Socks with Sandals.

This made my damn day.

2008-12-31T03:38:38Z

Arise, Sir Terry Pratchett.

...I know, right?

Everyone must honor their own anodyne.

2008-12-25T02:14:09Z

I made one last mix this year. It's my State of the Union. It needed accompaniment.

1 Jens Lekman You Are The Light

2 The Mountain Goats This Year

3 Peter Bjorn and John Objects Of My Affection

4 of Montreal The Party's Crashing Us
5 Yeah Yeah Yeahs Y-Control
6 Belle & Sebastian Sukie In The Graveyard
7 Junior Senior Move Your Feet

8 The New Pornographers All For Swinging You Around

9 Cake Never, Never Gonna Give You Up (Barry White)
10 Ween Freedom Of '76
11 Okkervil River Song About A Star
12 Neutral Milk Hotel Naomi
13 Tarkio Weight Of The World

14 Ben Folds Such Great Heights (The Postal Service)

15 Magnolia Electric Co. Werewolves Of London (Warren Zevon)
16 Elliott Smith Stickman

17 Billy Bragg A New England

18 The Microphones I Felt Your Shape
19 Ryan Adams Come Pick Me Up
20 Aimee Mann Goodbye, Caroline
21 Tom Waits Innocent When You Dream

Math don't lie.

2008-12-09T17:37:54Z

A reddit discussion about the worst band in the world according to Google:

Akaji: Nickelback < Creed.
TJHookor: I was just about to write the same thing.
TheMemoman: Nickelback has just a worse reputation. Creed IS actually worst. Another bad PJ clone. Nickelback still sucks hard, I wouldn't mind a two-way tie to be honest.
blackeyes: Nickleback + Jesus = Creed.
stu091: So Jesus = Creed - Nickelback.
accelerape: Why isn't this a t-shirt?

Six-foot-twenty, made of radiation.

2008-10-06T23:23:46Z

I know this one's been around, but I got "George Washington" stuck in my head today and had to watch it. Repeatedly.

Brad Neely is a damn genius.

Labor-thday.

2008-09-01T22:12:33Z

It's my birthday again. I'm twenty-eight this time. I'm not surprised.

My body is a mystery to me. Some nights I'll drink five beers and feel like death warmed over twelve hours later. Yesterday I had three margaritas, a Manhattan, a double Jack and Coke, an Irish car bomb (thank/curse you, li'l sis), a tequila shot (“”), and an undetermined amount of beer. My head tried to ache a little this afternoon but gave up. No complaints, mind you, but that makes zero sense.

Every seven or so years, depending on leap years, my birthday falls Labor Day, which was also the day I was born. Monday's child is fair of face. I called Mom and thanked her for not holding all twenty-seven hours of labor against me. It would've been understandable, all things considered. It's ninety-plus degrees outside, which is actually cooler than the record hot day in 1980 when I decided to pop out. They didn't have A/C in their apartment, either. It's a wonder she didn't saddle me with six flavors of guilt my whole life long over that.

People occasionally ask me what I want for my birthday. There is never a genteel enough way to say you don't want anything. You always look like you're being difficult. But really, just having a lot of people show up and have drinks with me until two a.m. is generosity enough for me. If they also want to buy the drinks, I will not say no.

Deliciousness for your ears.

2008-08-17T18:13:32Z

Time for you to hear more about music I'm listening to now.

Asobi Seksu - Asobi Seksu and Citrus

I like the term "shoegaze." , but the genre itself can grate on me at times. There's a degree of densely-layered, kitchen-sink sound that wears me out, but Asobi Seksu have a lighter touch and stay well inside that threshold. They listen to My Bloody Valentine but don't worship them. It helps that having your female keyboardist do lead vocals too is a formula with success written all over it. Vocals are occasionally in Japanese too, which is fun. For the curious, their name translates as "playful sex."

Regular earworms: "I'm Happy But You Don't Like Me" and "Walk On The Moon"

Mos Def - Black on Both Sides

I'm a late adopter when it comes to hiphop, such that I sometimes still hyphenate the word. It adds fifty years to your age, like "aero-plane" or "fascimile-machine." Over the pat few months I've gotten into Mos Def in a big way, and I'm proud to say I didn't have to listen to Black Star to get there (though I did get that album immediately after). I appreciate lyricists who aren't just trying to be as hard as possible. Dude can tell a story.

Regular earworms: "New World Water" and "Do It Now" (teaming up with Busta was just sick)

Frank Black - Teenager of the Year

I make no excuses for not having gotten this album years ago. Maybe I just wasn't ready to let go of the Pixies as an ensemble and didn't know how fulfilled I'd be by just Frank. Answer: very. I find myself wishing most of the songs on this album were longer, but he likes to get said what he wants said and then hit the next track. The lyrics and guitar are almost pure Pixies, with the signature buzzsaw scream only toned down a little (I'm given to understand that this is a trend that continues in his later work).

Regular earworms: "Headache" and "Calistan"

Magnolia Electric Co. - Sojourner Box Set - Nashville Moon

Jason Molina is the man you want to have a brief, disastrous love affair with just for the sake of getting a song out of him about it. If you read his lyrics, you'll find them to be decent at best, but this is only because you haven't heard him sing them. A lot of music is like that, of course--music has a transformative property that takes even trite rhymed couplets and makes them something entirely other, and J. Mo is a master of the art. This is a good, strong compilation and it'll pretty much make you want to get drunk, do something you'll regret, then feel like you've come out the better for it later on.

Regular earworms: "Nashville Moon" and "Don't Fade On Me"

Books are awesome.

2008-06-27T21:42:44Z

In the two years and a month I've been with this company, I have not taken any vacation time. I discovered recently that I have three weeks of it saved up. Alex, my boss, insisted that I dedicate one full, consecutive week, forty paid hours, to vacationing before the end of this summer. So after I put in a few hours tomorrow to catch up on things, I won't be returning until a week from Tuesday.

I plan to do absolutely nothing that is important or momentous. It's going to be fantastic. My only ambition is to catch up on some reading. That's the only reason I'm writing this. I'd like suggestions on things that need reading, even if you're not sure I haven't read it already. That or just talk about your own summer reading list. I've read fuck-all but things I already own, for the most part, for the last couple of years. It's pitiful. Help a fellow out.

Feel free to clutch your own head.

2008-06-05T02:09:55Z

For a couple of days, I was having real trouble with my right ear. You know the sound of wind blowing on the other end when you're on the phone? Something like that would happen inside my ear every so often, for a little more than a second at a time. It was loud, but below the pain threshold. Distracting as hell, no matter what you're doing.

What really irritated me is that I couldn't pin down a reason. There's been more than a little storming going on here, so Cimmy offered that it could be the wild shifts in barometric pressure. I didn't have any other symptoms, so infection was really unlikely. I'd been to see They Might Be Giants a couple weeks ago in Kansas City, but come on, I'm not so old that I'd suffer damage from that. Besides, I could hear just fine for the most part.

Yesterday I was at Brett and Scott's. Their complex has a pool, so they went for a quick dip. I didn't feel likes borrowing shorts or showing off my pastiness, so I sat poolside and we talked. The rushing, fluttering sound hit my ear and I did what most people do to plug an ear—I pressed my tragus down with the end of my finger until it stopped a moment later.

Brett and Scott looked at me quizzically, since I'd made an irritated grunt. I explained the problem I'd been having, then noticed a silverfish on the concrete. In the space of instantly, I thought:

That hadn't been there before. Silverfish don't hang around swimming pools. They hang around in my house sometimes, though.

A silverfish had crawled into my ear canal.

That I haven't had a problem since has pretty much confirmed this. Brett refuses to believe it, which is understandable, but it definitely happened. Silverfish are harmless, by and large, but I'm still calling my landlord.

Son of a bitch.

2008-05-20T01:00:34Z

The back wheel of my bicycle is missing. Someone took my back wheel. Not my front wheel, which is easily removed and replaced. The back, which requires you to disconnect things and bend the shit out of other things and ruin the entire bike. I didn't treat it the best in the seven and a half years I owned it, but it was mine and I loved it.

Fuck everything.

The left hand doesn't know what the right is doing.

2008-04-06T14:55:00Z

Most technology has a built-in feature, which is the ability to point out shortsightedness in its creators. A few years ago, someone designed a spiffy radio alarm clock which, after prototyping, tweaking, testing, retesting, and probably sixteen more steps, ended up on a store shelf in 2006, from which it got bought for me. They thought of quite a few things that hadn't been within the reach of Sony when they made my last alarm clock fifteen years before, including an automatic time set feature. To make this feature useful, there's one thing it has to do manually: adjust twice a year for Standard and Daylight Savings times, based on the set dates for this to occur for the foreseeable future. There's probably on an official table for this somewhere in Washington, D.C.

What they didn't consider until their clock was in stores was that a certain piece legislation that was already on the docket during the design phase would go through. It went through, and it called for Daylight Savings Time to start earlier by a few weeks. What this means is that I have to adjust for Daylight and Standard Time myself. What it also means is that my clock knows what day would have been the start of Daylight Savings had it not been for that legislation but I don't. Not, at least, until it sets itself forward, which it did this morning. I've got an hour to kill that I'd like to have spent sleeping, but I didn't figure out that I was up an hour early until after I'd showered and gotten half-dressed.

The legislation also extended the end of DST, so some Sunday morning in autumn, it's going to go back an hour without my knowledge and I'll sleep in another hour. Let's hope I don't have somewhere to be that day, too.

Lies? On the Internet?

2008-04-04T21:32:26Z

The main page at Ok Cupid lists "Recently Joined!" users, with the date in parentheses right behind it. This would lead you to believe that, as of today, the thumbnails below are of people who joined, y'know, recently.

I've logged on a few times since last night, just to check, and of those times, every other time I see either Cimmy, her friend Natalie, or both. Each of them has been a member for years, plural (Cimmy slightly longer than I, and that's four or five of 'em).

That's all I've got today. I've been painting and I'm tired.

The Crimson and the Blue.

2008-03-31T14:00:18Z

Most people know I'm not into college basketball. While it's about ten times more engaging to watch than the sack of bastards that is the NBA, I don't have the energy to have an opinion about sixty-four different teams.

"What do you think about Gonzaga?"
"Theirs is a funny name."

However, there is a point at which I'm not going to fight my school spirit, and that's when KU wins a close game against an apparent Team of Destiny and makes the Final Four. That was a fun last seven minutes of any game. Brett had been watching the game at Brothers and I'd watched at home, so I walked to Mass Street to meet him for dinner at Chipotle. Our Chipotle has window seating that faces directly onto the main drag, and it could not have been a better place or time to fill up on burritos. The sidewalks were crowded with people walking and running by, triumphantly pumping their fists in the air, high-fiving, and chanting. When we make the Final Four, half the town gets into their cars just to plug up every major street and honk their horns. Things began to escalate about ten minutes in; men (boys, really) ran by waving their own shirts in the air and others plastered themselves to the window to shout their joy to the people in Chipotle. Then quite literally thousands of people started to stream down Mass, down the actual street. Traffic slowed to a trickle and eventually one lane emptied entirely. At that point, Brett and I had to join in.

We walked down to the Eighth Street intersection in the gray mist, surrounded by screaming, happy people. A man in jeans and galoshes had tied his shirt around his waist and held a mop in the air. Triumphantly. A tuba, trumpet, and snare from the KU band played the fight song and we stood in the middle of the intersection, with cars essentially parked around us, and mumbled our way through the alma mater (most of the crowd had either forgotten half the words, never knew them, or was too drunk to recall), bellowed the Rock Chalk chant, and stood in a circle around dancing people. The police stood in pairs on each block, keeping an eye out just in case, but none of them tried to stop any of us who'd ducked into a bar to get a beer and take it out on the street, the reason being that damn near all of us were doing it.

Soon as we were done at that intersection, someone yelled, "We're going back the other way!" and sure enough, as one person the throng did a one-eighty and headed south. For the first time I really understood how in other, larger, and more rabid college towns, this sort of thing leads to cars being overturned and lit on fire. Brett and I thought about how we could probably have pointed this crowd toward Columbia, Missouri and with enough beer, they'd have marched down there and burned it to the ground. GO SCHOOL.

I got more high-fives last night than when I graduated. Once it got to the point that some drunk asshole was getting the whole group to do Rock Chalk Jayhawk every three minutes, I knew it was time to go home. Also, we'd wound up at Quinton's, and I hate that place.

If we beat Roy Williams's Tarheels, this will have been like a tea party.

The Other "The Tudors."

2008-03-02T00:27:14Z

If you're considering going to see "The Other Boleyn Girl," quit while you're ahead.

...that could've been a pun!

This film is bad. I can forgive enormous liberties with history or with the source material or both if it serves the presentation of the story in the given medium. Since none of the many liberties in this film do that, I don't feel the need to be forgiving. Of all the main characters, only Mary is remotely sympathetic, and even when she is, they've spent so little time investing you with any involvement in her character that you just don't care when, shock of shocks, things go badly for her. When they go badly for everyone else too, I found myself wishing they'd make the ultimate fast-forward and jump-cut at the same time and start running a print of "Elizabeth" before Act Three started.

I couldn't even hate this movie. It didn't offer enough to hate. Now, "Sex and the City" is something I can get behind hating. I wonder how it feels to know you're making a comedy whose minimum box office take is guaranteed despite it not being, at any point, funny. Even the trailer wasn't funny, and that's supposed to be a trailer's job. Instead, it hung out its shingle and said, "Coming soon: new content featuring the cast of Sex in the City." Is this what people thought when I told them about "Serenity"? In some cases it's nigh impossible for me to believe that one man's unbearable vapid shitstorm is someone else's hour and a half of entertainment.

Stimulus response.

2008-03-01T02:03:04Z

Thanks, Kelsey (pixie37373), for the caffeinated soap--it's works. Having done the math, we figured out that the 200mg per shower dose of caffeine is roughly the same as an entire two-liter of Coke, absorbed directly through the skin. I offered to test it out, just to be sure it wouldn't be too harsh for Cimmy, whom it was meant for as part of her birthday present. In another century, I would have been her food-taster.

First, it's peppermint-scented, which is neat. Second, it takes affect at least as quickly as drinking it. Third, it's pretty potent. I purposely only used it on about half my body to avoid the full dose, and though I was about three hours short of sleep, I didn't need to stifle a yawn for hours. For the most part, I associate the sensation of caffeine with the taste of soda (I don't drink coffee or tea), so separating the sensations is really kind of weird. It's like a silent buzz in your spinal column.

Final analysis--this would be a great way to treat caffeine addiction, like nicotine gum. It would also be a great way to hide your caffeine addiction from others., though they'd probably start to think you were compulsive hand-washer.

A seventeen-minute break.

2008-02-29T01:13:22Z

Sometimes words lose potency over time; it's inevitable in any living language. Excruciating came to be because it was felt that no existing word was sufficient to describe the effects of crucifixion. Starving once only applied to someone dying of malnutrition. You get the idea. It's not arresting anymore to use the word insane. I wish Americans could use "mad" like the British without ambiguity. Regardless: For seventeen minutes yesterday, I spoke to a man who is insane. I mean it.

He's in late middle age, possibly older. He sounded avuncular, friendly, matter-of-fact. He opened by saying that, in his state of Utah, the Mormon church was into everything, and it pushed a certain agenda. This is not an unfamiliar opening; there are plenty of Utahans who don't like that they can't have an alcoholic drink at their neighborhood Applebee's. While they're used to it, they're still weary of having to follow someone else's morality because it happens to be popular.

For the entirety of the conversation, had you listened only to his tone and not to the content, you could imagine this was fishing he was talking about. It wasn't until the word "kill" came up that I started to think that maybe this call was going to run long.

"They sort of, you know, push an agenda onto people that maybe, well, and you know that they've, well, it's clear that they've had people killed when people, you know, when they disagree with the agenda."

Had he been in a rage, I could have taken this comment in stride, could have thought of it as sarcasm. What stripped my gears was that you could hear the resigned shrug. They kill people. Them's the breaks.

He visited one of our locations near his town, he said. He began to describe being seated, then told me that his time was short. "They've killed everyone who's tried to help me, you see. It's because I've said things. I speak out about them on, y'know, on the Internet. They're trying to, y'know, tear me down." it wasn't a tirade or even a lament. As far as I could tell, it was back story.

The reason his time is short is that they're poisoning him. They're doing it slowly. He has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. He knows why. Slow food service, like he had at our restaurant. When his meal takes a long time to arrive at Applebee's, McDonald's, anywhere, it's because they've found out that he's at a different restaurant than usual, so they have to stall him while they rush over the poison and add it to his food. It's worth noting that I didn't consider until after the call that the man knows this and still goes out to eat. Suspension of disbelief was that easy—that is, suspension of disbelief that he was sincere. Still that even tone, rambling but not escalating.

His mother's fatal stroke back at the family home in Texas, at the age of eighty-seven, was likely because of something similar. I think he said that he suspected his brothers of being complicit in poisoning her such that it would appear natural..

The Mormons, or more likely Dick Cheney, had one of the Walton family murdered. This was to punish Wal-Mart for helping him. Their store was willing to sell him a bicycle, transportation he can afford, and either the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints or the Bush Administration want him to have transportation only on their terms. He must either ride the bus, which runs on their schedule, or buy a car, and every car he buys breaks down. In this way they keep track of him.

Toward the end, he said he was waiting to hear the little double click on his phone line that meant the FBI was listening in. He hopes I'm really who I say I am and not an FBI agent myself. I assure him that I am who I say. He chuckles and says, "I hope so." He'd like to believe that, but it's hard to be sure.

He called to say that his meal took half an hour to get to his table, but he wasn't complaining about it. It was only right that he tell us that one of our restaurants was now part of the plan to kill him, in case we might be interested to know. He wasn't desperate, or for that matter even worried, just resigned and certain that something bad would befall him soon.

I couldn't say with certainty that I had ever been in contact with anyone who had lost his mind. Then I spoke to a very nice, if long-winded, paranoid delusional from Utah, and though people find it funny when I tell them, it doesn't make me laugh. Not that it upsets me, either. It's fascinating, and a little troubling, but mostly just strange. I'm increasingly of the opinion that our minds aren't so much ours as leased to us, under terms that we are not going to be told and from someone we haven't met.

Science!

2008-02-18T03:09:30Z

A friend and I are exchanging books, the better to expand one another's horizons. In exchange for Snow Crash, I get to read A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson, and I can't say enough good things about it. Bryson knows exactly how to combine basic concepts of how the world works with historical context; he spends as much time on the odd lives of the people who made the Big Discoveries as he does on the discoveries themselves. Whereas books like A Brief History of Time showed us that lofty scientific concepts are within the grasp of the layperson, at least in their basics, Bryson refines the idea by broadening the scientific scope and looking at the process to a greater degree. I get the distinct feeling that human nature is at the same time one of science's greatest assets and its biggest liabilities. We're in love with the unknown and afraid of that which doesn't fit our worldviews. And I used to wonder why I'm often of two minds on a lot of subjects.

That's all I've got. Brett and I went halfsies on a sizable bottle of gin and went through a bottle and a half of tonic before conking out around four, so I'm not as together as I'd like to be today. Also I got to play with Boris, whose mother is a pug and whose father is a miniature pinscher. He's the most spastic dog I've ever met, and he likes ears.

Twenty Love Songs, Vol. 0

2008-02-15T01:49:24Z

This one goes out to anyone who wants to claim it. I seriously opened iTunes, filtered for the word “love” and pulled out the songs that I liked the best. If the overall tone seems to lean one way or another, this is because of my taste in music. Happy today, everyone.

01 Nouvelle Vague Love Will Tear Us Apart (Joy Division) is it something so good/just can't function no more?
02 The Velvet Underground Who Loves The Sun?
03 Stars Elevator Love Letter i'm so hot for the rich girl/her heels so high and my hopes so low
04 Air Playground Love (vibraphone version)
05 Wilco I'm The Man Who Loves You but if I could you know I would/just hold your hand and you'd understand
06 The Beatles You've Got To Hide Your Love Away
07 ELO Love Is Like Oxygen
08 The Magic Numbers Love Is Just A Game
09 Beulah Popular Mechanics For Lovers i hear he wrote you a song, but so what/some guy wrote 69 and one just ain't enough
10 The Evening Episode New Love
11 Nada Surf Inside Of Love
12 PJ Harvey To Bring You My Love i've laid down the devil, curse god above/forsaken heaven to bring you my love
13 Moxy Früvous Fell In Love
14 Silver Jews Sleeping Is The Only Love
15 Jeff Buckley Lover, You Should've Come Over
16 Björk All Is Full Of Love maybe not from the directions you are staring at
17 Tom Waits Sea Of Love (Phil Phillips)
18 David Bowie Modern Love
19 Eels Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover (Sophie B. Hawkins)
20 The Magnetic Fields Love Is Like A Bottle Of Gin but a bottle of gin is not like love

Everyone gets famous.

2008-02-07T02:05:00Z

Danny, who likes to climb geography for fun, once made an arrangement with some of his fellow climbers concerning their official last words. Should one of them make a fatal error halfway up a rockface, odds are his last words would either not be worth committing to paper (should he, understandably, not have the presence of mind to say any) or not be audible. They agreed to set down, in advance, what each of their last words would be, with the understanding that the survivors would swear blind that, for example, Danny's final cry as he Dopplered away was, "I regret nothing."

After I misjudged my speed on the exit from K-10 to Renner Boulevard this morning and did a two-seventy in the right lane, I reflected just before I got out to dig the snow from under my tires that I should make the same arrangement with my closest friends. Otherwise, the evidence shows that if I die in an accident and someone is with me who survives, they'll almost surely have to admit that the last thing I said was either "shit" or "fuck."

The car was fine and I was fine. I just feel the need to come up with something believable to have said, now.

Wearing the donkey mask, feeling the flow.

2008-02-06T04:15:02Z

This evening Sterling, Danny, Cimmy, and I did our duty, registered as Democrats, and caucused for Barack Obama. We went to the fairgrounds, crowded into what amounted to an enormous metallic barn with electricity and bathrooms, and started shouting loud enough to drown out the smell of cattle. Despite our best efforts, Clinton got more than the 15% necessary to get any delegates at all from our district, but regardless, it feels really, really good to have voted with the majority in this state for once, even if I had to declare myself a Democrat. Sterling's serious enough about it that he's going to the courthouse tomorrow to re-register as an independent. I'll do it sometime before November.

We had record turnout in Douglas county. This week they changed the venue for our district at the last minute; it turned out to be a prescient move, since we more doubled the capacity of Liberty Hall at the fairgrounds tonight. That's pretty fuckin' good.

Now I'm watching CNN on mute and wringing my hands. I thought stuffing myself full of buffalo wings was what got my stomach hurting, but now I'm more and more convinced it's the idea of a Clinton nomination. I need a drink, followed by five drinks.

Godspeed, sir.

2008-01-13T03:26:19Z

Ten years after the rest of his family got out of their braces (Mom, Erin, and I got a package deal in 1996), Dad went to the orthodontist. He wore braces in high school, but his wisdom teeth helped push the rest back out of kilter and the following decades didn't help. It's never been a serious matter, but he finally decided he wanted straight teeth. As Mom's date to the company's belated holiday party, he briefly displayed his new brackets, then beat feet to the bar and had three beers in half the time it took me to drink two. Poor Dad.

Unless it's a matter of some importance or unless he actually solicits the opinions of others on his own, my father does not take advice. Unlike his wife and two children, he won't rinse with Listerine to keep the inevitable sore mouth at bay. Had the bottle been left out on the bathroom counter and he thought of the idea himself, he'd probably have a well-scheduled mouth-cleaning regimen. Because Mom suggested it, he'll be doing no such thing. He's not contrary. He'd just like to do things his own way, for the most part. He'll figure out some other way, and it'll turn out to be even more simple and efficient; if you cut him in half he'd say "engineer" all along the inside.

I don't think I'll ever forget what it was like the first time I bit into a cheeseburger after I got my wires installed, sophomore year. The ensuing full-body paralysis gave me a few moments to think about how awful it could be to own a head. Dad will be a bit more stoic about it. He tends to find ways to occupy himself privately if he's in pain or stress. and he just got a brand-new Gibson SG to play with, so he'll soldier on.

I'm not a Democrat, but I watch one on TV.

2008-01-06T06:13:28Z

The best present I gave this year was the complete The West Wing on DVD for Cimmy. Until this point, I had seen just a handful of episodes. I don't think I've seen a show that has given me so many "booyah" moments. It's possibly because it's acting as a surrogate for the hope I used to have that America could feel like more than an arrogant lout who embarrasses himself at the World Party but is continually too drunk to know it. My biggest worry isn't that we won't fix our image by going in a responsible direction but that we can't fix it even if we do act responsibly going forward.

I've put my chips on Obama. Kucinich is actually a better and more vociferous candidate on many of the issues, but as much as I'd like to, I can't ignore political reality, a monster so hideous it didn't make it into any of the Greek myths. It'd be nice if the country could be made to realize that he's a reasonable candidate, but we've created the idea of what is and isn't viable, and it's based on the same arbitrary rules that govern what is and isn't fashionable to wear. By those rules, I'm pretty sure a real-life Jed Bartlet wouldn't be considered electable. I like that Aaron Sorkin has been so good as to help me pretend such a person could make it.

Got me one of them rhinoviruses what you hear about on the teevee.

2008-01-05T02:13:31Z

Got a cold something like two weeks ago. Started postnasal, which felt like Tom Waits sounds without the advantage of sounding like Tom Waits sounds. It turned into congestion with uncontrollable coughing on Christmas, and now is something like bronchitis. I can feel the exact shape of the upper lobe of my right lung, because for some reason that specific part is alive with pain every time I do anything more serious than talk or take gentle breaths. Coughing feels like I've been punched in the chest, and I've got to do it to help get the unplesantness out (you're welcome).

My sinuses gave up on my senses of smell taste two days after Christmas and they haven't worked for more than thirty seconds at a go since. I can't bring myself to eat anything I really like or get takeout other than fast food. It's wasted on me. Do you have any idea how depressing that is? I don't look like it, but I'm in love with food. In the last year I finally took Mom's advise and started trying to cook actual meals for myself and others. I've discovered the satisfaction in a meal well prepared, even if it's just a grilled cheese for Cimmy. It gives me a little joy. Now it's only worthwhile cooking for her, which is sweet and all but God do I want to make a chicken quesadilla with that great green chile lime salsa I found and some marble jack cheese. I'm salivating but all I get is texture.

Bronchitis caused by a cold is viral, ergo basically untreatable; you just waitit out. It'll take at least a couple of weeks on top of my current sentence, and I don't like the odds that I'll be back to five senses before then. Rarely do I get sick for more than a few days, but when I do, it fucking owns me. I'm going to practice curmudgeoning now.

“Fun” with structural ambiguity.

2008-01-05T01:51:20Z

English has essentially two demonstrative pronouns, this and that. This is usually only used for something near to the speaker. It would sound off to most (but not all) if you were to look out a window at two distant trees and call them “this one” and “that one”. Even those who feel you could say this would, by and large, agree that calling both “that one” and pointing to each in turn would feel more correct. You probably already know this. Sorry.

Spanish, for example, has three pronouns: esto, eso, y aquel (this, that, and that-one-over-there). It lets you differentiate between two non-this items; you could call those same two trees “eso arbol y aquel arbol.” We haven’t had a new function word in English in far too long for us to get one now, but if we could, I’d vote for this one.

I told you that story to tell you this one: One day in November, we ran out of windowed envelopes in my department, so I went to a storage cabinet in the hallway nearby to get more. The bottom drawer was open, but it didn’t have any envelopes so I went to open the one above it. It wouldn’t budge. A passerby remarked, “You can’t open that one if that one’s open.”

I knew what she meant, of course: the cabinet is built so that only one drawer can be open at a time. Still, there are two ways to parse her sentence, both of which are true.

You just thought you did, that's all.

2008-01-05T01:33:05Z

It took twelve hours for me to remember what woke me up this morning well before my alarm was to go off. My family (that is, Mom, Dad, and Erin) had taken me on an extended vacation with them. We left around New Year's and toured the world in a vague way. I couldn't conjure any details, but I knew we'd done it, and I was concerned that I had so little to show for the journey. There were trunks, weren't there? And I seem to remember a sunny veranda somewhere warm and exotic. What brought up the hair on my next was understanding that it was late November already, that it was 2009, and that we hadn't told anyone we knew that we would be gone. They've got to think we're dead, I thought. All of them. They've given up all hope. We've screwed up their lives and now we're about to screw them up again by coming back. I've got to talk to people. I've got to tell everyone.

I still hadn't even thought of anyone specifically when it pulled me awake. It really wanted to hold onto me. I had to actively feel the comforter wrapped around me before I could get the dream off. Took me a bit to fall asleep again, but I'd forgotten well before then. I just now remembered. It's like the dream I used to have every year, usually several consecutive nights in June, that it was the last day of school and we were all done but I was about to miss the bus home. Same feeling, only it grew up and developed Issues.

Very few of my dreams are about the event itself. They're always about the aftermath, and wondering what the hell I'm going to do now.