I meant to post this picture on Wednesday, yesterday, but my schedule has been so hectic as of late.
This is me, obviously, as that’s how I looked on Wednesday, but it’s also more appropriate for how I feel: out of focus. I am searching for clarity, and sometimes I can feel like I see it all around me, but it just isn’t there for me or in me. But I’m okay with that right now.
So, here’s a picture of me that I took of myself and my new phone that also has a picture of me on it that I took of myself. Aren’t you awed by that?
I’ve had a very productive week. I made pesto on Monday, then when I arrived home on Monday night I managed to not leave the house until around noon on Wednesday. I went to my garage to get my laundry out of the car as it had been there since Monday evening. I also went to the ATM, and the grocery store for butter. I went on my bike at least.
I made it out a bit more today, going for coffee and lunch on Lakeshore in the Grand Lake district of Oakland. Made it to the post office and mailed the title release for my motorcycle to the DMV. Went to the comic store too.
I am enjoying this downtime. Finally.
I haven’t driven my car since Monday, aside from taking it to get an oil change at 8:30 this morning. Life on the bike … it’s nice, really nice.
I’m back in California as of last Tuesday. I’m going to spend the weekend in San Franciso dog & house sitting. I’m enjoying my time off, though there have some matters that have required my attention and taken me away from the feeling of liberation and relaxation I’ve been craving. They’ve been minor distractions and have been tolerable.
I dropped my phone into a campfire last Monday night, so have been without phone service since then. I should be rectifying that today. I fell into the fire too, and I thought that I had survived unscathed save for some scratches on my legs, I found a blister on my right calf this morning. Obviously I must have burned it. My fleece has some warping on it, but is still servicable, and my camera case is all messy and partly melted, but it did its job and protected the camera.
Here’s the victim of campfire abuse:
That being said, I’ve lost a significant portion of the numbers that I had stored in the phone, it being a pre-simcard model. I have most of the them stored on my PC, but the ones that I had not yet transferred over, I have lost. [Yeah Yeah Yeah, you gadget whores, the phone was ‘ugly’ to begin with, but I got three good years out of that beast, and was prepped for at least a few more until I fell into that burning ring of fire. — Apologies to Johnny Cash.] If you could send me your digits when you get a chance, that would be super. Just email me!
Speaking of a Johnny, happy birthday Jonny G!
tuesday 19 July 2005 04:15 GMT + 1
Zurich, Switzerland
For the past couple of days I’ve had a terrible ear infection. I wasn’t bothered all of the time by it, but when it flared, it was an inferno. The infection would come and go without warning, without anything triggering it that I could consciously sense.
It was aggravating and pleasant at the same time. No, I’m not a masochist.
This was one of the worst cases of an ear worm infection that I had ever had.
I had the first attack a few days ago. I was walking to the tram stop outside of my hotel here in Zurich, and I suddenly remembered and began hearing a lovely melody in my head. At that time I couldn’t remember anything besides the melody, but I could swear that it was a violin. I kept jogging the melody around, trying to pull out the name of the song, the artist, or at some lyrics, but something distracted me on my way to wherever I was going and I forgot about it.
I was hit again last night when taking some pictures of the decorated teddy bears that are all over Zurich. With this attack, I got some semblance of the lyrics floating alongside the melody, but they weren’t anything that I could remember and look up later. I just remembered echoes and not the words themselves.
I had my player with me, so I began going through artists who I thought it might be: Bob Dylan, The Strokes, the Napoleon Dynamite and Garden State soundtracks, all stuff I had been listening to recently. None of those had the damn song that kept floating in and out with the worm attacks.
The worm started crawling again at dinner tonight. Again I was getting only the vague almost-lyrics, and still tying them to nothing concrete. I let it go and finished my meal.
I haven’t been sleeping very well on this trip, sleeping odd hours on the weekends, and waking up randomly in the middle of the night, unable to go back to sleep. It’s three in the morning as I type this. I was hit again while lying awake. This time something came to me: a W. I looked at the player’s list. Ween? No. Weezer? No no no. Wilco? Yes! That was it. I knew it before even finding the song that I had finally cured myself. It was just a matter of pressing the skip button until the melody that had been haunting me for days flowed into the earphones.
I must have been doing something else when I had listened to the album last. I wasn’t paying attention to the music, and was unconsciously put at risk to infection. You’ve got to remember to practice safe music listening.
“Jesus, etc.”
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Wilco
Jesus, don’t cry
you can rely on me honey
you can combine anything you want
I’ll be around
you were right about the stars
each one is a setting sun
tall buildings shake
voices escape singing sad sad songs
tuned to chords strung down your cheeks
bitter melodies turning your orbit around
don’t cry
you can rely on me honey
you can come by any time you want
I’ll be around
you were right about the stars
each one is a setting sun
tall buildings shake
voices escape singing sad sad songs
tuned to chords strung down your cheeks
bitter melodies turning your orbit around
voices whine
skyscrapers are scraping, your gravelly voice
is smoking
my cigarettes are all you can get
turning your orbit around
our love
our love
our love is all we have
our love
our love is all of God’s money
everyone is a burning sun
tall buildings shake
voices escape singing sad sad songs
tuned to chords strung down your cheeks
bitter melodies turning your orbit around
voices whine
skyscrapers are scraping, your gravelly voice
is smoking
last cigarettes are all you can get
turning your orbit around
last cigarettes are all you can get
turning your orbit around
last cigarettes are all you can get
turning your orbit around
Ah, the things that you find on the internet when you’re up all night in your hotel room surfing.
My life isn’t nearly as sad as that sounds. No, really. It’s not.
Anyway. Enjoy the Starsky and Hutch (newer variety) pinball machine.
Want to see me acting like an idiot on the internet, get called on it, apologize, and then make a new net friend?
Begin on your revelatory path to ronnyd’s idiocy here and then work your way back through the links provided within the various posts.
You don’t get entertainment much better than this for free, kids.
thanks for helping me edit this post, sarah!
I’ve made a change to the posting structure of my journal entries, to fall, yes, I agree, more in line with the masses. As I read more and more online journals, I see that the de facto standard is to post the most recent entry at the top of the page, moving all previous entries, as they get older and older, further down.
I’ve done this only with the journals from 2005 so far, as there weren’t that many of them, and I have to consider whether I want to do this with the rest of the journal too. I had originally considered the formatting structure when I redid the look of the journal about a year and a half ago, and I chose to keep the entries in a more narrative format, so that you could read from the top to the bottom in chronological order as though you were reading a book. I’ll have to see if this change helps me to post more often.
Another consideration is whether to start using some sort of, damn I hate using this word (see below), blogging software. A lot of weblogs advertise the fact that they were created with some sort of blogging software, like Blogger, Movable Type, or WordPress. Anyone have any thoughts on these tools? I think that they would make things easier, as I currently type in HTML directly with a simple text editor and upload using either FTP or an SCP client such as WinSCP.
Of course, all of that describes what I do when making changes via my Windows laptop, and that’s going away soon, as some of you might know. I’m going to have to get familiar with updating again on my OSX laptop, which isn’t a bad thing at all. I started this website on that machine anyway, and besides that machine is mine.
Here’s a neat tool that I was pointed to the other day. It’s the Artpad at art.com. It’s a bit tricky to use on a laptop with just the trackpad, as I’m sure that a mouse would be much nicer to work with.
Here are two of the paintings that I did. No critiques, please!
http://artpad.art.com/?ij1julcdff0
http://artpad.art.com/?ij2tip4w7r0
Check it out, it’s relaxing and not as smelly as real paints. Maybe you or I will be inspired to go to an art store and pick up some of the real stuff.
Posted also to my WEBLOG at people.tribe.net/ronnyd
Don’t misinterpret that title. I don’t hate keeping an online journal. www.ronnyd.com/weblog is evidence of that. That site is not updated as often as I would like, but it’s there and it’s passed its two-year birthday.
I’ve cross-posted this there as not everyone who reads ronnyd.com is a tribe member (though they should be! (www.tribe.net will get you all started. Look for me under this sites email address (ronnyd at ronnyd dot com)).
For me, this need to create geek-speak for something that we happen to do on a computer is infuriating. Maybe it’s not geek-speak, but maybe it’s a hipster lingo. Eh, whatever it is, I don’t like it.
See, I fancy myself a bit of a word man, or least I romanticize myself that way. My vocabulary probably isn’t big enough, nor my grammar strong enough, for the romanticizing, so please just indulge me. I would like to write, be a writer, a scribe, an historian, an investigative journalist, or what have you. I know that I need to get out onto paper some of the really bad and awkward prose that’s lurking in my fingertips in order to get there. I’m working on it.
Back to the point of this post: Stop for a moment and consider the word ‘blog.’ Say it with me now: ‘blog.’ It’s pretty revolting when you say it out loud, isn’t it? Sounds more like you’ve puked up your guts after a night on the sauce that it does in describing the contents of or the act of writing your thoughts into your online journal for god-knows-who to see.
‘Blog.’ A lesson I learned when studying computer science is that programmers hate to type. The less typing one has to do in order to complete a task the better. If you can reduce your code to the smallest set of arguments and functions possible, and still accomplish your intended or assigned tasks, then you’ve hit paydirt. I think that this is the type of mentality that has permeated the online universe. LOL. BRB. TTYL. OMFG. We all know what these mean, don’t we? They’re shorthand, and they do save time when typing, chatting, and, um, journaling. There’s no argument from me there.
But.
Does our language suffer at the altar of expediency? Is this vast archive of thoughts, perceptions, hopes, memories, fears, anecdotes, and dreams, this online archive, going to be looked back on in revulsion because we chose to call this forum that we share in a ‘blog?’ Are our thoughts that we share any less sacred or true because we invent new words, even if born of the need for speed, to describe our online life.
Maybe, maybe not. Maybe I’m just making much ado about nothing.
Should we care all that much? I think that you know my answer, but, yes, I think that we should. After all, when we express online, we’re nothing but black and white pixels on the screen. We have at our disposal this tool called language, and we have rules for using it. The more adept we become in using it, the more clearly our thoughts can pass from one to another. In becoming more adept in our use of language and all of its foible and beauties, there is less chance for miscommunication or misinterpretation of our thoughts or feelings. When used to its fullest power we can express and share more fully.
Maybe I’m just a conservative and hate change and growth. Nah, that’s not it. I still hate the word ‘blog,’ though.
