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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.

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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.

Posted on

craps was his favorite game

Luck be with me.
Someone give me a breathalyzer, right now. Do it. It’s only 8am but I swear I could blow at least a .05.

Being so multicultural and everything, Sharaun and I and friends went out to celebrate a day dedicated to the patron saint of Ireland. And, despite all the intelligence which pointed to it being a weeknight, I went ahead and invaded the beer tent anyway in a futile hunt for the weekend. I never did find the weekend, but I realized I’d been looking a little too hard sometime around 11pm. That’s when I found myself standing outside with some guy in a towering green felt hat which had a poofy green afro of fake hair attached. He offered me a cigarette and I accepted, a sure sign of drunkenness for me. Loopy already, I got the magic Marlboro and could barely stick around to hear the rest of my new friend’s story (something about a tattoo he got when his dad died: a flaming baseball and some dice). It’s always amazed me that the rare gravitational anomaly where you suddenly feel like you’re rooted to the ground and your surroundings are swirling around you only seems to happen when you’re drunk… there’s got to be some science behind that. Thankfully, I was able to master my emetic reflex and make it to bed.

Sometimes I wonder if my lulls in writing are because I’m so busy that I don’t have time to write, or because I’m so busy that there’s no time for anything worth writing about to happen. I think it’s a bit of both. I mean, after a 12hr day of writing e-mail, not listening to meetings, and staring at a computer monitor… there’s really not much to write about besides writing e-mail, not listening to meetings, and staring at a computer monitor – and that stuff just doesn’t make for interesting writing. On days where I don’t really do anything but work, there’s not much interesting stuff to talk about. As a semi-firm (like tofu) rule, I don’t get into too much detail about what I do for a living or where I do it… I mean, bloggin’ fools have been fired for that!

Until Monday.

Posted on

ivy walls

Not the bull kind.
Yesterday I had a 6:30am meeting. I also had a 5pm meeting. I finally quit working around 10:30pm. When the first thing you say to your wife when you climb into bed is, “How was your day?,” you know you’ve been a little too focused on work. Needless to say I didn’t feel much like writing. Being busy like this is really taking a toll on the page… but I will maintain… I will persevere. So, with my eyes on the prize, I boldly march forward into today’s entry.

Just because a fellow decides to buy a bike and ride it to work some days instead of driving, does that mean you need to ask him every day if he rode his bike? It’s an unexpected side-effect of my decision: guilt. I know that, every day when she gets home, Sharaun is going to ask me if I rode my bike to work. And every day I don’t ride my bike to work, I feel the guilt as I back the truck out of the garage; my bike still hanging from its hook in the rafters. You people who ask me if I rode, I’ve got your number. I’m convinced you’re not just asking me if I rode my bike on that particular day. Nay, you are charging me under the cloak of curiosity, silently indicting me! “Did you ride today” translates to “I know you didn’t ride your bike today, you lazy bum. Now admit as much out loud before the world and God, and be ashamed of your sloth.” I know, I’m perceptive.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned before that Sharaun is a teacher, but… Sharaun’s a teacher. OK, now that I’ve established that… wait, what did I establish again… that’s right, Sharaun’s a teacher – you get an A. Anyway, she often grades papers in the evening. As much as this sucks for her, to be working in the evenings, sometimes it can be fun…. those times are mostly the times when we sit around and make fun of the answers some of her kids come up with. And, after careful consideration of the ethical principles involved, I decided to post some of the brightest gems from tonight’s papers. This lesson was on “Aryans Bringing Change to India,” and below is a sampling of some of our favorite answers from her 6th grade class, original spelling and grammar intact. All these kids got Fs… my wife is brutal.

Question: Where did the Aryans come from? Where did they migrate to?

Answer: They migrated to the Black and Caspian Seas.
(Really? They migrated to the sea?)

Answer: They came from Black Sea and Caspian Sea, and they went southward Indo-Europeans.
(They came from the sea… and they… huh?)

Answer: The Aryans came from Europe and Western Asia. They migrate took over a hundreds of years ago.
(Ohhh… that first sentence was so dead on. The Ritalin must’ve worn off before the second one though.)

Answer: India came from hometown, and went to Europe.
(I don’t even… know how to… what!?)

Question: How did the Aryan migrations effect civilization in India?

Answer: It effected them by drying up the crops.
(Migration dried up the crops. OK.)

Answer: They just too over and too over they’re land with out them knowing and just mess up everything.
(Can’t even comment… laughing.)

Question: If you had been a Brahman in early Indian society, how might you have felt about the teachings of Buddha? How might you have felt about his teachings if you had been an untouchable?

Answer: I would’ve felt interesting and happy. If I were an untouchable I would feel like crying into tears becan he’s telling us to keep our head up.
(The phrase “crying into tears” is outstanding.)

Answer: I will have felt confused because it’s bad that they were doing those things and doing things unknown. Probuly helpful in a way because they were keeping they’re country clean in away.
(Say what?)

I’d like to thank her for her help with today’s entry. Goodnight.

Posted on

false profit

Fakir. Get it?
I haven’t been writing because it just hasn’t been in me. I sit down with the laptop, write a couple thoughtless sentences and give up. Before, I may have pushed myself to get something done, to get something up, but I don’t see the point anymore. As it is, I’m already shamed by my matching-shoe entry last week. The reality is, I write a lot. I write a whole lot. Every night I crank out paragraph after paragraph. One wonders if it’ll ever dry up. It’s like wondering if, with all the music that’s been made in the history of the world, how people still manage to come up with an original tune. I guess when the variables are infinitely arrangeable, there’s always a chance for an original. Not that anything I write is terribly original or even worth reading, but at least there’s no threat of “drying up.” I can keep pumping out sentence after sentence of crap. Here comes some of it now, enjoy.

As sore as I am, I’d trade sitting in my cube today for the sunny and sweaty yardwork of yesterday in a heartbeat. With Blind Faith’s eponymous, and only, LP blaring from the windows while I heaved the breaker bar at the rocky “dirt.” Instead, I’m sitting here on my already-tired-of-being-sat-on ass, listening to the Arcade Fire live on Morning Becomes Eclectic. A decent performance, but it’s not like I was in need of convincing when it comes to the awesomeness of this band. The problem is, when you release an album that is so stunningly good, so noticeably standout from everything else released that year, following it up is rough. I remember reading about Radiohead’s follow-up phobia after releasing the universally praised OK Computer. As if to silence the murmurs of “can they do it”, Radiohead released Kid A as the follow up and blew everyone’s mind again. I’m hoping the Arcade Fire can have their own mind-blowing follow up, and their sophomore effort is probably the one future album I’m currently most looking forward to.

Begin random unrelated paragraph.

I don’t think I’m the only one, but maybe I am, who feels like he really only knows a fraction of what people may think he does. I’m talking specifically to the work environment. I’m not an expert, in honesty I retain very little. I’m a fake, a practiced charlatan, and a cunning opportunist. Over my short time on this planet, the only real skill I’ve mastered is knowing how to influence peoples’ perceptions. An expert at getting by, proficient at faking it, and revered in the field of hype – I’ll come to you with nothing in my head and anything you’d like on my tongue. You’d think after a while, I’d get called out, cold-busted. Nope, I know enough to lay down safety nets… just like always, I know just enough to get by and nothing more. I come to school to do the bare minimum for the As and honors. Even with all your persuasiveness, you’ll not impress upon me your get-ahead attitude, I’m too satisfied with simply getting-along. Relying on my pseudo-skills to advance me… I will let your perception carry me. Thanks.

End random unrelated paragraph.

My week-long AIM screename mixup has been an exciting and interesting thing. As you may remember, it all stared last Saturday when I got a bunch of IMs from people I’d never heard of, all of them thinking I was someone named Zak or Charlie. Throughout the week, the IMs continued. Despite my frequent ignoring them, and, when responding, my adamancy that they had the wrong person – I learned a lot about the people IMing me, the person(s) I was supposed to be, and IMing and today’s youth in general. For instance, I learned that the job of a child predator really isn’t that tough. In just the first day of mistaken identity, these girls’ freely offered their names, ages, and location. I didn’t ask, and I even told them I was an old man who they didn’t know. It mattered not. Unasked, they sent pictures and even phone numbers; I learned what schools they go to, what dance studio they attend. It didn’t matter to them that I was a stranger – they could care less. That, to me, was a little disturbing.

I addition to a somewhat shocking lack of information-guarding, I learned that instant messaging is extremely important to these kids. The girls who were IMing me ranged from 12-14 years old, and they were relentless. They also have their own language. I like to think of myself as still being fairly-in touch with the youth culture of today, but some of the abbreviations and idioms they were using had me rushing to Google for a whippersnapper-to-geezer translator. Seeing how important IMing was to these kids made me realize that this is a entirely new communication medium. Something my generation and the ones preceding it simply didn’t have. It’s real-time note-passing, but with the added bonus of distance to reduce inhibition. As a behind-the-curtain method of communicating, it’s extremely efficient for the hormone-charged youth to conduct faceless flirting – which everyone knows is much easier than mustering up in-person game. Like the long flirty phone calls of my generation, IMs flying through cyberspace are today’s kids’ way of developing those oh-so-important teen infatuations. I guess it was just interesting to me that they probably don’t even consider that they are the first generation afforded this indirect and immediate type of communication.

And, to round it out – I finally got back to my long-running project of digitizing all my music. When I stopped, I was at about 80% ripping my entire CD library. Then, when I upgraded my PC my ASPI layer got all screwed up and my ripper wouldn’t work at all. My intense hatred of working with computers on my own time kept me from properly debugging the problem until tonight, when I forced a reinstall of the ASPI layer and got things back up and running. When I stopped before, it was at the daunting task of getting all my Beatles and Beatles related materials ripped… and now I’m happy to report I’m almost through with George Harrison and on my way to Lennon. Soon it will be Macca and finally the Fab Four themselves. When that’s done, all that’s left to do is walk through the collection and make sure every CD has digital representation. Then, reap the second-hand rewards via Ebay, local record shops, and secondspin.

Goodnight all. Good. Night.