Wikipedia will teach you about the "@" symbol.

 
"In Armenian, it is "shnik", which means 'puppy'."

Nirvana - Pentecost Hotel 1968

Where I am now.

I like going places that I've never been - I love poking around a new city or riding a train or bus through town after town. It occurs to me as I think about this that there are very few places that I've been to that I haven't felt a little tug that says "you know, you could live here. You would be happy living here." I've felt it in tiny towns in the rural south and I've felt it in the depths of New York City.

I used to ride around the country on the Greyhound bus. Many times, the bus would be going through some place that I've never heard of, and I would look out the window and suddenly just want to jump off the bus and find an apartment right there.

Sometimes, when I am not expecting to, I feel it about the place where I am actually living.

From time to time I find myself pouring over blogs by people who are just writing about how they are living their lives. They take pictures of the flower bed after doing some weeding and another couple of shots of the store because they had to go for milk and eggs anyway.

I don't know if that's the sort of blog that I want to turn this into. No. I know that that is not the sort of blog that I turn this into. But from time to time I think I'm going to expand my horizon to include the close at hand.

The picture in this post was taken about half a mile from where I live. I had no reason to take it right then. But it was something to do while I was walking home.

embarrassment of riches

I have been spending the last few months noodling about with a site called 750words.com.

It is a simple site and it works like this:

I log in. It gives me a blankish page with the date on it. In the lower right corner of the page is a word counter, so as I type I can see the words accumulate. (I can anyway, what with them being written down and all, but there is something about typing and watching the word count chugging up.)

Then, once you have reached words a little box pops up that tells you that you have written the proper number of words and can now look at statistics about your writing.

For example - I see that it takes an average of 357 minutes per day to write 750 words. This makes sense because I generally wake up and do some writing in the morning and then finish up before I go to bed. My best streak is completing the 750 words 38 days in a row.

My writing is at a PG-13 level. The words I use indicate that I am introverted yet happy. I seem to think mostly about the present.

I have an adverb score of 9.4. The average adverb score is 9.9. I have no idea what that means.

In any event, I signed on a few months ago because I thought that I needed encouragement to write more. There is a school of that says that if you always write a certain amount every day, then you are always in the habit and it will help you write more. So in that way, this site works.

Two drawbacks though.

First - I find that once I have fallen off the wagon, it's hard to get back up again - those little badges and stars that pop up to tell me that I've done well start to dissapear. It easily stops being something that I am doing because I want to and turns into something that I am doing because I have to. Which is not the best way to happy me up.

Second - While 750 words a day seems a good amount, there really isn't a good mechanism to go back and strip the writing for parts. My "writing" day tends to go like this: I start writing. I write a bit about this thing and that thing. One paragraph seems like it should go to a blog post that I am meaning to write. Here's a thought about a poem that I want to come up with. "Hey my foot hurts again! I wonder if there is anything up with that?" (My foot doesn't really hurt. There is nothing up with that.)

I have now, it tells me, written 51,880 words. The problem is that I really don't have them organized in any coherent manner. There are a number of things that I have written over and over and over again. While it is a good tool to get me going, I now have all of that stuff that I don't know what to do with.

So - blogging is going to get a little strange as I now try to get into the habit of incorporating that stuff into this. Which is what I should have been doing all along.

That's five hundred twenty nine words there. Not bad for a Saturday morning.

(The number is different now. I've done a touch of editing. That's another thing about using this site. I find that I am quite frequently saying something in more words than less. I write out numbers - like five hundred twenty nine. It sort of changes that way I write, and the way I think about *what* to write).

My cunning plan for this morning was to try to chug out a 750 word (whoops, forgot to write that number out - I better add a needless parenthetical aside to make up for it. Oh and some emdashes - I have discovered that they count as words - so that changes my style a little too. (I think.) (Actually no - truth be told, I have always been an abuser of the emdash and the needless parenthetical.)) post. But I am still a bit short.

I took a break to get the coffee going. That means I get no bonus points today for writing without interruption. See - That's the sort of mindset that this site causes.

Anyhow, this sentence is going to kick me into the win column, so that means I'm off to start the day.

And don't worry. I have absolutely no intention of dumping this on you every day like this. I was just scratching it off of my increasingly long "to write about" list.

streetviewing

I've been inspired by Apres Garde to start looking through Streetview for interesting things to "take photos" of.

Here's the best I've found in my travels so far:

 

Madness : Johnny The Horse

And now, the most delightfully peppy song ever written about a homeless schizophrenic getting kicked to death. You're welcome.

Tom Russell on Letterman

I really haven't been paying attention to Ke$ha.

And yet I still somehow surf my way to this:

EW: And somehow you vomited in Paris Hilton’s closet?
K: Totally separate occasion, but yes, that did happen. They stayed in my house in Nashville when I was 17. Then fast forward six months, I’m out in LA, and I sing background vocals for her second single. And then that night we went to her house and we were all dancing, hanging out. Then I got overexcited and ralphed in her closet. I thought it was a bathroom… and it just so happened not to be a bathroom. It was a closet.
EW: Did that end things with you and her?
K: That kind of ended the relationship right there.
EW: Do you hold that against her?
K: No, I wouldn’t want to be my friend either.

The Leisure Society 'A Matter Of Time' (live)

Compare and contrast