at home on my own, I change to the heavy-duty speakers and listen to things at a reasonably enough volume that I can still hear the rain falling with the window cracked.
I should probably stop writing now, because I’ve run out of real concerns and will just continue to dribble nonsense endlessly into this text file to avoid making any real decisions about what I’ll do with my day.
Hopefully it’ll be fun.
For anyone still wondering, it’s “Goddamn clusterfuck”.
*So far there have been some good plurals in this update. I’ve always had a fondness for nouns ending in “f” that go against the grain and don’t ditch it in favour of a “ves” when pluralised. So in this case, I’m loving the word “roofs”. Similarly, I love the word “dwarfs,” though Tolkien has popularised “dwarves” – I believe some copies of The Hobbit still carry a note to the effect that “dwarfs” means basically “people suffering from dwarfism” while “dwarves” refers specifically to mining peoples.
“Slate” is also a good collective noun, meaning the list of people eligible to be voted into a particular position or positions.
** Having heaphones in, not having crippled myself :)
Thursday, June 4, 2009
My Sister Has Returned
After a yearlong absence while she studied music and German, my youngest sister has returned to the house my in which my father and occasionally coincide. We both live here, but it seems we don’t overlap quite as much as should, an unfortunate consequence of both our evening habits and professions.
I spent the evening with Katie, the father absent for his public speaking class/group. I’ll be honest, I’m well aware he doesn’t much enjoy the company, so I naturally lean towards the assumption that it’s a class, but I’m also given to the understanding that he needs relatively little further education in public speaking, which only confuses the whole affair. Regardless, I chattered idly with Katie while she engaged in the same activity she always manages to indulge during her returns to the house.
Katie is really quite impressive when it comes to cleaning and organisation at speed. I’m not sure how it’s happened, but she is very certainly the only member of the family to have developed an innate sense not only of when things are out of place but also if they are in some intangible manner disarrayed. Moreover, this sense has been incredibly tightly honed to the point where she can sense, in an apparently entirely organised space, that certain items require reclassification.
I helped for most of the evening (if spectatorship still qualifies as ‘help’) as Katie reclassified a significant amount of the “food”* in our presses as “refuse” and then made sure to reassign it from “press” to “bin”. I’ll be honest, her criteria confuse me – there are a number of items ** that were kept despite their being well past their Use Bys. I have no idea how one judges the toxicity once the date is passed, but somehow she can.
She then proceeded to explain, at great length and in interminable detail, why I shouldn’t be using air freshener as fly spray. I left the room to attend an imminent call of nature and returned to the smell of a kitchen doused in air freshener, but given the sheer quantity of the foods* we had moved around would account for any number of airborne irritants (that amount of mustard and red wine vinegar could draw bloodied tears). We then walked the dog until she looked like she wasn’t up for walking any more and returned to the house around half past nine, to make some tea.
Katie had some urgent phone related business to manage (I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really paying attention) so I busied my writer’s hands with the tea – a task with which I’m pretty intimately familiar from so many years of delicately arranged looking-like-I’m-working-harder-than-I-really-am. On opening the press, I saw what our gleeful ‘organisation’ had wrought.
There is a press in my house now, big enough that I might fit myself inside it comfortably, that contains only a black box, perhaps a litre in volume. Inside this box are perhaps fifty teabags. Surrounding the box, improbably black against the white-and-spilled-spices backdrop of the press itself, were three or four houseflies – dead – gassed most likely, a can of Glade practically smoking a foot to my left. There was something else too, that looked like the slightest twist of a dried tea-leaf.
It turned out to be a moth, twisted by whatever cocktail it had ingested. Insects don’t have lungs, and so it had absorbed, directly through spiracles to every meaningful cell it had, the lavender-fresh smell of an unnaturally strong outdoors and it had been twisted beyond all meaningful recognition.
I dug out two teabags, swung door of the press shut and wondered if this was what the whole second generation German guilt over the concentration camps feels like.
I’m like a household Caliban. She has taught me how to clean, and my only profit on it has been to see the mess that I have made.
* Largely, the “foods” present in my house are, in fact, condiments, but let’s not get into the technicalities any more tonight.
** Including but not limited to: Black Olives, “Hot Chick” Curry dishes and some kippers in sunflower oil we feared the father might notice missing.
I spent the evening with Katie, the father absent for his public speaking class/group. I’ll be honest, I’m well aware he doesn’t much enjoy the company, so I naturally lean towards the assumption that it’s a class, but I’m also given to the understanding that he needs relatively little further education in public speaking, which only confuses the whole affair. Regardless, I chattered idly with Katie while she engaged in the same activity she always manages to indulge during her returns to the house.
Katie is really quite impressive when it comes to cleaning and organisation at speed. I’m not sure how it’s happened, but she is very certainly the only member of the family to have developed an innate sense not only of when things are out of place but also if they are in some intangible manner disarrayed. Moreover, this sense has been incredibly tightly honed to the point where she can sense, in an apparently entirely organised space, that certain items require reclassification.
I helped for most of the evening (if spectatorship still qualifies as ‘help’) as Katie reclassified a significant amount of the “food”* in our presses as “refuse” and then made sure to reassign it from “press” to “bin”. I’ll be honest, her criteria confuse me – there are a number of items ** that were kept despite their being well past their Use Bys. I have no idea how one judges the toxicity once the date is passed, but somehow she can.
She then proceeded to explain, at great length and in interminable detail, why I shouldn’t be using air freshener as fly spray. I left the room to attend an imminent call of nature and returned to the smell of a kitchen doused in air freshener, but given the sheer quantity of the foods* we had moved around would account for any number of airborne irritants (that amount of mustard and red wine vinegar could draw bloodied tears). We then walked the dog until she looked like she wasn’t up for walking any more and returned to the house around half past nine, to make some tea.
Katie had some urgent phone related business to manage (I’ll be honest, I wasn’t really paying attention) so I busied my writer’s hands with the tea – a task with which I’m pretty intimately familiar from so many years of delicately arranged looking-like-I’m-working-harder-than-I-really-am. On opening the press, I saw what our gleeful ‘organisation’ had wrought.
There is a press in my house now, big enough that I might fit myself inside it comfortably, that contains only a black box, perhaps a litre in volume. Inside this box are perhaps fifty teabags. Surrounding the box, improbably black against the white-and-spilled-spices backdrop of the press itself, were three or four houseflies – dead – gassed most likely, a can of Glade practically smoking a foot to my left. There was something else too, that looked like the slightest twist of a dried tea-leaf.
It turned out to be a moth, twisted by whatever cocktail it had ingested. Insects don’t have lungs, and so it had absorbed, directly through spiracles to every meaningful cell it had, the lavender-fresh smell of an unnaturally strong outdoors and it had been twisted beyond all meaningful recognition.
I dug out two teabags, swung door of the press shut and wondered if this was what the whole second generation German guilt over the concentration camps feels like.
I’m like a household Caliban. She has taught me how to clean, and my only profit on it has been to see the mess that I have made.
* Largely, the “foods” present in my house are, in fact, condiments, but let’s not get into the technicalities any more tonight.
** Including but not limited to: Black Olives, “Hot Chick” Curry dishes and some kippers in sunflower oil we feared the father might notice missing.
Monday, June 1, 2009
I broke my Blogo...
So, on Flash's recommendation I've started using Blogo, because it makes it a lot easier to manage multiple blogs (which I've started employing for the benefit of those who aren't into the non-Marc's Life blogs that I post). Anyway, I managed to kill it within 24 hours of getting it, but a reinstall fixed it all up.
I'm just getting ready to go to sleep now so that I can wake up early enough to go to work tomorrow morning without feeling like a zombie. I don't have a tremendous amount of news except that I played a lot of football with Adam, James and Lee today.
It was a strange experience; we were all in the mood to play, but it was certainly far too hot a day to play football. Instead we all half-heartedly dragged ourselves around in an attempt to keep the game going. I really like when it's so hot that you can feel the heat of the sun on the back of your neck as though it were physically applying pressure. We don't see enough days like that, as a rule, but one here and there is certainly a tolerable deviation from the norm.
This is the first update I've actually written in Blogo itself. My normal pattern is to write an update in word, read it over for any glaring errors and then paste it into Blogspot/Wordpress. Blogo seems to support a very freeform approach to writing with which I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable.
I'm sure I'll feel the whole process out as I go, but I can see myself returning to Word and the copy and paste method quite quickly.
Ever since I worked as a copy editor, people often ask me to read their own writing so that I might improve it in some way. Whenever someone asks me to look over their work, the first thing I do is put on a very stern face, gesture at the whole thing and tell them, "Well, your first problem is pretty obvious; your text is out of control. It's all over the place. It's okay though, I can handle that for you." Responses are always good, especially given how vague the statement is.
Anyway, to cut a long story short, that's how I feel about writing in Blogo. My text is out of control, and normally I can handle that for you, but not without a half decent word processor.
I'll continue the research. It's good to know someone is doing this important work.
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