The life and times of an uncertain blogger

I don’t want to speak too soon, since we have another major winter storm heading our way tomorrow and Saturday, but I think our house got out of this unscathed! (w00t!)

The tree limb looming over the north side of the house somehow stayed intact — I think it was close enough to the roof that, when the ice weighed it down, the roof kept it supported enough that it didn’t break.

We are so lucky!

Supposedly, there are still a million people in the state - or 42% of the population - without power today. I’ve never seen anything like it. We’ve seen worse storms, but I think it was the type of precipitation that did us in. Freezing rain coated layers of ice on tree branches, while sleet adds a much thinner coating.

You’d be surprised how much a tree limb can weigh when it has one inch thick ice on it.

Our only possible casualty (::knock on wood::) may be the Desert Willow I have in the front yard. According to a horticulturist I spoke to, it’s not supposed to grow in climates like ours, and the only way it survived here was that its first two years had to be really mild. That tree is my favorite thing about the house and is stunning when it blooms, which it does twice a year, but right now, it’s completely weighed down by ice and its top is only two feet off the ground. My only hope is that the ice insulated it enough to let it live.

All in all, this has been a great week for me in spite of the bad weather.  Thanks to a very smart friend, I’ve got some great things brewing on the horizon, and I couldn’t be more energized and excited.  It’s amazing what progress a person can make when they can bounce ideas around with someone with intelligence and imagination.

Now, I’ll leave you with one of my newest favorite songs. It’s a Foo Fighters song called The Pretender and is up for a Grammy this year.  I absolutely love the guitar and bass line, and Dave Grohl’s voice is awesome!  I think it’s rockin’! (It’s not the kind of song you sing; it’s the kind of song you wail, and I’m doing my share of wailing! )

Unfortunately, RCA won’t allow the video to be posted anywhere other than on YouTube, so here’s a link to the video. Awesome song!

Foo Fighters: The Pretender

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Wow…

I had NO idea how bad the ice storm in Oklahoma was going to be.  According to the news this morning, one in three homes in Oklahoma City is without power — that’s about 600,000 homes– and they expect it to take over a week to restore power.

That’s pretty scary.

Scarier still is the very heavy tree branch hanging over my roof.  With the ice covering it, I’d guess it weighs about a thousand pounds, so if that sucker breaks off and falls on my roof, the roof is toast.  Even worse, my insurance company cancelled me, because I have a tree branch hanging over my roof.  So we have no home owners’ insurance right now and a big hazzard hanging over us like the Sword of Damacles.

Let us pray.

Even though I can’t afford it, as soon as this clears up, I’m hiring someone to cut those branches down and haul them off. 

We’re supposed to have snow this weekend, so it doesn’t look like the weather will be improving any time soon.  (Have I said that I hate winter?  I do.)

As I sit here right now, I’m reminded that my son asked me if I heard the loud crash last night.  I didn’t hear it, and it never occured to me that it could be a tree limb breaking off in our back yard. I think I’ll have to leave early today to check that out. 

Keep your fingers and toes crossed for us! 

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It’s a winter wonderland in Oklahoma today.

No; no snow, just ice, ice and more ice. We’re supposed to get it all day tomorrow, too. Needless to say, I won’t be driving in to work. I’m very lucky that my boss has the same attitude about putting life and property at stake for a job. She won’t be going in either.

So, I have another day off, but that is doing nothing for my mood. I woke up ticked off after only 3 1/2 hours sleep last night — I won’t go into why. Suffice it to say, I’m still steaming. People who know me will tell you that it takes a lot to make me angry, but once I am, back off! Given that I got so little sleep because of it, I wish I could have backed off myself.

Too bad that’s not possible.

It’s my own fault. It really is. It all boils down to possessiveness. The big, ugly green monster. And, in truth, I have no reason to even feel that way in the first place. It’s petty and childish.

Even so, it’s put me in a black mood all day.

So, in order to combat the darkening I’m feeling, I’m going to think happy thoughts. Here’s something not many people know about me — I have a dream of retiring on a ranch, with a little plot of land to farm next to the house, some big dogs running around, a couple of cats who come inside to curl around my feet, and a wonderful man to warm the other side of the bed at night.

Isn’t that a pretty picture?

I think I’m going to move that from the dream category to the goal category. I think that sounds like a future to shoot for. And who knows? It could happen!

In the meantime, I’m going to put all the crap that has been this day on the back burner and enjoy the rest of the evening. Maybe I’ll watch the Iron Chef, then the rest of Las Vegas and end the night with the latest episode of Chuck. Then, when I can’t hold my eyes open any longer, I’ll take a Benedril to get rid of my winter itch and put me out for at least eight hours.

Hopefully, tomorrow will be a better day.

1:30am addendum

The day ended on a high note, and my bad mood has fled, so sleep will be good tonight!   The power of a goal accomplished with the help of good friends.  Who’d'a thunk it?

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When the Internet was new, users developed a language of their own — a shorthand that was both descriptive and exclusionary. Internet geeks understood it completely, while outsiders were left scratching their heads. Internet slang has evolved and changed throughout the years, with those changes sometimes bordering on the ridiculous, but the basis has remained the same. The shorthand is quicker than typing out entire sentences and can be equally exclusionary, though that is slowly changing.

Internet speak is divided into two types — emoticons, text based “pictures” that represented an emotion, and acronyms that represented longer phrases. Some of this slang has made it into our speech, so much so that almost anyone can understand it, while others remain more contained to the Internet community.

In the early days of the Internet, as Internet jargon was evolving, it was interesting to watch new slang take hold. Since we were Americans speaking mostly to Americans in those days, it was easy for us to catch the meaning, so adoption of the shorthand was fairly quick. Today, it’s often not so easy. With the introduction of other cultures (including Asian Internet culture that has a well developed Internet language of its own) into our Internet society, we have witnessed a shift in geek speak. MMOs have also caused a shift; since they allow users to “emote” using commands, many of the old jargon has been replaced with command-based jargon.

Here are some examples of some of the differences between the old and the new:

Old: LOL — New: lawl or lawlzor (LOL stands, as most people know, for “laughing out loud,” but what in the world is “lawl” and “lawlzor”? Sound out LOL, and you’ve got your answer for the former; the latter is just the same with the random “zor” added to the end, which was something added by gamers.)

Old: {{{{Maggy}}}} — New: /hug Maggy (Both of these represent a hug, but in the old days, the brackets surrounding a name were like a virtual hug, surrounding your name as arms would surround your body. The new version is command-based, used in text conversation to represent the command that would emote the action to you.)

Old: Newbie — New: nub, nube, or n00b (All represent someone who’s new and inexperienced, but the new version is a shorthand of a shorthand that evolved from the sound of the original shorthand. Now, though, most people pronounce it as you would the “nub” of a pencil, which sounds nothing like the original form.)

Old: ;D, o;>, };> ;P, etc. — New: ^^, QQ, >.<, TT, etc. (All of these emoticons represent emotions, but many of the versions are adoptions from Japanese Internet culture. QQ and TT both mean the person is crying -- if you look, you can see that both represent tears falling from one's eyes -- and these came directly from gaming communties. QQ represents someone who's whining, and players often see comments such as "Stop QQing" and "Less QQ and more pew pew," with "pew pew" representing the sound a vitual gun would make. In other words, stop whining and just play." While QQ is used to insult someone, TT is what someone types when they're sad, so has no connection to ridicule.)

Some of the new jargon has actually come from common keyboarding errors. For example, “pwned” is Internet slang for “owned,” as in “I just owned you,” which means “I just beat you soundly.” Others are new shorthands like “leet,” which means “elite,” “ftw,” which means “for the win,” and “l2p” which means “learn to play.” ZOMG has replaced OMG (oh my god) — this change is directly related to the “zor” phenominon. If you sounded it out, this would say, “Zoh my godzor.”

Yes, really.

Geek speak, while constantly evolving, has become so much a part of our every day lexicon that many of us find ourselves using them in our rl (real life). I’ll never forget the time I was teaching a computer aided composition class at the University of Oklahoma in 1991, when someone in class said something very funny, and, instead of laughing, I said, “LOL.” My assistant rolled his eyes at me and called me a geek as he walked out the door to tell anyone and everyone he knew about what I had just done. Now, that wouldn’t be so unusual.

Internet speak permeates our lives so much that it was even used in the opening episode of last year’s South Park, which won an Emmy. Eric Cartman’s famous line, “Looks like someone’s about to get pwned” has been repeated countless times since the show first aired. Text messaging on cell phones and BlackBerries has increased the number of people who use and understand the “language.”

In short, it’s everywhere.

Because of the evolution of Internet slang, my Masters thesis, titled “The Rhetoric of Online Communication” is sadly outdated today. Internet lexicon changes so quickly that any documentation of it would have to evolve with equal speed in order to keep up. I can’t imagine how different it will be ten years from now.

So if you want a big kick, sign on to World of Warcraft and fly to The Barrens to watch some Barrens chat. You’ll laugh so hard at the craziness there that you’ll type “rotflmaopimpwtime” and mean it!

Before I go, here’s a funny book jacket. For these folks (obviously NOT Internet geeks), the title meant something completely different than what it means to the Internet savvy. For those of us who see omfg all the time, this is a hoot. If the authors had any idea, they’d be mortified!

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Well, OU trounced the #1 Missouri Tigers last night in the Big 12 conference championship. It was a great game on neutral ground, and OU still beat them by 21 points. But will the BCS let them be in the championship?

Doubtful.

While I would put our schedule up against any other team’s schedule, and even though the two games we lost were away games — and one was lost in the final seconds to a rogue field goal while the other was lost after our star quarterback left the game in the first quarter with a concussion — I don’t think the BCS votes will go our way.

It’s too bad, too. I think OU could beat anyone right now, and I’d love to see them get the chance. As it is, they’ll probably be in the Fiesta Bowl playing against Kansas.  Don’t get me wrong — that would be a great game. KU was awesome this year, the coach used to be OU’s offensive coordinator, and he’s a great coach and a good friend of Bob Stoops, and OU didn’t get to play them this year, so it would be a great opportunity to show that yes…we’re better than KU this year.

KU didn’t really have a tough schedule until they played Mizzou. Every team they had played but two were having losing seasons and the other two were something like 6-5.

Nothing to write home about.

I guess we’ll find out tonight on Fox’s BCS show.  Whatever happens, OU can call themselves champs again!  And for Sooner fans, they’ll always be number one!

UPDATE:  OU will be in the Fiesta Bowl, going up against #3 West Virginia.  It’s too bad we won’t be in the national championship, but it should be a great game. Stay tuned!

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Every year about this time I have a dream that is so sweet and poignant that when I wake up I’m left with such longing that I can hardly stand it. Each time, I desperately try to go back to sleep — to get back there once again and live within that joy for just a little longer,and when I can’t or when I ultimately wake up, I can’t help but cry for the loss.

The dream is never the same, and I never remember it for long, but it’s always about the same person, and the situation is always the same. His name is Mark, and he loves me, and I love him, and we’re blissfully happy.

Mark is a real person. Well, Mark was a real person. He died around this time of year in 1986, when he was only 24 years old.

From the time we were 12 years old, Mark was one of my dearest friends. We had deep conversations, we shared sensibilities, and it was one of his greatest goals in life to make me and his other friends smile.

As wickedly funny, talented, and brilliant as Mark Wilson was, he was also an enigma. He loved to make people think he was something other than he really was, and since it was the 70s, Mark spent much of his time pretending that he was on drugs. When asked a question in class, he’d lazily look at his teacher and say, “huh?”

It was all a complete act, though. He was always keenly aware of everything going on around him, and he thought it was hilarious that the teachers were so naive that they thought a straight A student who was involved in extracurricular activities that required a lot of effort and time was a druggie.

So, while the teachers wrung their hands with concern, those of us who really knew him used our hands to hide our grins and stifle our laughter. Mark didn’t even try pot until he was 21, and he didn’t drink. In reality, he was the perfect kid; he just hid it very well.

Mark played guitar, wrote amazing music, was the best high school trumpet player in the state, had his own comic strip, wrote and created comedy tapes and made me laugh every single day I knew him. He did irreverent things. For instance, he had an old station wagon that had push buttons on the dash to change gears with, and he once drove me home from school in reverse in that car, going 55 mph down the highway…backwards. Every day in fifth hour, Mark made up a different story for me, our legs crossed one over the other on a chair that sat between us, and each one made me laugh till I cried.

By the time we graduated from high school, Mark and I had become very close — likely much closer than anyone realized. We relied on each other. In college, we arranged our classes, making sure they were all in the evenings, so we could stay up all night together, drinking coffee and eating french fries at iHOP. Our relationship was completely innocent, and it continued as flitted from boyfriend to boyfriend. He was my friend, and I never wondered why such a cute guy never had a girlfriend of his own. I’ve often wondered how I would have reacted if he had ever told me he was seeing someone.

I don’t think I would have liked it. In fact, it might have changed everything.

When we were 20, Mark came over one evening, and in the midst of telling me about The Hobbit, which he had just read, he asked me if we might try having a real relationship, go on a real date and see how it went. When he looked at me that night, there was something in his eyes I’d never seen before, and it scared me, because, even then, I was an intimacy-phobe, though I didn’t know it yet. But I agreed, because I’d been comfortable being alone with Mark for eight years, and there wasn’t a thing about him I didn’t like, and well…I loved him.

So, the next night, we went on a date to dinner and a movie. I don’t even remember what the movie was. What I do remember is him holding my hand, and how his hand shook with nervousness, and how mine was clammy with anxiety. And I couldn’t take it. When he took me home and tried to kiss me, I wouldn’t let him and told him I couldn’t have a relationship with him. It was just too weird. It was like dating my brother. He took it well…shrugged his shoulders and smiled, and that was that.

It was probably one of the biggest mistakes of my life. If only I’d gotten past my initial panic and just let him kiss me, the wall would have come down, and I would have let myself love him and let him love me. But I didn’t, and gradually he stopped coming around every day, though we still remained close friends even after I married. He obviously hated that I had married someone who didn’t cherish me the way he did, but he swallowed his feelings and continued to come over for visits.

The last time I saw him was just after leaving my husband and moving back home after spending a year out of state. We had a chance meeting as we walked in opposite directions down the street. We talked for a long time and made plans to go to the big football game that Friday night — a game we’d gone to together every year from the first year we’d known one another until I got married. But he didn’t show up that night, and it was only after his funeral that I found out that he’d committed suicide that evening, shooting himself in the station wagon with the push button gears.

I can still remember driving to the cemetery and searching for his grave, and then crying my eyes out and railing at him while I stood in front of that freshly turned earth.

That night, I had my first dream about him — the only one I remember. He came to my back door and asked to come in, and I let him in. I asked him why he hadn’t come to me before, and he told me that he couldn’t, because I didn’t know that he was dead yet, and he didn’t want to freak me out. I hugged him, and he kissed me, and it felt so real, and then he walked out of my life.

And each year, I dream about him again. I know that the dream is probably nothing but an expression of unexplored love, a wish fulfillment thing, but I always wonder if he’s not really there with me for just that one night.

I still miss him. I still wish I’d let that wall come down when I had the chance. I still wonder if he’d still be here if I had.

This is a very personal tale — one I wouldn’t normally tell — but after dreaming that dream again, I want people to know about him. He was a special, sweet, wonderful person. There’s no telling what he could have done with his life had it not been cut so short.

Unrequited love is never good, but I believe that unexplored love is even worse. The former has no hope, because only one person is doing the loving, while the latter is full of possibility, because both people love one another. The fact that such wonderful possibility is ignored and left to die makes it a tremendous loss. It leaves a future that never was.

And so, here I am today, mourning my friend, Mark, one more time, and looking forward to next year when we can live that lost future together once again, even for just one night.

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