the rest of the year

Put a new song up on my MySpace.

I wrote this song during my last winter in Boston, after the space shuttle Columbia exploded on Chinese New Year's Day. I brought my acoustic guitar back with me from California so you get to hear something other than Fender Fat Strat for a change. The mic picked up my neighbors thumping around upstairs at the end of the song. It's a sincere and maybe sentimental song, so be nice, and tell me that you like it.

This is how I spent the last twenty-four hours. I could not sleep, so I watched Rachel Maddow until 2 a.m., then lay awake until 5 a.m. kicking my legs on my bed. I'm convinced now that it's physiology not psychology keeping me awake, and that it's time to buy the Beautyrest that RK sleeps on. Then I became unconscious, and then apparently snoozed for 95 unconscious minutes between 9 and 10:30 a.m. I went to work, where I finished up a motion to dismiss in a weird employment discrimination case (my FIFTH in three months!), and then chatted over lunch for two hours with my co-clerks about what was the matter with their significant others' families. I am single and older than them, so I contributed to the conversation by advising them that by the time they turned 28 they would reach a point of serenity about all other people, and then I managed to forget almost every key word in the serenity prayer as I tried to recite it to them. After lunch I futzed around some more on CM/ECF, used a typewriter, and sent off two gifts to two loved ones by U.S. Post. The day expired. I rode the el home reading every fourth line of the Economist, and when I got home I changed in to my gym clothes immediately, with the intent to improve my cardiovascular health. But I was paralyzed by the thought of the after-work horde, so instead I puttered around my room for two hours, recording and rerecording the vocals to the new song. At 9:25 p.m., I left to go to the gym. I jogged my fat gut at a leisurely pace and tried to watch The Office through my fogged eyeglasses. At 10:30 p.m., I went down the treacherous icewalks of Paulina Street to get to my 24 hour neighborhood supermarket, where I then wasted away forty minutes reading the labels attached to various gourmet cheeses and farinaceous processed products trying to see if I could avoid corn derivatives. (I am currently reading NG's copy of The Omnivore's Dilemma, so I tried to spend a little more effort and money on my purchases tonight.) At my supermarket, you can scan your own groceries, so you can avoid all human contact. I did that, and stacked my fragile cage-free eggs and cherry tomatoes carefully in the reusable grocery bag my mom packed my sushi for the flight to Chicago in. At 11:11 p.m., I walked the frigid five blocks back to my house singing along loudly to a Bob Marley song - one nice thing about the early Chicago winter is that people flee indoors so when you walk outside you're alone and you can sing as loudly as you want to - and prepared a meal for one of instant mac and cheese (so much for effort and money spent on food purchases), spinach, and vegetarian Italian "sausage," and then ate this with my right hand while putting the keyboard track under the new song with my left hand. I've spent the last three hours fiddling with knobs and testing out and nixing a "Sweet Trumpet" track for the new song.

I recall this here even though it is excrementally boring because I was struck by the contrast between the high lonesomeness of my 24 hours in Chicago and the oceanic love I felt when I was in California. I won't recall California here; you can see the pics on my Facebook. I didn't blog over Thanksgiving because I was having too much fun to spend any time in front of a computer, contra this.

I guess the point is WAH WAH WAH WHY ME Chicago is cold and scary! I don't want to go on any more blind one-time dates with Internet men! I want BH to pretend to eat things for me! I want OZ to have jiaozi with my grandma! I want to sing with WD! I want to play Rock Band at Google until midnight! WAHHHHHHH!!!

Okay so maybe I'll say a little about California, just the part about my dad. He was very much himself this weekend. In the news over Thanksgiving was a story about a crazed man who stalked some random woman who talked to him in a nightclub. This week he broke into her house in San Mateo and killed her. My dad read an article about it while waiting with me in Urgent Care on Thanksgiving (for my corneal abrasion, see previous post) and shook his head, saying over and over, "Fatal attraction. Fatal attraction. This is why I never look at women. You don't know how you act if you get attracted. Fatal attraction." He seemed to really like the way the words "fatal attraction" sounded, because over the next four days he must have repeated the phrase at least twenty times in my presence, pronouncing all the syllables separately. My mom is overweight, so my dad is always talking about his love for fat ladies. We drove by a plump young couple walking down El Camino: "Oooh...fatal attraction." A bottom-weighted lady huffing up Cow Hill: "Fatal attraction!" An ad on TV for Rosie O'Donnell's show: "Wah, fatal attraction!" My dad also continued in his tradition of attempting to read Korean words wherever he saw them, at one time slowing to a near stop on a busy street in Sunnyvale to read: "Ha...ha...ho...hon...han...HAN! Goo...gook...kook...KOOK! Myoo...mya...zoo...shoo...shooka...sooba...soopa ma...maa," etc. The words "HAN

KOOK SUPER MARKET" were printed directly below the Korean he was attempting, at 15 mph, to read. He also said he loved Korean cuisine, referring to it as "Pong Pong Pyang Pyang," and suggested we stop at every restaurant we saw. Then he complained loudly about how a store in San Francisco that advertised its sandwiches as the "best turkey sandwiches in the world" had recently cut its portions, so that it was now "half the best turkey sandwich in the world - same price!" He suggested that when he gets rich and retires he and my mother would drive together to Chicago to visit me, and driving was better than flying because one could keep lobster in a bucket by the driver's seat and eat it all the way across the country.

Oh, the stories don't capture the near-constant stream of weirdness that comes from my dad! I miss my parents! They're so weird! It's late! I'm tired. BLARRHHGHH goodbye!