This is the one about feeds.

In the past couple of months I’ve found that I’m spending fewer idle hours on the internet.  Which is good, I guess.  But my Google Reader is full, and it’s making me a little anxious.

First, if there are any non-nerds reading, I should define Google Reader as a web-based aggregator, which is capable of reading Atom and RSS feeds on or offline.  Umm…still confused?  How about this: it’s one website where you can read all of your favorite websites when they are updated.

Good.

So I subscribe to 124 feeds.  And I’ve got everything categorized into fifteen folders:

* Blogs (written by people I know…virtually or otherwise)
* Local (local food and news)
* Productivity (ironically one of the biggest time-sucks)
* Design & Coding (web stuff)
* Android (phone stuff)
* Orange County Politics
* Diabetes Blogs
* Design (like interior design)
* Technology
* Entertainment
* LGBT
* Blogging
* Links to me (I created a feed that shares links when someone links to this website)
* Work (things related to my profession)

I easily get over 1,000 articles a day in my reader.  And when I was reading things every day, that wasn’t a huge deal.  Granted I used to breeze past a lot of stuff…or just mark entire folders as read if I wasn’t interested that day.  But I kind of feel like now I’m overfed – too much to read, not enough time to read it.  So what goes?

This is the one done with a sharpie.

I’m kind of impressed with my abilities this afternoon.  Today, with two sharpies and about fifteen pieces of paper, I re-worked What Some Would Call Lies.

If you’re reading in a reader, click through.

This scribbled, doodled, kind of look had been something I wanted to throw together for some time.  It was inspired, actually by a valentine card from a few years ago.  Anyway.  It’s new.  It’s cute.  Enjoy it.

The only thing that I don’t love is that depending on your screen resolution, you may not be able to see ALL of the doodles in the background.  So click here to see the image full-sized.

This is the one where you’re a mispelled word.

In the Teen Center at work yesterday a group of boys were sitting around watching the Suns VS Lakers game and as teenage boys tend to do, they started talking trash on one another.  After a few warnings about their shitty language, they finally started censoring the cuss words.  Here is one exchange that took place between Oscar and Luis:

Oscar: “My dog just had another set of puppies.”
Luis: “Your dog had puppies like three months ago.”
Oscar: “I know…she has a lot of puppies.”
Luis: “That’s because your dog is a…” he paused to think about the word he was going to use.  “That’s because your dog is a H-O-R.”

This is the one about fonts.

You know how songs can totally bring you back?  Would it be strange to say that when I use particular fonts, or just scroll past them when putting together a flyer, I kind of get transported back in the same way?
I’m serious.

Some fonts, pardon the nerdy pun, carry more weight than others.  But just like particular perfume, sometimes just seeing a font means more to me than anyone could ever guess.  Here are a few examples:

In the early 2000s (damn that makes me feel old), I was working for a newspaper covering city politics.  And said newspaper was struggling to put content on the web – instead of having searchable, dynamic content they were just uploading a .pdf of their paper to the web.

So I was contracted to create a simple site that used a CMS – and my design used Bell Gothic.

This was also the font that I started creatively adjusting the tracking in.  Back in the day.

Over a year ago I loved this font.  I used it everywhere but the two places that stick out are here on this site (notice it’s gone, btw) and I also created a Power Point and manual for a training we did at work on Effective Guidance and Discipline.

To be honest, the font and design were the only things that were enjoyable in that entire thing.  But it was one of the few times since being in Arizona that I’ve been able to get super creative and put on my novice graphic designer hat.

I hate this font.  I really hope my old boss isn’t reading this.

In California when I was a literacy coordinator for a Club, my boss was a girl named Kristen that used this font like crazy.  I guess if I had a font named “Mike Lawson” I’d use it a lot too…oh wait, look at the header of this blog and all the headers on the right.

I get it.  She liked it.  She thought it was cute.  But entire meeting agendas in the Kristen font were just too much.

Hate.

This is another stupid font, but it totally brings me back.  Back in the early 2000s (again?!) I created a website to host my resumé and my first official blog (even though I’d been doing Internet Journals since high school…the title of “blog” was new).  I used the font Grinched in the design.  If you click here you can kind of see the design on the Internet Way Back Machine even though the website is gone now.

P.S. Unless you want people to think you know nothing about design, don’t use this font.

This is my absolute favorite free font.

The love affair started back in my Princeton Review Days.  Julie used to always call this font the “Mike Lawson Font” and she knew if I made flyers because I would ALWAYS use the font.

It’s a wonderful headline font.  It looks good spaced out or scrunched together.  It’s just beautiful.  Additionally, The Boys & Girls Club’s current “Be Great” campaign uses the font:

It’s so versatile.  It’s simple.  It’s sexy.  I love it.

Another font that I don’t LOVE, but have used.  Again, when I was a literacy coordinator one of my duties was to create and run activities that disguised the learning components to engage non-traditional readers in literacy-related activities.

I did a lot of random things…”Don’t you like Family Guy and The Simpsons?” I’d say.  “Then come to my fun club where we’re going to watch TV.”  And then I’d make them read scripts and act out scenes before we could watch them.

And then one Halloween season I created a book of scary stories using the Chiller font.  “I’ve got some really creepy stories…but you can only come if you don’t get scared,” I told them.  And we’d turn the lights off and read with a flashlight.

What about you, what font brings you to a place?

This is the one that may or may not be ironic.

I blame Alanis Morissette.

Maybe I was sick the day we learned this in 9th grade English, but I’ve never really completely understood “irony.”  Well, I do get it.  But I’m not exactly comfortable saying “that is ironic” versus “that is a funny coincidence.”  I do know that a traffic jam when you’re already late isn’t ironic, but actually just poor-planning on your part.

So on Sunday I was eating lunch with my buddy Jeremy and our conversation included, among other things, two things that would seem unrelated: my previous job working for a test-prep company and people who climb Mount Kilmanjaro.

When I was talking about my job as an SAT tutor, I was saying how miserable my life was.  I hated walking into expensive houses and tutoring kids that drove cars nicer than my own.  And I especially disliked that the services we offered were inaccessible to children that couldn’t afford the hefty $100/hour price tag.

Jeremy pointed out that the kids were doing the work.  It wasn’t like they paid me to take the test for them.  True.

Our conversation moved on to other things…including a brief discussion on a man who liked to throw pies in the faces of the women he is copulating and how it’s a difficult fetish to live out.

And we eventually moved on to Mount Kilmanjaro.  Jeremy has a friend that climbed it, and my old boss from the test-prep company took a month off and went to Africa to climb it.

And here’s what may or may not be irony: my boss had to, as most people do, pay a group of guides to get him safely to the summit.  He paid a lot.  The guy who ran a company that charged a lot to get kids to reach a high score on a test had to pay a lot to get himself to a high point on a mountain.

Again, Jeremy pointed out that the hikers in most cases were doing the actually work.  Most people don’t pay to get dragged up the mountain.  But that’s ironic, right?  Right?

But a “no smoking” sign on your cigarette break?  Come on…how long have you worked there?  Shouldn’t you know where the designated smoking areas are?

This is the one that is done for YOU.

I love you guys.  All five of you that read this blog regularly.  In fact, I love you so much that each time I pass one of those pesky speed cameras on the freeway, I smile.  Or I make a silly face.  Or I flip the bird.

If you’re not familiar, Arizona’s freeways have speed cameras that flash your picture if you’re going 12 mph over the speed limit.  And then they mail you a ticket with your photograph.

I’m a pretty good driver, and I don’t normally speed.  But each time that I pass one of the cameras I think of you guys…and how fun it would be to post the picture that would go with the ticket.

This is the one that was not intended for me.

In February I wrote about a string of emails that were sent to my email address about a fishing trip that a different Mike Lawson was supposed to attend (read the post here).

My name isn’t that uncommon, and I was lucky enough to snag MikeLawson@gmail.com.  I’m sure that someone out there has MichaelLawson@gmail.com or MikeLawson1977@gmail.com or MikeRLawson@gmail.com.  But I’m just plain old Mike Lawson.  As I talked about with that fishing trip email that I linked to, I receive emails almost once a month for Mike Lawsons that have either improperly shared their email addresses or for people trying to reach a Mike Lawson but have left off the numbers or initials.

On Friday I received an email from a man named Trent and there was no subject, and there was absolutely no text in the email either.  The only thing I got was the following photo attachment:

And how do you get that in your inbox from some unknown person and not hit reply?  So I wrote Trent an email that asked him who he was and for an explanation of the photo.

Trent wrote back and said that he accidentally left the “4″ off of the email address.  And told me to enjoy the free photo.  But no explanation.

This is the one with 1 paragraph updates.

First off, I bought a Speedo.  Don’t judge.  I just put it on in the locker room, and prance out to the pool.  Nobody has time to see how I’ve inelegantly squished my junk into it.  This does, however, call for some serious manscaping.  And since I’ve started seeing results at the gym I’m not all embarrassed to be seen in the speedo.  The one area that really needs some of my attention tanning.  Why are gay men so superficial, btw? (There was a lot of TMI in that paragraph…sorry.)

Since my guest post on SixUntilMe.com, I’ve received a lot of really supportive emails, tweets, comments.  Thanks to everyone that read it and sent me support in any form.  Additionally, I should mention that I wrote the post soon after we hit splitsville and just posted recently – so I’ve done some serious healing since then.  And if you liked the post, you might also like the comments that people posted (at the time of this writing there are 31 comments).  The majority of them are supportive, but there’s also a few criticisms of my diabetes v.s. cancer comparison.

I’ve been pretty religious about the my gym routine.  Sure there is the obvious benefits…I use less insulin in a day after I’ve run a couple of miles, my energy level is higher, etc.  Those are all really great reasons, but the main reason I’ve gone six or seven times a week is to keep up the foursquare mayorship.  Since the last time I obsessively blogged about foursquare, I have earned a Photogenic badge for checking in at three locations that have photo booths (?!) and a Bravo Newbie badge when I ate dinner the other night at Fez…which, like Bravo, is clearly gay but straight people don’t always realize it.

My reading has slowed down a bit.  I blogged about the bizzaro couple of days where I was starting books and then deciding not to reading them.  If I’ve ever made fun of you for starting books and never finishing them, I take it all back.  It’s really not something that I do…and it has kind of ruined some of my momentum.  But then I found a James Patterson book (so?!) that gave me my mojo back, and I’ll be posting about the 22nd and 23rd book I’ve read this year pretty soon, I’m sure.

I’m listening to a lot of podcasts now.  A lot.  Like close to a dozen.  Since I’ve last updated y’all on my podcast listening, I’ve added The Big Gay News Podcast (daily gay-related news), Democracy Now! (daily political talk show that I used to listen to on Pacifica when I lived in LA), Johnjay and Rich (it’s a cut up version of their local radio show), Jordan, Jesse GO! (nerdy weekly podcast by two straight guys), NPR: Fresh Air (daily interview show), Pod Is My Copilot (weekly shoot-the-shit podcast), Stuff You Should Know (they pick one topic and break it down so even us stupids could understand it), The NerdistThe Q Cast Connection (which is Chris Hardwick’s podcast), (a bunch of homos from Florida sit around and talk).  My iPod has basically been turned into a podcast-listening device.  Music is for emotional people.

This is the one that surprised me a little.

I work with kids.  I think you know that.  In fact, with a few exceptions, most of my jobs have been working around children.
It’s one of those things that has just happened and isn’t on purpose.  And as a result of being around children all day every day, I have found that I sometimes think like them or are sometimes more interested in what they have to say than the adults around me.  It’s totally fucked up and a shrink could probably unravel this a lot better than I’d ever be willing to let it get unraveled, but that’s not the point of this post.

The point is that I was in Target the other day and I heard one eight-year-old yell to his eight-year-old friend “I love this movie…have you seen it?”

And anyone who knows me knows that I have trouble staying out of conversations regardless of if I was invited or not.

So when I heard the kid say that he liked a movie, I turned my head to see what movie it was…totally expecting to see them gawking over Iron Man or Avatar or something that kids are into.  But instead, the eight-year-old was pointing to this movie:

I’m serious.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.  WTF?

Really, kid?  You liked the movie set during World War II…about the non-Jewish boy who finds friendship with the Jewish boy (in the “striped pajamas”) on the other side of the fence?  What about it stimulated your little boy brain?

Bless his heart.

This is the one about my mom’s band-aid.

One evening last week my mom told me that she was clipping her fingernails earlier that day cut one of her nails too short.

“It hurt so bad, Michael,” she told me.  “I had to put a band-aid on it because the skin under your nails is really sensitive.”

She walked over to me and started taking the band-aid off.  As I’m writing this, I’m realizing that this is kind of gross…that my mom would walk up to share with me a wound of any sort, but in the Lawson family, this is normal.

She peeled back the band-aid and stuck her ring finger out for me to see.  It looked normal.

I think that the quizzical look on my face confused my mom.  She bent her finger so she could take a look.

“Oh,” she said.  “It was my middle finger.”  And she held out her middle finger for me to inspect.
“But you were wearing a band-aid all day on your ring finger?” I asked.

She laughed.  “I guess so.”