The Crud

I have, as a friend put it, “The Crud.” I have been thusly afflicted for the last two days. I hate being sick: having a nose that acts like a leaky faucet, a throat that feels like sandpaper, minor aches that appear and disappear all over, and the occasional chill that seems to have a mind of its own.

The Crud caused me to miss a class today. My body was apparently in repair mode and decided it would better be able to accomplish that if it kept me asleep through my alarm. It would have been nice had we been able to have a little conference before my sluggish body just made the decision on its own. This, much like America at the hands of the President Bush regime, is not a democracy and what I say goes. But it appears that my body must have deemed a coup in order to help me recover was more important that global futures.

Vitamin C, echanacia, orange juice, and tylenol cold and flu have been my best of friends today. Maybe with their help I can clean out The Crud and hope to survive another flu season relatively unscathed. My biggest disappointment today though, was that The Crud caused me to miss my fitness evaluation at my new gym. What a glowing first impression I’m leaving. Maybe I can reschedule it for Thursday.

Low point today.

My roommate’s father died at 7 pm. He is a wreck.

As I told him earlier, I hope that it is a very long time before I have to understand what it is he is going through. It is so hard to fathom someone who has always been in your life not being there anymore. Just picking up the phone to say hi seems like such a trivial thing to do, but when the option is no longer available it becomes so much more.

I don’t want to imagine my mother or my father not being just a phone call away.

Don’t leave things unsaid. Don’t wait to see the people that you love. It is said so often, but bears repeating: once they are gone, you won’t get the chance again.

Don’t leave things to regret.

Sweat and pain pt 2

Motivated by the events of Saturday night: read about it here!, and taking the post from Sweat and Pain pt 1 a bit further, I went out today and have paid far too much for a membership to a local gym. It’s an annual membership so I have an entire year with said gym. I go tomorrow for my free fitness evaluation… HA! More like unfitness evaluation. This is going to be quite humorous. I shouldn’t really be that bad, I stopped working out every day back in late may/early june and dwindled off from that. I think I know where I’m at physically, but I’m not looking forward to seeing the cold, flabby, facts.

I’m probably going to post the results tomorrow after I get out of class. This should prove to be entertaining.

Memories

I found a one use camera a few years ago during one of the many moves I’ve had to make over the years. When I found it I had a good idea of what was on it, and because it was so soon after a breakup, I decided not to get the film developed because I did not want to wrestle with harsh feelings mixed with good memories.

So I re-found that same camera a few days ago and decided it has been long enough that I can deal with it. I went to the local Wal-Mart, which made a part of my soul die, and took it to the 1-hour photo center. Thinking that my friends would be fashionably late as the usually are, I figured I would have enough time to get them that night. I was pleasantly surprised that they were not late and called me to inform me as such. So I left the film there safe in the knowledge that I could come get the pictures the next day.

That night, while we were celebrating the birthday of my good friends’ wife, we saw many different costumes come wandering through the establishment we chose. From the Mystery Inc. gang, to the mummy, to Robin, to the “Dick in a Box” guys.

Then she walked in.

Consciousness

As a burgeoning sociologist, my colleagues and classmates are constantly talking about the differences that: separate us, bind us, keep us downtrodden, keep us uplifted, or just generally keep us. We have had a very limited opportunity to study these things with two tragedies: Hurricane Katrina and the California fires.

Reading through news stories, blog posts, and listening to news programs, it lifts my heart to know that the discussion is not focusing on one aspect of the problem. No one seems to be focusing purely on race, or class, or economic status, or education. It seems that the talks are on all of those subjects and several not listed. Unfortunately I am seeing a deadlock in the discussions.

It seems that since we, as a society, are unable to put one single perfect all encompassing label on the problem, we are leaving it, frustrated that the problem is too hard and multi-faceted to tackle. What is happening to the discussion? There are many of us out there who are blaming it on one single thing, yet these people and their arguments are quickly becoming passé to the grand majority of the country when confronted by other arguments who say it is something completely different.

This may seem like a very clear “duh” moment, but it has to be said. There is no single perfect label to place upon this mess that Katrina and the fires of California have opened our eyes to. The problem is systemic; meaning that it has integrated itself into every aspect of our lives, is perpetuated from several different angles of society, and has as many outcomes as it has reasons.

Douchebag fitness center

So I am looking for a gym. My requirements are thus: I have limited times that I can actually work out; either at the ass crack of dawn or after I get off work around midnight-ish, I do not want to exercise with four hundred other people, I don’t want to have to drive to get there, I do not want to work out with douchebags, (sorry adam, that means you can’t come), and I don’t want to spend a fortune on it. One would think that these minor requirements would be able to be accommodated. Alas, it has been much more difficult that I could have guessed.

#1 I have gone to two that are supported by the city’s park department. While both are nice, have ample space, and have plenty of classes, they miss the mark on two out of my list. They are not 24 hour and do not stay open past 8 or 9 and unfortunately they are both completely packed in the mornings. Both of those are down.

#2 A few days ago, I went and checked out a place run by a local hospital on the north end of town. The place was nice, albeit a little on the small side, is less than 3 blocks from my house, is open 24 hours, the staff is extremely nice, and they don’t want my entire arm and leg, they will settle for my hand and possibly the lower half of my leg. It is a little small, and the place does not have a huge staff, but I can’t as of yet find any major defects beyond those two.

#3 Today, I went and met with a guy at the local superclub that is a short bike ride from my house. Again, they have ample space, not very many people, are open 24 hours, and as I said I can bike there. Sadly though, they want an arm and a leg for the privilege of using their saintly facilities and unless you want to sign up right there and then without trying the place out they want you to spend even more! Plus the guy that showed me around was like mighty morphin power douchebag. This guy used every single trick in the salesman’s book to try and get me to sign up, which I can’t fault him for, but when I told him that I was probably not going to be using his gym, the look that came across his face almost made me sign. The guy looked like I had just kicked his dog! He was so sad and despondent that I almost felt sorry for him. I hope that losing my sale did not cost one of his imaginary three children to not get braces.

I don’t know. I may have to try out number 2 for a week or so and see how it works out.

Oops!

The title of my last post was, “and now for something completely different.” While it may be referring to something completely different, Wil Wheaton chose to use the same title on an earlier post for his blog. I must have read it the day before and my overloaded and addled brain must have thought it was so cool that I had to use it too.

Sorry Wil Wheaton, I didn’t mean to step on your toes.

And now for something completely different…

For decades the housing market has been taking advantage of people with little means. Until very recently, (say the last six months), almost anyone could get a loan on a house whether your credit score indicated you should or not. Loan companies along with banks have almost ignored the scoring system that is in place to not only help keep them out of trouble but to keep the consumer out of a debt they could not afford. The effects have been devastating, and all across the country the foreclosure rates are staggering:

In Baltimore, Maryland, last year there were 947 people that lost their homes. This year an astounding 7001 were kicked out on the street. That is up 8,785 percent!

In Phoenix and Tuscon, Arizona, 777 people lost their homes. Unfortunately, 2,414 people were foreclosed on this year. An increase of 311 percent.

There is a great many reasons for this to occur, but part is due to shady lending practices from subprime lenders that didn’t truly care if you could afford the loan or not. It is these people that are getting hurt in the worst ways. They try to refinance their loans and because their credit scores aren’t up to what is being touted as, “tightened lending standards”, they fail to refinance and are forced to foreclose. But then they see what pickle they are truly in as they slowly realize after submitting several applications that the lending market has tightened up like Fort Knox: they aren’t letting anyone in. Forced to go back to renting, they are then shocked to learn that they still owe the money on the house! Prices are falling and lending practices have tightened, as this family has realized, but while houses are coming down in price, the banks are not lending to as many people, and because of that their home is not being sold. They are still on the hook for the loan until it is sold. Sadly, if there is a difference in what the house is sold for and the price of the loan, the family will still owe that difference.

There is help for those millions of people who were loaned money they never should have been. The U.S. House is putting forth legislation that might “allow those who can show they were approved for a loan they could not afford to sue their lender for refinancing or a new loan.”

The Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act of 2007, introduced by Representative Barney Frank D-Mass., introduces a new concept called assignee liability where it “[...] would ensure that investment banks and other securitizers monitor the quality and underwriting standards of the loans they fund.” I for one certainly hope that it passes, as the predatory practices of these money lenders have already hurt far too many people.

Personal accountability can only go so far if your lender is telling you that you can afford this loan when in reality you can’t.

As soon as the House of Representatives website (clicky) allows me to download the text of the bill, I will post it here for everyone to see.

Yay for mouth pain! pt 2

Naps are a wonderful thing. Especially after a particularly draining session in the torture dentist’s chair. If you have never had the exhilarating experience of the first part of a root canal, let me be the first to tell everyone to go out right now and ask their dentist for one!

My face still hurts and it is quite difficult to talk. The painkillers that the good doctor injected into my gums is starting to wear off and I can finally feel my nose. Not being able to feel one side of your nose is a very strange sensation, especially when it is combined with everything from the top of your cheekbone down to the bottom of your jaw.

I am alive, but barely.

Yay for mouth pain!

I am leaving in a few moments for a dentist appointment. The goal: to scale and plane one quadrant of my teeth, and while he’s in there, treating me to my very first root canal! I’m so excited I think I’m going to go have several stiff shots of jack before I go.

So I probably won’t be making it to work tonight. The last time I went to the dentist, he gave me morphine! I was worthless after that until the next day around 2pm.

Have I mentioned I’m not looking forward to this?

Sweat and pain

It is time to be honest with myself. It is time to face a fact that has been known to me my whole life and is painfully obvious to all that know me away from the digital world. Sometimes in conversation I say this in a joking manner to alleviate the tension caused by my appearance, but this time I say it with deadly seriousness.

I am overweight. I am fat. I am obese. I am: plump, chubby, stout, portly, heavy, large, and corpulent. And I have been this way for as long as I can physically remember.

I am not morbidly obese to the point that I can not get out and walk or ride a bike (of which, I do both often), but I can recognize that my shape is not one of a healthy individual. I am conscious of what I’m eating and I try to stay away from foods that prevailing science believes to be unhealthy for me. I’ve even recently decided to look into a more vegetarian lifestyle, particularly macrobiotics. As I feel that red meat is not good for me, I have never really liked pork, and the texture of chicken has taken a decidedly foul (pun intended) twist to my taste buds.

But as so many in the health industry has said, diet alone is not enough. To that end, at the beginning of the year, I had a gym membership to a 24-hour club that I frequented for approximately four months. During that time I lost about 40 lbs, and felt better than I had in years, but succumbed to distractions of my own creation as so many of us do. I want to be healthy because I want to live a long and fruitful life, because I want to see my grandchildren, and because I know it will benefit me in the here and now.

Now comes the difficult part: committing to the change. It is a complete change in lifestyle, eating better and going to the gym, and I hope that this time I will stick with it. I’m going down to a gym that is just two blocks from my apartment so distance will not be a problem. I took a tour of the place today and the people who run it are fantastically nice. And the place is open 24-hours a day so time will not be a constraint. I think that I have made every attempt to remove the readily available excuses from my path.

Now I just have to commit to the sweat and pain.

Wish me luck.

Phunk

iTunes, you are the bane of my pocketbook. Every time I say to myself that I need to slow down on the iTunes purchases, I find something that I absolutely have to buy. Like these two remakes by Shawn Lee: Hey Ya and Clint Eastwood.

Shawn Lee’s Ping Pong Orchestra’s piano and harmonica filled rendition of Hey Ya is full of soul, funk, and easy listening. They turned what was a dynamite Hip-hop song into a long lasting easy jazz riff with just enough pop to keep you on your toes. The song’s background noises bring the listener to a dimly lit bar, complete with small, dimly lit, circular stage that the band mills around on, getting into their own groove to the complete delight of their listeners.

The original Clint Eastwood already lent itself to the slower side of things with its head bopping rhythm and light attitude. Shawn threw a low electric bass and high pitched electric lead and combined it with his own style of composure to make it his own.

I loved both of the originals, but the renditions put forth by Shawn Lee gave me a newfound respect for them, and gave me a new artist to get to know. This time I am glad I let my wandering fingers find new songs to buy. Check Shawn out on iTunes or on his website, www.shawnlee.net.

Happy listening,

Until next time!

Choices

It is never quite clear when a choice is made how that choice will affect your future self. Like the choice I made when I was 15.

I had just gotten paid from my very first job. I was a dishwasher and busboy for a family owned diner in the small town I grew up in. It was a Friday and I had just been handed a check for $200. Now I realize that children should never get paid that much. Having found myself newly rich and 15 with no bills the money needed to be saved for or any other expense. I hoped on my blue Schwinn mountain bike and rode around town with a desire to get rid of the burning wad of cash in my pocket. My trip would be very short.

The first place I came to was a computer shop being run out of an unused office of the local newspaper. It advertised a “Complete home pc with monitor, keyboard, mouse, and preloaded with Windows for Workgroups 3.11!” For only $125 it could be mine. I marveled at this sign, wondering to myself all manner of questions about this home pc thing, and what windows for workgroups was, and if it was anything like the commodore 64 we used in my computer class at school. Let me tell you it was not.

I walked in the door of the newspaper office, and this is where I was first hit with the clambering business of a fast-paced news office, but where those impressions led me is a story for another time, so back to the computer. I asked a very nice receptionist where the computer sales were and she pointed me in that direction. When I walked in the small office-turned-computer-store, I was inundated with small led lights and the sounds of dozens of small computer fans pushing air across the hot innards of the little beige machines. Monitors of all sizes sat atop the beige boxes, some displayed DOS prompts and some displayed swirling colors or changing pictures or text that moved across the screen at different rates of speed or star fields moving with different speeds. To say the least I was stunned. I had never before seen a computer do these things and I never thought I would. I had a super nintendo, (and a nintendo before that, and an atari 2600 before that), and it was about the coolest thing I had ever owned, but I could feel this was somehow different.

The man behind the counter asked if he could help me and I descended on him with questions like a pack of wolves on their first real meal after a long winter. He answered them all graciously and without any kind of smugness, superiority, or the “buy something or get the hell out” attitude that so many retail salespeople seem to have these days. He told me of this thing called “the internet” and how I could go online to pages where people come to look at pictures or news or any number of things that couldn’t be listed but had to be found. He showed me the computer advertised on the window: it was an intel i386 processor with 256k of ram, a soundblaster16 card, and a 200MB hard drive.

I asked if it could get to this online he spoke of and he said that I had to buy and install something called a modem. After he explained that the modem was the piece of hardware that allowed the computer to talk to others over the phone line, I bought it for an even $25. So $150 of my $200 was gone and I walked home with a computer and some parts.

The thrill for me in any new adventure is figuring out how it works. I knew nothing of static electricity dangers or ZIF or PCI or ISA or RAM or any of the technical jargon that accompanied learned computer people, but I was bound and determined to find out. After several days of pouring over the Windows 3.11 manual (yes I read the manual, it was much larger and more informational than the help system joke that accompanies MS now), and reading the manual that came with my 14.4k modem, I installed it and was ready to embark on the journey to the World Wide Web.

My first experience with the BSOD (Blue Screen of Death), occured when I booted up for the first time oddly enough. Apparently I forgot to install the drivers first, and then I had IRQ conflicts, and then Windows didn’t like the drivers or the connection software. At one point in time this was all great fun. I learned so much about computers and software and how it all worked together from this, my first experience, than I ever could have from a class or a tutor. I loved every minute of it.

One simple choice led me to where I am now, writing this blog, sharing with anyone who would listen. I’m giving a shout out to all the people I used to hang with on the Springfield Chatmaster BBS (my first ISP), and to all the people on the many IRC channels that I used to frequent. I truly miss those initial days of discovery that one simple choice led me to. Here is to being young and wide eyed.

And the journey begins

So here it is, my first actual blog.

I started an irregularly updated blog on a myspace page, and that is great, but I have problems with the format flexibility of that blog so I decided to come to WordPress.

So what is it that I’m doing here? That is a fantastic question. I’m still looking for the answer to that one, but I hope that this project will help me find it. I will be doing some reviews on books I’ve read and music that I like. I will be interjecting this with comments on topics like politics, globalization, ethnocentrism, racism, and social problems. All topics that I find entertaining to talk about and that I feel should be talked about in a public forum.

I will do what I can not to pull punches, but that will be a trait I will have to learn. I want this to be an open forum, free from reprisals, where anyone can come to speak their mind, and where everyone can be civil to each other.

This means for anyone who decides to comment there will be some rules just to keep things civil:

1. Do not attack the person.
   1. Everyone here has a right to their own opinion.
2. Do not use foul language.
   1. It will be censored and/or the comment will possibly be prevented from being posted.
3. Keep all comments on topic.

I think that’s it for now. I will publish again soon.