a thing I'm reading

David Foster Wallace is damn good. I'm reading Oblivion right now, and every story captures a little bit of the scatter-shot process of thoughts, as well as the elusive nature of our abstract thoughts when we try to pin them down and put them into words.

He writes the way you think. Or the way you wish you thought. Or, often, the way you really hope you don't think but deep down inside know you sometimes do, and you're kind of glad someone else thinks this way and wrote it down but you're also trying to distance yourself, in your mind, from that kind of thinking and so you also feel superior to the person who admits to thinking like that.

I have realized some people find his habit of using run-on sentences or run-on thoughts hard to read. I just find myself marvelling at what he's able to do with words.

a public service announcement

A comment left let me know apparently someone is following this blog
- not even I'm doing that. But for those that are interested: if you
want to read about my travels in New Zealand, do it here

news from a home

I have received troubling word from Hattiesburg, Mississippi:

The End Zone is now charging $1.50 for a draft beer.

i heart letters to the editor

It must be fun to be on the letters staff of a large newspaper. In
the last two days Wellington's paper, the Dominion Post, has
published a letter from a man wondering why more attention wasn't
being given to smoking as a preventative step/cure for the Bird Flu,
because many of the front-line solders in World War I smoked and
dealt with victims of the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918, "and to
the best of my knowledge none of them died."
The day before, a rather irate reader wrote in to ask why the paper
perpetrated the myth of the American moon landing by publishing a
photo purportedly of the moon taken by the Apollo 17 crew.
"Such a myth might have been useful in protecting western
civilisation with Soviet technology might have been seen to be
superior, but those days are gone."

someday it'll happen

So I might have lost weight since being in New Zealand, but the other bad habit I expected to magically disappear here hasn't. Despite cigarettes costing NZ$11-12 a pack, I've still been smoking - but less than I did in Mississippi. The price and the smoking ban in bars contribute to an easing of the habit, but having a smoking flatmate and a number of smoking friends means I'm still just as much of a smoke mooch as ever.
Ah well.

it's my favorite kind of life

From a Morphine song:

Early to bed/early to rise

Makes a man or woman miss out on the nightlife.

a job

Actually got a job this week, one playing me $25 an hour to walk around and hand out information on a new bank card to businesses (more or less). Not horrible, but it's still the first time in ages I've had to actually be at work by 9 a.m. more than one day in a row.

giving in

Kirsten and I arrived in Wellington with the intent of getting short-term jobs (for a few months) and then moving on, traveling around the country.
Now, granted, I perhaps haven't been looking for a job with the fervent dedication some would say I should. But I've been looking.
(One of my favorite moments in Wellington came when I went in to put my name on the lease for our apartment. I told the rental agent I had no job, and she asked what I was qualified in. I told her I was a journalist. She talked out loud to herself as she wrote down, "Not qualified in anything."
The plan is to do some free-lance writing while I'm here. Hopefully eventually even make some money at it. But for now, I'm going to have to get some sort of nothing job for a little money while I try to set up a few stories.
I finally broke down yesterday and signed up with a temp agency. One of the few things working at a newspaper for four years does qualify you for, other than writing, is typing fast. The lady lit up after giving me a typing test and seeing my speed.
It also gives me more motivation to find something else - waiting tables, anything. Anything where I don't have to dress up and sit in a cubicle. Technically, the last four years at the paper I was working in a windowless office at a cubicle, but there were key differences. For one, I almost never had to wake up before 10 a.m., and often didn't have to wake up until much later. I also wore jeans into the office 90 percent of the time. Most of my days were broken up by going out to a college campus to talk with athletes or coaches, although there were the bad days when I was sitting around waiting for someone to call me back who was out of town.
And then every now and again I got paid to go to sporting events and eat food someone else was paying for.
Come to think of it, that's the kind of job I need to find.

something's wrong here

Running blogger's built-in spell check function on my last post, I discovered something.
The largest free blog site on the web doesn't have the word "blog" in its spell-check dictionary.

for a writer, I don't do much of it

I spend a lot of time online everyday, especially right now when I don't have a job or anything else to fill the time during the daylight hours (sure, sure, I could venture outside, but who wants that?)
I realize, however, I don't do much of what I intend to do. Often, I mean to post an update to this or my other blog. Instead, I am drawn into a whirlpool of information, much of it meaningless. I find myself more interested in reading others' writings than putting some of my own up.
In a way, this isn't really a bad thing. Blogs, especially this one, are the virtual equivalent of talking to yourself, or maybe ego masturbation. At any rate, it's mostly a personal exercise.
But I'd still like to exercise it a little more. Where's that self-control I keep thinking about?

i think this is good news

I can't imagine how hard it was for the reporters to sift through all the sketchy information they were getting after Katrina hit, but it looks like the worst of the news might not have actually happened. One thing I worry might get lost in this article are the accounts of officials who say even though the murders, rapes, etc., may not have occured, or not with any frequency, it doesn't change the fact conditions were horrible.

as a long-time Netflix user, something I have to say...

DVD Unlimited is crap.

movies

I'm trying out the New Zealand version of Netflix.

Anyone got any movie recommendations?

something done right

So it only took a trip around the world for me to see Batman Begins - it's still playing here in New Zealand, and we watched it in Auckland.
Awesome. It's too bad more of the other comic-based movies haven't done it as well.

i'm rooting for New Orleans

While this hurricane thing has been fun as a hypothetical excercise in the past, now the weather channel is telling me the best city west of denver and south of new york is in peril (of course, having been through a few weather channel hurricanes, I think their predicitions can also be a hypothetical excercise). I'd like to think they're wrong - I want to know all my bars will still be there. Not to mention the however-many -hundred-thousand of people who won't be able to leave the city.
Good luck.

sell me, you beautiful bastard

If a man is living his life right, he should go through plungers like he goes through toothpicks. He should have, at minimum, seven plungers.

I don't have any.

smells like wet whore

[NOTE: somehow the original post got lost. It was brilliant, filled with witty writing and cutting insights. The writing below has none of those things.]

I had the good fortune, or something, to see Bob Saget do standup in Denver. Going to the show wasn't my idea, but I was strangely curious to see Danny Tanner do dirty jokes.

Most of the show was Saget riffing on how he's really a dirty old man, and how fucked-up it was he was on Full House and America's Funniest Home Videos, where he became kind of a symbol for the worst of family-friendly TV.

The show was funny, although the theme ran out of steam before he finished. The jokes tended to have punchlines such as the one used for the title of this post.
However, one thing Saget does have is a sense of how to handle an audience. The opening acts had some funnier jokes, but they certainly didn't have the presentation down, and got fewer laughs than Saget got for anything he said. It's clear the man has spent a lot of time on stage.
However, I just couldn't stop thinking of him on Full House, which, I guess, was the point. And for those of you wondering: Saget says "Danny Tanner was not gay." Saget sings it, actually. It's his finale.

why don't the little ones get tired?

For nearly the last week, ever since I became officially unemployed, I've been helping Kirsten baby-sit her two nephews, one 4-year-old and one 2-nearly-3-year-old. Not quite a week in, and already I'm exhausted. This morning I laid on the floor just on the edge of dozing while they screamed and played and jumped on me. Then I think I'm about the age my dad was when I was 3 or 4 and I'm beginning to realize why sometimes my parents just disappeared or told me to. Also, gaining a whole new respect for what my parents actually accomplished in not killing me (or my siblings, I guess, but probably mostly me).
I do have some experience, however. Yesterday we took the kids to the pet store. As I told someone else, it's a lot like keeping track of people on drugs. They're easily distracted, have 20-second mood swings, no short-term memory and if you do it properly you can use suggestion to give them ideas they think were their own.
And then sometimes they just don't make any sense at all.

to bad ideas and rash decisions

My new toast. I came up with it last night - the bad idea at the time, as it always is, was a shot of Tequila. The rash decision was to drink it.
Now I have a new toast, and I'm very, very tired.