to reach an arbitrary goal. Almost three full years of daily posting…
If you count nonsense like this…
blogging
Day 71: Playing and Counting
Games We Play
This morning, E and I decided to play a game we hadn’t played in ages: Pentago. It’s a simple concept: Get five marbles of your color in a row. But the challenge is that each of the four nine-by-nine quadrants can be rotated. It’s a great game for the mental manipulate of objects because players have to turn those quadrants in their heads and make plans to try to surprise their opponent with an unseen 5-row connection.
At first, the Boy just tried to connect five in a row. I showed him quickly how easily stopped that could be, and how I could simply build on my efforts to stop him and create my own row with a twist here or there. Then he got it.
Did I “let him win”? Well, not so much. Once he figured out the importance of the twist, I played a while without really paying attention to anything other than his obvious efforts and he sneaked one or two by me.
After each game: “Can we play again?”
Snack
In the afternoon, the kids brought the old Rummikub satchel out: “Can you teach us how to play this?” they asked.
Indeed — I could barely remember myself. Something about runs and threes- and fours-of-a-kind. That was about all I could remember, and there were no instructions in the game.
It’s moments like that which make me really appreciate YouTube. A quick search, three minutes of watching the video, and off we went, playing a game I hadn’t played in decades.
I last remember playing it in Nashville with Uncle N and Aunt L over the Thanksgiving weekend. We might have played it the last time we were there for Thanksgiving, which would have been 2005. Though we could have just played dominoes and Uno — that’s all I have photographic evidence for:
Uncle N passed away less than a year later from ALS, and we never went back there for Thanksgiving. So it might have been even longer since I played Rummikub. At any rate, the kids loved it. The Boy, less so because he couldn’t see all the combinations and such. L, however, fit into the game perfectly: that type of kombinowanie is just what she does best.
Yesterday
We watched last night the 2019 film Yesterday, in which a failing musician somehow enters an alternate reality in which only he knows anything about the Beatles. He subsequently recreates their catalog as his own. As expected, there are lots of Beatles songs in the film.
“Is that a Beatles song?” L asked as one started.
“Is that a Beatles song?” E asked with the next one.
“Yes, they’re almost all Beatles songs,” I explained.
“How many songs did they write?!” the Boy asked incredulously.
As a result, we listened to a lot of Beatles music this afternoon. They kind of liked it — we kind of encouraged them.
It did inspire some musicality from them. The Boy has a little guitar that he suddenly became interested in. However, it is missing strings, so I suggested he play my mandolin, which I bought in high school because R.E.M. had released Green, which featured the mandolin on a number of tunes. It’s a $100 plywood job that’s a perfect size for him.
Tonight, I worked with him on some basic ideas: pressing down strings just behind a fret to change the pitch. Chords? They’re a long way off. (Besides, I can only remember four or five chords on a mandolin.)
The Girl, who has been toying with a ukelele from time to time, gave it a try only to be shocked at how very different it was tuned from her uke. (When she first got the uke, I was surprised to find that, like a five-string banjo, the highest string is actually in the position where the lowest string is for most other instruments. They both just have that one out-of-place string that always gives me fits.)
We’ll see how this develops, but hopefully, the interest will remain.
When do I stop counting?
When is this quarantine officially over? When do I stop prefacing every post with “Day X”? I started the first day we were supposed to go to school and yet didn’t — March 16.
Yet because we don’t have any coordinated national approach and since every state is easing restrictions step-by-step, there’s really no firm date for me to stop doing that. When we head back to school on a normal routine? (Will we do that in the fall?) I’ve decided that the most logical date to stop doing that is June 4, which would have been the last day of school were this a normal year.
On the other hand, I’m fairly certain that we will see an enormous uptick in cases after states have eased these restrictions. Just look at Cocoa Beach in Florida this weekend:
It’s concerning, to say the least:
On the Sunday talk shows, Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, said she was “very concerned” about scenes of people crowding together over the weekend.
“We really want to be clear all the time that social distancing is absolutely critical. And if you can’t social distance and you’re outside, you must wear a mask,” she said on ABC’s “This Week.” (Source)
If we have an explosion of cases, the very thing we were trying to avoid, then this entire 70+ lockdown will have been for nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Are we smarter than that as a species? Most days I have my doubts.
Counting
I’m on a run: I’ve never posted so many consecutive days on this site. Not even close. I’ve posted daily since December 21, 2019. Counting roughly, that’s 130+ consecutive days. Why? Why not?
Not only that, but for the month of May, I’ve written an average of 1,047 words a day. That’s like my journal writing when I first arrived in Poland and everything — everything — fascinated me endlessly.
Of course, I have cheated a few times: I included long quotes from books I’m reading, in part because I was honestly interested in writing a little something about them, in part (at least once) because I just wanted to reach that arbitrary number (like I just did in this paragraph). One thousand words. At least. Every day.
I can’t possibly keep that up. The quarantine is helping with that. But daily posts? Could I make it a full year? Probably. Will I? No idea.
Ten Years of MTS
Ten years ago, when K and I got married, I bought a domain name that was a clever (I thought) combination of our names: kingary.net. This domain name, in turn, came about when a friend, seeing our clever “kingary.net” suggested that it’s so corny that we’ll soon be wearing matching tracksuits. And then she bought this domain. And then I discovered Textpattern. And then I discovered WordPress. And the rest is sort of small-time history.
Ten years is a long time to keep a hobby, it seems to me.
Routines
There are only so many daily routines one can work into a twenty-four hour period, and the addition of a new routine — or the re-initiation, rather, of an old routine — leaves less time, logically, for other routines. So when I tried finally to start working an exercise routine into my day, I found that, after school, jazz dance shuttle service, dinner, time with the kids, goodnight routines, and a short workout that I was left with ten minutes until my bedtime. So something’s got to go.
Habit and Momentum
I learned riding a road bike in the mountains of southern Poland that there’s a simple trick to making it to the top of a hill: don’t stop pedaling. That of course sounds a bit axiomatic, painfully obvious even, but the simple truth of momentum is that, as long as you keep pedaling, as long as you keep that cog rotating, you have a little momentum from the last rotation to help with the next. True, it starts to become almost a token momentum, and that’s when the temptation to stop is most overwhelming. The legs burn and ache; the heart feels like it’s about to explode; the vessels in the temple pulsate with almost frantic rapidity. But as long as you don’t stop, you’ve got something to build on. Once you stop, it’s almost all over, especially if it’s a steep climb and a hundred kilometers stretch out behind you.
So too with daily writing. One day off becomes two, and threatens to become three — and you can only write about the threat. I had two entries in mind; I was just too lazy to get the pictures off the camera. Maybe later — back-posting counts if you say it does.
Writing
L writing her newest post.
Treading Water
I’m attempting to go a full year with daily updates on this little endeavor. Sometimes, I cheat: I might have nothing really I feel like writing about, so I just post some nonsense — a quote, a short, meaningless observation. Occasionally I’m not in the mood, but I do something silly — maybe a picture from the past. Every now and then, I just don’t have the time/energy/ability, so I do some silliness — a picture from the past, a quote, some nonsense. Rarely it’s a combination of one or more — mood, ability, not having anything to write about. Even more rarely, I have something to write about but not the ability or willingness to write about it. Today, for example, we have hundreds of pictures on the camera and lots of wonderful experiences here in Charleston, but I just don’t have it in me tonight to do anything about it: mood and ability conspire. And so I cheat, and go to bed.
Nose and Stone
“You really don’t have to,” says Kinga often enough when I trudge upstairs to keep my little posting streak going. I think I’m on month four of daily posts, and I really sometimes think it’s not worth it. What’s the point? But then I think, I can always cheat.
Day Before
‘Twas the night before Thanksgiving, and all through the house, everyone was sleeping, except for the idiot who keeps slogging away at the one-post-per-day nonsense.
One Semester in One Month
I just finished up a course on diagnosing and correcting reading deficiencies in middle and high school students. One of the most useful courses I’ve ever taken — especially the book: Kylene Beers’ When Kids Can’t Read: What Teachers Can Do. It’s my new classroom Bible.
The course was a one-semester course crammed into one month, what my school calls, appropriately enough, “January term.”
Which is finally over. And which explains how we could take the Girl ice skating for the first time and it receive nary a mention here…
Maybe over the weekend…
Breaks
The thing about breaks is that they are the epitome of entropy:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Breaks encourage cessation.
As a teacher, I experience this every single Christmas break and summer vacation. “As soon as I rest for a short while, I’ll accomplish so much.” It never happens, for breaks — in my experience — encourage mere anarchy to be loosed upon my world. At least for a brief moment.
With a blog, it’s the same. For two weeks, I’ve done virtually nothing here, and the break has been almost unnoticeable: with the end of the semester, I’ve been so busy that grading and more grading has filled any break I might have convinced myself I was taking.
Through the break, though, there have been pictures:
Quotes from Yeats’ “The Second Coming”
Reflection
Every single blog in the Western world has been reflecting lately on the significance of starting a new calendar year. I, for one, elected to abstain.
It’s probably a good idea. I suppose there too much reflection is almost an oxymoron, unless you’re facing a life-and-death situation. Which few of us ever face, thankfully.
So I’ve taken the start of a new year as an opportunity to do the opposite: stop reflecting. At least here. A short break. A breather.
Goals
A goal of posting daily for an entire month seems simple enough. In reality, with a three-year-old and house, I’m discovering it’s quite a trick. A day of wandering around Ikea after a night of insufficient sleep makes it seem relatively insignificant.
“What’s the big deal?” I ask. “I’ll just skip a day and then the pressure will be gone. Back to normal: three or four times a week.”
Then I think perhaps that is a post in and of itself. Part of the circular nature of posting daily on one’s own site: blogs tend to foster posts about blogging just as poetry tends to lead poets to write about the act of writing. It seems relatively insignificant and somewhat egotistical, but I don’t care. It’s almost eleven; I’ve posted for the twenty-first day in a row; I might be cheating, but then again, maybe not: I make the rules around here.
Time
Is it cheating to post at 12:16am and count it as the previous day’s post? After all, for my consciousness, it’s the same day.
When I kept a journal religiously, I often fretted about this. “What date should I put on this?” Perhaps “fret” is the wrong word. Or maybe it is: when I was in Poland the first time (96-99), I wrote daily. One entry was along the lines of “I’m just writing this to keep my string of entries going.”
I guess this is something similar…
Recipe for Exhaustion and No Time
Begin by
- Moving, to a
- New city, where you live in a
- New house, while starting a
- New job, with a still relatively
- New baby.
Eventually, I will begin writing here again…
Book of Questions :: An Invitation to All Visitors
One of the most popular websites — judging by the number of comments — is Michele. It doesn’t take long to figure out why: her blog is not about herself exclusively, but also asks engaging questions, like a good host.
Gregory Stock beat her to it, though. I first discovered his Book of Questions (Amazon) when I was in high school. As one Amazon reviewer’s son said, “This book doesn’t have any answers, but it sure does make you think.”
The Book of Questions is just that: a book of engaging, sometimes provocative questions. From the introduction:
This is not a book of trivia questions, so don’t bother to look here for the name of either Tonto’s horse or the shortstop for the 1923 Yankees. These are questions of a different sort — questions about you. They are about your values, your beliefs, and your life; love, money, sex, integrity, generosity, pride, and death are all here. Some of the questions are indeed “heavy,” and some of them are almost jocular, but they are all mentally stimulating.
Rediscovering it on my bookshelf a few days ago, I realized that this is a blogger’s idea book written before the advent of the Internet, let alone blogging. It includes questions that, when honestly answered, could improve any blog, especially one like MTS that is growing staler by the day.
What I propose, then, is this: simul-blogging (the term, from my perspective, started at Ocean) to answer selected questions from Stock’s book. This would be different than merely commenting, as participants would not be initially influenced by others’ thoughts. Instead, we all write about the same question at roughly the same time, with a given date for publishing it — something along the lines of Marginal and Fallible do, but on larger scale.
Any takers? To begin with, perhaps something on the lighter side, banal even:
Question 120: Would you accept $10,000 to shave your head and continue your normal activities sans hat or wig without explaining the reason for your haircut?
My own answer will be posted on Friday 11 February. If you join in, paste the question at the top of your post, then leave a comment for Monday’s entry with a link to your answer.
“Spit flyin’ everywhere,” Take Two
A wise woman once wrote,
I, too, am saddened by so much of what I read in blogs, and comment threads are even worse. It’s as if writers are grabbing the mike and running to the stage without having once practiced the song they are about to force onto the audience. At first it seems funny and then it just seems sad, desperate, irresponsible.
Raging, inarticulate personal attacks in comments and posts are becoming all too common.
There are blogs that are devoted just to criticizing other blogs. And it’s not just attacks because of political views, but attacks based on, well, anything that doesn’t suit the “reviewer.”
There are also bloggers who go around biting ankles in comments.
Regrettably I’ve done both. This post is what’s left after all the spittle has been wiped away and people began talking civilly.
“It’s easy to tear down than to build up,” said my mother (though I suspect not just mine), and the truth of that is becoming more and more evident in blogs and comments. A few examples show the childish creativity we employ (and I’ve included my own comments in this list):
- don’t feel bad because you’re dumb
- as obviously immature as you are
- It’s called symbolism–does that elude you? I know the topic of my post did.
- lots of passion here and lots of anger but not much reason
- the world may not miss you
- These people are cowards
- So as to be clear — we wish there to be no misundertandings — you are an in idiot. While I’m sure you have plenty of self esteem and the trophies to prove it, you remain an idiot.
- Have fun in Poland, hope you aren’t Jewish.
- a mean spirited, self-centered liar, spreading small-minded insults
- I cannot believe there are people like you out there, but then again, you are from [location deleted]
- Damn! In the above post, some idiot forgot to edit before he sent […]
- She is articulate; you are not. She is thoughtful; you are not.
- When you grow up and enter the real world you’ll realize that common sense and rational judgement [sic] will take you a lot farther than anger, bitterness and sarcasm
There is a full range of personal attacks and libel here. There are subtle jibes:
- “Does that elude you? I know the topic of my post did.” naturally implies, “You’re a dolt because you didn’t understand my post.”
- “When you grow up and enter the real world” implies, “You’re childish now.”
There are not so subtle jabs:
- a mean spirited, self-centered liar, spreading small-minded insults
- I cannot believe there are people like you out there, but then again, you are from [location deleted]
There are nuclear strikes:
- don’t feel bad because you’re dumb
- as obviously immature as you are
And at least one hinted at something much bigger than a personal attack: “Have fun in Poland, hope you aren’t Jewish.”
Some of these comments were catalysts for others in the list, so it’s easy to see how things can spin out of control.
We attack; we get attacked; we retaliate more viciously than we were attacked; one of our friends sees the tangle and jumps in to help — soon it’s a playground brawl.
The problem is that the blogosphere is messy. It’s part of the aptly called “the web,” so it’s inherently difficult to track everything down and find out who indeed did start. By jumping in, as I have foolishly done, we may end up attacking the attacked when we should have turned our backs on the whole mess and gone to hang out at the swings.
“If you can’t say anything nice…”
Another problem is that the internet is essentially anonymous, and thus emotionally free:
People have no hesitation at being ugly over the internet simply because there is no cost to them. There is no personal investment to online discourse. The lack of personal interaction allows people to be as ugly as they want to be…which is often pretty ugly (Robert Fenton)
It’s like the crank calls my friends and I used to make back in the eighties when there was no caller ID and we were simply voices on the other end of the line. We can create whole personas on the internet, complete with false pictures, names, stats – everything. And in that liberated, new “us,” some of us show the darker, more immature sides of ourselves more often than we do in person. We’re all split personalities, as role theory points out, but the online personality can have a bit uglier voice than the others.
“I always think it is a shame when people stoop to personal attacks on other people, no matter what the medium” (Renee). My crank calls were never not so vitriolic as some of the things I’ve seen in comments.
In the end, it’s obviously better to sit back and watch the cat fights than to get involved. Sound advice for myself, a bit too late.
“Spit flyin’ everywhere”
A wise woman once wrote,
I, too, am saddened by so much of what I read in blogs, and comment threads are even worse. It’s as if writers are grabbing the mike and running to the stage without having once practiced the song they are about to force onto the audience. At first it seems funny and then it just seems sad, desperate, irresponsible.
Raging, inarticulate personal attacks in comments and posts are becoming all too common.
There are blogs that are devoted just to criticizing other blogs. And it’s not just attacks because of political views, but attacks based on, well, anything that doesn’t suit the “reviewer.”
There are also bloggers who go around biting ankles in comments.
Regrettably I’ve done both. This post is what’s left after all the spittle has been wiped away and people began talking civilly.
“It’s easy to tear down than to build up,” said my mother (though I suspect not just mine), and the truth of that is becoming more and more evident in blogs and comments. A few examples show the childish creativity we employ (and I’ve included my own comments in this list):
- don’t feel bad because you’re dumb
- as obviously immature as you are
- It’s called symbolism — does that elude you? I know the topic of my post did.
- lots of passion here and lots of anger but not much reason
- the world may not miss you
- These people are cowards
- So as to be clear — we wish there to be no misundertandings — you are an in idiot. While I’m sure you have plenty of self esteem and the trophies to prove it, you remain an idiot.
- Have fun in Poland, hope you aren’t Jewish.
- a mean spirited, self-centered liar, spreading small-minded insults
- I cannot believe there are people like you out there, but then again, you are from [location deleted]
- Damn! In the above post, some idiot forgot to edit before he sent […]
- She is articulate; you are not. She is thoughtful; you are not.
- When you grow up and enter the real world you’ll realize that common sense and rational judgement [sic] will take you a lot farther than anger, bitterness and sarcasm
There is a full range of personal attacks and libel here. There are subtle jibes:
- “Does that elude you? I know the topic of my post did.” — naturally implies, “You’re a dolt because you didn’t understand my post.”
- “When you grow up and enter the real world” implies, “You’re childish now.”
There are not so subtle jabs:
- a mean spirited, self-centered liar, spreading small-minded insults
- I cannot believe there are people like you out there, but then again, you are from [location deleted]
There are nuclear strikes:
- don’t feel bad because you’re dumb
- as obviously immature as you are
And at least one hinted at something much bigger than a personal attack: “Have fun in Poland, hope you aren’t Jewish.”
Some of these comments were catalysts for others in the list, so it’s easy to see how things can spin out of control.
We attack; we get attacked; we retaliate more viciously than we were attacked; one of our friends sees the tangle and jumps in to help — soon it’s a playground brawl.
The problem is that the blogosphere is messy. It’s part of the aptly called “the web,” so it’s inherently difficult to track everything down and find out who indeed did start. By jumping in, as I have foolishly done, we may end up attacking the attacked when we should have turned our backs on the whole mess and gone to hang out at the swings.
“If you can’t say anything nice…”
Another problem is that the internet is essentially anonymous, and thus emotionally free:
People have no hesitation at being ugly over the internet simply because there is no cost to them. There is no personal investment to online discourse. The lack of personal interaction allows people to be as ugly as they want to be” which is often pretty ugly (Robert Fenton)
It’s like the crank calls my friends and I used to make back in the eighties when there was no caller ID and we were simply voices on the other end of the line. We can create whole personas on the internet, complete with false pictures, names, stats everything. And in that liberated, new “us,” some of us show the darker, more immature sides of ourselves more often than we do in person. We’re all split personalities, as role theory points out, but the online personality can have a bit uglier voice than the others.
“I always think it is a shame when people stoop to personal attacks on other people, no matter what the medium” (Renee). My crank calls were never not so vitriolic as some of the things I’ve seen in comments.
In the end, it’s obviously better to sit back and watch the cat fights than to get involved. Sound advice for myself, a bit too late.
Nagging, er, Encouraging Kinga to Blog
The original motivation behind this whole blog was the joke domain name, “matchingtracksuits.com.” The “matching” part implies not one author, but two.
That was the idea.
But my wife has been reticent to join me on this blogging adventure, and instead reads what I write behind my back.
The original motivation behind this post was to get readers to direct some encouraging words Kinga’s way. That was the idea.
I’ve been encouraging her to write a bit, if only to practice her written English. She seems hesitant to put her thoughts out for all to see (as if the Vast Hordes visit MTS).
Perhaps there’s a blogging gene and she’s missing it?
I have to admit — I do like this whole blogging thing. It’s a natural extension of my journal, which I’ve been keeping for years and years now. It just includes the added element of “audience.”
Yet, while I like it, it is getting a bit tiresome. The initial thrill must be wearing off. Unlike with various other addictions, I don’t foresee this resulting in heavier doses.
Perhaps some help would, well, help.
Perhaps that’s the real motivation behind nagging my wife about this. But maybe, perhaps, conceivably … there are those out there curious about the other tracksuit.
Metablogging
CW Fisher wrote about the proliferation of “I” in blogs, then amended those thoughts with one of the best pieces I’ve read about blogging. In a comment, Isaac: wrote,
Fascinating stuff… this whole blog phenom just hasn’t straightened itself out yet, so who knows what kind of writing to call it? And remember – rules for writing should increase accessibility and help convey messages; not serve as prescriptive left-over remnants of the past.
Isaac is right – this is an entirely new form of writing. It’s certainly spawned its fair share of vocabulary. Blog, blogger, blogging, blogosphere, blog rolling and many others have in a short period of time gone from oblivion to cliche. I hate all those words – they sound almost obscene, but I’m too lazy to go about re-inventing vocabulary.
I’m new to the web log scene, and before then, I’d never even really read that many of them. I started writing online because a friend bought me the domain name and, already having a web site, I had to so something with it. I’m not new to daily writing, though, as I’ve kept a journal for over twelve years, amassing close to two million words in that time.
Yet blogging is not journaling.
Nor, as Isaac implied, is it like any other form of writing.
Privacy issues and instant, world-wide accessibility aside, there is one thing about blogging that makes it different from almost all other forms of writing. It’s the activity I’m engaged in right now – metablogging. Blogging about blogging.
Since I’ve been exploring the blog world, I’ve found that we tend to write an amazing amount about what we and others are doing to the blogosphere. Of course it is a world of pundits musing, rambling, ranting, and a host of other blog-clichés about anything from seeing Star Wars trailers online to grieving the loss of a wife, but what I see more often than anything else is blogging about blogging.
The blogging world is a giant printer cable swallowing its own tail, very often publishing about publishing.
How boring.
He says in self-indictment.
So why do we all do it? We’re all enamored with this new technology we’re creating–writing about blogging is standing before a mirror. It’s preening. And it’s the one thing all bloggers have in common. That’s why the post I’ve written on blog-related topics have gotten the most comments. Not everyone cares about Poland or religion (my two favorite topics, truth be told), but most people who bump through care about blogging.
Yet this is somewhat logical, this metablogging, because blogs cannot exist in a vacuum. How many blogs, after all, are there which have no links to other blogs? Before the advent of Blog Explosion and similar sites, blogging was a more organic activity. Manually inserting links, then blog rolling was how everyone kept track of blogs, and how everyone else discovered new ones. Blog Explosion tends to make it a bit more commercial, especially given the fact that we can buy credits. This explains why we see “Pro-Life Blogs” appear time and time again on Blog Explosion. Throw together a banner and we all can have our cyber billboards.
Yet despite Blog Explosion and similar tools, checking out your favorite blogs’ links is still the best way to find interesting reading, and so we’re all still dependent on each other, which goes some way in explaining why we love to blog about blogging.
The question of why we blog about blogging is overshadowed by the larger, more blog-existential question: Why do we even keep a blog at all? If you’re reading this, chances are you keep a blog. Why? Most people blog like they live: without thinking.
I’m not well-read on blogs (probably never will be–there’s too much crap out there), but among all those I’ve ready, only once have I found an expression of the philosophy behind the blogging, an answer to the question, “Why am I doing this?”
Fr. Thomas Dowd, keeper of the blog Waiting in Joyful Hope writes that the philosophy behind his blog is simple:
One item, once per day, inspired by something that happened that day. [. . .] Sometimes my blog will have a direct reflection on my day, other times it will seem to be a more “theoretical” reflection, but I can guarantee that it is (almost) always inspired by something from that day.
A philosophy – why I’m doing this. It’s a great idea. When I ask myself, I’ve no answer.
Because I got the domain name? Hardly a reason.
I must come up with some better reason to continue.