Warning: this entry contains medium-strength metababble.

I've just noticed that someone in Google-land has given this site a description: A college student records his ramblings, thought experiments, and poetry. College student? Sure. Ramblings? Oh my yes. Gedankenexperiments? I'm flattered at the notion. Poetry? Poetry? I inflict many things upon you innocent readers, but as far as I can remember I've never been so cruel as to blog my own poetry. And I've certainly never been male, except in a couple of dreams, which I haven't blogged either.

Which leaves me wondering at the impression people get when they first visit this page, how I'm slotted in to various neat little systems of stereotypes, and whether that has any meaning when related back to piteous blogland metacommentary or society as a whole. There's no time for me to speculate now, as the computers are in demand today and I really should get back to reading about heat flow and crustal stresses within the New Madrid Seismic Zone, but if you're new here you are warmly invited to make wild and unfounded generalizations about my personal habits and hygiene in the comments box.

I have the forty-second best "real person" personal website in the whole wide universe. You don't have to take my word for it - this site has been "objectively reviewed by two of [this company's] Review Team on the criteria of Personality, Content, Creativity and Functionality." They're going to profile me to their global customers and visitors, which sounds nefarious but I don't think it actually means anything. Maybe it means I should start using more corporate buzzwords, but I'm so far out of touch with the business world that I'd probably sound just too quaint. Meanwhile, while I'm bragging, it's always nice to find myself on the linklist of a previously unknown and damned entertaining blog. Referral logs are fun that way, plus I got search engine hits for "denmark naked elections", "incommunicando" and "gabbro rock poems".

Uhhggh. Tomorrow, or sometime soon anyway, I will tell the story of how I've been getting run out of the computer lab lately. It doesn't have much of a punch line, but it'll feel good to rant about. Meanwhile, you can rest assured that there's a good (or bad, depending on your viewpoint) reason for this post being short and boring.

I got to ride on the top of a double-decker bus this afternoon, and it absolutely made my day. Other things I noticed were:

• My month-old boots (well, month-old to me, I bought them used) are already wearing down on the outside of the heel, which seems to be a bit of a fad among all my shoes. When I stand still and fidget on my feet, I put most of the weight on the outsides, and I suppose I do it when I walk too but it's not so easy to pay attention then. So tonight I tried standing more towards the inside of my feet, and I felt a bit pigeon-toed. Then I did a little dance at the bus stop, but I hid it inside my big ol' jacket. It was mostly my hands that were dancing anyway.
• I am utterly unable to tell the difference between weather that's only a little bit crappy, and weather that's moderately crappy. Yesterday was only a little bit crappy, but today was apparently respectable crap weather, because the morning bus was twice as crowded as usual from all the people too chicken to ride their bikes. To me it felt pretty much like yesterday, and the extra rain was just a bonus.
• The window display of the Scottish Pub, which is the window I lean against when I'm waiting for the bus to come take me home, had a little tourist map of Copenhagen crumpled in one corner. I've made such good use of that map in the past three months that now whenever I see it, I want to coo like a woman with a screaming biological clock. It's frightening, really.

Incidentally, I don't feel at all guilty when I blog in list format. If we have anything to learn from the success of High Fidelity, it's that books with recurring list motifs are popular and easily adapted into fun-but-forgettable movies. And the moderate commercial success of a fun-but-forgettable movie is fuckin' gravy for a college student. The Paramount studio execs will be around any day now, I swear.

Okay, it seems to be well established that these throwaway survey-meme-whatsits are a bit of a guilty blog pleasure... but of course they can't be alone in the category. I'd also throw in the discussion of emode-style tests, all those posts that manage to find new and clever ways to describe how very bored you are, inspired drafts of prose poems, and of course telling last night's dream. What other fluffy blogging traps do you just loove to jump into? And which is absolutely the guiltiest of all your guilty pleasures?

My top three go roughly as follows:
1. trying to imitate rabi's idiom -- am I really too stubborn to acknowlegde my influences? It feels like trying to be what I'm not.
2. loading entries with words I think will generate funny search engine hits -- naked naked naked!
3. meta-commentary and the use of blogworld (as opposed to mainstream internetworld) themes -- will the vicious cycle of deconstruction ever end? and what about that girl on the bicycle?

Ahh, sweet indulgence. This more than makes up for the absence of KinderEggs on today's Netto expedition. Hi-ho, Silver!

If everyone generates good anecdotes at approximately the same rate, and I have more than one friend, my friends are going to generate more good anecdotes than I will. As a consequence of this fact, sometimes I feel a bit like a middleman or a sneaky meme-trader, like much of my coolness lies in all the good stories my friends have told me and all the neat things they do. At times it turns into a kind of hero worship, and I'm unable to imagine that anyone would be retelling my stories in the way I retell theirs, and I'll even forget that my own life can generate stories at all.

Which is why it feels so funny to look back on my archives and realize that I've mostly been telling my own stories here, and people are still listening to me.

I like pseudonyms. I like them in much the same way that I like changing my site design around for no good reason, or changing my clothes - it's all a part of playing with image, I think, and image is a fun game. My scattershot approach to online identity politics hasn't been the most efficient means of branding myself, but so what? I'm not out to establish myself and make money, even though I do have £2.03 sitting in my amazon.co.uk associate's account.

Hmm. There was a rant hiding in there somewhere yesterday, sprung from the bosom of a thread in hesitant firmness, all about whether or not I consider each of my pseudonyms to have a distinct personality, but I've just worked myself into a distraction by introducing the clothes analogy. Now I'm thinking about socks, and warm woolen tights that have bright patterns on them, and funny hats, and other ways to winterize my wardrobe. Also about the fact that in a box somewhere, I think it's in California, I own a tie-dyed union suit, complete with the butt-flap, that I wore to class sometimes last year. I always felt bright and happy wandering around inside it. I think if I wore it around Copenhagen, though, I would not only freeze my ass off but I would feel quite awkward while doing so - people here seem to almost uniformly go for this muted, sophisticated, solid-color look, and it's quite nice from any mature fashionista perspective but it never makes small children giggle.

Now I should flog myself a bit for making two English errors: I just split an infinitive, and yesterday I improperly pluralized the Euro. Of course, infinitive-splitting is a perfectly acceptable practice if you're not trying to impose Latin grammar on the universe, and only an idiot would seriously think that "one euro, two euro" would ever make it into common usage. But I did want to use the word flog.

I should go to bed.

So, as soon as the stupid clears up between Blogger and my web server, I'd like to put together a short favorite entries index for the archives. Any suggestions?