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O my readers, I do so awfully regret that I was terribly busy this day and did not amuse you with any morsels from the messy table of my mind. I was most unstintingly working! Not even a lunch break did I take, that I might leave early and so discharge some grand-filial birthday shopping duties.
But lo! What other activities have delayed your hostess, keeping her from distracting you with idle gibes and drivel? She and her beloved husband have put an offer on a house! A-HA!
Today I was bored, so I puttered over to Amazon and started messing around, rating a few things I have picked up recently, et cetera. I find this very pleasing—does anyone else here? Sometimes I just go to the “My Recommendations”, “Improve my Recommendations” section of the site and rate things, childishly pleased both when they get my taste right and when I get to dash their hopes with a well-placed 1-star or “Don’t use this to recommend things for me”
Also, there’s nothing like seeing:
You Know You Want Itin the morning.
The Oxford Companion to the Bible beckons from your Wish List.
Once upon a time, I mentioned to sister sledge that I had bought “Elv1s”, the collection of said chappie’s #1 hits¹. She recoiled in horror. “Oh, c’mon, don’t give me that,” said I. “They’re great, cheesy songs you just have to dance to.” In the course of explaining her aversion to the King of Cheese, she wrinkled her nose and said, “I mean, he didn’t even write any of his songs!”²
I keep on thinking about this myself, from time to time—the idea that an artist’s legitimacy is determined by his involvement in both writing and performing the music. I think about it when I am enjoying a cover, or when I find myself wrinkling my nose, like sister sledge, when I leaf through a Wired article about teen stars who are basically nothing but mouthpieces for gifted producers.
Now, it’s possible that this criterion only matters for indie street cred, but I would argue that that’s not true. While Hapa’s cover of “In the Name of Love” is excellent and even adds a wrinkle with its incorporation of Hawaiian genealogical chant, it is not the same as U2’s original recording of it. That tells you something about U2, whereas the cover tells you something about the music Hapa enjoys listening to and playing.
As I muse on this phenomenon, song-writing being more ‘valuable’ than ‘merely’ singing, I think that perhaps this is a uniquely modern development. In olden times, people wrote songs and passed them on. A wandering musician or clown would pick up tunes and words where he could and patch them together. People would buy “music” that was only lyrics, sometimes with a note “Sunge to thie strayne of Greene Slieves”, sometimes with no guide to the tune at all. Since there was no way to record music and no concept of intellectual property³, there was no question of “authenticity”. Even if you knew who wrote a song, you would never get to hear him sing. He was in Yorkshire and you were in Kent. Only with sound reproduction does music cease to be free, and the idea of the musician as auteur instead of entertainer appear…
¹And a remix. I bought the CD for the remix. A big gorgeous remix of “A Little Less Conversation”, which I first heard on Smallville. Clark discovers puberty is indeed a time of changes when suddenly has heat vision whenever he umm…thinks about girls. So he’s trying to learn to control it by setting up a scarecrow and thinking about Lana. And they play that song. THERE IS NO BAD HERE.
²Time for sister sledge to break out the Bob Dylan wisdom!
³I find this rather charming. It’s like Kender, without a sense of property at all. “Why shouldn’t I take this shiny? It was just sitting there in his coinpouch!” “Why shouldn’t I write my own ‘Hamlet’?”
So we went house-hunting yesterday. Here are a few of the things that I learned:
Schmeeattle was a bustling whirl of fun. We ate a yummy and nutritious brecwast at a fancy vegetarian restaurant with a lot of greenery, roamed Pike Place, bought earrings and green tea, did not feed our meter under the watchful eye of the meter matron, and enjoyed crumpets at the Crumpet Shop. I had one with cream cheese and a scrambled egg (best…crumpet…EVAR!) and one with butter and orange marmalade, as usual. I have loved marmalade ever since I forced myself to love it at the age of 8 under the influence of Paddington books.
Then Sister and Matt conspired to take a Wilderness Walk before returning home. This was expressed to me as “a walk”, and so it was that I ended up on a short hike (2.8 miles over rising and falling rooty trails) in my Doc Martens, wearing a jacket and carrying a purse. In short order, we returned to my sister’s fabulous new abode (she and her Intended have brought low the housebeast) and she gave me a foot bath and mini-pedicure out of repentance for dragging me on a small hike unawares after a long day of walking. I only wish she were here now, to massage my calves after said hike-and-walk plus almost four hours as an immobile car passenger! I walk like a little old lady, the charlie-horses are so bad. At any rate, I have concluded that Doc Martens, while THE thing to wear hiking around city streets, malls, et cetera, are NO good to hike around trails in.
The evening was spent first on luscious repast by my sister, then in playing “Hoopla” by the makers of Cranium, bought especially. “If I had known nobody WINS,” said she in disgust, “I wouldn’t have bought it.” It’s a cooperative game, but we ended up enjoying it a great deal anyways. Between Hoopla, talking, and extreeeeeeeme silliness, I didn’t get to sleep until 2 AM. Which is not something I do lightly at my current stage of life.
So, the next day I toured my sister’s new garden (comes with the house, dontcha know) and she made us a scrumptious breakfast before hugging us goodbye and giving us directions to get back on I-5, which we promptly garbled and ended up driving in circles for a while before we managed to get on the freeway and make our way home. Fun!
The flaw in the plan for getting to Seattle was not getting to Seattle, which I do expect to occur in the fullness of time. The flaw was expecting my dear husband to get to my place of business. About 15 minutes after I started fretting, I got a call. “I’m lost.”
“Where are you? Are there signs?”
“I’m in a parking space labelled “Fishery.”
Oh dear. Oh d-d-d-d-d-dear, dear, dear.
The above dialogue has been cut for humor at Matt’s expense, but did actually occur.
So, having done absolutely nothing but make pie and play Settlers of Catan all summer, letting the weekends fall from our hands like bouncy balls, we are going on trips. Two weekends in a row. Just when we should be spending the weekends hunting the housebeast with our native guide, the Realtor.
We are quite silly. But off we go, to what some affectionately call the “Emerald City,” and some jealously call “Sodom on the Sound,” and I pragmatically call “where my sister and the Crumpet Shop are.” Given the attractions therein combined, I think you can guess my feelings about visiting Seattle.
Glee!
Recently I’ve had quite a time with my boss’s computer. He couldn’t download software updates because he doesn’t know his account password (it automatically logs in for him). I reset his password and, in the process, lost access to the Keychain in which Mac OS X stores things like your e-mail passwords. So I had to go look up his two e-mail accounts’ passwords in our files. He had to keep entering these two passwords over and over again until a computer tech support chappy could come and fix that problem and other minor ones we’ve been saving up. So the tech comes, and my boss and my co-worker have him take their account passwords off entirely. Of course, I could have done this for them—had I known they desired it. It never even occured to me to ask, even—I mean, no passwords? This is my boss’s laptop that he carries all over the country!
So I’ve been thinking about passwords—my boss and co-workers both seem unable to remember them, or to use anything more complex than a dictionary word or such—whereas I have upwards of 10 passwords stored in my head, not dictionary-listed and not completely alphabet-composed, just that I use on a fairly regular basis. Is this an age thing? Or, more accurately, an “exposure to computers” thing (My father, who is probably the same age as my boss or a bit older, has never had any trouble with this, but he is a Computer Wizard.)... Or does it vary even more than that, and my recall has to do with my exposure to computers, to practice, to choosing good passwords, and to my ability to remember trivial bits of information? Your own experiences?
The tale of my attempts to save the world through blood-donation is a long one, fraught with mishap and despair. Actually, the first time I ever gave blood, the only despair it was fraught withal was “despair of having a nice pretty arm for the next 3 weeks”, and all the mishaps devolved on my friend Spunkmeyer, who gave blood despite being borderline on the weight requirement, and ended up fainting twice and giving up her cookies three times.
Since that time (1999) my fine O+ blood has graced no greedy bags. On September 11th, I joined a non-merry crew of people trying to do something more constructive than morbidly eyeing the television, and trooped all over the Case area searching for a willing phlebotomist. Despite the high number of hospitals in the area, no one wanted our blood. Sometime later that fall, I stopped by a drive at the Campus Hillel - during Finals Week, I think - and, after waiting and filling out forms, was told I was borderline anemic. I guess skipping breakfast and turning your nose up at cafeteria meat isn’t the healthy person’s choice.
But recently I heard that the Oregon Red Cross was hurting (they are doing much better this week), so I decided it was time to try again. I’d really like to be a regular donor. After all, as soon as [It will be a pirate ship. With red sails. And a pony.|text|my ship comes in], I will travel a great deal and become ineligible. I made an appointment and set out, trusty Yahoo Map in hand, after work yesterday. The only year-round place to give blood in these parts is just over the Willamette in NE Portland.
The Map informed me that Macadam becomes Kelly becomes Arthur becomes 3rd becomes Caruthers becomes 6th becomes 26 W becomes 405 N, and that I should care. “I will follow the 405 N signs,” I informed the map. I soon swooped onto 26 W, and tried to do the two consecutive merges that would preserve my self-determinism. But the cretinous truck drivers of the world had other plans, and I found myself rudely ejected on 12th. “This does not bode well,” quoth I. “26 West!” quoth the map in alarm. “Yeah, yeah,” I replied, and made my way through the heavy traffic back to 6th. I merged left once! I merged left twice! I merged left chicken soup with rice! Or not, but at any rate, soon I was on 405, and the map directed me to go 3.2 miles on said marvel of engineering before turning left on Cook Street.
“Turn left? Turn left off a freeway? No exit?” “Turn left. Cook Street!” the map said smugly. I scanned the horizons for signs of Cook Street. Instead, I saw signs of a fork in the freeway.
I clutched the unfortunate map by the midsection. “Interstate 5? Highway 30? You been holdin’ out on me, Yahoo?”
“Cook Street!” it gasped in defiance. Disgusted, I let it flit back to its seat. Most people were veering right. I hoped Cook Street was popular, and followed the flow down I5. Immediately, my O+ pump sank. I had been here before. Somehow, whenever Matt and I get lost in Portland, we end up here. If I didn’t take the first exit, I’d be headed north until I found a hotel for the night in Olympia. I took the first exit. I ignored the anguished howls of the map, turned around in front of a run-down pub, and headed south on I5.
“Right! This time, I will miss…no…EXITS!” I plunged back onto the bridge. There simply were no exits to miss. “Fine! Fine!” I navigated around a bit and got back on 405 North. “This time I’m just getting off in East Portland!” I noted the names of the streets near Vancouver Avenue (my eventual destination) and flung the map into the passenger-side footwell. I crossed the river again. By this time, any witches on my tail were well and truly flummoxed. I took the Highway 30 fork. I got off at the first exit. “Rose Quarter,” I noted, “I’ve been here, so at least I can escape if need be. There’s even a train.” I scanned the road signs for familiar names. No go. What street was I on? I glanced upwards. VANCOUVER AVENUE! “Ha! Ha!” I chortled.
“Cook Street,” a melancholy voice echoed from the footwell.
“No! We’re-” I glanced up to check the street number. “on WEIDLER?” I thought I heard a papery cackle. I turned, turned, turned, to find the blessed Vancouver. No go. I retraced the same back alleys again. No Vancouver. Was it a mirage? I pondered the advisability of turning my clothes inside out and trying to convince the street spirits I was, in fact, Yticilef Enna. Finally, I stopped the car, got out the 1997 Thomas Guide mapbook, and managed to find my way to the Red Cross, despite the date of the maps and the intensity of new construction in the area.
I was 15 minutes late. Of course, as my appointment didn’t show up on their list, this didn’t signify. I waited for a bitsy, Larry King interrogating Tammy Faye on high above, and answered some questions. I was given a form to fill out. I really wish there was a box that said, “I got my first french kiss in college from my now-spouse, caffeine makes me hyper and I think a wild party involves playing Lunch Money” so that I could skip ahead. At any rate, I finally got my finger sticked by some sort of volunteer. My blood had only 37% iron. This is healthy, but you need 38% to give blood. Primal Scream mounting. “Can I go now?”
“You still have to talk to the nurse,” the volunteer said.
Now, please note that I had in fact had a very hard day before all of this. So this nurse in her early fifties with an intelligent face, a kind smile, and interesting glasses walks in, and before I know it, I’m crying about the fact that I can’t give blood. So we chat and chat, and as I got ready to leave, I said, “Thank you for listening to my non-blood-related problems,” and she laughed and said, “I’m a retired mental health nurse.” I got a hug before I left.
Sometimes I create the blog entries in a text editor first, because I’ve had some browser crashes before. But no! I decided to do it straight in the browser today! And the power flickers for one instant, and POOF! What have I done, O computer spirits?
Your long and amusing blog entry will be much, much later.