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Slumbooks

I just got these new links from one of my recent visitors (Hullo Kat!). I figured I might as well include them since they bring back much of the good old days.

The first link is the Slumbook. I remember the grader class being assigned to produce those. I bought the cheapest notebook I knew that didn't have a celebrity's face on the cover. Then I brought out my prized collection of stickers, most of which were free from Chickadees. I had DC and Marvel Superheroes mostly. Strangely, they carried rifles and machine guns in those depictions. As if blinding costume color combinations weren't enough. Well, bless the children! I placed a couple on every page.

I meticulously wrote the preassigned questions with the proper spacing and margins. Now this was really exhausting work for an ungifted grader. Gruelling, really. I knew nothing of calligraphy then. Good handwriting was never to come naturally to me. I wrote so laboriously then! As if I were creating a universe.

It's a good thing I got a spiral notebook. Just strip away those pages with missed spaces, wrong spellings, and crooked margins! I even had to put glue behind some of the stickers just so I could reuse them. I was lucky to get away with a few pages.

I used signpens just because they were the best pens I knew. Never mind that they bled to the pages beneath.

Ultimately, the effort gave me much happiness. Young one learns to be proud of his accomplishment, never mind the grade. Looking back, it was one ugly pile. Such a smile I had though.

I wonder if that link will last long though. The poet Carl Sandburg says that the past is nothing more than a bucket of ashes.

Is that so huh? I wonder why that smile was burned? That twinkle in the eye. Not this grin I am now accustomed to. Or this raised eye brow.

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Mood Indicators

I also picked up a Mood-Indicator. Cute little thing.

I always wanted to get me one of those. I think it's really very honest to tell everyone else how you feel at the moment. Specially when you're serving them something. Food, joke, news article, scientific formulae, painting, problem set computations, dance interpretation, poem, song, drink.

The Chinese say "Fight with Cook, Get no Dinner." I find that when I'm really upset, I don't cook well. The family knows when I'm not in a good mood. The damn dish says so. I had the blackest bile frothing in my heart when I cooked for New Year's Eve. I cooked doubly hard, cooking and checking myself at the same time. I think I tasted the dish at every turn of the pan, just to make sure. I knew I averted a culinary disaster.

It's the same with everything really. Objectivity is really more hype than anything else. Even scientists are passionate! I would have them no other way. A mad scientist over a heartless one, I always say!

Since this a public blog, I guess the readers are entitled to know the state of the cook. Not just as an excuse for the cook though! Else, I'd just leave depressed there permanently and get away with every typo error. It's for the reader's sake. They might want to know were it's all coming from.

Any human product involves emotion. After you hear the baby crying, you hear the man. That is what the historians refer to as History, the critics call the Canon, and the humanists call the Project. That is what the theologians look forward to as God, what the scientists speculate as the Grand Unification Theory. A sea of tears cried in man's pain, her joy, her grief, her triumph, her attempts at dispassion.

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Internet Moods

After creating the html for the indicator, I scrolled down the preferences and saw another indicator. It was the Internet Mood Indicator. Somehow, the internet had feelings and through html and javascript paths, they somehow got their finger on its pulse.

We were done stripping emotion off men. Now we put them on his creations. In some measure maybe, we are a pride of pygmalions chipping away at this internet, looking forward to some cyber galatea.

Aw man! Freaky thought. For some reason, I'm not hot on getting that index. I wouldn't know how to deal with an angry internet! Much less a tearful one.