Last weekend and what-not

I have finally posted pictures from the month of may to Flickr. You will find, much like the one above, pictures of the fairy garden that Allison and I made for my mom (I hope it survives). Also pictures of that noble beast, Othello. Finally, under "Garden 2007" pictures, from a few weeks ago, of our new garden plot, refitted with (fingers-croseed) deer and critter proof fencing. When we go up to the garden today, I will take some new pics of the garden with plants, including a rose bush of the "knockout" variety.

out of the wormhole

I have exited the wormhole of working two jobs, today being my last day at EPL. Next week will be my first official full week at the Newberry. I am looking forward to being able to establish a better routine that will include working out at the gym, reading books, and writing. I haven't decided whether or not to schedule the latter two activities in the early morning or in the late night. My brain is crap in the morning, so that would seem to rule out mornings. But I get quite distracted later at night.

In other news, our dryer isn't working well and all of our clothes come out smelling musty. Very appealing. Wellesley has begun running up to Tatum's automatic feeder and slamming herself into it (and the wall) which causes a generous amount of food to shake loose. She has already created several large gashes in the all, and I am racking my brain over how to thwart a cat. Sadly no feasible solution has presented itself and the cat has me beat!

new new job

Tomorrow I start a new new job at the Newberry. For the next week and a half I'll be working both of my jobs, which means long days. Oh well, I will have to savor my downtime. While it feels strange to be starting a new job again, I am feeling much less anxiety than I did over starting at EPL. I don't, however, equate this with a difference of anticipation or excitement, but a greater sense of ease over adjusting to a new routine. The Newberry job is full-time and requires a commute downtown (pre-loop really, but fer away enough). But I feel to a greater degree the inevitability of becoming inured to these facts of the job. Well, to the future...

strange after-lifes

I rescued a handful of old paperbacks from the trash yesterday at the library. They included an erotic pulp novel, a book of Havelock Ellis' sexological writings, a books of HG Wells' short stories, and a book on the Marquis de Sade called Philosopher of Evil by Water Drummond. I only learned later that Drummond was a pseudonym for Robert Silverberg, a well-known science fiction writer. I opened this book and saw that it had been published in Evanston in the early 1960s. Intrigued I began searching for information on the Internet. Regency was an offshoot of several magazine and book publishing ventures by William Hamling, mostly science-fiction. Hamling worked with Hugh Hefner at one point and later published a men's magazine called Rogue. He began a line of soft-core pornographic novels under the imprint of Bedside Books, which later became Regency, all of which were run by "Blake Pharmaceuticals". Their offices were on Dempster, between the El stop and Sherman. Well, none of this is inherently interesting, but strange to imagine a cosmos of science fiction fans and soft-core porno writers have once lingered along these streets.

writing with cats

I have been a fairly productive writer recently, having begun a nice routine of writing for several hours every morning and some late nights too. My cats have other plans, as you can see from the above pic.

My daemon?

I was surprised that my daemon came up as a wolf. What do you think?

Update: Wow, through some circuitous path, my daemon has returned to being a wolf. Who woulda thunk it?

Part-time life

As I seem to be facing mounting criticism for only working a part-time job, I applied to a part-time job with a local non-profit. Drafting the cover letter took some time, however, as I always end up feeling like a patent medicine salesman writing these things. So, there goes another version of myself out into the ether, awaiting judgment.

I have been reading Borges' Universal History of Infamy and enjoying it immensely. I would highly recommend this collection of stories. It has given me several ideas for my Estep project. I also bought a comic book version of Moby Dick over the weekend and read it with great relish. Now, I have only read about 100 pages of the original. But this comic version is quite brilliant as it includes Melvillean digressions on how the nature of whales and how whale blubber is "harvested." So, very smart, actually.

cb2 catalog

For a real hoot, please check out the most recent CB2 catalog [please note the Internet version seems to be a bit cleaned up; the paper version will fill you with riotous laughter and happy glee beams] where you will find some of the most bizarre and incomprehensible catalog copy. Reproduced below, you will find a letter that I sent to the company via email:

Yes, I was looking through the most recent CB2 catalog and was astounded by the incomprehensible copy written for many of the items. My favorite happens to be the description for the channel storage (p. 47), "Dark wood grain laminate shelving flaunts a 1" slit down the back to simultaneously reveal a hint of wall, conceal a mess of media cords. Bookcase has 5 fixed shelves. Media cart sides two doors with clean 1" top reveals that open to one adjustable shelf each." I was distracted by someone writing "a mess of cords," which is a weirdly idiomatic expression. But I didn't even know which product this referred to. Then the third sentence is simply confusing. There is strange and bizarre verbiage like this every where in the catalog: "angled wider seat" (not Wide angled seat) (15) and "slat mat stained matte black" (43). What gives with the strange copy? Was this intentional? This really makes me not want to buy these products because I don't understand what they really are.

This kind of writing reminds me of a beloved Kikkoman soy sauce advert. I can only assume that someone wrote out the copy in a foreign language then had it translated by a non-english speaker. Our current hypothesis is Italian. What do you think?

scrapbook stupidity

I've been working on a scrapbook for our trip to Europe last summer. Well, it's actually more of a scrapbox, as you can see in this picture. Normally, I enjoy doing things like this. I would spend hours making mix tape covers in high school. But this project has been troublesome from the get go. I have fought with paper, with glue, with the photoprinter (also seen in the picture), with layouts, with fingerprints, with every aspect of planning, design, and execution. Yet I labour on.

One annoying thing also associated with this project occurred yesterday when we tried to take some paper back to Paper Source. I purged my receipts last week and no longer had the proper documentation to prove that I bought two miscellaneous packs of paper roughly a month ago. The return policy at the store clearly states that if you don't have a receipt that they can look up your purchase history in the computer. What they don't tell you is that asking the clerk to do so will elicit the kind of response usually reserved for suspicious panhandlers, con men, and presidents. Basically, they treated my like a criminal mastermind, trying to engineer some masterstroke of chicanery in which I defraud the Paper Source company of $12.00. Needless to say, I was in no mood to cackle like an evil genius afterwards, but did maintain enough composure to buy more paper and clutch my receipt as I left the store.

starting work

I was called today and informed that I had passed my drug test. Well, that's one exam in the past six months or so that I didn't fail! That means that I will begin my new job at the Evanston public library in two days. Back to the grind! The last two weeks have been pretty enjoyable. I spend my days reading and working on my Estep project. The mantle in our living room is finally up, just needs a few final touches added to it. With the weather finally breaking into warmth, things are looking up. I suppose these reflections are appropriate for today. I didn't like today's prompt in the Writer's Book of Days, so I got out my Tarot deck and pulled a card and looked it up in my Tarot book. The card that I pulled was the five of cups, seen above (though I don't have a Rider-Waite deck, so the image on mine is a bit different). But the point is that the figure is consumed with grief because it is fixated on the three empty cups and isn't aware of the two full ones behind it. So, I was planning on using this image/description as my writing prompt, but haven't gotten around to it, as luck would have it.

Jarvis Cocker, "Don't Let Him Waste Your Time"

what?

I'm not really meaning to make the Internet comment culture into a hobbyhorse, but I have to note the following comment left for a fun little Internet puzzle game called Cubis 2:

Pros: Easy to learn, and fun to play!
Cons: Gets boring
Comments: Really fun to play when bored.

Uh, there are two possible things wrong with this. On the one hand, if the game's only con is that it gets boring, yet is fun the play when bored, then, as the commentator astutely points out, the game must be REALLY fun to play! On the other hand, why would you play a game that, if bored, will cause you to become bored (or even more bored) as a result of playing it?

Tonight's Lost

How great was it that tonight's episode of Lost featured a classic gothic trope, live burial. Here is Eve Sedgwick on live burial:

It is the position of the self to be massively blocked off from something to which it ought normally to have access. This something can be its own past, the details of its family history; it can be the free air, when the self has been literally buried alive; it can be a lover; it can be just all the circumambient life, when the self is pinned in a death-like sleep. (The Coherence of Gothic Conventions)

Thus, this trope seems very appropriate in a show and on an island where "secrets don't stay buried" to quote Mr. John Locke.

Post Script: If there were a way to officially declare war against Internet fandom, I think that I would. The mere thought of people whining on message boards about how a show like Lost has "jumped the shark," makes me ill. How sad would it be if these people's trigger happy vitriol makes the network pull this show. The inability to screen one's thoughts and reflect on one's responses surely is one of the more frightening symptoms of Internet culture, don't you think? Or to quote Mr. T.S. Eliot:

Nothing again nothing.
"Do
"You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
Nothing"
[...]
"Are you alive or not? Is there nothing in your head?"

foggy day

This picture was taken over the weekend when fog clung to everything.

Golden Compass footage

Bridge to the Stars has just posted a promotional video with pre-vis and pre-rendered CGI mixed with live action footage from the upcoming Golden Compass film. It is very stunning and exciting and...and...

just for fun

got the job!?

Well, my powers of perception must be quite dim. I was sure that I had bombed my interview yesterday. Yet this afternoon I get a call from HR telling me that I got the job. Part of the problem is that I talked myself out of my dejection yesterday by convincing myself that I didn't want the job. Now, I have to unlearn that line of reasoning and substitute the "this is a good thing" line of thought. Of course, I am also completely worried that a better job will suddenly spring up, but that seems a bit too optimistic. Oh, real world!

goodreads

This is fun:

Bad interview

I am probably being overly pessimistic but I had a bad interview today. It was very brief and there was none of the clicking. You know, the clicking. The essence of the interview was very much, "Can you stand on your feet?" and "Can you show up to work on time?" Well, my answers to such questions were a resounding, "Yes!" But having such skills affirmed doesn't really inspire one's passion for a job.

review, recall

I find myself possessing a less than adequate memory these days. I am beginning to do what my mother does, which is repeat myself. So, blogging actually is a nice exercise for someone with the kind of selective amnesia which I seem to have. Looking back through my blog archives I was able to recall moments like when the coffee shop first installed its countertops. Important things like that. March has been a productive blogging month so far. I have more than two posts, which seemed to be my monthly quota for quite some time. Well, that's all, really...