Friday Fun

I need to do something about the fact that this blog is devolving into Friday Fun and the occasional random strange link. Look for actual content next week. (Actually, I was looking forward to having a piece this week, but Mom went and called animal control and ended The Great Cat siege before I had enough material.)

I get these from The Daily Meme usually, and they are usually sets of questions. Though I think the following are good questions, I want to warn you now that I had no hand in the creating of them. I have no idea what streams-of-consciousness oddball came up with them, but I like it so I'm going with it.

And that's about enough disclaiming, don't you think?

When and/or where do you do your best thinking... in the car while driving to or from work, in the shower right after you awake, while on an airplane, in the kitchen making dinner, when you're out for an afternoon or evening run, while applying your make-up, right before you drift off to sleep, at the gym, or some other time and place altogether?

Well, I do all my best thinking in the shower. I have a theory that the hot water and the process of shampooing/massaging my scalp stimulates my brain. Or maybe because I shower in the mornings, so the crossover between the freer dream-state and the fully conscious awake state is particularly creative? I don't know. Anyway, I tend to come up with grand plans, brilliant ideas, story ideas, character plots, etc. in the shower. Lately, I've been fleshing out what I will write if I decide to participate in any capacity in NaNoWriMo.

Do you ever have epiphanies, moments when things become so abundantly clear that you're left wondering what in the heck you were thinking up until that point in time? If so, have your epiphanies led to dramatic changes to your way of being or your thoughts about a particular thing, or was your epiphany nothing more than a simple blip on the radar screen of your existence?

Hmm. I think I tend to have retrospective epiphanies. Like, I will suddenly realize something that's been going on for a while. Past epiphanies include the semi-famous "This is bullshit. You are lying to me. You're an asshole. I'm leaving," incident, which I'm still not sure if I said out loud or not. Circumstances being what they were, I didn't really get a chance to ask. Two days after This Guy and I got together I had a rather epiphanous freak-out, in that it suddenly occurred to me that life had kind of radically changed in the past seventy-two hours and though it had been wonderful and funny and giddy-making it hadn't been particularly surprising until just that moment. In the most literal meaning of the term, I've had a couple of experiences where I feel like I was in some sort of direct communication with the Divine. Those have probably had the largest impact on my life.

They say every one of us has at least one in our lifetime... Without revealing something you're not comfortable sharing, have you ever had what you believed to be a million dollar business idea? If so, what did you do about it? If you haven't done anything with the idea, and you're pretty sure no one else has done anything with it yet either, do you think you'll ever act on this million dollar idea of yours?

Oh, I've had an idea since college, but I don't know how to make it turn a profit and I don't know if someone else has tried it. See, at Bowling Green there was a phone number you could call and get any question you had answered. In 24 hours, if not right then. Fact Line, it was called. You could call fact line with anything. You could, say, see a fire truck go by outside your window, dial 2-2445 and say "What's going on at Prout?" and someone would say, "There's fire alarm going off in the computer lab." You could be up far, far, far too late at night binge-ing on chips and salsa and studying for finals, get a weird idea, and call up Fact Line to ask "Who won, the Hatfields or the McCoys?" (The McCoys) You could get movie times, directions, phone numbers, constellations, the Pythagorean theorem, any damn thing that crosses your mind, from Fact Line. If I could find a way to make Fact Line profitable, that's what I would do.

Mandatory/planned fire drills in the workplace... An unnecessary waste of time or in the best interests of the employee and company?

Before working for BASF, I would have said "waste of time." There's something about working at a site where nineteen different highly toxic processes are going on at any given moment that makes you appreciate safety measures. When I was in DC, I was appalled by the lack of any kind of safety plan. I think at minimum, you should always know where the nearest safe fire exit is, where one other "alternate route" leads, should the first one be blocked, and the rendezvous point is for your building once evacuated. And I really think that whoever posted this set of questions was interrupted by a fire drill at some point.

So. . .talk to me.