I read a lot of stuff online, and most of it is pretty good, but not incredible. But every now and then I come across a blogger who is so eloquent, so engaging, so entertaining, that I have to keep reading. I can’t hit the “next” link fast enough, it seems. The last blogger I ran into that engaged me that fully was Dooce. Until today.

I Stumbled upon WaiterRant.net, and after reading this post, I was hooked. By way of warning, the language (and occasionally the content) isn’t always family-friendly, but the writing is lively, the posts are often wryly humorous, and occasionally the waiter-writer drops a gem of a post that gives you some serious food for thought. Personality blogging at its best. So bon apetit.

Tags: waiterrant, blog, amazing

One of the bad parts of getting into a routine is that it becomes just that: routine. There’s just something about the mundaneness of the same old-same old that feels like motionless motion. Days come and go, days check off the calendar, and the weather changes (unless it’s cold and snowy. Then that weather seems to stick around FOR EVAR), but the mechanics of life stay the same. It feels like there’s a lack of progress. It’s the same problems, the same hangups, the same stressors. Same job, same classes, same faces. After a while, the sameness will drive you crazy, grinding you down to nothing. And this, my friends, is the bane of January. It’s the long haul. It’s the stretch of icy-cold boringness that seems to stretch into forever. There’s little of note on the horizon, no major holidays (Valentine’s Day is NOT a major holiday), no exciting anything. Just grayish whiteness.

And in case you’re wondering, yes, it snowed again today. Spring just needs to get here. ASAP.

Anyway, I’ve posted a poem that’s related to all this. Enjoy.

A Day in the Life

Tags: poem, january, cold, routine

“So you’re saying that girls are more emotionally gropative?”
-Scott Wilkes, Roommate Extrordinaire

Tags: newword, gropative

I feel like I’ve known President Gordon B. Hinckley all my life. My earliest memories of General Conference are of him, and I’ve always felt a special bond with and appreciation for him. I loved his humor, his wit, his confidence, and I’ve often aspired to be like him. I’ve read his books, watched his interviews, listened to his talks. And I can stand here today and tell you that surely, this was a man of God.

Tags: hinckley, mormon, death, prophet, farewell

Friends of the blog (all two of you) might have noticed that the blog was down for a bit this evening. Don’t even worry about it, it was just me banging on some stuff under the hood so that I could announce that I’m officially running on the latest version of Wordpress. That’s right, I now have all the bells and whistles and hacker-proof-ness that my fellow Wordpress users have been enjoying for MONTHS! Yeah, I know, it’s been a while. Now we return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

Tags: wordpress, upgrade, hallelujah

Giant fluffy flakes
Fluttering gently to earth
Makes driving so hard

Tags: haiku, winter, snow, driving, poetry

Today, I saw a news story about a bunch of F-16s that were mistaken for UFOs in Texas. I confess that I was actually really disappointed. There’s nothing worse, in my opinion, than getting my hopes up and then totally crushing them. You see, deep down, I think I want to believe in UFOs. Now I’m not a conspiracy theorist. There’s a certain amount of angst towards the establishment that’s required to take that title, and frankly, I’m just not worthy. Rather, I just think it would be totally awesome if there were alien spacecraft flying around checking things out and kidnapping people.

Now I realize that this should scare me, but for whatever reason, it doesn’t. Maybe I’ve seen too many sci-fi/adventure flicks. Maybe I think that the aliens are friendly like the ones in “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” Maybe it’s because I’m pretty sure that if they were going to invade us, they would have done so already, because of their vastly superior technology. Whatever the reason, all I know is that I would LOVE it if it turned out that all these encounters were real for the following reasons, among so many more…

• Once the government admits that aliens are real, we can start to use their hi-tech gadgets commercially. I know that I personally am very excited about hovercars and self-drying clothes.
• Sci-fi becomes real. All of a sudden, documentaries are a whole lot cooler.
• Alien ambassador programs.  We’re hoping that they’re done with those probes now.
• Then we’ll be able to focus on finding out who REALLY killed JFK.
• Fox Mulder will finally be vindicated.
• Finally we find out that we’re not alone! Now instead we’re just insignificant and backwards.

I mean, doesn’t looking at that list just get you all excited inside? Never mind…

Tags: aliens, ufo, conspiracy, welcome

As sappy as I feel saying this, I had a hard time believing what I was seeing when I saw the news update that Heath Ledger had died. After all, I had no deep, overwhelming connection to his work. And while I enjoy several of his movies, I don’t know if I would list him among my top ten favorite actors. But seeing his picture under the headline proclaiming his death, well, there was something about it that made my blood ran cold. Perhaps it was because it was sad to see yet another promising young life cut short before its time. And perhaps it was because he wasn’t too much older than me.

Perhaps I’ll live life a little bit differently tomorrow.

Tags: heath-ledger, death, reflection

I’ve decided to try an experiment. I’m going to blog every day this week- yes, every single day- just to see if I can do it. Word on the street is that if you want to be a really good writer, you need to do it every day. I wouldn’t mind :

First, I’ve had two professors, both of which have published commercially successful books (one of them is actually finishing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series as we speak), swear by this. “Write every day,” they both say, sounding like broken records.

Second, I got addicted to dooce.com. I love Heather Armstrong’s writing, and when I first discovered her (thanks Jenn) I was so enthralled that I went back into her archives and started reading from the very beginning. And I discovered something in the process. While she was a pretty good writer at first, she was nowhere near the writer that she is today. Her posts were amusing (some moreso than others), but not the engaging, vibrant, colorful posts that she writes today. What was the difference? I’m going to go out on a limb and say “practice.” She’s been writing for a few years now, so she’s got a ton of posts under her belt. And it shows. I’d be willing to bet dollars to donuts that you’d see this pattern with virtually every other A-List blogger and writer out there.

So there you have it. It’s not exactly a cloud of witnesses, but it’s sufficient for me to want to give it a try. So keep an eye out, and I’ll do my best to keep the daily posts from sucking. But if they suck, it’s because they’re practice.

In the meantime, check out my latest writing project for my class…

An Adventure

Tags: experiment, writing, blogging tips, tips, blogging

So I have good news and I have bad news. The good news it that with school being the way that it is, I’m writing a ton, and it gets me in a writing mood, so you’ll probably see a lot more being posted on my blog. The bad news is that I’ll probably be posting a lot of the things I write for my classes on TI as well. So bear with me, because a lot of them are going to be long. I’ll try to just post them as pages and link to them from a post, but no guarantees. The first one is called “Statistics.”

That is all.

Tags: writing, english, publishing, statistics