Switching Over

My last entry here was in June, but I never made a conscious decision to quit here. I never thought of anything for this space again. Something about this particular format defeats me; I either want to write too much, or too little, and my (very) rudimentary html knowledge never quite allows me to fix any formatting problems that arise. I think I'm done.

I'm tentatively posting stuff here now:  Not An Essayist
and we'll see how long that lasts. It's not really a public site, per se, but more of a place for me to catalogue links I find interesting. If it ends up being a bunch of This isn't happiness reblogs I might have to rethink it.

Overheard

I was in a very slow-moving line at a cash register today. Two of the customers in front of me had struck up a casual, small-talky conversation, which sort of trailed off when one women made an unexpected joke related to her boyrfriend's testicles.

Moments later, the testicle-joke lady declared to one of her family members that she would "move to another country" if strappy pink high-heeled shoes were made widely available for men.

Neither of these comments was quite as contextless as I've presented them here, but it was the juxtaposition of these two particular statements that seriously irritated me. So, it's okay to comment on a third party's testicles to someone who clearly wasn't expecting the conversation to take that turn, but it's not okay for a dude to feel pretty and click a little bit as he walks?

The Lakes of Canada

The first time I listed to Sufjan Stevens's cover of The Innocence Mission's "The Lakes of Canada," it didn't exactly grab me, but this song has been creeping up on me ever since.



I can't put my finger on why I find it so appealing--when I can parse the lyrics, they're not usually blowing my socks off. Maybe I've embarked on a love affair with the banjo.

(I am also fond of the Charles Boyer-esque French accent on the guy talking to Sufjan Stevens at the beginning of this particular video.)

Getting Closer

When my Mom was moved to Palliative Care (that's never good), I had only a few books with me. One of them was a library copy of Dodie (101 Dalmations) Smith's I Capture the Castle, and it's the one thing I recall reading in her room, during (rare) lulls between other visitors. It was in late May, and the bright sun streamed through the mid-century hospital's wall of windows, and sometimes I was alone, with Mom and the book.

I've since gotten my own copy of the book, but haven't yet been able to read it from start to finish; for a year or two, I keep losing heart about a quarter of the way into the story. I'm getting closer to the end this time.

Tigermilk

I can't stop listening to Belle and Sebastian's Tigermilk lately. I've long since known every song on it, but I hadn't listened to the album as a whole until very recently, and it's so, so lovely.

It's a14-year-old album now (!), but I wasn't clued in to Belle and Sebastian until about three albums later (Fold Your Hands, Child...). Books and music were a totally different story in the pre-internet days**, for rural kids like me. I had to trust Spin magazine and the one alternative radio station out of Windsor-Detroit (89X) to point me in the direction of music I might like, and neither would have covered music from an album with such a limited initial release (1000 albums).


**Actually, I know the internet existed in 1996, but I also remember that circa 1993-94, my high school only had 2-3 computers capable of hooking up to the internet. IF my home had internet in 1996, it was most definitely a dial-up connection, which meant we couldn't be tying the phone line up for hours. And I feel 90% sure that my parents didn't get an internet connection until a year or two after that. In fact, the longer I think about it, the less sure I am that my parents had replaced the Commodore 64 (seriously) until after I moved away for school. For assignments, I used an electric typewriter from my last year of high school until midway through my third year of university (although that was unusual, at the time).

So, yeah, Tigermilk. The best song is the first song:



But I love 3-4 other songs almost as much, and the only one that's a bit of a dud is "Electronic Renaissance."

Forgotten

I've forgotten something that I can't put my finger on, so I've been scrolling through my google searches to see if something there will jog my memory. Nothing is.

Meanwhile, I've been amused that one search consisted entirely of  "Civil War" -- I was looking for a timeline of the U.S. Civil War, and I think my vague search time actually pulled up exactly what I wanted (this), but I'm still astounded at how lazy the original search was.

I also had to recently search "define: passim" ("throughout or frequently" in citations--I can't believe I never ran across that one before) and "horse collars" and "recursive smurf" (I was looking for this picture) and "street" (just street--I think I may have hit enter before I was done with that one) and "lemon cake" and "slice" (the drink?) and "armin tanzerian."

My mind is a junkyard lately.

Vocabulary

I have watched Arrested Development enough times now that today I had to look up "circumvent" to make sure that I was using it correctly. I was confused once I recalled G.O.B.'s declaration that the Bluth company should "cicumverent" union penalties, or that he intends to "circumvrent" his mother as he steps past her to leave the room.

The meaning I wanted was "to avoid by artful maneuvering," which is a real and correct definition, after all.