Bloglet, the gentleman's mock turtle soup -- Moss made it sweeter than myrrh ash and dhoup
Ay, chihuaha. I just couldn't take it no more. First off, that was the longest I've gone without blogging since Moss gave me the thing in '00, no question. Cold turkey, no warning... it was hard on the heartstrings, let me tell you. Second off, it's no fun when you're having a thoroughly lovely and mellow time to be thinking every second "if something really amazing, mightily shocking and extreeeeme and unprecedented happens right now -- I can blog it!" 'cause, really, what was I waiting for? The only thing of that magnitude that could conceivably happen sometime in the near future -- short of typhoons and jackpots -- would be if I got laid... and you all know I'm far too tasteful to blog something like that. (official summary, august '01 to august '02: bupkis). So, fooey. That experiment will not be repeated lightly. Anyhow, I'll fill in a little of the sodden edges of the past in the next couple paragraphs just so posterity doesn't feel slighted or nothing.
Greyhound bus ride was very lovely; everyone thought I was a boy (I still have to develop the Greyhound-Effortless-Drag theory. The possibilities are startling.) except a woman who wanted me to carry her luggage and a man who cried, took my phone card, and disappeared into the wastes of North Dakota. Two geek boys coming back from GenCon, a truck driver who thought that truck drivers didn't get no respect, and a passel of well-mannered adolescents who liked beef jerky all thought I was a boy, and an amusing and inexplicable thing it was. Hee hee. I thought I should tip off the geek boys, since I had been having a nice conversation with one of 'em for over and hour, but I must have done it the wrong way and embarrassed him inadvertently, since he changed seats after that and didn't say a word. Ah well. The music donations, by the way, were divine. Even the squawky-squillo Japanese heroic tenor guy, heh heh. Oh lordy.
Then I arrived in Missoula and gave my ma a copy of the liner notes from I Puritani autographed by Sutherland and Pavarotti as a present 'cause the final revision of her book is that freaking close to being finished with and she's been working like a mad horse in a laundromat. I played lots of Scrabble with Tante Karin visiting from Norway, and swam in a cold bend of the Clarkfork when we couldn't find Gold Creek. I purged several years worth of sins by listening to horrifically bad gay karaoke at Amvets, and contributed a bit of my own (Mack the Knife and -- thanks to you dear creatures, Zoot Suit Riot. That song makes me miss waltz parties so fierce.), and then I saw two old friends which made me massively happy. I watched several mindless and charming movies, drove the car a bit, and wrestled with my nephew (metaphorically) for the phone line every night. Well, the last three things are still current, I suppose. I'm in Missoula one more day, in Bigfork for two, and leave evil-early Sunday morning on the train to go back east and start school again.
I'm apprehensive. I still don't know how badly I mucked up last semester. I've had five dreams about it now, each with a different result. But it's trial by fire, y'know. I wanna whup myself into shape. I'm not sure how to do it. It's just got to be done. So here goes. A couple more days of blissful freedom and then Whoosh! Down the hydraulic pipes and into the wash of sloggery. Hee hee.
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04:26:00 PM,Thursday 22 August 2002
T.I.A.I.L.W.:Coercive influences.
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(11)
09:28:31 AM,Thursday 22 August 2002
Y'all are the best. I've now got two spiffy new CDs to take with me on my travels, and I'm damn grateful. Woo! So, goodbye, Maryland, for a couple weeks. I'll be in Missoula for a week, Bigfork for a little less than a week, en route a couple days each way, and back here on August 27th. Ma, I didn't call you 'cause I packed up my phone with all the other stuff that I left at Msache's apartment, but maybe if I have some spare time between now and... when'll it be, Monday? I might give you a ring. Anyway. I'll catch youse guys on the flip side.
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(4)
07:44:05 AM,Saturday 10 August 2002
T.I.A.I.L.W.:Liza with a Z.
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(3)
06:59:41 PM,Friday 9 August 2002
I mailed off my student loan deferment form, but the stamp machine was out of first class stamps and I didn't want to spend $7.40 for a whole book of 'em, so I bought thirteen three cent stamps instead, and stuck 'em all on in neat little rows. They'll probably think I'm some sort of resentful passive-aggressive anarchist or something. Oh well.
But then I bought an ice cream sandwich from a vending machine! And ate it in the sun.
And I can now play Soul Man on the cornetto.
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(5)
05:15:20 PM,Friday 9 August 2002
What are the best sort of mix CDs to make for a 50 hour bus trip?
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(17)
10:37:26 AM,Friday 9 August 2002
Well.
That, as they say, is that.
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10:24:27 AM,Friday 9 August 2002
Ew! My peelu fibers got all moldy.
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12:28:04 AM,Friday 9 August 2002
Mozart, Shakespeare, and Maurice Sendak.
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(4)
09:05:23 PM,Thursday 8 August 2002
Awake, awake, awake,
in the middle of the night.
Should I try to sleep?
Should I try to fight?
Wachet auf, wachet auf,
why'd I wake up?
'Cause the power went off,
And my mind went, "Hup!"
Snip-a-trip, snip-a-trip,
How'd my body know?
It is a mystery!!! So, so, so.
Fishmonger, fishmonger,
give me three more hours.
Only if you dream about
whiskey sours.
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(1)
04:34:37 AM,Thursday 8 August 2002
I just have to have the heebies...
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10:04:06 PM,Wednesday 7 August 2002
So freaking pretty.
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08:38:46 PM,Wednesday 7 August 2002
"Du bist mein Bub'... du bist mein Schatz. Ich hab' dich lieb."
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(3)
06:06:42 PM,Wednesday 7 August 2002
So I'm going home to Montana on a Greyhound bus this Saturday (woo!) and I bought provisions to last me the trip yesterday. Good stuff... an MRE and EZ-Cheez and Beef Jerky and a couple microwavable thingies... anyway, I also got some raspberry flavored vitamin-c powder stuff that you put in your water and it makes it taste all fruity without ever having been anything like a fruit. And I also got a FlexiFlask, which is this hardcore plastic bag that stands up and can be frozen, boiled, microwaved, folded flat, or rolled into a tube. Very practical. The only trouble is, when I make up the raspberry powder stuff and put it in the flask, I look like a vampire who's just robbed the Red Cross. Sort of disturbing. Guess I should have thought of that before, huh?
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(1)
04:18:41 PM,Wednesday 7 August 2002
I've slept on it, and I don't think I can be in love with the Nazi propaganda chickie for more than eight hours, bedroom eyes be damned. So I'm revising my proclamation. I'm not fickle, just... principled. Yeah. For the rest of the day, I am no longer I.L.W. Diotima-as-portrayed-by-a-sexy-but-evil-genius. I am instead I.L.W.: Michelle Meyrink. Yes. That's better.
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07:41:51 AM,Wednesday 7 August 2002
T.I.A.I.L.W.:Diotima. (Incidentally, the above picture is, in fact, not the actual Diotima, but, um... Leni Riefenstahl... as Diotima in some movie or other. Yes, it is intensely creepy to have the hots for Leni Riefenstahl, I know. I know. But I can't help it. Look at her! And she's sort of got a look in her eyes that reminds me, a bit, of what I imagine might have been in the real Diotima's eyes. And jsut today, earlier, I stumbled across a bizarre article on the web which contained a quote from a post-modern scholar who had just written her PhD thesis and said, "There are only two women in Plato and I reclaimed them as whores." I mean... well, it's just a generally odd day for classical literature and dark-eyed women. Please don't take any of it the wrong way. But who does Eros have to answer to, anyway?)
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10:17:14 PM,Tuesday 6 August 2002
It looks like a dueling scar. I wish it really was one.
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(3)
10:04:41 PM,Tuesday 6 August 2002
I am encased in a many-layered pudding. You know, like, in Zelda, when the giant stack of pancakes would eat you and you'd be wriggling inside it for a while and come out and your shield would be gone? My brain is currently inside that metaphorical stack of pancakes. Hopefully it'll come out the other side with nothing more than its shield missing. GLARRRGH!
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09:10:37 PM,Tuesday 6 August 2002
Hm. A new blog page. I feel like being mundane, so I'll talk about the lame stuff that's been occupying my mind about my computer and the music I play on it. Yawrn. First-off, RealPlayer is a goat-buggering thornpubed lickspittle pissant. Graaargh! I run Windows XP, right, and it's an uneasy truce, 'cause I've basically surrendered to the truth that I'm just too lazy to teach myself a Real Man's operating system. Back in the early 90's, I contemplated becoming a badass computer geek like my brothers and nephews, but it never wound up happening and, at this point, I think I'm doomed to a life of luserdom. Alas.
Anyway. So I use XP, but that doesn't mean it has to make me its groveling catamite. On principle, I resent programs that start up without me telling them to, or cheery little messages telling me they'll take care of everything and I don't have to worry my little head about them. (See above. God, I loathe that thing with a loathing beyond loathing.) So I have autoplay turned off for my CD-ROM. It'll do whatever it does when I say it will, damnit. Also, I've been ripping a lot of CDs, so it's especially annoying when the thing starts playing as soon as I put it in.
But the rank ordure that is RealPlayer doesn't *let* you turn Autoplay off. If you've got no "default audio CD" thingie set up (and they all bloody well launch themselves when they're default; you'd think a good default soldier is one who waits for orders instead of running his head off at the first sign of troops, rain, or sheep), RealPlayer, if it's installed on your computer at all, automatically claims it. I mean, you can tell it to go the hell away for a given session, after the first time it does this to you (though it involves mucking around with sprawling scrollbarred option menus), but the next time you reboot, it snatches it up again and launches your damn CD the second it gets a whiff of it. I uninstalled the entire bleeding program, and reinstalled it, carefully going through all the "custom" options and making sure it didn't have an inch of given power over my CD drive. Ha. I finally had to uninstall it again and just resign myself to go without .ra and .ram files, which is all I wanted the bloody player for in the first place, arrrgh!
On the bright side, I finally downloaded WinAmp (I had been using the shareware MusicMatch Jukebox), and I think I'm in love. They have a Marlene- Dietrich-in-a-Tux skin! And trippy kaleidoscope plugins that whup the spleen of anything else I've seen. And it's tidy and nag-free, and just generally lovely. I actually haven't checked to see if WinAmp will take over the default-CD duties without launching itself willy-nilly, which I should have done before unloading my gorge with the foregoing, huh? Oh well. Maybe I will. Meanwhile, I'm very happy.
One other small bitch, though. My laptop came with these nifty buttons that you can use even when the lid's closed; so it'll play CDs without actually booting up into Windows. But in Windows, specifically, using Windows Media Player, the buttons will control your CD or your tracklist. Thing is, Windows Media Player is ugly and pathetic. If I could get these buttons to order WinAmp around, I'd be truly ecstatic. I mean, all I have to do now to advance a track is press ctrl-alt and then "B" and then ctrl-alt back to whatever I'm doing, but it's still a lot more trouble than one little button, especially if you're doing something that doesn't like being pushed aside so quickly.
Anyhow. This-all was deadly dull. Sorry 'bout that. Better stuff as it comes through my bathroom window.
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(3)
01:09:11 PM,Monday 5 August 2002
A mindless game to see into your mind. Perfect! (`8
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(2)
12:38:31 PM,Monday 5 August 2002
