Thursday, January 19, 2012

Wintry Mix

I remembered the term. Wintry Mix. Well, I didn’t remember it. Adam, my husband, read it out loud from “the paper.” It’s sleet, snow, rain, all combined. It’s very fresh. People freak out about winter. All I think about is how much I love Iceland. How much I like clean air. I’m all for it. Plus, you know, you can’t become allergic to precipitation. Is it cold? Sure. But in about a month, all the flower shops will be filled with tulips and daffodils. I mean, if Holland can get into spring by the end of February and pass that tradition onto us and we can benefit, and we have, how much can you complain?

Use Safe Copy. Use it. It’s only fifty bucks a year. It backs up everything on your hard drive to an outside server. All your docs, music, pics, vids. It makes so much sense. Plus, it backs everything up in the same folders that you have. So it looks the same when you check it out online. And you can access the info from anything. Other computers, phone, pads of all stripes. I’ve been with this outfit for over a year and I love it. Effortless. Safe and amazing.

Safe Copy


Governor Brown and his bullet train from LA to SFO! Thank you! Come on now. Let’s do it! I want a bullet from LA to NY. Please? Could we please? I’d sit for the fifteen hours. Fly through Kansas at 250 miles per hour. Read some. Be thanking Allah I was on the solid ground instead of bumping through the thin air. Plus, the more we fly, the more we warm up the air, the more the air gets unstable, the bumpier the flights get. It’s a negative loop of pain. Get me off that hell tube. Get me on that train.

Henry Wolfe, my friend and talented musician, check out his music. He’s writing new songs all the time. Go to his sight. Download his songs. Buy the tunes online. You can do a search at the iTunes Store under his name. I especially love Buzzards. When it comes up on my iTunes cycle, I stop everything and only listen to that and do nothing else.

Henry Wolfe

I was making a reservation on the phone for a hotel today. I couldn’t tell if the person on the other end was at the hotel or a booking agent. I asked him to just tell me who he was. I was concerned because, you know, it was a random phone number and I could be handing over my credit card info to anyone. Plus, three different windows popped up for the same hotel in comparison. You know, that whole internet assault. So he tells me who he is. I could tell he was lying. Said he was with the hotel. I was annoyed that he was lying so I said I was going to call the hotel directly. I was cheerful and low key but I hung up. He called back and left me a message. He said, “Fuck you asshole. I’m watching you.” It was a threat. What small outfit was he the booking agent for? Expedia. Yes, Expedia, that little travel concern we’ve all heard of. I emailed Expedia to tell them what happened. I got a form letter apology within three hours. Onward. People are in distress these days. And Expedia, even, doesn’t care. Sad world. What next? I ask someone at Citibank to check on a fraud claim and they tell me to go fuck my mother?

Speaking of fucking your own mother…wouldn’t you have to actually get erect for that? What on earth would have had to have gone down in your sexual imprinting that made it so you could get an erection for such a journey?

I am doubling down on the piano and learning all the Gershwin Preludes. They are really beyond my level…but I am using whatever piano lesson techniques I have under my belt, my ease of reading music, along with my O.C.D. to repeat and repeat and repeat the fingering until it’s so in my hands, there’s no way I CAN’T play it. Interesting, playing an instrument. Great place to shove a lot of energy. Clears the mind. And it’s not really creative. It’s tasky. When you finally learn it and you add some feeling to it, that’s a creative thing. But more instinctual than anything else. I dig it. Plus, if you’re learning Gershwin, you can’t really say you are wasting your time.

I am doing so much career stuff right now that there’s little time for writing. (Coordinating. Selling. Yep, it’s like having a booth at the craft fair…except people don’t buy little things all day long. They wait forever and ever…and then finally, there’s one big sale.) Need to write more. I have to mix it up better.

Starting this horrendous habit of small pads with chicken scratch all over them all over my desk. Can apartment chickens be far behind?

If you really want to feel like you did when you were a kid…like all free and like it’s all new and fun, you just have to let go of everything. What made it so fun to be a kid was that you didn’t have a ton of experiences and a mountain of knowledge to weigh you down. You just lived. Of course, assuming you are an adult reading this, you can’t be irresponsible and chuck it all. You have to take care of things as an adult using experience and knowledge. Pretty much. And instinct. But any short or long periods you can steal for yourself to forget it all, you will find yourself laughing a lot and having a good time.

It’s January 20. Ground Hogs are getting nervous.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

If it's all automated you don't need to pay any actual human beings to apologize. That's the way it's going. God help us! Mother/judith