Bienvenue au Progrès Expérimentaux
Currently Reading: "Elementals" - A. S. Byatt
A friend at a party I was attending yesterday mentioned that she didn't know that I had a Livejournal. Surprise! Allow me to give you and anyone else who finds this post a tour:
First we have the subject line. Sometimes I write this first before posts to describe a recent experience or the current state of the world, like "A morning stroll at seventeen degrees", or "tamikku" (an interesting-sounding Finnish word for January) sometimes I write the subject after I write the post as a summary or reference to what has been written. Disproportionatly however the subject lines reference my knowledge of the occult and worldwide superstitions, like the feast of Brigad or the British practice of saying "Rabbit Rabbit" at the beginning of a month, or the Spanish practice of eating twelve grapes at midnight, as I did on a whim while writing a midnight post by shoving twelve hybridized 'Midnight Beauty Table Grapes' in my mouth and ingesting each before 12:01. This brings forth a salient point to note: I only infrequently post updates to this journal; unplanned, free thought style (a bit like like "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man") and I am often in a silly mood when this occurs. Most subject lines can be clarified with a quick Google search I am sure, or pieced together as a logic puzzle, "not not not not" for instance is a double double negative, and therefore simply an affirmative.
Next we have the "Currently Reading" line, which I add myself because it is not an option for the bottom like "Current mood", but I wish to encourage universal literacy. I do not comprehensively list everything I read, usually just what I am reading at the direct moment of the post's authorship, unless my subject is what I did over a vacation. I hesitate to summarize or review books, movies, art, music, lectures, and the like because these can have different meanings and values to different people at different times, so while I may like X because it reminds me of Y and Z others may not have seen Y or Z, or they never got into that direct brand or genre of whatever as I did because of my seperate personal experiences. Also it may be difficult for anyone else to find a free copy of X without a great deal of trouble (and that is always frustrating reading other people's posts on things you will have to hunt for for decades to come) which is why I sometimes include a " > " sign, which will be a direct hyperlink to what is being referenced. Recently I have mentioned a few movies because they have been rated either too badly or too well and one might miss seeing it or miss the problems with it without my expert guidance, but generally I keep in mind the rule that future-me is generally going to be the only one to ever go back and look through any of these posts.
Next we have the main body of my writs, which at first dealt with my struggle to encapsulate my entire body of personal oddities into a blogger-page called "WillFAQ", and then a few amendments to this work and updates, and more general silliness. I originally intended "Experimental Progress" to go through an ongoing list of personal-self-improvement, scientific, and hypothetical project frameworks, but unfortunately a great deal of my lab work is governed by patient-protection protocols (which as I plan to be a neuroscience researcher for a long time I really have to get into the habit of not discussing publicly), I already have notebooks where I jot down new ideas, and many civic-outreach sort of things either involve the mention of corporate products, politicians I do not like on a deep level, or potential embarrassment for friends whose lives I am interfering with or reporting on even in the few conversations I might mention with their initials.
Allow me to draw a few examples: this week I wrote to the Lexus corporation via e-mail to thank them for sponsoring a full day of ad-reduced music on the basic non-premium Pandora.com accounts (which I have been using since Oct. 8th, 2006) by explaining in detail exactly who I was demographically and why I would never want to buy a "Lexus CT Hybrid", and what better full-electric models they might come out with in the future to appeal to the beorgoning millenial environmentalist wave (though in truth honestly who ever first implements Google's autodrive capabilities is going to win quick market supremacy).
I wrote a letter to an old friend this week describing how I felt that they should not get married if by chance they were still in love with someone else we know (might I add no reader of this journal knows this person I think), potentially killing babies in upcoming timelines for the sake of the lasting happiness of the reciever of this message
I wrote a strange theory on female masturbation and oxytocin uptake in the brain in relation to evolutionary-morphology pressure, the Old Spice guy, and contemporary social mechanics
and I did some Change.org petitions, which quickly pile up if mentioned regularly and make one seem like a nutjob (though they often have great results)
So leaving out all of this sort of thing (and anything else non-novel), I might be left this week with "In the past few days I did some spring cleaning, read about the Middle-East more than usual, and I ate some sausage-bread." This or cryptic references may be all that is left of a post. In truth because it is lent I have also been trying to eat more fish, so never liking wild fresh-water salmon (though it is one of the lowest species in mercury contamination) I located a cajun-spiced variety that covers the normal plasticy-taste and tried that for the first time- here is another thing... though I have keen senses, writing in a detailed manner about perceptual experiences often makes you read as a psychopath, so this is another thing not contained within standard posts. AND potential catalysts for relative wealth disparity, no good pictures of me enjoined in sybaritic eicasticy with the corpulent hedonists of yore, lest some unwary random visitor be crushed beneath the sheer power of my awesome beauty, power, and luxurient science-student lifestyle.
Afterward we have "mood", in which I use esoteric descriptors largely neglected and ignored by the larger Livejournal community, since in my case the common ones seem largely redundant when one considers the mention in pages linked to WillFAQ that INTPs emotionally match the mood of the music they are choosing to listen to, so I instead dedicate a few posts to 'Haptic", "Tectiform" and "Xanthochroid"
and then I list whatever music I am currently listening to, or whatever song I was listening to through the majority of the writing should my post bridge between two songs. I've written elsewhere about the importance of silence for concentration and learning, but ExProg is more about half-conciously rehashing while also reading snail-mail and rearranging desk drawers. I would estimate that 90% of all mentioned music in ExProg is either viewable on You-tube or easily Googleable for free. Probably 100% is on iTunes. My music come from a wide variety of sources, a great deal from the artwork I seek out through surfing every day or friends living or studying in other countries, or influence-trees, or whatever else leads me to this sort of thing.
In conclusion I rock, and also the new Red Riding Hood movie is not as terrible as it is made out to be.