LaurieWrites

Tiny Mix Tapes is my favorite.

Currently, "sex is good. remind me of that fact." and "songs that won't remind me of you" are my favorite.

This is pretty awesome too:

Make me something exactly 20 minutes long. That way, in case I don't fall asleep by the time my 20-minute sleep timer on the stereo goes off, I don't have to deal with the tension of hearing a song unfinished. You know how that goes.

Requested by: mosni
Compiled by: jhox
Total length 19:51 just to play it safe. These songs should step you down into sleep quite nicely, as well.

01. They Might Be Giants - "Sleepwalkers" (No!) - 2:42
02. Cassandra Wilson - "Tupelo Honey" (Blue Light 'Til Dawn) - 5:36
03. Otis Redding - "I've Got Dreams To Remember" (Very Best Of) - 3:15
04. Johnny Hartman - "In The Wee Small Hours of the Morning" (I Just Dropped By To Say Hello) - 2:49
05. Stan Getz/Joao Gilberto - "Corcovado (Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars)" (Getz/Gilberto) - 4:16
06. Mike Oldfield - "Molly" (QE2) - 1:13

Poorly Worded Sign of the Day

Who refused the permission to prohibit the parking?

Here. Again.

Nothing like a little comedy from the mailman.

I received a couple of pieces of mail today at my parents' house. One was addressed directly to me here...a present from my friend (YAY!! It is beautiful!!!!) who knew I was here, and the other some lame credit card thing. The mailman scribbled, "HERE AGAIN?" on the outside of both of the envelopes.

I have never met him, since all the mailboxes for the court are grouped in a little mailbox house at the end of the street, so I don't know how he expects me to answer him. But he apparently knows me. "HERE AGAIN?" Yes, my funny little postal friend, I am indeed. Thanks for the reminder. I thought that was very strange.

In other random news:

I've used the phrase "wholly unsatisfying" like eight times today, and I don't even particularly like it. I don't know why I keep saying it, and the next time I do, I'm going to hit myself in the mouth and people will stare. Won't that be fun?

I have a sore throat. This is not normal for August, and it's making me very uncomfortable. Sore throat = November or February. Summertime must be fabulous and illness-free.

I can't wait to get my hair cut. I feel like Thing on the Munsters, or Sigmund the Sea Monster. Of course Sid and Marty Krofft have fansites. How did it take me so long to find these gems?

I am really sort of tired of watching my great friends go through unhappy, screwy relationship situations. I just wish people would...get with the program. Bleh. What is the deal? It's summertime!

I so need a massage. I feel like a cinder block has been sitting on both of my shouders for days. 

I just had some of the best Indian food I've EVER had, in Frederick, which I find sort of amusing. Tandoori chicken...rock on.

I look forward to perhaps ONE day this weekend when the virtual treadmill I've been on for the past month will stop, but I don't think it's going to happen.

I loathe people with poor communication skills - especially when it wastes time for everyone concerned.

My dog is excited that I'm home. Hence, he's up all night, walking around on my bed. Hence, sleeping isn't working out so well. Small price to pay for such devotion, I guess.

This has been the longest week in recent memory, already. Ice cream bar, anyone?

And centrifugal force, while we're at it.

My friend gave me these silly sunglasses...and I wore orange pants today....which can only mean one thing...(and no, not just that I'll fool around with my camera...)

It's time to try....

DEFYING GRAVITY.

(This is way harder than it looks. Harder than buying a router even. Maybe. That didn't make all the blood rush to my head...) 

"So if you care to find me
Look to the Western sky!
As someone told me lately
Everyone deserves the chance to fly."

This is Elphaba's song (the Wicked Witch) in Wicked. So do it the right way, instead of the way she did it, (the gravity thing, that is...) and maybe you won't end up turning green, ruining the lives of many little people, and melting in a pool of water.

Oh, and orange pants rule. Wear the orange pants. And the weird glasses. It definitely kicks Wednesday right in the ass.

Anything goes in a place like this.

I am obsessed with the Killers.

It's really weird. I love "Hot Fuss". I've listened to "Smile Like You Mean It" and "All These Things That I've Done" twenty times apiece since yesterday. That's all.

8.9

August 9th, 1994. I had a teal Cavalier and I drove it here: I didn't know what a red state was, then, so I had no idea I was moving to one. I had this really open heart.

I spent a lot of time (and went into significant debt) here:

I lived here: And here. And here.

I worked my ass off here, for a few years:It was the most significant work I've ever done. I learned most of what I know about communication, and meaning, and memory, then. It got pretty intense.

Now is likely the place in the story where I should tell you I found myself in this particular city, because of a trip I took in August one year. But that's not exactly true. I just learned to keep looking.

Dayton never looked like this at night.

Route This

So I walk into the CompUSA last night, which is quite an accomplishment all by itself. I can get a bit overwhelmed in there, what with all the wires and the little rebate cards and the extremely bright lights. But the deal is, I need to set up some kind of wireless situation in the house, and in spite of all the reading I do about this online, when it comes down to it, I need to check this kind of stuff out in person. So, I rambled on in.

The router concept has confounded me for a while now. I think I've gotten that by plugging a router into the existing broadband modem that is currently plugged into the desktop cpu, I can set up my big old desktop (aka: the center of my universe as I have known it for the last three years...I'm coping SO well after a week without it, truly...), have access to the Net on it, and the signal will also magically travel right up to the second floor, to the laptop that just may be sitting on my big, fluffy, mounded-with-pillows bed. This is key, of course.

The router aisle was disconcerting. The endcap was all one particular brand, and they were all 120 bucks. I didn't think they'd be that much. I mean, I'm not trying to connect to Brazil. I'm not one of those competitive techies who's all "Well, I have 8 million GAGAHERTZ on my (insert pretentious, outdated-in-six-months device here) and I find that's JUST about enough, but I'm really thinking about jacking it up to 10 for the next go-round." Nope. Just give me a signal strong enough to connect to my crack candy websites and my e-mail accounts with the pretty fonts and allow me to do all of this LYING DOWN in my lovely  bed with no trouble whatsoever, and I will be very happy.

Of course, once past the endcap, the routers ate my brain. There were like fifty different ones. And there is apparently a conspiracy in the router-selling community, that each brand makes ALL of its boxes look exactly the same! I mean, Grandpa Router, (I'm not even going to pretend to remember the numbers of the frequencies, here) that sort of meanders your connection along, maybe hooking you up the next room over if you talk nice to it, looks EXACTLY the same as the super-powered Wunderkind Router, that can power the laptops and riding lawn mowers of an entire ZIP CODE. The frequency numbers on each box contain decimal points, without indicating their significance. One of the boxes said "SPEEDBOOST!" and then told me jack NOTHING about how my speed would be boosted and what kind of boost it needed, anyway.

And of course, as the price for each identically-packaged router goes up, it only does so in increments of ten bucks. This is only enough to be annoying, and not to indicate a clear difference between them. So I'm thinking, hmmm....49.99 after the (insidious, pain in the ass, unnecessary...) 17 rebate cards I'll never fill out...how is that different from 69.99? And is it better to just bet the farm on the 89.99 one, which I may or may not need in our relatively small house? I mean, why not? WHY NOT? THIS ONE ONLY HAS 12 REBATE CARDS! "But is it 'speedboosted'?" the devil on my shoulder says. And why should I care?

This is normally when I run screaming from a store. Last night, I stopped a clerk instead. See, I really want this thing.  "Hey," I said, "I'm going to spit this out even though I really have no idea what I'm talking about." And I explained how I thought I understood the whole router concept, but could he just listen and tell me what to do. And I told him about the laptop, and the broadband, and I think I even mentioned wanting to lay down and type if I wanted to. And he said yes I was mostly right and that yes, all I needed was the router to make it work. But then he said something about houses built out of brick versus drywall, and how probably the 49.99 one would be okay, in fact he was pretty sure of it, and how big was the house anyway? So I thanked him and I left, and decided to look into this just a little bit more. But at least I know I'm on the right track.

Thank You, and Goodnight.

I loved Peter Jennings. He was truly my first crush that I remember, which likely defines me as the geek that I am, but that's fine. He was just so calm, so smooth, and so...there. Every night. So there. And he had the greatest voice, ever. In the years before the Internet, cable television and exploding planes, I watched the news every night. We were an ABC house, and I was a Peter Jennings girl. And when those planes exploded almost four years ago, I turned to ABC yet again, long after MSNBC became my media drug of choice. It was necessary to spend that day with a familiar face and voice, and it turns out, from what I read, that I wasn't alone in that choice. 

Barbara Walters is saying "don't smoke", today. Ted Koppel is saying "stay in high school," as his reaction to what Peter Jennings may have regretted about the choices he made in life. But I say that if you can accomplish a great deal more than most people in 67 years, if you can stand in Baghdad in the January before the August in which you die, reporting on and supporting American troops, you haven't done so bad, for an ex-smoker and a high-school dropout, if that's what people choose to focus on. And when you die, folks should wait a while to make it into a public service announcement, and then they should say, "Look what you can accomplish even if you don't finish high school. Look at what you can do, even if you made some unhealthy lifestyle choices. You can be seriously impressive in the time you have, and all over the world, people will pause when you die, and remember you."

Last night, I went to the Borders store where I used to work, to get some writing done. I don't have wireless Internet set up at my house yet, and I need alternatives to feed my addiction, apparently. I also haven't been able to concentrate on this project I'm finishing at home, what with the move and the uprooting and the plethora of my STUFF that's piled up waiting to go into storage and oh hell let's be honest, the general feeling of crazy-go-nutsness that I've been experiencing since last year week. I don't see many people I know there anymore, which makes it much easier to concentrate, and I do find the cafe a comfortable, comforting, grounding sort of spot. Except those chairs they have now - quelle suckage! My butt was flat going in, but now it's concave, and it HURT. I think the idea is to discourage lingering, but haha to that. A stitch and bitch knitting group was meeting a few tables over from me. Then, some weird, uncomfortable match.com date between two older people who did nothing but bitch about their exes (his had an anxiety problem and two small children. Hers was apparently just a wreck across the board.) was taking place right next to me. I so wanted to interrupt and tell them to move on, switch to decaf, and talk about ANYTHING BUT THIS DEADWOOD, but figured that wouldn't be welcomed. Next time, I bring a grandma cushion,  my friends, and my "The Doctor Is In" sign. Can't get comedy like that everywhere.

I began working at the store in August, 1999 (!!!!), and August is generally a pretty significant month for me. I left Maryland for Ohio on August 9th, 1994, and somehow managed to come back on August 9th too in 1999, not realizing til later that it was the same day. I went up the escalator last night to search for the Amanda Davis book in fic/lit before I started working, and here was this John Irving display, and a "now hiring" sign. It made me smile. Six Augusts later. So much change! But you know, they had the book I really wanted, right there on the shelf, which was cool. I can usually count on that. Lots of things have been moved around in the store, all the desks and lots of the shelves, and there's new carpet, which is nice. Carol from Kids stopped by my table in the cafe, all excited about the remodel of her area, and said I had to go back upstairs and look at it. (I was effortlessly patient with Carol, who normally drives me a little nuts. This made me feel good. I must be mellowing in my old age!) So, I did...and the music department is totally different. I don't like it. They've changed all the cd racks to the new style - no nice wood to brace yourself on while you plow through them. ; ) There's lots more floor space, and the travel section is right next to the music now, which is very, very strange. The whole mood of the space is different. It's very...spare, I guess...in contrast to what I thought was a homey feeling before. But things, they change. There isn't anything more to say about most things than that, I find. Must needs take what was good about it, file it away in the happy places somewhere, and bag the rest. Would that this was as easy as it sounds. Would that silly things like music department shelves could mean a little less sometimes, just enough to take the edge off.

Unbeige

Quote of the day: "You make something off-white or beige because you are afraid to use any other color, because you don't want to offend anybody. But by definition, when you make something no one hates, no one loves it. So I am interested in imperfections, quirkiness, insanity, unpredictability. That's what we really pay attention to anyway." tibor kalman