It only gets louder when you cut off your ear

Giving them a flashlight is useless too

The search for the newest Skin is starting to rev up.  Although it’s more than two weeks to the deadline for applications we’ve already received a dozen and Millie says some of them are really good.  I’ll have to take her word for it at this point since I don't know how to make my own evaluation based only on the documents we get.  Got the word yesterday from Nadine that when this person is hired he/she will be added to my roster of faculty so I’m going to be taking a lot closer interest in the selection process this time. 

I totally lucked out with FNG who is every bit as amiable, low-maintenance and capable as initially assessed, and while I’m hoping this will be true with the next hire it wouldn’t be smart to count on it.  Especially the "capable" part.  In three years on this job I’ve seen way too many people who I’m reasonably certain are fit only for academia because they’re constitutionally incapable of taking care of anything resembling practical details in their jobs and/or lives.

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P.S. Well aware that this is the fifth entry in a row where most or all of the content is on the private site.  That's just how I'm rolling these days.  Write me if you want the password.

They sit at the table and throw us the scraps, for christ's sake leave us something

Another long week concluded and largely a quiet one.  Too quiet, kemo sabe.  My office-neighbors are either working from home or running off to meetings and sometimes that’s a good thing but not lately.

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Go back off in your jackyard

This post is almost 100% family-stuff of the sort I customarily reserve for the private version of Ear.  If you've got the password it's here.

Put me down but don't blame me for what you did

A few days back writing a 100-word song blurb for the 1975-1980 page I got to use “disgruntled” - one of my favorite words to employ sparingly – in reference to the fall of 79 when I was playing Rundgren’s “Heavy Metal Kids” frequently to express my disgust with, in quintessential college sophomore fashion, just about everything.  It’s such a funny word, so thoroughly onomatopoeic, though unfortunately in this era it seems to always be followed by either “ex-employee” or “postal worker.”  Which is exactly why I employ it sparingly.

That said, I’m certainly feeling more than a bit of the ol’ disgrunt this morning myself.  Not to say it's not mostly minor shit:

1. There’s a jackhammer tearing up the sidewalk five stories below my office window, and what sounds like another periodically working inside on the floor above. 
2. The kitchenette microwave has disappeared – it was Anna the Bimbo’s and she apparently finally came over the weekend to pack up her stuff – and while today’s packed lunch is still borderline edible at room-temp it’s nothing to look forward to. 
3. My left ear hurts from the sharp little prong-y things the acupuncturist taped in various recesses of it – the first part of a weight-loss treatment we’re trying out – and even though by themselves they’re not so painful unless you sleep on that side, as it happens that is the side I sleep on and I’m supposed to keep them in for a week at least.  Fuck.

but still.  And to cap it off my head hurts and I’m feeling dragged out and bitchy from sleeping poorly, which last night had little to do with the prongs in my ear.  Early in the evening I had a brief but tense conversation with my brother E. in New Hampshire; I thought it was going to be about me coming to visit around Christmas, he thought it was going to be about telling me to get my head out of my ass regarding my relationship with our mother.  Guess which it actually turned out to be.

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A pocketful of mumbles, such are promises

An absolutely beautiful, calm day yesterday and another one coming up: weather is spectacular, sunny and barely pushing mid-70s, and the family downstairs has taken an impromptu trip out of town so no screaming fits and slamming doors for two days.  Or inhaling Andy’s second-hand smoke if I want to sit on the porch.  Bliss all around, in other words.

I don’t know what would happen if all of a sudden I had nothing to complain about.  It’d be a disaster.  Good thing that’s not in danger of happening anytime soon, even if with Bush leaving office I am correspondingly short on subject matter.

Good lord, the election was almost a year ago.  I need to get a life.

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Three lullabies in an ancient tongue

Another long work-week mercifully drawing to a close.  Nothing major planned for the weekend except watching the second season of Californication and/or settling in with a couple of books.  Both books are non-fiction which is a significant deviation from my usual reading pattern, though since one is a bio of Stephen King and the other is Least-Heat-Moon’s latest travel-tome I’m not exactly worried about straining the brain.

Something else merciful is how quiet the office is.  Millie, Cathy and Dialtone are all out until Tuesday and Smelly Gal is so far nowhere to be olfacted, halle-fucking-lujah.  Work-volume has slowed considerably and my computer’s in fine health; had a nasty scare Wednesday afternoon when I had to reboot after a crash (positively the only time that’s ever happened to me on OS X, I cross my heart) and then couldn’t log back on.  I was sure I’d done something beyond my ken that hosed the hard drive and spent a half-hour sweating until I fixed it, though I found out the next day that the problem was actually network-based and I neither broke nor fixed jack-shit.  Too bad about all those panicked calls I placed during that half-hour, though.

I’ve had this iMac for three years now and it’s been remarkably trouble-free.  I can’t tell if this is because it’s a sound piece of hardware or because I read MacWorld and take away a fair idea of how to keep it well-maintained or maybe I’m just lucky.  Either way it’s a good thing because Nadine tells me I’m not getting a replacement until this one dies.  That chafes some because I would like the added real estate that the 24-inch model affords, but otherwise I’m good with what I got.

Come January I’ll have had the home iMac 3 years itself and it too has been remarkably trouble-free, so I hope if something’s going to go wrong it’ll happen soon before the Applecare expires.  If all goes well the current plan is to wait another year at least to replace it, maybe even with the 24” model which can only get cheaper in the interim.

Spent a lot of time in front of the screen last night, manually checking for duplicates in iTunes and assigning ratings to songs and doing various other administrative stuff that’s more fun than it sounds.  Also working again with iWeb 09 with which I’m going to publish a long-delayed portion of my personal site: the one where I present and blurb my favorite songs from five-year periods (1970-75, 1975-80 and so on).  I’d been intimidated because I’ve never designed using streaming audio before but this latest iWeb makes it bozo-friendly like you expect Apple products to.  Now all I have to do is provide text content which conversely is harder than I thought it’d be.  Or maybe I knew that already and that’s what was intimidating.  Whatever.  I first got the idea to do this almost two years ago and it’s good to be getting off my ass on it.

(Yes, even to the point of choosing a Partridge Family song.  Just going to suck it up and be brave.)

You wouldn’t think it’d be so difficult for a self-professed frustrated music critic to write 100 words apiece for songs I’ve loved for thirty years and more.  And sometimes it isn’t; for the Zep’s “Your Time Is Gonna Come” it suffices to post that I’ve always had a thing for swirly organ intros, or that I actually don’t much like Cat Stevens’ “Longer Boats” until the drums come in near the end.  But when it comes to explaining that such a total piece of tripe as “Court of the Crimson King” made it on the list just because it evokes the moment I first heard it huddled around the stereo with my sibs one Christmas Eve, well… try putting that into words.  Let alone keeping to 100.

Not to mention limiting myself to 20 songs from each period.  The cuts are painful: “Jumping Jack Flash,” the Band’s “Chest Fever” and Elton John’s “High Flying Bird” for 70-75 alone so far.  “Bird” was on the list well before last week when I stumbled across it used to such masterful effect in Californication's S1 finale, I rarely admit how much I've loved that tune and it astounded me to realize someone else might love it just as much, but it was never going to make the final because each period gets just one song from an artist and “Can I Put You On” trumps any other Elton John up to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, which fortunately falls into 1975-80.

And so on.  80-85 is going to be the hardest in this regard; already got 30 candidates and haven’t even concluded the nomination process yet.  Kim Wilde is that period’s Partridge Family and it’s going to hurt like hell to bump the Rain Parade or even Romeo Void for her.  Or maybe I’ll just say WTF and include all thirty.  Benefits of using your own site, right?

This is all to say I’m probably going to be continuing to spend time in front of the screen over the weekend, perhaps even at the expense of reading.  That’s often what I mean when I say “nothing major.”

Purify our misfit ways and magnify our crystal days

One of the people I’ve reconnected with via Facebook is my good friend Nancy C____ from Bard.  Just last week, in fact; a mutual FB compadre let me know she was on and Nance and I have been tersely corresponding since.  I say tersely because when someone was one of your two or three best friends in college, someone with whom you spent many many hours of the day and night running your mouths both under and independent of the influence of a variety of drugs, someone who was the singer in your very first rock and roll band but it’s been 20 years since you lost touch – well, any resumption is going to seem truncated by comparison.  But even a little goes a long way when it comes to close buds like her.

I’ve not written about Nancy much if at all in these pages; we hung out a lot for the first few years after Bard while she was still living in Barrytown, but once she moved to Cincinnati at the beginning of 1985 things more or less dropped between us.  The next to last time I saw her was February of that year; I was living at my mother’s house in PA then and she swung by with her soon-to-be husband on their way to Ohio.  She was driving her car of the previous few years, something I called The Shark – red and American and early-70s sporty, some kind of Pontiac that aimed to be a fatter version of the Camaro.  We had dinner that night at DeStarr’s, my longtime favorite West Chester restaurant.  I don’t remember much else because I was pretty out of it from the night before, which I’d spent tripping with friends in Haverford and not gotten in until 5:30 with no sleep since.  Nancy chided me none too gently: “Sean, you knew I was coming and you didn’t have to bake a cake but you could at least be 50% awake.” 

The last time I saw Nancy in the flesh was August of that same year when we each flew back to Manhattan for Michael and Suzanne’s wedding.  I was sleep-deprived then too, staying a couple of floors down in an apartment so infested that the cans of poison-water around the bed-legs didn’t keep roaches from intermittently scurrying across any exposed skin.  Shudder.  Also I was having sex with my hostess in that apartment, the Frenchwoman I’d been pursuing for years, so it would be polite to say my attention was elsewhere at the time.  While I remember a number of things about that Labor Day weekend, regrettably few of them have to do with Nance.

The last time I remember hearing from her was 1989, in the days when people still actually sent letters.  She had been planning on coming out to CA for my wedding but had to cancel on short notice.  Michael didn’t make it out either – he was in law school then – and given my marriage’s short duration I’m now glad I didn’t make either of them party to it to that extent but at the time I was very disappointed.  Especially with Nancy, which was pretty selfish of me considering she had to stay in Cincinnati to be a witness in the trial of someone accused of murdering her neighbor.   (All the more selfish in light of me not being at her wedding the summer after she moved to Ohio.  I had no money at the time but probably wouldn’t have gone if I had.)

Nancy was a letter-writer, excelling in both quality and quantity, and I bet she still is.  Unfortunately as I’ve noted once or twice before I’m not, and I let things lapse between us fully once I started grad school.  She had a two-year-old boy by then, was married happily to a fairly successful photographer, and one day I sensed how radically our lives had already diverged and would only continue doing so.  Up to then I’d always thought she’d continue to be a fringe-dweller like me, like it seemed we’d both been well-prepared for by Bard, but once it became apparent she wanted instead to have something approaching a normal American middle-class life it felt to me like we weren’t going to have much to talk about.

Last week Nancy told me she’s still married and her son just graduated from college.  Also, she has a daughter who’s 10.  I’m sure the 12-year gap between children is one of those highly interesting Nancy-stories she used to have so many of and I look forward to hearing it someday.

When I pointed her to a story on my website written in reminiscence of one of our ’84 adventures, an August day walking from Tivoli to Barrytown under heavy shrooms, she wrote back that it must have been a different year because she had a car by then and was done with walking.  I told her “Yeah, you didn’t just have a car, you had The Shark but we weren’t going to be driving it anywhere that day” and her final response was “Oh, of course, it’s just been a long while since I’ve thought about that time.”

Which is not even close to true for both of us, as you might be able to tell.

Your futon, your cigarettes, I can't stand them anymore

It wasn’t warmer yesterday, not by a long shot.  In fact it rained pretty much the whole bloody day and I was lucky to get my morning errands – laundry and delivering the newsletter to the FMA – done on my bike right before it started.  So yeah, another pool-less 24 hours, 48 if today continues gray and intemperate.  I’d complain but I’m still really not in the mood for swimming.  Don’t know what that’s about.

In the hubbub of last week I let a notable anniversary slip past: the 10-year of my first trip to Austin.  Flew in October 8th to visit Angela a little over a month after we met, flew back to Oakland on the 12th.  Unfortunately my record-keeping for that stretch leaves a little to be desired and today I couldn’t tell you exactly all of what we did during those four or so days.  I remember the weather was pretty cooperative, sunny but not too.  Angela introduced me to Strangers in Paradise and I spent a lot of time on the couch reading book after book, which you might think an odd thing to do on your first weekend with your new lover until you find out what a couple of geeks we both are.  We had a lot of sex, some of which in its intensity and intimacy went way beyond my understanding and experience of sex up until then and mostly since too.  We went to Shady Grove for the last meal before I caught my flight back.  Probably went to a burner party too, because then as now a weekend doesn’t pass here without some kind of burner party.  Everything else is lost though, at least for the time being.

Which is a pity mainly because I’d like to know what I thought of this town the very first time I saw it, back when I knew nothing about Austin apart from little bits I’d picked up from Reivers lyrics and Gina Arnold’s mid-90s dispatches from various SXSWs.  Most salient, back when I had not clue one I’d live here someday.  The night I flew in I thought chances were equal I’d never be coming back here after the weekend, that it was all too likely whatever Angela and I felt for each other on the playa was a fluke based on time and circumstance and sure, we’d have some fun for a few days but would probably let it go once they were over because who the hell wanted a long-distance relationship to further confuse things in life?

Well.  You know how that turned out.

I’d like to say I instantly fell in love with the town just like I did with Angela herself but I suspect that would be just a little bit revisionist.  I’m not sure I actually saw enough of Austin that weekend to fall in love with.  What I do remember is being disoriented at how different it was from what I’d gotten used to during 15 years in the Bay Area: Austin had great swaths of ground undeveloped, low buildings, trees everywhere, uncovered creekbeds, etc.  Those and so much more made it really feel like a town and not a city.  Mostly I think I was charmed by that, as I continued to be the first year or two after I moved here, though let’s get this straight: such charm was based mostly in the difference between the new and the familiar, rather than in the qualities inherent in Austin’s style of under/non-development.

And of course, much of that very Austin once charming to me has changed in the time I’ve been here.  Less unused land (much less), new shiny high buildings, endless traffic jams, the whole big-city schmear.  Town Lake is still pretty much the same at least, even if we do call it Ladybird now.  If I saw Austin for the first time today I’d have an entirely different take on the place; I’d sure as hell be much less in a hurry to move here.

(Of course I also can’t imagine having at almost 50 a relationship of the sort I did back then that made moving here seem so damn appealing.  But we’re going to leave that one alone for now.)

Since January I’ve been reconnecting via Facebook with people I’ve been out of contact with for two-plus decades and many of them have the same question: “How the hell did you end up in Texas?”  Mostly I tell them the same thing: It seemed like a good idea at the time.  Used to be I said There was a woman involved, which was always good for a wise I-hear-you-brother nod.  But the farther away I get from that relationship the less important it seems in the big picture, and besides which I don’t want to have to explain why (or even think the person’s wondering) I haven’t gotten with anyone since.

If the discussion continues, my stock line is Not that I regret making the move, and it’s true that I don’t - still think that it was every bit necessary.  Followed next though by But I think I’ve stayed here too long, which of course is no surprise to you faithful reader.  By my next birthday I’ll have lived in Austin for just a hair under 20% of my life.  Somehow 20% is more alarming than 10 years.  10-year occasions often seem so arbitrary just on their own.

Angela popped up a few weeks back on my Facebook list of suggested friends.  I declined since I don’t really want to know what she’s doing now any more than I want her to know it about me if I can help it.  But lately I do wonder whether this month maybe, just maybe, I’m not the only one thinking in terms of ten years ago.

Kick off your muddy boots

Rained again yesterday, a lot, and the temp dropped enough to require socks (day) and the second comforter (night).   Which is to say that Austin’s again habitable, however brief this spell of coolth may be.  It’s still October, after all.

I don’t think once this month is over it’ll prove to have been a very notable one, not for me anyway.  Nothing particularly sexy looming in either work or home life, just hanging out/hanging on and waiting for time to pass until December and vacation and family/friends.  I need to start thinking about east coast winter wear, which probably just means a few more flannel shirts than the couple I bought in CA last time, and waterproofing my boots, and most of all a heavier jacket than I’ll ever have cause to wear in Austin (or eventually the Bay Area).  I suppose that’s as sexy as it’s going to get in the near future.

Yesterday’s event went well or so I hear – it had to do with big donors so plebes like us staff weren’t invited – and now I’ve got the nice colorful new foamboard-mounted poster, more than 3 feet square, that I did for the Skins to hang on my office wall in between uses at future events.  I recently started shifting the décor from the absolutely, starkly bare to a modest gallery of my work – might as well remind folks here every chance I get that I’m not really an administrative assistant, no matter what my title says.  The hall outside is turning into such a gallery too, with the semi-stylish conference-size posters I’ve turned out for various Shirts gradually taking over from the old and ragged - and dreadfully dull - pieces hanging there for years.  I see now in a way I didn’t before that in a place like this if you want to make a mark you need to stick around for years before it becomes apparent.  I’m aiming for no less than total visual domination of the walls on this whole floor by my fifth anniversary here.

Someday I’m going to have to move past just putzing around with pretty colors and fun effects on InDesign and Photoshop and get serious about some deeply marketable skills for the next job, whatever it’ll be.  I’ve been looking at a couple of job descriptions for what I’d consider ideal gigs at UT and have come to the conclusion that given the choice between graphic designer and webmaster I’m almost certainly better off focusing on the latter.  I think I’ll always be stronger in matters of structure and organization than outright creativity, at least when it comes to visuals.  This is the sort of thing it’s good to know about yourself.

So if I’m going to pursue that plan, now all I have to do is obtain credentials as a webmaster, right?  Should be a piece of cake.  Even for an almost 50-year-old.  All I need is the cash and the time.  What skimpy research I’ve done into available curriculum reveals it’s likely to be very expensive in both ways.  Also I don’t know if it’s feasible to aim for -master status when you’re as uninterested in learning more than the most skeletal aspects of programming as I am, but I suppose I’ll find out when I start asking more questions.

Next year.  Everything’s going to happen next year, I promise.  I don’t want to go back to being a student until then. 

Actually I don’t want to go back to being a student at all, ever, but the idea of effectively advancing my skills/career without formal education is laughable.  And while I work at a university, what better chance am I going to get?  Gotta remind myself of such basic truths sometimes.

Right now I’m having a hard enough time getting myself to the pool.  Haven’t been back yet in spite of my promises, public and private, to do it.  Today at least I’m off the hook, since not only is it too chilly for outdoor swimming but I’m going to a matinee of Zombieland with Rick and that’s effectively going to block out the whole day and anyway my swimming suit’s locked up in the office and currently inaccessible because of the stupid fucking football game.  Warmer tomorrow and a blank afternoon schedule so I’ll have to think of something else.  Or maybe just bite down and go anyway.  I’m sure I’ll be glad when I do.  Gotta remind myself of that basic truth too.

It’s just that swimming laps several days a week is… well, not very sexy.  Then again, as observed earlier sexiness isn’t exactly a criteria for activities in the next two months or so anyway.

What the winner don't know a gambler understands

Every now and then someone with absolutely no reason to does something really nice just for me.  Yesterday when I was finally able to tear myself away from slaving over a hot InDesign long enough to hit Chipotle for lunch, the manager there – a small raspy-voiced guy who by now knows me as a regular – asked how my day was and when I said it left a lot to be desired he up and comped me for the whole schmear, burrito and chips and everything.  Or a few weeks back I was waiting at a bus stop with my bike on a blazing-hot day and when the bus came the rack was full but the driver let me bring it on inside anyway and I’ve never seen that happen before, not in seven years on Cap Metro.  He didn’t even make me come back to swipe my UT card at the farebox.  And so on.

I understand people in this world routinely perform such kindnesses for others with no apparent interest in reward or even appreciation. I do it myself sometimes even though I don’t have a burrito to give away or a bus to let someone board.  Life is full of little kindnesses and I suppose I’d be more inclined to enumerate mine if I didn’t usually forget about them immediately afterward - which is what you’re supposed to do as far as I’m concerned – or even not think about them as such to begin with.

Audra’s gone off to Ireland to see her boyfriend again and the day before she went I discovered she’d leave a project hanging, specifically getting a poster mounted for display at the department showcase tomorrow.  Since I’m doing two posters of my own (posters which were in fact the main reason yesterday turned out particularly hellish) I offered to take over for her and she gratefully accepted.  Now, I suspect Audra as a really pretty woman is quite accustomed to men vying to come to her rescue, and in spite of my best intentions (feminist or otherwise) I’m still a sucker to do just that and etc. etc., but let’s put that aside for the moment.  Mostly I offered to help because it was a simple and practical solution. 

(Now true, I would have made the offer a lot more grudgingly for others of my fellow staff, none of whom are all that pretty or for that matter friends-ish with me outside work like Audra, but no one except for us needs to know that.)

And that’s what I told Audra when she said how nice I was: that I was just being practical.  Which made her argue that no, I was nice, and me in turn argue further that I wasn’t doing it for that reason.  At all.  Finally she told me to shut up, mock-exasperatedly: “Just accept it, Sean.”  So I did.

Or more accurately pretended to.  Why is something like this so hard?  I mean, apart from the classic (and usually unsolvable) male/female communication dichotomy on display here.

People tell me I beat myself up a lot.  Even my cardiologist: last week we were talking about weight and he’s young and very slim and I doubt he’s ever had to work a day at it – really, how many seriously overweight Vietnamese have you ever seen? – and just being around him was making me feel like a florid fat old white guy (or rather, more like a florid fat old white guy than usual) and I apparently let it show because he told me not to be so hard on myself. 

I hate it when people say that.  Like I’m supposed to do something about it.  Like the kind of conduct that others see as self-negating isn’t ingrained at a cellular level.  I’ve gone through periods of trying to be more consciously benevolent to all including myself – usually they’ve involved joining something with cult-like trappings – and it’s never taken.  I’m at an age where it’s easy to figure if it hasn’t yet it’s probably not going to.  That makes it simple and practical, if rarely truly comfortable, to be me.

Not really sure where I’m going with this entry, any of it.  I’ve been pretty angry lately even for me and I’m not sure whether it’s stress at work or the dark months looming or me feeling sick of myself or all of them and more.  I’ve done what I know how to make my life simpler and more practical, trying to ease strain caused by instability and uncertainty and the drama they’ve led me to live out during previous phases of life, and in some ways I’ve been pretty successful at it and in other ways I haven’t been successful at all.  Interacting with the outside world as little as I do now: that’s not success, not in this context.  It pisses me off, but then a lot of things do.

Yet successful or not, people still perform random kindnesses.  Just for me.  Sometimes I really don't understand this world.