Possessions are causing me suspicion

There is one thing I’ve been putting off in life for quite some time now, and a few recent events have finally spurred me to get cracking. The task? A major review and overhaul of my possessions, specifically all of the stuff I’ve acquired over the last, oh, ten years. The recent events are two in number: first, it’s coming up on the two-year anniversary of when we moved into our current apartment, which means that any moving box that still has stuff in it is fair game for disposal. Second, my favorite office supply store near where I work is going out of business. I know that doesn’t seem terribly relevant, but it fits into the puzzle because the office supply store is where they sell things that help you get organized, like file folders and so on. And also, the store itself was incredibly well organized, in a way that bordered on obsessive. Since I value my own organizational talents, the store and I were a good personality match. And now that they’re going out of business, I figure I’m going to need to pick up the slack.

Back to the moving boxes for a moment. Thanks to all the housing woes of the recent past, many of which have been chronicled here, there’s been a lot of moving in the last several years. It’s true that moving frequently often discourages the piling up of unwanted stuff, because you have a strong motivation to keep your possessions lean and you don’t have time to fill your current space with crap. On the other hand, though, recently I’d been moving often enough that I never wanted to spend the time to really look through boxes of papers and random possessions, especially if they were already packed carefully and easy to just move. So a lot of crap has been following me from house to house, simply because of inertia.

I’ve also been partially stymied by the impulse to try and get rid of things in a constructive way, by selling or giving them away on Craigslist. I had a little success at that before the last move—people will take all kinds of odd things if you offer them for free or cheap on Craigslist. But in the ultimate reckoning, I realized a couple of weeks ago that I had a lot of stuff to get rid of, and listing it all individually on Craigslist was too daunting. In fact, it was keeping me from getting off the ground at all. Then I read an online discussion about cleaning out stuff, and was reminded of Goodwill. Stuff that isn’t trash but that I don’t need or want is exactly the kind of stuff that Goodwill takes. Aha!

For about a week, once I started to commit to the idea of going through things, I was in the planning stage. There are only a couple of storage areas in the house where I originally stashed the stuff we don’t use: the dining room closet and the extra room upstairs. There’s also the three redundant corkscrews in the kitchen, but that was quite easily addressed. Now I’m in the phase where I’m actually gathering the unused stuff, trashing the trash and boxing the Goodwill candidates. I also cleared out a clothes drawer that had shit in it I didn’t even remember; things I hadn’t worn since college, or never. Uh, college is getting to be a long time ago. That led to a lot of gleeful chucking of things into the trash, and now that drawer is only half filled. It’s like my pajamas get to live in a mansion with cathedral ceilings now.

I also visited my doomed office supply store today, and bought some things to help organize some of the crap I do intend to save. Childhood papers and writings from the distant past are scattered across several boxes and locations right now. My plan is to collect them into a single plastic file box, which I can then easily store and move. My messy life will be neatly filed—ah, the irony.

Of course, an important part of the entire process is to report it here, if only to provide motivation to see this through. Embarrassment is a healthy source of stamina. After all, I mentioned here that we sold the old Civic when, last September? Well, the bag containing all the stuff from the glove compartment and the trunk is still sitting in the dining room. Uh, maybe it’s time to get rid of that.

Ode to a Honda Civic

During the Long Blog Blackout, one event occurred that can be seen as either momentous or no big deal, depending on whether you give a crap about cars. I confess that I do, and so when it came time to replace our 1997 Honda Civic with a newer Toyota Matrix, I was compelled to write this homage to the old trusty car. Read on below the pic.

It was inevitable, of course I knew it was inevitable. But just as humans have the ability to adapt to new situations, so they also often favor the routine, well-worn path. And in this case I’m talking about a path that was worn for nearly fourteen years: our 1997 Civic, bought at a time when we were kind of poor and in grad school and driving around in a shitty Hyundai Excel. That Civic seemed like pure luxury by comparison—I still remember feeling like it was a major step up even on the test drive. Now it’s fourteen years later and 185,000 miles further down the road, and it definitely doesn’t feel like luxury anymore. (Not that it ever really was: manual steering! manual transmission! manual windows and locks!)

A lot of people view cars with an entirely unromantic perspective: necessary transportation, gets you from here to there, annoying when they break down, unremarkable when they don't. Unfortunately I see cars as more integral to my life. In grad school it carried us on thousands of miles’ worth of trips back home for the holidays, most of them, it seems, conducted in horrifying snow or rainstorms legendary in scale. It was bought mere months after we got married, so it forms a sort of monument to the longevity of our relationship. It carried us into our new life when we graduated and moved back to the East Coast; we slept in it during that horrible drive east when there wasn’t anywhere to stay on the way. And then, a few years ago it acquired a roof rack, and we put our bikes on it and had all kinds of fantastic day trips and vacations. With the new car’s arrival it became almost purely a vehicle for the weekend, to escape the mundane life and to be free of weekday worries.

Of course, there is a new(ish) car to take over that role, so it's not as though I’m really losing something. In fact, objectively speaking I should be more excited, since the new(ish) car is so much younger than the old Civic. But for now, it’ll be those deadly adjectives New and Different—something my routine-loving personality will chafe at for a while. At least until it too becomes Old and Familiar. And someday I’ll write a fond homage to it, just like I'm doing now. Assuming that we still have the internet, of course.

Housekeeping

It’s been a while since I checked in, but things have been pretty quiet for a change. In fact, we just celebrated our first year of living in peace and quiet after escaping from Crazy Neighbor Land. Go us!

Just to give you an idea of how organized I strive to be, I’ve always tried to keep a record of my old addresses and phone numbers. (This actually came in handy when we ended up going back to renting, because I still had the contact info for our last landlord, from 2004.) The list was always in my Palm contacts list, but when I migrated over to Android and Google Contacts last month, things aren’t really arranged the way I like. I don’t really need my apartment info from 1992 to come up in my main phone list, you know? So I’ve been revisiting the data and plugging it into a simple text file that I can stow someplace out of the way.

Well, as you can imagine, I’ve been struck by a serious wave of nostalgia as I look through those old addresses. I have them all the way back to the first years of Swami and Fang, when we lived in a crappy place about ten minutes’ drive from campus in Williamsburg. To confirm the address, I even tracked down the website for the apartment complex and took a look at the Google satellite view. It’s amazing to think how many people have lived in that unit since we jammed our stuff into the Hyundai and the rental truck and drove off in 1992. I sure hope they’ve replaced the carpet since then. Oh, and fixed the lamp that was broken while someone was practicing his golf swing indoors.

Eighteen years have passed and we’ve lived in seven more places since then. I know a lot more than I did then, about all kinds of things. I also have a better idea of exactly how little I still know, even after all that time. But the one constant is that everything I’ve learned is colored by wherever I lived at the time.

When I try to visualize a life’s experiences, my first impulse is to picture a road, with the way behind spread over flat terrain with long views, and the way ahead a steep hill that you can’t see over. But I’m not sure it’s really like that. Things that happened a long time ago often feel immediate and can easily provoke a visceral reaction. As I think about that first apartment I can almost feel myself living there right now, even though it’s so far removed in time. So maybe memory and experience is more like one of those rooms full of churning plastic balls, where you have no idea which ball is going to surface in front of you next. And something is constantly handing you more balls to add to the pile. Hmm. I think I just suggested that we’re all trapped inside a giant McDonald’s Playland! That might explain a few things.

Vinyl Elvis

Hm, I need to stop thinking about how badly the Wizards are playing in the playoffs. Because they are playing very, very, very BADLY. It’s killing me. But I can’t blog about that, it’s really too painful.

So yesterday Elvis Costello released his latest album as vinyl only (though there is a promise of a CD version to come out later). It’s interesting to watch the reaction of the fans, because two things become clear: (1) both he and many of his fans possess a huge, I might even say irrational, love for vinyl LPs; and (2) I don’t.

I suppose there’s a reason one refers to the formative years as being, well, formative. During mine, there was one record player in the house, and it was smack in the living room. And the floor in there was incredibly susceptible to vibrations, so if you wanted to listen to a record you had to announce your intention so that everybody could sneak around and not make the record skip. The implication of this is that playing music in record form was not in any way a private activity, even with headphones. So if it hadn’t been for the cassette tape, I wouldn’t have had any freedom to listen to whatever I wanted, or to give the music the kind of undivided attention that music sometimes demands. (Or to get emotional when the music demanded that you got emotional.) This set of circumstances also means I never had the magic moment of putting a needle down on a record to hear it the first time, and so I don’t have a desire to recapture this with Elvis’s new one. (I also don’t have an audiophilic passion for the topic of fidelity, but that might be worth a whole post of its own.) But I can’t fault Elvis for engineering that experience anew for a lot of people who find that important, so that’s cool. Although he’d better put the damn album out on CD too, dammit.

Through a strange coincidence I also watched the movie High Fidelity for the first time last weekend, and of course it’s awash in record-store geekery and nostalgia for the vinyl. God, how I wanted a summer job in a record store when I was younger. It’s probably for the best that I was never granted such a platform where I could feel cooler than the rest of the world, heh. But as a mini-review I’ll say that I wasn’t super impressed with the book, and the movie didn’t work any better. For a John Cusack plus Tim Robbins flick, I would definitely watch Tapeheads a few more times rather than see this one again. (Heh, according to the IMDB rating I am in the minority opinion there!) And for John Cusack directed by Stephen Frears, for the love of Pete you should totally go with The Grifters—much better.

Think there’s any chance the Wizards won’t get swept? Aaaaargh.

Abandon all hope

I was clearing out old emails at home the other night and came across a good discussion we had on the Elvis Costello mailing list back in 2006. The question was, what books have you abandoned reading? Now, I have at least one good friend of steely resolve who finishes everything she starts, no matter how painful the experience. I, on the other hand, have a lot less resolve—okay, let’s be honest and say hardly any. Unexpectedly, though, my abandoned list is not that long, since I don’t start a lot of books that I’m not sure I’ll be interested in.

The following list is in no particular order.

Tristram Shandy, by Laurence Sterne
This one is not surprising in the least, although it’s mildly surprising that I tried to read it in the first place. I first heard of it in grad school, because it’s the subject of a (very dull) scholarly article written by a proponent of the Russian Formalist school of literary analysis (yeah, that sounds just about as dry as it actually is). The book is actually fairly entertaining, especially given that it was written nearly 250 years ago, but is so meandering and plotless that it finally lost my interest. It might have been easier to get through if I took some kind of recreational mood-altering substances.

Idiot, by Fedor Dostoyevsky
Another bad decision motivated by grad school. I was supposed to read it before my comprehensive master’s exams, but never managed it. A later attempt was also foiled when I quickly lost any interest in any of the characters, and couldn’t find a plot to speak of. I was surprised by my abandonment, though, because the other Dostoyevsky I’d read was actually quite good. If you want to give the Russian classics a go, I would recommend you try Crime and Punishment, which was way, way more engaging. Actually, start with Gogol—that cat had a sense of humor, unlike any of his fellow countrymen.

Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The third in my trilogy of grad school-inspired miscalculations. I don’t even remember a single thing about it. Did I get past the first page? I think I did. I would definitely recommend Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich instead, if you feel that you must.

The Bostonians, by Henry James
Whoa, was this one a crashing bore. I don’t think I made it past the first scene where a bunch of tiresome people say dull things in someone’s salon. Considering how much Boston gets your heart pumping, what with the gale-force winds and insane drivers, this book should have a lot more going for it. This was my first and last attempt at Henry James. I will not make a weak Dave Chappelle joke here.

Dune, by Frank Herbert
Admittedly, I pulled this one off my brother’s shelf when I was too young to really have a crack at it, but the first page was all I got through. Heck, even the Bible knows that you put all the dull genealogy a few chapters in so that you give the reader a chance to get interested. For whatever reason, I never went back. Doesn’t stop me from making postmodern, ironic references to the sandworms, so I figure it’s win-win.

Lord of the Rings trilogy, by J.R.R. Tolkien
I put these on the list even though I have actually finished them, simply because it’s remarkable to note that I made two attempts in my youth to get through all three, but got stuck both times at the end of Two Towers. Frodo and Sam get separated in Shelob’s lair, and then for some reason I failed to pick up volume three. For all I knew, Sauron got the ring and nuked everyone’s ass back to the First Age. Then again, I was too young for these, too; for example, it was only during the recent revival of Tolkien and my first adult read of these books that I realized that Strider and Aragorn were the same dude. Rest assured that I’ve now finished these easily, and got all the way through Silmarillion as well. Boo yah!

Leap day

Well, I gots to post on February 29. By the time the next one rolls around, we’ll probably all be brains in jars with terabit wireless implants for communication and virtual interactions in Fourteenth Life.

In contrast to the futuristic tone of that paragraph, things have been pretty retro this week. This morning I saw the video for Rick Springfield’s “I’ve Done Everything for You,” which is five minutes I’ll never get back (but I just couldn’t look away). And my bro tipped me off to the fact that if you run a little program called DOSBox, you can play Snipes on your Mac or Linux box. Oh man, did I waste a cumulative several months of my life playing that. I’m actually afraid to set it up now—you all might never hear from me again. At least, not until the whole brains-in-jars thing comes to pass.

Striking writers

So Hollywood’s writers have gone on strike for the first time since 1988. That gives me the perfect excuse to think about what I was doing in 1988 (since this blog is All About Me, of course). That was the spring I was stuck at home before I went (back) to college, when I was slogging through a year of community college. I watched Letterman religiously back then, back when he was the funniest thing on TV. (For the record, though, I hate Chris Elliot.) I had not yet decided to watch Star Trek: TNG, which was probably a good thing because it pretty much sucked until the third season.

Of course, that was an election year, and the inevitable end of Reagan’s presidency was finally on deck. I was still too young to vote, and things didn’t exactly turn out the way I wanted, but at least Bloom County’s National Radical Meadow Party was still holding raucous caucuses. And we all have fond memories of Bentsen’s “You’re no Jack Kennedy” moment.

In the realm of music, I was just getting into Crowded House with the foolish impression that I was finally getting into a band fairly early on in the game. Then I found out about Split Enz, whoops. I think that was also during the brief period when Sting was cool, which lasted up until I went to a show on his “Nothing Like the Sun” tour in August and decided he was kind of lame. That summer was also spent buying all the Genesis albums, which may cause you to wonder whether I should really consider myself an arbiter of cool.

All in all, the spring and summer of 1988 were characterized mostly by lots of sitting around waiting for my life to get its shit together. Er, is there any way I can tie that in with the writers’ strike? Too bad nobody from the Guild is around to help me out.

Memory prime

Things feel a little off balance right now. Here it is, the second week of September, the sky is that ridiculous shade of blue again, but I’m not in Maine. We’ve gone there around this time of year for four of the last five years, and it feels so strange not to be there now. It’s funny how quickly the human brain gets accustomed to a repeating pattern, to the point where you even start waking up a minute before the alarm goes off. Back in grad school, when we used to drive from Ohio to Virginia every break, it got to the point where I would look out the window at exactly the moment we were passing by a particular landmark, my eyes falling on it at just the same moment the impulse popped into my brain to wonder when we would see it. (My personal favorite was off the side of I-70 in eastern Ohio: a rusty sign for the “Sports Paradise” standing in the middle of an overgrown field, with smaller, crooked lettering at the bottom that said, gratuitously I think, “Closed.” Ah, the stuff of poignant, overemotive poetry.)

Our new place has been an interesting exercise for my physical memory. Since it’s laid out almost identically to our old place, I think I settled in here a lot more quickly than usual. (Our apartment in Columbus had corners that I never got used too, due to the weird layout and cobwebby, Victorian vibe. I think I vacuumed behind the staircase only one time in the six years we lived there.) But I do find myself sometimes heading to the location of the old fridge, or looking around and wondering what I’m doing in someone else’s house. Some of that is that I’d never paint my bedroom peach, but some of it is the back reaches of my lizard brain still getting used to the new surroundings. Still, I’m getting to where I don’t need to look for the lightswitch, and I almost don’t get irrationally pissed when I think about those clomping moose we used to live below. Actually, I take that back—I’ll probably always be irrationally pissed at them.

So why am I not in Maine? Well, the trip to Vermont we took instead was a total blast, so I’m glad about that. And it’s probably a good thing to break out of the routine, to make sure Acadia always stays special. But man I could go for a blueberry smoothie right now from Gaucho’s, or how about that mojito at Havana...Eden has the best vegetarian food ever...next year we’ll definitely have to cycle the Park Loop Road again...I miss Maine.

Stormtrooper True

One of my fondest internet-related memories dates back to April 2000, during the whole Elian Gonzalez debacle. Soon after the raid during which Elian was seized from his family’s house in Miami, this little Shockwave movie found its way onto the Net. Sure, it’s dated, sure, it references a stupid Bud commercial, but I laughed so damn hard at that thing. And the best part was, it got pulled almost immediately because it used a copyrighted photo, so it quickly faded into obscurity. (Here’s a story describing the controversy at the time.) Now that the moment has long passed, though, I’ve found it online again and I can relive that classic moment. Good times, good times.

A always, B be, C closing

Tomorrow’s the closing on our old place, and thus an era will finally come to an end. I don’t have kids, so I can safely say that buying and selling a house (especially both at the same time) is by far the most stressful thing I have ever done. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to permanently curling into a fetal position, that’s for sure.

However great it will be to close the book on that place, the memories are poignant. The first stab at home ownership, the first annoying neighbors, the first flooded basement (thanks to the annoying neighbors, no less), the first smoke alarms going off for no reason in the dead of night, the second and third flooded basements. (Did I mention those neighbors yet? At fault for every instance of basement flooding. Everyone, make sure your washing machine hoses are either younger than five years old, or better yet, get a damn shutoff valve that works.) There were good things about it too, though. It was the Trekette’s first home, for example. And I’ll definitely miss the beautiful rosebushes in the yard; I love any plant that responds well to stern and remorseless pruning.

But anyway, it’s time to look forward. I love our new place, next month we’re going on vacation, Erin and Keith are coming back for the summer soon, and two Crowded House concerts are on the schedule for August. Lots of good stuff ahead!

Squonk

Last week I was both shocked and pleased to find a lot of Genesis-related stuff on VH1 Classic; they were part of this year’s Rock Honors concert or somesuch. Let me tell you, I never thought I’d get to see Peter dancing around in his Slipperman costume while flipping channels. There was a long show on their history, which fortunately spent more time and attention on the early stuff than the superstar/sellout phase from the late 1980s. The live footage was amazing, partly because I never expect to hear such obscure music on TV, partly because Peter was such a freak onstage at that time, and partly because I can’t believe live shows were ever like that: all the musicians sitting down, one lunatic jumping around wearing bat wings on his head, and eons of dead time between songs while the band set up the equipment for the next song. Totally alien to the modern pop era in every way. And then they showed an hour-long show of live footage from the Seconds Out concert, where a pre–pop slimeball Phil sang Lamb songs while sporting a beard of mountain-man proportion. I mean, you can’t beat that with a stick.

Unfortunately, my Genesis buzz was totally killed later in the week, when the Rock Honors concert was aired. It was all has-beens: Heart, ZZ Top, and the boys in Genesis, who reformed this year in order to fund the pensions. I watched about two minutes of “Turn It On Again” before I had to look away—man those guys look old, and Phil sang with absolutely no energy. They also knocked the key of the song down a few steps, I suppose in order to spare Phil’s voice, but it was a move that thoroughly sucked the life out of the song. Ugh. I guess I’d better pull out Three Sides Live if I want to experience the full, glorious spectacle that was Genesis.

Oh, and one more thing I must gripe about: at one point during the history show, they interviewed Phil talking about the fact that their early fans were almost always male. Bastard made some idiotic comment about men being better able to handle the complexity of the songs. I know, I know, Phil is a complete tosser, despicable in many ways, but I always held off with my own contempt because of what he was part of, what he accomplished when he was just a drummer in a band. That kind of statement indicates that I should probably give in to the scorn, what a sexist asshole. No more slack for you, pal.

Encounter at tvsquad.com

Thanks to Danielle for pointing me to Wil Wheaton’s reviews of ST:TNG. They’re awesome! Can you believe it’s been almost twenty years? Yikes. And TNG is still the best Trek series, however craptacular that first season was.

Home is anywhere: Week 1 recap

Okay, Week 1 has ended and here’s the score so far. Places visited: 7; places with potential: 0. The number of horror stories is sadly very small, although I did see one Pepto-pink bathroom and one place that was so 1980s, I swear I saw Sheena Easton in the living room wearing those huge geometric earrings. The nicest place had had an offer on it within the previous half hour, so hopes were deflated before they’d even had a chance to rise. Plus, that one had a tang of Wretched Excess, what with the special wine refrigerator in the kitchen. I don’t think I could in good conscience keep my wine at 54F and whatever percent humidity while children are eating tree bark in Africa. And so the search continues. There are two or three more prospects that didn’t hold open houses; hopefully we can check them out sometime this week.

Speaking of Sheena Easton, I still remember her guest starring on Miami Vice. The love of Crockett’s life, cruelly struck down before her time. I think we can all learn a lesson from that tragic tale: make sure to upgrade to the bulletproof shoulder pads.

Number nine, number nine

My oldest nephew turned nine years old yesterday. Nine! Hell, I vividly remember being nine.

• My oldest sister went to college (I drove down with my parents to move her into the dorm)


• I was in fourth grade, which was when I met my first real best friend


• My 27-year-old (!) somewhat hippie teacher read The Hobbit to us in class


• I learned long division—I remember being so crushed when I found out remainders were just a crutch we’d have to learn to live without


• I procrastinated so long on my science project, which was to build a model of the solar system, that I ended up with one of the crappiest ones in the class


• One of my classmates would solve your Rubik’s Cube for a price (geek hustler!)

The week of my ninth birthday, the #1 pop song was “Centerfold” by J. Geils Band, and E.T. came out three months later (I never saw it, though, can you believe it!). And I should mention that Elvis Costello’s Imperial Bedroom also came out that summer, although I didn’t become hip enough to notice that one until around eight years later.

Nine! So old, so young. Freaky to think about it.

How soon one forgets the sticky floors

Tonight Steve and I were driving by Newbury Comics, and it launched a series of memories of seeing Neil Finn do an in-store performancethere, and the concert at the Paradise later that night, and it snowballed into recalling all the Finn-related concerts we’d seen here: that Paradise show in summer of 2002, one at Avalon the following February of 2003, and then the Finn Brothers in 2004 and 2005. It’s about time to have another visit, I think! But the Paradise one might always be the best to me. The venue is so small, the farthest away you can get from the stage is probably 20 feet. Even the annoying chick in front of me trying to push backwards the whole time couldn’t bring me down. Ah, GA shows are to love, and to hate.

There’s something so special about knowing that the guy standing in front of you on the stage came from the other side of the world and is probably losing money on the tour because he had to fly all his gear, but dammit, he’s in front of me right now playing his heart out. And Neil’s stage persona is half perfectionist, half laid-back dude screwing around. I don’t know how to explain it; it makes for the best shows. I love seeing Elvis Costello live, but not as much, because the venues are always large and so much more impersonal. Plus, 70% of the people are there to hear the hits, or discuss stock trades, and don’t really give a damn. At Finn shows that bunch of jackasses is closer to 10% or less of the crowd, I’d say.

In April 2001 Neil played several shows in NZ with a bunch of musician friends, and it was broadcast over the web. I was glued to the computer and that tiny, grainy window onto something that was happening thousands of miles away. I snapped the screenshot you see here; more are available at somethingsofinn.com (follow the left sidebar: Neil Finn > Live Shows > 2000-2003, scroll down to 6 April 2001). That experience is yet another reason why I can say, with a minimum of irony and cynicism, that the Internet changed everything. For the better.

How long til the next tour, Neil?

Hail to the teach

I got an email out of the blue today from one of my students from Russian 101 back in 1994. Of course I remember her, since there’s so much personal interaction in language classes and the students spend the first couple of years just learning how to talk about themselves. It’s definitely flattering that she remembers me. That was my first quarter teaching, and I was probably a pretty lousy teacher. Then again, 101 students always have the best impression of you. You’re like the Oracle at Delphi, writing mysterious characters on the board and speaking in tongues. The students are all optimistic and fresh, and everything is fun and games. By 104 three quarters later, they’re completely demoralized by the strangeness of Russian grammar and beaten down by complexities such as motion verbs and verbal aspect. It was at that point that I was hearing one girl lean over to another and utter in a stage whisper, “She hates me!” And how could I forget the student who wrote with unexpected candor in his instructor evaluation of me that he didn’t work very hard in the class because was just trying to pass. He did—just barely.

Today was the first day of classes here at the ivy-encrusted university where I work. I sure don’t miss grading workbook exercises every night, or trying to figure out an engaging way to introduce the dative plural. (I don’t think there is one.) But it’s nice to know that somebody learned something because I was there to help.

Ten years of bliss

Just like the date-stamp says, it’s September 14, which means it’s the tenth wedding anniversary for Steve and me. It’s a standard assumption that getting married changes things, but for me I don’t think it really changed anything. Steve was my best friend and the most important person in my life before the big day, and he has been the same ever since. Maybe getting married actually changed everyone around us, since the government and the law and the people around us had to acknowledge what I had already known.

Anyway, that day back in 1996 was a great one. A fun party, perfect weather, my stepbrother-in-law taking my sister’s dare to roll all the way down the grassy hill outside the reception site. And of course, the magisterial trashing of one of the crappiest cars I ever drove. I’m still grateful to everyone who took pictures, especially Laura who captured the best one of all, the mobster shot (email me if you want to see the pic).

By the way, silly string harms the finish on auto paint. In case you ever need to know.

I love you, Swami!

Book review: Just a Geek by Wil Wheaton

This review will address two themes: ST geekery, and a more sober discussion of life and adulthood and all of that self-reflection schmack.

First, some geekery. I must begin with full disclosure: I am a huge Trek fan, and have been since I was 8 or 9 years old (I was always Captain Kirk in the role-playing I did with my friends—yes, even at that tender age I was domineering). In fact, I recently unearthed a calendar from 1984 among my possessions where I had written in which TOS episode aired each day. Now that’s some good blackmail material.

When TNG started up, though, I was going through a phase of Geek Denial and didn’t watch it. Actually, I’m not sure I even knew it was on; 1987–88 was a particularly crappy time in my life. It wasn’t until the fourth season that, under the influence of roommate Marc, I started watching ST again. It’s probably for the best that it happened that way anyway, considering that the first two seasons were fairly awful, and seasons 3 and 4 were excellent. Anyway, let’s just say that I am now and shall always be deeply in love with TNG. I think it’s the best ST series by far. Some obscure cable channel has been re-running them lately, and I find it damn near impossible to keep from watching them every night. (One of the greatest hours of TV ever was on the other night, in fact, when they showed “Family.”)

Despite all the love, though, I thought (and pretty much still think) that Wesley Crusher was the biggest L0ser in the known galaxy and I always thought his character was completely lame. (I shall not weigh in with my opinion of his eventual fate, except to roll my eyes.) Steve and I nicknamed him “The Weasel,” and lo there was much mockery. Things remained in this state for the entire decade of the 1990s and the early years of the 2000s.

Then, a few years ago I discovered Wil Wheaton’s blog. I don’t remember how I found it, or what I expected, but I ended up spending a fair amount of time poking around. I do recall the first realization that struck me: he and I are about the same age. Since I had watched the early TNG episodes only in reruns, I always assumed I was older. We also have both played a hell of a lot of Nethack. Other than that, I noticed his writing style was engaging, and he wrote pretty openly about his family and whatever was going on in his life. He seemed like a real person, rather than some 2D, glossy celebrity. The fact that he had his own presence on the Web, all done himself, was cool. And the site was damn popular—every post had comments numbering in the dozens at least, so clearly the dude was writing something interesting. Then it dawned on me: Wesley Crusher might not be cool, but it was distinctly possible that Wil Wheaton could be cool. They were, like, orthogonal and shit.

So last Christmas I found myself asking for Just a Geek, which he was plugging on his site, and so I got it. Fast forward to last month, when I finally took it off my huge stack of planned reading and cracked the cover.

Suffice to say, I devoured the whole thing in a few sittings. If I had to sum it up, I’d say that it’s a narrative of Wheaton’s struggle to come to terms with his past as Wesley Crusher. Somehow over the course of his time on TNG, he went from successful child actor to starving adult actor, and at the same time he suffered a fair amount of rejection from people at Paramount and the convention circuit as they treated him far worse than the other regular cast of the show, even after the series ended and everyone could be considered former cast members (Wheaton had left partway through season 4).

But the message is larger than that. When Wheaton hits his late 20s and early 30s, life gets pretty nasty and complicated as he has to confront the fact that acting might not ever pay the bills again. I think many people can identify with this arc, since I think for many of us our career path, determined by choices made in college or grad school, will at some point naturally start to reach a lull (or smack into what turns out to be a brick wall). So Wheaton’s struggle to confront this, and his eventual success in overcoming everything that was holding him back, is engaging reading and inspiring to those of us trying to avoid the same traps. Even though this isn’t All About Me, I would also humbly point out that his own blogging and book-writing have provided some of the impetus for me to get off my ass and finally create this blog.

All of this, plus a few hilarious anecdotes about TNG and some warm recollections about his fellow cast members, made this book a very satisfying read. In terms of design, I thought O’Reilly did a good job even though it’s not their usual fare. I especially dug the sans-serif typeface they used for Wheaton’s quoted blog entries. (That was an obligatory warm comment about O’Reilly, should they take an interest in hiring me—hint, hint.) I might not ever give The Weasel the time of day, but Wheaton will definitely get the Fingers of Rock if the opportunity ever comes up.

In Soviet Union, watch winds you

In keeping with the ’80s theme around here so far, I just wanted to share a closeup of this watch. My friend Carla gave it to me long ago—it had no band and didn’t run. I resolved to fix those problems some day, and, well, it’s probably been fifteen years but I finally did it. I found a watch shop that looked like they could handle an odd piece, and they certainly did. The woman there insisted that I go with a red band, which violates my all-black-all-the-time philosophy when it comes to accessories, but you’ve got to admit that it just makes sense.
I loves me my throwback Soviet watch.