Monthly Archives: February 2013

The hardest part…

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With much respect for Tom Petty, I have to tell you that I don’t necessarily agree with his conclusion that the waiting is the hardest part. As far as I can tell from personal experience, it’s the writing that regularly threatens to knock your teeth down your throat and beat you into a bloody pulp of submission… But hey, maybe that’s just my perspective.

PressDoing a day’s work with your brain is exhausting. It’s naturally a different kind of exhausting than baling hay or digging a ditch, but it’s still an activity that will leave you mentally spent at the end of the day. Normally, I’d recommend making sure to take the time to mentally recharge, rest, recreate, and relax, but when you’re in sight of the end, the only thing your exhausted brain wants to do is keep pushing ahead. Even with your eyes glazed over, your brain wants to drag you across the finish line. Or at least across the first of several finish lines you need to get past.

I realize the last two paragraphs probably read like gibberish. In this one instance, I’m going to be OK with that. You see, I’m two chapters away from being able to call what I’ve been madly typing away at for months a First Draft instead of just another Work in Progress. Trust me, that’s an important distinction if only to the guy behind the keyboard. It means that in maybe a week or two the first draft will get its first full length read through, polishing will start, and then it will make its way to several people who have graciously agreed to read a first draft that’s sure to be full of grammar, punctuation, usage, style, and myriad other problems. Then it’s more polishing, revision, cover design, formatting for e-publication, polishing, developing sales descriptions, publication, figuring out how to leverage jeffreytharp.com to sell ebooks on Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and trying to wrap my head around whether it’s worth putting a book of snarky observations into a dead tree edition.

Two thousand or so words now stand between me and where I want to be. This isn’t the end. It’s not even the beginning of the end… but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Dead space…

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I feel about federal holidays like some women seem to feel about shoes; I love them and can never, never get enough. As much as I love President’s Day for being one of the days I can sit back with my feet up and enjoy not doing a damned thing. Nothing in life is free, of course, and that means taking the bad with the good. In this case, the bad is that President’s Day is the last holiday between now and the end of May. Call me crazy but the months just seem to go better when you have a impending long weekend to look forward to every few weeks. Having one 90-odd days off into the future doesn’t have the same motivational effect. No one has ever accused me of being a big fan of delayed gratification.

Sure, be happy you have a job, not everyone even gets federal holidays, blah, blah, blah. All of those things may be true, but the only thing I see stretching out in front of me between here and May 27th is dead space. Well, dead space and as-yet-unscheduled days of annual leave, but mostly dead space. And please, don’t get me started on how it’s possible that it’s the middle of February already. I’m pretty sure time has been set to march past at the double quick. First world problems, to be sure, but since I live in the first world, I just think of them as the regular kind of problems.

Hippies, sickness, and grad school…

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OK, so I’m not going to lie to you guys. I got a good laugh out of at least two of this morning’s archive posts. There’s something about hippies that always makes me want to bash heads together and grad school, well, that experience so very often has the same effect. Still, they make for good blogging so I should probably be thankful.

For those following along at home, over the last few Sunday mornings we have made the transition from my original MySpace blog to the far more “grown up” blog hosted for a while over at Blogger. That doesn’t really change much in terms of style or content, but it does help set the tone and atmosphere of where these old posts come from.

At any rate, go ahead and enjoy this morning’s update from the end of March 2007. Next week we’ll start into April and feature blogs from my last trip to Italy. I know you’re not going to want to miss that… because frankly there isn’t much that makes for better copy than an American in in a foreign country.

Time of day…

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I love this time of day – The few hours before the rest of the world wakes up, finds the caffeine, and starts moving again. The hours when it’s quiet, when the dogs, still groggy, are happy to nap at my feet, and George is satisfied with basking on his rock under his own miniature sun. It’s a few brief moments of time that seem to work well before the day has a chance to jerk things around too much. Anyway, my only point is that I really do enjoy these weekend mornings. Of course I enjoy the weekday mornings too, but since they’re so quickly interrupted by pulling into the parking lot and putting on my “professional” face, they don’t really get to count.

It’s President’s Day weekend. That doesn’t mean much unless you work for Uncle Sam or a bank, but for me, it means the last scheduled three day weekend between now and the end of May. As tragic as that is, for the first time in a long time, I think I’m making every minute of it count. Starting it off with plenty of coffee, a little bit of writing, and a big dopey grin seems to be like a good place to start. Yeah. I love this time of day.

Making empties…

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I wish I had one of those USB port in the back of your head kind if get ups that Neo had in The Matrix. If I did, I’m pretty sure the first thing I’d do is download some semblance of patience. I’ve already spent too much time here talking about basically having none of it to speak of so this won’t be a long rant. It’s not like I’m asking for infinite patience, just a little. Enough to keep me from cleaning out the fridge while I’m waiting for the weekend to start. Then again maybe the best thing to do is turn a few of those full bottles into empties and actually try to relax.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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What Annoys Jeff this Week?

It hasn’t been an awful week. Tomorrow is Friday and I’m looking forward to an outstanding three day weekend and even better company. So there’s your silver cloud, now it’s time for the lead lining:

1. Command Decisions. Maybe I shouldn’t complain about the sheet of ice that covered the parking lots and roads at work this morning. The nuckleheads who piled up or ran down into a ravine trying to get to the gate are the ones who have a real gripe. Since all I did was twist the hell out of my back trying to keep my footing when I got out of the truck, I guess I got off easy. Since I didn’t have any trouble on the county roads getting to work, this might just be a case of the better part of valor being the powers that be saying “yeah, we didn’t get a head start on this one, go ahead and delay arrival by an hour.” By then that fine coating of ice would have been melted and a whole lot of property damage and more than a few personal injuries could have been avoided. Seems like it would have been a no brainer.

2. Books. Now that every DVD and CD I own are safely stored and backed up to disk, I’m starting to eye the one last bastion of physical media in the house… The bookshelves that take up an entire wall of my home office. They’re stacked to overflowing with dead tree editions of every book I’ve read over the last 20-odd years. A handful of them, certainly under a hundred titles, have some significant meaning to me and I’d keep the paper copy regardless. For the rest, though, it would be awfully nice to file them away as an ebook to have on hand “just in case” I ever need some factoids about the 1890s oyster harvest in New York Harbor for instance. Sadly, there is apparently no easy or cost effective way to get from paper to electrons in any kind of large volume without taking inordinate amounts of time. As long as it’s cheaper to buy everything over again as a new ebook than it is to copy what I’ve got already, the paper products won’t be flying off the shelves around her.

I usually shoot for three, but like I said, it hasn’t been an awful week. Check back tomorrow, though, because it’s Friday and something is sure to fly off the hinges 30 minutes before quitting time

Three zeroes and a birthday…

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Let me say that it’s a big week for me personally and that as a result I’m about to geek out on you guys a little bit. Today marks the 3rd birthday of jeffreytharp.com and running this blog as an independent website. After spending my formative years blogging on MySpace a short stint on Blogger, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed having a permanent place to hang my virtual hat. Having the name right there as the web 1000 Postsaddress means you’d damn well better be willing to be accountable for whatever comes flying out of your mouth. Even though it’s occasionally caused some friction, it’s made be a better blogger and a better writer in general. It’s absolutely worth it.

In addition to marking a birthday, this week also saw my 1000th post go live. Since there is still more good stuff coming from the archives every Sunday, I look for that total to keep going by leaps and bounds. All my old blog posts from MySpace are now available here and I’m working my way through the Blogger years every Sunday. I’m really looking forward to finally having all my posts under one electronic roof sometime in the next four or five months.

Finally, thanks to everyone for keeping up with me from June 29, 2006 to today. I know the “about” section claims that I don’t write for an audience, but we all know differently. No one throws this much life and opinion into the ether if they don’t secretly enjoy being the center of attention from time to time. I supposed that’s not really much of a secret anyway.

19,526 visits, 1,003 posts, 314 comments, and 59 countries over the last 1,095 days. For one sane voice in the wilderness, that’s a pretty respectable record.

State of the Dis-Union…

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There’s a formula to the State of the Union Address. After thanking the Speaker and the Vice President and maybe saying a few other passing remarks, President Obama is going to be “please to tell you that the state of the Union is strong.” It’s a powerful turn of phrase that’s been uttered in one form or another at every State of the Union Address that I remember hearing in the last 34 years… Which is exactly the problem.

Anyone with a set of eyes in their head can see that the state of the Union is not strong. There are two Americas with an ever-widening chasm between them. It’s not a division between black and white, or north and south, or even of wealth and poverty. It’s a division between right and wrong, of good people caught up in visceral disagreement about the fundamentals of what it means to be a part of this American experience. We’re divided by partisanship and by politics and by the very idea of what we expectSeal government to be and to do. It’s an existential question about the role we collectively expect government to play in shaping our lives and our actions. And everyone thinks their version of right is the only version of right. Our Union is not strong.

There is nowhere in time or space that I would rather be than America in the 21st century. Our generation is the one that can stand in the gap. The one that stands poised on the edge of something better or something far worse. The future doesn’t just happen because someone hands it to us well formed and happy. It has to be forged by real people doing the hard work of governing, of business, of and education. Those ideas don’t fight nicely into five second sound bites, though.

I’d give real money if the president showed up before Congress in a few hours and said simply, “My fellow Americans, the state of our Union is troubled.” But I’m not holding my breath.

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Lifetime appointment…

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Aside from the celibacy thing, I’ve always thought being Pope would be a pretty good gig. You get to live in one of the world’s best and largest museums, you’re the absolute monarch of your own sovereign country, your personal bodyguard has those snappy uniforms, you’re head of the only organization I can think of that dates back to the time when a Caesar ruled the known world, and about a billion people go along (more or less) with whatever you tell them because you theoretically speak with the voice of God.Slide1 Let’s be real honest, even for a non-practicing Protestant like me, that sounds like a pretty sweet job. Plus, it’s a lifetime appointment, so it’s not like you’ve got some wackadoodle member of a House of Representatives running around trying to impeach you.

I’m not making light of Pope Benedict’s decision to resign. I think it shows a remarkable degree of self discipline to walk away from the kind of temporal authority that goes along with the fancy hats and armored thrones of his office. The guy was basically elected king at 78 – an age by which I plan to be either retired for over a decade, dead, or possibly both. By 85, I don’t think I can fault him for wanting a little down time before going off for a more personal and very final introduction to his maker.

Of course there’s more to the story than has come out in the media. Over two millennia the Catholic Church has gotten very skilled at guarding its secrets, so we may or may not ever really know what was going on inside the Vatican when the decision was made. I guess one of the perks of being the Bishop of Rome and Successor of Peter is you really don’t have to justify yourself to anyone.

If the princes of the church are looking for an unorthodox candidate, I’m happy to throw my hat, as it were, in the ring. My Latin is a little rusty, but pope-ing it seems like good work if you can get it.

And then there was March (2007)…

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Moving right along with cleaning up the archive and making this place look respectable, we’ve finally stumbled into the old blog posts from March 2007. From everything I can gather, I was spending alot of time in airports shuttling back and forth between the nation’s capital and west Tennessee. Then again, that could have been just about any point in a five year period, so that doesn’t really narrow it down all that much. Regardless, it’s still an interesting read.

If you’re curious about what’s on tap for next week, it looks like hippies, TSA, grad school, and a sprinkling of other “areas of interest”. You know, pretty much the usual.