Red Dwarf

THIS is a meme I’ve seen around here and there, offered as a fun way to introduce yourself to new readers, which seems about right as NaBloPoMo kicks off here. The idea is to pick 26 words that somehow describe you. Some of them may be a bit of a stretch since the letters that are worth more in Scrabble are harder to work into things like this.

• A is for Aardvark, or more formally, the Aardvark Computing Society, the geekiest of the geek clubs in my high school. Legend has it that the name was chosen as a “hack” so they’d be listed first in the yearbook.
• B is for board games. I have always had a love for playing interesting board games. “Interesting” in this sense tends to have a direct correlation to how many little pieces come in the box, and how many scores of pages the rule book is. Complexity can be fun! My current favorite is Return to Dark Tower, but there are many that have held my interest at this point.
• C is for Computer Science, my field of expertise, what my degrees are in, and what I’m grateful every day that people actually pay me to do for a living, despite the fact I’d do it for fun anyway.
• D is for D&D, a game I’ve enjoyed playing since I was a teenager. (Although technically we moved from D&D to Pathfinder a few years ago.)
• E is for Eagle. I slid onto the plate with this one, finishing the requirements too close for comfort before my 18th birthday, but I’m glad now, looking back on it, that I put in the effort to get this rank while I was in Scouts. It proved to me that I was capable of doing something challenging and was something I encouraged my kids to reach for as well.
• F is for family. One of the most important things in my life.
• G is for The Gashlycrumb Tinies, a macabre little book by Edward Gorey that describes the unpleasant fates of 26 children in A-B-C style. (“A is for Amy who fell down the stairs, B is for Basil assaulted by bears,” and so forth.) I had a poster form of the book up in my apartment at college, just showing off my darker sense of humor, but it ended up creeping out my roommates too much, which was also amusing but I took pity on them and took it down.
• H is for hovercraft. As a fan of Monty Python’s Flying Circus since I was a teenager, I made sure that as long as I was going to the trouble to learn another language, I had to learn how to say that iconic phrase, “My hovercraft is full of eels.” (Which, if you’re curious, is something like 我的氣墊船充滿了鱔魚—wǒde qìdiánchuàn chōngmǎn le shànyú.)
• I is for ice storms, something we survived several winters when I was a kid. It usually amounted to a week without power sometime in January while the city was paralyzed with all the streets covered in a layer of ice.
• J is for journal, this thing I’m writing in now, which has proven to be a great way to remember all the things that have happened in my life over the last few decades.
• K is for Kermit, in tribute to how much I used to love the Muppets as a kid.
• L is for labels. Our family started a tradition of using barcode labels instead of gift tags at Christmas, so the kids wouldn’t peek or open any gifts until Christmas Day (and more to the point, a reasonable time on Christmas Day) because they couldn’t tell which gifts were theirs until we unlocked the codes so they could scan them to find out.
• M is for Magic: the Gathering, a great card game I’ve enjoyed. Also, an indicator of how geeky my wife and I are—we brought our Magic cards with us on our honeymoon and played a game or two in the card room on the cruise ship.
• N is for nature, a place I like to occasionally go visit to relax and unwind.
• O is for optimistic, something I tend to be, probably to a fault.
• P is for programming, my favorite pastime.
• Q is for quilts. A lot of my childhood memories involve my mom’s quilt frames set up in the living room as she worked on sewing one quilt after another.
• R is for Ragnarok, the best Multi-User Dungeon game on the Internet. And where I met my wife, so it’s kind of special to us.
• S is for Science Fiction, one of my favorite genres of fiction (along with Fantasy). Star Trek, Star Wars, Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Lathe of Heaven, so many more, each with an interesting story to tell.
• T is for Tolkien, who contributed so much to Fantasy literature and folklore that I’ve enjoyed most of my life.
• U is for unusual. I love being unconventional in creative ways.
• V is for volcano, something I live in the shadow of. A few volcanoes, actually. Never gave them much thought until the spring of 1980, when one we thought had been extinct decided to erupt and wipe out the summer camp we were planning to go to that year. And dumped volcanic ash all over us just to complete the bargain.
• W is for whodunit. I don’t read mysteries often enough, but I enjoy trying to figure them out before the big reveal.
• X is sort of for eXtreme programming, a novel new way of organizing the work of a team of programmers, invented by a friend of mine and his associates.
• Y is for Yendor. I spent many hours earlier in my life in pursuit of the Amulet of Yendor, the ultimate prize in the computer game Rogue.
• Z is for zen. I don’t subscribe specifically to the discipline of that name, but the general appeal of finding my mental place of calm and focus is something I often feel, to recharge in the middle of the hectic chaos of my life.

My alphabet starts where your alphabet ends!
—Dr. Seuss
On Beyond Zebra

NOVEMBER. Already? November. It was just November a little bit ago. And with the start of the month of course comes the commencement of National Blog Posting Month, which helps me get motivated to write down a few more of my thoughts and experiences in this, my journal of my life’s thoughts and experiences.

Trouble is, there’s so much going on that sometimes it’s hard to feel like I can justify the time to stop to write any of them down. And right now, I’m deep in the middle of work toward a deadlilne looming for my degree, so I can’t guarantee a post a day here, or that they will all be any kind of pithy or deep thought-provoking ideas but I’ll try to post something and maybe with luck a few bits of humor or interest will show up, purely by accident.

Your PhD is doing its best to grind you down. If you’re not careful, your PhD will take over your life.
—Maureen Lipman