Prepoceros

First, comment filtering is magic with extra sparkles. Whereas previously I was faced with a queue of a hundred or so spam comments every time I logged in, since the switch a week ago I’ve had to moderate three whole comments. THREE. And two of them were from real people. (The third was an ad for online poker in French.)

By the way, I’m not sure if “approved commenter” status carried over in the switch, so you might have to wait a while to see your first comment post-update. If you’ve posted something that’s completely disappeared, email me (prepoceros at gmail).

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How long has it been since I last posted? A month? Everybody’s stopped reading, right? Awesome. Now I can talk about you behind your backs.

The thing is, I had finals, so I took a week or two off, and after that I’d get back to blogging, but then I graduated, which was a Big Life Change (in that my employability spiked dramatically), so naturally my next post HAD to be about graduation, but that would be a LONG post, and an IMPORTANT post, and really what’s the point of starting all that today when I can eat cake and take a nap instead. You see?

But no, that’s not how blogging works. Blogging (the hacky way I do it, at least) is about jotting things down as they happen, however dull and poorly-written the results might be. Planning, gathering resources, editing…those are for chumps. And professionals.

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It probably won’t surprise you that I, a reasonably regular blogger, keep up with a considerable number of other blogs. I collect and read RSS feeds with Bloglines, which greatly simplifies that up-with-keeping. If a blog doesn’t publish a feed, I tend to write it off as being not worth the effort; I can think of only three non-feeded blogs that I remember to read at least once a week.

I generally settle in to check on everybody once a day, maybe two or three times if I have lots of work to procrastinate on, and it usually takes me about an hour to get through a day’s posts. If there are enough intriguing links to other compelling sites with large archives, the process can last all day (see above re: procrastination).

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If you think that title sounds familiar, you’re probably recalling “What if the fire alarm beeps infrequently” from last January, in which I listed some of the more amusing search terms that led people to this site.

On a whim I’ve pulled up the stats again only to be sorely disappointed. The recent search phrases are nowhere near as interesting as those of a year ago. The vast majority of the multi-word searches, in fact, revolve around the same topic:
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I’ll still do my usual Year-in-Review, so don’t get your hopes up that you won’t have to slog through those acres of text, but some sciency folks are doing a condensed bloggy version in which they repost the first sentence of the first blog post each month.

By golly, that sounds like a great way to get a new post up while exerting little to no creative effort! Just the thing for the week after finals week, when my thoughts turn from Greek and Quantum to Christmas shopping*.

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It’s over. By my count, I wrote 22 posts during the 30 days of November, which I’ll call respectable, considering. I missed a shot at perfection right off the bat when I spent the first evening of November in the emergency room, and the drawn-out sickity-sick through the rest of the month made even near-perfection tough to attain.

But what’s done is done, and I’m not bothered by my missing the mark this year. NaBloPoMo got me out of the blogging slump I’d been in, and that was what I’d most hoped for.

There was once an afternoon when I mused idly that I might like to try making a video every day in December, but John quickly talked me out of that one, thank goodness. Success at such a project would likely be much, much worse than failure.

So long, NaBlo! See you next year! Thanks for the hostess gifts; they’re lovely.

Well, I’ve gone and done it again. Unable to resist fussy’s promises of thirty days of writer’s block, I signed myself up for NaBloPoMo again. A year is just long enough, I think, for me to forget the vow I made never to do this again.

So if it’s consistent daily posting you want—the one or maybe two of you who still stop by occasionally—consistent daily posting you will get. By “consistent” I mean that each post will exist in a similar way as the previous one did; there is no implication of quality.

I signed up two weeks ago, but my blogging inertia is so great that I couldn’t bring myself to write this whole big post about it until today. I started this very post four or five days ago, actually, and only got a sentence and a half in before I . . . got distracted or wandered off to play with the dog or something.

Did I tell you I took the GRE Math? I took the GRE Math. Last Saturday. It went okay, nothing fantastic. I did about as well as I could have, given my level of preparation. Physics is coming up in November, and then I’ll take the LSAT again in December for kicks. Tra la.

I am teaching four nights, three in a row. It would’ve been five, thanks to Humberto, but I will be blissfully unavailable on account of a long-scheduled tutoring lesson.

My car is sick. Have I mentioned this? Possibly. It started making a funny noise, and then the check engine light came on. It went into the shop today, and the mechanic said not only did he not hear a noise, but when he drove it around a bit, the check engine light turned off. THERE WAS A NOISE. I am not a hypochondriac about my car. Okay, maybe a little bit, but seriously, it was whirring and clicking. Abnormally.

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I seem to have strained my eyes, or at least that’s what it feels like. For the last little while, any time I’m on the computer for more than an hour I get headaches and feel nauseated. I feel that way now, in fact, so there won’t be much more of this typing thing. It’s as good an excuse as any to go to bed—I’m a little behind on sleep.*

My point, I think, is that this is frustrating. It means I’ll have to start making blog-reading the LAST thing I do when I sit down at the computer, not the first, otherwise I’ll spend my hour or more without accomplishing anything. Sigh. My life is so hard.

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I expected to get my LSAT score back on Monday, but it came in today. On this test, you could miss one question and still get a 180. I missed both of the questions I thought I might miss, plus two more through mistakes I made—not careless mistakes, but mistakes nonetheless. My score was a 175.

On (what was, IMO) the hardest Logical Reasoning question on the test, I stared at it for a good minute, put down a plausible guess and circled it, then came back at the end of the section to stare at it for three or four minutes more. Just as time ran out, I got a flash of insight into the problem and furiously erased and rebubbled my answer.

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