You're Doing It Wrong

I am dead last in the office NCAA basketball pool. I am comforted by the fact that (a) I am the only person keeping my coworker from last place and he actually watches NCAA basketball and (b) when we do the office bake-off I will leave those people in the dust.

I finally invested some time figuring out how Flickr works and updating my photos. I’m going to try to change the photos more often but we’ll see how I do. I don’t know how these Internet people keep up with all the blogging and photosharing and contact lists and iPod playlists and cellphone ringtones. It’s a fulltime job maintaining ones personal technology. There’s software to update and batteries to charge and giant user manuals in 4 different languages to plow through. I have 5 free songs I’ve yet to redeem from the iTunes store.

I finished I, Elizabeth which turned out to be the never-ending novel. I don’t think I’m going to read anything over 400 pages, ever again. No, I take that back. But in general, I will avoid super long books. Do books need to be that long? This one sure didn’t. By the end I didn’t even know who she (Queen megalomania Bess) was talking about. How many Roberts were there? I’m going to find a chronology online to help me fill in the gaps.

RE: books too long. I used to read fantasy books but now I’m daunted before I’ve even started. Who can even type 1200 pages a year? I remember liking a book called A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth which was over 1,000 pages long and I stuck with it with few complaints. Then there was this book by Milan Kundera. I think it was Immortality and it wasn’t close to 1000 pages but it felt like it. I would read for what seemed like ever and only 14 pages went by. I had that book on the nightstand for 2 months and couldn’t believe I wasn’t finished with it yet. It was a loaner and I hate handing a book back to someone and saying I hated it. But I did.

I forgot to tell you a funny story from a week or two ago. Bob hung out with a group of his teacher friends one Friday after work and ended up getting home late (you know, after 9pm) and there was a communication mix up so I was a little annoyed. You know what they were doing? They were watching History Channel videos. How geeky is that? How can you even be mad a a person who stays out late watching History Channel videos?

Last topic for today concerns the show Alias. What happened to this show? It’s like the last season of XFiles, I’m used to watching so I keep watching and I don’t like it. Instead of being drawn into their world, I’m wondering how the actors can say some of those lines without cracking up. I never understand the missions. They jet to some exotic location and have to steal something or talk to someone either in a club, an impenetrable fortress or a crowded street bazaar. The idea of the sister is good but her character is sadly not very interesting. Even Sydney “I have weird posture” isn’t interesting any more. Bummer.

I am reading I, Elizabeth by Rosalind Miles. It’s about Queen Elizabeth I and about 600 pages. I’m enjoying the book but are so many people and they all have the same 2-3 names (Katharine, Jane, Mary or Henry, Edward, Thomas) and if they aren’t royals, they’re dukes or earls or regents or councillors or whatever. I need a white board to keep track of it all.

Those Tudor royals were nuts. How could you get anything done if you spent all your time wrangling for power, marrying your cousins, sending people to be executed? And that’s not even getting into the whole church craziness. I wouldn’t have cut it in those times.

I’ve watched a couple of DVDs this weekend. The kind with tons of special features.

I know special features are a selling point. People feel ripped off if there are no extras. But truthfully, who has time to watch that stuff? How is your life improved by seeing a trailer (a commercial) for a movie that’s been out forever and you’ve already seen the film? Who has the time and desire to page through photos or costume drawings or read a script on the TV?

Interviews are nice. I like hearing the filmmaker talk about the film and some commentary tracks are excellent. But some are just people talking, obviously trying to think of things to say. Or endless butt kissing about how talented the people who made the film are — do I really want to hear that?

The Lord of the Rings movies have multiple commentary tracks. It takes a special circumstance for me to have 4 + hours to watch a movie I’ve already seen anyway, much less all these extras.

I’m not saying the extras are bad, I’m just wondering how many people really take advantage of them.

Today is the 7th anniversary of our moving into this house. Hard to believe. It’s gone by quick.

We haven’t made any interior changes like getting rid of the wallpaper we hated when me moved in. We’re just not motivated in that way. I wish we were.

The only work we’ve done is replace some windows with storm windows and that air conditioner was a biggie. We also have someone prune our trees.

When I was younger, before the house, I always thought that I would be happier if I had a better living space. Bigger or more private or mine or whatever. And a part of me always thought that was a geographical fantasy — that if you’re not happy where you’re at, you’re not going to be happy anywhere.

But I love our funky house. I love our neighborhood. And I love living with Bob.

I divided my rhubarb over the weekend.

I didn’t even know I had rhubarb until last year, I think. I thought it was some random volunteer in the garden and I neither removed nor encouraged it. Last year it was extra robust and I harvested and decided to learn more about rhubarb which according to Billy “grows like weeds” in Wyoming.

I found this article about rhubarb and marked my calendar so I could divide this month.

I figured once I started it would all make sense but actually I ended up digging up this gigantic root ball and I gently tried to separate what I thought were the rhizomes and ended up breaking things apart with big ugly cracking sounds.

I bought two bags of compost and separated the thing into 8 new plants. We’ll see how it does.

Via The Banterist

Definitions for people who get coffee at that place:

Antiventi
A person who rejects company size lingo and orders their beverage in small, medium and large.

Hesitip
The act of waiting until the employee can see you place money in the jar, so you can get credit for it.

(The Banterist is worth your time. Super funny.)

We saw Rebirth Brass Band last night.

The tickets said the doors opened at 8pm and the show started at 9pm. We arrived at 8:25 and first they said they weren’t open yet but then they decided that right at that moment they would let people in. But they told us that the band wasn’t in the building although they’d called and assured the club that they were “10 minutes away.”

The two of us and another dozen people about our age funneled up the stairs and into the club. By the time the band started playing at 9:15pm there was a decent crowd gathering. (This always happens when Bob takes me to something I’ve never heard of. I develop this bizarre misplaced distress that no one will come see the show like I’m personally responsible and the people will feel bad. It usually ends up being packed to the rafters.)

The crowd was half people like us, big music fans (or their significant others) and the rest were hipsters. I could tell because the girls all part their hair crooked and have ironic accessories like purses made out of cans of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup. The guys have ponytails or carefully sculpted bed-head and shirts with heart-stopping patterns. And they all wear pathologically quirky eye-wear.

It was super fun. The band is from Louisiana and plays kick ass party dance funky fun music. We had a blast. AND they finished at midnight. I was in bed by 12:30a.

Via Gawker

Yesterday, Maxim assistant editor Steve Mazzucchi attempted to eat 50 sickeningly sweet Cadbury Creme Eggs.

How come no one ever challenges me to do something like this?

The whole thing is photo documented if you visit the link. Yeah. And actually, I don’t want to be challenged to do this. Just bring me Cadbury Eggs to eat at my leisure. I like the caramel ones, too. (I ate one this morning. I have to eat them in the morning because if I eat one too late in the day, I can’t sleep.)

Here’s one more Dylan quote that I forgot last time:

[Describing an 8 second film of Robert Johnson, blues guitar hero] “He looks nothing like a man with the hellhound on his trail. He looks immune to human dread and you stare at the image in disbelief.” p. 287. I should probably point out that if you follow that link, it claims the film Dylan saw that inspired that description is not Johnson.

I finished another book this afternoon (Sidney Lumet, Making Movies) #12 which means I’m in still on track. The last two books have been non-fiction and I feel like I’m not reading when I read non-fiction. Next is going to be fiction. I’ve still got Momaday and there’s a Proulx in the pile, and I, Elizabeth which is a fatty and a little daunting.

Bob commented that it was an interesting choice to choose books that are short so I can make 50 for the year. I think it’s kind of stupid, myself. I think his logic was that I could sample a lot of different things over the course of the year.

Also, now that I’m reading on the train, it’s a whole different way of reading. A. It’s harder to concentrate and B. I’m reading in short 20-25 minutes bursts twice a day. Barely enough time to get immersed before I have to put it away until later. Not my ideal way to read.

In other news, today the air conditioning was installed. It was much more complicated than I expected. At one point we had 4 guys here. Every time we get something installed it seems like they have to drape cords, cables, wires, pipes, or whatever around the house and under the eaves and tuck under the siding or staple around the deck or something. I’m wondering if this is genuinely worrisome or just something that offends my sense of order.