I definitely find this to be true:

People are sometimes surprised at how quickly they adapt to the habit of carrying a notebook--they really start relying on it and very much notice (and curse) the times when there's no paper around to capture an idea or a reminder. I think that, after a week or two, your mind sort of loosens up since you know there's always something there to catch thoughts while they're fresh.

I don't necessarily write very much down while I'm out and about, but if I don't have a small notebook and pen with me, I seem to become obsessed with the fact that I might forget something, so I start making lists in my head, which occupies my brain and keeps me from having creative or otherwise interesting thoughts, I think. Just knowing that I have the ability to write things down frees up my brain to do other, less prosaic things.

Jeremy Wagstaff's LOOSE wire: The Moleskine Report, Part IV

I'd say this is one store that you do not want to try to tob: CNN.com - Country store becomes shootout site - Jan 26, 2005

I've been enjoying reading several weblogs about "going analog," i.e., losing the handheld and going back to paper. Well, actually what I've been doing is bookmarking them -- I haven't read most of them yet because I kind of want to savor them.

I'm so drawn to blank books of all kinds that I quite often buy a small one that I love, but I very seldom use them anymore, because the handheld (in my case, a Handspring Visor Prism) is so much more convenient and can hold so much more information. It works for me, at least right now, but I still do feel the allure of writing things down on actual paper.

I was just reading this in 43 Folders, home of the Hipster PDA, basically a stack of different-colored index cards held togther with a binder clip:

Although this appears to be marketed at students for storing CDs in a school locker, it also works great for storing, organizing, and transporting index cards. Just yesterday, I was talking with a woman who wished it were easier to truck her cards between home and work without a lot of hassle. This might be one way to do that.

Doesn't that kind of defeat the purpose? If you've accumulated such a large stack of index cards that you need to cart them around between home and work in some kind of folder organizer, doesn't that indicate that you've gone past the point where they work for you? I can see the value in paring down, and in carrying a dozen or so cards for notes with a rubber band around them or a binder clip, but if I was having to devise things like this CD carrier to tote them around, I'm pretty sure I would be tempted to go back to my PDA.

More on this later (I want to collect the links, because while I don't think I'm ever going to back to paper exclusively, I do find it interesting. Office supply porn. :)

Using a kids' CD filer for organizing index cards

Girls Gone Feral, the companion cassette to Girls Gone Wild, features women who've abandoned civilization for a life of degraded uncertainty in the Alaskan wilderness, sleeping in fresh malamute carcasses, eating dung, and howling infernal discourses that even Professor Chomsky might concede have no human precedent. In the second and third volumes, the Girls steal firearms from a kindly unsuspecting trapper on location for a Disney film about a personable anteater on its long journey back to Africa. This allows them to move from dung to an elk diet.

Timothy McSweeney's Worldwide Fondness: Letters

Just when you think society can't stoop any lower, you get something like this:

"Everyone needs a moantone," says Ms. Jameson. "And we'll provide them in the universal language of sexy sighs recognized around the world but with our own personal touch. The technology is way beyond most of us, but the bottom line is that you'll able to hear the other Jenna's Web Girls moan and me when your phone starts to ring. We'll also provide audio content in Spanish plus photos and text features."

Adult Industry Invading Cellphones : Software : MobileMag

Link via Boing Boing

I will write about this subject in the journal tonight (this by way of reminding myself and giving myself the push to do so):

For many years I have been possessed with a strange panic every time I leave the house. It works like this, upon my return from an outing, (usually after at least a few hours or so, worse if I have left for days or weeks), I am convinced that I will return to find my house gone. Burnt to the ground. Or that one of my cats is dead. Something horrible, it doesn't really matter which. It always starts a few miles from my house. I am aware that these thoughts are probably irrational and not to my benefit, but they persist.

wish jar journal

New one up at the journal.

Even though I try to be very diligent about remembering birthdays (especially) and anniversaries, I don't generally pay attention to the exact days that things (particularly bad things) happened. I know that there are people who do, and I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with it, I think I just have so many things in my head at one time that there isn't room for everything.

more

Interesting quote from Richard Buckner:

"There have been a lot of points in my career when I probably should have stopped for a while and gotten some kind of a real job, but you just keep going," Buckner says gruffly early in the morning after a late show in Cleveland. "Whatever you're left with sometimes should probably be just what you should have."

The Independent Weekly: Richard Buckner

Something about going in there and walking out with that cardboard-ringed grande in my hand... it makes me happy. Is it the packaging? Is it the satisifaction I receive from giving myself a treat? Do I deserve a break today? Am I crazy? Could be, could be.

I don't drink coffee, but I do drink tea. Chai tea latte, to be specific. And that makes me happy.

HYD.

Link from Mr. Ointy

The way I see it, the whole point of a signing is to be able to say hello to the people who buy the books, and for them to say hello to you, and for them to know that you picked up that book and scribbled something illegible on it. (In my case, I doubt there are any two signatures exactly the same.)

Not that signing a book is anything like being kissed (unless of course, you are), but the Atwood Patented Booksigner seems to make as much sense and promise to be as much fun, as a machine that would kiss you on the cheek, thus reproducing a kiss on the cheek from a celebrity you fancy, who's a thousand miles away kissing a screen, which then issues you with a slip of paper informing you that you had just been kissed by the person in question, for, as Ms Atwood puts it, posterity.

I'd rather just not be kissed than walk away with my 'You were just AutoKissed by...' slip, just as I'd rather not go on a signing tour than use an Atwood machine. In my opinion it's something that should be personal, intimate, faintly silly and include all the spelling mistakes, the illegible bits and the ink-blots. (Signing that is. Not kissing. Unless you'rethe sort of kisser who produces ink blots.)

Neil Gaiman

Great article about sleep: Circadiana: Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sleep (But Were Too Afraid To Ask).

Until not long ago, just about until electricity became ubiquitous, humans used to have a sleep pattern quite different from what we consider "normal" today. At dusk you go to sleep, at some point in the middle of the night you wake up for an hour or two, then fall asleep again until dawn. Thus there are two events of falling asleep and two events of waking up every night (plus, perhaps, a short nap in the afternoon). As indigenous people today, as well as people in non-electrified rural areas of the world, still follow this pattern, it is likely that our ancestors did, too.

When left to my own devices, i.e., during periods when I've been unemployed and didn't have to get up in the morning to get to work, my natural rhythm follows this pattern. I would get sleepy and go to bed for a "nap" in the early evening, say 7:00, sleep three or four hours, then get up for a few hours, then go back to bed for a second shift. A nap in mid-afternoon wouldn't be unheard of, either.

Everyone doesn't have the same natural sleeping pattern, yet most of the world is forced into the same one for purposes of industry. Which is understandable, of course, but difficult for people who don't fit into the (artificial) norm.

I can adapt pretty easily, it's just not my natural state. I love it when I'm able to do it, but not at the risk of my job, of course.

Link from Boing Boing.

This is an old post, but I enjoyed reading it this morning, because I think he makes some very valid points. I think in our current culture, gay men are stereotyped, and the "mainstream," i.e., straight, people don't even realize it. The limp-wristed, lisping, interior decorating gay man has become the icon, and it's ridiculous and, I'm sure, not true, or at least not universally true. Like the butch, crewcut, stocky lesbian woman -- it's obviously not the universal norm, but a stereotype.

Anyway, I thought it was interesting. It fed off a current post from the same author about the movie "Alexander."

We started off as godless, sex-obsessed, dirty monsters and we fought and we've rebelled. And now instead we're god-loving, relationship-focused, kitchen-cleaning princes among men who like little dog, Versace and television where 'we' get to patronise people. Our 'positive' image has already been reincorporated and recontextualised and reconsidered and represented. The tremendous variety of gay male experience - from the most delicate to the most brutal, from the most elegant to the most fierce, from the most diplomatic to the most battle-ready, even from the most tacky to the most trivially crass - all of it is reduced down to the image of gay men as a fussy little child - who plays at 'houses', plays at 'cooking', plays at 'being a man', plays at life.

plasticbag.org | weblog | On pets...

There are a few new entries up at the journal, including the latest one, Restless, in which I discuss Jimmy Buffett, Native American history, and bariatric surgery, plus ice storms, curious cats, and the fact that I like wearing underwear.

Running across this made me laugh:

She's so snuggly that this afternoon I went all Willa, trying to type on the computer with one hand so I could continue to pet the sweet kitty on my lap. I finally gave up trying to work and read some journals for a while.

And another thing . . .