An exegesis
About me:
My name is Jeff Gerhard and I live in Washington, DC, the city in which I was born, though not where I grew up.
I am mostly a roustabout, a layabout, a deep thinker about ephemera, a scandalous squanderer of natural abilities. I occasionally like to dabble in things like music, web design, and graduate school studies in the field of international affairs. For my day job, I work at a law school library working with the cataloging department and working in particular with internet resources and German-language legal materials. If I have a long-term career goal, well, it involves international education. I have some ideas, though precious few.
My contact info is to the right, and here are a few of my other internet homes:
Facebook · inevitably. A good way to find me.
Last.fm / audioscrobbler · this is a musical profile and log of what I listen to. It’s pretty rad — I am becoming a bigger and bigger fan as time goes by.
District lies · This is my on-again off-again showblog, about rock concerts that I attend.
The Standards · A silly tumblr blog where I sometimes do reviews of youtube videos of amateurs playing guitar standards.
So what’s a monodrone??
“Monodrone” is the name of a song I wrote a long time ago. I wasn’t too concerned about whether it was a real word or not; I meant for it to convey the background noise of daily life. It turned out not to be a real word at all, and yet it had another meaning, one that was amusingly cool.
A monodrone, you see, is the name of an odd Dungeons & Dragons monster. It is one of a class of weird semi-sentient creatures called modrons. They look like this:
One D&D site describes monodrones as “the absolute bottom level of modron society. Non-sentient and barely intelligent to begin with, the nigh-mindless, endless throngs of monodrones…” etc., etc. Cool! I feel like such a bizarre creature is an okay thing to share my website’s name with.
Besides, I have a soft spot for strange creatures whose names begin with the prefix “mono.” Besides monodrones I have always been a big fan of Narnian monopods and real-world monotremes.
About this site:
I have had some sort of website since 1996 or 1997. I never really had much to say, and still don’t, but I enjoy the medium. I used to use geocities and tried to exploit their free websites to the utmost, but finally began upgrading to a “real website” in 2005.
On the right-hand sidebar of this particular page, I am playing around with more typical blog-type elements, but on most pages I have left a category structure in place. It is a bit contrary to the usual blog style, but I am a bit of a contrarian at heart. I think of this as a “website” rather than a “blog,” and I am always contemplating tossing some crazy new element into the mix. I have a lot of ideas but they are all just too much work. So I limp along. So it goes.
This site went live way too prematurely, and has never really been completed to my satisfaction. But it’s comfortable now, as of 2007. Much like a home, you always wish you could get new living room furniture, or you always want to paint the bathroom, but at a certain point it becomes good enough that you can invite folks over. I reached that point around the end of 2006, but we’re still talking about a work in progress here.
