John Zeitler

I freely admit that I have a rather… staccato speech pattern. When I am feeling confident in what I have to say, the words flow forth at a fairly rapid pace. The problem is that I insert long pauses into my speech. This is because my brain is running at a far higher clockspeed than my mouth and the buffer just… kinda…. runs out. Oftentimes this is circumvented by turning off error correction in the buffer so as to fill it with something, anything, to get the point across.

This afternoon after failing to say the word “academically” throughout thirteen full seconds of trying I realized that it might be seen as less charming and more indicative of some form of severe, yet amusing, mental illness.

I picked up a pair of noise-cancelling headphones this evening owing to three facts. The first is that my previous pair of earbuds had broken (cord snapped right out of the left bud) one morning a few weeks ago, and I needed a replacement pair. The second is that I had a sizeable rewards voucher for Best Buy sitting on my account.

The third is that, while trying to save some money and the rewards certificate, I had bought a pair of cheap stopgap earbuds at a 7-11 downtown the morning that the originals had broken. And that, today, I discovered that they were practically worthless when sitting next to someone who had quite a bit to say about my choice of commute entertainment: an anime. It matters comparatively little which one, because I am firmly of the belief that this woman would have just as gleefully excoriated me for watching SuperBook. I was not, in her words, reading the Bible, therefore I was sinning. She actually said that.

This comes literally eight hours after I had felt, for a little while, that geekery was becoming acceptable in public after seeing a forty-year-old man quietly reading a Batman graphic novel three rows ahead of me this morning.

Oh, and for the record? It was Shakugan no Shana, and I was incredibly lucky that my stop came long before any of the clothes-changing scenes came. I would have hated to have to explain to the paramedics that my minding of my own damn business caused some nutbar lady to have an aneurysm.

Part of the reason why I try to avoid watching certain shows until long after they’re culturally relevant is because, innately and quite unhealthily at times, I have an in-built and deep-seated suspicion of anything that becomes too popular too quickly or too universally. In general I’ve noticed that, averaged out over my lifetime, I’m usually either six to eighteen months ahead of the curve on some things, or three to six years behind it. In short, and put into tropes, I’m susceptible to early-onset memetic mutation, and in cases where the meme doesn’t take hold I instead suffer from acute, prolonged, and chronic hype aversion. Neither of these things are in and of themselves bad. In point of fact it turns out that nine times out of ten this allows me to keep a dispassionate, critical eye while examining media.

But for the love of God, why didn’t people at least try to pressure me into watching The West Wing before this?! I haven’t TV-crushed on a series this hard since Babylon 5 (another one I got into nearly a decade late). Just… yeah. If this means I have to re-subscribe to more than just basic cable so I don’t miss something really good coming out this fall, then so be it.

This weekend was a flurry of activity, but most of it being involved in the home meant that even though it was very, very busy, it was still a welcome change from the torrent of draining errands I’ve had to spend my weekends on in the recent past. Now, I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me at work, but it’s also a huge amount of stress off of my shoulders.

And yet now I find that I need to spend plenty of time watching The West Wing. Awesome.

I realize that I’ve been preternaturally quiet on this here blog for the past week or so. It turns out that when you have a job that you enjoy and feel like you’re contributing to, you tend to want to work more and harder at it, and have less time for leisure activities like, say, blogging. Funny thing, that.

Anyway, despite today being a “rest” day, I spent a lot of time doing hard work on some household tasks that had fallen by the wayside, such as neatening up the living quarters and getting some clothes washed. I know, thrilling stuff. But this has cleared a lot of stress off of my general plate and has made me feel very, very productive and confident. Again, funny thing how getting stuff done makes you want to get more stuff done.

What this really means for the blog is that I’m going to try to budget my time a bit better in terms of having more than just three or four terse sentences for an update, and that this coming week I’m going to spend some otherwise down time writing up posts for… you guessed it, Essay Week 2010. I skipped ’09 due to a number of factors, but this year I’m fortunate enough to know when I’m going to have a gap, and I’m also lucky enough to see it coming more than an hour beforehand. In addition, Essay Week 2010 is going to debut something else I’d like to try out.

You can help select the topics for Essay Week 2010! I’ve got five or six ideas running around in my head right now as to things to write about, but if you’ve ever wanted to know my thoughts or opinion on something of interest to you, now’s your chance. Leave a comment to this entry, or send me a direct message on Twitter (or an @ reply if I’m not currently following you) with the topic you’d like me to address. Try to keep the topics at least PG-13 or lower, and please don’t pick something ludicrously polarizing or controversial. On Thursday, July 22nd I’ll pick the most interesting topics and write about them, interspersing them with the other essays planned.

Essay Week 2010 will run from Sunday, July 25th to Saturday, July 31st. Till then, please enjoy what I hope will be an elevated level of vocalization on this site.

I was supposed to take part in a pretty interesting Guard vs. Orks mission tonight after work.

None of the Orks players showed up.

Kinda frustrated now.

I was at work until 9:45p and had to take a cab home.

We’re not talking about today. Ever.

Important lesson for the day.

Apparently I am a subconscious air-raid warden, because if there’s even the slightest elevated light level from what I’m accustomed to, I will not be able to sleep very well, if at all. That was discovered last night when I forgot to turn off the bathroom light, on the other side of my bedroom door, and it nearly kept me up all night.

I apologize for three no-content posts in a row, but tonight was ludicrously busy for me and I am just now (10:45p) getting things ready so that I can go to bed. Sorry.

So I had a nice dinner, take-out. About halfway through it I stopped and realized that they may have given me actual meat instead of the vegetarian version I’d ordered. It’s hard to tell.

This is either going to be a normal night or a very long one…