I'm not updating this very frequently lately, am I? The experience of losing what I'd typed the other night made matters worse, too.

Anyway, let's see ...

I bought stuff Tuesday night. The impetus was that I decided my man-purse had gotten completely out of control, and I set out to ensmallen my entire payload. First stop was the Sprint store, where I replaced my old clunky Qualcomm (nice phone, works really well, great interface, absurdly large by today's standards) with a Motorola flip phone. Sprint finally offers a dual-band small phone in three varieties - a black one, a silver one you can get silly snap-on covers for, and a different silver one they call the "Timeport." Technically, they're all the same phone, but the Timeport includes their computer connection kit in its purchase price and the other two don't. Since I don't particularly need a 14.4 wireless modem, I bought the black one, which in addition to being cheapest is also a couple millimeters smaller than the Timeport. I don't know why. Motorola still can't make a phone with a good interface, but it's much improved over their older Startacs with the one-line LED display and super-cryptic interface.

You can change the "banner" on the display to something 12 characters or less. Mine says "Underpants" now. My old Qualcomm most recently said "Sneh." Before that, it was "...I hate'em" in reference to the line in Repo Man.

After purchasing the phone, I headed to Tysons for a new wallet, since my old Dooney & Bourke has two problems: it's big, and it has one of those plastic windows for the driver's license which has not aged well. I suppose I could send it back to the Dooney people and get that window replaced, and maybe that's a project for a later date. I had bought that specific wallet years ago because it was large enough to hold most European currencies, but still rather thin. I carried it until I adopted the man-purse concept after finding this bag at Whole Earth Provision Company (crappy site, great store) in Austin, TX. They've actually modified the bag a little since mine, and I don't think the particular changes they made were an improvement. I carried that bag for about 4 years (I think) but it was wearing out and not quite serving my needs, and I've gone through two different bags since then with little success. So I ended up at the Coach store in Tysons (I'd seen another interesting wallet at the place in Tysons II where Emily bought her laptop case and the briefcase for Patrick, so I knew of one option already).

I ended up getting two things there: a card case (holds 4 credit or driver's license size cards, plus other stuff jammed into the middle), and a leather money clip. I've done the money clip thing before, so I don't know if this will be an optimal solution or not. The card case/money clip combination has less leather overhead and thus takes up less space than a full-blown wallet, so this may just work. But I have eliminated the man-purse (for now) and I don't have a wallet in my back pocket annoying me when I drive.

While in the Coach store, I heard a song on their sound system with a singer who was oddly familiar, but I couldn't place who it was. The song was "Whatever Lola Wants," which it turns out is from "Damn Yankees" and is therefore an Adler and Ross number. Learn something new every day. I settled rather uneasily on the idea of it being Bobby Darin, but something told me that wasn't right so when I got home I did a bit of research and figured out it was recorded by Mel Torme. I couldn't identify Mel Torme. It amazes me that I didn't recognize the Velvet Fog. Hmph.

After Coach, I stepped into Nordstrom for the specific purpose of buying some actual black dress shoes, since I own none that fit (I have some Bostonian cap toes, but they're a little too small and not quite stylish enough for the suits I have) so I've been wearing Doc Martens the past couple times I've worn a suit. Ended up with some Kenneth Coles which, oddly enough, have rubber soles. They looked better than the leather soled ones which were also from Kenneth Cole. They also had some other shoes from To Boot New York which were too square-toed for what I want, and some really nice but expensive Salvatore Ferragamo dress oxfords that I liked but, well, I don't wear dress shoes enough to spend $380 for one pair. The Coles are monk straps, but I can't find the exact ones on the website to link to the picture. You'll just have to imagine them yourself. Or go to Nordstrom and look around the men's shoe department until you see the ones I got. Also bought a black dress belt since I haven't had one that fit in several years, and I don't want to be discovered wearing a suit with a braided leather belt.

I'm more vain than I tend to let on, it seems.

I've actually been thinking about that lately, because it occasionally bothers me that I don't dress better on a regular basis. But I've narrowed it down to the root cause: there are no casual clothes that fit me. I'm what should actually be a good standard size (a 42L in suits) but my arms are too long and my chest too normal for the clothes that most companies make nowadays. I require a 37" sleeve if I want my shirts to look right, and nothing comes that long except nice dress shirts and XL-Tall casual shirts, which otherwise billow around my chest like I've been inflated and look ridiculous tucked in. There's a fold-in-and-tuck method to try to flatten out all that puffy shirt, but it only works as long as you never sit down or bend at the waist - so trying to use it is an exercise in futility. So except when dressed in tailored suits I look like a schlub or a grad student. I've tried to find fashionable clothes and there's nothing that fits me.

So I wear almost the same thing every day: jeans or shorts, t-shirt, contrasting untucked buttondown on top of that. This is not a wardrobe that's going to enable me to get past the style enforcement at, say, the 18th Street Lounge, which is sad since I can walk there from home. It's also not a wardrobe that's going to aid me in meeting single women in style-conscious DC. So I have reasons for wanting to dress better than I do, but frankly I probably won't bother to try much harder than I have before. I've tried already, and I know the clothes just aren't out there.

Now, wasn't that interesting?

In other news, I'm going to Toronto this weekend, to go hang out with some very good friends and probably help them paint more of their new condo. There will be lots of hanging around with people I like very much. This is a good thing.

link (2000-03-30)

I'm driving home tonight and something tells me to get off the Toll Road in Tysons instead of driving straight back into the District. So I do. Then the little voice says to go to Tower. So I do. Then the little voice guides me back towards the magazine rack, where I spy McSweeney's #4. So I grab it. They also have The Baffler #13, and since I have just recently seen a subscription card for The Baffler at Nicole and Tino's I grab that too. I wander around the magazine rack a bit longer, passing by the DVDs since they're terribly overpriced at Tower (which is why I never shop there) and go to check out.

I'm not paying attention as the guy rings up the items, except I hear him mumble something about "... on sale?" I pay no heed to that remark, but the total is $16 something. I sign the Visa slip and grab my receipt and bag. The McSweeney's has a little green price sticker with the correct price of $22, but it had rung up at the $8 price for issue #3. I leave without complaining, and with a deeply discounted McSweeney's #4.

link (2000-03-28)

I had an entry going here, then I hit the wrong button and lost it. Stupid laptop.

Short version:

I think I'm talking myself into buying a house in the burbs.

Feh. Maybe tomorrow I'll go back and rewrite what I had.

link (2000-03-23)

Yesterday's accomplishments:

Read p. 32->end of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Composed two diaryland entries
Showered
Ate, although not well
Sent another email to the chyk from the personals ad, possibly setting up a datelet for Monday night
Received no confirmation from same

Today's accomplishments:

Walked to Adams Morgan, ostensibly for coffee and breakfast
Gave up on that idea when Tryst was crowded, bought a paper, walked back home
Read part of paper
Talked to Rob
Talked to rents
Watched some basketball
Got the wireless network up, finally
Watched Sunday night's offerings from FOX

I have now screwed around with the kernel on that linux gateway more than I ever would have cared to, but the wireless works, the wireless and wired subnets talk to each other, and I can get onto the net from anywhere in the house now without stringing any more Cat V. Yay. Now I just need to get the cables that are already there minimized and things will be relatively stable.

Until I move.

Today was apparently Hispanic Loitering Day in Adams Morgan, an ethnic culture thing I just can't get. There were just all these people standing along Columbia Road. Not talking, not participating in anything, just standing. Add those to the other groups of people (also hispanic, as it happens) who were strolling in that slow manner had by people who don't really have any concern for time, either theirs or anybody else's.

Now. One large problem in the DC area, and in the District in particular, is this particular demographic, which is not limited to any particular ethnicity it would seem but crosses all barriers except that of income. This demographic, due to the economic divide often caused by a lack of skills (communication and otherwise), is the one that ends up filling all the "service" jobs around here, because anybody who is capable of getting a better job already has. So I have to walk around the loitering or strolling people on the sidewalk along Columbia Road, and while it's annoying it's not a major complaint. They're entitled to spend their Sunday afternoon in whatever fashion they choose, and they're not doing anything wrong.

The problem, however, and it is indeed a problem (let me tell you), is that they're the same people who work behind the counter at the CVS, or who take too long and do a sloppy job changing the oil in your car, or or or. Now, service industry jobs like that mostly suck. I always make an effort not to be an asshole to those people since I know they probably have to put up with long hours of self-righteous boomer fucks yelling at them for the slowness of the line or the fact that they used the wrong oil despite the presence of four quarts of oil in the passenger seat and notes both printed on the work order and written on it beneath the printed one, saying "USE CUSTOMER OIL." And in the case of stuff like CVS part of the reason the line's so damned long isn't that the person behind the counter is particularly incompetent, it's because the design of CVS is hideously poor and doesn't take into account the way people shop in drug stores, and the management of CVS doesn't see fit to have more than one person on duty behind the counter at any given time, and since CVS sort of owns the market in most neighborhoods they're in people can't quite vote against their poor management with their feet. But I digress.

This demographic, the group of people for whom time is not important, make it very difficult to keep living in the District. There is a belief (or at least a willingness to believe) that things would be better out in the suburbs. Of course I've been to CVS in the suburbs and the lines aren't any shorter, it's just that there's no bulletproof window between you and the cashier so the experience is slightly less unpleasant. Safeway in Reston or Bailey's X-Roads is every bit as miserable as Safeway in Adams Morgan. You still can't take your cart to your car (which is why I drive to Harris Teeter for groceries). And out there in the burbs, you get to be that much closer to the self-righteous boomer fucks.

So it's a tradeoff. I can stay where I am, where the neighborhood is funkier, where the houses are more interesting, where there are bars I can walk to, but where the people drive me insane because they don't know how time works (to reference Kids in the Hall). Or I could move out closer to work, where the houses are made of cardboard, all look alike, and can only be painted one of seven colors (probably only one of two colors depending on what colors the neighbors' houses are), but where the people would also drive me insane because instead of not knowing how time works, they don't know how to take time off, and they're so wrapped up in themselves and how much of a hurry they're in that they forget how to be nice people.

Ehh.

I'm afraid if I move out there I'll turn into one of them. It would appear I've started to already, judging by the rant above.

Oh, and a coda on this morning's entry:

I woke up from that dream feeling desperately like I needed to call a person I haven't seen in a year (and who wasn't one of the women in the dream) to apologize for something I did the last time I saw her a year ago. I didn't remember anything from the dream that would have made me think of her or that I needed to apologize to her, but there could have been something else there that I forgot before I was fully lucid. Weird.

link (2000-03-19)

Bizarre dream this morning. I usually don't remember my dreams, so the ones that I do remember always seem especially strange. I guess if I remembered more of them they wouldn't seem so weird by comparison.

Anyway, I joined this one in progress in some sort of swampy outdoor camping area. It was time to retire for the night, and I had laid my sleeping bag out already. First odd thing, I was next to somebody I've known since fourth grade, but who never seemed to like me much. Her sleeping bag was on top of a 6" foam mattress (just a big block of foam, actually), but I had mine on the ground where it could get wet, as it apparently had rained. So Julie (the girl who never really liked me) suddenly discovered that something of hers was missing (memory fails me, but it was something small, like a pair of earrings) and she immediately accused me of taking them.

I offered to help her look for them, but I don't think she believed I hadn't taken them. She stood up and lifted up her sleeping bag, leaving the foam mattress on the ground, and I started to look around for the earrings or whatever they were.

To make this weirder, there were about a dozen other women there, all people I had known, and they were all (including Julie) wearing those old style two-piece nightgowns with the gown underneath that closes between the breasts, and the diaphanous over-gown stuff on top of that (I have no idea what that's called). The other girls/women were mostly ones I had known in school or college, but one or two were from more recent memory. I was never involved romantically with any of them, so their appearance in this dream, together, is a bit of a mystery to me. I was the only male there.

So another girl came out of this house (sort of like a rundown plantation home from Louisiana, where I've never been) in front of which all the various sleeping bags seemed to be arrayed. One of the other women made a comment to her that she needed to close her gown and there was much giggling, but it didn't occur to me to look more closely, as she was facing the other way. I began to fuss with my own sleeping bag, which had gotten wet after sitting on the wet ground.

I realized that I need not be wet that night, so I picked up my sleeping bag (Julie by this time having vanished along with her sleeping bag and the foam mattress) and headed into the plantation home to find a dry spot to bed down. Inside the house was familiar but I can't identify what house it was supposed to be. It was not, however, the interior you'd expect of a run-down plantation home. None of the women in nighties were there, so I assume this was one of my regular dream scene shifts, but I still had the sleeping bag and it was still wet on the bottom.

I found a spot to lay out my bag, in a hallway for some reason, and wondered why it is that I own both sleeping bag and pad but I hadn't brought the pad along with me. My backpack was suddenly there although I hadn't been carrying it earlier, but the pad wasn't in it. I was very confused.

Then I woke up.

link (2000-03-19)

I was right. Second entry of the day.

So Emily and I have been talking a lot this week (we're siblings, that's what we do). And mostly, as with a lot of the conversations I have with people (I don't know if this is unique to me and my friends, or if other people do this too) we've really just been having the same extended conversation that resumes whenever we're back with a chance to talk more.

This week's conversation has been about tech work, money, housing, settling down or not settling down, and other "oh hey, I'm almost 30 and you're 35, let's do the overconsidered navel-gazing expected of people our age" topics. Okay, it's not like that, but I suppose someone listening in might think that.

Unlike the people I overhear in bars around here, Emily and I actually understand the things we're talking about. No marketroid sputtering about databases or B2B or stock options (that possibly because neither one of us has any to speak of) or The Capitalized Internet and how it's really a Whole New Paradigm, or a New Anything. We talk about getting things done, about the steps taken or the work required, about what it means to have a clue in a mostly clueless world.

So among other things that we mentioned (all of which I remembered most vividly until I started typing here in this white rectangle) was the comment that all this internet stuff isn't rocket science, whereupon we realized that most of rocket science probably wasn't what we think of it at all. Rocket science probably worked in its day about like the internet works now - a bunch of smart people said, well, it ought to work this way, so let's try it and see what happens, and then when it worked they revised it, and when it didn't work they fixed the most obvious errors and tried again. Repeat until you've got something that does all the things you need it to do, and wait until somebody needs it to do something new, different, or better, and then you're back to trial and error. In other words:

Rocket Science = Educated Trial and Error

So by that definition, a lot of internet work is indeed rocket science. It was good for a chuckle.

Other stuff discussed:

We talked about the house-buying idea, quite a bit. Em and Patrick have been looking for housing in Haarlem, and the market there is apparently more insane than the market in DC. Haarlem's full. There's not really any available housing, so when stuff goes on the market it's available to realtors to show privately for a week, then it's listed in the paper so people who don't have realtors can schedule an appointment the second week, then on the Friday of the second week everybody who's interested puts in a sealed bid. Highest bidder gets the house. This has led to an appalling increase in the sale prices of homes there. I don't feel anywhere near as bad about the DC area after hearing that. They're prepared to spend an amount of money it scares me to think about, and for what they'll spend they'll probably get something horribly cramped and with a bad commute (although what passes for a bad commute there is no worse, and possibly better, than what we have here). Yow.

And it's weird having these conversations, because with people you've known a long time (or, in the case of Emily, all your life) you mentally lock them into a certain age. Emily's been married five years now and has two kids, but to a certain extent my mental image of her is somewhere around age 22, finishing up her undergrad at Rice and picking places to apply for law school. I'm sure it's even weirder for her, as she's probably got me frozen at age eleven, two black eyes after losing control of my bike and ending up on my head, after she'd convinced mom that I was old enough to ride over to Jonathan Taylor's house instead of being driven.

We also talked about stuff I'm doing at work, and how I'm afraid to go into meetings and start telling people what I think out of concern that I'll irritate or alienate them. I'm involved in one project that's always been the responsibility of my department, and there's another project going on at the same time that overlaps a lot with what we're already doing, and we might be coming up with a solution for their problem while we're solving ours. I don't, however, want to go into their meetings and say, "your project is wrong, shut it down and give the budget dollars to us," but that's precisely what needs to happen.

So I relayed all this to Emily, who was reminded at that point of something that had happened years ago when I met an actor in a play she was directing. She had been giving him some direction on a scene he wasn't getting (he was Pozzo in Waiting for Godot) and it was mostly flying over his head, it would seem. So I showed up to meet her, and upon being introduced to me as her little brother, his first words were, "Your sister intimidates the hell out of me."

But wait, it gets better.

She's now doing web work for an organization in Europe, and has gone from being somebody who just maintained a couple pages to being an integral member of their web team. This is after not knowing anything about HTML at all before she started doing that first page. So now she's working with a couple other people, maintaining a rather large site, and she recently went on vacation. So somebody else who had just started helping with the site did a bunch of maintenance ... and her editing software turned all the links on every page she edited from .html to .htm, thus breaking something like 600 links over the course of a week.

Emily discovered this upon her return, ran a link check with Dreamweaver, corrected the changes, and sent an email saying what had happened and to look out for it in the future. A couple weeks later, the same thing happened on a smaller scale, so Em sent another email. The response:

"I quit." It seems that Emily intimidated that woman too. This is what I'm afraid of doing. We are both, apparently, born intimidators.

Emily's always accused me of being much worse about being smart around other people than she is, so I've learned to try to be careful when it's possible that I'm going to make people think I'm condescending or insulting or presumptuous or any of those other things people think of young people who actually have opinions that they'll defend. So I told her about my worries of going into these meetings, basically having to tell people that their project is going down the wrong path and they should give the project to me and the department I work in, that we'll be able to do it properly.

The good news is, I've talked to one of the people who's sort of in charge of part of that other project, and she's willing to steer stuff in the direction we're going, and I wouldn't be too surprised if she gives the project to us if we ask. It may not be so terrible after all. And I haven't had to show anybody up in a meeting yet. While I do get some satisfaction out of tearing stuff apart when it's done wrong, I can't expect to be able to work with anybody if I keep demolishing their projects in public.

So far, nobody I've introduced to Emily has said, "your brother intimidates the hell out of me." I guess I'm doing okay.

link (2000-03-18)

Much to say, but my brain's still a bit scattered. Maybe today will be a two-entry day. Mercury went direct Wednesday, and my brain's more able to put words together in the right order than it has been in a couple weeks.

To that end, here's entry number one.

I'm reading, like many people I know (and many more I don't), A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I just got to the end of chaper four (the end of the "nice novella length" section of the book). Many people have liked it quite a bit, others have been rather unimpressed (although those readers invariably comment that Eggers is a good writer, but the story isn't holding them).

I've found it almost too close for comfort. I'm enjoying it quite a bit, in contrast with Amanda's opinion of it, but it does strike a bit too close to home sometimes and I have to put it down. I think this is because even though Amanda and I get along quite well, and ironic distance seems to be the only way many people we know face life, her ironic distance is much more deeply ingrained than mine (and apparently Dave Eggers'). Eggers, like me, has used and continues to use irony as a buffer, a way to keep things from bubbling up to the surface and being painful every day. But where he and I would appear to be similar, and different from Amanda et al., is that somewhere under there we're still trying to work out those things that we bury underneath the irony. I suspect many people of our generation have resigned themselves to the ironic life and left their emotional baggage packed, the suitcases arrayed neatly by the door but carefully stepped around daily. Eggers and I (and others, it would appear), can't help but unpack, but we don't do a very good job of putting things away, so we keep packing and unpacking, rearranging, trying to figure out how to make the pile of baggage go away or get smaller.

While his tragedy and mine are different (he lost both parents, 35 days apart, to cancer; I lost my older brother to an unheeded stop sign and a cement truck), there are many similarities in the way we've gone through life since then. We're roughly the same age now, but he was 21 when he lost his parents and I was just shy of my eleventh birthday when Mark was killed. It's weird to read his book. His neuroses parallel mine: he does these entire scenarios in his head in the pauses of daily life; he envisions entire futures spawning from the slightest change in plans, reaction, or behavior; he fancies entire conversations with other people (well, Toph at least; I imagine he does it with other people too although perhaps not in the book) where they both portray themselves and say the things they probably would say if those conversations actually happened, and where they play the role of his subconscious or the Greek chorus of his life, telling him the things he already knows but refuses to deal with.

I've met lots of people who rely on irony to get them through the day. Hell, they're most of my friends. Where we differ is in how we deal with stuff, where we choose to be direct and handle problems up front, where we instead avoid the problem and hope it goes away on its own. Suck recently harped on the suddenly overused "elephant in the room nobody's talking about" metaphor, but in my case I keep talking to the elephant in the vain hope that he'll see things my way and leave of his own accord. When that doesn't work, there are a million distractions to be found. Eggers resorts to the drawing of a stapler. But he also wrote the book, in the apparent hope that catharsis might help.

Dear Elephant,
Please go away.
*Heart*, me.

I see much of myself in the way Eggers portrays himself. If I had a little brother (instead of being the little brother myself, as was the case) I'd probably do the same things he did. He keeps trying to fill all of Toph's time, trying to make him super-normal, constantly keeping him (and himself) distracted. That's me. Because all the time we're not distracted, we're back to talking to the elephant. As an eleven-year-old, I built ever more complicated structures out of my Legos. Now I buy CDs. That constant need for distraction is still there.

Weird.

We'll see how I react to the rest of the book.

link (2000-03-18)

So I had a response this morning to my online personals ad.

Wait, you say, what online personals ad. You never told me about any online personals ad. I thought I was your friend.

Well, there are some things you don't yet know about me (Zorak is many things) and the fact that I've had an ad up at Swoon has been one of them. I'm not telling you which one. I'll buy anybody a beer who can figure out on the first try which ad is mine. (Offer limited to people I'd normally be drinking beer with already; membership is available to qualified applicants; inquire within)

But anyway, I was actually thinking about it this morning, and how I might as well go ahead and remove it since it hadn't gotten any response in any of its various iterations, and probably wasn't going to any time soon if at all. I was reminded of something I saw in their little online "forum," where somebody said, "help, I put my ad up a week ago and I've only gotten one response, what am I doing wrong?" The replies were all, "You got a response?! What did you do?"

This also follows a conversation with Emily earlier this week where she suggested that Washington might be a good place to try the personals ad route, and that her friend Carey had done it with some success in NYC. She doesn't know about the online personals ad either.

But I got a response, which was in my email this morning right after I'd been thinking I ought to delete the ad entirely. I sent an email back around lunchtime today. We'll see.

link (2000-03-16)

So I have been remiss and haven't added anything here in a week. Sorry.

But I'm sitting here with the last part of a nice bottle of wine (Sebastiani Merlot 1996) and a full belly from dinner (steak, sauteed in butter because I don't have a grill, asparagus, garlic mashed potatoes) and it occurs to me that I probably ought to fill you in.

The week: well, the week was the week. Did actual work, had meetings where stuff actually seemed to be accomplished or decided upon, installed some software for testing and actually tested it and was able to get some good results out of it and throw some feedback towards the vendor. Realized on Thursday that I know exactly how I'm going to solve not only the existing problem in front of me, but the existing problem that's been in front of some other people in other departments too.

Picked up Emily at Dulles on Friday, and she gave me a hard time for getting in the door a minute after she'd gotten through customs and started looking for me. I told her that still meant I was two minutes ahead of her, since it took three whole minutes for her to appear after I cleared customs at Schipol. Took her back to the office and gave her the nickel tour of the data center, and she was suitably impressed. Introduced her to Tino, and to our manager, and then ended up going out for drinks and dinner with Tino and Nicole.

Emily faded promptly at 9:00 (only 3am her time) so we paid the tab and headed home, where she had to play with her new computer for a half hour before falling asleep. Apparently she also woke up a couple times in the middle of the night, but since she was in another bedroom and I sleep like a fitful rock I had no idea this was going on.

Saturday involved an intended brunch at Thyme Square in Bethesda, which turned out to be lunch because they only do the brunch on Sunday. Afterwards we stopped in at a furniture store on whatever street that is, then went shopping for a laptop case for her and a doctor's bag style briefcase for Patrick, and she ended up buying both at the same store in Tysons II. I was amused to hear her bargaining with the guy behind the counter, since nobody ever bargains with anybody in stores here. It worked. She got the prices she wanted.

We then went into the office, since it had turned out that the CD-RWs she'd burned with her data before leaving Haarlem were effectively blank as far as any machine I owned could tell, so we used work's bandwidth to download the web sites she needed. Took about five minutes total to download both sites and their cgi-bin directories. Except for the guys painting the elevator lobby who had all the doors taped off, thus making entry rather difficult, that went well. We then went to the House of Nicole and Tino to see if their CD-RW drive would have more success than the CD drives I had available to me, which turned out not to be the case. Then to dinner, which started out as being at Fuddruckers but then (after a cell phone call from Nicole) turned out to be at Jerry's Subs and Pizza, where I tried not to express the extreme discomfort I suddenly found myself dealing with, due to gas cramps caused by that morning's lunch. Oi. I don't know if I was successful or not. I still ate almost half a pizza. I finally burped enough to make the problem go away, just in time to be able to sit still for a movie.

We saw "Cider House Rules." Emily, many years ago, had handed me her paperback copy of the book and said, "you have to read this." She then followed up for the next week or so until I actually started, at which point she didn't need to follow up anymore. The movie's good, but apparently works much better if you have read the book and can fill in your own continuity where the plot jumps. The theater was full, and we ended up sitting scattered around separately (Nicole and Tino sat together at least, but I was in the solo chair next to the wheelchair spot in the back of the house, and Emily was over in a single chair by one aisle, next to the wall). This is perfectly fine for seeing the movie itself, but it makes it impossible to make snarky comments about other movies' trailers to your companions.

I didn't actually mind sitting alone, which then begs the question of why I don't go to movies alone anyway. Eh. I guess it's because the social interaction before, and the ability to bounce commentary off of somebody else after are what make movie going fun.

Of course I didn't comment to anybody what had been a rather striking moment to me (but one that threw me all the way out of the movie for a bit), when the director staged a scene by starting out with a closeup of Charlize Theron's ass. It's a gorgeous ass, I have to say. But it broke all my concentration on the movie and made me think about nothing more than her ass for a couple minutes. It's the only nudity in the film (and in a film that gets most of its plot from the morality of performing an abortion, that's rather surprising), and I'm not sure it really fit.

But I was thinking about her ass again this morning, and I thought it sad that the next morning the scene that stuck in my head was of little consequence to the plot, so then I had to deconstruct why it was that the ass was featured so in the first place, and then why it stuck in my head like it did.

In answer to the first question, I think it's a symptom of a larger problem in movies nowadays, in that cinematography is being confused with direction. I've seen some beautiful, lush films lately that sucked as movies. They sure were pretty, but somewhere somebody let the beauty stand in for plot, cohesiveness, or direction. So in the case of Charlize Theron's ass, what occured to me this morning was that there's a thin line between a nude portrait that's just a nude portrait, and a nude portrait that in spite of the fact that it's not about sex, is about sex. The camera shot on her ass, which then backed up to become a full picture of her stretched out nude on a bed, was a portrait that both wasn't about sex, and was. But it was a portrait, a still life, not a scene in a movie. This morning I found myself wondering how it was staged, how the director had her model for the camera (and it was indeed modeling, not acting, at that point). And the thing is, an ass isn't necessarily about sex, but most of the time it is. You don't tend to see somebody's ass unless you're otherwise involved with them, so there's this whole connotation about staring at her naked ass (which the camera did for us, making sure that we stared for the proper length of time) that says "This Scene Is About Sex." But at the same time, I'm not sure if we're supposed to stare at her ass that way, or just appreciate it as a portrait of a nude lying on a bed, some modern Modigliani or Degas that just happens to be done in light-on-screen and not oil-on-canvas. So then my thought this morning was that every one of those painters way back when probably had a woody the whole time they were painting, and while we smack the label of "art" on something because it's painted and it's beautiful, that doesn't mean that it can't be sexy too, which is something fucked up in this American culture of ours where we try to convince everybody that sex and beauty are separate things and never the twain shall meet. Fah.

The thing about this is, I don't want to be obsessing over Charlize Theron's ass, and I don't think it's what the director had in mind, but I'm doing it anyway. Which means that it was out of place in the film. Gratuitous. Bothersome even more, because what Homer (Tobey Maguire) says to Candy (that's Charlize) afterwards (that he's seen everything but this is the first time it's ever meant anything to him) is actually a plot point, but I found myself sitting there thinking about how nice her ass was instead of really paying attention to why that's relevant. Luckily I'd read the book so I knew why it was relevant already. But still.

The answer to the second question is that I probably need to get out and meet more girls.

Today brought more computer dinking around with Emily, then a late breakfast at Whiteys (which had lost its little entry shack since last I was there), then we were thinking about wandering around the Tidal Basin so Em could get a good look at the cherry blossoms. It turned out to be a bit too cold for her to wander around outside, so I drove over by the old place Amanda and I had rented, then we went to Pentagon City, to Borders and points in the mall. I spent, actually I have no idea what I spent, buying A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius like everybody else I know, plus Miss Wyoming (how can I miss Wyoming when I've never Wyomed?), O'Reilly's Learning Perl, a couple books on information design, and a coffee table book from Phaidon on 20th century artists that was remaindered at $20. We wandered around the mall trying to figure out what to get mom for her birthday and sorta decided on a digital camera, which the mall isn't a good place to buy and which we didn't buy online once we got home either.

Also bought groceries, drove home in a roundabout way past one side of the Tidal Basin (it's actually marked with "Cherry Trees" in ADC maps) where it turned out the cherry trees weren't in full bloom yet, watched some teevee (introducing Emily to Futurama), and then cooked the aforementioned dinner.

The weekend's various conversations included stuff about work and goals, and unintended intimidation of other people, and well while I should probably recap the results here I think I'm going to call it a night. They can be recounted later.

link (2000-03-12)

Something's fishy over at the Gap. Today marks the second time I've gone to a Gap Outlet store and heard a song by James that you can't buy in the US yet. The first time it was "She's a Star," a couple years ago, about four months before "Whiplash" came out. Today it was "Afro Lover," which is on "Millionaires," which hasn't been released in the states (but which I own an import copy of, and which, coincidentally, I had been listening to on the drive down to Potomac Mills).

So I went to Potomac Mills today, fighting lots of traffic (on a Sunday, no less) and a zoo in the parking lot, just so I could buy some shelves at IKEA so I can make the boxes of wine glasses on my kitchen counter turn into wine glasses on shelves and empty counter space. I also ended up buying a bunch of socks and boxer shorts at "Gap Body," (it seems both silly and practical at the same time), a coupla solid one-pocket t-shirts at the regular Gap Outlet along with a pair of pleated navy twill shorts (where I heard the aforementioned James song), and five bucks worth of Bad Badtz Maru stuff at the Sanrio store (two note pads and a "zipper pull," which is a little plush toy with an elastic loop you can tie onto a zipper or other looped item). Looked for a down comforter at the Ralph Lauren outlet after hearing about Nicole's find but there weren't any there except twin size.

Bought the shelves at IKEA (Ljusdal, with Frovi (there's a umlaut over that o) brackets), plus some screws and anchors which don't go together, dammit, so now I have 1/4" holes in the wall with anchors in them, and I have to go buy some bigger screws at the Home Despot tomorrow. Ugh. Also bought a Babord shoe rack and an Emily bath mat, which will coordinate, oddly enough, with the Emily comforter cover I bought a couple months ago. Got out of there for under $100, surprisingly, although I think I pushed it closer with a stop at the Swede Shop on the way out for cinnamon rolls and oatmeal crisps to take to the office.

Accomplishments of the weekend:

• Did all the laundry
• Washed the dishes
• Cleaned a bit of the house, although more needs to be done
• Got some sun today in the car (yay healthy red glow!)
• Paid bills tonight
• Ordered new checks
• Started putting up the shelves (to be continued)
• Practiced
• Watched "Shakespeare in Love" on the MagicTV, took it as somewhat of a sign I need to keep up with the opera thing since the show must, you know ...

Still need to do the taxes. Oh well. Can't do everything all at once.

Helped Emily order a laptop from Dell, although I'm not entirely sure the order will be completed since they misspelled her last name and they also needed the confirmation number off the back of her credit card, which they said they'd call and get, but didn't.

It's late. Bed now. More tomorrow.

link (2000-03-06)