Smallhouse Log

Thanksgiving

Oh my food. The Backstory Bash was huge, the family salad enjoyed its perennial popularity, and the pie turned out OK but the creamcheese frosting was a bust. Seriously, there were like thirty people there, and one little turkey, but so much food, oh so much food. That's my life, I can't complain.

I meant to mention it when I switched the layouts, but there is some new writing up (it's been there for a while, hidden in the prototype). I'm not saying you need to read it, but maybe you want to? Sometimes people hint that this is the case. It's a letter, of sorts. I'm also revising some short stories that should be up sometime, I plan to look through some old essays for ones I actually am proud of, and as for poetry... I've got some new items I'd like to share, yes, but I'm working on a system to keep them better organized and more accessible. And by system I mean "set of PHP scripts and database tables".

This is what I do for fun?

Wednesday

So I got impatient. Not everything is quite in place yet (poems, links) and I haven't, ok, poked at it with a variety of browsers (honestly, not even Firefox, I probably should do that) but I went and switched it anyway. I hope everyone finds it prettier.

Now it's time to bake a pie.

Tuesday, last week of Pentecost
"Well, you haven't sneezed yet, but, ah, you might in the future." -Connor, 11/16/2008

So I'm growing to actually enjoy my job. Mostly, I'm sure, the environment and the people, though talking with old people on the phone isn't bad either. We're at the tail end of a campaign, though, and we're low enough on past patrons that we actually started making cold calls -makes me feel slimy. Today's the last day, though.

It's a job where you can get a lot of thinking done, if you're willing to take notes. You might be interrupted at any time by someone actually answering their phone, after all. I write poems (also haiku, eg. "I press the buttons / Hold my ear to the handset / Phone just keeps ringing"), I draw, I figure out my budget, and so on. But what I'm saying is, I figured out my budget. And I can afford, with this job and the drug study, to eat, pay rent, clear my phone bill, and travel for Christmas. But, possibly, not back. Alternately, I could go round trip as far as Minneapolis. So. We'll see how that works out.

later that night
"This stunning group has been touring all over the world; in Europe as well." -Janelle from work, 11/05/2008

In her defense, we say a lot of weird things into the phones; Patricia, who used to be directly behind me, said "G-Spot Tornado" every chance she got. I get to say "Musical Joke" every now and then, but I'm sure I'll get crazier things to say as I move up the food chain.

So less than an hour after exclaiming at length how happy employment and the sort of advertisements you find in gay bars makes me, I sunk into depression. I blame Maslow's Heirarchy. I was served up a nice little dose of what I'm calling the Middle School Special: a savory blend of rejection and lonliness with a dash of coming down off a caffeine high.

This lasted for a few hours as I moped through baking and consuming a frozen pizza, riding the CTA, wanding back and forth in the loop trying to find a certain store in the bitter cold, giving up, riding the CTA some more, and finally arriving at the Coynes' cheerfully painted and well-heated apartment, where a combination of bruschetta, your-mother jokes, earl grey, and four hours of conversation about death, slavery in modern times, religious politics, beating up flappers, and the sexual proclivities of various supernatural beings brushed my misery aside.

Wah wah wah, end of the line: The fact that I no longer have any dire problems has caused a resurgence in my preoccupation with lesser difficulties, but I'll almost certainly survive. But... "I want something else to get me through this semi-charmed kind of life."

That's right I went there what.

Twenty-sixth Sunday after Pentecost
"No one eats Grape Nuts, that's crazy." -Lorange, 11/9/2008

Three more weeks until the new liturgical year. Seriously, I'm switching calendars next summer. To what, I have no idea.

It's been an eventful week, to put it mildly. I achieved gainful employment, I ate gyros at the only place serving gyros in Hyde Park I haven't eaten gyros at before (by way of celebration), I helped elect our homeboy to the Presidency, I accidentally went to a gay bar, and I acquired the CD I've most been looking forward to for about a year now.

Long versions: I work at the Harris Theatre in Millenium Park, where I *shudder* sell tickets over the phone. At least it's for something I support, and it's not cold calling, so it's... survivable. It's a bit close to the "working for money" line for my liking, but it does have one notable benefit: free tickets. That's right. So let me know if anything upcoming catches your eye, I might be able to hook you up.

Gyros: Seriously, I've eaten a lot of gyros in the past two years. A lot of gyros. All over town. I could write reviews. I will write reviews. It will be awesome.

Obama: I voted, then I went home and ignored everything. I still haven't looked at any results, but Lorange and Joe made sure to let me know when they got home. I set off a champagne cracker to celebrate, then went back to bed.

Gay bar: In retrospect, I should've been able to guess, since the concert was explicitly billed as a queer-and-friends-of-queer event... and the name of the bar was "the Jackhammer". Not exactly subtle, ha. It was a lot of fun, though. I went to see (now officially favorite) local band, Aleks and the Drummer, and was finally able to purchase their recent EP, May a Lightning Bolt Caress You. (NB: Apparently most of the songs are mostly in English; I never would have guessed, since the song where the lyrics are most intelligible is a cover of a Polish pop hit.) Yes, I've been listening to it on repeat; it's one of the very few recordings I've encountered in my life that does justice to the energy of a live performance. <gush>I love it so hard.</gush>

But back to the concert. First band, all the way up from Kansas, was Charles S. McVey, a trio named for the pianist/vocalist/songwriter/frontman. A mix of soft- and dance-rock, they sang, as far as I can tell, mostly dirty love songs. Catchy and emotional, they put on a great set. Next up was Aleks and the Drummer, who played some stuff from their upcoming album. They had some technical difficulties that interfered a little, making it their worst performance I've been to. It was still yards better than most, of course. Oh my gears I love that band. Finally, cover band hard-rockers Barely Standing closed out the night to a thinning crowd. With some impressive guitar solos and well-chosen hard rock favorites, it was fun to keep dancing around and use all the energy I worked up during the A&D set. I must be out of shape, though, I apparently can't dance for forty straight minutes like I did in high school. A great tragedy.

Miscellaneous gay bar experience: I'm used to the two bathrooms in bars being "Mens" and "Womens", not "Public" and "Private". Seriously, there was not even a door. Their video selection was hilarious: The night started with punk documentaries, moved to Hanna-Barbara's Godzilla: The Animated Series, and closed out with True Stories, the only one that was close-captioned. I felt awkward at first, which I felt kind of ashamed of. When more A&D fans showed up after the first band, though, that I'd mostly felt awkward because I'd been the youngest person there by a good two years. With more of my peers around, I relaxed a bit, yeah, danced like crazy. And finally, McDonald's has, it seems, ads specifically aimed at gay bars: For their "late-night" campaign, there was a poster. This poster showed a picture of a big mac on a black background, with the caption "Hot buns. Juicy beef. No cover." If that doesn't cause you to hiss "Yesssssssss" through clenched teeth, you are not functioning within acceptable parameters.

And then I went to a coffee shop, because Lorange is seemingly incapable of sleeping if the temperature in the apartment exceeds fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit.

Tuesday

So I said I wanted to write out my reflections on Demian. I was thinking, at the time, as an essay, but it doesn't look like that's going to happen. So. Demian is a book by Hermann Hesse, an author who was recently recommended to me. The first book I read, I didn't quite get: I felt like it wasn't written for me. I understood the plot and the themes and the philosophy, but not the message, the telos, the thing it was really saying, written between the lines in figures I couldn't read. It was very frustrating, I had to have someone explain it to me.

I did not have that same experience with Demian, though I struggle to explain it. Sinclair, the protagonist, is too cowardly, too impatient, too solitary for me to identify with strongly; yet his transformation, his philosophical journey, I feel as my own, as a familiar path, a smiling reminder of things I came to understand as slowly as Sinclair did. I feel a reassurance from this book. I feel like I, as Sinclair at first is, should perhaps be shocked by the assertions Demian (the character or the book, it doesn't matter) makes: that a well-reasoned heresy carries as much weight as a scripture, that advocates of the Devil do the work of God, that virtue can be the opponant of salvation, that there is often no difference between a blessing and a curse. But I am not shocked, not even surprised. I am reassured.

Demian is essentially a novel about ethics. I am perhaps not reknowned for my great love of ethicism (or even ethicality, sadly) but I assure all who have their doubts that it is a favorite subject of mine. The title character expounds a system of ethics, putting forward a few basic principles and then sewing them up together. These are not new ideas: some of the first principles he relates to Sinclair are, in their basic forms: think for yourself, might makes right, and -that favorite of ethicists- it is good to be ethical (that is, to follow this system) and bad to be unethical. It is pointless to describe Demian's views further here; the book is not a long one. Suffice it to say that I enjoyed it fully.

And now back to your regularly scheduled Internets.

Saturday

According to iTunes, the top forty-five most played songs (which corresponds exactly with the songs which have been played, at time of writing, 75 times or more) over the past ~2 years contains:

8 songs by the Magnetic Fields
7 songs by Nineteen Forty-Five (plus one by Snow Machine)
7 songs by the Hold Steady
2 songs by They Might Be Giants
2 songs by the Electric Six
2 songs by Kid Koala
2 songs by What the Kids Want

4 songs off I Saw a Bright Light
3 songs off Together We'll Burn Like Autumn Leaves
3 songs off 69 Love Songs
3 songs off Separation Sunday

9 love songs
9 songs featuring illegal drugs
5 songs about death
5 songs offering advice
4 satirical songs (by which I mean songs satirizing other topics, eg. the government)
2 songs about the Bible
2 songs about the Devil (both different than the two above)

22 rock songs
14 pop songs
3 punk songs
3 rap songs
3 experimental songs

39 songs I've sung parts of while they're playing
19 songs I've sung all of while they're playing
11 songs I've belted out in the shower
16 songs I've hummed walking around in public
3 songs I've sung in public out loud

And, to my great surprise, not one song I've used a lyric from as a facebook status. No idea how that happened.