if you have a lover, here is the most important thing
that you can do. you should go over to that lover and
tell them that you are grateful for their existence, and
their love. because one very, very sacred thing that
exists in this rather bleak-at-best world is knowing that
someone out there gives such a passionate damn about you,
your health, your success, and your well-being, and is
willing to take you seriously and meet you halfway in
their life.
Elmo is on Emeril right now. He’s wearing a Christmas cumberbund, and his hair is combed. This is the most adorable thing I have seen today. How can I study when Elmo is on Emeril?
For as long as anyone here can remember, wedding
receptions in Pittsburgh have featured cookie tables,
laden with dozens of homemade old-fashioned offerings
like lady locks, pizzelles and buckeyes. For weeks ahead
— sometimes months — mothers and aunts and grandmas and
in-laws hunker down in the kitchen baking and freezing.
Then, on the big day, hungry guests ravage the buffet,
piling plates high and packing more in takeout containers
so they can have them for breakfast the next day.
Boy do I know what we are doing when we renew our vows.
Today was not a great day because I lost my keys in a snow bank. On the coldest day of this season. 0°F (before windchill), and I’m on my hands and knees outside the Rec Center, with my red bike tail-light to light up the dark, snowy ground, trying to figure out what the heck just happened.
The U of M doesn’t plow snow around the bike racks (in fact, they tend to plow snow into the bike racks), so I had just struggled to unlock my bike after a workout. The U part of the lock and the shank part fell off my bike into the snow bank after I unlocked them (which never happens). At some point after I grabbed the shank from the powder, the keys fell out of it. I retrieved the U part and then realized — NO — that I didn’t have my keys. 30 minutes into the search, my wet socks frozen hard, I had to give up.
I went back to Moos tower and, after calling Mykala to say “please come after work, halp!” I sat in the library and worked for a while on studying for this impossible radiology test on Thursday. All I could think about was that, there was a 10 square foot area where my keys were, and I couldn’t find them. My bike was fake-locked (the U lock jury-rigged to look like it was locked) outside. Worst case scenario: someone was going to take my bike and I lost my keys for good.
Mykala came by after work. She found the keys in the snowbank.
When John Gruberlinked my piece on unscientific laptop repair numbers just before Thanksgiving, traffic at tumbledry jumped significantly. It was fun to finally, truly test my homebrew website code (when Gruber links a site, the traffic tends to crash the site of interest) — I’m happy that the code I wrote can survive a decently large torrent of traffic. How large? Year over year on November 24, traffic here was up 30,000%.
It’s fun to attract that many eyeballs. One would imagine that more readers is only a good thing, but it can put you in a box. For example, I realized that pandering to the demographics of the visitors in that burst would keep a steady flow of folks stopping by. But boxing myself in to one single topic didn’t feel right at all. If I write tumbledry for my visitors and not for me, I’ll never achieve the authenticity, passion, and magnetic style of prose I’m always reaching for but never quite attaining.
I realized I’m still finding my voice. It’s been about 10 years since I began my personal website experiment, and I still don’t quite know how I want to do this. The only thing I know for sure: I’m never going to stop.
The high rising terminal (HRT), also known as uptalk,
upspeak or high rising intonation (HRI), is a feature of
some accents of English where statements have a rising
intonation pattern in the final syllable or syllables of
the utterance.
Ahhhh; much better. I’d been looking for the term for that style of speaking (where everything is a question, not a statement) for years. Listen for the HRT during any interview with a teenage girl (or guy, ok).
“It’s very, very difficult to want to give 14 hours a day
[to making a record], to continue to choose music over a
lifestyle,” he admits. “This is the part in a lot of
people’s careers where they usually come in to the studio
for four hours a day. I’m not a four-hour-a-day guy, but
I can definitely feel the pull: do you wanna go into a
room where you’re basically gonna excavate, emotionally,
for 12 hours? Or do you wanna go to a restaurant where
everybody gives you golf claps for what you’ve already
done?
I think the phase “emotional excavation” is very very interesting.
Best use of plinky piano counter-melody: “The Brilliant Dance” by Dashboard Confessional. That album was released 8 years ago. 8. Years. Bad things have happened since then, but I can remember nothing but good things. I think that means that nothing truly bad happened. That’s interesting.
In 2003, John got a copy of “A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, A Scar” by Dashboard. I remember looking at the album art, a cassette tape ground into asphalt, and wondering what the new album would sound like. In those early days of ripping music, there were some interesting quirks. I had to remove most of the spaces from “A Mark…” to make it fit in the ID3 tags of the MP3 files. Dashboard had all these really long song names, so I’ll always think of “The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most” as “The Places You Have Come to Fe”.
8 years from now, it’ll be 2017. I hope to remember only good things.
