OddThinking

This post rambles a bit which just goes to prove my point. Or one of my points.

One of the questions I couldn’t answer three months ago was how my job status change would affect OddThinking.

The answer seems to be that I have gone a little quiet. Not deathly quiet – still on average a post every three or four days, but still quiet.

Some of that is due to travel; I popped up to Queensland for a couple of weeks.

Some of that is due to taking lots of photographs, the editing of which is a traditional competitor for my blogging time.

Some of that is due to laziness.

Some of that is due to Facebook and Twitter taking on some of the role of telling my friends what I did today.

A lot of it is due to me doing stuff that isn’t really in the OddThinking style.

I mean, I could post that I spent two days on a Tropfest (amateur) filmset as Production Assistant. (I had to Google to find out what the official title of the person who runs around and does whatever manual labour is required. I think that is the closest. I got to move lights, point a boom mike, and hold the reflector thing that backlights people’s faces.)

However, there is no story, no geekiness and no humour there, which are the three of the four legs of the OddThinking stool. (The fourth one is painful analogies.)

I’ve been going to lots of parties, outings and lunches. Turns out the risk of Social Boredom didn’t pan out. Again not bloggable, but that’s no reason not to invite me to the next one.

Oh that reminds me. The OddThinking Meet Up has been delayed until October; no time was suitable. Sorry.

I have (in cycles) been focussing on health and fitness. Not very exciting to read “I went to the gym today, and now I am tired.”

I went to visit the Cabin Fever website out of a feeling of obligation to a performer I know. Cabin Fever was a week-long “reality-TV” style performance by a distant friend. He locked himself in a Canberran shopfront for a week, with a video streamed to the Internet. To my surprise, I found it deeply engrossing, and spent a lot of time (ridiculous amounts) watching (and participating on-line) during the week. I ended up driving down to Canberra for a night to make a cameo performance in the Cabin.

Time consuming. Fun. But what is there to blog about? That I cold-read the name of a boy’s sister, to his great astonishment? Nah, you can guess the basic mechanism for that. Some crackpot theories about performance may distill out of it, but that may take time.

My sex-life is off-limits for OddThinking, so I am sticking to “No Comment” there.

I’ve watched a few movies, but not a very exciting blog subject (except to say if you ever have a woman who calls herself ‘Mary Poppins’ apply for a child-care position, don’t give her the position! She should not be allowed near children! I would document all the instances of neglect, child abuse and unprofessional behaviour, but that would require me to watch that damn film for a second time.)

I have done another Python puzzle (in press), but it isn’t a very exciting one. I am almost writing it out of obligation; I will have to see if it can be pepped up in some way.

The Online Photo DB Review project is stalled but not abandoned. In fact, it is on the critical path of a number of other small projects, so it should be percolating to the top of the list soon.

Another idea I have had (and, in fact, this was originally going to be the subject of this post!) relates to commemorative t-shirts.

I have a lot of old t-shirts in my closet. I should ditch them, but they each act as a memento – they each tell a story, and I can’t bring myself to throw them out.

So, my idea was to photograph each of them, post the photograph and transcribe the story they tell me. Then throw them out. Even if you don’t find the story interesting, at least I will have some free closet space, which is a better pay-off than most of my unpopular blog-stories.

Then I saw someone had created a t-shirt quilt; a quilt containing all of the slogans from their old t-shirts.

Should I make a quilt instead? How hard could it be? Stick to my tired old ways (photography and story-telling) or go out on a limb and make my first quilt? Once I made it, what would I do with it? Every time someone saw it, would I have to go through the same defiant story about my father’s father? – “Yes, I have a needle and a prick! You gotta problem with that?”

I expressed this dilemma to a friend last night, and she explained the obvious solution. Photograph the t-shirts, then make the quilt. If it doesn’t go well, publish the photographs. An excellent idea, but she went further. If it does go well, photograph the quilt, and then throw it out to save the closet space!

I might not take it to that extreme, but I do have another whimsical, unimportant project to add to my list.

In conclusion, keeping busy, having fun, but not doing much bloggable. I will continue to ponder whether I need to tweak the OddThinking four-legged stool to make it easier to post.