February 26, 2008.  Random thoughts past midnight:

Politics.  That pathological egomaniac, Ralph Nader, is running again.  What bothers me more than his running is that thousands of people will throw their votes away on this bozo.

As for the Democratic campaign, the media seem to have decided that Hillary Clinton is as good as finished.  I wouldn't count her out yet, though I'm not a Hillary fan.  She is beginning to look vulnerable in the three remaining big primary states – Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania – but, even if she loses one or more of these and is behind Obama in the committed delegate count, never underestimate the Clintons' power to wheel and deal among the uncommitted super delegates.  Of course, that will be bad for the Democratic party and could even cause many Democrats to defect to the Republican side and McCain.  I would really hate to see the Democrats blow the election by letting one candidate's personal ambition ride roughshod over the best interests of the party.

Verizon Revisited.  Just when I thought everything about my bill was finally straightened out (see Feb. 14 and 16), my router died.  This necessitated a call to Verizon's tech help via Miss Chirpy, the cheerful but incompetent robot who inhabits the customer service line.  After navigating the convoluted menu, I was eventually informed that a technician would call me.  Miraculously, one did – four hours later.  He told me that a new router would be shipped and that I would receive it in two days.  He also told me how to bypass the router in the meantime so that I could get online, though my wife's computer would not be able to do so until the new router came.

Three days passed – no new router.  I was about to undertake, with gritted teeth, another call to Miss Chirpy, when I received a call from Verizon.  However, it wasn't about the router but a follow-up on the billing issue.  The caller was unaware that I had a new problem.  I took this coincidental opportunity to ask the caller to check with the technical people about my router – anything was better than grappling with the frustrating automated phone system.  She said she would, and a technician did call me back.  It turns out that they "had issues" with shipping a router and would have to send a technician to my house to install a new one.  Nice of them to let me know, wasn't it?

Anyway, a technician did come the next afternoon and set up a new router.  We're back in business with both computers connected to the Internet.  All's well that ends well?  No.  Both of my problems have been rather simple and should have been routine, but both have brought out serious communications problems within Verizon and between Verizon and its customers.

Facebook.  My wife received an e-mail from Facebook stating that a family friend had asked her to register as a "friend."  We checked it out with the family friend and were informed that Facebook accessed the friend's address book and found my wife's address there as a registered Facebook user.  Two details bother us.  First, my wife never registered at Facebook; she hasn't even been to the site.  Second, if registration at Facebook gives it access to one's address book, how safe is that?  Infiltrating address books is one of the primary tactics of adware and spyware generators.  That makes me highly suspicious of the whole Facebook operation.

I've never understood the whole electronic "social networking" phenomenon anyway.  Are people so devoid of real-life friends that they most resort to outfits such as Facebook to establish contacts?  I'm not against having "virtual" friendships with people who share one's interests.  In fact, my address book contains the names of several people whom I have never met in person and with whom I exchange e-mail.  However, I don't measure my social status by how many hundreds of people I have in my address book.  I am as selective about the people I hang out with online as I am about the people I hang out with in real life.  I also don't feel compelled to put the intimate details of my life out on the Internet for the world to see.  I think the best word for that is tacky.  Ironically, people who do this are among the first to scream about "invasion of privacy."  Hey, if you choose to run around with everything hanging out – including your most intimate feelings – you voluntarily surrendered your privacy long ago.

February 29, 2008.  I am in the process of creating The Joy of Grumbling.  I envision an expansion of the idea stated here in the February 19 Mudgelog.  By "expansion," I mean a book-length work, and I'm not sure I can pull that off.  The only other sustained writing on one topic that I have done was my master's thesis (fifty years ago!), and that was a bit of sustained academic drudgery that I undertook only because it was required for a degree.

I don't think I'm lacking sufficient ideas for a sustained treatise on grumbling.  Besides explaining the benefits of grumbling, effective ways to grumble, and other general ideas, I can include many examples of things there are to grumble about – and that list is endless.  The real challenge is to pull everything together into coherent chunks.  So far, although I am working with a very rough outline, I am just taking thoughts and running with them until they exhaust themselves.  I shall, no doubt, have to do some very serious self-editing in the future.  When one is writing on just one subject, albeit viewing it from different angles, one tends to become repetitious and tiresome.  Still, given modern readers' preference for digesting short chunks at a time (especially when reading nonfiction), I shall probably write so that each chapter can stand alone.  That suits me fine because, as I've said, I'm more of an essayist than a writer of sustained treatises.

I have been soliciting input on this site's Message Board, and I have already gotten some very thoughtful suggestions.  I've also been talking with and e-mailing friends.  The impression I'm getting reinforces one of the themes of The Joy of Grumbling.  Although the world's Pollyannas love to chastise grumblers for being pessimistic joy-killers who contribute nothing to the welfare of humanity, although the bookstores abound with books containing platitudes about the power of thinking positively, people love to grumble.  They all seem to have a huge catalog of pet peeves, and they not only enjoy expressing them but revel in doing so.  If we ask any group of people to start sounding off about pet peeves, the discussion will soon become enthusiastic and animated, often punctuated by laughter.  Even those who believe that grumbling is negative and counterproductive will soon be participating.  (I guess I better stop here because I should be saving my ideas for the book.)

March 20, 2008.  Good grief!  Here we are two-thirds of the way through March, and I haven't had an entry since the end of February.  My excuse, of course, is that I'm plugging away at The Joy of Grumbling, which is turning out to be much harder to write than I thought it would be.  I'm rather good, I think at coming up with ideas for writing, but getting those ideas down is another matter.  I'm up against the cold, hard fact that I am, and always have been, an essayist and that I'm ill equipped to sustain a long work.

Still, I won't abandon the idea, even though I feel a bit discouraged at the moment.  Perhaps I need a compromise.  Since I'm accustomed to creating on a smaller canvas, maybe I should rethink The Joy of Grumbling as a series of essays built around a common theme.  That might enable me to do what I advise my students to do when they are overwhelmed by the prospect of writing an entire essay.  I tell them to break the topic into meaningful chunks and to focus on one chunk at a time.  In their case, the chunks are paragraphs; in mine it would be separate essays that would eventually form a larger whole.

One thing I must not do is to spend so much time thinking about doing it that I'm spending too little time doing it.  That would be, of course, the precrastinator's ultimate rationalization.  It's something like what students do when they're assigned research papers.  "How's the paper going?" I'll ask.  "Oh, I'm half done," the student will say.  "Let me see what you have," I say.  "Oh, I haven't written anything yet."  It turns out that the student has photocopied or acquired from the Internet reams of pages, but that's it.  I'm not that bad – I have about twenty pages written – but I'm beginning to sink into more thinking than action.

Maybe after the spring weather gets here, and the juices start to flow again . . . maybe after the semester is over, and I don't have student papers to read . . . .  Dammit, there I go again.