Wednesday, April 29, 2009

That's Gross MUNI Rider. Volume 2.

I've been wanting to write this blog for a while. Alas (and I realize it's definitely a good thing) I have been burning the candle at both ends getting my thesis done. Tonight, however, I took one night of reprieve to relax, have band practice, and get some much needed sleep. Don't look at the time stamp of when I wrote this. It doesn't count.

So anyhow... Not too long ago I returned taking the streetcar in to work in the mornings, after my CEO had ever-so-generously been giving me rides in the mornings. As deeply appreciated as it was, it's good to have the morning to read and shake the ol' dew off the lily. So part of the "joys" of riding the bus is the cast of characters I happen to share streetcars and bus stops with. One such public transportation utilizer I tend to wind up on a lot of trips with is a man who has earned the auspicious title "Snail Man".

I see him from time to time, he gets on and off the bus at my stop, he's not terribly far from my age, and he's an epic geek. Not in the good way. You can just tell. So I tend to be generally indifferent to most passengers, and with my wondrous headphones, I usually don't have any occasion to interact with people, but I just got a weird vibe off the guy from day one.

Then, one day, as I'm walking down towards the bus stop, he is about ten or fifteen paces ahead of me. I find it a little odd that he seems incredibly focused on something along the wall [I should take a second here to insert the fact that I live across the street from a school and public playground, so there's a lot of plant life and all that]. So as I get a better look, I see he's picking up a snail and putting it on the top of the wall. Odd, but hey, whatever. Then he stops again, about ten paces later. And picks up another snail. He places it down on a plant just the other side of the wall. Then he picks up a third snail off the wall, and tosses it into the street.

Odd.

I have kept my space a tad more, as I don't necessarily desire to be in especially close proximity to someone who chooses to handle snails when hand washing is not an immediate option. The other day, though, it was a bit more than I could handle. I am standing at my bus stop, as per the usual, and up walks Snail Man. It's just he and I, and as much as I am doing my best to ignore him, I can't help but see: he's put something down on the edge of the railing that protects me from being crushed by runaway vehicles. At least on the one side. But I get a glance at what he has placed on the railing.

It's a fucking snail.

This is not some impetuous "moving a snail along a wall where it already was" or "giving it back to nature" thing. This man, a seemingly normal individual, decided for some bizarre reason to pick up a snail, carry it from wherever he first got it, transported it across the street, to the bus stop, and was placing it somewhere unsuspecting where anyone could easily accidentally manhandle this poor snail. This, to my eye, is not normal. Then he proceeds to board the bus, hold the handrails with his possibly slimed hands, and proceed to what I can assume is his day's work. This is gross. This makes me want to vomit when I think about it. I mean, hell, hasn't he heard about swine flu? Maybe he's bearing some weird strain of snail flu. Either way, I have yet another reason to wash my hands vigorously any time I leave the bus. Thanks for that, Snail Man. And whatever you do, don't ever try to shake my hand. Because I won't.



On a completely unrelated note, I have added a little poll to the right hand side of the blog, below the links section, which is also recently expanded with some wonderful blogs from some wonderful people.

Friday, April 24, 2009

I am too nice...

... or "When crazy people talk to Bill randomly in a public place, volume 47."

So tonight I'm at the cafe, trying to do some thesis work, and finally making a little bit of legitimate progress. I'm in my "don't bother me, I'm working" mode: hat pulled down, glasses on, headphones on, intent stare on my monitor, papers spread out on the table where I'm working.

This kid walks up, asks if he can sit at the table. Since this is not the least bit uncommon, I happily oblige. Naturally, I do not engage. I continue as I was, staring at the monitor, trying to write. I make a momentary mistake and look up for a split second, and the kid starts talking to me.

So on and on he goes. How he's from Hawaii and on a road trip. How he's taking a semester off to pursue his photography and art. What a wonderful town Albuquerque is. How much he loves San Francisco. The wonders of being on hippie hill in Golden Gate park at 4:20 on 4/20. How the energies of the universe converged to have him discover a six pack of beer from the Kona Brewing Company in a fridge at a friend's house in New Mexico. How literature is fantastic because there's so much in this world to write about. How he may be young but the world is teaching him all sorts of wondrous things as he goes.

After imparting all the world's wisdom to me, he wants to show me his photography... on Facebook. It's cool, I figure I can at least get him to wrap it up and get back to work. It's now been some forty five minutes. So I look at his pictures. They're good enough, I can see he's got an eye for what's what. Then what happens? While he's signed into his facebook account, a chat window pops up. What does he do? He starts chatting with this person - "a fellow traveler." He continues this... for twenty to thirty minutes. I sit there, trying to be polite.

Then, as his conversation online winds down a bit, he begins to regale me with his tale of woe, how he was in Berkeley and lost his friends, how he wound up here but doesn't have the phone number of the guy he is crashing with, how is phone is almost dead. "Can I use your phone?"

Three phone calls later, he's gotten in touch with his friends and is back to chatting on my laptop. I at least got some outlining done in the meantime, since lord knows nothing else was going to get accomplished. In the end, I lost damn near an hour and a half of my life for being polite enough to give up a seat at a table.

Is there a sign around my neck that says "I listen to all your crazy shit and even occasionally feign interest?" Or do these people just have a heightened sense of someone who won't tell them to screw off?

Thursday, April 23, 2009

Attention Twitterholics

I just added the "retweet this" button above the post. See it? Like right there?? Almost directly above these words... little green thing... theeeeere you go.

So you know what to do. If you don't have twitter, I just gave you the reason you've been waiting for to sign up.

You're wonderful. Real content should resume any day now, depending on thesis progress.

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Type cO-dependent Negative

Today I went to donate blood. I haven't done it in a little while, and I always feel good to do a little something from time to time to make the world a better place. So I walk in as usual, fill out my form proving that I'm neither a drug addict nor a man-whore, and I go to the seating area to wait for my name to be called for the little interview process. I'm greeted by a somewhat odd sight: there's a guy there in a t-shirt and jeans (which is common) with his girlfriend, who is in a little black dress and heels. This is odd enough in and of itself, however, they are all over each other. It's absurd. They're holding hands, they've got their heads up against each other, they're sporadically making out when the mood so strikes them. I am used to seeing way too much PDA all over the place, but the blood bank? Seriously? So he gets called in for his interview, and the girl tries to follow him into the little interview room. She gets turned away (hence "confidential" interview). She goes to the cantina for a cup of coffee, and by the time I get out of my interview, she is standing there, staring at her dude in the chair giving blood. I mean, she isn't moving, she isn't looking around or anything like that, she is just frozen in space and time, gazing longingly as liveblood is slowly removed at a safe pace.

I am a little weirded out by this whole thing as I settle into my chair/bed slot and the nurse begins taking my blood. Not three minutes pass and a guy walks in to the blood-donation area... followed by his girlfriend!! She (like the other girl) tries to follow him up to the table, only to be (like the other girl) turned away at the entrance. So what does she do? She sits on her knees at the partition and rests her chin on it so she can watch him the whole time he's donating blood. Like a sad puppy looking out a window waiting for its owner to come home, she's sitting there watching him longingly, as if she may never see him again. Then, at the cantina after he's done, she's sitting practically on his lap, stroking his hair, rubbing his back, and talking about how brave and strong he was. It was a fucking voluntary blood donation! It's not like dude made it out of surgery okay, or ran across a minefield to donate blood. He came in, got it over with in about fifteen minutes, and got a friggin donut when he was done.

The first couple I can kind of wrte it off - they were probably both under 21, so they can still have that cute "kid love" where your whole being hinges on never letting your significant other out of your site, but the second people were old. Dude had grey hair. There is absolutely no fucking reason for this sad puppy dog kind of affection for people like that. See, I've gone with a friend to give blood before, it's fun. It gives you someone to make small talk with, but that person was also donating. I've never seen people bring their significant others to the blood bank like it's some sort of breezy Saturday afternoon date or something. Or at least if they have, the people had the goddamn sense of self that they could sit alone for ten minutes while their dear sweet lover sits a whopping thirty feet away from them.

So, in about 3-4 months when I can donate again, does any fair maiden out there want to come dote over me while I donate blood? I'll let you give me a shoulder massage, and maybe even call me something adorable like "sugarbear" or "Beefy McSexpot" - if interested, you know how to get a hold of me...

Friday, April 17, 2009

Fuel to the Fire

As per the usual these days, I tend to be a little off on my blogging. The bright side of this is that I am a stone's throw away from finishing my thesis, and therefore actually having free time once again to blog to my little heart's desire. But until then, you'll have to be content with my sub-par ability to keep up with my updates as much as both you and I would like.

So a while back, (370 days ago to be precise! bizarre...) I wrote a post about Karen O from Yeah Yeah Yeahs and how much she bothers me. As some of you might have heard, they have a new album out, and it's really quite good. I give it a thumbs up if you're on the fence. The copy I got has a couple of bonus tracks, and I was reminded of a realization I'd had some time back: Karen O is actually a ridiculously talented singer. She's just such a spastic freak onstage that I think even she forgets it sometimes. See, the YYYs have an acoustic EP out on iTunes, and the bonus tracks have acoustic renditions of a few of the new songs, and every time I hear them, I am really floored at her voice. It's crazy - if she really gave a damn about singing more often and not trying to be that wild unpredictable maniac that everyone can't help but write about, she could go down as one of the better female rock singers of our generation. But unfortunately she's so busy screaming and acting like a weirdo and just generally forgetting everything anyone ever learned in the history of singing that it just doesn't come through. So this begs the question: does "showmanship" (and with her I use the term incredibly loosely) trump talent in our time? Are we willing to settle for someone with real natural talent doing a half-assed job at what they are good at in order to put on a show?

I think overall the same thing can be said for Charles Bukowski after a while. Sadly, later in his career, once the word had spread to the general population about his work and his readings, he bought into the image he tried to put forward. He was a talented writer; not great, not the best of his time, but he expressed things flatly and clearly in a style that was all his own, but half the people who'd show up to his readings were there to see him get shithouse drunk and make an ass of himself. If he didn't it was as if he were not keeping up his end of the bargain. However, on the other hand, it was the casual reader that would show up to his readings to see him get drunk and make threats and talk about women that really paid his bills for a decade or so.

Exhibit C in this little melange is reality television. With the exception of a few random folks here and there on some of the talent-based shows, nobody on reality TV has a single iota of talent. Yet we still flock to the toob to watch it all the time because these people make such a friggin' spectacle of their everyday lives. Is it really entertainment? Hells no. But does it help TV live up to its reputation as the opiate of the masses.

In closing, and I was going to try to tie this in with the Karen O discussion (as I so subtly did right there), I wanted to let you all know that I have registered, though I won't be writing in it for a while, a new blog that will be music-centric. I know some of you out there think I ramble on about music too much sometimes on this blog, and to some extent, I agree. So, with you good folks in mind, I will be writing a second blog just talking about new music, old music, and all sorts of other fun like that. The blog is called Godspeed You! White Blogger and I hope you all enjoy it!

Monday, April 6, 2009

"Bee boo beep beep boo" Means "I Love You"


So something has been kicking around the back of my head recently, and I thought it has finally come time to get it on paper. Er, monitor.

Anyhow, with my sister's recent nuptials I got to thinking about the wild and wacky world of dating. I find it interesting that in our modern interwebby times, so many people have turned to online dating. There's nothing wrong with it; it clearly worked out smashingly for my sister, but hell, she's a rare success story from what I've heard. It's sad really, people who I know deep in the depths of my heart are fantastic catches exchange information on successes and failures of the various dating sites they've used. It's like exchanging information on car repair places or dentists.

Is this what we've become? Are people getting to the point where we get everything online? I know that I love the convenience of the 'net: I can get shoes, a computer, books, guitars, and anything else that can be bartered or swapped for. But is this really where we should be looking for love? Plus there are seemingly tons of sites to choose from. But I suppose the thing that almost weighs most on my mind is: if all these wonderful people I know are using these dating sites, and apparently not having any luck, what the hell chance does a guy like myself have? I mean, the folks I know who are using some of these dating sites are good looking, smart, have killer jobs that they love, and are just plain altogether good and interesting people. How is it that they're having to use an online personals site? Is this just the trend that is emerging in our more and more web-reliant times, or are people just giving up on more "traditional methods" of meeting people more quickly?

Stop and think about that for a hot second... fifteen years ago (not that it really applied to me at the time) people who were still single in their late twenties and on were probably not running off to the newspaper to post personal ads in the papers. Is this just another logical step? I mean, I know a thing or two about social networking and stuff like that, but goddamn, I just can't feature it.

So riddle me this, dear readers, is this whole online dating thing just the furthering of our internet reliance, or is it an instance of people giving up on the good ol' traditional means in favor of something new?

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Update

Hey kids. There's something weird here asking for some authentication for some site biddles.uk -- DO NOT PROVIDE ANY INFO. I have no clue what it is, but I'm checking it out right now.

Be safe.

UPDATE - turns out it has to do with an image I used in the book page (they must have changed to a password-secure page at Biddles, which is an online publishing company)

Everything is fixed. Thanks to Nate for picking up on that!