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 dabble in 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. At the moment I am trying to figure out how to get my thesis to include Chinese punk rock without my having to learn any Chinese.

My contact info is to the right, and here are all my other internet homes:

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.