Some Words

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.

All this time I’ve been jokingly blaming my neuroses on my Judaism, when all the while I should have been jokingly blaming them on the damn cat.

After getting home from work tonight I made myself a drink. It was a sidecar, which was delicious. Two of the three ingredients of the sidecar are not in my basic bar setup (or weren’t, Cointreau has convinced me of the value a good orange liqueur, there will be no decent into triple sec). Drink in hand, I sat down for a good long read.

This went well, but after a while, I felt like getting another drink. I didn’t want another cocktail, but my options after that were limited. I didn’t feel like scotch, which is my usual non cocktail standby. Then I realized that there was beer in the refrigerator. For whatever reason, I have not been drinking much beer at all. I don’t know that I’d had a beer in months. Normally in the winter I’ll have a few stouts and porters. I always feel that these are good beers to try out. I rarely return to one or another, there are simply too many varieties to be pinned down to one winter beer.

A friend had brought over a six pack on my birthday. I was Stella Artois, a beer I have spent most of my life mocking. The ads they show in the local movie theaters have not helped this cause. Still, there were four bottles, and lacking another alternative, I opened one. It was then that I was reminded why I don’t like Stella. It is my considered opinion that Stella Artois is not beer. It is Eurosweat. If you were to tour the brewery, you would find many large hary Europeans with funnels attached to them. These funnels would carry their sweat, soon to be labeled “Stella Artois” into a vat, for processing.

The sad fact is that I’ve polished off the bottle anyway. Mmmmm… Eurosweat…

And so a weird week concludes. The girlfriend has had what looked to be infections on both her big toes for a while. She went to the doctor, and they confirmed her suspicions, and then removed her toenails. I am told that this didn’t hurt much at the time, but it has given me the screaming willies.

It also means that no less than twenty people, myself included, have told her that removing the toenails was an old medieval torture technique. Apparently this is one of those little facts too lurid to escape the mind of the teenage humanities student.

Which just reminded me of the time, in said humanities class, where the teacher came in scandalized, and informed us that she had looked up medieval torture the night before on google, and not gotten what she wanted at all.

So… it hasn’t exactly been a habit to write in this space recently. Last night, as I was deeply busy not writing, I started to think about habits. I’d seen this video by ze frank about procrastination. (Thank you 43folders for the link.) I thought it was a good laugh.

Last night I realized that instead of doing what I’d intended to do, I was downloading fixed width fonts form my terminal program. I was so angry with myself for putting off all that work that I went to bed. Productive.

This morning I was in the bathroom brushing my teeth shortly after waking up. I was thinking about habits, and after a rinse and spit, I went to leave the bathroom. On the way out, I hit the light. This turned the light on though, as I don’t turn the light in the bathroom on unless it’s dark out. For some reason though, this habit has not been linked with my habit for turning out the light as I leave the bathroom. Sometimes I don’t catch myself turning the bathroom light on as I leave. I find the bathroom light on later. I’m convinced something in my brain has crapped out, possibly after a night of hard drinking.

This morning I was going to get right down to work on all the things I hadn’t done yesterday. Instead I started looking up wordpress themes. Then I considered learning php so that I could make my own. What amazes me about ze franks monologue about procrastination is how eerily it has begun to describe my own life.

Look at Ian not writing.