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dinner with the family

Outbound once again.
So… the night before last was pretty awesome. I got a call from Sharaun on the way home from work, and in pretty short order we both agreed that we didn’t feel like doing dinner at home. We ended up having an awesome dinner for two at a local Indian joint. Sometimes, even though we’re together most every night – we don’t seem to get enough time to talk about random things. And that one-on-one dinner really hit the spot. We talked about work, about not-work, about summer plans, about all sorts of stuff. Then we made a joint trip to Wal Mart so I could pick up some socks. Afterward, I helped teach her the basics of non-linear equations so she can tutor a former student of hers. Man, I really enjoy algebra. Especially explaining it to other people. I think I could easily be a math teacher, really. I was talking slope-intercept form like it was taught to me yesterday. Anyway, it was a really enjoyable evening with my wife… we need to do that more often.

I mentioned that new Radiohead track yesterday. Hearing it just got me all Radiohead’d up… and I started listening to Kid A tonight. Man, that album is so outstanding. I can remember getting it like it was yesterday, in fact – I think I even wrote about it way back then. August 28th, 2000: The real new album I am waiting for is Kid A, Radiohead’s 4th – coming in early October. I know it’s going to be awesome. I am hoping to download [it] before it’s released – the promos should start showing up on Napster soon hopefully. September 11th, 2000: Listening to Radiohead’s new one, Kid A. It’s not out for a month yet – Napster. Awww yeah… that album made a huge impression on me. I can remember being the new kid on the block at work. I sat two floors up from the team they put me on. No one even knew I existed. I got no e-mails, no calls, no nothing. For the 1st six months I’d come in at nine and go home at three. I can remember feeling guilty for taking a paycheck for sitting around, listening to music, reading webpages, and writing. Kid A just worked so well with that lonely, out-of-my-element thing that was the first few months of my employment.

Made reservations for my happening-way-too-soon trip to Taiwan tonight. I actually realized that I’m departing US soil in a mere week’s time, and had yet to book flights and hotel. Not wanting to pay the dreaded less than one week booking premium, Wayne and I called the “emergency” travel number late last night and booked our trips. Two weeks people. The notion is seriously dreadful to me right now, leaving a week from today to go to Taiwan again. If it was only a week trip, I think I’d be fine… but two whole weeks. The only other time I was there for two weeks, I started getting seriously antsy for home near the end. And I know I’ve said it a million times, but I always get like this right before I go. Once I’m there, I’m usually OK. I just wish there was some way Sharaun could join me, I think she’d get a big kick out of Taiwan. Ahh… Taiwan… I come to your island shores once more.

And now it’s 11:30pm on Thursday. The trash is at the curb, the dishes are done, and the countertop is clean. And that, my friends, means it’s time to hit the sack. Goodnight.

Posted on

the modern worker

Shiva.
12:20pm on Wednesday afternoon, and I’m right where I want to be for the rest of the day. At home, windows open, music on. Too bad I have to go back to work, that place really puts a damper on my days. I’m listening to a live version of a new Radiohead song that leaked the other day. Seems they’re back in the studio and working on long-player #7. I can’t deny that I consider them to be the most important musicians of the last 15 years, and I look forward to each of their releases with the utmost anticipation. I mean, what other outfit today could see a bootlegged live version of a single new song get a three-paragraph review? Despite my afternoon off yesterday, I still don’t feel right. I’m hoping it goes away soon, I don’t want to be sick and traveling. Yes – that’s right. I’m off for Taiwan yet again in just over a week. You know how I always dread going just before I’m supposed to go? I’m in that phase right now, I just plain don’t feel like going. Two weeks this time, ugh… I feel like I just got back from the last trip. Anyway, I am going, so I better get used to the idea.

Last night I crawled in bed a little after 11pm, and started thinking about how much I didn’t want to wake up and have to go to work the next day. Then, a sentence came to me. Then another. Soon enough, I had enough stuff to warrant me getting back up and out of bed to sit in front of the computer and write a paragraph. I finished it last night before midnight, and almost added it to yesterday’s post – but decided to keep it in case I didn’t feel like writing today. And then, here it is…

I am the modern American worker. I am the employee you hate to love. I complete all that is assigned to me. I foster relationships, work well in teams, and know my field. I will always do what is necessary to succeed. I am easy to get along with. I meet deadlines and assume responsibility. You can rely on me. Resources permitting, I will come through for you 100% of the time. I know how to prioritize. I know how to delegate. I can handle many complex tasks simultaneously without degrading the quality of my output. When you compare me to the checklist, I will meet or exceed all your criteria. Wanna know what else? I feel no sense of duty or loyalty towards my employer; only laziness and comfort keep me where I am. My interest in the company’s success extends only as deep as my desire for a continual paycheck. My work is not inspired. I do not aspire to climb ladders, keep paying me and I’ll stay here forever. I view my job as the necessary evil funding my real life. I say what you want to hear and do what you want done so that you will shut up. Every once in a while I will go above and beyond Joe Employee – but I don’t do this for the betterment of the company or for personal growth – I do this because I know those gold stars at the top of my review might earn me more money. If your goal is to see how much you can squeeze out of me without complaint, my goal is to determine the minimal amount of effort to likewise keep you complaint-free. I will always be like this. The more responsibility you pile on me, the more I’ll pretend to care – and we’ll all be happy. I will express completely insincere feelings so that you think I am one of the ones who “really cares.” I’m the modern American worker, it’s nice to meet you. You can shake my hand if you want, but I just took a piss and didn’t wash it.

I resisted touching that up from last night’s original midnight incarnation, so it’s 100% raw as-written. Looking back, it seems a little overboard and harsh – but I guess it makes its point.

I found this article fascinating. It’s long, but the author writes well and the subject is something I’m a tiny bit familiar with, working in the Indian-rich field of engineering. Once, a friend and co-worker of mine was taking vacation to head to India for his arranged marriage. He’d never even met the woman who’d be arranged for him, but had corresponded with her via phone or e-mail. He was not scared or nervous, but excited. I remember him telling me, “You should come to India for the wedding. I cannot pay for your plane ticket, but if you are able to come you will not have any other expenses. You can stay with my family, and all your food and lodging will be taken care of.” He told me he would be “honored” if I attended… and to be honest, I really considered going – it sounded like the experience of a lifetime. Too bad my pockets aren’t overflowing with money, or else I would’ve. Anyway, read the piece if you have time… good stuff.

Goodnight.

Posted on

under the weather

Zzzzzz....
Today I came home from work after lunch. I think my body is threatening me with sickness, telling me I need sleep by making me feel “off” during the day. I worked through it yesterday afternoon, but wasn’t the most productive. Today the feeling came on earlier, and I just decided to take off and sleep. I got home, did some dishes, made some personal phone calls I’d been meaning to make, and then fell asleep on the couch until Sharaun got home. Now I’m up, and feeling a little better for my nap I think. Unrelated, but with no paragraph other than this one to call home: Since the deadline for getting in the ticket lottery is this Thursday, I went ahead and submitted our application for the World Cup 2006 in Germany. I’ve got my fingers crossed that we get tickets for the matches we want, but considering our luck with lotteries of late (we didn’t get trail passes for Whitney, lost the lottery)… I’m a bit on the guarded side.

I had a thought/idea for today’s entry, but didn’t quite know how to describe what I wanted to say. So, after a bunch of rewrites, this sentence seemed to work best: Over the course of my life, I’ve been constantly honing the skill of having “tough skin.” By tough skin I mean that I’ve done a little more than take the old “Like water off a duck’s back” adage to heart, I’ve actually made it a way of life. I realized early on that humor or comedy can be a very useful tool. Jokes can be used to avoid answering questions, a measured wit can smooth over rough situations, and best of all – jest can turn issues of self-confidence into entirely socially navigable subjects.

When establishing my comedy-as-a-net life-strategy, one of the first lessons I learned was the need to be able to poke fun at myself. You have to be able to make jokes about the things that you are most uncomfortable with or afraid of talking about. This is a critical skill. A common usage model: Someone is picking on you about one of your dreaded insecurities, you take their joke and one-up them, effectively out-joking them about your own fault. This not only establishes you as someone who’s “solid,” it makes you the funnier one (and thereby the winner). Being able to talk openly and joke about your insecurities and faults not only makes people feel more comfortable around you, it helps to downplay your own hangups in your own mind, and realize how stupid and tiny some of your self-issues are. Pride is your worst enemy here, you must learn to accept yourself as-is and work with what you’ve got – every dent and scratch. Keep in mind that you’re not shooting to portray yourself as one who has no self-worth or cares about nothing, but rather someone who is comfortable with himself as they are – blemishes and all. When you’re comfortable in your own skin, you’ve effectively put on a suit of armor. With time, you’ll reach a point where you won’t be “pretending” that things don’t bother you, they really won’t bother you – you’ll have bested them. And to those too-sensitive to manage that state of removal, don’t worry; if you still feel the need to – you can cry about things. Just remember: laughter in public, tears in private.

Another benefit of a humor-led life is the effect it can have on relationship-building. The Chinese have a perfect word for what I’m talking about: guanxi (关系). Guanxi is a word that represents the relationships and “networks” a person has built up and maintains; almost all of Chinese business is guanxi-dependent. Your guanxi defines how successful you’ll be as a business person. Having a humorous outlook on life lends itself to being a typically good-natured person; and being of an agreeable and in general good nature is the key to building good guanxi. When people are laughing, they let their guard down; they get comfortable. Even the shyest and most guarded of persons can usually be laughed out of their shell. For tough nuts, the real skill lies in choosing an approach – some folks require precision, individually-tailored comedy that’s tuned to their comfort level. Your technique will improve as you learn to judge someone’s personality; the faster you can assess someone’s personality type, the sooner you can adapt your jest to their palette. Again, being good-natured and agreeable is a far cry from being a pushover. In order to earn respect you must have some hard lines and integrity. But tempering your edges with joviality is the key to a well-balanced, guanxi-reaping, personality.

When you stare and stare and think and think but nothing else comes, it means the post is over. Goodnight.

Posted on

all that glitters

Gwee-tar!
Work today was an all-out assault. I don’t remember feeling so completely taxed in a long time. It was one of those days where I just couldn’t get away from the distractions and interruptions. Whenever I got focused on something, something came up and sidetracked me. Phone calls, working with people, my brain was switching tasks too fast and I got burned out. To top it off, I didn’t get a proper night’s sleep the previous night and it was my first day trying to cut back on both the amount of, and kind of, food I eat. I figure I have to do something about this gut… I just can’t abide it any longer.

The other day I was IMing with my old friend Andy, and mentioned that I was also multitasking and trying to write an entry. Since I’m not entirely sure if this not-writing jag I’ve been on is a product of me being so busy lately, or just me not having something decent to write about – I asked Andy for some ideas. He bounced a couple ideas off me before the words “Robin’s birthday present” come across the IM. Once my memory was jogged, I agreed that this had to be written down. Before the story, let me set the scene.

Robin was the first person I met when my family moved to Florida before I started the 6th grade. Her dad was our real estate agent when we were searching for the place we’d eventually call home. During the house-hunting process, my folks formed a decent relationship with our agent, Robin’s dad, and after we’d decided on a property and the deal was done he asked the family over for dinner at their place. That’s the night I met Robin. She was a smart girl, we were both around the same age – and me being a 6th grade boy I was of course mildly attracted to her (as 6th grade boys tend to be to any and all females). I remember that night, she had a book on handwriting analysis and she had me write a paragraph to analyze. Turns out the book said my handwriting showed I was conceited… at the time I didn’t know what the word meant, but I suppose that book had me pegged.

When I started the 6th grade at my new school, Robin ended up being in almost all of my classes. (When I was in the 1st grade, I took a test and was branded “gifted.” It was by virtue of this taxonomic classification that I met and stayed with my clique of friends, including Robin, for my entire middle-school career). Around the 8th grade, Robin became my first real girlfriend and we dated on and off (mostly on) for the next two-ish years. Come Robin’s sweet-16, we had recently broken up for what I think was the last time. It wasn’t a nasty breakup, our relationship had been mostly one of convenience… y’know, someone to sneak into the woods with and fool around, someone to talk to and hold hands with, etc. I mean, we were kids after all. Anyway, although freshly-estranged, I was still invited to her 16th birthday celebration, along with 15-20 more of her closest friends.

At the time, the group of friends I ran with was pretty tight. So it was no surprise that the afternoon before the party found us all hanging at my place kicking around potential gift ideas. I’m not entirely sure what the genesis of our eventual gift was… I imagine that it had something to do with the fact that none of us had given the matter any though until the day-of, and was compounded by our inability or lack of desire to “run out” and pick something up for the occasion. Either way, someone came up with the idea to get a medium sized cardboard box, line it with plastic, and then fill it with a vile mix of random substances from around my house. Once we had the leakproof plastic-lined box prepared, we began dumping in the ingredients. I had forgotten a lot of what went into the box, but a quick consultation with both Andy and Kyle helped reconstruct what I think is a pretty accurate rundown.

The base of the box was dirt. We piled in a decent amount of soil from the backyard. After that, we began rooting through the pantry. Chocolate syrup, ketchup, two swiss cake rolls, whip cream, raw ground beef, flour, milk, a can of kidney beans, one egg, cream corn; it all went into the box and was mixed thoroughly with a stick. Now, I don’t think it wasn’t part of the original plan, and was even a bit extreme for my taste… but I heard a rumour that someone may have even relieved himself into the box during the ingredients procedure. #1, not #2. Actually, that’s not a rumour at all… I saw my buddy straddle and pee into the box of crap right before my eyes. We all knew it was taking it a step to far, but once the pee was in the box it became part of the plan. As you can imagine, the varied nature of our box’s contents favored the nose with a super nasty stank. Once sealed and wrapped, the little square box looked rather unassuming – and its considerable weight worked in our favor as it piqued curiosity over the possible gift contained within.

I remember taking the gift to the party, along with the card we’d done: a greeting card (not even for a birthday) that we’d all signed and then purposely put in the road and run over with the car so it had tire-marks and road-burn all over the…

Wait… wait…
This is bad.
I feel more and more like a dick the more I write about this…

Sometimes the stuff we did back then confounds me, but y’know, I wouldn’t trade those memories for anything. Like driving around subdivisions late at night and spotting a Big Wheel left out on a porch, then pulling it to the middle of the street and running it down at 40mph in the Nissan Sentra. Or cruising the K Mart parking lot for a car with its sunroof open so we could drop a lit “Mammoth Smoke” inside, then watching the firetruck from the bank parking lot across the street. Some kid’s Big Wheel! Someone’s car! We had no hearts. Anyway… I digress, back to the story.

The party was a grand event, and all our friends were there. When we walked in with the box and handed it to Robin, Andy remembers her saying, with excitement, something like, “This is the heaviest gift, so I’m going to save it for last!” I don’t remember much from the actual party, as my nervousness and anticipation about the gift-opening probably occupied most of my thoughts. Having a reputation as jokers, a considerable amount of “buzz” developed about the gift. So much so that, when the time came for Robin to open her gifts, people crowded around the dining room table. As she promised, she saved our gift for last. I vaguely remember not being able to bring myself to watch the event transpire in real time. Instead, I think I turned my head and waited for the crowd’s reaction. From here on out I get the details mixed up, but I can remember a few things. I remember people saying, “What is that?!,” and, “It smells so bad!,” and I remember a guy named Paul laughing loudly.

Robin cried.

I don’t remember how long after that it was that I swung a stick and shattered their porchlight, quite by mistake I might add, but I guess that was the final straw. Her father, who was red in the face with anger, promptly called us foul words and banished us from the party. I think we actually left through the screened in porch in the backyard, he didn’t even give us the chance to walk back through the house and say goodbye. Apparently, due to the smell, quite a few people assumed we had given Robin a box of shit for her 16th birthday. It was a box of “shit,” I guess, although not in the literal sense. And, despite how things now seem when I look back, I don’t think we really understood the utter rudeness and downright meanness of some of the things we used to do. At the time, we were just into pulling pranks and doing stupid stuff.

Sharaun hates it when I cuss on my blog, and I generally agree with her. It’s usually not necessary to swear to make good comedy, and, in general, it detracts from the perceived intelligence and couth of a person. But some stories, like this one, absolutely require the use of a few bad-words. Them’s the breaks I guess. I guess the story may not be as funny to someone who wasn’t there or doesn’t remember it, reading it back I got a little chuckle but I’m not sure how the uninitiated will receive it. I thought I’d float it out anyway, so now it’s over.

Well, tonight was the Bravery show and I must admit it was mighty enjoyable. Short, but good sound and nice bouncy 80s-synth-rock goodness. Local shows are always the best because I can be home and in bed before midnight, all with a good show still ringing in my ears. Goooooood night.

Posted on

the hare won, right?

Focus.
I’m back. Did you miss me? Whatever, you’re full of crap. I bet you didn’t even check the page yesterday, you damn sunshine patriot. So; yeah. I took a writer’s vacation. Work dictated it more than anything… but I’m not going to say I didn’t kinda enjoy not writing. Today I got a bunch of lackluster paragraphs rounded out with a couple links to tunes. Maybe listen as you read along, I don’t care… it’s ultimately your bag. Enjoy.

Can I tell you how much I like this Aqueduct album? Oh, I can’t? Sorry then. Wait, who the eff are you to tell me what I can tell you? This internet thing is a free medium last time I checked. So: Dang I like this Aqueduct album! You people who may think you’ve heard it before, say, on the OC or something – shut up. So what if it was on the OC already… so what if the OC seems to be rapidly gaining on me in terms of the illustrious “I found that band” cred? The OC! I show for teenagers about cute and rich and white high-schoolers who drink beer, oh and there’s lesbians and indie music all over that biatch. Anyway, you should check out the album, it’s called I Sold Gold, and even though the revered PF panned it – I’d recommend it. Rock this track and tell me what you think.

As much as I don’t want to, I’m going to get up in the morning and go to work. Sometimes, I get this feeling… like something big is on the horizon. It usually comes in the morning, with the cold air. Today it came strong on my way home for lunch. Almost transcendent for a minute, I just get this feeling like I’m on the precipice, about to step off the edge or something. Not a scary feeling… an excited one. I don’t think I have the shining or anything like that – I just think it means something good is going to happen. I don’t usually serve out MP3s, but here’s the song that was playing when I got my good vibes… listen to that awesome guitar breakdown at the end with the fast video-gamey sounding part. As for the vibes themselves… I dunno. Summer is coming and the sun is still shining on my way home from work, maybe that’s it. Maybe I’m gonna win the lottery; then I can finally stop shaving altogether.

Why didn’t I write the past couple of days? Business trip my friends. Yeah, more customer visits. You remember the last time I was in Taiwan?, well some other customer-dudes wanted to hear that material – so Wayne and I made the short trip to present to these fools. As usual, we owned the audience. I was telling Wayne, I created the bulk of the material I presented over a year ago… and have just morphed it ever since. Oh sure it’s changed over time, but I swear I only made the effort once – the rest is just tweaking. What I’m getting at is, I’ve been presenting the same crap for over a year now. Considering, I’m pretty damn good at talking about this material. I don’t practice anymore… don’t worry about it… just go up and do the song and dance. Don’t worry, there was never any passion to be lost. It’s a loveless task, but I rather like it.

At work, I have complicated system of Post-It Notes task-management. I have a mid-sized pad on which I keep my medium-to-long term obligations in a asterisk-prefixed list. Not necessarily in priority order, just a list of everything I need to get done in one-to-two weeks time. For one-off obligations, I have one of those tiny little pads, and I take quick notes and stick them to the top of my laptop. Those are low-time-investment do-today things, I have to clear them off before the end of the day. In this age of cellphones and PDAs and high-tech little black books – my primary organizational system consists of Post-It notes. This is all I have for this paragraph, I realize it’s a little weak… but I’m going to talk more about work after I hit return twice.

After being a member of the working class for several years now, I’ve come to a rather shocking conclusion. Either, 90% of the workforce is stuck in 1st gear – or I have an amazing capacity to do things at mach speed. I’m not saying this to brag, I’m trying to document and explain an observable phenomenon. Through experiments conducted by myself and on myself, I’ve come to the conclusion that I can do what management considers to be a multi-day task in three to four hours. Again, I’m being totally serious and not trying to blow my own horn here (lots of masturbatory colloquialisms in this paragraph it seems; y’know blowing one’s own horn and doing experiments… oh, you get it). Anyway, I’ve been blessed with this incredible talent – and I use it to my advantage on every occasion possible. My big secret is that my week’s work really only took me one solid day. If this is true, I have an untapped potential to increase my workload by up to as much as 80%. You want what done? Uh-huh. Due Friday? OK, I’ll get working on that right away. Right away Friday morning… sucker. Cut me a check, it’s the weekend already and I’m beat.

You think they’re gonna make new dinosaurs? Goodnight.

Posted on

newsworthy

Extra! Extra!
Good evening people. I’m finished with tonight’s entry early, and I’ve been feeling tired today so I think I’ll turn in early. Tomorrow I head over to the bay area for some customer visits, spend a night, and return late Wednesday. Should be a nice short jaunt, and I think it’ll be good to get out of the office for a while. Other than that, I recently added a season pass for the original Star Trek series to my TiVo. As if my TOS (TiVo-obligation syndrome) wasn’t a crippling enough affliction – I continue to pile on the time-wasting shows. Anyway, I love the original Star Trek, it’s so awesome. I have no idea why I’m writing about this. Here’s some more junk.

When I was a kid, I can remember my parents letting me listen to “my” music sometimes when we were on long trips in the Ford LTD. Thinking about that now, I don’t think I’m gonna be one of those parents. I mean, “my” music back that consisted mainly of bands like Depeche Mode, Pet Shop Boys, Ah-Ha, and the like. A far cry from my folks’ parental tastes for John Denver and Neil Diamond. Just thinking about them making that aural sacrifice and putting up with Casio-driven masterpieces like Speak and Spell really means a lot. Heck, Sharaun and I fight about what we’re going to listen to in the car on a regular basis. No sir, I’m afraid my kids are going to listen to whatever I’m listening to. Maybe by then they’ll have independent audio for each car occupant and this problem will resolve itself… but if not, my kids better learn to like Depeche Mode.

Am I the only one who doesn’t see the newsworthiness of this whole feeding-tube thing? Maybe I just don’t understand the long-term ramifications of the ruling, I’m willing to accept that. But this story has had top-billing in all major US news outlets for days now. There’s nothing more newsworthy going on in the world right now? Aren’t we still at war in Iraq? Doesn’t [insert country of choice here] have nukes? When I go to the BBC’s webpage, they have these stories. I wonder if American news is really as tunnel-visioned as it sometimes seems? Seems like we care more about car chases or the latest “amber alert” kid taken from an Alabama Wal Mart than the current state of world affairs. What, Iran refuses to stop weaponizing their supposedly fuel-grade radioactives? Who gives a crap, Demi might be pregnant with Ashton’s baby!! Tensions between China and Taiwan are higher than ever before? Booooring, did you hear about that kid in South Carolina who got suspended from middle school for wearing a confederate flag shirt?, I’m incredulous!

The other day the guest on the Daily Show was Tom Fenton, a former CBS news anchor who’s recently written a book about the what he sees as the sad state of news media in the United States. The interview was really interesting, and the following quote really says what I’m trying to get at here, so I’ll just go right to it:

I don’t think, at this time when our government tells us that there are people out there trying to blow us up or get their hands on radiological or biological or chemical weapons, that we can afford the luxury anymore of having a dumbed-down electorate.

Tom Fenton on the Daily Show

Of course, Stewart came back with the devil’s-advocate defense that the networks are just playing to the ratings and giving the dumb audiences what they want. Changing his voice and playing the role of some network news programming bigwig, he said something along the lines of, “If the people would rather see a truck on fire than what’s going on in Afghanistan, follow the truck!” Anyway, Fenton was a good sport – but I think the underlying message of the interview is pretty relevant. Especially since people are dying every day, and not because their feeding tubes are being debated in the Supreme Court. Well, I didn’t intend for this to become and anti-war thing, but while I’m here I might as well offer up one more bleeding-heart link. Thanks for listening.

And, thanks to the power of the internet – if you’re interested, you can actually watch the entire interview here.

With that, I’ll call it a night. Until tomorrow’s away-from-home entry, goodnight.

Posted on

around the 4-layer spiral

Watch out, we're coming to the crossover.
I set out to take this weekend slow. And what’s more, to make the most of it by waking early each day. My original plans were to finishing up planting the various flora and fauna we’d purchased but not completely installed last weekend. But some late-season rains put the brakes on that. The rain was nice tho, it was particularly heavy for California – with thunder and lightning which is a rarity here. Back in Florida, thunderstorms are a daily occurrence in the summer, so they tend to make me a bit nostalgiac.

Y’know, I’ve heard of anger management problems, and I don’t think I have one of those. I do think, however, that I have a frustration management problem. Sometimes, I get unbelievably frustrated – with everything. Today is one of those days. Usually, some small legitimate thing triggers the frustration… but from then on everything else just seems to get picked up and added to my big rolling snowball of irrational frustration. On days like today, everyone drives infinitely slow. Everywhere I am is just an obstacle that’s keeping me from where I want to be. Everything I’m doing is just a waste of time keeping me from getting to what I really want to be doing. I finally get to a point where I feel like I’m about to jump out of my skin, then I realize I’m upset over nothing and just let it go. It’s usually right about then that have to use the bathroom and a stray pubic hair somehow gets plastered across my pee-hole and splits my normally manageable precision stream of urine into an un-aimable V shape consisting of two separate streams. It’s God’s little way of telling you to give up. Yeah, I definitely have a frustration management problem.

I haven’t talked music in a while. Maybe that’s because the latest records stacked on my multi-platter arm are somewhat well known to begin with. It seems that either the collective ears’ of America’s youth are finally responding to the weekly subliminal indie dosing they get from the OC, or I’m simply experiencing a loss of power to my commercial-acceptance shields. But you gotta admit, the recent explosion of MTV2-phyllic new-new-wave rock acts really do have an addictive sound. And with that in mind, I was pretty pumped that Sharaun and I managed to score a bunch of tickets to a local small-club show by one of the aforementioned aforenamedcoattail-riders, the Bravery, that’ll be going down next week. With their album in-hand I’m really looking forward to it. Aside from the best the “new alternative” stable has to offer, I’ve recently acquired the latest Ben Folds album, as well as the new Stephen Malkmus joint. Both are worth investigating if the Killers and their extended family-tree are beginning to wear on you.

Work on the digital migration project continues. I’m halfway through Lennon, and have started my first real attempt to cross-check what I’ve ripped with the complete database of what I own. The goal is to find holes in the ripping, and make dang sure everything I own is digitized before I start selling off the then-redundant discs. When I started all this, I actually printed out a copy of my database and highlighted each album as I ripped and verified it, sometimes making notes if something was notable. But the whole effort has dragged on so long that I’ve not only lost track of what I was doing, I’ve lost the printout. So now I’ve got this folder full of music and no real way to check it against what I own. But, with a little creative manipulation of the DOS ‘tree’ command, and some fancy cutting/pasting tricks – I managed to get a side-by-side list of my collection and what’s already been ripped to the drive. I’d like to thank OpenOffice 2.0 beta for most of my data manipulation and srpreadsheeting, if you haven’t yet – check it out.

Speaking of software – having the right tools has played a large part in my willingness to pick up this project again. Ripping discs is not so bad when they’re all commercially available and the ripping program can look them up in freedb to get all the track names. But bootlegs, transfers from vinyl, and other rare/odd discs just won’t freedb – meaning the only option is to type all the information in by hand. I recently downloaded a couple more utilities that have proved perfect for the task of tagging those pesky non-freebd-able albums. Moosic Organizer lets you actually search the freedb site and manually apply an album to one that won’t lookup on its own. And MP3 Book Helper has an “import from CSV file” feature, which allows me to copy a bootleg’s tracklist off any website into a spreadsheet, save it as a CSV file, and tag the album in one-click that way. Sure beats typing every track in by hand.

Finally got around to watching Ray tonight, great movie. Watching some of those club scenes was really powerful. Seeing greasy, sweaty, hard-working musicians pouring their every ounce into their instruments… it reminds me of the feeling I got the first time I heard Otis Redding’s set at the Monterey Pop Festival. Kyle brought over a tape his dad had made. Side A was Wilson Pickett; side B was Otis. Some was live, some was studio, and it was my first real chance to actually “listen” to soul music. On that day, we had decided to pretend we were kids again – and had broken out our old slot car tracks. His track was compatible with mine, so he brought over his cars and track, and we pieced together a massive circuit that sprawled and twisted its way around the floor of my bedroom. We must have listened to that tape three or four times through as we gunned our little cars on to victory. Up the side of the bottom bunk along vertical U-turn, around the 4-layer spiral, down the extended straightaway and into the hairpin around the closet door. For some reason that memory stuck with me, the four speakers I’d arranged in each corner as a mock quad setup blasting Try A Little Tenderness over the clicks and clacks of little cars moving from section to section on the track. Some things I think you’re just supposed to remember.

Goodnight.