February 2008

Year 7 of the grand playlist experiment comes to a close (or a beginning?) with a mish-mash of songs that drifted around me. I thought about including The Jefferson’s theme song for moving, but I think it’ll wait until next month. Yes, that is Gnarls Barkley, Slayer,Bo Diddley and Lilly Allen in the same fucking playlist.

1. 2 Minutes To Midnight - Iron Maiden
2. Run - Gnarls Barkley
3. Shake A Fist - Hot Chip
4. Truckin’ - Cancer Rising
5. I Can Tell - Bo Diddley
6. San Bernardino - The Mountain Goats
7. LDN - Lily Allen
8. Lately - The Helio Sequence
9. Bag of Hammers - Thao
10. Altar Of Sacrifice - Slayer

-Matt

More Adventures

Setup: Gretchen is somewhere in San Diego searching for some place, and I am playing tech support guy. We talk about and forth about how to find a place, and then this:

GW: Okay, I gotta go, a bird just shit on me

M: Really, a bird shat on you?

GW: I gotta go, it’s the second time it’s happened since I got here.

M: Twice? two birds shat on you?

GW: There are birds all over the place and they are shitting on everybody

M: Weird, well, I hear that’s good luck.

GW: Bye.

My Girlfriend Be In San Diego

A half-remembered transcript from this morning. (IE, I made much of it up)Let me set this up. I am at work, and talking to a couple dudes when I get the call. I ignore it and she leaves a voicemail. I call her back.

M: Hey, what’s up

GW: Did you get my message?

M: No, I never listen your messages and you never listen to mine, keeps this relationship spicey.

GW: Like your colon

M: Like my colon? What?

GW: I am in Albertson’s

M: So?

GW: They sell liquor, I am staring at a half gallon of Tanqueray and it’s 30 bucks. Should I buy it?

M: Are you going to drink it?

GW: No, oh wait, here’s a half gallon of Albertson’s Brand Vodka. I’m going to buy that.

M: What are you going to do with it?

GW: I dunno, what should I do?

M: Keep it as a souvenir, or bring me back a San Diego Zoo mug.

GW: I’m going to drink it.

M: Alright, well, I gotta go, if you drink all that, don’t get pregnant.

GW: Okay, bye

Anyway, this being her first trip in like 6 years, I hope to hear more of the wonders of California from the perspective of a boozy Gretchen. I’ll post them if I get them, because I am boring.

Entering the Dead Zone

 

After tomorrow I am entering a 5 day period I’m going to call (very ominously, I might add) “”"The Dead Zone”"”. Both my internet connection and my parking space are expiring at that time, so I’ll be driving around the city for the entirety of the weekend and early next week searching for free Internet and reading books by David Sedaris. In any case, we’ve reached the point in my moving schedule where it’s time to start packing in Greedy Pines, but you know, not packing it in too much because I’ve still got to live there.

My plan is this for the next 5 days:

1. Do all my dishes and put them somewhere high up.
2. With the exception of one bowl and one spoon which I will use to eat cereal. (I have enough to last at least a fortnight!)
3. I will also allow a pint glass, because I have lots of beer to drink.
4. Come up with complex plans of great in importance to steal a crapload of boxes.
5. Make a fort for Ramona out of the boxes
6. Watch her ignore the fort and attack my chair with reckless abandon.
7. Order 3 days worth of Chow Mein
8. Unlock Eternal 3 level on Katamari Damacy
9. Put on tight pants
10. Wash 5 pairs of underwear
11. Wash 13 Socks
12. Use odd sock and 6 quarters to make rudimentary weapon.
13. Watch “The Wire”
14. Eat all of the Chow Mein and sit in all 5 pairs of underwear, grading each on performance and snugability.
15. Knit

Anyway, after that I pretty much don’t know, because I think that only covers Saturday really. Sunday maybe I’ll call U-Haul and attend a Unitarian Church.

Attack! Attack! Attack! Attack!

A Disguise!

Originally uploaded by Tzpkcht Kzmsrskstlrz

I like to think that when I take off my glasses nowadays i gain some sort of wonderous super powers, though in reality it pretty much just makes me feel like I’m drunk and everything gets a little fuzzy.

In any case, I have nothing to report other than there is nothing to report. It’s like two weeks until move-time, and I am actually having to force myself to not start preparing and doing a lot of spinning of wheels about it. I have a bunch of post-it notes on the wall, and none of the dates start until next week sometime.

So, in the meantime, and probably for the forseeable future I have to take it easy, take it slow and try to manage my antsyness, a newly-minted budget, and a manila envelope full of secret documents

So if I seem like I’ve disappeared, it may be that I have simply donned a disguise and am playing it so low-key, that you have failed to notice the vigor and fearlessness coming from my direction!

Did that plant move? Do I smell rash-medication? Has someone drawn a penis in the dust on your car? Does that meter maid have a pervy mustache and his hands gnarled up excitedly?

It could be me, so watch the night skies!

Back to School

I enrolled myself in a project management class a couple of months ago and pretty much forgot about it until yesterday afternoon when I checked my work schedule and saw large chunks of purple blotting out the sun in the middle of the week.

Work education, or at least classes taught at work is an interesting place, where you aren’t really expected to pass or fail or anything, you just show up and try to make the best of it and try to glean some useful nuggets of wisdom. Project Management can be boring to learn, but it is valuable and interesting to a certain extent. Just hard to try and sit still for 8 hours while I know email is piling up behind the scenes.

In moving news, it looks like 24 days away from the drop-dead date by my count. It’s my 6th move since 2003 so you’d think it’d be easy by now, but as always something will go sideways and I’ll be here ranting about it. In the meantime I’m keeping quiet and playing it cool until I have something interesting to talk about. Which I don’t.

Aha! A project better than deep frying?

While trolling the internet today I saw a project about how to make a polaroid pinhole camera, it seems a little complex, but I can imagine that it would make a cool Saturday project or so. I’ve got a pack of unused Polaroid film, so maybe it could make it worth while.

On an unrelated note, I also was given plans today by Jimmy J as to what we will do in case of zombie attack, which I guess it seems like I should have thought of by this point in my life.

In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

There was once a discussion over at Blogspedition about people coming to Neutral Milk Hotel’s album In The Aeroplane Over The Sea in different ways and different times. Something personal that strikes me about it is that when Gretchen and I broke up for that one half-year or so,  we both listened to it quite a bit, albeit separately. She probably knew it was about Anne Frank, I did not.

Anyway, just saw a post on Stereogum about the whole thing that was well written and interesting. Apparently this year marks the album’s 10 year anniversary, and they posted a bunch of videos of the songs being performed.

I can’t recommend this album enough. If you have a record player, buy it on vinyl so you can hug it like a care bear, I think it’s around 12 bucks for a new copy.

Thinking about Caucusing

So yesterday, Faye mentioned the caucuses on  Saturday to me, and I sort of mentioned that it’s all a joke due to super-delegates and the like, and really the whole primary being a sham in many ways. But in any case, as I thought about it throughout the day, I considered the fact that it might just be fun to get out and actually participate in the political process anyway, so as far as it goes, I am going to do my best to get to the caucus on Saturday afternoon. (For the Democrats naturally)

I’m actually pretty opened minded about each major democrat candidate. I think each of them would do a good job, and I think McCain will be tough to beat for each of them in different ways, so I’m going to let the speechifying do their dirty work for me. I’m leaning slightly to Obama, but am open to be swayed to Mrs. Clinton (much to the chagrin of my sister). Hell, if there is a sizable group of people clinging  to the Kucinich campaign (like Troy), I might help those guys out too.

Mitt Romney Dropped Out and I am sad.

So Mitt Romney is a quitter on top of being a douchebag, albeit one douchebag I hoped would win the primary and then stumble and asshat himself to an easy loss in the presidential race.

6 Years ago, if someone had told me that John McCain was pretty much going to be the nomination of the Republican Party, I would have been pretty happy, I liked McCain pretty well, thought he was a smart politician and someone who would be adept at changing the political landscape, but in the meantime, he’s sort of become a lackey for Bush and the war.

Which pisses me off for obvious reasons.

Scrapper’s point about McCain and the chain of command from his military days is an interesting one, I can sorta see where supporting your boss in good times and bad is good in the military because it can save you from being court-marshaled, but doing so just so you can have one last good run at the presidency makes you a lapdog for the worst president this country has ever had (even worse than Hoover you ask? Probably.)

The other reason it makes me mad is that he’s a pretty good match against my slightly favored candidate of Obama, in that he can overcome Obama’s charisma with a sort of crafty, knuckleballer approach. Whereas up against Clinton, I can see him having a much tougher time.

The issues? Bah!