Blogging vs internship

Blogging - sheesh!  Who knew it would be such hard work?

Actually it's not hard work, I just never seem to get around to it.  Which is annoying because working nights is fertile ground for a blog such as mine.  There is no end of bizarre stuff that happens in hospitals after hours, and as the cover intern it falls to you to deal with it.  At least two or three times per day I think to myself, "Now this is prime stuff, PTR, don't forget it!"

But of course, by 4 in the morning when it starts to quieten down a bit, the last thing on my mind is to jump on a computer and do some blogging.  I just want to curl up on the couch with my seven vegemite sandwiches and read mindless pulp sci-fi whilst crooning softly to myself.

The weeks off are no easier.  The Hatchling is at a great age where she's learning new stuff minute by minute, she's heaps of fun to do stuff with, she careens around like a pinball bouncing off everything, and by the end of the day I just want to curl up on the couch with my sixty-three cheese sandwiches and read back issues of wargaming magazines whilst breathing through alternate nostrils.

Blogging just never seems to get a look in.  Which is a shame, because I keep having ideas.  Just yesterday, I thought, "Hey - what if you were to rewrite the plots of famours adventure movies but set them in hospitals instead???"  And sure, that's a stupid idea, but in the past I would have actually done it.  But now I just dwell on it briefly and then fall asleep on my toothbrush.

Internship - sheesh!  Who knew it would be such hard work?

Apocrypha

I usually have a small notepad secreted somewhere about my person where I jot down phone numbers, book references, interesting quotes, and other things that I am otherwise liable to quickly forget.  Scattered throughout the book will be little seeds of ideas for things to post about here.  About half the time I follow up on it.  About half the rest of the time I'll decide the idea is a dud.  Very occasionally I'll decide that an idea is good but would be more effort to complete than I'm prepared to give.  And the rest of the time I find the note at some later date and think to myself, "What the hell is that supposed to mean?  I must have been smoking crack."

Sometimes I can look at a note and clearly remember the circumstances under which I wrote it - just not what the note actually signifies.  Sometimes a note makes me think of something quite definite - but I'm pretty sure it's not what I meant myself to think of when I wrote it.  Sometimes a note is truly mysterious - it's in my hand but I have no memory of it at all.

Here's a collection of extinct blog prompts from the last couple of years.  It resembles the ravings of a madman, so I've chosen to arrange it visually to resemble poetry - the poetry of driftwood and lost balloons and old photos. 

Muntries
Sealink!

favourite bowl

Thar she blows!

character "in" a book - from? of?

Greatest American Hero

Wolf Creek Cafe
Calendars and other people's dogs
egogram

Kit fox

itch! actual ants!

glasses with bizarre sideboards

Shadow puppet - doctor?

Sad second-hand stores

HOTKEYS = NERDS

CREATION - FRANKENSTEIN

David Bowie over 20 years

Body dysmorphic effect vs re-reading own writing

aqueous humour - watery joke?

visualizing blood vessels!

eating vs studying - good-bad or bad-good

gold injections!

stress reduction kit

only girls and Italians cook

presentation - ongoing fear

who wants a ride up?

SHOP ANGRY

tuning fork

BKA v DKA

chopping veggies - not dice!/cubed! chinese style

on screws

book cover/binder

concentrate on not reading things

awards for med school

a blob for you

psychic expo

smelling like chicken

towel - bee - cold - A-delta - alfalfa

lostradio - insulting people, standing in dog shit

Colonel Light's laser powers!
evil genius of Pat Rafter accumulating sinisterness
What's next?

Maslow's hierarchy of blogging

1. Naming.  When finally committing to starting a new blog, a blogger needs to find a unique name for his blog which at once indicates his depth of thought as well as his insouciant whimsicality toward the whole thing.  He also needs an online handle which will fulfill the same needs for him.
2. Posts.  Now that she has a blog name and a handle, the blogger actually needs to post something.  She feels fulfilled by coming up with an idea and writing something observant or clever which is long enough to be worth reading but not so long as to not be worth reading.
3. Comments.  Once fulfilled by his ability to generate posts on a semi-regular basis the blogger is driven by his insatiable need for comments.  He will seek them out by asking questions in his posts, leaving comments on other blogs to lure readers to his blog, and casually mentioning the fact that he has a blog that people leave comments on to acquaintances.  He will check his blog dozens of times each day to see if there are any new comments.
4. Subscribers.  Comments are eventually taken for granted as merely the blogger's due return for her efforts.  What she really wants now are subscribers, a.k.a. followers.  She wants a little band of imaginary friends who owe her fealty and might perhaps, in the event of some kind of internet war, be drafted into her private army to fight for her.  She imagines that they check her blog dozens of times each day to see if there are any new posts.
5. Notoriety.  The blogger has now gathered his disciples but what he wants is fame.  He'd like, for example, for his blog to be mentioned in another blog, or in a newspaper, or for him to overhear people at the next table in a trendy cafe discussing some uproarious post that he recently wrote.  Ideally, he'd like for one of his friends who doesn't realize that it is in fact he who writes the blog to recommend it to him.
6. A book deal.  If only someone would just email her and offer to print out all these years of crap and sell them in time for the Christmas gift rush, she'd never have to work again!

Enraging

I don't often write a blob just for one person but this is an exception.  In the last couple of months I've noticed that the little-used check-boxes at the bottom of each blob that allow you to choose between "engaging", "enraging" and "absurd" is being consistently checked as "enraging".  Just once for each blob, usually within a day of me posting.  My assumption is that it is a single reader doing this rather than an emergent behaviour of the interwebs as a whole.

Here are the questions I would like to ask that strangely devoted reader:
Are you really enraged?  If so, why do you keep coming back?  Do you like feeling angry?  Or is it your way of marking the blob so that you know you've read it because you have some kind of memory deficit?  If that's the case, how do you remember what your method is?  And why not just bookmark your favourite post and read it anew each day?  Or are you trying to inspire your fellow readers to vote more often?  Or is it perhaps your way of giving me a little wave so I know that you've visited even though I don't know who you are?

I know you're out there, enraged man, in the dark so utter,
For when I put my blobs online I hear you gasp and splutter.

Agony Aunt 2

Dear PTR,


I need your advice!  I'm a terrible procrastinator, so I often find myself with plenty of time on my hands while the urgent stuff piles up, looming over me like a reef break.  But since I took your previous advice and enrolled in a medical degree, I find that I don't have any friends, hobbies, nearby relatives or private interests.  Clearly I can't spend time actually studying - that would be preposterous.  So what can I do?

Ideally I'd like an activity where I can unleash my boundless creativity.  Something involving writing would be great, since nothing tangible is created so my procrastination will have nothing to sink its hooks into.  In the past people have laughed at things I've said, so it would be good if I could come up with a way of just spewing out all this garbage that comes into my head during the day without regard to social niceties.  Sure, maybe a few people will give me some kind of feedback, but wouldn't it be great if I had ultimate control over that too so I could simply remove any response that didn't stoke my flaming ego.

I am also very opinionated and like ranting and raving about things of which I am ignorant.  Considering alternate points of view is too hard, so some kind of way of expressing myself at great length in a pompous and pious tone would be nice.  Oh, and I am a deeply sensitive person, so from time to time I would like to show people a picture I have taken of a sunset or a cloud or a little baby duckling snuggling up to a tiger.  In fact, I would probably just steal the picture from some other website and publish it without attribution, but I'm still sensitive, right?

Perhaps I could also find some way of telling stories about the things I do which show how funny, clever, brave and self-deprecating I am.   It would also be nice if I could indulge myself by being ironic a lot.

Any suggestions?
(signed)
Idealistic in Adelaide


Dear Idealistic in Adelaide,

You should start a blog immediately.

Sincerely,
PTR

Dead reckoning

I really haven't been myself recently.  I wonder who I have been?

Perhaps I've been you.  You've been reading my blog, so my thoughts have been swirling around in your head, at least briefly.  So in a sense, you've been me.  So someone must have been you.  Maybe it was me.  I must say I don't care for it.

Some of you have blogs that I read.  I must have been you for some of the time when I was reading them.  But it seems unlikely that we were reading each other's blogs at the same time.  I haven't noticed that I've had any absent spells after publishing blog posts when it seems likely that you'd have been reading them.  So during that time when you were me, but I wasn't being you, I must have been a third party.  I wonder what happened to them?

It seems most unlikely to me that this mass transfer of consciousness is somehow magically transitive like a game of musical chairs where nobody loses.  That would require detailed record keeping and would be fraught with coordination problems.

No, the most likely explanation seems to be that during the time when you are reading my blog and hence are being me, I am being inhabited by the spirits of the dead, who have no requirement to be elsewhere urgently.  This is alarming.  If I get too many blog readers, I won't be myself for much of the day.  Hopefully the dead who possess me will have been doctors in real life so I will be able to continue to carry out my daily duties.

Alternatively, how about we all agree that you don't read my blog except between midnight and 6.30am South Australia time, when I am usually in bed.  Sleeping like the dead.