And to think I actually ate there twice this past month! (first time in 8 months  and normally I pack all my own food!)

Cheers!

• Work out (the Great Return has begun – 4 months on hiatus – and I totally miss it)
• Tanning session for a whole 4 minutes (base coat of basal carcinoma before hitting Ft. Lauderdale this wkend)
• Billing – 8 weeks behind but I’ll kick it quickly.
• Lvl 46 for Bloodmantle, baby, w/ 21G in the bank. I’ll be ridin’ in style in no time. I’ll post a pick of my faboo ride once I get it. Of course that leads to the question of COLOR:
• Replace the space heater that has mysteriously failed after working flawlessly for years. I’m thinkin’ Sears and replacing our indoor/outdoor thermometer since BF is a weather freak. (Besides we have gift certificates) And of course there is the water filter… So, Sears it is…
• Purchase Cold Hearted Snake in honor of American Idol’s new season.
• Inst new iTunes, hopefully that will heal my ongoing struggle to get into said store to make purchases (links keep showing up as broken, or store is unavailable, VERY annoying, and the installation just locked up the whole machine, which is why I still think that Apple is actually kinda a shitty company now).

Lost

Been too busy to watch and to be honest I’m losing some steam. I don’t know why. It could be that I know that I have 30 more episodes to catch up on all the questions. It could be that Sun is being a bit of a hard-ass right now with Jin and I don’t like that. It could be that I wish Jack/Sawyer/Kate would just get it over with. I will say that the flashbacks are still compelling. For the most part I haven’t reached the point of saying, “I don’t care about that! What happens now?” We’ll see…

Career: “What’s Your Message?”

I came across a couple of thoughtful articles by Steve Pavlina, a blogger with a brain and a soul. Sometimes he’s a little too California for me and his cheerful optimism grates my frosty, dark, Northern composure, but then if I just shut up and read his articles I find that he has a lot of good things to say and consider.

Case in point: our use of the word “career”, how overdetermined its usage is, and how defining it for ourselves usually leads to some soulessness. He says that we tend to be instructed on what our careers should be by a bottoms-up method in which we look at our physical/mental strengths and match those up to whatever set of strengths reside in an occupation. The top-down method employs the “What turns you on? What’s your core passion?” roster of questions to find another set of profiles that reside in some occupation. What I love about Pavlina is that he is quick about avoiding false dichotomies: he says that both methods have their strengths and weaknesses so he marries them in an 80/20 top-down/bottoms-up split.

I strongly sympathized with his assessment of his wife’s difficulties as a secretary. Pavlina’s wife, Erin, could type 90+ words / min, and that skill was overplayed in career considerations. “Oh, you can type fast? Why don’t you be a secretary?” Being a secretary never addressed her passion to be and  exhibit being compassionate. Likewise, I have a great deal of technical skill but working in an environment where emotions are taboo (engineers) is what left me cold at Ford. It was a stultifying experience, to put it mildly.

In his other article, he talks about how often we look only at our career’s label and its functional responsibilities and not recognize how poor and flat that view is. That view doesn’t really consider the person do the work and their multi-faceted motivations for doing a job. “Oh, you’re an attorney. You must like doing legal paperwork.” If your motivation and passion in being an attorney is to negotiate peacefully that passion is completely lost in the appellation, “attorney”. Pavlina suggests reframing the label, maybe just for yourself to something relevant to your motivations and passions, in the case above, “Peacebringer.” Yeah, I know, it sounds a little fruity to me too. But I too see and feel so many of us who get completely depressed talking about their careers or jobs. We seem to wait for some sort of put-down since we are obliged to hate our job. It is the appropriate and fashionable thing to do. God forbid that we might more plainly state what joy we do derive from our work.

So, I’ve been thinking about what are my real passion is. As Avenue Q, might ask, What is my Purpose? I think it’s to be a counselor. What form that takes, I have no idea, but I need to try harder to express that passion to counsel and advise. I like doing it. I like helping people sort out their feelings about whatever it is. Now, I just need to be mindful of that drive and to build outlets to express it.

While casually listening to my NPR commie-pinko feed, I heard Leonard Nimoy speak of his new Full Body Project. I didn’t know that he gone on to become a photographer, good for him. He talked of the daunting task of taking pictures of very heavy women, good for him. He spoke of meeting Heather and being inspired by her performance work as both a political and artistic effort, fine, fine, nice to see a Michiganian find some success. He then said that she had died. My eyes bugged out. I stopped the feed and started searching for her frantically online. How could she be dead? She was vital, smart, beautiful and motivated to make real change in American culture. She was in California living the good, queer American dream. And she was young! Rather, she was my age! That didn’t make sense at all! She had so much to do! She had died of ovarian cancer this past February. I hadn’t heard anything here back home. And I had felt no sign of her passing as I imagined great ladies might, silly git. For me, it was the divine whispering, so softly, I will cut all threads–even yours–without your assent.

Monster House

The Bad:

The Uncanny: I have not seen Polar Express, mostly because I thought that its lack of facial expression in the trailers was creepy. This, in turn, reminded me of Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within and first reading of Dr. Masahiro Mori’s theory of the Uncanny Valley. In 1970, he suggested that as a simulation of a human being’s appearance and/or motion becomes increasingly accurate, there is very suddenly a point at which humans’ interest in the creation turns into utter repulsion. There is still some of that dissonance in Monster House. They couldn’t get the faces to register emotion enough. Even though the production had something like 70 points of detection on everyone’s faces, they still wound up looking like they had just gotten a Botox treatment.

Kathleen Turner as Constance/The House: Mind you, she was fine, but the notion of taking such a role… I thought that Turner had a lot of cajones to take a part as a circus freak/possessed house. I hope she got a nice check for her troubles.

The Plot: I know this is a kids’ movie but it seemed a bit too simple at times.

The Good:

The characters: Their acting was just fine. Verbally, everything was perfect.

The animation: Despite the Uncanny Valley, you have to be amazed at what Sony accomplished. A good deal of this film is very, very beautiful to look at.

Um, it was. Like not really hard at all. Basically, throw in the ingredients to the breadmaker (liquids first, then dry ingredients). Wait an hour-and-a-half for the machine to do its job and let the dough rise. Cut up the dough and make bagel shapes. Boil some water and then boil the bagel shapes for about a minute per side. Cook in the oven for 20mins. Done. Mystery solved. Were they good? Yeah, in the fresh way, but I’m a big fan of the Panera pseudo-cake-snack-bar bagels. I want bagels with raspberries and chocolate and cream cheese seeping from them. I’m totally gonna hack their sh-t!

And I have some engineering and tweaking to do, but I think I have some definite idears totally kill the competition. I will be Bagel King!

So, it’s been a while. I probably should be doing something productive, but rather than cry about it or castigate the effort as paltry and insufficient, I thought, why not? Everybody else is writing their tedious lives. Why can’t I?  Enough with the cynicism, I just read this article exhibiting Apple’s complete product line. It made me a little sad. Turns out I used Apple right from the start and then somehow it fell apart for us after 1990. Even though I went to a university that long been affiliated with Mac, after freshmen year, I just stopped using them. The memory of my FORTRAN classes programming on a Macintosh Classic still makes me shiver. Work pulled me into the Borg consciousness of Unix and all small biz lives on Microsquish. It’s only the iPod that drew me back and that was only recently. I have very strong reservations about the iPhone and its innovations. I’m not easily enamored by form if it is mostly functionless. End-Of-Thought