Approaching an update

So...I can't remember the details of my dream last night at all. All I remember is that I was at a dinner party, and I was sitting across from Stephen Colbert. He was quite sarcastic with me. On more than one occasion, he just responded to something I said by raising one eyebrow and staring at me. Thanks for making me feel so uncomfortable, Stephen Colbert!

Wouldn't that be great if that was the whole update? :) No such luck, my friends. I'll keep it brief, though. ( Sorta. )

Which brings me to today, which I basically took off from cards to try and catch up with life a little bit. I burned through my snailmail, which is basically becoming less and less relevant to my life. I tried to settle some open issues pending my attention in my Inbox. I caught up with some LJ and other online reading and such...just general maintenance. I also fled the house in order to camp out at the local library and leech off their wireless. You know what they have in the men's room here? An array of home-printed signs imploring, "Please Do Not Shave." I guess there was a problem with that here recently? I gotta wonder what they have against it, though. Sometimes...you just gotta shave.

Anyhoo...I suppose that's about it. I think big changes may be coming soon, but I don't know. There's probably also things going on that I should blog about, but I don't know about that either. I don't know a lot, apparently. :) Ah, which brings me to another point: I smoked a pack of cigarettes over the course of this past weekend, so that sucked. Well, no, it was actually quite nice. :) But what it means is that I'm back in withdrawal, and therefore not a lot of use to anyone. I imagine the fallout will be much less severe than it was a couple weeks ago, but still...no fun. Funny how you can binge drink for a night and then be messed up the next morning...maybe even much of the day. But a cigarette hangover...that's like a week of regret, man. :) But anyway...so there's that.

There's also yet another article out there about the science of happiness. Okay, it's not really an article; it's a speech. Still. I found it interesting, and I shall link to it here. I do not, frankly, remember where I picked up the link, so it has to go unattributed for now. All I know is that I'm linking to it because it goes well with the last happiness article I linked to from this post. Yeah.

In other news, a bunch of Whose Line people are hitting Atlantic City. Actually, just this weekend, Wayne Brady performed at the Borgata. I don't really go to shows or anything, but I might have liked to have swung by that one, just to see if anyone shouted, "Oh, shit! It's Wayne Brady, son!" or anything similar. If not, I would have to. Anyway, in more useful news (like...about stuff that hasn't already happened), Caesar's is having a show soon with Colin, Brad, and Greg. I think that one's in early July; I keep seeing a poster for it on my way to the Trop. Neato. Don't think I'll be going to that one, either, but hey. (I mean...look, if Colin shows up in a pink tutu, I'm just going to burst into tears. I'd rather not risk it.) Anyway, I just thought I'd mention that. I don't often get to mention anything about Atlantic City. :)

Anyhoo. Despite my complete lack of blogging, recent days have actually seen a lot of emotional turmoil from my end. I realize it's been a really long time since I've blogged about anything personal (or...let's face it...interesting). I figure there's enough going on out there...you don't need me. :) But every time I think about sitting down and writing an entry about myself and my feelings, my eyes kind of glaze over and I eventually wander away, kind of idly scratching my nose and wondering why I thought that might be a good idea. Bizarre. But...there it is; instead of anything meaningful, you get an ad for Colin Mochire appearances. :)

In any event, I'm hungry, so I'm going to put the computer aside for a while and take a break. I may well make another post later; I have much of the night to myself. So, until next time, friends. Smell ya later!

What's in a name?

I almost forgot...I got meme-tagged. Based on various conflicting information, I either explain my handle, reveal my nom de plume, neither, both, some combination...I don't know.

Well, flatvurm. Clearly derived from flatworm. I remember, actually, being in the market for a new nick when I started finding out that "Stavro" was becoming a bit too popular (and by that I mean that it started to be already taken on sites I was trying to sign up for). I'd been Stavro on the 'Net long before I had any inkling what the 'Net was to become, so little was I to know that there were people just like me all over the world who would dig on the same sources as myself for handle fodder, so Stavro turned out to be a little too common for my tastes. I was hanging out with the usual crowd on the ol' #stuy95 IRC chat circuit, when I finally reached the breaking point and realized that I needed a new nick. As I recall, the last memorable thing I'd done with the group was go to a parasite exhibit at a museum, and that seemed like a good a place as any to look for inspiration. The tapeworm exhibit seemed especially gruesome, and I just like the way "flatworm" worked; it sounded good, it truncated well, it was sort of spineless and grimy...I can dig it. I'd learned my lesson, though: no more plain English. I remember it went through a "Flatwurm" iteration at some point, and I'd briefly considered "Flatwyrm" for about a millisecond before I rejected it for being too trendy. I tried out the -vurm suffix for a bit, and someone remarked they liked that version the best for the German-looking construction, so I stuck with that. It's not that great a story, frankly; it's much more interesting what's come from my nick than what led to it. :) The only tidbit I've really got from that origin story is that I thankfully escaped being forever known as "Giardia." :)

Pen-name: Well, believe it or not, some small amount of thought has already gone into this one. :) I remember a while back, I pulled the name "Alan Croft" out of thin air when I wrote some fake excerpt to quote or something. I even had fake books to reference. I'm not sure if I have any of the stuff any more...it was just little bits and bobs and nothing of any import. (I have, by the way, done this with both prose excerpts and lyrics I made up. Funfun.) I don't think I'd use that one again, though. I always thought to myself in the dark, dark hours that if I ever did comedy writing or something like that, I'd use Bobby Lockdown. This is a rough (idiomatic) translation and basically the English equivalent of how silly I think my name sounds in Spanish. :) (And just for the record, the fun doesn't stop there. Depending on the nature of the work, I could go with Bobby Love or, and I cannot imagine the circumstances that would make this happen, Bobby Love Lockdown. Oh yeah.) The tired, world-weary author stuff, though...well, it's funny. I've actually got something sitting on the back burner for that, but I can't reveal it as that would sully the whole point of the thing. :)

So, yeah, there ya go. I'm not going to propogate this one, just because. Tally ho!