Naming Rites

I've just been informed that friends have named their new-born with the same name as mine. This new arrival (and by the way, welcome ... I hope your arrival wasn't too stressful. Congratulations to the parents also) is gifted with not just the same first name as me, but also the same last name. Jinx! It's a little unnerving really! Am I being told something here?

Please, I'm not making any comment about new Ma and Pa's choice of names. The person I too am named after is someone to look up to and aspire to emulate. So thats all good. A lovely choice of name from that perspective (baring the fact that I havent exactly showered the name in honour ... A meaning less detail, I hear you protest).

But personally, I never really liked my own name and so am quite happy if someone else wants to assume the duty of living up to it. I would have named myself something quite different. How do you think I would suit a name like "Mr Mystery", "Perpetual Leader and Mentor", "Dark Master of Turian". Or maybe something simple like "Lord" would suit me. Smerk.

If destiny were left to come up with names for people I'd probably be called something like "Ooops!", "Sorry" or "Splat!"

A Very Trendy Site

Found this a very interesting site. Tracks the trends that the authors of the site believe are taking off ... Trends like Counter-Googling (using google to research your customers, as opposed to customers using google to research your product), Gravanity ( Where graffiti meets vanity: catering to the obsession of ordinary citizens wanting to leave ‘something’ behind. ) and Starbucking (The art of spotting a promising local new business and then quickly copying the concept to other cities, countries or continents. You don't have to come up with the Next Big Thing, just spot it.)

It's Tragic What Make Me Laugh

There was a blond cooking in her kitchen when some grease caught on fire. She screamed, "My kitchen's on fire. AHHHH! Help!" She called 911 and yelled, "My kitchen is on fire!" They said, "OK! How do we get to your house?" The blond answered, "Duh! In the big red truck!"

Missing her

She is away ... Out of phone range and phone contact. And I miss her (like I'd miss my arm if someone had stolen it). And, borrowing a line from my Greatest Emails Collection (coming to all good book sellers soon), "sad violin music plays, punctuated with duck noises, and a thousand sorrowful fairy hamsters sing soft sad songs about taking your partner by the hand and swinging them to the left and then to the right and then getting really bored and just slinging her.

Ok, enough of that. Move on thank you, move on. There's nothing to see here, move on people.

Defeat Is the Scent of Disinfectant

My family was on hall cleaning today. So its our job to head down to our hall and clean a part of it ... Only a part, because it's a large hall. As always, I feel that there is something kind of sad about empty a big empty hall. Despite the warmth of the day, I feel cold, the creak of the floorboards sounding almost spooky. It makes me appreciate that the building is nothing without the people ... and to me, people-less, it feels lonely. I know how stories about haunted houses get started.

Anyway (picture me shaking my head to clear that random thought), its my duty to clean the male toilets. Yes, yes, I know, it teaches me humilty, it's character building and so on. Actually, I'm, not so worries about the demeaning nature of the task ... It's just that I hate the smell of cleaning products on my hands. So I get myself some gloves ... You know the sort ... Ambidextrous ones that manage to feel uncomfortable no matter which way you put them on and make me wonder about the sort of hands they were actually designed for (I'm visualising some poor guy with little fingers the shape and size of thumbs), with floury stuff inside, in a very fetching shade of hospital pink. And having so equipped myself for the task of cleaning, I throw myself into it (well, not literally, but you know what I mean).

At the conclusion of this little effort, I carefully remove the gloves (taking care not to touch the outsides), ditch them and wash my hands. Sniff test time ... Winner! .. Everything I eat for the next week is going to smell like toilet cleaner.

My head has frozen

Having one of those day. Actually, I seem to have quite a few of them. My attention span is about 30 seconds ...

Anyway, I am so bored I am convinced my head is freezing over. Slow tendrils of ice forming over my cortex, icicles swinging gently from my hypocampus, and my pre-frontal lobes slowly becoming just one great icebloc. Need to do something entertaining to wake up again ... Yet somehow rather than doing anything like setting fire to the carpet and watching my co-workers scramble or seeing how much a 19 inch monitor bounces if dropped from 8 stories, somehow, I am still sitting here, staring at the screen wondering what it would be like to be not bored right now.

Sharing the Pain

Hmmmm ... now what do you make of this? Have you ever noticed how quick we are to share the pain? We seem incapable of making that decision to protect others from our own suffering, and afflicted with a bizzare determination to plunge others into the same "bad moment" we are experiencing. I don't mean on major issues here, like the death of loved ones, the outbreak of war in our homeland or discovering you have no milk when you have already poured out the Coco Pops ...

Nope, I'm talking about the small stuff here. Those small sorrows that remind us that this is Monday and that these irritating events that are a sure sign of a bad hair day coming on. We seem incapable of keeping these frustrations to ourselves. Almost as if we have a limited storage capacity for pain that swiftly overflows and inundates others, we just have to give those around us a "taste". You know what I mean ...

You step out of a lunch bar, sandwich in hand and head for your favourite lunch time lurking spot ... and bite into your purchase only to discover that, either you picked something from the "Instant Food Poisoning" menu or the sandwich constructor was trying to kill you. And what do you do then? You turn to the person next to you and say something along the lines of, "Man, this sandwich tastes like a hippo barfed in it ... you taste it." For some reason, its important to us that the other person enjoys the taste of hippo barf too ...

Walking along a street with a friend, its your misfortune to pass an over-ripe rubbish bin, loaded with what, at 50 paces, smells like 5 kilos of rancid baboon cheese blended with 12 rotten eggs and garnished with a dead rat. And on receipt of this olifactory exposion, what do we do but share it. "That smells aweful ... can you smell it? Go on, take a sniff." Now why didnt we say, "That rubbish bin smells really bad ... hold your breath"?

Somehow, and for some reason, we all want share the pain. Yet, strangely, when its good, we want to keep it all for ourselves. Hmmmm ...

The Urgency Chip

Ever noticed that there seems to be a chip embeded in all mechanical and electrical tools to discover how much you actually need the tool to work ... and if the need is really, really urgent ... deny it. I've been working on a video for youth group, showing how the money they raised was spent in the 3rd world country we sent it to. Admittedly, I may have made an error of judgement using Microsoft MovieMaker, but tonight it died. I had spent a couple of nights working on it, but tonight was the night that I really needed to get the movie finished and tonight, MovieMaker decides to go belly up. Sigh! That will teach me to trust a sub-industry standard tool.

Anyway, I reckon it has a detector built in that somehow, either through the urgency with which I used the mouse, the sweat levels on my finger tips or some other sophistocated and altogether more mysterious means, knew I NEEDED to finish this tonight ... and decided to show me who it boss.

Well, oh mighty Microsoft, maker of MovieMaker and other notorious software, purveyor of software that goes belly up, face down and blue screen ... You think you've won, don't you ... You think your victory is complete and I will just bow to the inevitable and give up on this project ... If you think I am the sort of person to just give up, throw in the towel, and fold at this point in the game ... Your right. Good night.

A Piece Of The Storm

From the shadow of domes in the city of domes,A snowflake, a blizzard of one, weightless, entered your room
And made its way to the arm of the chair where you, looking up
From your book, saw it the moment it landed. That's all
There was to it. No more than a solemn waking
To brevity, to the lifting and falling away of attention, swiftly,
A time between times, a flowerless funeral.
No more than that
Except for the feeling that this piece of the storm,
Which turned into nothing before your eyes, would come back,
That someone years hence, sitting as you are now, might say:
"It's time. The air is ready. The sky has an opening."

Mark Strand

Grail's comment : Saw this ... had to share it ...
I guess this is really a poem about the transience of our lives ... as God says "As for man, his days are like grass; he flourishes like a of the flower of the field for the wind passes over it, and it is gone, and its place knows it no more."

Sometimes it seems to me that this is all our/my life is ... "a flowerless funeral"; a waiting for something to happen; a slow, grinding endurance race run in weighted shoes, the pace of the race run with that dragging slowness only truly felt, and feared, in nightmares while pursued by the wolves of the night ... and so we/I wait. We/I wait for Christ's return, yes, but also for "life" to happen, for some cosmic light bulb to be switched on in the dark room of existance, a beam of sunlight to shine through the dust clouded pane of glass in the window of my/our life and, I dunno, something to happen.

Why Blog?

... I mean, it would be easier to email wouldn't it. Probably. Email however, gives one the impression of imperminence and shallowness. This may not be significantly different, but at least I feel like I'm leaving a permanent record of my thoughts and feelings about things, kind of like carving my name with a chisel in the wind swept side of a mountain, graven and preserved for all time ... Well, maybe a mountain made of jelly. This is after all the e-net and all, ya know.

Actually, my real purpose here is to document those things I wish I'd told my girlfriend and forgot before we got to talk. You know, all those bizarre thoughts or ideas that occur during a day, those passing experiences that could be shared, but somehow, never are. Sights I've seen, smells I've smelt and what exactly it was I was thinking when I crashed into the glass doors on my way into the building this morning ;)