Kablammo!

Legend:

• Places I've lived
• Places I've visited
• Places I've had a layover or changed flights

• Mew’s And the Glass Handed Kites is one of my favorite albums from 2005, and due to its long-delayed American release, it’s one of my favorite albums from 2006 as well.
• One song, “The Zookeeper’s Boy”, has the word ‘ostrich’ in the lyrics, but it’s pronounced as three syllables: ‘os-ter-rich’.
• To me, that sounds an awful lot like Österreich. I wonder if there’s any relation there?
• Well, I know that ost- can mean ‘bone’ or the like, as in osteoporosis; and that öst- can mean ‘east’, as in Austria. I wonder what the etymology of ‘ostrich’ is.
• Apparently I was wrong on both guesses: ostrich c.1225, from O.Fr. ostruce (Fr. autruche), from V.L. avis struthio, from L. avis “bird” (from PIE *awi- “bird”) + L.L. struthio “ostrich,” from Gk. strouthion “ostrich,” from strouthos melage “big sparrow.”
• Incidentally, Austria shouldn’t be confused with austr-, meaning ‘south’, as in Austral, the opposite of Boreal.
• Interesting that Boreas, the Greek north wind, is the root of one word, and that Auster, the Roman south wind, is the root of the other. Is consistency in wind use too much to ask for?
• Of course, astr- (astral, astronomy, etc.) is yet another completely different root. Damn you, Greeks.

I have two months to get my shit together.

On a related topic, every performance review in my entire life, at least as far back as elementary school, has said the same thing: great work, but it would be nice to hand something in on time once in a while. This one was no different.

Jõuluhommikul

Paul Eerik Rummo

Rudisevad kõnniteed
ja vastlöödud kellade kaja
hardana tardunud jõe kohal
ja läbipaistvais puuvõrades
Kõik see
ja kangialuste kuuselõhn
on nii pagana patriarhaalne
et isegi mina
sündinud ateist
ristimisveest puutumatu peaga
pistaksin põue pudeli benediktust
ja kõnniksin katsikule
Maria manu

Tere Maria
Oi mis priske poisslaps
Jeesus Kristus
tõepoolest ilus nimi

Ja sa loodad et temast
saab suur mees
kõikide teiste lunastaja

Minu ema
mulle pani nimeks
Paul Eerik
ja küllap ta lootis
samamoodi

‘Twas the day before Christmas — that is, Christmas break —
And being at The Office was all I could take.
I wanted to head home, get drunk, or have fun,
But I couldn’t leave while my work stayed undone.

I knew it was nobody’s fault but my own
That I’d end up staying till I was alone,
But why should I suffer for being so lazy?

What’s been on my mind recently:

• I haven’t been able to concentrate properly for months, or possibly even years. I can’t even think properly anymore. It used to be I could think about something for a while, or focus on a difficult concept, or whatever, and there’d often come a “click” of sorts where things began to make more sense, or at the very least I’d have a better idea of just what it was I didn’t understand or was having a hard time grasping. Now it seems whenever I’m on the verge of any understanding or insight, my focus just evaporates or otherwise disappears, and I immediately and uncontrollably start thinking about something—anything—else, and whatever progress I nearly made is lost.

  It’s like I’m a character in “Harrison Bergeron” and I’ve been given one of those ear-insert handicaps.

• I haven’t slept properly in a while (this may be related to the previous bullet point). The two hardest parts of my day have always been getting up and going to bed, and I’ve never been good at either one. While I haven’t gotten any better at going to bed, I have tragically gained the ability to rather consistently force myself into a reasonable facsimile of wakefulness at (for me) an insanely early hour. Net result being, of course, that my overall amount of sleep is way down. And the sleep I have been getting is pretty fitful. And I don’t even catch up on weekends.

  There’s this old Life In Hell strip where in the first 15 panels—when he’s getting up, going to work, working, etc.—Binky is bleary-eyed and half-asleep, and then the last panel shows him lying in bed with his eyes wide open.

• Washington, D.C.’s hockey team is, appropriately enough, named in recognition of the fact that the District of Columbia is the seat of the government of the United States of America. But the team’s logo prominently features a stylized rendition of the building in which the legislative branch of the said government convenes. Granted the building in question is located within the city in question and is an extremely famous landmark, but goddamnit if your team is called the Capitals (with an ‘a’) it seems tremendously thoughtless and/or cruel to put the Capitol (with an ‘o’) in the team logo and encourage people to confound those homophones.
• The Verizon Center has an honest-to-goodness organ player to liven up sporting events. I thought those went extinct a while ago, and I’m glad to learn I was wrong. The Verizon Center also seems to enjoy playing Muse recordings to liven up sporting events. I guess they don’t want to overwork the organ player.
• I’m afraid of something—it’s the only explanation I can think of—but I don’t know what it is.
• I like Dr Cameron when she’s angry.

I woke up this morning, rubbed my eyes, got out of bed, and stretched. Then I ran my tongue over my teeth and felt something crumble, with a texture like puff pastry or those fried noodles you get with Chinese soup. I went to the bathroom and grinned for the mirror, and sure enough, I could see through my enamel in parts, though I felt no pain. Like a guy with a toothache (rather, a guy wondering why he didn’t have a toothache), I couldn’t help myself and kept investigating with my tongue. Every poke or prod resulted in another bit of tooth crumbling away and dissolving, and I stood transfixed, watching my teeth gradually disappear.

It was at this point that I remembered this has happened a few times before, and began telling myself it was all just a dream, which was true. I was aware that I was asleep; I was aware that I was dreaming; I was aware that none of it was really happening; but that didn’t make it any less horrible. I was powerless to do anything but watch and let the dream run its goddamn course. By the time I was finally allowed to leave, my mouth looked like Ren’s in the episode where he loses all his teeth (probably because I have no other reference for what a freshly toothless mouth looks like): a bunch of gaping, empty sockets with cartoonishly oversized nerves sticking out of them.

When I woke up for real, Listerine was at the top of my list of priorities.

Apparently I’ve been working here long enough that my network login password has expired twice already.

When I was little, I was afraid—terrified—of Elton John, because I’d seen this picture of him and he looked like some kind of horrible monster:

(The whole outfit is pretty awful, but I think it was the sunglasses that really did it.)