Author: grid

So I had this idea. I was going to write an article for alistapart.com. I love A List Apart. Everyone who works in my industry should read it regularly. Including me. I got all excited because I had this idea that I could write an article about how content management systems are so clearly the wave of the future, but that because they’re so clearly the wave of the future, everyone is making them, and now they are crashing down onto the internet like some kind of tsunami rather than the calm relaxing waves they could be. I got so far as to compose my email to the editors:

I would like to write an article tentatively titled “Content Management: Is it for everyone?” The article will examine the phenomenon of content management systems, explain their benefits (template systems, dynamic content, no-brainer editing) and drawbacks (features not matching function, server requirements, burden of complexity) all from a web developer’s perspective. I will conclude that content management systems are in their “terrible teens” and that unless you’re a web development firm who wants to compete with the big boys, or an ISP trying to give something useful to your customers, custom development is still where it’s at. However, this will not be true in ten years.

I knew it was more than the asked for 2 sentences. And I was going to shorten it… maybe. But then I had a thought. (Probably first one of the day.) What if they already have an article about content management? Now I’m in a pickle. Because the only real article that I could find on content management is pretty old. But it covers a lot of the same ground I’d been proposing. Also, the guy who wrote the article is from madison wisconsin, and he apparently developed this 3D shockwave pong that I found distracting. Damn him and his cheese-eating web-development!

Notes after watching Confessions of a Dangerous Mind:

Nietzsche said: “The man who despises himself still respects himself as he who despises.” I am a man who respects himself for not saying the things he wants to say but can’t. Or perhaps I despise the things I want to say, and therefore just don’t say them.

This movie twisted all my thoughts up around inside themselves, and I loved it.

Simultaneously I feel more alone than ever. Mary Anne Evans said: “What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?” How lonely was she, pretending to be George Elliot so she could publish as a man?

How lonely am I, typing to my friends, through this void, into nothing; not even talking with them; not even talking?

UPDATE: Here is another quote on loneliness: “Man’s loneliness is but his fear of life.” (Eugene O’Neill) This one gives me some small courage.

I read this quote by Robert Harris just now:

It is perfectly legitimate to write novels which are essentially prose poems, but in the end, I think, a novel is like a car, and if you buy a car and grow flowers in it, you’re forgetting that the car is designed to take you somewhere else.

I like cars with flowers in them. But I’d like to write a starship with fireworks inside instead. I guess I don’t really care if it goes anywhere.

Tonight we went to a sneak preview of Mean Girls. It was pretty amusing, and I think I actually enjoyed it more than The Whole Ten Yards, which Nate and I watched last night. It was your above-average teen coming-of-age chick flick.

Apparently the source of most of our tickets is now quitting his job, and we’ll be left without all these free movies in a few weeks. This is quite disturbing, and I almost went up to the Paramount rep. after the movie tonight begging him to take me under his wing or something. In the last few weeks we’ve gone to see Mean Girls, The Whole Ten Yards, Ella Enchanted, Hellboy, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and I’m sure there are others that I’m forgetting about.

I’m at a coffee shop with Jason right now. Ahhh the mirracle of technolgy.

Apparently I’m not manly enough when I’m chatting. Laura pointed out the other day (while looking over my shoulder at an ICQ conversation) that I say “hehe” all the time, like a little schoolgirl. Sometimes I’ll interject with a somewhat manly “heh.” But that’s really just for variety; at heart I’m an IM wimp.

For probably the first time in three or four years, I feel like I’m getting enough sleep at night. Also for the first time in at least that amount of time, I’m starting to have problems getting to sleep at night. When I was in high school (and junior high, I’m fairly certain) I had some serious issues with insomnia. I basically had what’s happening to me now–I would fitfully roll around in bed for an hour or more before I fell asleep (and at night when you’re trying to go to sleep, that hour can feel like five) and then I would wake up at some extraordinarily late hour in the morning. Lately, I’ve been struggling to get up by ten.

So it’s the chicken versus egg thing. Do I wake up late because I’m having trouble falling asleep, or do I have trouble falling asleep because I’ve been getting up so late? In the mornings, it’s a supreme effort to even just roll out of bed when I’ve woken up naturally. If I were just living as my body dictated, I would wake up, and spend the next hour or two just deciding whether I should get up or not.

The woman from True Stories comes to mind, the one who was so rich she just decided to stay in bed for her entire life. I’ll bet there are really people like that out there. Thing is, I’d get bored staying in bed all day… even with the internet, I’ll bet. Eventually I’d want to get up and do something.

I decided this weekend that I’m going to start taking Tai-Chi again. The last time I took it was in spring of 1995, nine years ago. I was a senior, and taking classes at the UofMN for college credit. But I still needed to fulfill my high school credits too, and that meant I needed some gym classes. I took racquetball winter quarter, and Tai-Chi in the spring. Strangely enough they were some of my favorite college courses.

Anyway, I found out my friend Neon has taken some Tai-Chi at this place over on University, The Twin Cities T’ai-Chi Ch’uan Studio. We were talking this weekend about how we’d both like to get back “into” it, and she happened to mention that one of the instructors was this guy named Paul. Now, if you’d asked me if I remembered the name of my instructor from nine years ago, I would have laughed at you, and easily said no. But when she said Paul, I knew that was the name of the guy I’d been taking classes from. I didn’t know it was the same Paul, of course, but a trip to the website and we had that figured out. Anyway, I’m excited to start it up again. I won’t remember any of it, but that hardly matters. I’m hoping to get rid of some of the gut I’ve accumulated recently, and perhaps gain back some of the flexibility that I had gained when I took the original class way back when.

I got a spam earlier today that made it through my filter whose first line was a famous quote by Karl Kraus:

Sentimental irony is a dog that bays at the moon while pissing on graves.

Then it said: “Low rates on Software”.

Tomorrow I have a ticket promised to me for the new Hellboy movie. I’m stoked.

Well, I’m hoping to maybe actually sleep now… my eyes aren’t focusing properly, and my throat is all scratchy like it sometimes gets when you’re tired. (Only problem is it’s felt like that pretty much all day. I think I’m coming down with something.)

Have you ever had regret that you didn’t use a particularly volatile emotion? I don’t even believe in regret. But someday I’m going to look back on this part of my life and think “What was I doing?”

I guess it was Stephen King who said, “You’ve have to get busy living, or get busy dying.” (In the Shawshank Redemption.) All my intense emotions lately have been the result of really great movies. Last night Laura and I watched American Splendor. Then afterward I played video games instead of tapping into the intense emotion I was left with. But that was living, so writing must be dying. Writing must be the business of dying.

Today I’m helping someone move.

Is it natural to worry about whether you’re living life to its fullest?

Last night I wore myself out playing unicycle hockey long past the point of being too exhausted to play (I was pushing myself because I feel that I need the exercise). Then I stayed up and played video games for hours, drinking Baileys Irish Cream with ice.

I am just sipping at these thoughts of death and regret, nursing a near-empty glass.