RSS/XML Subscribe
Archive for December 2005
I’ve learned through trials and tribulations that the laptop is nothing more than a device that says to you how very busy and important I am. While it is portable and brings joy to millions of users around the world, the advent of the portable electronic notebook computer is frequently a giant stop sign to those around me. It says, “Oh look, E.J. is writing again. I should leave him alone.” If I actually have time to do it, I can pull up a spreadsheet and appear to be doing a bunch of work that I’m not even engaged in. “Oh look at E.J., he’s doing important work. I shouldn’t bother him”
Well, almost everyone. As I sit here at Otherlands and type this, someone has just managed to interrupt me. But it’s someone I haven’t seen in a really long time so it’s no big surprise. Of course, there is some part of me that is damaged because when they idle near my screen for too long it nearly immediately translates itself into fear that they are stealing my ideas. Hey buddy! Great to see you too! Yes, a new laptop! As they stare a moment too long at the screenplay I am embroiled in writing, I force the biggest smile I can as I hit the Windows-D keys and hide my desktop. “So, how’ve you been?”
Believe me, it isn’t that I want to be left alone. It just doesn’t matter where I go I’m consistently inspired to write while, at the same time, unable to find any peace and quiet in which to do the writing. If I’m at home, my downstairs neighbors have a television lives with the volume knob at a 9. Small wonder that I say hello to them, and they always go, “What?” a couple of times before figuring out I’m just being friendly. So now, I’m in a portable universe of writing that is supposed to take me riding on a giant reading rainbow! I can go to any wi-fi hotspot and update my blog, sending my emails to my wrist PDA and setting reminders to call my cellphone whenever and important event occurs.
After all, I am now the owner of a laptop. I am important and busy. I want to be left alone, obviously, and that is why I am carrying this gigantic thing around — so that people will not notice me.
Right now, I’m in the new car phase of my laptop. Oh, look at my new laptop! It is so fast! It slices, it dices, it even cuts mices. It juliennes. It burns DVD’s in just under 5 minutes. I can surf your bluetooth-enabled cell phone from my desktop and dual boot into the sd card readers USB port with a firewire cable! How long, in fact, is it before more companies follow the lead of Ferrari and start making laptops that are branded like cars I wonder? No longer will we own computers like the Hewlett-Packard. Much like the long-obsolete Packard automobiles, new types will begin to appear like the Mercedes-Benz, the Porsche, and the Alfa Romeo. I’m sure this can’t be a new idea, and now that I own a computer worth more than my car, I can see the need of introducing these Y-chromosome-enabled vehicles of life performance with titles that even the stupidest among us can relate to.
So here I sit, ruminating on how few hours are left in 2005 and, more importantly, on how important I must be now that I own a laptop. I guess I was always far more important than I ever imagined myself to be, and now that nobody is talking to me as I sit here (even when I’m not typing) I have hard evidence.
I remember when it wasn’t so lonely at the bottom a couple of weeks ago.
I sat here reflecting on the year just passed and realizing how much went on that I never bargained for. I went from no job to small job to big job to great job, from heartbreak to heart felt, from a single voice to thousands, from no connection to anything to a connection with so many. This was the year I decided I didn’t care what anyone thought about me anymore. I decided to go ahead and take the plunge with everything that has gone on in my life, to suck the marrow out of it and keep pushing forwards. There has been no single best part of this leg of the journey — it has all been good, even the bad.
I began to recognize who my true friends were, the people who were really there for me when the times got roughest. I began to see more clearly that just because people around me were talking about something didn’t make it cool. I began to find this voice that I never knew existed in me through issues I had tried to sweep under the rug.
I have started to appreciate my family more, disjointed and dysfunctional as we are. I have started counting blessings and being grateful instead of having demands and expectations and copping a shit attitude when I don’t get my way. I have started to see the promise in things that once seemed bleak and distant.
For the first time this year, I can suggest candidly that I have earned the respect of people in my peer group for doing nothing more than being willing to open up and talk about things that I used to only talk to my friends about. I’ve been invited to talk about things in front of dozens of people. I’ve been inundated with emails and phone calls, people wondering what I have to offer them instead of my having to ask what they can offer me. I’ve been blessed with the ability to translate ideas into realities, to take apart pieces of the world and put them back together for others to see in ways I never knew I could. I’ve suddenly been granted a chance at the life I have always wanted. I have people who rely on me for my abilities and my opinions.
I’ve begun giving away what seems like more than I could keep. I have chosen acceptance over analysis on things which I could not explain. I’ve tapped into resources of mental and emotional stability that I thought I could not overcome. I have, in short, made some improvements.
But 2006, which now is not so far away, will be a year filled with new goals and acquisitions. Is it wrong to seek promise in the flipping of a calendar page? Is it so far fetched to think that the things I’d like to see improve can actually get better just because I place the value of their improvement on a number? Frankly, I don’t know.
This thing which I started thanks to the encouragement of my friend and comrade Rachel has turned into something much bigger than I could have ever imagined it to be. This was just supposed to be some place that I threw my casual ideas, that I stripped down what was happening around me to its barest essence. This blog is my safe place. It’s where I can talk to you and you can talk back to me without fear of what it looks like to the outside world.
I learned a very valuable lesson from someone half my age this year about how the power of a single voice could affect a change farther and wider than my mind can comprehend. Did I ever think that would happen here? Absolutely not. Did I ever think anything would change as a result? I don’t know and I still don’t. Regardless of what happens from here forward, I always have this moment in time to look at and see where a single piece of information dispersed in a single place can warrant outrage and stir the echoes of a vocal minority to seek justice.
I’m not out to recapture that moment again. If any change occurs, as it should, then it is only because it was supposed to happen anyways.
No matter where I am from, there is nothing so profound as finding my own heart in the place where I am. Like most aging hipsters, I have tended to follow my own credo and shape my own rules. I have squandered more than I have held onto, and I have fond memories of it all. In my disconnected state from all that has come to pass, I have been able to walk a course of freedom that words don’t really explain.
Someone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up this year. I thought about it for a minute and then I answered, confidently, “I want to be in a position to never have to answer that question again.”
That’s what I want for all of you, too. I want you to have a new year that is filled with questions that don’t really require an answer. I hope for you to have a new year undaunted by resolutions.
- I hope you meet every deadline, that you find the world asking your opinions on things, too.
- I hope you reinvent the wheel.
- I hope that you can travel.
- I hope that you can enjoy time with the people you love, that you’ll get to see that game in person instead of having to watch it on TV.
- I hope you eat well and sleep well and dream big.
- I hope you don’t drink too much and pass out on the table.
- I hope you have a fire to warm you on cold nights and an air conditioner to keep you cool when its too hot outside to move.
- I hope your car runs, that you get to climb a mountain or run a marathon.
- I hope you pay off all your bills and become debt free.
- I hope your health stays strong and that you get to see some light in your children’s eyes.
- I hope you stop watching television and start doing.
- I hope your children come home safe and unharmed from the war.
- I hope that your cookies don’t burn, that your refrigerator is running and you don’t have to catch it.
- I hope you can find comfort in quiet and that you will listen for the beauty in ordinary things.
- I hope you don’t lose hope, and I hope you’ll be encouraged not to quit when things seem their toughest.
- I hope your heart is as big as the words we use to describe it.
- I hope you’ll learn a bit more tolerance when it comes to the things that you don’t understand.
- I hope you will seek forgiveness from those whom you have harmed, and that the people who have harmed you will ask for forgiveness in return.
- I hope you will only promise what you can deliver, and you will never back down from a challenge.
- I hope you will look for the good in those things which trouble you the most, and that you will do something that will change someones life for the better.
- I hope you will stop yelling at your parents.
- I hope you will win the lottery.
- I hope you will hear the song that will change your life forever.
- I hope you will find true love that is deeper than any ocean, realer than any sense can interpret.
- I hope your babies are born healthy, I hope you make more money, I hope you will encourage your significant other to take that yoga class.
- I hope you will find something that resembles enlightenment, and that you find a way to spread that enlightenment around through your own example.
I hope for all of these things for you next year. And if for some reason any of it doesn’t happen, it won’t be because I didn’t wish it for you.
This warmed my heart. Thanks for the link, Erik.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051221/od_nm/britain_santa_dc
This Santa has just the ticket for cheer
Wed Dec 21, 8:33 AM ET
LONDON (Reuters) - A “Parking Ticket Santa Claus” has been spreading cash as well as Christmas cheer around the English city of Birmingham, a newspaper reported Wednesday.
The mystery Santa has placed Christmas cards containing 30 pounds ($53) on the windscreens of drivers who have received parking tickets, the Daily Telegraph said.
“Don’t let this ticket spoil your Christmas,” declares a note in each card. “Here’s #30 to pay it off. Merry Christmas - Parking Ticket Santa.”
Fourteen drivers are believed to have received gifts from the unseen Father Christmas, who has given his profession an image boost after a string of stories about “Bad Santas.”
In recent days, men in Santa outfits have been accused of committing armed robbery in Germany, exposing themselves in southern England and going on a drunken rampage in New Zealand.
I am constantly amazed at how people in my city talk about the “spirit of Christmas”, of “holiday cheer” and all that “peace on earth goodwill towards mankind” gobbledygook when, at the end of it, I have evidence they don’t even believe in it.
Should I really be so shocked that I drove to Sam’s Club yesterday on a work-related errand only to see the horns come popping out of people’s heads? The bloated, self-indulgent masses corpulating and posturing themselves as defenders of their sovereign right to the last item on the shelf or the parking space that they didn’t wait five minutes to get is beyond me. As I watched the sad parade of belt-strapped children and wooden, steely-eyed mothers burping and shoving and yelling their way through aisles of overpriced bargains, I became saddened by the whole mess of it.
Was it the man in the parking lot, wearing a Santa hat while driving his brand new Cadillac Escalade, who began honking loudly, rolled down his window in front of women and children walking by and screamed out at the car who cut him off, “You stupid asshole motherfucker! That’s my fucking parking space you’re taking! Get the fuck out of there or I’m going to kill you, you stupid motherfucking son of a bitch,” before opening his door to pick a fight with his baseball bat? (Mind you, the car in front of him moved — you would, too, if you saw that guy carrying a bat and yelling)
Was it the woman with the jewel-encrusted crucifix around her neck who, while carrying a handful of gift wrapping paper, yelled at her crying daughter to “stop being a fucking brat” and took a swat at her as they stood in the middle of a line of people staring on in horror?
I’m not sure which one it was, and maybe it was just my good fortune to have been in Cordova for the one moment of the year where the congestion and the confusion fused together to form a bond of explosive stress. But I saw so clearly what was missing from the Christmases I knew not even that long ago: spirit.
Somewhere, there are people who really understand the meaning of the holiday season. It is not now, nor will it ever be the people who flock to the malls to throw away their hard-earned cash on gifts that, if you can actually afford them, generally go unappreciated anyways. There are many traditions which have since become considered arcane — slavery, public executions, curing colds with leeches — and the traditions of this most arcane of pagan holidays should be curbed without destroying the good intentions behind it.
After all, Christmas really is a holiday for children. We adults are only casual observers who, in our race to prove our own worth, should slow down long enough remember that. There is no joy in the pain we make for other people. Perhaps, in the spirit of real gift giving, we should consider a broader path than the one we take back to ourselves.
So from now on, I’m not planning on going to Cordova or Collierville to drop a bunch of money on Christmas presents — in fact, unless I have to for work, I’m staying out of the Eastern Bloc of Memphis. This year, I’m thinking about who out there is less fortunate than I am. I want to know if I can do something nice for someone in need in exchange for all the gifts I have received this year. I’m open to suggestions if you’d like to drop some on me.
I got a message from DANGERDOOM today with this puzzling and slightly incomplete blind item inside of it –
HAVE YOU BEEN TO A STORE AND BEEN TOLD THEY WILL NOT SELL YOU A DANGERDOOM CD BECAUSE DISNEY IS PREVENTING THE SALE OF CDS?
THAT IS WHAT WE ARE HEARING. THE MOUSE IS TRYING TO STOP THE MOUSE IN THE MASK?!?!?!?!
Not exactly sure why that would be happening unless Disney is getting crazy about “the mouse” and any overt reference to its main mouse, Mickey. But what the eff does Mickey Mouse have to do with DANGERDOOM? Someone out there please clarify this because it sounds like an interesting story or a great way to stir up fake drama in order to boost record sales.
Either way, that DANGERDOOM record is D-O-P-E!
Okay, so you missed it last week? Well, so did I. Here it is again!! The Apple 12.1″ iBook is on special at Amazon and it includes a free mighty mouse — $899 plus a $100 mail-in rebate - total price: $799 after rebate! This will be gone at the end of the day (Sunday) so get it NOW!
Apple iBook Notebook 12.1″ M9846LL/A (1.33 GHz PowerPC G4, 512 MB DDR SDRAM, 40 GB Hard Drive, Combo Drive, Built-in AirPort Extreme)
Other products by Apple ComputerAverage Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars
Usually ships in 24 hours
This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping. See details.From the Manufacturer
Surf the Web, chat with friends, do homework, play games, even burn DVDs and CDs to create your own video or musical masterpiece. In your favorite café. At 2 a.m. With built-in wireless capability and 512MB of memory standard, the iBook G4 delivers today’s digital lifestyle to your backpack.… Read more
Please remember to Blog Responsibly. Bloggers don’t let bloggers blog drunk.
Wow, I mean….just, wow.
I wanted to write a short thank you to a couple of people who really went above and beyond this year in their holiday gift-giving. An anonymous donor (at least anonymous for now) purchased the HP Pavilion laptop I am currently typing this from for me. I am deeply grateful for this gift, and it is already being put to great use. It will be a gift that I will treasure for a long time to come, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Equally special and generous, was the gift from Bruce Garrett who made an exceptionally gracious contribution to my annual hosting. If you would like to join Bruce in his endeavor, here is a link that you can use to make a donation towards my annual hosting bill directly to Dreamhost (the best hosting company like ever).
Your donations go directly to my hosting and nowhere else. If you have a buck, stick it in the jar. If not, happy holidays anyways. Now I have to work early in the morning, so I’m going home to get some shut eye. You be careful out there, it’s raining cats and dogs!
I just got through doing this deal because, like a bunch of you, I’m an idiot for playing poker online. This site called Your Poker Cash will bankroll you $50 when you sign up for a new, first-time players account at Party Poker.
Now, of course, they don’t just give you the money and let you cash it out. You have to take the money and play with it online at PartyPoker. However, if you build on your $50, you can do pretty good. They will let you cash out your winnings after you’ve played 500 raked hands (meaning hands played at any cash tables not including tournaments). They don’t spam you like hell or anything, either. The catch? They want you to check out Party Poker and become a regular player there. Got some free time to play poker online during the holidays? Click here to get $50 at PartyPoker from Your Poker Cash. I endorse this wholeheartedly, and I hope you win big.