Monday 'Mazement

So I come back upstairs from the grand opening of the newly remodeled cafe where we got free mini-cupcakes and free soft drinks and specialty coffees are today only a dollar -- oh, and the hired music guy was a trumpeter with an electronic music beat-box thing and a flugelhorn and a bass trumpet (!) -- and I made someone laugh by noticing it was the same old cafe but with all those colors we got sick of in the 70s -- she said, yeah, where's my avocado stove? -- and back at my desk the application that merges instant messaging (sort of like texting between computers) with telephony was flashing me a message I had a missed call. I opened the email and damned if the system hadn't transcribed the message into text. Did a pretty good job, too, got all the words right, wrote "11:00" for "eleven o'clock", everything except my dentist's name, which it interpreted as the more common English variant.

That's all. Maybe I'll microblog today to keep from getting bored. I have a big problem with boredom and my response to it has been unproductive, to say the least. For years I've berated myself for not trying hard enough to focus and stay on task. All my career, all while in college, hell I remember having trouble with that in kindergarten. Kindergarten is when I learned two important lessons: a) sometimes assignments just aren't going to happen so there's no point caring about 'em; and b) parents cannot be counted on to be of much help. The latter was also a useful encouragement to not care too much. But I do care to a point -- for one thing, it sounds stressful to live without an income -- and years of attempts to stay on task and focus and whatever having failed miserably, I'm thinking to try an entirely new tactic: Train myself, not to focus and fail at it, but instead to switch tasks much more effectively, i.e. into activities that return value.

Should that include blogging? Probably not. But if it shovels out some material that otherwise will rot in my mental hallways such that I trip over it while going back and forth between various work rooms, then yeah, it could help.

That bass trumpet was cool. I still harbor fantasies of playing my horn again, or a horn anyway, being as mine is a piece of crap and my son's sousaphone will probably require a couple grand in repairs, and I've thought a valve trombone would be cool because I love the sound and there's no need to learn how to operate a slide if I already know the fingering, and a bass trumpet turns out to be a valve trombone all curled up to look trumpet-like. Sounds beautiful. Hmm. Well. What to do with that idea? I also want to mount my father's electronic keyboard at home somewhere and learn piano. That'll happen really soon too.

Okay, that's all. Do some job now.