Some Words

I can’t set a time for emails to send through gmail. How the hell am I supposed to prevent review staffers from knowing I’m still up and working on stuff at two in the morning? If I leave it in the drafts folder then I’ll forget to send it entirely. Come on Gmail. What you want me to use Outlook or something? Not that I’m about to start using mail.app, but that would necessitate cron last I checked. More Google staffers should spend time catering to my whims, and bringing me grapes. Someone needs to dedicate their 20 percent time to making my life mirror Hedonism Bot’s.

Since the last post was the 500th I’ve posted here, I find it fitting that it was one of the most banal that I’ve ever managed to pump out. Banality: just one of the many exciting new services we hope to provide you with here at Some Words.

Continuing on that front, I think I have been getting a lot more boring recently. At least, if my recent purchase history is to be believed. I have it on good authority that Americans are best defined by their recent purchase history. No one has ever failed to follow through after buying those running shoes.

That said, spending just above my comfort level has always been one of the ways that I motivate myself to actually get over the initial hurdle on some challenges. When I wanted to deal with my fear of heights? I bought climbing shoes. Shortly thereafter I was getting up on the rope. I still have overgrip problems, but I wasn’t looking to become a world class climber.

So what would you know from the recent purchases? And here’s where things really start to sound like a Jeanie Teasdale op-ed. I got a bunch of nice pens, and have been practicing my handwriting. Yes, I’m working on penmanship. Apparently I’m not happy with the cheapo pens that come in twelve packs anymore. I would have hated this in the past. Why bother, most of the stuff I do is typed. But like a time bomb, the heckling that my handwriting drew at one of my first post college jobs appears to have finally tipped my over the neurosis threshold into trying to do something about it. While I was working on edits for the past few weeks, I was also carefully working on my print letters. Now I’ve got a cheap fountain pen and have started on cursive.

I read somewhere, and I think I’ve used this quote on the blog before, that “people like to buy books because they think they are buying the time to read them.” I wonder if I like buying pens because I think I am buying the time to write my own projects with them.

Teenage Ian would have wanted to kick my ass for this. Fortunately for me, even if someone invents a time machine, teenage Ian wasn’t so big on climbing, biking, or generally staying healthy. I had more of a cola and video games lifestyle back then. I could probably take seventeen year old me in a fight.

With the usual post finals apologies to friends I haven’t written. I’ll be hunkering down tomorrow before starting the summer job to write everyone an email. Maybe two. We’ll have to see. The summer has some exciting work ahead, and the weather here in Portland is finally nice. I look forward to climbing onto the bike every day.

Well then… after surviving finals, getting out of the Portland airport just before the snow closed it down, then getting out of the Denver airport just before one of the planes went off the runway, and tonight riding 18 miles in near whiteout conditions, I’m done with close calls for the month. Thank you. Check please.

Finals was what it was, and I think I now have some idea of what I’ll need to do in law school to survive. Hopefully this means more time to do a few other things, and work on some of the interesting projects that organizations like the NEDC. In the sort term though, I’ll settle for posting once a day and getting back to writing, at least until school starts up again.

To the several people with unanswered email in my inbox. I’m sorry. I’m about 100 messages behind right now. I’ll catch up… really. Very sorry to all the friends who I am once again acting like a stranger to. It’s a wedding. I underestimated how much time that took,

Well… that was about the stupidest thing I’ve done in a long, long time. I spilled coffee on my computer and flattered myself into thinking that I’d managed to not get any inside the vents. I left it on, and now it’s looking like a best case of $400 with a worst case of a whole new computer. Plus I’m not even going to find out for a few days. It’s a very special feeling.

Making matters worse is the fact that I’ve seen this happen to other people before. I know better. Always turn off the computer as soon as you can after something spills on it.

And now, here I am, without the stuff I was working on, with the old computer back out, and wondering what to do next.

So last night I played a game of kickball with my former co-workers. It went well, we won 25-1 and I managed to not just kick high lobs and get caught out the whole time.

After that we went to a bar called “The Chalet.” While there, I had the worst burger on earth. It was a mushroom swiss burger. The mushrooms were clearly from a can, and surrounded by some sort of goo or pulp. These had been superheated, so much so that I burned my face bringing the burger up for the first bite. I wondered why this was, but when I actually got into the burger, I found out that it was because they melted the cheese that way. The meat was a little cold, and had a sort of Styrofoam texture to it. It bounced a bit and fell apart in my mouth, but not in a good way.

When I got home, K had the perfect idea for cleansing the taste buds, banana cream pie ice cream from Sebastian Joe’s. Someone, an ice cream genius, over there got the idea of making banana ice cream with nilla wafers in it. I cannot explain to you how delicious this is.

Well, in a couple of weeks I’ll be going to look for a new apartment in Portland. This is, over the next four months, what I expect to be most stressful in life. I hate looking for apartments. I tell myself that Kelli is the one who is going to care, but really, it’s going to be me. I’m just too spoiled living where I do right now: a 2 bedroom with free laundry, nice layout, and a backyard with a deck and some garden space. Within six blocks are four book stores, Bill’s Imported Foods, The Wedge Co-op, a regular grocery store, a bike shop, a tea shop, six coffee shops, a solid liquor store, and a good bakery. Move that out to ten blocks and you have doctor, dentist, Shuang Hur. I’m right on the main bicycle arteries for Minneapolis and my landlord is mellow and gets things fixed when they need to be fixed. The only downsides are the lack of cupboards in the kitchen and that we pay heat.

I am spoiled. The odds of finding that in Portland feel small right now. All of this is not increasing my written output for the day. Whining does not count.

Well, Passover came and went, and I started in with whiskey again, and I didn’t post. The other night something went horribly wrong with a batch of falafel that I was making, and I didn’t post. Side note, that was some seriously wrong stuff with the falafel, they didn’t hold together while frying. This left me with something akin to fried seasoned sand, about one pound of it. Yum.

Anyhow, yesterday was my last day at work, and now I’m taking some time off before school to finish up writing projects, finish the wedding preparations, climb, and get some other stuff in order. My financial aid situation is still not where I want it, in a big way, so that will have to be taken care of.

I don’t want to promise that this will lead to more posting. Pretty much only my friends read this space, and it’s nice to have a way to let you know if something interesting happens, but I’ve been bad in the past and probably will be in the future. There’s a lot of writing and only a little less than four months to do it. But I’m going to try, in as much as I find that I have interesting things to say, to keep posting here. One of the other things I want to do is to finally put some more short stories on the second page. Look for one in two or three weeks.

I’ll be moving to Portland, OR for school and hopefully I’ll see some of you who’re out on the west coast. I’ve lost track of too many people, and if you aren’t coming to reunion I hope to see you soon.

That’s all for now.

I’ve set a new personal best for getting fed of up with the Passover diet. This time it was in what amounts to the first day of the fast. Only, you know, most of the rest of the holiday to go.

I’ve been strangely hungry the whole day too. I have a sneaking suspicion that you don’t get the full one hundred and twenty calories listed in the nutritional information.

Tomorrow I should get my last letter back from a law school. Given the time it’s taken, I’m guessing the response is a forgone conclusion.

I finished Tristram Shandy a few weeks ago. I haven’t really taken the time to write about it, and just saw the movie a few days ago, which was a nice coda to the whole experience.

I think that Tristram Shandy was one of the few classics which was not covered in a class at Carleton. I don’t know that for certain. I don’t have a course listing with me at the moment. Still, if I am right, I think that is a terrible shame. It was a strangely enjoyable experience. I don’t know that I have been simultaneously bored with and immensely entertained by a book before. Tristram purports to focus his story, and immediately bounces off in new directions. The problems for me came when he seemed to carry on with one fragment of narrative longer than others. It is a sorry statement about my attention span when a book renowned for it’s short attention span focuses on a topic too long.

Those longer passages got tedious to me when I read too many pages at once, but the page by page experience was hilarious. I think I have mentioned on here before that I do not often laugh while reading books, even if I find them very funny. Shandy had me laughing at several points.

The movie was an equally pleasurable experience. I managed to watch it all in one go too, which already puts it on a separate field from the novel, which was serialized. While many reviewers talked about how the movie could never film the actual book and focused instead on the feel, and staying true to the oddness of the book, I think they actually did an admirable job of getting the book in too. There were many quite pleasing parallels that I noticed and which benefit the reader of the book when watching the movie. K had not read the book when she watched the movie, and her characterization of it was that it was “odd.” This was amusing to me, because compared to the book, the film felt grounded, focused, and remarkably sensible.

So… there are a lot of tracks on my HD with bad ID3 tags. This means that I can’t find them, as iTunes doesn’t know where to look. I could fix this myself, but I though there must be a faster way. Musicbrainz had a sourceforge app for OS X that seemed like it might help.

I installed it, and ran it for all my songs missing ID3 tags. Blue Valentine by Tom Waits was in there. The program thought that track six, “Wrong Side of The Road,” was Boyz II Men singing “Let It Snow.” It thought that “Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis” was Van Morrison singing “You Don’t Know Me.” The prize, by far, was the mp3 of my old band that I accidentally left in there. This, it turned out, was either “Die Born” by Days of the New, from the album “Days of the New III,” or “Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me)” from Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel’s Greatest Hits.