Remember me talking about how Kara’s dad made a documentary? Now he’s produced a short film for a competition on skepticism and science, featuring her adorable fast-talking niece Lydia in a quest to verify the existence of fairies. Unlike Andrus, this one you can watch right now as part of a proven and effective way of avoiding your work. Go do that!
Category: Roommates
That’s no battle station
A few weeks ago, Kara and I went out to dinner at a fancy restaurant for her stepdad’s birthday, and I got to meet several members of her extended family for the first time. It was a really nice dinner and we all enjoyed ourselves. Then we walked out to the car, got in, started the engine, glanced backwards and realized that someone had smashed in the rear passenger window and stolen my bag, containing books and my laptop, and a couple hundred dollars’ worth of new clothes Kara had just had delivered by UPS. Have I mentioned that it was raining?
The waitstaff at the restaurant informed us that this was the fourth such smash-and-grab from their parking lot in three weeks. There is no camera or floodlight there. I still need to call up the building owners for a polite discussion about that.
The whole situation sucked a lot, but we got the window replaced and Kara got some of the clothes replaced by a kind friend for her birthday. My car insurance covered the window but not the contents; Kara’s home insurance would have covered them, but in neither instance did the damage meet the deductible. (I had to buy a new windshield after a rock chip incident last summer, too, so I have now replaced about 40% of the glass on my car out of pocket.) The fact is that we are very fortunate to have afforded such luxuries to begin with, and remain both fortunate and luxurious.
I replaced the laptop with a much newer, shinier, more expensive version, but then my boss took the opportunity to buy a nice new Mac Mini for my desk at work (I had been using the aforementioned four-year-old Macbook) and I returned it. The laptopless life is one plagued with tiny inconveniences, so I’ll probably buy it again in a few months when they update the hardware.
The point of this post is to eulogize my old dingy white Macbook, which, for a refurbished computer at the very low end of Apple’s lineup, did me proud for three and a half years. I used it as my only work machine for much of that time; it accompanied me to London, Innsbruck, Winston-Salem, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, London again, Paris, and Taastrup, where I dumped a glass of water into it and actually managed to grow mold on its hard drive. And then I replaced said drive and used it at the new job for another six months! No one could have asked more.
Thanks, Macbook. You were a good computer.
Geek Note: For reasons I can’t remember now, I named the laptop DEATHSTAR on our home network when I first bought it; after the hard drive resurrection (and, for the first time, the switch out of Boot Camp to native OS X), I rechristened it Fully Operational. Apparently every Death Star gets destroyed, though, so I have moved on to a new naming convention. Kara’s and my iMac is now the Batcave, the Mac Mini is the Batpod, and whenever I get the laptop again, it will be the Tumbler.
Update 2255 hrs: Kara has informed me that the iMac is named Hodge, after John Hodgman, and always will be, and HOW COULD I THINK THAT, and WHAT AM I GOING TO DO TO OUR CHILDREN, RENAME THEM EVERY TIME I READ A BOOK. (I say he’s only Hodge as long as Windows is running. He is a PC.)
I’ve been meaning to post about this forever! Not forever. Three weeks.
As part of my Christmas present, Kara got tickets for us to see Phoenix on January 24th. It was a really fun show, except for the fact that the people around us did not understand Brendan’s Grand United Concert Zone Theorem with regards to where idiots are allowed to stand. I was really ticked about this at the time, so we started leaving a little early, which meant that we were standing about two feet away when Thomas Mars started wading out through the crowd to climb up on a speaker and declare his love for Portland. Shaky phonecam proof:
He’s an odd-looking dude. But that was pretty cool!
This also makes xkcd more plausible
Sick Kara is zoning out watching The Lost World on TV. It occurs to me that the moral of all the Jurassic Park movies, as explicitly stated by Jeff Goldblum and borne out by events onscreen, is this: “Quantum physics guarantees that you will be killed by dinosaurs.”
I never really liked the films, but I could get behind that premise.
This is why
(Kara and I are creeping by the Portland train station in heavy traffic. I notice the beautifully gabled windows on its upper floor.)
Brendan: What do you think is up there?
Kara: Oh, offices.
Brendan: What?
Kara: Yeah, you can see in some of the windows. Look in that one–see, cubicle walls.
Brendan: That’s disappointing. I was hoping that, like… orphans lived inside.
Kara: I know!
Brendan: And had adventures.
Kara: I know EXACTLY what you mean.
We Return You Now to Masterpiece Chatlog
Holly and I were discussing the inevitable self-recrimination that comes of owning a computer with anything one has ever written on it.
| Brendan: | I am not sure if there is a way to mature that does not involve violent, sickened hatred toward all one’s own past incarnations, but–hang on, I think I just reinvented Buddhism. |
| Holly: | But Buddhism was invented by someone who didn’t have computer logs of half the things he’d ever said or written. |
| Brendan: | Well, he WAS a lot cleverer than you or me, Holly. |
| Holly: | And ha, yes, teachings “transmitted orally” for ages, says wikipedia, so maybe that is indeed the solution. |
| Holly: | I bet he invented the computer and then saw what self-recriminations and nausea it would scatter on the path to enlightenment and self-improvement, and hid it at the bottom of a pond or something. |
| Holly: | (This is the plot of the next Dan Brown novel.) |
I saw Snüzz live in concert solo only once, last year, while I was living in North Carolina with Jon and Amanda. It was some kind of multi-band benefit thing, and the Brasfields, ardent fans of his, convinced me to go and take a cute girl from OKCupid.
The show (like the date) was a mixed success. It introduced me to Midtown Dickens, my favorite lo-fi act, but while Snüzz was great, he only played for about twenty minutes. Afterwards he sat next to us in the audience, and I mentioned that I was a friend of Jon’s; he smiled broadly and said hey, yeah, Jon and Amanda were awesome, he hoped to see them again sometime. Then I said I’d enjoyed the show but wished it had been longer. He opened his mouth, hesitated, then smiled (less broadly) and just said thanks.
Turns out he was probably forced to stop early by the symptoms of his then-undiagnosed lymphoma. I wish I’d known to say something more tactful. He’s holding the second of a couple benefit concerts himself now; the first was to raise funds for his medical bills, and this one for a group that helps buffer cancer victims against unforeseen costs.
It’s not like I have many non-Brasfield contacts in North Carolina, but hey, if you like good music you should go and toss some money in the hat. It’s this Sunday night at the Blind Tiger in Greensboro.
Things are different in Oregon
Brendan: Hey, pdiddle. Wait, two pdiddles! They crossed just in front of us!
Kara: Two whats?
Brendan: Pdiddles? Cars with one headlight?
Kara: Oh! You mean a beerfuckyou.
I went on a shopping spree for this occasion because it turns out I was down to one pair of pants
I start a new job today! A real job in an office, where I have to commute, in pants! Well, actually I’m still contracting until the end of the year, but if all goes well I’ll be an employee after that. I understand the pants part stays the same.
I’ll be working in a little development shop with four guys, two blocks from Kara, making web sites work on your cell phone. (Not on my cell phone! My cell phone barely gets texts.) I have ranklements about the necessity of the change that I will not air here, in the interest of respect for metaphorical bridges, but it will be good to stop sitting around clicking the Twitbook and stuffing handfuls of trail mix into my mouth all day.
It’s going to be fun! I’m excited. Remind me that I said this in a month.
Nononymity
Carrie Fisher blogs, apparently, and the evidence suggests that she’s been doing a bit of back-and-forth with the Internet in her own defense. Basically, people think she doesn’t look like she did in 1983. I will allow you a moment of shock.
On my west’ard migration a year and a half ago, while I was bumming around San Francisco on my own, someone–Sumana?–suggested that I take a night and go see a play. By happy coincidence, I was in town at the same time as Fisher, who was doing her show Wishful Drinking at the Berkeley Rep. So I got a ticket and went.
I learned a great deal about Fisher that evening (I hadn’t even known she was married to Paul Simon), and in the process saw probably the only good one-person show ever. I also laughed a lot. How can you avoid laughing at the image of Cary Grant calling up a teenage girl, at her parent’s slightly deranged request, to lecture her soberly about the dangers of LSD–twice? Or at a still from the bridge of the Death Star about which she noted that “I weighed about ninety pounds here, eighty of which I carried in my face?”
It’s one thing to know somebody is a writer; it’s another to see her perform in a self-written multimedia showcase that includes jokes about her own electroshock therapy. I liked Carrie Fisher before then, almost as much for her guest spot on 30 Rock as for Star Wars (and that was all before I knew she tried out for Han Solo). After that show, like became admiration, and she was elevated to the selective ranks of people who have secured my loyalty pretty much for good. Even if her blog posts are littered with unnecessary punctuation.
(In case you’ve noticed that I started dating a short girl with a screenwriting degree, a taste for wine and a sardonic sense of humor within months of moving to Portland: shhh.)
It’s not as if I think the people reading my blog are among those going “oh no how did princess lea get fat :(.” But I feel the need to state this anyway: Carrie Fisher rolls with my crew. And before you write a word against her, consider the fact that fuck you forever, and die in a hole.
Shitcock.