Kablammo!
Brave weapon, turn to a deadly blaze! Kikuichimoji!
Suvest sügisesse, mitte ainult mina
October 12, 2007(Apologies to Juhan Viiding.)
Taevas kisub kõrgeks, sügis astub maha.
Jälle kukub asju diivanite taha.
Liikumatult istun iseenda süles,
pole mingit soovi võtta asju üles.
I’ve been exhausted for weeks, and I don’t see it getting better any time soon. I managed to pull off what amounted to a Herculean effort at the end of FY07, but instead of having some room to breathe I still feel like I’m on the verge of drowning in a sea of useless crap.
There was a moment somewhere, maybe even a week or two, where I was nearly in a ‘zone’ of some sort, which manifested itself in a surprising (and timely) bout of productivity. That productivity, though, was born of not giving a crap, which might not be the best thing in the world, and anyway the crap-giving has returned. Or maybe it hasn’t, I can’t quite tell. Either way, I’m left with a profound sense of ennui. Again.
There are so many things I’ve been meaning to do, and most of them have been on the list for months. Things like filing my state tax return or getting my car inspected I can probably continue putting off fairly safely, but if I ever want to go back to school I need to write an application essay like Right Now, This Instant. And if I ever want to get my colors I need to finish writing that other essay I started in the spring when they were getting impatient about how long I was taking. I ended up being able to stall for time a bit, but now that time has just about run out.
And then there are the other things. I’ve never known what I wanted, but for a little while there I felt like I was at least on the right track, and it was a situation worth pursuing. But I’m not sure anymore of that, either.
But seriously
August 10, 2007It just occurred to me that what I miss most about college—or school in general—is resolution: finishing one thing, and beginning another. Pass a course, great; you’re on to the next. Flunk it, it’s not even the end of the world; start over next semester. In moderation, at least, it’s no big deal.
This goddamn interminable sameness at work is, I’m pretty damn sure, what I really don’t like about it. I have coworkers who have been doing their job—my job—longer than I have been alive, and that’s terrifying and horrifying and unfathomable. Those people are obviously a hell of a lot better and faster and more efficient than I am, and they’ve been practicing for a hell of a long time, so more power to them. But if I’m going to spend a lifetime—a goddamn lifetime!—practicing a particular skill, I want it to be because it’s something I enjoy doing so much I want to do it for its own sake, not because getting better will let me go on ratrace-autopilot for 40 hours a week until I retire.
Or maybe I’m just making excuses.
Of course, the other nice thing about school is winter and summer breaks. Which are nice for their own sake, but also serve to reinforce the episodic nature of the experience—again, unlike the sameness of work.
Seven months ago I came down with pneumonia. It was a miserable ordeal, but I loved it. Why? It gave me a plausible, undeniable excuse to do absolutely nothing for a week. Not a care in the world, other than the sickening feeling of drowning in my own lungs, and wishing the bathroom were closer because walking 20 feet made me winded. On balance, though, I’m almost wistful for it, because it was a nice interlude. And that’s all I really want.
A modern-day fable
February 5, 2007Boston Reaches Settlement in Bomb Fiasco
It’s just like the boy who cried wolf, except there actually was a wolf nobody was prepared for that ate up a bunch of sheep, and then the mayor of the village told everybody to be extra careful of wolves in the future, and to pay attention to the color-coded ‘wolf threat level advisory’, and to be sure to tell the constable if they saw or suspected or imagined any wolf-like or wolf-related activity. And then one day a man came to the village with a fluffy poodle with one of those ridiculous poodle haircuts like you see in cartoons, and the poodle’s name was Ignignot, and nobody paid them any mind until some guy shouted “Hey! That’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing!” and the village made the man give them two million dollars in “goodwill funds”, and everybody lived happily ever after.
Kubrick ad nauseam, vol. 1
February 2, 2007Like any reasonable person, I’d rather see a movie on the big screen than on a smaller one. So it is that while I enjoy going to the cinema in general, I particularly like going to see revivals and rereleases, and I’ve been lucky enough to see such classics as This Is Spinal Tap and a few parts of Kieslowski’s Dekalog in theatres. And one of the biggest perks of the cinema classes I took in college was not just having an opportunity to see Orphée, Броненосец Потёмкин, and The Magnificent Ambersons, but seeing them on a proper screen.
So it was that I was happy to discover that a (fairly) nearby movie theater was having a Kubrick retrospective of sorts, and last Saturday I watched The Shining, which I’d somehow managed to avoid seeing before, and Spartacus, which Mr Lang sacrificed a week of my 7th-grade history class to show us. For both films, it was quite bizarre to see preview and “note the location of the nearest exit” reels that were in better condition than the main features.
On the weather
July 9, 2006How do I like it here, people ask me.
Everything is great—work is going well, there’s always stuff to do, etc.—but I’m of the firm opinion that people were not meant to live in this kind of heat and humidity. Yes, I’m sure there are worse places, but I’d complain about them as well.
And then, as if we hadn’t had enough rain recently, I was just greeted with this:
I can’t wait.
In other news, despite constantly complaining about the oppressive [atmospheric] conditions here, I remain too lazy to make use of the swimming pool in my apartment building. So it goes.
On tuna
July 2, 2006Why is it so hard to find tuna in oil? Tuna packed in water is just too dry; you can’t eat it straight from the can. I don’t mind tuna salad or other dishes made with canned tuna, but I do mind being forced to add things to tuna in order to make it palatable. And whatever beneficial health effects you might arguably gain by purchasing flavorless tuna is no doubt offset by the fact that you’re required to combine it with mayonnaise in order to eat it.
And then when I do scour the shelves of a couple different grocery stores, passing over dozens of brands of water-packed fish, all I find is tuna in olive oil. I don’t mind olive oil in general, but I do mind it being used as an excuse to make everything “gourmet” and therefore extremely expensive. That, and I’m not a big enough fan of olives to want everything I consume to have their sweet-salty-fruity aftertaste. Especially tunafish. (Or horse mackerel.)
On homophones
June 29, 2006Considering how many people seem unable to distinguish between “there”, “their”, and “they’re”; it seems tremendously unfair that the same thing doesn’t happen with “your”, “you’re”, and “yore”.
UNSW Embryology- Molecular Development- Sonic Hedgehog
I suppose this is what happens when kids who played videogames grow up and get Ph.D.s. Now we have a bunch of papers with abstracts like
Embryonic stem (ES) cells differentiate into functional motoneurons when treated with a sonic hedgehog (Shh) agonist and retinoic acid (RA).
and
Sonic hedgehog regulates Gli activator and repressor functions with spatial and temporal precision in the mid/hindbrain region.
Berthing pains
April 17, 2006berth (bûrth)
n.
- Sufficient space for a ship to maneuver; sea room: kept a clear berth of the reefs.
- A space for a ship to dock or anchor: a steamship moored to its berth at the pier.
-
- Employment on a ship: sought an officer’s berth in the merchant marine.
- A job: a comfortable berth as head of the department.
-
- A built-in bed or bunk, as on a ship or a train.
- A place to sleep or stay; accommodations: found a berth in a nearby hotel.
- A space where a vehicle can be parked, as for loading.
What else is there?
April 12, 2006About a year ago I was talking with a friend of mine about my near-obsessive compulsion to download and buy music, when I mentioned that I was glad that I didn’t seem to like jazz. After all, just listening to rock and such can take up way too much time to begin with. Checking out new releases can be a full-time job, and that doesn’t even start to address the issue of back-catalogs. There are hundreds of albums that I own and hundreds more that I “own”, and I still don’t even know what Deep Purple sound like. Hell, two years ago I barely knew who David Bowie was.
I’m not an expert on the music I listen to, but I can drop some pretty obscure names if I need to, and I also have a decent sense of my failings as it were and what I really should get around to listening to. Jazz, on the other hand, I felt was a completely foreign and alien world, with such a ridiculously long and thoroughly-catalogued history that I wouldn’t know where to begin. I was thankful for my ignorance, shielding me as it did from the need to listen to and explore the world of jazz. (Lite-FM stations, incidentally, were also a big help in this regard.)
Sadly I couldn’t leave well enough alone, and for some stupid reason I decided to take a semester course on the history of jazz and the blues. Fuck me in the goat-ass; it turns out there’s a lot of this stuff that I really enjoy, and recently I’ve been purchasing a Horace Silver album a day. (In my defense, he was essentially Xploding Plastix 40 years before they were.)
Am I going to start seriously listening to classical music next? I don’t know if I could take that. At least I should have a steady paycheck (i.e. a way to subsidize this insane music habit) soon.
Song of the Moment: «Calcutta Cutie» — Horace Silver
Powered by WordPress with Hiperminimalist Theme design by Borja Fernandez.
Entries and comments feeds.
Valid XHTML and CSS.