Sunday, April 17

Kiwi for Thought

I recently decided that buying kiwi as a snack item instead of cookies would be a good idea. There are lots of reasons, but one of them is because it (like fruit in general) is supposed to be better for your brain than cookies. I encourage you to be skeptical of these conclusions because, if for no other reason, you will get to keep eating more cookies.

I've discovered that kiwis are one of the more difficult fruits to judge for ripeness. If it's soft, you know it's ripe, but it might be too ripe. If it's still tough... who knows? My squeezy test is not serving me well. A week ago I had a kiwi that was messy. Well, they're all messy, but this one was too ripe and was thus inordinately and probably maliciously messy. I wish to avoid this in the future.

Today, I tried a much tougher kiwi and carved it for a while until I finally realized it was just too tough to eat and enjoy. This saddened me.

Kiwi,

Why do you have to be so difficult? Can't we get along?

Sincerely,
Garrett

Saturday, April 2

How to make your blog worse

I've heard from several people recently that the worst thing you could do to your blog is start to quote other blogs. I think it has something to do with gaining a following of readers who respect you. For every reason you could possibly imagine, I am not worried about any of that.


Thus, I have this to share with you:


"If I meet someone and I try to guess their name before they tell me what it is and it turns out that their name starts with the same letter as the name I guessed - I win.  Then, if I space out because I am thinking about how much I won and I suddenly realize that I have no idea what the other person is talking about and that they just finished a sentence and their voice kind of went up at the end which means that they asked me a question and now they expect me to answer and I say "yes" because I figure that is a pretty common answer and the person doesn't notice that I wasn't listening because "yes" was the answer they were looking for - I win."
http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2009/10/i-am-champion.html


In case you were wondering, I am posting all of this because I'm considering the possibility of making my blog slightly worse. For example, the part at the beginning about how people have told me that you shouldn't quote other blogs. Yes, that was a lie. I assume everyone is okay with that now that I'm coming clean on said lie. Also, it's the type of thing that lots of people would say to me if conversations about blog etiquette were a more common part of my life.


Also, the second part of the quote is very true of me. I don't tend to guess names as I meet new people, but I do get pretty excited when I get distracted and get away with it. Again, to make everyone who knows me feel better about this consistently deceptive behavior, it should be pointed out that I am different from the above blogger in that, as my concentration returns, I expend a decent amount of energy on reconstructing what the person just said/is now talking about. A mixture of contextual inference and desperate grabs at fleeting morsels of unconscious memory.


In essence, I'm saying, "Sorry, please don't be mad at me. I try really really hard, I promise."


If you were thinking that last part was kind of pathetic, I can't blame you. Although, you might want to hold your sympathy as you ponder the motives of my sympathy. What do I have to gain from apologizing? Not much. If it was nothing, you could trust me, but I'm clearly looking for sympathy. So, you should stop being sympathetic... right?


Quickly now, go re-evaluate your assumptions about honest human interaction.