New Year's

A bit of New Year's hope.

A Fine Squidoodle-Dee--Doo... and Emily Bronte, Too

Do all things come to an end -- or at least transformed beyond the point of loved recognition? 2014 has seen the end of Squidoo and the transfer of featured content to Hubpages. I never wanted to see that day.

I opted to let a majority of my pages make the transfer... not all. Prior to that point, I had never deleted a lens. (Not for practical reasons in many cases, and not because of the hours of work that I invested, but because those pages get personified.) But in that short time frame we were granted, I saved, took screen shots, and hit delete on many, bawling away. All of them are to be resurrected someday, many are to find their home on Wizzley -- when I find the time.

It was an exhausting couple days. One poetry page that was supposed to make the move got deleted -- after I saved it, yes, but before I got its little mug shot. When I tried to do the screenshot, I got the 'green monster surprise' pictured here. As my mother would have said, "Well, that's a fine Squidoodle-dee-do."

The poetry lenses that made the move have their own tribulations. There is a policy on Hubpages that one can have a maximum of two links to any site that's not whitelisted. Flickr is okay, but Audioboo -- whoops, now the site is Audioboom -- isn't. Most of the poetry pages that transferred had more than two links to hosted audio content and thus transferred with warnings.

YouTube is largely unfamiliar terrain. The short fix is to centralize the audio elsewhere. Evening Nigh's 'sister blog' Audio Reflections is planning to do most of the hosting. Here, though, is the audio for Emily Bronte poems:

The Visionary

Spellbound

The Night Wind

The Lady to her Guitar

I plan to do a lot more writing here. Self-consciousness and guilt about being away so long can make it hard to return.

Reflection: At the Beginning of (my) History

At the beginning of American history long ago... Well, at the beginning of American history class (still long ago!) there was a survey that I had to fill out for my teacher. One of the questions was what era I would have wanted to live in. My answer was now.

My answer still now, but I have more reasons. Actually, I would have rather been born a little later than I was. What would I do without the internet? What would I do without the scientific information that I can access, that I can use to guide me... to explain the things that are contrary to what they appear.

I want to do something I haven't done in a while: share a very personal Squidoo page: My Mother, Molecular Medicine, and Me.

The picture is my 10th grade self: I was 15 (though you might guess less) and about 90 lbs ( though you might guess more).

Reflection: Onward Beats and Stopped Time

Change. The online coffee company has gone through two incarnations in my time in Seattle. Today it closed shop for the second time, sold for the second time, destined this time to become something other than a coffee-and-computer place. So much for computer and coffee. (Well, except if I have a netbook in tow...a netbook that acquired a 4G device after the seven-year-old DSL modem broke.) And so much for scanning. (Well, except for the scanner at the public library.)

So much at least for that particular ritual. Walking through Capitol Hill, a song played in my head: We walked on the beach beside that old hotel. They're tearing it down now, but it's just as well...

And perhaps it is just as well, more or less: the onward beat of computing against that backdrop of change and minor loss. And yet some of the losses experienced in this city will never be just as well.

...Still warm from the memory of days to come. Ah, not quite. A warm day in late March, the warmest day yet this year, but warmed from within only by a flicker of hope. And a prayer.

Reflection: My Friend Mandy

I was looking up "Mandy doll" on eBay for a Squidoo page I was working on.  I looked at the ads at the bottom of the page.  Apparently they had Mandy's current page, current address, and telephone number.  Wow! And was Mandy on Facebook, too?

'My Friend' dolls sending friend requests to former playmates? They don't call them My Friend dolls for nothing.

What an advanced age this is! (Or is there something disingenuous here?)

Reflection: Hey, Your Chocolate is in my Peanut Butter!

People often imagine it's easier for me to write than talk. No, one advantage to writing is that people don't have to sit around and wait while I do it -- but it's a more cumbersome.

It's not just a matter of being strategic or finding the right thing to say, though that is definitely a part of it in certain contexts.  But there's also the issue of putting it all together. And sometimes I would describe it as a cognitive thing more than a psychological one.  Words that go around and around my head before I type them -- that's obsessive compulsive, huh?  Not always.  Anxiety, perfectionism... those are not the only precipitating factors. One factor that seems to precipitate it is being tired.  And one thing that can help is a stimulant -- e.g. caffeine.

The more tired I am the more I seem to resist task switching: like switching back and forth between purely cognitive things (composing) to things that involved orchestrated motion.  I want to compose a whole paragraph in my head while lying down -- and rehearse it, too.  I might feel ready to type when I've got the paragraph to the point where... well, where it pours out almost as fluently as 3 x 3 = 9.

You know those old commercials where they go, "Hey, your chocolate is in my peanut butter!" It's like the part of my brain that orchestrates expression and the part that controls motion don't want any mixing.  There's a time for chocolate.  There's a time for peanut butter.  But not both.

And I may compose the "Hey, your chocolate is in my peanut butter!" quite fluently while having a conversation in my mind with a friend.  (Which is how I compose a lot of things.) But it can still feel less daunting to keep playing it in my head than to actually switch gears and it.