e_o_i raze what determines where the short_name is employed as opposed to the long name, if you don't mind my asking? just curious. also, dig how you have your own personal blathe on red now, for at least one name. the next time someone says something on blatherskite_dreams, a link you shall become. "kerpow!" said the vocal cannon of verisimilitude. 131018 ... e_o_i Yay! I have a page! I feel blather_famous. Now if that's not a link you'll have to make a page for that too. It's a life_lesson: do one nice thing, and people will expect you to do more. Of course, you can always refuse. Like how Doctors Without Borders sent me a map of the world and asked me to give them more money, and I didn't. But I kept the map, because it has the now-independent European country of Montenegro. I wonder if it has North and South Sudan? ...It even does! Except North Sudan is just Sudan, which seems a little unfair. (If you find this a strange thing to be excited about, keep in mind that I have a cushion globe that still has the USSR on it. I like my countries up-to-date. Maps With Borders, Doctors Without. Anyway.) Ah yes. Question. Well, I like to call myself epitome of incomprehensibility the first time I write someplace, and then e_o_i thereafter because it's shorter. Although my computer has memory of these things, so I'm really just selecting from a drop-down menu once I type that first "e". And sometimes I'll be e_o_i if I'm writing something short. Or now, in honour of this page, and in mild self-reproach at my current verbosity. 131019 ... raze i think you should celebrate your verbosity! with verbal confetti. verbetti, even. don't dip into the verboten verbetti, though. that's risky business. 131020 ... raze surreal_sundays is a beautiful snapshot. you're right to feel strong in your syntax. 131022 ... e_o_i Thanks. Strength is a funny thing. I mean it's relative. I can lift myself through chin-ups, three to five at once, but I can't bench press a big bunch of weight: stats of 159 cm and 48 kg (to be metric) aren't on my side for that. What that episode seems to say is that I feel secure meeting strangers, or long-time friends. People I've met before but don't know that well? I'll embarrass myself, and then let ice-crusted oxygen tanks frighten me. No, that falls apart. Extracting the universal from the particular isn't my forte. It's like making soup, and I'm better at making salad. Besides, most of the people I saw at tonight's poetry reading fell between the stranger-friend dichotomy, and if I felt at all insecure I didn't notice it. Nervous about reading out loud, sure, but not insecure. 131022 ... raze happy one-year red blatherversary to thee! invisible cupcake time, i decree! a candle! a bright stripe-y candle on top! blow that thing out and…wish for some…pop. phooey. i ran out of steam at the end there. but i was strong coming out of the gate. 140321 ... e_o_i Hey thanks! I'd forgotten all about it. 140321 ... Toxic_Kisses EOI, You are not, to use your word, a bother. I am naturally socially inept as well as emotionally unstable. Although even more so as of late. Thus I have chosen (past tense, as in something that I decided before my previous encounter with you) to socially exile myself. Generally speaking, a good 30-40% of the time just by communicating in one way or another I tend to (unintentionally) negatively impact the person I’m speaking to, or even someone else entirely. This however seems to have escalated to quite a degree as of late, now it seem as within the last 2ish months that whenever I chose to express myself that a good 8 out of 10 times it will have a (/an extreme) negative outcome. Thus I choose a complete and total lack of communication whenever possible. However when not an option I try to compress what I have to express into as few words as possible to _hopefully_ negate any negative consequences. To do otherwise takes an inordinate amount of energy as well as time and tends to drain me to an extreme degree. Mainly bc I try to express myself in as concise a manner as possible and then view what I’ve written from all angles to avoid misunderstandings. It takes time to craft that and for me (someone who is naturally prone to misunderstandings and negative consequences (weather for myself and/or others)) an Excessive amount of effort and energy to do so. Add onto that that my emotional state seems to be careening to extremes from one moment to the next, well it’s a good thing I’ve had so much practice with silence dew to my ex over the years. Thus choosing to write (or for that matter post) something to blather while still more than half asleep is about as far from a good idea as I can get. Truly I should know better by now then to do something so frivolous. Regardless it is done. You however are not and never have been a bother. Side note: I actually quite enjoy reading the things you’ve written when I happen to stumble onto them. Mainly what I miss about blather (blue) is the vast beehive of activity. I could post something and it was Schrodinger's Cat. It felt like no matter what I posted or how much I posted it was hidden in the murky blue depths of blather among the many others who were posting. I was just one unnoticed patch among many in a calico quilt, which is what I prefer. On the rare occasions in which I was garnishing with (what I felt) too much attention and the disconcerting glare of the spot light shifted onto me I’d run away to red and hide here for a while until I felt It was safe to return to the comporting shadows of blue. In that atmosphere (blue) it felt like I could do the hoky-poky naked if I’d wanted to and it wouldn’t really be noticed bc of all the equally “crazy” antics other ppl were doing at the time. Being in blather was like riding a wave in the ocean, there were insane highs and incredibly depressing lows, and whether what I wrote was ever acknowledged was never the point. It usually was simply a feeling of release in to the void, like putting a letter in a bottle and throwing it out to sea. It was also nice to witness other ppl riding similar waves in their own lives, to know that whatever I was going through someone had already been there (and made it out the other side) or was currently going through something similar. There was a beautiful since of ~Alone Together~ when it came to blather. I will stabilize eventually, but even after that I may still choose to I chose to cease communication. As it is quite a bit of what I’m currently doing requires little to no communication what so ever, so thankfully it’s not like the lack of communication is something I’m having to put any kind of effort into. What I’m working on is none the less time consuming and I wish to keep my focus on this as appose to trying to communicate (the sooner I get it done, the sooner it will be done.). However ignoring what you had written me previously did not seem an option, or at very least not one I was willing to live with, granted I do fully agree I most defiantly could have gone about replying to you in a much better fashion, hopefully our next interaction will go more smoothly. 140617 ... TK Typo: garnishing remove the ING add an ED 140617 ... TK defiantly = definitely No doubt there are others, spell check can kiss my pretty ivory @ss. 140617 ... e_o_i I'm not mad, honest. It takes me a long time to write things like emails for a similar reason. I can spend half an hour on little things like answering a friend or writing to the government about a cheque that was sent to the wrong place (see "vote"). I worry too much that I'll say the wrong thing, or the wrong thing in the context, at least - and then I have the pessimist's comfort that I'll say something wrong anyway. But not necessarily pessimist. Portals_to_discovery. Still. Stuff that I write often - OFTEN - doesn't make the sense I want it to make. So for example I didn't mean to sound mad by putting stuff in brackets. I was just trying to find a compromise between answering and not answering, if that makes sense, because I know you didn't want people to make a big deal of you writing or not writing, but at the same time it'd seem like I was ignoring you entirely nothing, and I do really hope you're happy(ier) whether you write here or not. It's cool. See, what does that mean, "It's cool?" What's "it"? And why is it below room temperature? Is there a reason? 140618 ... raze did you know the first thing you ever wrote over on blue (at least as far as i can tell) was in july of 2005? well it was! i think. happy slightly belated nine year blatherversary, i say. 140731 ... e_o_i Huh. I was thinking I'd written here first in '04, but you may be right. I had a couple of temporary names... the Eowyn of dont_use_your_normal_name_in_this_blathe but not of "knickers," but that was '05 too, and why would I use an abnormal name if I didn't have a normal name already? 140731 ... e_o_i But, for example, since it came up on the recent page - from "math" - "Math is the sum, difference, product and quotient of all fears from here to infinity. Oh dear, I'm afraid I've been randomly looking through the movie review book and inventing terrible puns instead of studying. Oh well, I passed math anyway" - that was me having finished high school, not me looking forward to another grade. Is there something like emotional developmental delay? Because I sure don't sound like a 17-year-old there. I sound like I'm about 12. Anyway, thanks! Happy prime-numbered birthday sometime too! 140731 ... raze i don't know how i missed joke_splicing until just now, but it made me laugh for about fifteen different reasons, and in three different dialects. (is also trying to keep his dissonance, because there's never a mechanic around when a sharp becomes a flat.) 210723 ... e_o_i Aww, thanks! And I JUST got the flat tire pun. Took me a while. I need sleep. Buenos noches, gute Nacht! 210723 ... raze you know, when we wrote those two collaborative blathes way back when, i remember you thinking my contributions were more poetic than yours. i'm going to respectfully submit this loving bit of rebuttal half a decade after the fact: "there's a sunset behind everything that matters" is such a gorgeous and unexpected closing line, it made me tear up a little reading it again just now. 210926 ... e_o_i I don't know! For descriptive quality, you knock things out of the park. In a good way. Or knock things into the park that belong in the park. Or introduce unexpected things into the park, like an elephant with an easel that draws elegant spirals while a band plays Spanish waltzes on improvised guitars. But I'm self-satisfied enough to admit I also like that line! Sometimes, when I'm inspired by something - and the sunset along the Detroit River impressed me - I can get at it in an oblique way. Not always, but sometimes. And then there was the inspiration of having someone to write with! It felt like when Julia and I were teenagers, playing word association or making up impromptu songs while playing Tetris on her mom's old black_and_white computer. Improvising with a creative mind. That's what made me think like that. Because there isn't *literally* a sunset behind everything that matters, but it gets across a feeling of finding something beyond the obvious. Maybe. 210926 ... tender_square what’s in a name, she asks in her poem “literary illusion”: “sifting through a library of letters, my itinerary / leads me to the alchemy of thought and creativity.” her transformation embodies “a living, breathing paradox” and we are lucky enough to witness it here on blather in all its beauty and glory. (thank you for sharing your excellent chapbook, “songs of irrelevance,” with me, e_o_i! i’m blathing more about it under “what_are_you_reading.”) 211020 ... nr i met you! you have cool glasses! you bought me half a brownie! i took more cold pills! 211022 ... raze you two met each other?! hooray! hooray i say! i hope you had such a good time. 211022 ... e_o_i Thanks, tender_square! And nr, it was great seeing you last week! I wanted to say you have a great sense of style: for one, by coordinating clothes by theme as well as colour. And not just in fashion, but by being interested in a range of different arts and ways of exploring the world. Also, my apologies to people who emailed me recently and I haven't responded. Right now I have a lot of little things to do, which I'm clumsily trying to organize. When I start on writing something like an email - or a blathe - I tend to take a long time, so those things can be the first to go. Unless I'm really dedicated to avoiding something and writing or socializing happens to be my outlet. I'm trying...I'm trying... I started crying in class today over being mildly embarrassed, but only one person witnessed the crying bit, so I wasn't re-embarrassed, soda speak. Only in my mind. One midterm down, though! Two midterms and an essay proposal to go. 211025 ... e_o_i (I guess embarrassment is always in the mind. It's not like it's in the air or something. But anyway.) 211025 ... tender_square all the best on your midterms!!! 211025 ... nr that's all so kind of you to say, e_o_i! it's funny, i kind of did feel like putting together a "wordy" outfit that day (plus the new moto jacket i finally kept, after ordering a few that didn't quite work), but often, especially during the pandemic, i literally wear unbuttoned jeans and pyjama pant-like pants around my apartment. it was great spending time with you too, and super interesting hearing about your educational pursuits and family lineage. thanks for listening to my silly puns. and despite what David heard, i have nothing against Dutch people. :P hope you had a great time in this city, and good luck with the midterms. 211025 ... e_o_i I'll give you the benefit of the doubt! You're not like those other anti-Hollanders, who, upon learning I was 1/8th Dutch, started staring angrily at my left arm. But no, I don't remember what it was he misheard, except that it got weirdly integrated into a discussion of the potential overratedness of the film Punch Drunk Love (which I haven't seen, because I haven't seen anything. Only heard things.) By which I mean it was great to meet you! 211112 ... raze i just wanted to say that fun_with_automatic_transcription is so much fun, and it makes me happy every time i see you add something new to the growing collection of gems. 220125 ... e_o_i Oh, thanks! It's more selfish, more an impetus to get the thing done than anything. Unfortunately, the TA job takes up at least twice as long as it's supposed to, so I haven't had time to write a lot else here. Groucho Marx voice: I was too busy avoiding my other work, I haven't had time to avoid answering your letter yet. (Letter? I don't know. I;m tired.) 220125 ... raze we were both writing about ice pellets at the exact same time just now! i feel this moment deserves to be commemorated. i am holding up an imaginary banner that proclaims, "hail, hail the hail that unites us." 220330 ... epitome of incomprehensibility It has a perfectly scientific explanation! Your observation-to-writing time matches the seconds it takes single ice pellet to hurtle down from a cloud. Mine? The time it takes a flock of ice-laden clouds to lumber from Montreal to southern Ontario. 220331 ... raze okay, "the fertile burgundy ground of blather" is officially my favourite phrase (and mental image) of the moment. that's too good. 220507 ... e_o_i Thanks! It just popped into my mind that the red_blather background around the word box was close to brown, an earth colour, but when I focused on it, I thought "burgundy" was more accurate. 220508 ... raze as someone who used to get sick several times a year like (slightly faulty but unfortunately still reliable) clockwork, i feel your pain. i hope you feel better really soon. 230322 ... e_o_i Thanks! Yes, I'm feeling better today. No tiny unseasonable Christmas elves are pounding at my forehead from inside. 230323 ... Soma I feel foolish because today is the first day i realized you also have that longer name and here all this time i thought you were a separate person with a name indicative of someone just very fond of vowels. 231219 ... e_o_i No, that makes complete sense! It's easier to process an acronym when the letters are uppercase. I came up with "epitome of incomprehensibility" for a blathernym when I was 16. I kept it, but I try to use the shorter version for the 2nd or 3rd etc. time writing on a blathe. My browser gives me automatic suggestions for the "you" field, so it's not about typing time, more about how it can fit on one line. Sometimes the 2-line presentation of the longer name looks clunky. Aaaaaaaaaanyway. I like "Soma": nice and compact, allusive and/or elusive. 231220 what's it to you? who go blather from