"How are you?"

"gumballs!" is how I am.

How to answer? It depends. Who is asking? What is the context of that particular relationship? Did we just meet or have we been friends for years? Do we have an audience?  It depends on what aspects of my life -- the "you" in the question -- this person is actually asking about.

Aside from the part to do with me, I am faced with the need to quickly build a complex mental model of the asker, who I may have only just met. There's rarely time to do the person or the question justice before they follow up with the inevitable: "something wrong?"

Uhm.

It's hard to explain all this on the fly. I do try sometimes, especially with the cashiers at Trader Joe's, who seem very nice but I don't think quite follow my reasoning.

XKCD to the rescue! Now all I have to do is whip out my phone and point to this page, which explains everything.   Surely with this tool at my disposal there will be no more less confusion.

Pro Forma Indulgeo

I don't really know any Latin, but I'm hoping that using some will make me sound erudite as I do this blog thing that I have been resisting for ohhh-sooo many years.

Bet that's been done.

(You know, there's a good case to be made that I was part of creating one of the first blogs and blogging software. We were writing a web site for a radio station in Portland Oregon in what was it, '95? and they wanted their DJs to be able to, you know, write stuff about what they were thinking. It just wasn't that hard, so we wrote the code to let them type into a text window and publish it with a date and time stamp, and there we were. We didn't call it anything. We just did it.)

I don't know. The lizard tells me I'm funny and I should blog. Of course, he says a lot of things and not all of them seem to be about this universe. But he does make me laugh, and there has to be some truth in humor, since there's certainly humor in truth.

My biggest problem with this blogging thing is that I write too good. Since I write good, the finished product has to look like I write good. So I spend too much time working it over. Too much polish.

Hey, do you remember that commericial for lemmon pledge where they spray on the pledge until it's an inch or so thick, with the voice over saying "week after week you polish your furniture until - you're polishing the polish!" In those days, commercials didn't seem to be using self-mocking irony to sell, but then, I was a kid, so maybe I just didn't notice it. Maybe it was supposed to be funny.

Anyway. Polishing the polish. Mabye that would have been a better name for this blog. Can I still change it?

In the spirit of the title, I should say something here about please indulge me with this blog, and I don't really know what I'm talking about, I'm just going to tell you my thoughts however flawed, or some other crap about how it's just words, to maybe lower your expectations.

I don't think so.

Who are you anyway? Why are you reading me? Don't just sit there in silence. Say something. Tell me something.