| Jan052009 | Interview With a Blogger |
A few days ago, Distracted Spunk responded to five questions and offered to interview anyone who could spare the time and honesty. She’s sent me her questions:
- What’s your favorite form of punctuation?
- If you could relive any one day in your life, what day would it be?
- What do you think it would take for you to stop blogging?
- Have you ever had an “almost” moment – where it seemed like things were just about to start but they never actually did? Job-wise, relationship-wise, friend-wise, etc.
- What would your dream bathroom look like?
Explain in detail! :)
I’d like to offer the same to any readers of this blog. If you’d like me to interview you so you can blog about it, leave a comment and I’ll email you some questions. Be forewarned that I will send you Jon-Stewart-quality questions: ones that are super insightful and well thought-out but ultimately serve to set me up for some punchlines.
Favorite Punctuation
Funny that she should ask this. She’s the only person I know that actually writes complete sentences in IM with periods and capital letters. From this, I infer that she is a proud writer with the highest respect for the craft and the language. Or maybe she’s just spend too much time writing papers.
My favorite punctuation mark is the semicolon. It’s a widely-known but rarely-used mark to link together related clauses or list out items where commas would be unbecoming. I like it because it puts just the right pause in the rhythm of a sentence: longer than a comma, shorter than a period and without the added noise of an extra word.
Runner up would be the sarcasm mark which I see a lot in closed captions, e.g. “That’s so great (!)” It must be an uncommon usage because I almost never see it used outside of this context. I like the way it takes the loud bang of a exclamation mark and mutes it between two parentheses.
My least favorite is the interrobang, used to combine a question and punctuation mark into one. It just looks unwieldy and doesn’t have the finesse of ligatures.
Reliving Any One Day
I’m not sure I could pick one. I’m currently in a pretty happy place and I don’t ache with nostalgia for any particular day. Maybe as a joke, I’d go back and relive the day that I first saw Groundhog Day. That would be deliciously meta but nobody else would be around for the joke.
Ok, if we want to get really sad here, I’d go back to that day I last saw my grandpa alive. He was lying in a hospital bed, pre-op, and about to go in for another round of bypass surgery. I had not been present at his previous surgeries and I had no knowledge about the gravity of the circumstances. As we left his room, my parents told me to hug my grandpa and say goodbye and I remember thinking it was such an odd request because I almost never hugged my grandpa. Ours was a strong familial bond but hugging was simply never part of the regimen. Nonetheless, I embraced him because I thought surgery must be pretty scary so maybe he needed all the moral support he could get.
I wasn’t dissatisfied with the way I said goodbye but I wish I had known exactly what that goodbye meant.
What Would It Take to Stop Blogging
Blogging has been that constant in my life for the longest time because I’m so connected to the internet. I spend 8 hours a day at a computer and then I go home and spend some more time on my laptop. In between, I use my phone to read the internet. It’s insane, I know. It’s why my hard-working, blue-collar parents probably don’t think too hard about why their son is paid twice as much as they are to sit down and wiggle his fingers all day.
I can’t think of anything that would make me stop. It would have to be something completely unexpected. Like I suddenly form a meth habit or some EMP knocks out the entire internet. It’s like asking what it would take for me to stop walking.
An “Almost” Moment
Job-wise and friend-wise, nope. Relationship-wise? Ergh. It pains me to even think about it. How close do you have to be to count it as “almost”? Like when I feel like I can stand on a box and almost pluck the full moon out of the sky?
There were several paragraphs here and I deleted them. You’ll have to take my word that they were very well-written and yet hard-to-read.
Dream Bathroom
I haven’t thought much about this but I imagine a contemporary, minimalist theme with maybe a touch of zen garden. I haven’t got any real ideas about colors but I want a very modern sink and one of those floor-to-ceiling glass showers that could fit two people comfortably. Oh and I want wireless speakers that my iPhone or computer can stream to so I can listen to music in there. And I want the softest towels imaginable, ones that caress like a lover’s touch. And magical mirrors that are resistant to fogging up.
Oh, and heated tile floors. Mmm.
That’s all, folks. As I said above: if you’d like to be interviewed, leave a comment and I’ll email you the questions.
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