Q and A: Whither Thou, Tild?

Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy interview.
Well, maybe not so much bumpy as meandering. Wayward? Erratic? Not your straightforward point A to point B, that’s for certain.

Greetings, Tild fans! I am an imaginary interviewer, a hypothetical composite of the typical readership of Tild’s blog, aka Tild~, or tildology.com to be exact. I’m a mashup of all the folks who tend to show up here:

…The woman in Georgia with a cold who’s looking for information about nose washing;
…The guy in Dubai who wants to read about bad girls who don’t keep their tape sticky;

…The She-Blogger fan in Toronto;

…The folks in the UK who can’t get enough of Laurel & Hardy’s “Way Out West” dance;

…One of the hapless clods who keep trying to hotlink to the wily strawman picture so that they can add it to their comments and thereby look totally super-bitchin’ in those endless flame war threads at FARK or the Something Awful forums; .

…The many admirers of Easter Jesus’ chocolatey goodness;

And the people who come here looking for Meerkat Manor family trees

or for a bit of Minnesota-specific political snark , be it about prominent local prig Katherine Kersten , Minuteman-wannabe Dick “Rambo” Day, or notorious now ex-MnDOT commissioner and fandancer Carol Molnau,

…or maybe just for a little cheesecake.

Whatever you’ve come here for, you’ve no doubt noticed that it’s been pretty quiet around here for quite a while now. We’re lucky to get one new post a week. What’s the deal with that?

Look! There’s Tild now. Let’s ask her.

Imaginary Typical Tildology Reader: Hey! Tild! It’s 4:30 in the morning. What are you doing up?

Tild: Oh, hi. Hey, if you’re one of those idiots looking for the strawman picture, goddammit will you PLEASE learn how to save images to your own server?! Use your own bandwidth for a change, asshole!

ITTR: Umm, excuse me Miz Tild, but I am most certainly not one of those idiots. What I am, in fact, is an Imaginary Typical Reader of your blog, come to interview you and find out what’s next in the exciting ongoing history of tildology.com.

Tild: You are? Hmm. Do you mean to tell me that the typical reader of my blog is the disembodied head of Agnes Moorhead’s even snider younger sister inexplicably floating in the stratosphere next to a “flying wing” airplane?

ITTR: You tell me. You picked this image to be the ITTR avatar.

Tild: Oh. Yeah. Well, alrighty then. Never mind! What was the question again? Why am I awake at 4:30 AM? Well, my youngest kid the high school senior is in the high school’s Concert Choir which is going to Washington DC for four days, and they needed to be at the high school at 4 this morning to board the buses to the airport. I’ll never get back to sleep now, so I guess I’m up for the duration.

ITTR: Aha. So then. Please tell us: What have you been up to lately? Sure hasn’t been blogging.

Tild: Well, you do know that I have a full time day job, right?

ITTR: Yes, I’ve gotten that impression over the years, but you’ve never really described what it is that you do. So, what exactly is it that you do?

Tild: I work for a large corporation; a big player in an industry that’s run for profit but really shouldn’t be. The mitigating factor for me is that the particular division that I work in is more or less a watchdog unit. We investigate the billing habits of the purveyors of our industry’s services. Our work is to keep those purveyors honest — or, you could say that in an ethically challenged industry we try to make sure that its practitioners adhere to the laws, such as they are, and to industry standards, imperfect tho they may be. That fact helps me sleep at night, I gotta admit. You know, because I feel like in my little corner of the industry I’m more a part of the solution and not so much a part of the problem.

ITTR: Wow, that’s quite discreetly phrased, I must say. Can you describe what you do there?

Tild: Sure. I gather data from various sources, convert the data into the formats used by several databases, and upload that data. One might say that I’m a data wrangler.
Yeehaw!

ITTR: Gosh! Sounds fascinating!

Tild: Uh huh. You said it, not me. I’ve also been working part time at a book store since last fall. The end result of all this toil and trouble is that I haven’t had huge amounts of free time to devote to blogging. Or when I do have some time, I often don’t have any energy for it.

[TO BE CONTINUED...]