OC #2

i am very tired, and i get chattery and weird-stream-of-conscious-y when really tired.

so here are two (kind of three) facts i feel are post-worthy i have thought of.

1. My First Memory: If I think as far back as I can about my childhood, my first memory is watching a dumpster fire out my nursery room window. That sounds really negative and alarming, but when I was a kid, I thought it was sweet. I doubt I had this complexity of thought at age three-ish, but it had some watered-down feeling of "here I am, comfy in my softly-lit bightly-colored kid room, and outside there is pretty chaos." i used to live on OSU campus, for the first four years of my life, and it was a nice small house with pretty curtains, a nice futon, and it always smelled like incense. i loved that house. but my family moved here so we could go to worthington schools when i became kindergarten-aged.
1.5 My First Dream (that I can remember): I was in said old house, and there was a thunderstorm going outside. I walked downstairs in my little cotton and lace nightgown, and immediately following the stairs, in front of them, was our back door. It was metal with chipping white paint on it, and the top have was a screened window. I stood on my tiptoes so I could see outside, and it was stuck in the light the world has when lightening brightens the world at night. I looked up, and I saw an object floating in the sky that was about the size of a VW Bug and charcoal-y colored. It was shaped like a 3D diamond, or like two square-based pyramids stuck together at the bases, whatever makes more sense, haha. On each face of that was a smaller triangle based pyramid, and the edges were rounded off instead of sharp. I knew, somehow, in that way you just know facts and accept the knowledge in dreams, that it was thunder. I went out the door into my back yard, and climed a leafless tree to try to touch it. I don't recall if I did or didn't touch it, but I remember trying.

2. I really like hotels. Today I went to Fort Rapids with Laura and some friends, and it's a waterpark/arcade attached to a hotel. At one point I was bored of tooling around the arcade and water park rooms, so I walked into the hotel section and just wandered the halls for about fifteen minutes. The elegant monotony of the same doors and the same thick carpet and the careful lighting and the muzak is extremely calming. The fact everyone's on their way to somewhere else is somehow exciting for me, too. Hotel rooms are usually somewhat nicer than what one has at home (probably because it's a two-room unit, instead of a whole house), so that's also excitig. When I move out and can't yet afford vacations to locations, I intend to rent myself a hotel room in a very nice hotel, maybe even in my own city, for a few days. I am probably really weird, haha.

OC #1

I had no internet for about five days this week. We first thought it was an area outage, from the weather, but we found out after a few days that it was some sort of wonky setting on our computer. We thought we fixd it, but it then started to run appliactions that use the internet - iTunes, WeatherBug, etc. - but not either of our web browsing programs, so we couldn't actually get on the internet.

This will sound cheesy, but I found I started to ENJOY the lack of internet. Instead of sitting around for hours doing basically nothing over and over again with the occasional social plan made or compliments exchanged, I was able to do things like start to bake and cook again, and read a very good book (For Another Day, by Mitch Albom. I read The Five People You Meet In Heaven and am trying to get my hands on all the Albom I can). The internet for people my age is largely based on interaction with peers, usually coupled with some sort of showing-off of yourself. It just feeds into kind of doing lots of little things to impress other people. I had a relaxing few days of spending my down time with myself, not thousands of other people on the internet.

That said, I couldn't really make myself do it again if internet use was an option, haha. After a while, in these times, it would grow pretty inconvenient (in regards to this class and many other things, you practically need it to function). And it's nice to know what's going on, be it news stories or my friend's social stuff.

Research and Linking #1

This Research & Linking post is kind of secret-baring themed.

Through these sites, it's become pretty evident that a LOT of people have secrets they want to get off their chests for everyone to see. I kind of got the feeling, too, that people being complex and bizarre is more common than anyone thought.

The blog hosted on this site, PostSecret, is probably fairly well-known. The concept is people send in their secrets on postcards decorated as they see fit to relay and enhance their secret, and the man who runs the blog, Frank, will select some each Sunday to post. Not all sent in are posted, but Frank publishes all of them eventually in books available for purchase. Of the three, I think PostSecret is the most artistic and "real" seeming, as there is physical material to help the secrets seem real.

A slightly different take on the PostSecret concept is LiveJournal Secret, where the secrets are still represented artistically, but digitally. People create their secret and can submit it in a weekly submissions post, anonymously. Each secret IS posted, so everyone who makes the submissions post will have their secret shared. The secrets are posted nightly in batches of about 50, and when they run out, they post new ones from the last submissions batch. While the advantage of having every secret posted is above PostSecret, they're among many others so less attention is payed to them. PostSecret only posts around a dozen a week, so each one is memorable and gets attention. LJSecret is run by a handful of people, as it's purely an internet system with so many secrets to handle.

My last example of the secret-baring craze on the internet isn't technically a blog, but it fits the theme. Group Hug is the most instantaneous of all of them: you type your secret in, and it's posted. There is no graphic or visual art aspect, and GH gets the most secrets posted, so you get the least attention here, but it the most instantly satisfying. It was started five years ago by a man named Gabriel Jeffrey, and has since started spinoffs, much like PostSecret has. There is a ranking system for each confession, to determine which is on the front page, but that's the only bias, all are there for viewing.

Also, I have not yet obtained the book, but I'll get them through the library or amazon as soon as I can.

- tess