Do I want to max out the RAM on, and basically muck around the inside of, my recording PC so I can eventually record more complicated music with more tracks and stuff?
Or do I want to record more complicated music with more tracks and stuff so I can justify maxing out the RAM on, and basically mucking around the inside of, my recording PC?
She played Crewman Cutler on "Enterprise" in three episodes two years ago. I had a complete and utter crush on her, as did thousands of other nerdy little dudes on the Internet.
SOMERVILLE, MA - Saw a couple deciding on marriage vows in a café late last night. She was clearly very into the whole process; he had a shaved head. She kept reciting phrases from a book - a Choose Your Own Marriage Vows book, I can only assume - and saying to him, "Are you okay with that?" He would nod. She would pick up from the exact subtleties of that nod whether or not he actually was okay with it, or didn't want to argue, or genuinely hated it, or didn't care.
It seemed to me an odd place, and an odd technique, for choosing perhaps the most significant words you'll ever say to the most significant person in your life. It seems like a very intimate thing. And out there on a ratty - but trés, trés hip - couch, they picked phrases out of a book. How sterile. How impersonal.
But marriage vows aren't really for the two getting married, are they? They have all their lives to tell each other how they feel. Frequently, one would hope.
No, it's for everyone else there. The whole ceremony is a ritual in declaring to everybody else how they feel about each other. For marking down in law, in the collective power of the state, that they love each other.
Odd, eh?
Then the café closed and everyone got free muffins. Wouldn't want to just throw them out, after all.
A week ago, a quarter of a Little Debbie Oatmeal Cream Pie appeared on my car's rear bumper. I assumed some punk-ass kid from, I dunno, the "hood" put it there as some kind of hilarious joke. No harm, though, so I just drove with it and assumed it would fall off. 20 miles later, nope. Still there. So now it was an endurance test.
Weekend? Yup. Still there.
Monday? Getting a couple red moldy spots. Still there.
Rain? Tenacious.
65MPH? Indefatigable.
Sadly, this morning it was frozen and fragile, and had to be brushed off with the first dusting of snow of the season. Oatmeal Cream Pie remnant, I salute ye.
You know, I don't even care about baseball. I even laugh at the Red Sox fans when they get all worked up about "This is The Year" and "We're gonna beat The Curse!" They never learn. If it ain't meant to be, it ain't meant to be. Less fatalistically, the more desperate you are to prove yourself, the more likely you are to screw up.
But last night, sitting in a smoky restaurant at 11:30, after the Yankees closed their deficit, beautiful Sox fangirl on my arm, I could feel the stark disappointment. The dejection that everyone knew, whether for an hour or five minutes, was finally inevitable.
In 1989, Emerson Fittipaldi and Al Unser, Jr. were swapping first and second in the last laps of the Indy 500. Neither had ever won it, but Emmo was already a Formula 1 world champion. Little Al was a rising star, trying to prove he was as good as his dad, a 4-time Indy winner. As they glided around slower traffic, maybe 5 laps from the finish, Emmo's car drifted up - the normal racing line - and tapped Al's wheel coming out of a turn. Al's car spun backward and crunched against the outside wall. Emmo finished the race under a yellow flag.
I actually felt a headache begin this morning. I was doing my normal "Wake up at 5:00 am to go pee" thing, and as I moved toward the sink, the Headache Center of my brain whooshed on. Not so much like a light bulb flicking on, more like one of those faders that takes half a second to turn all the way on. It started right in the center of my brain and filled out behind my eyes. It wasn't even that intense, just so noticeably all of a sudden there.
I know I didn't just notice it then because I thought when I awoke, "Huh, my lips are chapped, my mouth is dry and my throat is sore, but for once, I don't have a headache." Perhaps I should just stop thinking things.
The Great Beard experiment was once again a failure, so it came off Sunday night. Good thing too; when I went in for my TMD jaw stuff on Monday, I had sensors stuck to my face and neck. The said a beard would interfere with that kinda thing. Who knew? Good thing I don't have a hairy neck.
The beard may make another comeback someday. When I've passed puberty at age 45 or so.
I'm thinking of growing a beard again. Purely for medical reasons. I figure if my face hurts all the time as it is, why scrape a razor over the thing every day?
Ever have an iced coffee thrown at you from a moving car? No? Well ha then, I've now lived more than you.
No one seemed to understand, years ago, why I'd consider a suicide attempt a positive life experience. I gave reasons then - it was going to happen sometime, eventually, so it was a sort of catharsis; a choice to stop living was every much a right of mine as any other choice of what to do with my life. But very few people are interested in that sort of talk when it's someone close to them. They'd much rather talk about how worthwhile that person is, how there's so much to live for, even if it may not seem like it now.
Well here's a more practical reason then. When you're standing on a highway overpass, contemplating the constant physical pain you've been in for years because of a dental problem you can't seem to get anyone to fix, and you're reminded of the general worthlessness of humanity by someone chucking a cup full of ice at you, a complete stranger, at thirty miles per hour, it's helpful to recall that the last time you tried to kill youself you spent hours floating in dense, silent blackness - no tunnel of light, no friendly hand gently pushing you back - and maybe that's not a place you want to be. Maybe years chasing after a chance of a tolerable life is a slightly better alternative to no life at all.
I get to be all geeky-manly tomorrow. The negative wire connecting the battery in my guitar came out - right before a show, of course. I've never actually taken my guitar apart on stage. No one seemed to notice the difference, particularly. (I used a mike instead of the pickup.) But Radio Shack will be my salvation. Indeed.
People go to bars and clubs and drink things loaded with alcohol, a depressant. Entertainment at these venues typically consists of rowdy, raucus rock bands hoping to incite dancing and general mayhem.
People go to cafés and drink things loaded with caffeine, a stimulant. Entertainment at these venues, if any, typically consists more of my type of stuff, calming, acoustic music hoping to incite sitting down and listening peacefully.
CD manufacturing dude is sending me new barcode stickers. The way he says it, 13-digit barcodes are the international standard, and most (most) big retailers in the US have alrady converted. But, well, you know, some haven't. So now there's gonna be a whole complicated two-barcode thing going on with my CD. Nothing's ever simple.
The nail on my right pointer finger grows really fast. I trim it all down and then like the very next day it's all WAAAAAAAAA I AM HUGE AND INTERFERING WITH YOUR ABILITY TO TYPE!!! Damn fingernail.
The company that manufactured my CDs screwed up the UPC barcode on the back of the case. UPC barcodes, you see, have 12 digits. There are 13 digits on mine. And I can't even tell what the actual bars say, because they don't seem to scan under a barcode scanner. Neither the cute little one I got off eBay or a real professional one.
Poor baby, life is rough for you, huh? No one seems to see you, no one notices your pain--except for your friend Big Bird, but he's always off hanging out with his other friends. You wish you were him, all happy and curious and popular and bright yellow. You feel like his shadow anymore, like the only reason you exist is to amuse him. It's hard being somebody's imaginary friend. But stop trying to kill yourself--imaginary people can't kill themselves. Sorry. And hey, maybe tomorrow you'll feel better!
Someday people will see you, I promise.
Thursday was my dad's birthday, so Sunday we did our traditional thing and I took him (and my mom, plus my roomie) out to brunch. He picks the place. And when we get there, we're the only family in the building. The staff is our personal set of servants, and they outnumber us two to one. Dad suddenly gets all paranoid about the price. You know, times are tough, money is tight, we understand, don't spend too much on us...I tell him it's fine, but Mom offers to pay for half of it. Okay. I'm not having any particular money problems at the moment, other than just being a tightwad in general. How my parents' money problems are supposed to be alleviated by helping me pay for my dad's birthday brunch is beyond me.
Just because a cat sits all afternoon over at the kitchen table, and then joins you at the couch only after she's fed, doesn't mean she loves you just because you feed her, right?
I forgot what a wasteland daytime TV is. The programs aren't that bad, really - can't complain about Babylon 5 reruns and last night's Daily Show - but the commercials suck. I don't need a goddamn lawyer, I'm just sick for a couple days. I suppose I could sue someone. Who made those multivitamins so freakin' big? That's mental anguish, man.
Note to self: when asked to choose what toppings you want for your cheeseburger sub, saying "Everything" because you can't keep up with the rapid pace of the cashier rattling off possible items is unacceptable.
There's no hope for me anymore. I'm a yuppie. Friday, Saturday, Sunday: each of these days saw me with a different Starbucks beverage in hand.
Friday there were some local folkies playing there - some of 'em I knew, some I didn't. On the plus side, I got myself booked for 20 minutes on their next "Five Star Friday." Yay.
Saturday was the weekly sojourn to some giant bookstore where I can sit in the café and steal their electricity to do my homework. Occasionally I buy something to soothe my conscience, like, say, a vanilla creme thingy at the built-in Starbucks at B&N.
And Sunday was a date that careened into the Braintree B&N, and you gotta lay down cash then, huh?
Oh, and I'm blogging about being a Starbucks yuppie. That pretty much cements the cliché dealio.
This is gonna be like all those "it was only a dream" endings, or "we went back in time and made everything you just saw not happen" endings, only it's for an episode you never really cared about in the first place.
I went to Blockbuster to try and return the video game with their sticker on the back that I'd gotten bundled with a $5 Dreamcast at a yard sale. My plan, as it all too often is, was to act naive and hope the tellers were apathetic enough to take the game back without any questions. Still, I felt a need to tell my whole story (fully orchestrated, 4-part harmony) to the glazed-eyed kid behind the counter. He seemed stuck on the concept of "yard sale," but I refuse to call them "tag sales," just because.
In any case, he assured me that Blockbuster would never sell a game in a regular old jewel case, so the thing must have been one of their old games that they sold outright. The dude at EB probably didn't notice or care that the game was from Blockbuster, and wouldn't give me money for it because it was too old, not because it was stolen.
There should be a system for determining the status of hot people you want to hit on. Here is what I propose: as everyone knows, the government will be issuing barcodes to everyone to place on their heads in the next few years. These barcodes will allow the government to track all people's transactions with others, and any time there is personal interaction, citizens will be required to scan each others' barcodes for homeland security purposes.
The barcode itself contains only a number; that number links to an account on some government server somewhere. If civilians had the ability to access non-classified parts of anyone's record, then they could look in the "Marital Status" of anyone they come in contact with. "Single and Looking"; "Dating a Guy I'd Be Willing to Get Rid Of"; "Married to Someone You Could Never Compete With," etc. Access that database through your wireless PDA and you have a nearly instant answer to that most vital of questions: "Should I even bother?"
Memorial Day is coming up. I'm sure it'll be a three-day orgy of jingoism, self-congratulation by people who've never done more fighting than a drunken fist to a drunken nose and teary-eyed TV news anchors with digital flag images behind them. Meanwhile, real veteranswho opposeunnecessary war shake their heads sadly at what our country has become.
I'll be watching the Indy 500, of course, and lamenting the sad feud between CART and the IRL.
Used Sega Dreamcast and two awful games at yard sale: $5
Trade-in value of one awful game at Electronics Boutique: $3
Two good games, extra controller, memory card and AV cable at GameSpot (because EB apparently decided to sudenly start sucking in that area): $49.95
Look on my face when I noticed the "BLOCKBUSTER RENTAL" sticker on the back of the game that EB had mysteriously refused to take as a trade-in, and that to give me money for the other game, they'd taken my name and address: PRICELESS
So I have this Web site. There's a News section there that an obnoxious pal of mine has been complaining about. Apparently some posts are not so much "News," he claims, but more "bloggish." And he demands that I have an actual blog to put them on.
I do what I am told. Because I'm a tool like that.
