SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 22-Dec. 21): Sagittarian Janos Bolyai was
born in Transylvania in 1802. By age 20 he was an
accomplished violinist, mathematical prodigy, skilled linguist,
and the best swordsman and dancer in the Austrian Imperial
army. At that time, he wrote a 26-page paper that was tacked on
as an appendix to a long mathematical textbook penned by his
father. Janos' contribution turned out to be revolutionary. Long
after his dad's tome was forgotten, his short treatise helped lay
the foundations for a complete system of non-Euclidian
geometry. I'd like to make him your patron saint for the next six
weeks. I believe that you, too, are primed to spawn a pithy
creation that will not at first receive due credit; you, too, will
establish a landmark that'll turn out to be more influential than
what seems important now.
~ Free Will Astrology
I was sitting my office this afternoon working; I'd put on headphones and was trying to
drown out sports talk radio coming from one of the offices at the end of the hall (I
generally don't mind working with all men, but there are disadvantages).
I kept hearing a chiming sound underneath the music, like wind chimes. The windows in
the office were open, but there are no windows in my office, and since I was hot, I
had an electric fan running. I kept lifting the headphones off my ears, but couldn't tell
where the chiming was coming from. I finally figured out that the fan was blowing the
windchimes in my office--they usually hang in the window, but I'd taken them down in
order to hang up a Halloween bat, and I'd hung them on a peg on the wall.
The fan was blowing them just enough to get them moving slightly--it would take a few
minutes for them to work up enough momentum to actually chime, and by the time
I'd turned my head, they would have stopped.
For some reason, it just struck me as a delightful thing--I kept hearing this beautiful
noise in the distance, kept looking for it, and finally realized that it was right over
my own shoulder all the time.
I'm thinking about taking a break from Mood Swings for awhile. I find myself reading
online news and other weblogs solely for the purpose of looking for something to post,
and that can't be good. And I feel guilty when I go a day or two without posting anything.
I think it's time to step back from it for awhile, maybe for good. We'll see.
Anyway, it got me thinking about how much things have changed since I first got on the
web. I remember the first websites that people built--they would make a page, put up
their resume, their favorite links, and a couple of paragraphs about themselves, and
never change it again for years. That was normal then.
Now we apologize for not updating a site for two days, and people write and complain
about the lack of updates (not to me, but I'm referring to a lot of the Sims sites I've
been visiting lately, where the people who make objects have shut down their sites in
frustration because they're constantly being harassed by visitors who believe they
aren't working fast enough, aren't producing enough free stuff to download).
Journalers and webloggers feel guilty when we don't post something every day. I remember
evenings sitting at the computer trying desperately to think of something to write about,
because I knew there were people out there waiting to read it, and I couldn't face
disappointing them. I finally allowed myself to back away from that a little bit, to
give myself a little breathing room, and now if I only write two or three days a week,
or less, that's okay. If I go much longer than that, people do write, but it's
usually to see if I'm okay . . .
I just thought it was interesting, and certainly just a reflection of the evolution of
the web.
I've decided to start working on the novel again. It's been almost a year since I put
it down; I didn't think I could work on it again, but I was looking over some of my
notes, and got excited about it again. November is NaNoWriMo
month, of course. I don't think I'll do that--too much pressure that I don't need--but it
did get me thinking about it. Although, who knows? I might. I've got a couple of weeks
to think about it.
