dresese

Scary

In honor of Halloween, I'd just like to say that the "LearningLeaders" posters on the subway freak me out. To those that haven't seen it, they feature little kids with white hair and a big bushy white mustache. Albert Einstein is cute. Kids are cute. But kids who look like Einstein are extremely disturbing.

You can see some examples at their website.

Recent books

I've been doing a great deal of reading over the past few years. Every work day I have about an hour and a half total time on the subway with nothing to do except read. So, I've read a great deal. Some recent highlights are:

• The New York Trilogy - by Paul Auster. I've been reading a lot of Paul Auster lately. It is some wonderful, strange, and beautiful stuff. This book is the strangest one of his I've read, and probably the most engaging (and sometimes infuriating) of his work. (Well, I've only read about 4 or so of his books so far, so I perhaps cannot make such a sweeping claim).
• A Man in Full - by Tom Wolfe. Also Bonfire of the Vanities. There were read, not out of a burning desire I had to read Tom Wolfe, but because they were available in the building library and were books I had actually heard of before. I found them both to be a quick and easy read. But is it any good? The writing style seemed a bit lacking, almost as if it were written by a teen girl with lots of exclamation points she wanted to share with the world, and a constant chatter of interior monologues. But despite the annoying style, I felt both novels had something to say, and told a story that said it in an interesting way. So, pretty good.
• Kafka on the Shore - by Haruki Murakami. Not, as you may think, a sequel to Einstein on the Beach. Instead, it is a novel about a teens search for... well, a lot of things. Very strange, sort of creepy, then peaceful, then also romantic, and then back to creepy again. I had no idea what the hell was going on with parts of this book. It's sort of a twilight zone episode crossed with a coming of age story. Even with the bizarre plot, or even because of it, it did turn out to be a pretty enjoyable book.
• Full Metal Jacket Diary - by Matthew Modine. I found this little gem in the library in our basement. It was a great read about the process of acting in a Stanley Kubrick movie. Not only did it have great tidbits about things like how F. Lee Ermey got the job as the Marine instructor, but had some excellent quotes by Kubrick on making movies. I don't think they'll have this at a library, and it probably doesn't have enough content to make it worth $20, so just find it in your local bookstore and thumb through it. I'd tell you to come on over to my building's laundry room, but this book has disappeared as mysteriously as it arrived.

Best Tek Yet

This episode of Colbert's "The New Tek Jansen Adventures" which aired last Wednesday was the funniest thing I've seen in years. Years! It's been quite some time since I laughed so hard. Of course, it might just be me who sees it as so amusing, I'm sure it helps that 2001 is my favorite movie.

Crazy town

Sometimes it seems that everyone in this town is fucking crazy. I went out on a brief errand a few days ago, just down one avenue to a store. As I crossed the street, I heard a man screaming into a public phone "FIFTEENTH AND EIGHT AVENUE!". I've never heard a location shouted in such anger before. As I returned from the store, an older woman, walking towards me, suddenly threw a bunch of bird seed below a car nearby. Startled, the next person I saw was a woman coming towards me muttering to herself. As I avoided her, I realized that everyone I had seen on the street in my errand had been crazy. Then I did a little self-check to make sure I wasn't acting crazy as well. Nope. It was just them. Where do they come from? How do they survive here? What do they do all day? I don't know, but they are here and I'm guessing that if they disappear, then a person even crazier must replace them.

Hooray for late night debugging!

As I write this, it is now 12:41 AM. At midnight, I got back home. I was out with Adam seeing Scorcese's new movie, The Departed. Which was, by the way, awesome. But that's not the point of this post.

Upon getting home at midnight, I would ordinarily just go to sleep. But, somehow, I felt like I wanted to debug a problem at work that I was working on earlier today. As much as I realized that it was a pretty sad thing to do, I quietly opened up my laptop on my bed, and lied down on the bed (Greta was still in the living room). I started working on the problem. That's when I saw something slowly drift downwards in front of me. I peered over the laptop to see a rather large spider right in the middle of my pillow. A bit frightened, I glanced up a the ceiling to see where he had come from, but I was unable to see anything interesting. I squashed the spider with a book in short order.

The scary part isn't the spider. We have spiders here occasionally. The scary part is that this spider gently drifted down right into where my head would have been if I was sleeping. And I like to sleep face-up, and I'm sure when I sleep I must snore with my mouth wide open. Would I have woken up clawing my face? Would I have woken up with a spider in my throat? Or perhaps I would not even have been the wiser, and a spider would just scuttle about my face merrily before returning home.

After a lengthy and disturbing discussion with some ex-coworkers earlier this week about bedbugs, I'm feeling a little vulnerable right now to the whole nocturnal creepy crawling things.

On the other hand, I'm feeling pretty special. I not only avoiding some unpleasantness, I solved the bug pretty quickly. And, now that I think about it, I caught my train back to Queens tonight immediately, which is unusual for 11:15 pm on a Sunday night. Luck is, evidently, with me tonight.

More posts

Posts to this blog are getting fewer and farther between. Once a week is already bad enough, but once every two weeks is getting almost to the point of giving up.

Sometimes I think the problem is that my life is not that interesting. But if I think about it, that's not the problem. I probably think of something nearly every day that is blog-worthy. The problem is more of time. If I write a blog entry, I write it at home, at the computer. I only get about an hour or two of time at night when I would be on the computer. And if I'm in front of the computer, I am usually doing work.

Yesterday, a solution occurred to me. I have roughly 1.5 hours I am on the subway every day. Previously, I've been spending this time reading books. And it's been great: I've read a lot of great books in the past few years. But if I wrote on the subway instead of reading, I could and would write a great deal. Later, at home, I would simply need to transcribe all my writings.

So this is what I'm doing now. I am writing this on the subway. Standing up. While trying to keep my balance against the stops, starts, and unexpected decelerations. I'm writing, but as you may imagine, writing while standing up, while balancing, on a subway does not lead to great handwriting. And if you have seen my handwriting before, you may find it difficult to imagine what my bad handwriting looks like. I write, but whether I can read it later on is a mystery right now. If you are reading this, I suppose I must have made some sense of it.