On a scale of 1 to 10 I'm an Um...

True insanity cannot be measured.  On the light side of things a one is mild insanity.  Then there is intense insanity.  And then there is, well, me, at whatever strange alternate level of insanity it is that I seem to exist in.  I am more of the "Um... okaaaay" type of insanity and I've had another one of those days.

You know how some days you are just too tired to care?  You stayed up late you woke up early?  Your reaction to sunshine and the alarm was not the typical sleepy groan but more of the melodramatic face-plant into the pillow?  Do you know what I'm talking about?  Well, I had one of those days today.  I was not tired enough to be grumpy, just tired enough to make absolutely no sense.

Photo Source: Pinterest

At work I was meant to be updating my client's social media profiles.  I barely know how to update my own.  What makes you think I'm qualified to update a financial client's profiles?  I had to research how to effectively use hashtags on twitter for businesses.  Yes, I do actually have a twitter account but I'm not really sure what to do with it.  I certainly don't know how it's used for business.  And Delicious.  What is the point of that site?  Is it really a directory of links or is it really like twitter?  Do people actually look at your Delicious account or is it more meant as a list for you?  Why is it called Delicious?  There is nothing tasty about it.  I just don't understand. I know nothing about technology and social media.  I really am the world's worst online marketing employee. 

A day of staring at the screen trying to decide if articles were interesting enough to catch attention, but not so interesting as to offend my financial client, sent me further into my strange mood.  Suddenly I was staring at the weirdest abbreviations and I couldn't keep my mind from wandering.  I muttered "SM?" to my computer.  My colleague looked up with a cocked eyebrow and asked "did you say S&M?"  Social media does not abbreviate well it would seem.  We were both tired and this was much funnier than it should have been.  We decided that after a day of work I would clearly be an expert in S&M and loans for my finance client.

Not long after lunch our big boss arrived with two teenage girls and starting filming the boot of his car in the parking lot below.  Well, at least that was what we heard.  There was apparently too much fast driving and some sort of flipping involved as well.  We came up with kidnapping theories and somewhere along the line nearly invented an office rumour that he had two families and was trying to keep them from knowing about each other and this somehow involved a blackmail video filmed from the office of a car boot.  We are still working on it.  We may or may not send round an email on Monday asking the burning question of what on earth they were actually doing.

As the day progressed work got more boring. When you start to read the phrase "pitch craft ideas to x person" as witch craft, and you giggle to yourself, you know you are reaching that stage of tired where everything is funny.  Next writing emails that proposed an article about loans, I asked the blogger if they would be interested in it and even this caused me to giggle inanely to myself.  Interested.  Loans.  Interest.  Hehehe.  Clearly I had not slept enough, I had been at work too long and I had really, truly, gone over the edge.  I was past the point of no return.  Returns... hahahaha.

I'm bored.  Are we done yet?  Photo Source: Flickr by Holster

We decided to count the seconds, not minutes until we were done with work.  This led to the realization that seconds seem so much shorter than minutes and even a great number of them somehow feels short.  But we went further, by the time we arrived in town on the bus at about 6pm there were roughly 2,009,000 seconds left until Christmas. 

We stopped in at Primark, a work friend and I, and found the clothes to be quite exotic.  We found zebra stripes in one row.  And then rounded a corner to find the rest of the zoo.  Every variety of great cat imaginable was there as well as owls, ducks, and dragonflies.  Dragonflies are there to support the ecosystem not necessarily as an attraction, but anyhooo.  We had fun trying on and making fun of everything we could get our hands on.  It's more fun this way.

Eventually we left for food at McDonald's and met some very interesting and slightly overly friendly guys.  They wanted to know how old we thought they were.  It became a big game.  They tried to guess our age and my friend tried to convince them she was 29 with two children.  They didn't believe her and were triumphant when she revealed that she is only 24.  Though they had a hard time believing that I was 26.  They also didn't believe that we worked at a marketing company.  True it has a funny name, but they suggested that we looked like we worked at Nando's instead.  I'm not sure that wasn't an insult.  Ah well.  It was funny to mess with them.

Eeyore wonders why and how it always snows only on him. Photo Source: Flickr by Nikoretro

On our way out and to the train station we started to see snow flakes.  Really large ones, all of a sudden and not in a flurry, just randomly.  It was suspicious.  Turns out it was only snowing on one street of the whole town.  I'm guessing it was a snow making machine and possible marketing ploy?  I don't know but it was odd and we weren't the only two who noticed.  Needless to say it was a strange day.  It was almost surreally funny and strange.  I mean, who has ever heard of it only snowing on one street?  Yeah, I'm going to have to investigate this tomorrow.

For now I'm going to sit indoors all snuggly with some hot chocolate and attempt to return to a state of semi normalcy, you know, mild insanity, and maybe even warm, cozy sleepiness. 

A blog by any other name... would be as bloggy?

I really don't like the word blog.  I never have, but my aversion seems to be growing for some reason.  Maybe it's because I have to accept the fact that the term blogger now applies to me because I have a blog.  It's just such a dumb word.  Wait, you may think, there is a method to its madness.  Yes, yes, I know.  Blog comes from web log.  Which sounds like blog if you say it together.  But really.  Who keeps logs?

Ships have logs.  And tress turn into logs.  But when people sit down and write it isn't really in a log.  If you asked someone if they kept a log they would probably stare at you with that look.  You know the one I'm talking about.  The look that says I haven't decided yet whether you are drunk, stupid, or simply an alien.  If you were to ask someone if they kept a journal or a diary on the other hand they would know what you were talking about and probably reply civilly, without any trace of that look.  You may sit down to journal but you would never sit down to log.  You aren't logging down the events of your life in some sort of formal scientific process.  Maybe it's just me, but the average web log is hardly scientific.

Let's say for argument that you woke up one day and decided not to keep a journal, but rather the things you intended to scribble down, and the manner in which you intended to keep them, were really best classified as a log.  Ok, fine, you have a log.  Are you now a logger?  No, those are the people who cut down trees thus turning them into logs.  By scribbling things down you are either a writer of some sort (and for the sake of this argument we'll include lyricists and poets etc.), some sort of scientist, if you decide to be so formal about it, or a businessman required to keep precise but short notes about your dealings.  Although you can't really claim that your "log" is scientific simply because it involves a precise process, as a hypothesis and conclusion would really be required, I won't argue the point with you.  I'll allow that you are a scientist before I allow that you are a logger.  However, unless it is a professional record you're keeping you really ought to simply call yourself a writer.  But I digress.  Let's go back to the word blog.

I think what really bothers me is the fact that the word blog sounds like so many mucky things.  Blog sounds a lot like bog, a marshy, muddy, potentially alligator infested place that smells of decay.  Or maybe blog sounds more like blob and I don't even want to contemplate the substances this could be or the foul places you might find it.  Now, you don't need to agree with me.  Maybe you have a strange nostalgic soft spot in your heart for marshy peat bogs.  Or a love of clogs, those charming wooden shoes, which the word blog always reminds you of.  Or the word blob is funny to you and conjures up images of cute pudgy animals.  Who am I to judge?  Just so long as you know that not everyone shares your views of these words.  In fact, there was even a horror movie about a blob, complete with the blob song.  You think I jest?  Go ahead and look it up.  It's on IMDb.

"Beware of the blob, it creeps, and leaps, and slides, and glides, across the floor, the door, and over round the house, a splotch, a blotch, and then the blob so beware!" - My Dad's version of the Blob song

I remember my Dad singing it to my brother and I while we were camping.  He used to dance gleefully around the campfire chanting the blob song to us while the firelight made his eyes glint crazily as he crept ever closer to tickle us.  Don't think this allows you to dismiss the inherent ickiness of the word blob.  This is not simply the rant of someone traumatized in childhood.  If anything this memory makes me think of the word blob more fondly and I still think it is a strange word evocative of disgusting things.

And blog... well, it is evocative of all of those marshy, mucky, horrible things.  Plus it opens the world up to more terrible words like plog, which nobody even seems capable of defining properly or consistently, or vlog.  Both stupid words. 

I'm not saying we shouldn't use the word blog.  It is a well accepted term and it is much too late to change it now.  I'm just saying that it's a dumb word and that it should have been called something different from the very start.  Something less primordial sounding.  Just a thought.