Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

Attempting Dvorak

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I know, I know, my posting rate is abysmal of late. Laziness, I guess.

My latest “Oh, I know, this’ll be fun, and a good use of my time” idea is learning the Dvorak keyboard. Why? Because it’s there, man.

Actually, I have no freakin’ idea why I’m doing this. I type at 60+ wpm on Qwerty. (Dunno exactly how fast. Definitely fast enough to impress a lot of people who’ve seen me in action.) Undoubtedly there is more than a little “I can learn anything!” ego involved. Only a little, I’m sure.

(And no, I am not doing my writing-writing in Dvorak. I switch back to Qwerty for that.)

Update: I took a typing test, the result of which was 75wpm in Qwerty. (Might have been faster, but the words in the test were random and I couldn’t get a flow going.) Going down to 10-15wpm is quite a downer.

Turning pagan

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I realized this past weekend I’m turning pagan. Not in a Wiccan/animist/Asatru kind of way. No, no acceptance of sky gods around here. Just a reassessment of celebrating the seasons.

Sophia was excited out of her mind about a party she was going to on Saturday—an Easter egg hunt. I asked her, “What do we celebrate on Easter?” and she said, “Bunny rabbits and Easter eggs!” Which was pretty much all she knew about it.

I found myself thinking, You know, that’s okay. It’s as good an excuse as any to have a party.

Now that Easter’s come and gone, I feel as though Spring is really here. The days are getting longer. We can get out of the house. (This last part has been fairly crucial when you have little kids. Of course, then it rained on Sunday and we were stuck inside.) Now that we’ve gone through the ritual of bunnies and chicks and eggs, I have a whole Spring mindset now.

The same thing happened around Christmas. We don’t celebrate Christmas as any sort of religious holiday, but I am completely down with having a giant celebration at the darkest part of winter as an excuse to get together with family and friends, to keep spirits up during the coldest part of the year.

On Sunday I laughed when I realized that while I have zero belief in the religious traditions surrounding these holidays, I have no problem whatsoever with celebrating Easter and Christmas in their roles as markers of the season. I’m a right proper pagan now.

Obviously, I’d have some different rationales for why we’d celebrate these holidays if I lived in the Southern Hemisphere.

News of the Weird

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When I was a small Di, I accompanied my mother to innumerable flea markets and second-hand stores, where she would pick through the clothes and merchandise and I, always, headed for the books. And I loved any books having to do with the Weird: witches, ghosts, UFOs, ESP. I don’t know whether this is a consequence of being a kid in the 70s or just my bent or what, but I always asked to buy this or that 5 cent paperback and when we got home my father would look at my haul and just shake his head.

One book I picked up I read over and over again—it had spontaneous combustion and alien abductions and ghosts and people vanishing off the face of the Earth. One stop shopping for the weird. For years I thought it was a book by Charles Fort, but now I think it was Stranger Than Fiction. And of course I loved Holy Blood, Holy Grail (are they going to sue Dan Brown, or what?), which led me down the rose-strewn pathway (ha!) toward not only the Knights Templar but the Gnostic Gospels. And, of course, the gold standard for Weird Thinking: Umberto Eco, whose The Name of the Rose and Foucault’s Pendulum would be required reading, but you’ve already read them, haven’t you?

As you grow up, though, and real life keeps intervening, you find tangible things to frighten you and make you wonder. Like what makes mothers kill their children or husbands kill their pregnant wives or corporations layoff thousands of workers in order to make their stock move up a point. Sure, there might be UFOs, but fuck that: did you hear about Thalidomide Fen-phen Vioxx? Before I had kids, late-night TV shows about ghosts would still make shiver; now, not only do I not watch late-night TV shows, but who gives a flying you-know-what about ghosts when I have to worry about where child molesters live in my neighborhood?

However, a part of me will always love stories from the Weirdside and conspiracy theories. Which is why one of my daily stops now is Rigorous Intuition. I don’t know how Jeff does it, but several times a week he posts a chapter-long meditation on some “weird” angle to recent news stories. Washington DC gay call-boy scandals (the 1988 version, not the 2005 version—but are they linked?), Project Montauk, Lord Maitreya. Aleister Crowley, the United Nations, John von Neumann! One of the favorite phrases in the comments section is, “Don’t fly in any light aircraft, Jeff.” Because TPTB (if I have to translate, you don’t know need to know) will bump off anyone who reveals these innermost secrets, of course.

Rigorous Intuition is one-stop shopping for all your deepest fears about the assholes running our planet. Check it out.