My desert island would probably be annoying

Ukelele torture/party

I’m with Mark Frauenfelder— a live ukelele weirdo beats the pants off any radio. Who watches that ad and wants to hang out with Mr. Grouchypants?

This reminds me of the Most Wanted/Unwanted Songs project, where researchers attempted to create the most agreeable and disagreeable songs in the history of the world. The disagreeable one was a 25-minute, bagpipe-Opera-rap with clip-clop noises and a chorus of children, and it was awesome. I’ll take that over a bland, romantic, R’n‘B duet any day. Marketing focus groups don’t see things that way, I guess.

I can’t stop watching the ukelele ad. The little white socks!

Data slob

My friend and erstwhile coworker Justin just found 1.3GB of my old MP3s in the dark recesses of his work hard drive, from last December when I was briefly stationed on his machine. He was happy to have “Common People.” Thinking about it, I believe I deposited that song on at least 3 workstations on that campus, and possibly also on a network drive.

Fangirl/pirate/slob/nomad.

Leftovers (almost left behinds)

It is really easy to stop writing. I think of ideas or stories I want to write down every day, but if I don’t act on the seed within a certain window, the urge just sort of passes.

  1. My ideas are not worth writing down for posterity, or they’d be worth writing down the next day.
  2. I should write more often, if I’m going to write at all.

Urges that have passed in the last few days:

  • Telling you about Antony and the Johnsons playing in a cathedral in Vancouver. Especially about how overwhelming and fantastic it was after about the fourth song, when the sound man finally turned up the volume just enough to resonate in the architecture. And about the comfort of seeing a genderqueer sensation sing in a church, along with a varied crowd of freaks and families and plainer sorts. I really like it when things don’t have to be burdened by being a radical act.
  • Writing out the caffeinated explanation I came up with for why I laugh so much. I don’t think of myself as a giggly person, but somebody probably does. Once the caffeine wore off, this train of thought seemed highly drug-induced: self-absorbed and overly sincere. The jist of it was that I laugh at the paradox of everything being absurd, yet perfect. Am I in my ninth grade mystical phase all over again? I did not know caffeine held this potential for unselfconscious declaration. Maybe it’s a better vision quest drug than I initially thought.