it’s halloween.

so spooky halloween to you! i point you to this discobelle post of fun halloween music. i am currently rocking out to the halloween mix*. loudly, as i am the only one in the office right now.

(* track 15 on this mix: The Bulgarian (ft. Spoek) – The Zombie Door (Vox version) turns out to be rather filthy. the chorus seems to be ‘jack it like a zombie’ repeated. just letting you know so you don’t, say, for instance, blast it in your place of work for everyone to hear.)

due to a miscommunication of sorts, half the team is working in san jose today, with two of us up here in the city. not a big deal, but annoying, as i had to buy a train ticket to get up here. goodbye 11 dollars it turns out i didn’t need to spend.

also, mike sent me a list from the av club of bad horror movie villians. shockingly, i have not seen most of these films. more shockingly, mike claims to have. and triply shocking — morty, from ‘the fear’, jack frost (the evil snowman) from ‘jack frost’, or the gingerbread man from ‘the gingerdead man’ are not represented. i might have to call sheningans on the article now.

also, i need to tell you the taglines for ‘jack frost’: “He’s chillin…and killin”
and for ‘the gingerdead man’: “Out of the oven… and into your heart!”
wow.

and i am in a funk. for a multitude of reasons.

but this morning, walking into the office, i passed an older, bald man with horns attached. i, myself, am wearing my old devil ‘headband’ which is an easy, lazy, pretend costume. but it was great fun to pass someone else in the street who had dressed up the same way. we said hello to each other and it made me smile a lot.

that made the trip up here worthwhile, i would say.

in other news, robert goulet died. this is not huge news and, sadly, i remember him most for his excellent emerald nuts ad last superbowl.

and if we want to really cheapen his memory, how about will ferrell impersonating him singing the thong song?

Popularity: 2% [?]

there was a nice post this morning on coding horror about desktops. i’m posting it here less because of the post and more because of the links to sites with desktops. i’m fairly picky about desktops — i like plain over flashy. too many colors and suddenly i cant see anything on there.

i went through the list that was posted and came away with a couple that get thumbs up from me:
k10 / ondisplay — i sometimes find nice ones and then photoshop out other peoples icons
mandolux — this guy gets how to do desktops. seriously.
damask wallpaper patterns — if you need a nice tiling pattern that looks like old wallpaper flourishes, this is where you want to be.
and then there is my old standby:
threadless — they make awesome desktops; simple colors, fun to look at and easy to handle.

so there. some ways to spruce up your workspace.

yesterday, i was hanging with the kurt and the keren and the mike and said how overwhelmed i am by the sheer number of people in the world. (skipping the part where i realize for the 100th time that usually the world feels very small to me.) a lot of this comes from realizing how much waste we contribute to every moment of our lives.

this list, depicting photos of waste, should help prove it to you. “…two million plastic beverage bottles, the number used in the US every five minutes.”

it isn’t just people i want to escape, it’s this lifestyle. it’s the fact that im drinking from a plastic water bottle right now. because i haven’t gone out and bought myself a metal one to reuse. it’s because i’m staring at an ipod and computers and plastic figures, all of which will outlive me.

it’s overwhelming and exhausting.

i think it is obvious that i have to flee somewhere soon. since i’m broke and have no time off, my options are limited. ideas anyone?

and on a lighter note, perhaps you haven’t seen how awesome i am at modeling. the model they used (behind me) has nothing on my skillz.

Popularity: 2% [?]

sigh.

its sunday night and i have no real idea where the weekend went. i don’t have enough to show for it. im sitting here, on sunday night, drinking cuban rum (thanks kurt!) and wishing it wasn’t sunday.

i think my mac mini has to go back to the shop. it has been coughing a lot, to the point of me re-installing tiger yesterday. and then today, it has had 4 kernal panics. yeah, i think it is safe to say that something isnt right. having never dealt with faulty apple hardware before, i am loathe to admit that it is having problems; i dont want to deal with it. but clearly something isn’t right. i wanted to blame it on a specific program, but the last panic happened when only itunes was opened, so i dont think i can point at anything but some weird hardware issue at this point. (and software or hardware, a clean os and itunes shouldnt cause a fault — and it is certainly apples fault if it does have issue.)

otherwise the weekend seems to have consisted of me internalizing r’s grad school app process, which can’t be healthy for either of us. i have stayed away from it, but i think the unknown factors and fear of the future has really gotten the better of me now. there isn’t an easy fix nor is there a point to worrying over things i cant control.

have i mentioned how much i hate my next door neighbor? i don’t think i have. he plays his tv at all hours at excessive volumes. it really is awful and uncalled for. i want to believe the walls are thin. but i dont think this is the entire problem.

i can’t wait to move into an apartment bigger than the one we have now. it is getting crowded. of course, that apartment could be anywhere in the united states almost so its certainly a give and take there.

i’m staring at the photos on the wall. i have plastic hangers that hold something like a dozen photos on the wall in long straight sleeves. most everyone i know has a place in these; i have 4 and i think almost every friend i know is hanging on my wall, albeit in a drunken pose. mike, andru, ben, petunia, me, eric, roxy, goose, ray, carter, my father, even goth robert all appear from where i am sitting and they make up less than 50% of the total. nostalgia is a powerful drug, kids.

the neighbors tv is so loud. its really annoying.

and hey, make that 5 kernal panics in a day, again with only itunes open. sonofabitch. guess i know what i am doing next weekend. arg.

and seriously, he needs to turn that tv way down. ass.

i guess its times to gulp the rum and escape to the bedroom. yeah, maybe being a homeowner isn’t so bad after all.

Popularity: 1% [?]

so it’s halloween week.

i’ve never been one for teaching holidays. in fact, most of the time i can’t be asked to give more than the barest mention in class that a holiday is even taking place. there’s a passage in a laurie halse anderson book that i always think of when this subject comes up. i just looked it up, and here it is:

We are studying American history for the ninth time in nine years. Another review of map skills, one week of Native Americans, Christopher Columbus in time for Columbus Day, the Pilgrims in time for Thanksgiving. Every year they say we’re going to get right up to the present, but we always get stuck in the Industrial Revolution. We got to World War I in seventh grade—who knew there had been a war with the whole world? We need more holidays to keep the social studies teachers on track.

but in this job, teaching halloween is part and parcel of the whole cultural exchange thing. most everyone has heard of it, but they don’t really know what it is, or why people observe it. (when it comes to that, neither do most americans.)

i want to tell my students here about the history, the stories and beliefs that led to all of the traditions. but is it hypocrisy–making halloween out to be a much better and more meaningful holiday than it actually is in practice?

sigh. far too often, i feel like the only thing american culture has to offer the world is a load of freshly expelled, commercially-driven crap.

Popularity: 1% [?]

As the Dubya asks for more money, try wrapping your head around how much cash is being taken out of your pocket…to protect us from those non-existent weapons of mass destruction.

 Visual representation here.

Popularity: 2% [?]

How weird is it to look up at the TV and see someone with whom you attended high school? Well, sure, Tripp has The Mraz, but still. Tonight I happened across VH1 to find John Aboud staring back at me, a guy I hadn’t seen for 20 years since moving away from Douglas Freeman High School following freshman year. I suppose it isn’t so much ‘weird’ as a pleasant surprise, both in that he’s doing something I recall him being good at (read: being funny) and in that it afforded me that rekindling of old, old memories from childhood (talking in the halls, working on school projects, discussing which girls were hot when we were rangy ‘men’ of 14). It seems like eons ago.

Popularity: 1% [?]

things that have happened to me recently:

1. i just had a filling. it was a little one, so it wasn’t bad. but the right side of my mouth is all wonky now. i can see it being a little sore as the novocaine wears off. such is life.

2. i just read a ‘made in 24 hours’ comic about crohns disease. it’s really good and sums up a lot of the experiences i had prior to surgery. unfortunately, crohns doesn’t have the ‘cure’ colitis does — namely, removing the offending organ (because crohns impacts both the large and the small intestines). the only exception to my experience in this story was the energy fro ‘roids. i was so sick by the time they threw me on them that i didn’t even notice — in fact, most of them seemed to almost make me feel worse.

the story about food ads on tv is especially true. i don’t talk too much about being sick anymore with anyone but rachael really. if you’re new to the game, the hospital saga seems to start around this post — but petunia and carter and roxy all posted stuff around then too from their experiences.

here is a morsel: i was hospitalized and my parents flew out to la. they basically lived in my apartment for the 40 days i was stuck in a hospital bed, making a few flights home to hold down the fort. one of the things they did in the mornings and evenings was clean the apartment. they had nothing else to do and no other outlet for the stress my illness was causing them.

and one day, cleaning, they found the list i had made before i got super-sick. it was titled “foods i will eat again when i am well”. it was a solid sheet, though written in sharpie, of foods i missed eating. everything from pizza to biscuits n gravy (which i still haven’t had — i’m unsure if this is due to my not really wanting it or just sheer laziness). anyway, the list is depressing and it made my parents cry. and i still have it; i found it in a box last week. maybe ill scan it. but it really is depressing.

so yeah, this comic is pretty much what life was like for me for a (short) while. and now it isn’t. it’s still not ideal but i have less than zero room for complaining or whining.

3. hima wrote me the other day about patrick. we all know i enjoy the ‘the world is so small!’ stories. well, this time, it turns out that hima has a friend. this friend is dating a boy. the boy is the brother of patrick’s wife. so it seems i am connected to both sides of the family.

hima knew a few details i didn’t, but we had to agree that nothing seemed to make sense. of course, we have little information and are sitting a continent away, but still.

that too, is what makes this so weird. i was attached through vcu peeps to all of this, because patrick taught there. and because i know meg. but hima, she is all the way out here with virtually no connection back. but yet, there is one. a fairly direct one. and the fact that she an i know each other just makes it all the more odd.

seriously, how many people do i know that are connected to other people i know, independently of me? the world is tiny.

* * *

seriously, i can’t be the only one that freaks out over this article: Tests reveal high chemical levels in kids’ bodies

But that fascination soon changed to fear, as tests revealed that their children — Rowan, then 18 months, and Mikaela, then 5 — had chemical exposure levels up to seven times those of their parents.

and then on npr this morning, i hear someone say that the earth has had 5 major extinctions. and we are about to be number 6.

sigh.
its enough to make me want panic in the streets.

Popularity: 3% [?]