My Time as a Human

This daily column/blog has been quite a ride so far. I’ve been experimenting with the format and content a bit. I’ve also been trying to work out a schedule that both stays within my one hour time limit and doesn’t leave me squinting and scrambling to find keys late into the night after a long day.

One of the first conventions I picked up early in this process was that of using pseudonyms for people who appear in the stories. All the cool kids who write columns, articles, and public blogs use them. I finally decided that, to be safe, I should too. I realized that there was some danger of revealing something about someone that they didn’t want made public. Of course, I couldn’t just use pseudonyms alone (not cool enough) and had to work out this whacky scheme of using only names starting with Z, which is certain to kill me when I hit the 150th name and have to make it up at 2:00am.

There are other advantages to the Z names. If I can’t use full names, two people named “Frank” would cause confusion. If you like what someone you hear about says or does, you can always do a search in the blog for more stories involving that “character”. Z names are also inherently cool.

In practice, people are forever outing themselves by posting a comment with their real names. Recently, it went even further when my friend asked me why I was so good at attributing the photographers who’s photos I use on the site, but hadn’t given her credit for the web link she sent in!

In fact, let it be known that Throw Them Into the Deep End was spawn of a link sent by my dear friend Wendy Spies.

So now the conundrum: would people rather see themselves in print, or not have readers know that they’ve willingly spent time with me? Would I rather have people bummed that I used a fake name or suing me for using a real one? Fortunately I only have a few hundred readers at the moment and I’m not a mudslinger so chances of offending anyone are pretty slim. I have, however, become somewhat attached to the Z names. I think I’ll roll with this for a little while longer and see what shakes out.

[ed. Yes, this is a post begging for comments.]

As these digital pages begin to fill it’s time to take stock in this blog and how it’s progressing. In a mad attempt to spice things up I’ve been injecting myself with Hunter S. Thompson, Tibor Fischer, and Hemmingway. Having just spent time with my parents and on a documentary project about suicide, this leaves me producing something like Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegon — after the quaint little town has been burned to the ground and the poor man has has spent 55 sleepless hours driving cross country with a bitter in-law. The juvenile cracks, counterculture references and sweet tales of times past mix like soy milk, the Hells Angels, and a French maitre d’.

I haven’t done any advertising yet and, with readership still fairly low, it’s hard to justify staring at my web stats like Hillary Clinton at the polls, trying desperately to guess the response to each post. If an Indian kindergarden class is asked to check out the picture of the white guy in a turban my numbers double. So for now I’ll let it evolve and see where the daily writing exercise takes it.

Pictures

I just had a crazy dream when biking across the University of Texas campus and almost Schwinned a student when I let go of the handlebars to exclaim, “eureka”. I’ve been struggling with the problem of coming up with images fast enough to post them along with the blog posts. Asking for permission takes too long, and I’m trying to be good about rights. The solution is clearly to make my own on the fly and I have a number of experiments in the works so stay tuned!

Tools

Warning: geek moment

I have been experimenting with a number of blogging tools and discovered that Textmate has a blogging package. Textmate is the offspring of an Emacs aficionado and OS X and so it has some of the best parts of each. Sadly, “some” doesn’t seem to be quite enough, as it doesn’t keep track of tags as it goes. Emacs, on the other hand, doesn’t understand how to be a useful text editor without a lot of hacking that I’m not sure I want to do just yet, and the blog package someone wrote for it (to make it more like Textmate, ironically!) isn’t quite mature yet. So, in limbo, I have at least moved from my trusty BBEdit (which is still the best at remote file manipulation) to Textmate and if I keep it up for a whole month I’ll cough up the $30 to register it.

Note To Self

Writing takes longer than I think, either because it gets interesting or because it stops cold in the middle of the process and I’m left dangling from the last word like a lost participle. Trying desperately to type, still my participles dangle. I’m still trying to find the right routine that gets blood flowing early enough in the day to fuel my fingers without sending them on an unstoppable rampage that leaves me with a novel and no place to sleep. And so with that, the egg timer chirps and I’m off to hack a few breadcrumbs together.

I met with Spike yesterday to talk about some ideas I had about writing and blogging and other things literary and she suggested that I mention the people I meet with in my blog posts. So there you have it.

Being a giggling little boy about such self-referencial meta-style humor I couldn’t help but write that, but there were enough sprouts of ideas popping during our conversation that I must go on. We talked a bit about format and I dredged up memories of suck.com and other early web pioneers of blogging. I feel like their format, which interspersed photos and links and featured a thin single column, made the posts feel a lot more readable. In the web era, anything I think I’ll like that looks like a large block of text leads me to immediately respond with, “wow, this is probably really valuable, potentially life-changing information!” I immediately save a link to it and stash it for later reading. “Later”, on the web, never happens.

This ultimately leads into another discussion about length. If I can grab someone with text that looks like a quick read and hook them, I can probably get them to hang around longer but there are still limits. One thousand words was the suggestion, but of course I still haven’t learned a real sense of how long that is. At this point, this post is only 249 words long, making this only 1/4 of its ultimate potential length. I still have plenty to say, but can I keep it interesting for that long? Or is that restriction enough to tighten my scribbling to something that is better thought out and fundamentally more rewarding for you, my dear reader?

I’ve certainly learned the value of creative constraints. Like a gloved fist squeezing play dough, tighter constraints cause creativity to explode in all directions. Great examples include the (translated from the French) A Void, which never uses the letter ‘e’, or any given Flipside/Burning Man theme. One idea I’m toying with is creating some constraint-based system for my public blog. Like requiring the use of Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day in my daily post. I’m not sure this will make me the omphalos of the blogging world, but I can hope. I am already trying to limit my post writing time to one hour, and with the help of an egg timer this should make sure I get to the gym and work and remember to eat.

When I originally conceived of a public blog I thought that it would be a place that I would only write up the more “important” of my philosophical ramblings, crafted with the greatest of care. Then I realized that what appears to be interesting and amusing about me (if I am, in fact, interesting or amusing) is not just the twisted way my brain views the world, but also the way it responds to things. So long posts about the evolutionary underpinnings of man’s desire to eat corn are equally important as, “oh look! I found something shiny!”

The new blog is called, “My Time As A Human” and can be found deep within the interweb. It’s an evolving experiment, but you’re welcome to come along for the ride.

There. 618 words. Not so restrictive after all.

Wait, now it’s 627!