For the first time this summer, I actually had a decent dinner while attending the madness that is Rochester's "Thursdays on First." A taco salad from "Salad Bros."
Blogging has become one of those curious life distractions. Back when I started blogging in 2002, it was still a fresh and exciting medium, a medium from which I could potentially launch a lucrative career IF ONLY enough people would notice my brilliant and occasionally unspeakable hilarity.
Now, everyone has a blog, or everyone has disappeared into FaceBook, or everyone has jumped into the increasingly bizarre vernacular of Twitter, which has become something akin to shorthand swearing, what with it's omnipresent @ and # symbols.
But, that's the Web. Every month is a shake of the Internet Etch-A-Sketch, and we begin anew. My blog never caught on the way I had secretly hoped, but what did I actually expect from an eclectic mix of whatever the hell this blog has been about for nearly a decade? I don't have the regular ambition to be a Bleat, and I'm not curious enough to hoover up and link to all the news and opinion of the day of an Instapundit. Well, whatever. My blog is what it is. And it is a THUNDERJOURNAL.
I used to bemoan the fact I never learned a different language (I knew enough Japanese during my year living there to get through shops and restaurants), but the fact of the matter is I've learned and relearned the language of the Internet, and frankly it's getting tiresome. And it's not just tiresome because you have to relearn the language; you also have to remember all the previous iterations. It's like keeping an original version of Windows 95 on hand just so you can remember why things are the way they are now.
During my last job--of which I will only briefly reference, as that job is now the equivalent of Voldemort and "SHALL NOT BE NAMED--I had to perform all sorts of odd tasks meant to ensure Internet relevancy. Crap like search engine optimization (SEO) and Google Analytics and a whole bunch of similar stuff that always struck me as the kind of thing you maybe thought about seriously back in 2005, but really aren't part of the Internet of today. But, such concepts just aren't easy to let go, so they remain and continue to haunt us even though the Internet has long since moved on to other annoying things.
Just when you think you have it figured out, someone goes and rewrites the Internet dictionary, just because they can. "They" being the busybodies who think we want to have hyperlinks automatically appear on words and phrases, so when you accidentally roll over them, a small advertising box appears that's seemingly impossible to close. I used to think Internet advertising had hit it's annoyance apex with pop-up and pop-under ads. Boy howdy, was I mistaken. Rollover ads just make me want to put my forehead through the monitor.
Somewhere along the line, Web advertisers decided to sacrifice effective ads in the name of making them APPEAR IN FRONT OF YOU SO YOU CANNOT ESCAPE THE FRICKIN' THINGS! So, you have a silhouette of some dancing chick with text that says "Obama Asks Moms to go Back to School," and you're left thinking to yourself "What the hell is this shit?"
I can't profess to understand all the logic behind the way a lot of Web sites are architected today. I mean, I understand why sites break up articles into three or four pages to increase page views, but it comes at the expense of being exceptionally annoying. The same goes for Web pages that automatically reload after a predetermined interval. As if us stoopid Web surfers don't know how to refresh a page ourselves.
Last week, I had a face-to-face, sit-down interview for a new job and, despite my own perceived lack of solid inter-personal skills, I managed to advance to the second round of the applicant review process, in the form of a writing exercise assignment and personality assessments.
Now, the writing exercise I'm pretty confident about. After all, having written professionally now for over a decade, I think I have that particular skill figured out. The personality assessments, however, left me a little bit frazzled.
I was assured, prior to taking the personality assessments, that there were no wrong answers. That's just nonsense. Of COURSE there are wrong answers; otherwise, what's the point of taking the assessments?
I was also encouraged to be "brutally honest with myself," which just can't possibly end up being a good thing for me. I mean, I once blew up a grenade in my parents' back yard, got hit by a train and cheated death in other similar monumentally stupid ways over the course of my life so far. If I'm ever going to be brutally honest with myself, the only conclusion I could possibly reach is that I'm a spectacular moron.
The assessments themselves were particularly peculiar. In the first assessment, I was asked to place 12 terms and phrases in order of how good and bad I felt they were. I was able to list the "good" terms fairly easily -- "I love my life," and "I find comfort in the harmony of the universe" were the kind of phrases that struck me as generally good.
The "bad" terms, however, were seriously bad; like, almost comically seriously bad. For example -- and I must stress I'm NOT making these up -- "poisoning the city water supply" and "torturing a person to death," were two phrases I actually struggled to rank in the 11th and 12th positions. Let's be honest, they're both REALLY bad, but I found myself waffling a bit when it came to deciding which one was the worst.
I mean, yeah, torturing a person to death is bad, but if I'm not the one doing the torturing, or the one being tortured, I didn't think it was AS BAD as poisoning an entire city's water supply. After all, a poisoned water supply can kill hundreds, if not thousands of people, whereas the whole torture thing is only going to kill one person. In the end, however, I listed "torturing a person to death" as the worst phrase, based entirely on my preference of how the word "poison" sounds better than "torture."
The second personality assessment was a list of over 300 "True & False" statements and, let me tell you, the statements ran a very diverse gamut. While I confidently answered "True" to "My car has air conditioning," I wasn't quite sure how to respond to "My excuses aren't usually believable." That really depends on the person I'm delivering an excuse to, after all.
There were literally scores of questions that could have gone either "true" or "false" depending on all sorts of extenuating circumstances, so I felt mentally exhausted after over an hour spent completing the assessments.
And the worst part is, I just KNOW I got all the questions wrong, if I'm going to be brutally honest with myself.
