Month: January 2005

Posted on

i know because i know

Creation of man.
Working from home, always an iffy premise… the “working” part, at least. Today though, I’m trying to do my best, as there is a lot of “working” to be done. One thing I’ve always wanted to be able to do while “working from home” is use my desktop PC to remote desktop into my laptop. That way, I can access all my work stuff while sitting in my comfy chair, using my big monitor, a regular keyboard and mouse, and tucked away in a quiet room away from the TV. It’s much easier to do work while sitting at a “real” PC rather than being hunched over a 15″ screen on the couch. For some reason though, every time I tried to use XP’s remote desktop from desktop-to-laptop, I’d manage to connect and then the laptop would immediately drop the wireless connection, which in turn dropped the remote desktop connection. I tried tweaking all kinds of settings, but I got the same behavior every time. Out of frustration, I decided to try good ol’ VNC, and lo and behold it works like a charm. It seems to be a little “laggier” than XP’s native remote desktop, but it’s permissible simply because it works. Now the laptop can sit in the living room while I work in the comfort and isolation of the “data center.” Dang I’m a nerd.

I’m sorry… I’m gonna talk God.

Saw a report on the national news tonight that sparked a question in me, but I’ll frame it with a story… to set the backstory, if you will. Back in high school I started regularly attending church with Sharaun. I’ve long been fascinated by religion. History mingled with faith, unquestioning love mingled with elitism; something about the mystery and power of religion has always been attractive to me. I would attend with an open ear and open mind, taking in every lecture, every sermon, every study, trying at all times to learn for myself. On one occasion, I guest preacher was visiting from out of state. Known for giving very passionate (remember, this is a non-denominational congregation of the Protestant, back-to-the-Bible ilk), and engaging sermons. His sermon on that day was about Jesus’ time in the desert after being baptized by John the Baptist.

For those of you who were absent that day in Sunday school, after being baptized, Jesus was called by God to wander the desert for forty days… all the while being tempted by the devil. The Gospel of Luke recounts one moment of Jesus’ temptation: And the devil, taking him up into an high mountain, shewed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time. And the devil said unto him, “All this power will I give thee, and the glory of them: for that is delivered unto me; and to whomsoever I will I give it. If thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine.” For some reason, this statement struck me. I thought about it for the rest of the lecture, and afterward found the preacher to ask the question I’d formed: “By what authority does Satan offer Jesus this? Who gave it all to him? How can he offer it?” The preacher responded that Satan must be lying; he is, after all, the devil. Still, I always wondered why Jesus just didn’t call him on it: “You have not the authority to offer this Satan! Only my Father owns all, and only He can do with it as he sees fit.” But he didn’t, and the explanation would have to stand.

Anyway, back to my story. On the news they were talking about the tsunami and how it has rocked the faith of many living in the regions hardest hit. “How can God allow this to happen?,” they asked. “Why’s it have to be God,” I thought, “Why couldn’t it be the Devil’s doing? Wouldn’t that make it easier to swallow?” Then it hit me, it couldn’t be the Devil’s doing… because… when you get right down to it, just what can the Devil do? The concept of the Devil is kinda flawed, because God is omnipotent. So blaming bad things on the Devil really doesn’t work… because they were first run by the proxy filter that is God’s divine will, right? So, in essence, God let the Devil’s evil happen, right? What real power does the Devil have then? If he can’t affect anything without God letting it happen, he may as well be powerless. In fact, the Devil is only a powerful force if God allows him to be… right?

If you take it one step further, you run into the whole omniscience of God vs. human free will problem. That is, how can God both grant us the free will do make choices between good and evil, yet already know the result of every choice we’ll make. If God already knows how we’re going to live our life, and whether or not we’ll end up in Heaven or Hell, why even make us live? If he knew all along that Adam would accept the apple from Eve, did Adam every really have a choice at all? So, I dunno y’all. The simple explanation is that God is not, in fact, omniscient, or that he has some kind of limited-omniscience. I just dunno. But luckily, I don’t have to figure it out anytime soon… or ever, for that matter. So, keep on believin’ what you believe, ’cause I don’t have the answers.

Whew… that’s it. Did all the heathens come through OK? Good.

Another mystery of the universe that’s always perplexed me, although not quite on as high a level, is why TVs sometimes “buzz” when certain things come on the screen. I know I’m not the only one who’s seen this, right? Something like a telephone number or some words are flashed on the bottom and an audible buzz comes from the speakers? Sometimes, it seems like the reds are “too high” or something, and only red portions of the image get all staticy, and are accompanied by the buzzing. It’s almost like the colors get so bright that they bleed over into the sound. Anyway, I always wondered what makes that happen. Turns out, that’s pretty much what’s happening. The scientific explanation? The “overmodulation of the video carrier (higher video content equals brighter picture) on a television transmitter results in loss of carrier such that the TV demodulation circuits cannot demodulate the sound carrier properly.” Thank you, today’s lesson is over.

Man, what a dismal entry thus far. I gotta pick up the pace or something.

You know what’s interesting to me? Snuff. Not like the modern stuff you put under your lip, but real honest-to-goodness old school snuff. I’m almost interested enough to get some and try it… how exotic would it be to carry around a snuffbox and paisley handkerchief for the brown snots that would result. I could feel so stuffy and British, snorting milled tobacco for the nicotine high. How very Elizabethan I should be! The most foppish dandy, not to mention the dandiest fop, of them all.

I found this site the other day and really dug it. I bet Colin Meloy has consulted it a time or two when writing his songs.

Well, believe it or not… I have like six more paragraphs written. I figure I’ll save them for tomorrow, or next week, or never… because, for now, I’m done. Goodnight.

Posted on

cell one

Listen and learn.
Sharaun asked that I stay home from work today, as she’s not quite ready to go it alone. It’s fine with me; really. The weekend was largely uneventful, you can read about it all out-of-order in the paragraphs I wrote below. Saturday was spent being Mr. Domestic… cooking, cleaning, and administering Vicodin at the proper intervals. Sunday we slept in, and in the evening Pat and Cynthia graciously came over and cooked lasagna, while Kristi and Erik chipped with a salad and some homemade toppings for the ice cream. I heard it said once (and I bet I’ve even said it on here before) that, in your twenties, your friends are your family. I couldn’t agree more.

As life goes on, I get more torn about using my weekends to sleep. It used to be that I’d look forward to Saturday and Sunday because I could sleep until 10am, or later. Lately though, I’ve been trying to get up at my normal hour even on weekends – all out of the desire to be awake and use as much of my offtime as possible… even if it’s to sit around doing nothing. It’s easier when the mornings are bright and cool, the kind of mornings that just call you to yardwork. Winter makes it more difficult, and rain makes it near impossible. When I roll over and hear rain, nothing seems more appropriate than another hour of slumber.

This weekend, I installed this cool little script that integrates with Winamp (my MP3 player of choice) and uploads data about what you’re listening to. So, when I’ve got Winamp open, it’ll show what I’m hearing real-time. I modified the script a bit to make the artist names clickable to a Google search. The style sheet was being stubborn, so the links are blue… even though I wanted them plain black. It’s a nifty little plugin and I can configure it to work through the proxy at work… enabling the world to see what I’m rockin’ to as I slave away for the man. You can check out the list at the very bottom of the sidebar on the right. I’m all about content… or something.

Being house-bound to look after Sharaun’s post-surgery needs isn’t that bad, or, at least wasn’t that bad today. I managed to get quite a bit done: de-Christmas’d the house, including using the one hour of non-rain all day to climb up on the roof and take down the house lights. Also managed to finally clean out the guest room (which also doubles as the “junk” room when we have no guests). Anyway, I also felt pretty good about managing things with Sharaun… making sure I kept a steady flow of Vicodin in her blood, making her some oatmeal for breakfast, a grilled-cheese for lunch, and some soup for dinner. Now, if that’s not a sickness-tailored menu, I don’t know what is. She seems to be doing well, putting weight on the surgered knee and doing the exercises her doctor recommended. Not much complaining either, which is good.

I’ve talked before about my tendency to let the mail “go.” Since I’m the one that does the finances, I’m usually the one who collects the mail. Lately, I’ve taken to doing this only once a week. I don’t need the mail anymore. For me, it’s gone the way of the print newspaper. I mean, I realize that there’s still a lot we need mail for (like receiving goods bought on Ebay and stuff), but I care less and less about the ceaseless crap we get. Every day, I could choose to refinance my house with any of the five mortgage offers we receive. I also believe I could hold the world record for most credit cards held if I responded to the pile of crap we get daily. Recently, however, I’ve gone beyond just neglecting to check the mail… I’ve started to not even read the dang stuff. I have a huge pile here in front of my monitor… just sitting there. It sucks, because I know there must be at least a couple bills in there that I haven’t even looked at (the damned stone-age holdover ones that still don’t offer online or automated payments). I don’t know what to do with it all. Bank statements for instance… for some reason I feel like I should save these. Why? I dunno. All I do is cram them in a drawer and throw them away eventually. Again, paper mail is dumb… sorry to ramble.

Although it may sound stupid, and uber-Californian, I’ve been thinking lately how I’d like to write a screenplay or book. I did some research online, and found out that there’s a lot of crap that goes into either, but I was more intrigued by the screenplay thing. I downloaded an OpenOffice template to aide in screenplay formatting (these things have formatting rules that are more strict than my 10th grade term papers), and read up on the do’s and don’ts of the whole process. The rigidity of the whole process took a lot of steam of my initial idea, there seem to be so many rules… I think reading a good book on the whole process would be advisable before every putting pen to paper (just a colloquialism people, you know I can barely hold a pen anymore for typing). Anyway, there are several really cool sites out there to help aspiring screenwriters, but one of the coolest I’ve found is johnaugust.com. Mr. August wrote the screenplays for Go and Big Fish, and he actually offers the real things as downloads on his site. He offers the original spec (speculative) scripts, final shooting scripts, and does frequent reader Q&As on his blog. Really cool, although I can’t really tell if I’m serious about trying to write something.

Man, I’ve seen so many “top” lists for 2004’s musical output, and this dang TV On The Radio album shows up high on every one. I remember downloading it when it first came out, and hating it. But, with all these people saying it’s so good, I decided to give it another try. Guess what, I should’ve trusted my instincts… it’s not my bag at all. Toplists are sometimes really good at opening my ears to new tunes, and in some cases re-opening my ears to things too hastily shelved. Some of the albums that scored high across multiple top lists really surprise me. Fiery Furnaces?, that album blew. Bjork?, that album blew. Devandra Banhart?, that album blew. I won’t go so far as to disparage you, dear reader, should you like these albums… after all, you’re certainly not alone… however, you also have no taste.

Good night my friends.

Posted on

under the knife

Knee.
I must have acid reflux or something. Lately, I mean, within the last couple months, I get hearburn from everything. I get heartburn from drinking water, from a piece of gum. It seems like the simple act of swallowing is enough. A couple times, I was even awaken from sleep by the crap. That’s bad, right? I sit at my desk and drink coffee while some burning acid-gasses from Hell sit right at the bottom of my throat. Those generic chewy stomach pills seem to work OK, but not for long enough… and I don’t mind the tropical fruitchalk flavor too much. But, I think the whole mess is merely a symptom of my being fat. You know, needing to lose weight and all. So, to the fire-demons living in my belly: I hate you.

Sitting in the hospital room with Sharaun. She’s all dressed for the knife, the requisite blue “gown” and the word “yes” in capital letters on her left knee, “no” on the right. Waking around 3:30am to get here at the appointed time has left me a little sleep-dazed, but I’m as awake as one can be under the circumstances. My plan was to bring the camera, to take some good action shots of her in the hospital… but I forgot. In a few hours she’ll be all done, with a fixed up knee and all. During those hours, I’m going to do my best to catch up on some work I have to do. I have a 75% review this afternoon for a presentation I’m working on, and right now I’d say my material is at about 10%. Not really, I guess, since I have all the material I’ll cull from… I just need to cut, paste, tweak, and assemble it. Still, I wish it was done… this place doesn’t “feel” like it’s gonna be that conducive to progress.

Last night she got a little freaked out (I’m back to talking about the surgery thing again, if you couldn’t tell – that work-talk was just a lengthy trip off-topic). She has this fear that she’s going to have a reaction to the anesthetic and die or something. Crazy enough, she got a text message on her cellphone yesterday that said “Hey baby, sleep with the angels.” It was obviously a wrong number or something, but the “sleep with angels” part sounded a little too much like an ominous foretelling of death to her. So, ‘round midnight the tears and the “I don’t wanna do its” came… but it was short-lived. Even as I sit here now watching them put her IV in she seems fine. That text message was weird tho, I’ll give her that… I mighta been a little freaked out too.

Well, just kissed Sharaun off into surgery… and I’m in the family waiting room. About an hour and a half, the doctor said. Netstumbler says there’s an access point here, although it’s not broadcasting an SSID… but I can’t seem to get on it. The signal/noise ratio is a little high… I must be too far away from the thing. Would’ve been nice to be able to check my e-mail or surf the web while I wait. As it is though, I’ve managed to make huge progress on the work I was complaining about just a paragraph or two above. My presentation is now something I won’t feel stupid presenting as 75% content, not bad for two hours work. I seem to have stalled though, as is evidenced by the fact that I’m writing this…

Well, an hour or so has passed between paragraphs. The surgeon just stopped in to tell me the whole thing went well. Following him into the room was another man outfitted in scrubs, face mask also hanging to his chest. Turns out it was a doctor from Japan who had come to observe Sharaun’s surgeon’s technique. Apparently, he’s virtually patented this particular kind of ACL repair, and spends lots of time (and I’m sure makes lots of money) teaching the procedure to others. Anyway, when he introduced me I remembered my Japanese-style greetings from previous experience with work greeted the doc with the appropriate “san” attached to his surname. He seemed a bit surprised, but it made me feel all cultured and stuff. Anyway, she’ll recoup for an hour or so before I can see her again… so back to work here.

Ahhh… back home. Later.

Posted on

thanks for taking bullets

My bang is bigger than yours.
I was trying to explain what’s been bugging me lately… I have this open-ended feeling about work. I tried to explain it the other day when talking about how my perception of the post-vacation workload wasn’t quite accurate, but that’s just part of it. I have a lot to do at work, but I’ve been feeling kinda aimless. Last week’s vacation that wasn’t really “planned,” my non-travel this week (which was planned, and canned at my own hasty discretion), the March trip to Taiwan which, until today, wasn’t at all nailed down, etcetera etcetera. I dunno, nothing really tangible… I’ve just felt kinda “floaty” and undecided about things, and I guess I don’t like that. Today wasn’t a stellar day either, the morning started out crap… one of those stupid personal confrontation things I hate so much; lunch wasn’t any better… a mix-up left me stranded and eating a cheeseburger at my desk. Ugh. Whatever.

About a week ago, I got an e-mail from my old college roommate. It was unexpected, as we haven’t talked in a while. When I got the note, I immediately replied. I’d heard he’d gotten married, and I wanted to congratulate him, and mention how good it was to hear from him. After school, he joined the Army, went on to be a Ranger… y’know, the frontlines… the special ops… the intense stuff. Anyway, I know he’s done several stints in the Middle East… Afghanistan, probably Iraq, maybe other places… who knows. We kept in touch right after college, but after that I used to wonder where he was sometimes. Clearing caves in the mountains? Being the first on the ground during some critical mission? I kept up enough through other friends to know he was back safe, and had heard he’d got hitched. Anyway, he mentioned that he’s going back again… the 5th time. Hey Ton, I just wanted to say be safe man… take care and be safe. That you do what you do, is awesome to me… and not “awesome” like stoner-awesome, awesome like the worthy of “awe” kind. Thanks for it.

I alluded to it above, but my next trip to Taiwan has finally been finalized (“finally been finalized,” funny). I’ll be gone for three weeks in March, Sharaun won’t be able to go. I’m kinda bummed, as I was looking forward to taking her around. And although I actually am excited about being over there for that long – I’m again bummed to be away from Sharaun for that long. My two-week jaunt there was fine… but near the end I was more than ready to come home, I missed my wife, our house, and just good old normal American stuff. I’m hoping though, that I can make the most of the trip… experience-wise (work and personal). Some people I work with hate it over there… I don’t mind it much at all. The food is good, the people are nice enough, and I’ve made it abundantly clear in past entries that I feel “special” traveling on company money (it’s hard for me not to go back and edit that linked entry to sound less pretentious and self-important, ugh). Plus, if nothing else, it always makes for good posting.

I don’t even know what I’m doing up right now. I was so loth to get out of bed this morning, all because I stayed up late last night… for no reason. So why I’m here at half-past midnight… I don’t know. I think it has something to do with finally getting hooked on the narrative that is this Streets album. I wanted to hear the end of the story, wanted to hear about the girl and the money. I’m not much in the mood to write anything else. I wrote a huge thing, three paragraphs, about my confusion over telescopes looking back in time… only to realize I’d already written about it before. Crap.

Does anyone want my Gmail invites? Drop me a line and I’ll send ’em. Goodnight.

Posted on

my moby dick

It's a cam! Duh!!
A triumphant return to work… not at all like what I was expecting. While sitting at home on vacation, my vision of the tasks awaiting me upon my return was of a giant mountain. However, actually sitting down at my desk and taking stock, I’m not in completely bad shape. Albeit, I have a lot to do in the next few weeks – but I think I’ve situated myself in a pretty good position to get things done in time. I guess the guilt of not working made the view-from-vacation seem more dire than it actually was, which is good. Right now it just looks like a couple busy weeks before any lull is in sight, nothing I can’t handle.

Sometimes I get tired of the endless circle that is the debate about the war. If you make one move to criticize anything about the war, be ready for the triad of war defenses: “This is war, bad things happen.” “You’re just a pussy liberal hippy who can only put down this country because real men are out there protecting it.” And finally, “What about all the good that’s come of it?” If you’re a staunch Bushie neo-con, be prepared for some patchily-rank longhair to come at you with “This war is for oil, money, and US interests alone.” “Bush is a megalomaniac, cowboy, look-how-big-my-dick-is, wanna-be Satan bent on world domination.” “People are dying for no reason.” And of course, “Where are the WMD?” It goes around and around. You question the war, you’re an ungrateful hippy; you support the war, you’re a baby-killing, right-wing fanatic.

Can’t we have some middle ground? Where is common sense in it all? Sure war sucks. Good stuff is happening in Iraq, bad stuff is happening in Iraq. Shit, good stuff is happening in my bathroom; occasionally, so does bad stuff. Why does it have to be so black and white? I don’t like war, but I wouldn’t spit on our troops. Where are my common-sense people? People who can have an educated opinion that’s not lunatic rhetoric. Not gun-toting, hippies-would-rather-see-America-raped-by-Islam-than-stand-up-for-themselves conservatives; and not vegan, hybrid-driving, don’t-touch-anything-alive environmentalist liberals. Where are the people who think rationally? Is it just me, or does international media seem to present a lot less polarized or skewed viewpoint than most American media? Here we get 110% foaming-at-the-mouth patriotic God-forcefed imperialism or 110% limp-wristed simpering liberal whining. Yeah OK so I overstated my case a little for the sake of writing… whatever… journalistic license, I think they call it.

As much as I don’t want to recycle unoriginal links… I saw this via MF the other day (although I know BB had it too, and I’m sure other morning-zoo fodder sites like Fark/Fazed will pick it up soon) and it appealed to the voyeur in me or something. Someone noticed that certain webcams all have similar strings in their URLs, and made a simple Google search which pulls up hundreds of unsecured, broadcasting webcams from around the world. On most you can pan and zoom around, and some even have sound. Check it out. And, to add a completely unrelated sentence to this paragraph for the sole purpose of creating a uniform paragraph height that is pleasing to the eye: I only just now gave PF’s “best album of 2003” a shot… and Ben was right, it is damn fine.

I work in a cubicle of shoulder-high grey fabric walls. If the “entrance” (1/4-wall side) of the cube is due-south, my chair faces the north-west corner. On the west wall there is a cabinet where I keep random stuff, including some pictures I’ve taped to the grey metal exterior. A couple of my wife an I in various mountainous locales. Two of my dad in front of the Space Shuttle, those always elicit questions… hey dad, if you’ve got pix of you actually in the shuttle, send ’em my way OK? Three Andy Griffith fridge-magnets, which someone actually once mistook for family pictures. Adam Bomb from the Giant 1st Series, and a Post-It note with an arrow pointing to Adam Bomb from the Giant 1st Series and the words “This is dumb.” On the east wall is my whiteboard, which I try to keep filled with a jumble of math equations and engineering-themed drawings, and three show posters from gigs at the Fillmore (Death Cab, Modest Mouse, and someone I can’t remember right now). Due north (to the right of my monitor) is a shelf filled with books and a Sgt. Pepper standup cutout Kyle gave me back in middle school. Somewhere else there’s a coathook, a couple neon lights, a tangle of wires, spindles of loose burned CDs, and all sorts of crap. I dunno, just thought it might be interesting to paint a picture of where I spend my days. My coal mine, if you will.

In the self-serving statistics portion of today’s entry, I finally found a simple WordPress plugin that outputs the total wordcount for all entries. So far, not counting this entry, I’ve typed 224,278 words since starting this site. Compare that to the 211,763 words of Moby Dick… impressive. While I haven’t yet written my own Bible (1,029,084 words) I have managed to rival the bulk of a literary classic… which must mean my tome instantly qualifies as a literary classic, right? That’s what I thought! You can just mail my Newberry to work, I’ll hang it on my unadorned south 1/4-wall for the world to see. Thanks.

Sometimes I look over how much I write on this thing each day… and I can’t understand it. Where do I get the time? Hahahaha… and… goodnight.

Posted on

smoke and silence

Zealots need not apply.
As much as I love music, I sometimes crave silence. When it’s silent, you can hear sounds you normally don’t hear. The sound your spit makes as you work your mouth; skin rubbing skin as you wring your hands, your own breath in your throat. Smoking my pipe in silence has always been enjoyable to me, to be able to listen to nothing at all and watch the smoke waft from the bowl of the pipe. I can remember sitting on the back porch back in Florida smoking my pipe and reading the yellow-paged copy of The Fellowship of the Rings I bought from the used book joint. I liked to go out when it was raining… sit in the screened-in shelter and read and smoke in silence. Yeah… that’s what I’m writing about.

I’ve got to try and get to bed earlier tonight… this 1am thing is fine for vacation, but won’t work with a 7am rise-n-shine. One thing that staying up and sleeping late is good for is dreams. Over the past week I’ve had several memorable dreams, a strange occurence for me. My dreams always seem to mix old and new. Just this week, I was trying to protect a friend who hired another friend to kill an ex; was scuba diving with two acquaintances from college, and making a scale model of some geographical feature… an islet, or isthmus, or phalange or something. Whenever I wake up able to recall a dream, I wish I had one of those dream “interpretation” books, although I’ve looked at them and they’re about as specific as a horoscope most of the time. Still I would hate to miss the fact that dreams about scale models of fjords mean you’ll win the lottery if you only buy a ticket.

Something about the idea of a commune is totally appealing to me. Except, I wouldn’t call it a commune… I think the term “co-op” has a lot less Davidian connotation. Y’know, get some friends together… snag some cheap undeveloped land, and start communing on it. We could grow our own grub, build our own houses, generate our own power, maybe do some web-developing work for extra scratch (like the comet-cult), whatever. No job except tending the crops and animals, keeping the house, generating power, and fervently praying to the co-op’s chosen higher power. OK, we could skip the fervent prayer part… but I guess the “no job” thing is relative considering maintaining the cult… uh… co-op would be a full-time job anyway. Maybe I’ll just join the Rainbow and move to a national forest.

One the back-to-basics kick, I proposed a week-without-TV experiment to Sharaun tonight. I want to go one week without TV, seems like such an easy thing right? We could read more, talk more, maybe get out and walk around more or something (pre-surgery, of course). When it comes down to it I guess we “watch” a lot of TV. Even though I rarely “actively” watch, the TV is probably on every second we’re in the house… even if just in the background. Most of my killing-time time is spent on this computer, typing or surfing the web for nothing. I bet that’s not so uncommon nowadays… online time overtaking TV time as the dominant thoughtless activity. Anyway, I just wanted to see if we’d feel any great sense of “liberation” by cutting the cord and going TV-less for a week. I picked a bad time though, with her being laid up post-surgery and all. Although, she didn’t seem completely opposed to the idea in general… so maybe after she’s recovered a bit.

Ugh… every time I search through my old entries and find one of those strange WordPress-conversion artifacts (y’know, commas-turned-question-marks, letters with accent marks turned Chinese characters) I just cringe. I hate the fact that some of the older entries look crappy. Every time I find a post with artifacts, I try my best to fix it… but I know they still exist out there. Tell you what, if you see one… or find some ingenious way to search for them… lemme know and I promise I’ll fix every last one. OK? Thanks.

What a piecemeal entry… I’m sorry. It’s time to go to bed now, goodnight.

Posted on

newborn year

The internet has sprung a leak.
2005. 1st post.

Friday I watched Garden State again, for the sake of Ben and Pat, not because I’d fallen in love with Natalie Portman’s character… absolutely not. For some reason I identify a lot with the movie, even though I’ve never been on anti-depressants, killed my mom, or done lines off a urinal… I think I identify with some underlying sentiment or something. Some kid (can I still think of myself as a kid?) trying to find something. Not me now, or anything, but maybe a me back in the day. Skipping college to drive to a playground by the river and swing on the swings. The place was empty. We swung on the swings while songs from Mellon Collie played in my head. Each time I swung to the top, I wanted to keep to jump off and fly away. Then we stopped, and I decided to get a tattoo. I’d had the intended design in my wallet ever since wasting a day at my drafting table once back in high school… so it seemed as good a time as any.

I guess, even though the Pumpkins and I had a “falling out,” and I kinda gave up on their music… three of their albums were huge to me at the time. I can remember listening to Siamese Dream in Andy’s room sometime in 10th grade. I played that album to death… driving down the river road back home. Then, Mellon Collie came out during my first year of college. Sharaun and I were apart for 8mos… and that album was prominent during that swirly-emotional period where incidents like picking up the daughter of a mother and father team of long-haul truckers at the Books-A-Million or, while trying to find a place on the road to pull over and have sex with a girl, stopping at a public park I only remembered because I’d been there in high school hunting psychedelic mushrooms on a nearby farmer’s land, just served to reinforce the fact that I wasn’t with Sharaun. Then, parts I and II of Machina (although I’d pretty much given up on them) helped me through my first mind-numbingly boring month at my post-college career by giving me something to read and a new interest.

Jeez… I know that was a syntactically complex paragraph, but I don’t really know how to rewrite it so it’s more clear. Good thing it’s Monday now as I write, and I care no longer about the coherency of old-and-busted, led-by-emotion writing. Guess that means it’s time to get back to the more practical “what I’m doing” style.

I’m sitting here, my last day off before returning to work. While I’d much rather sit around and not go to work, there is a pile of stuff calling me back to the cubicle. It’s going to be an interesting 1st couple of months I think. I’ll be “working from home” for a bit this week and next, since Sharaun goes in for surgery on Friday. Then I’ve got some travel tentatively planned for the first quarter of ’05. I feel like I really let things fester a bit over this vacation, but then I feel torn for feeling that way – since I have a deep belief that a “vacation” should be a true respite, a complete disconnect, from work. There are any number of loose ends I could have chosen to tie up with my free time this past couple of weeks, but I instead chose to watch the Twilight Zone marathon or take a nap. I promised myself that I’d play a little catch-up today… and in fact that’s why I’m here on the computer right now… writing this entry… not catching up at all. Maybe it’s the rain.

Listening to the new Decemberists album, which, while leaked on the 18th, isn’t set to see release until the end of March. I kinda felt bad reading Mr. Meloy’s response to news of the promo leak while actually listening to the album, a full three-and-a-half months in advance (apparently they even know who leaked it?). But my love of the band, and curiosity about the new material, once again drove me to listen. I held off on forming an opinion upon a single hearing… at least anything other than, “Yup, sounds like the Decemberists.” I’m about four times through it now, and happy to say it’s getting better with each spin. And, as always, to appease my conscience (which seems to be growing ever more virtuous with age), I’ll purchase the album at the next show. Sheesh, no more pirate warez on my box, no more P2P sharing (as if one-way downloads are any better), and no more beating up the aged. What’s happened to the callous badassness of my youth? Spoonfeed me applesauce and be done with it.

Afternoon folks… more tomorrow if you’re lucky.