It's high time I coined a word, and "sexperiment" seemed like a good one... except it turns out I didn't coin it. There's a book that was written a few years ago by Ed and Lisa Young with "Sexperiment" being the main word in the title. I've obviously not read the book, so I am not equipped to comment on it. My sexperiment is my previous blog, "My Night In a Cage with a Hot Woman", in which I sought to see if a suggestive title and a bit of teasing, along with accompanying keywords, would boost readership by a significant amount. As of right now- a little more than a day after publishing it, the answer is a guarded "maybe".
The numbers have not been huge, but there's been a bit more geographic diversity than I've seen of late- France, Poland, Canada and a country in Africa (the country in Africa has experienced some unrest over the past few years, so I won't be giving it a shout out). Before I forget Jennifer corrected me on a particular datum from that post- our anniversary is in a few days, not a few weeks. It's not that I don't know the date; I'm not the stereotypical husband when it come to that, at least. Then again, in the U.S. date convention, October 10, 1987, is rendered 10/9/87, so there is absolutely NO reason for me to forget it. Of course 10/9/14 falls on a Thursday this year (it was a Friday when were wed), so chances are good we won't be doing anything special on our "special" date, as Thursday night is our busiest night of the week, and I work nights, so we'll try to do something special on Saturday or, more likely Sunday.
I should also mention a couple of rules I try to follow in blogging. I try to avoid writing anything that may be morally questionable. This is generally not difficult to do, as I generally filter my writing and have no natural inclination to expound on salacious themes. Whenever I write on a topic that causes the hair on my neck to rise, I ask Jennifer to proof it before publishing. I'm certainly not a prude, but I write under the understanding that- I.R.S. assertions about emails aside- nearly everything that happens on the interwebz is stored somewhere. And I do not want my writing to come back and bite me. I also do not want to embarrass her. I'm also fairly certain that I've never used anyone's name without their permission. Jennifer, Anna and Ryan, for example, have all given me verbal permission to use their names. And apart from Ryan, I never use last names. Ryan D. Reynolds is a special case- he's an aspiring comedian, so this is publicity for him. Mr. T is also an exception of sorts: he's our youngest son. When he was first mentioned in a blog, he was under eighteen (the age of majority in the U.S., a.k.a. "adulthood"), so I felt a certain amount of anonymity was required. He is now eighteen, but his persona of "Mr. T" has been established in this blog, so he remains to be known as Mr. T.
I've also always had a very compact, terse writing style, so I try to keep my blogs relatively short and readable, although as I look at this particular blog, there are atypically large chunks of words. My writing style has pushed me to the brink in the past.
I've never been a model student, but have always had an interest in history. In high school, even though I was in the top third of my class, I had to beg, plead and petition to get into the senior Advanced Placement European History class (and for the record, I also applied for the A.P. English class, but my high school cancelled the class because they had decided that the incoming seniors' writing skills were deficient). Near the end of the school year, I took the AP History test, and decided to take the English test- even though I had absolutely no idea of what to expect. The AP classes not only taught the subject, but prepared the students for the test. At the time, the tests were graded on a scale of one through five, with a three generally guaranteeing college credit. I scored a four on the history test. On the other hand, I "only" scored a two on the English test. I should mention that I got this score with zero prep or mentoring, and I was the ONLY senior in a class of approximately 330 that even took the test.
Flash forward to freshman year of college. My then-girlfriend Dolores (sorry, Dolores, I couldn't find you on Facebook) and I were sitting in the Student Government office one day, and she casually asked if I had a term paper that was due soon. I looked at my planner- she was correct.
I had a paper due the next day.
The thing that I often forget to mention in this story (which has been told a number of times) is that the instructor was quite the feminist, so much so that she was know to grade males harsher than females, The college had been, until quite recently, an all-women's institution.
When the assignment was first given, I immediately had an idea for the topic. Each member of the class was to pick a Renaissance leader and show or prove how they fit the criteria as defined in class. The problem was this: the leader I had picked was Napoleon Buonaparte (as I write this, I have a red squiggly line under the word Buonaparte; however, this is not a misspelling- when he first joined the French army he was a Corsican and only in his mid-twenties changed his name to the more French-sounding Bonaparte). Discounting the popular feeling that he was not particularly "enlightened" and that he came to power at the dawn of Romanticism I felt I could successfully argue my case.
I had my work cut out for me. And the paper was due tomorrow.
Now, in my defense, when the paper was first announced, I hauled myself over to Rebecca Crown Library, and as was (and still is) my standard practice for doing research, I pillaged the shelves for anything related to the subject. Because of my daily ritual of visiting The Sutlers' Wagon, I had a good background in the Napoleonic period. However, because of my as yet undiagnosed ADHD, those books ended up sitting in a rather tall stack in the Student Government office. What happened next was the stuff of which legends and epic songs would be written.
As this was in the days of prehistory (that is, before computers), my paper needed to be typed out. I had an outline in my mind, and wrote as I found information to support my ideas. When I finished a page of handwriting on a looseleaf page, Dolores would type it. We labored for several hours, and in the end I had eight and a half pages of double-spaced text- Sister Kaye Ashe's minimum was ten pages.
To summarize: I wrote a paper the day before it was due, a page and a half short of the minimum, well outside the specified period, and handed in a rough draft which was submitted to an instructor who was known to be a rough grader.
The paper got an "A". Like I said, I'm a terse writer.
As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.
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