Some Words

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.

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.