Intermittently writing this between spates of shoveling out my inbox. Actually, "snowplowing" may be a better word.

Good satire makes you both laugh and think. Hofstadter wins on both counts with A Person Paper on Purity in Language.

They are both equally important and vital to the firm's success. No one disputes this. Beyond them there may of course be other firmly members. Now it's quite obvious that all members of a given firm should bear the same firmly name-otherwise, what are you going to call the firm's products? And since it would be nonsense for the boss to change whis name, it falls to the secretary to change bler name. Logic, not racism, dictates this simple convention.

Yesterday, at my regular "RSI is Bad!" massage therapy appointment:

"You said you increased your typing a lot the last two weeks."
"Yeah. It seems okay, just... being preventative, you know?"
"I had to do a lot of surface work [on your forearms] to warm them up to do the deep work. They're very..."
"But boy, they feel less like rock now!"
"...rock would be a good description."

I left with slightly sore (but much happier and looser) arms and instructions to not type that night while muscles were further unwinding. Consequently I have about 40 pages of handwritten notes to transcribe tonight, and more motivation to find a microphone that'll work with Dragon Naturally Speaking. (For the record, I am incredibly saddened that I have to use Windows for this. That's basically all my Windows box does. Alas, Linux + Wine + Dragon = nonfunctionality... were there some concrete contribution within my means that I could make to ensure this situation would be changed, I'd do it, but I don't have the bandwidth or the interest to rocket down that path myself right now.)

I'm actually pretty proud of how I'm managing my (more or less "in remission"? I'm not sure what the right term here is) RSI right now. I'm not managing it perfectly, but I'm learning well, and little glitches are getting recognized and worked out. I'm even pacing myself... part of me misses being 14 and able to wantonly abuse an incredible capacity to heal. In high school, 2 all-nighters a week and work-marathons that completely precluded sleep, food, and reasonable posture for 2-3 days at a time were normal. I once broke an unintentional multi-day project-induced fast by downing two mega-packs of Kit-Kat bars and a 2-liter bottle of Mountain Dew before an open mic night where I was performing. Ok, I was slightly hyperactive with a mildly elevated heart rate, but otherwise fine for the evening, and slept it off in 10 or so hours later that night. I can't do this kind of thing any more*. Either that, or I'm becoming more sensitive to the damage that they've always caused.

I now need decent keyboards, typing breaks, at least 3 hours a sleep a night, and food every 36 hours to function at peak alertness; allnighters drag me down a bit. I've also noticed that what I eat affects how I function, and no longer down mega-packs of cheap candy or try food experiments like The All-Ramen Diet (which was a total culinary failure; I lasted slightly less than two weeks before deciding that things like Taste and Nutrition were worth paying more than 30 cents per day for food and switched to getting "this chicken is cheap because it expires tomorrow" and similar items from the grocery across the street). I did some idiotic things when I lived on my own for the first time in my early teens, but it at least prevents me from doing the same idiotic things now that I'm older. At least that's what I tell myself.

Explaining rickrolling and All Your Base to members of my parents' generation makes me re-realize how... arbitrary these things are. They're secret handshakes that signal your "in" status in the Ranks of The Connected. (And okay, they're a bit amusing, but really.) Fortunately, I think we're self-aware enough to simultaneously look at these sorts of things with wry detachment and recognize how silly we're being.

Got my first bossa nova piece from Kevin today. I have acquired the habit of cocking my head to one side (the right side) when I hear a new sound, see a new fingering, or understand a relationship between notes that I hadn't previously grokked, and I did that today midway through Meditations when I realized with glee that my work with diminshed chords had actually paid off. On top of that, the Aebersold book I've been waiting 3 weeks for finally arrived at the Berklee bookstore, so now I have play-along tracks for things like Summertime and Watermelon Man (and those tracks have been given a decent working-through already). It's been a good week for music.

The "Red Hat Is A Firehose" learning experience continues. Boy, does it! The deep end of the ocean is the bestest* place to swim.

*I want this to be a real word, so I use it as such. I often wantonly ignore my ex-grammar-nazi/former-newspaper-editor-in-chief tendencies in the name of Having Fun With Language Stuffs.**

**see?