Hello, my name is Matt, and...

...my cats either love me or want to eat me. Either way, they lick me.

Rainy Night Impressionism

These are a series of pictures I took on my way home from work, after dropping Brandi off at Glamorama. I know it probably looks like I dared death itself, snapping photo after gorgeous photo as sheets of water cascaded off the windshield. My only answer to that is, yes, I am a daredevil, and a sexy beast, and also water looks a lot larger when you stick the camera right up to the glass and manually focus on raindrops the size of pumpkin seeds.

The Problem with Radio Shack

I walked home from work yesterday. For my father, for a period of about ten years, this would have been a feat of profound ease, since he lived directly above his business by six floors. I'm about seven miles away. Luckily, I wore my iPod Shuffle mom got me for my birthday, my distance running shoes, and a good attitude. The miles went quickly. I took some shots of the UIC campus at golden hour - the magical time just before sunset when the refraction of the Earth's atmosphere brings the reds, oranges and deeper colors (green flashes just before the sun disappears) normally bounced into space back to the planet. Combine that lighting with just a little slow motion, body armor and Viggo Mortensen and you've every third shot from "The Lord of the Rings". They reminded me of the three years Brandi and I shared in our old apartment. Sure, it was small, but every cloudless sunset we watched downtown turn into a pumpkin-hued faeryland. Then the sodium lights of the parking garage came on and night turned into a permanent sunset from the south. It wasn't our favorite direction anyway.

I walked through some prospective neighborhoods. Chicago has changed so much since I moved here. I remember my friend Dave advising me to live anywhere but Cabrini Green. Now there are condos going up opposite the mall there. Yeah, you can still see the shattered hulks of the low income skyscrapers dominating the view there, and, yeah, only the brave or the foolhardy really live there just yet, but you have to admit it's a step up.

Not that all change is positive. ComedySportz lost its lease on the space it occupied for five and a half years, the former Steppenwolf space, soaked in history and the screams of the victims of David Mamet's early stabs at dialogue, because the owner sold the building out from under them to build condos. The Annoyance Theatre got it worse: they turned it into a parking lot. (Joni Mitchell refused to comment.) Sometimes you work so hard to improve an area that your reward is your failure to afford anything there.

Still, Chicago looks nice. We're in for a good time this Saturday when we go out to look at condominiums. Bucktown, Wicker Park, Humboldt Park and other spots along the Blue Line elevated train may be on the slate. I like to know a place with my feet. My feet give thumbs up. This is painful, and I won't ask them again for their opinion.

Ultimately, besides wanting to get home, I also targeted Toys R Us (how the hell do you get the dyslexic "R" on a standard keyboard and how are they listed on the stock exchange: "TZRS"? Or is that a company that makes tazers?) and Radio Shack. Toys, etc. had the usual bevy of games, dolls, action figure and - my favorite - shape shifting robots that transform from robots to cars, airplanes, rockets, video cameras, construction equipment, dinosaurs, enormous spheres... and back! Unfortunately, I'm a little too Down-the-Rabbit-Hole to appreciate what's out now. Haunting all the Transformers forums waiting for the next leaked shot of MegaSCF Starscream or the Cybertron Jetfire repaint they're calling Astrotrain has spoiled me during non-virtual toy runs. Of course, I've still got the itch. Just ask Brandi how many times we've gone to Target that I have had to go to the toy aisle to look at Transformers. (Every time.) So, while I pondered the wisdom of dropping $35 on a Millennium Falcon that transforms into roboticized versions of Han Solo and Chewbacca, I ultimately decided against it and just used the free access to the Little Boys' room to relieve seven miles' bladder pressure. Then it was off to Radio Shack where, try as I might, I could not make myself enter.

Here we come to the crux of the problem. I wasn't tired, at least not tired enough to walk two doors down. I had enough time, though we were nearing nine o'clock, I still had at least fifteen minutes to spare. I needed to go; the aforementioned GP2X has a loose spring inside the battery compartment that is just waiting for me to grow some guts and solder it down. I needed solder and possibly a new soldering gun. I like looking. Why did I dread going inside?

It reminds me of a quote from Braveheart. Edward Longshanks, chief villain of the film, proposes the Droit du Seigneur, whereby any bride who marries a Scot must spend her first night at the castle of the English lord, presumably with the English lord, and not necessarily sleeping. "The problem with Scotland," Longshanks says, "is that it's full of Scots. We'll breed them out."

The problem with Radio Shack is that it's full of Radio Shack employees. I'm not sure what part of their training adds that extra sheen of craziness when they ask what they can help you find but I inevitably feel the hair on the back of my neck stand on end when they get near me. Probably, they know a lot more than me about electronics, but that doesn't help them find what I need, just gives them better segues between RJ-11 phone cord and selling me last year's Cingular clamshell phone and plan. I feel what I think a doe would feel in a sporting goods store: sure the all-cotton shirts feel nice and I can even nibble on some but doesn't that "hunting" section have something to do with harming my relatives and OH MY GOD, I think some of those shoes are actually made out of my Aunt Berenice. The three nicest words in English may be "I love you", but in the hands of an expert, the four creepiest are, "Can I help you?" followed by the nine creepiest, "Can I help you find something at Radio Shack?" No, please, gosh no. I would feel worse about my prejudice, but the chain that foisted both the Tandy brand and the TRS-80 on an unsuspecting America deserves a little pain, I think. If I need a top of the line remote control car, I'll pay the dumb consumer tax at Sharper Image. If I want something more reasonable, I'll hit the eBay, where I'm sure there are thousands just waiting to get out of the homes of kids who grew out of burning through AA batteries chasing squirrels around pavement and now burn rubber chasing the ladies in their beaters. Besides miniature electronics sold for 99 cents in little dime bags, what the hell else does Radio Shack have that other chains do not? It's not customer service or a dedication to quality (Apple) or kitsch (Spencer). When they're not busy lurking in their own stores, what other things do Radio Shack employees do? And who would want to work there?

The secret may lie in those little dime bags after all. I had a disturbing thought: what could explain all that gear, survival in one of the harshest retail environments, a longevity that would put the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers to shame, and why do they bug customers with a metronomic regularity? What if the last human employee of Radio Shack died sometime in the early nineties, having not hired his replacement, but BUILDING him (her/it) in his significant downtime? What if Radio Shack is staffed by robots, inhuman golems driven only by the desire to sell little bits of themselves in lilliputian sandwich bags and sipping freely of the AC wall sockets during lunch? I know we were all worried about Steve Jobs being replaced by a Steve Jobs-bot, but HAS IT ALREADY HAPPENED and IS IT SIGNIFICANTLY MORE MEDIOCRE THAN WE EXPECTED?

I can say no more. That Tickle Me Elmo is watching me with suspicion and malice. I have to distract it, either by tickling or a flamethrower and I'm all out of tickles.

Arty Pics

This is Bob, a great, great guy. Bob stood up for me at my wedding and helped make my Cape Canaveral bachelor party interesting by shooting up insulin at the children's section, just after we saw all of the Mennonites go into the robot exhibit. This story is starting to read like a Palahniuk novel, but, honest to gosh, it's true. Bob also improvises, directs, writes, draws, and teaches his new puppy amazing tricks because he is better to his dog than Shaggy ever was to Scooby, and all of that art in his life breathes a lot of life into a dumb off-the-cuff lunchtime shot like this. I swear, women in bonnets and men with the crazy beards, making a big beeline to the robot exhibit while my bachelor posse stood by and made jokes about making a horse drawn spaceship... but while we laugh now, perhaps we won't be so amused when our robot masters place their Mennonite best friends in the food mines while the rest of us labor away in the solar drilling fields.

This is a picture of a pole on the way to work in the morning. I like it because I think it looks like a modern take on a Jurassic forest, with metal apatosaur heads looming in the distance, while a bestickered tree stands in the foreground, advertising the dominance of the alternative punk band mammals that will dominate the landscape after the great Lawsuit descends on all from the skies. Watch the punk bands swell absurdly large, then give rise to a strange new lifeform in the musical scene: intelligent record execs! Seriously, though, if you're running late, try not to do it in Roscoe Village, because it is impossible to catch a cab there even though there's a gas station on the corner. They just don't come through. Roscoe is one of those middle streets, sitting between the much larger arteries of Belmont to the south and Addison to the north, but Damen, the north-south cross street, is too far west to be lakefront and too far east to be the highway. So you sit and wait for the bus even if you're running really, really late.

What's that sound? Why are you moving your fingers back and forth like that? Oh, damn you, World's Smallest Violin, you always ruin my Pity Parties! Someone fetch me more Pity Punch.


Someday, my kid will ask me, "Where do you work, daddy?" and I'll eventually tell the wee one that I support two offices' networks at a state university. Then I'll pull out these pictures to show that it's really not as bad as it seems. First, though, I'll probably say I'm a super spy with a bunch of documentaries about my adventures called, "Thunderball," "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" and, embarrasingly, "Octopussy". By that time, I hope to say that I have been played by a number of different actors, including Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalten, Pierce Brosnan, and that guy from "Layer Cake" nobody's quite sure is going to work out. And since I'll have all the usual gadgets one has working on a network - Cat5 Ethernet cable, laptop, palmtop, flash drive, USB hubs, network switches, flat panel monitors, and the kid won't know any better, I can say that they were gifts from Q, my inventor, and that anyone else who has them is just copying, and can't press a button for the keyboard ejector seat. Probably, the only way my kid will see through my ruse is by calling out my lack of British accent, which I can rectify in advance by always having one around my children.

I took this shot of downtown Chicago looking out from I290, which I cross every day to go between both of my offices. I mean, when I'm acting as a double agent between East and West Germany, both of which still somehow exist as political entities. I know it looks like that dark zit in the top half of the photo is a plane about to run into trouble, but you have my word that it is not going to collide with anything and we don't need to pass any more Patriot Acts to assure ourselves that Big Brother is looking out for our best interest. The building to the right of the Sears Tower (center, black, ugly) is nicknamed the cake building, for reasons that have nothing to do with what the food court serves. I know. I asked. I think the footprint somehow resembles a cake, although if I had a cake shaped like that at my wedding, I don't think I would have been able to top it with Transformers, because my weird quotient would already have been filled. The cake building looks orange in this light, but is actually a shade of pink, and very tall, though not as tall as its friend across the street, who cheats by adding all the spires to its official height.



Chicago for the Legally Blind

Finally, these are a few deliberately blurry shots showing off the power of not using autofocus. I guess you can click on them for the larger shot, but as alternative that uses no bandwidth whatsoever, you could also lean closer to your monitor.

Little Gray Pillbox

For some people, it's young, young, young, dead. James Dean famously lived his mantra, "Live fast, die young, leave a beautiful corpse," although how you're supposed to judge the aesthetics of your funeral when you're the guest of honor is a little beyond me or anyone else without an advanced degree in metaphysics or witchcraft. Some people live this without actually dying young. Were Keanu Reeves to depart us tomorrow, I think a lot of America would believe he's in his forties. You can hide a lot behind Botox. Just keep a close eye on how far it penetrates into your acting.

Other people are destined to look old forever. Walter Matthau could have done "Grumpy Old Men" in his mid-twenties. Peter Falk is just now catching up to the age he played in "The Princess Bride", but the chorus of "but he's too young to look so old!" never reached my ears. You can watch Steve Martin age on the covers of his old standup albums, hair turning within just a few years from black to jet white.

And so we come to my darling head. My friend Melanie plucked my first gray hair out of it at sixteen, in French class. I was kind of excited. Another person - Mike Myers I think - observed that Europe is a funny place, with young people pretending to be old and old people playing at being young. Proof: men utterly unqualified to wear Speedos subjecting everyone around them to the torture of caged cellulite. I always looked forward to growing up. Here, I was already growing old. Bonus!

Fast forward another sixteen years. What do I have to show for all this time? At this point, I expected my eyebrows to be gray, but all I really have to show for it is a set of gray racing stripes and a bunch of gray cowlicks at the crown of my head. Looking at it in the mirror, I observed to the woman shearing my head down to a bearable length tonight, it looked like a gray pillbox hat, or perhaps yarmulke. Happy Jewish New Year to me. Time to party like it's 5999. (It's 5576, I think.) Probably it will be 5576 on the Christian calendar before the last mousy brown hair falls out of my head, but, you know, near-immortality is a nice trade-off.

And anyway, now that I'm older I can start pining for the days when I was younger. I've already started with Transformers, comic books and calling my beautiful wife my "girlfriend" (she's so adorable). What next?

Larsenopolis Goes Interactive: now soliciting comments for World's Worst / World's Best

Hi. I'm not sure if you're out there, especially after my especially long hiatus from web logging, but if you are, I would love your help.

I'm going to start a new entry for this blog called "World's Worst / World's Best". This is a joke. Not the fact that I am starting it; that is no laughing matter. "World's Worst / World's Best" will be like the classic short form game "World's Worst", except there will be only one player and two jokes. The first is what the world's worst BLANK will say in a given situation. The second is what the world's best BLANK would say. You supply the BLANK.

As a particularly lame example not to be confused with comedy, I offer the following:

World's Worst Banker:

"Interest rate? Well, I'd date you but I wouldn't take you home to mom."

World's Best

"I've taken the precaution of securing your money in my chest, next to my beating heart. Mint?"

If you are interested, please add a comment to the blog. I would prefer you add them to World's Worst / World's Best entries, but we're not exactly doing brisk traffic here, so I and my army of Larsenopoli will scour all comments for, say the next week. At least one will be chosen, the the person submitting given credit, especially for humoring me. I look forward to hearing from you.

Weekend Snapshots

The eBay eFfect

I accidentally bought a digital camera off eBay. I say this with the full knowledge that nobody slips and makes a bid. At some point, you're serious. I was looking at DSLRs, digital single lens reflex, cameras that use viewfinders and sensors sharing the same light. Not that it matters as much today with viewfinder-less digital cameras , but the cool thing about SLRs before they went D was that the mirror that sent the image to the viewfinder popped out of the way when you pulled the trigger to take a picture. This made a satisfying potato chip "click". Camera makers now sometimes add "click" sound files to bring back that soul-satisfying virtual celery crunch, but it always suffers from small camera speakers and you can't feel the camera jump in your hand like a startled pet. There's also the issue of interchangeability. SLRs have (expensive, holy cow!) lenses you can pop on and off depending on whether you need to shoot a hummingbird mid-flap or Lindsay Lohan in a bikini on a private beach, 300 meters away and hiding behind a particularly long blade of sawgrass. Finally, in the realm of "what you immediately get with the camera besides promises and a neat sound", we have depth of field. In a nutshell, this means the camera will get a shot of your subject in focus with the background out of focus. It's a way to make the viewer see the final picture in 3D without resorting to headache-inducing polarizing lenses, dorky glasses or intricate modelwork.

I put in a bid at what seemed an absurdly low price for the camera. It was. Another eBayer outbid me in about an hour. I thought, "I'll check back later and see how high this sucker gets." I did. Numbers stayed low for the unit, so I made another bid. And, I think, another. I'm kind of stretching the word "accidentally" here, aren't I? Like a bad gambler, I did not establish an upper limit for myself, and higher prices started to seem quite reasonable. This is why, on the eve of my first foray into the tense world of home buying with my partner, pal and caller-outer Brandi, I found myself trying to explain why our household needed a fifth digital camera (sixth, including the camcorder, although I also count crappy 640 x 480 camera phones). The fact that I needed a piece of tape to hold the battery compartment closed did not help my case.

So I'm hoping that posting some pictures I took this weekend redeems my cause somewhat. Also, bitterly muttering, "silly, silly me".

Sixty Pound Cotton

Thanks to Brandi's brave steps in the direction of laundry by the pound, I took a look around my office / dressing area - I like to multitask? - and decided there was a Solution. I loaded all my dirty duds into two bags and dragged them to a swell place by Diversey and Elston. We dropped them off, picked up poker chips for Brandi's Ladies' Poker Night, saw a bunch of condos (more on that later), came back and loaded everything into the car. Wow! I can see why things have gotten hashish-smokin' easy for the modern housewife and overworked, home-schoolin' college dorm dweller. Even the cost is bearable, considering the cost in quarters and time of dragging sixty pounds of mostly cotton blends to the laundromat's bulk washers. Oh, and I also just bought a DSLR. I can't complain about money, ever... again.

Real Estate Note for the Day: a man urinating on your window is a sign you must not buy that garden apartment, even if you really like how much light it gets.

We were out looking at condos and stopped in at an open house around Lawrence and Kedzie in the Albany Park neighborhood of Chicago. There was one finished unit and the rest you kind of had to visualize. I like that part. Dad sees the world through the lens of an architect, so to relate to him past childhood, I've learned to appreciate architecture in the raw, and hopefully to fill in the gaps between studs with my imagination. The first floor unit looked nice but a tad small. Brandi pointed out that some places work out great for renting but stink when you know you're going to own them. We wandered across the hall to a condo with two bedrooms, a kitchen, two bathrooms and one great room almost as large as a basketball court. The developers had combined the living and dining rooms into a Devastator-esque giant room designed to knock down and steal the candy of lesser rooms. It was nice but just at the edge of what we can afford and, we were informed, headed north by $10,000 in the next week if we didn't snap it up. We finished looking and started back down when we spied the garden-level apartment door open and thought to take a look. One word sprang to mind, "feh." It had decent light for something buried just slightly in the earth, but overall felt like nothing to write home about since it lacked southern exposure and abutted on one side to the building next door. Again, we started out... but, then I spied, just across the back deck, the ground-level version of the light-filled apartment with the uber-room upstairs. The back door was open and, while not explicitly welcome, we weren't forbidden from traipsing across and taking a look.

It looked decent, though varying significantly with the floor plan of the room above. Here, the rooms were more segregated and the overall impression of vast space was dampened by it. I went to the bedroom space forward and realized with a shock why significantly more men live in garden-level apartments than women. A man was urinating, pretty much anywhere he pleased, but certainly on the building and in clear view of the windows and quite possibly on the windows. See, the building on that side went right to the sidewalk, and, to his credit, moments before he had been peeing in front of an empty apartment.

By the way he staggered when he was done, I'm pretty sure he was drunk or ridiculously proud of watering the windows. In hindsight, maybe it's like those movie villains who insist environmental disaster is the earth's immune system trying to shrug off the pestilence of humanity. Maybe the building's immune system was this man, peeing at us from behind the safety of a pane of glass. I don't care. Brandi felt that the neighborhood might need a few more years to turn itself around and I agree, wholeheartedly.

Setting the Chip from Read to Write

June was a busy month. I do not offer this as an excuse for the rarity of my updates, just as a backstory for the even more lame excuse that will shortly follow. My day job was transitioning from one location to another, ComedySportz again offered me a chance at teaching level 202 of the training center as well as a once-a-year gig as one of a bunch of fathers singing Christmas carols about Sears merchandise, and my tertiary career as a graphic designer got some exercise in the form of PowerPoint operator for a chair manufacturer's annual showcase of new products. For a few weekends, I slept more or less where I dropped and cursed the name of that she-devil Work.

Then the money came. One of the things you'll almost never hear Joe American complain about is, "I just think they're paying me too much money. The laws of supply and demand need a rewrite and the first guy who should get the axe is me!" I had such noble plans: throw some of it in our joint account for the upcoming New York trip, make a big car payment, lower the balance on my credit card. Sure, some of these things happened, but another, BAD thing happened whereby I succumbed to temptation and bought another handheld gaming system.

Had I learned nothing from the Game Boy Advance I bought three years ago? I remember my plan to play Metroid on the CTA to shorten my commute boredom turning into an all-consuming passion to race to the end of the game, which I did. Twice. I remember hiding the unit, its charger and cartridges away like the Ark of the Covenant at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark because, while both contained power enough to touch the face of the infinite, was humanity (or your humble narrator) ready for that? I mean, really?

It turns out, no, I really had learned nothing except how to fool myself into thinking I was learning a useful skill. See, even though I had been ogling the PSP for more than a year and couldn't walk into a toy store without trying the DS touchscreen, I could not justify in my mind the idea of buying a gaming platform. There's no font for contempt, but, boy did I want one for that last sentence. Here, Gizmodo and Engadget had given me just enough knowledge to make me a danger to myself and others. What gaming system played homebrew games, emulated NES and SNES games of yore and could play movies and more, all using as its operating system a special flavor of Linux? Why the GP2X, that's what!

If you've never heard of it, never fear, most of America joins you in ignorance. It comes from Korea and doesn't even have a distributor here in the States. My box comes, like Rod's girlfriend in "Avenue Q", from Canada. It comes in a sexy black cardboard box with a listing of everything it does printed on the front, two AA batteries and a spare USB plug. Unfortunately, it doesn't come with anything else: no headphones, no CD, no free SD card to hold your games, and certainly no instructions on how to get things from your computer to work on this dual processor, 200 MHz Linux workhorse. Start it up and you'll see options for Games, Movies, Utility, Explorer, Music and System, but figuring out the difference between "Explorer", "Utility" and "System" takes a little thinking. Not to mention the fact that regular ol' MPEG movies just didn't play on the GP2X and you've got a somewhat-sexy (like Scarlett Johansen, it's a little thicker than its press shots would have you believe) black box that plays MP3s and is about two and a half times larger than the video iPod which dwarfs it in capacity. It took a lot of good hours at work - hours that I would normally have devoted to updating my blog, surfing the web, writing sketch comedy or even, lord forbid, updating status reports - to figure out how to install homebrew games on it. A few more hours went down the sucking time vortex of the GP2X before I could even figure out which of those games did not suck, and their numbers were not large. Then I found the tutorial on encoding AVIs in DivX-friendly formats and another on NES emulators and everything started to fall apart. The nail in the coffin: the ROM for Super Mario 3.

History repeated itself. Hours vanished from my life. People called, but the message just went to voice mail. I went through batteries like gangbusters. Well, I recharged them like gangbusters. Even if I'm throwing my life away it's no reason to throw the environment into the toilet. Work got put off. I even tempted my darling wife into my corrupt lifestyle, enticing her with a homebrew game within a homebrew game called "The Minigame Project", itself called "Fruity Guy". See, it's fantastically simple: you start out with 60 seconds. You run around a green field until you hit the strawberry that appeared anywhere on the screen. When you do, another stationary strawberry appears, along with a non-stationary ball that moves across the screen either horizontally or vertically on the same axis as the strawberry you "ate". Hit the ball and the game ends. Don't do anything until the sixty seconds are up and the game ends. Keep eating strawberries and more balls appear on the screen, until eventually the game ends... Unless... and I probably shouldn't even be mentioning this, but sometimes a slice of watermelon appears. If you eat that, you become large for five seconds. Don't think of this as a punishment! No! During this five seconds, the tables are turned and, far from the balls destroying you, YOU CAN DESTROY THE BALLS! Even better, for every ball you destroy, another second appears on the game clock. Play the game right and it might never end! Except for one thing (else): balls get faster the higher your score. Eventually, you can't outrun them. What can save you? Blind luck, maybe? Skill? Ha! I laugh at this thing you call "skill".

As well you might laugh at me. Now the GP2X sits in its beautiful box, at the bottom of a drawer, left at work for the first time in a month and a half and I'm writing about how much it's destroyed my life in a plaintive, abused lover kind of way. It's sad. Imagine all of the blogging I might have gotten done if I hadn't felt compelled to get Mario the fireflower so he could beat Bowser in the castle on board five of level one in game three. Imagine how sad it would be if you understood all of that, or even cared.

So it's time to set that chip from "Read Only" back to "Write" and let you know a little more about the real world drama in my life, which I promise is more exciting than warping from level two to four and then on to five. Really.

Clean Lines of the Skyscrapers

We're in New York City right now, both of us blogging in the egregious 45 - 75 minute-long line to head to the top of the Empire State Building. Actually, "line" is a bit of a misnomer. We came in from the front, up an escalator, through lobby one, past the snack stand into the first line, the security line, where employees of the building exhort you to buy the audio tour ($6) plus the General Admission tour ($16). Express Ticket ($40) holders go right up. The ESB (I'm cool enough to use the three letter acronym, or TLA) also offers extended tours of the 102nd floor observatory ($14 plus the base price). Line number one leads to two metal detectors / X-ray machines all-too familiar to air travelers. Like Disney World, the first line goes illusorily fast. About ten minutes after heading up the escalator, you're ready to call their "45 - 75 minute" bluff.

Then comes line number two, the ticket purchase line. For reasons of space which the staff confuse with time, groups are separated into the people paying and all the rest, in much the same way that a wolf will separate the weak from the rest of the herd. In this way, we say that the wolf's victim is "paying tax" to natural selection. Brandi went into the "herd" line, or line number three, which is hopefully the line to the elevator. We're both blogging about our New York experiences; she because she just bought a pair of Versace jeans formerly worn in a fashion show by a Brandi-shaped model (score!). I found this line situation too funny to let go.

Okay, we just rounded the corner to line number four, which I think exists just so they could take us past the popcorn stand. Friends of ours went to an amusement park in Florida - I should clarify: THE amusement park - and found that they were hungry almost constantly because the park pumped the smell of popcorn out of every nook and crevice.

Ahead of us lie the classic public transportation turnstiles either leading to the elevator to the top or the line to separate out the tallest from the shortest, those dressed formally from the casuals, hipsters from emos, Republican apologists from outraged Democrats. Oh, the machine that scans the tickets uses a grocery laser and makes a "wuhp!" sound like a futuristic suction cup pulling off a surprised octopus. We're in line for the elevator. After you've bought your tickets, they don't bother trying to sell you on anything more. Curiously, "crowd control", who also help hawk the vital services such as the audio tour, has vanished as well. Brandi hopes the elevator ride won't take too long. I assured her that modern elevators with all of their safety equipment, actually kill fewer people than fire. True fact, as far as I know.

I think the designers of the ESB Observatory tour must have studies fractals to fit so much line into a two-dimensional space.

Hey, we're here!

Hi, my name is Matt...

..and in the song "Puff the Magic Dragon", at the line, "Dragons live forever, but not so little boys...", I always thought Jackie Paper died.

I always thought it was the big "C" that got him, poor little guy. I feel really bad about killing him off like I did. Probably, it was leukemia. Is there a particular form that does not give you time to put away your toys?

I never, ever thought he burned. Even as a kid, I knew "Paper" was his name, not his function. What, do I look stupid to you?

View from the Top

Right now, I'm writing from the top floor of one of America's ugliest pieces of architecture. No, not Anna Nicole Smith's cleavage. Ha ha ha ha ha. No. Ha ha ha ha. Um, seriously, way no. I'm at University Hall setting up AV equipment for my role as technologist for the University of Illinois. Adding to the mystique and glamor of my job: playing chicken and pressing a button when prompted during this morning's presentation. Time to buy a remote for the office, I think.

Still, check out that view. Even the Sears Tower's weird boxy shape looks good measured against the ribbon of highway. I'm lucky I get to have these kinds of views. Even though I'm usually the guy hidden behind the curtain and today was the only guy in the room wearing less than a two piece suit (I had on khakis and my very newest sneakers), and even though I make about a third as much as these guys in a given year, I can still enjoy the view from the top.

Ha ha ha. I had you going for a minute, though, right? She's the dumb playmate who married the millionaire on his deathbed. Ring a bell? A bell that goes, "ha ha ha ha ha"? Okay, whatever.

Go, view.

Mighty Movie Magic - or - I really did believe a man could fly but then it was boring and after a while I was just hungry

I'm hitting the movie theater opening night to confirm or deny Ebert's two star assessment of the alien in blue and red, Superman Returns. Unluckily, work held me until late, so with a two plus hour running time I'm going to be home with my Earthling darling (and occasional Kryptonite, especially when she melts my heart) Brandi. Luckily, I've got a seat at the rail. It's twenty more minutes until they even start rolling the ads and I'm within striking distance of the skinny comic book kid who thinks he's hilarious because he can quote the entire Superman oevre and blend it seamlessly with his infinite Simpsons wisdom. Even his voice sounds like it has braces. Do other people see me like that? I swear all the reference comedy comes from a less arrogant space. Really?

Oh, now he's telling his date (again, really?) that he can show her all his downloaded, pirated movie clips except that she would have to spend the night in his bedroom. Boy, silk gets jealous that he's so smooth.

"I read enough comic books that I've learned something: my life is a comic book..." ==> direct quote

Good gravy, he's talking about and handing out tips on dating now. Apparently, when he starts seeing women, they can't stick to his plan of keeping things casual and they wind up seeing each other every day. He's looking for a middle ground between friends and marriage. Actually, I think he's looking for middle ground between World of Warcraft and Tomb Raider, a mythical paradise that might also include real live girls wearing revealing outfits.

More pearls of wisdom. How can he still be talking such pap? This time it's Miss Manners' guide to the teenage social scene: "I'm sorry, but texting me on the phone is the least-appropriate thing to do." Okay. Somehow, waxing poetic about how awesome he is with women to the woman he's with falls outside of his irony radar.

"I would rather a singer do bad acting than the other way around." Our friend weighing in on the age-old debate of singing versus acting.

"When you talk about puppets, I'm saying to myself, 'You and I miss marionettes...'" I can't even guess at the context.

I understand at last, what makes bullies go nuts around guys like this (me? Less so, now that I work out.) This guy seriously needs to get hit in the face with a dodgeball. Speaking of! ComedySportz held a "Sportz" rehearsal last night where we played, some of us for the first time since middle school humiliation. Yes, people got hit in the face... accidentally, the thrower felt really bad. Yes, I throw ridiculously bad and catch worse. I'm still replaying the movie in my head of the moment when someone in front of me stepped to the left, dodging/revealing a ball too late for me to do anything. Nailed. Someone on my team caught a ball. Back in, I threw a ball. Caught, handily. Out again. Friend, that is the circle of life. The only thing that suxors about it is that I wanted to be so much better at the game. I've spent more than half of my life since training for some sport or another. It should carry over.

Ads have started. Movie ads are looking more like movies, but they still suck. I can see why people want to move the movie back to the living room. It's sort of a reverse Catholic church. (Footnote: in the early days of Christianity, back when it was a flavor of Judaism and a little after, services were held in the home. How much altar do you need to speak to an infinite being who knows your every movement, hears your every thought? It wasn't until the Council of Nicea when St. Nick consolidated power specifically into churches, in the process deciding what exactly was Jesus' mix of god and human. Churches sprang up.) Okay, you probably should punch me in the face now. I deserve it.

AFTERMATH

The move is sawn. Seen. Whatever. It's over.

Funny moments:
1) Between preview and movie, two guys wedge into the two courtesy seats I left between me and the couple next to me. They talk through the entire movie. But that doesn't bother me because...
2) A family sits down in the seats in front of me about two minutes after the movie starts. They obviously have nowhere else to sit. Also important: they're not that into the idea of sitting still and not talking through the movie. I think the youngest slept through the whole thing. I'm not sure the movie is appropriate for the under-six crowd. There probably should be an age cutoff for Kevin Spacey movies. Otherwise I'm worried they're going to change all the packaging to "Se7en": starring THAT GUY from "Superman Returns". No, not the Namibian love child guy. Not the guy with the freckles. Head guy. Now you're talking.

Anyways, they didn't bother me that much because...

3) Some guy next to me wouldn't stop sneezing/coughing and he wouldn't cover his mouth. And any fan of Kevin Spacey movies remembers that moment in "Outbreak" when you follow Ebola-esque germs from cougher to all the other people in the movie theater. Remember? Anyone?

Anyways, that didn't bother me that much either because...

4) The movie deserved two stars, maybe less. Ever have a talented friend take himself way too seriously? He's a good artist but all of a sudden he treats every napkin doodle like the Sistine Chapel? That's this movie. To Brian Singer's credit, I think he faithfully reproduced every iconic Superman comic book moment from 50 years of comics, and that's pretty much every frame, but oh! that dialogue stank. We get that Superman is terse. He's not Spider-Man with a quip for every villain vanquished. He's a little nerdy. But Singer took so many colors away from his word palette that we weren't looking at a barebones black and white so much as just white... like the bread but less filling.

Even worse was the way the powers played out. Perhaps it's five years of Smallville talking, but once you establish limits, even simple ones, like, "Superman can be harmed by and has reduced powers in the proximity of kryptonite" should be abided by. Also, once you have (metaphorically-speaking) fired off a gun in a scene or at least revealed that something is a weapon, leaving it unfired for the remainder of the movie because you want to show the heroism of ordinary people is just hack. Everything becomes a matter of convenience then.

Finally: Kryptonian technology made from crystals? Cool. That it always makes the same crappy seventies chandeliers in small, medium, large and continent-sized? Not so nifty. Also, if water makes it grow, what's it take to make it stop growing? How can Lex chart that? And even if it's growing a new continent on the eastern coast of North America, how does that take away from the coastlines of all the other continents? Is there only so much basalt to go around?

I'd give you the answers, but then I would have to invite you into my bedroom, place of Geek Mystery, and we all know what that can lead to.

Babies? Somehow?

Frankenstein Helps the Plants to Grow

In the foreground: my brandywine tomato plant, raised from seed from a kit bought by my lovely wife, Brandi, and just starting to sprout some serious leaves. I should have tomatoes by, oh, about fall.

But what's this? In the background? Something green and decidedly not leafy! Something with scars at its temple, the strength of many men and the simplicity of a child. Something not alive, but not dead, either, not a Spring but certainly not an Autumn and absolutely out of place with that weird orange and purple jumpsuit. It's... Toy Frankenstein's Monster!

Our downstairs neighbor makes our lawn look like a putting green, but he also gets pretty excited when it comes to garage sales... to the point where he beings home and decorates the yard with creatures like Adam here. Downstairs, we've got robots, gondolas, potted plants, some of which I suspect are weeds that just sprouted in the right place, and of course about forty clocks set to go off every hour, forty-three minutes past the hour.

I'm fine with it all as long as it makes the plants grow. Which, somehow, it does, as evidenced by my amazing, now flowering squash plant:

Switcheroo

It's not funny to me now, but I hope it will be ten years down the line. Work has me switching offices. I work two half time jobs that add up to a full time paycheck. Too bad one of the half time jobs doesn't realize it's half time. I talked to my boss to the problem. I'm being transferred to a new office. Problem solved? Uh, no, because the half my bosses transferred is the easy half. Now I'll be working for an office that I've had the pleasure to support a handful of times over the last couple of years.

This office is trouble.

Put yourself back on the playground. There's a kid sitting on the swings, not swinging, staring at you. You think, "Hey, maybe he thinks I look like someone he knows. He wouldn't want to beat me up. People just don't do that." So you run around with a couple of your friends playing tag. You look up. He's closer. More, the look on his face is one part Freddy Krueger, one part shark maw, frozen mid-bite by the magic of digital video. Someone calls your name. You turn and trip. Was that a leg?

On the way back into class he points you out to his friends. Your velcro wallet goes missing after gym. He drops something nasty and green into your milk at lunchtime. When you complain about it to the teacher, she sits everyone down for a conference and the kid says it was all a big misunderstanding and how a lack of familiarity can turn even friendly faces into scary creatures... in short, all of the crap he's learned to shovel over the years to avoid having to fess up over his bad attitude. At the end of the conference, you shake hands and he smiles just as wide as the teacher wants him to, only you can't: as he shakes your hand he's digging into your wrist with his fingernails.

When you walk home, you realize he lives three doors down from you. His mom and your mom really, really want you to be friends, because then they can send one over to the other's house and halve those pesky babysitting bills.

You don't even know his name and you know it's not going to work. Worse, you feel bad for your mom. Money doesn't grow on trees and you need to get out of the house once in a while.

Yeah, well, it's still not going to work. Can we call it at that?

Not today.

I first found out I would be transferred when my on-site contact told my boss that she didn't like my personality. Sure, sometimes I try to cultivate a hard nosed character on stage, but at work I try to be earnest and interested, if slightly worn out from my extracurriculars. My boss had the answer, and that answer was transfer. I got confused and asked my on-site contact what she meant and she could give me no good answer. When I got upset she said the transfer could happen then (end of February) or now (end of June). I didn't want to leave at all. I picked later.

Well, I thought, maybe I'm not giving them a fair shake. I'll probably like the new office.

No. I did not like the new office. Not at all. I told the outgoing tech support guy about this. He told me why my experience was unusual. See, even though the people I had not liked had behaved badly towards me, misunderstanding me, interrupting when I was trying to explain, sending out emails to complain about the work when I was halfway through and forced to move on because at that point I was supporting three offices while the outgoing tech was on vacation, all of the bad feelings I felt didn't matter because that was them being them. Sure. My point exactly. His advice: don't let it make me act nasty toward them.

I'm a ComedySportz ref. Until you've played target to a houseful of drunken twentysomethings out to prove that they're funnier than the show they paid to see, you don't know the meaning of the word patience.

I know how to take it and smile. It doesn't mean I want to. And just because I can doesn't mean I should, or that anyone should, but since I own my skin, I'm the one who has to look out for it.

I spoke to the on-site contact about establishing parameters of service, things that I can and cannot do. I want to establish to everyone that I am half time and that there will be some times I can't immediately see to their issues because I've got a line of issues as long as my arm on a good day. He said it would undermine my position. I think he's right. I wish it would undermine it. Some offices come to depend on a network admin to the point of addiction, where they stop caring whether they click on an infected file. Who cares when someone else can clean up your mess? Why learn when you've got someone else to do your learning for you? Isn't that what money is FOR?

Bless you, Mr. President.

I've complained a lot lately. It bugs me. Maybe I will like the new job better. Maybe the new kid's not so bad. We both like Spider-Man more than Superman. He stole my super-poseable, but he let me play with his Legos. Sure, it sucks, but patience is its own reward. Besides...

I dragged that Spider-Man through the poison ivy behind the tracks. I hope he puts it in his mouth.

I'm sending out resumes. Today.

Hi, my name is Matt and...

..I once bought a pound of chocolate covered pretzels before seeing a show at Second City. I thought I was going to share.

I ate the entire bag.

..and suddenly knew what it was like to TASTE through TIME.

Bike the Drive Pics

Sunday morning, I signed on to Bike the Drive, a cool Chicago event where they empty IL-49 - otherwise known as Lakeshore Drive - of cars and set up bicycling-friendly conditions for 15 miles. The route went from Hollywood in the north to the Museum of Science and Industry at 57th in the south, with special event booths dead center at Columbus and Balbo. Water breaks at three and four mile intervals as well as flag-waving volunteers kept even the not so fit - mentally and physically - hydrated and in line.

I biked with a smile on my face... but there was trouble in my heart. First, the humidity was cranked about as high as you can get before the air turns to Jell-o and, second, is 5:30 AM really the bes time to start this sucker? On a Sunday? Do I LOOK like an early riser? (I'd like to be. Tell me I am. Do these pants make me look like an early riser? Be honest. I won't be mad.) I had a 10:00 ComedySportz show the night before, so "early to bed" was not an option. I set the alarm for six. Unfortunately, I set the music station to NPR. Note: the easiest way to sleep through an hour and a half of alarm is to motivate yourself with light jazz and news commentary. So I got out late and did about half the course, but I did get a t-shirt, a number, two bananas, a bagel and a free PowerBar, so I consider that $40 well spent.

Hold on, let me turn off the sarcasmatron. Yeah, I kind of do. I wish it cost less, but all of the bicycling stuff around Chicago does make it seem much safer for bicyclists than most metropolises (metropoli?). And if you divide everything up, my bagel only cost about ten dollars, which is about right in 2014 dollars, not adjusted for inflation.

April's Starch March

Despite my firstborn son status, I survived Passover. Eating matzoh for a week and a day didn't help. When I got on the treadmill the Saturday afterwards, it felt like I had accidentally worn my combination gym shorts/X-ray lead apron. Energy bled out of me. I refused to extend the ban against leavened foods to my diet beverages. To all for whom Coca-Cola is banned from kosher-for-Passover foods because of its corn syrup, I say, "Suckers." Still, the twelve miles was very, very hard. They say your body has about two thousand calories' energy stored in its muscles. This is your "gas tank" and when it goes empty, that's your "wall". Runners like colorful metaphors. I hit the wall at about seven miles. Now I know why runners like to eat a big dinner of pasta the night before.

Brandi and I celebrated the end of Passover by eating most of a Chicago-style deep dish pizza with extra cheese and tomato sauce. I can't help but wonder if Moses and the Thirteen Tribes did the same when they reached the Promised Land.

The thirteen miles I did the next weekend went much quicker. My secret: a giant Jewel-Osco cookie, with frosting, and lots of sleep.

My dad used to talk about exercise giving him energy. I never had any idea what the hell he was taking when he said it. Exercise bums my body out. I work out and I need lots of rest. At least, I usually do. After my thirteen mile run, I was wired. When I came home and tried to burn a DVD for my friend Bob, the computer crapped out. "Stupid computer," I wanted to shout at it, "I'm ready for more. Run, dammit!" But like so many things in the tech industry, just punching it did more harm than good.

I didn't actually punch my computer. I haven't seriously abused my electronics since the time I took my iMac's keyboard and slammed it into my recliner as hard as I could. A couple of "shift" keys came off, as I recall, and a bunch of the numeric keypad. So, if you ever wonder why I consider re-attaching keys that have popped off the keyboard, consider that my start. I also once punched my computer so hard the processor popped out of the motherboard. Boy, did that scare the crap out of me. "Disconnected?!" Slam. Computer goes blank. Matt tries to remember how much money a new computer would cost and how soon he can get one. As a lark, he opens up the case of his computer, looking to see how much silicon he's going to have to solder together to get the old thing to work. To his surprise, he discovers the heat sink and processor have dislodged from the motherboard. He plugs it back in. The computer powers up. Matt hears a silent reply from the gods of computing: it was not her time; it was too soon.

I have trouble sleeping sometimes. What doctors call insomnia, I call "cats". We saw an animal behaviorist to learn why one of our cats held her feces so long, she began throwing up because her digestive system literally could hold nothing more, and why the other one sometimes uses what he likes to think of as the literbox and what we think of as "pillows". Apparently, there is a silent power struggle in our home. Also, cats' noses are 3500 times more powerful than our own. I suspect that number. Wouldn't that mean if a cat smelled a flower, he would explode? Regardless, we have to clean the litterbox more often. We also need to devote 20 minutes a day to getting them aerobic exercise. Twenty minutes each. I joked about one of us quitting our jobs to become cat parents. Brandi said, "You told me getting a cat would be a lot of work." Being right sucks when it doesn't get you out of anything.

Brandi also swapped around bells to deal with the issues of dominance - one cat seems to have developed a dominant streak in addition to the permanent PMS she seems to be suffering whenever she meows. I swear when I hear it I want to write a symphony of nails on a chalkboard, just to have something more pleasant to hear. Rio, our orange cat, now has three bells to Patrick's none. Whenever she bounces it sounds like the opening strains to "Jingle Bells". Unfortunately, cats are nocturnal, so while they do like to sleep on top of us for part of the night, they also roam in the very early morning. I've woken up at four in the morning two days in a row only to look at the clock and groan.

I did have an interesting dream this morning. Last night, Brandi and I joked about quitting our jobs and moving into our garage to eliminate 90% of our rent and most of our utilities. My sleeping brain must have been listening because in my dream we had downgraded to exactly that and the cats were driving me absolutely nuts there. I also had terrible flu-like symptoms. I woke up - in the dream - and tried to find the computer or the phone to call in sick to work. Eventually, probably when the alarm went off, I realized it was a dream. I opened my eyes for real... and felt okay. I was only dream sick. I think it was my unconscious phoning in sick because the dream wasn't very good or original. It was the best it could do.

Brandi asked me the other day if I had goals. I rattled off a short list of them, including, "make the best Chicken Parmesan ever" since, coincidentally, I was making Chicken Parmesan at the time. I want to lead an interesting life. A long time ago, in eighth grade, I thought I could lead an interesting life by writing one. I think that dream lasted until I saw "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas", and I realized that writers trying to lead interesting lives either a) burn out or b) lie. The honesty bug makes lying painful and socially awkward for me, so I opted out. Sure, I still write and love it, but it's something I want to make part of my life, not something I want to carve my life out of. Perhaps the distinction is semantic.

Regardless, I want to make elegance. Sometimes I draw. Other times I perform improvisational comedy. Alarmingly, I haven't found a good way that also brings in a lot of money, although, strangely enough, the ways I have found wound up costing us a lot in taxes every year. You won't catch me saying this very often, but thank goodness for George W. Bush and the repeal of the marriage tax. Whoa. That hurt more than I thought it would. I think I had less trouble running a half marathon.

Brandi and I wisely chose to do both our laundry and taxes on the same night. I won't imply there was friction, but I will say it's a good idea we didn't soak anything we owned in anything flammable. We owed. Between the two of us we had at least a small child's body weight in clothing. Several highlights of the evening: 1) sending that letter off with the taxes, our payment, and a middle finger aimed squarely at a conservative government bent on spending my money on crap like Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay, 2) the hauling, 3) laundromat television blaring really loud Spanish soap operas at us for three hours, 4) thanking the woman at the counter at the post office for staying there late to handle us last-minute stragglers, whereby decreasing by 0.000004% the chance that someone in the near future will "go postal", 5) did I mention the hauling?, 6) pretending the change machine was a slot machine, sticking a twenty dollar bill and "winning" twenty dollars in quarters. Hey, I get my entertainment where I can.

The nice thing about getting laundry done is never having to gamble that you're going to walk under a black light while wearing your favorite pair of pants for the eleventh time. This has happened to me and it was not, not, not pretty.

There but for the grace of God go I.

Looks like the mayor trotted out the nice weather preview today. Not bad, Mr. Mayor. Your choice of seventy degrees married to partly cloudy skies and gentle breezes may just be the master stroke of your political career. Then again, some of the naysayers are blogging about your taking advantage of the creation of someone with even more connections. I wonder what He would think of that, sir.

This weekend, I played a show held in honor of the theatre where I have performed for almost the last six years. 2851 North Halsted played host to shows with John Malkovitch, Gary Sinise, Laurie Metcalf and a thousand other Chicago theatre stars, legends, afficionados and hobbyists. The show alternated scenes from St. Nicholas productions, Steppenwolf and ComedySportz, and, yeah, we held our own against actors far more seasoned. You get a lot of leeway with comedy. Deanna, Martin and I did Brecht/Ibsen stage directions with the directions parts shouted offstage by Katherine and Keith. I don't say this often enough but our timing rocked. Fresh-faced improvisers often make the mistake of filling the air with sound. I used to peform with a guy - "Jethro", but he was born "Jeff" - who made sound effects every time he took a step. Unfortunately for him, he also really liked to set his partner up with intricate, clever arguments, which he would invariably punctuate with some weird farting noise because he was baking quiche. He was great once he quit that habit. Other improvisers just talk. And talk. Did I mention the talking? I learned reasonably early on in sketch writing that efficiency counts most. People use ten words when they could use three or one and a tilt of their head... Why? Because they don't trust the actors or audience to know their intent, and so they trade clarity for mystery or tension.

We did not trade clarity for mystery. Given a Brechtian location of junkyard, Deanna immediately went searching for her lost wedding ring, an opening with about a million overtones of sadness, anger, love, shared history. Martin and I hardly had to move.

I should also take a moment to mention the other two scenes: Pick-a-Play and Blind Line Mamet. In Pick-a-Play you usually have two players reading and one justifying, grounding the scene and helping to marry lines from, for instance, Shakespeare and Duck Tales. Our artistic director, Joe Janes, chose to make all three actors read from plays by the same author - Sam Shepard. The unity of voice allowed Sara, Paul and Martin (again!) to relate to each other through voice, body language, mime... in other words, acting. For the suggestion, Joe got a Sam Shepard location (trailer park). Sara broke hearts when she cracked open that first brewski.

Last before the Panel of Famous Former Tenants, Scot, Rich and Ben performed Blind Line Mamet, set in a typical Mamet location (pawn shop). All the lines the players pulled out at random came from David Mamet plays. My favorite in light of the Brown Bag or "We never say anything dirty at ComedySportz because like Jackie Chan we want to play family friendly to increase ticket sales, and this is generally a good idea" Foul was, "Money talks and bullshit walks..." Three guys in suits wandering around a pawn shop cursing at each other? The audience ate it up. Props to Scot for trying to sell, um, something and props to Ben for not giving in to the improv urge to identify everything because, man, Mamet is vague, sometimes infuriatingly.

Oh, I also got drunk on expensive champagne.

They had glasses of it out. It was billed as a "champagne brunch". I had just finished my scene and felt relieved my unburnt bridge to the rest of the Chicago theatre community stayed unburnt, so I wandered out into the lobby. Brandi started me off on watching my calories, so I didn't want to stuff Ann Sathers cinnamon rolls into my face, delicious and sinful though they were. Put enough work into your workout and eating starts to feel like an investment. Of course, after everyone went in to the theatre to watch the show(s), they stopped putting fresh glasses out, so I had to open one myself. In the coatroom. Because I was afraid of getting caught. I poured a glass and headed back inside the theatre, resisting the urge to chug. I still drank it quickly.

Then I got another one.

Oh, my poor liver, you were born for better things.

Brandi and I had a glass of wine at dinner, testing out the Costco Riesling we want to use for Thursday's seder at our house. We both almost fell asleep into our Chicken Parmesan. I would have slept for the rest of the night, except that I had another ComedySportz show (Battleprov) that I had to ref (badly; at one point telling the audience to send a player out of the room, "...with a one, two, three! Ready? Goodbye [player]!" Pause. "I just forgot how to count to three.").

In retrospect, I'm kind of lucky to be alive.

Certainly on a day like today.

Enjoying the sunset.

Pinned by the turtle

Babysitting duties this Saturday, with Brandi and special guest rockstar Michal. We trundled off to the local playground to work off some energy. Michal dared me to crawl under the cement turtle. I did it. "Now sit up!" I could not. If I had to guess, I would say I couldn't have sat up underneath it since the late seventies, when I was Michal's size. I did make Brandi take this great shot, though. It looks like we wrestled and I lost.

By the way, if I'm ever homeless and out of friends, I'm making the underside of this turtle my home. It's small but still roomier than my studio on Melrose. I kid. The studio had a closet. Just a few blankets would keep me warm in the turtle's concrete embrace through wintertime. The shell would keep out rain. Maybe a length of chicken wire for the larger vermin? Maybe a hot plate? Maybe I'm gonna think this plan through a little harder?

Aw, turtle.

Some wine with that cheese

Nothing hurts more than losing a patient. Unless that patient belonged to somebody you didn't like. Plausible deniability works, but you have to fake sorrow.

We have a guy who works at one of my offices. People call him "Buzz". He's old enough, but I'm sure he never walked on the moon. Buzz has problems with technology. Lucky for him, though, he's a legend in his own mind. He breezes into the office with a sheaf of stuff to scan for, I dunno? His personal archives? He can't use a computer.

I walked through the door this Wednesday and smelled trouble just as strong as the smell of burnt pizza drifting up from the Giordano's four floors below. Our office manager walked up to me. She wore a smirk. "Buzz is looking for you."

"Oh?"

"The Internet is out at his home. He's going to ask you to fix it."

"We're not supposed to do support outside of the office."

"I know. [The admin you replaced] went to his house. He's going to ask you to go to his house."

What? Does nobody tell this man "no"? Apparently not, because about ten minutes later, Buzz walks by my desk.

"Uh... Yeah, the Internet's out at my home."

Pause. What was he waiting for? Me to ask how I could leap to the rescue? Where he lived? Whether he broke the Internet? "Okay..."

"Yeah, I need it to work."

"I can't work outside of the office."

"Well, the other fellow came by."

"I'm not him."

Buzz went through a bunch of different reasons why I needed to restore Internet connection to his home. Some things you should know: Buzz doesn't work for my office, per se, but he has received grants for travel and a computer because he promised to drum up enthusiasm for our seminars. So far, $10,000 later, nothing. He has an office on campus he never uses. He has an assistant who he used so infrequently, she was re-absorbed back into our main office. However, he needed the home computer for, er, work email. His wife works for the state retirement system and would be out of luck without that computer. If that failed, he would "talk to [my boss]". I respond to veiled threats with unveiled apathy.

"Can I tell her to give you a call?" he asked, turning large, watery eyes towards me.

"She can give me a call," I said. My shoulders slumped.

So she did. It helped that his wife was nice and seemed more lost than demanding. She gave me the error message, which I looked up. Not a lot of solutions. At home, they used dialup. So many things can go wrong with dialup. Worse, it's not like you can call tech support when your computer blows up. She was speaking on her cell phone. Okay, that works. Her computer still didn't. The limited information I had suggested her modem had failed or become unseated from the motherboard, but like many users she had her own opinions about her granddaughter using her computer, or maybe the lightning storm, or maybe...? One thing was sure, her operating system did not see a modem attached where once there was a modem, and the computer was very, very old.

I recommended she get a new computer, but, that being just my opinion, I also looked up Yahoo! tech support, so she could consult more advanced minds than mine. She called back ten minutes later. "They couldn't help." I gave her Dell's support number. Ten minutes later, nobody called. I thought I was off the hook.

The next day, the computer showed up at my desk. Buzz brought it in. He didn't leave a note, though. I realized it was his computer because, two minutes after I walked in the door, our office manager handed me a slip of paper showing me the model of computer Buzz had taken home from the office. They matched. On the minus side, the problem would not go away. On the plus, I might be able to fix the problem just by re-seating the modem.

I couldn't fix the problem. Was it the modem driver? Well? Aztech, the modem maker with the name adorably combining technology with bloody sun god worship, had drivers for Windows 2000, but only for New Zealand. Installing them kind of fixed the problem, at least until I tried to dial out. No dice. I looked up other access numbers. The computer made "faxing" noises, but fell shy of handshaking and acknowledging username and password. I installed the XP modem driver for US computers. Yahoo! still hated me.

"You're going to have to get another computer," I said for the second time.

He stared at me. "So, what are you saying?"

Nothing hurts more than losing a patient. Except losing your patience. That sucks, too.