No sooner do I get back from Dallas that I find I have to go to Austin for a funeral.
Hopefully I’ll return to normal blithering tomorrow, and tell you about T-Fest.
Bummers and Good Things
First up: I’m leaving town tomorrow, so you’re not going to hear from me again in these pixels until Monday, Why? I’m headed to Dallas with The Boy to attend T-Fest, an informal gathering of fans of crap cinema. I helped start this oh so many years ago, and it’s grown. It has its own Facebook page, even. I’ll be live-Tweeting it, as I am able, so anybody who follows me has that to look forward to, oh boy.
I enjoy spending time with my herd. It’s a rare group that equally enjoy Charles Laughton upstaging his co-stars, then The Zombies of Sugar Hill, then wash it down with some Nightmare City. Well, nobody enjoyed Theodore Rex, but then, I think that is an utter impossibility, right up there with folding a piece of paper seven times. Mythbusters can manage it, but not many more.
Go on. Watch it. I dare you.
So I was wondering what would turn up at the last moment to ruin things. You know, as usual. First candidate is my bum knee, which has grown much worse since that Amazing Race-style shoot a couple of weeks ago. Apparently you don’t heal as fast in the second half of your life as you do in the first. GO FIGURE. Second candidate is my hillbilly teeth. Gum disease and brittle teeth gallop down my mom’s side of the family, whom I most take after. Mom had a full set of dentures by the time she was 30. I’ve beat that by nearly a quarter of a century, but probably can’t for much longer. I brush, I floss, I use Listerene, all of which has helped delay the inevitable; but last night another tooth just simply broke off, snap. It was apparenly already dead, I feel no pain, but dammit, I also feel uglier than ever. I’m never going to act again, except as maybe a meth addict.
My Precioussssss
I guess, if you need an upbeat thing to offset the misery, my second job sprang for my new phone, and I finally have that Droid. (Brief pause for the iPhone users to proselytize) I was surprised at the learning curve involved in switching to a touchscreen phone, and am thankful that the Droid 2 still has the physical slider keyboard. The onscreen keyboard and my fat fingers do not play together well. I am totally digging the customization level. I even used it as a GPS navigation unit last night – to a location I already knew, thank you – and the Droid even used the shortcut I always employ. That was impressive, even if the setup has a few more steps than necessary. A dedicated GPS unit would have been much easier, but what do you want for an included extra? And a nifty one, at that?
So I’ll see you on the Twitter, or here next Monday. Have a good weekend. I’m sure as hell going to try.
Yet I’m Not Mad.
Oh, Tumblr, you minx. I thought you were over that little flu.
Set up my queue this morning, with no problem. First poster fired off as scheduled. Come to work, finally pin down an interview, check my Twitter feed… oops. Should have been at least two more auto-posts in that time. Attempts to force a publish meet with the dreaded “Maintenance” page. Finally, get through, and now we’ll see what happens.
I don’t want it to look like I’m complaining; hell, Tumblr costs me nothing, and it’s something I enjoy doing. I’m sure I’m not going to see much of that attitude when I eventually journey over tot he message boards of City of Heroes, which is, after all, a paid service. The game, not the forums.
A long-awaited expansion, Going Rogue, went live officially yesterday. Yeah, there was much bemusement when Palin’s book of the same title came out, a year or so into the game’s development. The big draw here is to take your hero or villain through a falling/redemptive arc and have them fight on the other side, or even enter a gray moral ground. That’s something that has been asked for as long as I’ve been playing the game – at this point, over five years – so, as you might imagine, the floodgates opened.
I had pre-purchased the expansion some time ago, as it allowed early access to a couple of the new character types in the existing game. The temptation to make a whirling dervish double-pistol wielding Chow Yun Fat hero was too tempting… even if he did wind up looking like Black Dynamite. SO I (and others like me) got an extra day to frolic in the new city zones, an alternate dimension dystopia called Nova Praetoria.
Well, last night… the evening of the first official day… I tried to log on to find some emergency maintenance going on. When I did get one, the mapserving was frequent as the server farms groaned under the load. I eventually logged off earlier than I had anticipated, but this is old news for me. The same thing happened during other hotly anticipated expansions, and I see no real reason it to change. The system of tubes is gonna get clogged, you know?
But I’m sure there will be many dire threats to ragequit on the forums, blah blah blah. That is also the nature of the System of Tubes, and since I can’t change it, I might as well enjoy it.
Grumble Grumble Coffee Grumble
What a lovely bunch of small irritations this morning.
I guess I have, if not an addictive personality, a tendency toward fickle obsession, to employ an oxymoron. The latest obsession has been a Tumblr site. I got an account because gee, everybody else seemed to have one. It got me out of a jam when I couldn’t embed a video here (and I find WordPress superior in every other way, so… what the hell?), I posted a few more pictures, a few more videos… and then it struck me.
Another of my petite fixations over the years has been movie posters. Well, any sort of pictorial movie promotion. Somewhere there’s a Cub Scout scrapbook which is full of nothing but movie ads clipped from newspapers. I recall I was really excited about The Dunwich Horror, young madcap that I was. But int he digital age, this has led to my downloading scans of movie posters from various sources, and there they sat on my hard drive, occasionally glanced at when I was looking for something to illustrate my reviews, back when I wrote movie reviews.
Hey, I could throw a few up on this Tumblr thing!
And so it began. A few became quite a few, and quickly the rationale behind the whole thing. I discovered there is a limit to how many pictures you can post in a day. Then I discovered that it’s possible simply queue up posts and have them self-publish at regular intervals. I’ve been upping 20 posters a day with my snarky-ass comments, or the occasional compliment or complaint when my ass is not feeling particularly snarky. 10 in the morning, 10 in the evening. When I have time, I’ll queue up the entire day’s worth.
Clicking on “archive” at the bottom of every page yields a landscape of crap movie posters that I want for computer desktop wallpaper. Hell, wallpaper for my office.
Lat night, though, started up the dreaded “Maintenance” pages. They continued into this morning, off and on, as I attempted to set up the morning queue, in a maddeningly inconsistent manner. Probably the worst thing about this Tumblr obsession is it makes me late for work, which is not really that big a deal. If I clock in a half-hour late, I just stay a half-hour later. But I like the schedule, I like consistency. I could have just said, oh, I’ll just queue up more this evening, but nooooo, surely it will work this time, oh it did, now I can queue up some more BAH.
Otherwise:
I work at an Institution of Somewhat Higher Learning. I should not be fighting down the urge to tell the HR department that there is no such word as “inputted”.
At least I haven’t seen or heard anyone using “orientated” in at least, oh, 36 hours or so.
So I guess my attempt to purge negativity from my life has borne some fruit. Stuff like this would send me into a deep sullen depression, previously. Now I just sigh and get on with my life.
Well, there is this whole Prop 8 and “Ground Zero Mosque” crap, but that is stupidity on a somewhat grander scale than I can effect without nuclear weapons, so I’m not going to dwell on them right now. My nukes are in the shop, being tuned up.
Sunday Double Feature Picture Show
So I finally got to see my pal Dave’s new house yesterday; they were more settled-in (as Dave put it, “I have a place for you to sit now.”) and we both had holes in our schedules. It also resulted in the following unfortunate sequencing of Tweets, when my live Tweet butted up against a queued Tumblr post:
As they say, LOL.
It’s a nice house. He’s put a lot of work into it, and intends to put some more. Dave is one of those handy people, a tinkerer. He’s the exact opposite of myself, who can’t put one piece of paper on top of another without disastrous results. Also, unlike his old apartment, he was able to attack the set-up of his home theater sound from a zero point, rather than piecemeal. Which was also fortuitous, as the room he was allowed for a makeshift man-cave was oddly shaped, and defied a traditional set-up.
After demoing the sound set-up with the battle of Helm’s Deep from The Two Towers, we settled down to some serious martini-quaffing and movie-watching. Dave wished to further shake-down his system, so my choice (from a number of DVDs I keep leaving with him until I can badger him into watching them) was Shoot-Em-Up, which has my vote for possibly the Most Gleefully Stupid Movie Ever Made. Which is not to say it isn’t cool. It is intensely cool. But it also does not pretend to be anything it isn’t.
Afterwards, Dave was amazed I had not yet seen Tropic Thunder (I been busy. Sue me.), so we took care of that.
So I’m thinking that now I might not need to see The Expendables.
Duck and Cover
Oh, that Friday the 13th. It is a pistol.
At least thus far it’s been a gently mocking pistol. I’m already late, when my wife asks me how she does something on the Blackberry. Different model than I’m used to, different interface. I am rendered later. Not a big deal, it’s my short day, rendered shorter by some extra time put in yesterday.
Arrive at college. Second Summer session is over, parking lot is a vast emptiness. I head toward my favorite space. When, amazingly, a van is there. It stops. The driver ponders the situation. He shifts into reverse. He stops. In a parking lot which currently holds only one parked car, he is apparently spoiled for choice, and cannot decide. Never mind. My second favorite spot is wide open, and I slip into it. I look around. The indecisive van has apparently decided to head for more crowded climes, where the choices are much more limited.
I pick up my travel mug. I always bring a large mug of coffee from home, where I know it will be made to my taste, and not dependent on the whims of the faculty at large. The mug has become unaccountably slippery, and my floorboard is now the proud owner of half a cup of coffee, and I face short rations this morning.
Opening my email, I find a letter from a lady I interviewed about a local mental health initiative last Spring. I say “interviewed” but in this case it means she read from index cards, defying any of my attempts to just get her to talk into the camera. The final story is a triumph of stock photos and CG text, because I couldn’t dwell on her dead-eyed reading.
Well, she’s giving a talk at some gathering, and needs some changes in “the CD I developed for them”. Currently working on the wording of the reply which explains the difference between news stories and informational programs developed by PR firms. I will try to avoid pointing out that the latter pays much more than the former, and therefore clients, as opposed to interviewees, get to ask for changes.
No, wait, I’ll just pass that off to my boss. That’s why she gets the big bucks.
Rodney Dangerfield used to have a bit in his stand-up: “This morning, I grabbed my briefcase, and the handle came off in my hand. I went to my front door, and the doorknob came off in my hand. I tell ya, I’m afraid to go to the bathroom!”
I have a haircut scheduled this afternoon. This oughtta be good.
Buttons Get Pushed
Yesterday, while not a terrible day, seemed determined to find out how many of my buttons it could push.
As my morning was winding down, I received a text message from my wife. Since that day a couple of months ago when I received a text that simply said “Come take me to the ER”, I’ve tended to have palpitations everytime I hear the Jetson’s doorbell, which is the signal for a wifely text. Yesterday’s text was only slightly different – this time, her sugars had crashed, she was unable to drive, and I needed to come pick her up and bring her home to rest.
So I leave work a little early and help her to the car, joking that a) when she stumbles, she must have a teenage urge to pull me down and make out, and b) it’s pretty sad when you’re relying on a cripple for support. We pick up lunch and head home. She has some cheese and an apple turnover, trying to get her sugars up, and finally goes to sleep.
I attempt to follow suit, as it is siesta time – see earlier post – and the doorbell rings after a meager five minutes of sleep.
I have gone on at length about how I am going to, in a fit of rage, some day pull down the doorbell and reduce it to its component atoms with a ballpeen hammer. Instead I limped downstairs, since my son had already answered the door, there was no possibility of pretending no one was home. Besides, I didn’t want them ringing the doorbell again and disturbing my wife.
It was not missionaries, but my other least favorite visitor, a teenage waif selling overpriced services/magazine subscriptions door to door. First of all, given that I have difficulties sleeping, if you wake me up, it is best for your well-being if someone is dead, injured, or the house is on fire. None of these were the case. I told her she had awakened me. She seemed surprised, as apparently fat men wearing nothing but a T-shirt and boxers were apparently de rigeur in her world. No, I’m sorry, I am currently underemployed and not able to afford your wares, even if I were interested. I am going back to bed now, goodbye. No, it would not help if you spoke to the lady of the house, goodbye. No, you coming by later to speak to her would not help, did I mention goodbye? At this point she attempted to bully her way into the house and I flipped on the Full Asshole Mode and finally got rid of her.
I feel terrible after switching on Full Asshole Mode, but the last time I attempted to gently inform a similar door to door type of the uselessness of continuing his spiel, he stood in my front yard and screamed curses at me for being such a selfish bastard. I complimented him on his sales technique and closed the door.
I get angry at myself for employing Full Asshole Mode, and I get angry at the person for making me employ Full Asshole Mode. I want a moat, but the damned Home Owners Association said no, and incidentally, you need a new mailbox and to paint your house.
Later – after managing a bit of fitful, rage-filled sleep, I drove my wife back to her school, where she had a Board meeting to attend. I got some groceries, including much-needed Pug Dog Chow, and it was on the way home that the day received its coda: waiting at a red light a bird swooped in low over the line of waiting cars, and landed on my car’s antenna, which is one of those that extends on an angle above the driver’s side window. Well, that’s unusual, but sorta cool, I thought. And then the bird poop started running down my window.
The only proper response was laughter. Anything else would have been ridiculous or pathetic. So I laughed, and decided that maybe it was time to finally wash the car.
Let Him Do It Instead
Like anybody needs help getting depressed in the morning. Mike Sterling, whose blog I’ve been reading for years, has embarked on a new enterprise, Estate 4.1, “Celebrating Web 2.0 and the part it plays in allowing user comments to improve the online news experience.” In other words, Mike goes where angels fear to tread – the comments sections of the Yahoo news sites – and posts the cream of the stupidity he finds there. With links to same.
If nothing else, he quashes any temptation I ever have to abjure my usual firm stance on avoiding poisonous pools of idiocy, and actually sneak a peek in there. A temptation which inevitably leads to the ruination of any sense of bonhomme I may have managed to build that particular day.
So here’s to you, Mr. Sterling. You may be doing this for your own amusement, but you are providing a genuine service to mankind, by doing a disservice to the unkind.
(“Real People of Genius” music fades)
Mandatory Post Bitching About the Heat
All climate change deniers are quite welcome to hang around with me, my wheezing, near-apoplectic air conditioner, and my army of fans (the electric, air-blowing kind). The Heat Index finally fell below 100 degrees at 9:00PM last night, for God’s sake.
Which brings me to the subject of casual racism. Everything these days is tinged with racism or accusations of racism, and I almost miss the days of casual racism, which seem almost innocent compared to the weaponized racism we’re subjected to daily.
No, the racist crap from my youth I’m dwelling on a lot lately concerns the Hispanic population of Texas. My grandfather – otherwise one of the kindest, most downright decent people I have ever known – hated them with a passion. He was free with the disparaging of other minorities, notably the blasted Hun, but he reserved special ire for those Messkins. (One day we’ll talk about when I fell in love with a Latina, who reciprocated. That was messy.)
You can say my grandfather was a product of his times. That doesn’t excuse it, but I’m also going to point out my only problem with it was that, even if given the chance, he wouldn’t have changed. It was simply the way he was, at that point. I can only speak for myself, in the final analysis, and this bullshit is something I struggle with internally every single goddamn day. I’m not immune to the poison that gets hurled about every day, and right now I’ve got a build-up of over 50 years of garbage to deal with. I find myself thinking terrible, unworthy things. I am shocked, and slap those thoughts down, and wonder where the hell did that come from? But I know.
And I honestly think that every person, everyone who hasn’t gotten that Premium Divinity Upgrade, deals with it every day. Some are shocked and try to do better. Some simply accept it. Some seem to fucking glory in it.
Well. I managed to steer myself into some far-too-serious territory there.
The point I was aiming toward was, in my youth, one of the stereotypes that of the “lazy Messkin” was the guy taking a siesta, a mid-day nap. Never mind that my grandfather often took one, too. Them Messkins would crawl off and sleep at the drop of a hat, and would frequently drop their own hat. And it was one of them damned sombreros, too, I’ll bet.
Guess what? Like my grandfather, I nap too. Even when I worked in an office back in the 90s, I introduced my boss to the concept of a 15 minute nap after lunch, and it worked wonders for both of us. If there is an upside to my current impoverished part-time-only job, it’s that I get my nap in, with no problems.
And you know what the siesta was? It was finding a shady spot and sleeping through the hottest part of the day. That wasn’t laziness, that was sanity. That was sensible.
Of course, currently, it would be impossible for me to sleep through the entirety of the hottest part of the day. I can do some serious napping, but not six to twelve hours worth.
In Which Our Narrator Gets A Bit Morose
Made the 100 mile trip to visit my parents Sunday; I really need to do that much more often. The only real drawback is having to also haul our pet pug-dog along, because she is the second grandchild, and the poor thing gets so over-excited that she spends the entire 90 minute trip sounding like a mule having an asthma attack. No amount of cranking up the radio counters that.
Wonder of wonders, I did that rarity: actually talking at length to my father about something besides the weather and lawn care. I often wonder what the hell was up with me, how I enforced this emotional remove from my father, going way, way back. Is it a generational thing? I seemed to succumb to some sort of outside influence – looking back, I felt it was expected of me, which makes no goddamn sense whatsoever.
None.
I say generational because I recall all too clearly the Men’s Movement of the 90s. Remember, the drum circles, all that? Like a lot of the pop psych movements, there was a lot of nonsense associated with it. There was one thing about it that I found particularly powerful, however, and valuable: a sudden willingness to examine and analyze and think wait a minute…
One of the most important books for me was Why Men Are the Way They Are, by Warren Farrell. I found it in the Women’s Studies section of a bookstore, but it’s a book that also really, really needs to be read by men. There were far too many times I found myself reading a section and thinking, “Well, of course that’s the way it should be done…” followed almost immediately by a rueful, “No, no there really isn’t a good reason for that.” It was very eye-opening.
(I should also note that shortly thereafter I tried to read Farrell’s The Myth of Male Power, but I found it whiny and not terribly useful. But I bless him for the book I did find useful)
So that weird emotional remove – I still feel it. I work toward overcoming it with my father, I work toward overcoming it with my son. He is on the cusp of teenager-dom (shudder), and I wonder if that old reserve – which even though I know it to be there, and to be wrong, still sits with the apparent invulnerability of a black ice glacier – has already worked its harm.
Being human is no damned fun at all. Being an aged pug-dog in the back seat of a car working yourself up to puking with excitement is probably a lot better. But then, considering that also means a lifetime of getting people to scratch your curly butt because all the generations of in-breeding has insured you can’t do it yourself – I guess I’ll take the incertitude and complications of life.
I like being able to scratch my butt.
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