Year: 2012

Randomly Friday

Random thoughts for the last Friday in January:

  • It’s kind if a drag that it’s never really seemed like winter here this year, but I must admit that that the $107 gas bill I just received (half of last January’s) went a long way toward easing my pain.
  • I may make a quick trip to Atlanta the weekend of 10 February to see this movie, in case anyone there wants to tag along. I’ve been obsessed with the Pruitt-Igoe saga ever since I first read about it in an urban sociology textbook almost thirty years ago. It was one of those pivotal reads that started me down the path toward my fascination with urban history (and urban decay).
  • Thing I love this month: free copies of the dead tree edition of the New York Times every day at work. It’s apparently part of some “newspapers in education” program or something. I hope it lasts.
  • Thing I hate this weekend: the fact that I’ll be spending most of it working. But I’m on deadline for a grant application to fund the first phase of my dream project, so work I shall…
  • I bought Bugles tonight and I’m not afraid to use them.

Come back, zinc…

I can’t even recall if we were at a party or in a bar. That’s how fuzzy it is. But I remember talking to my boss about how he’d lost a fortune investing in Canadian zinc mines. That really surprised me, but he emptied his pockets and all he had was a five and a toonie so I guess he meant it.

I was way too drunk to drive home so I flew to Fresno instead and crashed at the home of my former sister-in-law and her husband. We all watched Cops for a while. Then, just as I crawled into bed, the alarm went off and I woke up in Winston-Salem and started getting ready for work. I was remarkably productive all day today considering how busy I’d been the night before.

Acting my age

I was thinking earlier this morning about how I used to always feel younger than my years and how that’s no longer as true as it used to be. As you might guess, I was viewing this development rather negatively at the time. But now that I think about it, maybe it’s a healthy thing–a much needed reality check.

I’m forty-seven years old. That’s not ancient by any definition. It’s not like I’m ready for Medicare or dinner at the cafeteria at 4:45 (unless I’m with my dad) or Wheel of Fortune. Granted, I’m also not an annoying twenty-five-year-old hipster fuck but I think that’s something of a positive. And I wasn’t really an annoying twenty-five-year-old hipster fuck even when I was twenty-five, although I may have been closer than I care to admit.

I’ve obviously been subject to Peter Pan Syndrome in the past; I spent thirteen years in San Francisco, after all. And I’ve fetishized being a curmudgeonly old coot on occasion as well, which is easy to do in Winston-Salem where everyone is an old coot so there are lots of role models. Neither approach seems particularly satisfactory.

I think maybe I’ll just try being forty-seven for a while. It’s a good age, if not one that gets a lot of good press. I’ve reached a certain level of comfort with my surroundings but I’m not willing to settle for the status quo either. I’m past the whole “fashion victim” stage but haven’t reached the point where I no longer care about my appearance. I don’t have to jump on every trend but I also don’t feel that all technology and new ideas are inherently evil. I can’t drink a lot but I don’t want to either. Cute boys don’t leer at me very often but I also don’t care all that much anyway. So how bad can forty-seven really be?

At any rate, it’ll be over in six months when I hit forty-eight. I’ll reassess then.

Ewww…

While working on the refi, I discovered that my credit report suggests that I maintain a current address in San Francisco. Of course, the address is Mark’s, although I’m not 100% certain how it became associated with my name. Actually, his last two addresses are associated with my name.

Anyway, it’s becoming a bit of a task to get them eliminated. Experian states that one of them  “was provided by a creditor or public record” and won’t even let me begin the online dispute process, which will necessitate a phone call on Monday. It’s just a little nagging annoyance and it will eventually get straightened out, hopefully without screwing up the mortgage paperwork. I can deal with it.

What’s really offensive, though, is the insinuation that I would ever live in San Francisco again. Blecch…

Exhausted

Thanks to some help from a higher-up, I had rather a major coup today with respect to my grant project, albeit not something I can talk about here at the moment. It’s a good thing and will give my application (and the project, if funded) terrific credibility, but the timing was…ummm..a might inconvenient, coming a little more than a week before the application is due.

My next ten days or so just got a lot more complicated. It was already pretty nuts to begin with and I’m already pretty thoroughly worn out. It’s going to get worse.

Better try to sleep some now.

No limits?

So I keep hearing these radio ads for some Walmart/T-Moblie phone plan. For $35 or something (I can’t be bothered to look it up) you get “unlimited talk, text, and web.” A few seconds later there is reference to “unlimited web for the first 250MB.”

Correct me if I’m wrong but doesn’t that constitute…well…a limit?

Me like

I know I’m about a year late to the party but I met Portlandia tonight and it makes me happy.

Thirty seconds in I laughed out loud at “Portland is a place where young people go to retire.”

And then I laughed out loud many more times.

I haven’t done that in a while.

It was nice.