Jeff’s Journal

1) A year ago today, my wife and I signed the paperwork for our condo in New Hampshire, and made fleeing from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts official. On the same day was the silly Mooninite scandal, where the Adult Swim marketing scheme wreaked havoc over an amused populace.

A year later, I still regret nothing.

2) Anyone have more than a passing familiarity with WordPress and can help me with a link exporting problem?

3) I’m currently very addicted to clementines.

I feel like I have more to say here, but no dice.

1) 5 hour workday. Working Sunday kinda sucked, but being home at 4p after sleeping in is always good.

2) Future of the Left - Curses. The album’s been out in the UK for ages, but I haven’t been able to get my mclusky fix in a while, so this does the trick.

3) Kathleen Edwards has a new album coming out this spring. And she’s touring for it! David, you have your Beantown itinerary set up yet?

4) My medical drama from last summer? Yeah, just got a refund check from the hospital for that, which means my insurance decided to cover it after all. That’s $400 to bolster my savings I didn’t have 24 hours ago, awesome.

Mike tagged me for that “10 random/interesting things about you” meme, specifically because he feels he knows little about me other than my opinions on books, movies, and politics. So let’s see if I can’t throw ten interesting things out there with that in mind.

1) Through most of my grade school time, I was convinced I was going to be a meteorologist. I watched The Weather Channel the way some kids watch Nickelodeon, I owned all sorts of crazy meteorology books, the whole nine yards.

2) I gave up on that dream after freshman year of high school, when I failed Algebra I. To this day, it’s the only class I actually failed (I failed one other class in college, but an appeal turned that around), but not being good at math when you have an interest in science doesn’t work out very well. I also got a 67 in Algebra II. Thank god for the scale.

3) My speaking voice annoys the shit out of me, and I can’t imagine other people actually being able to tolerate it. I know that no one especially likes their speaking voice, but I’m especially thrown by mine.

4) Given how annoying I find my speaking voice, it’s still a mystery to me that I have a good singing voice. I mean, I did get into college as a vocal major, I did make district chorus in high school, so there’s obviously third party confirmation, but I’ve never understood it.

5) I find it incredibly difficult to lie. It doesn’t come easy to me, it’s not something I’m able to do more often than not. I like that aspect of my reputation, but it made working in sales very difficult.

6) While I love my job now, I surprisingly miss working at Tatnuck Booksellers from time to time. Probably because that was a good five years of my life, but even with all the annoyances and complaining I did, it really was a decent gig with a lot of good opportunity. I still can’t say I’ve found anything in the world quite like it.

7) Not surprisingly, given my interest in Kroger Babb and in indie rock, I’m incredibly fascinated by little-known people in history. The New Hampshire Humanities Book Group is reading a book about a Jewish Confederate soldier from the Civil War that I find absolutely fascinating, and may never find time to read - this sort of stuff really gets me.

8) In a lot of ways, my fear of dying is made greater through the knowledge that I’ll never get to read all the books I want to read. What’s worse is that there are definitely thousands of books that I’m completely unaware of that I would probably love. Such is life - but this wasn’t supposed to be about books, so…

9) Few things are more important to me in judging a person’s character - public or personal - than integrity.

10) I have a tendency to carry a lot of regret with me. I’m typically one to replay various scenarios in my head over and over, often involving people who probably don’t even remember being involved in the first place. While I still do that from time to time, the last few years of my life have largely quelled that - between marrying Ann, moving to New Hampshire, taking this job, and everything else that’s come along with it, I feel like I’ve made a lot of really good decisions for my life, and the regret I usually take with me almost ceases to exist after 2003. For someone who’s constantly evaluating his internal state, even with my general ups and downs, that’s a big step for me, feeling comfortable in my own existence.

After 90 minutes in the Virtual Waiting Room…

* 17 May v. Milwaukee. A Saturday. I’ve always had an affinity for the Brewers, and we get to sit in the ALCOHOL FREE SECTION. Which is fun for me, I suppose.

* 12 June v. Baltimore. A Thursday. Divisional games FTW, and in our favorite bleachers!

* 17 August v. Toronto. A Sunday afternoon in right field. Extra fun now that we live 10min from the AA affiliate.

* 30 August v. Chicago. A Saturday game, just to root against Adam.

Huzzah!

I’m not at all comfortable with M.I.A., the whole Tamil thing and such, but her cover of “Jimmy” is pretty infectious, and Of Montreal’s cover is even better.

…of the non-political kind.

1) It’s hard for me not to get excited over things like this, for obvious reasons. Of course, the media isn’t always rock-solid on reporting science issues reasonably, and any wide-scale rollout of this would be too late, but still.

2) Not to say I haven’t been excited about Super Smash Bros. Brawl up to this point, but this reveal about classic demos really gets me excited. Why? I couldn’t tell you, honestly, but I like the concept and it’ll likely get me spending money on the Virtual Console.

3) I don’t hate the Giants (ETA from the comments: Hitler HATES the Giants), and I look forward to a good Super Bowl if the final game of the season was any indication, but does this come across as dickish to anyone else?:

Everyone else on the Giants sideline ignored him, even the team managers, who had been keeping players warm all game. They didn’t bother to drape a jacket over Tynes’ shoulders as he stood alone near midfield, listening to the crowd cheer for his miss and watching the Packers win the coin flip to get the ball first — and perhaps exclusively, had Brett Favre not thrown that interception — in overtime.

Tynes would say later that the lack of communication from his teammates was “no big deal. … I don’t talk to anyone during games anyway.” He would also explain away his decision not to celebrate his winning kick on the field with his teammates. As the ball was tumbling through the uprights, silencing the Lambeau Field crowd and sending his teammates onto the field in a frenzy, Tynes turned and ran 75 yards through the opposite end zone, through the tunnel and into the locker room. He ran alone.

“I was cold,” he said. “I wanted to get inside.”

Maybe it’s just that simple — his teammates were celebrating a trip to the Super Bowl, but he was cold. He’d meet them inside. Who knows? But I will say this: I shadowed Tynes for most of an hour inside the Giants locker room, and Feagles was again the only teammate who said a word to him. Yes, there was a 10-minute period immediately after the game when the media was not allowed inside the locker room, and perhaps the entire organization used that time to kiss Tynes’ feet — but for the next hour, not a single teammate said a word to the guy who kicked the game-winning field goal in the NFC title game. That seems strange.

I don’t feel as if we’d see that on the Pats if it were Gostkowski. Maybe I’m wrong.

4) Speaking of football, one of the Patriot wide recievers, Dante Stallworth, believes he has a Martian alter-ego. But it’s okay - he only comes out during games. And people thought the Red Sox “idiot” culture was weird…

5) I don’t watch these often enough to stay caught up, but Michael Cera fans should enjoy Clark and Michael, a web-video thing. Also, Cera plays a role in the first installment of “Drunk History, which tells the story of the Hamilton/Burr duel through beer goggles. Thanks to Liz for this one, I got a kick out of it.

6) This is fun: Background Music for Your Movies. If I ever get around to making silly short films, I’m liberally using these.

7) Also from WFMU, Adlai Stevenson election spots. A really neat piece of American political history that gets so easily forgotten. It’s incredible the amount of stuff like this that probably exists in people’s attics and basements that may never get to see the light of day.

8) A pimp out for Fantasy Book Critic and Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist, two book blogs that have become instant favorites as well as extended my already-too-long-list of books to read beyond anything manageable.

9) I was hoping that the buzz on Rambo would be similar to Rocky Balboa, but it doesn’t appear to be the case. I’m hoping to catch There Will Be Blood this weekend, though.

Tis all for now.

I think I gave up my longshot dream of being a fiction writer about a year ago at this point - my writing tone is too conversational unless I have a point to make, where then I can get crazily academic as I oversource everything.

With that said, The Complete History of My Sexual Failures, a documentary due out this year, essentially mirrors a work of fiction that’s been floating in my brain for a few years now. There are noteworthy differences, but the basic concept is incredibly similar.

Alas…

1) So, yeah. Obviously, we’re seeing a bit of a different thing here - I’m starting to separate from LiveJournal a bit, which is what that top thing references.

My reasons are many. For one, I’m more than a little annoyed with some of the tactics of LJ’s leadership, both old and new. The, uh, “Great Strikethrough” was one thing, but when, for instance, you can’t search for “spice girls” in one’s interests anymore, well, it’s not quite the bastion of free speech that it was when I signed on back in, geez, 2000. It’s a little sad, honestly.

Secondly, a lot of it has to do with my literary endeavors - quite frankly, if my book is good but unfinished, having relevant material to point to and say “hey, look, I DO know what the hell I’m talking about and I can write in a coherent and consistent fashion” will only help me. I’m not ready to launch that blog for real yet - I want it to be based on bad movies, but I can’t figure out a good name let alone necessarily want to run it on my own. If anyone has suggestions on the former, let me know, and some of you may be hearing from me on the latter.

So either way, when I saw Lance with his crossposting recently, I looked into it, and hell, why not get the best of both worlds - my material can post on LJ at the same time it does on my site, and I can have separate blogs for separate things and still centralize them on LJ without having to worry about crappy syndication on LJ’s end. I’ll still have the occasional friends-only post on LJ, but you can always comment where you’re reading it, and yeah.

Yeah, this may seem trivial to a lot of you. That’s fine, but that’s just what I am, I suppose.

2) So, what’s new, right? Well, it’s old news to about a dozen of you, but we got a new TV. Instead of being responsible and paying some bills, I decided to pool together my Christmas money and get a better television for the front room. It’s nice, and gave us a little more leeway in how the room is set up, and yeah:

We went from a 26″ to a 37″, this one has 1080i and HDMI, and was a floor model to boot, so we didn’t pay an arm and a leg. I’m pleased, and, as you see, it fits in rather nicely to the whole room. We had about 16 people packed into the room for the AFC Championship game on Sunday (and thanks to everyone who came out, it really meant a ton to us), and yeah. Good times.

3) I held a massive event at the library this past week, where Jeff Kinney, author of Diary of a Wimpy Kid did a Q & A and a signing. It’s really refreshing to see such a big shot author be so down to earth at the same time - it’s like he doesn’t quite comprehend how much of a rock star he really is. I’ll never forget how disappointed I was in Judy Blume when I met her, and seeing the kids so excited to meet a genuinely good guy was really fun. I should have gotten a picture, but I forgot. No matter, though, we had about 90 people show up and it was pretty much completely awesome. Thanks to Ken for tipping me off, I love when old Scholastic contacts work out.

4) I don’t recall if I mentioned this, but I did buy a Nintendo DS. I like it - i don’t love it yet, but I also only really have one game at the moment, and that’s New Super Mario Bros., which is great but isn’t Team Fortress 2. I’m sure once I land Mario Kart DS and Zelda: Phantom Hourglass it’ll be a different story.

What’s shocking is that my mother ADORES her DS. We bought her one for Christmas, and she absolutely loves it - she has a bunch of puzzle games and keeps “burning the motherfucking food” on Cooking Mama. It’s hilariously unexpected. Talk about a great system overall, really.

5) Since it’s going around Facebook: I apologise for not pimping Kate Nash to everyone sooner, but she’s awesome and you should all listen to her.

6) On Heath Ledger - I was never a huge fan, but found his acting better than average for Hollywood folks his age and thought he made interesting choices when he could have just as easily been a heartthrob/action hero. It’s shocking to see someone less than a year older than you die, quite frankly, and that part is unsettling, but I’m more disappointed that we might not have ever had an opportunity to see what he was truly capable of as an actor.

Now, if we can only get Amy Winehouse to lay off the crack…

I think that’s it for now.

np: Kate Nash - Made of Bricks

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