Too much awesome

The Internet is a veritable goldmine of information – between LOLcats, Youtube, Wikipedia and TV Tropes, you’d be hard pressed not to be able to find something to amuse you for hours – that’s why I haven’t sat in front of a TV for any extended periods of time in years.

This recent weekend though, I sat in front of the TV for a lot longer than I can remember doing for ages, watching both the men’s and women’s finals of the Australian Open. The match between Serena Williams and Justine Henin, despite being Henin’s big comeback after having a child, was largely uninspiring. Andy Murray however, put up a great fight in the 3rd set against Roger Federer, making for some truly riveting moments. While still not back to level of the glory days of Edberg, Agassi, et al, men’s tennis hasn’t been this good for a long time – thank God that the era of the ridiculous serving machines and baseline bashers is over (women’s tennis is still there though, no thanks to the Williams sisters).

Getting to the point, I experienced an epiphany while watching a sport that I used to enjoy. I found myself getting bored (Jenny quit watching as soon as Federer started winning). My mind started wandering during the longer rallies, and I was itching to go Google something in between every point (15-0: the recipe for green onion pancakes! 30-0: did anybody respond to my Facebook status? 30-15: am I missing out on a deal at OzBargain? etc.)

Non-existent attention span aside, my point is that the Internet has ruined me for the mundane. A daily dose of awesome, served up fresh to my browser via RSS at my every beck and call, has skewed my sense of the ordinary towards the extremes of FTW and Epic Fail. Think about it the next time you Twitter or update your Facebook status: are you self-censoring by only posting things that meet some kind of criteria of what you feel is worth your friends’ time? Against this tide of vanity, how can you not start to feel that your own life is inadequate?

I realised that this affects my writing too. I couldn’t marr my blog with any old crazy thought that graced my mind – each post has to inspire, demonstrate my clearly superior intellect, and impart knowledge that transcends mortal understanding. Likewise my poetry was for naught if it didn’t tear at the very foundations of your soul… you get the idea.

I resolve in 2010 to be more mediocre. Next time you see a boring blog post or status from me, you’ll know that I’m doing it for you.

—-

btw, I still haven’t found a good recipe for Green Onion Pancakes yet. Do share…

Beating the ol’ drum

Things never quite go the way you think, do they? Last year I started a couple of new blogs to complement this one: GeekReads, supposed to be a blog about books that I enjoyed reading, ended up reviewing more movies than books; and THRIFTerrific, which started out as a place for me to show everybody how to be a tight-ass, ended up as more of a general Internet lifestyle blog. This left cyberseraphic free for me to use to focus on the art of writing, but amounted to not much more than a couple of depressing poems and some pictures of Transformers.

Reflecting upon the stats from Google Analytics and Webmaster Tools, it seems that the thing I do best is choosing and tagging images. My blogs rank consistently high in image-related searches, and visits are almost entirely from people looking for various pictures. If image clicks paid like pay-per-click ads, I’d probably be turning a buck from my efforts.

Notable (blogging) achievements from last year include the redesign, which I’m pretty happy with. I’m greatly indebted to my friend Jan for the logo execution – I’ll get around to putting it on a t-shirt one day, mate – as well as Rodrigo Galindez for the theme, and also for popping by to leave a comment. I’m very happy with the result, and glad to have moved on from the dull grey/black theme that I was previously using.

One other thing that I’m proud is my post rate. If blog posts were heartbeats then you could say that my blogs were barely alive in 2009. Hopefully this year I’ll be able to turn that into a pulse. A fitting analogy, since Jenny always encourages me to post more from my heart than from my mind. Har har.

At any rate (ah! I crack myself up), I hope you’ve been enjoying my various ramblings and look forward to more, because the words, they are a-flowing :-)

I AM MEGATRON!

I finally have it in my hot little hands; the toy that required me to jump through more hoops than a circus tiger to legally own. I now have my very own MP-05 Masterpiece Megatron! A quick recap of the process involved, especially for those of you who I’m sure are now very jealous (not):

• Join the Megatron Club ($10 annual fee)
• Apply for a P638 gun collector’s license from the NSW Police Firearms registry
• Apply for a B709 import permit from the same

I didn’t know about the B709, so when I got back from Hong Kong customs confiscated it while I organised the necessary paperwork. Annoyingly, they had scant regard for it being a collector’s item – they plastered the box with sticky tape and ripped it off roughly, and manhandled the box, leaving a few dinged edges and dented corners. Oh well, I wasn’t collecting the Masterpiece series MISB anyway.

Here are a few choice pictures, with the rest over at Flickr (by the way, I do this because I have a bandwidth limit on my hosting plan and I don’t want it to be used up hosting [often very large] pictures):

In gun mode

Standing pose

Face off between Optimus and Megatron

Wong-Wong (nee Hong) in Hong Kong

We had a fantastic time on our recent trip. We did loads of shopping (I think I’ve got enough socks and undies to last the rest of my life) and I gained 2kgs from all the endless eating that we did. Of course I bought a bunch of Transformers, and you should know better than to expect that I’d post about it here instead of making a separate dedicated post :-)

Dunno whether it was just being away from home, and all the stress that is here, or the hardcore retail therapy and excellent food, or the safety of being “parented” by my awesome mum and dad while we were there, but Jenny’s blues also took a holiday.

We also went on a tour of Seoul, but joined a really crappy tour, so I’d say that I’ve experienced Korea only very barely. The other Honkies on the tour decided that they were more interested in shopping, so at every non-shopping destination we arrived at, they’d take the obligatory photo and get straight back on the bus, leaving us to always be the stragglers. The “Korean” tour guide was also an idiot, constantly taking pot-shots at Jenny being an ex-pat despite the fact that she herself was from Hong Kong and had only lived in Seoul for 6 years, making outrageous claims about how she was more Korean than my wife. Grr… I’ll stop there before I get even more angry. Suffice to say, she was full of bull, and spent more time talking about herself than the country.

We did manage to get some time away from the tour to visit Jenny’s relatives, and they cooked us up a super Korean feast! Beat the heck out of the crappy food we were getting from the stupid tourist restaurants that the tour took us to.

Back in Hong Kong, we did some more last minute shopping, and finally managed to get across to the Hong Kong side, having only explored Kowloon up to that point! 2 weeks definitely wasn’t enough, and like how I’d dearly love to revisit Japan, Jenny now wants to make Hong Kong her home away from home!

A few pics below. More over at Flickr.

The Paradox of the Candle

Before I start with the content of the post, a poem with the same title as this entry, I wanted to mention that my beautiful and wonderful wife Jenny, is currently suffering from chronic depression brought on as a result of complex post-traumatic stress disorder. This means that she has been out of action for a while now as she battles her inner demons.

If you have ever experienced Clinical Depression yourself (not just feeling depressed, however bad), or known somebody close to you who has suffered from it, you will know that even if I were to try to explain, it would not make any sense. It would leave you feeling frustrated and wanting to help, but you can’t – the mind of a person suffering from Depression is not rational. Rest assured that she is currently getting professional help.

I thank you to pray for us and keep her in your thoughts as she heals, and allow our (her) story to be revealed in the fullness of time.

Here is the poem I wrote. It is partly a description of what I’m seeing, and partly my way of trying to understand what’s happening to my wife. It’s not a happy subject and does not have a happy ending, so please bear that in mind (especially if you’re suffering from depression…)

—-

What must it be like to live
When your purpose is to die slowly
To give life to light.

The agony as your wick is burned
And your body is consumed by fire
Until nothing is left.

To keep on living in pain
Hurting those closest to you
Seeing them suffer.

Affected by the merest breeze
Flame wavers but fights to stay alive
For what reason?

But if you want to end it
You extinguish yourself
And create darkness.