Sweet Nothings (no sugar added) - 6/1/2014

So, tonight, I've got nothing to say. It's kind of nice, not having anything running through my head. Oh, idle thoughts, to be sure. Things I might want to take up another time. But tonight, no silliness, no rantings, ravings or jumpings up and down.

Sometimes, I suppose, one reaches a brief point where there aren't any significant pressures pushing in one direction. Where everything just sort of works its way into a calm and lets one breathe for a bit.

Tomorrow I start the night shift, and have a number of people to start training and training with. That's probably part of why I'm not feeling talkative at the moment. Moving into a new situation always requires a certain amount of attention, and does take away from that randomness that fuels this kind of writing.

But in the meantime, I'm going to continue saying nothing for a bit. Words can be useful for that, from time to time. Not the nothing that so many public speakers end up saying with words, but the kind of nothing that can say things like “I'm still here”, “I'm thinking about you”, or “You really should consider investing in a slightly less flammable wardrobe at some point in the future.”

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Dawn - 5/31/2014

End of night

beginning of the chattering flow

birds and dew

deep wells of sleep

shallowing

into a starting

of the engines inside us

To wake now

is one thing

but to sleep?

to anticipate the day

as a period of darkness

of rest

while all others

stumble forth

and find their ways?

That is something to enjoy

to be in the separate part of things

the secret times

hidden places

unknown by so many

revealed only

in things

like this.

Here Be Owls - 5/30/2014

So, next week I start living on the other half of the clock. Working night shift again, and looking forward to it.

There's a different feel on a night shift. You're largely responsible for everything a day shift person is, but you have a lot less support. The volume of work tends to be lower, but rushes and surges still happen, and you have to deal with them. You also have to have a strong sense of judgment as to what is important and what isn't, because calling up supervisors and management has to be done only when necessary.

It leads to a certain mentality. I'm not sure about other types of work, but IS (or IT, or ITS or whatever you like to call it, the computer squad) tends to attract non-standard personalities in the first place, and night shift support tends to attract the most non-standard ones.

Yes, I definitely fall into that category.

What you get on night shift are the people who are competent, but either less social or otherwise willing to give up certain aspects of 'normal' life for some reason. For a long time at my last job, it was the chance to go to school. Now, it's the chance to spearhead and prepare for a new level of support that we will be providing.

Of the geeks, we are the most maverick. The least susceptible to management and the least needing of supervision. If you want to find both the best and worst people on an IS team, look to the night shift. That's where we'll be.

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Streaming Consciousness - 5/29/2014

Where was I? That's a question I seem to be asking myself a lot lately. Constant interruptions, frustration, breaking me away from where I am and finding myself in a different spot trying to get back to where I was without losing track of where I'm going tired of this tired of never having five minutes to follow the thread into the interesting parts of the day and wailing on a dark saxophone at the dawntimes in the green dry wet forest stretching away along blues found behind the seat and called up from a terminal in Sri Lanksa outside of a mini-mart where Soylent Bob and his buddy the orangutan comb their hair smoking nails and selling little baggies of something that only resembles what it is but isn't quite yellow stone emperors withholding temporary positions of power and nepotizing the dead for votes in Chicago when Mayor Daley is in town.

But then again, elephants don't really work like that in grad school. Mostly you can't get them to stop quoting Kafka in the middle of your lecture on amorphous algebraic matrices. Which is why Duke University got four of them for their varsity badminton team last spring.

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Makery - 5/27/2014

Make is an interesting word. It's an integral part of some classic phrases. You can make both love and war, and some people do both at once. You can also make peace, although this can be interpreted in more than one way. The Joker said he made art until somebody died.

What are we making today? But are we really making anything? The implied meaning behind the word is to create something that did not exist prior to our efforts. But all of the elements of that thing had to exist previously. We can combine, reshape and transform, but can we really make?

There are also variations on the basic meaning. To make time is to engage in an activity in such a way as to make progress. Usually applied to travel, it also frequently applies to seduction. Making is (along with nearly every other verb) used in certain situations to describe the eliminatory functions of the mammalian body. We can be on the make, we can make things up (were they down before we made them up?), we can make things over, but not under. We can make believe, but it's pretty hard to make doubt, unless you're good at arguing.

We frequently make mountains out of molehills, which must piss the moles off pretty badly, to suddenly have to dig several thousand feet farther than they expected just to ruin your lawn. Although maybe moles can make point-five past lightspeed, if they need to.

We make jokes, we make fun, we make silly faces. We make mistakes (all. the. freaking. time.) but not often enough do we make amends. We make friends and enemies, and sometimes we can tell the difference. We make signs, sigils and wards, and then throw salt over our shoulders to make the evil eye go away.

We make money, and banks make money, but they're the ones creating it by the magic of compound interest. We just earn it by making things or making sure that other people get their things, one way or another. Sometimes, of course, we make a mess of things, and then we have to make a new resume.

We can make noise or music, and people disagree greatly on which is which (unless you're an acoustician, in which case you can make people yawn by talking about white and pink noise). Of course, yawning makes other people yawn, and may make the temperatures of their brains rise or fall (we're not really sure yet, but I'll make a note to figure it out).

And, of course, practicing the art of making babies is just about the most universal hobby there is.

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In Memory - 5/26/2014

Today is a day of memories.

Is it that we want war? Of course we do, it is part of us. But we also wish to leave it behind, to stop finding in it what we believe to be the solutions to seemingly intractable problems.

Regardless, there are always those in harm's way. They go there because harm, whether imposed directly or unintentionally by humans, or caused by the simple actions of the natural world, will be there.

They wear many uniforms. Soldier, sailor and pilot the most thought of, and most duly honored. But also those who keep the peace, who guard the oceans, who fight against fire and accident, who rush into the fray to bring healing. All of these people serve, here and elsewhere, and all should be remembered this day, living and dead.

All of these people, one way or another, fight against the entropy that would eventually consume humankind. Whether for good or for ill, they lay down their lives in the belief that their sacrifice, and those of their brothers and sisters, will make the world a better place. Some are right, some misguided, many somewhere in between.

But it is not whether they were right or wrong that means we should remember them, but that they stood against what they believed was the line of darkness. Foes that fought for awful causes, or who were misled by those who sought their own power, for them we should feel sorrow that their lives were wasted. For those that fought to preserve, to build, to ensure what we now understand as a better way of life, we should feel pride that these people found us worth saving, worth fighting for.

To everyone who has gone into harm's way, I say thank you. On this day, let your memories shine forth as the best part of humanity, the part that can find something greater in the world than itself, without losing sight of the nature of what we are, and why that is worth fighting for.

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Beating My Head - 5/25/2014

So some of you may have noticed I haven't been posting to Beat by Beat Serials for the past two weeks. That is not accidental and is not an indication that I have lost interest. It is an indication, however, that only one of the stories is really working for me (Singers) and I'm not quite sure how I want to proceed.

Nemo and Fog just are not gelling. The characters aren't, at least, and that's critical for me. Nemo is based on a character from one of the tabletop RPGs I play (Champions, to be specific), and is really not suited to this format as I currently have him/her/it set up. I need to re-think the whole thing and re-approach.

But that leaves the question of what, exactly, am I going to do with the Wednesday and Friday spots. I have ideas for other stories, but I'm no more certain of them, and I don't want the whole thing to become a revolving door kind of thing where I just start various stories until I get bored with them. The whole purpose is to develop discipline.

However, there is a point at which the story must be put away for a while. That is perfectly legitimate. Many writers have projects they work on from time to time, hoping that they will find the key that turns the story. I hope that I will with Nemo and Fog, but haven't got them at this time.

So Singers will be coming back, and I may just tell it two or three days a week, or I may do something else with Wednesdays and Fridays. Experimentation is the key here, and I” m going to do what I can to find a way to make this format and this style work for me.

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