I quote from the entry titled Helltown USA at a blog named Pruned…
Since the summer of 1962, a fire, fueled by rich anthracite coal deposits, has been burning beneath the mining town of Centralia, Pennsylvania.
Nonstop.
File this under, “Why have I not heard about something this incredibly freaky before now?” Check out the pictures. They’re both freakish and fascinating.
I love my iRiver T30 portable player. It holds 512 megabytes’ worth of my favorite music, and does a reasonable job of randomly stringing songs together. (Mind you, I made a point of renaming the 60 files that I’ve loaded so far in such a way as to ungroup the songs by a particular artist. This helps a lot, I suspect.) This morning, however, it seems to have taken my current state of mind strongly into account. Sure, the morning commute started on a bright, perky note with Oranges and Lemons’ “Soramimi Cake” followed by The Space Brothers’ “I Still Love You,” but after that things took a turn for the moody.
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The posting really slacked off, didn’t it?
Which is to say, I’m slacking off. I’m two weeks behind on Mai Otome recaps. I haven’t touched either of my video projects, let alone the LP dubbing project. I need to do one last website conversion. There’s cleaning to be done around the house that I ought to take care of. I’ve not kept in as close of touch with people I call my friends as I probably should. (An oft-quoted motto of mine: To have a friend, be a friend.)
I’m feeling so uncertain and so unenergized lately that it’s hard to work up enthusiasm for much of anything. In a weird sort of way this has worked out for Dawn and I in that our gaming schedule has taken a major upswing… but that’s at the expense of everything I just listed. This isn’t to say that I need to cut out the gaming; indeed, game time is some of our best quality time when we’re “at distance.” I’m also not blaming the game time. I simply haven’t felt motivated to do much else. One might call it a crisis of faith, in that I’ve lost faith in myself, but mine isn’t a faith-based personality to begin with. So, what do you call it? I have no idea… and of course, that doesn’t really help, does it?
(and as I write this, I spill soda on my shirt and pants. I miss the keyboard, thank goodness. I just finished my laundry a few minutes ago, thanks for asking.)
I look around at all of the reminders, empty places where Things I Said I Would Definitely Accomplish should reside. Each one sucks a bit of life out of me, from the basket of garbage that needs emptying (“I Will Definitely keep my room trash-free”) to the little stack of “Day The Universe Changed” DVDs awaiting the last disc to become a complete set. Nevermind my checkbook (“I Will Definitely build my financial buffer back up”) and the cardboard boxes of books (“I Will Definitely get a bookshelf this month”) and the saved emails (“I Will Definitely take care of these things for the people I care about”). Nevermind the big stuff, like “Am I asking my kids the questions that will help them open up to me more?” and “Do they honestly believe I care about them and enjoy their company?” and “Am I a good relationship partner?” and “Am I sticking with this job because it’s truly good for me or because I’m too afraid to try for better?”
Very little in my life has changed in the last year. There were a few significant improvements, to be sure, but I don’t think I have changed much. I may even have deteriorated in some important ways. What’s worse, I wonder sometimes if I’m really being true to myself like I promised myself I would be, back when things went terribly catastrophic. How badly have I fallen back into who I used to be? I honestly believe I’ve not done so too much, but that belief doesn’t erase all of the doubts.
And when you get right down to the core of it… am I willing to do what it takes to feel good about the direction my life is going?
“Gloomy thoughts for a Sunday evening,” you might say, and you’d be right. It hasn’t even been a bad day, truth be told, so it’s not like there’s anyone to blame (but myself) for the state of mind I’m in. As usual, it’s just something I must work through for myself. It happens, yes?
Take a number. Make it something in the upper double-digits or even the low triple-digits. Call it “N”, because we love vaguely algebraic notation. (Those of you who know my sheer unbridled joy at working math problems are snickering impolitely, here.) Out of any given number of days, your number “N” minus one would be the total days on which I don’t post anything to my LiveJournal account.
I only have the silly thing so I can use their oh-so-convenient “friends list” feature, which saves me having to bookmark (and check) each and every one of the dozen (or so) LJ accounts that I keep an eye on, and so I can leave non-anonymous comments. If these people would just post on a decent, self-respecting regular blog system like normal folks (stop that snickering; I can hear you), I wouldn’t have to do this. Necessity is the mother of additional logins, or something like that.
Today is a “-1” day, for I’ve posted another couple of LJ icons, which is just about all I’ve done post-wise with the account since it went up. Hey, if I am going to comment on stuff there, I might as well have some silly icons of my own to do so with, right?
Of course, if I start coming up with more icon ideas I’ll throw off the entire equation, won’t I? Hmm.
I quote here an email seen on the Entercom engineering remailer, courtesy of one Chris Tarr, Director of Engineering for our Milwaukee stations:
For those who didn’t hear, Google purchased dMarc, purveyors of Scott Studios and Maestro.
From the home office in Newport Beach, California, here’s the TOP TEN THINGS THAT WILL CHANGE NOW THAT GOOGLE HAS PURCHASED DMARC…
10. The logo on the front of the computer mysteriously changes for every holiday.
9. Jocks who need a quick fill song now have a button on the screen marked “I’m feeling lucky.”
8. When you try to put in a liner, the computer says “Did you mean…” and picks one spelled the right way.
7. Altavista and Zabasearch just bought every “Mister Microphone” in the country.
6. A song search for any song by the “Barenaked Ladies” also brings up six pages of porn sites.
5. “VT-32” now trading as “VT-46.87” after inexplicably exuberant run-up in the minutes after the sale was announced.
4. Hundreds of stations now offer prestigious email addresses to listeners on “dmail” server.
3. Jocks now spend hours mindlessly surfing the music library.
2. Next corporate buyout result: “MTV-bay.”And the number one thing that will change now that Google has purchased dMarc…
1. Revenooooooooogle Suite!!
In the interests of usability, the search form no longer shows gray text in a gray box on a gray background when you type into it.
You’re welcome.
In other news, the RSS/RDF/whatever feed now consists of the entry summaries rather than the full text. This more-or-less emulates what the previous system used to do. If you don’t like it, now would be a good time to say so. (My possible solution to an uprising might involve providing multiple feeds. I’m not sure yet.)
While I’m on that subject, I suppose now is a rather late date to point out that the feed URL has changed, so if you use a feed reader to keep tabs on me, you’ll want to re-add the subscription to this site. We apologize for the inconvenience.
