Category Archives: doing it wrong

Downtown Portland in the snow. Last winter.

When I was a young person every time I tried something experimental with my looks it was always a fail.

I once had my make up done at a beauty school and looked like a Vegas showgirl crossed with a circus clown.

I got a perm, I’m not sure what I was envisioning, maybe easier styling? Instead my hair, no matter what I did, looked like I passed out under a bench in the park.

I got feathered bangs that always stuck out funny.

That means that these day I have little incentive to even try plastic surgery, assuming I had the money to burn. Either you wouldn’t be able to tell or I’d look like I’d pressed my face against glass and it got stuck that way.

Downtown Orleans, CA

I like to revisit movies I haven’t seen in a long time to see what I think of them now.

I recently re-watched Rain Main (1988).

For the most part, the movie holds up.

The soundtrack has some genuinely awful moments

There’s a bit with someone smoking in a restaurant that feels like a character affectation that we didn’t need. It’s so weird now to think about people smoking everywhere. Now it even seems weird walking past someone smoking on the street. I always think it’s so old fashioned.

The performances in the movie are great — both Hoffman and Cruise are really good.

I always expected that it would take longer to notice getting older. I’ve been dismayed about certain changes.

One of them is the way I get tired. It’s not like, oh I’m started to get tired. I should start thinking about wrapping up what I’m doing because I’m feeling tired.

No. It’s like I’m tired right this second. Whatever I’m doing needs to be wrapped up immediately.

I have left 7 minutes of a show on the DVR because I have to go to bed. I have left the last 5 pages of my book unread. If I’m tired I’m finished. Immediately.

Mushroom at the Orleans dump.

When I first saw this I had to double and then triple check that it wasn’t satire or The Onion.

This is a real thing. It’s called the hapifork and it’s wonderful technology that tells you if you’re eating too fast. And you can manage this data from all your devices.

The technology is covered by four patents.

Oh hapi day!

It recently came to my attention that I don’t have a certified copy of my birth certificate. I have an unofficial copy. It hasn’t come up for me recently that I need one but I thought I should probably get one. It’s been on my list forever.

The fee was $28 — which I thought was kinda high. I almost didn’t do it but figured, it would be good to have.

So I filled out the online form and at the end it said: print and take to a window.

I’m about 1000 miles from the window right now. I’m not going to be able to take it to a window so I clicked around until I found the way to get it online but if I did it that way, with all the fees it would be $45.

That seemed like a lot of money to get a document that many jurisdictions in this country now require for an identity card.

I clicked around some more and found a way to get it through the mail for $28 if I wasn’t in a hurry. Which I’m not.

I still wanted to blow it off but I felt like I cursed it. If I decided not to do it, inevitably there will be something coming up where I need it and then I won’t have it.

I got it.

End of the season garden. It’s supposed to freeze any day now. I need to clear out the last of it.

I’m perpetually in a state of being overwhelmed. A podcast showed up in my feeds that said, “Here’s some stuff to think about if you’re overwhelmed.”

One of the big tips had to do with being more organized.

World, I’m here to tell you: If organization could help, I would know it. But being organized takes time, too. Sometimes that’s the overwhelmed. “Where do I find the time to get organized?”

There was also a bunch of stuff about social media is garbage. I know that one, too.

The title is a lyric from a song by an 80s band Missing Persons. But when I typed it made sense for the world right now. I feel like social media is shouting into a void where people listen only long enough to solidify their rage and then shout something else in response.

These are words that seem like they should mean something else:

penultimate — means second to last in a series. Should mean: biggest, baddest ever.
defenestrate — means throw someone out a window. Should mean: disembowel someone.
peripatetic — traveling from place to place. Should mean: digestive problems.
inimitable — incomparable, impossible to copy. Should mean: shouldn’t even be a word – it’s so awkward to say. I don’t like this word.