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Moving along smoothly...
Jan. 18th, 2010 06:28 pmI slept pretty soundly last night, but woke up feeling as if I has spent the night tossing and turning. The cough is still around, and I can't tell if it's any better, but it certainly seems no worse.
I lucked out, I think, with this past week's LJ Idol, as the bye I reluctantly took will apparently scoot me past The Gatekeeper Round, a traditional high hurdle in the competition, and into a group comprising the 100 or so remaining contestants.
It occurs to me that the "open topic" assignment exerts the same debilitating effect on a contestant's psyche as the "bye" feature (which goes squared for the "two bye" feature), and that the way to work through these barriers is to ignore them, basically.
What do I mean? Well, in my opinion, the entire value of a bye is to have it available as an imaginary shield to fend off potential predations of Real Life. Once a bye is used, the shielding effect it provides evaporates and the imaginary shield is degraded. If you have no byes left at all, you are no longer shielded. Your mileage may vary, but personally, I find having the shield is worth more than the dubious benefit of being able to "skip" writing an entry, because having done so, it is incrementally more difficult to write the next entry (something I fully expect to encounter this coming week). It is better to figure out a way to avoid having to take a bye in the first place.
(This is why, by the way, I think offering contestants two byes is no favor. Having used one, it's easier to invoke the second, after which writing becomes a real drag.)
There is a fairly easy way to get around the "don't know where to turn" confusion of the "open topic," too. If you well and truly are stumped for an idea, pick up a magazine or newspaper, open the thing at random, stick your finger on a page and read the word your finger points to. I can almost guarantee that your "subject" won't be any stranger than some of the stuff Gary has assigned as a theme. (Should you ever decide to do this, avoid using medical journals and engineering handbooks as your sources of inspiration unless you really want to push the envelope!)
How did I get here? (I certainly didn't intend to get up on a soapbox, but the thoughts came, so I committed them to pixel. Go figure.) The foregoing is offered with a grain of salt the size of the Rock of Gibraltar.
* * * Since coming down to the Seabrook house, we've been keeping a limited quantity of food cold in a portable refrigerator, which has been a royal pain in the neck. Finally, Galina announced that if we are to successfully rent this place, it would behoove us to procure a full-size, working refrigerator, and so we did, and said unit was delivered a short time ago. Together with a deep sigh of nutritional relief, I now realize that I've entirely too much natto in the house.
Apropos of which, I was witness on Sunday to my first ew-w-w-w! reaction to natto (by Natalie). I can sympathize with the "logic" of the reaction, but I can just as easily put it out of my mind. (Then again, it occurs to me that visually, the "stringiness" observed with natto is not that much different from that photogenic stringiness of cheese on a pizza, so perhaps my sympathy is more empathy, nie?)
* * * Have I mentioned this is turning out to be a weird month?
Cheers...
I lucked out, I think, with this past week's LJ Idol, as the bye I reluctantly took will apparently scoot me past The Gatekeeper Round, a traditional high hurdle in the competition, and into a group comprising the 100 or so remaining contestants.
It occurs to me that the "open topic" assignment exerts the same debilitating effect on a contestant's psyche as the "bye" feature (which goes squared for the "two bye" feature), and that the way to work through these barriers is to ignore them, basically.
What do I mean? Well, in my opinion, the entire value of a bye is to have it available as an imaginary shield to fend off potential predations of Real Life. Once a bye is used, the shielding effect it provides evaporates and the imaginary shield is degraded. If you have no byes left at all, you are no longer shielded. Your mileage may vary, but personally, I find having the shield is worth more than the dubious benefit of being able to "skip" writing an entry, because having done so, it is incrementally more difficult to write the next entry (something I fully expect to encounter this coming week). It is better to figure out a way to avoid having to take a bye in the first place.
(This is why, by the way, I think offering contestants two byes is no favor. Having used one, it's easier to invoke the second, after which writing becomes a real drag.)
There is a fairly easy way to get around the "don't know where to turn" confusion of the "open topic," too. If you well and truly are stumped for an idea, pick up a magazine or newspaper, open the thing at random, stick your finger on a page and read the word your finger points to. I can almost guarantee that your "subject" won't be any stranger than some of the stuff Gary has assigned as a theme. (Should you ever decide to do this, avoid using medical journals and engineering handbooks as your sources of inspiration unless you really want to push the envelope!)
How did I get here? (I certainly didn't intend to get up on a soapbox, but the thoughts came, so I committed them to pixel. Go figure.) The foregoing is offered with a grain of salt the size of the Rock of Gibraltar.
Apropos of which, I was witness on Sunday to my first ew-w-w-w! reaction to natto (by Natalie). I can sympathize with the "logic" of the reaction, but I can just as easily put it out of my mind. (Then again, it occurs to me that visually, the "stringiness" observed with natto is not that much different from that photogenic stringiness of cheese on a pizza, so perhaps my sympathy is more empathy, nie?)
Cheers...
