Runaway Future

On Monday, this happened.

Thinking outside of the standard feelings of tragedy and also the exploitive nature of the news coverage (the cover of Tuesday’s Metro was disgusting), I have this sense of closeness. I don’t know her, but it’s easy to see myself in her shoes.

Here’s a woman, in her twenties, just popping out of the office or something along those lines for a coffee. And now she’s gone. A life snuffed out. It’s a grim realization of the fragility of life. There one moment and gone the next.

The whole thing has been a regular topic at the office the past two days and you can see by the way people are acting during their daily routine on Spring Garden that there are others thinking of it too. I’ve never seen the traffic on the street be so accommodating and almost fearful of pedestrians.

What has been stuck in my mind is this: on Monday morning, this woman woke up, maybe a little tired from one of those case of the Mondays. It was a normal day until she popped out for coffee. Just a normal day, like any of the thousands of us go through everyday.

No one promised us tomorrow and that’s how it goes. Can you imagine leaving for work for the day and never coming back to your apartment, back to your life? What do you leave behind? Who do you leave behind?

And so it goes. On Tuesday, this happened. It’s on my route that I normally run.

So definitely there was the intention to make some content, perhaps about the crazy long distances I’ve been running lately or the upcoming NHL All-Star game, or the US or Canadian political scene, or maybe a late comment on Remembrance Day, or about this crazy amazing book I’m reading or another amazing book I just finished reading or one of the other 61 blog fragments I have saved behind the scenes.

Naturally, none of that happened. I’ve been trying to upgrade my site from Wordpress 2.0 to 2.6, as a preamble to setting up the Tumblr blog I talked about previously. After not having much luck with the automatic upgrade plugin due to some settings with my host, I tried to do it manually. Unfortunately, hit another snag with the host and after getting up to 2.6, I couldn’t talk to my database and had to come back down to 2.0 (albeit updating to 2.0.11, the most up to date version).

So that took some time and thus, here I am.

I normally take the stairs in my apartment building. I live on the 8th floor but it’s no big deal.

Coming home from work today, I walked up the stairs, entered my floor, walked to my apartment, put my key in the door and turned. And turned. And turned.

Looking up, a mischievous 7 laughed back at my pitiful attempts to unlock the apartment directly below my own.

So I went back to the stairs, up another floor and unsurprisingly, my key worked in the door for MY apartment.

I hope no one was in the apartment I tried to break into. It would have given them a bit of a jolt no doubt.

I think I need to take a nap or something.

Everyone’s heard of love at first sight. Recently, I was enamored with great design.

The site is Noah Kalina’s. He’s the guy behind the iconic “photo of himself for 6 years” video. His blog is just amazingly put together. It’s minimal, most of the content is multimedia, with embedded videos, playable music and pictures, even has a nifty little way for permalinks.

Looking further, the platform that the site is built on is Tumblr. The platform is part of a new breed of “tumblelogs”, designed to focus on short-form, minimalistic posts of multimedia, be it video, music, photo or whatever and quick quotes, links and the such. The idea appeals me as a fast and easy solution to share things I come across.

But the obvious question is what would happen to this Wordpress location and the accumulated three years of content I have here? I’ve spent time over the past few days reading through the content I’ve posted here. There’s a lot of crap, drivel about my day-to-day happenings, complaining about work. There’s also a lot of decent reflections of my feelings and thoughts. So much so, I’ve been toying with the idea of making a “Best Of” category to highlight what I feel provides the clearest view of self, with some sort of comment or explanation of context. I’ve also been pondering clearing out the crap that serves little to no purpose, filling up space for no reason other then to document another weekend of boozing. That’s more unlikely, simply because I don’t think I’m at a point when I can look back and judge the value of some of that stuff.

However, in the end, I was surprised by some of what I posted. Though long and sometimes plodding (as this post is getting close to being), there’s still some value in those words and so they will remain. Which is why I’m glad I found this plugin: ReBlog. It allows for blogs to be consolidated from multiple locations.

I’m not sure if a Tumblr blog is the way to go, for at least some of what I want to create. Maybe it’s just refreshing the design here, adding some new plugins and going from there. But I’m going to continue to think of ways to improve my content.

Mitch Hedberg had this great joke that went like this:

I sit in my hotel at night and think of something that’s funny and then I go get a pen and write ‘em down. Or, if the pen’s too far away, I have to convince myself that what I thought of, ain’t funny.

The definition of the balance between creativity and laziness. I had my own Hedberg-esque moment a few days ago, where I was lying on my couch, came up with a cool idea for a short story or a scene or a character or something and by the time I convinced myself to get up and write it down, it had passed.

In an effort to combat this laziness, this block of sorts and to maybe, just maybe spur on my writing schtick to a level I want it to be at, I received my eee-PC today. In fact, I’m currently writing on it.

It’s small, it’s sweet, it’s excruciatingly hard to make capital letters and all the typing takes on an almost delicate feel as I paw at the keyboard and hope the right letters come out.

But I’m writing. So there’s that. Who knows if this will continue. My hands are already cramped.