thisis.toddseal.com

The February 2006 edition of National Geographic Magazine has a cover story devoted to love. It begins with a short-short story of the author’s wedding day. Lauren Slater does a great job with narrative and description, really throughout the piece but particularly with that beginning story. That’s what made me think of writing some short-short stories. I’ve thought of putting together a short story collection for a long time, but all I keep writing are these really brief beginnings of things. Writing a story much longer than 2 or 3 pages seems daunting and I never get much further. If I take those beginnings and tighten things up a bit, I’d have a fair amount of short-short stories and… Anyhow, here’s today’s effort.
Read more of “Quick“

My bathroom sink sits, draining terribly slowly. This happened quite suddenly and right now I can’t even hear the faintest whisper of the water swirling down the drain. I’ve tried the plunger and some microbiotic drain cleaner that’s always my first defense. Nothing’s happened. I started to wonder what I would do if I could never unplug it. What if all my drains were stopped up? What if I couldn’t find a plummer? This beginning of a story popped into my head shortly after that.
Read more of “Walter And The Amazing Pipes“

You’re better off going to my education blog, (http://www.toddseal.com/rodin/); this blog is suffering from lack of maintenance. I have, however, managed to update how I am filling my spare time and some items that are noteworthy, so have a look.

It’s been quite some time since I’ve written for this blog. For a while there, I was trying to write for at least 3 blogs at the same time, each of them devoted to a different area of interest. This blog was supposed to be the place I could post little bits of creative writing. I haven’t been doing that much (neither the writing nor the posting), so this blog has become obsolete. I won’t delete it though because, despite the incredible amount of comment spam I receive here every day, I have hopes that I will sometime come back to this space to start posting creative things (I’ve written a song or two since July and maybe I’ll post those here). In fact, composing this post gives me the idea that I should use this area again.

I’m on the front page of two sites! Well, I was on Thursday, July 7, 2005.

I wrote another three-part series about the public education system over on Bayosphere (my first attempt at this is over on my education blog), staying up late into the night to pound out my thoughts on the keyboard. All three parts were initially in one post, but it was terribly long.

Dan Gillmor, formerly of San Jose Mercury News and now of Bayosphere fame, took note of my articles and put a teaser on the Bayosphere home page (link to the archived teaser). Additionally, School Information Systems must have seen my series and included links to all three parts on their site.

I don’t think I’ve ever been the “lead story” on two sites in one day. It’s strangely gratifying.

I wrote a letter to the editor and sent it off to USA Today, the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Jose Mercury News, and The Metro using moveon.org’s PAC Letter to the Editor tool. I dont’ count on it getting published, mostly due to its length. Though I tried to trim it down a bit, this thing runs 388 words, far too long compared to most letters to the editor that I’ve seen published. Oh well; this is my first letter to any editors of print publications. I’m sure I’ll get better at crafting a more attractive letter in the future. Here we go…
Read more of “Bush’s Pathetic Use of Pathos“

The South Orange County Regional Chambers of Commerce has put together a list of the 65 petitions currently in circulation in California. Only about 8 of them are to be voted on in November, 2005.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has decided that a special election will be necessary. This special election is supposed to save Californians millions of dollars and is to be an election that couldn’t possibly be held off or rescheduled for a later date, like next year in the regular election cycle when finances have been set aside for such an election and wouldn’t present any more of a fiscal burden than normal. Schwarzenegger seems to take his task of fixing California’s fiscal crisis seriously, constantly drumming up the rhetoric of “cleaning house” in relation to his charge. He continues to hit on the need for cooperation in passing a balanced state budget and speaks of a refusal to bend to special interest groups.
Read more of “Special Election Coverage“

I wonder if I can get a meme going, with somewhat of a “literacy” theme: Listening, Reading, and Watching…

First 5 Songs in Shuffle of Entire Music Library
Read more of “A Meme by Me?“

Coming soon, from the twisted mind of Clive Barker, the strange imagination of Stephen King, and the frightening vision of newcomer Mark Z. Danielewski…

This summer, fear The Booblegger!

Watch out; he’s coming to boob you.

During dinner, we watched a news segment on bootlegged copies of the new Star Wars film. It sounded like the reporter said “booblegger” and this is more or less the joke I made out of it. It’s not very funny now, I know, but maybe it’ll give me (or you) and idea for a story later. I tried drawing a picture of it, but it looked too pathetic.

After reading a Bayoshpere article, I started to write a comment that took on a life of its own. It grew to something more sophisticated than a mere comment, yet too meager to claim “Article” status. And, because of some foolish phpMyAdmin rummaging by yours truely, I’ve had to recreate this entry based on my recollection of what I was thinking this afternoon. A shorter version of this idea appears elsewhere. I present the unedited (and reimagined) version here. Subject: iPod.
Read more of “Sleek and Sexy“

The Set Up
You’ve just written a terrible blog post. It’s so bad that you don’t ever want the public to see it. You consider whether or not you should simply stop writing for fear of another creation like this word-ladden monstrosity, a verbal Frankenstein’s monster–only not as smart. You even eye the knives with a notion to chop off your–no, too extreme. It’s really bad, though. Your mother would blush and your best friend would be embarrassed to say she knows the author. It’s trash, really, and you want it gone forever, with not so much as a hint of it around. But you’re not using WordPress; you’re using Rodin, a small but functional CMS that worked perfectly for your little side project. So now what?
Read more of “Using Rodin?“

INSPIRATION: Daily, I see thug fashion in just about every caste of high school life. All of those categories of kids that I recall being distinguishable by the clothes they wore, those identifiers are gone as all groups of kids sport LRG, Rocca Wear, and other “urban wear” clothing. And for all that posturing, most of those kids, even the ones who talk a tough game, are just kids who want to look cool, not kids who want to do bad things. By appearance, the bark is far worse than the bite. And what if those tough looking kids we all walk past at various times each day and we see on TV, well, what if those kids were really “momma’s boys”? Read more of “Wanna Be O.G.“

INSPIRATION: Well, the combination of a bit of Chandon sparkling wine and being tired conspired to make me write this. Once again, you see the mention of my generic male character, Ron. I really hope he does some tricks for me one of these days…
Read more of “Drifting Off To Sleep“

I have no idea who this main character is. To be honest, I simply needed a name for him and Ron is someone that already exists in my stories (Ron has become my default male character name), so I chose a different name. Maybe this actually is Ron, though. I hope to find out in the next month.
Read more of “Who is Brian?“

I went to an old friend’s funeral and memorial service on Friday. It was an odd experience. I haven’t spoken to Nate in over 10 years. I went to grammar school with him and knew him through Bethel Church’s youth groups throughout my jr. high and high school career. I used to go over to his house for Monday Night Football every week. We formed a “club” called CCA (Church Cutters Anonymous) that wasn’t a serious club, but we took our church cutting very seriously. Read more of “For You, Nathan“

INSPIRATION: Vanessa was signed up to chaperone senior prom. I laughed and said two words: have fun. I had no intent of going. Then, I found out that the prom was on our 6-year anniversary. Well, in an effort to hang out with her a little bit, I agreed to go. We enjoyed our day before the prom, then got dressed up to go. She didn’t stay for long (bad night for her), but we did get to see a few students on their big high-school night.
Read more of “Senior Prom as an Adult“

Since this is a place for me to write and for you to comment, I will occasionally take the opporunity to post things I’ve written, little bits of short stories that either never panned out or just ended too soon. Right now is one of those opportunities. I ended up doing more with Ron (the main character in this bit), but this little section might just stand on its own.
Read more of “Short-short Story: Graduation“

I just did a quick Google for “limit number of posts on home page wordpress” and came to Justin Blanton’s site. That is exactly what I wanted to do. And he’s right, it’s just that easy.

But to make it even more so, I’ll tell you exactly where to put that code on your page in WordPress 1.5. I actually took an educated guess and was right on the first try. That doesn’t happen very often, so I figured it was worth a post to celebrate. I’ll also include a semantic way to have alternating colors for your posts on the index page (doesn’t it sound so much better with the word “semantic” attached to it?). Here goes:
Read more of “Limit and Alternate“

While driving the other day (actually, this happened about 4 months ago), my thoughts weighed heavily and I found myself depressed. In general, I felt rather down about my life and various other things. The 2004 election hit me hard, as the realization that you are surrounded by idiots so often does, so that could have been a major contributing factor. Luckily for me, I kept some very scientific research about that day, specifically that drive and the role my iPod played in my emotional state. After analyzing the data closely, I’ve come to a startling realization, that I will share with you shortly. Just to preface this study, I have submitted this article for publication in the journal Science; keep your fingers crossed!
Read more of “My Empathic iPod“

While eating breakfast, I am watching Today on NBC. This’s actually a crappy, fluffy morning show that I don’t care for. Usually, I turn on channel 11 to watch the news updates and sort of zone out the rest of the broadcast because I just haven’t gotten it through my head yet that I’m old enough that NPR is *really* what I want to be listening to. Still, Today ended up having two segments that caught my attention.
Read more of “Today Was Interesting“

I was on the radio last night with Gene Burns. This was the first time I ever called into a radio show and I was quite nervous. I am one to constantly question my expertise, even though I assert myself as confident and sure of my answers. Putting my ideas out there on the radio, impossible to edit, revise, or rethink, is a scary thing. What if I don’t get my ideas right? What if I completely lose my logic? Worst of all, what if I end up contradicting myself!?
Read more of “I’m On A [KGO] Radio“