antipodal blogging

Okay, as long as no-one on my blogroll has recently moved to Iceland, Northeast Canada or East Africa, I think I'm good.

'The fool' over at My Pet Shadow has tagged me (but this is not a meme) to be the next participant in his random (non-meme) post idea. :)

Here's how it works:

First, look through your blogroll and find the blogger whose location is the furthest from you on the globe. If your blog doesn't have a blogroll, then pick a blog you read regularly and use that one. Figure out the distance between your location and theirs in miles. Google can give you a bunch of links to sites that have a distance calculator. You'll need that distance to add to the running total.

Second, post it on your blog. Be sure to include:
1. A link to their blog.
2. The distance from your location to theirs.
3. Add that distance to the running total stated in the blog post that tagged you and list the new total.9,725
4. A link to the post in which you were tagged.

Third, let the other blogger know, via e-mail, a comment, carrier pigeon, or however else you communicate with others, that you've listed them as your faraway friend and let them know it's their turn. Be sure and let them know how this is supposed to work.

If it happens (and it's likely) that the person who tagged you is also the farthest from your location, go with the second farthest. No point in having you both post back and forth ad infinitum. Even though that would give you both something to post on those blocked days when your brain's gone dry, it would be just plain stupid.

In theory, people should be able to follow the path back to the origin (which is here) and forward to the latest.

So without further ado:

The blogger on my blogroll who's furthest away from me is bonnie over at frogma!















Being in New York, she is 16,233 km or 10,087 miles away from me.
That makes the running total: 19812 miles or 31884 km. (We've only just begun...)

Your turn, river rat! :)

5 things that have happened since I last blogged

1. I bought a car. My old one has been on the way out for some time and I've been driving it (oh so gingerly) with dogdy, grinding brakes and the engine stalling at every traffic light.

2. I won a camcorder and a camera (thank you Hoyts cinemas), the latter which I will use to show you my new car once I get it charged up (the camera, not the car). The cool thing is that it's an SLR camera, so maybe I can finally do a proper photography course.

3. My best friend at work moved back to Victoria. That was sad. On the bright side I do get to catch up with him sometimes as I work in Melbourne about once a month lately. Also I think he'll be happier there because he's training for a new job he likes and is now located in the same city as his (really nice) girlfriend.

4. Work has stepped up a notch. I'm much busier than before, but with interesting stuff. I also went up a pay increment which means a small pay rise. A promotion would be better.

5. I got into Twitter. I'm already defriending people who twit every ten minutes, but generally my favourite thing is watching people I like, like Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, or Rove and P!nk twitter between themselves. I also love the fact that when I'm right in the middle of something great/terrible/annoying/boring I can send a twit from my phone. Like sending out a message in a tiny bottle from whatever deserted island I'm on. And it appears on the sidebar of my blog, too, which was my original reason for signing up.

So it goes. Now, how's life with everyone else?

me and the blog

I've been asked before why I blog. It's a good question, but one that is hard to answer. I like to write, but there's a difference between writing for fun or relaxation or to comment on political or social issues or just life, and writing as a craft. I might work for weeks on a 400-word story or a poem, but that isn't going to happen with a blog post. And it shouldn't. It's more natural to just write and only edit for correctness. It's like the difference between snapshots and paintings, and the blog is more like a photo album than an art gallery.

Because of this, I sometimes worry that what I write on the blog is largely superficial. That isn't to say that I don't ever write about issues that are meaningful to me, but most of the time they are issues that are out there in the world and not about me personally and my own life. Some of the reason for that is that the most personal things (worth writing about) are hard things and it's difficult to open yourself to the vulnerability writing about them entails.

I don't write very often about things like the deep lonliness I sometimes feel, or how frustrating it is to feel like I have this immense capacity for loving that I never get to express (at least haven't for a long time). I haven't been in that many serious relationships, but those few were pretty good. I was good at loving them (obscure Christian Slater movie reference anyone?) I hope I get that chance again with someone I like and respect.

I've spent my whole adult life caring for, teaching, supporting and generally emotionally investing in other people's children and it's painful to realise that I may never get the chance to raise kids that I get to keep instead of give back. To be honest I've never even really cared whether or not I gave birth - I hate it when people say you have to bear a child to be a mother, because it isn't true. But the difference is that when you do give birth, you really have to screw up for someone to take that child away. When you don't, you have to wait for someone to allow you the privilege of raising a child, and that's rare. A couple of years ago a close friend of mine and her partner were basically just given a baby. I wish it were that easy for me. If someone dropped a child off on my doorstep, I'd have to change my entire life to accomodate them, yet it would be an easy decision to make.

These are the things that I don't often say, because they are ever-present and if I blogged about them all the time it would be a very angsty blog indeed. Generally speaking, my life isn't so angsty. It's busy and challenging and sometimes lovely. And sometimes not.

The other reason I don't blog about personal things a lot is that I'm (perhaps too) aware of my audience ~ both the known and the unknown. In my life offline I have a few friends that I talk to about pretty much anything, but only a few. I've connected with some awesome people through the blogosphere, some of them people I think I could be friends with for real if we lived close enough to each other for that to be viable. So part of me wants to just be one of those bloggers who writes without concern for who reads, because I've had good experiences with people who read and comment.

But the internet is a weird place and I find it more sensible to assume that everyone I know reads the blog, because then hopefully I won't write anything that hurts someone, or that exposes me or someone I know to stupid gossip, or reveal even good things that they regard as too personal for the internet. One of my closest friends found and read the blog for a while before telling me that they were doing so. What they thought they might read while I was unaware I do not know. But it's one of the things that makes me cautious, because this is a person who probably knows anything I'm likely to write here anyway. I don't know if it's truly possible to be anonymous on the net, and I'm not even sure I want to be completely so ~ but if not, then what I write will always be tempered by an imagined audience. It's just the way it is.

Anyway, the point of this post is really that I hope I can open up a bit more in the future about myself, even if there will always be a line that I don't want to cross. During my short break I read some of my earlier posts and it felt like I had more to say. I still have things to say. I hope some of you will stick around to read them.

taking a break

[Edit: because I just realised this makes me sound pretty depressed. Which I was...for about two days. Then I started my new topic, 'Poetry & the Imagination' and distracted myself from my own thoughts long enough for my natural resilience to kick back in. Which is usually the way it goes. :) I will continue with the break a little longer because it's been useful to focus on studies (uni and also the lent thing) for a while.]

I probably won't be posting for a while. I'm a bit weary of it all. Thinking. Writing. Being me. I'm not going to bore you with the reasons why. I probably won't comment much either, so don't think I've abandoned reading your blog if you don't see an input from me. I'll be back in the blogosphere at some point soon. Right now I just need a break. And as I can't take a break from work or my one subject at university, I'm taking a break from everything else.

Be good, love you guys.
chosha

end-of-year meme: cross-section of my blog in 2008

A meme from Sean. If you like the idea, consider yourself tagged and let me know in the comments so I can check it out.

The rules for the meme: Take the first line from the first post of every month for the last year, and post them together as a kind of cross-section of what you were blogging about during the year. Remember to link to all the posts you are excerpting.

January: ~~~happy new year~~~

New Year's is my favourite holiday.

February: q4: study the following photographs carefully. compare and contrast.

I was planning to post a series of pictures about food consumption across the globe that I received by email this morning.

March: wil anderson

More and more I find myself loving stand up comedy.

April: intended for the day, not the fool...initially

But then I read this post and now he's welcome to take the compliment for any bits he likes.

May: heart grown fonder yet?

I've certainly been absent long enough.

June: pen to paper

The first semester of my Grad Diploma in Professional Writing is drawing to a close (big test this Wednesday for Intro to Editing will be the last of my assessment tasks).

July: tag i'm it. 20+ years of chosha

I secretly love getting tagged, perhaps because it hardly ever happens.

August: feeling rattled ~ the windows et moi The carport at our place is open at the sides. September: the hobbit

From a current Empire magazine interview with Guillermo del Toro:

October: editing project crunch time

This semester my major editing project is (we choose/create our own) to create small training manual specifically targeted at coaches teaching wheelchair table tennis players.

November: I thought today's post would be about obama

I wanted to celebrate his election to President of the US.

December: big day out 2009

I decided to give Big Day Out a miss this summer - lots of other uses for my money right now.

Somehow I managed to miss any posts on Neil Gaiman or So You Think You Can Dance? How I do not know. :)

when do you tell?

I talked to a friend today and he mentioned that his wife is pregnant. It's early days yet, so they're not telling people, but I don't see him very often so he did tell me. (First baby...very exciting!) I guess they'll do like most people and go public when the first trimester is safely over.

On the net, picking your moment to tell some news involves a whole new level of analysis. No matter how anonymous (or limited in audience) you think your blog is, once you put something on the internet, you better be cool with the world knowing it, because once it's out there, well, it's out there. Romance is a good example here, because if you talk about dating someone, then you end up 'having' to blog the break-up if it happens, if only to signal that people should no longer ask how said romance is going.

You also have to deal with comments. This is true in real life, too, which is exactly why another friend has been keeping her romance on the downlow for months. And if you've ever been a part of a Mormon (or any closeknit religious) community, you'll understand how that goes. Everyone's always waiting for an announcement, even if you are nowhere near making one.

So most people want to get that 'first trimester' safely over. Nemesis introduced Gentleman Friend not too long before their engagement, but we all knew he was significant back when his photo appeared. I thought when Riftgirl and her beau joked about 'doing it for Obama' they were talking about sex. Seems now that 'it' was getting themselves hitched. The blog world had to wait a whole month for that news (totally worth the wait). I can really understand that though. They both have a relatively high profile on Youtube, etc, and share a lot of their personal lives, so it must have been really nice to have something special and secret they just enjoyed for a while alone before they told the world.

So what do you think? Do you blog about romance? If you do, what's your equivalent of a romantic 'first trimester' you want over before you hit the interwebs with heart-shaped news? What other kinds of news would you wait a while to blog?

rollover beethoven!

Oh, and did you notice what happens when you hover the cursor over the Japanese in my last post?








That's right! You get a translation. I've been wanting to do this for ages (it's how I'm hearing the post in my head when I write about Japanese stuff), but I knew that probably only six people reading it would understand the Japanese.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to Thmazing who just inadvertantly taught me the easiest way to do rollover text that I've ever seen (read: I just checked out his page source info for a post where he used the same trick). May you be visited karma style by random info you'd been looking for.

And I would have given you the html to do the same, but it keeps thinking it's an actual html command, so it won't display it properly (new trick to learn I guess), so if you want to know you'll have to go to the permanent link for this post, then once there right click on the screen and choose 'view source' (for IE) or 'view page source' (for FF).

ideas + a link for those interested in proposition 8

From a recent comment:

P.S. Please keep on blogging. I like what you have to say and need to come by here more often.

As lovely and appreciated as that compliment is, in the face of it I find myself completely unable...to think...about anything...at all.

This, I think, is why I do not write for a sitcom or a newspaper column. I think inspiration prefers to sneak up on me rather than being drawn to me by deliberate will. This phenomenon is also the reason I was hesitant to say yes when I friend recently asked me if I'd like to do some improv. When I imagine it I see myself standing like an idiot in front of other people with a completely blank face and mind. Scary.

Still, it's a course in improv, not a competition, so maybe I will be just one of many people trying to recall back when they had a shred of humour and imagination in them (about 20 min before they were asked to do improv in front of strangers instead of in a friend's loungeroom while mocking a particularly bad B-grade horror movie, or the like).

We shall see...

Abby also provided a link to a fantastic essay by Morris Thurston on Proposition 8. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Proposition 8 and particularly to anyone in California who will be voting on the matter. Thurston says, in his introduction:

An anonymously‐authored document titled “Six Consequences the Coalition Has Identified if Proposition 8 Fails” is currently being distributed by a coalition of churches and other organizations in support of Proposition 8, an initiative on the November 2008 California ballot. The intent of Proposition 8 is to overturn the California Supreme Court’s ruling allowing homosexuals to marry.

Most of the arguments contained in “Six Consequences” are either untrue or misleading. The following commentary addresses those arguments and explains how they are based on misinterpretations of law and fact.

The piece is clear, understandable and succinct ~ a very good read and relevant.

stuff white people like

Finally, the mystery is solved. The author of Stuff White People Like is in fact...white. It's been a topic of hot debate in the comments on the site. It was my first guess, though he writes like an (amused) observer. But I knew for sure he was white when I heard he got a book deal. 'Cause it's not racist if one of your own is mocking you, right?

Well, racist stereotype or not, it's bloody funny. ^_^

who's stupid now?

Don't ask me how I did it, but I managed to delete the feed for Jimmy's blog 'The StupidSheet' from my Bloglines notifier. It wasn't until I read his recent comment that I realised that it had been a long time between posts for him. Of course it hadn't ~ I just didn't know he'd posted because Bloglines was no longer notifying me.

I used the Bloglines list as a guide to updating the list on my sidebar, which means he also got left off the blogroll! And I do so like reading Jimmy's commentary and stories. I mean, the last post is about gridiron (yawn) so take no notice of that one (j/k), but he also got bitten by a dog a few days ago, and it sounds like the owner's bark was worse than the dog's bite!

Sorry, Jimmy! If you check the sidebar you're back where you belong. :)

today's post is brought to you by the letters 's' and 'u'

After months of procrastinating, I finally updated my sidebar. My blogroll now actually reflects the blogs I read, rather than the ones I was reading a year ago, and my current distractions are actually current. It was a bit scary to realise how many blogs I read regularly, but it did explain why I've become more of a lurker in the last few months. I enjoy commenting, though, so I'll try to do more of that.

Most of the newly added distractions are cool things I found while using Stumble Upon. SU was in amongst some Firefox add-ons I was browsing, but I've since found it's available for IE, too. You initially select some areas of interest and each time it chooses a random page from those areas you have the opportunity to click (on the toolbar) that you like it or not. You can also click that you like any page you happen to be browsing and if it's new to the SU system it will add it in. The more people who vote for a page, the more likely it is to come up when people click the 'stumble' button on the toolbar. As you go along, it gets more of an idea of the type of pages you enjoy. At the moment I like probably three quarters of what it shows me, and find something really interesting about one in six clicks.

Earth Album is a Google Maps & Flickr mash-up where the top eight photos on Flickr for a particular country are shown when you click on that country on the map. Of course I picked Japan first and the photos were great (two pictured here are Shibuya crossing at night and a Tokyo girl), but then I went more random and found the two photos below of the boys in the sand and some unusual trees, from Madagascar.

Songza is a search engine for songs and jukebox rolled into one. It remembers your playlist automatically and the interface is very simple to use. A current top ten also sits on the page and I have used that a few times to check out artists that I haven't heard before. If I want to hear a whole album I'd just find it in my music folder, but what I love Songza for is those moment where a song pops into your head and you want to listen to that one song without having to go searching through your music collection. Sometimes Keyboard Kid will tell me about some random song he discovered this week and I can find it in about ten seconds on Songza, and play it right then to see what he's talking about. Quicker even than him finding it on his iPod and I don't have to stop and put his earphones on to hear it.

One SU toolbar feature I've made a lot of use of is the option to email a page link to myself (or other people). It can be used for any page, not just ones that I've stumbled. In the past I've cluttered up my bookmarks with pages I found but didn't have time to look at properly. Now those pages end up in the stumble folder in my email and I can browse through them when I have time. And if I never get time it's just an email to delete, rather than a bookmark I have to cull at some point (more trouble). I think it's going to make it easier to keep my bookmarks relevent and few, which is just how I like them. And it's quicker than opening gmail to send myself a link.

Anyway, hope you enjoy the distractions as much as I have. My SU blog (just super short reviews of pages I really liked) is here. I've clicked lots of pages I like; the blog is a way to indicate my real favourites.

three weeks in japan

And so it begins: a series of posts on the holiday I just took. I was going to say that I wish I'd had the time to blog this along the way while I was in Japan, but then I realised that would mean I was spending my holiday talking about my holiday, and that's just silly.

meme: bloggers who think, bloggers who make me think

Way back in June Jimmy was tagged with a meme that asks you to give a 'thinking blogger' award to five bloggers and he was kind enough to include me on his list. (Thanks!) Of course then I got busy and the meme slipped down my 'to do' list, as did posting in general for a while. But now here is my own list of 5 thinking bloggers. The button below is for them to include on their sidebar, if they want to. Either way I hope they'll take the time to pass the award on to five more thinking bloggers, but I know not everyone's into memes and such.

The fool makes me think about life and love and poetry. He tends to come at subjects from an unexpected angle and is one of several bloggers I consistently find myself wishing I knew in real life. He also connects with nature in a way that is deeply interesting to me ~ sometimes I feel I can relate and other times his experience seem alien to my own.

Lolo makes me think about food in a more creative way. I find vegetarian cooking limited, so vegan cuisine always seemed impossibly so. But everything on her blog looks so delicious that I'm starting to think that I've just lacked imagination. Of course all the herbivores out there are saying, 'well, duh. Of course you can eat well with only vegan ingredients...' but hey, I do live in the land of the backyard barbeque, so cut me some slack. :) Anyway, go salivate and here's a quick plug for her upcoming cookbook.

Soulemama and her family are lovely and a little alternative. I'm a city girl and I like that. I don't grow a garden, or knit, and my artwork is usually created on the computer. Reading about her life is like going back (or perhaps more aptly, forward) in time, or moving to another country, so different is it from the one that I'm living. When I read her blog and look at her children in beautiful homemade clothes, interacting with nature and generally tackling their world hands-on, I feel like I'm reading a wonderfully illustrated children's picture book, the kind you always keep handy because your kids want you to read it over and over. She probably doesn't realise that she pushes me to explore my own creative processes and think outside the box about my life. She has a cool book coming out next year that I'll probably buy as a gift for a couple of families I know, but her store is closed for the summer, so you'll have to check that out later.

Dave writes a blog called How to Save the World. This guy is super-prolific, so much so that I sometimes can't keep up with reading all he writes. His topics vary quite a bit, but it's all about making the world a better place and it puts me in the mood to read, talk to people, learn more and act. I have no idea where he finds the time, but I'm glad he does.

Of the eight or so 'debt reduction blogs' I read, Tricia's is my favourite. I like her particular mix of news, personal experience and creative ideas. I actually started a blog about debt reduction, but in the end I realised that I wasn't saying anything that wasn't already out there. Tricia is almost halfway to zero debt and I'm learning a lot going along for the ride.

Obviously there are a lot more people that could have made this list. It's isn't a 'top 5' list; it's just a '5' list. I also avoided bloggers that I know have been tagged previously. They already have a 'thinking blogger' button. And rightly so.

benefits of blogging

I’ve been asked to post what I think are the benefits of blogging. I’ve been thinking it over for a few days and here is my attempt to sum it all up.

1. The Social Benefits

When I started this blog I had no intentions of writing for anyone but myself. It was kind of like keeping a diary that I didn’t mind people reading and I never really thought beyond that. But after a few weeks I realised that a blog isn’t really a diary, no matter how much it might sometimes resemble one. A blog is a conversation, because you’re deliberately sending something out to a potential reader, and it’s hard to sustain a conversation with yourself.

So I started making myself a part of the blogosphere, reading across the broad spectrum of blogs until I found something I felt like commenting on, and slowly I built up a group whose blogs I like to read and a group who liked to read my blog. I don’t think I’m ever going to be like Waiter from Waiter Rant, with his 200 comments per post, but I don’t really mind that. I just like getting enough comments to know that I’m not speaking into the void.

2. The Analytical/Introspective Benefits

I analyse everything. I always have and it’s a process I enjoy. I also like explaining things or writing them out. I often find that I make sense of things as I’m doing this, as if being forced to put words to what I’m thinking actually helps me understand what I’m thinking, or to see the flaws in it and where it needs to change.

3. The Wider Benefits

I know, I know, there’s a thousand truckloads of rubbish being added to the internet via blogs every day, but I can’t help but feel that as a whole the blogosphere still represents freedom of thought and expression. And there must be some truth to that, or China wouldn’t be trying so hard to control the access its citizens have to blogs.

It might seem a bit paranoid, but I sometimes wonder if the explosion of myspace drivel is an attempt to create white noise that distracts us from blogs of real substance, kind of like the big TV screens in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. People would rather be entertained or distracted than prompted to think, and those who have an agenda use that opportunity to control information in a way that’s useful to them. Bradbury was worried that TV would be the end of books, making people feel full of information, while actually giving them no real intellectual nourishment. The scariest part is that it is the people themselves who choose the pudding over the vegetables.

My own blog falls in both camps. I like to think, I like to make other people think, but some of my posts are pure fluff. The day that’s all the blog is might just be the day I finally quit it. Until that happens I’m adding my idea to the ocean of thought out there and collectively we sway the tides of opinion. I don’t overestimate my influence, but I do like being part of it.

more quizzy things

I Scored a 100%!

$5340.00The Cadaver Calculator - Find out how much your body is worth

(I'm not sure that rating tester read my Tarantino-related posts.)

76%The Movie Quiz

I'm kind of surprised it was this low.