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What This Poem Might Be
Posted 10:27 AM, Feb 26, 2007 |
At first glance, it looks as if a crowd of ants
has walked through a pool of ink,
dragging their insect feet across the paper.
They have flung droplets of ink
from their antennae like beads of sweat
from an August runner.
On second thought, it may be a map to a foreign land;
each dot is a castle, a leaning tower,
a strange city with white sand beaches
on every corner and streets of winding oceans.
One ornate, inky sprawl is the sultan’s garden,
a winding path surrounded
by plants with fingers for roots
and wings for leaves.
Maybe it’s an optical illusion,
a picture of an ancient explorer
plotting a path to an unexplored land.
Hold the page just right and cross your eyes
and you can breathe life into him.
He will speak to you in a language
you don’t know but can somehow understand.
He will speak truths from his world,
things that are true in your world,
things that will always be true,
and you will write down every word he says;
you will fill the page with scrapes and scribbles,
and then you will turn to the next page
in your book
and start all over again.
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The Year of the Golden Pig
Posted 11:03 PM, Feb 24, 2007 |
February 18 marks the Chinese New Year, and this year rings in the year of the fire, or golden, pig. Depending on who you ask or which calendar you use, the year of the golden pig comes once every 60 or 6,000 years, or somewhere in between, instead of the usual once every 12 years. (I was unable to learn what makes this year a special year, but for me, the year of the pig is always special, as both Woody Allen and Flavor Flav were born in the year of the pig.)
Well, my year of the pig started off by having the universe remind me that I am clearly not in control. Today was one of those days where the stars all align in the same way that, say, pigeons might align on a power line underneath which you are walking. Today was like a lazy Susan filled with foods you hate - spin it all you want, wherever it stops is going to be unpleasant.
My usual Saturday morning Frisbee game was cramped by an attendance of only 5 people, which isn’t enough for any sort of Frisbee game.
Then, after lunch, the EC and I went the House of Records down on Pico Blvd. We expected to find records that we wanted, but were dismayed to only find multiple copies of old albums by Chicago and John Fogerty and stuff like that. So that record store was a bust.
We walked to Trader Joe’s down the block to get curry sauce and bagels. Unfortunately, the checkout lines were so long it made one wonder if there was an impending nuclear winter. We set down our basket on the floor and just walked out.
Then, we went to another record store on Wilshire Blvd. Again, for me, nothing doing. The EC found a record she was looking for, but not me.
The EC also realized that she had forgotten to buy shampoo and needed some, so we crossed the street to go to the Rite Aid. Unfortunately, the main door that opens onto Wilshire was closed, and we had to walk around the building to get in the rear door. That may not seem like a big deal, but keep in mind that I was already having a bad day, and this was further evidence that things were not going well.
So we got what shampoo, and then went to Best Buy on Sawtelle, in vain hopes of finding any records I wanted. But they didn’t have any - sometimes Best Buy has weird, unexpected stuff, but not today. Lots of John Fogerty, though.
We returned home and sat around for a while and then went out for dinner with some medical people (doctors, I think they’re called), one of whom wanted to celebrate the Chinese New Year. So some of us drove for an hour and a half in traffic out to Monterey Park or someplace to meet the others at this Chinese restaurant. As we were driving to the restaurant, the couple of people that had been there described the food using words like “sick afterwards” and “fungus.”
While waiting for the seven of us to be seated, one of our party asked the hostess how long it would be and was told to, basically (via translation), “Be quiet. Don’t say anything.” So we left, and decided to get Mexican instead, which was great, because, while I often feel sick after eating Mexican food, there is no fungus involved.
Unfortunately (because that’s the only kind of fortune I was having), there was no room at the Mexican restaurant, so we ended up going to a Vietnamese restaurant. The food was not-so-good. We each ordered and then traded dishes, family style. Most of the dishes involved something that once lived in an ocean and thus I’m not a huge fan of. The ones that involved chicken and beef were not especially great, either.
Then we returned home.
Oh, and I only got a credit card bill in the mail today, too.
So this year, not starting off so well.
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Chain Note
Posted 12:53 AM, Feb 19, 2007 |
Yesterday, I came back from some lawn bowling and someone was parked in my space in the underground garage. At a loss, I parked in someone else’s space, figuring I would just go down later and move my car to my space. I tried to pick a space that I didn’t remember having a car in it in the past, but how often do you pay attention to something like that?
Well, anyway, when I went down to move my car, the car in my space was gone, and I had a reasonably courteous note on my car about how it was inconsiderate to park in that person’s spot, and they were now forced to park in someone else’s spot.
Originally, I felt a little bad about parking in their spot; just because I had been inconvenienced doesn’t mean I should inconvenience others. But I felt less bad when I found that they were just as willing to inconvenience someone else when they were in my shoes. Had they come back and someone had been in their spot, they would have had wasted no time parking in my spot.
Anyway, I envisioned the person whose spot they had parked in writing them a note about how they had to park in someone else’s spot, and then that person writing a note, and so on, until everyone had a note on their car.
I moved my car and then wrote a reply note on the back of the original note, explaining that I hadn’t meant to inconvenience them, but did so only because I was inconvenienced, and tried to move my car out of their spot as soon as possible. I left it on the hanging number sign over their parking spot (all the spaces are numbered), and I guess they got it, because it was gone later. Rather than sign my name, I simply signed my car’s make and model and color, hoping to spark some conversation between cars. Alas, no response note was received, and the garage remains a quiet place.
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Somewhere in Pasadena
Posted 3:13 PM, Feb 17, 2007 |
So I met Jenny Kim, the only person to ever guest host my blog (not this one, but the old one). She emailed me back in February, 2002, out of the blue, in response to a post I had written on the February 9th (I did the research - it’s not like I marked it in my calendar) about Liquid Plumr. She wanted to know how it worked because she also had a clogged drain that needed help. So basically, our paths crossed because of plumbing problems. Not too many folks can say that.
She guest-hosted way back in the day (in mid-April, 2003, thanks again to my intrepid research staff).
So I guess we’ve known each other for almost 5 years, but it took me moving out to California for the two of us to finally meet.
It was good. Weird, but good. And it was like picking up with an old chum who knows a lot about you but that you haven’t seen in a while.
She said the process of making friends is weird, in general. Yeah. Especially when two people have to make an actual effort to meet and be “real” friends - most of the time that stuff just kind of happens. Or something.
Well, anyway, Jenny is a cool kid.
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Dioramas and Dorks
Posted 12:02 AM, Feb 16, 2007 |
This guy, Thomas Allen, makes dioramas out of the covers of old romance and pulp fiction novels. They’re awesome. They’re also being used in some reissues of James Ellroy works, which is where I found them, via Bookslut. It was a long chain of things that led me to bring you this link.
In other news, today I saw the first ESPN report from Spring Training. Baseball is coming. It’s been a long offseason. I’m a baseball dork.
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bang!
Posted 12:01 PM, Feb 13, 2007 |
I was driving home today from running errands, including going to the bank, where they told me if I wanted them to convert my coins to cash, I had to roll the money myself, to which I was all, “Well, I might as well just open my own bank in my living room, then,” and have decided to plug meters with my change - I used a nickel to pay for 4 minutes of time for me to stop at the library and get a book, although the library was closed, so that errand was a bust, too, as were trips to the Gap and the non-aflame Shoe Pavilion - and so anyway, I was on my way home, puttering along at 35 miles per hour on Montana Ave., near the country club, and there was this Blazer/Suburban-type vehicle behind me. I’m a driver who constantly monitors traffic behind me, and I noticed that this guy was starting to move over to the right, as if he were going to pass me. (The speed limit is 35, but it does seem particularly slow.) The only problem is that Montana Ave. has only one lane of traffic going each way, and then a lane’s width designated for parking.
Maybe you can see where this story is going.
So I’m watching him drift over to the right, and then:
bang!
he smashed into a parked Audi. He was going 35 miles per hour, and he hit it pretty hard - it was definitely not a glancing blow. I had my windows down and sunroof open, because it’s February in California, and the
bang!
was surprisingly loud. The most striking thing about it (really, no pun intended) was that I was watching him drift, wondering what he was doing, and then he stopped immediately while I kept going at 35 mph. It was kind of like that scene in Star Wars where Luke hits the brakes on his X-Wing and the other spaceship goes flying past. Kind of like that.
I pulled over and jogged back; a small crowd had already gathered. He hit the Audi hard enough for it to hit some sort of moving van parked in front of it. His whole windshield was spidered with cracks, and his airbag had inflated. Someone was helping him out of the driver’s side door, and the guy was obviously in a daze. He didn’t appear to be injured, but just sort of tottered over to the grass and sat down.
It isn’t entirely clear to me what happened, whether he just zoned out, whether he was on his cell phone, who knows. I walked back to my car and drove home, which is the anticlimax to this story.
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Channeling Wynton Marsalis
Posted 11:51 PM, Feb 9, 2007 |
I was only in Concert Band in high school once, despite playing trumpet for 6 years and being forced to practice daily for the first two years. I finally made it - finally, as if I was really trying - to Concert Band as a senior, when I was placed somewhere in the phalanx of noncommittal seniors and wunderkind freshmen that made up the “Second Trumpet” section.
We were preparing for a band contest in Chicago, and, while I don’t remember the name of the piece, I do remember that there was a series of sixteenth notes, maybe 18 or 24 of them in a row, all played at a high E, that was for some reason given to me personally. It was intended to be played by one person, but not some mostly-uninterested second trumpeter (although I never saw the conductor’s score, so maybe…)
I always had trouble with high Es. There are a number of notes on the trumpet that are played with the same fingering combinations. (There are only three valves on a trumpet, for a total of 2^3 or 8 total fingering combinations. There are I-don’t-know-how-many notes in a staff or whatever, but you can see the problem.) And high E was one of those that was played open, i.e., with no valves depressed. I always had trouble with those - in my 6 years of playing, nobody ever really explained how you get different notes that have the same fingerings. It just kind of happens - at least that’s what I was led to believe. And the higher the note with each combination, the more difficult. E was, I believe, the 4th note with an open fingering, if you started at the bottom and counted upward. Maybe more, but anyway, details.
So I had to play this high note that I could barely play if you attached a rubber hose to the mouthpiece and just gave me a bellows, and I had to play a lot of sixteenth-notes, and I had to play them in some band competition.
I never puzzled, at the time, about why this particular assignment was given to me, a senior who would be stowing his trumpet away in his closet in 6 months. What did I have to gain? No idea.
So I practiced and practiced, actually, but never figured out what I was doing wrong (or right, if anything). In lessons with my band teacher, we talked about “double-tonguing,” some process that allows you to play notes faster, ostensibly by actually growing a second tongue. Gross. No way was I going to do that.
I never got the hang of double-tonguing. Well, not mentally, anyway. It was a lot like my experience in playing different notes with the same valve combination - it was just supposed to happen, except with that, I had way more time to just let it happen. I didn’t have the same luxury with an impending band competition.
By the way, this was one of those competitions in which our school band “always” placed “first or second” or “always” got a rating of “exceptional” or “mind-blowing.” I think that was all a fiction invented by teachers. I heard this every time I turned around, about our school’s debate team, speech team, government team (?), etc. Maybe I went to the most talented high school in the state, but realistically, no, I did not.
So this one day in band practice, we’re playing this song, and here comes my part, and so I play it, just like I had every other day. Or so I thought. But after I finish my part and put my trumpet down during the following rest, people in the band are actually turning around and looking at me with wonder, like, “Wow, he finally got it right.” And I had. The band finished out the song, my band teacher said that it was fantastic or some other praise, and we did the song again.
As if I felt like I needed to prove that I really didn’t understand what was going on, the next time through, I played it like I had every other time, which is to say not exceptionally well. And nothing else was ever said about my strange channeling of Wynton Marsalis.
At the competition, I played it just like I had every other time, and the judges commented that my sixteenth-notes sounded “muddy,” if memory serves. The only time I ever played them correctly was that one mysterious time in band practice. How that happened, along with the reason the part was assigned to me in the first place, will probably remain a mystery forever.
I’ve seen my high school band teacher a couple times since then, but have never thought to ask him what that was all about. Maybe he wouldn’t remember, or maybe he would but wouldn’t have had a good reason for assigning me the part, or maybe, who knows. I’ll have to ask, next time I see him.
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A Little Less Interesting
Posted 11:39 PM, Feb 8, 2007 |
Ha ha, no, the title doesn’t refer to the status of this blog as of late, ha ha, insert more self-deprecating laughter here, ha ha, and here, too.
I don’t much follow the celebrities, you know, or even the quasi-celebrities. I don’t really understand celebrity. I couldn’t tell you why Paris Hilton is famous, and most days, as I flip past things like Access Hollywood, I get kind of a puzzled look on my face, but then I see a baseball bouncing on an infield or two football players crashing into one another and everything goes back to normal.
But now that Anna Nicole Smith has passed away, won’t things get a little less interesting? She was always out there on the periphery of my celebri-vision, always turning up in strange places.
And, sadly, is this really the best photo CNN could find?
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Jell-O
Posted 11:27 PM, Feb 8, 2007 |
Reading a Murakami story tonight, he refers to eating some chocolate Jell-O. We don’t have such things in America, but maybe they do in Japan, or maybe he’s just taking artistic license. Or maybe he just means pudding. It’s hard to tell.
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New #1
Posted 11:38 PM, Feb 6, 2007 |
Not like I actually keep written lists of these things or anything, but Haruki Murakami is now “officially” (as official as it can be for a non-list-keeper like me) my favorite author. Many times in the past have I extolled the virtues of Mr. Murakami, so I won’t repeat those here. I will note that it’s been almost 2 years since I last read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, so maybe I’ll start that again. (Since reading that, I’ve also read 2 other Murakami books, and just started the most recent one available stateside this evening.)
Also, a new one, After Dark is coming out May 8th here in the U.S., so there’s that to look forward to.
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Groups I Am Biased Against,
Possibly For No Good Reason
Posted 11:32 PM, Feb 6, 2007 |
People who drive cars nicer than mine.
People on cell phones.
People with small, white dogs.
People who are significantly older than me and do not return courtesies like holding open doors.
People who ignore societal rules, like those who bring extra-large groups to bar trivia, only because the rules do not specifically bar it.
People who don’t make space for you on the highway, even though you have your blinker on and they aren’t in a hurry.
People who think swearing for its own sake is funny.
…
I suspect there are more.
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Turn of Phrase
Posted 4:39 PM, Feb 2, 2007 |
A few weeks ago, the EC and I tried out for Lingo. Earlier this week, we got called to be on the show but couldn’t make it work with our schedules, so that turned out to be a no-go. But then yesterday someone called me from the Gurin Company, which produces Lingo, and offered me an interview as a Production Assistant on the show.
For those of you, like me, that don’t know what that means, first of all, it isn’t particularly exciting. I’d basically work with the casting group, prepping contestants to be on the show, making sure they know what to say, where to stand, etc. It’d be a temporary position for the month of February, essentially, which is the only month during which they’re filming. It would also be a good way to get my foot in the door of the game show industry, a way to get noticed.
For those of you that know me, one of my dream jobs, after astronaut but before princess, is to be a game show writer/researcher. So, it might surprise you that I turned the job down. My issues were that it was a temp job, and not a very well-paying one at that. I know that it’s a foot in the door, but I guess I’m not willing to take a job like that just to get my foot in the door. I always hear about people taking jobs as secretaries, or on movie sets getting people coffee and stuff, just to get a start, and that doesn’t appeal to me. In fairness, it probably doesn’t appeal to them, either, but they’re willing to do it to get where they want to be.
Maybe this means I don’t want to be where I want to be bad enough, if that makes sense. I feel like I worked in a job that I didn’t really like for, well, forever - I have yet to have a full-time job that I really liked - and I’m just really wary about taking a job that I can sense, going in, I’m not going to like.
In other employment news, I also got a call about a job for which I interviewed back in June or so and “came in second.” The job is now available again, and the company contacted me. Right now, I’m waiting for them to call me back to set up an interview, etc.
The question you, as a reader, are supposed to ask now is: “Will you enjoy this job if you get it?”
Answer: No idea. But it’ll be something different, and working with people - kids, in fact - and mathematics, so back in the educational vein, but not standing in front of a class. I think I could like it. But in any event, we shall see what happens.
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