Whuh?! You don’t like my blog? FINE!!!! Why don’t you just blow it up? Unleash the Martians? See if I care. OOOOOh! DAAAAAAAD!!!!! Watch out! You just spilled coffee everywhere!!! HELP! What did I ever do to you people? OMG. Now this is nuts… dinosaurs? This is just getting silly. OK, OK. I’ll try to provide more interesting content. I’m sorry! I’M SORRY!!!
OK, the Getting Things Done bandwagon is completely out of control. I must admit that I’m VERY drawn to it, as a person who is ADD and has relied on external organizers to get through this world, but things like this and the freakin’ Hipster PDA are just out of control! I mean look at this Hipster PDA stuff:
* The Original Hipster PDA Idea
* Hipster PDA Porn
* A STRONG presence on del.icio.us
* Then templates to make your own
How is this any different than just using a regular pda or a regular calendar?
Now check out the del.icio.us links for Getting Things Done.
Insane!
And I must admit, I’m reading the GTD book to see what the guy has to say… after completely harrassing Aaron when he first showed interest in it.
It’s another bright shiny object (that’s my first original Wikipedia addition! Another self-referential BSO?) that is keeping many people from ever actually doing stuff! All in the name of doing more stuff! In the end, it’s just more fun to obsess about BSOs than it is to actually do one’s stuff!
Life is hard sometimes. Now if I could just get off the computer and shower so I can go do work instead of reading about (then writing about) getting things done (or not)!
I hate tornado warnings (see the red areas). I mean, what am I supposed to do? Take the cats into my handy dandy storm cellar? No wait. I live on the 2nd floor. I hear sirens and airplanes still flying overhead, airplanes that sorta sound like tornados. I’d rather they just turn the sirens off, since there isn’t anything I can do about it anyway.
—
Tornado Warning
523 PM CST TUE MAR 22 2005
THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN MEMPHIS HAS ISSUED A TORNADO WARNING FOR SHELBY COUNTY IN SOUTHWEST TENNESSEE UNTIL 600 PM CST
* AT 519 PM CST…TRAINED WEATHER SPOTTERS REPORTED A FUNNEL CLOUD 6 MILES SOUTH OF GERMANTOWN…OR ABOUT NEAR OLIVE BRANCH…MOVING NORTHEAST AT 30 MPH.
* LOCATIONS IN THE WARNING INCLUDE BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO COLLIERVILLE.
.THE SAFEST PLACE TO BE DURING A TORNADO IS IN A BASEMENT. GET UNDER A WORKBENCH OR OTHER PIECE OF STURDY FURNITURE. IF NO BASEMENT IS AVAILABLE…SEEK SHELTER ON THE LOWEST FLOOR OF THE BUILDING IN AN INTERIOR HALLWAY OR ROOM SUCH AS A CLOSET. USE BLANKETS OR PILLOWS TO COVER YOUR BODY AND ALWAYS STAY AWAY FROM WINDOWS…
Amongst all of my good news, some very sad news also came my way this week. Two wonderful men I know died. Both are about the same age as me.
Damon was a friend of mine in college and a composer. I spent many hours in practice rooms with him at Oberlin talking about how to write for the voice. He wrote for my voice in particular, and he used my advice to do it. It was a collaborative relationship, but we were also friends. My friend Annie and I just really dug him, and we spent a lot of time hanging out with him outside of our musical creating. He had some dark times, but the last time I saw him, he was doing really well, working with a relative of Bartok on some of Bartok’s pieces, deeply in love, happy as I’d ever seem him, and living in Brooklyn. Annie was the one who e-mailed me to tell me had died. I don’t have many details at all, except that he died about a year ago. I hate that he isn’t in this world anymore, that I won’t see him, that he won’t be composing any more music. I’m very glad I saw him at that reunion.
With Damon at our last Oberlin reunion in 2001.
Kipchoge is someone I knew less well, but he made such an impression. He was my age, but he was a professor. I think the first time I met him was at a campus-wide gathering of some sort where we were talking about issues of social justice in the classroom. It was in the Indiana Memorial Union. My friend Rebecca and I went, and he sat at our table. I remember my table better than I remember the title or point of the gathering. Kipchoge was smart yet down to earth, and from our time at that table that day, I could tell he was a good soul, and he was going to do good things in the world. Later, I found out that he did spoken word, an art form which is one of my favorites. I invited him to the spoken word tribe on Tribe.net. He’s just someone who was always around. I taught on the third floor of the School of Education, and so did he, so he was just around a lot, and we always chatted… because we just got along really well. My favorite memory of him was the time we were both grabbing really late lunches at Dagwood’s Sandwich Shop on 10th Street near the School of Education. We were both ordering food to go, but we decided to sit down together to eat. I learned he had a son who lived somewhere else. I learned that he had actually gone to high school in Mildenhall in England because he was an Air Force brat. My father was actually stationed at RAF Lakenheath, too, so I’d been there. I never expected him to have been there. What a small world. What I know about his death is that on Thursday, he checked himself into the hospital, then he was released that night. He died on Friday of natural (yet unexpected) causes.
Kipchoge at a department Christmas party at the end of 2003.
Anyway, these were both wonderful men, and it was too early. Way too early. But I’m glad they lived, and I’m glad I had the opportunity to know them both.
