Grace

I've been tutoring English in varying capacities for the since last summer to a few different students, all of whom are Korean. My most recent student has been an eleven year old girl, whom I started working with in April, and who will be entering sixth grade this fall. She's been living in the US since she was four or five and speaks English with the fluency you'd expect of a native. Originally, I was a little unclear what they wanted me to work with her on, but it seems they want me to work on writing, which is a somewhat open-ended, vague designation. Also, they handed me a copy of the vocabulary workbook Wordly Wise, which I've used before. So, we've split our time between doing grammar work (she's the one I make all the madlibs for) and working on brief writing projects (most recently, we've been writing flower myths after reading the legends associated with the origins of the water lily and narcissus). She's far and away the easiest student to come up with projects for, and we seem to have a great rapport.

Today, I showed up for our regular session, and her mother answers the door and asks if I didn't get her phone messages from last night, canceling the sessions for this and next week, and saying maybe will pick up again two weeks from now. She didn't explain why the cancellation; they're not going on vacation. I have a sneaking suspicion this may be her way of saying we're done for good. If so, I'm a little perplexed, though her mother's English is much more rudimentary, so it's harder to discuss it much.

I'm really hoping that it's not related to some of the material I've brought. Last week, I brought two things which I really only questioned retroactively. One was a poem by teacher-activist-slam poet Taylor Mali, entitled "The The Impotence of Proofreading." (Here's a link to a video of Mali performing the poem, which really brings the most out of it) It's riddled with sometimes quite embarrassing word-choice errors that slip through spellcheck. The original version has a couple of dubiously school-appropriate words, but I changed those in the printout I gave her. The other was a drabble (hundred-word story), from which I'd conspicuously removed all of the capital letters and punctuation, so she should put it back in for practice. The short story was about two guys going to kill a vampire, and realizing they had the wrong house number (text here). It focuses more on what bunglers these guys are than on the task at hand. Now, I know she's reading the book Twilight (yes, Joe, this is your upcoming audience), which involves what I believe to be a rather sympathetic portrait of vampires, so it doesn't seem that her folks have a problem with the whole vampire thing.

Am I reading too much into this?

In any event, it leaves me with even more lurking in Amherst time, since I have another tutoring session this afternoon from 3:45-5, after which point I lurk until knitting at 7, because there's no point in my driving all the way back to Easthampton. But, hey, at least the scenery's good at Rao's today. Oh, abstract retail crushes that show up with a pair of wellies and a pool noodle.

Yup. It's Feist on Sesame Street. "1, 2, 3, 4 chickens just back from the shore."
I really don't know what to say. It's been a really long trip sideways?

This still remains my favorite Feist song:
Feist - New Torch

More to post later about the noodle party, blueberries, and dressmaking. Maybe I'll spare you the ukulele, but then again, maybe I won't.

One of the myths I've tried to spread about myself is that I know more of "O Canada" than "The Star-Spangled Banner." It's not actually true, though I really never put any effort into learning the words. Like most Americans that think, I have a somewhat complex relationship with my country. Up until I spent an extended period of time outside it, being asked to define my nationality in one word aside from American, I had somehow managed to essentially avoid my own American-ness (see most of my posts from when I was in Kazakhstan for more ruminations on this). While I've come to a position that if I accept it, I have some power to affect what that means in a larger context, and that I really believe in some of the founding principles, I still am not much one for overblown red, white, and blue patriotic jingoism that can turn up around the Fourth. Also, the day off doesn't really mean a whole lot to me about now, what with the lack of contrast.

I really like fireworks, though. So, Fourth of July is really mostly significant to me so much as it means fireworks. My holiday was pretty quiet. Maria went out with some friends mid-day, and sometime in the afternoon I had the idea to go up Mount Tom, which has several good long-distance views, and see how many different fireworks displays I could see at once.

I highly recommend this to anyone. From one spot facing east southeast, I could see at least a dozen different fireworks displays, from Amherst to (I think) Hartford, CT. Pretty fabulous. Also, it gave me a good excuse to use my headlamp. Yesterday, I went up the mountain at night again, and walked through some awesome fireflies.

On Sunday, April-Lyn had a tip that Erin McKeown, who I haven't seen live since '01 or '02, was playing outside for free up in Greenfield. So she, Maria, Jenny, Adam and myself packed a picnic and headed up.
( More Erin McKeown, including songs for you )

Extensive posts in the middle of the day? Why yes, I am still gainfully underemployed. I have picked up some of the brainsucking linguistics work that I've been doing off and on since junior year of college, and still have my tutoring (though it's stacked one day a week for gas conservation), and am applying to what seems to be the right teaching jobs/program. And puttering in my garden (first basil and tomatoes yesterday!). And sitting around with the intarnets for company a lot.

So, Verizon's been sending me sporadic e-mails for the last few months informing me that my two-year contract is coming up for renewal and that they would love to subsidize my next phone in return for signing on for another two years. I haven't had any complaints with my service, except that there was none in Vermont, but they've recently worked on that, so I'm back to fine and figured signing up again is simple.

Also, they seemed pretty firm on wanting to give me a phone for free, between the online discount and the re-signing discount. Several of the options featured built-in music players, which I found particularly intriguing. When it came down to it, there was only one phone which fit all of my qualifications.

There is one catch, though. It's purple. Really purple.

I've decided to embrace this under the guise that it'll be really difficult for someone else to mistake my phone for theirs and very hard to lose -- "Have you seen a purple cell phone?"

Plus, it solves the void I've had in my car since my tape player (and therefore my adapter through which I play CDs) has been nonfunctional (it immediately ejects any tape put into it). The built-in speaker is not half bad. Not great, but not bad. So long as I have it plugged into the lighter so it won't eat the batteries, it'll be a great solution for now. I do need to get a bigger memory card for it, though. It came with a 64-meg card (plus about the same internal memory), but I can get cards up to 4 gigs, which is surely enough music for almost any given car trip.

Also, after some minor research and finagling, I have been able to make this my ring, something about which I am perhaps a little too excited.

On that note, ( I leave you with the full sketch: )

I ate the first food out of my garden for dinner tonight: kale and mint. I made buckwheat noodles with peanut sauce (mint is my secret, or at least non-obvious, weapon in peanut noodles), and sauteed the kale with onion, garlic, pickled ginger, orange juice, and soy sauce. Definitely got my grunt of approval.

The garden's been really happy without demanding a lot from me, and that makes me very happy. While I was away this weekend, it had another growth spurt. I took some pictures on Friday to show my mom, and put them up on my Facebook account today...just because. Garden Album

Speaking of which, I went to the Old Songs festival last weekend with my mom, Sadelle, her son Ian, and my sister. Sadelle's been going for about as long as the festival's been in existence, and my mom's been wanting Maria and I to go for the last few years.( Old Songs: Bhangra and Hurdy-Gurdy and Sea Shanties; Oh, My! )

Anyhow, the weekend was a nice little charge up. There's a lot of people in my life who can really use some positive energy right now. I think if you mapped out all of the stuff these folks are facing, you'd have an interesting prototype for a model hell. And I say that in honor of how strong these folks are in the face all the varied bullshit they're up against right now.

Back to gardening and playing the ukulele and otherwise trying to make the most of my current underemployment.

I'll leave you with one more ukulele related tidbit from the Belgian Ukulélé Session website, featuring all sorts of acts doing impromptu live performances with ukuleles. Sam Duckworth (Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly.) showed up and did a mean solo ukulele take of....Justice's "D.A.N.C.E."?

Sure.

Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly. - D.A.N.C.E. (Justice)

Some songs just appear from nowhere as a precision point of light. While reading one of the ukulele sites I've started frequenting (UkeHunt), I find a video of this song as a recent post for good beginner uke songs (which it is - the whole song has four chords in it - mostly it's C and G - and the strumming pattern is both easy and obvious). Anyhow, its primary appeal is that it's written as a rather practical response to someone's claim of, "I love you more than everything else."

Soko - I Will Never Love You More

I will never love you more than the drummer of the Flaming Lips.

I will never love you more than "God Only Knows."

I will never love you more than DVD nights with my girlfriends.

I will never love you more than peanut butter.

The artist, Soko, is a young French actress who's recently made home-fired forays into music. Her song "I'll Kill Her" made the rounds a little ways back but never caught my interest. I don't know that I could listen to a whole album of this (maybe a little too rough around the edges yet), but this is really hitting the spot right now. It's a nice palate cleanser to otherwise vigorous listening to the new Notwist album. Is the acoustic guitar of "Gone Gone Gone" saying "Pink Moon" to anyone else? Maybe "Place To Be"?

So, I was up at my dad's this evening to make him dinner.* He had the Celtics game on later in the evening, and while watching idly, something jumped out from the news ticker along the bottom. In the middle of the NASCAR results, they listed P. Menard. I immediately jumped to Borges's short story, "Pierre Menard, Author of Quixote," which describes one Pierre Menard, whose great goal is to spontaneously and independently produce the exact text of Don Quixote. Not memorize, not reinterpret, but independently write the exact same words as Cervantes. It goes on to describe how he attempted to cause himself to do this, and the differences in critical reception of Menard's version versus the original. A classic of nutsy Borgesian contextualism. For a moment, I wondered if someone had put it in there as a joke. If I were writing the news ticker, this is the sort of thing I would do just to see if people were paying attention, like I did sometimes in highschool by inserting brief non sequiturs in the middle of papers.

Minor research has established two things: P. Menard is, in fact, a real NASCAR driver, but his first name is Paul, not Pierre or an equivalent. However, using the initial, I can maintain whatever humorous illusion I choose. I may have to follow this P. Menard.
Original Spanish text of Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote
English Translation

*In the interest of sharing the menu without breaking narrative, a footnote! We made sort of a Middle Eastern fajita dealie.

• grilled semolina/whole wheat flatbreads, stuffed with:
• Flank steak rubbed up with cumin, caraway, black pepper, turmeric, garlic, chipotle, salt, tomato paste and a little hit of honey, then grilled
• Fried peppers and onions
• Kale sauteed with fresh tomato and the rest of the spice rub, with grilled zucchini thrown in at the end
• Strained yogurt sauce with cumin, cilantro, lemon, salt and garlic

Also, we put fiddleheads on skewers, grilled them, then dressed them very simply with olive oil, salt, pepper, and lemon juice. If you get the chance, try this, it's fabulous. It's basically like asparagus done up similarly, but with a somewhat different texture.
Oh my, was it good. I'm not usually much one for steak, but Dad wanted it, and every so often, done well, it's worth it. This was one of those times. Also, the commies are visiting now; mmm...iron.

Excuse me while I use gratuitous punctuation, but, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I don't know if I want this for myself, but I'm really glad these exist. Even if it did make the list, it would have to follow lots of others. Though, six years after the last one, this summer I'm adopting one of two shouldercaps, though there's part of me that's tempted to get both of the ones that I want. I'll get them both eventually, but spacing these things is important. Maybe I should scan the drawings and throw them up here.

Bad Knit Girls
Gallery of Knitting Ink

So, with my fifth grade tutoring student, one of the things we do each week is work through a madlib I make by lovingly hijacking a small piece of classic literature. A while back, I posted my madlib treatment of the oft-quoted but maybe not as oft-considered "to be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet.

I like using madlibs as a teaching device for several reasons: they force students to think about words' functions and roles in a sentence and they promote the sort of chaotically absurd humor I try to propagate.

This week, I decided to step it up a level and introduce the concept of a rhyme scheme into the mix. In fact, I made a villanelle madlib. I have a fascination with this poetic form, the extent of which is not entirely explicable. The most famous example of this form is probably Dylan Thomas's, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night. When I made my NaNoWriMo attempt last fall, I named my main character Villanelle (she usually went by Nelle). Of course, the whole shebang was supposed to highlight the variety of interpretations or outcomes given set information, and so invoking a highly restrictive, repetitive literary form seemed appropriate. On the more explicable side of my fascination with the villanelle is the way it has to reincorporate the same lines over and over, layering the same words with new context and providing a striking rhythm when read aloud. Also, I liked the sound of the word; it's got a little cellar door going on, and it shortened to something that didn't smack of literary pretension the way the full version did. Of course, the whole endeavor kind of collapsed under the weight of the conceptual burden I had layered upon it, and the resulting dust cloud was ripe with the scent of rotting Camembert.

The villanelle that I hacked up is fairly tame on its own, and, in fact, tackles the villanelle itself as its subject matter. But that's unimportant, as most of it gets thrown out the window anyway. A madlib with a rhyme scheme writes itself in an interesting way. One of the rhymes is given, the other is a string of rhymes that must be sparked and carried through by the madlibbers.

Here's a link to a pdf of the madlib file, including poem with blanks, separate blanks sheet, and full poem.

Also, in villanelle-related links, here is A comic which includes a sandwich description in villanelle form. How has it taken me this long to find Cat and Girl? Also amusing was the site for the book Hipster Haiku (No joke! Well, actually, it's full of jokes, but it does really exist.) by Siobhan Adcock, which includes a gallery of "Failed Hipster Poetic Forms." Dulce et decorum est pro Greenpoint score mori. I rest my case.

Also, I just discovered terza rima. This could be a fun concept madlib. Interlocking rhyme schemes? Hmm...

I'm applying to teaching jobs for next year, and I'm scared shitless.

These music files were supposed to be included in the post from earlier today, but as mentioned, I had to hit some yard sales and scored - the fabulous Pioneer Valley Roller Derby folks were hosting a rummage sale in Northampton. I've actually had thoughts of joining up with those folks, but that's probably a topic for more thought and another day.

That's right, music.

Ukulele-related:
Beirut - The Penalty Like some sort of butterfly, "The Penalty" spends most of its life as a plaintive little ukulele ballad before metamorphosing, and spreading its brightly colored wings for only a brief moment of horny glory. But you know what? Caterpillars are totally rad, too. If it wasn't for caterpillars, we wouldn't have silk. Also, many of them are damn cute. Plaintive little ukulele ballads are much the same.
...
I once had a student on one of my camping trips that was afraid the caterpillars in the lean-to were going to eat him in the night. Plaintive little ukulele ballads are much the same.

Sondre Lerche - Modern Nature Why is Tin Pan Alley called Tin Pan Alley? Where is it? Why are there so many tin pans? Can I bang on them? Where are my pants? What's most remarkable about this song is the fact that it was written by a high school kid in Norway in the late 90s, and was not, in fact, snitched from Tin Pan Alley. But, I suppose, there are tin pans and alleys, even in Norway. This particular kid from Norway doesn't limit himself to tin pans in alleys by any means, but the interlude is quite welcome. Incidentally, this was the first song worth listening to that I learned on the ukulele, back four years ago. I still haven't figured out how to reconcile the duetted response parts on my own.

Daft Punk - Digital Love Yeah, you know you can't listen to this song without getting a little warm and fuzzy and cracking a smile. This is high on the list of cutest damn songs ever. And, if you read my post from earlier, you know why this is ukulele related despite currently containing no ukulele. I have heard both the Mobius Band and Alphabeat covers of this song, but both leave something to be desired: there is still a paradoxically gaping, ukulele-shaped hole. I realize that much of what works here is the warmly robotic clipped edges on the vocoded everything, but I can be warmly robotic. I think. Maybe.

Other songs of the week:
Bishop Allen - The News from Your Bed There's something about bleak lyrics paired sardonically with bouncy, happy melodies that compounds the sadness in them. They Might Be Giants' serious songs have done that masterfully, and Bishop Allen, another great thinking band, plays that card to trump. This almost vaudevillian ode to dubious hermithood and existential dread is a prime example. There's a great picture in the line here, "There's a mouse in the cupboard that nibbles your crumbs and you talk to him every night. You say, 'Hey, Mister Whiskers, I'm bored and I'm numb; You can stay if you just treat me right.'" I imagine Justin Rice sitting on the linoleum with a blanket over his head talking intently to the corner cabinet.

Lykke Li - Dance, Dance, Dance I love going to the Basement to dance on Tuesday nights, when I think I can get away with it. I'd go more often if it didn't mean going alone. Which really brings me to the heart of this song, other than the way it uses either a guitar or bass as a gentle scraping percussion line. It comes down to being bold with your dancing and shy with your words. None of her other stuff has hugely struck me, though her Black Cab performance of "I'm Good, I'm Gone" is delightful for its resourceful creativity, but I think that's what the other songs need. They suffer from being a bit too polished a product. "Dance, Dance, Dance" somehow escapes this though.

Hi. Remember me?

So, after much contemplation, I bought a ukulele last weekend. Really, I've been thinking about buying one ever since that summer after college where I lived in Jenny's parents' office and noodled alternately on her ukulele and my guitar and tooled around on the computer with sounds I made with assorted kitchen instruments while I was supposed to be treebanking. So, yeah, it's been in the works for a while. I'd like to say that for all that contemplation I have some kind of super-uke, but that I still can't afford. Mine is a Lanikai LU-11, which was the best-sounding for its price range (under $75), which I'm excited about, but really likes to slip out of tune, which is not so thrilling.

So, what, do you ask, was the final inspiration to jump on it? The other week, I had a calling. It was a clear message of instruction from the universe, and it told me that it was up to me to bring to the world a ukulele-based cover of Daft Punk's "Digital Love." It won't be solo ukulele. The crazy solo, for instance, I intend to do on some kind of melodic percussion instrument. Basically, I'm going to take my laptop, my uke, and my cheap-ass mike into the music room at the school, where I have free range of all the glocks, xylophones, and metallophones I could want, and hit things until it sounds right. I've got some working chords, but I think it still needs tweaking. Whether or not this will bring balance to the varied forces of the universe has yet to be determined, but it should be a hoot regardless.

As for right now, while trying several things, I mostly come back to Beirut's "The Penalty" (yay, waltz time!) and Sondre Lerche's "Modern Nature," which was a favorite from back during the summer of lost ukin' and which plays so easy and sounds so good on a uke that I wonder if Lerche played any of its early versions on one.

In between quasi-obsessive uke-strumming (It's sitting in my lap right now. When I stop to think, I pick it up and strum.), I'm applying to jobs for next year. Basically, my current job is too far of a drive for what it is, and even so I worry about getting stuck. I'm applying to several more teacherly things, but would not be opposed to spending a while doing something like working in a bookstore, either. This was actually supposed to be the focus of this post, but then I rambled on about the uke, and now my yard-saleing date calls, with a chance of hitting the fruitful end-of-the-year dumpsters in Amherst, too.

They will rule the world with handclaps, ukulele, and la-la rock.

And, apparently, if the turnout at their show tonight is any gauge, I will be almost the only one who knows what's coming.

This was last night at the Bookmill. It kind of speaks for itself.

So, among the things that people pay me to do is tutor ESL. At the end of last summer, a friend of mine offered one student to me because she was busy and wasn't exactly sure how to go about it. Anyway, that family has apparently been recommending me to people they know, because now I have four Korean students. I just started with the fourth this week, though she's less English as a second language. She's in fifth grade and her parents want me to work on English composition with her, since she really does speak English like a native, which makes sense because, although she was born in Korea, she's spent most of her life here. Anyhow, because it was our first meeting this week and I wasn't exactly sure what to expect, I decided to just bring a few writing games to set the tone that I am not just a boring teacher-person. So we played two truths and a lie, the game where we come up with a list of ten words and each put together a short story which includes all of them (which works best in a large group, but you work with what you've got), and did a mad lib, which is a sneakily great tool for teaching the mechanics of part-of-speech.

I made one myself out of the first half of the "to be or not to be" soliloquy from Act III of Hamlet, because the mainstream impression of Shakespeare as highbrow detracts from people being able to enjoy it for what's actually there. I like to point out the important role of dirty jokes in Shakespeare. I happen to really like Shakespeare, dirty-minded emo boy that he was, and like to encourage people actually getting inside his writing. Also, I get off on mixing high and low and like to unseat things on pedestals, because by and large things on pedestals are uncomfortable, and anything that thinks it is needs a reality check.

Anyhow, I thought other people might have fun with with this, so I've posted a pdf of the madlib and the sheet of blanks that allows you to make the list of necessary fill-ins without looking at their context. This makes it more fun to do by yourself or in very small groups.

"To be or not to be..." - the mad lib

( Here's one permutation of it a friend and I did yesterday )

So, I'm looking for some opinions here:

My sister and I are looking into the possibility of blending and selling specialty pancake/waffle and quickbread/muffin mixes, likely via Etsy. As part of our exploratory market research, I want to know: what features would make you want to buy such a product? I mean, besides the "Hello! My name is: Pancake" sticker on the front (we do intend to use those as labels). A couple thoughts: Maria and I rock the healthy, whole-grain thing really well (I'm obsessed with oats), even in ways that don't taste so...whole-grainy; we've got a good lead on a wide variety of freeze-dried fruit; our spice racks totally pwn; we're not adverse to challenging the form with other inspirations, like, say, pumpkin pie or maple granola, or even something more out there like mole negro. So, comment with some feature you would want to see, whether it's an ingredient, a restriction, or a larger inspiration.

On another note, like everyone else, it seems, these days, I've made a Muxtape. I have the suspicion that far more of these have been made than listened to, but there it is. I'm already thinking about how I want to tweak it, so by no means consider it set in stone.

Copied directly from today's freecycle digest:

OFFER: Feisty Rooster
Posted: Mon Mar 31, 2008 10:55 am (PDT)
10 month old beautiful Aracauna(easter egger rooster). "Clearence" is
his name. If you can catch him....you can have him. He is acutually a
better watch dog, than my dog! He alerts us to any commotion going on
outside. I am located in Chesterfield.

I need not say anything else.

Before some freak cerebral updraft blows me off course from it again, let me tell you about the gorgeousness of hitting highly selective junk with sticks and the potential for it as a career choice.

So, Friday night, one of Maria's coworkers from Esselon invited us along to a concert at PACE, which is less than a mile's walk from our house. We still haven't gotten over how neat it is that they'll deliver pizza to our house at all (as opposed to where we grew up) or without whining (as with almost everywhere in Amherst, with the exception of the awesome Indian pizza place which was eaten by Pizza Shark). Okay, so I got used to it in college, but that was a while ago. Anyhow, point is we can walk to town to go see music, and that's pretty diddly-danged awesome, far more awesome than whineless pizza delivery, in fact.

The group in question is Electric Junkyard Gamelan. Yeah, go ahead, take in each of those words individually, and then as a cohesive whole. I wasn't exactly sure how it was all going to come together. It could have been as droningly hypnotizing as traditional gamelan (not unpleasant, just hypnotizing), it could have just ended up being generic jam music. These folks really did a remarkable job of transforming their junk into instruments, even beyond the expected percussion that comprises traditional gamelan. They had one stringed instrument that had a sitar-like sound which was made from a piece of an old futon frame, and a wind instrument that was a sax mouthpiece strapped onto a piece of copper pipe. Even under the wings of percussion was a table frame strapped with large, heavy-duty rubber bands, occasionally fed through a selection of effects pedals.

However, just as striking as the music itself and the instruments on which it was played was the make up of the group. It seemed to be focused around a core of middle-aged women, which was pretty awesome. It also included a younger woman and a New York hipster poster boy of indeterminate age with impeccably groomed sideburns (who, it seems, also helms an un-ironic hip-hop accordion project). Anyhow, this core group was such a refreshing contrast from the discussion at the end of the day at work, where I was listening to several of my coworkers of comparable age whining about how the onset of menopause was making them fat. I realize that these things are not mutually exclusive of each other, but it just seemed that this type of approach to music connoted a kind of self-definition that the other conversation lacked. I have great hopes of allying myself closer to the model of these musicians, hair streaked dramatically with gray. I've found one or two over the last several months. The first one, I yanked and handed to my student, telling him, "Here, this one's for you." Somehow, I think the subtle irony was lost on him, though. But, you know what, it was good for me and it didn't do him any harm.

Overall, I think that the music is probably the kind which is awesome live, but doesn't quite translate to the tin can as well. There are some samples up at their website, for the curious, plus you can dig up their MySpace page. If they come around, I highly recommend it.

My day began by having an argument with the clock. Clocks speak a highly tonal language which, since I couldn't possibly begin to mimic the inflections even with all neurons on duty, I am forced to respond to in a regressive caveman dialect which mostly consists of subtly distinct grunts and oafish swatting.

I'm still not sure who won the argument, but I did get up.

I never know where to start after having not posted for so long, so I think a description of something really immediate and inane is a good place to start.

The day our internet got properly hooked up, as I was finishing the setup on Spudnik, the wireless network, the lappy's seizure disorder started acting up again after several weeks of total remission, only worse this time as none of the tricks that had seemed to work before did. After over a month of opening it up maybe once a week to see if there was anything I could do or even if the problem had magically cleared itself up and using Maria's computer (which, among other things, lacks a CD burner), I decided it was time to at least research the possibilities for a new machine.

Last weekend, I bought a brand spankin' shiny new laptop. The rest have all been hand-me-downs with quirks. The last one, for example, had the screen edge held together with an auspiciously placed strip of electrical tape.

The computer itself is a Gateway M-6823 (detailed specs here). While looking at various models online, I also danced coquettishly around a very similar model during totally gratuitous trips to BestBuy. I finally decided to go in and buy it, after giving the old computer one last chance to boot up and not be fritzy. I walked straight up to that section of display to find it...empty. After poking at a couple other models and feeling really disappointed at the prospect of walking out of there without a computer, I explain to a salesguy what happened and ask about something similar. I realize about 10 seconds into explaining my dilemma of processor vs. RAM between two other models I'd looked up that were in the same range that he's as glazed as a yam on Easter and isn't really following. It's a good thing I happen to like glazed yams, because this one says, "let's just see what's in stock, maybe one's hiding." I don't find the exact same model, but I find something very similar, only it has a bigger hard drive. And it turns out to be cheaper by about $35. I throw the extra $35 into another gig of RAM and skip off home with my new toys.

It's interesting being in a financial place where I can make the decision to simply go buy a computer. I had been looking into options that would allow me to finance a computer, but then I realized that there were reasonable computers available such that I could simply buy one without decimating my savings. I'm presented with all of the things I said I would do when I had more than simply the bare minimum (the last two years really put "paycheck to paycheck" into perspective) - things like the IRA that I've talked about starting, the CDs I've said I would go in on (for both interpretations of CD). I could even do something really crazy like pay off my car all in one go, since that's that close to being paid off (was it really almost five years ago I bought that thing?), as I'm really looking forward to that time after it's all paid off but before it craps out, if for no other reason than it's one less thing to think about.

I always go into these things with an outline in my head of what I want to write about, often with little turns of phrase that amuse me. They always get lost, eddied on some other topic. Just like everything else I try to translate from my brain to reality. I never even got to the joyous banging-on of things with sticks alluded to in the subject line. Normal posting resumes tomorrow now that I've gotten over the initial "OMG - I haven't posted since the age of the conceptual dinosaur"*

*Some species of conceptual dinosaur have been reported to have been seen as recently as two Thursdays ago, but the reporters are reported to have been hitting the snozzberries pretty hard, and have since been deported. Yes, I do amuse myself.

Found this on the back page of a Boston Globe supplement about "things you can do to help the planet" that was in the burn pile the other day.

This woman has a fabulous tongue-in-cheek style, and mostly addresses the way we respond to news that we really want to believe and the rationalizations we make around that, in this case the assertion put forward is that unmarried folk do more to strengthen communities because they have more open social networks.
( Single Rules - Why the unmarried are the real do-gooders of the world )

(Original panel paper - Marriage Reduces Social Ties Discussion Paper for Council on Contemporary Families--1/2/2007)