The Wrath of Kon

Dispatches, thoughts, and miscellanea from writer Jon Konrath

  • The Title

    I finally paid off my car.  I think it was a five-year loan, and I got it in September of 2007, so I made good time on it.  That means other than the house, I’m completely out of debt now, which I think is a first for me since maybe I was 18.    But if you include the house, I am in debt orders of magnitude more than I ever have been.  And even if I could swing double or triple payments, it would be decades before I was back in the black.  But it will be nice to have that huge mortgage deduction on my tax form this year.

    Anyway, I got a car title in the mail yesterday, since the loan company had been hanging onto it while I was still in hock with them.  I have not had a car where I actually held the title since ’99, when I had my second Rabbit in Seattle.  I don’t know why I find this piece of certified paper so fascinating, but I do.  Maybe it’s because it’s from Colorado, so it’s sort of a magical time thread back to when I lived there.  Or maybe it’s because it’s a signifier that I don’t have a monthly payment to The Man anymore.  And oddly enough, the date the title was accepted at the DMV is the day I got married, which is weird.

    It’s slightly sad that the lien amount is something like $17,000 and I would now be lucky to get ten K out of the car.  And now that it’s paid off, and now that I listen to Car Cast all the time, I am constantly wondering if I should turn around and buy another car.  The timing is now bad for that, and I also lament that buying pretty much any car is an issue gas-wise.  With the Yaris, I average about 40 MPG, which means I go through a ten-gallon tank of gas a week.  If I bought just about any other car, I would take a hit in that stat.  I think the new Prius does maybe 10 MPG better than that.  The new Insight is rumored to get to the 60-some MPG range if you’re a careful driver.  I’m currently getting over the EPA estimate for the Yaris, because I have a ScanGauge, watch it obsessively, and have been learning little tricks to lower my fuel consumption.  But spending another ten grand to save about ten bucks of gas a week is not a mind-blowing investment.

    I have to admit I want a really fun car.  I spend at least two hours a day in my car, so it would be nice to have a really overwhelmingly nice cockpit to spend my commute in.  And I’m not a fan of big huge cars, or SUV type cars.  Like, I would love to get a Porsche Boxster.  Yes, it’s impractical, I would probably get carjacked, I would be paranoid about scratches, my insurance would be insane, and a ~$50,000 sticker price is not good.  And of course, 25 MPG, but probably closer to 15 or 20 once that right foot grows heavy.

    Another car I would like is the BMW 335D diesel.  It’s got the incredible bavarian interior, screaming power, and still gets pretty close to the Yaris mileage.  (I saw a review that stated it’s possible to get Yaris-like mileage when driving at 100 MPH on the Autobahn…)  But it’s a $50K car.  The cheapo route there would be to get the VW Jetta TDI, which is more like $17K and is peppy but probably gets better mileage than my Toyota.  I think almost any car would have a more comfortable interior than the Yaris, although it’s not bad for my daily commute.

    The reality is, I think I need to run this car into the ground and tally as many miles as I can on this until I get a new one.  It’s a decent drive, it’s economical, and if I’m going to do 15,000 miles of depreciation to a car a year, it’s probably better to do it on a subcompact than on a $50K sports car.

    Speaking of, I need to go do battle with the 880 now.  At least it’s Friday morning, usually the lightest day of my commute.  And soon, school will be out, and the roads will clear up a bit more.

  • Baseball pictures

    IMG_1317.JPGSo I’m moving photo pages (again) to Flickr.  And in that vein, I have moved all of my baseball pictures into one collection there:

    http://www.flickr.com/photos/jkonrath/collections/72157623497422165/

    There are 32 sets (30 games, 2 stadium tours) going from the first game I ever went to in 2006 up to last season.

    I can’t wait for this season to start.  We’re hoping to plan another long weekend in Denver, and I will have a real camera and a huge zoom lens, so I’m hoping for some good pics.  I will also probably try to get in a game in San Francisco.  The Rockies won’t play in Oakland this year, and they are doing so bad and the Coliseum sucks so much, I’m not sure I will go to a game there, but if I run across cheap tickets or I get insanely bored or really need a fix, who knows.

  • The savings of daylight

    DST always screws with me.  I think a big part of it involves growing up in a state that did not observe it.  I grew up in Indiana in a time with no seat belt laws, no helmet laws, no open container laws, and no car emissions or inspection laws.  And of course, the lack of observation of daylight savings time was also on the list.  Whenever any of these laws were discussed, people would grumble about constitutional rights and how changing your clock wasn’t in the bible or whatever.  And while it was convenient never having to change your clocks, it meant that any time you had a conversation with anyone out of state, it always began with “so what time is it there?  Are you guys eastern or central or what?”  And after I moved to Seattle, every single phone call I got from a parent began with the “so what time is it there?” conversation.

    Once I moved out of non-DST land, the thing that always messed with me is I almost always seemed to be on the road when the time change happened.  I don’t remember the exact numbers, but I think in my first ten time shifts, I was on the road for like 8 or 9 of them.  I even remember when I moved across the country in 99, the time changed during the middle of my trip, and I lost an hour in Texas and it completely screwed with me.  I was in Boston for my first time shift in Seattle; then here in San Francisco for the second one, and back in Indiana for the third.  I’d have to dig up old trip records to find more, but I remember always getting screwed up when I would return.

    Now the thing that screws with me is that they changed the dates.  I blame George Bush for this, even if I don’t blame him for much, and maybe I should.  I mean, Iraq is bad, but trying to figure out how to reset the time on my microwave oven isn’t easy either.  And another problem is the fact that half of the clocks and timekeeping devices in this house automagically change times, and half don’t.  Yesterday morning, my watch did not change, but my computer did.  And I have this new atomic timekeeping alarm clock (which I coincidentally bought when I was in Indiana over the holidays last year) and it magically changed.  But I was screwed up because I would look at the computer and it said 10:48 and then I went to take a shower and looked at my watch and thought “damn, it’s only going on 10:00 now – I must have looked at the time wrong.”  And then I realized the time changed.

    And yeah, I never read the news, or watch the TV news, and I know to some people that makes me a horrible person or whatever.  But I have my own conspiracy theories about why it’s a waste of time to keep up with the news.  Albert Einstein didn’t spend four hours a day watching CNN and listening to Air America, and he led a somewhat productive life, right?

  • The Run-in

    Here’s something I forgot to mention about my Vegas trip last January:  my ex from Seattle was there at the same time as me.  I did not run into her like I did on my 30th birthday, but I knew she was there because when I was waiting for my luggage, someone kept paging her.  That really tripped my freak-out meter and made me look at every single person arriving at the shuttle monorail station, wondering if she would show up, and what I would do.  In that particular case, we broke up with no real ill-will and remained friends, albeit walking-on-eggshells friends, for a couple of years while I was still in Seattle.  But after I moved to New York, some switch was flipped with her, and she decided I was the root of all evil and we could no longer speak.  And sure, I’ll be the bad guy of the situation and assume that role if it makes her feel any better, especially since we live however many thousands of miles apart, and it’s not like I need to avoid places to not see her.  But it’s strange that we keep ending up in Vegas at the same time, and it always makes me wonder what I’d say if I did have to talk to her again.

    I always remember the opposite scenario, especially back in Bloomington, with the bad breakup and the dread/anticipation of running into an ex.  Because here’s how it would go down:  I would get dumped, usually in some catastrophic way.  Then I would spend every waking moment wanting to see that person again, for that last word, that one bit of closure.  I always thought that if I said the right magic word, they would see the error in their ways and come running back to me, even though they spent the last month breaking every connection, burning every bridge, and completely salting the earth to make it clear to me that we would never get back together again.  But I would be pained in such a way that I would absolutely need to say something or lash out in some way and get in that last final “no, fuck YOU!”  And when I got to the point where I started leaving the house again, because this typically involved a refractory period of sitting in my room alone listening to Pink Floyd’s The Final Cut a million times, I would both fear and anticipate running into this person again.  Because Bloomington’s a big city in some ways – I mean, it’s a couple hundred acres and like 40,000 people milling about, but you’ll eventually cross paths again.

    But here’s one that I thought I documented (fictionally, sort of) in Summer Rain, but I guess I tore it out before the final draft.  So I dated this woman in 1991, and after spending that xmas break fuming and fretting to all of my friends about how I should dump her, I got back and she dumped me, and whatever reason, it completely knocked me sideways, and I spent a lot of time depressed.  We had a lot of stupid fights, and the scorched earth policy went into full effect, and I absolutely knew I could never go back with her (mostly because like an hour after we broke up, she had already fucked like 9 other guys, and was talking about moving to Australia or England or something, because she spent all of her time in IRC chat because she was a fervent Anglophile.)  But I was still borderline obsessed with running into her, getting in that last jab, getting her to somehow admit she was cheating on me the whole time or whatever.  I don’t really know what I wanted, but I was obsessed with it, the kind of obsessed where I had to take her name out of my wholist program on the VAX.  For a while, I left it in there, officially because I needed to know if she was in a nearby lab on campus so I could avoid her, but unofficially because I was somehow obsessed with where she was or if she was on the computer late at night, talking to her next prospect.  Not a healthy thing to do, but it took me a while to finally delete her name and get her off my radar.

    So we never ran into each other again.  And months later, I meet someone, and we meet and we have breakfast and everything is magical and just clicks, and if you think you’ve heard the story before, it’s because you did – the character Tammy in Summer Rain was based on this.  And we meet on this Sunday morning in the spring that’s one of those magical days in March in Bloomington where it’s suddenly 70 degrees out and sunny and you don’t need a coat and the memories of digging your car out of a block of ice and spending the last two months damning yourself for not going to school in Florida or Southern California quickly vanish from your mind.

    And I go on a walk with this new girl, and we decide to walk across campus to go use the new NeXT computer lab at the Student Building (romantic, right?) and we’re walking and holding hands and joking and strolling across that big parking lot that runs next to the Jordan River behind the music building.  And as we’re walking, guess who we see coming the opposite direction?  The ex.  THE ex, the one I have been avoiding, that I have sort of but not really gotten out of my head.  And I don’t even acknowledge her presence; I keep talking and joking and laughing with the new girl, and we go past her as if she’s just another stranger walking around on that sunny Sunday afternoon.  And I wanted to say something, to the effect of “do you realize what just happened?”  Because right then, the entire remainder of whatever bad karma or bad mojo or whatever you want to call it suddenly vanished from my system, and I realized I did not give a fuck whatsoever about this ex.  It was the magic pill that completely cured me of that breakup.

    Of course, I did not know at the time that in a few short months, I would be doing the same thing with the new girl, except now she would be in Pittsburg, not answering my phone calls or letters, and I was desperately wondering how I’d ever talk to her again.  And then the next fall, as I did talk about at the end of Summer Rain, I would run into her again, and coincidentally, it was at the same exact god damned spot behind the music school where I ran into the other ex, only this time I did not have some new girl in tow – I was actually in the middle of a huge fuck-up/breakup with someone else, spending my days moping around and writing giant multi-page journal entries about what I could have possibly done so wrong to fuck up my life so much at that point.

    I am now largely convinced that my next book should be something bizarre, like a sibling to Rumored to Exist. But one of the stories that I wrote for Air in the Paragraph Line #13 was about a bad breakup in 1993, and it makes me think I should just write a book that’s a chapter per bad breakup from like all of the 1990s, and maybe some light paste between stories to make the whole thing a novel.  Maybe, but maybe later… bigger fish to fry right now.

  • Middle Harbor Shoreline Park

    We found this little park near our house a while back, and I think we went there with A when she visited the new place.  Anyway, we went for a walk there yesterday, and I brought along the new camera and new lens and snapped a few shots there.

    Note that it appears I am back to using flickr again.  Someday I may import all of my old photos there and have them all in one place.  Someday.

    Middle Harbor Shoreline Park 03/06/10

  • Three stars in the sunset

    Yesterday was my last day at my job at Samsung.  As per my usual policy here, I guess I haven’t mentioned that I actually worked at Samsung for the last year and a half, although a simple google search or look at LinkedIn would have told you that.  But I’ve been looking for new work since the start of the year or so, and got an offer at a new place two weeks ago.  So I gave notice, did two weeks of short-timer duty, and finished yesterday.

    The big joke with some of my former coworkers is the length of the statute of limitations before I write a book about all of the crazy antics that ensued at the place.  I think everyone at every one of my jobs says this, and I have yet to write a sort of tell-all book about any one given workplace.  I guess Summer Rain hinted at that with my days at UCS.  But I never did the whole “working at a startup in Silicon Valley/Silicon Alley/Silicon Prairie” thing, and who knows if I will.  But it’s true that I do have conflicted feelings about cutting loose on my former workplace.  I mean, there’s some choice material there, but there’s also the issue that I would feel bad about striking out and getting catty about it.  And there’s also the fact that it might not be that interesting to people who weren’t there with me.

    I thought I would have no second thoughts about leaving the place.  The truth is, when I got this job back in October of 08, I jumped in quick, and backed out of a potential offer situation with another tech company.  And after a week or two of the new job, I had serious reservations about continuing, because of the work and the culture and the hours and the commute.  And every day, about halfway through the hour-some drive down 101 to the office in San Jose, I’d pass the office of this other company, and kick myself that I could be working at a much more sane place and have half the commute every day.  And maybe the other place would have had its own brand of crazy, but it’s one of those grass is always greener things.

    And then right after I started, the sky fell economy-wise, and pretty much everyone else in Silicon Valley got laid off, and there were absolutely no jobs available.  And my job was still paying, and still matching 401K, and still cutting bonus checks.  So I stuck with it, although I always hoped some magic startup would show up, looking for a doc wizard to head up their tech pubs department.

    So a lot of things happened.  Nothing bad, I mean I wasn’t beaten and raped and left for dead in the desert.  But we weren’t changing the world or creating great things or helping society or anything like that.  And I was doing very little as far as technical writing.  And morale on my team went from bad to worse.  But the paychecks kept coming, and I paid off my land, and I paid off my car, and I bought a house, and I kept driving two or three hours a day and working on my TPS reports and hoping the dow would crack 10,000 again some day.

    And it did.  And I got another job.  And I went through the ten thousand messages in my Outlook inbox, and hit the D key 10,000 times and realized that the last 18 months involved a lot of temporal bullshit and status reports on status reports reporting the status of reports that discussed what status reports we’d do next status report.  I spent most of the last two weeks deleting files and shredding paper like I was working for the Stasi in late 1989.  It’s not that I was working in a missile silo with tons of top secret blueprints; it’s just that even a doodle of a stick figure getting fucked by another stick figure drawn out of boredom in a meeting is still technically Eyes Only material at our R&D lab, and had to get cross-cut into dust.

    My boss was on vacation for the first of my two weeks, and then had to miss 4 of the 5 days of the second week due to crazy scheduling and some family medical stuff.  And my boss’s boss, who used to be my boss and heads up the lab had a last-second appearance in Korea and was also gone when I had to leave.  There were a couple of lunches and goodbyes.  And I took some time to get some dental appointments squared away and get a stupid re-inspection by PG&E done on the condo (long story) and took my damn time getting to work and left at five and did a whole lot of nothing, since there wasn’t much for me to do.  At one time, I thought there was no way I could leave, I was so intertwined with so many projects, but when it came down to transitioning out, there was a lot of “well, they’ll figure it out, or they won’t.”

    On my last day, the drive in was sunny and I actually made damn good time, listening to the Husker Du song “New Day Rising” a thousand times on repeat.  And then the sky turned grey and it started pouring rain.  And I walked through the halls of our R&D lab and realized I would miss the place in some strange way.  I mean, it was my first job in Silicon Valley, and I only worked there 18 months, but those were dog year months, lots of long hours, lots of late nights.  A year ago today, we had to work a 24-hour overnight shift to launch our first web site.  (And yeah, we didn’t need to be there, the same way the Egyptians could have built those pyramids a lot faster with a couple of bulldozers instead of ten million slaves.)  Our building was like this weird time capsule to late 70s/early 80s valley-chic, with this “high tech” look that resembled something you’d see on the old Apple campus circa the Apple II era, except it had never been updated.  And the rain and the gloom brought out the chipped paint and the moldy ceiling tiles and the stained carpets and the faded wood trim and made me realize I’d never work in a place that looked like this again.  I did my victory lap and said my goodbyes, handed in my laptop and gear, then went to HR to hand over my badge and get the last of my paperwork.  They asked me to sign some paper saying I wouldn’t tell anyone anything, but according to California law, you can’t be forced to sign one of those, and I didn’t.  (I won’t be spilling the beans about all of the intricacies of Windows Mobile 7, which was our biggest secret, but I don’t think anyone gives a shit.)

    This place was a must-wear-badge-at-all-times place (they love their door locks), and it was strangely sad to hand over that piece of plastic that was forever tethered to my hip, with that digital snapshot of my face circa October 2008.  I guess part of it is that the picture, and in a greater sense the job, signified the end of the summer of 2008, and I’m now so nostalgic about that era: about living in Playa Del Rey; walking to Subway every day for lunch; the weight loss journey, the walks to the waterfront; the time spent bumming around Santa Monica; the days hacking away a living at home, looking at the palm trees and listening to the Rockies in their 08 freefall.  I miss Denver, and I miss LA, and when I took this job, it was one of those huge “I must set aside everything and turn and burn and get my shit straight and go whole-hog on this”.  And I did.  And now it’s done, and even if I hated many aspects of it, I’ll miss it.

    But yeah, new job.  New people.  I will, as always, avoid mentioning this one here, to protect the innocent and keep that life-work barrier going strong.  But it looks good, and I’ll be getting back to my roots as a tech writer and doing some new cool stuff.  It’s still a drive, and it’s not sitting at home and listening to baseball games all day and chipping away at short stories, but it should be cool.

    I got escorted out after the final exchange, and got to my car and the pouring rain not long after 2:00, to face a horrible sea of taillights on the 880.  I stopped at the bank, I stopped at a gas station, and I dropped in a Nordstrom’s to get Sarah’s birthday present.  And by the time I got back to Oakland, the rain stopped, the sun came out, and it was all over.  So now it’s a sunny Saturday, and here’s to whatever the next big era will bring.

  • Air in the Paragraph Line #13 now available

    And now, the reason why I have not been blogging is done!  Air in the Paragraph Line #13 is now available at Amazon.com and other fine online booksellers.

    AITPL is a print journal of absurdist and online fiction I publish.  It typically contains a story or two of mine, plus maybe a dozen and a half other writers who contribute their own stuff.  The main factor in choosing stories is readability – I really like something that keeps me turning the pages, like the old issues of Cometbus did for me back in the day.

    For issue thirteen, the theme was “Bad Luck”, and our writers had a lot to say on the subject. It contains fact and fiction by Keith Buckley, Aaron Carnes, Joshua Citrak, Daniel Crocker, Timothy Gager, Nathan Graziano, Fiona Helmsley, Rebel Star Hobson, Robert Howington, Jon Konrath, Ben Mack, Jillian Olenik, Hassan Riaz, John Sheppard, Todd Taylor, and Daniel Trask. Edited by Jon Konrath, with cover art by Kurt Eisenlohr and cover design by Marie Mundaca.

    I published not only a print version (with a glossy color cover, perfect bound 6×9, 236 pages) but I also did a Kindle version.  The print version is cheaper than previous ones because of the printer change: $9.95+S/H list price.  (You can also find it lower if you hunt around, but you might pay more shipping.)  The Kindle version is a dirt cheap $1.99.

    Anyway, check it out:

    Also, I am desperately looking for book reviewers and have about a dozen copies of the print version to give away.  If you or someone you know reviews books for their site or blog, please let me know and I can send a copy!

  • Vegas, Again

    Okay, I have been back a week, but it has been a crazy week.  First off, here are the pictures from Vegas:

    IMG_0242.JPG

    These are the first pictures with my new DSLR.  I took roughly 500 shots over the trip, but I still have no idea what I’m doing, so this is the best 20% of that.  I do love taking pictures with the new camera, but there is a certain amount of overhead, mostly in the amount of stuff I have to haul around.  I’m convinced there is a better bag than Canon’s stock one, though.  And also, I could use a better lens, maybe something with a bit more length and speed.  There were a few shots where I simply didn’t have the right lens, and couldn’t get it to work.  It’s also possible that I had to set any of the 17,583 settings on the camera differently.

    And yes, I am switching back to flickr.  I think.  My frustrations with online photo hosting is the topic of another post.

    Anyway, the trip to Vegas was good, but short.  We stayed at the Flamingo, saw Kathleen Madigan at the South Point casino, hung out at the Venetian quite a bit, and hit a bunch of touristy stuff (pinball hall of fame, atomic testing museum, the reef aquarium at Mandalay Bay.)  I also saw quite a bit of the ‘new’ strip, which I have mixed feelings about.  The new City Center is pretty phenomenal, even though it looks a lot more like an airport in a European country than a casino.   I’m not saying the stylings of the old Boardwalk were much better, but I do miss our old cheapo place to stay on the strip.

    Anyway, good trip.  It was, of course, too short, and I feel like I didn’t spend enough money or gamble enough, but I guess those are both good…

  • 39

    I am a year older today.  I had a rainy day off of work today, hanging out here in Oakland and listening to the sound of gravel-like downpours smashing against the skylight.  I will be getting on a plane tomorrow morning and heading to Vegas, for a long weekend with Bill Perry, Marc, and Tom.  No immediate plans, other than gambling, eating, and maybe some comedy.  (I don’t think we’ll be trying to steal anything from Mike Tyson’s house, for example.)

    This birthday has been pretty mellow.  It’s the last one of my thirties, and I’m sure next year when the big 4-0 hits, I will be much more freaked out.  At least I did not have to work today.  But Sarah had to go out of town for work on a last-second trip, and that was a bummer.  She did get me a very nice gift though: a Canon Digital Rebel XS.  It’s my first SLR, and my best camera to date.  But it’s going to force me to actually learn about how to take a photo, and learn all of this nomenclature like aperture, ISO, shutter speed, and so on.  It does a good job with the auto settings, and it’s cool to have something that can shoot three frames a second.  But I need to buy a book or a DVD or something.  If you have any good links to things I can skim online that don’t read like a college physics book on optics, please let me know.

    I went to Denny’s today, as usual.  This time, it was the one in Emeryville.  I had their new Grand Slamwich, and it was fairly horrible.  It has too many things going on at once – a McGriddle-like maple syrup bread, eggs, bacon, cheese, sausage, mayo, and maybe nine other things.  I dunno, I am not that crazy about Denny’s anymore.  Every once in a great while, I’ll want to go there to get some pancakes, but in general, I am pretty much over it.  But it’s one of those time machine things, a direct portal into so many eras from the past.  I’ve gone there for pretty much every birthday for almost twenty years now.  It’s weird because my big memory today was Denver.  Before the big weight loss thing, I used to end up at Denny’s a lot, and maybe part of the reason it was so big to me then was I spent almost ten years without a Denny’s in my backyard, in New York.  Then I move to Colorado, and I can go anytime.  And then no wonder it takes me sixty pounds of weight loss to get down to an average BMI.

    (Tangent: if you write a product installer that has a “thermometer” status bar, it should go from 0 to 100% exactly once, and then be done.  Going from 0 to 100 to 0 to 100 to 0 to 100 and then staying at 100 100 100 100 and then going to 0 and then 100 etc etc is not helpful to me.)

    (Tangent #2 – OK I was too lazy to go downstairs to get my iPod, so I installed iTunes, and I’m streaming music from my laptop on my desk downstairs to my laptop in bed upstairs.  Years ago, I would’ve accomplished this by stringing a fifty foot length of cord over the loft.  This is magic.)

    Anyway.  I keep thinking back to old birthdays now.  Like I keep thinking about my 23rd birthday.  Part of that memory has to do with just touching a short story that took place in that era, one that might or might not get published in AITPL #13.  I was deathly sick on that birthday; I went to this girl’s party maybe two weeks before, and it was damn freezing outside, and I caught a cold that gradually became pneumonia.  I spent a good chunk of the day in bed, but I remember looking at my birth certificate and realizing both of my parents were 23 when they had me on that day back in 1971, and on that day in 1994, my life was so far from being together in any adult way; I was on my way out of a computer science program and struggling to identify myself as a writer for the very first time.  I was still moping around after a breakup that happened months before, one that I wouldn’t pull out of for a long time.  I was in debt; I was not making any academic progress; I was making only a few bucks an hour taking peoples’ shit on a phone support line.  I didn’t have a car; I lived miles out of town and off campus; I felt like I had nobody and nothing, and couldn’t even fathom being married and having a kid.  It was just one of those mind-blowing moments of time for me, and not just because I was coughing my lungs out and taking cold baths in the middle of January to try and break my fever.

    Man, I am listening to Husker Du’s Candy Apple Grey right now, and the song “Hardly Getting Over It”, and it fits the feeling of the above paragraph so much, it’s absolutely uncanny.  This is such a god damned good album, I can’t believe I didn’t worship these guys back in the day.  I was probably too busy trying to find Grim Reaper bootlegs or whatever.  But CAG is such a fully mind-blowingly emotional album to me now.  It seems like every third review of it online says something like “this album got me through a lot of hard times”, and I could completely see that.

    (I thought it was hilarious when “I Don’t Know For Sure” showed up briefly in the soundtrack of the movie Adventureland, BTW.)

    Okay, I need to pack and wake up in a few hours.  Just wanted to get something in while it was still 1/20.

  • Catchup

    I switched soaps this morning.  It wasn’t a conscious decision, like that the old soap was giving me problems; I just ran out of one, and broke open a 12-pack of a different brand.  I think the new brand is some Irish Spring derivative, “cool blast” or something like that.  This is significant in that I have these strong olfactory memories of different eras based on the soaps or colognes or deodorants I used back then.  I used this Old Spice deodorant back in my first year of college, and smelling that brand and type of scent is an instant time machine to 1989.  So maybe switching to another variant of bath product will bookend a new chapter in life.  Or something.

    I’ve been busy working on the next issue of Air in the Paragraph Line, and I’m making progress, but I’m moving from the phase where I don’t have enough contributions and the end is nowhere near, and the phase where I have enough writing to fill an issue, but I intensely worry that what I have doesn’t have enough pop, and nobody will buy it.  The next phase is where I have 97% of the work done, but I’m struggling with the last 3%, and the worries start to move to the “how do I tell people about this” phase.  There are some good stories in this issue – I should clarify that.  The problem is, after reading stuff 47 times during layout, it gets diluted in my head.

    The other project that’s been going on is adding a new pantry to our kitchen.  First, I should clarify what I mean by pantry, as there are two meanings.  One is that a pantry is a small room with shelves where you put staples; the other is a single, full-length base cabinet where you put staples.  I’m working on the latter.  There was this 15″ gap between the edge of our counter and one of the concrete pillars that runs through our loft.  And storage space is a premium in our kitchen, because we just have these open shelves, and no actual cabinets.  It’s one of those “modern” type of layouts, which is great if you don’t actually eat at your place, and you can put decorative glassware and random objects of art on the shelves.  But when they get congested with actual functional dishware and half-opened packages of taco shells and instant soup and noodles and whatever else, it gets a little cluttered.

    So my first project was to get these roll-front cabinets at Ikea, but they were only available in some oddball size, because they were supposed to sit on top of a base cabinet or a countertop.  They were too short to put just one there, and two of them would have been too tall.  Instead I went with a single 15″ wide pull-out pantry, which is 80″ tall and about three and a half feet deep, the same as the counter it would sit next to.  It’s a white, with gloss white foil front doors.  And now that it’s installed, it’s great.  The problem was getting it installed.

    Ikea, for whatever reason, gets me completely unhinged.  Buying it, assembling it, installing it – I think that they should stop waterboarding at Gitmo and just have the suspected terrorists put together Ikea furniture until they snap and confess everything.  I think part of it is that Ikea has this certain category-killer fuck-you quality to their products.  I mean, you could spend less on furniture by going to Target or Wal-Mart and getting completely shit stuff that looks really bad and is just as bad to assemble, but has no sense of designer aesthetic.  Or you could spend way more by going to a more upscale place where there are no prices on anything (because if you have to ask, you can’t afford it), and nothing is practical or functional, even if it looks nice.  So at Ikea, you get the worst of both worlds.  Everything at Ikea is some kind of compromise: it’s exactly two inches too tall, or has every color but the one shade you need, or it would be great if it had four shelves instead of three, and so on.  There’s a whole community of people who hack together things from Ikea parts, but it’s bad enough assembling the stock stuff.

    And assembly…  First, it took about two trips of about two hours each to get everything going.  (The first initial trip, then a second to return one part and get some handles, which I forgot.)  Then the fun started.  This thing did not have one start-to-finish set of instructions, but instead had three different sets: one for the base cabinet; one for the pull-out drawers; and one for the door.  Also, some smaller components, like the door hinges, the dampeners, and the legs, had either their own one-sheet or their instructions printed on their containing plastic bags.  So I had to sort of interpolate these instructions to figure out what steps had to be done.  The cabinet part wasn’t hard, except I got a dozen of the screws in place before I figured out I had one of the sides upside down and backward, because you have to pay attention to that crap, and I always don’t pick up some detail like that from the hieroglyphic drawings inside.  There were also no clear instructions on where the five pull-out shelves went inside the unit, and I spent forever counting holes inside, putting in the screws, and then later finding the shelves didn’t work at that level, which then meant backing out the screws and re-counting and re-inserting.

    Other problems: mounting the unit to the wall was a pain in the ass, and didn’t work entirely that well, because that wall is solid concrete and not drywall.  The door itself had no holes to be mounted, and there was only reference to a mystical template that was not included as to how to drill the hole patterns.  (I found a PDF online.)  I drilled and mounted the door, only to find that the highest shelf was too high, and I had to re-mount the top shelf and re-drill the door.  I also forgot the handles, as I mentioned.  So overall, it took about seven hours last Sunday, plus maybe an hour spread out over three different nights, and now it’s done.

    I am going to Vegas this week for my birthday.  I’m actually leaving on Thursday, coming back Monday.  It will be me, Bill, Tom, and Marc; everyone else wussed out.  Me and Bill are staying at the Flamingo, which will be my first time there.  No big plans yet, but we will have a car, so maybe we can wander a bit.

    The Kindle is still working great, at least as far as reading goes.  I tried to convert AITPL #13 to the Kindle, and it looked horrible.  But it was just a straight dump from the Framemaker source with no reformatting at all.  I have a better strategy for the export path, but it will take some time to get it all together.

    I wish I could go back to bed for six more hours.  Up until last week, I thought I had today off, because of MLK day.  At least everyone else having it off will mean an easy commute to the office (I hope.)