A Wild Young Under-Whimsy

Cleaning up this pigsty. It has been years since I updated my sidebar. Many of the blogs and websites I used to link to are now defunct, or on lengthy hiatus, so I've limited my blogroll to the most regularly updated blogs, plus new discoveries. I still track most of the old ones with RSS, though, on the off-chance the bloggers decide to stage a comeback. I also keep track of many, many other blogs for professional reasons, but as this is my personal blog there is no need to list all those.

Doing this really underscores the way that so many wonderful people I've met through blogging seem to find it exhausting or irrelevant now. Some reasons for this might be:

• because social media have largely taken over the networking aspects of blogging;
• because the commercialisation of blogging has squeezed the form like a tube of toothpaste, with celebrity bloggers at one end and specialist single-topic bloggers at the other (eg: mp3, gossip, lulz). Generalist blogs about people's everyday musings and antics seem less prevalent now
• because privacy is more of a concern now, and so people have retreated behind password walls into the private public sphere

I might keep tweaking this new list over the next couple of weeks, because there will inevitably be people I forgot to put on it and people I deleted by mistake.

As you can also see, I have added a list of the sites on which I waste so many hours of each day. Wikipedia is probably the worst of them: you begin with a legitimate query and then find yourself browsing lists of famous elephants and researching historical methods of distillation. You also end up being a dreadful knob at parties.

Bat the balls! This is my new ridiculous turn of phrase. You can file it next to "Jaunty Pussy" and "not too shabby"*. It originated earlier this week as I was vowing to get through lots of work in my working day. I was imagining myself as a tennis player, and the tasks I face in my daily life as one of those automated serving machines that remorselessly spits out balls. I saw myself matching the machine ball for ball, dispatching them all efficiently as they came.

Fthoonk! Pok! Fthoonk! Pok! It was a satisfying image of ultra-competence. "C'mon Mel, today you're gonna bat some balls!" I said to myself with fierce, comforting determination.

It is unfortunate that it sounds like some kind of masturbatory practice involving testicles. But I have become attached to my ball-batting expression and am psychologically unable to alter either 'bat' or 'balls' to sound more socially acceptable. "Bat the balls" it is, and "bat the balls" it shall stay. It sounds like some kind of ridiculous hyper-macho vernacular, such as one might find in Glengarry Glen Ross, or perhaps the Channel Nine boardroom.

So tomorrow, I'm totally gonna bat some balls! Pok!

* Just for future reference, you should probably know my Scale Of Greeting Responses:

Q: How are you?

A: Really good = I am feeling extremely happy
A: Not too shabby = Fine, thank you
A: Pretty shabby = I have a hangover
A: I'm all right = I am feeling stressed, angry or miserable
A: Meh (or other grunt) = Things are very bad with me today