Freudian slippage

The partially wind-blown sign over the Steak 'n' Shake at 71st and Binford reads, "IDS EAT FREE." Which is great, because my Id is really frakkin' hungry.

My Superego, however, reminds me that I'm going to pay for it one way or another.

Playing house

Our new house has taken shape almost completely, and with the addition of some bookshelves and a few purely cosmetic items, will be ready for photographing pretty soon -- as soon as we can get some batteries in a camera and do it, really. The cats are thrilled with our enclosed brick porch; we leave a window open for them from the master bedroom so they can go in and out as they please.

It's "cozy" in real estate terms, meaning it's not too big, but it's just right for us -- an older house that's recently renovated and otherwise very well-kept. It's really beginning to feel like home, which our previous house never did. The big difference is that "this old house" has obviously received some top-notch care, whereas the previous one was really just a decrepit old house with some nice paint. I'll miss the granite kitchen countertops and stainless steel appliances in the old place, but that's about all. My usual autumn wave of nostalgia has brought with it some memories of my old apartment at the Marott, but I feel zero emotional connection to the place we just vacated.

I'll save further description until such time  as I can post pictures, but in the meantime, speaking of real estate,  I'm beginning to think semi-seriously about buying the place, since it's on offer from stockholmvictim 's aunt -- at a pretty decent price that we might be able to negotiate to a very attractive price indeed. Of course, maybe it's just the inertia of not wanting to uproot again, and the feeling of investment I now have in the place, after hanging curtains and art, installing bookshelves, etc.

Also, speaking of House, the FB grapevine, via a certain fellow named Deutsch, tells me that this particular show now employs a certain wonderful friend of mine. Way to go, lumpyhead !

Moving on . . .

At this point? Counseling.

I'm sure that "Intel, Sponsors of Tomorrow" would like me to say that I would splurge on a new computer with a quad-core processor. I need one, actually, but I'll probably get a mobo with an AMD chip and build it myself.

As I was busy moving boxes into the new house the other day, the neighbors were playing their stereo in the backyard next door. One of the songs that came up in the playlist was John Mayer's "Waiting on the World to Change." Setting aside the grammatical quibble about "waiting on" vs. :"waiting for" -- rock 'n' roll gets a pass on grammar -- I started really listening to the lyrics. Yeah, I know, it's been out for a few years, but I got a bit bored with Mayer a while back and haven't been paying much attention to his music since.

Now that I've really listened to this (after just hearing it many times), though, I'm baffled. The whole song sounds like a bunch of lazy whining . . . . What happened to the guy who exuberantly declared back in 2001 that he'd discovered the secret that "all the good boys and girls" didn't know about the world, who wanted to scream at the top of his lungs at his high school reunion? The same guy later wrote this:

It's not that we don't care,
We just know that the fight ain't fair,
So we keep on waiting,
Waiting on the world to change.

What kind of passive-aggressive, defeatist crap is that? Is Mayer implicitly critizing the Gen-X slacker attitude that this comment embodies, or is he championing it? Is he expressing the exhaustion and frustration that comes when idealism runs up against the cold reality of a world governed by selfish and irrational power brokers? Or is he just whining because his overprivileged white Connecticut arse can't do anything about it? The dreamy, boppy tune of the song offers no clues, and the lyrics seem content -- or at least resigned -- to a world without solutions to these problems. He's not angry, he's not optimistic, he's just . . . waiting.

Looking Mayer up on Wikipedia, I find that he has at least gotten involved in philanthropic activities, even if they're mostly of the typical touchy-feely-liberal-cause celebre variety. So, kudos to him for putting his money where his mouth is anyway. (I also find that Mr. Mayer's birthday is the same as mine, and he's exactly one year older than I am.) But when your mouth is saying such wishy-washy things, and that's what people listen to, don't you care what you're saying with this song?

Gandhi said, "Be the change you want to see in the world." Mayer replies, "Ehhh, that sounds too hard. You do it."

Download of random facts/items, in no particular order, besides their general relationship to the change of seasons that's upon us:

Watch for falling seasons

Autumn is approaching, my favorite season by far. You can tell by the cooler mornings and the boldness of the blue in the sky. I'm even seeing some leaves ona  few trees starting to show hints of changing. I have not yet consulted the wooly worms or the Farmers' Almanac, but I have a strong gut feeling that it's going to be a beautiful fall in Indiana.

I hope it will be beautiful in Upstate NY, too, since I'm really looking forward to enjoying a wee bit of time off there even if I had to engineer it to fit onto the end of a business trip. We're going to a workforce conference in Niagara Falls during the week of Sept. 21, and stockholmvictim  and I will be spending a few extra days in the area afterwards, then hitting some clients in PA on the way back, as we drive back in the van with all the company's supplies.

In sickness and prevention . . .

One other clue of the approach of autumn is that my annual 3-4 day upper respiratory allergy attack has hit already. I'm in Day 4: the coughing day. This is usually pretty much the end of it, so hopefully that will get it out of the way for the year, so that I can enjoy the rest of the season. Hopefully I don't subject myself to further distress on Friday, though: Jane talked me into going to get a flu shot at the Marion Co. Health Department then -- I have never done this before. I don't really see a convincing case for getting them: it's like putting locks on only some of your doors if you're afraid of a burglary, and meanwhile, the vaccine itself can make you sick. We'll see, I guess.

Punkin' Goodness

One of the side effects of stockholmvictim 's stint at the Evil Coffee Empire was my addiction to the Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte. My Hoosiery love for all things punkin'-related overrides my manly aversion to frou frou beverages when it comes to this concoction - further complicating my love/hate relationship with the Buck$.

So I've challenged Mon to come up with an equal or better pumpkin spice latte at Mo'Joe. It's now out of my way to drive there in the morning (see news item re: moving below), but if she can pull that off, I'll go.

Another completely random observation: Is it just me hanging around the wrong coffee shops lately, or have cranberries taken the place of raisins as the more popular pastry ingredient?

Another new place

Yep, we've moved again; this time to a cozy and very well-kept little house near Garfield Park here in Indy. It happens to be owned by stockholmvictim 's aunt, who has had no luck selling it for the last year, and so is more than happy to rent to us. We trade down a little bit of space, but we trade up in terms of the peace and quiet (and tree-lined beauty) of the neighborhood, close proximity to a park (no excuse not to go running now), and a house that's actually as nicely put together as it looks. After a year of living in a place that's cosmetically attractive but deficient in all other areas, it's very nice to come to a place where the windows seal, the a/c achieves the temperature it's supposed to, the doors stay shut when you want them to and don't swell awkwardly, the living room floor does not sag in the middle . . . you get the idea.

On top of all of this, we're saving $240/month on rent and we may have an option to buy the place if we like it well enough. It is small, but our needs are relatively few at the moment, and we're using the opportunity to purge a bunch of unnecessary stuff. A garage sale may be in our near future.

Moving itself was frenetic and hectic, as we put off some of the big things, and we ended up being shorthanded this weekend -- but thanks to Mon's parents and some family friends, we got it all done, and cleaned up the former house to a condition far superior to that in which we found it. If our landlord there does not repay our security deposit, there will be hell to pay as well.

We never did post pictures of the house we just moved out of; we will correct that this time around. As soon as we get Monica's digicam out of a box and charged up, we'll take some pics and post 'em.

"Duck!"

I just read a blog entry from my friend lumpyhead about being a godparent to a friend's child. It's a sweet and wonderful show of trust in your friends to give them such a role of responsibility in a child's upbringing. I'm sure that she and her husband uber_deutsch  make fantastic godparents, because they basically rock at everything they do.

That got me thinking, though: If you're an atheist or an agnostic such as myself, you can't really name a "godparent," since you don't belong to any church and therefore have no special religious or spiritual responsibilities to confer upon a godparent. So, I have a proposition: How about a "thoughtparent?" This person would be a loved one whom you entrust with the responsibility to help instill in your child a respect for critical thinking, and to encourage his or her deep and abiding curiosity and love for inquiry.

This would, of course, not be exclusive to atheists, agnostics, or humanists. It's a completely non-denominational, non-discriminatory thing. A religious couple could name godparents and thoughtparents for their child if they so chose.

One could probably come up with a cooler title than "thoughtparent," but that was the first word that came to mind.

For some reason, I keep listening to Monica when she admonishes me not to cut my hair. Between that and a general lack of talent for life-maintenance stuff on my part, I have let my hair grow for the better part of three months now, I think. It's hard to be sure.

The result is a large mass of thick, curly, dark hair atop my head, which does not really resemble anything much beyond that. I do not have a hair style, just a lot of hair. I don't know what to do with hair this long, honestly, and now that it is this long, Mon wants me to try to keep it this way. This will require me to do a couple of things that I normally just don't do or don't like to do:

• Make an appointment with a "real" (read: "expensive") hair salon/studio/shop/whatever. I have found in the past that my results do not differ much between a haircut here and at a discount place, so I usually end up going back to the discount places -- especially since the usual circumstances of my haircuts are something like "Aaargh, I can't stand it anymore! I need a haircut now!"
• Actively maintain a hair style: I appreciate grooming as much as, and sometimes more than, the next guy. I am, nonetheless, a guy at the core, and spending time arranging my hair is not high on my list of worthwhile activities. Right now my path of least resistance  consists primarily of applying a dollop of hair gel to my mane and kinda messing it up, just to keep it from fluffing up and making me look like Seth Rogen, Einstein, or that fat kid from Superbad.

I'm trying to get ideas, but Googling for men's hair styles results in a bunch of pictures of prissy 12-pound pretty boys, sporting "high fashion" styles that look like they cost $600, but could have been achieved by an angry punk rocker with a Flowbee, a few PBRs, and a bottle of Elmer's. These are not for me.

The other result consists mostly of pictures of celebrities. I don't necessarily want to look like a celebrity either, but at least in the case of actors, they are generally required to look more like real people and thus to have more realistic hairstyles. I stumbled over pictures of Ioan Gruffudd, everyone's favorite impronounceable Welsh heartthrob. I'm nowhere near as handsome as that guy, but his hair is roughly the same consistency as mine. He generally seems to wear his hair medium-short and just messy enough to look cool without looking like a complete idiot. I'd like to have something to refer to when I go to a hairdresser -- I'd rather not put my fate completely in the hands of their whims of the day -- and this seems as good as anything.

So, I ask you, Dear Readers (all four of you) . . . based on those pictures of Mr. Gruffudd, do you think I could pull that off?



(I think Monica, in a fantasy world of hers, would have me let my hair grow to resemble the way Colin Firth wears his in Pride and Prejudice, which is not going to happen. First of all, I do not live in the early 1800s. Also, uh, no.)

Jane's cell phone plays an annoyingly cheerful ring tone that has two distinct properties:

(1) It is clearly audible to me no matter where in the house I happen to be, but she can never, ever hear it.

(2) Its tune strongly resembles the main guitar/bass riff of the Shocking Blue (later, Bananarama) song "Venus."

So it tends to ring for a long time, and I always hear it, and nearly every time, it sets my brain going for hours, endlessly cycling through "She's got it! Yeah, baby, she's got it! I'm your Venus! I'm your Fire! At your desi-yerr!" . . . and since I don't know any more of the lyrics of that song than the chorus, that's all I get.

I've never mentioned this to Jane, since I'm pretty sure she would not know the song. She's a Baby Boomer, but is willfully ignorant of most pop culture after 1960 or so. Go figure. So I suffer in silence. :-) After all, it could be any one of many, many worse songs.

Jane, i.e. my boss Dick's wife and our erstwhile colleague, is now basically a full-time professional community activist/neighborhood organizer/busybody with half a dozen active projects in this corner of Indianapolis. One of these is a fairly successful farmers' market. We're constantly fielding calls for her for the market, one of which I took this morning.

"Hello, I'm calling for Jane. I'd like to ask about the farmers' market and blah blah blah . . . ." (I stop listening when they get into specifics.)

"I think she's around somewhere. Let me see if I can reach her. In case I can't, is there a number where I can call you back?"

"No, you see, I'm Amish and I don't have a telephone."

All right, a few days after mercilessly bashing the Star's lousy prose, here I am linking to something on their Web site. The online edition features a photo gallery of someone's home every week -- usually they feature something fairly boring, like a McMansion with Crate & Barrel decor. This time, they're featuring a house pretty close to where we live, where some ingenious dude has converted a warehouse into a pretty amazing home. Check this out.

Could not embed! Here's the link.

I wish I had the handyman prowess to pull off something like this.