Touch You Last

I should be working right now. On Tuesday I’ll be leaving on a jet plane, off to Calgary for a week. (Sarah’s got a head-start on the trip. She’s in Vancouver right now, hanging with Beth , and they’ll both be flying into Cowtown about an hour before I do.) Work-wise, I’ve got a fair bit to get done between now and then. The smart thing—what I’d planned—was to work today and tomorrow between nine and two. I work better in the morning. I’m efficient. And I know that if I don’t start by noon, things will take me twice as long and I’ll drag it out and ruin my whole damn day. But here I am, well past noon, and the only thing I’ve accomplished is Sweet F.A. (Not entirely true. I have downed a pot of coffee. And deodorized.) But this isn’t a post about work, what it’s actually about is how Sarah’s away and I’ve got fifty dollars of allowance burning a hole in my pocket. If you didn’t know, you probably suspected—Sarah controls the purse strings in this f...

Well, the weather’s warmer, and all the crazy athletic people around me are somewhat inspiring, and the deadline for my 101 in 1001 is slowly closing in , so I’ve starting jogging again. (I’m not crazy about calling it ‘jogging;’ the word feels retro to me and it brings to mind visions of sweaty, hirsute men in headbands and short-shorts. But then if it had been ‘I’ve started running again,’ it would have sounded like I was fleeing, and then I would have had to include some kind of large explanation in parentheses.) It’s been a minor success so far. I’ve run about 35k since I’ve started—which sounded impressive until I realized I’ve been at it for about 35 days. (Not to say I’ve run 1k on 35 different occasions.) One of my as yet unattained 101 goals is to run a 22 minute 5k. I had no strategy towards how to accomplish this when I wrote it. It was just going to happen. Magically. Ideally I’d just wake up and found it had been done. Didn’t happen though. Instead, I’ve put a backup pl...

Sarah alerted me to the fact that I misspelled Nickelback in my Sucks/Rocks post . I felt dumb, but for ever so briefly because it is Nickelback after all and who really gives a shit anyways. (Wendy is going to smack me in the mouth the next time I see her.) Then I shook off the dumb and rejoiced, because I figured I could do another search and they’d be sitting in their rightful place, somewhere above death by self-immolation but below unidentified yellow discharge. Sadly: this was totally not the case. [Insert graphic of Suck/Rocks Nickelback rating here. For the time being, you'll just have to trust me that they come in around 8.4 or so. We performed the search the other day, but I've tried it today (about eight minutes ago) and the site is still thinking about it. I think it's going, "That can't be right. Must rerun search. It's the same?!? Re-run! Wha? Run again. Again! AGAIN!"] What can I say? There’s no accounting for th...

Welcome to my current obsession: Sucks/Rocks . It’s a site that determine whether something rocks or sucks. Beautiful in its simplicity, isn’t it? You enter your search term—say, Peanut Butter Cups—and the site will search for all instances of positive phrase relating to your term versus negative phrases relating to your term (‘Peanut Butter Cups are wicked!’ as opposed to ‘I can’t stand me no goddamn Peanut Butter Cups!’) It then takes these positive and negative hits, factors in some complicated maths, and comes back with a ranking from 0 to 10, with 0 being a black hole of sucking, and 10 being something that rocks more than anything that has every rocked before. One-off searches are fun, but it’s the comparisons that make things really interesting. Here are a few I tried earlier today: Let’s analyze the results. You’re probably as surprised as I am by Nickleback ’s standing. I’d certainly have placed them as sucking more than hippies but less than diarrhea , however, the mass majo...

Yeah, so I went underground for a few weeks. What’s the big deal? You’re not paying me. You’re not the boss of me. Damn, I can’t keep up this tough talk! I love you, and I missed you too. Now that that’s cleared up, some random updates: Facebook is the best and greatest thing ever. I was afraid it was just MySpace with a different name (which—largely—it is), but what makes it so wicked is that everyone I’ve ever met seems to have joined. I’ve connected with people I long though (nay, hoped) were dead. (That's a lie. I’m actually really glad to have reconnected with everyone I’ve found so far). Join up. You won’t be sorry. Unless you hate everyone you used to know. Then, never mind. We’re driving a Matrix these days because an oil change place wrecked the Protégé. I stopped into Georgetown last weekend to see my family, had some time to kill, and so went to a place my Dad recommended for an oil change. Well, after the oil change kid finished...