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Josh Ritter: wolves :: Counting Crows: rain

This is my insight for the day. Maybe insight is too strong of a word; thought is more like it. The other day I was thinking about public education while my teeth were getting drilled. My teeth were getting drilled today as well, but I was not thinking about education. 

Speaking of Counting Crows, the other day (and by that I mean some random day several months ago) I realized that a group of crows is called a "murder," and the song title "A Murder of One" made much more sense. That's the song with the lyric "I dreamt I saw you walking up a hillside in the snow/Casting shadows on the winter sky as you stood there/Counting crows." 

You'd think I'd been thinking about Counting Crows a lot recently based on this post, but the opposite in fact is true. The song lyric revelation made me think of a similar moment I had with Sheryl Crow's "If It Makes You Happy," but I was unsure of just what lyric was revealed to me after years of listening to the song. I did remember, however, that I had mentioned that moment it in the brief autobiography I wrote in a junior year writing class where I picked ten songs through which to tell my life story. (Yes, it was as bad as it sounds.) It was not worth mentioning, but I did proceed to spent a good half hour reading through miscellaneous pieces of old writing, coming across this gem. It was in a folder labeled "Memoirs," which I opened hoping that I would find a substantial body of work I could perhaps use. There was a single document named "March 10 (06)" and it consisted of a 3,000 word stream of consciousness, excerpted below.

Ok I’m going to write 1000 words right now without stopping to punctaute or anything so that I can take a shower and feel like I accomplished something– again we are going to go for quantity since measuring by quality these days makes me sad and like I want to cry. That was a little overdramatic, as was the part when I said I would not stop to punctuate. I feel that Lynn Truss, author of “eats, shoots, and leaves,” which is on my floor right now as we speak, would be disappointed in me. I also wasted precious time deleting to make sure that the comma went inside the quotation marks, even though I could just pass it off as british, it did kind of annoy me. I am on some level meant to be a proofreader but proofing these math papers makes me depressed since they are so badly written.

Three years later and not much has changed, eh?

A New Post

Because Kate demanded ever so politely. And because I have yet to post something in the new year and 2009 is already almost a month old. 

My excuse for this month has been an extended road trip. I am working on my excuse for next month. 

I have yet to finish writing my list of new year's resolutions. It is extensive. I also had a huge to-do list (which I also haven't finished writing yet). I was very proactive about one of the first items, which was going to the dentist for a check-up. I think it took some of the satisfaction of crossing it off my list when the dentist told me I have ten cavities that need to be filled and I should get my wisdom teeth out, but that my insurance probably wouldn't pay for both in one year. Now instead of having that one item on the list I have about five more dentist appointments to make, plus calling the insurance company, buying fluoride rinse (check!), etc. Not to mention how stupid I feel for not making it to the dentist in 2008. 

Last year I think my new year's resolutions were to volunteer and write. I started volunteering at 826 Seattle in February and I think I finally got around to joining a writing class in April or so. I also planned to exercise sometime last year as well, but never quite got around to that. I also resolved to blog regularly.

But it's a new new year. And I just got up to check why my water wasn't boiling after ten minutes. I was confused because my first thought was that I had turned the wrong burner on yet again (which is sad because I only have two burners these days), but I really didn't think that was the case. I felt for sure I had double checked this time since I had only an hour before been talking to Crystal about that very issue. Actually, it was more of a debate as to whether you can burn pans. I think her point was that pans are made to heat up and so you'd have to be really stupid to burn one. I think my point was that I am that stupid and have the burnt pans to prove it, therefore proving that you can burn pans. 

Water is making heating noises now. Oh, and I had turned the wrong burner on. But fortunately said burner had come out of its connection so my George Foreman did not melt. 

The end. 

Ugly Sweater Parties

What is the opposite of preaching to the choir? Preaching to the heathens that wander into church for the free sip of wine? I'm not sure. Anyway, that's what I'm doing right now as I know for a fact that I am the only twentysomething in the country who has never attended an ugly sweater party. And I know that some of you have even hosted these theme parties yourself. 

Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I would like to say that I have never been invited to an ugly sweater party. So I can't claim that I've ever taken a principled stance and actually refused an invitation to one of these things. I don't have much will power, and I don't want to make it seem like I feel strongly enough about this issue that I would give up the rare opportunity to leave my one-room hermitage just to make a point. As you can see, such opportunities are few and far between for me. It is 7:30 PM on a Friday night and I am at home by myself posting to a blog that is, at best, read by five people (but five people of the highest quality, might I add). 

Anyway, all I know is that ugly sweater parties have gotten out of control. By this I mean that last time I was in Value Village (which is a second-hand store where I buy most of my clothes these days, except for underwear, which I now order online from gap.com. Is that too much information?) there were two girls in front of me, either SPU or UW students, sometimes it's hard to tell. (No offense. I mean, some of my best friends are UW students.) I could tell this because the girl placed two ugly sweaters on the counter and asked if she could pay for one with a debit card and one with cash, because it was for her roommate. 

Maybe I'm just bitter because the only time I ever placed a costume choice in the hands of a roommate I ended up being the red Power Ranger for Halloween. Bronwyn got to be Superman, her friend got to be Batman, and Cara got to be Spiderman and I was the red Power Ranger. I had never even seen the Power Rangers. 

But that is irrelevant. The point is I thought having an ugly sweater party was funny when I first heard about it. But now I don't get it. At this point it's no longer an original idea by any stretch of the imagination, but it's also about ten years too early for it to be an ironic party theme ("Let's have an ugly sweater party. It'll be so 2007! Like when they thought it was so funny to have parties to make fun of the sweaters people wore in the '80's.")

Apologies. I'll dismount from my soapbox now (10! She sticks the landing!). I haven't been this controversial since 2006 when I wrote about pink baseball caps and Kenli accused me of hating breast cancer victims. 

Untitled

I've decided to post again even though I am not particularly inspired, nor do I have anything to say, just to keep up the momentum and to keep this from becoming the now-defunct non-blog. 

To answer your questions: tuna head was vetoed, as in it will not be appearing in the company e-newsletter, but we still like to call it that (behind Greg's back, of course.) So Tuesdays have become Tuna Tuesdays because that's when we send it out. I also like "Constant Tuna" as a code name since we use the Constant Contact program. So that's the tuna. 

As for Nano, I started out with a brilliant idea, which of course was not mine but Caroline's (the Young one), of writing "A New Englander's Guide to Seattle." I still like this idea. What I ended up with is in no shape to be shared now or maybe ever, but I think it was valuable experience for the process of it. That last sentence didn't really make that much sense, but I feel like you might know what I mean, so I'm not going to rewrite it. This is one thing I learned from NaNoWriMo. If you erase, you'll never reach the word goal. So you just have to leave it there and move it. It's kind of a good life lesson now that I think about it.

Maybe I need a theme. 

For the blog. 

Suggestions?

November Excuses

Apologies for not posting for over a month. In case anyone still checks this, I will offer an explanation for why there was not a single post in the month of November. Basically it was because I had too many outlets for my bad writing last month that there was nothing left over to post. First, I competed in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) for the second year in a row. I successfully wrote 50,000 words in 30 days. It is not a novel; it's not even the nonfiction narrative about moving to Seattle I intended it to be. All it is really is a big ass document, full of whiny journaling for the most part. 

And as if that was not a large enough quantity of crap, I have also been producing low quality verbiage for not only the Windworks newsletter (the only reason I include the link is because I think you should check out page 3 of this issue--I made Brian dress up for a fashion shoot), but also for our new e-newsletter, which I fondly refer to as "the tuna." This is because my boss named it "Tuna Head." I am not making this up.  I walked into work one day the week before Thanksgiving to find that my boss, Greg, had stayed up all night creating an e-newsletter. For those of you who have seen our website, you will understand why this is scary. Anyway, he had written a short introduction to the e-newsletter, which informed the reader/customer that the e-newsletter was named the "Tuna Head (Tune Ahead) Newsletter." He then went on to claim that "tune ahead" was a nautical term for planning ahead and that "we" liked "tuna head" since it was "catchy" and "memorable." Needless to say, the name was vetoed by every other member of the staff since we all agreed that a.) there was no reason the e-newsletter needed a name and 2.) if it did have a name for our company newsletter, it shouldn't sound like we smoked a bowl and then had a brainstorming session. 

That's about it. I'll try to start blogging again. Thanks for reading.