The Enigma Machine

I need to justify myself.

I always talk about the Sandbox, which, in my mind at least, leads to the impression that I spend a lot of time sitting at home, listening to the podcast, not going out into the community and not doing any work.

About two and one third of these statements are true.

A typical Sandbox podcast is just under an hour long. I listen to the first ten minutes of the lovelies over breakfast and coffee, and then turn to bureaucratic tasks for the rest of the show.

“Bureacuracy? What do you mean?” you ask.

Good question. One would think that you were an audience plant, with such a great question.

The truth is I have horrible handwriting. I know, right?! For most it’s completely illegible; I myself can only read it for a certain period of time before the individual characters lose any kind of constituent meaning. And whatever length of time I can understand English is cut in half when we’re talking Cyrillic.

The bureaucracy, then, is that while I’m listening to the morning show I look over my previous notes and plug them into an amazing computer program that runs through the web browser, which sounds like a masked, skirt-chasing maniac. Who’s not the Phantom of the Opera. Those descriptions can get a bit confusing…

I have a mountain of notes because I’d never gotten around to doing the same thing with the two full notebooks of scribbling I created last summer. I should upload a picture of it in the near future, if I remember when I have camera, notes, and computer all in the same place – working with them is kind of like looking at an Atlantean tablet washed up on Egyptian shores, annotated by a Ptolemaic scribe, and refashioned into a bracelet for his wife by a Frenchmen in Napoleon’s army. Without the help of the Rosetta Stone.

Then I go to the archives, and reading in Russian is like reading a children’s novel! (If only…)