Tuesday, July 15, 2008

"Exciting" New Regular Feature...Prepare To Yawn

So my meeting today wasn’t as long – or painful – as I’d anticipated, though the painlessness was mostly due to the fact that it didn’t last as long as anticipated.
It was originally scheduled to go from 10:30 to 5:00, but some of the participants had a delayed flight, so we didn’t start until 11:30, and it only lasted until about 3:30.
Now, if only we’d actually accomplished something…
When I got home from work I decided to mow the lawn. I didn’t bother saying anything about the bugs that were dive bombing my eyes to the Universe this time around.
I probably could have gotten away with putting off mowing for a few more days, as the grass in the front and side wasn’t really that long, but the grass in the back was all wild and unkempt, so I figured I might as well.
(I just realized; until I mowed it, my yard had a mullet.)
When Scott and Stacy stopped to get tickets for The Dark Knight in IMAX yesterday, they found that it was sold out, so they ended up buying tickets for a Friday night show at the regular theater.
In the meantime, Scott had signed up some free tickets to a Thursday screening at work, and had asked me if I wanted to go with him if he got the tickets, then rescinded the offer, as Stacy, who had no interest in going to the Friday show, decided that she wanted to go to that.
He said that he was sorry to dangle that offer in front of me and then snatch it away, then noted that he’d said “dangle.”
I pointed out that he also said “snatch,” then said, “Is it revelatory that I focused on snatch, while you focused on dangle? Yes. I think it is.”
In any case, Jamie also scored some tickets to the Thursday show, but was not able to find a babysitter so that Casey could go, so she told Scott that I was welcome to go as her guest.
Earlier today Scott e-mailed me to let me know that Neil Gaiman will be at this year’s National Book Festival and that we should go. I agreed, and forwarded his e-mail on to my friend Eric, suggesting that he might also like to go.
It turns out that the Festival is on his wife’s birthday and that she’s thrilled at the prospect of meeting Neil on her birthday, so his response was “97% Yup.”
So that’ll be cool.
I’d posted a MySpace bulletin about the Heroic Portraits update, and in his e-mail to me Eric mentioned that he liked the Gallery and wanted to know if, in regards to Heroic Portraits, I was “getting any love.”
In response, I said, “And no, just like everywhere else, I'm not getting any love on Heroic Portraits.”
Over the past couple of days I’ve gotten hit with the whole “You’re so quiet” thing a few times.
There’s really not much I can say to that (appropriately enough), but I have been thinking about some of the reasons why I am so quiet, and I thought I’d make the exploration of those reasons something of a regular feature here.
So here we have our first installment:

Why is Jon So Quiet?
Because I don’t get much practice talking.
There have been periods in my life in which I’ve gone days without saying a word. Generally, the length of such periods depended on whether or not I needed to stock up on beer and cigarettes, and even then all I’d end up saying is “A pack of Marlboro Lights,” and “Thanks.”
Even now, I don’t have much cause to talk once I get home from work, and the odds are that even before I left work I’d probably been sitting in my cube working on something and not talking to anyone.
So, yeah. Most of my time is spent without having anyone to talk to, so when the opportunity to talk presents itself, I’m not really inclined to take advantage of it, because the odds are that, unaccustomed as I am to speaking, my voice will be hoarse, I’ll stammer or misspeak, or I’ll go off on some rambling, incoherent tangent that has nothing to do with anything.
And I prefer to safe my rambling, incoherent tangents that have nothing to with anything for my Threshold entries.

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