Over the weekend I did roughly three things that mattered. First on Friday evening I went and saw the movie called This is the End. It was an apocalyptic farce. As God is my witness I squirmed through about 1/3 of the film and could barely stay in my seat because I was laughing so hard for the rest of the movie. The phrase “Something not very chill happened last night,” will be a buzzword for months to come.
The second thing I did was travel to Ann Arbor, MI via Hell. Upon reading this you might think that it sounds like there might be a tie-in to the first paragraph. Well the answer is there isn’t any connection. Hell is just a little tourist trap on a dammed up lake on a scenic rural road between East Lansing and Ann Arbor. The trip was my family trying to fete me on Father’s Day. The sun was out, the air was warm and everyone was well behaved. It doesn’t get much better than that. Father’s Day was good.
The last thing I did was attempt to convert my blog posts into a manuscript form. Arggh! Blogger will let you download your blog in XML format so that you will have a back up. However it is not easy for a lay person such as me to convert XML into another program like Word. The incompatibility has thus required me to go back and snag each post with a copy and past technique putting each post into a Word document. I have one large word document currently.
Doing this has required me to clean up typos and to make some editorial decisions. Some of the posts contain HTML links that I am sure are now dead or are only accessible behind a pay wall. I don’t know what I will do with those. My guess is that I will have to revise these posting a few lines of summary about the author’s viewpoint. Some posts have extensive quotes from well beloved authors. In order to sort out copyright issues I am creating a series of endnotes. Yes, I have had to learn a new Word 2007 functionality. Finally I have decided that in order to add accessibility I am going to create a table of contents. Yup I have to learn a second Word 2007 functionality. Oh and what do I do with all those Youtube links to songs that I was riffing on at various points? Ugh.
How was I to know what creating a blog would teach me? But teach me it has. Typing out these posts has taught me about the value of journaling. Thinking about what I really need to say has taught me to clarify my minds swirling mélange of ideas. Reading the comments to what I have written has taught me about the value of friendship. This blog has taught me about the value of written language.
My guess is that where I am heading for this is a volume I can place in my safe deposit box to be read by my children after I am long gone. Gotta give ‘em to laugh about on those days later in life when they are facing the hard decisions we all must face.
PS. Lisa that is the Pocket Oxford up in the left hand corner amongst those years of journals. Just thought you would get a chuckle out of it.
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