Roy Huggins Says Stuff

Have you ever wondered what happens if you stick your hand in the path a running ceiling fan? I know I often have. It’s one of the morbid fascinations I’ve secretly harbored and have never had any interest in testing.

The answer: nothing much. Maybe a few bruises. *phew*

When small birds, like brownbirds, hop around on the ground, they are so very cute.

Larger birds, like ravens, are not.

I realized today that I haven’t listened to Poe in something like 3 years. That was a severe oversight. I really like Poe and am happily listening to Hello right now.

It occurred to me before that she must have a history of abusive boyfriends — or at least one really bad one. But now, 3 years later, I can realize it in that counselor-y¹ way.

A lot of things sound different than they did 3 years ago, in fact.

1. I find myself wanting to hand the lyrics from Trigger Happy Jack (”You can’t talk to a psycho like a normal human being”) to some of my clients [↩]

Some interesting facts about Sapporo, Japan:

1. It’s cold. Cold is not hot, unlike the rest of Japan.
2. It has an extensive and useful system of mass transit.
3. They make beer there!
4. The City of Sapporo is 60% forest.
5. My wife will be stationed there next year with the JET program.
6. I will be, too!
7. Yay!!!!

Yay!!!!

I’ve been thinking about the ways people behave around apologies. Sometimes folks don’t really know how to express themselves well when an “I’m sorry” situation arises.

Consider the following scenario:

Sam and Sally are housemates. Sally really loves curry. Suffice to say that there is a convincing reason to treat Sally’s curry as sacred.

Sally leaves her leftover curry in the fridge one night. Sam comes home after an evening of heavy drinking, finds the curry, and scarfs it.

The next morning, Sally opens the fridge and is furious. She doesn’t say anything, though, because her general approach to conflict is to be passive-aggressive. Sam wakes up (several hours) later and comes into the kitchen, opens the fridge, and realizes with a smack to the forehead that he ate Sally’s curry and she’s going to be very unhappy about that.

Sam goes to his silently fuming housemate and apologizes. What is Sally’s response?

“It’s okay,” she says.

This doesn’t sound right to me.

Yes, Sam is doing good by noting that he has wronged his housemate and taking the initiative to apologize. However, that doesn’t make the original act “okay.” It may repair the rift in his relationship with Sally and allow them to move forward without hard feelings, but simply declaring everything to be “okay” is sweeping it under the rug. It certainly doesn’t do anything to help Sam understand how much he has hurt his roommate.

I think I don’t like the phrase “It’s okay” as a response to apologies unless it really is okay. The phrase should be reserved for moments when someone is apologizing unnecessarily — like if they accidentally bump into you.

In the scenario above, it seems that Sally would get more mileage out of saying something like “Thank you for apologizing, it makes me feel better about this whole thing.” That way she smooths over the problem between her and Sam but without creating the impression that Sam’s behavior wasn’t actually hurtful.

It is my observation that insects in general, and flies in particular, find no problems in the fact that they are icky.

This is why they must be stopped.

The best part of cel phone ubiquity is that, by simply waiting on the bus for long enough, we can occasionally be privy to the deepest cuts of lovers’ spats.

There exists, in the world of school counseling, an achievement test called the Woodcock Johnson¹.

No, really.

I was just reminded of it recently when I was studying for the National Certification Exam for counselors. When I first learned of it in the big testing class we took, the professor didn’t understand why we were giggling.

Does that say something about him or us?

1. And yes, it is given to teenagers at school. [↩]

So I just installed Wordpress here, replacing my old professional website with a good ol’ basic blog.

For you few non-Webbies who may be reading this, what I mean to say is “Techy-tech-tech talk”.

For the rest of you: Wordpress has a neat feature in its Dashboard admin page that gives you a direct feed of all your site’s incoming links as recorded by Technorati. When I opened it up for the first time, I found to my delighted surprise that a bunch of different people have been linking to this site for as long as 400 days or more. That’s right, 400 whole days!

Turns out they’ve all got one of my old Blog Your Own Adventure promotional quiz memes still sitting in their archives. And guess what, they all liked it! I really should have been looking at Technorati a year ago. I might have spent more time working to improve BYOA.

So it got me thinking… maybe if I can build up BYOA, I can be bought out by Google! Google has yet to acquire a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style collaborative storytelling system, right? Wouldn’t they want one that even works with the “Blogosphere”!? I know I would if I were Google. I’d be on that like porn on YouTube. Or trolls on Daily Kos. Or something else on some other site that it’d be useful to associate myself with.

But no big, important company is going to initiate a buyout of someone who doesn’t look serious. And what do you need to look serious? A business plan, of course.

So here I am officially posting my business plan for the Blog Your Own Adventure Web 2.0 Enterprise Blogosphere Synergy Project:

1. Build BYOA
2. Wait Around
3. Get Bought by Google!

It’s a twist on the old Web 1.0 business plan template. And that template is proven to work. Therefore, my business plan has a solid, empirical basis. It can’t go wrong.

Right, Google? Yep, I thought so.