Areas of Unrest

15 April 2001 - Haiku Wars

QOTD: "Too many people have decided to do without generosity in order to practice charity." - Albert Camus, The Fall

Reading: Lynne Murray, Larger Than Death

Listening to: Outback, Baka

This week's L.A. Weekly had an ad for Secret Agent Camp. The idea is apparently to spend a weekend pretending you're James Bond out to save the world. I admit that pursuing kidnapped hostages might make an interesting weekend, but the ad mentions scaling 35 foot walls, flying through the air on zip lines and traversing rope bridges 50 feet above the ground. All they need to do is throw in a field of sunflowers and it would be pretty close to my vision of hell.

While I'm mentioning my neuroses, I realized today that I have another really stupid phobia. Not that this disrupts my life in any way, but I have a dreadful fear of sleeping more than 24 hours. I woke up from an afternoon nap in a minor panic that I might have slept so long that it was Monday and I'd missed work. And I realized that I've had the same reaction before. The obvious solution is not to nap. Or, at least, to set the alarm clock when I do.

Let's see, what's been going on? I had a one night trip to Sunnyvale for a moderately useless meeting, which provided an opportunity for a more productive side session. Being in town most of the week helped me make some progress on clearing off my desk at work, which meant I had no interest in dealing with my backlog at home. I did make a few more concrete plans for my upcoming vacation. You can tell the Internet has spread when you can make reservations at two star Maltese hotels via email. Aside from that, I spent my spare time mostly reading and making another attempt to clear out the stack of puzzles. I finally got to see "Memento," which is a reasonably interesting movie, with a nice puzzle aspect to it, and which raises a few interesting questions about how the brain works. I'm writing about things that have happened over the past few days, which I can do because I can form memories. But what if I couldn't process new memories? It seems to me that writing anything significant would become impossible.

Thursday night was Community Storytellers, which was fun, as usual. Leonard wrote a cute little song - "Sweet Whitefish and Pike" to the tune of "Sweet Betsy From Pike." I told my annual Passover story, which is really a combination of two jokes my father used to tell, with a frame around them to turn it into an actual story. I haven't found another way to work his other annual joke in, though. Every year Dad would say, "I don't see what the deal is about everyone being so rich in America. Here it is Pesach - and we don't even have any bread in the house!"

Finally, as proof of my insanity, I'm engaged in a war of haikus with my boss. It started a few weeks ago, when I was trying to do my weekly activity report and my computer was being flaky. I warned Milo that I might have to give him a handwritten version, but I got the computer working fine after rebooting an obscene number of times. When I emailed the report to him, I threw in a brief haiku:
The computer limps
along. I must not throw it
out of my window.

He was amused and I'd had enough fun with it that my next report was accompanied by:
Orbit HDC
Tomorrow at contractor
So highlights today.

I should explain that HDC is a high-level design checkpoint, which is a sort of design review. We also have detailed design checkpoints, which are called DDCs. And I used the actual name of the contractor, but it's safer not to do that here.

Another week went by and I wrote:
Two weeks had haiku
Did you think I could resist
Doing it again?

So this week, Milo sent out his reminder asking for our activity reports with:
By noon today please
send your voice highlights to me
haiku if you must

The actual highlights go into an attachment, but my email reply was:
Friday the thirteenth
Could there be any horror
Worse than my haiku?

To which Milo responded:
manson, simpson, vlad,
hdc, ddc, more,
these just might be worse

At least this is better than when we end up exchanging puns.