Some Words

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.

And it was an eventful four days, especially considering I had the time to finish two books (granted one was especially short) and make heavy inroads into three others.

I returned to find that the stress of having no one in the house (the girlfriend left for her family’s home about a day ago) caused the cat to crap all over the house. It was a particularly nasty problem, as the cat appears to have had diarrhea or some such illness, when it went on the carpet. Aren’t you glad I told you that? I am.

I had gone home with a little of the usual fear. What was I doing with my life? Why wasn’t I engaged in the life of awesomeness that some of my friends were. (paraphrase: “Hey guy’s. I’m moving to Tokyo, where I might work for Google, and I’m getting married.) Knowing, through college and home, a large number of thoroughly amazing people, who do thoroughly amazing things, has a way of making you feel, if quite privileged, a little low at times. Last night I went to the townie bar in Mt. Pleasant, The Bird. It was just what I needed, in a sick sort of way. There is something about seeing a few of the people you knew in high school, at the local townie bar, that is therapeutic. I don’t know how many of them were just in town for the holidays, but the knowledge that some of them had never left, provided the dose of schadenfreude that I needed to right the emotional ship. It was tempered by the realization that I was the only one at the table who didn’t have at least a Masters in something, but that was for the best.

Aside from buying a couple of gifts for people I know I won’t see until after Christmas, there is nothing to do but write for the rest of the year, which is good, as I’m way behind on all of my goals. As I write, I also plan to be overly introspective, and post things, about stuff.

Yea, verily, there shall be updates. Plenty to talk about for once.

Just went drinking with my old friend Shea and his wife Allison. I’m home for the holidays, such as they are.

There’s something weird about going home to a small mid-western town. It might not be the same for other people, but my hometown has been growing fairly quickly over the past several years. Every time I’m home there are new buildings up, and I’m always surprised by the number that get torn down. This visit was no different, as the main strip had lost about a quarter of the buildings I knew growing up. Also, apparently what once was ‘Downtown’ no longe qualifies. The suitably distainful now call it ‘Old Town.’ How quaint.

Writing has been sadly lacking for the past few days, putting my goal for the end of the month in serious peril. At this point I would need to do about 3,000 words a day to make the goal. Difficult, but not impossible. It all depends on the next few days, when I’m stuck in a car for long periods of time.

And on a totaly random note, which I will justify by saying that I am drunk, how come, in the notes at the end of game writeups, they tell me all the celebs who were there? Actually, this isn’t about the celebs, this is about how they tell me that a guy from a local team in another damn sport was there. Why am I supposed to care if a guy from the Tigers went to the Redwings game?

The more I watch this video, the more I think that Psapp is Radiohead without all the doom.

Which is not to say that Radiohead doesn’t make amazing music, but sometimes you need to cleans the palate before you walk into the garage and turn on the car with the door closed.

While hurrying to make some stew today, I was chopping an onion. In my rush, I was not paying proper attention to my hand placement. Usually I push my knuckles up against the side of the blade, tucking everything under my hand, so that the edge can’t get me. I was not doing that with the onion though, and my thumb went under the blade, thus loosing a sizable chunk.

It’s very embarrassing, as I am usually the guy who gives you a two minute mini lecture on safety before you get to use a knife in my house. Also there was a fair amount of blood.

It’s thrown me a little off. I had plans to ramble more today. I might still do that. I might not…

So it seems Scooter Libby’s book has some pretty fucked up passages. Now, I’m not exactly in line to read this book for its literary value. Nor for that matter, am I going to read it at all. But unless the novel is horror genre fic, I really don’t see where that was coming from. Nabakov wrote Lolita about a perverted and lonely man. To some extent you have to be as good, or at least nearly as good, as Nabakov, to get away with stuff like that. Granted it’s just a paragraph, but I feel pretty safe saying Libby is no Nabakov.

Congrats to my little brother. I should have posted this a while ago, but this was the first one I could find with him in it on youtube.

A friend showed me this:

I was at work and we were talking about private wikis, and how useful we really thought they were, compared to other things available. For a lot of project management, I imagine that this would be the better option.

Every time I see one of these things, I can’t help but wonder: Is this the one that will make me actually pay attention to the calendar I set? I thought I had that with iCal, but I’ve been very bad about following it recently. The little warnings come up, but I just close the window. In the end, you’re either organized or your not. But this might be a way to keep everything looking neat, if you’re already on the path.

I’m not talking about the British paper. My rss feed grows at an alarming rate. Every few weeks I try to trim it back down. How many witty takes on national politics does one need? There has been one blog that has stayed on the list for longer than almost any of the others. It’s not a political blog. It’s Gizmodo. Every day they put up around 50 posts. I go through all of them.

60% of them are new cell phone models, or worse cell phone and iPod decoration tips. I don’t care about how flashy my cell phone is. I got the free model. It calls people when I press buttons. Job done.

20% of it is existing tech that I don’t really need to hear the latest advances in. Do I really give a fuck that Sony has a new LCD HDTV out, that is 3″ bigger than the last one, or does 1080i? No. I might by one some time soon, but I’ll do the research then.

10% of it is stuff like glowing alarm clocks that tell you the weather. If it’s blue, it’s sunny! Of course there are other things, but that’s about the level of utility.

5% is Mac rumors that I could get from other sites.

5% MIGHT be something cool and new. Or it could be more cell phone stuff!

And yet I don’t take if off the feed. I don’t get it. It’s like I’ve invited the big hairy whore of mass commerce inside my brain for tea, and now I’m too polite to get it out. Maybe if some of these gizmoes had even marginal utility, with which to improve my life, but I can find those at other sites. And even as I’m writing this, I still haven’t removed it from the feed. I amaze myself.

Thank you Boing Boing. Without you I would not be able to scream:

“This is the state I live in!”

Sadly I do not have an audio file of my friend Cassie ranting about “Sweet Martha’s Cookies and a glass of milk.” As you can see the Minnesota state fair is mostly about shoving deep fried phallic symbols into your mouth. Is it any wonder that this is a relatively gay friendly blue state?

When I drive home from work these days, I always go past the Red Dragon. I do not stop. The Red Dragon is a booze death zone to me now. Half the drinks have 151 snuck in under cover of ice and fruit juice. All of them seem to come in enormous brandy glasses. Two of them can put most of the people I know under, and the really heavy drinkers I know tend to top out at three or four. On top of all this the classics are horribly done there.

So as I’m going by this time I have to stop for a light. A girl, who may have been there with a fake id, comes running out into the road. She has a sign. It reads, “Help a poor college girl by buying her a drink?” Now, at first I was a little shocked, lets leave the panhandling to the desperate cases I think. But then I realized that this is an ingenious plan. A) She was really small. She only needed this to work once and she’d be set for the night. B) Whatever guy in a car does give her the money, he’s off in his car when the light changes. This means that if he turns out to be an ass who thinks that buying her a drink means he’s entitled to anything… away he goes. C) It looked hilarious. She really understood how absurd the whole thing was. You could see it in her face. D) On some level I wish I’d thought of it when I was her age. I still wouldn’t have been cute enough to pull it off, but I wish I’d thought of it.