Quote

A quote you try to live by:

I try to live by the so-called Golden Rule, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. It’s a good, solid rule, whether one looks at it from a religious or evolutionary standpoint (after all, it’s a good behavioral adaptation). Technically, it’s a paraphrased version of a quote from the Bible, but that doesn’t change my answer.

I simpler version of this is simply, "be nice". I'm not nice 100% of the time, but I try.

I should have posted this before midnight, but I was busy working on my next post (which involves keeping track of every damn thing I do until I next go to bed) and I lost track of the time. The days get away from me sometimes.

Pet Peeves

Three pet peeves:

I spend a lot of time and money buying music, and often treat the internet as a kind of 24-hours-a-day record shop. Over time, I’ve noticed that there are a lot of people who treat it as a 24-hours-a-day cash cow, buying low and selling high. These people are called record flippers. A lot of the music I buy comes from niche markets, which means that physical releases are often very limited. People who buy them up just to make a profit take them out of the hands of people who buy them for listening pleasure. A $20.00 record becomes a $100.00 record in no time. People who actually buy these releases at the inflated prices are only adding to the problem by encouraging this kind of behavior. I’m aware that this nasty capitalist phenomenon occurs in other markets as well (such as homes – one of the reasons we got our current home for the asking price, with a free new roof thrown in, was because we weren’t flippers – the woman who owned the house told us that she was happy that we were planning to move in with our family rather than fixing it up and reselling it).

I’m usually pretty quick on the draw, but occasionally something I want sells out and gets flipped. Get a real job, assholes.

Another thing that really pisses me off is willful ignorance. These days, there is more information at our fingertips than ever before, yet some people seem to know nothing about anything. I sometimes joke that we’ve forgotten to ask the correct questions, but in many cases, people seem to just not care. I’ve definitely met some horrifyingly uninformed individuals over the years, and some of them even seem proud of their lack of knowledge. Unfortunately, a lot of these people are currently vying for the republican presidential nomination. Just what the world needs.

And then there are people who act like they’re entitled to more than the rest of us. We’ve all seen them, stepping to the fronts of lines, imperiously grabbing things from under our noses, stomping their little feet like enraged toddlers when they’re thwarted. That’s ugly.

I have more pet peeves, maybe even enough for them to qualify as a menagerie, but these are the first three that popped into my head.

The Future

Your life in 7 years:

One of my faults is that I often passively wait for things to happen, rather than going out and making them become reality. Luckily for me, this strategy has worked out pretty well. Then again, I’m pretty good at accepting my present conditions, whatever those conditions happen to be at the time. This kind of acceptance is both a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because I’m almost always content, and a curse because I might not know what I’m missing by not taking initiative. I guess I could say that I’m not overly ambitious.

This prompt also makes me think about what my life was like seven years ago. Seven years ago… 2008. In 2008 I was going through a divorce. I had just moved into a small studio apartment, and I still had both of my parents. Willow was 5 years old. Currently, I’m married again and living in a house we own, and both of my parents are dead. Willow is almost a teenager. A lot has happened in the last seven years, and I guess that the marriage and home ownership part are events that I helped make happen (these are things that don’t just happen on their own, after all). The latter was helped by getting an inheritance though.

In seven years, I’ll be about to turn 55. Willow will be 19. I have no major plans that are likely to come to fruition in the next seven years. Maybe I’ll clean the garage or something… More seriously, I’d like to make music. I feel that my creativity needs a jump start. I was talking with a friend on Facebook recently, and she mentioned wanting to collaborate on a creative project. Will it happen? Only if I step up and make it happen.

The short answer to this question is that, barring the influence of outside forces, I don’t see any major changes happening between now and then. Life is good. Sure, it could be great, but I am content.

Commute

Your commute to and from work/school/etc.:

At the moment, I have a reverse commute which has the benefit of not involving any freeways. The only bottleneck happens when I hit the morning “dropping kids off at school” traffic.

It takes me around 20 minutes to get to work. I start at home in the suburbs and end in the hills. The elevation change is just enough so that it can be overcast at home and sunny at work. Very occasionally, a storm will bring down a substantial tree near work, and on a couple of occasions, I’ve had to be creative to get in or out (parking and shuttling or borrowing a co-worker’s vehicle, like I did one morning when Jeanine and I had just started dating – I refused to miss our date).

The round trip gives me about 45 minutes of music listening time each work day, which always puts me in a good mood.

I realize how fortunate I am, living in the Bay Area and not having an interminable commute. The freeways keep getting worse and worse, with miles of stationary vehicles clogging the arteries each day. Morning rush hour has blended with the afternoon commute, so I try to avoid freeways completely during the week.

Words

Two words/phrases that make you laugh:

Poor word usage or atrocious spelling sometimes makes me laugh, but in a derisive way. Same goes for unintentional oxymorons.

The thing about words and phrases is that it is often the unexpected that makes me laugh. If I hear something often enough to remember it well, it loses its comedy power.

As authors go, I often find myself literally laughing out loud while reading the words of Joe R. Lansdale. He can turn a phrase with the best of them, often with darkly hilarious results.

Ferocious Fruit

A fruit you dislike and why:

I’m not a fan of grapefruit, finding it too tart. I’m not a fan of this question either. It doesn’t really lead anywhere interesting. If I disliked a fruit because it insulted me in some way, we'd have a story, but in this reality we share, the average fruit tends to be well-behaved, barring those incidents when rotten individuals are propelled toward the deserving, in which case human help is had.

Inspired by the insipidity of this question, I'm going to come up with an alternate 30 day writing challenge.

Anniversary

This particular writing challenge prompt almost coincided with our anniversary. It was off by a day, but I flipped the order of a couple of the prompts, saving the much less interesting one about fruit for tomorrow.

Your current relationship; if single, discuss that too:

Jeanine and I have been married for exactly three years now. Happy anniversary to us!

Strangely enough, we went to high school together, but didn’t know each other then. She remembers sitting behind me in algebra class. In fact, that’s how we re-met on a dating site – I got a message saying something like, “I think I sat behind you in Algebra class”. I never would have had a profile on a dating site in the first place, but after talking to a coworker who had tried it, the whole thing made sense. Online dating opens up a whole new world of people who you wouldn’t meet in your day to day life, which means you’re more likely to find somebody compatible.

Our first “date” was a walk along the trails at Rancho San Antonio Open Space Preserve, and that’s also where I proposed to her (no, not on our first walk together, but sometime later). That was in 2009. Now, in 2015, we’ve been married for three years, owned a house together for slightly longer, and we’re still going strong. The honeymoon period is over (due to various responsibilities, our actual honeymoon was a brief trip to nearby Carmel), but I find my love and appreciation for her still growing. I can only hope that this feeling continues to be reciprocated. Sometimes I feel like I could be a better husband – taking more initiative to get things done in a timely manner and things like that. There is always room for improvement, I guess.

She is quietly competent, owns her own business (she is a party entertainer, with balloon twisting and face painting being her specialties), likes the same kinds of pets I do (I got her a slightly dangerous spider for Christmas a couple of years ago, and she not only liked it, but named it George), puts up with my musical tastes (although occasionally raises her eyebrows and the piles of records and CDs that threaten to take over our living space) and odd hours, is completely unflappable, has a couple of cool kids (Eva is currently fourteen, and Steven is in his early twenties and doesn’t live with us). We’re both introverts, and both make our livings working with kids. She is also selfless and kind, and has as sense of humor compatible with mine. What’s not to love?

Her mom, Irene, lives with us too. She has mobility issues which are slowly getting worse. I know that for some, living with an in-law might sound hazardous, but I genuinely like her too.

Another important thing to mention is that neither of us drink or take any recreational drugs, which makes us part of a small minority. I never used to think that having a significant other who abstained from these substances was crucial for me, but now I realize it really is. She’s not a vegetarian though, but that’s okay. I wouldn’t want to marry somebody who was exactly like me in every way. That would be boring.

Here's to many more years!

Quarry Park

We got some more rain this weekend, and even a bit of thunder and lightning. Dexter the cat spent some time in the closet with his tail all poofed up. He's not a fan of thunder. Brian the kitten isn't fazed by it at all.

Willow and I checked out the new Quarry Park in Saratoga yesterday. It's near my work, and features the remnants of an old quarry, as well as information about the mining (copper and lime) that used to take place there. All of the facilities are sparkling and new, and the gravel-lined pathways are pristine. I think Willow took more pictures than I did. She looked inside the restrooms just so she could marvel at how clean they were. All of the trash cans and picnic tables were brand new too.

From the overlook at the park, there was a decent view of the cloud-enshrouded South Bay.

Today, in the backyard, a gravity-defying squirrel was spotted eating lunch. We no longer care if they eat our avocados. There are just too damned many of them. Have at it, squirrels.

Ageism

Your feelings on ageism:

I’m betting that nobody ever says, “I’m all for ageism!”, even if they happen to be practicing ageists.

From what I’ve read, for most of human history, people respected their elders. I’m sure there were exceptions, of course, but during a time of very little technological progress and/or in societies without written language, the survival of a group (whether it be a tribe, farming community, or any other similar grouping) depended on the passing down of information through the generations. More often than not, the village elders were founts of information and wisdom. They were the torch passers.

The older you are, the more life experience you’ve accumulated. That said, I’m sure that even then there were people who were so full of being young and in their prime that they resisted the advice of their elders.

These days, one doesn’t have to look far to come across evidence that elders are no longer always treated with respect. With technology changing faster than people can keep up with it (I’ve often said that our technological progress has long outstripped our social progress), a lot of people stick with what they know and avoid new innovations. This leads younger people to sometimes discount the life experience accumulated by the elderly due to their perceived helplessness when it comes to navigating modern technology.

Sure, grandma can’t figure out the computer, but have you ever sat and listened to what she has to say? Yes, grandpa would rather use his rotary dial phone than an iPhone, but he has accumulated 80 years of life experience. For all I know, it has always been this way, at least to a point. We tend to romanticize the past to a certain degree, even if we sometimes discount the people who have actually lived it. As a species, we’re maddeningly inconsistent, aren’t we?
Our society is centered on the young. Just look at who the ads are aimed toward. We tend to infantilize the elderly, and some of them, after enough treatment of this kind, almost seem to buy into it. The next time you watch a funny YouTube video of an octogenarian trying to navigate Facebook or a grandkid’s iPhone, thing about why you’re laughing and realize that your grandkids will most likely be laughing at you for a similar reason.

At the very least, if you’re middle aged or older, you can almost feel the wind from the giant broom as it sussurates across the floorboards to sweep you under the carpet. It’s an iBroom, of course, with all of the bells and whistles of modernity.

My feelings? It’s a shame.

Books Abide

A book you love and one you didn’t:

Since I would categorize my word consumption as “voracious”, there are many books I could write about. My first instinct is to mention Richard Adams’ “Watership Down” as a book I love, but instead I’m going to write about George Stewart’s “Earth Abides”, since at different times in my life, it has been both a book I loved and I one I didn’t.

The first time I read it, I was because it was assigned reading in high school, and while I enjoyed the post-apocalyptic theme, I was disappointed that there were no supernatural elements to the story. I was still young and immature enough to require monsters in order for my interest to be fully engaged.

The second time I read it, I was finishing up my sociology degree at San Jose State, and I enjoyed it much more, realizing that it was the human story at the core of the book that made it interesting, not the trappings of apocalypse. The collapse of civilization doesn’t need the supernatural to render it fascinating. After all of the intervening years since I last read it, I still consider it one of the more thoughtful entries in that particular sub-genre.

These days, with TV shows like The Walking Dead leading the way, one doesn’t have to look far to delve into the what-ifs of post-civilization survival stories. We’re at our best when our surroundings are at their worst, or are we?

I posit that this cultural interest in the collapse of civilization is tied in with our fears that it might happen in our lifetimes. After all, much of the science fiction created during the mid twentieth century seemed to revolve around the idea of alien invasion, and many of these stories, like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, featured alien infiltrators. Behind these fanciful stories was a very real fear of the Soviet Union. Our entertainment choices often reflect our fears and help us work through them.

Perhaps George Stewart was ahead of his time, or perhaps we’ve always feared societal collapse.

Tattoos

What tattoos you have and if they have meaning:

I have three tattoos. The first was done in the field during lunch in junior high, back in the late seventies or very early eighties. We used a pin and a bottle of ink. If the lunch bell hadn’t rung, I would have a Black Sabbath styled cross on my right wrist. As it is, I have something that looks either like a lightning bolt or the Sowilo (sun) rune, which is the rune of guidance, goal setting, and success. When kids ask about it, I tell them that Voldemort tried to kill me but I put up my arm to block his spell, hence the lightning bolt shaped scar on my wrist, instead of on my forehead like the one Harry Potter has.

The second tattoo is of a crow. I got it in Flint, Michigan in 1995 while on a road trip with my friend, Chad. On our way to Flint, we kept encountering crows, and while in Flint, I took advantage of the fact that one of Chad’s friends owned a tattoo shop. These days, Chad has a much bigger and more intricate tattoo of a crow himself, across his chest like the boy in Santa Sangre. Chad also sung at my wedding to Jeanine almost exactly three years ago. Oh, and these days we both call ourselves “Crow”, me for work, and him because it’s an abbreviation of a family name. Chad sings and plays washboard on this album, which features a song called General Crow.

The third tattoo I got while I was married to Jen, or perhaps almost married to Jen – sometime in 2002 or 2003, I think. I got the image out of a Brian Froud book – it’s of a wood faerie playing what looks like a sitar. At the same time, she got a tattoo of a lavender faerie on the small of her back. I think, from what Willow has said, that she regrets having it now. I like my wood faerie though. It doesn’t have any real meaning – although at the time, the fact that Jen and I got our tattoos together did.

I have no plans to get more tattoos, although I know who I would get them from if I ever change my mind. Josh Visher, an old coworker of mine from my Tower Books days is now a phenomenal tattoo artist. Check out his work here.

Fascinating

Someone who fascinates you and why:

I’ve thought about this off and on for around a week now, and can’t come up with a satisfying answer. There are plenty of people who I admire, respect, love, like, dislike, and am disgusted by, but nobody comes to mind when I think of the word, “fascinate”. Or maybe I just don't want to single anybody out. I sometimes have a hard time writing about specific people.

Taking a more general approach, I guess I am fascinated by our human capacity for acting contrary to our best interests. If one looks at the life choices made by fellow human beings (or at one’s own life choices, for that matter), it becomes obvious that some of these choices (what we eat, how we spend our time, etc.) aren’t doing us any good at all.

That said, much of the time, I’m motivated by pleasure. If something feels good, I tend to overindulge. Eating ice cream is quite pleasurable, but it sure isn’t doing me any favors. And don’t get me started on cheese. Putting off objectionable tasks feels good, but comes back to bite me later. The list goes on. I don’t even have any of the usual addictions (smoking, recreational drugs, etc.) and I still don’t have to look very far to find fault with myself in this regard. Fascinating.

Lack of understanding also leads to fascination. The less I know about a person (whether that person be an inscrutable artist or someone whose motivations are unclear), the more fascinated by that person I'm likely to be. Some of my favorite lyricists are those whose work is layered and full of hidden meaning. I'm also fascinated by cultures I don't understand. If more people were fascinated rather than fearful when it came to foreign cultures, the world would be a nicer place.

In general, as a species, our pathological behavior is fascinating. In true punk fashion, I blame society.

Living Somewhere

A place you would live, but have never visited:

This is a hard one to answer, because I’m not going to commit to living somewhere I’ve never visited. I wouldn’t buy a house without seeing it first, and I certainly wouldn’t commit to living in a geographic region (whether it be a city, county, or country) without visiting first. That said, for some reason, Scotland and Ireland come to mind. So do New Zealand and Australia. I’d rather live in a temperate or even arctic region rather than live near the equator. I’m not into constant heat and humidity. Scotland, from what I’ve seen in pictures and film, looks ruggedly beautiful. I know people in Ireland, which is helpful. Come to think of it, I have at least one friend in Switzerland too, so I’ll have to add it to this list. New Zealand and Australia are full of interesting wildlife. Living somewhere in Scandinavia might be interesting too, although it would involve having to learn a new language, and at my age, that wouldn’t be much fun. How would I make a living in these places? Not sure.

As for U.S. states that I haven't visited, maybe somewhere like Maine, Alaska, or Hawaii.

The short answer is: somewhere beautiful and interesting, without excessive heat, and populated by people who I share a language with. I'm getting too old to be able to easily learn a new language.

Ten Facts

Ten interesting facts about yourself:

Hmmm. Another list. I notice that a lot of online articles I see (and sometimes actually read) are produced in the form of a list. That’s an obnoxious trend, and is one more nail in the coffin of literature, but I’ll do my best to put my dislike of lists aside and answer this anyway. I refuse to number it though.

I have a mild phobia about talking on the phone, especially when it comes to making cold calls. I wouldn’t have a cell phone if it weren’t for the fact that they keep being given to me. My first one was given to me by Jen, who I was then married to, because she was tired of not being able to get hold of me. It was her old one (strangely enough, a few weeks ago, and around a decade after Jen gave me the phone, I got a text from her sister, thinking it was still her number - she probably still had it stored in her phone somewhere). That phone eventually became so decrepit that Jeanine got me an iPhone, so I find myself more or less keeping up with technology even though I have no real interest in doing so.

On a similar note, I’m suspicious of new technology until I’ve worked out the human cost of owning it. This is probably due to my interest in sociology (which I have a BA degree in) and my general Luddite tendencies. I’d probably be better off not owning a computer, but now I’m hooked. It also bothers me when I become dependent on technology that I can’t fix (let alone make), were it to break. I just watched a video yesterday in which a man built a whole house using stone-age technology, and it was fascinating. That said, making things like that isn’t a skill I possess. I seem to think better either abstractly or in two dimensions.

Sometimes I get the feeling that I think I’m smarter than I really am, maybe because most of my knowledge and intelligence doesn’t appear to be of the practical variety.

I’m a hardcore introvert, although my profession involves working with groups of people. Jeanine is the same way.

I feel that I often take the path of least resistance, but so far, this has worked out pretty well for me. I have a good life. That said, I tend to be very accepting of whatever my current circumstances are, a tendency that is both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, I’m always relatively happy, but on the other hand, I’m not often inspired to improve my life (with occasional exceptions that seem almost cyclical or seasonal in nature).

My favorite season is Autumn. I like transitions in general, and Autumn is a transitional time. I love wind, rain, and fog, and Autumn is full of promise when it comes to winter weather. Winters, especially lately, have been disappointing in this regard. My interest in transitions is due to the fact that I’ve always been a fan of possibilities and anticipation, and Autumn scratches both of these itches.

The qualities I most admire in others are ones that I don’t feel I possess myself: bravery, self-discipline, humbleness, selflessness, etc.

The qualities I least admire in others are the ones most opposite to the ones I think I possess.

I highly value intelligence. Plus, if your spelling is atrocious, my first impression of you won't be favorable.

I’m reserved around other people, unless I really like them and/or feel comfortable around them, in which case I’m kind of a goofball.

Newts, Plus Some Kissing and Telling

A couple of months ago, there were little Chorus frogs everywhere. Now, no doubt because of the recent rain, the walkways are crawling with tiny newts. I think we can thank the absence of bullfrogs in the pond for these as well. Adult newts are extremely toxic and any bullfrog ingesting one wouldn't live to repeat the mistake. The larval stage, on the other hand, don't contain the tetrodotoxin that the adults do, and thus make yummy snacks for everybody. This morning, I rescued several from the pathways, one from our staff room, and one from the boy's bathroom.

Here are three of them, hanging out on a moist patch of concrete in the middle of the night.

This is day 3 of my November writing challenge, and this is the only time I'll ever kiss and tell in these virtual pages.

Your first love and first kiss; if separate, discuss both:

I’m going to use my context clues and assume this question means my first romantic love. I could feign ignorance and talk about my childhood love for dinosaurs and monster movies, but no…

My first love was a girl named Sara. I was kind of a late bloomer, not due to a lack of interest, but because I was shy around the opposite sex and had low self-esteem when it came to my confidence in attracting that kind of attention from girls I liked. So, it wasn’t until I was nearly 20 (or maybe already 20) that I had my first proper girlfriend. I’m not really counting the girlfriend I had in the sixth grade. My sixth grade girlfriend was named Christie Williams, and I still wince when I remember how I asked her out. It went something like: “my friends want me to ask you to be my girlfriend”. That’s right, I was so lacking in confidence that I left myself a backdoor in case she just laughed at me. If I blamed the whole thing on my friends, I could respond to rejection with: “I didn’t really want to go out with you anyway. It was all my friends’ idea”. She said yes though. We sat around together and sometimes held hands. She broke up with me at Redwood Glen, which was the sixth grade science camp back then (it’s actually the same program I work for now, although under a different name and at a different location) because I was a messy eater. I think it was the spaghetti dinner that did me in. Anyway, Sara didn’t come into the picture until nearly a decade after that. I had plenty of female friends in the interim, but I never asked any of them out because I didn’t want to take the risk of introducing a huge awkwardness into our friendship if my advances ended up being rejected. There’s that fear of rejection again. With Sara, she made it pretty clear that she liked me. She was a few years younger than me, and lived 90 miles away. We’d met at Gilman St. (the punk club in Berkeley where I spent the majority of my time on the weekends, and where I still occasionally attend gigs to this day), which was around halfway between our houses. We dated for around a year and a half, with me heading up to Napa on the weekends and often staying there until late Sunday evening. This is when I started drinking coffee. It’s scary when you start to fall asleep while driving. She broke up with me shortly after she got her own car. I think she’d started seeing a previous boyfriend again, or maybe she just wasn’t excited at the prospect of driving all the way down to see me. In my relative naivety, I thought our relationship would last forever, and my agony at having her end it precipitated my move away from home. I suppose that was the lemonade that came from that particular lemon. It was good while it lasted, I suppose. We became friends on Facebook a few years ago, and had an interaction or two there, but she has since dropped off of that particular social media platform (maybe for one or more of the reasons outlined in my answers to the first question in the writing challenge).

I had my first kiss in the 5th or 6th grade, so I must have been 10 or 11 years old. There was a line of redwood trees along the fence at our elementary school, and like many kids, we were drawn to the trees, mostly because if we sat under them or between their thick trunks and the fence that separated the schoolyard from the backyards of nearby houses, we weren’t under the direct supervision of the “yard duty” (in retrospect, it’s funny that we would call a person “yard duty”, as if it were an official title rather than the description of a thankless task – that aside, I actually liked the old lady, Mrs. Larson, who performed yard duty and acted as a crossing guard – she often gave me things, like little wind-up monsters and candy and such). Anyway, one day a bunch of us played a game of Spin the Bottle, and I ended up kissing a girl named Lisa (who, strangely enough, just sent me a Facebook friend request a few days ago). It was very clinical – we pressed our mouths together, inserted our tongues, and moved them around. Our tongues were like two fish, alarmed to run into each other in the dark and frantically slipping past one another. I felt no real spark of excitement, other than the excitement that accompanies doing something forbidden. I was intrigued by the mystery of this weird adult ritual. I also remember going swimming at Lisa’s friend Melissa’s house, where the girls would jump into the pool in such a way that their shirts would ride up. The boys, myself included, were underwater with goggles. Not that there was much to see at that age.

I didn’t kiss anybody else (maybe not even my so-called 6th grade girlfriend, who I have no memory of actually ever kissing), until early in high school, when my friend Cristie drunkenly kissed me at a Michael Schenker show. In the interim, I’d matured enough to really enjoy the experience, and one of my other friends had to pull me away because he was impatient to leave. Due to the fact that Cristie was actually seeing somebody else at the time, neither of us ever followed up on that one kiss. We're still friends though, even after all of this time, and even if these days it's mostly limited to occasional Facebook interactions.

November Writing Challenge

It started raining at 1:50 this morning, and as the noon hour approaches, the ground is wet and the sky is heavy. The rain seems to have stopped for now, but we got some good, solid hours of downpour, including some power outages. This makes me happy.

The work week whipped by in a flurry of darkness and starlight. One of my favorite teachers, my friend Les, was up with his class. This meant I finally got to return all of the books and DVDs I'd borrowed from him. It was a by-the-numbers sort of week though, so no stories to tell.

Halloween came and went. I actually went to a party, but it was as a hired hand. I brought reptiles, plus a tarantula and a Hissing Cockroach, to a birthday/Halloween party in Los Altos. This was the second time I'd been to this particular house, although the first time was three years ago, so the birthday girl was correspondingly older. It went well, and in addition to my fee, I was sent home with a pizza and a ton of leftover spaghetti.

At home, Jeanine counted around 120 trick-or-treaters. For some reason, a lot of kids really don't know how to ring doorbells or say "trick or treat", instead electing to stand quietly on the front step and hope that somebody notices them. Modern parenting paranoia (not allowing kids to go to friends' houses on their own) is probably to blame. This year, I didn't dress up or carve a pumpkin. Inspiration just didn't strike. Jeanine carved all three. She never seems to lack inspiration for such things.

Shifting gears a bit, recently, I stumbled across an online writing challenge, and I thought I'd give it a try. The challenge consists of responding to one writing prompt/question per day for a whole month, and it appeals to me because it will shake me out of my comfort zone (or rut) as far as the kinds of things I post here go.

It's already the second of the month, so here are the first two:

Five problems with social media:

The following answers are based on my experiences with Facebook, since that’s the only social media I currently use.

The omnipresence of clickbait and targeted advertisements simultaneously empty the minds and wallets of the unwary. Even if the user genuinely wants the subjects of the ads, it still results in people having too much of a good thing and not enough of a bank account. My Achilles’ Heel is music and literature. That said, most of the music I find through social media comes from pages I choose to follow, not targeted advertising.

It’s the place where good grammar goes to die, sort of like the fabled lost graveyard of the elephants, except it’s all too depressingly real.

Social media insidiously changes the way people think. Like monkeys, we reach our little questing hands toward the objects of our desires, but the objects are forever changing, and suddenly we find that we desire things that aren’t conducive to health and happiness (for instance, stupid viral videos, arguments that go around in downward spirals of ever-increasing fallaciousness, blood-pressure-inducing articles about human idiocy, etc.). It’s like a drug that leaves the user wanting more and more. Since it’s updated in real time, there is always a new fix to be had, 24 hours a day. It’s easier to sit down in front of one’s favorite electronic device and scroll than it is to spend time accomplishing real world things.

Did I mention that social media is the grandfather of all time sucks? It’s like a black hole where all of our good intentions go to die.

It’s passive entertainment masquerading as active interaction. What we see is chosen for us, mainly because it’s easier just to scroll down the page than it is to premeditate our reason for being there.

Social media reveals that many people in our lives are rather vapid, which is kind of depressing. For example, many people tend to “share” things on Facebook as true, when they are obviously satire. It’s pretty simple to take the extra seconds to either closely read the article or do some quick background searching.

Oops. That was more than five. It might have been more challenging to come up with five advantages of social media. Writing only about the problems sounds too much like complaining, although it's probably more fun. The best way to write about problems is to pair them with solutions, and the best solution here is to be aware of the problems and simply use social media in moderation. Being human though, a lot of us, including me, have trouble with moderation.

Your earliest memory:

I’m not sure how old I was at the time, but I have a really clear memory of breaking a lamp in my room. If memory serves, the base of the lamp was in the form of a man holding a bunch of colorful balloons. I knocked it off a table (or something to that effect) and proudly went into the other room to show my parents what I had done. I remember feeling confused when they weren’t happy at my ingenuity. My destructive tendencies ended up being the cause of many other minor incidents over the years, often involving my own possessions. I thought it was a laugh riot to hit things (usually toy cars) with a hammer and pretend that they’d been in horrible accidents. The lamp might have been where it all started.

Another Week in the Field

This week, I became temporarily diurnal. Our machine needs oil, at least as far as scheduling goes. This means that I occasionally get desperate, last-minute messages about trading in my night supervisor hat for a field instructor one. Not that I mind, although I think scheduling difficulties are generally stressful for all involved.

My group this week included the usual spectrum of students, and we spent some quality time out on the trails. Nothing out of the ordinary happened. At the Friday meeting, we found out that our old dining hall is going to be demolished soon, and other facilities changes are in the offing.

Thursday, as I often do, I took my group up to Lake Ranch Reservoir. The sky was mostly blue, but it's obvious that Autumn is here, both from the slightly cooler temperatures and the drifts of colorful leaves decorating the trails. Everything is dusty and dry, and the water level in the reservoir is lower than ever.

One of the kids found a dead bat. I'm not sure which species it is.

At home, after getting back late from a night up in the city (to be detailed soon on my music blog), I went out to close up the chicken coop and saw this little guy looking down from the back fence.

I wonder if he was pondering a possible chicken dinner. We saw him again the next night as he investigated the front "lawn" (in quotes because, due to the drought, it's not actually a lawn at the moment).

Brian the kitten has decided that he likes books. As I type, he is on another rampage.

Killing and Biting, Plus A Kitten

Over the last week, we have had a few days of almost-rain, with just enough water falling from the sky to pit the dust, giving it a cratered appearance somewhat like the surface of the moon. The temperature has been vacillating back and forth between unseasonably hot and crisply autumnal. Autumn is, after all, a transitional season, although it remains to be seen what kind of winter we'll transition to this year. The possible impacts of the current El Nino have been in the news, but it's all just talk until the effects are actually felt.

A couple of noteworthy events, both of which I found out about second hand due to my nocturnal schedule, have happened at work over the last couple of weeks. I found out early last week (or was it the week before?) that one of my coworkers found a dead Mountain Lion over by the creek. He initially reported that it had been shot, which is worrying, because that means that somebody was wandering around with a gun in the hills above camp. If a ranger or somebody else official had shot it (which wouldn't have been any better), the carcass would have been removed. The Santa Cruz Puma Project people were called in to investigate, and they reported that, no, it hadn't been shot. It had been killed by another Mountain Lion. Mountain Lions are very territorial, so this does happen occasionally.

Last Wednesday, one of the night hike groups heard a Mountain Lion, so it was probably the voice of the killer.

The other noteworthy event happened the same Wednesday, to a kid in the same group. Down by the pond, this kid started hassling a small snake, reportedly poking at it until it bit him. Unfortunately for the kid, he picked the wrong snake to hassle, so for the first time in our history, a camper got bitten by a rattlesnake. The incident was handled well, with an immediate 911 call being made. The camper got one vial of antivenin and reportedly will have no lasting repercussions from his little misadventure. From what I heard, the fellow members of his field class weren't surprised at his lapse of judgement, and didn't want to send him get well cards.

There is also a nest of rattlesnakes under a boulder near our front gate. I'm in the field again this week (another last minute staffing snafu - I awoke to an e-mail and a voice message this morning), so I'll check the area out at some point.

My own work weeks have been very routine, with nothing much of interest happening. I get to work, hang out with my swing shift friends, Weasel and Tiger Lily, and then share space with our security guard, Apple Juice, until it's time to wake the kids up. I've been waking the kids up with some poorly-played trombone music, although I bought a kazoo horn for a dollar at the Clown Club auction on Thursday, so on Friday morning I discovered that yes, it is possible to wake up 150 kids with a kazoo. What fun!

At home, we have a new resident. His name is Brian. He looks like this:

A friend of Jeanine's found Brain abandoned at a campsite. He was originally going to be part of a trade because Jeanine was trying to give away our young roosters. As it ended up, somebody else took the roosters but we got the kitten anyway. We have one possible rooster left. it's just androgynous enough that we can't tell the gender. If it starts crowing, it's going to have to move.

Weekend Whips By

The weekend is already almost over. I watched Willow play three soccer games and one softball game. Her soccer team won one, tied one, and lost one, and I'm not sure what the final score at the softball game was. It's always a pleasure to watch her do things she likes and does well. I've said it before: I'm not a spectator sports fan, and I'm not sure what the big deal is with watching highly paid athletes play, but I love watching my daughter play because it is not only fun for her, but good for her in multiple ways.

I sometimes get overly scornful toward sports fans, but I guess if one applies entertainment preferences to Gardner's Theory of Multiple Intelligences, it makes sense that the more physically and socially (and less emotionally, intellectually, artistically...) oriented people in the population would gravitate toward events where physical and social skills are needed. Of course, if you look at professional athletes, the news is rife with examples of poor social graces amongst the sporting elite (ie: a lot of them are spoiled babies). This is yet another reason I'd much rather watch my daughter play. These games are just training for war anyway, at least war as it used to be fought, where things like physical skill and teamwork made a bigger difference.

Eva has started her annual gig working for Deadtime Dreams. Here is how she went to work yesterday:

On a completely different note, here's a nice picture of Venus, taken at camp toward the end of the week.

The forecast for today called for possible thunderstorms, but I'm looking out the window at an expanse of blue sky, with a few white, fluffy clouds around the fringes. Yesterday, it actually rained a bit, making the roads slick enough to bring cars together in expensive ways. It occurred to me that there are probably a lot of drivers in California who had never driven in the rain before yesterday.

Then, yesterday evening, we got yet another spectacular sunset.

We've been getting a lot of those lately though.

So far, only one of the Safeway chicks is crowing. Jeanine has named him "Pot Pie". He sleeps in a cat carrier in the garage so he won't wake up the neighborhood every morning. Anybody want a rooster? Maybe two or three roosters?

The nights at work this week have been relatively easy, with the exception of Tuesday night when a kid decorated his sleeping bag and mattress with his dinner. That's when I found that the washing machine still isn't working. I've also been waking up too early every afternoon, which means I'm operating on about five hours of sleep each day, instead of my preferred eight. Coffee is my friend.