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version seven. http://demongin.org |
To Do List
A short run-down of what has been on my plate lately; a sort of mea culpa for last week's nearly total radio silence.
Monday, 2008-11-10 | Lists
| Now that's what I call music. |
- Inspired by Nick's advice about how those who are seriously looking for a creative job should throw away the resume, I checked my resume out of subversion early last week, considered that it was exactly the sort of plain-Jane pablum that Nick (rightly) castigated as completely irrelevant and forked it into a traditional, black-and-white PDF version and a much cooler, up-to-the-minute web version. I have been spending most of my copious free time over the last week working on that project: expect to see a URL for that shortly.
- The standing, tacit agreement for the last several thousand years between people who gather to become intoxicated together is that they are doing so primarily in order to express their emotions crudely and directly in a context where they will be judged less harshly for having done so. For at least a 51% majority of my peers, this means expressing romantic longing or anger physically. For me, meeting up with dudes last Saturday night to drain multiple handles of whisky meant pulling off the following totally awesome Internet prank: yes, yet.
- I have been playing in a new band. We had a really busy weekend. We are currently formulating plans to unveil some of our work in the very near future. I cannot, of course, comment on any specifics at this point. Let it suffice for me to note that I am a.) acquiring a new set of callouses and b.) suffering from a new (to me) form of RSI (Wikipedia) that is much more painfully debilitating that any wrist injury from which I have suffered in the past.
- My new-found RSI is aggravated by the fact that I have been attempting (for just over a week now) to type correctly in addition to blindingly fucking fast: over the past two decades, I have developed the annoying habit of keying everything to the right of the J with the index- or middle-finger of my right hand.
- I can now run nearly seven miles in just over 50 minutes. That's about an eight minute mile, give or take. I'm not proud about that, but I like it as a baseline: when I get out to do the thing, I can ballpark that even if I drag my ass or the wind is out of control or whatever, I'll be back in an hour (tops) and will have run six miles (at least).
- I also spent some time last week whipping up a new creative-writing website: https://AllNightNeonSunrise.com is a kind of experiment in sorting, contextualizing and re-contextualizing information. Designed to function sort of like an essayist's grease-trap and capture the connections between (or among) diverse ideas that suggest themselves during the course of a day, are compelling enough to write down but, finally, not compelling enough to reformulate as an essay, https://AllNightNeonSunrise.com is an RSS stream moored within an obscure, user-hostile HTTP website (designed from scratch in python) that will, once we get going on it, spew baffling associative free-thoughts into the Internet.
- I also, during the last week, managed to attend Barack Obama's election night party in Grant Park. Artie Jordan, who remains a great friend to me in spite of my self and for reasons that I can't even begin to imagine, made it possible. I dumped my pictures in my Picasa.
There is precious little I can say about being in the presence of the single most befuddlingly and disarmingly charismatic person to tread upon the Earth during my lifetime that hasn't already been said. That "precious little" amounts to the following: a.) BHO is much slighter in person than he is on the Jumbo-tron and b.) the effect his presence has upon his immediate surroundings is most easily described as one that causes a "crackle" or "coruscation" in the air. His walk from the rear of the stage caused me to feel a feeling that was, in retrospect, a lot like waking up in the middle of the night and being certain that a television somewhere had just been turned "on": I have heard this described by others as "animal magnetism".
I am making good progress on retraining my right hand to default to the correct "home" keys primarily because my right hand has been reduced to a barely prehensile claw-like ruin of inflamed tendons during the last two weeks and the searing pain attendant upon each right-handed keystroke provides me with a unique opportunity to reflect on which key is being pressed, which finger is pressing it and how eager I am to be removed from this rotting meat sack into which I was born and placed within a more durable and robust life-support apparatus.
