Here’s a quick fun one for today…

This comes from blogthings.com, a site has a ton of silly quizzes, but with this one you just answer five simple questions and you’ll learn what kind of coffee you are. I am a soy latte:

You Are a Soy Latte

At your best, you are: free spirited, down to earth, and relaxed At your worst, you are: dogmatic and picky You drink coffee when: you need a pick me up, and green tea isn’t cutting it Your caffeine addiction level: medium

See?

I told you it was silly.

No Comments » | Email Link

I, like you, am having a difficult time losing weight.

Unfortunately losing weight is not like losing your car keys. You can’t just wake up one morning and suddenly find that 30 pounds is missing. “Now where did I put that weight? Did I leave it on the table in the hall?” you’d say.

Then you’d admire yourself in the mirror and say, “Who cares? I’m thin now! But where are my car keys?” If this were the case there would be an awful lot of skinny people stuck at home.

You see, you can’t lose weight by sitting around the house all day quaffing beers and clicking through the channels with the remote control. I know this from experience. Lots and lots of experience. Instead, you have to get up and change the channel on your own. Now sit back down and have another beer. You won’t lose a whole lot of weight this way, but you’ll save a lot of money on TV remote batteries.

But to really become thin, you must train your body to lose weight. Remember, by nature your body is designed to sit on the couch and watch re-runs of Judge Judy while munching on Fritos all day. Nature designed you to be a fat slob. You have to fight nature by doing something which mankind has loathed doing since the dawn of time: namely, move.

Prehistoric Man would have been more than happy to lounge around in trees all day and just watch the other animals hunt. But sitting in trees was an excellent way to be eaten by some sort of hideous Prehistoric Creature With Sharp Teeth. Not wanting to be dinosaur poop the next day, Early Man learned a very essential survival skill: running.

And because Prehistoric Man often spent more time running than he did eating, he was always thin.

So the first essential weight-loss skill is learning to be chased (but not caught) by man-eating creatures with sharp teeth. Unfortunately, there aren’t many of them around anymore if you don’t count the RIAA lawyers. To get around this problem you could either break into a local zoo and start running around inside the lion cages or you could simply find a substitute for dangerous creatures.

The obvious choice, of course, is to dive into heavy freeway traffic and run away from trucks, but that isn’t always practical because sometimes the trucks actually try to stop.

But Prehistoric Man didn’t just lose weight while running away from Prehistoric Creatures With Sharp Teeth. Prehistoric Man also did a lot of running towards cute and cuddly animals…which he could then bludgeon to death with big sticks. Then he would eat them. This involved a lot of running because the cute and cuddly animals understandably weren’t very keen on the idea.

I think everyone who is overweight (including myself) should adopt this “Chase-and-Kill” method of eating in order to lose weight. Think about how much more of a fulfilling and entertaining experience it would be if you had to hunt your food down before you actually ate it.

There’s no denying you’d be thinner if you had to chase that Big Mac through the parking lot before eating it. But seeing how most Big Macs don’t usually run away under their own power, it really wouldn’t be so much a “chase” as a “stomping” which would definitely take all the fun out of the meal.

Modern life has brought us to a point where you rarely see cute, cuddly and delicious animals (not including cats) walking near our homes and businesses. Even if you did spy a delicious creature within killing distance, most of you have had very little experience beating things to death with big sticks unless you’re a hockey player or cop from Los Angeles.

But even though you can’t kill random creatures in your front lawn and eat them, there’s still a way to combine Prehistoric Man’s thrill of the hunt with the convenience of modern day living…

Want a pizza? Order an extra large with cheese to be delivered to a neighbor who lives down the block. When the delivery kid drives by your house in his ‘94 Honda Prelude chase him down and beat him into submission with a baseball bat. It sounds drastic, but it’s okay. You’re doing this for your health. And he’s probably a punk that deserves it.

Got a hankering for a burger? Hang out at the drive-through and chase after the recent customers as they pull away with their little bags of fried meat.

Want something healthier? Run after a hot dog vending cart and eat all the condiments he’s carrying (remember President’s Reagan’s contribution to United States nutrition rules: ketchup counts as a vegetable).

In the mood for a little dessert? Attack an ice cream truck with your bare hands and raid the freezer compartments for a snack. Toss the extra spoils into the street as you beat your chest and yell like Tarzan from the top of the truck. You’ll be a hero to all the kids on your block and you’ll earn the respect and admiration of all around you as the pounds melt away.

Starting an exercise plan is always difficult, but I’m confident that the more delivery drivers and food trucks you chase down, the more weight you’ll lose. Soon you’ll not only be running towards your weight loss goal and your next meal, but you’ll also be running away from an unhealthy sedentary lifestyle and, more than likely, the police.

And if the cops catch you, don’t worry: I’m told there are lots of scary creatures you will want to run away from in prison. Though, when those prison creatures catch you, you’ll probably be wishing they just had Sharp Teeth.

4 Comments » | Email Link

A few weeks ago Sarah Hepola shut down her blog, due largely to her argument on Slate.com that it was preventing her from actually getting any “real” writing done.

This struck home because I have always considered myself a “writer” of some sort, though I truly don’t have very much to show for it at my ripe old age of nearly 35.

But yet I’m still “writing” and writing quite a lot these days. I write email at work and home fairly often. I write witty comments on IM and IRC that amuse me (and no one else) all day at work. But even though I’m regularly engaging in the act of “writing” I find myself without anything real to show for it.

I have exactly zero novels, zero television scripts, zero plays and pretty much zero income to show for my writing efforts during the third of a century I’ve been on this planet. I have a few short stories in a drawer (never published anywhere), a stack of yellowing newspaper columns from my college days and a bunch of rambling and sometimes slightly amusing electronic blog entries which don’t even exist in any sort of “physical” format unless someone out there hates trees enough to be printing this stuff out.

I also have 150 pages of a novel that I stopped writing about the same time I started blogging.

Why is that?

Because writing a novel is hard work. There’s an old joke that all accomplished writers have clean refrigerators because the act of writing is so miserable that writers will do everything else they have to do, including cleaning out the refrigerator, before sitting down to write.

Physically, the act of writing anything is always about the same. Whether I’m writing a blog entry or a novel, I’m still sitting down at keyboard, banging away at a bunch of plastic keys. One could argue that different parts of my brain are being used, I suppose. When I’m writing a blog entry or an email there usually isn’t nearly as much “editing” going on than when I work on a novel.

So why, then, is it so easy to write a hundred blog entries and so hard to write a novel? The answer, I think, is two-fold.

First, there’s the size of the project. It’s easier to make a meal for one person than to make a meal for 500 people. A meal for one person may take 30 minutes, a meal for 500 people could take 30 hours. It’s a simple matter of scope. Smaller projects are easier to finish, and as a result, often easier to start. I think nothing of spending 20 minutes writing an email to a friend, but I rarely sit down and try to dedicate just 20 minutes to writing part of a novel.

Second, there’s the expectation of feedback. Not every email or blog entry I write receives a reply or comment. That’s okay, because there’s still the “chance” of receiving some sort of validation that what I’ve written is good, bad or wrong. With a novel, or any longer piece of writing, I need to continually write a very long time to ever really receive any constructive criticism. Often, the work has to be completely done before receiving any comments. So if I write 1000 words every day for month on a blog, I have the potential of receiving comments 30 times. If I write 1000 words a day on a novel my potential for receiving comments is probably about zilch because I’d likely want to finish the novel before presenting it to anyone. It should be noted, however, the the social and potential fiscal “payback” of finishing and actually publishing a novel is probably more than that of writing a thousand blog entries.

And why is feedback or comments important to me? Because I’m a writer that writes to be read. Not all writers do. I write because I want other people to read and appreciate my ideas and thoughts. Sharing writing makes the act of writing much less lonely, and more of a “social” activity. The Internet, and the idea of blogging, takes this to a new high, where your words can immediately be read by millions of people as soon as you write them. It’s the ultimate in social writing. Your writing can be read by nearly the entire world instantaneously.

Would I rather write something that can quickly be read by the entire world, or would I rather sit and labor over something for months (years!) in the hopes of someone, somewhere eventually reading it?

There isn’t really much of a choice when it’s put that way.

Sarah Hepola shut down her blog because she felt her writing blog entries was standing in the way of her writing a novel. And, to some extent, that may be true. Time dedicated to one task cannot easily be dedicated to another task. But for me, shutting down this blog in the hopes it spurring me on to continue novel writing is not very appealing nor very realistic.

I once wrote a blog other than this one and I chose to shut it down. Did I spend all my free time working on a novel? Of course not. I simply found other things to do. I filled my time with video games, television, reading novels that I hadn’t written, working on the house, drinking, making a baby and the gazillion other things people do when they’re not writing a novel or a blog.

Ideally, I think the blogger who wants to write a novel should try to strike a balance between blogging (short term project with immediate feedback) and writing a novel (long term project with long term feedback). Is it easy to do? No, of course not. Is it possible? Of course it is…

So to answer the question in the title of this blog entry: No, I don’t think so.

I don’t think that the mere act of writing a blog precludes you or me or anyone else from also writing a novel. Does blogging time take away from novel-writing time? Probably. But so does just about everything else in life. In fact, the immediate feedback of a blog may encourage the timid writer to continue working and even give him or her practice in stringing words together on the glowing screen…

Am I working on my own novel again, now that I’ve mentioned it in this blog? Maybe… But you see, I just bought this new video game and my wife is four months pregnant and the house really needs to be fixed up and I really need to start exercising more and, well… my refrigerator is simply a mess at the moment.

2 Comments » | Email Link