I have a smallish wooden statue of Don Quixote in my room that my parents brought back to me from Spain on one of those adult and other siblings only trips. As I reread my last post (vain, I know), I reflected back to the assigned read of Don Quixote in Dr. Vogt’s 10th grade English class at my year at Gilbert High School (Gilbert, Arizona).

I couldn’t make it through the text, so Dr. Vogt gave me the comic book. That makes one book and a comic book that I made it through in high school.

And what’s up with all the high school people who take it seriously now? If the me of then were taking high school now, I could get a gas station job, drop out, and be in the same place I would otherwise end up (and in a less verbose fashion).

Like many 5th graders, I had to read To Kill a Mockingbird. I am pretty sure this was one of the only assigned reads I ever made it through prior to 10th grade (which is ironic because I read fiction voraciously).

I have to admit that I never really understood the mockingbird reference in the title of the book. That is until recently, when I recently realized how annoying mockingbirds are in real life. Each morning, we wake up to the incessant sound of our resident backyard mockingbird making every sound of every bird imaginable on volume 11 (ala This is Spinal Tap ) starting right before sunrise. It isn’t so bad during the winter when the sun comes up at 7:15 AM, but in the summer, which the sun is up before 6 am, I consistently wake the visions of shooting that bird with a shotgun, or less violently, grabbing and tying that stupid beak shut.

And on that note, how can hummingbirds make such loud noises with such a small body. They are running a distant second for obnoxious chirping early in the morning.

In next weeks episode of mockingbird, I will detail how another stupid mockingbird at my parents Santa Barbara house declared the front walkway off-limits to the actual tenants of the house.

Today, I had to call AT&T to get a home phone line. For the last three years, we decided that we didn’t need a home phone when both the Missus and I have cell phones. Why not make it easy on people and let them call the person they want rather than me having to take a billion messages from people who don’t really want to talk to me. However, at the Missus last doctor’s appointment with the obstetrician, he told her she can’t use her cell phone any longer because it will cause our baby to grow a second head or possibly a third arm.

So I placed an new order with AT&T. After filling out an order form online (btw, lest you think I am an idiot, I filled in all the spaces), I got an email today saying I screwed up and needed to give them more info. So I called AT&T. As anybody who has AT&T can attest, they have an entire area code worth of numbers to call to get to the right person, whom I have never actually talked to so I don’t if he or she actually exists.

After speaking to Vicki the Robot, I was put on hold.

The hold music? Yes, Muzak. As I listened to the first refrains, a few "questions" came to mind:

1. Who composes this crap? If I wrote lame muzak, I certainly wouldn’t publish the fact I did it to anybody I know. It is kind like tough-guy sports dudes who secretly read People magazine and know more about the Hollywood happenings than their wives. Or guys who were yell-leaders in high school and are too ashamed to admit it anybody.

2. What genius at AT&T decided that (a) this is good music to put on the hold line and (b) that it would be not be offensive to people? That question might be easy to answer. I suspect that they are trying to cut costs and recent studies show that if you make people listen to the muzak and put them on hold for 5 minutes that your call realization is 50 or 80 percent what it is if you put classical music on the hold line.

The bottom line: Muzak is offensive to everybody. Take notice AT&T, we hate it. Stop being cheap and get something better if you are going to put your customer’s on hold.

One of the problems I consistently have, not just with blog writing, but journals generally is audience and coherence. What topics should go into a given blog or journal? What audience does one write to?

Recently, as it comes to blogs I realized that (1) a successful blog has to have a “theme” more or less. That is, it cannot be all over the place because readers need to know what to expect when they come to read the blog, even if the theme is an all over the place theme. For example, successful blogs I read deal with politics. But I get really annoyed when the blog departs from its main purpose. Other blogs I read focus are intended to be culture/comedy, which is why the Bachelor Recaps gets a hall pass when it departs from recaps of the Bachelor.

(2): a successful blog cannot be “forced.” In other words, entries cannot be nothing more than typing to, well, proverbially hear yourself type. I have noticed that some people try to be witty and they aren’t, which fails. Or some people write just because they feel like they have to but haven’t anything particularly interesting to say.

All these musing said, if it isn’t apparent, I am having a hard time defining the scope of my blog. Do I include family stuff (already decided that goes in another blog)? Canyoneering advnetures (another blog)? Religion? Politics? Crazy stuff that happens what seems like every minute of every day at work?

I suppose my ideas for audience will have to wait. But to tee it up, is one’s journal really a journal if you are writing for others to read? Can you really be honest in a journal if you are self-censoring to make yourself look good? If you aren’t self censoring, however, what is the point in keeping a journal if nobody is to read it?

So I spent the better part of Sunday reconfiguring the sidebar of this blog from an older version of wordpress. Turns out, wordpress developers couldn’t leave well enough alone and had to change all the functions that run wordpress, which automatically renders the old Mecki’s Advice Column template the equivalent of Comidore64.

So I fixed most of the sidebar, but frankly I just don’t care how it looks at this point. That said, I am sure I will be tinkering with it tomorrow, because who really believes that I don’t really care?

OK, so this bluff is called. I am writing now only because I want to fill up some space in this dumb blog.