Eccentric Flower talk:201104/Unaddressable
From Eccentric Flower
Comments on Eccentric Flower:201104/Unaddressable
I'm formulating a comment (drawing a blank on a name, right now, so I'll save it for later.) In the meantime, I have a question. Are you yourself able to edit your posts without having it show up on the recent comments list the way our edits do? I thought I had caught you in a rare typo, but it's gone. Now I'm wondering if I was hallucinating, since one of the things I admire about your journal is your command of the language.
-- 19:11, 6 April 2011 (BST)
Oh, boy, do I ever edit. I am the master of 'reread it twice before I make it live and only THEN find the glaring error in the first paragraph'. I corrected, oh, I dunno, three or four things right after I posted it.
The "Recent journal comments" listing only shows changes in the "Eccentric_Flower Talk" namespace. What that means in English is it only shows edits to journal comment pages. But if you go to the BIG change listing, you'll see edits I made to the entry itself. In fact, you'll see all edits made to the site. MediaWiki keeps a full change log in perpetuity - one of the reasons I like it.
-- 20:25, 6 April 2011 (BST)
Ha! There it is! It was "due." Oh, but this means you can also see MY edits... Also the ones I make for Sean, from time to time. Ooo. Back in the day, I fiddled with ICQ a bit. You could actually see keystrokes as they happened, complete with backspacing. That was eerie. No secrets there!
-- 22:51, 6 April 2011 (BST)
Well ... I dunno. I called it that because it was about complaints I could not address directly to the people causing them. On the other hand, in a couple of days the fact that X, Y, Z et al intruded into my radar will have passed, and that will lie dormant until the next time they surface. So that's all right. (I wish I didn't live in such a small internet world sometimes though.)
As for my own problems being unaddressable, I have not yet given up on finding something which meets the four conditions in the penultimate paragraph.
-- 03:56, 7 April 2011 (BST)
What I wanted to say earlier is that this post hit home with me so sharply, I may need a mop to clean up the blood. I'm regretting all of the things I never pursued, but I believe, other than laziness, my reason was different. See, I don't think I'm good ENOUGH at the things I'm good at. I'm a competent artist, but lack creativity and imagination. I'm a technician, not an artist. Same way with music. I'm a fairly good baritone in barbershop style, (or I was until my sinuses killed my vocal chords) have an excellent ear, but I lacked that edge that takes one to the next level. I swap the occasional recipe with Nonelvis, but I wouldn't qualify as a gourmet chef. The only time I hold forth in your comment section is when a) it somehow involves grammar and syntax, or b) when I have to defend my fellow federal bureaucrats by providing a contrasting point of view. Otherwise, I'm content to appreciate your vast knowledge of arcane, esoteric subjects (Spike Jones, anyone? That was the name I was blanking out.) I never dig deeply enough into subjects that interest me, and, when I do, I don't retain what I learn. Never have had a good memory. And yet, I can remember song and commercial lyrics like nobody's business. It's a curse, I tell you.
I've had to learn to acknowledge my laziness and make the best of my lot, since where I am now is largely my own fault. I'm disappointed in myself, from time to time, but mostly my optimism kicks in and I say que sera sera.
You wowed me again. You used penultimate properly. *nods approval* So many people think it means better than ultimate, somehow. As if something COULD be better. Ultimate is. Simple as that. Same with decimated. No, it doesn't mean destroyed, it means reduced by 10%. You know that, I know that, but lots of people apparently don't, or don't care, which is worse. (It's also a curse to be a grammar nazi. I try so hard to ignore today's deplorable lack of language arts, but it's a struggle.)
-- 07:08, 7 April 2011 (BST)
Oh, by the way. Couldn't you communicate via email to kvetch about or gain incite into people whom you don't want reading about themselves in your journal? Since filtering doesn't meet your needs, I mean.
-- 07:16, 7 April 2011 (BST)
You know Dan and I have been wanting the kind of email list Bunny42 mentions for years - but it usually fails - for lots of reasons. I still hold out a faint flicker of hope that maybe someday we'll find the right group that will gel for at least a decade or so.. But of course each of our lists is a tad different. Anyway.. a digression..
-- 14:34, 7 April 2011 (BST)
You know Dan and I have been wanting the kind of email list Bunny42 mentions for years - but it usually fails - for lots of reasons. I still hold out a faint flicker of hope that maybe someday we'll find the right group that will gel for at least a decade or so.. But of course each of our lists is a tad different. Anyway.. a digression..
-- 14:39, 7 April 2011 (BST)
How many people are required to respect something for point 4 to be satisfied? And how publicly? And how often?
-- 16:28, 7 April 2011 (BST)
I was starting to wonder about how good a lawyer you thought I actually was until I got to the competition point. Thanks for clarifying.
There's nothing wrong with laziness. Indeed, I use what brainpower I have to *be* lazy. If I can collect on 50 hours of billables a month, I can support my family, sleep late most days, play with my kid, travel, watch TV, read, surf the net, etc. If I were a workaholic, sure, I could make four times as much, but then wouldn't have any time to enjoy spending it.
Bunny, one of my favorite ignorant locutions is "most unique." Uh, how's that again? "Penultimate" is easy because the root of the prefix is the same as "peninsula" -- almost an island vs. almost ultimate.
-- 18:17, 7 April 2011 (BST)
Joy:
Um, Bunny, you are male? (I don't know too many female baritones.) Okay, world just shifted a few degrees.
-- 20:07, 7 April 2011 (BST)
No, Joy. You had it right. Barbershop harmony consists of tenor, lead, baritone and bass. Both men and women use the same designations. For women, baritone is roughly a second alto. It's the trash part of the harmony. We have to be able to fit our song line in to complete the chords. Doesn't sound like anything, by itself, and is therefore more difficult to learn. After a while, if you're good at it, it becomes instinctive how to fit your note into the chord. Lead sings the melody, tenor is usually messing around about a third above the lead, bass has (often) the root of the chord. And that leaves us baris to fill in the blanks.
Not many males named Bunny either. Rare, but not unheard of. Bunny Berigan comes to mind.
*world shifts back into alignment*
-- 20:44, 7 April 2011 (BST)
Joy:
Oh, phew! I wasn't thinking barbershop (I know a little bit about the trash part of the harmony too. Always wished my voice were low enough regularly, instead of just while suffering a cold, to sing tenor.).
-- 21:19, 7 April 2011 (BST)
Huh ... the only male Bunny I've heard of is Bunny Breckinridge (http://www.google.com/images?q=Bunny+Breckinridge&biw=1523&bih=1050).
-- 22:38, 7 April 2011 (BST)
In "Oil," the novel on which "There Will Be Blood" is based, the son is named Bunny.
This has nothing to do with anything, does it.
-- 23:19, 7 April 2011 (BST)
Joy:
In "The Long Secret" by Louise Fitzhugh, there is a character named Bunny.
-- 02:03, 8 April 2011 (BST)
There's a boy named Bunny in A.S. Neill's "The Last Man Alive."
I had a couple of minutes of enjoying imagining you being this fabulous barber-shop-singing queen who spent a career masquerading as an uberbutch Federale.
-- 04:08, 8 April 2011 (BST)
Funny you should mention it. One of the things that made me leave Sweet Adelines was the ridiculous make-up and costuming. We could all have been queens and nobody would have been the wiser.
As for the name, with female Bunnys it's most often a nickname. Not so, in my case. Getting through second grade at Eastertime was not pretty. By senior year, though, the ten-year predictions had me Mother Bunny at the Playboy Club in Chicago. Since then, it's been kinda fun to be named Bunny. Mother said it was the only truly American name they could come up with, that had no foreign (or Biblical) origin. I've tried to think of others, and I find they are indeed scarce, unless you just make something up.
I was an ubersensible Federale. Talk about a rare breed, anymore.
-- 17:06, 8 April 2011 (BST)
Oh, puh-leeze! But you have a point. Guess I got lucky they didn't think of it.
-- 23:49, 8 April 2011 (BST)
Jette:
"I'm sure that if I took a poll, very few of you would claim to be highly brilliant and highly competent and in general on top of your game ..."
I would. I'm a good writer and that's what I do well and apart from some unsuccessful forays in food writing and marketing copy (which may be more lack of practice than skill), I am proud of the writing I do, and I believe it deserves respect.
The problems I have in my career are with bosses who give me things to do that aren't writing, and then aren't happy when I don't do them as well. I am not a meeting facilitator or an ideas brainstormer, and I don't design web pages quickly or well. I am paid very good money to write, and you are wasting your money when you ask me to focus on other tasks. I work best with people who respect my writing even if they do ask me to do other things as well.
I'm still neurotic about the fact that I don't have the energy to get all the things done that I want to do, and either projects take longer or don't get done at all. And then I am so fussed about this work that I don't make time to play. This is one of the primary problems of my life right now.
I could go on, but I am in fact procrastinating on some work that is slipping its deadlines, so I'll stop.
-- 17:25, 6 April 2011 (BST)