I drew an org-chart while we waited for the check; Peter Mulvey was outstanding.
Personal
Mornings in Carolina
I can’t help that I am naturally enthusiastic to meet someone new, fascinated with their life story, and immediately inclined to invite them to see a concert or a movie or a show. It isn’t flirting, it’s my obsession with finding like-minded people.
There is a woman who rides the trolley with me, if I am running five minutes behind schedule. She is pretty, with a slight frame, lightly freckled with dark hair that seems meant to be tucked behind ears, and lips so thin that they disappear when she smiles.
A few days ago she waved me down from across fourty-third street. “I thought I was running late,” she said breathlessly as she matched pace with me, “but then I saw you.”
I’ve been fascinated with her for a month now, her thin-lipped prettiness and her mysterious destination after she gets off the trolley at my stop. In our last conversation I learned she was from North Carolina, which explained her slight accent. I went fishing for more.
“Where do you work, anyhow? You get off at nineteenth, right?”
She works, as it turns out, at the Art Museum. She made her job sound clever and enviable, talking about scurrying around the photo archives like a mouse, climbing up two stories of filing cabinets to just barely glance the sun peeking through a basement window. It sounded altogether romantic, and she seemed to think so, describing the tunnels that connect from one building to the other – catacombs. As as she spoke I found myself utterly fascinated, wanting ot ask her for coffee or lunch so I could listen to that wonderful romanticism some more. And then I realized that that would sound an awful lot like asking her on a date, and that the last time I did something like that the girl in Borders though I was either stalking her or actively advertising that I was hoping to cheat on my girlfriend.
So, I suppose I’ll just have to wait until the next time I see her on the corner.
Oh, What a World
Despite the dreary day, I was singing to myself as I left the house. What’s a dreary day in the face of good sleep and getting paid today? Nothing, I say.
Anyhow, the day, it was dreary, and I was turning the corner, being Rufus Wainwright under my breath when, quite suddenly, a squirrel comes tumbling down the screen door of the pizza parlor on my corner to land at my feet, a nut secure between it’s jaws.
We exchanged glances.
Not wanting the squirrel to go into a mad panic when he would effectively have to run through me to get away, I continued my musical stroll.
Much to my surprise, the squirrel began to follow me.
Odd, I thought.
Still singing under my breath, I returned my glance from my new companion to the ground in front of me only to noticed a smattering of tiny birds pecking away at the sidewalk. As the squirrel and I approached them, they sedately looked up at us and then took wing – not in a mad escape, but to rest in the limbs of the tree I was about to pass under. And, one of them began chirping a lovely, regular melody, which caused me to pause in my walking (but not my singing).
Yes, in fact, it did sort of work as counterpoint to the Rufus Wainwright song I was singing under my breath.
Rodent sidekick, check. Flock of cooperative melodically gifted winged friends, check. Unassumingly singing a beautiful song, check.
Life was playing some sort of peculiar trick on me, and that I was in the middle of a Disney cartoon musical. A very peculiar, live-action, Disney cartoon musical, with “Gay Messiah” on its soundtrack. So, really, more like Moulin Rouge.
Taken with the whimsy of the moment, I began singing out, and sweeping my overcoat around me, which seemed to fairly alarm my squirrel friend, still with nut in mouth, but he did not flee. As he had yet to be spooked, I went into all-out pirouettes, now singing more or less at the top of my lungs.
It was around then that the construction workers renovating the house on Osage must have noticed me. I felt their dreary-world glares weigh in on my cartoon musical extravaganza like sopping wet cotton blankets. I stopped mid-spin, letting my voice catch in my throat, and looked to my animal backup-singers for some support.
Squirrel had fallen several steps behind me, and was idly munching his nut, paying me no heed. My aviary chorus had ceased their song, and were nowhere to be seen.
The construction workers continued to stare, quite dumbly.
Hands shoved into pockets and intently showgazing I resumed my walk.
I hate musicals.
Pop is Too Hard
I am very carefully learning how to type the right way.
It involves a lot of auto-correct.
Apparently, those little nubs on the F and J keys are to let me know where my index fingers should be positioned at all times. They are “home keys.” And, get this, I should be using all five fingers on each hand to type, including my pinkies, because they all have a role.
Now, this concept at once annoys and intrigues me – the former because I already type more than 80 WPM without all this high-fallutin’ home key nonsense, the latter because I could obviously be typing faster if I would use more that four of my fingers at a time. My current method involves a sort of halfway touch-typing with my dexterous right hand while my left effectively hunts and pecks with a single finger. As a result, not only am I noticeably slower on left-hand-heavy words, but almost all of my mistakes are on the left.
Some concepts of proper typing, however, are eluding me. For example, am I to believe “pop” is really pinky-ring-pinky? Are those tiny, secondary fingers really expected to do all that heavy lifting so quickly? Pop, pop-culture, popular, populist, pop-up …
I suppose typing is just one more thing to add to the “Shoulda learned to do it right in the first place list,” along with guitar playing, singing, sit-ups, and tying a tie.
But, hey, I did just touch-type that whole paragraph with no errors and my eyes closed, so maybe I’m on to something. Or, at least I can do more daydreaming on the job.
Being either morally or financially opposed to the ownership of a television, i have been following the Presidential debates through a variety of online resources. For the first i resorted to digesting every article i could find. For the second i read a verbatim transcript. For the third debate, i started my decision-making process with following the absolutely hilarious blow-by-blow by MSNBC blogger Keith Olbermann.
I like the idea of evaluating candidates based on the text of their performance, rather than the accompanying image; after all, i’ll feel our next president weigh in on my life more than i’ll watch him. However, my friends pointed out that by simply reading a transcript i was missing velocity – how quickly and surely the candidates reacted.
It’s all rather moot, i suppose, because we already know who i plan to vote for, but the entire process churns my stomach. At least i’m relatively insulated through my ignorance of all television, print, and radio media, but i still feel as though every brush i have with the election is making me dumber just by proximity.