Nothing funny about feldspar

I’ve been seeing people complain that Akismet all of a sudden isn’t working. I’m thinking there’s a new spam-type, because I’ve got more spam in my email in the last three or four days than I’ve had in months.

Luckily, this blog is so far out of the mainstream that I don’t ever have much for Akismet to do. Even if I did, I would seldom see it because I never visit my Dashboard — I do (almost) everything in TextMate and Vienna.

‘Course, now I’m fucked, aren’t I? For having posted this?

One of the hazards of aging is that you start to remember things in terms of anniversaries. “It’s x years since I graduated high school”¹ and “x-1 years since I had that car wreck that made me walk funny the rest of my life.” And then you start to think of all the stuff you were planning on doing. For instance “We moved here 10 years ago,” leads into “and we still haven’t replaced the kitchen” or “and we still haven’t got a guest room….”

But then you realize that you always have a list of what you have and haven’t done, and in general, you’re not all that upset about the contents of either. Perhaps that’s one of the benefits of aging.

Of course, it could just be that you forgot it all as soon as you remembered it, too.

1. Thank heavens it was a newish school and hadn’t developed traditions yet. I haven’t had any spam regarding any reunions, “significant” or not.↩

I picked up In Praise of Slowness from the library stack by the door and took it outside to read in the sunny afternoon. In it, Carl Honoré describes the “Slow Movement” wherein people treat time with almost Amish sensibility — doing things in their own time, according to the requirements of themselves and their community (and possibly their religion). As he says in the book, and then gives example after example, the movement is not about turning back the clock, it is about turning the clock to face the wall so it can’t watch you all the time.

This is a great sentiment, and one which I’ve had for quite a while, even though I am by no means an adept. I consider my time in certain instances to be very valuable and I am fully cognizant that one needs to make choices and compromises in order to reconcile the need for doing certain things with the available psychical and physical resources.

In other words, I’m attuned to Honoré’s message, but I didn’t read more than three chapters, because I had better things to do with my afternoon than read this yawny book; like, play with Albite.

I hope Honoré understands.

One of the downsides of working from/at home is the perception that you are always available at the drop of a hat to do this or that or the other thing. Especially if you cultivate this perception by going to the grocery store on Tuesday morning, or visiting the local art museum on Thursday afternoon, or if you meet people for working breakfasts/lunches/coffees on a relatively random schedule.

So when you have work to do on Sunday, you work, because that’s precisely when you planned to do it, because you were doing all those other things during the week. Unfortunately, Plagioclase’s mother doesn’t see it that way — It’s Sunday! We’re supposed to be gardening! — and now she’s upset that we haven’t yet planted our tomato seedlings.

I think I’ll schedule that for Tuesday morning. Or maybe Thursday afternoon. Or maybe even next Sunday. What’s a week-end when you don’t have a week?

I was composing a post in my head about my “caring budget” — this is my internal account for things I can or can’t (or won’t) afford to care about, such as the anniversary of “Sgt. Pepper’s yada yada.” (In case you didn’t realize, this does not fit into my caring budget. Nothing re:Beatles does.)

But then I hit a conundrum: if I talk about it, doesn’t that imply that I can afford at least a little bit of caring about it? I asked Plagioclase what he thought, and he pondered a moment and said “No, it’s meta. You’re talking about the caring. You could have picked any other subject to illustrate the point.”

“True!” I replied, “Like Kevorkian’s release or Lindsay’s rehab or the iTunes controversy of the week, or the new video of the Loch Ness monster, or sports.”

“Wait!” he exclaimed. “There’s new video of Nessie?”